Gonzo Report 148

Field notes from the crumbling American empire. Filed for the record on Wednesday, May 6, 2026.

“The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith

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Turns out HHS is getting some help from the EPA in killing all of us faster
An internal memo from EPA deputy David Fotouhi declared the agency’s 40-year library of more than 500 different chemical safety assessments to be untrustworthy, and ordered reviews of every existing regulation. Fotouhi, a former attorney for—you guessed it—various companies who produce toxic chemicals, specifically flagged an initial reassessment of ethylene oxide, a known carcinogen used in everything from antifreeze to detergents. Who knew that making America great again could mean bringing back lead-based paint, arsenic in water, or adding more forever chemicals to our environment?

Trump raped kids and became president, but homeless people sleeping in public go to prison
The National Homelessness Law Center called Louisiana House Bill 211 “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country.” In the state with America’s highest poverty rate, the Western world’s highest incarceration rate, and a 100,000-unit affordable housing shortage, Republican officials are moving to criminalize the consequences of their own failed governance. As is everything with the GOP, their motives are two-fold: to curry favor with the Führer, who signed an executive order last year promising federal grant preference to states that criminalize homelessness, and to get their greedy hands on more of that sweet federal grant money. The bill, already passed by the Louisiana House is now before the Senate, and would impose exorbitant fines, jail time, and unpaid hard labor on repeat offenders. The only thing fascists love more than extracting labor from people earning poverty wages is extracting it from people who work for free.

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Regime proposal would ban trans people from homeless shelters
A new proposal from the Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD puts forward a rule requiring federally funded homeless shelters to only house people by birth sex, effectively banning homeless transgender people from finding safe emergency housing. LGBTQ+ advocates say most trans people will likely stop seeking shelter rather than risk confrontations, harassment, or violence. When a government criminalizes people for just being who they are, it enforces a politics of visibilty as criminality, and openly advances a purge carried out with grant guidelines instead of guns. If they get away with this, it opens the door to countless other domains where federal money flows to institutions who serve vulnerable populations. The cruelty is always the point.

FDA hid taxpayer-funded studies proving vaccine safety
All currently available vaccines have long been proven safe and effective, but that didn’t stop the Worst Kennedy from reinventing the wheel, having FDA scientists conduct peer-reviewed studies on the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines, and—surprise—they were again proven to be safe and effective. However, as the truth is incongruent with all official Trump regime narratives, the study results were buried deeper than Ivana at Trump’s New Jersey golf course.

This concludes your report for Wednesday, May 6, 2026.

Hey, look at it this way—the good news is that it can’t get any worse. The bad news is that the good news was a lie. Until tomorrow, friends.

From hell with love,
–Zappa

Democracy dies in darkness and in the widening gap between what independent journalists make and what they need to keep the lights on.
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(Photo credit: mana5280)