No matter how often he texted me, no matter how often he gave a speech that hit my political soft spots, I could not get behind Graham Platner with anything more than, “he’s the nominee now, so let’s make it work.” From the Nazi tattoo imbroglio to the accusations of being a leftist Pete Hegseth, mixing sexual assault with his blackout drinking, it felt like a matter of when, not if, something would come out that had zero ambiguity. Something that Platner could not power through or deny. That something hit this week in the form of Jenny Racicot, an ex-girlfriend who not only recounted her rape at his blackout drunk hands, but also how she withheld telling the full story previously because she didn’t want to hurt his chances of winning on a platform she believed in. Tonight, Platner begrudgingly accepted reality and withdrew from the campaign.

As Matt Bernstein pointed out in an Instagram post yesterday, this was something we saw just a few months ago when Dolores Huerta confirmed that César Chavez, a legendary organizer of the United Farm Workers, venerated as a saint in that community and elsewhere, was a rapist. He repeatedly raped Huerta, getting her pregnant on multiple occasions, and she kept silent about it until she was 96(!) because she didn’t want to harm the good work he’d done. That such a thing happened sixty years ago and happened again this year speaks to a massive failing on the left to take this behavior as consistently and seriously as it does when the fascists do it.

Social media is, of course, a hellhole on this issue right now, and I’ve by and large tried to stay out of it because what good will it do? Leftist women are (rightfully) upset, and blasting the hell out of everyone else over it. Other leftists, like Ryan Grim and Ken Klippenstein (Ken being part of this disappoints the hell out of me—I thought he was better than that), are being unrepentant about supporting Platner, and then you have some who are arguing, well, this:

I’ll preface this by saying that Tim Burke is an outstanding journalist, professor, technical wizard, and someone I deeply respect and like. This is still a bad take.

The last Democratic candidate Burke refers to is David Costello. Costello ran unopposed in the 2024 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate because Senator Angus King, the incumbent, runs as an independent, even though he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate. Nobody else ran because they knew it was pointless, and it was. Costello got approximately 55,000 votes in the primary, and in the general, was only able to add 33,000 votes to that. He finished a very distant third, with the Republican getting 34% and King getting 51%. Does that sound like someone that was “already vetted” and “whom they’ve already voted [for]?” It sounds like somebody that was there and got the votes he did from the people who choose the straight party line vote.

By the way, Costello got 17,000 votes this year, finishing 24,000 votes behind Governor Janet Mills, who had quit the race weeks before the primary. The guy is a loser whom nobody took seriously. Platner won the primary with 172,000 votes and 72% of the vote, which is more than the total number of votes the last time Collins was on the ballot and the Democrats nominated Sara Gideon, the speaker of the State House of Representatives. Gideon got 71.5% of the vote in her primary in 2020, but the total votes for all three candidates were less than Platner’s turnout this year1, and Gideon was somebody that the Democrats were ecstatic to run against Collins. She raised money hand over fist, in a presidential year to boot, where Joe Biden won the state with 435,072 votes….and Gideon underperformed him by 94,000 votes.

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Susan Collins won a majority of the state’s voters, even after her votes for MAGA Supreme Court justices, even on a presidential year ballot, even after having shredded her promise to only run for two terms during her first Senate election, even against a well-funded liberal female that ran a good campaign against her. Collins won 52% despite all of that. For reasons that defy all logic, she is much harder to beat than she has gotten credit for, and it would take a lot to defeat her. Chuck Schumer’s brilliant plan was to recruit the state’s septuagenarian governor, Janet Mills, who reportedly turned him down several times until finally giving in. Mills did win statewide twice, but she’s also slumping in popularity and has backed an unpopular data center. She was not exciting, and she didn’t run a campaign so much as she slow-walked it, which left room for Platner on her left, and boy, did he seize it. So here we are, now, with a massive mess to clean up and a bitter man who thought he’d beat the rap. What now?

It would be an all-time blunder to ignore Platner’s electoral achievement. There was already a lot of red flags out there and he still wiped the floor clear of any opposition. He was muscling through. Voters have made it clear from New York to Colorado that they are as anti-incumbent as they’ve ever been, and that they want people ready to get into the pit to brawl with the fascists (not necessarily a literal meaning, but some electorates might not mind that either). Platner gave them that feeling. He positioned himself as the guy who wasn’t afraid of anyone and would raise hell in the Senate against the MAGA minions who are afraid to utter the mildest criticism of Mango Mussolini. It reminded me of what I consider to be the greatest line Aaron Sorkin ever wrote, in the 1995 film The American President (we miss you, Rob Reiner, this movie doesn’t get enough love). Michael J. Fox, who is the chief policy adviser/pollster for the fictional president portrayed by Michael Douglas, is trying to stiffen Douglas’s spine and make a difficult decision on a bill. Fox said:

The Democrats have suffered from a lack of leadership for a couple of years now. Their best and brightest, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are repeatedly denied leadership roles because something something seniority. Hakeem Jeffries is one of the worst House leaders fielded by Democrats in the last century, utterly ineffective and unable to lead a pack of Boy Scouts, let alone the Democratic caucus. He does not inspire, he’s thoroughly bought by AIPAC (who are toxic with the Democratic base), and it seems like Nancy Pelosi anointed him her successor because she’d look brighter in comparison, not because he was any good at this. Chuck Schumer in the Senate long ago lost his fastball, and regularly has to deal with revolts from his own caucus. He is also thoroughly ingratiated with and indebted to AIPAC, calls himself “Israel’s steward in the Senate" and is cozy with Wall Street. Bernie Sanders has done a lot to organize and fire people up, but he’s not officially a Democrat. Other great organizers, like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Kat Abugazaleh, were defeated in large part by AIPAC cash flooding their districts to ensure that they lost because they dared refuse to support Israel as it wages an unholy war against millions of innocents that neighbor it.

In short, there was no genuine leadership in a position of power, so Platner stepped up to the microphone and captivated people. He put forth policies they supported and he presented the persona they wanted. Platner’s fall has not changed the fact that he drew better turnout than Dems have done for a Senate primary ever in Maine’s history. The most votes ever won by a Democrat in a Senate primary. He clearly touched a nerve, and even though it turned out to be a mirage, he got the most voters ever to drink the sand. I do not know the precise who should replace him on the ballot, but by God, they’d better not be an Establishment candidate. The voters made it clear what they wanted, and the state party must take heed. A candidate with the same passion and positions can beat Collins—I don’t think it’s about the who, it’s about authenticity and what they believe—and anyone who can’t deliver on those counts is dead on arrival, and with them, a great opportunity to unseat one of the Senate’s biggest frauds in this century will be lost.

Last night at 11 pm Eastern Daylight Time, ABC began airing twenty-four hours of programming dedicated to America at 250, beginning with a laser show at the Statue of Liberty in New York. As I noted on my Bluesky account earlier today, it has been surprisingly informative, inclusive, and unflinching about darker aspects of our past. Working in tandem with National Geographic, covering current and historical stories from each of the 50 states, viewers so far have seen everything from a day in the life of an Iowa farmer to the story of a slave rebellion and its brutal suppression outside New Orleans. Another story followed one of Thomas Jefferson’s descendants through Sally Hemings and his deep emotion at being recognized by Monticello as a descendant, with the access and privileges the estate grants all descendants.

Native Americans have been centered throughout many of the stories, serving as guides through archaeological digs, national forests, the Appalachian Mountains, the Grand Canyon, and the swamps of the Everglades, all while being recognized repeatedly as the original stewards of this land. While it does not delve into the thornier discussion about “stolen land,” it is absolutely remarkable after all of the bruising fights that Disney and ABC have gone through with the Trump administration that they chose to take a pretty bold stand in this programming. While the Trump administration has been ordering the National Park Service to remove any mention of slavery from historic sites across America, Disney and ABC chose to confront it as part of our history, a brave stance in a media world increasingly run by sycophantic billionaires desperate to keep control of our economy and nation. They showed the German Coast slave revolt memorial in all of its gruesome imagery, which truly impressed me.

My wife and I watched for several hours today, and she asked me a question after reading some of the wretched drivel that Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore this week. He claimed “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11….There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Having watched right-wing politicians define communism in the last couple of decades when asked to do so—a painful exercise in historical illiteracy—I can confidently say that he would include every Democratic Party official, voter, and activist in that assessment, not to mention so many others who sit further left. It is the broad brush tarring of people like myself that turns people off from patriotism, especially from those who would qualify for Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 1775 assessment that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It’s this experience that has led a very strong segment of Americans to argue in recent surveys that flying our flag is a sign of being a zealot, and not a symbol of unity.

I’m guilty of this thinking myself. I’ve often said in conversations, social media posts, et cetera that I really do not like America, or that I hate it, even. Those things get spoken by me when I’m at my most upset over the gung-ho, rah-rah, militaristic patriotism that is so often thrown in our faces by certain segments of our population. I think that I’ve done so as an exercise in hyperbole, or a reflex against behavior that I loathe. There are few nations on Earth that can claim a long, unbroken record of pacifism and good behavior towards others. The history of most nations, if you look back long enough or hard enough, includes periods of bloodshed and warfare and oppression. The North American continent is largely land that was stolen and seized by colonialist settlers from another hemisphere. South America, where the native peoples eventually seized control of their destinies, has very notable recent history where those leaders oppressed their own people or launched wars against others. Innocence in statecraft is exceedingly rare, and nations are an outgrowth of our innate tribalism. Unless I moved to Samoa or Tahiti or a place like that, I would inevitably be part of a nation that has ugly history behind it.

