Category Archives: Law and Justice

We are in the hands of psychopaths (and cowards)

Make no mistake, MAGA is the brand of powerful American psychopaths.  The far-right, anti-fact, pro-corporate movement now called MAGA has long been engineered and funded by Charles Koch, whose father, beloved of Hitler, was a famous conspiracy theorist and psychopath.  The ideology of the MAGA “movement”, presumably headed by Donald Trump, whose racist father was also a psychopath, is based on painful revenge against “takers”,  everyone not born wealthy “booted and spurred” to rightfully ride the backs of their inferiors.

They’ve learned the lesson that Hitler first demonstrated in a modern mass media culture: if you keep true information from the public, and bombard terrified citizens with aggravating lies, the lies will come to be accepted, by most, as the truth. Once you’ve created a mass audience faithful to baseless lies, you’re halfway to ramping up the death camps. The lies are of a specific kind: incendiary reasons to fear and hate marginalized groups. Once you have created unreasoning hatred against, say, homosexuals, a gay hairdresser you illegally deport to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador deserves every rape and indignity he must endure, and forever is not long enough for a foreign government’s fully illumined dark-site to torture a sick individual like him.

Why the obsession, on the far right, with torture and the death penalty? Nothing moves the masses, and the political needle, like terror. These psychopaths (and sometimes, belatedly, their duped followers) know that total fear is the most effective tool any autocrat can wield. Horrific true stories of torture, terrifying random detention and death, the ability of the state to manhandle and murder anyone without due process or legal accountability, what could be better for an insane person hell-bent, literally, on controlling the world?

Why would a president who nonchalantly oversaw as many as 500,000 unnecessary American deaths during Covid-19, because of his damaging politically-motivated interference with scientists and pandemic experts, have any hesitation to let a few dozen, or a few hundred, or a hundred thousand, or a million, poor American children die of preventable disease?   Or starvation?   Or a million or two, or ten million, in Africa, Asia, South America?   The answer is that psychopaths have neither empathy nor the capacity to feel regret.   The worst of them, a very small percentage, are cunning serial killers.  Most of them are just CEOs, surgeons, nightmare bosses, bullies, masterminds of MAGA’s revenge tour.

Some object to a psychiatric diagnosis like “psychopath” to describe someone like Charles Koch or Donald Trump, or most of Trump’s loyal inner circle “ring kissers”.   I object to psychiatric diagnoses myself.  Homosexuality was a a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis as recently as the 1970s.   I am no fan of psychiatry and have no reason to trust the American Psychiatric Association, particularly after they publicly enforced their rule against a non-member and took part in a coordinated campaign to discredit a best-selling book that detailed Trump’s insane behavior, its roots and implications for his destructive presidency.  

A group of psychiatrists and other experts made a thorough and convincing case, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump [1], acting on their professional duty to warn of the dangers of having someone with severe emotional disabilities as the American president. They made an excellent case. The APA then got busy shutting down the book, and silencing the case for questioning Trump as unstable, vengeful, dangerous, citing a rule it made after unfair criticism of far-right lunatic Barry Goldwater from a group of psychiatrists prior to Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run. Fuck the APA and their “diagnostic manual”. It contains no definition of psychopath anyway.

Here’s what we know about psychopaths:  they are manipulative, selfish, concerned with exercising power over others.  They are adept liars, very charming and persuasive when needed.  They have no hesitation to commit bold acts (of every conceivable kind) because they lack empathy and have no capacity to feel regret.  They must take revenge whenever they feel slighted. Most psychopaths are very intelligent, some are not.  Our Number One psychopath is not a smart psychopath, but it hardly matters.   He has the genius army of the best of Charles Koch’s legal and intellectual network watching his back, guiding his revenge tour.

Trump had an argument with government scientists who predicted the path of a killer storm.  He changed their map with a Sharpie, to prove he was right.  Now he has defunded that agency, along with FEMA and any other government agency he feels was mean to him, contradicted him, made him feel like an enraged two year-old.  Adults who react like enraged two-year olds, if they have the power to, will kill you if you make them feel like an enraged two year-old.  That’s what psychopaths do, they are driven to take vengeance on anyone who  makes them feel like the monsters they are.  All in their life depends on the people around them recognizing and admiring their superiority.  Anything else is grounds for the most terrifying revenge imaginable. 

