1776: The Fund is the Foundation

On Monday, this past Monday, May 18th, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that it was setting aside $1,776,000,000 of taxpayer money, not for disaster relief, not for

veterans, for a thing they're calling the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

And the dollar figure is not random.

One...

1776, the year of American independence.

The same number the Proud Boys put on a planning document.

1776 returns.

They laid out a scheme to seize federal buildings and force a new election.

That's not me drawing a line.

That's the line they drew.

and then they printed it on the check.

Here's how the money came to exist.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump, the private citizen, the plaintiff, the civilly liable rapist, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns

during his first term.

So you have Trump suing the IRS, which now Trump runs.

A federal judge, Kathleen Williams, started asking hard questions.

about how a sitting president can be on both sides of the same lawsuit.

And before she could even, you know, declare a ruling, his lawyers just withdrew the suit.

The judge said she'd been, in her words, stripped of jurisdiction because the settlement was never even filed in her court.

A few hours later, the DOJ announced a deal.

The plaintiffs, Trump, his two sons, the Trump organization,

get a formal apology and no damages.

And in exchange, the government stands up a $1.776 billion fund to pay other people who say they were victims of weaponization.

The man who signed it is the acting attorney general, Todd Blanch.

Before he was acting attorney general, he was Trump's personal

criminal defense lawyer.

The money comes out of something called the Judgment Fund, a standing Treasury account meant to pay for court judgments and legal settlements.

Treasury has 60 days to move the cash into an account reserved, in the memo's words, for the sole use of the fund.

And the very day Treasury was supposed to certify the payment, the Treasury Department's General Counsel resigned.

93 House Democrats called it a specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.

A civil rights attorney called it theft far worse than Watergate.

And two of the police officers who were beaten defending the Capitol on January 6th have already filed suit to stop it because the people most likely to get paid out of this fund

are the people who beat them.

That's the worst part.

They don't get paid as people who got a break.

They get paid as victims, and victims in America are owed something.

Victims get checks.

So today we're gonna talk about how that inversion gets built, and why it isn't the first time this country has done it.

Welcome back to The Overlap.

I'm Joshua, flying solo this week.

William's out in the ether doing things one does.

So it's just me and it's a big one.

I want to be precise about what this episode is and isn't.

It's not a story about pardons, right?

Presidents pardon people.

They always have.

Carter pardoned the draft Dodgers and Ford pardoned Nixon and Clinton pardoned Mark Rich and people lost their minds for a decade.

And then Biden preemptively pardoned his son, Hunter.

The pardon power is broad and ugly and it's been broad and ugly for 250 years.

Trump used it on day one of his term, granting clemency to roughly 1600 January 6th defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 proud boys and oath keepers convicted of

seditious conspiracy against the United States of America.

That part's over.

That's the visible event.

This episode is about what comes after the pardon, the machine that takes people convicted by juries, sentenced by judges of violence against the Capitol, against the United States,

against our democracy, and reclassifies them as victims of the government that convicted them.

And then on the back end of that reclassification hands them money.

The pardons were the headline, the fund is the foundation, and the foundation is the thing that is going to outlive all of us, which might be very short.

I'm gonna do this in four moves, right?

You know the formula.

First, we're gonna talk about the history because we have done this exact thing before, after the Civil War, on a scale that reshaped the country.

Second, we'll go into the machine as it actually exists.

this week and what was put into place, where the money comes from, who controls it, who got fired to make room for it.

Third, the people.

Tarrio, Rhodes, Barnett, and on the other side of the ledge are the officers who held the line.

And fourth, we're gonna talk about what it means and what you can actually do about it.

One promise before we start, I'm gonna say the officer's names.

Caroline Edwards, Michael Fanon,

Harry Dunn, Daniel Hodges, Brian Sicknick.

Because in every story about who gets a check, there's a parallel story about who doesn't.

The selection of who counts as a victim, that's not a footnote to the political project.

That is the political project.

Richmond, Virginia, summer of 1890.

20,000 people lined the streets, Confederate veterans in their old gray uniforms.

50s and 60s now.

25 years past Appomattox, marched behind a covered statue.

The cloth comes off and it's Robert E.

Lee on horseback.

