Trump-negative reporting by Bari Weiss’s CBS News!

What’s the world coming to when you have a billionaire crony buy a major news network, appoint a reliable political ally as news editor-in-chief, and they still report this kind of ugly, critical shit about you? From Heather Cox Richardson:

Daniel Klaidman, Michael Kaplan, and Matt Gutman of CBS News reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after a federal raid on a popular horse racing venue in Wilder, Idaho, led to the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants as well as the temporary detention of 375 U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Only five arrests ended in criminal charges, all for unlicensed gambling.

Answering allegations that agents had used zip ties on children, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Boise and Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin flatly denied the allegations. “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” she said. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is the kind of garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.” But after photographic evidence of zip-tie bruises on a 14-year-old female U.S. citizen as well as personal testimony, the FBI changed their assertion to say no “young” children were zip-tied.

An 8,000% increase in “death threats” against Trump’s violent, armed for insurrection Ku Klux Klan brigades? That’s almost as high as the 9,000% reduction in my drug prices under the most transparent, generous and loving president in world history. All that cash they send me every month is making me not care so much about civil liberties anymore, as long as those fat checks keep rolling in. Still, some part of me still notices there’s not a peep in the corporate media, or anywhere else, really, about the steady number of actual military veterans who kill themselves every day in the US. It adds up to around 6,000 a year.

More than 6,000 veterans have died by suicide each year since 2001, with the figure peaking in 2018 at 6,738 deaths. The slight decrease in 2023 follows the downward trend since 2018. source

Thank you for your service, loser.

As for actual total losers, nobody is reporting how many hundreds of thousands of poor, “nonwhite” children Elon and Donald continue to gleefully kill by slashing USAID funding and putting Little Marco in charge of closing it down completely. The shameful, quiet mass slaughter was discussed in the press briefly after The Lancet’s recently produced report projecting more than twenty million additional deaths (on top of the between 500,000 and 1,000,000 already dead in 2025) that will occur in the next four years. Here’s Little Marco, for the defense of Ayn Rand’s strong-get-to-fuck-the-weak view of the world:

Asked about the study, a senior US State Department Official called The Lancet a “failed journal” and said: “Some recent ‘studies’ are rooted in outdated thinking, insisting that the old and inefficient global development system is the only solution to human suffering. This is simply not true.”

“Rather than helping recipient countries help themselves, the old system created a global culture of dependency, compounded by significant inefficiency and waste. This has prompted development donors everywhere – not just the United States – to reconsider their approach to foreign aid,” the senior official added. Last July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the new approach as “prioritizing trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance.” source

And finally, the latest in Epstein/Trump news, Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) with a nice summary of the facts of the coverup and the always outraged, tantrum pitching Pam Bondi burning him for blasphemy. She had previously screamed at lawyer and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin (D-Md) ” ‘You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser! You’re not even a lawyer!” You can google that yourself, Pam.

Fascism’s hatred of compromise

Fascists do not compromise, being uncompromising is their brand. Fascism, militaristic rule by state violence, backed by corporate power, is based on a relentless appeal to terror. Being terror-based, fascism never needs to articulate a rational set of beliefs based on observable reality — no argument is allowed in a fascist state. A terrified populace is ready for the protection of a “strongman,” a leader who will never yield or bend. That these strongmen are, in fact, the weakest and neediest (and generally the most insane) people in history, is obscured during their reigns by the irrationality they unleash among a public scared out of its collective wits. A fascist ruler never compromises, about anything, ever — hence “strongman”. An angry two-year old never compromises while raging either, but nobody confuses an enraged toddler with an all powerful being. Unless your critical faculties have been disabled by a crippling fear of death, in which case that infuriated toddler has every right to rule.

Fred Koch, wealthy father of the most influential fascist of the American rightwing, billionaire polluter/”philanthropist” Charles, was essentially a Nazi. The German nanny Fred hired for his four boys (as he built the fuel refineries that kept Hitler’s Luftwaffe in business throughout the war), a stern disciplinarian who required the young brothers to defecate on a strict schedule, ran back to Germany to be with her beloved Fuhrer, after his blitzkreig conquered France. Fred Koch inspired his boys to fight, to compete for dominance. The two history recalls as The Koch Brothers, Charles and David, ruthlessly fought their brothers in court for decades and essentially prevailed. You can read the sickening details of how this psychotic father replicated himself in his two “strongest” offspring in Jane Mayer’s masterful Dark Money. David, backed by Koch money, ran for vice president in 1980, on the Libertarian ticket. The Kochs got an appropriate 1% of the national vote for the millions they spent on the campaign. Charles, a brilliant and dogged engineer, got to work building, testing and constantly correcting a vast anti-democratic machine to influence public opinion, frame every public issue to suit his private passions, pass unpopular legislation, defeat regulations to protect air, water and biodiversity, gain control of the federal judiciary (he succeeded 100% with the 6-3 ideologically pure Federalist Society Supreme Court) and so on.