[1]

The Rule of Law, MAGA style

It is a terrible thing to be a lawyer for a crazed, antisocial serial criminal with no impulse control who is also a compulsive liar.  In a court of law, where rules, facts introduced as evidence and actual laws applied to those facts decide the merits of the case, it is difficult to legally defend someone who keeps changing their lying arguments and continually implicates themselves and their accomplices with careless, incriminating public statements.  If the criminal defendant is a braggart who cannot stop publicly taking credit for things that are flagrantly illegal, your nightmare as a lawyer gets worse still.

Here in the USA, the Constitution is the source of all law binding the federal government, and through the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, every state government as well.   No government entity in the United States may deprive a person of life, liberty or property without a notice of its intent to do so and a hearing at which the accused may be heard.   This is called due process, the requirement of legal notice and an opportunity to be heard before any punishment is imposed. 

The process you are due, as someone in the United States legally (or illegally, for that matter) is — you must be charged with a crime and then given the opportunity to be heard by a judge before you can be imprisoned, fined, have your property seized, be deported, etc. 

The president had his myrmidons round up a few hundred seemingly random Hispanics, shave their heads, put them into orange jumpsuits and chains.  They then staged a photo op, marching these supposedly dangerous criminals onto a plane to be flown to a notorious penal colony-style prison  in El Salvador.   They staged a photo op on the other end, of these men deported without due process, or any process at all, actually, being marched off to the overcrowded supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador.

The family of one of these men, Abrego Garcia, a legal resident married to an American citizen, raising an autistic five-old child as well as two kids from his wife’s previous relationship, made an emergency motion in federal court to have him returned to the United States.  According to the testimony, Garcia has been, as most poor immigrants are, a model citizen, with protected status here because of credible threats of violence and death by gangs in El Salvador.

You may be familiar with the self-contradicting piece of doggerel  offered by the Trump administration in federal court to justify its actions, what I call the Nazi line about this case.  Call it the MAGA line if you like, but read a few histories of Mr. Hitler’s Germany and you will see no difference in technique.   Garcia was deported due to “administrative error” the administration admits, yet, Trump’s DOJ and all of his spokesmen and surrogates insist Garcia is also a member of the violent MS-13 gang.

Important thing to remember, MAGA arguments, like Nazi arguments, do not need to make any sense in the conventional sense of the word sense.  Picture the poor bastard lawyer who’s got to make this ridiculous clerical error/ but still terrorist, argument. He’s got to argue this in front of a judge not disposed to ignore the plain text of the US Constitution in order to approve clearly illegal actions by a flagrantly lawless government of lackeys serving a vengeful and ignorant madman.

Check out what he is forced to say, this poor bastard Trump DOJ lawyer. When I read this out loud to Seedj she said, “he’s not going to be in that job very long .”  I have to give this man props for his candor.

Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.

“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”

Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.

“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.” 

Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.

source

If only we were not living in a post-truth culture

Truth, critical thinking and adherence to the facts matter more now than at any time in our history.  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse lays out an irrefutable case for Trump’s cynical weaponization of the government against the People.  The case is irrefutable, except by calling Whitehouse a hysterical, sick, dangerous, partisan lunatic, and somehow discrediting, among the lowest information Americans out there, the truthful and factually detailed report he delivers to the Senate, and to the People, in this latest installment of The Scheme.

Traitorgate

Mary Trump posted this picture at the top of her piece called The Ongoing National Security Debacle.  I have only one word to add to the caption of this picture worth thousands of words.  Mary’s caption is fine, excellent, really.

Morons.

I have read several excellent pieces about this foul bit of ongoing fascist foreplay, the illegal, asshole use of a chat group, on personal phones, to plan and gloat about a secret military strike. Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the larger point of this group chat bullshit is brilliant. Heather Cox Richardson’s keeps to her very high standard of excellent, insightful reporting — if you only read one, her’s is the one to read. Robert Reich is on fire on the obvious, burning question of Where Are the fucking Democrats at this moment?

