Category Archives: Nazis

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!”

When a psychopath also has dementia

I’m not a psychiatrist, and American psychiatry at the moment only recognizes psychopaths who are antisocial enough to be arrested and locked up for criminal behavior (Antisocial Personality Disorder, “APD” [1] ) but the scary clown in the Oval Office fits all the criteria for what used to be called psychopathy.   All of his relationships are strictly transactional, he pursues only narrow self-interest, ignores laws and norms, is impulsive and incapable of empathy or regret.  Now, increasingly, daily, he exhibits signs of senility.   This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American, last night:

At [yesterday’s] meetings, Trump repeated Russian talking points, complained about how poorly he is treated, said he had ended six wars, insisted that voting in the U.S. is full of fraud, and suggested he would cancel the 2028 elections. By the late afternoon, the president was unable to recognize President Stubb, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “President Stubb of Finland,” Trump said. Looking around, Trump continued: “And he’s uh, he’s somebody that, where are we here? Huh? Where? Where?” Stubb said, “I’m right here.” Trump focused on him and answered: “Oh. You look better than I’ve ever seen you look.”

This evening, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Trump paused his negotiation with European leaders to call Vladimir Putin. Her source said that European leaders were not present for the conversation. Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times reported that the call was forty minutes long. source

I don’t know why Trump WOULD call Putin, in the middle of a meeting with Zelensky and European leaders about ending the war Putin started, the war against civilians Putin prosecutes mercilessly, including as Zelensky was flying to war-ravaged, crime-infested, national emergency DC to meet Trump.   I don’t know why Trump WOULDN’T call Putin.   He greatly admires the Russian dictator, and Putin, master of spy craft, kleptocrat, political assassin, aggressor in an unprovoked war, kidnapper of 20,000 Ukrainian children, orderer of mass graves for executed Ukrainian civilians, multifaceted war criminal, his idol, his Excellency, the beloved perpetual President of Russia, likely has his 79 year-old protege by the balls somehow.

Could His Excellency have a copy of pertinent sections of the thousands of hours of secret video Trump’s old buddy Jeff used to take, of his powerful guests enjoying some sneaky fun with fourteen year old girls?

You never know what someone as highly moral as Jesus Christ’s personal pick to be the 45th and 47th president is capable of.  History shows pretty convincingly that nothing is beyond his impulsive imagination, since he lives in a world of his own creation where he is the incomparable superstar around which everything else in the universe worshipfully rotates.  

Hopefully his advancing dementia takes him off the fascist billionaires’ chessboard sooner rather than way too late for humanity. Let charismatic, hugely popular President JD Vance try to run the sinking ship of the United States of MAGA/Project 2025.

“He [Putin] said, ‘No country has mail-in voting—it’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’ And he said that to me. It was very interesting, because we talked about 2020. He said, ‘You won that election by so much, and that’s how he [President Biden] got it… you lost it because of mail-in voting. It was a rigged election.’”

[1] click the blurb for the rest of the article on APD

Here are the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for APD, this list make you think of anyone?

My man scores better on this than the genius score he got on the test for dementia that he’s still bragging about!

Tragedy is inevitable when mass media lets a powerful idiot [1] doublespeak without correction

In 2018, in Helsinki, when Trump met with his idol Putin, after a secret one on one meeting their translators were ordered to destroy all notes of, he contradicted his own intelligence services about well-documented Russian meddling in the 2016 election (“The Russiagate Hoax” according to MAGA orthodoxy).  In answer to a question he said, standing next to his close friend, Vladimir,  “I don’t see any reason why Russia would have meddled in the election.”  The next day, after backlash, Trump clarified that he’d meant to say exactly the opposite of what he’d actually said, as so many of us so often do.  He claimed to have been tripped up by the double negative in that sentence.  A nice sixty second video of him making both statements appears here.  In any event, the idiotic, lying retraction was seemingly accepted by corporate media without much of a ripple.

He’s up to the same thing seven years later, his main trick, the only thing he really is an expert at, continually lying to cover up, or at least muddy, his other lies. Before the summit with the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war Trump said he would not walk away without a cease fire and would impose serious sanctions on Russia. After the aborted meeting, where, after public fawning by Mr. Trump, who applauded his Russian counterpart as he walked the red carpet, a ceasefire and sanctions were both taken off the table, Trump beamed about confirmation of one of his pet theories by Mr. Putin.

Putin himself said, Trump proudly reported, that Trump won by a mile in 2020, that mail-in voting guarantees massive fraud (see Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database [2] for definitive disproof of this widespread far right myth, snarlingly parroted by Bill Barr publicly before the 2020 election), and that’s why he “lost” a rigged election Biden cheated in with fraudulent votes.  So Putin PROVED that Trump’s claims are correct and all the so-called Election Truthers, a crazed offshoot of those who opposed the Birthers and the incredibly smart Flat Earthers, are big, fat, smelly liars.  “I don’t know why Vladimir WOULD lie about the certain fraud of mail in voting?” His takeaway from Putin’s confirmation of this pernicious anti-democratic myth? US only country to use infamously corrupt mail-in voting (although Putin’s Russia allows mail-in and internet voting, as do dozens of democracies). That would have to be scored: Putin lies, Trump lies.

