Category Archives: History and Politics

Hitler’s A-B-C of dictatorship

Do not be intimidated by the constant threatening roars of a would-be dictator and the cruelty of his incompetent lackeys.  A lot of things have to line up for one of these weak bastards to become an actual authoritarian leader of a longtime democracy, no matter how badly they may want to be one. The man who dictated The Art of the Deal to his ghostwriter appears a less and less likely American Putin.

Our boy just got Epsteined by Putin up in Alaska, which Trump said the other day was part of Russia. It might as well have been, Putin stepped up to the mic and began speaking in Russian before his host, the American president, could get a word in.  “Next time in Moscow,” said Trump’s murderous, kidnapping, war criminal buddy Vladimir, in English, with a little smile, pantsing Trump again at the end, getting the last word as well as the first.  Here’s how the NY Times laundered the story on its front page:

Heh, just a couple of old pals who couldn’t agree about how to end the unprovoked slaughter one of them is committing on the sovereign territory of a neighbor. Got to love that Grey Lady.

Meanwhile, DC gets its illegally removed chief of police back, and the guy who threw the Subway sandwich at the ICE agent, who Pam Bondi fired and wanted locked up for 8 years, is going to have an excellent wrongful termination case against DOJ, if he feels like bringing it. Everything these MAGA zealots do is for the optics, and they keep screwing the optics up.  The horror of Epstein’s crimes, and Trump’s repeated lies about releasing the files, and the attempted cover up of those lies, are not going anywhere. His reflex to constantly double down keeps making his position worse. What does Trump say about the teenage girls who were victimized and traumatized for life by his teenager raping, blackmailing, best buddy Jeff? The so-called victims, he claims, are Democrat plants who are trying to make him look bad, and getting paid to lie about him, a guy whose redacted name is only in the Epstein files a few hundred times, at most. America’s greatest winner is always the most tortured victim ever, nobody has ever suffered like him.

In a democratic republic the first step to seizing absolute power is getting the right person elected to a high enough office to claim dictatorial power when the time is right.  Having organized, violent shock troops on the ground, beating up political opponents also helps. Exploit a national emergency to pressure parliament/congress into immediately passing a law enabling unfettered emergency executive powers.   Election, violence, emergency, enabling act granting absolute power, police state, et voila, dictatorship.

Here’s a textbook case, though, keep in mind, it was during a worldwide Depression and shaky, liberal German democracy was less than twenty years old (in contrast to a 227 year-old emergency powers law Trump is currently exploiting in his bid to be an authoritarian).

In the 1932 German elections Hitler’s Nazi party, with organized shock troops actively beating up opponents in street battles across Germany, captured a plurality in the Reichstag with a solid Trumpian 37% of the vote.  The arrangement the other far right parties made when Hitler was appointed chancellor left him supposedly well under the control of the president of Germany, 85 year-old Paul von Hindenburg.  Hindenburg, as president, had the absolute right to fire Hitler, who came into the government demanding the dissolution of the parliament (Reichstag) and passage of an Enabling Act to allow him extra-constitutional powers.  Hindenburg refused, until after the Reichstag was set on fire on February 27, 1933, and in an atmosphere of Nazi intimidation, the Enabling Act was passed by the Reichstag, and signed into law by Hindenburg. Chancellor Hitler now had emergency powers and democracy in Germany was over.  The Nazi party, soon the only legal party in Germany, was able to rule unopposed under the Enabling Act, without having to touch another word of the Weimar constitution.  When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler combined his office with the presidency and declared himself Führer.   The rest, sadly for humanity, is history.

Think of the sweeping extra-constitutional emergency powers contained in the massive Patriot Act signed into law here six weeks after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.   Bush and Cheney were not yet in position to become dictators, because our democratic checks and balances were still intact.  American fascist billionaires got to work fixing all annoying impediments to permanent one party rule. But all the stars have to come into alignment before their dream can come true, including having an ideal front man as dictator. Is the increasingly faltering Trump really the man for the job? Peter Theil’s handpicked best boy, repellant chameleon JD Vance, clearly isn’t.

All of the illegal and extralegal Article II powers Trump has claimed in his second term are based on fake “emergencies” that supposedly trigger these constitutional exceptions to congressional and judicial limits on the Executive’s power.   None of these are actual emergencies, but if the 6-3 Koch Supreme Court allows you to continue wielding emergency powers, until they eventually rule on the actual merits of the individual cases against invocation of each specific emergency power, and if Congress, even by one vote, doesn’t stop you — emergency powers it is!   

Fucking 19 year-old Big Balls, the most famous of Musk’s hackers who infiltrated government databases, fired civil servants and deleted whole agencies that threatened Musk with investigation,  gets assaulted in DC at 3 a.m. by a pack of teenagers?   Emergency Powers!   Federal law enforcement in the streets of burning criminal cesspool DC! (where, as Kashyap announced recently, violent crime is at a 30 year low).  Members of a violent Venezuelan gang present in the US?   Emergency War Powers, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, based on the Tren de Aragua invasion!  Mass ICE arrests and planeloads of asylum seekers and other dangerous committers of misdemeanors sent, without any kind of judicial process, to an El Salvadorian torture prison, to Sudan, for indefinite imprisonment. Now he wants to do the same to citizens for the crime of homelessness. He’s had his federal goons seize their tents in DC, throw their meager possessions into garbage trucks.  Being poor and smelly is an unpardonable crime. Trade imbalances with foreign nations?   National economic emergency! Congress loses all power over taxation!  What’s the logic of Trump’s solution, tariffs?  Tariffs for everyone!  Article II.  China will pay for them, Mexico will pay, build big beautiful tariffs in every city, like walls, or lobbyists!