This kind of coverage (the three mentioned above, I haven’t read Mary’s yet) is a huge part of the fight we all need to participate in, now and not when we are done trembling about the lack of amenities at the eventual death camp many of us will be shoehorned into.

When you are up against Nazis you are fighting psychopaths, whatever spineless mainstream Democrats may say about the virtues of playing possum while the Nazis magically self-destruct because of their own hubris, irrationality, stupidity and incompetence.  The very things that drive Nazis.   The exact things we have to remain educated about, highlight and fight at every turn.  At every fucking turn, my friends.

An American  leader even stupider and more spineless than Trump

I wrote this last night, before several members of the opposition party folded and made a catastrophic deal with, do not flinch from this word, read history, American Nazis.

This is the insane, erratic, enraged, two year-old, whose opposition leader apparently has no memory, courage, sense, dignity or access to the internet.  The only man capable of making a very stable genius, who is actually a very unstable, stupid person, look like the artist of the deal.

Criticized? Read this Chuck, you stupid motherfucker (and forward it to Gillebrant and the other invertebrates who voted with you).  This is the last time Trump shut down the government, in his previous temper tantrum showdown with sick, dangerous enemies.  Wikipedia, jackass.

The United States federal government shutdown from midnight EST on December 22, 2018, until February 9, 2019 (35 days) was the longest government shutdown in US history[1][2] and the second[a] and final federal government shutdown involving furloughs during the first presidency of Donald Trump. It occurred when the 115th Congress and Trump could not agree on an appropriations bill to fund the operations of the federal government for the 2019 fiscal year, or a temporary continuing resolution that would extend the deadline for passing a bill. The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal departments or agencies from conducting non-essential operations without appropriations legislation in place. As a result, nine executive departments with around 800,000 employees had to shut down partially or in full, affecting about one-fourth of government activities and causing employees to be furloughed or required to work without being paid.[3] The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown cost the American economy at least $11 billion USD, excluding indirect costs that were difficult to quantify.[4]

The shutdown stemmed from an impasse over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in federal funds for a U.S.–Mexico border wall.[5][6][7] In December 2018, the Senate unanimously passed an appropriations bill without wall funding, and the bill appeared likely to be approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Trump. After Trump faced heavy criticism from some right-wing media outlets and pundits for appearing to back down on his campaign promise to “build the wall“, he announced that he would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund its construction. As a result, the House passed a stopgap bill with funding for the wall, but it was blocked in the Senate by the threat of a Democratic filibuster.[8]

In January 2019, representatives elected in the November 2018 election took office, giving the Democrats a majority in the House. The House immediately voted to approve the appropriations bill that had previously passed the Senate unanimously (which included no funding for the wall). For several weeks, Trump continued to maintain that he would veto any bill that did not fund an entire border wall, and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the Senate from considering any appropriations legislation that Trump would not support, including the bill that had previously passed.[9][10] Democrats and some Republicans opposed the shutdown and passed multiple bills to reopen the government, arguing that the government shutdown amounted to taking civil servants “hostage” and that negotiations could only begin once the government was reopened.[11][12][13][14]

On January 25, 2019, Trump agreed to endorse a stopgap bill to reopen the government for three weeks up until February 15 to allow for negotiations to take place to approve an appropriations bill that both parties could agree on.[15] However, Trump reiterated his demand for the border wall funding and said that he would shut down the government again or declare a national emergency and use military funding to build the wall if Congress did not appropriate the funds by February 15.[15][16]

Trump’s approval rating dropped during the shutdown.[17][18] A majority of Americans opposed exploitation of the shutdown as a negotiating strategy and held Trump responsible for the shutdown: A CBS News poll found that 71% of Americans considered the border wall “not worth the shutdown”[19] and a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53% of Americans blamed Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 34% who blamed Democrats and 10% who blamed both parties.[20]

On February 15, 2019, Trump declared a national emergency to fund the wall and bypass Congress, after being unsatisfied with a bipartisan border bill that had passed the House and the Senate a day before.[21]

Source

Musk ought to name the first vernichtungslager after you, Schumer, you pathetic unwitting, democracy betraying, weak, easily played, collaborator motherfucker. Nice work, asshole, now do the Roman salute.

