Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Trump being Trump

Colin Ferguson, the now mostly forgotten LIRR mass murdering “gunman,” insisted on defending himself at his murder trial. The judge was unable to convince him of the folly of doing so. Ferguson, who didn’t show any skill representing himself (and later lost an appeal on “ineffective assistance of counsel”), asked the witnesses “do you see the man who opened fire that day?” and the witnesses each said, “yeah, it was you.” The jury, not being as credulous or transactional as our corporate mass media, or as blinded as the followers of a charismatic cult leader, convicted Ferguson who is not eligible for parole until 2309.

I thought of Ferguson as I read Trump’s immediate, idiotic, violence inspiring lies following the hideous murder of extreme right wing activist and organizer Charlie Kirk:

In the Oval Office, President Donald J. Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” source

As a man who has never angrily gone after every judge who ever ruled against him, or their family, or ever called one stupid or corrupt, or threatened a prosecutor, never fomented a violent attack on police protecting Congress, never used tear gas and mounted federal law enforcement agents to disperse a legal, peaceful protest for a strongman photo op, or done anything else bad, ever, I guess the poor demented fellow gets to say whatever he likes. It’s a free country, after all.

Nice if-pology idiotically framed as an apology from judge scolded by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh about their new rule on binding precedent

This is one of the scariest distortions I’ve read in the New York Times recently. The article focuses on the conditional apology given by a Reagan appointed federal judge after he was scolded by two bullies on the 6-3 Leonard Leo majority Supreme Court for not following “binding precedent” — an unsigned summary order, with no legal reasoning they released on an emergency basis to serve President Project 2025.  Their ruling on massive cuts to the The Department of Education, they scolded, obviously applied to cutting NIH grants to study cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV and similar deadly plagues. This was a bit of unprecedented bullying by these radical right ideologues.   The Grey Lady styled it as the federal judge (who ruled correctly) messing up and legitimately being required to apologize.

Let us also note that an emergency application from Special Counsel Jack Smith languished for seven months before the 6-3 far right majority granted candidate Trump unprecedented blanket immunity for any crimes committed by a US president as part of his “core duties” (try to imagine the hypothetical where a president would have to commit a crime to do his job, the six provided none).   Their delayed ruling effectively ended the prosecutions of Trump for violating the Espionage Act (by taking classified documents to his home when he was out of office), obstructing justice (having his lawyers lie by claiming he’d returned everything), and trying to overturn the results of an election he was well aware he lost. 

In glaring contrast, every one of Trump’s emergency applications, complaining he’s not being allowed to commit random illegal acts, is immediately heard and almost invariably decided by the far right six in the hardened sociopath’s favor. As was his emergency application after he was busted by federal judges for illegally firing tens of thousands of civil servants without cause and violating other laws.

Here is the Gray Lady’s idiotic headline about the Supreme Court extending its power in a hideously fascistic manner (while neutering lower federal courts):

Judge Apologizes to Conservative Justices in Case Over N.I.H. Cuts

Judge Young said on Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.

“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Judge Young, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

“I can do nothing more than to say as honestly as I can: I certainly did not so intend, and that is foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer,” he added.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with White House in nearly every case it has considered.

Source

Wrong headline.  Wrong framing.  Here’s a better headline, off the top of my head:

Respected federal judge bullied by Trump appointees for not recognizing their unsigned, three page “emergency” shadow docket ruling as binding precedent.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with the New York Times sometimes, they only intermittently serve the interests of democracy in their reporting.

For one thing, the federal judge’s apology was conditional — if I offended you, I’m sorry. This is known as an if-pology. The New York Times apparently doesn’t make this distinction. The judge defended his actions while “apologizing”– how was he expected to know an unsigned three page emergency ruling was now binding federal precedent according to two members of the highly partisan Supreme Court majority? How indeed? He had to be told by two of the six doctrinaire jurists who made their way up the far right judicial pipeline by proving their brazenness and fidelity to the dogma of their extremist judicial fraternity.

Read the rest of the article, it doesn’t spell things out with the greatest of clarity, but it eventually manages to make clear how offended the judge who apologized was to be singled out this way for an ass whupping by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch (two prep school bullies whose powerful mothers both assured them they were destined to sit on the Supreme Court). Another triumph of incoherence by Project 2025’s architects, with a snazzy assist from the journal of record.

