Category: Politics

The following is a transcript of President Donald Trump’s January 21 speech at the Davos Economic Forum, or as much as could be translated from his native language:

Hey there. So anyway, I gotta lotta complaints. I had to switch flights before I even got here. Somethin’ about electrical issue. Somebody should do somethin’ about that. Who’s the Transportation Secretary? Who elected him?

Anyway, I land here in Davos, and they got the big red carpet rolled out for me, but there’s no honor guard. There’s no heads a’state. Nobody to greet me. It’s like I’m bein’ snubbed. Like when the last time Zelenskyy came to see me in Washington. But when I had Putin in Alaska, I pulled out all the stops. I had the military roll out a red carpet for him themselves. I came out to greet him. That’s how ya show respect to a real man. Putin’s a real man. He’s so forceful, so strong… so masculine … Hyh. Huh. ‘Cuse me. Sorry, just talkin’ about him makes me so wet…

So anyways, I came here to talk to NATO about Iceland. I mean Greenland. Why do I, I mean we, we need Greenland so much? Well, there’s this story. One Viking’s talkin’ to another Viking, and he goes ‘Sven, you named this place Iceland but it’s all grass and volcanoes.’ “Ya.” ‘And you named this other place Greenland but it’s all ice and rocks and tundra.’ “Yas.” ‘Why?’ “So da bandits raid da Greenland and leave my Izeland alone.” ‘But people aren’t gonna get confused just because you switched the names! You’d have to be unbelievably STUPID!’

So anyways, that’s why I’m goin’ for Iceland.

Greenland is a source of rare minerals. And lutefisk. Can’t forget the lutefisk. We must never allow ourselves to enter a lutefisk gap. But it’s all under threat now, it’s all under threat from Russia and China. No really, you see them China navy vessels all trawlin’ around the Arctic, you know it’s them cause they all smell like roast duck. And the Russians. You tell me, ‘Russians aren’t patrolling the Arctic. In fact this whole thing seems like it’s straight designed to turn the rest of NATO against its biggest military asset so Putin can move in.’ I have NEVER worked with Putin. I have never wanted him to succeed. Only America. I have never wanted Putin to dominate the United States, bending us over, pounding and pounding, making me wish I could have his baby…

Sorry, where was I?

So I says this and everybody’s all mad. Like the Nobel committee wouldn’t give me a Peace Prize, cause I keep threatenin’ to invade everybody. I don’t need them. I told the Kingdom of Nobel, cause you wouldn’t give me a Peace Prize, I don’t need to think about peace anymore. But nobody agrees with me. They’re so ungrateful. Like the Swiss. And the Germans. If it wasn’t for us, they’d all be speaking German now.

[offside] What, they ARE speaking German? Proves my point.

They used to love me. They used to call me ‘Daddy.’ Girls love it when you call them Daddy. Nobody calls me Daddy anymore. Well, maybe Eric and Tiffany, but who cares about them?

I told everybody here, I could use force. I really, REALLY wanna use force. I wanna see blood in the streets and people cry. Like Minneapolis. Women love it when you use force. Did you know that? My lawyers are sayin’ don’t elaborate. But I wanna use force. But I won’t. Cause I’m a nice guy.

See, I can do all this cause I’m the most popular president ever. I won the popular vote this time! By LOTS! Nobody will stand up to me. Cause everybody loves me. If I ever die, and I made a deal with God, so that’ll never happen, but if it did, my birthday would be a national holiday! It’d be bigger than the Fourth of JULY! That’s how much America LOVES me!

I won that election. And the one before that. And the one before that. And all the others. Washington? He cheated. I woulda won. All of them, they cheated. Reagan winning 49 states in 1984? Cheated. Lincoln winning the Civil War? Cheated. If I’d been Jefferson Davis in 1860, I’da won that election. Then we’d all be the Confederacy. But don’t worry, I’m doin’ everything I can to make that happen.

All I’m sayin’ is that you owe me. I mean us. The United States. And by that, I mean me. You owe us. We give you protection, we expect a cut. We expect a piece of the action. I’m just askin’ for Greenland. It’s just a rock. Just a piece of ice. It can’t be that important to you. I’m willing to destroy the greatest alliance in world history over it, it can’t be that important.

Yeah, people say all this makes me a dictator. Sure I’m a dictator. Some times ya need a dictator. Why did ya need a dictator? So he can make as much money as he can squeeze outta everybody else and fuck over anybody he wants with his government to make up for the fact that he’s so old and feeble he can’t find his own dick under his dunlop with a set a’tweezers. That’s why ya need a dictator.

Did I mention I’m almost eighty years old, clinically senile and have no internal monologue?

Well, anyway, that’s the speech. I’m late for my golf game. I hear the golfin’ is great in Switzerland this time o’year. Where AM I? Am I elected yet??

—

On the CBS Evening News, anchor Tony Doukopil remarked, “Today, Donald Trump truly became president.”

You know how I said my New Year’s Resolution was to not focus so much on Trump?
So much for that idea.

Overnight between Friday and Saturday morning, the Prince of Peace invaded Venezuela. That in itself is not a surprise, given that our Simple Simon Bolivar has been telegraphing moves against that country for most of his first year back in office. What amazes me is that it worked. Apparently they dropped in some commandos and captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and are hauling them back to the States on charges of machine gun possession, drug smuggling and other stuff that Boss Trump doesn’t seem to mind if you’re rich enough to bribe him for a pardon.

And sure, even some Republicans are sputtering over the fact that their President is acting without Congressional approval, but we had several votes come up before this to invoke the War Powers Act and they didn’t vote for it then. Trump operates, always has operated, under the old saying “it is better to get forgiveness than permission.” Just DO the thing, and permission is moot. After all, we’ve already done it, and it’s going to be a lot harder to undo. Same thing as getting rid of USAID, the Department of Education, the East Wing, all of it. So in the next few days Trump’s media shills are going to go on full court press to tell us all that anybody who opposes this new campaign for freedom is a Commie Muslim atheist tranny who just hates Our Lord Donald Trump, America’s Greatest President since Jesus Himself.

And our Liberal Media has been showing several incidents of locals cheering in the streets because Maduro is gone, but anybody who thinks this country cares about liberty, especially under our own wannabe dictator, is going to be very disappointed by the new management. These guys are less altruistic than Ayn Rand.

Speaking of whom, Rand did say that a free nation needs no permission to liberate a collectivist slave state, and few people would dispute that Maduro was running a collectivist slave state, but then that being the case, and given that we are clearly not acting on ideological motives, it comes back to the question of who benefits.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but has had only about 1 percent of the global output, partially due to US sanctions and largely due to mismanagement of facilities. In his press conference, where he sounded more wheezy, slurred and fatigued than ever, Trump openly declared that the country would be directly managed by the US on behalf of our oil companies. There was of course no mention of María Corina Machado, the right-wing opposition leader whom many observers thought won Venezuela’s last election, won the Nobel Peace Prize of 2025 (in exile) and publicly said that Trump should have gotten it. I am posting the transcript of Trump’s “speech” here in order to spare the reader Trump’s Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. Given again how much potential the territory could yield compared to current production, there might indeed be room for improvement.

But it’s just like thinking you can get rich in Las Vegas. The trick is not to make the money, the trick is to get out of town with it. It was almost as easy to conquer Iraq because that country was also a human rights nightmare and people were glad to see us come. But then we decided we didn’t need stuff like a local support base, let alone an exit strategy, because while in theory we were going to liberate the population, in practice all the connected people in the Bush Junior Administration were going to run the place as an industrial colony for the Empire. And that’s what strengthened the guerrilla campaigns against us, because whatever our troops on the ground wanted, they weren’t there to save orphans and give them Hershey bars. And they of course paid the cost, along with hundreds of thousands of locals. And keep in mind, the Bush people actually DID have some folks who believed their own hype about Iraqi Freedom. Trump clearly just wants to treat an entire country as his personal property, and his underlings make the Bush team look as competent as the actual British Empire. And they didn’t last forever either.

The difference is that Iraq was hot, humid and infested with guerrillas but was a nice, open desert for our troops to operate in. Venezuela is hot, humid, infested with guerrillas and a country consisting mostly of deep jungle with a coastline.

Can anybody say “Vietnam”, boys and girls?

Not like Trump would have any experience with that place.

The real disturbing aspect of this invasion is not that this is somehow a break with precedent. Of all Trump’s aggressions, invading a Latin American country is one of the more typical examples of American foreign policy. This is NOT a new action in American history. Remember when we invaded Panama and captured Noriega, just cause we could? When Reagan invaded Grenada in the Caribbean and overthrew its President, just cause he could?

No, nobody remembers. Because nobody reads history. This country can’t even learn from its own Goddamn history. That’s why Trump loves the poorly educated. Who else would elect him?

To paraphrase again from Ayn Rand, what this country needs to do is not preserve the Constitution, but to discover it, because we haven’t been running things according to the Constitution for quite some time. And if the first year of Trump II: Electric Boogaloo didn’t make it clear that that approach to government is reaching an unsustainable point, his Vietnam II is going to make it that much more clear. But since it’s also becoming clear that the Congress and the media won’t treat this as anything more than another Surprising Plot Twist episode of The Trump Show, this country may have to completely destroy itself in order for us to start fresh. It’s starting to look like a better and better idea. Maybe if we didn’t call ourselves “The United States of America” we’d quit assuming we had a legacy right to invade people in this hemisphere.

Of course that raises the question of what we call ourselves. America is taken. Columbia is taken. I don’t think most of us would appreciate being called California and All These Other Guys.

Personally, I’m partial to “Freedonia.”

Over Christmas Week, God’s Chosen Servant Donald Trump claimed his junior sibling’s title of Prince of Peace, by bombing Islamic militia camps in Nigeria, allegedly because of their strikes against the Christian majority. Raising the question of why Trump won’t authorize strikes against Russia when they have been bombing Ukrainian Christians for years. This happened on Christmas Day, after Trump and Melania participated in NORAD’s Santa Christmas watch, with Trump saying inappropriate things like claiming to win Pennsylvania in 2020, saying “We want to make sure that Santa is being good – we want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.” (He does live around Canada, after all) and then telling one eight-year old girl that she sounded “cute” and “beautiful.”

Speaking of which: Among Viceroy Trump’s many, many Truf Senchal posts over the holiday, he excreted a hysterical defense of his position regarding the Epstein Files ™. I do not care to go over this in full, I am just going to link https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115782891296626533 and invite you to read this as I do, as if Trump’s posts are being voiced by Eric Cartman.

