The Cycle Monday Memo
Live Free. Die fast. Get Digested Slowly
Let’s begin with a quick vibe check. Are you breathing air with an AQI over 300 today? Wearing Crocs in public because it’s too hot for socks but too dangerous to go barefoot? Great. Then you’re ready for this week’s news.
I. The Elon Musk Civil War: America Party Edition
First up, our favorite discount Bond villain, Elon Musk, declared civil war on the Republican Party this week by suggesting he’s launching the “America Party,” a political vehicle so inspiring it was conceived during a Twitter poll with as much methodological rigor as your drunk uncle asking, “Who wants to go to Waffle House?” at 3am.
Now, Musk says he didn’t actually file an FEC filing for a new party. That’s what his lawyer told him, anyway. So maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. He’s a busy guy juggling at least 6 jobs with a ketamine and video game addiction.
What we know for sure: conservative influencers lost their minds at the idea.
In case you’re wondering how Trump feels about it, he issued his usual sized rant, to which Elon responded: I ain’t reading that.”
Although Elon seems to think he’s forming a “moderate” party, The America Party’s founding principle is “eliminate the national debt,” a position so extremist it makes your average fiscal hawk look like Karl Marx.
It would attract precisely one type of person: libertarian bros under 50. That would be AWESOME.
But let’s be honest. If Musk actually launches this thing, Republicans will spend 2026 fighting for control of a coalition split between:
Trump’s Tinfoil Hat Insurgency
Musk’s Naturalized Bitcoin Bros
The five remaining moderates clinging to their offices like survivors on a sinking cruise ship.
Pass the popcorn. Or the Dogecoin, whichever retains more value this week.
II. Alligator Alcatraz: Trump’s First Concentration Camp
Meanwhile, in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has unveiled Alligator Alcatraz. This is not a drill. The Florida Highway Patrol put up official signs for an area of the St. Johns River crawling with so many alligators it resembles an open-air reptile supermax. Apparently, it’s illegal to swim there, but if you do, the penalty is… natural selection.
New signs installed over the weekend read “Alligator Alcatraz,” as if this is a cute tourist attraction and not a lagoon of death where the sentence is life, swiftly commuted to digestion.
Welcome to Florida:
Live free, die fast, and get digested slowly.
It’s a libertarian paradise, really. Minimal government interference in your decision to become protein paste for a creature older than dinosaurs. Ron DeSantis probably sees it as a model for Medicare reform: eliminate benefits by encouraging the elderly to swim across the river for cheaper groceries.
Here’s some good news, I guess. It took Trump twice as long as Hitler to open his first concentration camp.
III. The Epstein List That Never Was
On to darker fare. Last night, the holy trinity of Fox refugees—Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi—decided to close the book on Epstein conspiracies once and for all. Their message:
There is no Epstein client list.
There never was.
He killed himself.
Stop asking questions.
That’s it. That’s the official line now. You’re supposed to believe a list, that Pam Bondi once claimed was “sitting on her desk” doesn’t exist.
The government has no record of who flew on his planes or visited his island. It was all just a bad dream, like supply-side economics or Matt Gaetz’s hairline.
Predictably, MAGA world is having a meltdown. QAnon forums are screaming betrayal. Twitter’s darkest corners are demanding names. Bongino is telling them to get over it. And somewhere in a prison cell, Ghislaine Maxwell is wondering why she didn’t take up banking fraud instead.
Even Catturd feels betrayed.
IV. Camp Mystic, the Flood, and NOAA DOGE Cuts
Finally, we end with the tragedy at Camp Mystic, where the Guadalupe River rose suddenly and flooded a girls camp, killing at least 80 people with others still missing.
Here’s what’s coming out:
Officials knew the area was prone to flash flooding.
They knew there was no advanced warning system in place other than the traditional flash flooding text warnings your average Texan gets all the time.
The multiple camps in that area had been relying on an informal word-of-mouth chain to warn each other upstream and downstream.
Texas emergency management agencies had been requesting funding to build a real warning system with sirens for years. The state legislature denied it. Why?
Because they were too busy passing multi-billion dollar tax cuts for oil companies and rich people.
Federal requests for flood mitigation funding were also denied by the Trump administration in 2017. FEMA said they were busy with hurricane recovery elsewhere.
Don’t forget, both NOAA and the NWS were DOGE victims. Trump’s DOGE cuts to NOAA resulted in staff cuts nationwide and in the Austin/San Antonio office, the Severe Weather Coordinator was forced into early retirement.
If you think that’s bad, here is something else you should know: The Big Ugly Bill slashes over $2 billion dollars from NOAA. Trump’s budget cuts to NOAA were explicitly justified by his administration as a way to offset other tax breaks and increase “private sector efficiency.” After all, who needs government forecasters when you can get daily hurricane updates from a meme account with a Pepe Frog meme as the profile picture?
Camp Mystic sits on a river known to surge violently with little warning. The local NWS office had been pleading for more staffing and better predictive tech to protect the lives of Texans living and vacationing along its banks. Requests denied. Kids died.
V. America Baby!
So there you have it:
The richest man in the world started a new political party by accident. Or maybe he didn’t?
Florida has opened Trump’s first concentration camp.
MAGA’s innocence has been lost by Trump, Bogino, Patel, and Bondi hiding the Epstein List which definitely has Trump on it.
And Texas can’t fund a flood warning system because of limited government
Tune in next week for more news from the greatest nation on Earth, where our national motto should read:
“We could fix it, but that would be socialism.”
Until then, swim at your own risk.
Rachel
You are a treasure, Rachel. Did they call Concentration Camps that when they built them? Or is it a later term. I appreciate that people are not dancing around this, and calling it what it is.
Ha-Ha! So true: “We could fix it, but that would be socialism.” -- in a nutshell.