Category Archives: Law and Justice

Help Bandy Lee’s message go viral!

Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist who has great, and highly relevant, expertise from years working with violent psychopaths. Feeling that she had a professional duty to warn, based on her observations of newly elected President trump, she convened a 2017 conference on the Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Lee and twenty-six highly respected colleagues, including Robert J. Lifton (author of, among other works, “The Nazi Doctors”) published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, NY Times best-seller and invaluable primer on malignant narcissism. I recommend that book to everyone.

Trump’s allies were able to marginalize the indispensable guide to Trump’s pathology and largely remove it from public discussion. The conservative American Psychiatric Association, ably aided by the powerful NY Times, attacked and vilified the book as a clear violation of the APA’s Goldwater Rule.

That rule (binding only on members of the APA, but treated as an inviolable federal law) states that, no matter what public evidence exists, psychiatrists are forbidden from offering their informed opinions about any public person they have not personally interviewed — and may publicly draw psychiatric conclusions only if the person in question authorizes it.

In other words, the Goldwater Rule states that, if an angry psychopath in a position of public power is cool with public discussion of their rage and unslakable thirst for revenge, after personally consulting with a shrink, only then may the psychiatrist publicly speak about it.

Bandy Lee is brilliant, courageous, articulate and she has a CRUCIAL message that would wake up millions of undecided voters, if they were exposed to it. She has assembled great experts, and recently held a second conference on trump’s dangerous unfitness at the National Press Club [1]. What she has not been able to do is disseminate her message widely, in a way succinct enough for the average distracted, traumatized, non-intellectual American voter to digest, or even encounter.

Bandy Lee’s website is http://www.bandylee.com. Her Substack newsletter is at https://bandyxlee.substack.com/. You can read her detailed assessments and hear long form interviews at those sites, along with a video of the full recent conference. Sadly, you will never encounter her CRUCIAL information in a short, shareable form that could (and should, and MUST) go viral.

I URGE ANYONE READING THIS to put on your thinking cap and find a way to recruit a Ryan Reynolds, or some other genius of social media manipulation, for help getting Bandy Lee’s crucial message out to millions, particularly as it could well be the deciding factor for the “undecided” voters out there.

As I wrote to her on Substack:

Corporations (including a democratic forum like Substack) control most communication in the US, one way or the other.  There are only two ways to influence mass public opinion, both engines for disseminating persuasive information/content, true or false, are problematic.  

The corporate mass media news and editorial narrative leaves out context, engages in false equivalencies, allows lies to air unchecked, consents in the destruction of norms, normalizes pathology, etc.  Profit-driven mass media, whose only motive is financial gain, exerts tremendous influence on most Americans, particularly older voters.

“Social Media”, odious and divisive as it also is, is a powerful driver of public opinion, for better and for worse.  A meme is born when it hits quick, memorably makes a good point, and makes people want to share it.  Billions of shares of a video featuring a memorable dance to a song called Gangnam Style.

I don’t know how to use social media myself, as I’ve learned again recently trying to get answers for why trump appointees Louis DeJoy (slow the mail, cut costs) and Joseph Caffari (Homeland Security IG who, uh, accidentally let all January 6 secret service evidence be irretrievably destroyed) are still in positions of power, but there are geniuses in the field of internet marketing with expertise in how to create viral short videos.  Talk to the folks at Meidas Touch about how to make important, individual points in shareable 30 second bytes.   

Your expert insights need to be set out in short, shareable videos.  If undecided voters are exposed to your message, it’s hard to believe many would vote for trump.   You should be in touch with the Lincoln Project, for example, their take on your main points about Trump’s dangerousness, coming from experts in violent pathology assisted by experts in propaganda, would get wider exposure.  Talk to Anthony Davis about creating some shorts from your interviews with him, I have seen many 30-60 second sections of those talks that would make great shareable shorts.   We need 30 second clips of some of your best points, points that can instantly be shared. Millions of people need to hear them!

Your best-selling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is an indispensable primer for understanding the personality type capable of pathological violence.  That we have a presidential candidate for a major political party possessing all the clear warning signs of destructive rage, on steroids, is CRUCIAL for undecided voters to know.  

