There is literally no limit to how stupid, vicious and incompetent psychopaths like father of 13 (all by IVF) Musk, his front man DJT and their young, unprincipled anti-government hackers (on the payroll of the government) are. I went on to the Social Security website to download my 1099. In order to log in I needed an email sent to me with a security code. Here’s the email that came from ssa.gov:
Google says: you can’t trust a message from Social Security, proceed with caution, red flag, red flag!
Apparently you can pick up one of these MAGA hats in Greenland or Canada. God bless these United Shayyssssh.
Mary Trump posted this picture at the top of her piece called The Ongoing National Security Debacle. I have only one word to add to the caption of this picture worth thousands of words. Mary’s caption is fine, excellent, really.
Morons.
I have read several excellent pieces about this foul bit of ongoing fascist foreplay, the illegal, asshole use of a chat group, on personal phones, to plan and gloat about a secret military strike. Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the larger point of this group chat bullshit is brilliant. Heather Cox Richardson’s keeps to her very high standard of excellent, insightful reporting — if you only read one, her’s is the one to read. Robert Reich is on fire on the obvious, burning question of Where Are the fucking Democrats at this moment?
This kind of coverage (the three mentioned above, I haven’t read Mary’s yet) is a huge part of the fight we all need to participate in, now and not when we are done trembling about the lack of amenities at the eventual death camp many of us will be shoehorned into.
When you are up against Nazis you are fighting psychopaths, whatever spineless mainstream Democrats may say about the virtues of playing possum while the Nazis magically self-destruct because of their own hubris, irrationality, stupidity and incompetence. The very things that drive Nazis. The exact things we have to remain educated about, highlight and fight at every turn. At every fucking turn, my friends.
I’m going to take a break from thinking about my vexing personal situation, worries about a suddenly intermittent ability to pass bloody urine since an unnecessary urethral surgery done by a master salesman so confident he felt no need to do a single pre-surgical test, to muse a bit about another dangerous psychopath everyone in the world knows, and a good percentage of the world hates.
Those who hate him, or course, suffer from a special mental illness his handlers have cooked up (a regurgitated version of [Dubya] Bush Derangement Syndrome from the pre-Obama era), so we can, fairly and honestly, consider him universally loved, perhaps even intergalactically so.
(Why should I be required to show more courage than Columbia University, ABC, Disney, Chuck Schumer, bumbling numbskull John Fetterman, the Republican-led Congress, various law firms the president has threatened? Only one reason, actually: not to obey a wannabe American Hitler and his stinking horde in advance, fighting fascism fucking 101, brothers and sisters. I know well how many of the dead the original Hitler caused to be slaughtered (full disclosure, I may have an ax to grind, dozens in my family were killed by Elon’s and Don’s Herr H.), his one small fault now reduced by many to merely hating Jews a little bit (and who doesn’t? [1]), though the well-documented history of his impressive mass murder score is being erased, possibly by Musk employee Big Balls himself, as I tap this keyboard)
Anyway, sorry for the distraction. I was going to show you a picture, which I display under the for now robust protections of free expression provided by the First Amendment, which may soon be banned, even criminalized as “domestic terrorism” by Elon “Free Speech” Musk, enemy of unelected bureaucrats, and Pam “Too Corrupt to Serve in Trump’s first term” Bondi. Here you go:
Now these two photos of the same man are equally handsome, a fair minded person might say. One wears makeup, had painful scalp reduction surgery (which caused him to violently assault his first wife, who’d suggested the plastic surgeon who left him in agony) and spends twice the average worker’s annual income every year in hair dressing to make himself look tall and tan and young and lovely as the Girl From Ipanema. The other, non-cosmetically enhanced head merely reflects the results of 78, going on 79, years of life’s inevitable changes.