61 feet of bronze and granite, paid for partly by private donation.

and partly by the state of Virginia, a state that 25 years earlier had been part of an armed insurrection against the United States of America, using public money to build a

monument to the men who led that insurrection.

But forget the monument.

Let's talk about the pensions.

After the Civil War, the federal government paid pensions to Union veterans.

Normal.

You fight for your country, your country takes care of you.

By the 1890s, those pensions were the single largest line item in the federal budget.

By some measures, around 40 % of all federal spending.

Confederate veterans got nothing federal because they'd fought against the federal government.

So what happened?

Every former Confederate state stood up its own pension system.

Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, the Carolinas,

They taxed their own citizens, including, and sit with this, the black citizens whose enslavement had been the cause of the war, and they paid pensions to the men who fought to

keep those people enslaved.

A black taxpayer in Mississippi in 1895 was funding a pension for the man who fought a war to keep his parents in chains.

By the early 1900s in several southern states,

Confederate pensions were the largest single expenditure in the entire budget, larger than education.

How do you sell that?

You change what the war was about and you change who the victims were.

That's the lost cause.

An organized decades-long propaganda campaign, the Daughters of the Confederacy, Veterans Association, sympathetic newspapers, and textbook publishers.

Three claims.

One, the war wasn't about slavery.

It was about states' rights and Northern aggression.

Two,

The Confederate soldier wasn't an insurrectionist.

He was a noble defender of his home.

Three, the real victims were Southern whites who suffered occupation and reconstruction and the indignity of black people voting.

I grew up in Louisiana.

I went to school in the public school systems of Louisiana.

I was taught in the nineties.

that the Civil War was really about states' rights.

It wasn't really about slavery.

Slavery was a piece of it, but it was really about the right for a state to govern itself and not have the federal government intervene.

All right, reframe the perpetrators as victims.

And once the perpetrators are victims, the money isn't a reward for treason.

No, that sounds wrong.

It's restitution.

You'd be a monster not to pay them.

And the federal government eventually went along with it.

In 1958, with almost no Confederate veterans left alive, Congress passed a law granting them status equivalent to Union veterans for certain benefits.

Symbolic by then, sure.

But the principle was set in federal law, the men who took up arms against the United States are equivalent to the men who defended it.

Now, I want to be careful, because William would stop me here if he were here today.

The Civil War is not January 6th.

The scale is incomparable.

700,000 people died in the Civil War.

I'm not flattening it into a metaphor.

What I'm pointing at is the mechanism.

The way a defeated faction gets rebranded into a victim class and then they get paid.

That mechanism is identical and it runs in five steps.

One, an armed action against the legitimate government fails.

Two, the participants face consequences.

And three, a sustained campaign recharacterizes the action, not as an insurrection, but as patriotism.

Not treason, but resistance to tyranny.

And then four, once that takes hold amongst enough of the political class,

Public money starts flowing to the rebranded victims and then five monuments everywhere.

And we're already at step five, hostages, patriots, political prisoners, victims of a tyrannical regime.

Put those transcripts behind the speeches at Confederate monument dedications in the 1890s and you really can't tell them apart.

These phrases didn't appear in 2021 out of nowhere.

They've got 150 years of scaffolding underneath them.

And here's the part that should probably scare you the most.

These structures don't unbuild.

Once a pension system exists, once a class of beneficiaries is named, once there's an office to process the claims, it just keeps running.

Long after the original coalition dissolves and the original justifications become kind of embarrassing.

Now there are documented cases of federal widows' pensions being paid into the 2000s.

A century and a half after Appomattox, a southern state was still cutting checks based upon a man's service in an armed rebellion against the United States of America.

A pension is a story about who matters.

The Confederate pension said Confederate soldiers matter.

And the implicit second half of that sentence was always, and the people they hurt do not.

So let's get concrete about the machine that exists this week.

Two things are happening at the same time and you have to hold them together to see the shape of it.

First thing, and this one started back in early 2025.

is the purge.

You remember this.

Within days of the inauguration, the interim U.S.

Attorney General for D.C.

Ed Martin fired career prosecutors who'd worked the January 6 cases.

One of them told Politico that 25 to 30 of his colleagues were all let go at the same time.

The firing letters reportedly said, in effect, the reason was their role in the prosecutions.