Trump’s brand is violence, fighting, oppositionality, never admitting fault or defeat.  A classic psychopath.   He’s already fomented criminal violence in his name that he’s promised pardons for, as well as constant threats of, and pardons for, future violence.   His handpicked (by his handlers) Supreme Court majority recently ruled that his pardons may not be questioned or appealed, even if they are offered for sale.

Blah, blah, blah. . . Dr. Lee is busy and I haven’t heard back from her.

On the well-funded extremist right, they always march in lockstep, speaking in one voice, defiantly repeating the same disproven lies over and over until they wear people out. On the non-fascistic side of the spectrum there are a million voices, ten million shades of nuance, and those diverse and personal messages have neither the persistence nor the compelling public force of a unified, infuriating talking point grunted over and over and over and endlessly amplified by mass media.

Bandy Lee correctly diagnoses the danger we face right now — Trumpism is a public health emergency, like the recent pandemic. Trump contagion (which, to be fair, emanates as much from Charles Koch, Leonard Leo, John Roberts and their filthy ilk as from their current performative avatar, the Orange Polyp, himself) has made millions admire and imitate his lowest impulses, impulses he cannot control. This way lies rage, more and more violence and eventually mass murder, guaranteed.

Want a nice factoid? In 2014 there were 912 antisemitic incidents in the United States, a number that has gone up every year since Trump’s (oops, trump’s) 2016 election — last year there were 8,873 reported antisemitic incidents [2]. I would assume all hate crimes in the US have increased in similar numbers, remember the violent aftermath of trump’s witty, peaceful Kung Flu call to violence?

You want to argue about whether Trump is dangerously, violently insane, an American Hitler or not? Put him in back power, surrounded by loyal MAGA appointees, wait a couple of years and — guaranteed, I’ll meet you in a death camp somewhere (if we’re lucky, that is). It took the actual Hitler twenty full years, from his violent attempted coup, to the opening of the first true Nazi death camps. All these creatures need is time.

[1] Bandy Lee, earlier today:

The theme of our conference was that fitness is not a subjective, partisan, or even political “opinion” but a scientific finding based on extensive research, clinical experience, and uniform application of medical standards to military officers, officers handling nuclear weapons, surgeons, and executive officials.  The consensus at the conference was that mental fitness is critically important for the U.S. presidency and that Donald Trump is decisively unfit.  It should become widely known that Trump’s mental unfitness has now been objectively measured in multiple ways; that mental health expertise is critical to explaining what he is and is not capable of doing; how dangerous it is to have a mentally unfit person in a position of power; and how his psychological dangers can quickly spread into social, cultural, and geopolitical dangers, by rendering domestic legal and political institutions, and global balances and alliances ineffectual.

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[2] Reporter Bob Garfield, in a particularly brilliant post, includes this:

The preemptive blame, of course, is meant to both intimidate Jewish voters and rally the violent among MAGA faithful, such as the ones who attacked the Capitol over his 2020 “stolen election” lies, such as the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” such as the mass murderers who shot six Jews to death at a deli in Jersey City, NJ, such as Robert Bowers, guilty of gunning down worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, such as the perpetrators of 8873 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year alone (in 2014, the year before Trump’s first presidential campaign, there were 912, and the number has risen every year since), such as the Proud Boys, Goyim Defense League, Blood Tribe, Ku Klux Klan, QAnon, Black Hebrew Israelites, Atomwaffen Division and other hate groups.

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Debunking just one MAGA lie

As MAGA prepares to once again fight like hell (or they won’t have a country anymore) their lawyers have filed dozens of election challenge cases already [1]. As their ilk does for every other lost cause or lie, they have a simple (if false) answer about all those court cases they lost last time:

All MAGA election-related cases were dismissed not on the merits, but on procedural grounds, like lack of standing.

Even if this were true — it is not — lack of standing is a fatal flaw in a lawsuit, as is failure to state a legally coherent complaint (supported by evidence). In order to win a case a party must have standing — an actual provable injury the court can address — in order to proceed.

The scumbag Attorney General of Texas brought a case to the Supreme Court, signed on to by legal eagle MAGA Mike Johnson and more than a hundred MAGA legislators, seeking to overturn voting results in several states Trump lost in 2020. Even the MAGA Six had to acknowledge that Texas had no standing to bring this case limiting what other states could do. Nor did any of the loyal legislators, led by MAGA Mike Johnson, who signed on to the law suit to do their master’s bidding, have even the remotest theory of standing to act as “friends of the court”.

