Category Archives: Ahimsa

Trump’s five dimensional chess checkmate move on the eve of No Kings Two!

Millions are expected to participate in over 2,500 No Kings rallies across the United States tomorrow. MAGA has been all over corporate media speaking in one voice. They are all calling this a Hate America Rally by paid operatives, carrying identical signs (proof of conspiracy), all terrorists, the worst kinds of violent criminals (and pedophiles, it goes without saying), in fact, the fake rally is pro-Hamas and anti-fascist! Paid protesters hired by George Soros (soon to be under IRS investigation along with other Marxist Democrat donors) and Hamas (Qatar funding this one too?), stupid, angry people who irrationally hate good old American fascism as much as they hate Jesus Christ, Civil War Heroes of the South and even Charlie Kirk.

Trump played his part today, masterful five dimensional chess to those who love him. The hate America, anti-fascist, pro-Hamas wing, that deluded 65% of our country, may look at this inspired move differently, but you be the judge.

Five simple steps to fascism

Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) gave an excellent floor speech, setting out in plain language, the simple, easy to follow, well-considered and well-funded blueprint for the American fascist plan, which follows the same rules as every fascist takeover in history.

1]   After exhaustive investigations by Trump’s first, and second, DOJ, prosecutors found no grounds to indict and prosecute James Comey.  Trump-appointee US Attorney, given recent ultimatum to indict Comey anyway, resigned.  Trump inserted as acting US Attorney a loyal former beauty pageant contestant/insurance lawyer who promptly filed an inept one page indictment of Comey, two charges with no statement setting out the facts on which the charges are based [1].   This was applauded by the January 6 rioter lawyer, conspiracy theorist and election denier Ed Martin, now Weaponization Czar of the DOJ.  $50,000 cash bribe to border czar Tom Homan, recorded by the FBI?  Nothing to see there, no evidence, case closed, you’re corrupt, not Mr. Homan!   DOJ ignoring a Congressional subpoena by producing less than 1% of the demanded Epstein files?   Just politics, in a totalitarian way of thinking.  An elected Democratic Representative, jostled in the middle of the illegal arrest of the mayor of Newark?   LaMonica McIver is facing 17 years for the felony of assaulting an officer (pardon me, sir, is my eye hurting your elbow?), indicted by Alina Habba herself, so there!

2] Numerous (number I heard recently was 31) former FOX “personalities” are working in top positions in the Trump administration, including at least one cabinet member and acting US Attorney. Dan Bongino, in February 2025, became the 21st such “personality” given substantial power over a government agency. The symbiosis between the administration and Murdoch’s “news” network does not, technically, amount to state-run media, yet. The plan is (bring in the fucking FCC, yo! you laughing now, funnyman?) to eliminate all other voices in the media, defund PBS, NPR, Voice of America, etc. American mass media, as cravenly greedy (and lucrative) a corporate media as the world has ever known, has already made every concession to the unreasonable and vindictive Mr. Trump. What could go wrong, fellow citizen journalists?

3] If ten people at a peaceful protest in Portland, Oregon are tear-gassed, pepper sprayed and shot at with rubber bullets, by heavily armed masked ICE agents in body armor, a woman shot in Chicago by ICE, a man killed during a “stop”, Blackhawk helicopters brought in to execute five search warrants for nonviolent criminals, what do you think the reaction to 10,000 peaceful protesters at the same place would be? ICE is this madman’s workaround to the American law that prevents the use of military against citizens, absent a true breakdown in law and order, an actual emergency. Trump’s eight (and counting) “emergencies”, under which he does all sorts of otherwise illegal things, are all, frankly, pulled straight out of Stephen Miller’s ass. The second to last place the government is allowed to use force to disperse people is when they are exercising their constitutional right to assemble for redress of their grievances. The last place is on election day, which is their ultimate plan to suppress all but their own voters to steal another “rigged election”. State violence is the beating heart of fascism, a gun butt to the face is Fascism 101.