The more complicated truth is that I have struggled with this question a lot in the past two decades—as our nation turned into an imperial danger to others, claiming jurisdiction to strike against “terrorist threats” with our military anywhere we saw fit, and as I learned the darker parts of our history, parts that were far closer to the present day than politicians and media figures implied. In 2008, I thought we had made it through to a new day in America. We elected, in the midst of our Brown Scare against Scary Names and Dark People, a man named Barack Hussein Obama as our President. A charismatic, biracial, incredibly intelligent man who was a perfect illustration of the American Dream and succeeding on merit should’ve been our finest hour, and yet it took mere weeks for an internal backlash driven by hate and latent racism to take center stage. Nearly twenty years later, that backlash has brought on full-blown war against the civil rights of dark-skinned Americans and immigrants. The Voting Rights Act has been overturned by a Supreme Court stacked with five white conservatives (and the Black Klansman Clarence Thomas) eager to dial back the clock, no matter what the facts, actual law, or stare decisis says. Within an hour of that decision, Southern states began removing Black-majority congressional districts and destroying their representation in Congress.

How do I love this nation? How do I have any pride in my nation when the past decade has been a primal scream of hate, anger, division, repression and downright evil behavior by many of our leaders and far too many citizens? How do I take pride in a nation that has the most wealth on Earth while also refusing to provide basics that every other major economic power does? How can I cheer on our athletes in international competition when our government has actively sabotaged the efforts of other nations in those competitions by putting them through harassment and abuse before matches? Where does someone draw the line between supporting fellow citizens and unintentionally boosting the bad faith message of our government?

It may be true that other nations have dark sides or horrific behavior in their pasts, but it cannot be denied that right now, it is our nation amongst the worst offenders. We are at the furthest point from our ideals in decades, if not longer. If the Nazis took back Germany tomorrow, there’s a 50% chance America would join a war on their side, given our government’s ideological bent. It sticks in my heart, even as I watch our football (soccer) team advance in the tournament and cheer on their efforts. It’s a nagging guilt that I can’t get to go away—just what am I supporting? Where does the individual end and the greater Volk, to use the German, begin? If a nation is a collection of people united in common purpose with defined boundaries, are we even a nation at this point? America feels more like a bunch of gangs fighting on a playground than a cohesive unit, unable to even agree on basic principles like our kids should not be slaughtered in school by assault rifles.

Another school of thought is that dissent is the highest form of love. German revolutionary Carl Schurz, who immigrated to America after the failed 1848 uprisings across Europe, assimilated wonderfully—becoming our ambassador to Spain under Lincoln, Senator from Missouri after the Civil War, and a cabinet secretary to President Rutherford B. Hayes. Schurz wrote, “My country, if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani gave a speech yesterday where he said, “…Patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time.” If that is the case, then I am a patriot of the highest order, dissenting against our sins for 25 years, even at times where it was most dangerous. I am, to this day, still extremely proud of my words for an opinion column at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus newspaper, The Michigan Journal, in the weeks after 9/11 when our civil liberties were being infringed upon quite heavily and the chorus of voices demanding we accept it was the loudest.

I wrote that depriving anyone of civil rights, let alone throwing “terrorist suspects” into Guantanamo Bay without any due process, is not the America that so many fought and died for. It was a sentiment that was difficult to find, and I am proud that I wrote it, proud that I took a stand, and proud that I’ve always stuck by it. Perhaps that is the greatest love of country and I’ve been unable to accept that because it feels so unreciprocated. Love is supposed to be shared, a feeling that is mutual, even though it so often is not.

I’ve written all this today and the funny thing is that I’m still not able to answer my question. I still do not know how to say I love my nation or I do not, because it’s not a question with a binary answer. I love the great natural beauty of America, I love how there are so many culinary experiences from other lands available here, and how we’ve readily taken to so many of them. I love that we have, at times, done the right thing by our own people, and by oppressed peoples elsewhere. I love that some of the greatest expressions of human freedom were written by Americans—Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr.—and that those writings still inspire today.

There is much to love here in America, even as there is so much to loathe at the same time. Maybe the true love of country is being able to speak about both with equal passion, and fight to preserve what is good while working to correct what is wrong. It’s upon all of us to do so with grace and respect, hard as that may be, if we wish to live up to the lofty ideals of 1776.

The graphic above explains the process of infection, but kind of undersells the horror of the cycle in its scientific language. The components that make this nasty larva so devastating is that it literally has sharp pincers that dig into the flesh. If you try to remove it, it will burrow further into the flesh to evade capture (hence the term “screwworm”). Imagine these horrid little things digging under your skin, laying eggs, eating away at you, and turning into flies that swarm around your wounds. While it mainly affects livestock, it can also infect humans and pets. That’s certainly bad enough, and with the overall levels of cattle herds in America at a 75-year-low, this holds potential for driving up beef prices to astronomical levels. As it is, beef prices have already been lousy enough that Texas barbeque joints, a staple of the state for decades, are closing left and right. That was before this flesh-eating monstrosity returned. God help us if it’s not contained.

I went out the night it was confirmed the screwworm was here and stocked up. Hamburgers, ground beef for various meals like pasta, brisket…I wanted options before the great Price Spike of 2026 launched, because you just know that containment is going to fail this time around. Have you heard Agriculture Barbie, excuse me, Brooke Rollins, talk about this? “We’re looking at using minidrones powered by AI to fly over herds and look for infections.” Artificial intelligence cannot make up for the lack of common sense that this Cabinet lacks.

The screwworm is the perfect metaphor for the MAGA mindset. Donald Trump and his cult burrowed into America’s flesh, slowly killing this nation from inside, eating away at our shared beliefs and principles while utterly shunning science and . Despite starting a massively inflationary and pointless war, despite trying to give himself a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off violent insurrectionists with, despite tariffs that are making everyone poorer, despite repeatedly falling asleep during staged Oval Office television events and in sycophantic Cabinet meetings, Trump manages to hold a baseline level of support around one-third of America. This is especially true within the Republican Party, where the bar of decent behavior cannot be located. Every time you think that bar has been set, along comes an event or person that should be unable to clear the bar, and yet, they do, because Republicans hold the levers of power in all three branches of the federal government and accept that the bar is in Hell.

East of El Paso, Texas, is a string of counties that were founded in the 1880s, named after Confederate leaders from the Civil War. Reeves County, for Colonel George Reeves; Jeff Davis County, for the former president of the Confederacy; and Culberson County, named for David Culberson, a Confederate soldier later elected to the U.S. House when Reconstruction ended. These counties are staunchly Republican, which tracks, because Republican Party members are increasingly part of the Confederacy redux. These three counties together don’t quite reach a total population of 20,000 people—the two most notable things about them is that Reeves County is home to the famed Old West town of Pecos (the phrase “West of the Pecos” derives from it) and Jeff Davis County is home to Mount Livermore and the McDonald Astronomical Observatory. They also serve as poster children for why the MAGA clowns that post maps showing “all that red!” are clowns—that spot is red, but there aren’t many voters in it.

In 2024, Donald Trump won these counties by a 60-40 split in the general election, which is on par for most deep red counties in America. His total number of votes in Culberson and Jeff Davis counties was merely in the hundreds, though, and his campaign made no mention of it as newsworthy because it was just par for the course. On May 26th, the Texas runoff primary between sitting senator John Cornyn, the Majority Whip, and sleazeball Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took place, and Cornyn got beat badly statewide by a 65-35% spread. Paxton, like many Republican primary challengers these days, took a stance that was fully aligned with President Trump as his campaign message. If Trump said it, Paxton would echo the same phrases, whether talking about Cornyn or Democratic nominee James Talarico. This tendency led to something very funny in the aftermath of the runoff, however. Paxton, eager to preen about how much he won by because his narcissism rivals the President’s for its inability to ignore insignificant events, sent out a press release that touted his victories in the above named counties as 15-20% higher than Donald Trump’s in 2024. On the surface, that would seem like quite an accomplishment.

Then you remember that the phrase “Everything’s bigger in Texas” also applies to the scale of the lies told by its public officials.

Ken Paxton won Culberson County 79-21%. Ken Paxton only received THIRTY VOTES. John Cornyn won EIGHT VOTES.1 Bragging that you won by twenty percent more than Donald Trump, when the total vote count was lower than the casualty count2 of the El Paso and Sutherland Springs mass shootings and equal to the casualty count of the Uvalde mass shooting is a special kind of pathetic. Bragging about minor accomplishments is very Trumpian, and another of the main Trumpian components of the party is its naked, open corruption—and again, Ken Paxton embodies it on a massive scale. He is one of those unique people that is cartoonishly evil and yet has managed to evade consequences his entire adult life. His own party impeached him in the Texas legislature, and he only escaped conviction because his wife was a senator and rallied them to his cause. A year later, she’d file for divorce because he began openly cheating on her, a very Trumplike display of ingratitude. His office has routinely taken cases away from local district attorneys, only to either lose them or plead them out—most notably so in child sexual abuse cases. It’s such a noticeable pattern that judges in these cases have openly called into question the plea bargains, and the Texas Tribune, in partnership with KUTX Public Radio, did a great job in breaking down these cases. Paxton has released hardcore sex abusers of children into the population either through deliberate choice or gross incompetence. I’m sure that would’ve made Jeffrey Epstein happy were that monster still around, and perhaps Donald Trump likes it very much as well, since there’s a better than zero chance that he raped underage girls based upon his history.

