“When you see prices go up at the grocery store, the prices are going up because of excess government spending,” he [Elon Musk] said in an online conversation with, among others, Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. “It’s very important to connect these dots. The supermarkets are not taking advantage of you. It’s not price gouging; it’s that the government spent too much.” (This, it must be said, makes no sense.)
from a recent NY Times op edby Jamelle Bouie
This idiotic, easily refuted, childishly phrased, false statement is worthy of Musk’s fellow genius Jared Kushner, or the surrogate father he is angrily wrestling with, Jared’s father-in-law, what’s his name.
The major supermarket chains, who increased profits heroically during the post-Covid supply chain disruption and associated inflation, did this by increasing their prices. Even Musk’s fellow enraged, entitled, sub-normal, professional golfer Donald Trump, conceded there’s little even the all-powerful president can do to reduce grocery prices. He’d been lying when he vowed bring grocery prices down on day one, as it happens.
The Unitary Executive would be able to control prices, if the US government had any role in setting prices for private businesses, like supermarkets. Nothing about this hopped up South African asshole’s statement makes a lick of sense. In fact, it doesn’t withstand the weight of a single question. Disinformation (deliberate lies told to advance a political agenda) is their entire game. They don’t have facts, or law, on their side, only will, divisive lies and the lawless exercise of state-sponsored brutality.
Irrationality does not make truth, fact, evidence, law, cause and effect, moral values disappear. It only obscures the real world behind a tsunami of pernicious lies. It is our duty as citizens, and human beings, to keep the line between reality-based rationality and fantasy-based fascism as clear as we can. There is almost no overlap between those two worlds, which is also by design of the irrationalists, keep everything black and white, and something to rage about. Our job is to protect nuance and mutual conversation in all its human dimensions.
Irrationality, and the insane cruelty that flows from it, is, to me, the most terrifying force in the world. Destroy objective reality, replace it with a violent fantasy that makes no sense, and you can get some people to do anything. The project of the far-right “Libertarian” Koch network, for generations, has been to create an eternal battle of subjective, antithetical worldviews. Truth is what we say, the courts and all critics are enemies to be destroyed, if they don’t accept our side of our irrefutable truth.
Example: the Jews control the world and are manipulating majoritarian tyranny by convincing stupid colored people to do their bidding in a fake election-based “democracy”. Any election we lose, that’s why. When we win, even by 1%, that is a mandate, a historically powerful mandate, the true, irrepressible voice of the People, speaking as one in support of the Leader.
Consider the perfection of this loop: if you say that I always need to be right, and that I’ll lie to destroy you if we are in a conflict, then this proves that YOU always need to be right and are lying to destroy me. Therefore, it’s a draw, which makes me right. People who love you (if there are any such creatures) may believe your lies, everybody else will believe my truths.
Once everything is reduced to the realm of feelings, loyalty, love, communal obedience, good/evil, black/white, there is no factual basis for deciding anything. True faith settles every question, and faith, the faithful are told, is a far greater thing than the vanity of those who cite the so-called facts of a difficult and dangerous world. The only safety in such a world is the sanctuary of true belief.
In our current predicament, I’ve been taking some consolation in the sheer stupidity, incompetence and blind adherence of those loyal to a grandiose, pathologically greedy, perpetually enraged fool and his “transactional” worldview. I am thinking now that this consolation may be misplaced. Stupid people, angry stupid, manifestly unqualified people, those incapable of weighing facts reasonably, are capable of the worst atrocities imaginable. This is particularly true if they are given unchecked power to carry out their leader’s most insane plans.
Why not torture 30,000 random immigrants in a tent city on a piece of Cuba that is not subject to American law or the Geneva Conventions? “Let’s fucking do it!” Even if our actions are criminal, the Big Guy can pardon us, and no pardon may ever be questioned.
Why not cut off food and medical supplies to the world’s most desperately poor children? Why not end health care for millions of America’s most vulnerable children and old people? Why not remove every government regulator of waste, fraud and corruption, in the name of smashing waste fraud and corruption? With me, everybody “USA! USA!!!!”