Supreme Court precedents are binding rulings that all federal courts must follow. They are traditionally based on articulated legal reasoning, analyzing and evaluating the arguments of both sides in light of past Supreme Court decisions directly impacting the issue in question. Supreme Court holdings are based on centuries of case law, legislative history, the text of the Constitution, the merits of both sides of the constitutional argument presented.

These emergency “shadow docket” rulings, sometimes only a paragraph, answer only the narrow burning question placed in front of the court for immediate, emergency decision.  The Supreme Court, in the past, has rarely ruled this way, except on the eve of an execution, for example.  It is now routine for Trump to run to his appointees for these “shadow docket” rulings which are made without briefing or argument, citing no cases, no precedent, no legal analysis.  His record is something like 16-0 in these unsigned majority  orders.

To force federal judges to consider these abbreviated, unsigned emergency rulings “binding precedent” is an abomination on the Constitution, the specialty of this particular group of six transactional corporate assholes in robes. Shame on the Grey Lady for helping to obscure how radical and dangerous this latest overreach by these judicial arsonists is.

Nice bit (hic) from Jair Bolsonaro

Jair Bolsonaro, who managed, with the help of right wing judges, to have his popular opponent jailed for fake corruption charges right before former insurrectionist Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, (“lock him up! lock him up!”) lost his reelection bid after one term (to the man he locked up). Then, advised by Steve Bannon, he tried a January 6 style overthrow of the election results, and immediately (while still president) fled to the US for health reasons. He’s now on trial for his crimes against the constitution of Brazil. Courtesy of the Grey Lady:

He didn’t appear in court because of poor health, his defense team told reporters outside the courthouse. Ahead of the trial, one of his sons told a Brazilian news site Mr. Bolsonaro had been suffering from debilitating hiccups that the former president attributes to complications from a stabbing attack on the campaign trail in 2018. [1]

Trump’s “illegally” (subject to unsigned shadow docket order by the Federalist Six) imposed 75,000% tariff on Brazil when it stubbornly refused to halt the totally unfair persecution of democratically elected Hall of Fame hiccupper Jair Bolsonaro who had the presidency illegally stolen from him by communists and intellectuals in 2022 and didn’t do anything Trump and his people didn’t also do, literally, perfectly, legally, in the months prior to, and on, the Day of Love, January 6, 2021. Many people, billionaires and poor people alike, love dictators!

[1] 

Mr. Bolsonaro, 70, has been under house arrest, wearing an ankle monitor, for weeks. Then, over the weekend, Brazilian authorities tightened security measures, placing police officers around his home amid worries that he may try to flee and possibly seek refuge at the U.S. Embassy near his home.

Prosecutors accuse Mr. Bolsonaro and seven members of his inner circle of overseeing a vast conspiracy to cling to power after his defeat at the polls in 2022, seeking to overturn the results, trying to enlist the military in their plot and drafting plans to poison Mr. Bolsonaro’s rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is now Brazil’s president.

Mr. Bolsonaro and the other defendants face criminal charges, including the “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law” and “coup d’état.” If found guilty, Mr. Bolsonaro could be sentenced to more than 40 years in prison.

source

Note, the scrupulously fair to Nazis NY Times (see my upcoming post for more chilling details) presently does not allow me to easily attach a “gift” link to their articles.  This is a new innovation, I was able to attach a gift link yesterday. If you have a subscription to the NYT, you can read the rest of the article, perhaps now you can even without one.   The gist of the article is in this footnote.

How Nazis always do it

When it comes to manipulating public opinion, particularly regarding an embarrassment to the party in power, lead with an aggressive, lying attack directly contradicting the actual truth.

The Environmental Protection Agency [1], a thoughtful, forward-looking Nixon creation hated by Project 2025 and Leonard Leo’s Supreme Court, had its legs cut off by the 6-3 majority.  They ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to mandate carbon emissions from existing power plants. The 2022 decision also opened the door for a future Unitary Executive to have the final word over government scientists on most things formerly protected by the EPA.    Not enough for Project 2025, the arms and head had to be cut off too. 

So President Project 2025 obliged.

The Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”

Source

Here’s Trump appointee-speak (note the consistent sprachregelung, with piquant, aromatic notes of the boss’s seat) for what the EPA, and the entire federal government, which has the final say in every state, now stands for (and it’s not the so-called environment, woke mind virus infested cucks!)