Let’s leave those Confederate counties we’ve been discussing, hop on Interstate 20 and drive through many of the deeply Republican counties of the state until we reach Fort Worth, the heart of Tarrant County, population approximately two million people. Tarrant County’s Republican Party is chaired by a fellow named Bo French, and after May 26th, he is the party’s nominee to sit on the Texas Railroad Commission. It doesn’t sound very important until you discover that the TRC regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas. Bo French doesn’t mean anything to you until you Google him and discover what an unrepentant racist shitheel he is. The oil and gas industry is remarkably integrated amongst the workforce in the field, and because of its risks it pays very well—and that’s why Bo French is running to regulate it. He represents the degenerate white nationalism of the Party of Trump, best buds with Temu Himmler, excuse me, White House Obergruppenführer Stephen Miller. French wants America to deport a third of the country’s population, 100 million people, so he can take away those well-paying oil jobs and give them to other white folks. Texas was part of Mexico for centuries until we seized it in a war, but sure, let’s kick out the real natives so the colonizers can have more to themselves.

It’s a childlike white supremacist view of how the world works, because the only way you remove 100 million people from a nation is by murdering all of them—and these people who tout their “Christianity” at every turn would commit a massacre that would exceed the deaths of God flooding the earth and destroying His creation. The vast majority of the country is repulsed by this behavior, but the Republican Party cheers it on, continues funding it, continues voting for the people Donald Trump points at and labels “one of us.” Lately, that includes Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, who won the nomination to face Senator Jon Ossoff in November, and Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, who won the primary for Tommy Tuberville’s Senate seat. Collins, on his best day, is a man who can only muster the intellectual wattage of a nightlight, but he hates anyone who isn’t the correct shade of cream coloring; meanwhile, Moore is a loudly self-proclaimed Christian who supported the Jan. 6th insurrection, refused to vote to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Capitol Police who prevented greater violence during said insurrection, and ran away from his constituents last year during a town hall where they were angry about his screwing them over. Moore’s also got a perjury charge to his name, which he managed to beat, but clearly lying is perfectly acceptable to this charlatan. He’s also a crypto industry puppet, which makes him a perfect mark for Trump’s crypto scam (one of the many impeachable offenses the man has committed).

Can you conjure up a better distillation of the average MAGA congressman these days?

With less than a month to go before America’s 250th birthday, the gloomy outlook of 1976 seems almost quaint compared to now. There was stagflation and a massive Vietnam hangover, yet the country largely celebrated the bicentennial with a degree of joy. I recently visited the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, where a whole exhibit of bicentennial tchotchkes is on display, and they were rather dorky, but pure at the same time. Nothing I saw there looked like the sort of gung-ho, chest-puffing fake machismo merchandise being hawked online and in stores. There was definitely more of an innocence to it, an innocence so many of us desperately long for right now.

What I didn’t see at the Ford museum was photos of a grotesque “Claw” on the South Lawn of the White House, where motocross stunts and UFC fights took place on Sunday for the amusement of the would-be emperor Donald of Orangeface. What I didn’t see at the museum was video of some drunk bum named Josh Hokit, who showed up for the weigh-in at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday hammered, slurring, and vomiting on himself. Hokit then followed up this disgraceful appearance by grabbing the microphone held by Joe Rogan (who doesn’t know how to tie a tie or wear one at the proper length) and bellowing that “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right?” Rogan, whose use of HGH and other “enhancing” drugs makes him look like he ate his past self, smiled and laughed like it was funny to disgustingly insult the former First Lady, a woman of class that nobody in attendance could come close to achieving.

What I didn’t see was the Marines in full dress uniform providing an honor guard for this collection of derelicts, or $1000 gold “Trump coins” sold to attendees, or MURICA baseball hats, or any of the tasteless, tacky, and downright absurdities that were part of this supposed “event to celebrate America” that you had to pay $15.99/month to Paramount to even watch. The billionaires will share their ill-gotten gains with the President who enables it, but not with us regular folk. We are Peasants, and they are the Feudal Lords, and they are determined to show us our Rightful Place in their broligarchy.

Oh, speaking of broligarchs, our Secretary of WAR(!) Pete Hegseth went to D-Day memorial ceremonies and berated the Europeans for allowing “an immigrant invasion upon their shores” and not “defending Western values as we did in World War II,” demonstrating once again that he’s a drunken fratboy who clearly skipped history class—America and the UK were “Western nations” that were fighting Germany and Italy, also “Western nations,” but Pete was too wasted on Four Loko to show up to class at Princeton (another black mark on the Ivies) —and who has no sense of purpose other than bellowing empty threats and personally holding down Black and female military officers from promotion while he works to make the military a grotesque patriarchal Christian Crusader Force.

Somehow Fratboy Kegseth also managed to make the military incapable of carrying out victory against Iran,3 which is why last night, Donald of Orangeface sat at the Palace of Versailles and signed the worst surrender treaty since the ill-fated one Germany signed there in 1919. There is no doubt that Iran won, our nation’s stature was left doubly diminished by our war crimes and by the humiliation inflicted by a far lesser power, and that this treaty, like the one in 1919, will inevitably lead us to far greater bloodshed down the road. If there’s one thing you can count on from the average fascist, they are incapable of subtlety or executing plans efficiently. Most of the time, they’re just downright fucking stupid, and the cult of personality that permeates every fascist state ensures that all of the downstream chorus of sealions must twist themselves into knots while yelping that the glorious leader has won another smashing victory over his foes.

When I was growing up and learned about the bicentennial events in social studies, I dreamed of the day when the 250th anniversary of our founding came. The child version of me thought it’d be similar, lots of patriotism and fireworks and fun-themed events on television. I never imagined that the White House would resemble the alternate 1985 that Marty McFly found in Back to the Future II, where Biff Tannen turned the center of Hill Valley into Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Palace.

For a child of the Eighties, who grew up with the gauzy Reagan view of patriotism and the mythos of an America that anyone could succeed to the highest levels in, where our institutions were cherished and respected, where our politicians didn’t regularly utter profanity or speak like third-graders, this has been a shock. The scales long ago fell from my eyes regarding American conduct, but at year 240, with a Black president in the White House and equal rights for LGBTQ people, it seemed like we’d get to 250 in decent shape.

Instead, much as my Hunter S. Thompson-inspired headline implies, the nation is filled with fear and loathing. Fear at what a dementia-addled, pants-shitting narcissist of a president might do each day after he’s gone on a Diet-Coke-and-Adderall-fueled rampage on Truth Social, fear that the reincarnation of the Gestapo known as ICE might do, fear at a sudden collapse of the global economy, losing our jobs and homes and dignity, and loathing of what a disgrace America has become. Loathing of those who run it, loathing of the Epstein class of millionaires and billionaires who raped underage girls and got away with it, loathing of the inequality and suffering, and loathing of our fellow citizens who enabled this disaster because they were convinced that brown people and gender dysphoria were the real threats to our security.

America is about to turn 250, and the walls are cracking while the roof prepares to fall in. Maybe we deserve this for our arrogance, strutting across the globe and dictating to others what they should do. Maybe it’s our just desserts to be joining the United Kingdom, our “mother country,” in the fall of two former empires. I’d like to hope America can still be saved, but a large part of me questions whether anything is left worth saving. Oh well. Happy birthday, I guess.

It’s 12:30 on a Thursday morning or is it Friday or Sunday no it’s not Sunday I’d be at Doral or Mar a Lago or….Bedminster, I’d be at Bedminster it’s too thick and sticky at Doral in June it is June, right, it is June and November is just a few months off and those Democrats are going to steal the election again, aren’t they, they’re going to steal it I’ll show them I’ll order the Post Office to not deliver any mailed ballots and all those fake votes from the Somalians and Mexicans and cartel members and the MS-13 that Stephen tells me about every day won’t be able to steal this from me…

Oh, look at this video, doesn’t it look great, I look so great in it, big and manly and strong, ready to give hell to those ragheads in Tehran and those dirty commies in Havana. Love it, there’s a re-truth for TrumpLover56, what a nice lady she seems like she Loves Trump been with Trump from the beginning because she loves a winner I’ve made America a winner again, we’re winning so much that those lunatic Dumbocrats are just shitting themselves and they’re afraid of what i’m going to do next they should be afraid of me maybe i’ll just go send ICE into their offices in Congress and arrest all of them they’re such lousy fucking traitors. Oh, I like this, look at this picture of me with the Dumbocrats cowering in fear below me, i look like that Gozer chick from Ghostbusters with the lightning, what a great movie, Ghostbusters, that Lenny guy was a great mayor, reminds me of how Rudy was, a good tough mayor who wasn’t afraid to tell that EPA weasel to piss off and let the good guys with their nuclear guns save the day. I’m gonna re-truth that, MAGAPatriot2007, smart young man, real handsome, bet he kills with the ladies, of course, nobody killed with the ladies like Trump did, not even Jeff on his best day.

