Life during the fight for American Nazism

During the rise of an irrationally-based power grab by fascists, everything you can think of will be weaponized, forcing a relentless, exhausting stream of irrational choices on the populace. Every issue, no matter how insignificant, will be framed in BLACK and WHITE, an existential battle between good and evil, the Nazis representing good and everyone else the vicious or unwitting tool of cunning, deadly evil. A pliant corporate media, driven by an unslakable lust for profit, will treat both sides as having legitimate points. In the name of fairness you get shit like this:

Mothers Against Drunk Driving will be holding a public meeting tonight at 8 pm. Mothers For Drunk Driving is demanding the right to debate, and present their equally compelling point of view. Baseball bats, bear spray, sharpened flagpoles, clubs, firearms, knives, whips, brass knuckles, acid, burning torches, pitchforks, hatchets and all homemade weapons permitted. Fighting is encouraged. Refreshments will be served.

And God bless these United Shayyyssshh…

How long before the New York Times is accused of anti-Semitism?

There are anti-Semites, plenty of them, millions of these creatures, everywhere. These hateful fucks have always been around and always will be around. There are also many critics of inhuman policies by the coalition of violent extremists and cynics currently running the Jewish State. Some of these critics are anti-Semites, no doubt. Some of these critics are humanitarians who are not anti-Semites.  Many of these critics are Jews, who, like me, hold our people to the moral standards we are all supposed to live by.

This headline is an uncharacteristically bold statement by the New York Times, we’ll have to keep track of the blowback on this one, eh?  I can hardly wait to see which White Christian nationalist American Nazi is the first to angrily accuse the Grey Lady of vicious anti-Semitism.  Hopefully they won’t give the Nazi salute as they do so, though it would be kind of funny if they did. Hitlerious, actually.

Cults, embracing lies as loyalty, the sting of death

Every cult is based on embracing the infallibility of the cult leader. This asshole is usually a charismatic (to some) narcissist, a person who can never be wrong, will kill to prove that, and who rewards any follower who swears undying loyalty to them with an assurance of (usually transactional) love. For the most part.

The cult leader, being infallible, doesn’t need a reason to throw somebody out of the cult, but for the most part, they tolerate cult members who are undyingly loyal.

For anybody who does not go along with a cult leader’s infallible, indisputable so-called lies, taking a self-described moral stand in the name of some asshole abstraction, like “truth”, there is only death. If apostates, heretics, dissidents and critics are not always killed by the leader, and made grim examples of, the spirit of questioning and undermining authority grows like a poisonous weed in the cult. The death inflicted on the questioner is usually spiritual, the hated apostate may never be spoken to, or of, again. Within the cult, this is the functional equivalent of death by physical killing.

 The sting of death is the absence of the person you loved, absolute and eternal, silence that can never again be broken with a laugh or anything else.  With death all possibility for a better mutual future, for reconciliation, for greater understanding and peace is crushed into bitter dust. The bitterness of willfully annihilated love is impossible to describe, though many of us know well the awful taste of it.

Lying liars lie, no lie

The great Heather Cox Richardson, reporting on a recent MAGA lie. It is worth noting that using bold, infuriating lies to influence public opinion was raised to an art form by the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propogana:

The cowboy myth emphasized dominance over the Indigenous Americans and Mexicans allegedly attacking white settlers from the East. On Friday an impressive piece of reporting from Jude Joffe-Block at NPR untangled the origins of a story pushed by Republicans that Democrats were encouraging asylum seekers to vote illegally for President Joe Biden in 2024, revealing that the story was entirely made up.  

The story broke on X, formerly Twitter, on April 15, when the investigative arm of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which promises to provide “aggressive oversight” of the Biden administration, posted photos of what it claimed were flyers from inside portable toilets at a migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, that said in broken Spanish: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The tweet thread got more than 9 million views and was boosted by Elon Musk, X’s owner.

But the story was fabricated. The flyer used the name of a small organization that helps asylum seekers, along with the name of the woman who runs the organization. She is a U.S. citizen and told Joffe-Block that her organization has “never encouraged people to vote for anyone.” Indeed, it has never come up because everyone knows noncitizens are not eligible to vote. The flyer had outdated phone numbers and addresses, and its Spanish was full of errors. Migrants who are staying at the encampment as they wait for their appointments to enter the U.S. say they have never seen such flyers, and no one has urged them to vote for Biden.