Why is any of this hard for America to grasp? (rhetorical question)

The power to create federal agencies resides exclusively in Congress.   Leaders of these agencies must be confirmed by Congress, after FBI vetting, conflict of interest checks and public hearings.   The power of appropriating tax dollars and spending them is exclusive to Congress.  Congress holds the power of the purse.   Yet Trump creates a fake agency, cutely named DOGE, appoints an unelected, unvetted billionaire disrupter, with multiple conflicts of interest and many investigations into his shady business practices,  experienced only in slashing his workforce, spreading racism (“free speech”), setting a modern record for buying access to power ($270,000,000 and growing) and creating chaos to head the “agency”.  The president’s lawyers deny in a sworn statement to the court that this unhinged maniac is in charge, as he illegally mass fires government workers, closes agencies, withholds funds Congress has voted to disburse.

Everyone acts as though this clear violation of multiple laws, and the constitution itself, is all perfectly fine, or at least a matter for the courts to sort out.  The NY Times, and virtually everyone else, refers to this fake agency as The Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) as though it’s an actual, legally created government department with unlimited power over every other department.   It’s all perfectly normal, by the looks of it, insane and arbitrary as it also clearly is.

A group of reactionary billionaires, in their most recent manifesto, Project 2025, begs to differ with the constitutional order. They regard efficient, elected government as “majoritarian tyranny” that persecutes the billionaire class. They are persecuted by regulations on how they may treat their workers, how much pollution their factories can emit, how safe their products must be. So they prefer an all-powerful CEO with the power to make all these persecutions vanish.

They played the long game, orchestrating the capture of the Supreme Court, achieving a 6-3 majority of ideological purists, “Originalists”, from a far-right judicial fraternity called the Federalist Society, funded the by the same folks who fund the Heritage Foundation and all other reactionary “think tanks”.   This majority ruled that unlimited, dark money is political speech (for corporations and the super wealthy, anyway), that racist voter suppression laws and racial gerrymandering are fine unless made with explicit racist intent, announced explicitly during the hearings for the law in question, that anti-bribery laws only apply in certain specific scenarios, that government scientists don’t get the last word on scientific decisions, white Christian legislators and judges do, that the president may sometimes have to commit criminal acts in the course of his core duties (how about a hypothetical there, boys?) and that these criminal acts may not ever be prosecuted.  They added a cherry to this shit sundae (which also, of course, abandons the fate of raped, pregnant girls and women to their individual state legislatures) by ruling that no presidential pardon, even if sold outright in public, may ever be questioned in court.

Granted, MAGA is absolutely a cult and Trump has been vetting it for loyalty with extreme zealousness since his loss in 2020.  The Republican party has rid itself of any elected officials who defy the cult leader.   They are as spineless, and infinitely flexible in their views, as they are punitive and driven by a thirst for vengeance.  But where is the opposition party?   Outside of a small handful of elected Democrats, and a group of Democratic attorneys general, there is barely a peep from the corporate Democratic leadership.  Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx) is great, we hear from Jamie Raskin (D-Md), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) but rarely a murmur from anyone else.

How is it that DOGE is not denounced daily as an illegal “agency”?  It was not created by Congress, it was pulled out of Charles Koch’s crusty nonagenarian ass.   How is the illegal shuttering of USAID, the decimation of Medicaid, the mass firing of IRS, Veterans Affairs (thanks for your service, assholes) Department of Education civil servants, and thousands of others, just subject matter for law suits?   How is a hopped up, unelected oligarch’s idiotic refrain of ridding us of “unelected bureaucrats”, not routinely and regularly slapped down as the simpleminded self-contradictng bullshit that it is?  

I understand that rage is not amenable to reason.  Strong emotion beats a beautifully articulated logical argument in the court of public opinion, but still — how about a little fucking truth and clarity once in a while?

