Category Archives: current events

Narcissistic rage as government policy equals fascism

Everything you learn about the personality type that must see themselves as perfect, can never be wrong, perceives all criticism as enraging defiance, an attack that must be met with crushing force, is seen in the leaders of fascist regimes and the culture of those regimes. It’s uncanny how the politics of fascism mirrors the personality disorder of those who can never be wrong and are always 100% right to rage.

The malignant narcissist, or the psychopath, (neither defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s vast catalogue of mental and emotional disorders, the DSM) always stands on their right to express full-on rage, angrily posing as the persecuted victim as they act to extract maximum punishment of those who defy their will. This is psychopathy 101. Never wrong, no consideration for anyone but themselves, no capacity for remorse.

Listen to this illuminating short clip from psychiatrist Russell Razzaque:

We can understand that people who behave abusively, sadistically, are deeply damaged by their past shame and humiliation. They are compelled to seek power, to rigidly control other people in order to feel safe. The childish dream of every one of these broken creatures is to project super strength and enjoy unlimited praise and admiration. You can feel sorry for them, on one level, though they quickly lose the right to that sympathy when they begin aggressively offloading their heavy shame onto the world around them, demand obedience to their whims and start building concentration camps for their enemies.

You lose all sympathy the first time you are vicious to someone who has no power to stop you from being vicious toward them. Note the way this administration is using the continual public spectacle of mistreating the most vulnerable among us, including law-abiding asylum seekers detained for deportation after coming to court and having their cases “dismissed”. Notice the violent attempt to cow the public by manhandling, handcuffing and detaining of peaceful protesters, elected “Democrat” officials, a union leader, often without an arrest or any charges being brought.

Despicable, insane, evil, even if also mentally ill. Jesus Christ is weeping at this Nazi shit being done in his name by followers who would drag him by a chain behind a truck until he was dead. Well, at least Hitler is having a mirthless, Hiterlian laugh, in the smoking section of the hot place.

Well said, David Corn!

Understand the nature of what we are all witnessing.  American fascists, who can smell the unlimited power they’ve been lusting after for decades, are driving toward totalitarianism as fast, and recklessly, as they can. And they’re doing it in the open, using all of the same techniques any Nazi type regime uses to seize and consolidate unchallengeable power. Here’s a short summary of their terror campaign of performatively brutalizing their political opponents who stand up for the due process rights of everyone on American soil.

First we have masked, ID-less feds rough up a few Black elected Democrats on public property, arrest the Black Congresswoman who is in the middle of the scrum with masked federal officers and charge her with a 17-year felony (even though the Black mayor they unlawfully arrested was never charged with any crime.) Then we rough up a Democratic Senator named Alex Padilla, trying to humiliate him by forcing him to the ground and handcuffing him, without charges and without consequence (so far). Next we throw a New York Jew, an elected NYC official and a leading Democratic mayoral candidate, against the wall of a federal building in New York City, handcuff him, seize his cell phone and detain him for three and a half hours but press no charges.  Pretty soon all this shit is normal, as the regime claims to be violently fighting “the weaponization of law enforcement.” Nazi fucks. Be careful out there, friends.

Great, important bit of reporting on Trump’s 2024 “mandate”

If you believe that the vastly unpopular, eternally angry, distracted, greedy, “transactional”, lying, increasingly deranged 47th president happened to win every swing state (a rare feat in any presidential election), by virtually identical margins (all just above the recount margin) and that the 20,000,000 ballot decline in mail-in ballots, (the first time the number hasn’t increased since 2008), had nothing to do with Trump megadonor/postmaster DeJoy’s refusal to segregate mail-in ballots or postmark them when they arrived, voter suppression laws in every red state, single drop boxes in counties of millions of voters, fake drop boxes, Russian bomb threats to Democratic precincts on Election Day, had nothing to do with Trump’s narrow victory in 2024, then the piece linked below probably won’t interest you.