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said.

But [Heather adds], increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.

Like Dr. Brainworm’s clueless concepts of a plan to make random little kids in airports not strike him as so mitochondrially defective.

Fuck those fucking putos.

They only get away with this incoherent, immoral, indecent, crude, lying lawlessness if good people stop fighting them at every turn. It is on us all, to pace ourselves and do whatever is in our power to do, Remember to stay encouraged by the uniformly high level of reckless idiocy and constant failure displayed by these mirthless assclowns [2] as they carry out their boss’s wildly unpopular cruelties. Do not accept deliberate incoherence as the final word.

[1]

The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. Wikipedia

[2] They might actually be asshats:

In the word’s official entry in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, lexicographers theorized that it could be a play on the phrase to “have one’s head up one’s ass,” an insult which, if pictured literally, would indeed result in the person’s ass serving as a sort of hat. However, the author concluded, “a more precise history will depend on the location of further attestations.” source

The Incoherence is the point

Adam Serwer, writing about Trump in 2018, came up with an excellent explainer of Trump and MAGA (and all fascist regimes, actually) “the cruelty is the point.” It is, indeed. Public cruelty to cow people and make those who love sadism thrill to the in-your-fucking-face-asshole aspect of the cruelty is exactly the point. Think of the disgusting excesses of ICE, Trump’s masked gestapo, and how, somehow, no laws apply to them anywhere in the United States because they have jurisdiction over immigration and customs. An immigrant who shows up for his immigration hearing and gets grabbed and sent to Sudan? BINGO — cruel! Consider the recent FBI raid on John Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md. The FBI closed the street he lives on at 7 a.m., sent in a dozen vans with sirens blaring and lights flashing, not because Bolton posed any threat to anyone (though he is one of the most despicable neo-con assholes of the last 30 years) but to make a very public spectacle of humiliating this Trump critic in a naked act of revenge using the full power of the state.

So, absolutely, the politics of cruelty is an essential feature of Trumpism/fascism, got to try to keep everyone scared into compliance. What strikes me over and over in the Age of Trump is the incoherence of the relentless conman and his administration, and the MAGA insistence that incoherence, from the mouths of their leaders, is just as valid as the most well-reasoned, evidence-based arguments. Trump is the same as Hitler in this regard, or Stalin, or Putin, or any other boldly incoherence-spouting thug that has attained that level of power. Of course Ukraine started the war with Russia, it’s vicious insistence on its right to exist as an independent nation is an eternal provocation that must be redressed with overwhelming violence! What choice did Putin have?

As destructive, or more destructive, than the cruelty: The Incoherence is the Point. Destroy the possibility of truth and any dialogue not based entirely on lying, outrageous, hyper-partisan talking points. The incidence of voter fraud in all elections since 1982? Vanishingly small, statistically insignificant, something like 0.0001% of all votes cast — nonetheless, voter fraud is, according to MAGA, and amplified on ‘both sides’ corporate media (not to mention on Fair and Balanced FOX), the gravest threat to democracy our threatened nation of American carnage has ever faced. Tax money invested in renewable energy? Waste, fraud and abuse, based on a liberal hoax spread by climate alarmists, people who irrationally hate fossil fuel!

Vaccines kill, they don’t save anybody from anything. Food and medicine for starving children outside the USA, waiting in warehouses as Congress appropriated the funds for their distribution long ago? Let it rot, it’s all waste, fraud and abuse, 103 dying per hour worldwide is fine, it’s not happening here, those are shithole countries. Making voting too easy for everybody kills democracy. The party in power may do whatever it likes to retain power and disenfranchise political opponents, that is the will of the plurality that gave them their overwhelming mandate to rule. Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell totally exonerates “gentleman” Trump of allegations of sex with minors! She said so herself, in exchange for transfer to a nicer prison, fair is fair! There are countless examples of childish senselessness every day from Trump and his lackeys.

Here’s a beautiful illustration. What kind of demented idiot wears a hat, referring to himself in the third person, announcing that he was right about everything? You guessed it.

You can see the thought bubble over his sleepy looking face.