A step back into the America that MAGA wants to make great again, back to the days before “judicial activism” destroyed our great nation. 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court, after hearing the arguments, ruled that “separate but equal” in America’s racially segregated public schools was a crock of shit. They ordered “desegregation” of all American public schools be carried out “with all deliberate speed”. The speed was deliberate enough that racists went to work to make sure their children never had to sit in the same classroom as non-white children. The public school I attended was not integrated until 1964. That school, one of the top rated public schools in New York, was the elementary school Trump would likely have attended, he could have walked there from the house he grew up in less than ten minutes. His psychotic father had other plans for his sadistic young son.

American racists were outraged at the “judicial activism” of the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. It made no difference to them that the decision was based on a rational evaluation of the evidence presented, in fact, that made it 100 times worse. In response to this judicial act of “communist” sabotage, brought by Negroes and their race traitor allies against a school board 146 miles from his hometown of Wichita, Fred Koch and several wealthy industrialist fellow travelers founded The John Birch Society, a far right-wing fringe group still in operation today. You can visit their website. Once the lunatic fringe of the right wing, which Republican politicians and pundits were always careful to distance themselves from, JBS, as they brand themselves now, is mainstream MAGA, the quivering heart of the present day Republican Party. Check out this photo, the first thing you see when you open their homepage:

A Who’s Who of popular (and obscure– who are those two on the right?) American fascists. These extremists have a vision, as you can see bullet-pointed above. A white Christian oligarchy where none of our most entitled and deserving “legacy” citizens ever have to hear whining from “communists” and other sick individuals (people like me) who hate their freedom. You could call that a coherent worldview, if it wasn’t so inhumanly insane. The hallmark of these fuckers is their refusal to compromise. Here is their glorious mission statement:

Americans committed to:

Defending our God-given rights
Protecting liberty
Upholding the Constitution
Promoting less government
Preserving America’s founding values

Something I learned from my personal life — there are people, dear loved ones sometimes, who, once in a conflict, reveal a rigidity and need to fight to the death that was unthinkable a moment earlier. Their unwillingness to compromise is actually an inability to compromise, based on a deep terror of loss of control. This type only feels safe when they are in charge and their will is not disputed. They refuse to negotiate because they can’t compromise, crippled by a fear as powerful as the terror of imminent, violent death. Feel sorry for these creatures if you are kind-hearted, but never underestimate the depths of their desperation when they are in a battle to the death (which they always are when compromise is needed).

Speaking of psychopaths, it struck me last night — Trump was deeply jealous of his buddy Jeffrey, a guy who started with nothing but an amazing ability to lie and manipulate and an insatiable appetite for young girls, and wound up as a super-wealthy friend and confidant of the most powerful people in the world. Epstein got away with raping 14 year-old girls for decades, and his powerful buddies — including lying gay anti-icon Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent [1] — all stayed close to him anyway, even after his criminal proclivities became public. Wealthy, powerful men like Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump, all stayed friends with Epstein, seemingly whether blackmailed by him or not. No wonder the perverted fucker was suicided in federal detention under Trump and Bagpiper Bill Barr. How infuriating his successful, unaccountable scumbag life must have been to the eternally covetous Donald John Trump!

[1] In the event the administration becomes aware of this on finance.senate.gov and takes it down, as they are wont to do, here is the first part of the post:

Washington, D.C. – Following new revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s deep and long-running relationship with J.P Morgan, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to turn over Epstein-related Treasury records to Senate investigators. Finance Committee staff reviewed a large portion of those files in person at the Treasury Department in 2024. Senator Wyden has sought to obtain the complete set for further investigation, but Bessent has repeatedly refused to produce them to the committee and downplayed their significance. The files detail Epstein transactions totaling at least $1.5 billion dollars, and they include the names of women and girls he may have trafficked, as well as the identities of individuals whose involvement with Epstein may put them at risk of blackmail or other foreign corruption. They also reveal potential violations of federal anti-money laundering laws by J.P. Morgan and other banks–compliance failures that helped Epstein continue abusing and trafficking women and girls many years after law enforcement was first alerted to his activities.

