Category Archives: History and Politics

Autocracy 101 — why these folks are Nazis

“We have the right to disregard the Constitution because we act according to what we think the law, and reality itself, should be.”

This is rule number one if you want to overthrow the constitutional order — no court case that we lose, no court order from any court, binds us to anything but more agitated grievance and the threat of inflicting more mass desperation (right on time for Thanksgiving, you ungrateful, “entitled”, poor people!) and state violence. These things are done to turn up the heat on the population until they are provoked to riot and then, voila!, the desired police state.

You’ll have to pardon me for calling these folks Nazis, but there is literally no daylight between these murderous zealots [1] and the original and extra crispy German versions from the 1930s. Many young Republicans (and every old fascist) can’t even denounce Hitler, they feel he got a bad rap just because he didn’t get to finish his work properly. Some joke about how much they love Hitler. Arguably as sick a joke as the one about playfully gassing people who don’t vote for them, equally fucking hitlerious. It’s just, you know, 35 year-old kids being kids…

How many brown kids under age five did you murder today, JD?

[1] Project 2025 used the richest man in the world, unelected (and generally despised) Trump/MAGA world record megadonor humanoid Elon Musk, to kill so far over 600,000 poor people (and counting, at over 2,000 a day) in foreign countries by illegally ending USAID. The world’s richest psychopath said he was cutting waste, fraud, abuse and corruption (his areas of greatest expertise) with his crack hit squad of Big Balls and company. What did USAID do? Wikipedia:

In the twenty years from 2001 to 2021, USAID saved a yearly estimated range of between 4.1 and 4.7 million lives, with a yearly estimated subset of between 1.2 and 1.7 million children under five saved.[17]

The brutality of actual history

Hannah Arendt once said that life would be so beautiful, if it wasn’t for history. History has always been written in the blood of meek people by evil fucks. True history is the damnedest thing and real progress against its oppressive weight must be fought for every day by people claiming their right to common decency.

The consistent, exploitative cruelty of human history is the reason rich people don’t want their kids to hear the real history of what their ancestors did to other people. It’s why they invent myths to protect the beneficiaries of past brutality from the horrific reality their benefactors inflicted on others for their own profit. Here’s a powerful example of why actual history hurts so much.

Right Answer to a Clown Question

Just as you can say a quick dash to the Emergency Room is “inconvenient” rather than a frightening, often terrifying, medical ordeal, it’s possible to state everything in a way that advances your argument.  This is known as framing, it’s a common technique in sales and bullying.  At its most extreme, it is The Big Lie, a cynical tactic that was perfected during Hitler’s audacious and influential experiment in shaping mass opinion.

A reporter asks a House Democrat how much more pain it will take for the American people before Democrats stop shutting the government down and simply sign on to a “clean continuing resolution” to pass Project 2025’s agenda, with the unreliable promise that Republicans will finally negotiate,  after all the Heritage Foundations demands are met and all leverage surrendered.  

Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO), with a real-time masterclass on how to, literally, flip the script.   Excellent answer, sir!

Corporate mass media is, tragically for an informed citizenry, run by corporations and their human alter egos.  Virtually every one of these super powerful “persons” is a psychopath.  They have no empathy, they demand their right to own everything, are reckless with the well-being of others and they lack all capacity for remorse.  In a word, monsters, destructive creatures without souls. 

Shari Redstone, intent on selling what she inherited for $8,000,000,000, and scrupulous about not alienating an insane, vengeful president’s bullying FCC chair, sold her father’s once highly respected news channel to Trump megadonors,  billionaire father and son team.  They, in turn, paid a provocative right-wing influencer, Bari Weiss, $150,000,000 for her web-based news/opinion service and placed her in charge of editing the news for CBS/the new owners of CBS.   Prior to Shari Redstone finalizing her multi-billion dollar deal, with the blessing of Trump’s loyal FCC, CBS agreed to pay Trump $16,000,000  for editing a 60 Minutes segment featuring his 2024 opponent Kamala Harris (as every outlet always edits every interview).   Here’s part of what ran on Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes the other night.   Talk about living in the Age of Incoherence.