4] Congress, under Article I, has the sole power to tax and spend, allocate funds to implement policies and pay everybody. A bully with an insatiable taste for revenge has taken over the once diverse Republican party and remade it in his hideous image. None have the courage to oppose the president’s asserted (if unconstitutional, to use a quaint phrase) unilateral right to have the last word on on taxes, which he calls tariffs — paid for, like the wall, by Mexico and other countries used to sodomizing the US on trade deals– and withhold funds allocated by Congress like he illegally did when refusing to send approved military aid to Ukraine unless their new president announced a fake investigation into Joe Biden’s surviving son. You recall, that was the basis for the first impeachment witch hunt hoax. He was impeached over what he’s doing right now, openly and notoriously, as they say in the law, illegally usurping the power of Congress.

5] Having one set of permissive rules for the master and those loyal to the master, and another, brutal set for all who oppose the Leader, well, you can’t get more Nazi than that, boys and girls. One gets to violate the Espionage Act with impunity, or take a bag full of cash in an FBI sting, on camera, gouge out the eyeball of a Capitol policeman, shove a Congresswoman during an illegal arrest of her colleague, throw a senator to the ground and handcuff him — the other gets investigated for “mortgage fraud”, “lying to Congress”, “taking classified documents”, “assaulting an armed agent engaged in a scuffle over an illegal arrest” “jay walking”, using the f-word, etc.

That said, Chris Murphy says it better, and more memorably. Worth watching, if you have any doubts about what Charles Koch’s ultimate plan is here.

[1] since I wrote this earlier today, the same go-getter, Lindsay Halligan, newly minted interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, indicted NY AG Letitia James on several counts related to alleged mortgage fraud.   Adam Schiff is probably next, they’re working from the list Trump accidentally sent, in a public “Truth” “Social” post, to his protective Pitbull Pamela Jo Bondi.

Nazi bullshit, 2025 style

Some still consider it controversial to call our angry American authoritarians Nazis.  Read any history of the Nazi movement and their seizure of power and you will encounter many similarities, including an eerily familiar cast of characters across both regimes.   Loyalty to an infallible (if also insane) megalomaniacal Leader was the first, and last, rule in Nazi Germany, it is the only rule for government work in Trump’s America.  A nonentity like Himmler, or Eichmann, or dozens of other obsequious, supremely ambitious mediocrities, could rise to the top of the Nazi hierarchy by showing the ruthlessness to loyally do whatever vicious, destructive, atrocious action (Aktion in the original German [1]) Hitler suggestd needed to be done.  

I know one argument against this administration being like the Nazis is that these current fascists have not set up concentration camps (although they allocated $45,000,000,000 for the construction of private detention centers by some of Trump’s biggest donors, one of which Pam Bondi used to work for) and certainly not death camps!   I say, give them time, and the power to do it, and everything their predecessors did will be done.  It took the Nazis more than five years to really get rolling with the mass imprisonment in a network of concentration camps and then a few more years before they rolled out the first death camps.  These things take time, the public will freak out if death camps are set up too soon. If you doubt their murderous motives, ask family members of some of the 500,000 or so already dead from Trump/Musk/Vought’s/Federalist Society’s unconstitutional cutting of USAID funds allocated by Congress for food and medicine to ravaged nations on other continents. Or the families of the people executed on those boats Trump’s Secretary of War  blew up in international waters.

Look at the actions of each regime at this point in time and distinguish if you can between early Nazi abuses of authority and a Blackhawk helicopter delivering heavily armed masked ICE agents on to the roof of a Chicago apartment complex, goons who proceeded to break down doors and lead 300 residents out into the street in zip-ties, including naked children.  Something like five people were actually arrested in the end (or maybe ICE had warrants for five when they emptied the entire building).   Lights, camera, AKTION!   Tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets to disperse small, peaceful crowds, brutalizing and body slamming older women, old men, young men, young women, traumatizing children,  wearing masks and no badges, throwing nonviolent folks on the ground to be handcuff and cursed at.  Nothing to see here, you fucking cucks! 