One reason our Invincible Sun seems so threatened is that the Trump Files are not looking any better for him. His Department of Justice (a name that it was given before Orwell) released another huge document dump on Christmas Eve, which as Beltway insiders will tell you is standard procedure for presidents of both parties, hoping nobody will pay attention to the news over the holiday or the weekend. But some of this stuff is really bad, even by his standards. There’s one statement from a prosecutor saying Trump “traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a [Ghislaine] Maxwell case”, there is a document supposedly sent by Jeffrey Epstein before his death to fellow prison pedo Larry Nassar as a good-bye greeting saying he has taken the “short route” out. And there is a document listed as file EFTA00025010 where an alleged victim of the trafficking ring, who was thirteen at the time, said she got pregnant, and the conspirators, including Trump, murdered the baby and dumped it in Lake Michigan from his yacht in 1984.

And because apparently there’s nothing else we can do – like, IMPEACH THE MOTHERFUCKER, ALREADY – people are just speculating. Like, supposedly the Nassar letter is fake because it wasn’t stamped in New York (never mind that letters in the federal prison system don’t always have the same origin as the sender). Because the details are so sketchy, and the details are pushing the envelope, some commenters seem to think that the DOJ is deliberately fronting the most horrific and sensational material in order to discredit any accusation against Trump. It’s what Steve Bannon would call “flood the zone with shit” and Vlad Vexler would say is creating a false narrative not in terms of believing the government’s truth, but in terms of believing there is no truth.

I posit that if that is the case, then this maneuver is not the flex that they think it is, because posting the most appalling stories about rump in the hopes that people will be numb to them only belies the point that these stories are not surprising because we have already seen enough examples of his personal evil and corruption to believe he could do such shit, whether these particular cases can be proven or not. Remember, everything against Trump is fake news. Until it isn’t. Russia Russia Russia was fake news, until we found that “perfect phone call” where Trump tried to force the Ukrainian president to create dirt on Joe Biden to get an arms deal from us against Russia. The intimidation campaign against Republicans after November 2020 was fake news, until the Georgia Secretary of State released his recording of Trump’s phone call to him. Trump’s pictorial birthday letter to Epstein was fake news. Until the Wall Street Journal produced their evidence.

And at that point it just comes down to two questions: What is going to be enough for the Church of Trump to quit supporting him? And, what is it going to take for the disaffected majority to say that this cannot stand?

See, Trumpniks, this is why the rest of us think you’re idiots. Not because you oppose abortion, or oppose aid to Ukraine. Those are actual political positions, and you used to have intellectuals who could make serious arguments for them. Not anymore. Now all you care about is Trump. You agree with everything your God-Emperor says, even if he changed his mind three times today. And the joke is that you’ve built your entire philosophy around a mortal man who is that much more perishable than the rest of us. Pretty soon he’s going to need more life support technology than the “real” God-Emperor of Warhammer 40K, and if he dies it will do more to wreck your universe than it would the Imperium.

Seriously, Trumpniks, what will you do when he’s gone? Are you seriously going to tell me you would storm the Capitol in the name of JD Vance and his Liz Taylor eyelashes?

You have nothing else but Trump. You ARE nothing else but Trump. And the laugh here is that “his” positions aren’t really his. Cutting off aid to Ukraine is only acting in service to your Master’s Master, while abortion only became an issue for the non-Catholic contingent as a dodge from supporting institutional racism, and this was one of the areas where the Captain of the Princess adapted to your team and not the other way around.

Everybody knew how much Trump fucked up the first time, and they knew he was gonna fuck it up again, that much worse. He actually announced it, with his tariff policies, and with hiring on Elon Musk and RFK Jr. Nobody cared. They were tired of watching boring Democratic professionals fuck things up in boring professional ways. They wanted to watch their favorite celebrity fuck things up in hysterical and unpredictable ways. (The joke here being that however much the Right accurately snipes at empty-headed Hollywood liberals who think their stardom validates their opinion, they decided to worship a fake TV billionaire who embodied their sense of ‘real’ America, created for them, as Trump would say, straight out of Central Casting.)

People just wanted to keep watching the Trump Show. They didn’t want their favorite celebrity to serve his well-deserved sentence. The fact that this required putting him back in charge of our foreign policy, economic policy and nuclear weapons was just incidental.

The issue is that way too many Americans do not know, or do not care to know, the difference between reality and entertainment, which means that not only does morality not even enter the picture, neither do the consequences of their own actions.

I actually can’t put this any better than Jermaine Fowler could, so I’m just going to link his post:

https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-celebrity

What it comes down to is that we are in this situation because a critical mass of non-critical thinkers in this country decided they wanted their favorite reality TV game-show host/wrestling heel/pedophile to become an omnipotent and unaccountable GOD.

Verily, can we doubt that Our Divine Sovereign is a wise counselor, wonder worker and font of miracles? Just consider, in the summer of 2024, perhaps coincidentally the weekend before the Republican National Convention, Our President was holding an outdoor speech and got shot across the ear, ducked and came back up with blood streaking across his face from the ear. And yet, the very next day, he was spotted at his usual golfing spot with no bandages. And while he did have one at the Convention, not long after he was revealed to have completely healed, even though most physicians will tell you that a body can’t regenerate ear cartilage after it’s been damaged.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE HE WAS NEVER SHOT AT ALL!!!!

Such is the power of mindless celebrity worship that it elevated the most pathetic unqualified lowlife to the world-historical figure of our age, the Colossus who strides the earth. Or at least, spreads his ass across two seats in an airplane.

And yet, Our Lord’s lizard-like powers of cartilage regeneration apparently don’t extend to his hands, as he was recently sighted with concealer on his left hand after having bruises and bandages on his right hand for months. Allegedly this tracks with the fact that an Alzheimer’s treatment drug called Leqembi is administered through injections in the hand and may cause drowsiness, and also requires frequent monitoring with MRIs. This decline may be why Trump is becoming that much more grandiose, rattling off ever more expansive plans for a “Golden Fleet” and a Versailles-like palace where the East Wing used to be, and assuming the Kennedy Center for himself. It’s what you do with Grandpa to keep him occupied, let him go to the office and act like he’s doing his job so that he’ll still have a daily routine and not get any worse. Not like the real architects of Project 2025 wanted Trump as anything more than a figurehead, but soon they might not even have that. And as the agenda gets further and further away from crowd-pleasing and more and more towards Trump’s vanity and the architects’ sinister designs, the support base may flake away, as we have seen in the off-year elections.

So this is my New Year’s Resolution, if it’s actually possible to keep: Talk less about Trump. Stop focusing everything on that decaying bag of pig manure. He is a known factor, and probably not long for this world. (But maybe he is. As I say, God is real, and He hates us all.) This is not to say I will not talk about politics. On the contrary, it is all the more important, because as the midterm election season arrives, we need to talk about what happens after Trump, given how many people did not vote for Harris because they were sick of the Democrat establishment, and the fact that Trump really has destroyed the entire premise of American government, the idea that there is a professional class of people, including politicians, that place patriotism and the public good above fealty to their Mob boss. That is gone, even if a Democrat is elected president. We all know how much the Church of Trump hated the Biden Administration when it did follow the law, imagine how they will react if the next president follows their role model’s example. And after all, what could stop him?

That’s what we need to face, sooner rather than later, because Trump’s demise is more in sight than ever.

But for now, let us all celebrate the best thing about Trump’s first year in office:

It ended.

Of all the disgusting and offensive things Viceroy Of Russian North America Donald Trump has done, while exceeding the threshold of disgusting every waking hour, the one that attracted the most social media attention was early last week when he was on Air Force One and a reporter, Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg News, asked him what Jeffrey Epstein meant when he said Trump knew about “the girls”. Trump just said, “I know nothing about that”, and when she asked if there was anything incriminating in the Epstein Files, he put a finger right in her face and said, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

First off, let’s get the obvious out of the way: In Trumpworld, every accusation is either a confession or a projection.

Secondly, that woman is on no level as overweight as Trump.

This was the same week that he hosted the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, at the White House. Which one does for an acting head of state. But Bin Salman is usually referred to by his initials, MBS, which also stand for “Mr. Bone Saw.” Because a Saudi dissident reporter, Jamal Khashoggi, went to the Turkish consulate for Saudi Arabia in October 2018 – during the first Trump Administration – and was killed there, after which according to intelligence reports the murderers, some of whom worked on MBS’ personal detail, dismembered Khashoggi’s body. Saudi Arabia of course was also the homeland of the 9-11 terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center. So when Trump had him in the White House, an ABC reporter pointed out to MBS that a lot of 9-11 survivors were angry at this visit, and Trump stepped in, first to badmouth ABC, and then in reference to Khashoggi, “Things happen, but he knew nothing about it … You don’t have to embarrass our guest, asking a question like this.”

Of course Trump was going to take MBS’ side on this. His comments were a direct message to all the professionals in the room: If I could, I’d do that to any one of you. I mean, it makes sense that Trump would emulate an Arab oil prince. More money than God, you get to grow out your beard and wear a bathrobe in public, and you probably have 14-year old Filipino girls serving your every whim on pain of death. Of course you can’t eat pork in a Muslim country, but rules never apply to Donald Trump.

It’s of a piece with Trump’s lackey Steve Witkoff forwarding a 28-point “peace” plan for Russia and Ukraine that requires Ukraine to disarm and bans it joining NATO while at the same time forcing no concessions on Russia whatsoever. The authorship of the “American” plan was put in question given that much of the text uses idioms that are more common to Russian than American English. But the fact that this is presented as a State Department plan only confirms that Trump shares, or wants to emulate, Vladimir Putin’s approach to the world, in two respects: The idea that Russia, as a bigger, stronger nation, has every right to take little pieces out of a smaller, weaker nation at its leisure, which is not true, and that if Ukraine continues to resist, Russia will crush them, which is also not true, because Putin couldn’t do it three years ago when Russia had a fresh military with a million-odd less casualties.

And of course the more legally serious manner was where Democratic legislators with military/intelligence experience, including Senator Mark Kelly (D.-Arizona) and Senator Elissa Slotkin (D.-Michigan) made a media post addressing the military saying that they should not obey illegal orders from the government. Trump responded to this by twitting that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR” that should be punished by “death!”