It is easy to forget the hundred plus lawsuits the RNC and Trump brought prior to the 2020 election, to try to suppress voting by Democrats. Take the sickening, desperate case of Trump v. Boockvar in Pennsylvania. In that case Trump 2020 and the RNC cited purely speculative harms they might have suffered if absentee voting was allowed to take place as planned during the peak of the pandemic. They laid out for the court the specter of theoretical, massive fraud never remotely seen in US elections.

They submitted no evidence to support their claim (there was none), yet the judge, a Trump appointee from the Federalist Society list, did not dismiss the case. He ordered them to produce evidence. They produced a big box of printouts and screen shots from Fox, Breitbart, Der Sturmer, Die Volkischer Beobachter, The New York Post, OANN, “evidence” the judge eventually detailed and dismissed. I followed the case on the electronic docket, one of more than 100 frivolous cases the litigious fucks filed before the 2020 election. Nobody was reporting on these cases and it was aggravating to me at the time.

In the end, I was relieved that the young federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, not only dismissed the case in the end, but took an additional hundred pages to make his dismissal appeal proof. You can read about his dismissal of the case here.

It’s always war to the death with Nazi fucks like these. The SS continued fighting to the death while Hitler was in the bunker, raging and getting ready to shoot his beloved German Shepard. Let’s hope today’s fight to the death continues to remain more figurative than literal and that more Ranjan-like holdings are written by defenders of our constitutional democracy.

perfect shot ear, perfect!

[1]

The R.N.C. is leading a broad network of conservative legal groups in the effort. Mr. Trump’s allies, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took over the committee last March, placing Ms. Bresso in charge of the legal operation and promising a more aggressive strategy. After the 2020 election, the party’s lawyers had at times refused to participate in Mr. Trump’s legal campaign, forcing him to rely on a collection of outsiders who filed cases rife with errors and false claims. Several Trump lawyers have since been criminally charged.

Among them is Christina Bobb, who is now senior counsel on the R.N.C.’s election integrity team. Ms. Bobb recently suggested that she was braced for more litigation after Election Day.

“I’m kind of holding my breath for that,” she said on a recent podcast. “I think we’re in probably, at least litigation-wise, as good of a place as we can be before the election.”

(NYT link above)

Don’t forget John Roberts

From Heather Cox Richardson yesterday, on the long judicial coup run by the cunning, privileged owners of the activist extremist party that is now calling itself MAGA (see, also John Birch Society):

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” 

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate. . .

She then details McConnell’s right-wing judiciary appointment mission, and how he removed the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, when the time was right, to get a couple of 50% supported nominees on to the court, after denying Obama his constitutional right to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia eight months before the 2016 election.

. . . Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion. 

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Don’t forget America’s most partisan balls and strikes umpire John “Corporations get to say ‘go fuck yourself'” Roberts. How does this smiling corporate shill, who schemes behind the scenes, votes in every key case with the right-wing fraternal order of the Federalist Society block, and has authored some of its most infamous decisions, get a pass from even someone as brilliant as Heather? How is he, the man who, although he didn’t vote with the other four to kill Roe v. Wade, gleefully signed on to nullify the power of federal regulators, keep an insurrectionist on the ballot in Colorado and immunize criminal acts committed by a criminal president, among other MAGA endorsed rulings, still seen as somehow “moderate” or an “institutionalist”?

Look no further than his infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder when he ruled that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which he acknowledged righted a historical injustice, was no longer necessary. His argument is bland and pristine: Congress relied on forty year old data when they reauthorized it, so me and four Federalist Society diehards are undoing their uninformed, undemocratic activism. True, except that he was lying about the forty year old data, as it turns out. As I wrote when I read the decision:

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nah, says John Roberts, we’re going back to that golden time when the wealthy land owners, the ancestors of our greatest billionaire donors and close friends, made all the decisions for the USA.  Dignity and respect, after all, are just words, and ridiculous ones when applied to those who deserve neither. Strike three, bitches.

I began writing this yesterday, and today the Gray Lady herself chimes in on Roberts. Here’s how he teed up the question posed by the Roberts court in Trump v. US:

The justices instructed lawyers from both sides to address a broad question: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure.”. . .

