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-defendants 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 errors 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 0.01% 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, 0.01% of 3,000,000 is a lot of mistakes (30,000, approximately 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 being fired, quitting or 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.

Fascist enterprise graphically laid out by the Grey Lady

In fairness to our demented president, the Federalist Society Six on the Supreme Court declared him the victor in 2004’s Trump v. United States. They ruled that he couldn’t be prosecuted for anything he could argue was part of his official job. So we have to forgive him for taking it so literally, he was never a man to see nuance, even before his steep cognitive decline. If he could, theoretically, order Seal Team Six to murder his political opponents, if done in consultation with his cabinet (official core duty) — and pardon the hit men with no restrictions — then why should he not believe he can fire all Inspectors General without cause, purge the civil service without cause, rescind Congressional budget allocations he hated, shake down right wing law firms, TV networks, universities, weaponize the DOJ for retribution against his enemies, and so on? Many of those acts are not even arguably criminal, at best they are violations of civil law, or norms, or whatever.

The New York Times published an exhaustive, if politely phrased, catalogue of Trump’s mafia don presidency. Check it out.

The link to the article again — the details are many, and impressive in their thoroughness. Dictator on day one or bust, courtesy of the tireless work of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Antonin Scalia Law School, The Council for National Policy, The Institute for Humane Studies and so on. It is worth bearing in mind, in the face of this onslaught of Nazi contempt for law and democracy, that many of their policies, political theories and practical plans are as ridiculous and legally untenable as the asinine theories of now disbarred far-right wing constitutional crackpot John Eastman and longtime Trump buddy (predictably abandoned by his old friend once things went south for him) Rudy “Trial by Combat” Giuliani.

Contact your senators and  representative about ICE funding!

Pardon the delay, I thought I posted this several days back when I sent this to my senators and congressman. In the meantime, seven House Democrats joined the MAGA block to pass an additional $10,000,000,000 for ICE operations, no strings attached. Our elected officials need to get tens of millions of calls if we are to have any hope of getting them to act with a modicum of courage.  Here are my talking points, below is the email I sent to my elected representatives in Congress.

ICE agents should not be armed.   ICE agents should not be allowed to conceal their identities like Ku Klux Klan terrorists.   ICE agents must not be allowed to violate state and federal laws.  ICE must recognize and respect state sovereignty and local jurisdiction over law enforcement.   ICE should not be funded unless these legal limitations can be imposed on them.  Funding them as the administration demands ($70,000 signing bonus, anyone?) is essential for the triumph of authoritarianism.  Restraining an out of control ICE by withholding their budget until reasonable terms are met is the only responsible action to take.

I urge you to vote against funding for DHS/ICE without placing serious limitations on the scope of ICE activities.   Democracy depends on restricting the power of a lawless, heavily armed agency, on an agenda of retribution, intent on the violent escalation of tensions in American cities.  The fake “emergency” the administration cites for ICE deployment in targeted cities is as pretextual as IEEPA is for bombing foreign nations, and private boats, without informing Congress.

Do not vote for a budget that funds ICE in its masked, unrestrained, unaccountable form.  The Trump administration is using heavily armed ICE forces in selected cities, in response to a claimed emergency, to violently provoke responsive violence.   Project 2025’s endgame is a police state.  ICE, led on the ground by serial perjurer US Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, is the tip of the police state spear.   

If ICE agents deployed this way can violate the law with impunity — smash car windows, tase drivers, tackle and zip tie people, tear gas and pepper spray protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, conduct warrantless, door-to-door searches, use illegal chokeholds, break down doors without warrants, detain people, including citizens, without reasonable suspicion of anything, shoot people in the face — democracy is at an end.

ICE agents should not be armed.   ICE agents must not be allowed to conceal their identities like Ku Klux Klan terrorists.   ICE agents must not be allowed to violate state and federal laws.  ICE must recognize and respect state sovereignty and local jurisdiction over law enforcement.   ICE should not be funded unless these legal limitations can be imposed on them.  Funding them as the administration demands ($70,000 signing bonus, anyone?) is essential for the triumph of authoritarianism.  Restraining an out of control ICE by withholding their budget until reasonable terms are met is the only responsible action to take.

You have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.  Uphold the Constitution by voting to condition ICE funding on restricting the scope of ICE’s illegal assaults on random citizens and non-citizens.  You are the opposition party, Americans are counting on you to oppose the militarized march to fascism.   

Do not listen to Chuck Schumer and his corporate sponsors.  They orchestrated an end to the MAGA shutdown, without obtaining a single concession for ordinary Americans, a​t a moment, after off-year elections, when Democrats had all the momentum and Trump owned, and was taking the blame for, his shutdown.​   You cannot negotiate with a party that insists on its right to violate even laws their president signed into law.    Schumer doesn’t speak for the majority of Americans, let alone most Democrats.  He certainly doesn’t speak for those who oppose fascism in our country.   Defend the Constitution.

Proud to be an American Nazi!

Portrait of a Loser

The world’s greatest winner, shown here beaming, after solving 75 major international wars and being unfairly deprived of his rightful Nobel Peace prize, shaking down the winner of this year’s peace prize for her prize, which he now claims for himself.

Are we tired of winning yet?