Let’s look at a couple of the most prominent and influential Nazi-style influencers in Trump’s malodorous inner circle, verify their Nazi bona fides.

Take a hateful bigot like Stephen Miller, a weak and rage-filled worm elected by nobody, wielding hatred and a burning ambition to inflict pain on those he loathes.  Very powerful due to his outsized ability to influence the needy Mr. Trump with strategic flattery and tactical rage, he sets cruel immigration policies not dissimilar to early Nazi policies toward minorities.   He is said to be the great mind behind the brazen (in his mind audacious) war crime of killing foreign nationals on boats, on the same rationale former Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte is currently on trial at the International Criminal Court for using — suspected drug dealers must die, no arrest, no trial, say they’re doing it and kill them.  Here’s Miller:

On Saturday afternoon, [Stephen] Miller posted: “The issue before us now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.” source

We’ll leave aside the recent finding by the pre-Patel FBI that most domestic terrorism, and virtually all political violence, are from right wing extremist  groups, most identifying as white Christians.  That paper was removed from the internet by alert Trump lackeys, since it unfairly attacked good extremist groups loyal to the president and his “agenda”.  No more right wing violence, it’s “a growing movement of leftwing terrorism”.   Dr. Goebbels is smiling in hell right now at the audacity of America’s Big Lie party.

An ambitious right-wing hater like the well-paid Heritage Society “ideologue” Russell Vought, author of the chapter on presidential power in the almost universally despised Project 2025, has been angling to take the reins of the US budget for a long time.  Now that he has them he is rushing to exploit the Trump shutdown to advance his extreme agenda of finally destroying the “administrative state” and replacing it with one run by a transactional, greedy, Executive, immune from criminal liability, with absolute powers.   This suddenly intoxicatingly powerful asshole calls this arrangement “radical constitutionalism” for some reason.  

In 2022, Vought argued that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought advocates what he calls “radical constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority. source

Pamela Jo Bondi and Kashyap Pramod Patel speak aggressively, angrily and often incoherently, for themselves, their breath tainted by where their mouths have been.   Trump has now hired 31 former FOX “personalities” and producers (of propaganda) — the inspirational, highly qualified Secretary of War and Makeup and the new, fond of wine, US Attorney for DC, to name but two.   The list of unsubtle ass kissers is too long to make here, but Emil Bove III, Todd Blanche and the world’s most obvious “bottom”, cherub faced liar and hater, uber-Christian, adorably fey MAGA Mike Johnson, all deserve mention.  Sorry Alina, Lindsay, Lindsey, et al. 

[1]  Aktion:  A German military or police operation involving mass assembly, deportation and killing; directed by the Nazis against Jews during the Holocaust.

(source Museum of Tolerance, or as they will soon be forced to rebrand themselves, after making a handsome payment to Trump’s “library” for defaming Hitler, Museum of Woke, Cuck Losers!)

For once, AI actually had a better capsule summary:

In Nazi terminology, “Aktion” referred to a violent operation against civilians, often used as a euphemism for mass murder operations, such as those carried out during the Holocaust. It was a way to disguise the true nature of their actions from the public and the victims.

Sound familiar?

The Madness of President Project 2025

Mr. Trump’s agitated, increasingly irrational dementia doesn’t get 1% of the media attention former president Joe Biden’s occasional gaffes, stumbles, age-related hesitations still get.

It’s as if by his longtime assertion of brash incoherence Trump has inoculated himself, perhaps with one of Dr. Brainworm’s non-harmful, anti-scientific health injections, against anyone questioning even the most insane things he says or does. It’s just Trump being himself. Take two Tylenol and call me in the morning, when you have autism.