Putin, the world’s wealthiest dictator, is a KGB trained expert at manipulation, intimidation and murder, and Trump is transparently the easiest president in American history to manipulate.  Tell him he’s great, that he doesn’t smell bad, that he’s a genius and he will eat whatever you’re holding right out of your hand.   This is the secret to Stephen Miller’s and Laura Loomer’s great success, they are experts at making Trump feel powerful, infallible, invulnerable, the greatest winner ever and not a deviantly corrupt, mentally unbalanced old man visibly losing his tenuous grip on reality with every passing day.

Meanwhile, as a result of the Artist of the Deal’s masterful negotiation with his master, Vladimir Putin, Russian tanks ravaging Ukraine today are flying Russian and American flags. USA!  USA!!!

By the way, I love this picture of Putin, taken the other day while Trump hosted the war criminal in “Russia”, or Alaska, or whatever. Thank you to Rapert Murdoch’s NY Post.

“Trump is greatest ever”

[1] Apologies for the outdated, now offensive term. “Stupid” or “dumb” just didn’t seem to do it.

[2] These slick, lying Nazis, authors of Trump’s blueprint for American Autocracy, Project 2025, have made the actual database quite a bit harder to access, after years of showing detailed findings of the vanishingly rare, statistically insignificant amount of voting fraud since 1982, a rate almost as low as the proportion of multibillionaires (like the owners of the Heritage Foundation) in the general population.

Hitler’s A-B-C of dictatorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the other hand:

Fascism is rule by bullies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascism does not succeed without mass desperation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endlosüng

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] from that article:

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

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

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

Voted in for life with a 50-49 mandate!

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

The need for collective moral action

Robert Reich ends today’s piece about living a moral life in our age of bullying with this plea:

Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.

This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.

source

It’s hard to disagree that we all need to be part of a vast network of moral resistance. The damage to our society that the Project 2025 government is busily doing is pure, punch-you-in-the-fucking-face fascism in action. Opposition to such bullying, lying and flagrant disregard of law would seem to be a bipartisan effort, except to tens of millions who respond to the reasonable fear and insecurity that accompanies powerlessness by following a strongman who have no qualms about bullying. The bully, they feel, will protect them, so they revere him and justify his bullying as part of a larger plan that humans cannot comprehend. The face eating leopard will never eat their faces, they believe, because they faithfully worship the mighty predator.

We must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance, as Reich says. It is our only hope to save our professed, widely shared values about justice, human equality and the inherent dignity of every individual. These values are under determined attack by literal American fascists who believe in an inalterable hierarchy of unaccountable power and privilege for superior citizens. The frustrating question is “how, exactly, do we organize and participate in this desperately needed vast network of moral resistance?”

I have been trying to find a way to get directly involved and have so far come up with very little, outside of signing up for, and donating to, my local Democratic organization. This is part of our dilemma as Americans. We are programmed, from birth, by thousands of hours of ads viewed in our earliest years, to be avid consumers. There is a seductive illusion of freedom created by the vast variety of consumer items we have the complete liberty to choose among (assuming we can afford to buy them). This phantom freedom also creates a childlike dependence on the cool things we can buy at retail superstores and other, less tangible, shiny objects sold to us by hucksters.

Our politicians? They need millions of dollars to run for federal office, and that money doesn’t come cheap, most of them feel they have to take it from whoever offers it to them, if they are going to win elections. We wind up with Chuck Schumer and company as the compromised Opposition party whenever Republicans are in the majority. The Democratic party can’t condemn an American ally for starving a besieged, captive population in an area that ally is constantly bombing. Desperately hungry people, lined up for food, are shot dead by an occupying army on a daily basis. But the Democrats corporate and lobbying sponsors would be furious about an official Democratic party condemnation of these war crimes by a beloved American ally. So Amy Klobuchar condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza, decries the forced starvation of the victims of Israeli policy, and two days later smiles in a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting the US to show that he can come visit his allies with impunity.

This is what decency and civilization demand. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it. It’s why, at a moment when the forces of fascism are so organized, well-funded and gleefully defiant in their sadism, terrorism (masked ICE squads accountable to nothing but unelected American Nazi Stephen Miller) and contempt for our experiment in democracy (which has allowed them to legitimately take power, as Mr. Hitler did back in 1933)

On Thursday, Trump’s loyal, cowed and bullied senators, who have already voted for cloture rather than allowing any further debate about Emil Bove III, their boss’s cynical pick for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals court (the cadaverous looking, bullying, morally repellant Bove has never been even a traffic court judge) will likely have the votes to put a man currently the subject of contempt of court proceedings into lifetime office as a judge. The contempt proceeding against Bove has been delayed for months by a temporary restraining order (which usually last a week or less) granted by Noemi Rao, rabid Federalist Society federal appeals court judge crazed in her assertions of illimitable Trump Executive Power and her vigilance against “usurpation” of such power) allowing Trump’s lickspittles to put Bove onto the one man short list to replace Alito or Thomas.

How do we organize and participate in a moral movement to stop that, by Thursday? The war against fascism is a war of attrition, and we all have to keep doing our part to protect values we all believe in, values under attack by a lawless regime fueled by bullying, death threats and the thrill that unaccountable sadism inspires in millions of our fellow citizens. God bless these United Shayyyyysh.

We get very little important news from our corporate media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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