“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes, and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records, because it’s simply impossible that somebody with his background in finance is unaware of FinCEN or any of the other investigative offices within the Treasury,” Senator Wyden said. “From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

Negotiating with Nazis is a doomed exercise

The only language Nazis speak is power. The only way to defeat Nazis is through constant, organized, unbroken resistance. It is futile to argue with people who hold violently incoherent views and demand obedience or death. The impasse over funding of DHS is a great example of the futility of negotiating in good faith with a party that spits on good faith. This is a characteristic of any fascist movement. One slogan of the early Nazi supporters was “wir scheissen auf die frieheit!”, which the NY Times delicately mistranslated as “we spit on freedom” when the German verb actually means “shit”. We are a nation of laws, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage in fighting Nazis. As Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Josef Goebbels famously said:

The Framers of the Constitution, who “conservative” “constitutional scholars” like MAGA Mike Johnson claim to revere, amended the Constitution with explicit protections against government intrusion into personal freedoms. These first ten amendments are called The Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment [1] protects every person living in the USA from unreasonable searches and seizures. If the government wants to search your home, they must have a warrant signed by a judge who agreed there is probable cause of some illegal activity before that search is legal.

Nazis hate restraints like this on their power. They insist that the power they have justifies whatever they do, and if the doing gives them more power, so much the better. You cannot negotiate with Nazis. One reason is that their worldview is incoherent and inhuman. They can’t be persuaded by evidence, logic, appeals to ethics, conscience, common sense, common decency, fairness, justice, etc. Their mission is to unquestioningly serve the weltanshauung of their insane Leader. All authority in a Nazi system is top down, all power emanates from an infallible, superhuman Leader (Unitary Execuctive in American fascist lingo). Opposing the will of this all-powerful being is punishable by death in a Nazi state.

So true believer MAGA Mike Johnson refuses to yield, insisting DHS has the indisputable legal right to disobey the Constitution and a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent in performing its duties. Johnson insists DHS may make its own rules about arrest, detention, gassing and killing civilians in “self-defense”, and create their own “administrative warrants,” ignoring the Fourth Amendment, to round up dangerous brown children and their immigrant parents. 75,000 of these “worst of the worst” are already detained in over 200 American concentration camps.

There will be no compromise on this in the DHS funding debate, courts may not order the Leader to do anything that violates the Leader’s view of what must be done to preserve The Homeland (also borrowed from the German, Heimat [2], used by Nazis to define love of the Fatherland). MAGA “populists” work in coordination with our most powerful billionaire psychopaths and their hundred tentacled legal/public relations/voter suppression octopus. One particularly smelly tentacle is the “law firm” America First Legal, headed by nonlawyer Stephen Miller, the most adept and virulent of Mr. Trump’s inner circle of psychopathic asslickers. Miller’s absolute power flows directly from the Leader. Check out Miller’s mission statement for suckers who might kick in a few bucks they don’t have:

We protect America First values by holding every level of government accountable, strategically litigating against unconstitutional policies, and ensuring that power stays where it belongs — with the American people.

We are in a hard fight for our democracy, with worse days to come. Our elected leaders, many sponsored by, and beholden to, legally created “persons”, corporations, who are always psychopaths, are probably not up to the task of fighting for our experiment in self-rule. It is up to each of us to push them to stand firm in a battle where they have only the leverage we provide by organizing, protesting, speaking out. Call your senators.

[1] The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized source

[2] The word describes a state of belonging “the opposite of feeling alien,” and its definition is not limited to a geographical place Continued in Wikipedia

Script for ICE/CBP reforms

It is imperative to call and email our senators (and members of Congress) as they negotiate conditions for funding ICE and CBP. You can reach them at (202) 224-3121.

Have a short script ready. This will be mine, starting with thanking my otherwise weak-willed senators for taking principled action in severing ICE/CBP funding from the rest of the government appropriations bill in order to rein in their unchecked abuses.

Thanks for taking a stand for democracy, your votes are crucial and I greatly appreciate you holding the line in negotiations over reforms of ICE and CBP.

ICE and CBP have been deployed to cities under a false national emergency in an attempt to violently provoke a violent response from citizens. They should not be armed for anti-riot duty as though facing an insurgency in Fallujah — they have faced zero violence, in spite of their constant violent provocations including cold blooded murder.

At minimum, they must not be allowed to conceal their identities and must be placed under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement. They must not be armed with assault rifles, tear gas, pepper spray and green gas — a chemical weapon illegal under international law. Do everything possible to restrict the ability of these armed goons to gas children, smash car windows, break into homes, schools and churches, and murder law abiding civilians with impunity.

Stand strong against this brazen, lawless assault on our democracy!

And for my follow-up email:

A federal judge had to order this the other day, after massive ICE gassing (the plume of chemical irritant was visible from a mile away) of a peaceful crowd in Portland:

“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads,” he wrote.

Federal agents are restricted under the order from using chemical or projectile munitions unless the target of such weapons “poses an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Agents are not allowed to deploy munitions at the head, neck, or torso of any person, “unless the officer is legally justified in using deadly force against that person.” And agents are restricted from deploying munitions if doing so would “endanger any other individual who does not pose an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

For help understanding the stakes and preparing your message, read this from Indivisible.