At the same time, DOJ leadership, a memo from Emil Bov,

directed the FBI to hand over the names of every agent who'd at any time worked a January 6th investigation for quote, review.

We're talking about potentially thousands of agents.

The FBI Agents Association warned that it would gut the FBI and their ability to protect the country.

Pam Bondi reframed it as rooting out improper investigative tactics.

Asked about the firings, Trump said he hadn't heard about them, but added that it was a good thing because the people fired were very corrupt.

So that's the first half of the ledger.

The government is removing the people who built the cases.

And the framing, now this is the important part, the framing is that they were the wrongdoers.

The prosecutor who put a guy away for beating the shit out of a police officer with a flagpole is somehow recast as the abuser.

The agent is recast as the persecutor.

Hold that thought.

The second thing is the fund.

And the fund is brand new, like this Monday.

Let me walk the mechanics because the mechanics are the scandal of all of this.

$1.776 billion out of the Treasury's Judgment Fund.

A five member commission appointed by the Attorney General.

One member chosen, quote, in consultation with Congressional leadership.

The rest by Blanche.

The commission writes its own eligibility rules.

The settlement says it'll weigh the, quote, totality of the circumstances, including things like legal fees and prison costs.

Submitting a claim is voluntary.

There are, no partisan requirements, and the whole thing is set to wind down by December 15th, 2028, about a month before the end of Donald Trump's term, in case you weren't

paying attention or don't have a countdown timer on your.

person, your phone, your desk, whatever.

Leftover money then reverts to the government.

Now watch what happens when reporters ask the obvious question here.

Can the people who assaulted the police on January 6 get paid out of this?

And Blanche, at a Senate appropriations hearing said, and I quote this, anybody in this country is eligible to apply if they believe they're a victim of weaponization.

Asks specifically about Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, he said the commission would set the rules

quote, that's not for me to set.

Vice President Vance, same day at the White House, he wouldn't rule it out either.

He said, and I quote, I'm not committing to giving anybody money or committing to giving no one money.

and that claims would be judged case by case, he acknowledged openly, we do have people who are accused of attacking law enforcement officers.

That's a direct quote.

He didn't say no.

Nobody in the entire building will say no.

And the lawyers heard that loud and clear.

CBS reported within 48 hours, legal and PR shops in DC and New York were scrambling to position clients.

One Republican attorney, Dan Bacher, said he's already fielding inquiries, said he'd help people get made whole.

The first concrete claim we know about came from former Trump advisor,

Michael Caputo, asking for $2.7 million.

A conservative group called the Oversight Project said it would help people apply.

The phrase one publicist used reportedly, all J-6ers will apply.

Here's kind of the uh Iran-Contra of it.

The defining feature of Iran-Contra was funding a political project outside the authority Congress had granted.

Congress said that

No, basically, via the Boland Amendment.

So the administration built this off the books mechanism just to do it anyway.

This is structurally that.

As Jamie Raskin put it, only Congress has the power to appropriate money.

And Congress never voted on this.

The administration's defense is that there's precedent.

And they point to this 2010 settlement called Keep Segal.

where the Obama administration set up a $760 million fund for Native American farmers who'd faced discrimination.

But Senator Chris Coons demolished that comparison in the hearing with one question.

Did the Keep Siegel case involve a president suing his own government, then settling before any judge could actually review it?

Because that one was approved by a court and had defined eligibility criteria, and this one approved itself.

And why isn't this blowing up into hearings the way that Iran-Contra scandal did?

Because the committee that would hold those hearings, the House Judiciary Committee, its weaponization subcommittee, is run by the people who built the narrative this fund

operationalizes.

The oversight body became the propaganda arm, and then the executive built the apparatus the propaganda demanded.

This is a closed loop.

There's no third party.

with the independence to break this.

There's no balance of checks and, you know, balances.

Now to put two halves of this ledger together, because this is the whole episode in one sentence, the same Justice Department that fired the prosecutors who convicted these men

is now standing up the fund that may pay those same people.

The career attorney pushed into early retirement and the pardoned defendant cashing a federal check are not two separate stories.

They are the two sides of one transaction.

And let me put some names to it because sometimes abstracting these scenarios from the real people that it actually affects kind of numbs you.

