Category: Politics

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.

Doesn’t it make you feel better?
The pigs have won tonight

Now they can all sleep soundly

And everything’s all right

-nineinchnails, “March of the Pigs”

The big news at the start of the week was Viceroy Trump’s telegraphed announcement that he is mobilizing the National Guard and directly commandeering the Washington DC police force to protect the “Capital”, despite the fact that District Represenative Eleanor Holmes Norton pointed out that the crime rate is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. And despite the fact that he previously cut District security in DC’s budget by at least 20 million dollars with his One Big Bullshit Bill.

And it was just announced that on Friday the 15^th, Trump will have a Ukrainian “peace” summit with his liege, Vladmir Putin, and without Ukrainian or European representatives. In Alaska. Which implies that the talk is less about selling out President Zelenskyy by handing over Ukraine’s fortified eastern territory and more about selling out Sarah Palin’s home state and returning it to Papa Czar.

All just another week in Trumpworld, where the most powerful nation on the planet is run by a retarded pigboy who grunts and oinks and squeals and treats the whole world as his personal trough of slop and we all just accept this cause apparently that’s what God wants.

So we all have to join JD Vance in vainly wishing, hoping and praying for the happy day when little piggy finally becomes bacon.

But this is why we need to recognize Trump’s increasing escalations for what they are. Distractions. Of course he was going to militarize DC anyway. He’s probably thinking of calling it “Trumpburg” or something. (I know, I shouldn’t give him ideas.) Of course he is going to try to give away the store on Ukraine and lift sanctions on Russia, apparently because they’re worth more money than the EU. And as if Ukraine is going to accept a 1938 Munich deal when they still have the EU on their side.

This is a semi-successful attempt to distract people from what everyone had been talking about:
The Epstein Files! (TM)

Because again, the only thing that unites the Church of Trump and the rest of us who believe in causality is: “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” Nothing else can turn the Trumpniks. You certainly can’t appeal to reason. With them everything is that much more identity politics than the postmodernist Left. Normally a Christian would say “I am a Christian because I believe in the Credo” or “I am a Christian because I believe that obliges me to do certain things.” The reason things are different with the Trumpniks, and the reason you can’t persuade them with bourgeois concepts like facts, is because their morality is based on identity politics. Rather than saying “Because I am a Christian, I believe certain things are good and evil” they say “Anything I believe is Good, because I identify as a Christian.” It’s like “I identify as an Army Attack Helicopter”, only you expect people to take you seriously.

Which goes to the point that you also cannot convince them with morality. I had mentioned that liberals tend to complain that the alt-Right are bullies. People should stop that. Trumpniks take it as a badge of virtue. And recently they’ve been throwing around the word “cruel.” Stop that already.

Like Trumpniks care that they’re cruel. They LOVE it when you say that. “Aw, does little baby think I’m cruel when I pour lemon juice in his paper cuts? How KYOOT!” That means you don’t like them, and since they don’t like you, that validates them. Like with “deplorables.” They’re out and proud about it. “We’re here! We hate queers! Get used to it!”

The hook it that this identity is based on the projection of self-righteousness, that the Demonrats are irredeemably Evil and Republicans are automatically Good. But now the Church sees the government they voted for do everything they’ve always accused Democrats of doing, what they voted for Republicans to get to the bottom of, and the coverup is far more active than anything in Democratic administrations because Jabba the Slut doesn’t want us knowing what’s in those files.

Like, it was revealed, basically by accident, that the FBI redacted Trump’s name the files, supposedly 40,000 times, but eventually they settled on saying “numerous times.” “During that process, agents came across multiple references to Trump, as well as “dozens of other high-profile figures,” according to investigative journalist Jason Leopold. However, FBI FOIA officers determined that Trump’s name and others were to be blacked out under existing FOIA exemptions. The rationale? Trump was a private citizen at the time the federal Epstein investigation launched in 2006. That legal status gave the FBI a basis for redacting personal names from public records unless a clear public interest could be shown. …Importantly, Leopold emphasized that the presence of names in the Epstein files does not imply any wrongdoing or criminal conduct.”

Yeah but, isn’t that kinda giving it away? How careful were the stooges in making sure that anybody else connected to Trump was likewise redacted, and who were those people? Wouldn’t we just be able to see what text was redacted in the files and add up the clues?