We live in a culture of illusion/deception by advertising, with a focus on youthful beauty, and Trumpie is touted as a genius because he has played to this illusion/deception “like nobody’s ever seen.” Leave aside the well-known fact that the man is a compulsive liar. There are other ways to refer to someone who constantly spouts falsehoods (see — NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, Völkischer Beobachter). In the law there is a distinction between “puffery” — making exaggerated claims of one’s own power to intimidate an adversary that do not cross the line into outright lies — and making false statements under oath or as an officer of the court (all lawyers who appear before judges are considered officers of the court) which are punishable as perjury. I apologize, insincerely, for this perverse insistence on drawing logical and semantic lines in the sewage we are all ankle deep in during Musk/Trump 2.0 Triumph of Wanton Irrationality Crusade.
The entire billionaire funded reactionary right-wing project of the last several decades, now in full stinking flower, has been to destroy meaning, to nullify rationality itself. Our current age of irrationality makes actual dialogue or negotiation between political opponents impossible since an irrational argument, asserted loudly and repeatedly, is just as good, for purposes of swaying public opinion, as a detailed, fact-based one that logically and completely refutes the other based on a body of what was once called incontrovertible evidence. Today, these irrational monsters controvert and crowds cheer, it’s not a problem at all.
This “the only the reality is what we say it is” leaves only constant warfare between hated enemies, rather than the sometimes contentious policy debates integral to a functioning democracy. Nazis don’t want democracy, they want Nazism, duh. You are either a woke snowflake who hates everything the rightful oligarchs of America stand for, OR, a courageous and fearless patriot who wants to turn America back to the paradise it was before insane deep state regulations destroyed the ability of Robber Barons to make, and keep, unregulatable wealth and operate as they saw fit, for the benefit of themselves and their poorly paid virtual slaves alike.
I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, and frankly I’ve disappointed myself. It’s hard to get out of your own feelings about being injured, physically and psychically, by a master salesman psychopath by writing about another one we are all sickeningly familiar with, or in love with his carefully manufactured false image (those who do not suffer from the widespread plague of TDS). His image again, please:
This thin-skinned stable genius strongman was recently bitterly crying over an official portrait of his, hung somewhere in 2019, that shows him looking a bit fat, bloated, an unhealthy color more like the unretouched one above than the carefully beautiful John Boehner-toned one he projects every day (he bragged that he was prettier than Kamala Harris, you be the judge, carefully…). The portrait’s painter, according to the strongest, most secure man in the free world, is a hack who is losing her skills, a bitch, probably an abortionist, sick, dangerous, a deranged enemy lunatic pet-eating sickie who deliberately tried to humiliate the world’s most handsome man after making Obama look so much more handsome than she made him look. Or, perhaps she’s just a portraitist who faithfully painted what she saw.
What do I know? The best I can do is something like this self-pitying self portrait as a partially crucified Picasso with pissbag and stylish, crucifix-coordinated shorts.
[1] By the way, according to Hannah Arendt’s short, encyclopedic primer on the original Nazis, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin edition, 2006, p. 133), Hitler himself had a list of 340 Jews on his personal “don’t touch Moishe” list.
I wrote this last night, before several members of the opposition party folded and made a catastrophic deal with, do not flinch from this word, read history, American Nazis.
This is the insane, erratic, enraged, two year-old, whose opposition leader apparently has no memory, courage, sense, dignity or access to the internet. The only man capable of making a very stable genius, who is actually a very unstable, stupid person, look like the artist of the deal.
Criticized? Read this Chuck, you stupid motherfucker (and forward it to Gillebrant and the other invertebrates who voted with you). This is the last time Trump shut down the government, in his previous temper tantrum showdown with sick, dangerous enemies. Wikipedia, jackass.