At this point, we're all so damn trauma-ridden and trauma-response that without understanding how this relates to the human being aspect of this, we sometimes forget how

utterly absurd this is.

Enrique Tarrio, National Chairman of the Proud Boys, he wasn't even at the Capitol on January 6th.

He'd been arrested two days earlier and ordered to stay out of Washington, D.C., but a unanimous federal jury after a full trial with his own communications and evidence

convicted him in 2023 of seditious conspiracy.

They found he directed the Proud Boys' assault from a hotel room.

22 years, the longest sentence handed to any January 6th defendant.

On January 20th, 2025, his sentence was commuted and he walked out of prison a free man.

Within months, he was on friendly television being treated as a wronged man.

Under this fund, the framework that weighs legal fees and reputational harm, a man, a jury convicted of plotting to break the United States government could be owed money for the

reputational damage of having been convicted of plotting to break the United States government.

Like what?

Stuart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, 18 years for seditious conspiracy, commuted day one.

The jury found he'd staged an armed quick reaction force at a Virginia hotel, weapons readied to be ferried into Washington DC, if he gave the word.

The investigation turned up an organization that had recruited former police, former military, intelligence veterans.

The threat was not theoretical.

The jury believed it.

The sentence reflected it.

He's now free.

And quote, anybody can apply.

And then Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man, feed up on Nancy Pelosi's desk, one of the most iconic images of that day, multiple felonies, civil disorder, obstruction of justice,

theft of government property, because he took a piece of her mail.

Pardoned.

I bring up Barnett.

deliberately because he's not a mastermind.

He's like a guy who came because Trump told him to and made the worst decisions of his life in an afternoon.

Like, hold my beer.

And here's the tell, the framework treats Barnett exactly like it treats Tarrio.

Same victim category, same eligibility.

If this were an honest case-by-case review of prosecutorial overreach, you'd see distinctions.

You'd see Barnett

handled differently than the man who ran the Proud Boys.

You don't.

Because the framework was never about evaluating individual evidence.

It's a blanket reclassification of a political category.

January 6th, defendants.

Into a victim category.

The reclassification is the entire point.

The facts of any one case don't actually matter.

Now, the other side of the ledger.

Carolyn Edwards, the Capitol officer who testified that she slipped in other officers' blood, that she was knocked unconscious against a concrete staircase, and she thought she

was going to die.

Michael Fanon, pulled into the crowd, beaten, tased,

told him that they'd kill him with his own gun.

Brian Sicknick collapsed and died the day after.

More than 140 officers, Capitol Police, were injured that day.

More than 600 defendants were accused of assaulting or impeding officers, with 175 of those people having weapons.

None of those officers are on any victim list.

Their injuries don't fit the framework because the framework isn't about who got hurt.

It's about who got prosecuted.

And two of them have now sued to stop the fund.

Harry Dunn, retired Capitol Police, and Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan Police filed in federal court this week to block it.

They called it a taxpayer-funded slush fund.

to finance the insurrectionists.

Their argument is brutally simple.

The men who attacked them haven't just escaped punishment, they're about to be paid.

The man who defended the building is not the recognized victim.

The men who attacked the building are.

The official designation of who counts has been reversed.

And the designation comes with money attached, it always does.

That's how the state declares who matters, by deciding whose checks to cut and which ones they're gonna cast.

So let's pull it all together.

The pattern is that American democracy, the current American state, has a recurring habit of taking the perpetrators of organized political violence after the violence fails and

converting them into this protected class.

Sometimes it takes decades, like the Confederate pensions, right?

They need time to...

build up the momentum, they need time to gather the forces.

Sometimes it takes days, like a Monday DOJ press release.

The mechanism is always the same.

A sustained campaign that reframes the violence as virtue.

And then an administrative apparatus that distributes resources to the newly virtuous, wiped clean of all of their sins.

and the actual victims get edited out of the official story.

Because their pain is now inconvenient.

There's a darker layer to this, and the history kind of insists on it.

The same apparatus that pays the perpetrators is often the apparatus that punishes the victims.

After Reconstruction collapsed, the state governments that built the Confederate pension systems were the same ones that ran convict leasing.

that looked away from lynching, that built Jim Crow.