The real terror of these merciless, idiot motherfuckers is not their bluster, their rage, their plans to inflict actual pain on their perceived inferiors and enemies. It is how far they have pushed the irrational, and the outright lies that “support” it, into the middle of our political discourse. Putin did not invade Ukraine, Ukraine was the aggressor. Putin wanted peace, Ukraine refused to talk. Putin no dictator, Zelensky dictator. Putin not fascist, Ukraine Nazi, also run by Jews. NATO attacked Russia, Putin only defend self. Putin honest, Ukraine liar. Trump not Putin puppet, only do what is right, for Trump. US veto UN on Putin’s behalf. Fuck Ukraine, America First!
The impossible thing about irrationality is that you can’t defeat it with all the reason, evidence, proof, and every demonstration of cause and effect in the world. Irrationality does not bend to anyone. Fuck you, I’m rational, YOU ARE IRRATIONAL, is the likeliest response after every available proof is put on the table.
I experienced this first hand from an old friend a couple of years ago. It was one of the most chilling demonstrations of this irrational, shapeshifting insistence on anything that could possibly make a person right, blameless and perfect and, the enemy, in this case me, the vicious persecutor. Her husband had proposed mediation to work out a simple conflict that had turned into an ugly year-long war. We met to prepare for the session, after I pointed out it was crucial for us to bring the mediator everything we agreed about so she could help us meet somewhere in the middle.
My old friend had told me when her husband, who hadn’t consulted her, informed her that Seedj and I might be amenable to mediation: “I fell on the kitchen floor and literally couldn’t move until it was time to walk to my car and drive to work.”
When I reminded her of this, she angrily told me I was lying. “Daniel must have told you that, it never happened, he was lying.” No, actually you told it to me. “I never said it, you’re lying.” I gave her the context, reminded her when she said it. “You’re lying, that never happened.” A moment later she said “I remember exactly how it happened and it was nothing like what you said. Dolly was there, and when Daniel told me he’d talked to you about mediation I did fall on the floor, but not for the reasons you said. It had nothing to do with mediation. I was just so sick of all this talk of ‘feelings, feelings, feelings’!”
And so she won that battle, ending our long friendship finally. She had already convinced all of our common friends that I’d been sadistically torturing her innocent husband for over a year to “bend him to my will” and that, in spite of countless apologies from her and her husband, I refused to forgive them. Set and match. The facts? What actually happened, who said what to who, who behaved with cruelty and who attempted to make peace? Totally irrelevant. We all believe in love, community, loyalty and forgiveness. We can never forgive someone who can’t forgive.
An angry insistence on the irrational is deadly. We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, it’s obvious by the fact we can’t produce it that the (fill in the pejorative blank) stole and destroyed the evidence, otherwise we’d easily win this case. We are not lying, and 42% of Americans believe we are not lying, as our poll clearly shows. Therefore, the prosecutors, judges, grand juries, witnesses, the laws themselves are the fucking liars and WE WILL NEVER BOW TO FUCKING LIARS! Welcome to MAGA, boys and girls.
Even language itself is destroyed in this fusillade of incoherence. The goons call themselves conservatives. Conservatives traditionally want to preserve the status quo. MAGA is explicitly a radical, far-right reactionary movement. They want to restore a status quo that was overruled by decades, if not centuries, of a march toward a more perfect union. They want the original union, with the right of the White Man to rule his women, his children, his racial and social inferiors. Is there anything conservative about a group that is actively decapitating our democracy by illegal means? Not remotely.
To those not familiar with the Nazi seizure of power, once they hear the details they’re shocked by the one on one, on the nose, identical nature of what Project 2025 is carrying out. Purge the civil service, institute loyalty oaths to the leader, act with brazen ruthlessness to demoralize enemies, imprison critics, start killing people. If the leader says it’s a moral imperative to kill people, who are we subordinates to argue with someone sent by God? The “logic” of the Third Reich was also identical to Trump’s incoherent exposition of reality — anything that suits the Leader is true, all else, lies punishable by a violent, sadistically imposed slow death. As the First Amendment still allows me to write and post here: fuck those fucking Nazi putos.
A quick reminder about the danger of an irrational leader in times of peril:
Alternate reality, based in a faith-based world of alternative facts, admittedly, is also, applying basic common sense and language usage, a lie, and a deliberate “distortion” of reality (more accurately, disinformation), but what are you going to do, especially when that alternate reality TV show shit seems to be working (he won the popular vote, everyone seems to agree) and is backed by virtually all of our greatest and most principled billionaires?