The United States federal government shutdown from midnight EST on December 22, 2018, until February 9, 2019 (35 days) was the longest government shutdown in US history[1][2] and the second[a] and final federal government shutdown involving furloughs during the first presidency of Donald Trump. It occurred when the 115th Congress and Trump could not agree on an appropriations bill to fund the operations of the federal government for the 2019 fiscal year, or a temporary continuing resolution that would extend the deadline for passing a bill. The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal departments or agencies from conducting non-essential operations without appropriations legislation in place. As a result, nine executive departments with around 800,000 employees had to shut down partially or in full, affecting about one-fourth of government activities and causing employees to be furloughed or required to work without being paid.[3] The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown cost the American economy at least $11 billion USD, excluding indirect costs that were difficult to quantify.[4]
The shutdown stemmed from an impasse over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in federal funds for a U.S.–Mexico border wall.[5][6][7] In December 2018, the Senate unanimously passed an appropriations bill without wall funding, and the bill appeared likely to be approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Trump. After Trump faced heavy criticism from some right-wing media outlets and pundits for appearing to back down on his campaign promise to “build the wall“, he announced that he would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund its construction. As a result, the House passed a stopgap bill with funding for the wall, but it was blocked in the Senate by the threat of a Democratic filibuster.[8]
In January 2019, representatives elected in the November 2018 election took office, giving the Democrats a majority in the House. The House immediately voted to approve the appropriations bill that had previously passed the Senate unanimously (which included no funding for the wall). For several weeks, Trump continued to maintain that he would veto any bill that did not fund an entire border wall, and Republican Senate Majority LeaderMitch McConnell blocked the Senate from considering any appropriations legislation that Trump would not support, including the bill that had previously passed.[9][10] Democrats and some Republicans opposed the shutdown and passed multiple bills to reopen the government, arguing that the government shutdown amounted to taking civil servants “hostage” and that negotiations could only begin once the government was reopened.[11][12][13][14]
On January 25, 2019, Trump agreed to endorse a stopgap bill to reopen the government for three weeks up until February 15 to allow for negotiations to take place to approve an appropriations bill that both parties could agree on.[15] However, Trump reiterated his demand for the border wall funding and said that he would shut down the government again or declare a national emergency and use military funding to build the wall if Congress did not appropriate the funds by February 15.[15][16]
Trump’s approval rating dropped during the shutdown.[17][18] A majority of Americans opposed exploitation of the shutdown as a negotiating strategy and held Trump responsible for the shutdown: A CBS News poll found that 71% of Americans considered the border wall “not worth the shutdown”[19] and a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53% of Americans blamed Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 34% who blamed Democrats and 10% who blamed both parties.[20]
On February 15, 2019, Trump declared a national emergency to fund the wall and bypass Congress, after being unsatisfied with a bipartisan border bill that had passed the House and the Senate a day before.[21]
Musk ought to name the first vernichtungslager after you, Schumer, you pathetic unwitting, democracy betraying, weak, easily played, collaborator motherfucker. Nice work, asshole, now do the Roman salute.
The power to create federal agencies resides exclusively in Congress. Leaders of these agencies must be confirmed by Congress, after FBI vetting, conflict of interest checks and public hearings. The power of appropriating tax dollars and spending them is exclusive to Congress. Congress holds the power of the purse. Yet Trump creates a fake agency, cutely named DOGE, appoints an unelected, unvetted billionaire disrupter, with multiple conflicts of interest and many investigations into his shady business practices, experienced only in slashing his workforce, spreading racism (“free speech”), setting a modern record for buying access to power ($270,000,000 and growing) and creating chaos to head the “agency”. The president’s lawyers deny in a sworn statement to the court that this unhinged maniac is in charge, as he illegally mass fires government workers, closes agencies, withholds funds Congress has voted to disburse.
Everyone acts as though this clear violation of multiple laws, and the constitution itself, is all perfectly fine, or at least a matter for the courts to sort out. The NY Times, and virtually everyone else, refers to this fake agency as The Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) as though it’s an actual, legally created government department with unlimited power over every other department. It’s all perfectly normal, by the looks of it, insane and arbitrary as it also clearly is.
A group of reactionary billionaires, in their most recent manifesto, Project 2025, begs to differ with the constitutional order. They regard efficient, elected government as “majoritarian tyranny” that persecutes the billionaire class. They are persecuted by regulations on how they may treat their workers, how much pollution their factories can emit, how safe their products must be. So they prefer an all-powerful CEO with the power to make all these persecutions vanish.