Has America really succumbed to an irrational narrative?   This narrative is perpetrated by corporate media, for profit.  There are two sides to every story, and almost half of Americans polled approve of the insane two year-old whose vocabulary has shrunk to the level of an eight year old.  Fine people in the Nazi party (führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft, sure, but don’t call us Nazis, those are Roman salutes!) and among those enemies the Nazis target.  False nuance swallows a very clear narrative:  one side relies on constant lies, the stoking of rage and flagrant violations of law to fire up their angry base, the other side believes good policies, fairness in law enforcement and acknowledged equality and respect for human dignity win the day among their reasonable supporters (and wealthy/corporate donor base).  

In the battle between lies and truth, there is no middle ground.  What the fuck, America?  The truth ain’t that threatening, call out the lies every single time, put the proof on the table.  Trump failed to rig the 2020 election and incited a riot to culminate a seven tentacled conspiracy to cling to power.  It appears he did a much better job in 2024, the first ever election in the Trump era that was not “rigged”.  His “mandate” is the narrowest in decades, his approval rating, at this point in his presidency, the lowest on record (breaking his own record from 2017). Plus, he’s clearly insane.   What the fuck, America?  

Koch 100,000,000,000 America 0

We are living, in this perilous moment in human history, in the country that Charles Koch and billionaire fellow travelers have been deliberately engineering since 1980.   The roots of their rebellion against “majoritarian tyranny” go back decades earlier.  Their goal has been to dismantle the regulatory state, the hated administrative state, to concentrate all wealth and power in their own hands without interference from “unelected bureaucrats”. 

Tax fuels the beast they hate, the administration of laws that constrain their profits, in the name of  protecting consumers, so taxes must go, except for taxes on working people who must remain immiserated so they fight each other instead of the powerful parasites who call themselves “job creators”.   Their use of propaganda, based on incendiary lies and amplified through mass media, has been audacious and temporarily successful.

Here’s a little history of their movement in this moment when, with a ragingly insane two-year old and his unelected bureaucrat benefactor as their battering rams,  they are salivating over their final triumph.

The catalyzing event for their long-game revolution was a Supreme Court ruling that absolutely enraged them. In 1954, as the Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum, the Supreme Court heard evidence of the shabby sham of racist segregation’s Separate But Equal as practiced in American schools. You can see photos of this era, the Whites Only water fountain is state of the art, the Coloreds Only water fountain is a rusty spigot on the side of the building. Need a bathroom? Use a modern toilet and wash your hands in the nearby sink, if white, if not, outhouse is out back, behind the bushes.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0, after vigorous argument between racists and those showing evidence of the grotesque inequality of “separate but equal”, that segregation in public schools violated the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.    This was seen, by white racists, as an affront to the white race, an act of betrayal by “activist judges,” judges likely manipulated by communists, if the truth must be told.  The Brown decision came down in 1954, and it would be years before integration of public schools would be undertaken ” with all deliberate speed”.

The court’s unanimous recognition of racial inequality was a war cry to America’s dedicated segregationists.  One group that organized itself against this tyranny was The John Birch Society.   The founders were wealthy businessmen, extremists on the fringe of the Republican party.  Mainstream Republicans took pains to distance the party from the ravings of the John Birch Society.  John Birch ideology morphed into Libertarianism, the Tea Party, now mainstream MAGA, that is to say, current Republican orthodoxy.  One of the founders of the John Birch Society was Fred Koch, autocratic father of the infamous Koch Brothers.   Fred Koch had the gratitude of Adolf Hitler, since he’d built the oil refinery for the Führer that fueled Hitler’s Luftwaffe.  Koch liked the cut of Hitler’s jib too.   You can read a detailed family history of the troubled Fred Koch and his tortured sons (raised by a strict, German, Nazi nanny) in Jane Mayer’s excellent  Dark Money. 

After an unsuccessful vice presidential run by Charles Koch’s brother David in 1980, an election where the John Birch Society/Libertarian presidential tickets received a fitting 1% of the American vote, the Koch network went to work building a network of organizations to win America’s hearts and minds and use unelected operatives to change America’s policies from within the system.  These have become familiar:  The Heritage Foundation (authors of voting fraud lies, climate change denial and Project 2025), Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Federalist Society (authors of numerous, infamous, unappealable 6-3 far right rulings), The Institute for Humane Studies, Judicial Watch, The Antonin Scalia School of Law, The Tea Party, armies of lobbyists and dozens of other well-funded “think-tanks”, influential public mouthpieces for popularizing and normalizing their extremist views, a vast propaganda network amplified by corporate mass media. 