When news reporters feel they have to take sides, where do you draw the line? You can see the distinguished Grey Lady’s editorial dilemma.
Every citizen who can gather and analyze news from multiple sources, and write with any degree of clarity, should be doing it in the public forum. We need to constantly push back against the calculated ambiguity of corporate mass media. In a tsunami of disinformation and misinformation (Trump administration official submits affidavit swearing that Elon Musk is neither head of the fictional DOGE nor calling the shots as his youthful team of hackers continues to breach secure citizen data and ignore court orders to fucking stop) we need truth tellers calling out these lies. Trump, the five dimensional chess champion, after one of his flunkies submitted the lying sworn statement in federal court the other day, immediately reiterated on live TV that Elon is doing a great job as head of the “government department” illegally assembled after being pulled out of autocrat Charles Koch’s crusty old asshole.
The aligned interests of corporate mass media conglomerates and our greatest, and most pathologically greedy and savagely competitive billionaire citizens, ensure that the news reporting we get is filtered to their monetary advantage. We saw this in the lead up to the 2024 election, when first Biden and then Harris were raked over the coals for perceived infirmities and inconsistencies, challenged about a claimed lack of detailed policy plans, while the billionaire’s candidate, Donald Trump, got a pass for a stream of colorful, incendiary, non sequiturs, lies, mental lapses and constant denials that the blueprint for his regime, Project 2025, although written by loyal members of his first administration, had anything to do with him. He knew nothing about it, he’d never read it, and he also disagreed with a lot of it, he said. That he is carrying it out point by point and that the primary author, a radical reactionary named Russ Vought, is now his confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget, pure chance, one supposes.
The head of “DOGE” (an illegally created government “agency”) is a racist, an actual Nazi supporter and spreader of hate speech (in the name of free speech absolutism, as long as nobody says anything bad about him or Trump). The world’s richest man, outside of the oil sheiks and Mr. Putin, gives two sneering Nazi salutes, on live TV during the inauguration festivities. He directed these “sieg heils” to invited visiting members of the present day German Nazi-like party, the AfD, a party he is financially backing.
There follows a collective wringing of hands in legacy media over whether the autistic, socially awkward, dorkish, racist Mr. Musk, meant to just give a heartfelt gesture when he inadvertently sneered and raised a stiff arm in an unambiguous Nazi salute, twice. Steve Bannon, international fascist (figure that one out), recently gave a public Hitler salute to a far-right audience he urged to “fight, fight, fight” and the news discusses what he might have meant, in a non-Hitler kind of way. And of course, all this Heil Hitler shit is just to distract us from the real damage these pricks are doing as they decapitate the government that represents we the people.
This is where citizen journalists come in. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, brilliant author of the nightly Letters from an American, is probably my favorite, but there are a number of excellent writers who are fleshing out truthful accounts and informed perspectives of ominous things that are happening behind the obscuring fog of “legacy media”. Robert Reich’s analysis is great, Allison Gill is fantastic, as is Timothy Snyder, a historian specialized in fascism and the lead up to War Two and its murderous excesses. Snyder offers imaginative, provocative thought experiments based on history. Brian Tyler Cohen partners with Marc Elias, of Democracy Docket, and former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, two very sharp legal minds, and provides very important updates on the fascist agenda. Mary Trump is doing great work. David Feldman provides important news with a sardonic sense of humor. The Meidas Touch network is a source of actual news and analysis, with a shout out to Lee McGowan, the Politics Girl. Mehdi Hassan is another important voice, and source of rational analysis, with his independent news service, Zeteo. Amy Goodman and her team continue to provide indispensable perspective with the War and Peace Report on Democracy Now! David Pakman gives an intelligent take on what’s happening in our country. Wikipedia provides an important, instant source of fact checking, as do websites like Snopes. None of these news sources are answerable to corporate overlords and the inviolable financial bottom line.
The original resistance to monarchy’s overbearing exploitation of its American colonies took the form of Committees of Correspondence. These writers informed citizens in other colonies of Britain’s predations and excesses in their particular colony. The back and forth of these committees resulted in the first gatherings of representatives of the various colonies to organize and fight back against a King, who sat by Divine Right, imposing his will on subjects thousands of miles away who had no voice in anything that that God’s ordained ruler decided to impose on those unrepresented subjects. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico come to mind.