And sure enough Slotkin, for one, started getting bomb threats at her house. Of course everyone in the Trump Party was quick to take their Lord and Savior’s side when the same people were screaming that if we showed the least disrespect to the memory of the slain Charlie Kirk, every Republican was fair game for any trans person with a gun. But Trump is a simple man operating on the simple logic of a personalist dictator: Anything I do is legal, since I own the government. L’etat, c’est moi. If Donnie could speak French.

I am quite serious when I say that I can think of no more loathsome humanoid in world history.

I mean, even Hitler liked dogs.

You might say, Hey, didn’t Hitler kill millions of people? Well, we haven’t given Trump a chance to commit real genocide! That stuff with the fishing boats and the detainees in custody, that was just testing things out! We have to trust in the PLAN! Remember, Hitler didn’t have nukes. What, you don’t think Trump would use nukes on Venezuela just to stay out of prison? Look at what he’s done so far! You KNOW what they do to pedos in prison!

Yet for all the things that our magical emissary from God is able to do in defiance of our laws and traditions, he is not yet omnipotent and it looks like his near omnipotence is starting to go the way of his actual potence.

Of course, this month Trump had to sign the discharge petition on the Epstein Files. (‘What’s that illegible scribble under his autograph?’ ‘It’s Russian for ‘I sign under duress.’) How that happened is pretty amusing in itself. First off, it almost justified the Senate Democrats’ cave on the government shutdown because it took away House Speaker Mike Johnson’s pretext to hold up the business of Congress. Johnson, who is the answer to the question ‘What if Waylon Smithers were a live-action character?’ agreed to allow the vote on the assumption that the provisions of the bill allowed the Republicans in the Senate to attach all kinds of conditions to delay it even further. Instead Senate Majority Leader John Thune made a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass the thing under unanimous consent. Never let it be said that Schumer is good for nothing. But I think this was also Thune signaling that he’s just as sick of Johnson as he is of Trump.

And while Trump’s threat against “SEDITIOUS” heretics in Congress was clearly intended to incite stochastic terrorism (since after all he was not legally liable for inciting a riot on January 6), that requires having an army of brain-dead followers willing to commit violence in your name. And their loyalty is no longer assured. This was made clear when his primary brain-dead follower, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, made a big announcement Friday that she is leaving Congress on January 5 (staying in just long enough to be eligible for the Congressional pension). This also means that at least in the short term, Republicans have one less seat in the House, which may be another middle finger to both Trump and Johnson.

This resignation may also have implications for the long-term. Mainly, that Greene isn’t quite as brain-dead as she acts. She has even gone to the media to publicly apologize for many of the intemperate things she has said as a zealot in the Church of Trump. Why? Supposedly the Epstein Files. Again, it comes down to the point that there are only two kinds of Americans: Trumpniks, and people who live in reality. And the only thing they can agree on is: “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” People like Greene have indulged in the sick conspiracy fantasy that a cabal of Jews are sexually trafficking good Aryan girls, and it turns out not only are they right in Epstein’s case, but the hero they thought was going to put a stop to all that is at the heart of the whole thing – if not a participant himself, definitely willing to use his power to protect people who were part of the conspiracy, namely Ghislaine Maxwell.

But it goes beyond that. Greene also said after Congress passed the One Big Bullshit Bill that she only realized after the fact that cutting Obamacare would make insurance prices go up for her own family members. In this she is pretty represenative for everybody who voted for Trump when the rest of us were telling them that’s like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. In the long term though, this really started when Greene overestimated her ambitions and asked Trump and others in the Inner Party about running for US Senate. Most Georgia Republicans know that running in a safely gerrymandered district is not the same as a statewide race, and shot her down. Trump, who at his best has better political instincts than most experts, agreed. And Greene’s been taking little steps away from the plantation ever since.

But the biggest point of Greene’s resignation speech was: “I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”

First, that’s an acknowledgement that Republicans will likely lose the midterms. Secondly, that in her otherwise safe, “sweet” district there would be a contentious primary that would require Republicans to raise millions of dollars they need to spend elsewhere. And while she would likely win that election, as Paul Ryan likely would have won re-election in 2018, it wasn’t worth it. Because a Democratic majority will almost certainly impeach Trump. Why? Maybe destroying the East Wing without permission. Maybe if he starts the You Know What They Do To Pedos War. Maybe because his Mama shoulda got an abortion and saved the entire planet cosmic levels of grief.

And Greene would be expected to defend Trump after he repaid all her loyalty with spite and threats, because she couldn’t tell him two plus two make five.

Greene, like Trump, has been a moron for public consumption, because that’s what it takes to appeal to a voter base of morons. But unlike Trump, she doesn’t seem to have gotten high on her own supply of stupidity. And she, like the rest of the cult, went along with the stupidity because it was profitable for her. In her case, literally. What all this says, after everything else, is that it’s not going to be profitable for much longer, and she’s jumping ship.

Again, Trump only seems invincible because he has a mob of mouth breathers willing to shed blood in the name of Our Lord. But when most of them are about to have their insurance premiums skyrocket and a roll of ground beef is passing seven dollars, while they see Trump living high on the hog with Elon Musk and the other elites, some of them might start to look around and think “Hey… mebbe he lied to me.” Now, these are the people who think that their Nickelback albums should come with a five-cent rebate, so basic deduction may be beyond them. But if Margie can learn, so can they. Trump should hope not. In the future, probably sooner than any of us think, our Dread Sovereign might make some all-caps imperial proclamation that he expects his followers to enforce, and the response might be:
“Quiet, Piggy.”

The only good thing about the Schumer Surrender on Trump’s Shithole Shutdown is that it killed the pretext for Trump’s chamberlain, House Speaker Mousy Mike Johnson, to hold up the business of the House, which would have included the swearing in of the special election winner in Arizona, Democratic Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who along with all other Democrats and four Republican heretics would be enough votes to pass a resolution on releasing the Epstein Files. ™ Well, Wednesday, Johnson had to do exactly that. And of course such a petition would also have to be passed by the Senate, and if that happened it would certainly be vetoed by Childish Caligula, requiring an override. But even as the House action happened, various sources, including Republican committees, started releasing some of the information that they had access to, including emails released by the Epstein family estate and distinct from the Epstein Files ™ in question. The one that got the most attention is a 2011 email where Epstein told accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump is “the dog that hasn’t barked” because one of Epstein’s victims spent hours at his house with Trump and was “never once mentioned by investigators”, saying “I’m 75% there”, which probably means 75 percent towards deducing that Trump was a mole for law enforcement. Epstein also told a confidant that he’d met Trump at a Thanksgiving event in 2017 – after Epstein had already been convicted of state charges for child prostitution but before being convicted of federal charges. And after Trump was first inaugurated president. And then the big story Friday was the email where Mark Epstein asked his brother Jeffrey if Vladimir Putin had a photo of Trump “blowing Bubba“…

Did I mention that the end of last week was my birthday?

Happy Birthday to Me

Happy Birthday to Me

Fuck Trump up the a-aaaass

Happy Birthday to Me

(and many more…)

But I still want to go over exactly why the shutdown surrender was a bad thing overall even if it is paying dividends and is getting the country back to normal, whatever that is under the Trump occupation. Because while that regime may be ending soon, the way things went down just confirms that Republicans are only part of the problem.

Why did the Democrats shut down the government, when that never goes well? Because they already caved earlier in the year. In March, there was a lapse of funding that required a continuing resolution to last through September. Many Democrats in both Houses of Congress opposed the resolution given that the Trump regime was already taking money from several government programs, and under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (‘O BUBBA’) would end up defunding a lot more by legislation. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (of New York) decided to get enough Democrats to pass the continuing resolution, despite opposition within his own party. This was partially because Trump had already put many decisions under Elon Musk’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ and a shutdown of Congress would only give DOGE more authority to take congressional powers away.

But in the subsequent months, not only did Congress pass Trump’s One Big Bullshit Bill, the Trump regime, while relying less on DOGE, continued to withhold spending that had already been earmarked for the fiscal year. Democrats indicated that they wished to avoid a shutdown – which Republicans under Trump had been threatening in order to force more concessions – but Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought said “The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan”, adding that the White House would not abide by bipartisan spending agreements and that he believed the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. But the Congressional majority has generally gone along with all this, because the Banana Republican Party is all in on the idea of a unitary executive, which Donald Trump takes to mean that he can do anything he wants because he was directly appointed by God, who is also himself.

The issue was clear. Shut down the government, and Trump exercises unitary authority. Do nothing, and Trump exercises unitary authority anyway.

It’s sort of like a labor strike. Now kids, some of you may not even know what that is, but it’s when the labor force at a given business stops coming to work in order to demand better wages, benefits or work conditions. And it usually involves some of the workers picketing the business front to discourage third-party workers (‘scabs’) from coming to the job. This requires solidarity from everyone involved, which is why it’s kind of hard to run a strike these days. And when in this case you had people like the Nevada Senators and John Fetterman who were not keen on the shutdown to begin with. But in a strike, everybody knows there is going to be hardship, because they (unlike Congress) aren’t getting paid. But they do it anyway, for the principle, and because if they did nothing, things would get even worse. Usually, for a strike to succeed, it has to put the onus on the holdout party (management, in this case Republicans). And because everyone knows the Congress are not a bunch of poor miners or kitchen workers, it is hard for them to put the onus on the party that didn’t want the shutdown. But when the president of that party was petitioning the Supreme Court for the previously not-acknowledged right to withhold SNAP benefits to the poor, everyone knew who was really responsible, and that Trump wasn’t just supporting the shutdown, he was escalating the suffering. And the off-year elections, in which hardly any Republican won, should have indicated where the public pressure was going. Even Trump twitted that the shutdown was one reason for the election results. And the public was willing to support the Democrats because they knew that if they did nothing, they would lose social services anyway.

Really, if the Lamestream Media thought that Trump’s non-negotiation negotiation was a case of hostage taking, it was a case of the bank robbers getting everybody in the bank together then showing the police the bank president. Then shooting him. And then saying “Let us get all the money and get out of here free, or we’ll shoot the bank president.”
“Uh… dude, you already shot him.”
“Oh.”

It is testimony to how inept Trump is that he thought this would work and testimony to how much MORE inept Democrats are that it did.

Which doesn’t change the fact that a shutdown hardly ever works for the party that initiates it, and it was that much less likely to work given Trump’s infinite appetite to inflict pain not only on the country at large but Democrats and heretical Republicans in particular. So if the Democrats didn’t make the best of the one option they had, the other issue is that they didn’t see if they could create other options.