Trump DOJ fucks the Epstein survivors again

Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the best in the business, describes the “inadvertent” outing of previously unidentified Epstein victims in the recently released Epstein files, 50% of the total in the possession of DOJ. O’Donnell reports that the DOJ had repeated requests from survivors to redact their names. The names of Epstein co-conspirators in the sex trafficking of girls were all redacted, in direct defiance of the law Trump signed in November, while the names and birthdates, and even photos, of many of the girls themselves were … whoops, uh… released publicly — also in direct violation of that same law.

The DOJ’s new front man, soul dead Deputy Attorney General/Trump criminal attorney Todd Blanche (sidelined AG Pam Bondi’s idiocy has been recognized even by Trump) whined that the DOJ corrected these little “mistakes” as soon as they were informed by the women whose nude photos as girls had been publicly released. Blanche claimed that these “mistakes” reflected like 0.002% of the millions of files, you know, perfectly understandable, given the enormous pressure DOJ is working under (to protect powerful pedophiles).

Do the math, boys and girls, 0.002% of 3,000,000 is a lot of mistakes (6,000, a fraction of the number of times Trump is mentioned in the released pages) for the country’s top law enforcement agency, The Trump Department of Justice. It’s also a thousand times the incidence of election fraud as documented by the Heritage Foundation in their exhaustive online database. Were these errors incompetence due to any DOJ attorney of character, competence and experience being fired, quitting or being sidelined, or simple vicious retaliation/intimidation against sexually exploited girls who, as adult women, pose an ongoing threat to powerful white billionaire men? You be the judge.

A constantly lying administration, when caught lying, always has an excuse, often a barrage of excuses. The technique is familiar to anyone who has ever encountered an angry narcissist: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). The Trump propaganda machine doctored a photo of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, arrested after peacefully protesting in a Minnesota church. Using AI in the service of truth, justice and racist propaganda [1] it transformed her calm, dignified face, as she was led away in shackles, to a disheveled tearful portrait of an unhinged prisoner. One of the president’s spokes-liars dismissed concerns by calling it a “meme”. Case closed, cucks.

[1] The White House posted a manipulated photo of her arrest to its official social media account, depicting Ms. Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist, as hysterical — tears streaming down her face, her hair disheveled, appearing to cry out in despair. “ARRESTED” was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a “far-left agitator” who was “orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”

While President Trump and the White House regularly circulate imagery altered by artificial intelligence, including demeaning and racist deepfakes, it is usually so over the top that the goal seems more about cartoonish mockery than outright deceit. (source above)

When psychopathy is normalized

The psychopath is motivated only by self-interest. Incapable of empathy, due, in large part, to a genetic anomaly making them impervious to the effects of humanizing hormones like oxytocin [1], the psychopath is also immune from regret. When they acquire political power over others the results are always the same — ruthlessly inhuman rule by violence.

Under this rule transparently false government lies are tirelessly promoted as the final truth. What we can observe with our own eyes, they insist, are the actual lies, all witnesses liars. A psychopathic government has every right to send heavily armed, untrained, largely uneducated bigots into cities, under a clearly fake “national emergency”, to smash car windows, tear gas, bear spray and pepper spray civilians at will, for any reason or for no reason, throw flash bang grenades, break down doors in violation of the fourth amendment, arrest toddlers, throw old people on the ground, beat people, zip tie them, pin them to the ground, shoot them ten times in the back, or, in the case of someone they find particularly bitchy, in the face. These objectively cold-blooded murders will be called self-defense, because those carrying out the will of powerful psychopaths can never be wrong and fault must always be the full weight of the murdered or abused person. They can also send anyone to concentration camps 1,000 miles from where they were illegally detained, and ignore any court that intervenes on the side of law, because, of course they can.

This is clearly the federal government we have now. A psychopathic president recognizes no restraint, so if the highest court in the land rules that a criminally inclined national CEO may not be held criminally accountable if he can claim he was only doing his job, the result is predictable. Mr. Trump’s government is preparing for a federal pogrom in Springfield, Ohio in the coming days, to celebrate, Black History Month in the sardonic Nazi manner popular on right wing social media. The targets of this pogrom are people from Haiti who are currently working in Springfield under Temporary Protected Status because conditions in Haiti are so dangerous that the State Department advises Americans not to go there. It’s fine for violent, criminal, disease carrying sub-humans who eat family pets, according to our currently fully Nazified federal government. Happy Black History Month, bitches, from JD Vance, Stephen Miller and President Thank You For Your Attention to this Matter.