I wrote a series of pieces on Substack putting together everything I could learn about fucking Looey DeJoy, the Trump megadonor whose mission was to bankrupt the US Postal Service (carriers of the correspondence the original resistance committees sent each other) and make sure millions of selected mail-in ballots went quietly, untraceably undelivered. Few read what I was able to gather, and no politician or media organization, or anyone listed above, for that matter, answered my many urgent queries, but it is important to have the information out there. DeJoy lost $9,500,000,000 for the USPS in 2024 it was revealed in a December Senate hearing the pugnacious partisan attended. There’s no way to know how many ballots were undelivered, in the first election since 2008 where the number of ballots didn’t increase, in fact, fell by upwards of 20,000,000. Now Looey, his barely compensated work done, steps down and Trump himself has stated he is going to personally take over the USPS, after illegally dissolving the board of governors.
Make no mistake what we are up against. These loyal kamikazes Trump has assembled, based primarily on their expressed love of the taste of his “ring”, are no different, in any meaningful way, than anyone who joined the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1933 when it became clear that radical measures were needed to restore the right people to absolute power over “majoritarian tyranny.”
Just because then-senator Marco Rubio’s committee concluded that Putin had indeed done everything possible to tip the election to Trump in 2016, after Robert Mueller documented 140 incidents of coordination between Trump’s campaign and Putin’s administration in the lead up to the election, there is no reason, except for the facts themselves, to believe that the whole “Russia thing” was anything more than a vicious hoax perpetuated by insane enemies afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Look, Putin and Trump are just friends, very good friends. They speak on the phone every so often, as they did during Trump’s four years as an “ordinary citizen” and it’s nobody’s business what they talk about. Trump may or may not have shared top secret defense documents he illegally took when he left the White House, then had his lawyers lie about having returned, as he held off Merrick Garland and his team until his handpicked MAGA judge could dismiss the Espionage Act case with an audaciously novel repudiation of the Special Counsel statute. Putin may well have sent his protege a handsome gratuity for strategic information supplied by his useful idiot friend, also nobody’s business. Now Donald is back to work, securing a future safe for plutocrats, autocrats and kleptocrats. It’s the persecuted billionaires against the rest of us, and Trump is determined to make his side immune from law and all other consequences.
Here’s Heather Cox Richardson with some recent history as background for the latest tour de force of brazen Trumpian Trumpishness:
The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.
The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.
In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.
To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.
Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.
Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Or, as Putin’s BFF pronounced recently, with characteristic humility, truthfulness and presidential gravitas:
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we [Ukraine] weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
The art of the deal, and who should know it better than the Michelangelo of strategic bankruptcy?
A person wounded deeply enough in early life to become incapable of compromising, admitting fault, empathizing with anyone else, who sees every conflict in terms of a war to the death, creates an alternate, transactional reality in which they can live feeling intact. In this reality they are always the persecuted, innocent victim, can never be wrong, and therefore there is never a need to compromise with anybody. In the narcissist’s mind they are entitled to do anything necessary to intimidate and silence anyone they fear. Every conflict, no matter how minor, must be fought to the death.
When narcissism rises to the level of psychopathy (“I will literally kill anyone who says I’m not perfect, even if it’s a million of you fuckers”) you have your Mr. Hitler, Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk. They will resort to any lie to dominate and destroy their deadly enemies. It is hard to avoid watching this alternative-reality shell-game playing out in real time in our Age of Narcissism. These unmasked, emboldened monsters will say and do absolutely anything to shield themselves from their own enraged sense of inferiority and humiliation.
To please his benefactor Mr. Putin, who is also holding out billions of dollars in business opportunities in Russia for Americans who please Mr. P., Mr. Trump announced that Russia’s war on Ukraine was Ukraine’s fault. Trump claims Zelensky is not the legitimate president of Ukraine, for reasons too moronic to detail here, and therefore his government has no right to be at Russia-Ukraine “peace talks”. He is also demanding 50% of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, apparently in payment for past American support, including the millions in arms he held up to blackmail Zelensky into announcing a fake investigation into Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma to hurt Trump’s political rival — the illegal quid pro quo “favor” Barr covered up and Trump was later impeached for the first time. Ukraine’s not inclined to take this 50% deal. For these and other reasons, Ukraine is not permitted to participate in “peace talks” between Trump’s loyal puppets and Putin’s representatives.