As Reed Galen pointed out Thursday, it’s not as though Democratic leadership didn’t have time to plan. “If Election Day last year was Tuesday, November 5, 2024 and Inauguration Day was January 20, 2025, that left 76 days, two and a half months, for the opposition party, that is, the Democrats, to huddle, brainstorm, plan, and execute any number of tactics that could have slowed down the new administration. Joe Biden was still President of the United States during this period.

Likewise, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer knew a short-term funding bill would be needed in March. He didn’t (do anything) about it a week ahead of time, but months in advance. When the time came, as we know, he and nine of his colleagues didn’t so much as cross the aisle to stop it, let alone stand athwart history.

…In 2021, Democrats passed emergency subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare, if you’re nasty) with the American Rescue Act. They extended them through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. They were the ones who passed the bill that phased out the subsidies come December 31st, 2025. They’ve known this deadline was coming for three years.”

So Schumer had to go along with the shutdown in fall because he had no plan to deal with his party’s lack of options in March, (other than caving in advance like they did then) and that was because they did not make any plans after November 2024.

What plans? Well, as I’ve said, maybe they could have looked at what Republicans did under Obama and Biden and used every counter-majoritarian stop in the system to do to Trump what his party did to stymie their presidents. But there was not only bad strategy, there was NO strategy.

As I’ve said in regard to Obama in particular, the Democrats are the real conservatives of American politics, at least if one regards our main Founding Father as Franklin Roosevelt rather than Thomas Jefferson. They see things only in terms of their paradigm and years after Trump came on the scene – heck, years after Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh came on the scene – they have no clue how to react to people who don’t play by their rules. Even Obama, who is both more intelligent and more assertive than the typical politician, didn’t seem to grasp that Mitch McConnell and his party didn’t regard him as a legitimate president. And they actually treated Obama better than Biden. At least they acknowledged Obama was elected.

In 2016, I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, and I still maintain that that didn’t make any difference because my state voted for her anyway. But there are a lot of states where people didn’t vote for her or voted “third” party and that made the difference for Trump in the Electoral College. And what we just saw is a good part of why that happened. The idea that there’s no difference between the two sides, the idea that even if there is, Democrats aren’t going to do anything, or George Carlin’s assessment that “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-mozilla-102&hsimp=yhs-102&hspart=mozilla&p=it%27s+an+elite+club+and+you+ain%27t+in+it&type=newtabv2Aug27#id=1&vid=ef6d4ec948c9c826c554c59741695aa1&action=click The idea that Democrats are in the same club as the Republicans and they can use the shutdown and the ACA as political issues to rile up the voters, and as soon as they win elections, go back to not caring. After all, once you’re elected, you don’t need to worry about health care.

There are two problems with that: One, it wasn’t the US Congress that was being elected, and two, if anybody still believes that Washington Democrats and Republicans are in the same club, it’s just the Washington Democrats. Everyone else recognizes that the Republicans are not a ‘liberal’ (as in market liberal, small-r republican) party but the right-wing version of a Leninist cadre that works within the system only so long as they have to and as soon as they have eliminated all procedural obstacles, anyone who opposes them will get put up against the wall. Which makes the Democrat Senators’ sellout that much more inexplicable and counter-productive.

And that just gets to the point that if everyone is blaming Chuck Schumer for the shutdown, despite his conspicuous statements of opposition to the deal, it’s because it’s only the latest example of a pattern. He had already failed to recognize the nature of his opposition in March. At the time, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D.-California) said “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. I think that’s what happened the other day.” Schumer retains his position mainly because he is an expert organizer and fundraiser for establishment Senate candidates, which also means he acts as a gatekeeper for who’s “establishment.” It is widely perceived, for instance, that after rabble-rousing leftist Graham Platner announced a Maine Senate campaign to unseat Republican Susan Collins, Schumer not only got current Maine Governor Janet Mills to primary Platner, he got opposition research to come out regarding (among other things) the Totenkopf tattoo Platner got in the military. Which on one level would be fine. Janet Mills is not a hothead. She is a popular, respected and vetted politician who would be a better Senator than Susan Collins, if only because she doesn’t vote with the Trump Party. However Susan Collins is 72 and Janet Mills is 5 years older than that. And we’ve already had Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) and other cases to show us what happens if a Senator stays in office until they die of old age. During the election season, Schumer never endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the official Democratic nominee for New York Mayor, even after Mamdani got the endorsement of New York Congressman and Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries. Schumer wouldn’t even tell reporters whom he did vote for in New York. It was suspected that Schumer preferred former Mayor and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary by a large margin, partially due to personal scandals and partially due to his assumption that being an establishment politician was an asset. And in the November shutdown deal, Schumer apparently did not want the eight Democrat-aligned Senators to go with the Republicans but he was unable to stop them. In fact he was apprised of their efforts even though he publicly opposed them. Oh, and here’s a news bit that hasn’t been publicized in the wake of all this: The Republican rider to the continuing funding bill that ended the shutdown included a provision allowing Republican Senators who were investigated by the government over the January 6 insurrection to sue the government for up to $500,000 each. This was added at the insistence of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (BR.-South Dakota) but Schumer signed off on it.

According to CNN’s Harry Enten, Schumer is “the least popular Democratic Senate leader ever” in polls dating back to 1985. Cause just think, we’re going to have to do this all over again when the continuing provision expires in January. And with friends like this, who needs enemas?

Even now, with Trump hemorraging, that doesn’t guarantee that America will get back to a good or even tolerable government, because both parties have been operating on “norms” rather than enforceable laws. And when the Trump Party acknowledges neither laws nor norms, the rest of the country needs to use what processes remain to stop them. And that requires an opposition that is willing to do so. Which currently doesn’t exist. So it needs to be created. I mean you never know, the next wannabe autocrat might not have a Mar-a-Lago full of sexual skeletons to expose, although to judge from Epstein’s black book, there’s probably going to be a lot of future candidates.

So with Donald Trump’s annual Shithole Shutdown reaching a new record for length, and Trump going so far as to enlist the Supreme Court to help him stop SNAP payments to the needy, his occupation government was getting more and more unpopular just as two important governors’ races and a mayoral race in New York were happening, and the results last Tuesday were such a shellacking for the Trump Party that in Georgia Democrats won two public officer races, when Democrats have not won a non-federal race in Georgia since 2006. Republicans have never been more unpopular, and Democrats have never had more leverage since Trump was inaugurated. Trump himself said that the two reasons his party lost were “Trump wasn’t on the ballot and the shutdown.” The first part is probably true given how many of his fan club didn’t vote for anyone else on the ballot in 2024, which is the main reason Democrats still have as many Senators as they do.

So what do you do if you’re the Democratic Party?

What do you do?

That’s right! CAVE!

Over the weekend (to make sure that no staffers would be available to take phone calls from angry constituents) seven Democratic Senators and one Democratic-aligned independent agreed to a deal that would end the shutdown without getting any concessions from the Republican Party to end the ‘recissions’ of the executive branch against Congressional spending, or preserve the insurance subsidies of the Affordable Care Act. What they got was a promise to vote later on a bill that might or might not extend the subsidies for a limited period. A promise. From the party led by the guy famous for making promises such as “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” and “Honey, I brought the condoms this time.”

If you’re Chuck Schumer, you surrender everything in negotiations and get nothing back. It’s what you do.

Now, with my right-wing background, I am sympathetic to the pitch that a government that invests in social spending makes people dependent on it. But the fact is, that only becomes an issue if one party wants to make it a political issue, and the political issue is not how much welfare is to be budgeted, but rather the fact that one party thinks that any level of welfare is a good idea and the other never liked it much in the first place and is increasingly clear will no longer support at all. That party says its motives are based in Christianity, but what they mean by ‘Christian’ is “Jesus fed the hungry and cured the sick by magic, so that means we shouldn’t have to pay taxes for that stuff.”

It was pointed out that both Nevada Senators voted for this, given that the shutdown has been affecting air traffic control for weeks and Trump’s reality-TV Transportation Secretary announced that flights nationwide will be cut by up to ten percent. Of course they haven’t pointed out that Las Vegas tourism has been down for months because regular customers from Canada and other countries are being harassed by Border Patrol. Or maybe tourism is going down because greedy corporate bean counters charge up the ass for hotel parking and 12 dollars for a room service coffee.

Maybe the Democrats thought that if they went along with what the Republicans wanted to do, they could get things back to normal, whatever passes for that nowadays.

Maybe they’re just fucking pussies.

Monday, independent Senator Angus King of Maine went on “Morning Joe” to talk to his fellow collaborator Joe Scarborough, and described his vote to end the shutdown, saying “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work. It actually gave him more power.”

Jesus on a pogo stick, the Las Vegas Raiders fight harder than that.

Senator King – excuse me, MISTER King – would you like to tell that to all those people who voted in Virginia? Would you like to tell that to all those people in Pennsylvania who voted to confirm non-Trumpnik state court judges? Would you like to tell all the people in Mississippi who voted to break the state legislature Republican supermajority, that standing up to Donald Trump doesn’t work? Let’s just lie back and let him treat this entire country like Virginia Giuffre??

What the last election should have told Democratic ‘leadership’ was that the public at large, including a lot of people who probably hadn’t voted Democrat in years, were willing to hold firm on the shutdown, and a lot of them knew that the shutdown and everything that’s happened as a result of it are the direct responsibility of Donald Trump, and he will do worse if we do nothing, and the shutdown is the only thing that has changed anything?

Instead, senior Democrats decided, “eh, no. Let’s just cave on everything and hold out for an empty promise that we know Republicans will never honor, so that their Boss can smirk at the camera like a retarded toad and sneer, ‘I win again. I always win. I get everything I want. Always. Cause God hates the entire human race so he sent me here to turn this entire planet into an unbearable Hell that I will rule for all eternity.

‘Nyahh.”

With such political acumen, it’s a wonder Kamala Harris didn’t lose 52 states.

Because the other thing that senior Democrats should have learned last week but didn’t was that those who voted last week didn’t vote Democrat because of the institutional party, but in spite of it. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries – Congressman from New York – didn’t endorse his own Party’s nominee for Mayor, socialist Zohran Mamdani, until the very end of the campaign. Senate Minority Leader (from New York) Chuck Schumer didn’t endorse Mamdani at all. (In his defense, if he had, it might have caused Andrew Cuomo’s polls to go up by 5 points.) He even refused to admit to reporters who he had voted for. Presumably if it wasn’t Mamdani, it would be Cuomo, an establishment politician who was ruined by allegations of corruption and sexual harassment and ended up getting endorsed by Trump. So for Schumer, that would be par for the course.