At this moment the other corporate party in America, the Democratic party, appears to be on the ropes, and democracy itself along with it.  Many people are in anguish about how the Democratic party blew it and allowed a lawless, compulsive liar hell-bent on revenge, against America itself, to narrowly win re-election.  There were several reasons for their failure (mainly in the presidential race itself, they won most other seats in several of the swing states Trump won), the most serious was the Biden administration’s inability to prosecute, convict and imprison the organizers of Trump’s January 6th putsch.  

Biden did uphold the rule of law by getting convictions, and rulings against, several prominent Democrats, demonstrating an admirable dedication to the rule of law, without fear or favor, while seeming to fear and favor the Nazis who are celebrating their takeover of America today.  

Biden passed an impressive, unprecedented amount of important legislation during his term and steered economic recovery with great skill.  It counted as nothing in the propaganda war and his approval rating reflected his loss in that war.   His pick for Attorney General was a man of high character and experience not fit for the fight to save democracy. 

Biden, trying to govern in a bipartisan coalition with determined enemies who hated him, did not root out corrupt Trump implants like Postmaster Louis DeJoy and Homeland Security IG Joseph Caffari, two MAGA diehards who did everything in their power to help Trump get reelected. 

Caffari, in addition to corruption scandals, covered up the deletion of the Secret Service and Homeland Security communications on January 6th until it was too late to recover any evidence.  DeJoy hobbled the postal service, to the tune of a $9,500,000,000 loss in 2024, and delivered at least 20 million less mail in ballots than were cast in the last election (first election since 2008 when mail-in voting did not increase).   Trump won reelection by less than 1/10 of that 20,000,000 ballot margin.  DeJoy quietly made plans to step down, immediately after getting the man he’d donated millions to back into the White House.  The Postal Service is one step from being “privatized” so that billionaire entrepreneurs can profit from a crucial American public institution that predates the Declaration of Independence.  

At the moment, it looks like Koch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and the rest of our greatest and most important citizens have won.  Their forces have been brainstorming, barnstorming, storm trooping and  planning feverishly for the last four years.  The Democratic party seemingly has no plan to counter their illegal and unconstitutional smash mouth power plays.  The only man who continues to speak about the important issues directly, address the problems of 90% of Americans head-on, seems to be Bernie Sanders. 

He was twice prevented from being the Democratic presidential candidate by the party itself.  So afraid of the taint of “socialism” that it twice orchestrated the popular Sanders’s “defeat” by selected party insider candidates.   Leaving the galvanizing of the often legitimate grievances of millions of screwed Americans ripe for the picking by a lying, cynical monomaniacal huckster front man, a serial fraudster and criminally inclined ignoramus with a particular talent for sucking in the angry and the gullible.

The fight, I’m sad to say, is completely up to us right now.  There is truth and there are lies.  We need to keep that basic proposition as clear as possible.  It is always dark under the shadow of the swastika.  It is a time for all of us to become the light in whatever ways we can figure out.

Cowardly tag team bullying of Volodymyr Zelenskyy

The cowardly tag teaming of Zelenskyy yesterday in the Oval Office, the public betrayal of a democratic ally by supporters of a brazen war criminal, was a new low for these modern day American Nazis. The only things missing were the swastika armbands and the snarled word “Jew” every time they cut Zelenskyy off, yelled at him, confronted him with lie after deliberate, knowing lie. I love that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s new boyfriend snarled a challenge at Zelenskyy for disrespecting the Oval Office by showing up dressed like fucking Elon Musk. They surrounded the Ukrainian president and sneered at him from all sides. Considering the ferocity of the attack, the lone Ukrainian in the room held up pretty well.