Why did Trump pardon the richest man in cryptocurrency, the guy who paid $2 billion dollars to Trump’s sons? Because he didn’t know anything about the guy, except that he got only a 4-month sentence. Apparently he didn’t know anything about the 50 million fine he was ordered to pay. Apparently all Trump knows is he has every right under Article Two to pardon whoever he wants, including the most depraved criminals in the world, as long as he has something to gain from pardoning them.

The personality type that can’t be negotiated with

I’m an old man, about to go into my seventh decade walking this brutal, miraculous earth. I only recently learned a truth so simple it seems embarrassing that it could have taken me 67 years to learn. I have well digested it the last few years, while writing hundreds of pages I hope to soon wrestle into a salable manuscript. Here is the condensed version of my belatedly learned lesson.

There are people, traumatized early in life, who develop a rigid personality that renders them unable to show vulnerability, see their role in conflict, change themselves for the better or acknowledge when they’ve hurt people. They live in terror of reliving the crippling humiliation they were subjected to in their earliest days. To protect their brittle egos they insist they cannot be wrong, always blame others for any conflict, escalate the conflict by silence, threats, lies, word salad, every means necessary. They are prepared to fight to the death, against their closest friends, to prove they are never wrong. My father was this way (minus the lying, he was too skilled to need to outright lie). It is a terrible way to go through life, but it is also a fairly common personality type.

They can be charming, funny, playful, sensitive, sometimes generous, they can see nuance, sometimes, but you can’t negotiate with them once there is any kind of disagreement or an expression of hurt that makes them feel imperfect. You can’t find compromise with someone who can never be wrong, they are always your victim — you are the merciless one, not them. They fight with the desperation of a hurt child terrified of further unbearable shame.

We have the grotesque living example of a movement of people guided by these principles: never wrong, blame others, lie, fight to the death over any conflict, no matter how small. Think of cherub-faced fake Christian extremist MAGA Mike Johnson and other creatures of blind ambition like him. They are convinced of their righteousness (or at least play the part), can’t see things from any other point of view (that would require empathy), have no hesitation to lie if confronted with wrongdoing (since they can’t be wrong, and therefore have a right to lie), have a harshly punitive stance toward perceived enemies while being super understanding and lenient to criminal friends, people who simply “made a mistake” but are otherwise loyal.

Politics is not my point here. I’m trying to point out the universal characteristics of this common, extremely harmful, and contagious, personality type. A personal example, then:

Our closest friends of many decades, a couple I’ll call Flack and Gina, planning to celebrate the younger one’s 65th birthday in Europe, were hit with bad news. Covid-19 canceled their fabulous birthday trip at the last minute. They made alternate plans, a week alone together in Vermont and then five days in a spacious cabin with their longtime closest friends, me and Seedj.

When we arrived something was hanging in the air, tension between them, which escalated day by day. Apparently the carefree week in Vermont had not left them feeling refreshed and carefree, they were clearly at odds, keeping their distance from each other, both expressing hurt the other had caused. The tension and passive aggression increased day by day, as I went about my normal business of trying to make them laugh and being conciliatory. I had no understanding that it was already too late for our friendship, I’d witnessed their shameful rage at each other and the sado-masochistic nature of that rage. By the time we left the rented house, after they ate a large breakfast and hadn’t prepared so much as a cup of coffee for me, we were no longer friends.

