Month: September 2025

FCC – Fascist Communist Collusion

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.

Is There Any Doubt Now?

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!!!

Charlie Kirk

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 2nd 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.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Season Two)

Well Strange New Worlds Season Three totally snuck up on me and now that it’s about over, I realized I hadn’t covered SNW Season 2.

Season One was clearly a showcase for modern Trek’s breakout star, Anson Mount as Captain Pike, with the broad arc of the season being his attempts to either escape or cope with the knowledge of his grim fate, culminating in an alternate timeline where he was the captain of the Enterprise during the “Balance of Terror” scenario and his decisions turned out to be disastrous for everyone but himself. We don’t see that much of Mount in the first few weeks of Season Two; it turned out he was taking family leave to be present for the birth of his first child. This was a good thing insofar as the audience got to see the strength of SNW’s large ensemble cast.

This started with the resolution of the Season 1 cliffhanger where Number One (Rebecca Romijn) was arrested for being from a genetically modified species, against Federation laws. This continued Romijn’s development of a character who only appeared in the original pilot by actually giving her an origin and a sympathetic background. It ended with the premise that Una would get to stay in the Federation on the grounds of being a refugee, which is one of those recurring science-fiction things (especially in Star Trek) where the status quo is technically preserved but the protagonist is made an exception to it because of “main character energy.”

Later when Pike was brought back to the Enterprise, they had the episode “Among the Lotus Eaters”, which was set on Rigel VII, in reference to one of Pike’s previous adventures referred to in “The Cage.” A radiation anomaly affected both the away team and the ship in orbit, causing everyone to lose their memories and revert to either barbarism or helplessness. This story highlighted one of the show’s most popular original characters, Erica Ortegas, who managed to get herself together to go to the bridge and save the day, but the writing was still a bit forced. Ortegas is a good enough character and Melissa Navia is a good enough actress that she needs a bit more motivation than “I’m Erica Ortegas, and I fly the ship.” Fortunately, they did work on that in Season 3.

One of the minor recurring arcs in Season 2 was where the implied attraction between Nurse Chapel and Spock in The Original Series became a full-fledged romance, and they managed to do it in a low-key way that didn’t violate established continuity. Too much. They also established a certain history between Chapel (Jess Bush) and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), having served not only as physicians but as combatants in the Klingon War. This leads to a later episode, “Under the Cloak of War”, in which M’Benga is told by Pike to assist in a peace mission with a Klingon diplomat that he knows to be a war criminal. Olusanmokun establishes his character’s intense internal pressure and stress, with events leading to a confrontation in which M’Benga ends up killing the Klingon, in what was probably not self-defense, though the case was ambiguous enough for Pike to go along with it.

It sort of figures that the show sandwiched its most dark and grim episode between “Those Old Scientists” (the Lower Decks crossover) which was the most silly episode of the series up to that point, and the musical episode, which was bound to be even sillier than that. Although on that score, “Subspace Rhapsody” was clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s “Once More, With Feeling”, especially the conceit that living in a musical reality causes everybody to confess their most uncomfortable motives in song. The difference being that unlike with Buffy, everyone on the SNW cast can actually sing.

And they did much to humanize the combative and hostile security chief La’an (Christine Chong), especially in the early episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” which somehow manages to combine “Space Seed” with “City on the Edge of Forever”, using James Kirk (Paul Wesley) as the bridge. In this case, La’an is stuck in a dystopian variant time line and the Kirk of this dimension is a captain of a united Earth military ship who ends up having to help her restore her timeline by going to 21st Century Toronto, where they try to make sense of things and end up falling for each other. It turns out La’an’s ancestor, Khan Noonien Singh, is in Toronto, living as a child in a special academy, and he is being stalked by Sera, a young journalist who turns out to be a Romulan agent trying to kill Khan to stop his influence from changing humanity’s timeline to where they become a threat to the Romulans. And in the midst of all this, Sera blurts out to La’an that she was supposed to have traced Khan to 1992 but thanks to multiple Temporal Wars she ended up stuck in the 21st Century instead.

This one episode, almost offhandedly, answered the ongoing question of why so much of the Discovery/SNW line of Star Trek doesn’t look like the previous Star Trek timeline- because it isn’t.

This is not the original Star Trek timeline. It’s just not. It is at best an alternate universe like the “Abramsverse” that split off from the “Prime” universe with a certain event.