I miss Jeff, I miss partying with him, I miss the girls he’d find, because boy, they loved Trump, they couldn’t get enough of me, six foot three and lean and athletic and could go all night and be back at my office by 8 am, I was a tiger back then. Goddammit, look at me, I know the doctors are lying to me, I know something is wrong, they keep telling me my weight is fine but it’s hard to move every day and my golf swing is starting to get fucked up and I can’t go play with my grandbaby Kai as much as I want or with Witcoff and I’m always bruised because they tell me they can only use my hands for the medicine so my hands look like shit and they’re always taking blood and running tests and the only one I like is that cognitive test because I ace it all the time. I can draw the clock perfectly and repeat the words they say back to me without any problems, but i hate those MRIs they’re so small and you can’t move and have to stay still for so long and I hate staying still I need to move around to feel good I need to be doing things because it’s going to be my 80th birthday and I’m not gonna be like Sleepy Joe where I sound weak and pathetic, I’m going to sound strong like a good leader should and I can’t wait for those cage fights in front of the White House it’s going to be incredible you know, I’ve gotta idea we should do for it on Saturday I’m gonna call Dana right now and tell him my idea, he knows what a good promoter I am and he’ll make sure to add it because nobody knows how to pump up events like Trump does because they only made one of me, but if there was two of me, it’d be Dana or Vince, man, Vince is having a hard time lately, I keep getting the SEC and IRS off his back, and then he crashes his Bentley and that girl is still suing him and they still won’t let him back at Wrestlemania even though he invented it and that’s his show and they just took it from him because of some Me Too shit, yeah, I know what it’s like to be persecuted, Vince, me too, alright.

Oh, that’s right I need to call Dana, but let me just check my Truth Social one more time and yeah, look at that picture of Chuck Schumer looking like a giant nerd with his glasses and giant nose, yeah, Roy warned me a long time ago about him, what’d he say, that he was an ass-kissing schmuck from Brooklyn who wasn’t smart enough to run a dry cleaners let alone be in government and he came around wanting scraps from Roy’s fame because Roy was a winner and I’m just going to re-truth this and maybe one other and then I’ll call Dana with that great idea wait what was it again…..

Asked by a reporter why the U.S. didn’t tell Japan or other allies about its decision to strike Iran before it did so, the president said: “We went in very hard and we didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? OK, why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

“You believe in surprise, I think, much more than us,” Trump added, referencing the 1941 attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii that precipitated the United States’ entry into World War II.

Trump makes Pearl Harbor joke during meeting with Japanese prime minister
—NBC News, March 19, 2026

That comment was indicative of the lack of control that our president displays these days (more on this later), but it’s the next part that is far worse.

“This is a very volatile world, and the military equipment, the power of some of this weaponry is unthinkable. You don’t even want to know about it. Oh, you could end this thing in two seconds if you wanted to,” Trump added.

In case you aren’t paying attention, that’s the President of the United States openly threatening to drop a nuke on Iran.

Trump also joked about the war with Iran last week, telling NBC News in a phone interview that the U.S. military had “totally demolished” most of Kharg Island in earlier strikes, but “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”

Kharg Island is a strategic island off the coast of Iran that houses some of the nation’s oil infrastructure.

This is textbook sociopathy. “We may hit it a few more times just for fun.” What person in their right mind talks like this?

Sadly, frighteningly, the President of the United States does.

Donald Trump’s mental and physiological unraveling has been on full display for the bulk of his second term. From telling a female reporter “Quiet piggy! Quiet!” when he was asked a question he did not like on Air Force One, to wandering off randomly at events where he’s supposed to stay next to another foreign leader, or falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Trump has behaved more like an octogenarian in assisted care than a president. He is an octogenarian, to be sure, who won in part because his predecessor of near age, Joseph R. Biden Jr., experienced similar moments and refused to acknowledge them. Trump played off that in a carefully stage-managed campaign that limited his events until Biden dropped out, and then-Vice President Kamala Harris ran a frantic campaign to try and prevent Trump’s seeming victory.

It was late in that campaign where the cracks appeared in Trump’s facade—such as the time he stopped his town hall to play DJ for over a half hour, requesting various songs be played and seemingly forgetting there was an audience waiting to interact with him. There was also the odd incident with a Trump garbage truck supposed to be a metaphor about him taking out the Biden trash—except his spray tan was applied in hideous fashion and he seemed to forget how to open the truck door.

It happened so late in the campaign that it did not impact him. Had there been more time, perhaps it could’ve been exploited, but it seemed like minds were made up by mid-October, when Harris had blown multiple chances to get on the right side of history over the Gaza genocide that her boss, President Biden, had too willingly provided the munitions for. It did not seem to matter what happened at that point, and it showed when fifteen million Biden 2020 voters stayed home. Trump won in a walk. Democracy has been in a tailspin since.

Earlier this week, there was another incident that was extremely telling about the decline of Donald Trump’s emotional control. During an event discussing the (completely unnecessary) two-year shutdown and renovation of the Kennedy Center for the Arts, a story came up regarding a GOP congressman who was in ill health, and, well, watch for yourself.

It has been obvious for nearly two decades that Donald Trump is a sociopath. Per the Cleveland Clinic, a premier medical institution:

I think it is self-evident how Donald Trump embodies every single one of these characteristics. What concerns me most of all in this moment is the impulsivity and lack of remorse he has shown about his extremely stupid war with Iran, a war launched because Senator Lindsey Graham and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goaded him into it. They stroked his ego, they pushed the right buttons, especially the narcissism, and away we went—no preparation, no thought as to the consequences, and no plan. The special ops job to snatch Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, just after New Year’s Day gave Trump and his overconfident, underqualified “Secretary of War” Drunky McRapist Pete Hegseth far too much faith in their ability to dominate militarily.

Now we’re running into a problem, though. What happens when inescapable consequences run headlong into the sociopath’s sphere? They often display volatile emotions and failure to learn from negative consequences. Donald Trump has made an entire career off of being able to escape negative consequences. Using bankruptcy to avoid paying his debts, using media to manipulate the facts, using his power to shut down investigations, and then using the cult of personality he’s built around himself to keep cowardly congressional representatives from using their power to remove him.

None of that can effectively counter the following consequences of his actions.

Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-third of the world’s fertilizer supply and one-quarter of its fuel supplies traverse. While America was initially insulated during the first week of the war, the closure of the Strait has changed that dynamic. The price of a gallon of gasoline here in Michigan, for example, has gone up a whopping $1.40 from three weeks ago—a 52% increase. The planting season is beginning in the Northern Hemisphere, and farmers across the nation will be hit with a second consecutive shockwave. A year ago was when the immigration crackdown began, and as migrant workers make up the vast majority of farmworkers, the direct effect of that crackdown is that fresh vegetables cost Americans 48% more now than they did when Donald Trump took office. Now the fertilizers that they depend upon to start crop growth are going to cost far more, with one of two likely results: either farm collapses will begin anew as they did in the 1980s, or the farms will manage to absorb that blow, but either result will further drive up the cost of grains and vegetables across the country and the world.

As bad as that is for us, the effects on Asia are even greater—90% of its oil and gas supplies come through the Strait. The rather rapid knock-on effects have been, for example, that 40% of gas stations in Laos are closed, completely out of fuel. While a few China-linked tankers have gotten through in the past ten days, the fact is that this represents a substantial harm to the continent. Why does this matter? Why, indeed, does this matter to us?

The United States economy is driven by debt. We are over-leveraged and have been for years, because the political will to change that is subverted by the Epstein class of bankers and billionaires, who have personally profited greatly from this state of affairs. That debt is financed through the sale of Treasury bonds, commonly known as “T-bills,” of which three-quarters of a trillion dollars is held by China. The overall amount of debt is at $39 trillion—a completely unsustainable number. Our interest payments alone are now $1 trillion/year, which was the entire national budget forty years ago. The American war machine at the Pentagon hoovers up that money each year by itself. Donald Trump promised, when he first became president in 2017, that he would eliminate our debt. It has doubled since then, much of it tied to his relentless slashing of taxes on billionaires and corporations, further necessitating increased borrowing when consequences like COVID-19 came calling.

China has long held the ability to cause a massive collapse in the value of the dollar as a currency if they sell off their T-bills. This current situation provides them an opening to do it, because we have, by choice, weakened ourselves and our military by depleting our weaponry in a completely pointless war. Adding to that, we are directly harming the Chinese economy with the oil shortage we’ve caused, and they may decide that we need to be knocked on our heels and choose to attack us, or Taiwan, or Japan. They could spur Kim Jong Un into invading South Korea, since Iran demonstrated the weakness of the THAAD missile defense system by destroying the one in the Persian Gulf with $20,000 drones. In short, this war could rapidly escalate to a world war.

We do not have the capacity to fight a world war. We are an empire at its limits, our friends deserting us due to insult after insult hurled by the sociopath-in-chief (who demands help with Iran while denigrating them!), and our ability to replenish our weapons diminished by the consequences of the war. The only thing we have that could prevent such a thing is our nuclear weapons…except that the impulsive, consequences-averse sociopath, as pointed out at the top, is implying he might use them if conventional arms cannot back the Iranians down.

We should never have started this war, we can’t even express why we’re doing it in a consistent fashion (reasoning seems to change hourly or daily), and instead of sober counsel, the president hears from: a former National Guard officer and known alcoholic; a closeted queer senator overcompensating by demanding war everywhere; a career politician who has never held another job but elected office; a general that was promoted over hundreds of more experienced and senior generals to the top spot as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman; and the prime minister of Israel, who has wanted war with Iran as long as Hegseth has been alive.