“He was right to take the classified documents and lie about having them, he made a shit ton of money selling them and got away with it, so no crime. He was right to foment a riot to try to stay in power, after the fake elector plot was foiled by a traitor vice president, because everybody around him was a coward and a liar who pretended the election wasn’t stolen. History proved him right, and all the so-called convicted rioters were totally vindicated of ‘wrongdoing’ with pardons on day one. Fraudulent use of charitable donations? Impossible, the money was given to him, to him! And by ‘he’, of course, I mean me. Always me, a person who is and was and will be always right, about everything, obviously!”

Words matter the most in incoherent times

Hannah Arendt pointed out that Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann’s inability to speak, except for cliches, revealed his inability to think. Language is an indispensable tool for discussing and understanding the world around us. Fascists deliberately distort and oversimplify language. This destruction of language is an essential part of destroying the ability to think critically. Critical thinking, like Critical Race Theory, is a deadly threat to would-be tyrants. Here’s a small, insignificant example of the blurring of language in the service of a point of view.

A MAGA podcaster interviewed Kash Patel, just before he became FBI director, Kashyap wearing a grey T-shirt with  K $ H in large letterboxed letters, over the words “Fight with Kash”.   

Interviewer:   “You say the FBI has Epstein’s list.   They’re sitting on it.  That doesn’t seem like something you should do.  You’re protecting the world’s foremost predator.  That seems like an evil thing,  regardless of who may be embarrassed in the release of that list.  Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederast, the largest scale pederast, in human history?”

Kashyap Pramod Patel:   “Simple.  Because of who’s on that list.”

I was surprised to learn that Kashyap wasn’t always a revenge-fueled man of infinite ambition.  In fact, back in the day, the upper caste Indian Hindu, son of an immigrant from Uganda whose family tree is traceable back 18 generations in Gujarat, was kind of woke.   Wikipedia informs us: Patel attended Garden City High School and his senior-year quote was “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason”, by Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Make of that what you will.  Patel has obviously evolved a long way from his quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s friend Abraham Heschel days.

To set the record straight on language, though.  Words have specific meanings and uses. Losing nuance is a step toward incoherence, especially dangerous in an age where a solid 40% consider passionate incoherence superior to a reasoned factual argument, for purposes of moving masses of confused people to concerted action. This solid incoherence embracing 40% owns most of the guns in America. 

The words pedophile and pederast are not interchangeable, though both describe adult men who sexually prey on often unwilling underaged victims.   These fuckers have very specific tastes. Epstein and his guests were powerful, lust-crazed monsters who did terrible, lifelong damage to many vulnerable, groomed, underaged young women and girls, but I’ve never heard it alleged, except by a MAGA podcaster, that serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein was a pederast.    

 

Not that it makes much difference to the abused boy or girl.  If you’re raped as a child, do the sexual predilections of your rapist really matter?  

Words and nuance do matter, though, especially in this incoherent age of MAGA and its worldwide analogues. Incoherent, fervently believed rationales for doing things generally lead to bad endings for everybody involved.

More on FBI director Kashyap Pramod Patel, from his most recent incarnation (from Wikipedia):

In April 2017, Patel began working for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Representative Devin Nunes.[5] As an aide to Nunes, Patel investigated the theory that Ukrainians were promulgating information about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[13] The New York Times later reported that he was the primary author of the Nunes memo,[9] which alleged that Federal Bureau of Investigation officials abused their authority in the FBI investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials, seeking a warrant for Carter Page, an advisor to Donald Trump, and relying on claims made by Christopher Steele, a British intelligence officer who was allegedly paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.[14] The memo’s veracity was highly questioned, but it bolstered Patel’s standing among Trump allies.[13] In April 2018, the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation, Rod Rosenstein, asked whether Patel had traveled to London the previous year to interview Steele; according to the Times, he did not provide a definitive answer.[15]   

and

Documents provided to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack and accounts of officials allege that Patel discussed security at the Capitol before and during the January 6 Capitol attack, and that he repeatedly contacted Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, on the day of the attack.[40] He was in [Gauleiter Stephen] Miller’s office during the attack.[41]