What this does is address a very common problem with science fiction, where the creator suggests a future at a certain date which will have all sorts of radical things, and here we are in 2024 and we don’t have ray guns or flying cars. Soylent Green was set in 2022, yet we don’t have ecological collapse, discolored skies, masses of people cramming the streets and industry casting about for meatless alternatives to traditional foods.

Okay, bad example.

Real history passed the period of the Eugenics Wars from the original series bible many years ago, and so the original series is very clearly not plausible as our future. But in SNW’s debut episode, Captain Pike did a primer on the Eugenics Wars for an alien government, and showed real footage of people marching on Washington after the 2020 election. So right from the get-go, they’ve retconned The Original Series background to make it fit in with our history up till now.

I mean, consider “Turnabout Intruder”, the famously bad Star Trek episode that marked the end of the original series. In this story, Dr. Janice Lester is an old contemporary (and former lover) of Captain Kirk who wants to destroy his life out of insane jealousy that he gets to be a starship captain but Starfleet will not allow women to be captains. Of course as the story goes on it becomes clear that Lester is too mentally unstable to be a captain regardless. The show did imply that this gender barrier was a double standard, but it did so in the most awkward and patronizing way. Which gets to one of the issues with the Original Series: It really was progressive in terms of its diversity casting (what was then called ‘United Nations casting’) but its treatment of women mostly remained old-fashioned.

Even so, ’60s Trek clearly modeled Starfleet after American military services, and at the time it might have seemed unrealistic, even for this series, to show women captains. Now it would seem unrealistic NOT to. This is where you have Captain Batel, and Michael Burnham, not to mention Burnham’s role model, Phillippa Georgiou.

As they put it in another classic science-fiction series:
If you wonder how he eats and breathes

And other science facts

(La La La La)

Tell yourself, ‘It’s just a TV show,

I should really just relax’

I wouldn’t say this is the greatest TV show of all time, but in just two seasons of Strange New Worlds, Paramount finally seems to had gotten the sweet spot for New Trek where it combines complex modern sensibilities with the ’60s Trek feel. As opposed to Discovery, which is often too impressed with its own “progressive” politics, or Picard, which was so dark for most of its run that it might as well have been produced by Zack Snyder. Did Season 3 do as well this year? Well… mostly.

The Witch Doctor

“Hard to believe that in 2025 we have to be telling people that vaccines are safe and slavery was bad.”
– Facebook post

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

-Isaac Asimov

In her later years when she was much more an intellectual influencer than a fiction author, Ayn Rand developed theories of politics and a certain vocabulary to refer to common concepts. And one of her terms was “Attila and the Witch Doctor.” This referred to the idea that every tyrant needs something to back him up in the realm of debate. “Attila” refers to the outright thug who sees government solely in terms of brute force. Examples would be the famous dictators of the 1940s and Third World strongmen. “The Witch Doctor” is his necessary complement, the intellectual influencer who promotes and enables the anti-reason collectivism of the Attila with nonsense philosophy and sophistry that usually comes down to “reality isn’t real”, “you can’t prove anything” or “the people who claim objectivity exists are just lying.” Examples would be various breeds of post-modernists, or anybody who says that politics has less to do with abstract ideas than power relationships. This sort of thing used to be the province of the Left, but just as the old fascists stole all their best lines from the communists, the alt-Right fully embraces “post-truth” as a means to power, by convincing people to doubt what was previously assumed, whether it was proven or not. Which makes it that much easier to assume control: When you’re a dictator, the goal is not necessarily to make people only believe the State, it’s to make them not believe anything, so that they can’t trust anything and therefore your nonsense is just as valid as the other guy’s verified facts.

We already know that Donald Trump is America’s Attila – the bone-in-the-nose, ooga-booga tribal war chieftain who stomps on everything in his path and calls that governance. But who in this terminology is the Witch Doctor of the Trump Party? It’s pretty obvious, especially after this month: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy was of course a famous member of a Democratic Party political dynasty and remained a Democrat until fairly recently when he became more at odds with the Party over his “unorthodox” beliefs about the health system. He does in fact have a lifelong history of alternative self-medication, dating back at least to college, where he credited his heroin addiction with improving his attention span in class. Despite disdain for vaccines and other mainstream medical services, Kennedy has continued to be plagued by health issues, including a memory loss that he attributed to “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”. His voice has been permanently damaged by spasmodic dysphonia, causing it to be rough and difficult to understand. The reasons for his conditions and the extent of them are unknown because he has not released his medical records.