. . . On April 25, the justices and the lawyers in the case gathered for oral arguments in the courtroom, across the street from where the Jan. 6 rioting had taken place three years earlier. The clamor from the Capitol attack had been audible from inside the court building, former employees recalled in interviews, and afterward, security sharply increased and fences shielded the building.

During the arguments, however, several conservative justices said that they wanted to focus not on what had happened that day, but on broader legal questions.

“I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,” Justice Alito told the courtroom.

“I’m not focused on the here and now of this case,” Justice Kavanaugh said. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Gorsuch said.

For the Thousand Year Reich, no doubt.

Here’s a bit about Roberts’s fundamental dishonesty:

One footnote left scholars wondering whether former presidents could ever be prosecuted for taking bribes. An N.Y.U. professor was startled to discover that the opinion, which leaned heavily on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case on presidential immunity, truncated a quote from that decision, changing its meaning.

Verdict: Federalist Society stalwart and Nazi fuck.

Read the new indictment of our criminal former president

To win a legal argument a lawyer must wield a blunt instrument, the law, with precision. A prosecutor must prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt or there is no conviction. There are many ways for wealthy, politically connected defendants to game the system and gain long delays in trial, conviction and sentencing. Ultrawealthy scofflaws enjoy tremendous advantages in court, as in life, and it is frustrating as hell to watch these litigious fucks run roughshod over law and decency.

Once in a blue moon we have a moment of seeming legal clarity. It is a beautiful thing to see an indictment lay out a case against one of these fucks that allows for no reasonable doubt. You can read that kind of indictment here, the very readable superseding indictment Jack Smith’s office recently brought against serial offender Donald J. Chrump.

The indictment uses plain language to lay out in clear, crisp detail, every element of each of the four crimes the Orange Polyp has been indicted for. The superseding indictment steers clear of the MAGA Supreme Court’s unconstitutional made-for-Trump July ruling that presidents may legally commit crimes, if they do this in the course of carrying out their core “official duties”. (Thought experiment challenge — imagine a criminal act that would be necessary for a noncriminal president to commit in order to carry out his official duties).

The revamped indictment removes references to losing candidate Trump’s “official acts”, as when he sought to promote an unqualified loyalist, American Eichmann Jefferey Clarke, to Attorney General to give an official stamp to his Stolen Election lie, or when he told officials just to lie and his allies in Congress would do the rest. It is an easy read that leaves the reader in no doubt as to the guilt of the infallible criminal candidate in knowingly spreading a lie about the rigged and stolen 2020 election, using that lie to whip up duped supporters and raise money, arm twist, wheedle and threaten government officials, inviting election officials of a state he lost to the Oval Office to convince them to change the votes in their states, signing on to a fake elector plan, exhorting an angry crowd he’d lied to for over an hour, at a private event, to “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” and taking no action, for hours, outside of stoking the mob’s anger at Mike Pence, as the peaceful mob of reverent tourists he inspired shut down a joint session of Congress.

In Defendant’s defense, during his hour long, lie-studded harangue of the angry mob at the Ellipse, a private event paid for by private funds (as Smith points out), losing candidate Trump used the word “peaceful” several times. So when he told them to go down to the Capitol to fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore, he meant to fight peacefully, you know, as one does when your country is about to be stolen from you.

The law is a blunt instrument and many serious harms are considered trifles by a system of law, designed for all, that routinely favors the rich and powerful. It is a refreshing thing to see a case laid out as beautifully, as indisputably, as Jack Smith’s office did in the reworked election interference indictment of Trump. We can lament the many delays a spoiled, entitled, unaccountable, law suit wielding, blustering, lying, ultra-wealthy bully like Trump always gets, and that Merrick Garland, a stickler for norms and rules, waited so long to appoint a Special Counsel, but, damn, this indictment is good. Check it out.

Now we just have to make sure very fine American Nazis don’t steal the upcoming election for their criminal figurehead so the trial can go forward, with all deliberate speed, in the several cases of US v. Trump (and his indicted co-conspirators).

Trump v. United States SCOTUS ruling

You won’t read this in the New York Times, necessarily, but this is the essence of what the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, in regard to former president Donald J. Trump’s case against the United States claiming absolute immunity from prosecution for any criminal act he committed while in office, or afterwards. It is an obscenely anti-democratic ruling by six members of an extremist, doctrinaire judicial fraternity (The Federalist Society) in service to American oligarchs.