In April, Trump devised a plan to oust FBI director Christopher A. Wray and to appoint William Evanina to lead the bureau, while Patel would become deputy director. Attorney General William Barr halted the plan, threatening to resign.[42] In January 2021, Axios reported that Trump sought to appoint Patel as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in December 2020. In response, CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign.[43] At the annual Army–Navy Game that month, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confronted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, repeatedly and loudly asking whether Patel was going to replace Wray or Haspel.[44] In the final days of Trump’s presidency, Mike Lindell, the founder and chief executive of My Pillow, went to the White House; Jabin Botsford, a photographer for The Washington Post, captured a document Lindell was holding that read, “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting”.[45] In April 2022, Patel told an audience that he had advised Trump to fire senior Department of Justice officials.[46]

This is from Steve Bannon’s ad for a movie, based on a book by Kashyap Pramod Patel that contains a partial enemies list, produced by Steve Bannon:

From Steve Bannon and the visionary team behind “Clinton Cash”, this groundbreaking film will leave you on the edge of your seat. “Government Gangsters,” based on the best-selling book by Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, pulls back the curtain on the sinister world of corrupt bureaucrats, government officials, and their media accomplices, as they conspired to bring down a sitting President, Donald J. Trump, and all those who support him. This explosive film uncovers the depths of deceit and manipulation they employ daily, betraying the very system they vowed to protect. “Government Gangsters” is not just a film-it’s a revelation that will forever alter your perception of government. May we never need another film like this.

Emil Bove III

Emil Bove, former Trump criminal lawyer [1], is on Trump’s short list to replace Samuel Alito, once Bove has been appointed to, and served briefly on, the federal appeals court. Bove was the acting head of the DOJ who dismissed the Eric Adams indictment and sought to keep the charges hanging over Adams’ head by dismissing the case “without prejudice” (meaning, he could prosecute at will in the future). Bove was doing this to advance Trump/Miller’s draconian deportation program by ensuring that NYC mayor Adams allowed ICE to operate freely in NYC, something Adams agreed to as part of a quid pro quo to escape prosecution for a variety of felonies.

Bove was outraged at the suggestion of a quid pro quo, as he told the judge. He also told the judge that even it was a quid pro quo, the judge still couldn’t stop DOJ from dismissing the case. Of course, after the quid pro quo was announced by Bove, U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon and six other federal prosecutors resigned in protest. Four deputy mayors in Adams’ administration also resigned.

Bove sent a lawyer to federal court in Maryland to stonewall the judge (one of the many currently sued on Trump’s behalf by rabid AG Pam Bondi’s DOJ) in the Abrego Garcia abduction/rendition to El Salvador prison for terrorists case. Erez Reuveni, experienced, recently promoted DOJ lawyer, who had argued Trump’s cases zealously in the Orange Polyp’s first term, was, as his duty to the Constitution required, candid with the court.

That attorney, former DOJ assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, Erez Reuveni, (I applauded the candor he was fired for at the time) is now a whistleblower, issuing a detailed warning about the corrupt orders he was given (lie to the court) by Bove, supremely loyal Nazi fuck and former Trump criminal lawyer that Trump is trying to ram on to the federal appeals court.

Bove stonewalled Congress the other day as he claimed not to recall telling Reuveni and a room full of DOJ lawyers to be ready to say “fuck you” to federal judges. “I don’t recall” said Bove, any time he was pressed, as every one of these carefully coached creeps does when a truthful answer would tank their nomination.

Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint begins:

Between March 14, 2025, and April 5, 2025, Mr. Reuveni, almost immediately after receiving notice of his promotion to serve as Acting Deputy Director of OIL, became aware of the plans of DOJ leadership to resist court orders that would impede potentially illegal efforts to deport noncitizens, and further became aware of the details to execute those plans. source

Here’s the money shot, the scene Bove claims not to recall:

Like so many other Trump Derangement Syndrome leftie commie fascist weirdos, anyone in MAGA world who does not line up to loyally do whatever they are asked, fired DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni was at one time, not long ago, a warrior for the mad president. Check this out.

It is a reasonable question to ask of Bove, if you have so little recall of what you said as acting head of the DOJ, since you can’t remember what every other lawyer in that suddenly silent room heard you say, should you be a fucking judge in the first place, you lying sack of sanctimonious shit?