To anyone who finds the narrow victory of a convicted felon (who escaped two other massive felony convictions — one for treason, under the Espionage Act, the other for a long campaign of fraud and inciting a riot to overturn election results — thanks to partisan judges he appointed), given carte blanche by an activist, partisan 6-3 Supreme Court stocked with members of a far-right judicial fraternity serving the interests of the top 0.2%, a bit suspicious, the factors laid out in this article will be of great interest to you — and hopefully lead AGs in those swing states to open investigations.

source

The failure to question so many suspicious factors in the first presidential election following an attempted coup by the winning candidate, including multiple frauds (fake electors, illegal pressure campaigns to state officials to change votes, tampering with voting machines, defaming election workers, etc.) and a violent insurrection at the Capitol, led by the former and current president, leaving aside Palantir and Musk, and their sophisticated data mining and influence operations that make Cambridge Analytica’s Brexit techniques look primitive, results in blaming the Democrats for a failed campaign, blaming Joe Biden’s slowness to step aside, blaming democracy itself for giving us a dangerous maniac president we can’t deny won fairly.

The endlessly corrupt Trump’s years of angrily lying about a “rigged”, “stolen” 2020 election, and making acceptance of that lie a condition for serving as a Republican official, have silenced anyone in his party, the corporate media, and virtually all of the Democratic party, from expressing reasonable suspicions or making charges related to what appears to be an energetically “engineered” election result. Critics probably fear appearing as delusional as sore losers like Trump, Kari Lake and the fully pardoned J6 rioters. Say what you like about their despicable techniques, but Nazis are always good at cowing opponents, especially if there are billions in corporate profits and fundraising involved.

Comment and response

In our age of the internet in your pocket, personally selected content (based on our harvested, analyzed online and conversational preferences) clamoring for our attention, when most of us are staring at smart phone and computer screens many hours a day, comment exchanges sometimes take on the aspect of a real conversation.  

You can read long comment threads under many YouTube videos, on Substack and everywhere else online and the back and forth is sometimes a great discussion, adding depth, appreciation and interesting background that the original video or piece didn’t include.  Those discussions enhance the original, make it more meaningful.   It is impressive how well-informed on certain subjects some people are. Many people are moved to write detailed comments on posts and interact in extended, informative back and forths with other commenters.  We’re living in a digital age of instant digital comment and response, at a time when face to face social interaction is in decline.

An honest talk about a compelling topic is always a great thing.  The alternative to commenting is not commenting, which the large majority of people do most of the time when it comes to online reading or viewing.   A reader’s silence has no inherent meaning, the significance of silence can only be seen in context.   Silence as the answer to a question directed at someone has a much different meaning than silence as the natural tendency of most readers after reading something.    On the other hand, “no comment” as the final comment on something of concern, has an unmistakably critical ring.

I very rarely get comments on this blahg or even a like or dislike (I don’t use ‘social media’ outside of this).  I write here frequently as part of a daily writing practice and a way of keeping track of my thoughts, events, interesting things I’ve read or seen, music, moods, ideas, a recipe.  If at some point I recall a great lecture I heard about how  Adverse Childhood Experiences [1] can cause harmful changes in the actual DNA of the grown up version of that child, I will have posted about it here and be able to easily find it to send to the person I was talking to about it. I will be able to quickly locate Steven Zipperstein’s brilliant Pogrom, for example, Shoshana Zuboff’s genius mapping of the terra incognita of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism that has swallowed and digested us all  is here.

I sometimes think of this enlightening and obvious NY Times headline I took a screen shot of at some point, a year or two after the worst of the recent mass death event, the Covid-19 pandemic. It explains a lot.

Many of those infected with Covid-19 that the virus did not kill are suffering the long-term effects of the disease, effects still not completely understood by science. Millions have also been broken in various ways by the terrifying prolonged traumatic experience of a highly contagious, international mass death spreading invisibly throughout human populations everywhere. Recall how frightful the early days of the outbreak were, before the vaccine, before we knew how to protect ourselves and each other, and how much insane behavior occurred, particularly here, in the United States, where our death toll, because of this insanity, was the largest of any nation, and close to the top of the per capita Covid-19 death list worldwide [2]. Imagine the effect on young children and adolescents, a mental health crisis rarely acknowledged, let alone addressed. Suck it up, you insane little bastards!

