Recapping This Week's Let's Address This
All this week's articles and interviews in one place
As a human rights lawyer, I bring you the latest you need to know about the state of our country with detailed analysis, receipts, and information on how to protect your rights, and how you can fight back against the rise of state violence and fascism.
This week, we witnessed unprecedented Federal interference into our elections, the targeted censorship of Black independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and perpetual distraction from the Epstein Files. Meanwhile, ICE fascists continue to decimate our communities with no end in sight.
Here is your weekly recap of Let’s Address This.
Call to Action
With the TikTok takeover and rise of media censorship in the United States, I’ll be posting more long-form content on YouTube. Subscribe to Let’s Address This on YouTube for real conversations, interviews with members of Congress, scholars, and national thought leaders.
This Week’s Articles & Interviews
READ: In Minneapolis, ICE Executes Alex Pretti—the 9th Murder of 2026
LISTEN: Episode 207—Witnessing Trauma, Resilience, and Resistance in Minneapolis
WATCH: A Conversation With Saikat Chakrabarti, Candidate for Congress in San Francisco
WATCH: Government Censorship Is Here, and Silence Is Not Safety
Dad Joke of the Week
This week I learned that cows help high schoolers gain confidence, because they’re protein.
The pattern isn’t interference, it’s installation. Federal agents raiding Georgia election offices, ICE operating without legal constraint, journalists getting deplatformed for covering it…this is what regime consolidation looks like.
Trump isn’t disrupting institutions anymore, he’s operating them. The question isn’t whether we’re witnessing fascism,
it’s whether anyone with power is willing to treat it as such and respond accordingly.
The Epstein files are the key to understanding why resistance from the wealthy is so anemic. Every billionaire, every tech platform owner, every “respectable” figure on those lists knows Trump controls information that destroys them while leaving him untouched.
He’s converted mutual blackmail into unilateral leverage because his base doesn’t care what he did, but their reputations would be annihilated. So they’ll let Trump do anything: rig elections, deploy ICE as brownshirts, silence journalists; because the alternative is he releases their names and they face prosecution.
They’re not complicit out of ideology, they’re trapped by their own crimes and Trump’s holding the evidence.
Legal analysis and rights protection matter, but they operate inside a system that’s already been captured.
The courts won’t save you—-we just watched a federal judge refuse to halt a deportation operation the appeals court already found unconstitutional.
Congress won’t save you—-half of them are compromised and the other half still thinks this is normal politics.
The only response that matches the threat is building parallel infrastructure outside institutions that no longer function.
Everything else is documenting the collapse in real time.
Yep, it’s all happening, right now.
—Johan
Here’s one from left field…I’m a big believer in hidden truth; truth which is not expressed strategically, but can’t be suppressed.
I think a person’s smile tells me more about them than a hundred pages of testimony, and a good smile is terribly difficult to fake.
All of which is to say that your portrait shows me something words can’t. I trust it, and I like it.