They played the long game, orchestrating the capture of the Supreme Court, achieving a 6-3 majority of ideological purists, “Originalists”, from a far-right judicial fraternity called the Federalist Society, funded the by the same folks who fund the Heritage Foundation and all other reactionary “think tanks”. This majority ruled that unlimited, dark money is political speech (for corporations and the super wealthy, anyway), that racist voter suppression laws and racial gerrymandering are fine unless made with explicit racist intent, announced explicitly during the hearings for the law in question, that anti-bribery laws only apply in certain specific scenarios, that government scientists don’t get the last word on scientific decisions, white Christian legislators and judges do, that the president may sometimes have to commit criminal acts in the course of his core duties (how about a hypothetical there, boys?) and that these criminal acts may not ever be prosecuted. They added a cherry to this shit sundae (which also, of course, abandons the fate of raped, pregnant girls and women to their individual state legislatures) by ruling that no presidential pardon, even if sold outright in public, may ever be questioned in court.
Granted, MAGA is absolutely a cult and Trump has been vetting it for loyalty with extreme zealousness since his loss in 2020. The Republican party has rid itself of any elected officials who defy the cult leader. They are as spineless, and infinitely flexible in their views, as they are punitive and driven by a thirst for vengeance. But where is the opposition party? Outside of a small handful of elected Democrats, and a group of Democratic attorneys general, there is barely a peep from the corporate Democratic leadership. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx) is great, we hear from Jamie Raskin (D-Md), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) but rarely a murmur from anyone else.
How is it that DOGE is not denounced daily as an illegal “agency”? It was not created by Congress, it was pulled out of Charles Koch’s crusty nonagenarian ass. How is the illegal shuttering of USAID, the decimation of Medicaid, the mass firing of IRS, Veterans Affairs (thanks for your service, assholes) Department of Education civil servants, and thousands of others, just subject matter for law suits? How is a hopped up, unelected oligarch’s idiotic refrain of ridding us of “unelected bureaucrats”, not routinely and regularly slapped down as the simpleminded self-contradictng bullshit that it is?
I understand that rage is not amenable to reason. Strong emotion beats a beautifully articulated logical argument in the court of public opinion, but still — how about a little fucking truth and clarity once in a while?
Has America really succumbed to an irrational narrative? This narrative is perpetrated by corporate media, for profit. There are two sides to every story, and almost half of Americans polled approve of the insane two year-old whose vocabulary has shrunk to the level of an eight year old. Fine people in the Nazi party (führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft, sure, but don’t call us Nazis, those are Roman salutes!) and among those enemies the Nazis target. False nuance swallows a very clear narrative: one side relies on constant lies, the stoking of rage and flagrant violations of law to fire up their angry base, the other side believes good policies, fairness in law enforcement and acknowledged equality and respect for human dignity win the day among their reasonable supporters (and wealthy/corporate donor base).
In the battle between lies and truth, there is no middle ground. What the fuck, America? The truth ain’t that threatening, call out the lies every single time, put the proof on the table. Trump failed to rig the 2020 election and incited a riot to culminate a seven tentacled conspiracy to cling to power. It appears he did a much better job in 2024, the first ever election in the Trump era that was not “rigged”. His “mandate” is the narrowest in decades, his approval rating, at this point in his presidency, the lowest on record (breaking his own record from 2017). Plus, he’s clearly insane. What the fuck, America?
Here’s what the commander-in-chief told the crowd at The Ellipse on January 6th, right before sending them off to fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore.
Fascism is always based on lies. It cannot function without a lying counter narrative contradicting what everybody is able to see, hear and smell with their own senses.That this shameless enraged 2-year-old is a master of lying temper tantrums, should not distract anybody from his essential nature. Note the simplistic elegance of this particular lie:
The 2020 election was stolen, the proof of the rigged election was covered up by a corrupt bipartisan coalition of sick and insane haters, therefore, anything we need to do now is fully justified in the eyes of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Now go hang that traitor, Mike Pence!
I will try to post an infamous MAGA lie here every couple of days, until this insane fucker self-destructs, or I am arrested in the middle of the night and sent to a dark site somewhere.
Every citizen who does not believe in dictatorship as the best form of government should listen to this speech. A masterpiece of clear thinking and statements of simple truths I wish American politicians were able to duplicate. Fascism is always based on lies, it cannot function without them. This French senator is from a center-right party, he’s no socialist. For that reason his frank words should carry even more weight with the average minimally informed American. Forward this link to everyone you know. Bravo, Claude Malhuret!
