Category Archives: History and Politics

Online committees of correspondence

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.”

Führer oath MAGA style

Everything old is new again, as they never tire of reminding us. The oath of personal, unconditional loyalty to Adolf Hitler got a nice 2025 makeover during MAGA’s return to power. The only people eligible to serve in Trump’s administration are those who swear that the 2020 election was stolen from the Leader (or at least refuse to admit Trump’s loss was legitimate), that the Leader was the innocent victim of a weaponized DOJ’s “lawfare” and selective prosecution for totally lawful acts, that transsexuals pose an existential threat to America, that Ukraine started the war with Russia in 2022, that our country is a corrupt, smoking, crime infested ruin run by a secret cabal of godless commies, and whatever else pops out of the big orange guy’s mouth.

Here are the old Hilter oaths, for comparison to the oath of personal loyalty to Mr. T. that Kashyap Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Dr. Brainworm [1] and company have taken to their Leader in order to narrowly secure their party-line cabinet positions.

Wehrmacht oath

On 16 March 1935 the German government renamed the Reichswehr as the Wehrmacht (Defence Force)[7]

Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid,
daß ich dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes
Adolf Hitler, dem Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht,
unbedingten Gehorsam leisten und als tapferer Soldat bereit sein will,
jederzeit für diesen Eid mein Leben einzusetzen.

English translation

“I swear by God this holy oath
that I shall render unconditional obedience
to the Leader of the German Reich and people,
Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces,
and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared
to give my life for this oath.”[8]

When the oath became law in July 1935, civilian officials would swear a similar oath.

Civil servant oath

Diensteid der öffentlichen Beamten

Ich schwöre: Ich werde dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes
Adolf Hitler treu und gehorsam sein, die Gesetze beachten,
und meine Amtspflichten gewissenhaft erfüllen, so wahr mir Gott helfe.

English translation

“I swear: I will be faithful and obedient
to the leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler,
to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfil my official duties, so help me God!”[8]

Oathtakers then sang both Deutschland Über Alles and the Nazi anthem Horst-Wessel-Lied.[9]

Horst Wessel, by the way, was a young Nazi street fighter killed by the antifa of his day. He became a martyr to the Nazi cause and a song for him, with lyrics by the poetic young Nazi Horst, if I recall correctly, was sung at all Nazi functions. Think of Wessel as Ashley Babbit. All Ashley did, on January 6, 2021, was try to lead a crowd of peaceful, respectful rioters through a broken window into the hall leading directly to the legislators the mob was trying to get at. As she pushed through the broken window she was warned by armed Capitol police to stop. Being a true patriot and a martyr, she refused to stop, was shot dead, and became a martyr to the Trump Brigade, the recently pardoned battle tested maniacs who overran Capitol police, sent more than a hundred to the hospital, all in perfectly “legitimate political discourse.” If you think MAGA is not composed of modern day American Nazis, you never read a history book on the Nazi seizure of power.

[1]

The Rusher Hoax 2.0

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.”

source

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?

Narcissistic shell-game

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.

source

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.

It looks like PBS is trying to preserve public funding and its broadcast license in the Age of Musk

PBS and NPR are under investigation by Elon Musk for disloyalty to the president’s agenda and for spreading factual information that might call into question the wisdom of Mr. Trump’s policy decisions, whatever they might be, no matter how creative, illegal or, frankly, insane.  The psychotic racist Nazi salute shooting billionaire, Mr. Musk, is acting as Mr. Trump’s Roy Cohn and he’s not taking any shit from any commies like the Liberal Corporate Media or Public Broadcasting.  He is, after all, the apostle of free speech. 

I was curious to see what a constitutional scholar interviewed on PBS might have to say about whether any of Trump’s actions constitute executive overreach. Say illegally creating a one man government “agency” and giving that one man the power to shut down any agency he pleases if he feels there could be waste, fraud or abuse in that agency– say giving food to starving African, Asian and Central American children, funding natural disaster relief or paying for medical care for orphans in Congo, Ukraine, or Gaza, which would be egregiously fraudulent, abusive and wasteful indeed…

This “constitutional scholar,” Ilya Shapiro, is from the Manhattan Institute, a “think tank” whose largest single donor is Charles Koch (with a half million annually from a rabidly “Libertarian” billionaire descendant of Andrew Mellon). Note the “scholar’s” fealty to the defense of the lawless president’s actions as perfectly legal and constitutional, certainly matters for the courts alone to decide.  With brazenness characteristic of his kind of partisan, he accuses Obama and Biden of creating agencies willy-nilly, at the very moment that Elon Musk is effectively the president of the United States and head of an agency pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s crusty old Nazi ass in line with his Project 2025.