The state didn't just stop protecting the victims, it joined the people hurting them.

The modern echo is exact.

The same DOJ that may pay Enrique Tario is the DOJ that fired the prosecutors who convicted him.

Not a neutral redirection of resources, an active hurting of one set of people to reward another set of people.

What does that mean for you, sitting wherever you're sitting right now?

Maybe you're in the car or listening to this in the shower or something, I don't know.

It means the basic civic deal is being renegotiated on terms favorable to the people who broke it.

The deal says participate in democracy, accept election outcomes, don't use violence and you have a place here.

The people who broke that deal on January 6th are now being told by their government that they were right to break the law.

That they were the real Americans.

And the people who counted the votes and guarded the building and prosecuted the attackers, they're the ones doing something wrong.

And once that message arrives as actual money, it's not rhetoric anymore, it's policy.

And policy is sticky.

The Confederate pensions ran into the 2000s.

If this fund builds out a permanent claims apparatus, decades from now, the government may still be cutting checks whose paper trail leads back to the insurrection, the attempted

overtake of the United States government on January 6th.

That durability is not a side effect.

It's the design.

And the deepest cost is the one that doesn't show up in any budget line.

The chilling effect.

A domestic terrorism researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, Jacob Ware, put the danger pretty plainly.

The message is that criminal action against the election system, quote, will be compensated if done on behalf of the president.

And that, he said, is antithetical to democracy.

and a peaceful transfer of power.

Think about every federal prosecutor and agent watching this.

The lesson being,

The lesson being taught is that doing your job, if it's politically inconvenient to a future administration, can and will be retroactively branded as misconduct, and you

personally will pay for it.

So the next time something like January 6th happens, some of the people who build the cases will hesitate.

They'll think about the agents purged in 2025.

They'll think about their pensions and their families, and some of them will look the other way.

And that's exactly how a democracy gets weaker.

Not in one dramatic stroke like uh overtaking the capital building, but in 10,000 small private calculations by individual public servants about whether the job is still worth

the cost.

The pardons were the headline.

The fund is the foundation.

And the foundation is what decides what kind of country we're standing in 20 years from today.

We always try to close with three concrete things, not stay informed, specific things.

One, support the officers directly.

The Capitol Police Memorial Fund provides financial support to the families of Capitol Police officers killed or injured in the line of duty, and it predates January 6th.

The people hurt that day, Edwards, Fanon, Dunn, Hodges, and many whose names will never, ever, ever make the news and you will never see or hear from them.

are dealing with medical bills, lost income, the cost of mental health care, while the federal compensation machinery is being pointed at people who hurt them.

Look that fund up, send what you can.

If you can just tell somebody else about it, that's fine.

Especially with the price of gas for this optional war.

Two, if there's a federal employee in your life, a prosecutor, an FBI agent, a career attorney, a clerk,

anyone who touches federal law enforcement, reach out to them this week.

Not to interrogate them and ask them what's going on in their lives, just ask them how they're doing.

The chilling effect I described is happening to real people right now, and the institutional support that used to backstop them is being dismantled.

Personal support from outside the institution is gonna matter a lot more than you think.

Reach out to your friends.

Three, and the most direct,

Find your member of Congress and find their position on the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

If you're in a red state, you know where they stand, but make sure that they know where you stand.

93 House Democrats have already moved to block it in court, and at least one Senator, Ruben Gallego, has pushed an amendment to choke off the money.

But most members haven't been forced to take a clear public position because most constituents haven't asked.

Call the office.

The staffer who picks up is required to log it.

Tell them specifically that you oppose paying federal money to people convicted of violent crimes against the government.

call takes four minutes, members respond in aggregate to call volume.

That's a real lever.

It's a way we can actually push the system.

So that's three things, right?

The Capitol Police Memorial Fund, the federal employee in your life, your member of Congress, on this fund, none of them is gonna fix this by themselves.

I've long given up on the idea that anybody's coming to fix this.

Together though, with a thousand other small things, they bend the line, and the line gets bent by people who keep showing up.

This has been the overlap.

Full transcript and every source for tonight's facts are linked below.

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So yeah, that's it.

One person, one conversation, one bent line.

That's the work.

Take care of each other and we'll see you next week.

yeah, that's the overlap.