Jay Jones in Virginia ran for state attorney general and the press got wind of him having an email conversation where he joked about shooting a Virginia Republican politician. Everybody called on him to end the race cause he had no chance and could have undermined Abigail Spanberger’s race to be Governor. Spanberger won by double digits and Jones won by 6 points.

While Spanberger may be perfectly acceptable to the Democratic establishment, a lot of other people who ran and won last week are not. They won anyway. The common thread was that people thought they would take the fight to Republicans, not that the party machine had given them the stamp of approval.

This is again par for the course. It ties into an operational problem that has been an issue for years and has only become that much more obvious as Democratic Party standard operating procedure is revealed as that much more ineffective against the new Trump occupation government. I had already mentioned that when New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez moved to get the ranking Democratic seat on the House Oversight Committee, she was stymied by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D.-California) who arranged for the seat to go to Gerry Connolly (D.-Virginia) who was at the time suffering from late stage esophageal cancer. And sure enough, he died, which is something that held up business. One of the issues with the House right now is that the most recently elected Congresswoman, Adelita Grijalva (D.-Arizona) is being held up by Speaker Mike Johnson (BR.-Trump’s Colon) because she and the House Democrats plus four Republicans would be enough to pass a petition to release the Epstein Files. That seat was vacant only because Grijalva’s own father, Raul Grijalva, was the Representative, and he died of old age and disease. Would that Democrats had let a younger and healthier candidate run in the last term, that standoff would not have been possible.

It is at this point I should bring up Kamala Harris as another example of Democratic establishment thinking. Because she may be totally irrelevant now, but in her memoir she revealed exactly why she is irrelevant and probably would have been more irrelevant than Joe Biden was when he was President. The book she released this year was called 107 Days, and it basically was organized on the theme that she only had 107 days after Biden’s retirement to run a campaign against Trump. I have not read it, because I’m cheap and I also make it a practice not to contribute to either left-wing or right-wing politicos who fuck up and then seek to profit from their fuckups with a tell-all book tour. But the excerpts I’ve seen are telling. For instance, Tim Walz (Governor of Minnesota) was likeable, outspoken and a good running mate for her but her first choice for Vice President was then Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is very articulate and persuasive enough to be invited on Fox News several times. Her other choice was the very popular Governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. In both cases she took the conservative position, thinking that Shapiro would not settle for a passive position in her Cabinet, and thinking that voters wouldn’t accept a ticket that had both her as a Black woman and Buttigieg as a gay man. (Raising the question of why demographics would be disqualifying if Barack Obama won the presidency and Joe Biden chose her as running mate largely because she was a black woman.) That and the fact that the Party leadership as a whole wouldn’t listen to suggestions that Biden retire until reality forced the issue, and then basically made Harris the nominee rather than have a contested convention where the public could be involved.

Mind you, I still think Kamala Harris would have been a vastly better President than Trump or any of his minions, but so would I, and what does that tell you?

Then of course there’s David Hogg, who moved from surviving the Parkland school shooting to anti-gun activism to general activism as a Democratic fundraiser. He was successful enough in that role to where the Democratic National Committee got him to serve as co-chair, but immediately ran into issues where his PAC advocated for replacing old establishment candidates with younger progressives. In May the DNC came up with an excuse for removing him and Malcolm Kenyatta as vice chairs. Hogg has continued with his PAC and has generally been more active with it than the DNC has been on a national level.

The institution calls itself a Democratic Party, but it practices oligarchy within its own ranks. If the oligarchy knew what they were doing, that would be one thing. I said it before, and I will say it again: Democrats are the house Negroes of American government. They fight to defend a decadent and corrupt system because it’s the system they grew up with and they can’t imagine anything better.

Maybe we need people with better imagination.

Cuck Schumer very cleverly got Senators who are not up for re-election in 2026 to vote for the sellout, and very cleverly refused to vote for it himself. But that means either he was working behind the scenes or he really did oppose the surrender and simply didn’t have the influence to stop his fellows. It is hard to say which is more condemning.

Ezra Klein of Indivisible announced Monday that his agenda is to focus on the primaries of Senators who are up for re-election next year to make removing Schumer from leadership a condition of support, and to make it a condition for support for Democrats running for open or Republican seats. That would be the first step. More broadly, continue to support that organization, No Kings, David Hogg (Leaders We Deserve) and anybody who’s trying to promote something outside the official hierarchy. I’d already said I wasn’t going to contribute to official Democratic Party fundraisers because the difference between a Democratic fundraiser and a Kickstarter campaign is that with the Kickstarter there’s a better chance of getting what I paid for. I now make an exception to that. I may in the future contribute to a Democratic Party fundraiser. Not online, but by mail, with a 5 or 20 dollar bill, after I have used it to wipe my own ass.

Brief remarks, because the week’s events led to a situation that requires me to go into more detail, which will require more time for me to work on the following post.

Saturday October 18, the No Kings movement organized protests across the country against the Trump occupation government, reaching nationwide numbers of at least 7 million people, including considerable turnouts in ‘red’ states. There were also protests in European capitals, including London, where the event was called ‘No Tyrants Day’ because their king isn’t a senile fascist moron.

And in response, Trump confirmed not only that he does think of himself as a king, but that he is literally full of shit.

Specifically, he put out a video of himself in a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP”, wearing a crown over his flight helmet, and flying over a No Kings protest in a major city to fly over the protesters and bomb them with an industrial-scale volume of liquid excrement. I mean, Trump can feel proud. He made all that shit himself.

No seriously, Trump may be so much of an asshole that he consists of only that one body part, but even his colon cannot produce such a volume of crap on command. He needed AI to do that. But really, isn’t that what AI is for?

It’s yet another example of how Trump and his cult, rather than discrediting their opponents, actually justify them by becoming more ridiculous.

Another factor in this is the deliberate approach of non-violence taken by protestors throughout the country, like dressing up in inflatable frog and dinosaur costumes. A lot of critics say this makes the protestors themselves ridiculous, but that’s the point. We had riots and shit when George Floyd was killed – around the time of the 2020 Republican National Convention – and that’s the sort of thing the Trumpniks use to motivate their base. Whereas when you spray mace at a guy in a frog costume or have to send 30 police to follow a team in a wiener dog outfit, the average person who isn’t invested in the culture war issues has to ask what the regime is scared of when they’re the ones with all the guns.

The key here is that we have government because we agree to it. We have had questionable and authoritarian government in the past, and have gone along with its questionable decisions because we saw it as legitimate. The key is that the government is undermined if it is no longer seen as legitimate, and in this case it is the Republican Party as much as the Left that is doing that.

Trump did get elected, but a lot of his voters, including non-whites and Roganbros, naively believed that Trump would actually run the government as a public concern instead of just another part of his business portfolio. And a lot of them are speaking out. Maybe not enough to vote Democrat, but enough to doubt. We didn’t vote for Elon Musk to run the bureaucracy. We didn’t vote for Stephen Miller to run the country. And most Republicans voted to get a handle on illegal immigration, but most people didn’t vote to give ICE a bigger budget than the military of Turkey.

See, in Ireland, and India, and, well damn near every place the British Empire conquered, the native population was like ‘okay, the country was previously ruled by a local warlord who took over by force and expected absolute obedience just because, so this isn’t any different.’ It was after the American and French revolutions that the premise of overthrowing imperialists became feasible. That is how Spain lost most of its empire. And that is how Britain lost India. The occupation was not seen as legitimate, and the imperial power, no matter how much weapons it had, could not clamp down on an entire population. And yes, that is just what happened to the US in Vietnam and to both Russia and the US in Afghanistan. The Trump regime is starting at the point that was the end stage for Britain in India. It’s just a matter of what it takes to mobilize the majority. India had religious traditions of non-violence. We have naked bicyclists and inflatable animal costumes. Whatever works.

So because this government is increasingly seen, even in the center, as illegitimate, the No Kings protest last week gave me more room for hope than ever, because it confirms that the country in general is on the right page. In the long run we will win. In the short term however Trump is doing tremendous amounts of damage to the country.

The most prominent example of Trump shitting on the country physically and not just virtually occurred Tuesday when his planned ballroom expansion of the White House started tearing down the East Wing, which fits the architecture of the rest of the structure, in order to build a giant annex that will be bigger than the main building.

This is both a symbolic and literal step in permanently deforming the country.

If Trump died tomorrow and Vance took over, presumably he would keep construction going on the ballroom. I’m sure he’s a really good dancer. But if not, we are going to need to repair the damage.

And again, that damage is both literal and symbolic. For one thing, this is another clue, as if we needed one, that Trump is not leaving in 2028 if he can help it. As Seth Meyers put it this week, “if I had only three years left on my lease, I wouldn’t be renovating anything.”

The simple fact that Trump can do this, with no permits, against the law, because everybody lets him, just confirms that he thinks of the government, by extension the country, as his personal property. And the Republican Party is quite fine with this.

The symbolism should make it clear to the rest of the country: The American republic is dead. It has been wrecked just as surely as the East Wing. You might be able to rebuild it once the criminals are purged, but you cannot pretend it’s still there.

Which is why we need to decide first, how the criminals are to be purged, and second, what kind of government is going to replace them.

While it is alleged that Charlie Kirk’s murder was, if not a conspiracy, an event that the Trump Right wanted to use to create their own Horst Wessel and “unite the Right”, the aftermath actually seems to be causing cracks in the foundation. For one thing, Kirk colleague Candace Owens (a conspiracy theorist of the first order) said that he was assassinated right after telling other friends that he was no longer supporting Israel for its war on Gaza.

Frankly, if our species ever gets its shit together long enough to advance science and break the lightspeed barrier, within 40 years of first contact, the natives of Alpha Centauri are going to be blaming The Jews for all of their problems throughout history.

It would be simplistic to say that Trump’s support is entirely based on white supremacy, given the support he has gotten in three elections from Jews and non-whites. However, he gets that much more support from actual white supremacists, and they are pretty simplistic.

When I say they are simplistic, I mean that literally, because they really do think that they should judge someone’s moral and intellectual value on the basis of their origin. Look at their role model, who uses “low IQ person” as his code for “black woman.” This is why a right-winger like Richard Hanania, who has been credibly accused of racism himself, disavows the brand-name Right now, because at least in America they’ve become useless at everything but racism.