It’s hard to think that any of this incoherent bullshit will actually fly, as baseless and stupid as so many of the Trump administration’s moves have been.   Trump said, prior to being elected the first time, that in order to always be the smartest man in the room, important for a certain kind of boss, he surrounds himself with people who are not as smart as him. Imagine how smart Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kashyap Pramod Patel, Kristie Noem and the rest of them must be. I take the tragically insecure Trump at his word about his hiring genius, and he seems to be demonstrating that principle every day.  If nobody in his administration is smarter than him, and he’s neither very stable nor that much of a genius, his word, like his idol Mr. Hitler’s, remains the last lying word on all policy, in which case, in the long run, our democracy should be OK.  

On the other hand:

Fascism is rule by bullies

If you say I am wrong, I will beat you down. If you say it again, I will have my people kill you. I have millions of people that follow me, all willing to die and kill for me, so I can do whatever I want to you and nobody can stop me.

This is the basic premise of fascism, it’s a strict hierarchy in which all authority flows from the will of the dictator. Followers of the dictator, empowered to enforce his will, get to dominate everyone below them in the hierarchy. That’s just how society is supposed to run, in the fascist worldview. The strongest person rules and everybody else accommodates themselves to the will of the strongest person.

Donald Trump‘s niece Mary, daughter of Donald’s ill-fated older brother, has called her uncle the weakest man she ever met.  She said his amazing talent is his ability to find people even weaker than he is and getting them to do his bidding. Trump the unapologetic bully exerts great appeal to the people who follow him, because he’s projects being strong and he doesn’t take any crap from anybody, and even when he’s wrong, he demands to be recognized as being right. This is inspiring to a certain type of person, who identifies with and admires someone able to live that way, to take what they want,  grab women by the pussy and so on.  The laws that apply to the rest of us don’t apply to him, because he’s a winner in a way that nobody else has ever been.

A bully like Trump is able to collect weak and useful people who were bullied earlier in their life and developed a driving need for domination and revenge. They’re drawn to a bully like Trump as a source of power that will allow them not to feel weak anymore, as they derive their own power from someone as powerful as he is. They are forced to constantly compete for his favor, stay in his good graces, and avoid the humiliation that he has forced on virtually all of their predecessors. Think of creatures like Kashyap Pramod “Kash” Patel, or Pete Hegseth, Emil Bove, Caroline Leavitt, Little Marco, Stephen Miller, Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi or any of Trump’s current lie-embracing myrmidons.  Loyalty and proximity to Trump, who craves and demands absolute loyalty and obedience, no matter what (hang that asslicking traitor Mike Pence!) is literally a license to kill, as long as your loyalty, flattery and actions are pleasing to the boss.

Young Donald Trump [1], the second youngest child in a wealthy family run by a psychopathic father and a distant, born very poor, immigrant mother, became a bully when his baby brother was born.   Mom had been gone when Donald was at that formative age when children most need their mothers, she was in the hospital for a prolonged stay. His father being a driven and ruthless man obsessed with amassing wealth,  was unable to give his youngest son much by way of anything except his annual $200,000 a year tax-free allowance.  With the arrival of the smallest, weakest little Trump, young Donald finally had someone to take out his feelings on.  With a helpless sibling he could dominate from day one, Donald began to show his now famous sadistic ‘pleasure’ in tormenting and humiliating people weaker than him.

Trump, who was disrespectful to his mother at home,  became a bully in school.   When his parents discovered he’d purchased a cache of switchblades to give out to a gang he was planning to arm at his exclusive private school, they yanked him out of that school and sent him off to a military academy.  They sent him there to teach him discipline, to make him a man, as they used to say (back when America was great). While Trump, who enjoyed the sadism of military academy life, was there his parents drove up every visiting day with different beautiful young women they’d pay to come to hang out with their son.  This made him look good to his classmates.  He was voted the “ladies’ man” of the military school by his peers, who couldn’t believe how many good looking chicks he kept pulling to come up and visit him, pose for photos with him.  

When his smart, charismatic older brother Fred Jr., the heir apparent to the Trump empire, revealed that he lacked the ruthlessness their father demanded of his heir, the father decided to break and destroy his oldest son.   He reluctantly groomed young Donald to take over the business.  Donald was soon in the tender embrace of the father he never had, ruthless, demonically brilliant Roy Cohn, homophobic closeted promiscuous homosexual, rabid anti-communist, and high functioning antisocial psychopath.   Cohn taught young Donald how to use the media and law to bully, as he’d always done in his personal life.  When somebody comes at you, come at them twice as hard. You never admit fault, and if somebody accuses you of something accuse him of something ten times worse.  If the government sues you for longtime racist housing discrimination, now illegal under the Fair Housing Act, sue the government for defaming you — demand a hundred million dollars. The Department of Justice lawyers will literally shit themselves.