Timothy Snyder, historian and scholar of twentieth century genocide by European fascist governments, who grew up in Ohio, not far from Springfield, wrote a powerful piece about the planned pogrom. He describes the steps by which Nazi agitation, literally by an American Nazi group, an essential part of The Base (al Q’aeda in Arabic [2]) and deliberate lies by JD Vance laid the groundwork for this ethnic cleansing. It chilled me to my heart to read, as it will chill you. I urge you to read it, and to take action before the deployment of the worst of the worst to another American city to make real the fake American carnage that Trump debuted in his first State of the Union speech, a speech written by American Jewish Nazi psychopath Stephen Miller. Miller is Trump’s brain, a morally stunted brain boiling with hatred and seeking violent revenge on anyone who has ever opposed its will.

two from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

[1] “in humans it plays roles in behavior that include social bonding, love, reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth” (Wikipedia)

[2] From the Arabic word al-qa’ida, literally, the base source

Nazi rule is based on blind obedience to lies

There is a personality type, often called malignant narcissist (though the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t recognize it) or psychopath (the APA has no direct diagnostic criteria for this either), that cannot be wrong, always blames someone else and is obsessed with punishing defiance of their will. If one of these sick bastards gets power they immediately surround themselves with others of this type so everybody is on the same page. If these morally deformed creatures control the government you get a fascist regime based on the indisputable will of the infallible Leader. The leader’s command becomes law, as it was in The Third Reich, führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft — the Leader’s word has the force of law.

It’s hard to argue, using facts, that Mr. Trump does not aspire to all of the powers Mr. Hitler had. He expressed as much to his chief of staff, John Kelly, regarding the unquestioning loyalty of Hitler’s generals (presumably Trump doesn’t know about the ones who plotted, and almost succeeded, in killing him). One infamous Nazi technique, now a staple of Trump’s MAGA party, is the Big Lie. An audacious lie repeated endlessly for public saturation then becomes an article of faith for membership in the dictator’s government. Ask any Nazi who was responsible for World War II, every one will answer “the Jews”. The ability to lie brazenly and without conscience is a job requirement for anyone aspiring to work for a “strongman”.

THE BIG LIE

Adherence to a gigantic, unifying lie is a loyalty test for all party members. The Stolen Election of 2020 lie is the reason, in spite of the election fraud myth being completely debunked, a MAGA federal judge in Missouri recently issued a secret search warrant allowing the Trump FBI to raid Fulton County, Georgia and seize boxes of ballots from 2020, preserved years beyond their required retention date, through a bogus lawsuit Trump filed years ago. Fulton County voted for Biden by over 200,000 votes in a state the strongman lost by a measly 11,780. The ballots were recounted numerous times. Trump asked the Georgia Secretary of State in a recorded, widely discussed January 2, 2021 “perfect call” to “find” 11,781 votes for him, to overturn Biden’s Georgia victory. It was the Black citizens of Fulton County, a Democratic leaning county, who defeated the race baiting Mr. Trump, an intolerable, enraging insult to someone like him. The only alternative to a more than 7,000,000 vote loss in an election is to scream fraud and make all of your followers repeat the lie until they are angry enough to riot and attempt to murder elected officials.

To own the news cycle on the day three million Epstein files were released, Trump somehow got a warrant to arrest Don Lemon, reportedly under the KKK Act, (according to Harmeet Dhillon at DOJ) among other federal antidiscrimination laws, for interviewing protesters in a church where the pastor is a local ICE official. The DOJ was unable to secure a warrant from the chief federal judge in the jurisdiction, and later from the Appeals Court there. The warrant was denied twice in Minnesota for lack of evidence of unlawful conduct. Not a problem for a reflexive, vengeful, compulsive liar who can never be wrong. Details of how he got the warrant, or what it contains, are still not public, but this is a case he will 100% lose in court, if it even makes it to court. No problem. Lemon spent the night in jail after his arrest yesterday at 11 pm. Here’s Rupert Murdoch’s take on the fact of the matter: The agitators [protesting in Pastor/ICE director David Easterwood’s church –ed] were reportedly under the impression that the house of worship’s pastor, David Easterwood, is a member of the federal immigration enforcement agency — a notion that Lemon perpetuated in a post on the social network Bluesky. [1]

Recall how Trump oversaw an inept and murderous response to a pandemic by weaponizing his opposition to the leading scientific advice. He went on television day after day, saying insane things, telling people that testing is the problem because it makes numbers go up and it makes the thing look worse than it is. He talked about just taking some bleach or cleaning inside your body with some kind of light somehow. The doctors around him at these news conferences seemed frozen in shame and horror trying to keep their faces neutral. By the time he, RFK Jr. and the former longtime heroin addict’s brain worm announced that Tylenol causes autism, everyone was inured to his compulsive lying. The result of Trump’s endless Covid lying was the US having the largest per capita Covid-19 death toll in the world (though our billionaires also had the largest financial windfall, so there’s that). No big deal that the American president directly caused all those deaths, though the adherence of his faithful to his pandemic lies was instrumental in his future victories among them.