The American reactionary movement always has had a very elitist view of the world, traditionally disdaining not just non-whites and non-Christians but any white Christian who isn’t straight Protestant. Their idea of tolerance is dating a Methodist. The 19^th Century Know-Nothing Party (no really) was based largely on treating Irish Catholics the way MAGAts treat Hispanics now. So no surprise that not only is the recent murder bringing out the inherent Jew-hate, it’s also revealed that even other Christians aren’t good enough for some in MAGA.

Charlie Kirk died while holding a debate session at a Mormon university in Utah, and in the wake of his murder, some “conservatives” actually blamed the Mormon community. On September 27, at a college football game between Brigham Young (BYU) and Colorado State university, the hometeam crowd frequently yelled things like “Fuck the Mormons.” The very next day, a Trump supporter drove to a Mormon church in Michigan, rammed into the building, opened fire with a semi-auto rifle, set the building on fire and killed four people before he was taken down by police. That weekend Mormons were holding special prayer after the death of their church president, Russell M. Nelson. According to one account, “Between 2015 and 2024, the FBI counted 160 hate crimes reported against LDS victims. These included 63 acts of vandalism and property destruction and 29 assaults. The states with the most incidents were Utah (25), California (23), Washington (14), Tennessee (12), Georgia (10) and Nevada (10).”

It’s kind of odd given that Mormon codes are that much more devoted to clean living than those of most professed Christian Republicans. Mormonism, originating in the US, is maybe that much more “white” than other American denominations. (There was a whole thing about how the Church considered Black people to be under ‘the Curse of Cain‘.)

Mormonism is very much an offshoot of traditional Christianity. It is considered “non-trinitarian” in that it considers the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to not be one being in three aspects, but three distinct beings. Indeed, most Christians consider Mormons heretical in that they consider God to be a physical living man. The Church of Trump considers Mormonism heretical because Mormons do not believe that man is Donald Trump.

My own opinion is similar to the kids on South Park: The inner mysticism of Mormonism may be pretty weird, but all the Mormons I’ve known have been stand-up people, and I don’t argue with results.

But the wave of anti-LDS prejudice is only the latest example of how what seems to be a broad Trump movement is motivated by hatreds more than love of country or God.

I’ve been seeing a lot of YouTube posts about cults (since we have one running the country now) and how to break people out of them, and related to this are a set of related posts about a “purple revolution”, largely from a poster labeled “Cult College” about how people disillusioned by Trump might actually join with “the Left” (that is, the rest of us) and get rid of his regime. And in one of her posts, “Screenshots From A Breaking Cult” she shows social media remarks and conversations from Trump supporters saying things like “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire government. I’ve been turned off from him recently with his dedication to Israel.” “I feel the same way!!!!!! I was republican UNTIL this reveal of what has happened with CHARLIE!!!” and “Always been a Trump supporter but things have changed. Two wings on one bird. Israel is pulling all the strings”.

I don’t see these people waking up. I see them going deeper down the rabbit hole. Because the main thing that distinguished Trumpniks from outright Nazis was the fact that their Christian identity (or rather, their superficial identification with Christianity) caused them to idealize “Zion” and thus Israel. But then they saw Israel performing outright genocide on Gaza, they saw that the country is doing so at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, who might actually be more crooked then Trump, and they looked back and realized just how much influence Israelis and Israel-aligned Americans (like Jeffrey Epstein) have on both major political parties. And they decided they no longer needed to square the circle between their racial anti-Semitism and their political philo-Semitism. They could just be honest with themselves and hate Jews.

This is how those on the Left (meaning, anybody who doesn’t think Trump is like Jesus only better cause Jesus has to be celibate) can look at media and go “how is it that I’m on the side of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene?” Because as I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.

For my own view: I think that the history of the planet indicates that we need a state of Israel, because Jews cannot be secure as a minority where they live, and that includes the United States. (See above.) I think that Israel, like any other nation, has a right of self-determination and self-defense, and was justified in going after Hamas, if not the deliberate campaign against civilians in Gaza. And while there is indeed undue Jewish/Israeli influence on the American government, the influence of Saudi Arabia on Washington may be even greater and more dangerous. After all, Israel doesn’t have any oil.

Oh, and speaking of Arab oil monarchs:

Just Friday, the Trump Organization announced a deal with the Gulf emirate of Qatar to build an “air force facility” at our existing base in Idaho. Now we’ve already had some training done for Qatar and other nations at our bases historically so this is not radical in itself. But less publicized is the fact that on September 29 – after Israel bombed a Hamas base in Qatar – Trump on his own initiative created a joint defense pact with Qatar without involving the Senate.

This in context of a year in which Trump, shortly after coronation inauguration received a “gift” of a luxury jet from Qatar, which will cost “hundreds of millions” to refit and is simultaneously supposed to be granted to the government after he leaves office and is to be given to Trump’s projected presidential library in the increasingly unlikely event that he leaves office. Come to think of it, now-Attorney General Pam Bondi worked as a consultant for the Ballard Partners lobbying firm to represent Qatar, and while it is apparently not true that Bondi herself was paid $115 million per month during her service, the firm was. “It was unclear how much of the $115,000 per month Bondi personally received.” Of course the Qatar news came up after Bondi’s Senate hearing this week, which was probably the best for her.

Sloppy Steve Bannon told Newsweek, “There should never be a military base of a foreign power on the sacred soil of America.” Israel booster and Trump insider Laura Loomer responded to the Friday news saying “Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans.”
Because even some of these people see that this is not about national security or national priorities, it’s all about feeding more slop to the Big Pig. Which to them isn’t so bad, but it actually causes them agita when they have to weigh their Trump worship against their xenophobia.

I mean the obvious point in all this is that even if you are a lily-white Christian member of the Trump cult – and especially if you’re not – a movement based on hatred is going to keep pursuing objects of hate and you cannot be safe with them.

But it also means that a movement based on hate has nothing constructive holding it together, and would turn on itself if its binding force were removed.

It really raises the question of what’s going to happen with these people when (if) Trump finally dies.

Or more pressing: the question of what is so terrible about the Epstein Files that Trump can’t let the Congress know what’s in them, when the Republican Congress flocked back to his side after January 6, when he sent a mob in the Capitol to kill them?

Could you live forever?
Could you see the day

Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?
– Steely Dan, “Kid Charlemagne”

Right now the big story from Washington is Donald Trump’s second Shithole Shutdown, where allegedly the impasse is because the Democrats are holding out. But really, everyone knew Trump wanted a shutdown because he was the one who refused to negotiate until the very last day before the budget ran out. The bigger story and one with long-term political implications for the Project 2025 government was the command meeting by Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Bombing Venezuelan Fishing Boats.

Actually, Kegsbreath and his boss insist on calling the Defense Department the “Department of War”, as it was before 1946. On one hand, this is one of those things like rump renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”, as though he were a God with the magic power to change the fundamental aspects of the world just by changing the labels. On the other hand, this is actually one of those things where in principle I’d agree with the Trump agenda. Our military is not very “defense.” Our “defense” is bombing the shit out of everything. It makes sense to call your military a department of defense when you’re a small country that can’t do much more than defend itself. If you’re Croatia, Austria, even Japan, it makes sense to call your military a defense force. Us? No.

Plus, the postwar renaming is exactly the sort of thing that inspired George Orwell’s world in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where destructive government agencies are sold as the opposite of what they actually are. I think Trump and Hegseth are just being honest. Would that they extended this policy and renamed the Department of Homeland Security the Department of Justifying Paranoia and Repression and the Department of Justice the Department of Railroading Trump’s Enemies.

But in September, Secretary Hegseth announced that all the commanders were ordered to attend a meeting at Quantico, in person, with all of the costs involved, and requiring them all to leave their posts no matter where they were in the world. This led to all sorts of speculation about whether sinister motives were involved. Like if Pete wanted to make all our generals take some Fuhrer Oath to Our Lord and Savior. Well, the meeting happened September 30, and while the general tone might have set the stage for a later Commissar Order against civilians, Hegseth just brought the top commanders all in one room just to review his already established political agenda for the military, in a speech that lasted maybe 30 minutes, and pacing the stage as he spoke, like a televangelist or time-share salesman. He said America must not only be able to win any war that is thrust upon us but “any war we choose”. He said while the military should not have “nasty bullying and hazing” he would do a “review of the department’s definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying, and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.”

He said he was going to enforce uniform standards of appearance, including getting rid of “beardos.” He said that all servicemen, of all ranks, had to do PT (physical training) twice a year. Because apparently Hegseth was sick of seeing “fat generals and admirals” in the halls of the Pentagon.

He said this prior to introducing Donald Trump, who is looking more and more like he swallowed the orange version of that gum Violet Beauregard ate in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

You know, when the Oompa-Loompas had to roll her away because she no longer had legs, she was just a ball with a head on it? That’s where we are now.

The fact that both rump and Kegsbreath seemed to think the goal was to get a bunch of applause moments on camera was clear when Trump told the crowd that he’d never seen a room so quiet before. And he joked that anyone could leave, but “there goes your rank, there goes your future.” And unlike Hegseth, he was not brief and on point. He went on for over an hour, apparently to demonstrate he has stamina in at least one endeavor. Mostly it was the same wheezy, whiny airing of the grievances that we got at his last UN speech, but he also said that this country faces a “war from within” and lamented the fact that the enemy are civilians who don’t wear uniforms, and that he told Hegseth that he should “use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Which should give some indication of what Hegseth means by dedicating the military to a “warrior ethos” where soldiers and commanders can act “without fear of retribution or second-guessing.”

Now, supposedly the fact that there was little reaction (other than laughter at Trump’s humor) was because the military, especially the higher ranks, are supposed to be professional and non-partisan. But the body language was telling. The audience was more stone-faced than Easter Island. I’m sure the fact that Little Boy and Fat Man brought them there just to be insulted and coerced didn’t help staff morale. But Hegseth could have told me to come in from halfway around the world to announce we were getting free hookers and blow, and I’d still ask “Why couldn’t we have done this over Zoom?” But then again, we know why Pete can’t secure a virtual chat meeting.

Even so, security was the exact opposite of the point. The point was to summon all the command staff of our military for an on-camera event to be props in Pete’s propaganda exercise announcing his “paradigm shift” for a “warrior ethos” Pentagon that would ignore liberal standards against hazing and “toxic leadership”. Odd given that he disdains beards as being for a bunch of “Nordic pagans”, if acting like a Viking is apparently regulation now. Especially since his own tattoos indicate being a fellow traveler with Nordic identity groups.