The media routinely calls this confab, in the Kingdom of Muhammad bin Bonesaw, between agents of Mr. P. and Mr. T. “peace talks”. They do resemble the talks leading up to the “peace deal” between Netanyahu and wealthy Arab oil billionaire dictators that Jared Kushner bragged about negotiating, several years back, peace talks ostensibly about the fate of the Palestinians. No Palestinians were allowed to participate in those talks, and the Palestinians, not surprisingly, got fucked. Of course, self-taught diplomat Jared angrily blamed the Palestinian’s for being “stupid” and never failing to shit on a deal that was in their best interest. There were other famous “peace talks” that involved only one party, the weaker one, and benefited the only aggressor. The Munich confab in 1938 that peacefully ceded strategic Czechoslovakia, producers of the best munitions in Europe, to Mr. Hitler comes to mind (Timothy Snyder wrote a brilliant take on the 1938 and 2025 Munich meetings and how the 1938 deal probably led directly to Hitler’s conquest of Europe with all that followed).
This reflexive lying, constant resort to brazen incoherence, the literal inversion of cause and effect, reflexive reversal of victim and aggressor, came to mind when I read the Trump administration’s brazen, incoherent explanation for why Mr. Musk has the legal authority to possess all citizen information and shut down any agency investigating Musk’s conflicts of interest, violations of law or for any other, or no, reason. Here’s what Trump’s handpicked “ring kisser” wrote to the court, in a sworn statement supporting the Unitary Executive’s right to do whatever he likes. Heather Cox Richardson:
In a court filing last night, the Director of the Office of Administration in the Trump administration, Joshua Fisher, clarified the government position of billionaire Elon Musk. In a sworn declaration to the court, Fisher identified Musk as “a Senior Advisor to the President.” He explained: “In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”
Fisher’s statement went on to say that Musk is neither an employee nor the service administrator—that is, the leader—of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Therefore, Musk gets to have unlimited access to all the social security, financial, tax, health and other personal data of every American citizen, because… his job title doesn’t actually exist and DOGE, the “Department” of Government “Efficiency” is not actually a department of government at all, and since the department doesn’t exist, it is not an entity for purposes of security vetting, Senate confirmation, ethics rules, conflict of interest laws, labor laws, miscellaneous law enforcement including for financial crimes, neither is Musk responsible for its actions, nor any conflicts he might personally have, nor …
It takes a cartoonist…
. . . anyway, the point is the ring, the ring, the irresistibly delicious ring. Historians and those who love its unique flavor are saying they’ve never seen anything like it, since the famously kissable German ring that guaranteed world peace in Munich 1938.
Ordinarily, in a democracy, government officials with a conflict of interest — like the law they are about to pass will immediately make them much wealthier — must step aside in matters where their personal gain is at stake and their self-interested vote looks corrupt. Conflicts of interest can also be used to compromise government officials, to blackmail them and pervert their very mission. Nominees are generally vetted for these conflicts, though the exercise is often pro forma. Think no further than hawk beaked coal baron Joe Manchin who served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and National Resources and what conflicts fueled that supercharged asshole’s decision making. Or Dunning-Kruger poster boy Jared Kushner.
Judges are held to an even higher standard regarding conflicts of interest, the appearance of impropriety. If an ordinary citizen can reasonably doubt the impartiality of the judge in a given case, that judge must step aside and let a more objective judge rule on the case. This “appearance of impropriety” standard binds all judges, outside of the nine most powerful judges in the country, the ones who make unappealable rulings on what is constitutional that set the law for generations. The lack of ethical requirements for these nine is perhaps our greatest national example of raging institutional narcissism.
Speaking of raging narcissism — if you grow up as the child of a wealthy psychopath and are a self-made millionaire by the time you enter third grade (the psycho transfers a couple of hundred thousand a year to each of his children’s accounts as part of his tax avoidance scheme) you may honestly believe that, because you are so great, that you have the right to the final say on everything. If you inherit the lucrative family business and in that family business your word is final, that reinforces your belief that you have the right to the indisputable last word on everything in every setting. The hallmark constellation of narcissism is never being wrong, always blaming others, fighting every conflict to the death, lest you, the innocent victim, be destroyed.