He caused the deaths of a few hundred thousand more Americans than necessary by weaponizing mask mandates as local government tyranny. This surely wasn’t his idea. Probably the brainchild of one of the genius psychopaths over at the Heritage Foundation or the Institute for Humane Studies. He convinced millions of people to believe that only a coward would put a mask on their face, and only a fucking fascist would force you to put a mask on. And so tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands (disproportionately his own supporters) died needlessly of an airborne disease whose spread can be slowed tremendously if everybody wears masks when they’re in public or in close contact with others. You make the belief in this “resistance to government tyranny” idea an article of faith and you have further radicalized your gullible base in their hatred of anything you can call government tyranny.

In 2020, after losing reelection by a wide margin, both in the popular vote and the Electoral College, of course Trump claimed the election was rigged against him. He fired and attacked everyone who said the election was honest, raged at anybody who verified the fact that the legal outcome of the election was the 7 million vote majority of his opponent. He railed against the judges who threw his frivolous lawsuits out of court citing his lack of any kind of evidence of fraud or irregularity. Since he is a psychopath and must prevail at all costs, he insisted on this “Stolen Election” lie, and continued to insist on it until it became an article of faith in his party. As an article of faith, it can’t be challenged by the facts or evidence. The election of 2020 was fraud, every single Republican senator and congressman in the United States, (who was up for reelection) was not allowed to concede that Joe Biden won the election. Every single one of them said, when asked directly, “well, Biden’s the president now” and no matter what follow up they were asked they had to keep pointing to this fig leaf of not lying as they perpetuated the lie in every public appearance.

Once you make a lie an article of faith anybody who wants power in your party must faithfully embrace, you attract only liars. You begin to select only psychopaths, fellow criminals and extremely weak people, desperate for power, approval and self-enrichment (and, in many cases, to avoid prison). They are as desperate for those things as the corrupt, compulsively lying Trump himself and they will do anything to get power and approval. They ignore the fact that everyone who came before them, the minute they were not useful to Trump, was ripe for defaming and even the lynching, as Trump called for, with a little mid-riot tweet stating of his Vice President “Mike Pence betrayed us, he wouldn’t do what needed to be done, what he promised us he would do. He is a liar. Go get him.”

Former CBP “Commander at large”, 5’4″ Gregory “serial perjurer” Bovino, somehow always finds CBP members even shorter than him to pose next to him in photos. What a man!

[1] source was Lemon’s “notion” fact or fiction? Apparently fact: note, this comes from the communists at Fortune. From those commies:

The website of St. Paul-based Cities Church lists David Easterwood as a pastor, and his personal information appears to match that of the David Easterwood identified in court filings as the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office. Easterwood appeared alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference last October. . .

. . . In a Jan. 5 court filing, Easterwood defended ICE’s tactics in Minnesota such as swapping license plates and spraying protesters with chemical irritants. He wrote that federal agents were experiencing increased threats and aggression and crowd control devices like flash-bang grenades were important to protect against violent attacks. He testified that he was unaware of agents “knowingly targeting or retaliating against peaceful protesters or legal observers with less lethal munitions and/or crowd control devices.”

“Agitators aren’t just targeting our officers. Now they’re targeting churches, too,” the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency stated. “They’re going from hotel to hotel, church to church, hunting for federal law enforcement who are risking their lives to protect Americans.”

I had no idea Todd Blanche was this fucking stupid

Yes, he was one of Trump’s criminal attorneys, one of the few who got paid by Trump up front. Yes, he took an oath of personal loyalty to Donald Trump. Yes, he has been instrumental in keeping the powerful pedophile associates of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump well protected. Yes, he did the unprecedented when, as second in command at the Department of Justice, he met twice with convicted sex offender/Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, after DOJ fired the prosecutor who put Maxwell in prison because the prosecutor was the daughter of one the president’s many enemies. Right after Blanche met with her Maxwell was moved to a much more comfortable prison, usually off limits to sex offenders. I knew Blanche was unprincipled, supremely brazen, and likely a psychopath, but until I watched this short interview, I had no idea how fucking stupid he is.

He had his talking points and he repeated them over and over again, trying to reframe what he kept calling “the narrative” we should be talking about, instead of focusing on the tragic death (murder, actually, Todd) of this one guy who had been involved in a “riot.” He performed on Meet the Press as witlessly as ventriloquist dummy Scott Bessent, Kristi Noem, Robert Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi or even Lindsey Halligan. He was less openly psychotic than Stephen Miller, but that’s not saying much.