It had all been my fault, you see, in my irrational need to eventually express frustration with what I couldn’t simply accept like a loving friend, I’d finally resorted the fucking f-word, a blow that sent them both reeling toward the fainting couch. It was entirely my fault that the long weekend had ended badly. They’d been very hurt by my irrational anger. My frustration had nothing to do with one of my oldest friends glaring at me with silent hostility for long minutes after feeling “defied”, her husband trying feebly to explain why she had “her back up” followed by a humiliating forced apology from her the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, hyper-adrenalized and unable to keep my eyelids closed. She told me with great shame that she was sorry I’d been so aggressive and threatening toward her that I’d made her act that way, she could have done better but I got her back up. Not exactly the healing apology one might hope for from a loved one.

They had to completely rewrite history to avoid shame. What I had seen and experienced never happened at all. I’d never witnessed cruelty, silence, distance and raging passive aggression between my two closest friends, that never happened, it existed only in my sick, judgmental, unloving brain. They had a new story, that blamed me for everything, put things in persepective. I could accept their story, and remain their friend, or insist I hadn’t been the cause of all the conflict and take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. The weekend had been wonderful, with no tension at all, they demanded I acknowledge, until I’d exploded with a curse word for no reason at all, thus ruining what had been a perfect five days.

You can apply this same “reasoning” to many things happening in our society today. It’s called reframing. Take something as undeniably ugly and traumatizing as hundreds of years of American chattel slavery. Not all bad, say the re-framers, slaves learned skills while being raped, whipped and degraded — and talking about slavery unfairly makes innocent white Christian kids feel bad about their ancestors, which is the real harm of slavery. The January 6th riot that sent 140 injured police to the hospital? Biden’s fault, Pelosi never called the National Guard, FBI provocateurs, CIA goons, the crowd that broke into the Capitol were innocent, meek, patriotic tourists, not violent rioters, “woke mind” virus, a stolen election, treason, sick, dangerous maniacs on the far left trying to bend the nation to their evil will. Government shutdown, the second one orchestrated by Trump and his allies? Not the Republicans’ fault, we promised the billionaires and corporations a huge increase in their wealth, too bad selfish poor people are so irrationally angry about other people’s success!

Once you notice an inability to compromise, a constant need to escalate conflict, to blame others for their own actions, a refusal to ever acknowledge being wrong, or see anything from another person’s point of view — game over. No compromise is possible with someone who can never be wrong, and blames you for making an unfair issue about being supposedly hurt by them.

You can’t go to mediation with someone, as Flack and Gina demanded we do, if there is no agreement about anything that happened to create the conflict. To me, I’d been attacked savagely and blamed for merely trying to help ease the tensions between my tormented friends. To them, I’d unfairly maligned the perfection of their deep, loving, human relationship, refused to acknowledge that Gina had simply made a “mistake” after I made her feel attacked– and she had apologized! — I was the problem, due to the unhealable damage done to me as a child and my unforgiving nature. A mediator would surely help me see that, they insisted.

Of course, a mediator only has the facts and feelings the parties bring to mediation. Successful mediation depends on a mutual desire, and ability, to be honest, compromise and move toward the other person’s needs to solve a conflict. The most brilliant mediator in the world is helpless if the parties don’t agree on anything that caused the conflict. Nonetheless, desperate people who can never be wrong will weaponize everything available in order to prove that the other person was wrong.

The application of this observation to our current political impasse is hard to avoid. In the individual case it is crucial to understand that when you’re dealing with someone who can never be wrong, there is no way to solve problems with them, outside of uncritically accepting their stilted view of reality. You will eventually learn that even if you do, the past conflict will inevitably continue to escalate until the relationship is finally destroyed. You have to get away from them, uproot them from your life. Not a political solution to the creepy billionaire-financed division between Americans, but a good starting point in knowing who you can reason with, work things out with, and who rigidly demands absolute obedience to whatever they need.

To this type, an appeal to empathy is an intolerable challenge to their projected perfection. Appealing to their empathy is a direct statement that they lack empathy, a mortal insult that must be avenged. If you love the person, you will tend to overlook the early signs of this personality. You do so at your peril, because every bit of mistreatment you tolerate in the name of friendship sets the baseline for what they are allowed to do to you. Once you complain, you break that sacred compact, blindside them with new demands and become an enemy who must be destroyed.