And so it came to pass, eventually, that this narcissistic bully who enjoys nothing in life but “winning”, that is, dominating everybody else in the zero sum world in which such stunted souls live, became president of the United States.   Russia’s dictator had a strong interest in seeing him elected in 2016, as Marco Rubio’s Senate committee detailed in a multivolume report after Special Counsel Robert Mueller documented 140 cases of Russia and the Trump campaign working together to get Donald elected.  No criminal conspiracy was charged, because Trump’s people were no rats (and they lied and destroyed evidence, one reason Mueller hurried to collect and include as much evidence as he could in the report) but Mueller could not exonerate Trump for ten counts of obstruction of justice.  None of this stopped Trump and Christofascist Bill Barr from announcing Trump’s complete and total exoneration from the Mueller “witch hunt”. 

When Trump lost reelection in 2020, after a chaotic term that broke all records for cabinet firings and personnel changes, he went insane. His team launched a multi-pronged attempt to reverse Trump’s electoral loss. They’d sent lawyers to every state in an effort to suppress voting before the election, then hatched several schemes to contest the outcome and do everything imaginable to overturn the election results. Revenge against a “rigged election” became his rallying cry. He fomented a riot by whipping up a crowd he’d primed for months with claims of a stolen election, an election stolen from THEM, and sent them to take out his rage on the joint session of Congress.

He watched on TV for hours as they overran police and ransacked the Capitol (a “day of love.”). The DOJ had four years to bring him to justice for multiple heavy duty felonies, but in their meticulous institutional devotion to “norms”, DOJ shat the bed. In 2024 the only thing we know for sure that Russia did to get Trump back into power was to call in voting day bomb threats to key Democratic precincts in swing states.

Bullies only understand one thing, force.  They are intimidated when people they mean to terrify don’t flinch. We must not flinch, there is no compelling reason to flinch right now.

Bullies bully and lie for the same reason people always do those things — fear.  Only while being more scary than the people they bully do they feel safe.  Meanwhile, anyone subject to the bully’s need to feel powerful has to defend herself, himself, themself, ourselves.   As a society, we can only protect ourselves from bullying by an insane dictator and his minions by organizing, standing up for our rights, doing whatever it takes to assert our rights as citizens of a constitutional democracy.

The forces of American fascism, racism and misogyny have been working hard for decades, and spending a fortune organizing and influencing, to bring about this dark moment in history. The rest of us, a large majority of our citizenry, need to not flinch from doing whatever needs to be done to resist American fascism. That the “opposition” party is so spineless, due to corporate interests controlling most of its leaders, is a grim fucking tragedy. No time to weep about that. It is on us not to be bullied by an insane movement of enraged toddlers wielding government power. Don’t be intimidated by an insane bully’s ranting threats to illegally deploy the military to lock us all up in privatized torture prisons, this guy’s rowing with one oar. He is panicking. He wants us to panic. Do not panic.

[1] This short biography of Trump is no doubt one reason the ever vengeful DJT defunded PBS.

Fascism does not succeed without mass desperation

Inheriting a fairly thriving economy (an unjust one, but by the measures we use to determine the health of a capitalist economy, healthy) and a Congressional budget that promoted renewable energy and allocated funds to address many other longstanding problems, Trump went to work deliberately negating the will of the majority, as expressed in Congress, and tanking the world’s richest economy. In doing so he also sought to crush all hope for a sustainable and more equitable future for 90% of Americans.

Make people insecure enough, gouge them for services they need, deny them health care, and food, demonstrate your right to rough up, detain and deport anyone you like with masked, unidentified squads of secret immigration police not accountable to any laws, remove all hope of change for the better and you have fertile ground for public panic. Mass firings, in violation of civil service law, by unaccountable, secret state actors, great for stoking fear and outrage. By putting the populace in increasing fear for their day to day existence you create the desperate, violent conditions in Germany after the Great Depression. Once you’ve set the stage on fire, creating enraging propaganda and stoking the blind fear necessary for a fully fascist state becomes child’s play for the dictator on day one.

There were at least three direct outcomes of Trump’s “in your fucking face” approach from the day he claimed victory in the 2024 election. Trump, as the Unitary Executive, on a self-proclaimed divine mission of vengeance, asserted, in a series of executive orders he never read, that he would carry out Project 2025 boldly by saying “fuck you” to Congress, which, under our constitution, has the exclusive “power of the purse” and later to every court but the 6-3 majority one that has his hideous back. He declared a fake emergency (we are supposedly at nationwide war with a super powerful Venezuelan gang) which he claims gave him the unlimited powers his idol, Mr. Hitler, assumed under the Enabling Act in the Weimar constitution after the torching of the German parliament building. Trump’s seizure of emergency powers, based on nothing, is currently under leisurely review by the courts.

The second direct, predictable outcome of his “economic” policies (and the president’s claimed right to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress is currently also tied up in court) is already hurting tens of millions, sending the poor deeper into inescapable poverty, increasing poverty and child hunger, until the rippling effects of his idiotic, economically nihilistic policies fuck the vast majority of Americans a short time later (while further enriching our most lucrative corporations). All of this predictable economic destruction, the inevitable result of his colossally stupid (or devilishly clever, depending on desired outcome) policies, is coming to pass as surely as his “clean coal” and fossil fuel pollution will continue killing people as he defunds what Congress has allocated for renewable energy and places new taxes on it to further enrich super-wealthy psychopathic fossil fuel barons who will now generate all electricity by burning up handsomely subsidized non-renewables.

The third, and probably most dangerous, is Trump’s largely uncontested insistence on his right to prevail with incoherent arguments that fly in the face of all evidence. He continually reserves to himself the right to lie and to fight, to the death, anyone who calls out his lies. Emotionally, he is two years old, and he cannot control his impulse to rage. Our acceptance, as a culture, of a powerful two year-old’s right to rage at us whenever he feels frustrated, which is several times a day, is the most damaging part of this stunted strongman’s attack on reality. That and the sycophancy of his shamelessly ambitious political appointees (and powerful unappointed “influencers” like Laura Loomer).