In the Meet the Press segment below, Blanche was shown the short video leading up to the ten shots that killed Alex Pretti while Pretti was flat on the ground. He was asked whether Pretti had wielded a gun at any point, or posed a deadly threat to the ICE/CBP officers who killed him, as claimed by Stephen Miller (“assassin”), Greg Bovino (“[Pretti] wanted to massacre law enforcement”[1]), Kristi Noem (“domestic terrorist”), Trump, Vance and the rest of the usual psychopaths. Blanche, by way of answering, blamed the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis for not protecting ICE and CBP officers during “riots”. In the most transparent reframing possible he kept insisting that the refusal of local officials to cooperate with ICE and Bovino’s Border Patrol was the real problem, and the cause of this tragic death of a “rioter”. To her credit, the interviewer kept redirecting Blanche back to her question about federal agents’ use of deadly force against a man holding a cellphone who they’d pepper sprayed and subdued, lying on the ground when they killed him in a hail of bullets. She never got any kind of direct answer to anything, and I understand, facts are generally very bad for Nazi arguments.

Blanche was dogged, he insisted that the real villains here are the obstinate and defiant anti law enforcement Minnesota officials and “rioters”, like the one tragically killed. The real victims, he insisted, are ICE and Border Patrol agents, who are doing a very hard job in the face of unchecked, open hostility in Minneapolis, and everyone is now attacking them because of one or two incidents in a hostile environment where they get no help from local officials when rioters keep obstructing them in their duties. The media keeps bringing up things like the 56 year-old man in his shorts dragged out of his house in Arctic Minneapolis weather and driven around in an unmarked van until they confirmed he was an American citizen, a couple of isolated tragedies that nobody wanted to see happen to anybody, that get blown out of proportion by agitators, rioters and those with contempt for law enforcement, the will of the Leader, etc. A tour de force of lawyerly ineptitude, and stubborn stupidity, which won’t matter, of course, if Project 2025 succeeds in creating the Nazi oligarch utopia here that they are so intent on bringing into being.

As Josef Goebbels observed during World War Two, which he believed was started by the Jews, depending on whether the Party won or lost the struggle “we will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all times, or as the greatest criminals.” Apparently history, against the backdrop of powerful, unaccountable, superior super-wealthy, transactional, entitled, infinitely covetous, fascist-friendly men, and their ladies, is once again debating this question.

[1] Gregory Bovino, head of Border Patrol operations said Alex Pretti was there to “perpetrate violence, obstruct, delay or obfuscate border patrol in the performance of their duties in an active crime scene.” He claimed “the suspect put himself in that situation. The victims are the border patrol agents there. [Pretti] brought a semiautomatic weapon to a riot, assaulted federal officers. This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” (Heather Cox Richardson)

Here you go, Greg:

New secret torture memo

Two whistleblowers recently revealed a secret Department of Homeland Security memorandum, dated May 12, 2025, giving a Trump “legal gloss” to the president’s right to instruct his personal agencies to ignore the US Constitution if ordered to by President Project 2025 under an imagined emergency pulled from Trump’s well-tongued ass. In addition to the new claim, echoed by the soul dead JD Vance, that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP — Bovino) agents are immune from prosecution for unprovoked cold-blooded murder (another 37 year-old, Alex Pretti, was pepper sprayed, beaten and murdered today, ten shots into his prone body, at least three in the back, by several ICE/CBP agents — firing again in “self-defense” — in besieged Minneapolis) the deliberately concealed memo instructs ICE that it is not bound by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. It advised that ICE and CBP may, contrary to the Bill of Rights, break down anyone’s door and seize them for any, or no, reason. The New York Times reports on this legal obscenity in their time honored, squeamishly restrained fashion [1].

“Shot while escaping” George Grosz circa 1936.

Nazis know that it is best to hide illegal actions to the fullest extent possible, particularly while committing atrocities. When writing up the minutes of the Wannsee conference of January, 20, 1942 — a meeting among top Nazi officials to set up the Final Solution, the administrative mass killings in the countries conquered by Hitler’s army — special neutral words were used to mask goals like “liquidation”, “annihilation” and “mass murder”. Anodyne substitutions were employed according to strict Nazi sprachregelung, “speech code”, now a staple of authoritarian and corporate communication strategies. The notes of that meeting were kept top secret and all but one copy was destroyed by the time Hitler shot himself in the mouth after condemning the weakneyss of the German nation that had betrayed him. That surviving copy of the carefully worded minutes of the Wannsee conference was produced as evidence of deliberate mass murder in the Nuremberg trials