The remainder, such as DNI Tulsi Gabbard (who campaigned for President in 2020 on an antiwar platform), Vice-President JD Vance (who has told every reporter in earshot for a month that he was against this war) and several other sundry advisers, were shunted aside. Not that Gabbard and Vance are great people, because they are rank opportunists with no moral compass, but it’s telling that Trump chose to launch this war from Mar-A-Lago, without Gabbard or Vance present. It’s telling that he continues to sideline them on public comment of this war, which caused Gabbard to twist herself into a pretzel to avoid criticizing Trump during her required congressional testimony this week.

That means that Donald Trump, a textbook definition of a sociopath, whose personality led hundreds of psychiatrists to publicly break the old “Goldwater Rule” about not publicly diagnosing a patient they had not met a decade ago, is faced with enormous consequences that he cannot escape. His advisers that he’ll listen to won’t present contrarian or cautionary advice. His disdain for the rights of other people, his lack of empathy, and his incessant need to always win are a toxic combination, and I do not say this lightly, but I believe the evidence leads to a dark place. When confronted in the next couple of weeks with the overwhelming evidence that conventional arms cannot end the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, I believe Donald Trump will decide to use nuclear weapons on the coastal cities of Iran where the blockades will be run from, or even on Tehran or Qom, the centers of government power. He doesn’t care about what happens to those people, he only cares about himself and his determination that he not lose, and because he believes he is America, that is the only logical endpoint of this trajectory.

We are rapidly running out of time to prevent that sort of apocalyptic disaster. Congress absolutely must impeach and remove him with alacrity, for the sake of this nation and the world at large. He will destroy it to save himself if he is not stopped.

Israel’s current leader, Benjamin Netanyahu (whose tenure in office is positively Putinesque), has spent the last twenty-five years warning of Iran’s dangers and begging the United States to join him in a war. Nobody’s taken the bait. Even Donald Trump, our aged leader that likely suffers from substantial cognitive decline, blew up last year in an expletive-filled rant about how both nations did not even know why they were fighting anymore. However, something changed in the last couple of months, and the man whose minions repeatedly promised us that he wouldn’t be a “warmongering president” has suddenly become a warmongering president.

I suspected from the moment that Trump parroted Bibi’s infamous 2012 United Nations speech at the State of the Union Tuesday night that this was coming, but I did not believe he’d start attacking mere hours after breaking off talks with Iranian negotiators in Oman. Shame on me, I guess, for not remembering that if there’s one thing our dipshit president is good at, it’s making sure we cannot relax on the weekend. Ever.

We’ve been running airstrikes with the Israeli air force for sixteen hours, and as I write this, the biggest news is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor of the founding Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has been killed. Less reported on is that 85 Iranian girls were killed by a missile strike inside their elementary school, which is absolutely criminal on our part. Retaliatory missiles launched from Iran are raining down in Arab nations, increasing the death toll of innocent people in America’s war of choice. Now, while I will shed no tears for the murderous Khamenei, I cannot and will not defend the many, many wrongs being done here:

• Going to war with no Congressional input or vote in both houses, which the Constitution requires

• Going to war with no ground forces or a plan for what happens next besides telling Iranian rebels: “Take over your government”

• Going to war side-by-side with the Butcher of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu

• Going to war, again, for regime change despite our absolutely horrendous record on this front

• Going to war, especially, because our president was best friends with a sex trafficker and almost certainly participated in some of his sex

• Going to war with no threat to us—despite whatever Bibi has said for decades, Iran is no closer to fielding a working nuclear weapon than they were in 2001—and against a nation whose economy has been destroyed by our sanctions.

A decade ago, Secretary of State John Kerry, at President Barack Obama’s behest, reached a solid, enforceable nuclear agreement with Iran. Netanyahu, who did his best to undercut Obama at every turn, helped torpedo key parts of the treaty, while simultaneously buttering up Donald Trump’s nascent presidential campaign, because he saw he could manipulate Trump. As referenced in the headline, this is regime change, fast food style. This is Netanyahu’s fondest wish, expressed in various forums for three decades, and to get there, he linked up with the McDonald’s-loving president to launch another American coup against Iran, without any ability or desire to do anything after eliminating the Iranian leadership from the air.

You can bomb away the “Supreme Leader” and the defense minister, and the head of the Revolutionary Guard, but all that means is dozens of lower-ranking wannabe despots grabbing for power and a complete lack of order. That was what happened in neighboring Afghanistan in 1989, and it gave us the Taliban. That’s the real issue here, the fact that we have a genocidal maniac partnered with a weak, vain, narcissist deciding to wage war, and that the narcissist is used to cheap thrills. Cheap thrills where you don’t put troops on the ground, where you blew up buildings and machinery from the sky, and where you can preen and posture on social media. Donald Trump loves to play at being the big boy President without showing any actual leadership.

In under a year’s time, we struck Iran’s nuclear facilities with our stealth B-2 bombers, declaring we’d destroyed their program, and pulled a snatch-and-grab of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Those missions were in and out moves, as former EUCOM (European Command, US Army) Gen. Mark Hertling said, and makes Trump feel like we can do anything without consequences. Quick hits. Fast-food runs, giving Donald Trump his dopamine hit and making him feel powerful. They don’t last, they aren’t meant to, and because he constantly craves stimulation (how else would you explain his social media rants that go on for over a hundred posts some nights), the mileage drops every time he hits that button. His speeches, his rants, his rallies, his use of the military as a plaything to aggregate more power to himself. It is as good a reason as any to explain his love of fast food—like constant stimulation, fast food gives you a nice boost at the start and goes down hard, leaving you feeling gross and regretting your choices.

I have no idea how this will shake out, and quite frankly, I doubt anyone does. The chaos president has inflicted a new level of instability to a region that has known little else for a century. The only thing that is guaranteed is that the innocent deaths of civilians will continue to grow in the days to come, and that should be the real story here, as it is all so unnecessary. What I don’t expect to occur, even though it absolutely should, is a War Powers Resolution in Congress and impeachment hearings for Trump, Vance, Rubio and Hegseth. Subverting the Constitution by enabling the latest metaphorical McDonald’s meal for Donald Trump is not a small thing, and there must be accountability if the Constitution is to have any meaning at all.

What’s happening tonight in Kansas, though, is not a legal reduction of wealth to levels more manageable. It is a full-blown assault on the very being of the 22,400 transgender Kansas citizens.

Erin Reed, a transgender journalist who runs an excellent newsletter, Erin in the Morning, reported earlier that as part of a legislative ambush that became a massive, sweeping anti-trans bill, Kansas had declared every driver’s license issued to a transgender person null and void, effective today, February 26th. It doesn’t stop there, of course, as it also created a “bathroom bounty,” nearly identical to Texas’ notorious “abortion bounty” law of 2022, which allows people to sue if they unwillingly share a public bathroom with a transgender person. Furthermore, it even appears to ban people of the opposite sex visiting in dorm rooms or nursing homes. Democratic Governor Laura Kelly had vetoed the bill, and the legislature nearly suffered whiplash en masse as they stampeded right back into session to override the veto.

It is not only the stripping of a basic human need in a rural state (the ability to drive), but this law essentially makes transgender people in Kansas an “unperson.” Without a valid driver’s license, they cannot vote, board an airplane, obtain credit, open a bank account, so on and so forth. It is designed to do the same as the Nazi stripping of standard passports from Jews did 88 years ago (and we all know how much the white supremacist GOPers love that number)—restrict their rights, their movements, and strip their basic humanity from them.

None of this makes anyone safer. It doesn’t “protect children” or “protect women’s sports.” It’s just one more act of unnecessary cruelty, imposed upon a small, vulnerable minority by a majority power that enjoys inflicting suffering upon others. Everything, and I do mean everything, that Republican Party-led governments do these days is in the service of:

• Assisting the accumulation of wealth by the Epstein class

• Stripping rights from minorities

• Shredding the safety net that helps the neediest amongst us

• Creating a white Christian nationalist infrastructure in contravention of the Constitution

• Hurting vulnerable people

They’re the walking embodiment of the Michael Jordan meme below.

And if you happen to be on the fence with the rights of transgender people, I hope you remember that these actions start with small, vulnerable minorities and then expand further out. Once you take the civil rights of one group of citizens, everyone’s are at stake. The SAVE Act that is making its way through Congress is, just like this Kansas law, so broadly written that it would strip voting rights from married women because their names would not match their birth certificates. That’s an estimated 70 million Americans. It’ll only keep going from there.

We must, must, make it clear to those in power this is unacceptable. There is no longer the option of “not being political” or “not paying attention to the news.” Staying in the dark simply makes it that much easier to rob you blind of everything you cherish.

Watching Les Wexner during his deposition in front of the House Oversight Committee was a remarkable experience. He laughs, he jokes, he creatively stalls at times, and gave the general impression of a man who believed he could talk his way out of anything. Right from the start, when asked to briefly summarize his career for the record, he told a well-practiced yarn about coming from a poor family who received a loan from an aunt and how he opened a Limited store and then more and more and more stores, and gave everyone from the cleaning crew on up stock in the company. He mentions Express, but did not say a word about Victoria’s Secret—which seemed rather strategic, given the tarnished reputation it held after Epstein’s crimes.