His wife is the actress Cheryl Hines, recently most famous for appearing in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which she played the normie bystander wife of a gravel-voiced crank who antagonizes everyone around him.

During COVID, Kennedy attracted controversy by saying that not only did the virus originate in China, it was developed to depopulate nations while specifically avoiding “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Well, seriously, if you were China and you were trying to screw with the United States, why would you target the people who go to Chinese restaurants?

Even so, RFK Junior had developed a respectable civilian career as an environmental advocate and lawyer for disadvantaged communities. So being against “the establishment” in various senses put him in the same category as Tulsi Gabbard and some other nominal Democrats who no longer aligned with that party but were not really conservative enough for Republicans. Accordingly, with his vaccine-skeptic agenda, RFK made an independent run for president in 2024, which given how close the polls were made him a real threat to Donald Trump, given that he attracted the kind of people who were, again, not conservative but less likely to vote for Kamala Harris than Trump. This came to a head when both RFK and Trump were invited to the Libertarian Party 2024 convention to appeal for their endorsement and Kennedy was well-received and Trump was… not. So after that Trump put the moves on Kennedy (and Gabbard) to appeal for their endorsement, which he got. This despite the fact that Kennedy was a former liberal and had been quoted as saying Trump was a “terrible human being”, a “discredit to democracy”, and “probably a sociopath“. And perhaps not coincidentally, once Trump got elected with the support of independents and former Democrats, he gave Kennedy a Cabinet position running the Department of Health and Human Services, where he would be able to run the bureaucracy in the exact opposite direction from where it had been. And even before that, once Kennedy endorsed Trump, he identified his health-skeptic movement with broader Trumpism, calling it “Make America Healthy Again.”

“Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) is the only MAGA sub-movement with its own famous name, which is odd given that it is only one of several important follower movements such as MARA (Make America Racist Again), MACA (Make America Chauvinist Again) and MASA (Make America Stupid Again). But like MAGA (Make America Great Again), MAHA works through the Orwellian tactic of using a positive label in order to promote its exact opposite.

As HHS Secretary, Kennedy creates policy based on the broader “MAHA” agenda, which attacks the use of vaccines as a cause of autism in children (with little evidence) and otherwise attacks the use of pharmaceuticals and processed foods in the American lifestyle. His idea of running the health care bureaucracy seems to center on slashing its staff. And merely in his public actions, Kennedy demonstrates a cavalier disregard for what ought to be the responsibilities of his job.

For example, in response to the mass shooting at a Catholic school, RFK not only blamed the use of anti-depressants by juveniles, he said, “When I was a kid, we had shooting clubs at our school. People, kids, my classmates, other people would bring a .22 rifle with their guns to school and park it in the parking lot.”

So apparently we’re supposed to believe that the son of Bobby Kennedy and the nephew of Jack Kennedy is okay with kids taking guns to school.

Next he’s probably going to advocate for the health benefits of drunk driving.

Which only points up the fact that however sordid the Kennedy clan in were in their private lives, at least they didn’t bring their vices into politics.

Kennedy’s basis of policy is pretty well summed up by an interview he did with Tucker Carlson, where he said,, “My opinion, I always tell people, is irrelevant. We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts. Right. We were told at the beginning of COVID don’t look at any data yourself, don’t do any investigation yourself. Just trust the experts. And trusting the experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation, and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.”

(Which led to John Cleese’s line, ‘I wonder what the qualifications are for not being an expert’.)

This statement in itself goes a long way to explain how MAGA in general and MAHA in particular can appeal to an eclectic group of people who wouldn’t necessarily go along with the darker aspects of MAGA – like the racism, authoritarianism and religious hypocrisy – by appealing to their intellectual vices, and thus eventually getting them to embrace the racism, authoritarianism and religious hypocrisy.

A central issue with the Trump regime (because ‘administration’ is the Hegelian radical antithesis of what they’re doing) is that you can only rebel against The Man so long until you either keep failing or you succeed, and at that point you become The Man. That’s where Republicans (including MAHA) are now. And leading from that, once “conservatives” (now including MAHA) get power, they reveal the hypocrisy of their movement: rather than endorsing freedom against an overbearing government so they can live according to their choice, they want to commandeer that overbearing government to their purposes to make everyone else live according to their choice.