Let me quote this super-confident illiberal scholar for you when asked about Trump/Musk overreach in shuttering agencies and not spending funds already allocated by Congress.  Recall that Trump was impeached the first time for doing that very thing — withholding money already allocated by Congress to get a quid pro quo from the new president of Ukraine.   Here’s the constitutional scholar:

Executive overreach is when you create new programs out of thin air, like Barack Obama with his pen and phone government, with DACA and all of these other things, or president Biden forgiving student loans, that was blocked by the Supreme Court, then said “I’ll do it another way” or vaccine mandates, all of these things creating new authorities that did not exist.

PBS gives this stinking pile of dung a forum to spout this Nazi apologia, the dictionary definition of gaslighting, presumably to demonstrate to King Musk, head of a perfectly legal newly created pen and phone government agency pulled out of Koch’s adorable tush, in order to show their fairness and willingness not to be shut down by Musk for not advancing the president’s agenda properly.  

Its painful to be living through this fascist nightmare here in the land of the free and the home of One Supreme Unelected South Afrikaan Bureaucrat unvetted appointee/government contractor with absolute power over the government’s budget and access to the personal financial and medical information of every citizen. 

Trump PR genius perfectly mirrors Hitler innovation

It’s a good bet that a Nazi-admiring racist, eugenics-spouting putz like Stephen Miller knows a bit of Nazi history. Elon Musk, the genius who is going to immediately fix things for wealthy white men once and for all, certainly knows a good deal about Hitler. He loudly supports the current German iteration of the old NSDAP and has promised to bankroll them in the next German election. He also sometimes gives the old Seig Heil salute, as he did on live TV to members of that Nazi-inspired party who were invited to Trumpie’s inauguration. The Hitler salute Musk never denied giving, the one the corporate media contorted itself to insist maybe it wasn’t a Hitler salute at all. Trump, who kept Hitler’s Collected Speeches next to his bed, used many of the Führer’s most effective crowd favorites during his recent campaign — hoards of dangerous, inferior people, criminal and insane, raping (and sodomizing, a brilliant Trump embellishment) white girls, poisoning the blood of the Master Race. He put his own inimitable stylistic touches on the old Nazi line with genius improvs like “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” but the basic outline is always faithful to the spirit of the omnipotent German psychopath. They seem to especially like repeating Hitler’s favorite PR moves.

Like Hitler, Trump is an innovative user of new technology. He revolutionized the use of social media trolling, weaponizing the powerful tool of mass influence. He was the first president to fire subordinates, and change the law, by Tweet, he used his phone to attack judges, prosecutors and everyone else in simple, bullying language anyone can understand, he announced policy decisions to the country and the world in real-time while sitting on the toilet, thumbs tapping away.

Hitler and his team were masters of the new technology of radio and during his 1932 campaign Hitler became the first person to broadcast an address to the nation live from an airplane. He addressed his faithful Germans while flying high above the Polish Corridor, which I remember reading was called the Burning Corridor. The contested strip of land attached to the city of Danzig/Gdansk, taken from Germany and given back to Poland after World War I, (and again after World War II) was a bone in the throat of German nationalists. I can’t find anything online referring to this historic broadcast, but historians of Nazism will all be aware of it. At any rate, the effect on ordinary Germans, of a political candidate magically addressing them from the clouds, promising revenge as he looked down on the very land he promised to seize, was a show of superhuman, godly power that apparently had a galvanizing effect on many German voters.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Trump and his team took to the air, in a luxury private jet (probably Airforce One) and he flew over the newly renamed Gulf of America. During a live video broadcast from high above the Burning Gulf, Trumpie played up the historic importance of taking back this beautiful gulf, illegally and immorally named for the Mexican coast line which forms a good part of it (virtually the entirety of it was, prior to 1845, Mexico itself), and announced the first glorious Gulf of America Day, perhaps more significant than the Super Bowl itself. None of his fans had the fleeting thought that this was as moronic as taking a Sharpie and crudely changing the hurricane map to prove that he was right and America’s top climate scientists were all very wrong about the path of the storm. Very wrong, in the adorably petulant phrase of Boof “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh, dismissing the dissent in a Covid era election ruling he authored. The dissent was, of course, completely right, and Boof, who had the votes needed to summarily dismiss all arguments, was very, very wrong. I know you are, but what am I?!