Heather Cox Richardson, American historian writing for future historians, records some of the latest insane Trump actions, posts and pronouncements, in her most recent Letter from an American. If you don’t subscribe to her free nightly email, you really should, her perspective is super well-informed and often illustrated with fascinating historical parallels. She is also a brilliant writer. Here’s the last paragraph of last night’s impressive inventory of floridly insane actions by the Commander-in-Chief:

Late this afternoon, Trump praised his remodeling of the Oval Office to include copious gold fixtures, some of which match polyurethane appliqué available from the home improvement store Home Depot. On social media, Trump posted: “Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!! President DJT”

source

Innocuous enough, out of context, perhaps, a vain compulsive old liar bragging about his impeccable 24 karat taste. But read along with everything else this increasingly mad, impulsive, vindictive man has done the last few days, weeks, months and years and the many objectively false things he repeatedly, angrily insists are true, it sends a chill up the old spine.

The good news, such as it is, is that in order to remain the smartest man in the room (always very important to Trump, as he has said, in moments of candor) he’s had to surround himself with fools and spinelessly ambitious people willing to meekly perform being even stupider than old Stupid Is As Stupid Does. To me, that collection of loyal incompetents is one of our greatest advantages in this perilous moment.

The cream of the wealthiest 1% who are dying for a permanent one party government run by a corrupt, pliable authoritarian, to protect their vast, inheritable privileges in perpetuity and screw everybody else, have a very problematic front man for their Project 2025 in America’s President Project 2025.

Stark Raving Mad

Heather Cox Richardson, not AI, describes the speech President Project 2025 delivered at the UN last week:

Trump’s speech went on to depict a fantasy world in which he had single-handedly saved the world. He claimed to have forged peace on two continents during his first term but said that “era of calm and stability gave way to one of the great crises of our time.” He then turned to the United States, claiming that “four years of weakness, lawlessness, and radicalism under the last administration delivered our nation into a repeated set of disasters. One year ago,” he said, “our country was in deep trouble, but today, just eight months into my administration, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world and there is no other country even close. America is blessed with the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, the strongest friendships, and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the earth.”

And that was the frame for the next hour of rambling boasts and insults.

Trump claimed that he had reversed the “economic calamity” left by former president Joe Biden. He had brought down costs and inflation, he said, and economic growth and manufacturing were both booming. He claimed that in his four years, Biden had attracted less than $1 trillion in investment while he had secured $17 trillion. Tax cuts and deregulation had, he said, made the U.S. “the best country on earth to do business.”

“In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he said. “We had the best economy ever, history of the world, and I’m doing the same thing again, but this time it’s actually much bigger and even better. The numbers far surpass my record-setting first term.”

Trump claimed: “On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before. You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or one year ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world.

source

Take courage, citizens

An insane bully has crippled one of our two political parties, rendered it a mere flapping appendage to his overbearing will.  The incoherence of the crazed leader is fervently embraced by his most ambitious and ardent followers, everybody else in the party simply does his bidding, out of fear of his rage.

He orders criminal acts because the Supreme Court already told him, the 6-3 winner of Trump v. US, that he’s allowed to do whatever crimes he wants as much as he wants and plus he “has his Article II” and no pardon, even if he sells it openly for $10,000,000, can ever be challenged in court  (see Trump v. US).

In spite of all the long-time professional prosecutors at the Department of Justice reporting that there is no righteous case to be brought against James Comey, (and others [1]) leading to the resignation (firing according to Trump) of President Project 2025’s own recent appointee who refused to bring this legally infirm indictment, he will appoint somebody, totally unqualified, to do what he wants them to do and they will do it.  With the cringing blessing of the righteous, blonde attorney general, Pamela Jo Bondi.

So James Comey is indicted the other day on two counts stemming from the same supposedly lying sentence, elicited by supreme weasel Raphael “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz a former debating champion.  The DOJ’s inspector general has already found Comey’s statement to have been truthful. Cruz tried to lay a clever lawyerly trap, during Trump’s first administration, but it didn’t work.  Still, it is good enough for Trump’s latest inexperienced Acting State Attorney. That single sentence of claimed perjury is the sum and substance of two serious, and extremely flimsy, felony counts against James Comey with a penalty of up to 25 years in prison. Yer typical Trump case.