As questioning began, one of Wexner’s three attorneys, Michael Levy (bringing three attorneys was surely designed to try and intimidate the committee), lodged an objection. He was told that was not allowed in congressional depositions. Said attorney continued to do it, regularly jumping in with objections to questions throughout, objecting in general, asserting spousal privilege, asserting attorney-client privilege, objecting to “hearsay,” and even objecting to “double hearsay.” While that is something you’d do in a court of law, it looks rather ridiculous to do so because a congressional attorney asked if a story that his friend told in Vanity Fair was accurate. All you have to do is answer yes or no!

The former CEO of Victoria’s Secret was asked if Epstein negotiated his prenuptial agreement, and said he didn’t remember if he had one, which seems striking—that’s hardly a thing a man would forget! If you felt the need to have one, you’d hardly forget about it. He said that “he didn’t know shit” about Maria Farmer, who has testified she was raped on Wexner’s property. Wexner kept saying that Epstein never stayed there, but bought his neighbor’s house. In the same vein, he made a point to say that it wasn’t his plane Epstein rode on with him, it was the company’s plane. Throughout the questioning, a constant nervous laugh punctuated many of Wexner’s answers. He made faces towards the end of the first hour, pantomiming being hard of hearing after a long pause by his questioners. It was an utterly bizarre moment in a serious proceeding.

Wexner said he never witnessed abuse, never witnessed minors or other young women with Epstein, never witnessed Epstein in any sexual behavior, etc. Wexner said they had no personal relationship, and that he’d never discussed anything sexual with Epstein. Folks, I’ve got Epstein Files that make these statements appear to be baldfaced lies.

The mogul later testified, repeating a story he’d described vaguely told after Epstein’s death, that Epstein had stolen from him, and here is where, in my view, Wexner’s claims about Epstein and his relationship with him fall completely apart. This self-made billionaire, this titan of business, who by all accounts worked very hard and kept up to speed on everything in his businesses, a complete workaholic, responded to this alleged multi-million dollar theft by:

• Not going to law enforcement

• Not telling anyone on Wall Street or in the retail/fashion industry to avoid Epstein or not to do business with him

• Not confronting Epstein himself, but having his wife do so instead, and that his wife got Epstein to return $47 million to the Wexner Foundation (charitable)

• Never having specified exactly how much was “stolen” from him

Furthermore, he testified that he cut ties with Epstein at this point in 2007, and a year thereafter Epstein went to prison. Except…Les Wexner and Epstein had this email exchange in 2008, which doesn’t fit his tale.

Subject: Re:
To: Wexner, Les (LesW@Limitedbrands.com)
From: J. Epstein
From Address: jeeproject@yahoo.com
Date: 06/27/2008, 12:14:06 AM

no excuse

----- Original Message ----
From: “Wexner, Les”
To: jeeproject@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 5:45:03 PM
Subject:

Abigail told me the result...all I can say is I feel sorry. You violated
your own number 1 rule...
Always be careful.

“All I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your own number 1 rule…Always be careful.” That doesn’t read like they had cut ties. That doesn’t sound like someone you were disgusted with. Wexner sounds like a disappointed parent after their talented kid got into trouble with the law. Why would you feel sorry for someone you allegedly fired a year prior for A: stealing millions from you and B: being a sexual predator?

When paired with the lack of credible answers to this subsequent list of questions…

• Why did he not confront Epstein?

• Why did he not tell his business partners and law enforcement about this?

• Why did he not testify against Epstein (a situation that Epstein told others could never happen, and was clearly right about)?

• Why did he do nothing until he was hounded into saying something, and then why did he make a statement had more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese?

…one can only conclude that Leslie Wexner is hiding things he’ll probably go to the grave with.

When Epstein was released from jail in July 2009, there were immediately people waiting to do business with him. Prince Andrew threw a welcome home party for him. Epstein still had his money, his jet, his multiple properties. It’s right after Bernie Madoff has been caught running his own Ponzi scheme—one in which many other wealthy people were conned out of money—and Les Wexner does not use this favorable environment to wreck Jeffrey Epstein’s ability to make money or resume his sex trafficking. Why is it, despite having all the motivation in the world if you take Wexner at his word, that the billionaire sat on his hands?

In the most charitable telling of this time period, Wexner failed to stop a monster from harming more people because he felt like a fool and his ego didn’t allow him to tell others about the shame he felt. In the less charitable description, he knew about Epstein’s true nature and did nothing, or he participated in the criminal enterprise to enough of an extent that his lawyers are objecting repeatedly at a deposition where they legally cannot object because they’re terrified their octogenarian client might slip up and incriminate himself? I suspect they were extremely nervous, because towards the end of the deposition, his lawyer leans over and tries to whisper (but gets caught on a hot mic), “I’ll fucking kill you if you answer another question with more than five words, okay?”

There are other oddities in the files that make it seem as if a lot of their correspondence has been withheld. Epstein advised him on reacquiring Express from its new ownership; Epstein was asked to speak with Wexner about taking back control of some of his brands because his successor was demoralizing staff and Epstein “is considered one of the few people who still has Les’s ear.”; Epstein and Wexner discussed the design of a new yacht. Lastly, in 2016, Epstein emailed Alan Dershowitz’s frequent legal partner Marty Weinberg (both had represented Epstein in negotiating his infamous 2008 plea deal)) to complain about Dershowitz’s references to Wexner:

Epstein’s tone indicates that he is protecting Wexner in some capacity here. It could be he doesn’t want to draw Wexner’s ire (if Wexner’s account is true of their split), or that Dershowitz risks exposing Epstein’s current activities by drawing attention to Wexner (and therefore, himself), or that they still had a genuine friendship and good feeling about each other. It’s hard to know without the context of missing emails and files, but there’s one thing that is for certain.

Les Wexner thinks we’re a bunch of gullible idiots. This deposition was a final grand performance by a master salesman and his attorneys, running the good guy/bad guy act in a unique fashion, desperate to not leave any opening for which Wexner could face actual consequences for his decisions. As with Prince Andrew, we can not and should not let up until there is justice from the man who helped Jeffrey Epstein become the monster he was.

I was sixteen years old when Dawson’s Creek sprang onto our televisions, and James Van Der Beek, with all of that glorious hair and a fashion sense I slowly adopted over the subsequent year, became a household name as the budding film director Dawson Leery, navigating the high school years and a best friendship with Katie Holmes’ Joey Potter that veered into attraction, love, and complicated relationships. But, outside of Dawson’s wardrobe, I didn’t pay much attention to the show, or Van Der Beek, for that matter. That changed a year later, when Varsity Blues, his first star turn in a film (and I’m pretty positive the first theatre film release from MTV Studios), and a story that I related to pretty hard. I was in the midst of a very challenging senior year of high school, having missed my second consecutive homecoming game due to injury, and our team collapsing under the weight of too many injuries and too few players.

As most of us were at the time of release in early 1999, I was writing my college applications, trying to finish strong in school, get to prom and graduation and face a future that didn’t involve training for football again. Or playing football again. I was too short, too injury-prone, and not on a team that had any attention to where even a smaller college would take me on. I was making my peace with it, because I had my sights set on the University of Michigan, and I was determined to keep my grades up and be admitted.

I went to the theatre to see it one afternoon with an old friend of mine, Mike, and what I didn’t expect from it was to identify so closely with JVDB’s character, Mox. Mox was the backup quarterback, playing football because that’s what you did in west Texas (Friday Night Lights, anyone?), and desperately hoping to get into Brown University in Rhode Island so he could escape the smallness of his hometown. There were teammates of his that somewhat resembled the ones I’d just suffered through a terrible final season with. Tweeder reminded me of one of my favorite teammates, Geoff, who always had me in stitches. Lance was like our own quarterback, Garry, who suffered his own horrific leg injury to end his football days. I could even relate Miss Davis, the health teacher who moonlighted as a stripper at night, to one of my own teachers who will definitely remain unnamed because I don’t feel like being sued.

I actually had a few tears in my eyes at the end of it. It felt odd to have that reaction, but he was where I was, that point in life where you are letting go of the final vestiges of childhood and moving into an adult life, where you control your decisions and don’t answer to a curfew or parents, but also leave behind the same friends group that you had before. You might go to the same college or university as many of them, but it’s a big place, and before we all had cell phones, it was harder to coordinate hanging out or meeting up. With a few exceptions, the friendships that had marked high school slipped away as spring turned to summer, prom and graduation in the rearview mirror, and an uncertain future ahead. It’s a very bittersweet time for most of us, and also a time where anxiety really kicks in—because the years of saying “I can’t wait to grow up” are over, and now you actually have to be grown, with all of the responsibilities and decisions and work that comes with it.

James Van Der Beek was lucky, though, because he got to leave Varsity Blues and return to high school as Dawson Leery for another two seasons. He got to manage that with friends that he wouldn’t leave behind when the college years started, because they were on the same show (and yes, he is…was….four years older than me, which meant he was already an adult, but you get the point). He even made another film before the last season of Dawson’s Creek, the underrated The Rules of Attraction, where he starred as the younger brother of Christian Bale’s maniacal Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Van Der Beek’s Sean Bateman was only half-mad and not completely off the rails as Bale’s Patrick was, but it was still a very intriguing turn. He was not playing an idealistic character, but rather a drug-dealing, skirt-chasing, thrill-seeking narcissist who just happens to be a college student, almost as an afterthought.