And this weekend, Vice President JD Eyelashes had a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo and tossed off the defense that well, the Biden Administration never made much of the Files because Democrats were in them. This was a bad move on three levels. First, it brought attention back to the seeping wound when Trump was trying to distract the marks with more atrocities.

Two, it assumes that after more than 15 years of Bill Clinton not being in public life, after Hillary Clinton basically railroaded her presidential nomination against Bernie Sanders, only to realize she was the only Democrat who couldn’t exploit the news of Donald Trump’s sexual assaults, people frankly don’t need to protect the once popular Bill Clinton if he was involved in the sex scandals on Epstein Island.

Third point, related to the second, if evidence incriminates Democrats, wouldn’t there be that much MORE reason for a Republican government to release it, even if only selectively?

And why give a sweetheart deal to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, reassigning her to a Club Fed – where sex offenders are legally NOT allowed – if you aren’t planning to use her for the coverup?

I saw this meme on the internet that explained the whole situation: “If the Epstein list doesn’t exist, Trump lied to you. If the Epstein list exists and he doesn’t want to publish it, then it’s because he’s on it, and therefore he lied to you. If the Epstein list exists and only your perceived enemies are on it, but he still doesn’t want it published even though he made you believe that your enemies are his enemies, he lied to you.”

As a much wiser, braver, more accomplished president put it, “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”

I’m starting to agree with Seth Meyers: It’s getting to where they should just call them The Trump Files Featuring Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump is a greasy little pig who has managed to slip out of every trap he’s laid for himself with his own malicious incompetence, but now he sees himself going down a metal corridor, and he knows where that metal corridor goes, and he would rather have ANYbody else go down that corridor but him.

The only reason he has never had to face the consequences of his actions is that he has had damn near half the country (at least, the ones who bother to vote) backing him up no matter how repulsive he is. And it’s worked up to this point, because even the Trumpniks with more than room temperature IQ – and there are lots of them – have to rationalize the fact that they have invested themselves in someone who is not just utterly immoral, but a malicious failure. Nixon and Clinton may have been utterly immoral, but they weren’t actively trying to destroy the country.

And there are two reasons why the Epstein case matters and why the non-Trump part of the country (real America) has to bite this case like a pit bull: One, such gain as Viceroy Trump got in 2024 from non-white and independent voters was from people who previously didn’t support Trump, and in that respect said more about how much America hates Democrats. (Cause let’s face it: We ALL do.)
In other words, he won because he got support from people who aren’t in the cult and who previously would have been just as likely to vote Democrat. So those are the people who don’t see Trump’s history of crime and sexual immorality as a resume asset.

Unlike the cult. Which gets to the second point. They now have to work harder and harder to maintain the pretense that their Lord and Savior is going to save Real America from the creeps and crooked elites, now that they know that Trump is a creep and crooked elite. But unlike the smart Trumpniks, they aren’t just in sunk cost fallacy, they’re in identity fusion.

The cult has to keep up support because as in the beginning, any support for Donald Trump says a lot more about the supporter than it does about Trump. So I speak out to you people again: Admit it.

YOU ARE TRUMP. You have power only as long as he does and he has power only as long as you support him. So you will never give him up. NEVER. No matter what he does to you and no matter what you can see yourselves turning into.

You voted to turn us into a shithole country. You voted to turn us into a Third World dictatorship because you would rather be a fearful peasant than an American.

You knew what he was. He said so himself. “You knew I was a snake when you took me in.”

You knew he’d been judged to have committed sexual assault when he lost a defamation case. You knew he was convicted of 34 felonies. You heard words out of his own mouth.

Don’t tell me this isn’t what you voted for. YES IT IS.

So I expect you to smile, stand up, take off your hats (except the red MAGA caps) and sing along to the MAGA National Anthem:

And I’m proud I elected a pedophile

Cause he means so much to me

And I guess I forgot the men who died

Who thought that we’d stay free

And I’ll gladly stand up

Next to you and defend him still today

Cause there ain’t no doubt, I hate this land

God Damn the U S AAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAA

(everybody!)

And I’m proud I elected a pedophile

Cause he means so much to me

And I guess I forgot the men who died

Who thought that we’d stay free

And I’ll gladly STAND UP

Next to you and defend him still today

Cause there ain’t no doubt, I hate this land

God Damn the U S AAAAAAAAAAA

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Donald Trump must have thought he had it made.