The human race, across the globe, has been recently mass traumatized by the pandemic and the effects are demonstrated in mass behavior worldwide. We have all been traumatized by it, few have escaped the effects of this long communal terror and all of the other strong feelings this terror evoked. When people are freaked out, people we don’t like can quickly take on the aspect of monsters, inhuman in their greed, stupidity, anger, sorrow, hypocrisy, whatever it is that distorts them into purely destructive beings without any redeeming feature.

I got a rare comment the other day, to my post about Kristi Noem’s lying about Senator Padilla being wrestled to the ground because he was “lunging at” her and hadn’t identified himself as a Senator (he had). In the course of it I wrote, describing the selective, irrational, often counter-factual, lying arguments of MAGA officials: This is a basic principle of all psychopaths: win the argument by removing context, deprive the other person of their right to do anything.

I had a long comment applauding this essential bit of truth and then running with it. The comment quoted numerous writers and thinkers I’d never heard of and included a link to a post written by someone who’d sent a critical comment to the British Medical Journal that the BMJ had declined to publish. Clicking the link to a blahg and starting to read the unpublished comment, it made sense that a scientific journal would decline to publish it, but official science’s refusal to publish it was cited as proof of science’s complicity in the worldwide conspiracy of deadly psychopaths. The comment continued into vaccine skepticism (with quotes and links) and conspiracy theories based on the coordinated actions of a worldwide cabal of undisclosed psychopaths.

I don’t dispute that many, probably most, CEOs, the leaders of the American Psychiatric Association, the far-right political activist billionaires who have waged a long war against “majoritarian tyranny” and the “administrative state”, those who embrace obvious lies for political advantage (99% of Republicans in Congress) are likely psychopaths, or, pragmatically obedient to psychopaths. That’s a different belief than, say, the antinatalist position that since we are not asked to consent to our own births (a tricky proposition, as even antinatalists must concede) that we are born involuntarily, into a life of pain, which gives us a moral obligation to liberate others about to be born without any choice in the matter [3].

The online world is an impossibly massive psychic battleground where intelligent, useful theories and idiotic and destructive ones are given equal weight by tens of millions worldwide, depending on how they hit individuals emotionally. Content moderation is something we routinely do in our daily lives, such as when confronted by advocates of the theory that powerful blood-drinking child raping cannibals like Tom Hanks control the liberal elites and the Deep State that persecutes White Christian Men.

For years YouTube posted links under sketchy videos, alerting viewers that the content contradicted known facts and should be viewed in that light. The owners of youTube have recently agreed with Trump/Musk/Thiel (three famous, extremely powerful psychopaths) that content moderation should be relaxed. You will, presumably, no longer have a corrective link under a January 6 riot video purporting to show that every rioter was a liberal, communist, FBI provocateur or Antifa supporter dressed as MAGA nation, that MAGA was completely peaceful and engaged only in “legitimate political discourse” and that all of the 1,600 rioters pardoned by Trump are owed large settlements for wrongful prosecutions and convictions. Same for the insane RFK Jr.’s claims about medicine, vaccines, toxic water, government bureaucracy, science, research, cancer, child malnutrition, etc.

As a matter of kindness and respect I wanted to post the guy’s long, gnarly, problematic comment and reply sympathetically to what I agreed with. As a matter of online responsibility, I couldn’t figure out how to do it without a bit of content moderation, which I would have applied to the sections about Covid, vaccines and so on. In the end, I’ll never know if the long, detailed comment was from a person or generated by AI (it was suspicious to me that there was no link or identifying information about the person making the comment, which was forwarded to me by WordPress).

We humans are really on our own out here.