The capitulation of America’s most powerful individuals and institutions, the prime beneficiaries of our corrupt culture, is probably the most sickening aspect of this Project 2025 scenario. Frivolous lawsuits brought by America’s most litigious asshole, lawsuits that would be laughed out of any court, net the Orange Polyp tens of millions of dollars in settlement money (a business expense and tax write off for these craven financial giants) from corporations (and their human alter-egos) eager not to get on the madman’s shit list.

One key thing to remember during all this — there is only one true victim in the United States. Donald J. Trump. Everyone else is whining about nothing, only poor, innocent Mr. Trump is persecuted like nobody’s ever seen. In Trump’s mind there is no such thing as an “Epstein victim,” aside from Donald J. Trump, whose only “crime” was being friends with a creep.

In closing, here’s a bit from Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent letter:

Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter [Tulsi Gabbard’s Russian talking point that Obama, not Trump, committed treason — with allegedly false claims of Russian meddling — in the lead up to the 2016 election] to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.

The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”

”Jeff was a creep who stole my beautiful 16 year-old Mara-Lago towel girl.”

Endlosüng

Every insane, violent, totalitarian plan for world domination has an end game, one Nazi word for this was Endlosüng — The Final Solution. This widely known secret plan of mass extermination, of all Jews and millions of other undesirables, would solve Germany’s problems once and for all, true believers in the infallibility of a morally deformed supreme leader believed. The Leader spellbound masses of otherwise hopeless Germans with promises of endless winning and eternal national glory, once the homeland was cleansed of blood poisoning and made mythically pure again. Mass belief in the Leader was fueled by his charismatic certainty in his holy mission. God, it is well known, and those He speaks to directly, can never be wrong.

94 year-old saltwater crocodile, and compelling argument against naturalization, Rupert Murdoch, and equally crusty, soon to be 90 year-old fossil trillionaire Charles Koch don’t have much time left to see the payoff for their vast investments, to watch their 50-year wet dream come to full, final fruition — a one party government that protects their privileges from “majoritarian tyranny” in perpetuity. American fascists are in overdrive now, working overtime around the clock, as their figurehead battering ram reveals himself as more and more of a liability to their cause of a government permanently controlled by the 0.01%.

Cracks are appearing daily in the transactional far right coalition currently going by the idiotic name of MAGA. It seems, by The Wall Street Journal’s current treatment of Trump (Murdoch’s other main public opinion organ, FOX, continues to play both sides for now) that Trump may be close to the end of serving his purpose for the oligarchs’ cause. An additional data point: Murdoch has always personally hated Donald Trump, outside of Trump’s usefulness to Murdoch’s cause. So, of course, Trump sues Murdoch for truthful reporting he claims is a lie and demands Murdoch immediately appear to be grilled under oath.

During Trump’s six month snatch and grab crime spree, preemptively greenlighted by the best Supreme Court unlimited dark money could buy, POTUS has done such widespread damage, in so many ways, that his political brand is probably expendable now. His inept attempts to distance himself from his good friend Jeff, a guy who appears to have become a billionaire by blackmailing his rich, powerful libidinous guests with videos of them in compromising positions with 14 year-old girls, seem to be digging him deeper and deeper into a hole he can’t get out of. What are Charles Koch and Rupert to do at this point? They’re not going to be taken down by this ranting, revenge obsessed two year-old and his cult of violent dupes. He’s crashing the economy with his demented tariffs and other destructive and widely unpopular agency closures. First order of business: make sure citizens can’t vote! Then they can deal with the Trump problem.

I would think what the FBI would posthumously identify as a flamboyantly gay Venezuelan hairdresser, former prisoner illegally rendered to CECOT, the torture prison for terrorists, on a successful mission of revenge (turn off the cameras, let the Secret Service fall asleep, not notice the crowd pointing to the nut with a gun on a nearby rooftop), after posting communist messages online, would be the perfect patsy to place the quieter, less obtrusive, equally psychopathic JD Vance into the Oval Office to put the final touches on Koch’s Project 2025. Fascists are always killers who practice strategic murder along with indiscriminate killing — death threats and murder are integral to fascist rule. A dramatic political murder would leave the base in a much better mood than removing a cognitively failing popular president (among his 39%, anyway) using the 25th Amendment. Killing makes the most sense to transactional psychopaths.

In fact, Trump’s US, in all of our names, is currently engaged in mass killing that makes Israel’s horrific killing spree in Gaza look restrained. Project 2025, demanding the closure of USAID, has already killed hundreds of thousands of poor people worldwide. As of June 15, the death toll for adults and children from aid funding cuts topped 340,000 and came out to 103 deaths PER HOUR (per HOUR!) [1] (on pace for 14,000,000 total deaths, it is widely reported [2])  by denying food and medical aid to desperately poor HIV, TB, malaria and diarrhea patients and starving children and elderly around the world. The story of this deliberately caused (illegally so, but the president may commit unlimited crimes in office with impunity, see Trump v. US) senseless program of mass death, alone, should be disqualifying for an American presidential administration. Instead, because of the far right firehouse of mendacity, always spewing disinformation full-bore, it’s a rarely covered “externality” of Making America as Great Again as it was during previous Gilded Ages.