When the aptly named Dick Cheney, as evil an elected official as ever lived, announced that America needed to go to the “dark side” after the 9/11 terrorist attack, to render suspects to secret “black sites” to torture them, in violation of American and international law, and treaties signed by the United States, he kept the details as quiet as possible. A secret torture memo was written to offer a fig leaf of legal rationale for these illegal, barbaric practices. Written by two far-right wing “neo-con” lawyers, now tenured constitutional law professor John Yoo and now federal judge for life Jay Bybee, the secret memo narrowly defined torture by torturing the definition of torture until it succumbed to the policy needs of the fascists then intent on torturing whoever they felt like torturing. President Obama later cleared things up by candidly, almost nonchalantly, admitting that, in terrible times, some well-meaning Americans “tortured some folks.”

Then Obama ordered the killing by drone, of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, not charged with any crime, but condemned publicly for months as the leading English language Al Q’aeda propagandist and recruiter. Shortly thereafter al-Awlaki’s teenaged American son was turned into chopped meat by another drone, in what the US classified as a “mistake”. In 2017 Trump had al-Alwaki’s eight year-old daughter killed, for reasons still unclear. Shit happens in war and very few people made a peep about any of this. Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, details the radicalizaton of al-Awlaki, a once moderate Muslim imam who apparently was being blackmailed by the FBI when they uncovered his regular visits to prostitutes. The authors of the Wikipedia piece on al-Awlaki don’t seem to be aware of Scahill’s research (though FN 246 cites the book), but this is from Wikipedia [2]. The New York Times wrote that the government report on the extrajudicial killing of al-Awlaki (released under FOIA) “provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care”, describing it as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result.”^[220]

Now we have the whistleblower release of the secret May 12, 2025 memo from Kristi Noem’s/Stephen Miller’s/Corey Lewandowski’s Department of Homeland Security, instructing supervisors to tell ICE agents that they may break down doors to conduct warrantless searches and detentions illegal under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. I don’t know why this is hard for the media to state unambiguously, since the Fourth Amendment is pretty clear about the right of persons to be safe from arbitrary searches and seizures in their own homes without a judicial warrant based on probable cause to support forced entry to a residence. Here again is the NY Times report on the secret memo illegally instructing ICE agents that they don’t need a judicial warrant to break down someone’s door and hustle them out into an unmarked van to be flown to random sites 1,000 miles away.

Like other, similar illegal orders, the memo outlining the legal rationale for ignoring the US Constitution was not distributed widely among ICE agents, most of whom appear to be uneducated, poorly trained, violent, cowardly idiots, Ku Klux Klansmen, misogynists and criminals, a legally sanctioned J6 lynch mob intended to violently provoke a violent public reaction. The memo asserting that the Fourth Amendment may be ignored during ICE aktions was a secret document that supervisors were read in on. They could read it once under supervision, to see the rationale that appeared to give their goon squads permission to ignore the Fourth Amendment in this “national emergency” (we are under attack by “narco-terrorist” gangs of illegal immigrants, the worst of the worst, including five year-olds, coming in caravans to eat the dogs and cats of Iceland!) but not have a copy of it. Nothing to see here. This is how fucking Nazis always do it.. Speaking of pieces of shit:

[1] why use “appear”, twice, in both the headline and the lede, Grey Lady? The executed man had no gun in hand at any point in the video, only a camera; the Trump admin says he was killed in self defense. The three “suggestive” bullets in his back “appear to contradict” the official story that he was a crazed gunman intent on inflicting mass casualties on ICE and CBP agents who shot him ten times while he was on the ground, in self defense? You appear to squeamishly suck ass, Grey Lady.

[2] In June 2014, a previously classified memorandum from the U.S. Department of Justice was released; the memorandum described al-Awlaki’s killing as a lawful act of war.^[23] Civil liberties advocates have called the killing of al-Awlaki an extrajudicial execution that breached al-Awlaki’s constitutional rights.^[24] The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki’s public statements and videos had been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than they were before his death.^[25] . . .

. . . In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship.^[177] U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an “imminent threat“.^[17] Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council.^[17] Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare.^[17] As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons.^[178] The authorization was nevertheless controversial.^[179]

Criminally insane

Rachel Maddow makes a good point here, why would the Republicans invite Jack Smith to testify publicly when all he would say is what he said?

Trump was the chief propagator of the big lie (stolen 2020 election), the fake electors, the coercion of state officials, the frivolous, evidence-free, court challenges, the plot to have Mike Pence announce Trump had won the election, the Green Bay Sweep, and the bloody riot at the Capitol with the gallows outside to hang Mike Pence. There was only one leader, one beneficiary, of this desperate many armed criminals octopus, Donald Trump.