And if you’re asking why I’m focusing on this rather than Trump’s (latest) Shithole Shutdown, one, it’s not like we’re not going to have a government shutdown every year if Republicans have anything to do with it, and two, the results of Tuesday’s publicity stunt are more directly embarrassing to Trump and his Party in the short term, and imply the potential results of Trump’s shutdown publicity stunt in the long term.

As The Fucking News points out, while Russell Vought, Project 2025 architect and incidental head of the OMB, is withholding funds already allocated from Democrat states, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (‘O BuBBA’), without concessions to the Democrats, is going to take away even more money from Republican-voting states, because O BuBBA causes the Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, which would cause insurance premiums in Alaska to go up 346 percent and Mississippi 314 percent, to give just two examples.

Cuts also include supports to first-responder and counterterrorism efforts. (‘a massive bailout for Antifa and Black Lives Matter‘)

Given that the public is largely blaming Republicans for this, the Church of Trump’s Society for the Propagation of the Faith is pushing the dogma that the main reason Democrats are holding out is because they want healthcare services to go towards illegal immigrants. Wednesday this was mostly the line of JD Vance. (Trump has apparently been posting on social media but hasn’t made any public appearances since the Hegseth meeting. Apparently the most macho Olympian demigod president ever is a bit tuckered out.)

This is of course raging bullshit, but when Trump debated Harris, he wailed, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” And that was even more raging bullshit, but who’s president now?

Democrats are once again being outmaneuvered by The Trump Party on the shutdown. The latest Big Lie is that Democrats started this cause they won’t accept a budget that doesn’t give healthcare to illegals. And Democrats keep going, “But it’s already against the law to give federal healthcare to the undocumented!” You don’t respond to the lie. That keeps it in public consciousness. It’s like responding to “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Instead, point out that Moscow Mike Johnson (the Hero-General of Avdiivka) wouldn’t even let the House debate a bill during the last day of September, instead choosing to close the chamber early. The Trump Party WANTS this, because they want a government that doesn’t fund anything (including soldiers’ pay) other than the security state and Trump’s personal priorities. Y’know, what they wanted to do anyway. What point is there in negotiating with that?

Like I say, fascism is evil and horrible even when it works. But this is not working. This is worse than fascism. At least Hitler had an infrastructure program. This is just looting the candy store until it goes bankrupt, and expecting someone else to hold the bag. Basically, what Trump did to Atlantic City, only applied to the largest, most powerful and most influential government on Earth.

The Trump Party isn’t negotiating with the Democrats or the rest of the country, because they don’t want to. The goal is not to preserve the congressional system of funding and legislation, the goal is to destroy it so that Our President can run everything by fiat, hopefully forever.

The goal is to treat the entire population (including Trump supporters and rich people who don’t goosestep in line) like the peasants in the French Revolution, blanking out what happened to the aristocrats in the French Revolution.

And to do this, Trump and his “War” Secretary need the support of the armed institution whose members were just ordered to make a wasteful, expensive, global security-threatening and completely unnecessary trip to one location, like their subordinate status made them magic genies to be summoned with a rub of the lamp, just to tell them that they’re fatsos who need a shave.

Anybody else see the flaw with this strategy?
Cause I don’t think Trump does.

Well, that’s it for this post. But before I go, here it is, Your Moment of Zen:

This is a follow-up to my last piece, not so much on the Charlie Kirk issue as to its use as a pretext to censor Jimmy Kimmel, and the reason that the federal government has the power to do that.

When I was a lot more outspokenly libertarian, I would come up with joke names for the various alphabet-soup bureaucracies in the federal government. Like, after the Waco fiasco, BATF was “Blame After The Fact.” FBI was “Fucking Bumbling Incompetents”. And the FCC was “Fascist Communist Collusion.”

And I might seem a lot more lefty than I was in the Clinton days, but I’m that much more convinced that Big Government can’t be trusted, especially when “small government conservatives” are in charge of it.

But in the wake of the Trump regime twisting executive arms to remove both Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel from late night, it raises the question of how that is even possible, while media people who are much more rude towards Viceroy Trump still have their jobs.

For example, prior to the merger with Skydance, CBS/Paramount was part of a larger media conglomerate run by the Redstone family, which also runs Viacom, which runs Comedy Central, which plays the Jon Stewart-led The Daily Show, along with the culturally libertarian shock comedy South Park. And in the wake of the corporation ending Colbert’s contract, they renewed the contract for South Park. Which started its latest season by saying PC Principal and Jesus Christ were in mortal fear of Donald Trump, even though his penis is “teeny tiny.”

Then you have Bill Maher, who lately has tried to play Switzerland in America’s culture wars. In the wake of the 2024 election, he decided to suck up to Trump out of mutual contempt for the PC Democratic Left, but that hasn’t stopped him from bagging on Trump recently. But no networks or affiliates can “cancel” him cause he’s not on a network beholden to sponsors.

That is in fact why Bill Maher is on HBO, because previously he was host of a show called Politically Incorrect, which just happened to be on ABC after the late-night news, and got cancelled (both socially and professionally) for “insensitive” comments after 9-11.

This is why guys like Bill Maher and the creators of South Park have not (yet) suffered the same pressures as Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, despite the fact that they are also within media megacorps. That’s not to say they can’t be cancelled; the HBO parent Warner Bros./Discovery has cancelled a lot of projects for reasons that could best be described as arcane. But the incentives are different.

This is also why Brian Kilmeade still has a job after telling the guys on Fox & Friends that it would be a good idea to subject the homeless to lethal injection. He’s on basic cable. Although that doesn’t explain why MSDNC cancelled commentator Matthew Dowd after offering his opinions on Charlie Kirk. That decision was just the general media cowardice we are seeing under Trump 2.0.

Just the day before he engaged in official censorship, Carr told a POLITICO reporter “I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech”. On the Reason Magazine website it was pointed out that under FCC rules, and Supreme Court precedent, the FCC can regulate broadcast media but not online content. The rationale for this has always been that the broadcast airwaves are a “scarce public resource”. Given that radio waves were the only broadcast communication medium, the FCC was created, and it served a purpose in resolving disputes between parties with regard to signal interference and related issues. But even prior to that, with the Radio Act of 1927, Congress defined that a radio station could only be given a broadcast license “in the public interest, convenience, or necessity”. This according to Wikipedia, which as of September 19 is still defining the FCC as an “independent” agency. In NBC v. United States (1943) the Supreme Court confirmed that rather than simply regulating radio stations to prevent interference with each other, the FCC should also “determine the composition” of content. This essentially made the federal government the ultimate media gate keeper and led to networks developing internal Standards and Practices censorship departments through the television era. Such strictures have rarely applied to premium cable outlets like HBO and Showtime, and the FCC did not seek to expand its control over cable since it was a for-pay service and not free to the public. However as cable/satellite and then streaming became more standardized, pay TV became the standard with broadcast becoming almost an afterthought, and most people picking up television through pay TV or streaming subscriptions, even with local TV networks. (Incidentally, the fact that HBO and similar services were not censored is also why the Fairness Doctrine was never applied to Fox News and other right-wing media on cable).

The idea that the airwave spectrum is subject to scarcity was based on a misunderstanding of physics even considering the limits of contemporary technology. “When a traditional telephone call occurs on copper wire, the same movement of electrons that occurs on “The People’s Airwaves” occurs within the phone wire. It has never been suggested, however, that the FCC limit the number of persons who may have telephone conversations or regulate what they say.”

Like much else in this government (see the Department of Homeland Security), the standard was based on a contemporary judgment that may have been flawed even at the time and as of now not only is useless but actually counterproductive.

All this really begs the question, if the enemies of Our Divine Sovereign are so unfunny and unpopular, and network shows aren’t making as much money as they used to, why is it so necessary for national security and the sainted memory of Charlie Kirk that the freest country God gave Man must ban late night comedians for telling mean jokes that mostly consist of just repeating what Republicans actually say?
As with so much else in this regime, the answer is “because they can.” And they can because of the FCC. The irony being, if network TV is no longer the draw that it used to be, it’s not only because capitalism gives us other options, it’s because those options are not so arbitrarily restricted.

If cancelling late night talk shows is a good business decision because the model is in decline and not making money, it raises the question of just how feasible the rest of broadcast TV is. CBS already decided that it was better to get rid of its 11:30 time slot altogether rather than have its own product on. And ABC, at the direct behest of both Brendan Carr and its right-wing affiliates, had to make that decision on the spur of the moment. To punish dissenting speech, they are undermining themselves. Not to mention, the affiliates that depend on networks for content will no longer get it, and both networks and affiliates are undermining themselves by aligning with an obviously senile and declining tyrant, who is, if not an actual pedophile, clearly covering for people who were, and who is the direct cause of Middle America losing their farms, losing their standard of living and losing their place in the world. People might start to realize who’s on their side, who is against them, and who helped bring about this state of affairs. And that would be bad for business. Although not necessarily America.

And then there is Newton N. Minow [then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission] who declares: “There is censorship by ratings, by advertisers, by networks, by affiliates which reject programming offered to their areas.” It is the same Mr. Minow who threatens to revoke the license of any station that does not comply with his views on programming—and who claims that that is not censorship . . . .

-Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

LEGALIZE COMEDY!
-Elon Musk, at CPAC 2025

Wednesday September 17, Viceroy Trump’s occupation government looked over Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue on ABC Monday and Brendan Carr (Project 2025 mastermind and incidental head of the FCC) told ABC and its affiliates that they had better play ball and get rid of the guy, telling a podcaster “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” And so, allegedly at the behest of Nexstar affiliates that were going to black out the show, ABC obeyed. Jimmy Kimmel’s late night broadcast has been taken off the air “indefinitely.” Immediately. They didn’t even let his contract play out like CBS did with Stephen Colbert.

Expect Guillermo to get arrested by ICE any day now.

Ostensibly this was because Kimmel had made light of Charlie Kirk’s killing, but if you see the tape, Kimmel was not disparaging Kirk or his family, but “this MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it”.

(Watch the link before it gets yanked!)

This is of a piece with Matthew Dowd, the most milquetoast of liberal pundits, getting kicked off MSNBC (the second most milquetoast basic-cable news after CNN) simply for pointing out that Kirk’s opinions were divisive.

Folks, let’s get real: If Charlie Kirk were a teenager shot to death in a high school, the Republican Party would not care. We know this because we have more examples than we can count.