The highest court in the land ruled that a president, present or former, may not be prosecuted for crimes he commits in office, if those crimes were done in the course of his official duties. If he was speaking to another government official about committing a crime — official business. All other crimes he commits while in office, not strictly in furtherance of his core official duties (try to picture why any crime would be necessary to carry out any core presidential responsibility — ah, never mind), carry the presumption that he had a good and legally justified reason to commit the crime. This presumption must be rebutted by a prosecutor before charges can be brought.

Just to ensure maximum protection to the man they protected in this one and done, tailor-made for the felon candidate ruling, evidence of any protected criminal act, or conspiracy to commit a newly protected presidential crime, may not be introduced in any other prosecution of a current or former president, in any criminal case where he is not protected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Forget logic, the plain text and original meaning of the Constitution Leonard Leo’s appointees pretend great deference toward, common sense, political wisdom, basic fairness, any concern with democracy. This unappealable ruling was made simply to protect the brazen, audacious, ever-cooperative figurehead presidential candidate whose electoral victory is their constituency’s only current chance for holding on to power. The 6-3 Federalist Society supermajority did what loyal, lifelong partisans always do — gave their teammate a uniquely tailored, unappealable assist.

The even more poisonous part of this demented ruling (demented from the point of view of democracy) is the holding that corrupt presidential pardons, even ones he openly sells to felons, his criminal co-conspirators, serial killers with billionaire sponsors, pardons given as the quo of quid pro quo favors done for him or his business, MAY NOT BE CHALLENGED IN A COURT OF LAW. This means a president may hire a hit man to murder a political opponent, or Rosie O’Donnell, and then pardon that hit man as soon as the murder is done — or by preemptive pardon, if needed to seal the deal. As was the clear original intent of the Framers of our experiment in democracy.

MAGA, the rebranded Republican party, the truckling followers of reality-definer Trump (in service to reactionary billionaire polluters and blasphemously false Christian leaders) strenuously opposes an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court, the one branch of government they are majority stakeholders in. These über-entitled motherfuckers always get what they pay for. NO ETHICS FOR OUR PARTISAN IDEOLOGUES! So ordered.

If you want to call these swine Nazis, you are currently within your rights as an American citizen to do so. At least until use of the term “Nazi” is recognized, when applied to those who behave like actual, historical Nazis, as verboten, strictly forbidden, illegal and grounds for immediate imprisonment, reeducation and worse, at the sole discretion of the infallible Führer.

Free speech for fucking bullies

Anyone who has ever been bullied either comes to hate and oppose bullies or becomes a bully himself. The first reaction takes a certain amount of integrity and a sense of self-worth, the second, only a reflex to appear tough and hurt others before they can hurt you.

Free speech protected in the United States includes verbal bullying, lying, divulging private details about others on-line, making many kinds of threats, claiming imaginary outrages are real (Biden is a pedophile who drinks the blood of his victims, etc.) and all sorts of disgusting speech. The truth does not always prevail over such speech. Here’s today’s bit from Trump v. United States and Common Decency, part 7,582.

This is 42 year-old Huyen “Steven” Cheung, MAGA loyalist and current Trump spokesman. Here are two quotes to give you the context of his general credibility, from his Wikipedia page:

Cheung was named the spokesman of the Trump 2024 presidential campaign. After Trump was criticized in October 2023 for his statement that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language of white supremacists and Adolf Hitler, Cheung responded:

That’s a normal phrase that is used in everyday life – in books, television, movies, and in news articles. For anyone to think that is racist or xenophobic is living in an alternate reality consumed with non-sensical outrage.[40]

After Trump was criticized in November 2023 for using language of fascist dictators by referring to his political opponents as “vermin”, Cheung said:

Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.[41]

Mr. Cheung was right that the phrase “poisoning the blood” is common in books, movies, television shows and news articles … about Adolf Hitler. Fuck that fucking puto.

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson, reporting on the recent stink Trump, Cheung and others made at a recent transgressive campaign photo op at Arlington National Cemetery that involved at least one member of Trump’s entourage shoving a female employee of Arlington National Cemetery who politely tried to prevent the forbidden campaign photo op. An Army spokesperson defended the professionalism of the employee, who although abruptly pushed aside avoided further disruption.

