Month: October 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and speaking of Arab oil monarchs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you live forever?
Could you see the day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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