So on June 26, after weeks of carefully navigating the gag order and legal restrictions, I published “Trump’s DOJ is targeting Daily Kos.”
If you go back and read that story now, you’ll notice how carefully every word was chosen. I never said we had received a subpoena. I never described the FBI demand. I never even explicitly confirmed an investigation existed. Every sentence had been vetted within an inch of its life.
But even within those constraints, I wanted you all to know we were under attack.
And you responded immediately. Within days, the community raised around $200,000 to kick-start our legal defense. Suddenly, the financial panic eased. We could fund the fight, at least for a while. We could retain the legal firepower necessary to force the DOJ into a real battle instead of quietly surrendering. If the government had decided to fully escalate, the costs could’ve become enormous. But at least now we had a fighting chance.
Legally, we were preparing for two separate fights at once. Our lawyers were developing a strategy to quash the subpoena itself, while simultaneously preparing for what we increasingly believed would be the government’s next move: obtaining a search warrant and trying to seize the information directly. The only question on our minds was when.
Then, on July 16, the Denver office quietly backed down and dropped the matter entirely.
The only condition was the now-expired gag order. Part of me wanted to tell them to go to hell and dare them to stop me from talking anyway. But settling was the smart move, so we agreed. It was fun to declare victory publicly: “They came for us. We stood strong. We won.”
Looking back now, this was an early example of how the administration operated: come in aggressively, make maximal threats, rely on secrecy and intimidation, then often retreat once confronted with meaningful resistance. (See Iran today.) They were counting on fear doing the work for them. They assumed most organizations would comply quietly rather than endure the cost, pressure, and uncertainty of a legal fight. Send a subpoena. Threaten search warrants and public raids. Wrap everything in national security language. And for Trump, that worked out well in those days, when way too many targets simply folded.
That is soft Fascism. Use fear to intimidate. SAY ‘NO’ TO WAR! RESIST!
Now everyone knows to stand strong and to fight back!
If you back down, they just go farther and get worse and worse, which is why they are always doubling down and never apologize. That's how they become crooks and theives, because they get away with it. And when they get away with it for too long, they are hard to stop and become very dangerous. Remember he said, "Grab them by the *****... If you are a star, they let you do it!"
And when you have more than one lawless and ruthless bully or dictator who has seized power, with weapons of mass destruction at their disposal... it's a recipe for disaster.
on June 2, 2026, 3:38 pm