Spoiler, Trump spokesman Huyen Cheung graciously claimed that the Arlington National Cemetery employee shoved aside “was clearly suffering from a mental health episode”.

Heather:

A statement from the Arlington National Cemetery reiterated: “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio first said there was a “little disagreement” at the cemetery, but in Erie, Pennsylvania, today he tried to turn the incident into an attack on Harris. “She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?” Vance said. “She can go to hell.” Harris has not, in fact, commented on the controversy. 

VoteVets, a progressive organization that works to elect veterans to office, called the Arlington episode “sickening.”

In an interview with television personality Dr. Phil that aired last night, Trump suggested that Democrats in California each got seven ballots and that he would win in the state if Jesus Christ counted the votes. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out today, Trump has always said he could not lose elections unless there was fraud; last night he suggested repeatedly that God wants him to win the 2024 election.  

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Heather, in a follow-up posted early this morning:

And now the U.S. Army has weighed in on the scandal surrounding Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo op, after which his team shared a campaign video it had filmed. The Army said that the cemetery hosts almost 3,000 public wreath-laying ceremonies a year without incident and that Trump and his staff “were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and [Department of Defense] policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.” 

It went on to say that a cemetery employee “who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside…. This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the… employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. [Arlington National Cemetery] is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.” 

“I don’t think I can adequately explain what a massive deal it is for the Army to make a statement like this,” political writer and veteran Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, noted. “The Pentagon avoids statements like this at all costs. But a draft dodging traitor decided to lie about our armed forces staff, so they went to paper.”

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American hero, to millions…

From the great Heather Cox Richardson

And then, this evening, Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a thumbs-up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that “[t]wo members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official” at the cemetery, where “[f]ederal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities.” When a cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where the grave was located, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.” 

The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans, along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism, grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy itself.

It’s hard to look away from the reality that the Republican senators could have stopped this catastrophe at many points in Trump’s term, at the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” then–majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers would jealously guard their own power, the Framers gave to the members of the House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of the Senate they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of an authoritarian leader. 

But the Framers did not foresee the rise of political partisanship. 

In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter suppression to keep Republicans in power, the weaponization of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation’s major political parties have lined up behind a man whom, were he running this sort of a campaign even ten years ago, they would have dismissed with derision. 

Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices. Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the nation’s fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In July 2024 they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above it.  

In May 2016, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham famously observed: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”

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Free Speech, Nazi style

Free speech is crucial to informed debate in a democracy. Without the right to freely exchange ideas, to speak and write freely without government prosecution, we’re pretty much done as a democracy.

Totally free speech is a double edged sword, of course, since Nazis and Klansmen are as free as anyone else to speak publicly as they see fit. Our First Amendment prevents the government from making any law infringing our right to say or write pretty much anything we want (unless we are actively causing violence). It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

They do this in a manner that is much clearer and more unmistakable than, say, in the Second Amendment which reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Aside from the use of the passive voice, and the context of a well regulated militia (conveniently omitted by most gun lovers), the gun amendment is much more squishy and subject to interpretation as to regulation than the freedom of religion, speech, the press and our right to peacefully assemble amendment.

Tech giant Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who famously told his executives that “you go to the mat” if the government tries to regulate Facebook in any way, spoke out recently (in a letter to pugnacious dickhead Jim Jordan, no less) against pressure he claims to have received from the Biden administration to monitor and flag pernicious lies that spread virally on Facebook.  Zuckerberg’s position is the same as virtually any working billionaire’s — you do whatever is necessary to prevent any government action that can lessen your profits, even by a penny.

Note the elegance of that Fox headline: Zuckerberg “admits” Biden is persecuting him and trying to force him to censor Americans.

Biden responded that he was asking all social media giants to behave as responsible citizens by flagging harmful lies that kill people. Facebook was among tech giants that allowed, among other things, countless viral videos touting the alleged harmfulness of the Covid vaccine that Trump fast-tracked with Operation Warp Speed. Biden pointed out that the deadly Covid pandemic is now only killing the unvaccinated. How much money would it cost Zuckerberg to post warnings on deadly lies embraced by millions because they show up over and over in a social media feed?

Who gives a fuck?

Free speech isn’t free, of course. It has to be fought for, against a formidable enemy — the brutal, incendiary, viral lie — as powerful as free speech itself.