[1] Apparently the CDC website/DOGE bots have not gone over and combed out this page, last updated 10-4-24. I suspect the current boss, floridly insane former long-time heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will make short work of this webpage, if it ever comes to his attention. Here’s a screenshot for posterity:

[2]. (From Wikipedia)

State and local responses to the pandemic during the public health emergency included the requirement to wear a face mask in specified situations (mask mandates), prohibition and cancellation of large-scale gatherings (including festivals and sporting events), stay-at-home orders, and school closures.[29] Disproportionate numbers of cases were observed among Black and Latino populations,[30][31][32] as well as elevated levels of vaccine hesitancy,[33][34] and there was a sharp increase in reported incidents of xenophobia and racism against Asian Americans.[35][36] Clusters of infections and deaths occurred in many areas.[b]The COVID-19 pandemic also saw the emergence of misinformation and conspiracy theories,[39] and highlighted weaknesses in the U.S. public health system.[17][40][41]

In the United States, there have been 103,436,829[3] confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,193,165[3] confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide.[42] The COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in the country’s history.[43] It was the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer.[44] From 2019 to 2020, U.S. life expectancy dropped by three years for Hispanic and Latino Americans, 2.9 years for African Americans, and 1.2 years for White Americans.[45] In 2021, U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 rose,[46] and life expectancy fell.[47]

[3] Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Wikipedia

What lying, ignorant, loyal Kristi Noem said before Senator Padilla was wrestled out of the room for asking a question

Context is everything in life. A person cannot determine cause and effect, or the nuances of who is in the right and who is wrong, without the context and sequence of what happened. The sequence of events is an observable set of actions and reactions, the justifiability of these actions and reactions is what lawyers argue over in trials. Leave out the cause, or something in the sequence of events, or even just create doubt about whether it happened just that way, and the effect can be made to seem completely insane, the person making the complaint a lunatic and a nuisance. This is a basic principle of all psychopaths: win the argument by removing context, deprive the other person of their right to do anything.

When I refer to Noem lying, consider her false claim, immediately after her squad forcibly put Padilla face down on the ground and senselessly handcuffed a citizen who was not resisting, legally detained or arrested, that Senator Padilla didn’t identify himself. He loudly said his name and title, on video, as Noem’s heavy handed security team started. Noem’s lying claim is contradicted in real time, it’s on videotape for fuck’s sake. This lie is far from her first as HHS Secretary, do a quick search for many more.

Her ignorance is reflected in her under-testimony definition of habeas corpus: the president’s constitutional right to detain anyone he deems an enemy. In fairness to the Secretary [1], maybe she meant enema. She’s an ignoramus, but loyal as hell.

Heather Cox Richardson, with another crucial detail about the ugly fascist strongarming of a peaceful senator the corporate media is scrupulously avoiding (corporate persons will be corporate persons, that is, psychopaths highly focused only on their own best interests):

While much focus has been on the assault [on Senator Padilla] itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

source

“We are not going away,” Noem said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In fairness to someone with Noem’s intellectual and moral capacities, she may not realize that she is parroting Nazi positions in her devotion to the Führereid [1] that was the condition for her obtaining a position she is wildly, tragically, unqualified for. She is an international security threat dressed up as a MAGA Barbie Doll, so cute with those hats and sassy outfits.

“We are not going away,” Noem said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

[1] from Wikipedia: The Hitler Oath (German: Führereid or Führer Oath)—also referred in English as the Soldier’s Oath[1]—refers to the oaths of allegiance sworn by officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht and civil servants of Nazi Germany between the years 1934 and 1945. The oath pledged personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler rather than loyalty to the Weimar Constitution of the country.

[2] Almost put in as the international security and anti-terrorism credentials of Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem the CV of her fellow cabinet member, Tusli Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence nobody but Putin can trust:

I wrote (and deleted):

She has long been friendly with Vladimir Putin and routinely echoes his talking points on US mass media. As a member of Congress she flew to Syria to visit with Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, and returned defending him, even as he continued his murderous war on Syrians to cling to power he eventually was forced out of.

There’s also this:

Gabbard launched her 2020 presidential campaign running on an anti-interventionist and populist platform, but dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden in March 2020. Previously, she also served as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2013 to 2016 but resigned to endorse Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. After her departure from Congress in 2021, Gabbard took more conservative positions on issues such as transgender rights, border security, and foreign policy. In 2022, she spoke at the conservative CPAC conference and left the Democratic Party.