The Espionage Act says that a private citizen who takes classified documents and shares them has violated federal law and must be imprisoned. You say “witch hunt” “liars” “adrenochrome drunk pedophile freaks” “commies” “nasty, smelly women” “illegal DEI hires” “sick, dangerous fanatics hellbent on irrational revenge” “CRT” “MAGA” “Lady Gaga’s dick” etc. You get your handpicked openly partisan judge to rule that the Special Counsel law is unconstitutional (in your case only) and that the illegal indictment must be tossed out with prejudice, et, viola!, back to your golden childhood dream of omnipotence. Although your judge’s constitutionally irrational ruling should have been immediately overturned, the appeals court in the circuit where Clarence Thomas is the presiding judge decides to simply wait indefinitely to make a ruling one way or another.
When you become president again, in the first election since 2016 that, amazingly, with your enemies and persecutors in power, wasn’t rigged and corrupt, why would you suspect that you had ever been mistaken in anything? Your 6-3 Supreme Court ended the compelling criminal cases against you ruling that you sometimes have to commit crimes as president to rule effectively, and that you get a preemptive Supreme Court created pass for every crime committed while acting in your core, official capacity (to be decided by that same 6-3 majority), and also in any grey zone (as when you are a private citizen) so why would you worry about committing crimes as part of your core responsibilities as president, CEO and Commander in Chief?
Civil Service law? Fuck that, fire all of them, let them fight it out for next five years in court, the taxpayers will pay for my lawyers. Oversight officers to protect the public against fraud, waste and abuse? Fuck them, all fired, even ones I appointed. Ethics enforcement? Get a fucking life, cuck! Medical care and food for the children of poor people, paid by funds already allocated by congress? Those little fuckers should have been born better, who gives a fuck how many of them have to go fuck off? International aid to people in desperate situations all over the world? USA! USA!!! Fuck them, let them beg their own dictators. Department of Justice officials investigating crimes the president believes were acts of heroic patriotism? Fire every one of those sick fucks. Department of Education? Don’t you mean department for teaching lowlife n-words to read? Abolished, like Abraham Lincoln did. Etc.
This paragraph from Heather Cox Richardson sums up the irrationality being shoved down our collective throats by a collection of handpicked American Nazis:
Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”
I guess the scholar of public policy, who makes an excellent point about self-determination of a conflict or interest being itself a conflict of interest, forgot about Alito and his wife, Thomas and his wife, Roberts and his wife, whoever paid off Kavanaugh’s debts or bought Gorsuch’s land right after he became a Supreme Court justice.
Irrationality is giddily ascendant, in the service of our most openly corrupt, and dancing on the grave of cause and effect, fairness, common sense, reasonable discussion, reading, writing, arithmetic. We are living in the Age of Narcissistic Will, and there is no age more conducive to the most brutal atrocities you can picture in your nightmares. There is no moment in history when it is more necessary to keep rationality alive and expressing itself clearly. Let us all try to do that every day, shall we?
The Nazi Seizure of Power was a book I read in a history course back at City College. I’m pretty sure it’s still on my bookshelf. It was a case study of the mechanics of how a democracy (in the case of Germany, a short-lived one) is overthrown by relentless lying propaganda, street violence, polarization of the population into enemy camps, vilification of the free press, willful defiance of law, death threats, capture of the government, purge of all professionals, control of mass media, mobilization of the police to enforce political will, political murders and loyalty oaths to an infallible madman leader. Our democracy, problematic as it is, unlike the idealistic interwar Weimar Republic which lasted less than 20 years, is more than two hundred years old and has withstood fascist coup attempts before. This time, it’s a coin flip at best, the flick of a virtual coin with the logo of a cute dog’s head on it, a doggie some call a doge.
With judge after judge correctly ruling on the unconstitutionality/illegality of most of Trump’s Project 2025 decrees, written by “Libertarian” billionaires at the Koch Foundation, Vice President JD Vance, Yale Law School graduate, self-made millionaire (with tactical assistance from fascist-friendly South African raised billionaire Peter Thiel) and favorite of smart rightwing rich people, channeled his inner Jared Kushner. Brazen stupidity, recent events prove again, often wins over the facts, reason and the law when you have the power to make it so. With this in mind the billionaires’ pick, JD Vance, insisted that when federal courts rule against the Unitary Executive they are usurping his power and their rulings may be ignored. After all, no less an iron-willed psychopath than self-made Andrew Jackson, who became wealthy capturing and selling runaway slaves, said the same thing. The Supreme Court may have ruled, but where is their army to make me obey them?
