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.

As predicted, harsh consequences for candid DOJ lawyer under Bondi’s like, totally unweaponized DOJ

From no less than today’s NY Times:

Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.

The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .

. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.

Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”

A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.

source

In a surprise move, the DOJ is recruiting replacements for DOJ attorneys fired for disloyalty to the president and his agenda  from the graduates of “Libertarian” law schools (Antonin Scalia Law School, anyone?) who believe, along with the Federalist Society, the far-right judicial fraternity they join as law students, in the right of the strong (super-wealthy) to do whatever they need to do to the weak (the other 99.5%).  A good psychopath will do that.

Nazi salute, some critics claim

The Grey Lady, doing what she does best:

raised-arm salute by Stephen K. Bannon that to many resembled a Nazi gesture incited an outcry on Friday not just from liberal critics of President Trump and his allies but also from a leader of the European right.

It came a month after Elon Musk made a similar salute, and at a combustible moment when the administration of Mr. Trump, who has long been dogged by charges of encouraging far-right extremism, appears to be leaning more aggressively into far-right alliances around the world.

Of course, critics on the left and the far right could be mistaken, because sometimes a Nazi salute, used to indicate an iron-willed commitment to final “victory”, is not a Nazi salute, even when used to emotionally punctuate a far right call to fight to the death for victory.

The ability to hate without reason

The ability to harbor irrational hatred forever, toward those who’ve done you no harm, appears to be on the rise worldwide.   This brutish ability, encouraged by psychopathic tyrants, is needed to herd entire groups into cages, cattle cars, killing centers.   Without this regrettable talent, predicated on seeing everything with immature black or white simplicity, righteous mass cruelty and genocide are impossible.

Those who can hate without personal reason are capable of any atrocity you can imagine and many you can’t imagine.

The beauty part, for those who profit from human hatred and distrust, is because this hatred is irrational, it can never be mitigated by reason, persuasion, appeals to common sense or decency.   The main thing is the pure, unreasoning hatred, an endlessly renewable resource.  When they see someone they hate, a stranger immediately recognizable as hateful, coming toward them, and they are in a group, they know exactly what to do.

Hatred of certain strangers, fostered by other fervent haters, is different than specific hatred of those who have personally oppressed and injured you. The first is baseless and unlimited. The second is directed at individuals who have actually acted hatefully toward you. This is a distinction that may be lost on many, because for large groups of people, simple is better. “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!”

Where this kind of irrational hatred leads is easy to see.   How to overcome it, disprove it, demonstrate its demonic, instrumental idiocy, is a much harder challenge.   Nazis will be Nazis and no amount of compassionate dialogue is going to deter them from their world saving task.

This type will insist that a bishop asking an American president to show mercy for the weak and the frightened is nasty, a radical leftist, a slut, a lesbian, a dangerous maniac who hates God and Christ and needs to be arrested and deported.   Get some hopped up follower to kill someone like Bishop Mariann Budde and the country is one step closer to the imagined paradise, where all critics can be made to shut up about anything that might make a Nazi, klansman or false Christian feel bad.   There is no bigger “snowflake” than one of these crying, lying, hate-filled eternal victims of those they hate.

No quid pro quo, cucks!

The media pundits and pollsters, between explaining that they really have no idea how the upcoming mega-storm election will turn out, cover the neck and neck horserace between a candidate who graciously finds the good in Hitler and another who does nothing but harshly criticize Hitler’s admitted excesses.

The Steve Bannon/Vladimir Lenin firehouse of mendacity and outrage, a propaganda blitz featuring a high powered hose spraying disgusting attention-demanding excrement every second of every day to disorient, destabilize and immobilize, never stops.

The latest, the other day (before a dozen more bursts of the trusty far-right diarrhea hose) is the leaked Trump campaign memo that number two on his list of Attorney General picks (and she certainly smells like it) for Trump 2.0/Project 2025 is his loyal last minute appointment Aileen Cannon of the federal bench in his home district in Florida. Her Deputy AG, according to this memo, will be the lawyer who defended Trump in the stolen documents case that Cannon dismissed, after endless delays motivated by a heady mix of partisan calculation and genuine incompetence, on legally incoherent grounds. Her dismissal of her benefactor’s case will be overturned as contrary to law and the criminal prosecution against her patron will almost certainly go forward, assuming Trump doesn’t win and make her, or someone like her, AG.

It’s actually no big deal, though. For, as the Federalist Six have proclaimed, the quid, if it comes after the quo, is merely a perfectly legal gratuity, not a corrupt, prosecutable bribe. She is offered the theoretical job AFTER she dismissed the case, so the job is a perfectly appropriate tip for services rendered. Ergo, no quid pro quo, suckers.

In other news:

Mark Milley is not the only general to call Donald Trump a fascist.

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that,” John Kelly, the former Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff, said during a recent interview with my colleague Michael Schmidt. “So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Kelly even went as far as reading a definition of “fascism” to prove his point. “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.

Those are the kinds of things, Kelly added, that Trump “thinks would work better in terms of running America.”

from an excellent op ed by Jamelle Bouie

Beautiful moment of love between the man himself and the newest official member of MAGA nation, former aspirant for the Democratic presidential nomination Tulsi “I’ll do literally anything” Gabbard.

Putin is laughing his evil ass off

It’s hard to grasp the passionate MAGA embrace of dictatorial, enemy assassinating war criminal Vladimir Putin, except that their leader, a vain, compulsively lying orange-faced man with pale pink ears,  appears to truly love the taste of Putin’s ass.   Heather Cox Richardson, putting a few pieces together:

Under its new co-chairs, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Trump loyalist Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee last week sent out a robocall to voters’ phones saying that Democrats committed “massive fraud” in the 2020 presidential election and that “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.” This is a straight-up lie, of course—Trump and his loyalists have never produced any evidence for their accusations and lost more than 60 court cases over it—but Trump clearly intends to make it a centerpiece of his campaign. 

While Republicans are pushing the Big Lie, in The Bulwark today, conservative commentator Mona Charen noted that Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky this week warned the U.S. that Ukraine will lose the war against Russia’s aggression if it does not get U.S. aid. 

Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history,” Charen wrote. “If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the [Republicans] than anyone other than Trump…. [T]hey mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin,” she said, “must be pinching himself.”

Heather’s full letter

Anatomy of narcissism

As I understand it, and have experienced it with my father and others, narcissism is a reflexive lifelong response to unbearable childhood trauma. The pain and terror of this humiliating experience mark the child for a life devoted to never again feeling those terrible emotions. In order to avoid this pain, it is necessary to silence any voices that can evoke these emotions. Critics and questioners need to be put to silence by any means necessary.

The demon that torments the narcissist is so terrifying that the narcissist will do virtually anything to avoid that nightmarish feeling of powerlessness and humiliation.

In the case of a malignant narcissist, driven to attain power so that he can use it to punish his countless enemies, the narcissist is capable of literally anything you can imagine, and things worse than you can imagine.

Since we are living in the age of narcissism, and if you need convincing look at Ye, Elon, Don Jr., Caitlyn, Pompeo, Sloppy Steve and countless other public examples, we have a lot to learn about how to survive these motherfuckers. We’d be well-advised to start studying this prevalent disease of our time.