We are, sadly, living in a renaissance of openly proud public psychopathy. This appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, with influential American culture presently at the epicenter of this plague on humanity. Bullying is an expression of deep inferiority that is easily seen, on a superficial level, as a kind of strength. It is the kind of strength that only destroys. Bullying inhibits and stunts the best intentions, and higher natures, of everyone around the bully.
My personal take on people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk’s elected second in command, and their stinking ilk is that they are driven by self-loathing that makes them cruel and punitive. They are primally wounded, to be what others see as childish, egotistical freaks; their grandiose mission in life is gaining power to punish the world for their humiliation. If they have the power to control and destroy others, they imagine they are important and safe from the self-hatred that animates their need for attention. If I humiliate you, who’s the humiliated one now, asshole?
I have come to this understanding through painful personal experience, being ostracized by a group of my oldest friends, based on lies told by two of them. My two closest friends, during a tense holiday the four of us spent in a rented house, were quietly at each others’ throats. The pressure mounted as the wife tried, and largely failed, to please her dour, quietly angry husband by micromanaging every moment of our vacation. Trying to help ease the escalating tension between my two old friends was a fool’s errand, and I paid a dear price for trying.
A laser beam of silent rage was fixed on me by the dear friend I considered the sister I’d never had, over a senseless, minor, easily fixable conflict. I wound up blamed for the entire disastrous vacation, I’d ruined a beautiful time on the second to last day by venting frustration in an inexcusable way. I’d uttered the forbidden f-word in front of these two silently vying prigs. It was that expression of visceral vulgarity that became the focus in the days, weeks and months afterwards. My uncontrollable temper, abusiveness and purported inability to forgive became the grounds for my righteous assassination by an extended group of friends of fifty years, the proof was in my own violent words.
My friend called a few days after our tense goodbye at the vacation house, saying “wasn’t that a great vacation?” When I reminded him of the rising tension, the anger, the coldness at our parting, he denied there was any tension at all until my explosion of anger made things suddenly uncomfortable for everybody. He told me he and his wife were very concerned about my abusive behavior, discussed it the whole ride home, were not sure they could ever forgive me. A few weeks of silence later my friend told me “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me”. He did not elaborate. More outbursts of indignation followed, and months of silence from my other friend, his wife.
This should have told me everything I needed to know about my former friends. I should have recognized they were now determined, adamant adversaries. Today there’s no way I’d keep trying to save a dead friendship once confronted by this united show of implacable anger and contempt. Now that I can see it clearly, a curt exit is the only sensible thing to do. In my defense, at the time it was unthinkable to me, as it was for Seedj, that our two closest, oldest friends were beyond the reach of friendship. They were, but it was impossible to conceptualize.
It took a full year, plus a month or so, before I finally saw their desperation never to be wrong as the monstrous, relationship destroying force it actually is. Rage does not yield to peacemaking if the inflexibly angry party will not hear anything that might make them feel imperfect, or in any way bad about themselves. The party’s over.
We were going to celebrate the retirement of another dear friend. The whole group would be there, paying a few hundred dollars a seat into his favorite charities as he was honored. The four of us had not seen each other since an ugly ending to an evening we’d spent together, five months earlier, when the woman who sternly told me that she and her husband had a contract never to call each other names, called her husband a name that stung him like an electric current. Then she smiled at me mischievously. When I made an oblique reference to it, they immediately got up from the dinner table and walked away. We hadn’t seen our close friends for five months, though I continued to try to get through to my friend, the husband, who I saw from time to time.
It would be impossible for me to pretend that all was well, and joyously celebrate our friend’s retirement, without being able to talk through our ugly impasse first. I challenged my friend and he dragged his wife down to hear what I had to say, a few days before the joyous retirement party. She had a prolonged temper tantrum. I’d put my phone on the table and recorded the session, to be sure I’d said what I needed to say. One part of me understood I might need the verbatim notes for later use. One problem I’d had in trying to make peace was that the story my friends told continually changed. There had been absolutely no tension in that house until I’d violated everyone with the fucking f-word. My friend had never flown into a prolonged silent rage at me, my aggressive hostility made her “get her back up”, understandably. I was the one with the anger problem, not them.