The younger Bateman is surprised, though. He meets Shannyn Sossamyn’s Lauren, and falls in love with her, even though she denies him the one thing he’s usually chasing: sex. She was saving her virginity, and Bateman says he respects it, but because he’s unable to stop his self-destructive nature, he ends up sleeping with another girl at a house party, and wrecks the relationship completely. There’s a lot more in between and after, but I saw it when it came out and loved it, and it foreshadowed some extremely bad decisions I’d make two years later—which would, in turn, completely change the trajectory of my life for years after that.

Much later, after marrying and doing all of the grown-up things, my wife and I binge-watched Dawson’s Creek start to finish, and suddenly Dawson Leery mirrored many of my high school and college experiences, adding to the ways that Varsity Blues and The Rules of Attraction reflected seasons of my life, or predicted a future I was completely unaware of at the time. By that point in his own life, Van Der Beek was gleefully parodying himself in the show Don’t Trust The B in Apartment 23, where he was the main characters’ neighbor, James Van Der Beek. It was delightful and a real shame that the show did not get to go on longer.

Fast forward another decade, and the news that James Van Der Beek was struggling with cancer and having to auction off items from Varsity Blues to pay for treatment hit me like a brick wall. A table read of a Dawson’s Creek episode in a theater was organized by his former co-stars and lifelong friends Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams to raise money for him—an event he was unable to attend himself. Photos of him appeared where that broad-shouldered, charming, good-looking man had shrunk to a shell of the guy that had decorated the walls of countless high school girls in the late 90s and early 2000s. I feared that he wasn’t going to make it much longer, and found myself sad in a way which resembled that moment in a theater 26 years prior. I had related to JVDB far more than I’d comprehended as my younger self, that his most well-known characters intertwined with my own life deeply. It was like watching a reflection of myself fade in a mirror.

Today the reflection disappeared entirely.

James Van Der Beek will probably not receive much in the way of laudatory writings in the obituaries that appear in the coming days. After all, he didn’t create the characters he was most known for, right? I would argue, though, that he brought them to life and gave them a resonance that persisted long after they left the big screen and he was known more as an answer to trivia questions than as the shining star he’d been. I mean, after all, I’m sitting here writing this piece about him. The characters don’t play the actor, the actor plays the characters, and if they do it right, they get to be remembered forever. If they’re also good people, the actors they share the screen or stage with become friends long after the production is over. James Van Der Beek turned all of his co-stars into friends that were behind him when the end came this morning, and played his character of Dawson Leery so well that headlines ran across every major news outlet that the star of the 90s breakout show, Dawson’s Creek, had died today.

He’ll always be Mox to me, though. Rest in peace, James.

Epstein, possibly the most prolific sex trafficker in human history, spent the last decade of his life investing in technology that would help Russia, as he wrote in a 2013 email, “leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.” He was fascinated by websites like 4chan and technology like Bitcoin and was personally invested in the success of far-right politicians in the US and Europe. He believed he was months away from ushering in a new world order that would allow him to continue with his monstrous passion projects, like creating a super-race of children with his own DNA and building fascist nation states to manage overpopulation and climate collapse. And he wined and dined the world’s most powerful men (none of whom seemed to have an issue with these ideas), inviting them to his island and his ranch, and made sure they were surrounded by an endless supply of young girls. And I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to do with that knowledge.

—Ryan Broderick, “Here’s how Epstein broke the Internet”

If there’s one thing that is a guarantee in America this year, it’s that people are absolutely fed up with elites. The people who affect every part of our lives, from banks, massive multinational corporations, and technology firms to megachurch pastors, government leaders, and media figures are about as close to persona non grata as you can be amongst the average person. If there’s one thing that’s become patently obvious over the last decade, it is that our institutions have failed us, and those institutions are run by the very elites who behave as if there are no consequences. As Broderick noted in the quoted piece above, what are we supposed to do with that knowledge? What are we supposed to do with the knowledge that professors, authors, judges, bankers, tech leaders, senior members of three different European royal families, ex-presidents and prime ministers (people who had nuclear weapons at their disposal, no less!), were chummy with a billionaire sex trafficker? What are we supposed to do with the fact that many of them maintained those links after he’d already been caught once? My wife asked me Friday night, “Why isn’t everybody in the streets already?” I think the only reason we haven’t all stopped everything and gone into the streets is because most of us don’t know what to do next.

We’re fighting off an endless series of crises, many inflicted upon us by the government supposed to serve the people—but who were long ago co-opted by the elites. We’re constantly having to determine whether the things we were brought up to trust in—churches, police, the justice system—are worthy of that trust. We have to spend extra time deciphering whether the video we just watched or the photo we just saw or the article we just read is real or a hallucination created by artificial intelligence; that artificial intelligence has been forced into our lives by the same cadre of elites is, in my view, not an accident. It is a feature of the system, one more obstacle between the very broad proletariat who are absolutely tired of being held down and lied to and stripped of our collective resources for the benefit of a relatively narrow club of elites. AI is simultaneously being designed to further reduce the numbers of humans that can work jobs with living wages and to make it far more difficult for humans to perceive reality—and that’s before you factor in how hideously destructive it is to our ecological balance.

Data centers fueling artificial intelligence are rapidly depleting and destroying the clean water necessary for people to survive. Tainted water keeps humans from having the ability to be hydrated, water crops, cook, bathe, etc. Water is a necessary ingredient to live, and artificial intelligence is destroying it as surely as Skynet destroys humanity in the Terminator films. Those films worked off the premise that as artificial intelligence became sentient, it would seek to erase humans from the Earth. AI doesn’t need to become killer robots to destroy us. The destabilization caused by lack of fresh water and clean air, the lack of jobs to support increased cost of living, and the lack of trust in anything you see, read or hear because AI can create such realistic false videos, audio, and images will surely do the job on its own. It doesn’t have to turn violent. It just has to keep riding the wave of greed that its champions justify its existence with.

Theoretically, our government is supposed to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Once upon a time, that was true—Harry Truman, Gerald Ford1, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama reached the heights of leadership without wealthy parents or benefactors greasing the skids. Those are the only four presidents elected in the last century who did not have that help, though. Coolidge, Harding, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr., Trump, and Biden all benefited from immense war chests and high dollar corporate donations. If the majority of presidents are elected through the munificence of the same elites destroying everything else for their personal gain, how can we possibly believe that government is for the people? This current government is certainly not. The Supreme Court, Congress, the president, all of these institutions are run by megalomaniacs and greedy opportunists, with the occasional dash of “Christian” faith that’s mainly used to justify the greed and the oppression of everyone else.

In short, Americans are fighting a battle on all fronts against these forces, and it has created feelings of hopelessness for many. That’s understandable. I fight against those feelings every single day—but there is also great cause for hope. Minneapolis has been organized to a degree most thought impossible in this day and age. Signal group chats, PTO meetings, wine moms, all of these have been organized into a force of tens of thousands who are following DHS everywhere and making it that much harder to inflict violence and create chaos, let alone kidnap anyone that doesn’t have pale skin. Organizing is key, and it takes time, and it’s not something that can be done in a hurry. At the same time, building those groups, building support systems, is vital because what can happen in a hurry is a collapse of the current order.

There’s a long-neglected book by former U.S. Navy captain and National Security Council area expert Dr. Gary G. Sick called All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran in which he details the modern history of Iran, the Iranian revolution, and the hostage crisis. One thing that the book shows is that governments and autocrats can look impregnable to the outsider, but on the inside, the structure is rotten, and it caves in with one swift, sharp kick. As we’re all trying to digest the depths of depravity these leaders stooped to, as we’re wrapping our heads around how a small conspiracy of billionaires obtained outsized influence over the entire globe, we are in much the same position as Iranians in 1978. As Sick wrote, they are a culture long accustomed to the belief that grand conspiracies are behind every trauma, every setback, every suffering, and it’s driven by the fact that foreign powers have, indeed, often invaded Iran and dictated the use of its resources, the distribution of its wealth, and the policies of its governments.

In 1978, therefore, the fifteenth year of some level of protests against the Shah’s government, there was no reason for the protestors to believe anything would change quickly. It was the mere adoption of a protest cycle that used every excess of the Shah’s own secret police, the SAVAK, against them in subtle fashion. The pattern went like this: religious leaders called a protest, and SAVAK would inevitably end up killing marchers. Shi’a Islam calls for a public memorial service 40 days after the death of a martyr. The pressure would die down, and then ramp right up again at the 40 day mark, because SAVAK had begun doing what DHS is doing now—interrupting religious services and storming into mosques and religious schools—and in the process would inevitably kill resistors. This, in turn, triggered another forty day cycle, and it repeated itself for months on end. SAVAK became increasingly worn thin by the inability to be in all places at once, and were unable to get ahead of each fresh protest. By the end of the year, the Shah had fled into exile and the government had been toppled. Obviously, as we all know now, Ayatollah Khomeini deftly maneuvered his way into power and then eliminated his opponents. One repression was ultimately traded for another.