America’s fight against brutality

I had a friend years ago, a pot dealer, who was one of the most ambitious, self-centered, hard-driving teenagers I’ve ever known. Recognizing he might not have the intellectual capabilities of many of his classmates in law school, he took to memorizing every case he read, studying twice as hard. He became a sometimes unethical lawyer before making his fortune buying and renting real estate and shrewdly investing. He was socially insufferable with his constant self-aggrandizing patter. I commented to a mutual friend that his then-wife seemed like a bright woman. “How bright can she be? She married Jack,” he said, very sensibly.

I think of Melania Trump, who may well be very bright (she speaks a number of languages, apparently, and has negotiated, and renegotiated, lucrative deals with her famously unfaithful husband), and her announced anti-bullying campaign when she first became First Lady. The anti-bullying campaign never happened, she was probably bullied out of it. Or perhaps her fashion statement spoke for her true feelings, when she put on the “I really don’t care, do you?” jacket.

Robert Reich really put his finger on what we are up against as a society, as a culture, in this perilous moment in human history. The entire game, the supreme struggle of our time, is brutality and exploitation versus empathy and cooperation. His whole short piece is well worth reading, the link is below. It ends this way, with a series of epigrams that could be carved in stone as eternal truths:

The central struggle of civilization has always been to stop brutality.  Unless we prevent the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe.

A civil society is the opposite of what Trump seeks.   A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It moves as far as possible away from brutality.

Every time the stronger brutalize the weaker — whether it’s Trump and his flunkies bullying immigrants and the state of California, white supremacists bullying Black and Latino people, giant corporations bullying customers with high prices, the wealthy bullying the public to get giant tax cuts, Elon Musk bullying poor people by cutting programs they depend on, police bullying poor Black people, powerful men bullying women through sexual harassment, politicians building their power by bullying racial or ethnic minorities, Netanyahu wiping out Palestinians in Gaza, Putin trying to take over Ukraine — it’s fundamentally the same playbook: 

Stoke fear.  Exploit desperation.  Suspend the rule of law.   Fan brutality.

source

Deliberately crash the economy, increase pressure, precarity and pain on working and poor people, instill fear on Wall Street and Main Street. Irrationally blame your predecessor for the results of your own destructive policies. Make people on both sides of a nation you continue to divide as angry as possible all the time.

Once everyone is feeling desperate, exploit this desperation for your own/billionaires transactional ends.

Because of this created mass desperation declare a national emergency and invoke emergency powers under some vague and semi-rational rationale. Anything should be good enough as long as you get the troops on the streets and actual violence finally breaks out.

Blame society’s most vulnerable for this situation and sic the angriest and most violent armed-to-the-teeth Americans against them. Institute mandatory Roman salute for all citizens and make gristly examples of anyone who makes Hitler comparisons, employs sarcasm, irony or the f-word, or is in any way disloyal to America Made Great Again.

Trump’s perverse veneration of slaveholders = fascist gold

Historian Timothy Snyder reminds us that Trump’s veneration of oath-breakers and traitors, guys like Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, (or, for that matter, insurrectionist rioters like Trump’s pardoned J6 Day of Love crew), is intended to create a false narrative about the past in order to dominate the present. Fascist politics frames everything as a death struggle, an eternal battle of the wills, between us and our sick, evil, dangerous “enemies” (whoever they may be that day). In the case of Trump, the enemy is any American who opposes his right to rule like the CEO of a privately held company his father gave him.

Trump announced recently to a carefully selected group of MAGA soldiers, at Hegseth-renamed Fort Bragg, that he is ignoring a bipartisan law Congress overrode his veto to pass, and renaming US military bases for the violent racist scoundrels who led an army against the USA to preserve “The Peculiar Institution” (slavery). By law, he has no power to do this. As bellicose, in-your-face, strongman propaganda? Gold.

The selected troops assembled for his video op applauded as Trump promised to change the name of former Fort (Robert E.) Lee back from its current name (in memory of a black military heroes) [1]. He’s constantly appealing to the unhealed heart of the Old Confederacy, which was never defeated, in the minds of the descendants of those who lost the Civil War they still claim Northern aggression started.