I found myself listening to part of the recording yesterday, while trying to master some editing software. My friend denied my challenge had forced him to bring his implacable wife to the table (though clearly it had). I was not the one restraining my temper, it was him, and his patient wife, he told me testily. I heard myself make every good argument, and listened to reactions that made no sense, except to deflect any responsibility from themselves. Yes, they conceded, for the first time, eight months after the fact, it had been tense in that vacation home, because the wife had been compelled to scramble, and micromanage, after a planned dream European vacation was preempted by Covid restrictions. I was mistaken about the anger between them, I apparently hadn’t seen anything. My friend told me they often go a week at a time, living in the same house, angry, silent, avoiding eye contact.
It would be a few more months until things came to their, inevitable in hindsight, ugly climax. In the days following painful knee replacement surgery my other close friends in the group made it clear they could never forgive someone like me, a person who can’t forgive. What I had done to their dear friends could never be forgiven.
It is said that the victors write history. They write it in the blood of their victims. My understanding of this dynamic, terminally wounded people who can never be wrong uniting others in their cause, using their power over others to feel better about the immense pain of their condition, runs deep. It could not have been illustrated more clearly than in the accusation, from someone who wasn’t there, that I’d “deliberately tortured my closest friend for over a year to bend him to my will.” My patient peacemaking efforts were doomed from the start, and I was then defamed, because I didn’t recognize the severe emotional disabilities of the people I was trying to make peace with.
So it is with the leaders and mythology of MAGA. They had every right to riot at the Capitol because they truly believed the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from their persecuted candidate. It was a Day of Love. Legitimate Political Discourse. Those who assaulted and grievously injured police that day — persecuted martyrs, victims of a weaponized DOJ. Virtually everything MAGA stands for is a lie. Putin wants peace, the dictator Zelensky is the aggressor. Medicaid is bankrupting a country of over 800 billionaires. This is always the pattern with these terminally insecure motherfuckers. Zelensky, in countering one or two of the aggressive lies snarled at him during a photo op/pressure session, was trying to “litigate” in public, according to mascara wearing man’s man JD Vance.
We are all living in an age where these severely damaged, destructive motherfuckers are ascendant, even admired by millions. In a better world, we’d treat them as damaged people who deserve our compassion. Here in reality TV-land, it’s hard to do. They reject compassion, having never experienced its healing power. They seek only power and obedience to their will. They continually demonstrate their contempt for the weak, the powerless, the gullible and appeal to violence. Hard to have compassion for people, no matter what their tragic personal history, who want to rule like Hilter did, but with more loyal generals who don’t sometimes get out of line and try to kill them.
It is important to recognize that lying is essential to the whole Nazi enterprise. A bully has no right to treat others with contempt, except in the bully’s subjective view that he is the righteous victim and everyone else the cause of his torment. Every word these creatures utter, almost without exception, is a lie calculated to stoke violent loyalty. Lying is necessary to advance a narrative that makes no sense in light of the truth, of actual cause and effect. USAID saves thousands of lives a year, and feeds and clothes millions of starving children, protects children from polio, in poor countries that gain goodwill toward the USA. There is less waste, fraud and corruption in USAID than in the illegal “agency” of young hotshot hackers pulled directly out of Project 2025’s ass, adorably dubbed DOGE (branding is everything).
The truth is getting roughed up in this current one-sided fight, but it is crucial to see what we are up against and counter the lies at every turn. Democrats, a cautious corporate party, have been very disappointing in this regard. It is up to we the citizens of this besieged democracy. Here’s MAGA enemy Anthony Fauci, from before his security team was publicly removed from him by agents of Elon Musk and his pet orange man/boy.
(Pardon the glitch, couldn’t embed the video, which appeared with a command, from a Google bot, to prove you weren’t a bot, then didn’t let you. Click the link, the pitch is important, brief and well-said.)