And, since we live in a world of wrap around propaganda, here’s Rupert Murdoch, doing his part.  Language matters. Trump “reveals”…

[1] Wikipedia: In September 2023, he became a partner at Blanche Law, a law firm founded by Todd Blanche. Days later, Bove joined Donald Trump‘s criminal defense team.[12] In the state court criminal trial of Trump in New York, he was second chair to Blanche on Trump’s defense team.[18][19] Bove represented Trump in the federal classified documents and election obstruction cases.[20]

Great, important bit of reporting on Trump’s 2024 “mandate”

If you believe that the vastly unpopular, eternally angry, distracted, greedy, “transactional”, lying, increasingly deranged 47th president happened to win every swing state (a rare feat in any presidential election), by virtually identical margins (all just above the recount margin) and that the 20,000,000 ballot decline in mail-in ballots, (the first time the number hasn’t increased since 2008), had nothing to do with Trump megadonor/postmaster DeJoy’s refusal to segregate mail-in ballots or postmark them when they arrived, voter suppression laws in every red state, single drop boxes in counties of millions of voters, fake drop boxes, Russian bomb threats to Democratic precincts on Election Day, had nothing to do with Trump’s narrow victory in 2024, then the piece linked below probably won’t interest you.

To anyone who finds the narrow victory of a convicted felon (who escaped two other massive felony convictions — one for treason, under the Espionage Act, the other for a long campaign of fraud and inciting a riot to overturn election results — thanks to partisan judges he appointed), given carte blanche by an activist, partisan 6-3 Supreme Court stocked with members of a far-right judicial fraternity serving the interests of the top 0.2%, a bit suspicious, the factors laid out in this article will be of great interest to you — and hopefully lead AGs in those swing states to open investigations.

source

The failure to question so many suspicious factors in the first presidential election following an attempted coup by the winning candidate, including multiple frauds (fake electors, illegal pressure campaigns to state officials to change votes, tampering with voting machines, defaming election workers, etc.) and a violent insurrection at the Capitol, led by the former and current president, leaving aside Palantir and Musk, and their sophisticated data mining and influence operations that make Cambridge Analytica’s Brexit techniques look primitive, results in blaming the Democrats for a failed campaign, blaming Joe Biden’s slowness to step aside, blaming democracy itself for giving us a dangerous maniac president we can’t deny won fairly.

The endlessly corrupt Trump’s years of angrily lying about a “rigged”, “stolen” 2020 election, and making acceptance of that lie a condition for serving as a Republican official, have silenced anyone in his party, the corporate media, and virtually all of the Democratic party, from expressing reasonable suspicions or making charges related to what appears to be an energetically “engineered” election result. Critics probably fear appearing as delusional as sore losers like Trump, Kari Lake and the fully pardoned J6 rioters. Say what you like about their despicable techniques, but Nazis are always good at cowing opponents, especially if there are billions in corporate profits and fundraising involved.

Trump’s perverse veneration of slaveholders = fascist gold

Historian Timothy Snyder reminds us that Trump’s veneration of oath-breakers and traitors, guys like Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, (or, for that matter, insurrectionist rioters like Trump’s pardoned J6 Day of Love crew), is intended to create a false narrative about the past in order to dominate the present. Fascist politics frames everything as a death struggle, an eternal battle of the wills, between us and our sick, evil, dangerous “enemies” (whoever they may be that day). In the case of Trump, the enemy is any American who opposes his right to rule like the CEO of a privately held company his father gave him.

Trump announced recently to a carefully selected group of MAGA soldiers, at Hegseth-renamed Fort Bragg, that he is ignoring a bipartisan law Congress overrode his veto to pass, and renaming US military bases for the violent racist scoundrels who led an army against the USA to preserve “The Peculiar Institution” (slavery). By law, he has no power to do this. As bellicose, in-your-face, strongman propaganda? Gold.

The selected troops assembled for his video op applauded as Trump promised to change the name of former Fort (Robert E.) Lee back from its current name (in memory of a black military heroes) [1]. He’s constantly appealing to the unhealed heart of the Old Confederacy, which was never defeated, in the minds of the descendants of those who lost the Civil War they still claim Northern aggression started.

Trump’s most devoted base is largely down in Dixie, among white Evangelical Christians.   The former Confederacy is bright red on the electoral map, and for the same irrational reason — the claimed God-given right of one Christian race to rule all the others.  In the mind of his base, Trump’s not going to let those goddamned black criminals who are eating the dogs, eating the cats, eat our goddamned pets and rape our women.  NOT ANYMORE!