Trump’s most devoted base is largely down in Dixie, among white Evangelical Christians.   The former Confederacy is bright red on the electoral map, and for the same irrational reason — the claimed God-given right of one Christian race to rule all the others.  In the mind of his base, Trump’s not going to let those goddamned black criminals who are eating the dogs, eating the cats, eat our goddamned pets and rape our women.  NOT ANYMORE!

Robert E. Lee, the American general who led Confederate troops in an actual war against the United States (most American casualties ever), is on a US postage stamp, for fuck’s sake. His former slave plantation became Arlington National Cemetery, but only after his death. A US military base was long named after this motherfucker. We don’t remember Lee as Benedict Arnold, we remember him as a refined and dignified southern gentleman who, out of loyalty to his home and family (many of whom apparently were horrified when he turned down Lincoln’s offer to lead the Union army) took up the glorious Lost Cause, protecting the rights of wealthy “planters” to own certain human beings and do with them as they pleased.

It’s Trump’s dream too. To do as he pleases, always, with no restraint from anyone because he is entitled, as a result of being born rich and the heir to a highly successful psychopath who bailed him out over and over from the results of his own hubris and stupidity. He has never been held accountable for anything he’s done in a long life of contempt, dishonesty and crime (the turd will be 79 on Saturday). He won Trump v. US, after all (consider the power of the name of that lawsuit) — not only is he the first president legally allowed to commit crimes if he believes they are part of his duties as Leader, but, perhaps even more sweet to the transactional, very stable business genius, no presidential pardon, even if bought and paid for outright, publicly and with receipts, can ever be challenged in court.

His $130,000,000 birthday present to himself, on the taxpayers’ dime, is a Soviet style military parade. He’s had sturdy fences constructed all along its route (to avoid another J6 when DC was completely unprepared for the illegal, unpermitted march he had planned and announced while whipping up the crowd to violence) and made sure no permitted protest is allowed within earshot of this North Korea-style spectacle he has planned for himself.

After all, traitors and sick, dangerous criminal maniacs prevented this parade during his first term, he has a right to it and he will have it, thank you very much. He’s publicly warned protesters that he’ll smash them hard in the fucking face if they try to rain on his big, beautiful birthday parade. He’s doing everything in his considerable power to provoke the violence that will allow him to do what his hero, Mr. Hitler, did when seizing power– invoke a national emergency and mobilize the military and secret police against any citizen who does not raise his arm in a proper Trump salute.

In this difficult moment, when this desperate and doddering dictator wannabe, who has already done such damage to the country while unable to pass anything in Congress or win a lawsuit in any court he doesn’t own 6-3, is playing his last card — provoking violence — we all have to keep our heads. It would be easy enough for Trump’s lackies to arrange to have a few dozen pardoned J6 rioters (perhaps even the dog dick who proudly marched the Confederate flag through as the others ransacked the Capitol, or the horned Q-Anon Shaman himself) join each protest and throw rocks, or fire guns at, cops. Putin wouldn’t hesitate, nor would any other dictator. I put nothing past these motherfuckers who make a career of lapping at their Leader’s colon.

Call me Anne Frank, but I am putting my faith in the better angels among us. The stakes are known to everyone, and I’m counting on the restraint of good people here in America resisting this wave of evil. If I’m wrong, I’ll try to send y’all a postcard on the way to Camp Donald J. Trump.

[1] “In the actual history of the United States, one war is central: the Civil War. Trump, who has never seen the point of the Union Army defending the republic, now seems now to have moved on to the position that the Confederacy should have won. He promised to rename Fort Gregg-Adams, the first base named for African-Americans, to Fort Robert E. Lee. The base in question hasn’t been known by the full name of the confederate commander since 1950. Lee was a traitor, an oathbreaker, a defender of slavery and the commander of a force whose mission was to break up the United States of America.” source

“I had Schleicher shot”

Adolf Hitler was one of history’s most infamous, prolific liars and mass murderers. Or, if you admire the Führer and think his program made a lot of sense, arguably history’s greatest self-made man. Or both can be true at once, or partly or mostly true, and other things besides: vegetarian, artistic, eccentric, flatulent, insane, loved dogs, sadist. We often forget, in this divisive, fascistic age of black and white when we all must be either good or evil, that more than one thing can be true about each of us, and that some of these true things directly contradict other true things about us.