Watch Lawrence O’Donnell explain that all to you in the first minute or two. Then watch James Comey address the country to express his resistance to tyranny and his confidence in the American system of justice and the strength of our democracy. 

Let it add a little bit of steel to your spine during these nerve-wracking days, (talk about the times that try men’s souls.) Let it be a tonic like that top rated Jimmy Kimmel monologue, like all acts of courage and clarity during a time of terror, cowardice and incoherence.

Woof, woof…grrrr!!!!

They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets!

[1] or NY Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Fed governor Lisa Cook, NJ  Representative Lamonica McGiver, or anyone else who catches the Orange Polyp’s evil eye.

A happy, healthy 5786 to my Jewish readers (and to everyone else)

Jewish new year starts at sundown on September 22nd this year. The day before, slain highly influential MAGA promoter Charlie Kirk’s life and work were celebrated by MAGA nation.

Shortly after Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered, the NY Times published where he stood on various issues. They republished it yesterday, when thousands of the faithful are lined up to pay homage to this martyred Christian champion of free speech (to hear some tell it) at a mega-MAGA-rally celebrating his life and work.   Look how mercilessly the super-judgmental New York Times smeared him for exercising his First Amendment rights to express a tiny bit of arguably antisemitic rhetoric! (The preceding sentence is an example of irony).

Antisemitism

Mr. Kirk was repeatedly accused of antisemitism, including by fellow conservatives.

He was a proponent of “replacement theory,” a once-fringe conspiracy theory positing that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants. That ideology motivated the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

Mr. Kirk also accused Jewish philanthropists of fomenting anti-whiteness by supporting liberal antiracism causes like the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country,” he said on his show in 2023.

Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

Allies of Mr. Kirk often sought to defend him against accusations of antisemitism by citing his support for Israel. Mr. Kirk defended Israel’s actions in Gaza. After his death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel mourned him as “a lionhearted friend of Israel” who “stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.”

Heh, takes one to know one, eh, Bibi?!

Read the article for more of the lionheart’s highly commendable free speech views:

Perfect reaction to a sickening killing

On his most recent show David Feldman played the entire 4:00 clip of Bernie Sanders reacting to the murder of Charlie Kirk, saying he could find no way to edit it any shorter. I agree. Feldman’s only regret about Bernie’s statement is that it wasn’t delivered from the Oval Office. Mine too.

Imagine how much different the world would be if corporate Democrats hadn’t orchestrated the summary replacement of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 primary after putting their big donors’ fat thumbs on the scale in 2016 to give Hillary her turn.

How sensitive is over-sensitive?

My father, who had many wonderful qualities, was also locked in a lifelong war never to be wrong. He never escaped the prison of his terror of being humiliated, of feeling again like the helpless victim of vicious abuse he was as an infant, child, teenager. He said as much the night he died. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he rasped sadly, in that dying man’s voice that comes at the very end of a losing battle with cancer.

My father was very sensitive, in many cases he was super compassionate and caring. When it came to taking responsibility for his actions that hurt others, he would not. His anger was always righteous, his analysis of who was actually at fault was always flawless (to him), and he had a great ability to turn every conversation to his advantage, to deflect all responsibility by constantly reframing what you were actually talking about. This inability to admit that he was ever wrong caused him to distort reality whenever he felt trapped. He also quickly wrote off people who hurt him, one perceived strike was enough, and he never apologized to or forgave anyone that I can recall.

This distortion, blame and inability to forgive put great emotional obstacles in front of me and my little sister. “Life’s hard enough, Elie,” he said that last night of his life, “without your father placing obstacles in your way, like I did for you and your sister, and I am truly sorry for that.”