Digging showed that the flyer was “discovered” by the right-wing video site Muckraker, which specializes in “undercover” escapades. The founder of Muckraker, Anthony Rubin, and his brother, Joshua Rubin, had shown up at the organization’s headquarters in Matamoros asking to become volunteers for the organization; they and their conversation were captured on video, and signs point to the conclusion that they planted the flyers. 

Nonetheless, Republicans ran with the story. Within 12 hours after the fake flyer appeared on X, Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Dan Bishop (R-NC) brought posters of it to Congress, and Republicans made it a centerpiece of their insistence that Congress must pass a new law against noncitizen voting. Rather than being protected by modern-day cowboys, the woman who ran the organization that helps asylum seekers got death threats.

source

Klan mom’s position on MAGA Mike

MAGA Marjie, aka Klan Mom, one of the angriest, most confrontational and arguably dumbest members of Congress, brought her motion to oust MAGA Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House today.  The motion failed 359-43, as representatives took turns shaking Johnson’s hand during the ten minutes of Klan Mom’s impassioned speech against the tyranny of the “uniparty,” her disparaging name for anything bipartisan or cooperative.  All she wanted was reasonable to-the-death partisanship.  Here’s the Grey Lady’s summary of her principled stand against MAGA Mike:

Among the demands were cutting off all future U.S. aid to Ukraine, defunding the Justice Department and imposing a 1 percent across the board cut on all spending bills if lawmakers are unable to negotiate a deal to fund the government in September.

Why give money to Ukraine when they are fighting the man who did so much to put the big guy in the White House in 2016, tried again in 2020 and is dedicated to the same great patriot, now the leader of the MAGA GOP, in 2024? The Justice Department is a despicable, corrupt partisan tool in the hands of the evil Marxist Biden traitors, best to defund it until the good guys take over again in 2025. As for a government shut down — let’s just do it! Government sucks ass!!!

Anyway, as I begin drafting my concise letter to New York’s senators and my Congressman about why fucking Looey DeJoy is still the postmaster, and has now fully crippled the US Mail Service (draft of the letter will be here in the next few days), here’s a couple of nice shots of the cross-fit chaos agent, still a viable VP pick for the dozy orange felon.

Why nobody does it better than Heather

Jerry Garcia is supposed to have said that you shouldn’t try to be the best at something a lot of people are doing. You should try to be the only one doing what you do. That describes Heather Cox Richardson, historian, writer and incomparable reporter.

She has the greatest gift for setting things in clear perspective, often with a historical analog, a haunting echo of the past, presenting the most consistently important contemporary reporting. Her May 7 account of American law’s current struggle to contain a brazen gang of determined maniacs cuts to the point, over and over.

It begins:


The past two days of former president Trump’s criminal trial for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, to silence her before the 2016 election have been illuminating in different ways.

Yesterday, witnesses established that the paper trail of payments to Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who forwarded the money to Daniels, had been falsified. That paper trail included invoices, checks, and records. Witnesses also established that Trump micromanaged his finances, making it hard to believe he didn’t know about the scheme. 

That scheme looked like this: Former Trump Organization employee Jeffrey McConney said that Trump’s former financial chief Allen Weisselberg, who has gone to jail twice in two years for his participation in Trump’s financial schemes and is there now, told him to send money to Cohen. Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 from a home equity loan in 2016 to buy her silence about a sexual encounter with Trump. Cohen received 11 checks totaling $420,000 in repayment, including enough money to cover the taxes he would have to pay for claiming the payments as income for legal services, and a bonus. 

Nine of those checks came from Trump’s personal bank account. His team sent the checks to him at the White House for his personal signature. 

A number of observers have suggested that the evidence presented through documents yesterday was not riveting, but historians would disagree. Exhibit 35 was Cohen’s bank statement, on which Weisselberg had written the numbers to reflect the higher payment necessary to cover Cohen’s tax bill for the money. Exhibit 36 was a sheet of paper on which McConney had recorded in his own hand how the payments to Cohen would work. The sheet of paper had the TRUMP logo on it. 

“It’s rare to see folks put the key to a criminal conspiracy in writing,” legal analyst Joyce White Vance wrote in Civil Discourse, “but here it is. It’s great evidence for the prosecution.” 

source

Subscribe to her email. She sends one of these concise, clear-headed, timely letters from an American every single night.