Why the Orange shit-bomber keeps Congress shut down

There are several compelling reasons, including enabling President Project 2025 to make unilateral, “plenary” decisions on everything in government (illegal demolition breaking a promise, another mass firing spree, $40,000,000,000 to his fascist buddy in Argentina, $172,000,000 for Kristi Noem’s two private jets, $250,000,000 for the Marie Antoinette Ballroom, $230,000,000 for him, restitution for the Biden witch hunts), since he alone is up and running, having ordered MAGA Mike to shut everything down and keep lying that the Democrat (sic) party is to blame.  Trump’s criminal behavior can’t be questioned (see 6-3 Trump v. US), not the destruction of the east wing of the White House, not the international war crime of murdering now at least 34 unarmed noncombatants he has designated narco-terrorists, also not the release, pardon and hiring of countless heavily armed January 6th rioters, in masks, employed by ICE to act as Trump’s lawless shock troops in American cities. 

Number one on this grotesque giant baby’s list of concerns is delaying/preventing the release of the infamous Epstein files. Recall that Kashyap Pramod Patel reassigned 1,000 FBI agents to 24 hour shifts to search for and delete Trump’s name from the files, proving the Orange Polyp had absolutely nothing to hide. Adelita Grijalva, vote number 218 in the House to get release of these files, elected a month ago, has had to sue Mike Johnson and the Hump administration to get sworn in so she can represent her majority Hispanic constituents.

MAGA Mike, a brazen liar as relentless and prolific as the man he loves, has spouted a series of angry talking points, making as much sense as his demented, mad boss. He blames Pelosi, Democrats and a series of demons, as evil as the personal ones that keep the cherub-faced liar up sweating at night. PBS, who his boss defunded in the “clean budget”, notes, of Johnson’s month of stonewalling the swearing in of a duly elected member of Congress:

On April 2, Johnson swore in Republican Reps. Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine, both of Florida, less than 24 hours after they won their special elections, during a pro forma session.

Johnson says the circumstances were unique because the House had unexpectedly gone out of session that day. Patronis and Fine had already arranged for their families, friends and supporters to be in Washington.

Fuck that twerp puto.

Meantime, in a cosmic bit of timing, the memoir of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein sex slave who ended her life at 41 (demonstrating once more that the harm of being raped lasts forever) came out the other day. Here’s a slice:

Giuffre writes, quote, “In my years with them, they lent me out to scores of wealthy, powerful people. I was habitually used and humiliated — and in some instances, choked, beaten, and bloodied. I believed that I might die a sex slave,” she said. Virginia also details how she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew three times, beginning when she was 17. Virginia also said she was beaten and raped by a “well-known prime minister.”

Virginia Giuffre died reportedly by suicide earlier this year in Australia at age 41. Nobody’s Girl was completed just before she died. In the book’s foreword, her collaborator, Amy Wallace, describes an email from Virginia shortly before she died that read in part, quote, “The content of this book is crucial as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders. It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic are addressed, both for the sake of justice and awareness. In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released,” she said.

source

I hope to God that the “well-known prime minister” was not fucking Bibi Netanyahu (oy! it appears to be former prime minister Ehud Barak…). Could things get any worse for the Jews right now? Could there be more fuel for antisemites? If a Jewish prime minister was one of Epstein’s “partying,” girl beating, minor-raping buddies, how much worse for the Jews would that be? Not bad enough we have an actual fucking Jewish Nazi, psychopathic vampire Stephen Miller, in charge of vilifying, humiliating, terrorizing and harshly punishing people guilty only of being brown, speaking Spanish and being hardworking day workers. As Mafia strongman Meyer Lansky observed, “it’s hard to be a Jew.” Dig it.