Robert E. Lee, the American general who led Confederate troops in an actual war against the United States (most American casualties ever), is on a US postage stamp, for fuck’s sake. His former slave plantation became Arlington National Cemetery, but only after his death. A US military base was long named after this motherfucker. We don’t remember Lee as Benedict Arnold, we remember him as a refined and dignified southern gentleman who, out of loyalty to his home and family (many of whom apparently were horrified when he turned down Lincoln’s offer to lead the Union army) took up the glorious Lost Cause, protecting the rights of wealthy “planters” to own certain human beings and do with them as they pleased.

It’s Trump’s dream too. To do as he pleases, always, with no restraint from anyone because he is entitled, as a result of being born rich and the heir to a highly successful psychopath who bailed him out over and over from the results of his own hubris and stupidity. He has never been held accountable for anything he’s done in a long life of contempt, dishonesty and crime (the turd will be 79 on Saturday). He won Trump v. US, after all (consider the power of the name of that lawsuit) — not only is he the first president legally allowed to commit crimes if he believes they are part of his duties as Leader, but, perhaps even more sweet to the transactional, very stable business genius, no presidential pardon, even if bought and paid for outright, publicly and with receipts, can ever be challenged in court.

His $130,000,000 birthday present to himself, on the taxpayers’ dime, is a Soviet style military parade. He’s had sturdy fences constructed all along its route (to avoid another J6 when DC was completely unprepared for the illegal, unpermitted march he had planned and announced while whipping up the crowd to violence) and made sure no permitted protest is allowed within earshot of this North Korea-style spectacle he has planned for himself.

After all, traitors and sick, dangerous criminal maniacs prevented this parade during his first term, he has a right to it and he will have it, thank you very much. He’s publicly warned protesters that he’ll smash them hard in the fucking face if they try to rain on his big, beautiful birthday parade. He’s doing everything in his considerable power to provoke the violence that will allow him to do what his hero, Mr. Hitler, did when seizing power– invoke a national emergency and mobilize the military and secret police against any citizen who does not raise his arm in a proper Trump salute.

In this difficult moment, when this desperate and doddering dictator wannabe, who has already done such damage to the country while unable to pass anything in Congress or win a lawsuit in any court he doesn’t own 6-3, is playing his last card — provoking violence — we all have to keep our heads. It would be easy enough for Trump’s lackies to arrange to have a few dozen pardoned J6 rioters (perhaps even the dog dick who proudly marched the Confederate flag through as the others ransacked the Capitol, or the horned Q-Anon Shaman himself) join each protest and throw rocks, or fire guns at, cops. Putin wouldn’t hesitate, nor would any other dictator. I put nothing past these motherfuckers who make a career of lapping at their Leader’s colon.

Call me Anne Frank, but I am putting my faith in the better angels among us. The stakes are known to everyone, and I’m counting on the restraint of good people here in America resisting this wave of evil. If I’m wrong, I’ll try to send y’all a postcard on the way to Camp Donald J. Trump.

[1] “In the actual history of the United States, one war is central: the Civil War. Trump, who has never seen the point of the Union Army defending the republic, now seems now to have moved on to the position that the Confederacy should have won. He promised to rename Fort Gregg-Adams, the first base named for African-Americans, to Fort Robert E. Lee. The base in question hasn’t been known by the full name of the confederate commander since 1950. Lee was a traitor, an oathbreaker, a defender of slavery and the commander of a force whose mission was to break up the United States of America.” source

“I had Schleicher shot”

Adolf Hitler was one of history’s most infamous, prolific liars and mass murderers. Or, if you admire the Führer and think his program made a lot of sense, arguably history’s greatest self-made man. Or both can be true at once, or partly or mostly true, and other things besides: vegetarian, artistic, eccentric, flatulent, insane, loved dogs, sadist. We often forget, in this divisive, fascistic age of black and white when we all must be either good or evil, that more than one thing can be true about each of us, and that some of these true things directly contradict other true things about us.

History is deep, complicated, nuanced, not straightforward and, though those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, it never repeats itself exactly. Historians say it doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain supposedly observed. I’m thinking about Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag in the spring of 1934, about a year into his 1,000 Year Reich, a couple of weeks after The Night of the Long Knives, a nationwide execution of all of Hitler’s most prominent political rivals.