A successful takedown of numero uno, organized with discipline, distance and perfect deniability by the ruthless Koch network (and we still don’t know exactly who was involved in Lee Harvey Oswald’s successful hit on JFK, 62 years later), committed on live TV by a “gay illegal alien radical leftist” would also inflame the public and merit imposition of martial law. That would seem to be pretty timely about now, in light of the raging unpopularity of Project 2025 and the cascading follies of Trump.

What better than something dramatic. cinematic, galvanizing — riveting live reality TV with scripted commentary — to facilitate seizing absolute power once their popular front man has proved himself expendable and becomes an involuntary martyr to the cause? Killing is nothing for Nazi types, the goal of autocratic power and limitless wealth is worth every bit of the illegality and violence it takes to achieve. Would they rule out nuking an anarchist jurisdiction? Do you think these folks would hesitate for a minute if there was a chance it could cement them into permanent power?

When the ideologically pure 6-3 Supreme Court majority, bought and paid for by our oligarchs and groomed in the extreme right judicial fraternity, The Federalist Society, declared, before his reelection, that Trump could not be prosecuted for virtually any crime he committed while president the first time and had immunity for any crimes he might commit, no matter how many or how egregious, during his second term — unless they ruled otherwise (they haven’t), that was set and match for American democracy, unless we, the People, can stop these motherfuckers first. The Federalist Society majority he recently railed against has continued to rule that Trump can engage in illegal firings, illegal agency closures, illegal renderings of humans to foreign countries without due process and so forth until they get around to ruling on the merits of things like mass firings without cause that violate civil service law, usurping the powers reserved to Congress, and the constitutionality of the 14th amendment and birthright citizenship, in a year or two, or never.

July 2024’s 6-3 decision in the aptly named Trump v. US effectively made the next president, be it Trump, JD Vance, or Peter Thiel himself, the American dictator. In order install a dictator implementing wildly unpopular programs that benefit only the top of the top 1% while immiserating tens of millions of less fortunate Americans, the vote must be suppressed as much as possible. Fortunately for Koch and Rupert, Leonard Leo and their creepy allies, this is something the Supreme Court can adjust at any time by striking down all voting rights legislation, like it did in Shelby County v. Holder, disemboweling the Voting Rights Act reauthorized last time 98-0 in the Senate and then nullified by John Roberts and four Federalist Society Libertarians, based on a lie Roberts wrote into the heart of the ruling.

Here’s something to add a bit of steel to your spine here in the shadow of the swastika and urge you not to tune out, not to give up advocating for truth, justice and the American way (well, not all of the American way, obviously, but the high principles we are supposed to always be animated by in the world’s longest running experiment in democracy).

[1] The calculator shows us that’s 2,472 deaths a day, 17,304 a week, 74,160 in a thirty day month. WHAT THE FUCK?!!! Cutting a program that cost 0.3% of the federal budget to give billionaires a little more money they don’t need? This is what happens when AI is employed to make life and death decisions that benefit a select handful of citizens at the expense of everything else.

[2] from that article:

Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts – combined with the potential dismantling of the agency – could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years, the study in The Lancet said.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse makes irrefutable case for Bove’s unfitness for office

Three major examples of prosecutorial misconduct in his short six month tenure in Trump’s DOJ, including a contempt hearing delayed for months by two Trump judges on the DC Circuit appeals court (until their colleague can be appointed to a lifetime post on the federal bench), and the creepy Emil Bove, Trump’s modern day Roy Cohn, is put up for a party line vote without any further debate or questioning.

Voted in for life with a 50-49 mandate!

In his honor, here is Trump’s tribute poem to Bove, himself, the Deep State and Project 2025.

We get very little important news from our corporate media

Here are a couple of major, and extremely urgent, real life stories that the corporate mass media (and, recall, corporations, as “persons” are psychopaths whose only goal is monetary profit) mentions marginally, if at all. The mass media covers politics as a good old fashioned horse race, with handicappers giving betting odds. The whole enterprise is a mind-numbing casino designed to fuel anxiety and generate advertising dollars. Meanwhile, in the board rooms, the human embodiments of corporate personhood who make decisions for their corporate alter egos openly bribe the most corrupt president in US history, pursuant to the plan to fully corporatize the US meticulously outlined in Charles Koch’s Project 2025.

To learn what’s really going on more of us need to become reliable citizen journalists, people so offended and alarmed by the march of fascism — masked goons squads on the streets obedient to no law, brutalizing law abiding immigrants, and the occasional Democratic elected official, to make their arbitrary arrest quotas of 3,000 per day,  unrestrained by a spineless Congress passively watching laws unenforced, and court orders defied, overseen by an openly partisan DOJ leadership composed entirely of Trump’s recent team of criminal lawyers, criminal in the sense of having defended the boss in numerous criminal proceedings and criminal in their contempt for the law — that they follow stories more closely than corporate advertisers may be comfortable with. 