History is deep, complicated, nuanced, not straightforward and, though those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, it never repeats itself exactly. Historians say it doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain supposedly observed. I’m thinking about Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag in the spring of 1934, about a year into his 1,000 Year Reich, a couple of weeks after The Night of the Long Knives, a nationwide execution of all of Hitler’s most prominent political rivals.

Hitler, a talented liar, was a trailblazing pioneer of the Big Lie, a technique of mass media manipulation, based on an audacious, endlessly repeated lie, that every powerful psychopath and dictator always makes use of.  Hitler lied without hesitation, to everybody and under all circumstances.  He said whatever he needed to say, according to the transactional needs of the immediate contest he was determined to win.  

He had the Prime Minister of Britain in his office in the months leading up to World War Two and was determined to have the European Allies, his former enemies, let him have Czechoslovakia (coincidentally, producers of the world’s best munitions). After throwing a terrifying temper tantrum, rolling on the floor biting at furniture as he snarled and screamed, he calmed himself and managed to sincerely assure British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin that once Germany had the Sudetenland and the German population of Czechoslovakia was back in German hands, that the Fatherland’s territorial demands would be at an end. Peace in our time, how about it, old bean?

Chamberlin shook his hand and came back to England with the good news that war had been avoided through diplomacy (that would be remembered by history as appeasement). Once Germany had Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s men dressed some political prisoners in Polish uniforms and shot them in the act of attacking a German border outpost. With the photographic proof of dead Polish aggressors at the border, the Führer then declared war on Poland, and the rest, as they say, is history. 70-85 million (70,000,000 to 85,000,000) dead later, in another war Hitler claimed had been started by a global cabal of Jewish elders (we did the First World War, then known as The Great War, too), the Führer condemned the nation that had betrayed and failed him, shot his wife, shot his dog and then shot himself.

I apparently wrote this on February 6, 2020. It is timely today:

Once you remove the last legal restraints on a lawless person, the results are easy to predict.  

I’m haunted by the image of Mr. Hitler, already the dictator of Germany for a year and a half, finally sending the Gestapo out to liquidate his enemies in “The Night of the Long Knives”.   Everyone on Mr. Hitler’s voluminous enemies list was murdered that night, June 30, 1934, including a nationally known ultra-conservative politician and decorated German general named Kurt von Schleicher.  He was shot seven times while sitting at his desk, his wife was also killed; a year later Schleicher’s cook, the only eye witness to the shooting, mysteriously drowned. 

The killing of Schleicher was sold the next morning in the Nazi press as an act of self-defense by the men sent to peacefully take Schleicher into custody on charges of high treason.  The Nazi story in the Nazi-controlled mass media was that they’d shot the accused traitor when he resisted arrest by opening fire on them, as desperate, insane traitors often do.  Two weeks later Mr. Hitler could nonchalantly drop the lie during a Reichstag speech and simply tell the nation: “I had Schleicher shot.”   

Even though “jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging and our country is thriving and highly respected again” I am feeling unaccountably uneasy.  (2025 note: Biden actually achieved most of these things, after, heh, stealing the 2020 election…) I keep thinking of what our infallible leader tweeted right after Mueller’s investigation “completely and totally exonerated” the man about whose ten counts of obstruction of justice Robert Mueller III wrote “we could not exonerate him.”   

Mueller, the lifelong Republican who “completely exonerated” Trump, of course —  a traitor– and the treason of his witch hunting partisan investigators is being criminally investigated by the aggressive Attorney General’s most aggressive investigator even as we joyously celebrate the unprecedented greatness of our great land.  Here’s the part of the president’s tweet I can’t manage to forget:

“It is finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.”