Heather Cox Richardson notes that the scene, staged as a performance to discredit Ukraine, who Trump is poised to betray, played out live in front of the media: “Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.” Heather lays out the whole sordid story briefly and much better than I can at the moment. Her account is here: source

Here is a typical American corporate news report of this disgusting performance art betrayal. It states that Ukrainian/Americans were blindsided by Zelenskyy’s refusal to … well, they don’t say exactly. Except that you don’t talk to a wannabe Hitler and his heir apparent in that tone of voice unless you clearly want what you do not want. I include this only for the general tone, which suggests Trump good, Zelenskyy maybe not good. A short watch should be enough to get the tone. The other clips (Chris Hayes long form and two quick shorts) are actually worth watching.

Entire seven minute public “negotiation” between Zelensky, JD and Trump

A very childish and stupid question posed by a Fox talking head— thoughtful, intelligent answer given by Ukrainian president.   Fox headline and MAGA talking point: Zelensky unapologetic and ungrateful, disrespectful to the Big Orange Leader.

It goes without saying that Vance lied, he channeled his inner Matt Gaetz to jump in, impress the boss. and the base (al Q’eada in Arabic), with his savagery and bully somebody already outnumbered and being shouted down. Truth and lies matter, what actually happened, what you saw with your own eyes and heard with your own ears matters, no matter how many times liars call people telling the truth liars.

The triumph of irrationality

Irrationality, and the insane cruelty that flows from it, is, to me, the most terrifying force in the world.  Destroy objective reality, replace it with a violent fantasy that makes no sense, and you can get some people to do anything.  The project of the far-right “Libertarian” Koch network, for generations, has been to create an eternal battle of subjective, antithetical worldviews.   Truth is what we say, the courts and all critics are enemies to be destroyed, if they don’t accept our side of our irrefutable truth. 

Example: the Jews control the world and are manipulating majoritarian tyranny by convincing stupid colored people to do their bidding in a fake election-based “democracy”.  Any election we lose, that’s why.  When we win, even by 1%, that is a mandate, a historically powerful mandate, the true, irrepressible voice of the People, speaking as one in support of the Leader.

Consider the perfection of this loop: if you say that I always need to be right, and that I’ll lie to destroy you if we are in a conflict, then this proves that YOU always need to be right and are lying to destroy me. Therefore, it’s a draw, which makes me right. People who love you (if there are any such creatures) may believe your lies, everybody else will believe my truths.

Once everything is reduced to the realm of feelings, loyalty, love, communal obedience, good/evil, black/white, there is no factual basis for deciding anything. True faith settles every question, and faith, the faithful are told, is a far greater thing than the vanity of those who cite the so-called facts of a difficult and dangerous world. The only safety in such a world is the sanctuary of true belief.

In our current predicament, I’ve been taking some consolation in the sheer stupidity, incompetence and blind adherence of those loyal to a grandiose, pathologically greedy, perpetually enraged fool and his “transactional” worldview. I am thinking now that this consolation may be misplaced. Stupid people, angry stupid, manifestly unqualified people, those incapable of weighing facts reasonably, are capable of the worst atrocities imaginable. This is particularly true if they are given unchecked power to carry out their leader’s most insane plans.

Why not torture 30,000 random immigrants in a tent city on a piece of Cuba that is not subject to American law or the Geneva Conventions?   “Let’s fucking do it!”   Even if our actions are criminal, the Big Guy can pardon us, and no pardon may ever be questioned.

Why not cut off food and medical supplies to the world’s most desperately poor children? Why not end health care for millions of America’s most vulnerable children and old people? Why not remove every government regulator of waste, fraud and corruption, in the name of smashing waste fraud and corruption? With me, everybody “USA! USA!!!!”

The real terror of these merciless, idiot motherfuckers is not their bluster, their rage, their plans to inflict actual pain on their perceived inferiors and enemies. It is how far they have pushed the irrational, and the outright lies that “support” it, into the middle of our political discourse. Putin did not invade Ukraine, Ukraine was the aggressor. Putin wanted peace, Ukraine refused to talk. Putin no dictator, Zelensky dictator. Putin not fascist, Ukraine Nazi, also run by Jews. NATO attacked Russia, Putin only defend self. Putin honest, Ukraine liar. Trump not Putin puppet, only do what is right, for Trump. US veto UN on Putin’s behalf. Fuck Ukraine, America First!