This Absolute Executive Discretion to Rule As He Sees Fit “theory” was the constitutionally incoherent argument made by federal judge Noemi Rao in ruling that a federal judge applying the law in the General Mike Flynn case was illegally “usurping” the executive’s unchallengeable power. Federalist Society all-star Rao was appointed by Trump to fill the smelly DC Court of Appeals seat left vacant when Federalist Society superstar Boof Kavanaugh was elevated to the Supreme Court. Rao was overruled 11-2 on appeal and even Trump’s Supreme Court wouldn’t take the case after that. Now Vance, the sitting vice president, makes the same idiotic, constitutionally abhorrent pronouncement, with all the casual gravitas he can muster.
When there was a shortage of protective gear for healthcare workers at a do-or-die moment in the desperate fight against a deadly pandemic, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was in charge of the Covid-19 task force. When asked at a news conference why federal stockpiles of PPE were not being sent to overwhelmed states, Kushner, true genius that he is, indignantly retorted that “those are the federal supplies, those are for federal use, they are not for the states to use, they are federal!” As incoherent a pronouncement as I’ve ever heard spoken on behalf of any government. In fairness to Kushner, he is not a very smart person, though he is phenomenally arrogant and appears to believe that his financial good luck in life is proof of his brilliance. The Dunning-Kruger Effect in full, fragrant blossom.
Now Vance makes a comparably imbecilic pronouncement about the president’s right to violate the constitution, federal law and the rulings of the judiciary tasked with enforcing that law, at will, because … because not to do so renders presidential power to impose his own dictatorship a nullity under our constitution? The sad fact is, no articulable reason is necessary to a Nazi in office intent on seizing permanent power, it is strictly a matter of imposing the Leader’s inviolable will.
The even more horrific part is that fascism, though always nationalistic, is now, under global corporatism, a global movement, its leaders in every country acting in coordination to support each other’s “policy agendas”. Trump speaks to Putin regularly, also Orban, he tells Netanyahu, publicly, that the US will complete the ethnic cleansing job Jared’s childhood buddy, Bibi, spent a year working on. Trump happily does business with every fascist and autocratic leader in the world. So does Roman salute/middle finger extender, Supreme Genius Elon Musk.
Musk, a US defense contractor who regularly chats with Putin, used his leverage to get Congress to not touch his contracts with the government of China, in order to avoid the government shutdown he demanded shortly before the inauguration of his friend Donald. As for Musk’s more mundane motivations for shutting down the “administrative state”:
According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.source
Willful, transgressive, transactional front man for autocratic billionaires, Donald John Trump, pulls a brand new government agency out of his apparently irresistible ass (to those who flock to kiss the “ring”), puckishly naming it DOGE. Look how cute it is!
The president has no power, under our constitution, to create a government agency, only Congress has that power. Still, no problem to a president radical in his views of power and ignorant of the workings of anything but his own will. DOGE, it is, with a mandate to cut two trillion in government spending so as to give that wasted money to our most wealthy citizens in a permanent tax cut. As czar of this imaginary agency, Elon Musk gets police to lock Congressmen and Senators out of actual government agencies he has shuttered and cut off funding to because, unlike the 18 recently fired Inspectors General whose actual job is to monitor agencies for fraud, waste and corruption, Musk is genius enough to intuit which agencies need to be closed for fraud, waste, corruption, anti-Nazi sentiments, wokeness, too many minorities hired, disloyalty to the Leader’s vision, threat to himself and so on.
Make no mistake about what these nominally American Nazis are doing. The innovation of Trump 1.0 was to commit many of his transgressive, sometimes criminal, acts publicly, proudly, defiantly. People who love Trump love him for this ballsiness, this “fuck you” honesty. See, if I brag about my ability to shoot someone in the fucking face with no consequences to me, and then I do it, how can you later hold me criminally liable, since I told you exactly what I was bragging I would do before I did it. Seal Team Six? Yeah, when the time comes I give them Kashyap’s enemies list with instructions to proceed with extreme prejudice. My pardon power is unchallengeable so I have a stack of laminated get of jail free cards for loyal people who do my violence for me. Murder at the word of POTUS is, in effect, blessed by the Supreme Court, the best Supreme Court billionaire money can buy.
