One of the most remarkable aspects of Trump’s candidacy has barely been touched on: He has brought into political discourse the idea that we should plunder countries for oil, and that the United States military should be turned into an agent of that plunder.

This is not even an exaggeration. The point came up again at a town hall event that Trump held with Sean Hannity this week. Hannity started with the falsehood that Trump had opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. Trump then repeated it himself, before going on to detail his own vision for occupation.

“But the way we got out was ridiculous. But I’ve been saying something ever since I’ve known you: Keep the oil,” Trump said, repeating that refrain as the crowd applauded. “And I said, when we went in, you know, in the old days, to the victor belonged the spoils.”

He added: “Now, if they would’ve done that, there would be no ISIS. I said keep the oil. And I think most of the audience has heard me say it 200 times—I mean every time practically. ... So I wanted to get out, but I wanted to keep the oil. So by nature, that means you’re staying in, because you’re going to have to guard the oil, etc., etc. But that oil is very prized oil, believe me.”

Trump has been talking about occupying Iraq’s oil areas since at least last August. If this were actually put into practice, chances are there would still be an ISIS—and a lot more armies of Iraqi national resistance. And this time, the United States would not be able to count on any of its traditional Western democratic allies to wage a project of imperialistic piracy.

While it’s looking very unlikely Trump will become president, he has accomplished something truly disturbing: bringing this kind of talk into the political mainstream, and getting crowds of people, plus members of the conservative media, to cheer it on.

After a baffling summer where Hillary Clinton’s team was allowed to dominate advertising, the Trump campaign is finally making its first ad buy in swing states—and it’s tiny. Trump is spending $270,000 in Florida, $72,000 in Ohio, and $78,000 in Pennsylvania. By point of comparison, Clinton has already spent $23 million in Florida, $17 million in Ohio, and $6 million in Pennsylvania. So Trump’s spending splurge puts him at less than 1 percent of his rival (and that’s without counting states where Trump isn’t spending money at all).

In effect, Clinton is playing with dollars while Trump is playing with pennies. This tends to cast doubt not just on his claims to be a billionaire, but on the entire motive of his campaign. If Trump isn’t spending money on ads, what is he spending it on? Where are the donations going? And is he really trying to win, or just create more buzz for his brand, which he can perhaps spin off into a media empire after the election?

J.K. Trotter is reporting that Gawker.com is shutting down next week, confirming rumors that Univision, which on Tuesday reached a $135 million deal to buy Gawker Media, is not interested in maintaining the flagship site, even as it absorbs Gawker Media’s six other sites. The closing of Gawker represents a victory for Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that pushed Gawker Media into bankruptcy and, by extension, turned Gawker.com into damaged goods in the eyes of the corporate world.

There will be longer, deeper obituaries written about Gawker, which started off as a New York-centric, media-gossip blog before expanding into a national outlet with immense reach and influence. But suffice it to say that Gawker is embedded in online media’s DNA, which you can see for yourself by simply taking a look around this very page. And after 14 years of near-constant churn and innovation, it was still better at what it did than all its imitators. Though its sensibility is everywhere, it is almost impossible to imagine the media landscape without it.

And the Obama administration agrees, announcing that it will end the federal use of private prisons, a major new policy that has been sought by criminal justice reformers.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on Thursday instructed officials that when existing contracts come up for renewal, they are to either decline to do so or “substantially reduce” their scope. The relevant contracts will all come up for renewal over the next five years.

“The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services,” Yates told The Washington Post, “and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that.”

In addition to an Inspector General’s report finding serious problems with safety and security for both inmates and staff in private prisons, there was also the recent, brutal exposé by Mother Jones’s Shane Bauer, who went undercover as a staffer at a private prison housing state inmates in Louisiana. In that piece, Bauer detailed chilling accounts of inferior medical care—including an inmate who lost both his legs and his fingers to untreated gangrene—sexual assaults, and other abusive practices, as well as the frequent cancellation of such rehabilitative services as the law library, education and job training, and drug counseling.

One thing to bear in mind, though, is this does not by itself signal the end of private prisons. According to Bauer’s statistics, most of the private prison population comes from state judicial systems, not the federal system.