ICE filling privatized for-profit detention centers (GEO Group’s former lobbyist, Pamela Jo Bondi, is on board with this highly lucrative plan) with law-abiding immigrants and American citizens with Hispanic surnames:

That tricked out used 747 that AG Pamela Jo Bondi’s former employers, Qatar, gifted to President Agent Orange? We haven’t heard a peep about it in the media for months. Did he accept the illegal emolument? We may never find out from “the most transparent administration in US history.” All media eyes are on the distraction du jour, are there videos of Trump cavorting with underaged girls at his former best friend Jeff’s place? Calling it a distraction is not to minimize the destruction done to countless young lives by these powerful, unaccountable pedophiles who anonymously participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. Wait, what about the big, fat, beautiful plane Qatar is bribing Trump with? No news. Except, there was apparently almost a billion dollars to refurbish the plane, snuck into the Big, Hideous, mass murdering Bill that Trump twisted arms to ram through Congress 51-50, as reported in the NY Times… at the same time Trump denied $15M in FEMA aid to Maryland after a devastating storm, because they are not a “red” state, like the surrounding ones, all hit by the same storm, that got FEMA money.

Most of my once large family was killed by Nazis and their accomplices in 1943. I was raised in the shadow of this horrific fact, like Armenians, Native Americans, Darfuris, Hutus, Tutsis, Gazans, Ukrainians, descendants of enslaved Africans, the list is as long as history. The fuckers who create the conditions for genocide are always the same, they change hats, colors, languages but their deadly narrative is always identical — don’t look at what I am doing to YOU, go kill THEM!

It is frustrating as hell that there is no clear organized resistance for progressives, how hard it is to jump directly into the fight, the way there is on the right with a marching lockstep and a million opportunities to prove their devotion to the cause.  We have no strong opposition party organizing resistance and making news every day by presenting facts in reaction to every single incoherent step toward fascism that Project 2025 inplements.   The Democratic party urges us to donate and vote, and sometimes sign petitions, and to please, please donate to the important fight.  The minority leader of the House of Representatives telling the American people that Democrats will address everything being done to our democracy “at a time and place of our choosing” come on, Hakeem Jeffries.

We can’t rely on mass media owned by psychopaths for accurate, actionable information about the world.   It has a single minded agenda: to sell advertising to generate profits for shareholders.  Billionaires all have the same bottom line — to make even more money.  It’s a kind of sickness that has no cure.   Corporate culture is its deadliest symptom.  We are living in it.  Keep your eyes open.

Subscribe to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s invaluable free daily newsletter, for starters; follow Robert Reich, Alison Gill, David Feldman, Katie Phang, Mehdi Hasan, Brian Tyler Cohen, Glenn Kirschner. Be alert for other trustworthy, non-corporate sources for what is actually going on during the American far-right’s determined lurch toward permanent one party rule, also known as totalitarianism.

Trump is as insane as the most powerful madmen of the 20th century, but he is only a battering ram for the interests of those much smarter and more calculating than him. The people calling the shots, even if equally mad, have been fine tuning their secretive plan for American fascism for decades, and financing it with unlimited dark money. Their goal is within reach, but for our resistance, and you can almost smell their frothy saliva at being so intoxicatingly close to their goal.

Also, never forget that mockery is what monsters fear more than anything. This short bit cracked me up. Laughing has never been more important than it is right now, my friends.

Two sides of the totalitarian coin

An old friend sent me this to ponder. She wrote: I did not quite understand this one…

Orwell was obviously right-on, tyrants always ban words, ideas, discussion, books, history, science and call it all something else, like Project 2025’s “Big Beautiful (mass murdering) Bill!” .   Huxley was famously insightful about society, I don’t think I ever read more than a few pages by him, I’m not really familiar with his philosophy.  I recall reading something he wrote about psychedelics that I liked.

About the author of this excellent analysis:

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers and mobile devices, and was critical of the use of personal computers in schools.[1] He is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1970), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). source

I took away from the Postman piece that Orwell saw oppression and violence as the way to break people to totalitarianism and that Huxley saw seduction and the ready, unhealthy satisfaction of every base desire as the way totalitarians get control.  These views are two sides of the same insightful coin, tyrants always do both.  The ones you can’t win with bread and circuses, and playing to their favorite passions, you lock them up, publicly torture a few of them, burn their books, murder their leaders. 

I took from this that Huxley saw the corruption of meaning, the incoherence needed for a police state, as a function of narcotizing citizens, rendering them senseless with an ever more tempting smorgasbord of overwhelming distraction and weirdly engrossing unreality that catered to their unquenchable desires.  Giving the masses what they love, what they crave, junk food, violent sports, titillating “reality TV”, pornography, the internet, twitter, instagram, youTube, NETFLIX, ICE, DOGE, “The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”, mind altering substances, hatred of others (many, apparently, love to hate), it all feeds into the same insatiable appetite for oblivion that drives everything else in out of control capitalism.   Constant distraction and the ease of access to pleasures, often in unhealthy, addictive forms, makes citizens complacent and apathetic while the fascists go to work without interference from more than a tiny, easily manageable handful — at first, anyway, until, after enough senseless atrocity, masses start shaking themselves awake (hence the far-right’s eternal war on “wokeness”).    

Both of these thinkers (and Neil Postman, too) seem like very profound prophets at this hideous moment in human history, as global oligarchs’ stage their determined march to totalitarianism. Tyranny on a mass scale always depends on the destruction of coherence and eliminating the possibility of meaningful dialogue. There appear to be at least two equally effective routes to the goal of mass incoherence that is the foundation of the Nazi state, 

Beware Emil Bove III

Emil Bove III, supremely loyal Trump criminal attorney, is, unless several Republicans find their spines, about to be confirmed for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals bench, with a party line majority of 51-50 or so. That would put the relentless, unprincipled 44 year-old Trump warrior, Trump’s present day Roy Cohn, in position to take ethically compromised Samuel Alito’s or Clarence Thomas’ smelly seat before the midterms, when he could be confirmed 51-50.