His pet Congress passed his omnibus budget bill to help people in his income range at the expense of everyone else. His pet Supreme Court basically takes every judicial case against him and finds some way to say that the Constitution still exists, but it just doesn’t apply to him. He got a bureaucracy that used to help with disaster relief to create an internment camp for brown people in Florida, and call it “Alligator Alcatraz.”

For lo, Donald Trump is the One Supreme Godhead, in whom, by whom, and for whom all things are made.

He even has direct control of the Kennedy Center, for he is Music, and he writes the songs.

There was actually a pretty good article by centrist Damon Linker on the general trend towards autocracy. The gist of it is that there is a lot of stuff that’s already been in the system (like the 1807 Insurrection Act) that could be used to create a dictatorship but did not because presidents previously acted in good faith. But just as there was no clear line separating the Weimar Republic from Nazi Germany, any change to the system would most likely happen laterally through existing laws and precedents and not by a clean break towards autocracy.

The punch line is: “How will we know when we’ve gotten there? Perhaps only when we come to realize the extent to which our laws—and the Constitution—have already been reinterpreted to be compatible with formerly unthinkable acts.”

This country is going to have to take radical action to reform its government. That doesn’t mean nationalizing McDonald’s and turning it vegan. And it doesn’t mean writing legislation specifically against Jeff Bezos to punish him for being rich.

It does mean that if Congress does pass some bullshit statist law (like say, banning TikTok) and the Supreme Court agrees 9-0 that the ban stands, then the ban needs to be enforced as ordered, not postponed indefinitely because TikTok bribed Trump, Trump is our president, and in our country, we let the president do whatever he wants, the law be damned.

THAT level of monarchical corruption is bigger than anything the Republicans are doing with ICE. That at least was authorized by the One Big Bullshit Bill. But Trump defies both “his” Congress and “his” Supreme Court because we just let the president do whatever he wants.

But that needs to be changed, not least because all those Republicans who cheer and jeer for their Messiah aren’t going to feel so good when some other president who isn’t Trump (it might even be a Republican) tries to go in different directions and they think they need to stop him. Like Congress or the Supreme Court might raise an objection and then the new guy can just pull out Trump vs. United States and tell John Roberts “You see this thing you wrote here? Where’s my due deference, bitch?”

That’s the problem. The radical agenda to reshape this government doesn’t just assume that Republicans will get to run this country forever, it assumes that Trump will be president forever and he will never die and he will never age, even though everybody can see him getting slower, more tired and more confused every week. But the setup is basically built around Trump and his personalist Mob boss approach to the world, and once that’s gone, it’s not going to work the same way with someone else.

Especially since Trump’s signature accomplishment was an omnibus budget bill that took benefits away from constituents in primarily red states, which he could only pull off because everyone in the cult loves him so much, but then Elon Musk told us that Trump is in the Epstein Files, which apparently nobody knew before now!

That’s the goofy thing. When I mentioned Elon’s post a while ago, the public reaction to it seemed to be kinda muted. I mean, why not? I thought everybody already knew this. Didn’t the cult already know Trump was a convicted felon? Didn’t they elect him anyway? If they didn’t know about Jeffrey Epstein, they must be dumber than I thought. Shows me for underestimating them.

Of course the real issue is that it probably would have blown over if Trump could just play cool and keep his mouth shut. And you know how that always goes.

Like having FBI heads Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who’d done so much to press for the release of the files before getting into government, suddenly turn around and say there was nothing to see and Epstein didn’t kill himself.

And then Pam Bondi’s Justice Department said there WERE no Epstein Files.

And when questioned about the whole thing at a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump lashed out at a reporter, asking why anybody would care.

And then, on July 12, Trump went on Truf Censhal and posted… THIS thing… https://x.com/BillyM2k/status/1944183426598257091

Wow. With a poker face like that, it’s no wonder Trump bankrupted six casinos.

Trump is the president of the United States. He and Pam Bondi have access to all the documents. He could release the Epstein Files at any time.

If he can’t, it’s because he’s IN them.