“Deranged Individuals”

Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump observed that Donald is the weakest person she’s ever met. His genius, she points out, is finding people even weaker than him, to do his bidding until he’s done with them and discards them. DJT has found his perfect mouthpieces in his cherub-faced “performatively pious pipsqueaker of the House” (David Feldman? John Fugelsang?) and his superficially cute psychopathic press secretary 28 year-old KKKaroline Leavitt.

In one voice, they say: how dare violent, enraged, murderous, sick, traitorous Communist, fascist puppets of the notorious Jew George Santos, er, George SOROS, SOROS, call us fascists when we’re only trying to protect persecuted white Christians from the machinations of these satanic Jesus hating globalists! These people are the violent, deranged fascist name calling libtard fucking cucks, not us!!!!.

I’m looking forward to the New York Times well-balanced reporting, if any, on the latest demonstrable lies from the pipsqueaker of the House, pious Christian protector of powerful pedophiles MAGA Mike “Gee, boss, your ‘ring’ is delicious!” Johnson. Here’s just one more from this dickhead:

Note Fox’s beautiful set up for MAGA Mike “[Newsom is] essentially trying to say that crime is worse in Louisiana than it is in California”. There’s no such thing as data, facts, objective things you can check and verify. There’s only opinion, which exists in a rigid hierarchy of utility to these depraved individuals. Here’s one more opinion, from America’s top law enforcement agent:

Facts exist, reality exists, billionaire-funded fascism in America is in a desperate sprint to erase facts, distort reality, control everyone forever. Do what you need to stay calm in the face of their lying chaos, keep the pertinent facts in mind and let’s keep moving forward with our neighbors.

Check this meeting out, this evening, October 21, at 8 pm EST: Mass call, what’s next after No Kings?

George Soros gave us all the same signs!

George Soros distributed all these signs to the 7,000,000 Americans who turned out for the second No King’s Day today, setting a record for the largest national protest in the US (all paid for by one guy).  Oddly, not one demonstration-related arrest was reported in New York City, war torn Portland, Washington D.C. etc., in spite of all the MAGA hype about No Kings being a Hamas, Antifa, violent criminal Hate America rally. 

In fairness to the administration, note that all of the pro-Hamas, antifa, America-hating signs are identical (since they were bought and given out by one man, George Santos, er, Soros, George Soros!). A pathetic attempt to manufacture some kind of false show of distaste for the delicious and incredibly great Donald J. Trump.

From a local No Kings demonstration in Queens, NY (a mile from where Trump grew up):

Identical Soros signs in Chicago:

On the other hand, millions of Americans, in numbers never seen before, love the delicious Donald J. Trump and are very creative in expressing that love.

Perfectly legal, IF the president is immune for criminal acts done as part of his core duty to avenge all wrongs

So much for the “presumption of regularity”. Courts are starting to notice that extending the presumption of normalcy, assuming, unless there’s serious evidence to the contrary, that the Department of Justice is acting in accord with its long established principles and practices, is a game for suckers.

Federal Appellate Judge for life, Emil Bove III, a smirking weasel who makes Bill Barr look highly principled, earned his bones during a brief stint at DOJ by overruling career prosecutors and arguing to a federal judge that the substantial corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams should be temporarily dismissed, held over his head, contingent on the Black Trump’s agreed to cooperation with illegal ICE activities in NYC. While at the DOJ Bove told prosecutors to be ready to tell the courts “fuck you” if they opposed the boss’s priorities. His proud tradition at DOJ continues with the abrasively defiant Pamela Jo Bondi, eternally aggrieved Alina Habba and the highly inexperienced and unqualified, but undeniably good looking, and loyal as a dog, Lindsay Halligan.