Bove is, not to put too fine a point on it, a straight up evil fuck. Significantly, Bove lacks candor. A lawyer, as an officer of the court, has a duty of candor to the court. Bove (as made explicit in a 2/5/25 memo from Pam Bondi the day after she was confirmed as AG, quoting Executive Order, Ending the Weaponization of The Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025)) instructed DOJ subordinates to fuck candor to the fucking court if the court was not letting DOJ carry out the policies and directives of Mr. Trump.

A prevaricating, stonewalling lawyer is bad, unethical, an enabler of evil practices and subject to disbarment in the rare case where the stars line up correctly. If a dishonest lawyer works for the Department of Justice, it’s very dangerous, for justice and democracy. Imagine the harm a federal appeals judge without candor can do to the faithful administration of justice. Try to imagine a harm an unappealable Justice without candor, or the capacity for remorse (a feature of moral weaklings in a fascist regime) would not be capable of doing.

Here are a few highlights from the resignation letter of Trump appointee, acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sasson, on being instructed, by then acting AG Emil Bove, to conditionally drop the charges against NYC mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’ agreement to allow ICE raids in New York City. The letter was sent to Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General of the United States. Bondi apparently accepted the resignation of this principled Trump appointee:

You and I have yet to meet, let alone discuss this case. But as you may know, I clerked for the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Both men instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law, and a commitment to reasoned and thorough analysis. I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.

I therefore deem it necessary to the faithful discharge of my duties to raise the concerns expressed in this letter with you and to request an opportunity to meet to discuss them further. I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record. . .

. . . Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case. Although Mr. Bove disclaimed any intention to exchange leniency in this case for Adams’s assistance in enforcing federal law,[1] that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo. That is especially so given Mr. Bove’s comparison to the Bout prisoner exchange, which was quite expressly a quid pro quo, but one carried out by the White House, and not the prosecutors in charge of Bout’s case. . .

. . . Moreover, dismissing the case will amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department. Despite Mr. Bove’s observation that the directive to dismiss the case has been reached without assessing the strength of the evidence against Adams, Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on “fanfare and sensational claims.” Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal. As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment from a new grand jury under my leadership. We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme. . .

. . . For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees, and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C. 3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of that duty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal.”). . .

. . . I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.

In the event you are unwilling to meet or to reconsider the directive in light of the problems raised by Mr. Bove’s memo, I am prepared to offer my resignation. It has been, and continues to be, my honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Here’s a short excerpt from Emil Bove’s acceptance of Danielle Sasson’s resignation letter (nicely annotated by the Grey Lady) in which he suspended lawyers working for Sasson and told her they’d all be investigated for disloyalty to the Boss and flagrant violation of Executive Order 14147.

On January 20, 2025, in Executive Order 14147, President Trump established the following policy: “It is the policy of the United States to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement.” In a February 5, 2025 memorandum setting forth the Department’s general policy regarding zealous advocacy on behalf of the United States, the Attorney General stated:

[A]ny attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law.

Your Office was not exempted from the President’s policy or the Attorney General’s memorandum.

Here is a former AG Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021 memorandum, duly rescinded by Pam Bondi in footnote two of the Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft [1] memo of 2/5/25. It is now officially and explicitly NOT the policy of the totally, like not-weaponized Trump DOJ that: the Department is steadfast in its commitment to protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence, and other forms of intimidation and harassment.

[1] Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft “the Leader’s words have the force of law”

Ban “Humanities” — and stop with the “Epstein” already, it’s antisemitic!

There is a powerful documentary about Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s most fearless and original thinkers, currently available to watch for free (until July 26th) on recently knee-capped PBS. Arendt is a hero of mine, I’ve seen the film twice so far, looking forward to seeing it at least once more before it vanishes behind a pay wall (though we all need to kick in some cash for PBS now after Koch/Project 2025 defunded it in a treacherous 51-48 “recission”). Her insights about totalitarianism (it is driven by intense mass loneliness/hopelessness) could not be more relevant today. Here is the link.

Charles Koch, fossil fuel baron and America’s most successful and influential living Nazi/Libertarian, has a favorite think tank, The Institute for Humane Studies. You can imagine how humane those studies must be if second generation Nazi Charles Koch loves them. The name of that outfit’s got to be up there with Arbeit Macht Frei for cynically “puckish” repurposing of language. That was a Nazi specialty, coming up with comically misleading names for hideous things. They even had a word for their creative designations to hide their actual purposes, sprachregelung. This refers to strict rules for language to be used about sensitive subjects. References to Jews on cattle cars heading to death camps in the East — sonderbehandlung [1] “special handling”, kind of darkly funny, to Nazis, anyway.

While playing with language, a central feature of our Age of Incoherence and brute force (destroy meaning, destroy the possibility of negotiation), as the largely incoherent master of the “weave” likes to do (or at least, can’t help himself from doing) why not contest the legitimacy of the National Endowment for the Humanities?

You can easily spin it: that agency, by its very title, is false, divisive and insanely, destructively over-inclusive — there is only one humanity, not multiple humanities! To claim there is more than one humanity is sick, a liberal plot to groom children to become sexual slaves to powerful creeps like Jeffrey Epstein. On second thought, not like Epstein, forget about Epstein, Epstein killed himself, Bill Barr said so, Epstein’s so-called victims are all lying, and anyway, who cares? Those “victims”, like the one who got millions of dollars in a settlement and then killed herself? Why does someone get millions of dollars and then kill themselves? You have to question that, don’t you? May I answer a question with a question? Is that questionable? That’s a funny word, when you think about it, “questionable”, right? What makes something questionable? Just asking a question, right? Right? Am I right?