And even the paste-eaters in the Church of Trump are not yet so stupid as to where they can’t make basic deductions. They can still add two and two to make four. For Trump to survive, he has to convince them that two and two make five. That the Epstein Files that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino did so much to demand, the files that the regime made a big deal about publicizing with White House ceremonies to hand out files to Trumpworld influencers, those files not only don’t exist and never existed, they were all made up by Hillary and Biden and Obama. And in this case it may be too much to ask, mainly because the whole premise of the Church of Trump is that their Lord and Savior is saving us all from the corruption of the Deep State, and all the evidence seems to indicate that he’s part of it.

Now, I personally am not going to believe things have changed until all the Trumpniks hate their Messiah as much as the rest of us do and they go out in the street and protest him like the rest of us do and come out in public and demand that he and his Mob be GONE.

And if it ever does get to that point, we’re gonna need to decide what to do with these people. Trump and all of his underlings who’ve done nothing but break the law under color of authority. Where are we gonna put them all when they’re awaiting trial?
Hey, isn’t there that new prison in Florida?

It may not seem like it now, but I still consider myself a right-winger.

Like, I actually agree with the Trump Party that we need to kill the Department of Education. After all, almost all the people who vote for Trump are products of American public education, so clearly it’s not doing any good.

And I believe that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right to bear arms and we need this because we can’t trust the government. Especially when it’s run by Republicans.

And I believe that our culture will be overrun if we don’t get a strict immigration policy. After all, the Iroquois didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

So in principle I should be on board with what the Trump Party is trying to do in Washington. If I’m not, it’s because I’ve not only seen how Trump operates in practice, (for more than eight years counting his time as monarch-in-exile puppeteering the Congress) I’ve seen how “fiscal conservatives” actually did things in the years before Trump assimilated the Republican Party.

As part of his personalist agenda to fuse the identity of the American government with his own ego, cult leader and incidental president Donald Trump demanded that Republicans pass his “One Big Beautiful Bill” in time for him to sign it on July 4. As it turned out, it was all Republicans could do to pass it in the Senate despite having 53 votes. In the end it went to a 50-50 tie on July 1 that had to be broken by Vice President JD Vance. In the Constitution, breaking tie votes in the Senate is the only real job that the Vice President has, other than succeeding the president in the event that he dies, which I’m sure JD Vance is hoping for as eagerly as the rest of the planet.

Why was it so hard for Trump’s devout worshipers to pass this bill? Because a lot of it hurts their constituents. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska only voted for it after Republicans specifically created exemptions for food stamp cuts in her state, but she still accepted Medicaid cuts in the final package. Many of those cuts would endanger funding for hospitals in rural communities with little medical service.

Yet despite all of the slashing to services the bill is projected to increase the budget deficit by billions, because it makes permanent the Trump tax cuts from his first term, which otherwise would have expired this year, while further increasing tax cuts for the upper percentile while eliminating tax breaks for the working poor and even upper middle class. And it further increases the deficit with billions in increases for the Pentagon and ICE.

All of this is supposedly based on the dogma that lower taxes will actually lead to greater capital generation and thus more money for the government, but what we are seeing already from Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo is a contraction. The Commerce Department reported last Thursday that the country’s gross domestic product declined by 0.5 percent in the first quarter, above the projected figure of a 0.2% decrease. Consumer spending growth was only 0.5 percent, down from a full 4 percent increase in the last quarter of 2024.

Capitalism works because we think we’re all going to get something out of it, and government policy under the Trump regime is to have a government that spends all of its money on catering to the donor class (including Trump and his inner circle) while increasing funding for the security state that Trump needs to deal with protests against the fact that capitalism is no longer working for everybody. And meanwhile as revenue increases for the upper percentile, the workers and middle class that the economy actually depends on will have less money overall (especially as they have to spend more on health care) and that will lead to a loss of consumer spending and investments, which will hurt that managerial class in the long run.