In the past, public evidence of a president ordering the Attorney General to go after his enemies would be a major scandal, covered by the media for weeks and grounds for impeachment. Particularly if he publicly whined to her that not doing so makes him look bad for threatening something his DOJ is not following through on. It’s hurting his reputation and credibility, wrote the man with a reputation for fraud and sexual assault and the credibility of a compulsive liar lying about proven fraud, a deadly riot he incited, serial adultery, sexual assaults he committed. Then he adds, to make his vindictive intent crystal clear for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury: They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!). OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED NOW!!! President DJT.

Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, that it was dementia that caused him to send this private order over “social media”, any other president in US history would have been investigated and impeached for this “unprecedented”, “irregular”, “unethical,” illegal order to the head law enforcement officer in the US. If Joe Biden had dinner with his AG, Merrick Garland, once, the anti-woke forces would still be screaming about the unpardonable corruptness of it. Trump constantly surrounds himself with his debased sycophants, heads of “independent” agencies who compete for his attention and favor by their willingness to demonstrate their capacity for depravity. Bondi’s outraged response to a photo of her at a recent dinner with Trump, right before the Comey indictment, was to defend herself as being two seats from the president, not right next to him as a commie senator falsely claimed.

Imagine this was written by Joe “Autopen” Biden and it urged his AG to immediately go after Steve Bannon, American Eichmann Jeffrey Clarke, Peter Navarro and John Eastman (as Garland legitimately should have).

Or as the amoral servants of the bottom line in corporate media frame the flimsy indictment of NY AG Letitia James, a “second major achievement”…

When dealing with compulsive liars who fervently believe every lie they utter, understand that truth has no place in the conversation. They will say, as they did yesterday as part of their Nazi talking points “Biden sent 274 FBI agents provocateurs to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to start a riot to blame on the innocent Trump!”. You might say “The innocent Trump was still the president on that date, the riot after his rousing speech was to prevent Biden from being certified as the winner of the election, how did the president-elect order the FBI to do anything?” They will say “fuck you, you hate America, and you’re anti-fascist, and are suffering from woke mind virus and Trump Derangement Syndrome, cuck.” The rest of the discussion will be, as they say, academic.

No Kings.

Gray Lady puffing up a grifting pinhead

The Grey Lady:

Trained in the bare-knuckle arts of New York City real estate, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff think of themselves as deal guys working for the ultimate deal guy. Their approach is simple: Get to a yes first, and hash out the details later. The two have spent a lot of time together over the past few weeks, crisscrossing Miami, then the country, and now the world, in pursuit of peace. The rebuilding of Gaza is also in their sights.

“The experience that Steve and I have as deal guys is that you have to understand people,” Mr. Kushner said. “You have to be able to kind of get the bottom line out of them, and then see who do you think is playing games, and how much room do you have to push things?”

He added: “A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats. It’s just different being deal guys — just a different sport.”

I have no idea why the New York Times is suddenly blowing this corrupt nepo-baby clown, and it’s frankly a bit sickening, but watch the fabulously rich boy genius’s brilliant bit of whining as he snippily answers questions about the last time he and his genius Nobel Prize recipient father-in-law made permanent peace in the Middle East, in spite of facing, according to the seasoned, streetwise “getting to yes” diplomat/deal maker, the recalcitrance of angry, self-pitying, deluded Palestinians perennially too stupid to act in their own best interests (compare — MAGA voters), presumably why they did not participate in the negotiations.

Here’s one of America’s greatest arrogant super-wealthy mediocrities (no offense to the mediocre intended) humbly bragging about having made lasting peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords. The first few minutes of this asshole’s responses are priceless, made hilarious by the chyrons that contradict his every talking point.

Why the New York Times took this opportunity, with everything else going on at the moment (including the scandal of peace-loving DJT not winning the Nobel Peace Prize!), to daintily fellate pardoned felon/Ambassador to France Charles Kushner’s well-born son Jared, you’d have to ask the editorial putz who approved the article. Could it have been a friend of Bari Weiss, new $150,000,000 CBS editor-in-chief?

Five simple steps to fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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