We are living, in this perilous moment in human history, in the country that Charles Koch and billionaire fellow travelers have been deliberately engineering since 1980. The roots of their rebellion against “majoritarian tyranny” go back decades earlier. Their goal has been to dismantle the regulatory state, the hated administrative state, to concentrate all wealth and power in their own hands without interference from “unelected bureaucrats”.
Tax fuels the beast they hate, the administration of laws that constrain their profits, in the name of protecting consumers, so taxes must go, except for taxes on working people who must remain immiserated so they fight each other instead of the powerful parasites who call themselves “job creators”. Their use of propaganda, based on incendiary lies and amplified through mass media, has been audacious and temporarily successful.
Here’s a little history of their movement in this moment when, with a ragingly insane two-year old and his unelected bureaucrat benefactor as their battering rams, they are salivating over their final triumph.
The catalyzing event for their long-game revolution was a Supreme Court ruling that absolutely enraged them. In 1954, as the Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum, the Supreme Court heard evidence of the shabby sham of racist segregation’s Separate But Equal as practiced in American schools. You can see photos of this era, the Whites Only water fountain is state of the art, the Coloreds Only water fountain is a rusty spigot on the side of the building. Need a bathroom? Use a modern toilet and wash your hands in the nearby sink, if white, if not, outhouse is out back, behind the bushes.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0, after vigorous argument between racists and those showing evidence of the grotesque inequality of “separate but equal”, that segregation in public schools violated the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights under the law. This was seen, by white racists, as an affront to the white race, an act of betrayal by “activist judges,” judges likely manipulated by communists, if the truth must be told. The Brown decision came down in 1954, and it would be years before integration of public schools would be undertaken ” with all deliberate speed”.
The court’s unanimous recognition of racial inequality was a war cry to America’s dedicated segregationists. One group that organized itself against this tyranny was The John Birch Society. The founders were wealthy businessmen, extremists on the fringe of the Republican party. Mainstream Republicans took pains to distance the party from the ravings of the John Birch Society. John Birch ideology morphed into Libertarianism, the Tea Party, now mainstream MAGA, that is to say, current Republican orthodoxy. One of the founders of the John Birch Society was Fred Koch, autocratic father of the infamous Koch Brothers. Fred Koch had the gratitude of Adolf Hitler, since he’d built the oil refinery for the Führer that fueled Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Koch liked the cut of Hitler’s jib too. You can read a detailed family history of the troubled Fred Koch and his tortured sons (raised by a strict, German, Nazi nanny) in Jane Mayer’s excellent Dark Money.
After an unsuccessful vice presidential run by Charles Koch’s brother David in 1980, an election where the John Birch Society/Libertarian presidential tickets received a fitting 1% of the American vote, the Koch network went to work building a network of organizations to win America’s hearts and minds and use unelected operatives to change America’s policies from within the system. These have become familiar: The Heritage Foundation (authors of voting fraud lies, climate change denial and Project 2025), Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Federalist Society (authors of numerous, infamous, unappealable 6-3 far right rulings), The Institute for Humane Studies, Judicial Watch, The Antonin Scalia School of Law, The Tea Party, armies of lobbyists and dozens of other well-funded “think-tanks”, influential public mouthpieces for popularizing and normalizing their extremist views, a vast propaganda network amplified by corporate mass media.
At this moment the other corporate party in America, the Democratic party, appears to be on the ropes, and democracy itself along with it. Many people are in anguish about how the Democratic party blew it and allowed a lawless, compulsive liar hell-bent on revenge, against America itself, to narrowly win re-election. There were several reasons for their failure (mainly in the presidential race itself, they won most other seats in several of the swing states Trump won), the most serious was the Biden administration’s inability to prosecute, convict and imprison the organizers of Trump’s January 6th putsch.
Biden did uphold the rule of law by getting convictions, and rulings against, several prominent Democrats, demonstrating an admirable dedication to the rule of law, without fear or favor, while seeming to fear and favor the Nazis who are celebrating their takeover of America today.