Mike Brock, quoted from CW Daily on June 30, said: “We are witnessing a capitalist class so drunk on its power that it has become incapable of recognizing its interests…so contemptuous of the institutions that created their wealth that they are destroying the conditions that make capitalism possible.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is actually one of the smartest commentators I’ve seen lately, had words to say about this in his July 1 Substack, basically on the subject of whether intelligence means making a lot of money. Quote: “There’s no intelligence in gathering great wealth if it means long-term destruction of the community. If you make money manufacturing an item that pollutes the local water table and causes cancer among local residents, that may be “smart” in the short term because you can take the money and live elsewhere. But you’ve also created a precedent for others to do the same until you’ve perpetuated climate change that makes water scarce, produces fewer crops, and creates greater poverty. The country is weaker for your children and their children. Even generational wealth has its limitations if the country is weak. That shows a lack of foresight which proves a deficit of intelligence. Of course, those living in mansions, sailing on yachts, and vacationing on the Riviera don’t see it that way. Which proves the point. They lack the intelligence to see the bigger picture which is the catastrophic effects of their myopia.”

But maybe an example will demonstrate what all of this means for anybody who relies on government services.

I work at a call center. This is in fact the same call center I mentioned in 2020 when I “endorsed” Trump’s re-election. And for obvious reasons I am still not going to give too many details. Everybody I work with is wonderful, it’s at least been steady work and more money than I previously made before in my life, which says more about my career prospects than I want to admit. But January we were all told that all of the customer care phone positions were being phased out. In fact my supervisor up to that point told us that she was one of the first people being let go. The only reason I and my co-workers are staying on, ostensibly through October, is because we work the graveyard (overnight) shift and they still need coverage. Frankly, half of the reason I wanted that shift is because I knew it had guaranteed job security. The drawback being that when somebody calls for emergency services at 4 am local time, I rarely get a supervisor on the phone because companies seem to think that people only suffer property damage from 9 am to 5 pm.

This drawdown also means that when we had a small pool of agents to begin with, there is no slack. I rarely take paid time off because there is only staffing for two agents on weekends which means only one person would be handling office emails and calls.

Well, the agent I normally work with on the weekends is no longer able to work from home, due to a home issue that I am not privy to know, and while they have a replacement to handle the call queue, she is not skilled to handle the email queue that we also have to deal with. This meant that in the last weekend I had no one to help me handle the email queue that had ballooned to almost triple digits because apparently no one was handling it on my days off either.

They still did not have anyone skilled for emails on Monday, which meant for the third day in a row I had to handle the entire email queue with no assistance. On a Monday. On the last day of the month. Which, like the first day of the month, means that every household in the People’s Republic of China, AND Taiwan, and North AND South Korea needs to be calling and emailing customer service every single minute for any reason or no reason at all.

So this meant that while I had no one to help me cover the backlog of emails, which eventually reached over 200 by midnight, I also had more than 80 calls backed up in the queue well past 7:30 Pacific, at which time swing shift left and I only had one person helping with the call queue. Which meant that we didn’t get calls done until 11:30 pm, at which point I still had to handle 200 emails in less than four hours.

Why? Because Jesus Christ is real. And He wanted to show me that He loves me more than anyone else in the whole wide world.

Or more realistically, because the company has been downscaling its operations for months now despite the fact that the customer base has not gotten any smaller, which means that when one of the regulars for the 24 hour line was not able to attend, there was no backup called because having properly skilled coverage for a Monday on the last day of the month was not that fucking important.

And this is what happens when the bean counters decide they can shave pennies by cutting back on manpower, without telling the customer base. Who, in California, seemed to be under the impression that June 30 was a state holiday called Let’s All Synchronize Our Watches And Cram The Customer Service Number With Water Line Break Emergency Calls Day.

Why did I bring up this anecdote?

We have been told by the right wing, in its more sober moments, that government needs to be run “like a business.” Which runs into the issue of how business is actually being run. That anecdote was an example of how management is running business “like a business.” That is, the directors are strip-mining all resources to maximize executive profits in inverse proportion to employee compensation and customer satisfaction. And with the Trump regime and its pet political party, we are seeing how rich guys plan to run government “like a business”: Into the ground.

The difference is that this works, sorta, with capitalism in that you can always go some place else to get private services and there is turnover precisely because someone else is able to capitalize on demand and provide services when other companies lose service quality or go bankrupt. What happens when this “management” approach happens to the only federal government we have?

We’re about to find out.