I am frankly not sure why Our Lord and Savior has not solved the problem by using his holy touch to resurrect Charlie Kirk from the dead. Is he not the Son of Man? Is he not one with the Father? Has he not conquered death, and conquered sin, for our sake?
Prove to me you’re really cool! Walk across my swimming pool!

But then, a day or so after the murder, reporters caught Trump attending a Yankees game and asked him how he was holding up after the loss of a close friend. Trump responded by bragging about the work they’re putting in at the White House to build his great new ballroom. And then he did his jerking-off-two-men-at-once dance. In his seat, and with no “YMCA” accompaniment. So I guess he had other priorities. Like when somebody shot at him and only killed an an audience member in the stands behind him. That guy never got to lie in state at the Capitol.

Liberals have charged that the Trump regime has been trying to not only martyr Kirk but make his death a combination Horst Wessel/Reichstag Fire. Given that the accused came from a right-wing Utah Mormon family, it seems unlikely that “this kid who killed Charlie Kirk (is) anything other than one of them”. But now Kash Patel’s FBI (Fumbling Bumbling Incompetence) has released transcripts of the suspect sending texts to his roommate, who he refers to as “my love.” So allegedly this is all because the roommate is transitioning to female and this goes along with the Trump (and Kirk) campaign to demonize trans people as violent killers. The suspect also explained, “I had enough of (Kirk’s) hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” And apparently in the text, he confirmed the location of the weapon, the type of weapon, that it was a family weapon, confirms he engraved a bullet with ‘owo bulges’, while also using police terms like ‘squad car’ and ‘drop point.’ As several people online put it, this is history’s first murder confession written on ChatGPT.

Presumably the authorities can back all this up by confirming the ballistics of the round that killed Kirk with the weapon in custody. Presumably. I haven’t heard them announce that yet.

But that is a separate issue. Because again, people in this country get shot every day. What doesn’t happen every day is that the government directly orders a network and its affiliates to cancel a program because they don’t like what it says about them. And it’s even more rare for a target to cave so quickly and completely.

In the case of Colbert, one could say that however popular he was in a certain demographic, the show was still losing money overall and CBS had been penny pinching in other areas. But in retrospect, that was simply plausible deniability. In the CBS case, the parent company wanted to merge with the Skydance company run by the pro-Trump Ellison family, and that was a lot more important than the fact that CBS’ “nothing personal” declaration meant that the network would no longer get any money at all from the time slot. Here both the Nexstar and Sinclair media companies that hold ABC affiliates decided they were going to independently cancel Kimmel, having already decided to go along with the program that Charlie Kirk must not only be mourned but canonized. More to the point, Nexstar is in the midst of a corporate merger with the smaller media company Tegna. This is of course subject to final approval by the FCC, meaning Brandon Carr. And as with CBS, it may not be so much that the capitalists were victims of fear and extortion and more that they were just cooperating to get the goals they wanted anyway.

Unless the regime mandates Nineteen Eighty-Four style surveillance equipment on our phones, radios and TV sets, we as individuals still have a right to free speech, in the privacy of our own homes. But maybe not in the workplace. And certainly not in the media sphere. Where corporate media are concerned, the problem isn’t that speech is free, it’s that speech is bought.

Is it not yet clear that Trump IS a dictator and that he intends to create a totalitarian state? Do you really think he and his pet political party would be making all these changes, on this scale, so radically and so fast, and would be allowing him and his cronies to profit from such titanic levels of bribery and grift, if they were willing to risk losing it all in next year’s midterms, let alone the next presidential election?

And for all the people who say “our country is better than this” – NO WE’RE NOT. Cause we can see what is happening, we see where it is leading and we aren’t doing a damn thing about it. Cause if it’s not Trump destroying the Constitution, it’s his pet Supreme Court, and if it’s not them, it’s these co-opted megacorps that go along and tell us everything is wonderful and everything is normal, and this is how it’s supposed to be and we have to put up with this because the man whose arterial fat is increasing in inverse proportion to his brain activity is appointed by God to reign over us forever and ever.

The Old Republic is not coming back. The institutions that supported it have been eviscerated and co-opted. And addressing what needs to be done will likely attract a lot more attention than asking why Charlie Kirk gets to lie in state at the Capitol when he was never in government.

At the command of our divine and immortal sovereign, Donald Trump, who causes the oceans to part with his imperious glare, who is the only reason the grass continues to grow, and the birds continue to sing, and the Sun continues to revolve around the Earth.

All I can say is that this proves one thing:

Whatever’s in the Epstein Files must be REALLY, REAALLY BAD!!!

Wednesday right-wing organizer Charlie Kirk got assassinated while he was holding a debate at a Utah campus. I spent the day going over my review of the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, cause frankly I considered that more important.

And no, I’m not going to say “RIP.” That can be interpreted in different ways.

The reaction among Republicans is predictable, as is the reaction of the co-opted “liberal” media, who spent much of their coverage calling Kirk a “free-speech advocate.” The current occupant of the White House ordered all US flags at half-staff through the week, and Station Casinos in Las Vegas put up marquee displays celebrating Kirk “in loving memory”.

If anything the ubiquity of gun violence in this country ought to be pointed up by the fact that also on Wednesday, another mass shooting occurred when a student at Evergreen High School outside Denver, Colorado shot two other kids, one critically, before killing himself to avoid capture.

If one day, the press says that three kids got shot in a school, nobody panics, cause it’s all ‘part of the plan’. But the same day, one conservative influencer gets shot, everybody loses their minds!

My first impressions:
The main thing that stood out to me when I heard the story was that Kirk was only 31 years old. He seemed a lot older.

The assassin took one shot, straight to the carotid artery of the neck, which is guaranteed to cause massive blood loss and quick death. I thought, that’s what happens when you get a professional.

And for that reason, unlike the Right, I did not assume the shooter is some transwoman vegan antifascist with pastel hair. Cause if Sniper School has been training those people, I finally get why Pete Hegseth is so mad.

As it turns out, just this Friday, the shooter was caught based on photographs from the scene, and because his own father talked to the police. He turned out to be Utah’s own, a 22-year old named Tyler Robinson, from a right-wing household that frequently trained with guns. When police picked up materials, including rounds, from the scene, they saw slogans like ‘notices bulges OWO’, ‘Bella Ciao’ (an Italian partisan song) and ‘catch this fascist’ – which would seem to indicate a leftist antifascist sentiment but have actually been co-opted by the so-called ‘groypers‘ who opposed Charlie Kirk within the Right because he wasn’t reactionary enough.

One reason I thought Kirk was older than he was is that I barely pay attention to him. You have on one hand Trump, who is a total attention sponge, and then you have the various other “intellects” of the alternative-to-being-Right like Kirk and Benny Johnson, and the “mainstream” media doesn’t pay attention to them and I don’t see much cause to either. But they are very popular and influential in their own sphere, which is why the Trump Right is so discombobulated by Kirk’s murder, more so than they were by yet another school shooting.

Did I want Charlie Kirk dead? No. Like I said, I barely even think about him more than I have to. I certainly don’t think he should have been killed for opinions. He was shot while holding a debate. Debate is how this country is supposed to work. But am I surprised that Kirk was killed?

No.

And the real story of this event is that I doubt anyone on either side of the political debate is all that surprised that such a thing could happen either.

As one person on social media perfectly summed it up: “I’m not advocating for what happened to Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk advocated for what happened to Charlie Kirk.”

I can go over some of his more offensive political opinions, like him being the kind of professional Christian who thinks Christianity means women should submit to their husbands and carry unwanted pregnancies even at the age of ten, as opposed to say, caring for the poor or protecting life outside the womb. Indeed he also said “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty … But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment”. He’d also said that black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” Those are opinions. You do not kill somebody for having opinions.

The issue that so many on the “Left” are bringing up in the wake of the shooting (‘Left’ meaning, ‘anybody who doesn’t think Trump was appointed directly by God to rule America for eternity’) is that Charlie Kirk went beyond political advocacy.

He said for instance that Leviticus 20:13 (‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death’) was “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was beaten half to death by a deranged home invader, Kirk said that a “patriot” should have been able to bail the assailant out and said, “I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?” Regarding the same incident, Trump joked, “Nancy Pelosi has a big wall wrapped around her house. Of course, it didn’t help too much with the problem she had, did it?”

An academic on Substack posted a first-hand account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Kirk’s campaign: https://substack.com/@drstaceypatton1865/note/c-154757002

“For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: “bitch,” “c*nt,” “n****r.” They threatened all manner of violence.

They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that I be fired. The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer me an escort, because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do me harm.

And I am not unique.

…Some received death threats. Some had their jobs threatened. Some left academia entirely. Kirk sent the loud message to us: speak the truth and we will unleash the mob!

That is the culture of violence Charlie Kirk built. He normalized violence. He curated it, monetized it, and sicced it on anyone who dared to puncture his movement’s lies.

And now, in the wake of his shooting, there’s all this national outpouring of mourning, moments of silence, yellow prayer hands, and tributes painting him as a civil debater. But the truth is that Kirk and his foot soldiers spent years terrorizing educators, trying to silence us with harassment and fear!

And now the same violence he unleashed on others has come full circle.”

This is of course the same culture that had nothing to say about the attacks on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or the assassination of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband, by the same person who tried and failed to kill a state senator. Under the LOL Right, threats are free and acting on them is tolerated. Mob intimidation by Republicans and Right fellow-travelers is to be considered fair and expected by their Democrat opponents, but Republicans wail like Lucille Ball should they get any such treatment in return.

If this were not in fact the policy of the Trump Party, Trump would not have issued a blanket pardon for all the people who committed violence against the Congress on January 6, 2021.

If such provocation only aggravated one side of the debate, that would be bad enough, but the abstract argument against the destruction of standards and the toleration of violence is that it makes it possible for your enemies to act on the same level. As we now see.

Again: I’m certainly not going to endorse violence against Charlie Kirk or his side, but I also don’t think that’s the point. The point is it’s happening anyway.

I’m still going to affirm the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, that one has a right to self-defense, but not to initiate force to achieve political or social goals.

And I’m still going to share things like The Onion post saying “Charlie Kirk Bravely Offers Himself As Tribute To The 2^nd Amendment”.

Because as anti-gun liberals know all too well, getting all sad and offended that people on either side are using violence to achieve political or social goals doesn’t stop that violence from repeating, because no one in charge really wants it to stop, and it’s looking like some people want to encourage it.