Hitler, a talented liar, was a trailblazing pioneer of the Big Lie, a technique of mass media manipulation, based on an audacious, endlessly repeated lie, that every powerful psychopath and dictator always makes use of.  Hitler lied without hesitation, to everybody and under all circumstances.  He said whatever he needed to say, according to the transactional needs of the immediate contest he was determined to win.  

He had the Prime Minister of Britain in his office in the months leading up to World War Two and was determined to have the European Allies, his former enemies, let him have Czechoslovakia (coincidentally, producers of the world’s best munitions). After throwing a terrifying temper tantrum, rolling on the floor biting at furniture as he snarled and screamed, he calmed himself and managed to sincerely assure British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin that once Germany had the Sudetenland and the German population of Czechoslovakia was back in German hands, that the Fatherland’s territorial demands would be at an end. Peace in our time, how about it, old bean?

Chamberlin shook his hand and came back to England with the good news that war had been avoided through diplomacy (that would be remembered by history as appeasement). Once Germany had Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s men dressed some political prisoners in Polish uniforms and shot them in the act of attacking a German border outpost. With the photographic proof of dead Polish aggressors at the border, the Führer then declared war on Poland, and the rest, as they say, is history. 70-85 million (70,000,000 to 85,000,000) dead later, in another war Hitler claimed had been started by a global cabal of Jewish elders (we did the First World War, then known as The Great War, too), the Führer condemned the nation that had betrayed and failed him, shot his wife, shot his dog and then shot himself.

I apparently wrote this on February 6, 2020. It is timely today:

Once you remove the last legal restraints on a lawless person, the results are easy to predict.  

I’m haunted by the image of Mr. Hitler, already the dictator of Germany for a year and a half, finally sending the Gestapo out to liquidate his enemies in “The Night of the Long Knives”.   Everyone on Mr. Hitler’s voluminous enemies list was murdered that night, June 30, 1934, including a nationally known ultra-conservative politician and decorated German general named Kurt von Schleicher.  He was shot seven times while sitting at his desk, his wife was also killed; a year later Schleicher’s cook, the only eye witness to the shooting, mysteriously drowned. 

The killing of Schleicher was sold the next morning in the Nazi press as an act of self-defense by the men sent to peacefully take Schleicher into custody on charges of high treason.  The Nazi story in the Nazi-controlled mass media was that they’d shot the accused traitor when he resisted arrest by opening fire on them, as desperate, insane traitors often do.  Two weeks later Mr. Hitler could nonchalantly drop the lie during a Reichstag speech and simply tell the nation: “I had Schleicher shot.”   

Even though “jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging and our country is thriving and highly respected again” I am feeling unaccountably uneasy.  (2025 note: Biden actually achieved most of these things, after, heh, stealing the 2020 election…) I keep thinking of what our infallible leader tweeted right after Mueller’s investigation “completely and totally exonerated” the man about whose ten counts of obstruction of justice Robert Mueller III wrote “we could not exonerate him.”   

Mueller, the lifelong Republican who “completely exonerated” Trump, of course —  a traitor– and the treason of his witch hunting partisan investigators is being criminally investigated by the aggressive Attorney General’s most aggressive investigator even as we joyously celebrate the unprecedented greatness of our great land.  Here’s the part of the president’s tweet I can’t manage to forget:

“It is finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.”

The Führer used the same kind of passion in sharing his deepest feelings with his faithful followers about his sick and dangerous enemies, the ones he said would be hanging from lamp posts, or slowly strangled on piano wire, on film, for his repeated viewing pleasure.

History rhymes, but it doesn’t always go according to a would-be tyrant’s plans, no matter how wealthy, powerful and unscrupulous his backers are.

German democracy was only about fifteen years-old when Hitler invoked the constitutional Emergency Powers his party never gave up (it’s always an emergency when one of these motherfuckers is in power, as we have seen). Our democracy, the world’s oldest, will be 250 next summer. Our founding document, The Declaration of Independence, a copy of which Trump hung on the wall of the Oval Office, has the same meaning to Trump as his interpretation of the MAGA riot of January 6, 2021 — it’s all about love, loyalty, and honor, and, personal loyalty to the boss, and freedom, and the God-given right to take long showers with plenty of water pressure to wash the shampoo out of your thick, luxuriant head of hair. Everything but what it actually is. We hold these truths to be self-evident, and shit. In the immortal words of George Lopez, fuck that puto.