Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The Heritage Foundation calls one-man-one-woman marriage the cornerstone of civilization while its own leaders can’t stop having affairs. Trump just stripped protections from 8,000 federal workers, making them fireable for any reason at all. The administration has separated dozens of children from their parents twice, including an 11-year-old taken once at age three and again last year. And the government is paying $5.1 million on a no-bid contract to cover four statues in 23.75-karat gold.
Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair is making sure they know what happens if they don’t. And independent outlets are being bought out one by one. This is the news they don’t want you reading. AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please upgrade today.
Now, let’s get into it.
MAGA Wants Traditional Families. MAGA Can’t Stop Having Affairs.
Conservatives have built an entire political movement around the sanctity of one-man-one-woman marriage. Turns out, very few of their leaders can manage the “one” part.
The Heritage Foundation laid it out in a January policy paper called Saving America by Saving the Family. The cornerstone of civilization, it declared, is “the committed union of one man and one woman.” They proposed tax breaks for married couples, starter trust accounts for newlyweds, and financial help for stay-at-home parents.
Then there are the men running the plan. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly admitted to cheating multiple times on his first wife, and his second marriage ended after he fathered a child with his Fox News producer, Jennifer Rauchet. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly documented his sexual encounters in a little black book during his first marriage.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s wife filed for divorce last year on what she called “biblical grounds.” Paxton then reportedly set up house with his “Christian influencer” mistress in a $2 million Dallas love-nest. MAGA voters backed him over the straight-laced incumbent anyway.
In fairness, these men do believe in the institution of marriage. They’ve entered it multiple times to prove it.
Trump Strips Job Protections From 8,000 Federal Workers
Trump has finally solved corruption in the federal government by making sure only his friends work there.
The president issued an executive order Wednesday turning an estimated 8,000 federal workers into at-will employees, meaning the government can fire them without giving any reason. The move culminates an effort he launched in his first term to strip federal employees of protections designed to insulate their work from political interference.
Nearly all 8,000 are at the GS-15 level: leaders of policy offices, regional directors, program managers, people overseeing spending and grants. Until now, the roughly 2 million federal workers could only be fired for cause, with formal processes and the right to appeal.
OPM originally estimated up to 50,000 positions could be reclassified.
This was not improvised. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page transition blueprint, called for exactly this. The document dedicated entire chapters to dismantling what it called the “administrative state,” its term for career federal employees who might resist or slow a president’s agenda.
The protections for federal workers Trump just dismantled only exist because in 1881 a disgruntled jobseeker shot and killed President James A. Garfield. We’ll see how that lesson ages.
Eight thousand federal workers just lost their job protections. This newsletter has never had any. It runs entirely on reader subscriptions, which means you’re the only job security we’ve got. Consider upgrading your subscription to paid.
Trump Separated Dozens of Children From Their Parents Twice
Eight years ago, the family separation policy was supposed to be the line America wouldn’t cross again. The Trump administration found a way to cross it twice for the same children.
The government has re-separated dozens of children from their families despite a landmark legal settlement meant to keep them together. Some parents have been locked in immigration detention for months. Others were deported. In some cases, immigration officials deported people even after discovering they were off limits for removal.
Eleven-year-old Ederson Galicia Alva is one of them. In 2018, at age three, he was taken from his mother’s arms at the border and held in a government facility for months. They were reunited only after lawyers intervened. Then, in June of last year, federal agents stopped his mother on her way to a landscaping job near Mar-a-Lago and separated them again.
His mother, Mirsy Maricela Alva López, was moved through two Florida jails, then ICE custody in Louisiana, then a plane of shackled deportees to Guatemala City. The children, born in the highland hamlet of San Martín Cuchumatán, flew down to join her.
A federal judge ruled the government had acted illegally, and last week the family was allowed to return to Florida. Ederson still doesn’t want to talk about the separations. He keeps asking his mother why she went to work that day.
Trump Is Spending $5.1 Million to Make Four Statues Gold
Another set of 19th-century-adjacent landmarks is about to get the Mar-a-Lago treatment, and this time it comes in 23.75-karat gold leaf.
The Trump administration has handed out a no-bid contract, now worth $5.1 million, to cover four largely overlooked statues near the National Mall in gold before the country’s 250th birthday. The contract went directly to a handpicked Maryland vendor called the Gilders’ Studio.
The statues, 19-foot-tall humans and horses called the Arts of Peace and the Arts of War, have been deteriorating for decades at the ends of two busy bridges. The gold that once covered them flaked away years ago, leaving dull figures overshadowed by the monuments nearby.
When Trump launched his broad makeover of Washington landmarks last year, these four were left out entirely. Then, in late March, they became a high priority. Internal documents obtained by The New York Times show the Park Service saw the statues as “a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives.”
The Park Service conceded it did not have time to research other bidders, then concluded that “there are no other vendors known that can perform this work.” The agency also estimated the job at $2.4 million in late March. The contract came in at roughly double that.
Nobody Owns This Newsletter but You
There is a reason the stories you just read don’t lead the broadcast networks. Networks hold FCC licenses, and the FCC chair has made it very clear what happens to outlets that displease this administration. Newspapers have advertisers. The independent outlets that once filled the gap are being bought out, one by one, by people who would rather you not read any of this.
AlterNet America has none of those problems, because AlterNet America has no owner but its readers. No license to protect. No billionaire in the suite. No advertiser deciding which children’s separations are too uncomfortable to cover. That independence is the whole product, and it only exists because people like you pay for it.
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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
The House Backed a Resolution Curbing Trump’s Iran War Powers. For the first time since Trump started bombing Iran three months ago, Congress pushed back. The Republican-led House passed a war powers resolution 215-208 Wednesday, with four Republicans breaking ranks to join Democrats in directing Trump to withdraw troops unless Congress formally authorizes the conflict. It’s the clearest sign yet that the war is losing support inside Trump’s own party after Speaker Mike Johnson tried to cancel the vote two weeks ago when it looked like it might pass and sent everyone home on recess. It passed anyway when they came back.
New York Democrats Unveil a Redistricting Plan That Could Flip Four GOP Seats. New York Democrats rolled out a roadmap to redraw the state’s congressional map and target up to four Republican-held seats by 2028, including Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’s Staten Island district. The plan calls for a 2027 referendum that would clip the wings of the state’s independent redistricting commission, letting lawmakers redraw maps mid-decade by a simple majority instead of the current two-thirds supermajority. Gov. Hochul framed it as a response to Trump’s gerrymandering campaign, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries declared “the Empire State will strike back.”
A California City Becomes the First in the U.S. to Permanently Ban Datacenters by Ballot. Residents of Monterey Park, California, voted Tuesday on a permanent ban on datacenters, and early results showed 86.3% of more than 7,000 votes in favor. It is the first time a U.S. city has banned the facilities through a ballot initiative rather than a council vote, which is likely to hold up better against lawsuits. The push followed anger toward HMC StratCap, which wanted to build a nearly 250,000-square-foot datacenter in the Los Angeles-area city. Developers have since withdrawn the application and indicated they won’t sue.
Coloradans Harmed by Conversion Therapy Can Now Sue for Damages. Gov. Jared Polis signed HB 26-1322, the Civil Actions for Conversion Therapy Survivors bill, on the first day of Pride month, alongside an executive order barring state agencies from spending any funds on efforts to change sexual orientation or gender identity. Starting in July, people harmed by the discredited practice can bring a civil suit against the professionals responsible. It arrives after the U.S. Supreme Court in March declined to uphold Colorado’s 2019 ban on conversion therapy for minors. The state decided that if you can’t ban the scam, you can at least let its victims bill the people who ran it.