The biggest story coming out of Rio is the controversy over whether the silver-haired dude-bro did or did not get mugged by cops outside of the Olympic Village. For those who haven’t been following, the facts in this case are weird and shifting, the upshot being that Lochte, the U.S. gold medalist swimmer, may have filed a false police report when he claimed that he and three other American swimmers were held up at gunpoint by men pretending to be police last weekend. The whole truth of the matter has yet to emerge, but new evidence suggests Lochte and company were the ones causing trouble that night, allegedly trashing a bathroom door at a gas station. Now his American teammates are saying Lochte fabricated the story, according to ESPN.

Rio is a city with real problems of crime and violence, among them the wanton brutality of its police. Its residents resent the billions spent on superficial makeovers for the Olympics instead of much-needed services and infrastructure, a story that has struggled to grab the attention of American audiences the way Lochte’s initial claim has. Residents also resent the condescending racism that made Lochte’s initial version of events so easy for foreigners to accept, which is one of the reasons the Brazilian authorities are taking the Lochte case so seriously. If it turns out that Lochte is indeed just a drunk gringo using Third World stereotypes to cover up his transgressions, it will say nothing good about Lochte or the way these Games have been covered.

The Wall Street Journal has unearthed 2013 footage of Donald Trump’s new white-nationalist-baiting campaign chair, Breitbart head honcho Steve Bannon, complaining, “We don’t really believe there is a functional conservative party in this country, and we certainly don’t think the Republican Party is that.”

On the one hand, the fact that the Republican Party isn’t a functional conservative party was trivially true at the time, and has only become more blindingly so in the years since. But by effectively capturing the GOP, Bannon has fulfilled his own prophecy. There’s an old aphorism in U.S. politics that Republicans insist government doesn’t work, then get elected and prove it. Bannon is—perhaps unwittingly or subconsciously, but possibly with complete awareness and malign intent—running the same play, against the GOP instead of the government. This election looks more and more like divine retribution for decades of conservative bad faith.

If Romney’s campaign concocted its own polling to convince itself it was winning in 2012, then Team Trump is retreating into another universe altogether, another sign that his campaign represents the triumph of the right-wing echo chamber.

Yesterday, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen appeared on CNN to deny that there had been any campaign shakeup. He then pushed back against host Brianna Keilar’s statement that Trump was currently down against Hillary Clinton: “Says who?” 

“Polls,” Keilar responded. “Most of them. All of them?” 

After an uncomfortable pause, Cohen reiterated: “Says who?” 

“Polls. I just told you. I answered your question.” 

“Which polls?” 

“All of them.”  

On CNN this morning, new campaign adviser Kellyanne Conway was asked about the offensive headlines at Breitbart, whose chief, Stephen Bannon, is now leading Trump’s campaign. These include: “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews”; “Sympathy for the Devils: The Plot Against Roger Ailes—and America”; “Big Trans Hate Machine Targets Pitching Great Curt Schilling”; and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

Conway didn’t seem to see anything wrong with them: “I’ve not read those stories, but I have to say—not unlike the reason that most of the media cover Donald Trump, and not Hillary Clinton—people like to click on headlines and see what they’re about.”

It appears that Bannon and Conway were brought in so that Trump wouldn’t be surrounded by advisers telling him to change. The only way they could think this is a good idea is if they are living in a separate world from the rest of us.

The Republican candidate for president tweeted out this rather strange message Thursday morning:

At first glance, the tweet seems nonsensical. The United States, of course, is not Britain. It is not even in the European Union. And Trump had no actual involvement in the Brexit referendum, beyond his praising of the result while touring his golf course in Scotland. (Scotland voted heavily to Remain in the EU.)

But, a day after he brought on a leader of the alt-right media to head his campaign, he appears to be associating his campaign with the right-wing movements that have sprung up across Europe, including UKIP in Britain. It is of a piece with his attempt to link Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who has become an enemy of the right for opening Europe’s borders to refugees. He is fully embracing his identity as a force of white nationalism and a disruptor of allegedly corrupt Western institutions.