The impossible thing about irrationality is that you can’t defeat it with all the reason, evidence, proof, and every demonstration of cause and effect in the world.   Irrationality does not bend to anyone.  Fuck you, I’m rational, YOU ARE IRRATIONAL, is the likeliest response after every available proof is put on the table. 

I experienced this first hand from an old friend a couple of years ago. It was one of the most chilling demonstrations of this irrational, shapeshifting insistence on anything that could possibly make a person right, blameless and perfect and, the enemy, in this case me, the vicious persecutor. Her husband had proposed mediation to work out a simple conflict that had turned into an ugly year-long war. We met to prepare for the session, after I pointed out it was crucial for us to bring the mediator everything we agreed about so she could help us meet somewhere in the middle.

My old friend had told me when her husband, who hadn’t consulted her, informed her that Seedj and I might be amenable to mediation: “I fell on the kitchen floor and literally couldn’t move until it was time to walk to my car and drive to work.”

When I reminded her of this, she angrily told me I was lying. “Daniel must have told you that, it never happened, he was lying.” No, actually you told it to me. “I never said it, you’re lying.” I gave her the context, reminded her when she said it. “You’re lying, that never happened.” A moment later she said “I remember exactly how it happened and it was nothing like what you said. Dolly was there, and when Daniel told me he’d talked to you about mediation I did fall on the floor, but not for the reasons you said. It had nothing to do with mediation. I was just so sick of all this talk of ‘feelings, feelings, feelings’!”

And so she won that battle, ending our long friendship finally. She had already convinced all of our common friends that I’d been sadistically torturing her innocent husband for over a year to “bend him to my will” and that, in spite of countless apologies from her and her husband, I refused to forgive them. Set and match. The facts? What actually happened, who said what to who, who behaved with cruelty and who attempted to make peace? Totally irrelevant. We all believe in love, community, loyalty and forgiveness. We can never forgive someone who can’t forgive.

An angry insistence on the irrational is deadly. We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, it’s obvious by the fact we can’t produce it that the (fill in the pejorative blank) stole and destroyed the evidence, otherwise we’d easily win this case. We are not lying, and 42% of Americans believe we are not lying, as our poll clearly shows. Therefore, the prosecutors, judges, grand juries, witnesses, the laws themselves are the fucking liars and WE WILL NEVER BOW TO FUCKING LIARS! Welcome to MAGA, boys and girls.

Even language itself is destroyed in this fusillade of incoherence. The goons call themselves conservatives. Conservatives traditionally want to preserve the status quo. MAGA is explicitly a radical, far-right reactionary movement. They want to restore a status quo that was overruled by decades, if not centuries, of a march toward a more perfect union. They want the original union, with the right of the White Man to rule his women, his children, his racial and social inferiors. Is there anything conservative about a group that is actively decapitating our democracy by illegal means? Not remotely.

To those not familiar with the Nazi seizure of power, once they hear the details they’re shocked by the one on one, on the nose, identical nature of what Project 2025 is carrying out.  Purge the civil service, institute loyalty oaths to the leader, act with brazen ruthlessness to demoralize enemies, imprison critics, start killing people.  If the leader says it’s a moral imperative to kill people, who are we subordinates to argue with someone sent by God?  The “logic” of the Third Reich was also identical to Trump’s incoherent exposition of reality — anything that suits the Leader is true, all else, lies punishable by a violent, sadistically imposed slow death.  As the First Amendment still allows me to write and post here: fuck those fucking Nazi putos.

A quick reminder about the danger of an irrational leader in times of peril:

Grey Lady boldly headlines Trump’s lies…

Alternate reality, based in a faith-based world of alternative facts, admittedly, is also, applying basic common sense and language usage, a lie, and a deliberate “distortion” of reality (more accurately, disinformation), but what are you going to do, especially when that alternate reality TV show shit seems to be working (he won the popular vote, everyone seems to agree) and is backed by virtually all of our greatest and most principled billionaires?

When news reporters feel they have to take sides, where do you draw the line? You can see the distinguished Grey Lady’s editorial dilemma.