When the government attempts to curb lies, powerful liars are outraged. They cite their right to say whatever they please, as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Unfettered free speech, particularly when it goes viral, is supremely useful for climbing to power. Once in power, Nazi free speech is famously whatever the fucking Fuhrer, and his handlers, say it is.

In late April [2022], the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, whose mission would be recommending best practices to counter disinformation related to homeland security. The head of this board, Nina Jankowicz [1], was cyberbullied until she resigned. Operations of the board were promptly “suspended”. As far as I’m aware, the cyberbullies prevailed.

Biden subsequently opened an office, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, to combat the pernicious threat of vicious “social media” and specifically to police cyberbullies who make gender-based attacks. Not much has been reported about the task force since it was launched with some fanfare in June of 2022.

Now Zuckerberg is bitching again about his right to be the number one richest man in history, which, weighed against the health of our Nazi besieged democracy, is the only thing that counts to a billionaire who, by definition, can never have enough.

I’ll leave you with an example of free speech from the New York Times. See if you can spot the difference in these two paragraphs, the lead paragraph in a recent article about “MAGA jurisprudence” (an oxymoron if there ever was one).

As for freedom of the press, so necessary to protect democracy that the founders chose to protect the press in the First Amendment, they have a right to publish any opinion they choose, even in news articles. I’ve tweaked one sentence in this New York Times first paragraph to make it more accurate. See if you can spot the sentence I fixed:

The Supreme Court term that ended this summer delivered a number of big wins for traditional conservative causes. The court made it easier to challenge federal regulations. It made it harder to prosecute former presidents who commit crimes while in office. And it delivered another decision that expanded the rights of gun enthusiasts.

The original:

The Supreme Court term that ended this summer delivered a number of big wins for traditional conservative causes. The court made it easier to challenge federal regulations. It made it harder to prosecute former presidents. And it delivered another decision that expanded the rights of gun enthusiasts. 

Let’s leave aside that the editorial frame of “traditional conservative causes” is a poor description of these truly radical, reactionary decisions.

“It made it harder to prosecute former presidents” is a true statement, as far as it goes. A more accurate statement, one that better informs and underscores the revolutionary nature of the Supreme Court’s radical rightwing decision in Trump v. United States is: “It made it harder to prosecute former presidents who commit crimes in office.”

Freedom of fucking speech, sisters and brothers, mind that shit carefully.

[1] She gives examples of free speech she was treated to while heading the Disinformation Governing Board:

And then beyond that, there were calls to create deepfake pornography of me and then the violent threats, which were numerous. And I was reporting at least one a day to the department for the three weeks that this campaign was going on before I resigned – things like, go hang yourself, you leftist, C-word. You’re the new Goebbels; will you meet the same end? Of course, Goebbels killed himself. One person said, this is a hill to die on; get ready – we will not tolerate this. And this, to me, seems to have come directly from a tweet that Representative Lauren Boebert sent out saying that this was Stalinist or Mao level, and this was a hill to die on, so directly echoing her language and the threat. People saying, you will regret this. Kill yourself, you subhuman sack of S-word. You and your F-ing family should be sent to Russia to be killed. Hey – I don’t know how to describe this word, a pejorative for a woman – quit And then beyond that, there were calls to create deepfake pornography of me and then the violent threats, which were numerous. And I was reporting at least one a day to the department for the three weeks that this campaign was going on before I resigned – things like, go hang yourself, you leftist, C-word. You’re the new Goebbels; will you meet the same end? Of course, Goebbels killed himself. One person said, this is a hill to die on; get ready – we will not tolerate this. And this, to me, seems to have come directly from a tweet that Representative Lauren Boebert sent out saying that this was Stalinist or Mao level, and this was a hill to die on, so directly echoing her language and the threat. People saying, you will regret this. Kill yourself, you subhuman sack of S-word. You and your F-ing family should be sent to Russia to be killed. Hey – I don’t know how to describe this word, a pejorative for a woman – quit your job before we destroy your life. Everything you’ve ever cared about will be taken from you. And you’re nothing but a freaking liar. And you’re going to pay for it with a heavy price, you stupid B-word, before we destroy your life. Everything you’ve ever cared about will be taken from you. And you’re nothing but a freaking liar. And you’re going to pay for it with a heavy price, you stupid B-word. That’s just a few of them. (source)