The Führer used the same kind of passion in sharing his deepest feelings with his faithful followers about his sick and dangerous enemies, the ones he said would be hanging from lamp posts, or slowly strangled on piano wire, on film, for his repeated viewing pleasure.

History rhymes, but it doesn’t always go according to a would-be tyrant’s plans, no matter how wealthy, powerful and unscrupulous his backers are.

German democracy was only about fifteen years-old when Hitler invoked the constitutional Emergency Powers his party never gave up (it’s always an emergency when one of these motherfuckers is in power, as we have seen). Our democracy, the world’s oldest, will be 250 next summer. Our founding document, The Declaration of Independence, a copy of which Trump hung on the wall of the Oval Office, has the same meaning to Trump as his interpretation of the MAGA riot of January 6, 2021 — it’s all about love, loyalty, and honor, and, personal loyalty to the boss, and freedom, and the God-given right to take long showers with plenty of water pressure to wash the shampoo out of your thick, luxuriant head of hair. Everything but what it actually is. We hold these truths to be self-evident, and shit. In the immortal words of George Lopez, fuck that puto.

Make America Great Again is racist (misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic and fascistic too, of course)

Bryan Cranston nails the basic truth about MAGA. Once you hear it there is really no rational argument that bringing the country back to the days before the Voting Rights Act and the other “Civil Rights Era” laws protecting the civil and human rights progress of all Americans, an imagined time of national greatness, is not as fucking racist as every infamous (or beloved, for true MAGA conspiracy believers) Supreme Court decision supporting racism at law prior to and in the century after the Civil War.

Bryan doesn’t mention it in this short clip, but MAGA is also deeply misogynistic. This cruel, dishonest political “movement” has no problem with draconian laws forcing raped ten year-old girls, and pregnant women in comas, to carry fetuses to term and give birth to babies even if medical tests show the newborn is doomed to die moments after birth. The mother’s life and sanity, MAGA preaches, must come after an abstract idea of the sanctity of the soul of the unborn, and every theological argument undergirding witch burning, as cited by mad, enraged, reactionary medievalist Samuel Alito.

MAGA’s credo of hatred of the Other and punishment of the “weak” is hateful, immoral and about as faithful to the teachings of Jesus as the insanely justified “Godly” tortures of the Spanish Inquisition.

There is also MAGAs strong embrace of every element of fascism, specifically the practices of Nazi Germany where public and private loyalty to a compulsively lying infallible Leader were requirements for government work — and eventually life itself. MAGAs success, like Hitler’s, requires an endlessly supple police state where laws can be changed at the Leader’s will to serve the Leader’s increasingly destructive impulses. Heather Cox Richardson ends her most recent piece with this:

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council agreed. He wrote: “In order to build a mass deportation machine to round up and deport 4% of the entire goddamn population, you must first build the police state.” Source

Two months ago, and today

Clipped this one minute from a great Seth Meyer’s Closer Look showing a childishly petulant Elon Musk whining about what a jerk Tim Walz was for mocking Musk as Tesla share prices plummeted. I was unable to embed it here as a short youTube video, but it is very much worth a sixty second gander. Well-done, Seth. Everyone should be seeing this twenty second tour de force of childishness by one of world’s most inhuman “geniuses” on a loop. What a colossal whiner this cartoon evil “genius” Great Replacement Theory embracing / race to colonize Mars is existential asshole is.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxbeeFmjoSd-62QRp0Kqk2anzi2FwfMXwN?si=TBVcpf-xPzHJa515

Today I received this ad from Elon Musk on youTube. When you have a shit ton of billions you can tolerate losing or gaining $150,000,000,000 or so at a time and giving things away for free to tens of millions of citizens without even feeling it. Makes you look generous too, giving away free hats, like those million dollar checks to Pennsylvania voters who signed on to the Biden Crime Family story. My hat’s off to yer, Elon. Go back to South Africa, you Nazi fuck, will you?

But first will you send me one of those cool collector’s item hats, man?

I am human, not a glitchbot

Not for nothing, but have you ever seen a more insane looking self-portrait used to promote a person’s mad cause?