I had thought of talking about Viceroy Donald Trump’s wannabe-North Korean birthday party military march on June 14, but as the British would say, I couldn’t be arsed. In any event it was not a further escalation toward God-Emperor status, in fact quite the opposite. Because while the “No Kings” protests organized around the country had a collective attendance of at least 5 million that Saturday, the Trump event in DC (ostensibly a tribute to the US Army) might not have gotten 250,000 for the whole area. It was probably best symbolized by the reel of a Sherman tank slowly proceeding down the road, its squeaky treads clearly audible because there was hardly anyone in the stands to watch it. As for Your Own Personal Jesus, Donald Trump spent the whole time with a pinched, pained expression on his face, similar to when he walked out of the closed door meeting with Putin in Helsinki. That is, when he could bother to stay awake.

Happy Birthday, Occupant of the White House. No, I am not going to wish you any more, cause it looks like you wouldn’t enjoy them anyway.

But Trump’s No Good, Very Bad Day happened at the same time (actually June 13) as Israel’s preemptive strikes on the nation of Iran, which in the first stages took out several heads of the Islamic Republic including the head of the “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” and several directors of Iran’s nuclear development program.

And before I go on, I have to say I am of two minds about that.

On one hand, the reason the Middle East is the way it is now is really the reason that the United States is the way it is now, and that is because Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are basically the same guy. Now, to be sure Netanyahu is much smarter than Trump and not quite so obnoxious and repulsive, but they’re in much the same situation: A crooked as hell wheeler-dealer who first made his mark for media savvy (I first remember seeing Netanyahu as a talking head on ABC’s Nightline), who is involved in so much self-dealing, and has used his office for so much self-dealing, that the second he leaves office he is going to be prosecuted and most likely convicted. Which is why he will do everything in his power to never leave office. And the main part of that is catering to the coalition of religious fanatics that currently has controlling interest in his government, and pushing their agenda of ethnic cleansing all the Muslim minorities en route to turning the country into a one-party theocracy. (And if you’re asking if I refer to Trump or Netanyahu, the answer is ‘yes.’)

On the other hand, simply having an evil government does not mean a nation has no right to exist. And the problem with the ostensible “anti-Zionists” is that for some reason they think the Jewish state is the only one whose existence is illegitimate. But if history has shown anything it’s that when Jews are a minority in their nation they risk being disenfranchised and ultimately killed. (Like in the United States, if Trump thought he could get away with it.) There needs to be a Jewish state and there needs to be a two-state solution. Iran flat out wants to destroy Israel. Arab nations historically have always wanted to destroy Israel, but the Sunni nobles want to destroy the Shia Iranian republic more. And it’s not as though Iran’s government are nice guys even by Saudi standards. Indeed, this is a point of similarity between Iran and the United States. One country is technically a democratic republic but is actually run by a cabal of corrupt and ancient theocrats who want to start World War III in hopes that their Messiah will appear in the Middle East. The other is Iran.

So Israel was going to provoke pre-emptive war and get the United States to go along with it, like we always do. After all, it’s not as though anyone can make the case that Iran isn’t a sponsor of terrorism that has repeatedly declared itself committed to destroying the State of Israel. And is developing nuclear energy even though its economy is based on petroleum exports.

But given that Israel had the situation well in hand, it raised the question of why the United States needed to be actively involved. It goes without saying that the president acting unilaterally without Congressional declaration of war is blatantly un-Constitutional, but it also goes without saying that no president of either party has sought a declaration of war since Pearl Harbor, and that would be one of the least unusual things about Trump.

And all this is an example of why I’m not one of those people posting hot takes on the news every single day. (Along with the fact that I have a real job.) Because in just the last few days since last weekend, things have been changing faster than I can keep up.

From June 14 onward Viceroy Trump was making increasing noises indicating he would not only back up Israel diplomatically, but also militarily. His social media posts frequently repeated words to the effect of “IRAN MUST NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.” It often happens that elderly men can’t get out of their obsessive prejudices, but few of them have their own nuclear weapons. This deathly fear of nuclear war is in fact a sincere position of Trump, which is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin has so easily manipulated him on Ukraine, because he can always threaten nuclear escalation if the US acts against him. Even if Trump has effectively been immunized to the American justice system, one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.

So last weekend after his typical “two weeks” dodge, Trump actually sent bombers out from Missouri to hit Iran nuclear sites in what everyone is already calling the Nobody Came To My Birthday Party War. June 21, after world reaction had gotten sufficiently crazy, he came out of the White House to deliver an official announcement on the mission, backed up by JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio, who seems to be more sad and embarrassed every time he gets on camera. The speech was notable for its brevity and for being very inarticulate and “low energy.” At some point during all of this, Trump thanked God, probably because he thought he’d just won the Super Bowl.