The same people who wail “this is a republic, not a democracy” fail to bring up the reason the Founders made the distinction, and why they put so many counter-majoritarian elements in the US Constitution: You want to have people who actually know what they’re doing running things, even if the general direction is set by the public. Otherwise the public good itself would be undermined: “It is a just observation, that the people commonly INTEND the PUBLIC GOOD. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always REASON RIGHT about the MEANS of promoting it. They know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.” (The Federalist, No. 71)

And this is why the Trump regime demonstrates that our old republic really is now a democracy because it demonstrates the indulgences that the Founders thought pure democracy would fall err to. Not just the takeover by a demagogue but the inconstancy of public policy based on unqualified but popular opinions.

MAHA, while represented by Mr. Kennedy, embraces a whole range of alternative health theories, some of which, like avoiding processed foods or eliminating artificial food dyes, are hardly bad in themselves. The movement also gained traction in the wake of COVID quarantines (which were enforced mainly by state governments, NOT the first Trump Administration, cause ‘freedom’), especially in regard to not allowing people to congregate in houses of worship. However some of these concerns are perennial quack theories. In particular, MAHA opposes the fluoridation of public water. Their designation of what constitutes ‘healthy’ vs. ‘unhealthy’, rather than examining the data, is based largely in culture war prejudices. For instance, it has been noted by people across the political spectrum that the corn syrup lobby in Congress is influential enough that it has changed the nature of our food products so that glucose is processed more efficiently. This has helped lead to an obesity epidemic in this country. Thus RFK supported Trump’s pressure campaign to make Coca-Cola change their American product back to sugar from high fructose corn syrup. However, chemically there is little difference and being dependent on a diet of sugar is hardly more healthy than a diet of corn syrup products. Likewise RFK promoted Shake Shack’s decision to make French fries with beef tallow rather than vegetable oil, but that doesn’t mean that cooking in animal fat is healthier than cooking in seed oil, because it’s saturated fat.

The common element is the idea that “democracy” (an idea that MAGAts oppose when it means making representative government more accessible) justifies Asimov’s observation that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Those who objected to the decisions of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other experts during COVID, on the grounds that they were often in error, blank out the point that they were almost as much in the dark as the rest of us but still acted on the basis of the knowledge they had, and it was the basis of that collective knowledge that led Trump to endorse a ‘warp speed’ vaccine program during his last term, after COVID almost killed him because he didn’t trust the experts. Prior to that, his alternative to the experts who were potentially in error was to describe the virus as a ‘Democrat hoax’, which was totally in error. And yet that political correctness is now the basis of public policy, even after it has already proven to be in error.

A writer at The Bulwark summed up the impervious selective rationale: “if you’re an expert who gets one thing wrong, it damns you. If you’re a total lunatic crank who gets one thing right, it makes you bulletproof.”

In any case Thursday September 4, RFK appeared at a Senate hearing reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services, and he was grilled by Senators of both parties, including Bill Cassidy (R.-Louisiana), who had voted for Kennedy’s confirmation, and who pointed out that Kennedy had recommended that Donald Trump be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for pushing the “Operation Warp Speed” COVID treatment in his first term, even though Kennedy in his office has restricted access to COVID vaccines. It was the sort of scrutiny and hostility that Kennedy should have received when he was originally nominated.

Better late than never. Except now it’s too late.

Because the whole premise of fascism, Trumpism in particular, is that you never have to say you’re sorry. Now that Kennedy is installed as head of Health and Human Services, Trump is never going to get rid of him, very much in spite of all the people telling him that he is exactly the wrong man for the job. And in that respect Kennedy is the perfect symbol for the second Trump term and its malicious disregard for competence, not to mention a perfect example of how Trump can corrupt even those outside the conservative orbit, not so much in spite of their avowed skepticism as because of it.

Too bad.

I mean if you’re going to have an ex-heroin addict as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, you should get Iggy Pop. He’s taken enough pharmaceuticals that he should have spontaneously exploded over 50 years ago, he’s at least 73, and he’s still alive. If that doesn’t qualify you as a health expert, I don’t know what does.