Biden passed an impressive, unprecedented amount of important legislation during his term and steered economic recovery with great skill. It counted as nothing in the propaganda war and his approval rating reflected his loss in that war. His pick for Attorney General was a man of high character and experience not fit for the fight to save democracy.
Biden, trying to govern in a bipartisan coalition with determined enemies who hated him, did not root out corrupt Trump implants like Postmaster Louis DeJoy and Homeland Security IG Joseph Caffari, two MAGA diehards who did everything in their power to help Trump get reelected.
Caffari, in addition to corruption scandals, covered up the deletion of the Secret Service and Homeland Security communications on January 6th until it was too late to recover any evidence. DeJoy hobbled the postal service, to the tune of a $9,500,000,000 loss in 2024, and delivered at least 20 million less mail in ballots than were cast in the last election (first election since 2008 when mail-in voting did not increase). Trump won reelection by less than 1/10 of that 20,000,000 ballot margin. DeJoy quietly made plans to step down, immediately after getting the man he’d donated millions to back into the White House. The Postal Service is one step from being “privatized” so that billionaire entrepreneurs can profit from a crucial American public institution that predates the Declaration of Independence.
At the moment, it looks like Koch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and the rest of our greatest and most important citizens have won. Their forces have been brainstorming, barnstorming, storm trooping and planning feverishly for the last four years. The Democratic party seemingly has no plan to counter their illegal and unconstitutional smash mouth power plays. The only man who continues to speak about the important issues directly, address the problems of 90% of Americans head-on, seems to be Bernie Sanders.
He was twice prevented from being the Democratic presidential candidate by the party itself. So afraid of the taint of “socialism” that it twice orchestrated the popular Sanders’s “defeat” by selected party insider candidates. Leaving the galvanizing of the often legitimate grievances of millions of screwed Americans ripe for the picking by a lying, cynical monomaniacal huckster front man, a serial fraudster and criminally inclined ignoramus with a particular talent for sucking in the angry and the gullible.
The fight, I’m sad to say, is completely up to us right now. There is truth and there are lies. We need to keep that basic proposition as clear as possible. It is always dark under the shadow of the swastika. It is a time for all of us to become the light in whatever ways we can figure out.
The cowardly tag teaming of Zelenskyy yesterday in the Oval Office, the public betrayal of a democratic ally by supporters of a brazen war criminal, was a new low for these modern day American Nazis. The only things missing were the swastika armbands and the snarled word “Jew” every time they cut Zelenskyy off, yelled at him, confronted him with lie after deliberate, knowing lie. I love that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s new boyfriend snarled a challenge at Zelenskyy for disrespecting the Oval Office by showing up dressed like fucking Elon Musk. They surrounded the Ukrainian president and sneered at him from all sides. Considering the ferocity of the attack, the lone Ukrainian in the room held up pretty well.
Heather Cox Richardson notes that the scene, staged as a performance to discredit Ukraine, who Trump is poised to betray, played out live in front of the media: “Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.” Heather lays out the whole sordid story briefly and much better than I can at the moment. Her account is here: source
Here is a typical American corporate news report of this disgusting performance art betrayal. It states that Ukrainian/Americans were blindsided by Zelenskyy’s refusal to … well, they don’t say exactly. Except that you don’t talk to a wannabe Hitler and his heir apparent in that tone of voice unless you clearly want what you do not want. I include this only for the general tone, which suggests Trump good, Zelenskyy maybe not good. A short watch should be enough to get the tone. The other clips (Chris Hayes long form and two quick shorts) are actually worth watching.
Entire seven minute public “negotiation” between Zelensky, JD and Trump
A very childish and stupid question posed by a Fox talking head— thoughtful, intelligent answer given by Ukrainian president. Fox headline and MAGA talking point: Zelensky unapologetic and ungrateful, disrespectful to the Big Orange Leader.
It goes without saying that Vance lied, he channeled his inner Matt Gaetz to jump in, impress the boss. and the base (al Q’eada in Arabic), with his savagery and bully somebody already outnumbered and being shouted down. Truth and lies matter, what actually happened, what you saw with your own eyes and heard with your own ears matters, no matter how many times liars call people telling the truth liars.
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