Everything to a Nazi is a deadly battle of will. We fight like hell, because if we don’t fight like hell we won’t have enemies to vilify and attack and then, uh, you’ll start fighting like hell against us, which we will never allow, even though, admittedly, we are bringing the pain to you contemptible, uninformed, powerless assholes. It would be very, very wrong to stop fighting our enemies like hell. Or, possibly, if it is to our advantage, very very right. Words mean only what we say they mean, which is why it’s so crucial to rename the Gulf of Mexico with the full force of our willful idiocy, which is very right, or very wrong, or whatever you like, because we are currently building concentration camps for fuckers just like you.

Conflict of interest to be decided by the person with the “conflict”

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.”

source

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?

Triumph of the Will

In the days before television, before most people had the collected intelligence of humanity in their pockets and got constant personalized alerts for “news”, movies and radio were the biggest influences on masses of people. Hitler was a pioneer of the radio, dramatically broadcasting from a plane for the first time in history, and his team understood the power of pageantry and the movies. His Minister of Public Enlightenment, Dr. Josef Goebbels, took over German cinema early on (and the Poisonous Dwarf’s casting couch was infamous). A glorious bit of movie mythmaking, Triumph of the Will, was created by a young, innovative director named Leni Riefenstahl. The heroic depiction of a million person 1934 Nazi rally rendered as an impressive show of unity, strength, precision, passion, love of Germany and dedication to winning a war of will.

Triumph of the will is the achievement of every successful dictatorial type hell-bent on dominating and controlling others. Only what the leader wants matters, the only measure of value in their world, their only sign of their own worth as people, is getting blind obedience to their will.

You can see it in families and small social groups, where a formidably willful personality who will never take no for an answer imposes what they want on everyone else. You can see it in any corporate boardroom, where certain titans retain the last word and any opposition will be instantly squashed. We are seeing it now in our besieged government, where tyrannical personalities, acting in brazen disregard of legality, now above the law, (since their demented, willful front man can pardon anyone for anything and that pardon can never be challenged, per the 6-3 Nazi majority his party installed on the Supreme Court) cow everyone around them with the very real threat of career destruction and worse.

Every single one of these Nazi motherfuckers always does exactly the same things when they feel their will being challenged. They attack, they lie, they distract, threaten revenge, take revenge, they destroy anyone who stands in the way of their will, make grim examples of those who defy them, along with every hapless scapegoat they can find. Triumph of the will is the only thing that matters to these implacable monsters and they will violate any law, norm, put themselves through any humiliation, risk everything in their reckless march to victory. They see the world, idiotically, as populated by winners and losers, predators and prey, those worthy of everything and those who deserve nothing at all.

It is a horrific thing to find yourself up against one of these creatures. They are implacable, immovable, impulsive, easily enraged, capable of things the rest of us can barely imagine. For some primitive reason, many of them are always able to attract followers, defenders and enforcers. I have know a few of this type over the years, they are always the exactly same. Driven by a terror of their own worthlessness, they are determined to dominate others, in order to have a fleeting sense that they are worthy of great respect and unconditional love (conditioned on their omnipotence and ability to destroy all enemies).

In the end, after they have revealed an ugly side of themselves they cannot control, and all other strategies have failed, they will pour their heart out about how much they love you, right before they lunge forward to cut your head off. This type must be resisted and, better still, avoided. There are many, many, many more of us, people capable of compromise after reasonable discussion, than there are of them. The problem for humanity, one of these pieces of shit generally has many times more influence than non-psychotics. This is particularly true if you encounter one of great wealth. It is most true if the triumph of the will psycho in question is the richest man in the world and desperately believes his audacious genius is unmatched in every situation.

Straight talk from President Trump

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.”

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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.

The Grey Lady politely opines

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.