Ostensibly the reason Netanyahu wanted his little Donnie involved is because the US has “bunker buster” bombs that have multi-stage explosions which are intended to eliminate targets deep underground. Well, as it happens, “Despite the use of heavy munitions, initial assessment suggests the facilities weren’t fully taken out.” News articles indicated that “it appeared nuclear material at Fordow had been moved in advance of the attack.” Probably because the president telegraphed his intentions by screaming that Iran must have an “unconditional surrender” and then wavering on whether he would get involved.

But Monday, after a perfunctory Iranian attack on US bases in Qatar, Trump declared, on his own initiative, that the two nations had come to a ceasefire, yelling on Truf Censhal, “(Israel) is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

And Monday-Tuesday overnight, the ceasefire ended with Israel accusing Iran of violating it. And Trump posted, “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Less the World’s Policeman and more like the World’s Substitute Teacher.

And once it became clear that our Dominus Mundi could not make a ceasefire happen between two other nations by imperial proclamation, he got clearly upset. On the way to his flight to a NATO meeting in Europe, Trump told reporters “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Let’s all get aflutter and act like the biggest news story on Tuesday was that Donald Trump used the F word in front of reporters. Most of this country has been using the F word in private for the last ten years because of this guy. But hey, at least all the basic-cable news outlets got an excuse to play the recording unedited. It’s NEWS!

Which kind of gets to the real reason we have to put up with this and keep putting up with it: Some people want Trump around cause he’s great TV.

In one of his Bulwark columns, Jonathan A. Last went over the related issue of the Western world outside the US dealing with Russia and Ukraine, and said, “this is what nations have to do: Make long-term plans about an uncertain future based on incomplete information and constantly shifting variables. America is no longer capable of such things because the American people do not want leaders who are capable of them.”

The reason we have a tyrant toddler fucking up every aspect of the world every single day is because this country really IS a democracy and this country didn’t want its favorite “reality” TV game show host to go to prison. The fact that he would be president was incidental. The plain folks of the land selected the best representative of their collective soul.

The premise of the Republican Party and Trump in particular (who as far back as his PLAYBOY Interview praised the Chinese Communists for showing ‘strength’ in crushing the Tiananmen protests) is that democracy doesn’t work and we should get rid of it. The fact that he got re-elected in the first place shows that he might actually be right.

At the very least, millions of people who voted for the Democrat candidate in 2020 against Trump did not do so last year, either because of the Biden-Harris policy towards Israel and Gaza, because they thought Kamala Harris had girl cooties, or they just couldn’t bother to care about the future of their country, which they knew was an issue because they were at least smart enough not to actively vote for Trump. But it doesn’t matter. In our binary political system, when you don’t vote, you vote. Because not voting for A usually means B wins. If you don’t want B to win, you have to get out and vote for A. Since you know damn well that in this case Republicans are going to come out Hell or high water to vote for Republicans to keep Democrats from winning.

If we manage to get this country back without our own pre-emptive strikes on a theocratic government, we really need to change this political system to curb the chance of 2024 happening again. For example: Tuesday night, the Democratic Party primary for New York mayor (which is the only party primary that matters) was a ranked-choice vote, and the establishment candidate was the centrist (and corrupt as Hell) Andrew Cuomo, trying to make a political comeback after leaving office in disgrace. Despite having several other choices, New York Democrats rallied around Muslim “progressive” Zohran Mamdani, getting more than 7 percentage points over Cuomo, a result that caused Cuomo to concede even though Mamdani has not yet cleared the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff. Given the margin, Mamdani might have won with the traditional first-past-the-post primary, but as of Tuesday 984,859 people voted, whereas in 2017 (before the ranked-choice system was implemented) the Democratic primary that was won by Bill de Blasio got only 437,517 votes, which indicates that more people might turn out to vote if they have someone to vote for, and if their “weird” first choice doesn’t automatically throw away their vote.

That would be the main change we need to make on the federal level. Also, qualification tests for candidates. Like a psychological exam. And a civics exam. And a literacy exam. If that seems too invasive, at least make the guy post 50 times on social media without misspelling his own name.