Good to hear, finally, and that first and last apology was gratifying, but, sadly, he was dead by the next evening.

I’ve finally come to understand, in the last chapter of my life, that if something hurts you, and you tell the person who’s hurting you that it hurts you, and they continue to do it, you have to get away from them. 

People who continually hurt others have a problem they will always blame you for.  Their problem only becomes yours if you tolerate being blamed for it. It turns out you can’t negotiate with someone who insists on their right to do what you have told them hurts you.  They will immediately become the victim of your unprovoked attack, you are persecuting them, they’ll cry, tears of betrayal in their eyes. This insistence that you are victimizing them is pure contempt for you and your feelings.

Once you have seen contempt on the face of someone close to you, you cannot unsee it.  When you learn a person will never change their insistence that you are solely to blame for every conflict, will never compromise or concede anything, ever, there is only one move: you need to get away from them.

I fondly believed all of my life — to my detriment in the end, when I was metaphorically lynched by a group of my oldest, closest friends during one of the most vulnerable times in my life — that every disagreement or hurtful pattern with people I cared about would yield to goodwill, humor, a gentle, reasonable presentation of facts, an exchange of views, an accommodation of everyone’s feelings.

Displays of genuine friendship can mend a painful situation with someone who cares deeply for your feelings. Someone who loves you yields to what you need. They don’t need to be persuaded that you’re hurt. They can acknowledge when they’ve hurt you, and try not to do it anymore.   

All of the goodwill, friendship and benefit of the doubt in the world will not move someone who, damaged enough early in life, can never, ever, admit they are wrong or ever did anything, even unintentionally, that could possibly hurt you.

You will hear from these types that you are one who has the problem.  Strictly speaking, this is true, the problem you have is that you are locked in a relationship and still trying to reason with someone like them.  They will tell you that you are over-sensitive, self-pitying, ruled by childhood trauma you never overcame, blaming them unfairly, that you frighten them, that your expectations of others are too high, that you can’t control your emotions, you’re too analytical, blind to how much they love and respect you, that you don’t realize how hurtful you’re being to them by unfairly accusing them of hurting you. 

To put it bluntly, these fucks will say absolutely anything to avoid conceding anything to you about the reasonable, foreseeable effects of their hurtful behavior.  When you see this behavior is a pattern, and it doesn’t stop, weed these folks out of your life, there is no other healthy option. There is really no middle course with someone who insists on their right to treat you as they see fit, even if you tell them many times that you can’t stand the way they treat you.

I don’t really mind being called over-sensitive anymore, not as much as I used to, anyway. I am sensitive, exactly as sensitive as I need to be. I would like to become ever more sensitive, because sensitivity is where all the beautiful things, as well as the painful ones, live.  I am sensitive because I am sentient.  I will not deliberately hurt somebody in my life, I try not to hurt strangers either most of the time.  If I find out I’ve hurt someone I know, I’m quick to make amends.  If I am over-sensitive, I greatly prefer it to being insensitive, under-sensitive, whatever the opposite of over-sensitive is.

Being sensitive, and knowing exactly what causes us the most pain, we need to learn to protect ourselves from repeating familiar harm.  I have found, over and over, that once I see contempt in a friend or family member, or anyone else, and contempt becomes their final answer, that I always feel immediate relief when I get away from that person.  Contempt as a final statement doesn’t heal, doesn’t change, is not amenable to negotiation. 

A show of contempt draws a life and death battle line, humiliating to the person who shows contempt, who can then never back down for fear of more humiliation. Their agitated implacability makes finding peace impossible.  Contempt is a relationship breaker, walk away from it and you will always feel tremendous relief. It is one horrible thing you no longer have to try to accommodate your sensitive feelings to.

There is enough of that horror in the world we can do nothing about, without having it inflicted by those close to us who insist, irrationally, counter-factually, that they love and admire us and that we have to love them no matter what because of that. Love is sensitivity to the feelings of the person you love.  It is nothing else.