Anyway, looking for concrete information about this sudden, posthumous fuss about one disgusting, rich, well-connected dead pedophile, I started reading the Wikipedia article about Virginia Guiffre. She was the young woman (14) who worked at Mar-a-Lago and fell into Epstein’s orbit, eventually broke free, sued and won large settlements against Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew (a real royal prince of a man, apparently) and then, quite recently, committed suicide.

Did you know that all this was out in 2005?

In March 2005, while Giuffre was still establishing her family in Australia, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein after a 14-year-old girl and her parents reported his behavior.[39] The girl described being recruited by a female classmate from her high school to give Epstein a massage at his mansion in exchange for money, wherein he subsequently molested her.[22][39] By October 2005, the police had a growing list of girls with similar claims of sexual abuse, statements from Epstein’s butlers corroborating their claims, and a search warrant for his Palm Beach property.[39]

Police detectives noted that the accusers all described a similar pattern[40] where Epstein would ask them to massage him and then sexually assault them during the massage. When police searched through Epstein’s trash, they found notes with the telephone numbers of the girls on them.[39] One of the girls was called by Epstein’s assistant while being questioned by police.[39]

Giuffre told the Miami Herald that she received a series of phone calls in rapid succession over three days in 2007. The first call was from Maxwell, then one day later came a call from Epstein, both of whom asked if she had spoken to authorities, followed by a third call from an FBI agent who stated that Giuffre had been identified as a victim during the first criminal case against Epstein.[41] She resisted speaking at length to the FBI until she was approached again about the matter in person, this time by the Australian Federal Police, six months after being contacted by phone.[41][42]

Photos, records and witnesses confirm large parts of Giuffre’s statements about her time with Epstein.[43][44]

Anyway, Epstein, because he was very rich and had many powerful friends (who he would NEVER think of blackmailing), got a sweetheart non-prosecution deal on his Florida state prosecution from then US Attorney for South Florida Alex Acosta. The state of Florida declined to prosecute, after monkey business during the investigation caused the lead law enforcement officer involved to turn it over to the FBI for federal investigation. The FBI referred it to Acosta, who, somehow, left the case in state court instead of federally prosecuting Epstein, as he should have, given the weight of the serious allegations against Epstein.

Wikipedia continues:

Lead police detective Joseph Recarey asserted that the state prosecutors were at first eager to pursue criminal action against Epstein, but that “everything took a turn” when lawyer Alan Dershowitz got involved.[45] Krischer then decided to take the unusual action of turning Epstein’s case over to a grand jury, and then presented testimony from only one girl. Epstein’s legal team aggressively sought concessions and prolonged the process when negotiating a plea deal with Acosta.[46] Acosta, who described the tactics of Epstein’s lawyers as a “year-long assault on the prosecution and prosecutors”, eventually agreed to sign a controversial non-prosecution agreement in 2008, which was done without informing the victims,[46] later determined to be in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.[47]

Reiter expressed that the state and federal prosecutors’ handling of the Epstein case amounted to “the worst failure of the criminal justice system” in modern times.[40]

Pursuant to the “sweetheart” non-prosecution agreement negotiated between Dershowitz and Acosta, Epstein was able to leave the minimum security prison whenever he needed a “massage”, after kind of pleading guilty only to not verifying the age of the young “prostitute” he hired that one time. Acosta wound up in Trump’s cabinet, until he had to resign in shame, and former Florida AG (2011-2019) Pam Bondi is currently Trump’s Attorney General, the one with only one client, the president.

What does Bondi have to do with it? Just asking.

As for Joe Biden, check this out!

Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey[99] and charged with sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy by prosecutors with the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York[100] In the indictment, Epstein was accused of soliciting massages from underage girls where the activities became increasingly sexual and then of enlisting the girls to recruit other underage victims for pay.[100] U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York appealed for other victims of Epstein to come forward.[100] The federal indictment also listed the key role of Epstein’s paid “employees and associates” responsible for scheduling victims.[100]

One month after his arrest, Epstein was found dead on August 10, 2019, after reportedly hanging himself in his Manhattan prison cell.[11][101]

On August 29, 2019, in the wake of Epstein’s death 19 days prior, the case against Epstein was closed after District Judge Richard Berman dismissed all sex trafficking charges.[102][103] Judge Berman expressed support for Epstein’s accusers, stating that he invited them to speak publicly at a hearing on August 27, 2019, out of “respect” for “the difficult decisions victims made to come forward”.[102] Giuffre was among the 16 women who spoke publicly at the hearing, which included Anouska De Georgiou, Sarah Ransome, Jennifer Araoz, Chauntae Davies, Courtney Wild, Theresa J. Helm, and Marijke Chartouni.[104] At the hearing, Giuffre stated, “The reckoning must not end. It must continue. He did not act alone. We the victims know that.” Prosecutors signaled that they would continue an investigation for potential co-conspirators.[103]

I know what you’ll say, Trump was president in 2019. That’s what they WANT YOU TO THINK!

Watch the Hannah Arendt documentary, please. It is, in part, an instruction manual for what we are up against at this perilous moment in history.

[1]