We are in a world of shit, my friends. Denial is not an option, we all need to get off the couch and work together in any ways we can create. Courage and determined opposition are essential now to preserve the actual will of the people that our constitution cites as the source of government power, which depends on the informed consent of the governed. No matter how courageous, determined and smart our opposition is, luck will play a huge role as well in how things turn out.
When the looting starts, the shooting starts. Nazis have no hesitation to do what is necessary to advance their “policy goals” — if it requires killing boatloads of people, so be it. The 25th Amendment is on the table for the billionaires whenever Trump’s favorability numbers drop off the chart. So is a real assassination, as opposed to that highly politically advantageous but likely staged one right before the Democratic convention last summer. Everything in psychopath world is transactional, but, of course, you don’t need me to tell you that.
Further proof of the Leader’s indisputable genius, in his own inimitable style:
In what sounds like an attempt to hand over air traffic control systems to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system and his AI company, Trump today said—and here are his words, as Aaron Rupar transcribed them—“We’re all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work. We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system one by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that’s all it is. They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all the kinds of things necessary for that. And it’s very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment. And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems. And they would’ve, bells would’ve gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like, just wouldn’t stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would’ve gone off. They have ‘em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would’ve just never happened if we had the right equipment . And one of things that’s gonna be, I’m gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in New York and I’m using a sys— I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete.’ And we can’t have that.”
Predictably, Crooked Hillary apparently posted this piece of treasonous snark, false, sick claims that could have come directly out of the poisonous mouth of Lyin’ Ted, the guy with the ugly wife whose father killed JFK, RFK and the great William McKinley:
“US airlines had gone 16 years without fatal crashes. Then MAGA fired the FAA chief, gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and threatened air traffic controllers with layoffs. Now there have been two fatal crashes. Hope your unvetted 22-year-olds fix things fast.”
There is not much light here in the shadow of the swastika. We must be that light, for each other.
There are many things you can say about the US president riffing out an insane and illegal plan, pulled out of Bibi Netanyahu’s hateful ass and not run by any of Trump’s “advisors”, to forcibly evict millions of residents from Gaza and convert their former land into beachside condos for the wealthy. One thing, of course, is that it is an obvious distraction from what his illegally “empowered” financial benefactor, active neo-Nazi supporter and partner in crime, Elon “Stable Genius/Visionary” Musk has been doing with illegal data hacks, blanket agency lockouts, illegal agency closures and so on.
The Grey Lady notes that Trump is “unbound”, presumably because the party he took over, now serving the John Birch Society’s core values, controls all three branches of government, with a newly created, illegal fourth branch, pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s ass, led by an immature, vindictive, transgressive billionaire psychopath government contractor, running roughshod over law and democracy. OK, “unbound” sounds better than “unhinged” or “insane”, shows a bit of editorial restraint when describing the leader of the free world. I can take unbound, though, “untethered”, which means the same thing, carries a much more accurate connotation.
The “improbable idea” is another matter entirely. Unless it is perfectly fine to forcibly remove two million besieged Gazans from their densely populated, largely destroyed, longtime home. Improbable that Trump would be able to simply round them up and, as the Turks did to the Armenians a century ago, send horseback killers to bullwhip them into rivers and the sea to drown. Improbable unless Trump gets to build the beautiful concentration camps of his dreams, and equip them with machinery to make undesirable people simply disappear. Perhaps Elon Musk is working on this logistical challenge right now, in moments stolen from his main goal — colonizing Mars.
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Here’s Trump’s White House chief of staff’s reaction to hearing unbound Trump’s improbable idea being broadcast live to the world, off the cuff, as the attention-starved rogue ratings hog so enjoys doing.
I didn’t find this telling photo of Susie Wiles, Trump’s soon to be former White House chief of staff, listening to his insane, er, improbable, plan to turn Gaza into a real estate development paradise, in the Times. It speaks volumes about how insane the improbable, unbound guy she works for is.
The New York Times, I have no words for how despicable the influential news source is, and how instrumental it is in preserving the ugly, unsustainable status quo we are living in right now. For every important investigative piece they publish, you can see dozens of daily examples of their bias for leaving things exactly the way they are. Why rock the boat when rich people are already getting so much bad press? It’s as though the 99% are making some kind of moral case that it is wrong for one greedy psychopath to have 400,000 million dollars while millions of his neighbors live in poverty and precarity.
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