However, it doesn’t have to be. Unlike a place like Iran or Iraq after Saddam Hussein, or Afghanistan after the Taliban fell in 2001, the United States has a rich history of democracy. We have a legal system that, despite its current weaknesses and failures, still provides an excellent framework for how to proceed. There are more of us than there are of the elites, and inevitably, they will have to agree to a more egalitarian society and an end to the abuses of the administration, or they will go the way of the Shah: exiled, vilified, and ultimately forgotten.

You want to know where to sign up for the revolution? Join with a group of friends, neighbors, or like-minded people who believe in mutual aid, support, empathy—all of the tenets that flowed from early Christianity. The oppressors claim the mantle of Christ, but they wouldn’t recognize him or his parables if he was preaching right in front of them. Organize, and be ready—you never know when the moment will come, but I promise you, Donald Trump is fading, and the harder he’s squeezing all of us, the more desperate he really is.

CONTENT WARNING.

There are three videos I’m inserting. The first is in real time, shot by a witness known so far as “pink jacket lady.”

The second video is a separate angle, with freeze frames involved, shot by Rob Doar. Doar is the head of Gun Owners of Minnesota. He’s very much a conservative (here’s his Twitter to prove it), and he breaks down the situation with freeze-frame and it’s unambiguous—this was an execution. Pretti wasn’t fleeing, wasn’t holding his gun, because they took it from him, AND THEN THEY SHOT HIM UP.

The third and final video is stabilized and slowed down from the first angle. These videos make it extremely plain what happened. The final video shows, clear as glass, these murdering bastards shooting a defenseless Pretti in the back. These Gestapo wannabes then tried to kick out the Minneapolis police on scene, who refused to leave and insisted on taking control of the crime scene. Not helping their case, seven nearby witnesses to the murder were snatched by these pathetic Nazis and taken to the Lubyanka…excuse me, the Bishop Whipple Federal Building (Bishop Henry Whipple was an advocate for protecting Native Americans and an anti-racist—his namesake building being used for ICE violence is a grotesque insult).

DHS is refusing to release the names of anyone involved, has Pretti’s gun, put these murderers back on active duty today in other areas, and smeared their murder victim as a domestic terrorist who “violently resisted arrest” after “approaching with a gun intent on doing harm.” None of this is true. NONE. OF. IT. They have their whole script pre-written and smear their victims before the bodies are cold. They are getting out of vehicles in groups of eight or ten, they attack random civilians and are just begging for someone to fight back. It is what limpdicked bullies do, unworthy of government, a badge, or any power at all. You might notice I haven’t said the word “agents.” That’s a deliberate choice. Calling the perpetrators of Nazi street violence agents legitimizes what they do and who they are, and everything about this is illegitimate. It is an attempt to foment a civil war by the government against the people.

Minnesota, somehow, some way, has not spilled into open rebellion. Yet. It’s hard to imagine people enduring the murder of friends and neighbors, the “arrest” of toddlers who are sent to Texas within hours (children of legal immigrants!), and the general occupation by untrained violent Nazi scumbags who were given a badge and gun by ICE Barbie and orders by that cowardly bitch Stephen Miller. It is because of them that things are so bad. It is because they’re such grotesque caricatures of human beings, leeching off the public payroll (Kristi Noem has two new private jets at our expense) and treating the rest of us like we’re in the Hunger Games. They enjoy violence. Miller constantly tells everyone who will listen how gleeful the suffering of others makes him. ICE Barbie shot her dog in the face for not being obedient enough. She cosplays as some tough woman while having enough plastic in her face that she might melt near open flame. Miller hasn’t had a fight in his life, but is hiding behind his thugs, daring someone to hit him.

Justice, to me, would be both of them meeting the same end that they have brought upon innocents, but I doubt we’ll be so lucky. What should happen, and what needs to be the bare minimum position for any Democrat, is the abolition of ICE, the arrest of every criminal thug who partook in this “operation”, and war crimes trials for the administration. They have taken a giant dump on the Constitution, smeared it around, and dared Americans to do something. DHS is lying so badly that after they claimed they were trying to apprehend some “violent criminal,” an Ecuadorian named Jose Huerta‑Chuma, the Minnesota Department of Corrections issued a fact correction that the named “criminal” has no convictions and was only detained once…by ICE in 2018.

Along these lines, surely, we thought, surely a white male, who had a license to carry his weapon, who was an avid hunter, who worked helping veterans—surely this would rouse the National Rifle Association, right? The ones who screamed for decades that guns were needed to protect from a tyrannical government? This is the tyrannical government at work and Pretti had his weapon and life taken while exercising his First and Second Amendment rights. Well, if you believed that, I’ve got an Alaskan bridge to nowhere to sell you. Behold the bootlickers of the NRA.

I’m a gun owner. I gladly did the background check and got the license to purchase my Smith & Wesson from the sheriff’s office, because I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to go through those things. Owning firearms is a responsibility. Let me tell you, it’s wild that the sheriff’s officers respect my rights more than the most right-wing administration in American history. It’s wild that the right-wing, which screeched about gun rights, is not doing a thing about Alex Pretti tonight. You know why?

They never meant it. They just wanted to be bullies, like this administration, so unable and unwilling to accept a nation where diversity and equality were becoming more common. They sandbagged reformed gun laws after every school shooting. People regurgitated the NRA talking points repeatedly when the bare minimum was asked of everyone to reduce the amount of mass shooting in America, and they did it so gun manufacturers could make more money. Every single time the NRA and politicians scaremongered, these people filled up on ammunition and weapons—but because the tyrannical government aligns with their other beliefs, like blatant racism, there’s barely a peep when a gun owner, licensed, was murdered. Not a word from those gun fanatics, nor from the “gun rights” organization refusing to defend a gun owner murdered illegally by the feds, nothing.

THEY NEVER MEANT A DAMN WORD.

We’re on the verge of a civil war solely at the incitement of the government. All the groups that promised to fight against this are siding with the government. It is driven by the same motivations as most civil wars—ethnic cleansing, maintaining supremacy over a nation with only minority support—and it will only get worse and worse from here. Our 250th birthday as a nation is fast approaching, and unless more people realize that this is now a battle against the same sort of tyranny the Founders decried, it will be the last birthday we celebrate as a free nation.

I will end this with a quote from the opening of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet, which was a driving force beyond shifting sentiment towards revolution 251 years ago.

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general Favor; a long Habit of not thinking a Thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of Custom. But the Tumult soon subsides. Time makes more Converts than Reason.

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling.

In a clip that made the rounds right before the weekend, the Health and Human Services Secretary (and worst Kennedy family member ever) said this to the wife of Nosferatu…ahem, White House torture czar Stephen Miller. “The interesting thing about the president is that he eats really bad food, which is McDonald’s, and, you know, candy and Diet Coke,” Kennedy continued. “He drinks the Diet Coke at all times.” But, he added, “He has the constitution of a deity. I don’t know how he’s alive, but he is.” RFK Jr. later said, “You know, Dr. [Mehmet] Oz has reviewed the President’s medical records and said he’s got the highest testosterone levels that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70 years old.”

Bingo.

It’s long been speculated what is keeping the President going when it’s clear how exhausted he is because he’s constantly falling asleep on camera. Rumors of Adderall abuse have swirled around him for over a decade. He’s used makeup to cover up bruising on his hands. He bragged about acing another cognitive test without recognizing that it is not an accomplishment to be taking this many cognitive tests in a year! And now, we have a likely culprit for his worst outbursts.

Artificial testosterone is prescribed to menopausal women and sometimes to older men to deal with deficits in their emotional state, energy, sexual health, and more. However, such therapy comes with side effects, especially if the patient is taking more than the recommended dosage. Those side effects are substantial—and directly link to certain behaviors that Trump exhibits. They include insomnia, increased aggression or uncharacteristically aggressive behavior, mood swings, euphoria, irritability, impaired judgment and delusions.

Sure sounds like someone we know, right?

In recent months, the president has openly insulted reporters in very direct, crude terms (“Quiet, piggy! Quiet!); gone off on social media rants lasting for hours (33 posts in two hours on November 5th, 160 posts overnight between December 1st-2nd, and 158 posts on Christmas Eve all the way until 4 am Christmas morning); launched an abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro; is assaulting the Minneapolis metropolitan area with over 3000 DHS stormtroopers; readying to invade Greenland to seize it for himself, requiring members of his “Gaza Board of Peace” to each pony up a billion dollars that he’ll control; named himself Acting President of Venezuela; openly threatened citizens with being shot if they’re disobedient; and that’s just within the last 45 days!

Perhaps more alarming is the timing. Every 24-26 days in the past couple of months is when the President has been at his most erratic and impulsive, which certainly points to a regular dosing schedule of testosterone. It is not a joke, though. His behavior is putting our nation, even the world, at great risk. Decades of diplomacy have been shattered, and important partnerships damaged with our closest allies. Trump’s overtly threatening to attack an ally, both directly and via his sadistic facsimile of Shakespeare’s character Iago (Miller again), with backup from his racist troll of a vice-president, Jackass D. Vance, to “subtly” reinforce the overt threats.

Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona, a combat veteran, appeared on CNN with Anderson Cooper the other night and said, “I’ve been very clear. He is a madman. He is insane. He’s only thinking about himself.” “You really think he’s insane?” repeated Cooper.

“Yes!” Gallego shouted back. “I’m sorry, where are we at this moment where we don’t understand what’s happening in this country? The man is threatening war against a NATO ally. We all think this is rational, right? Let’s accept what’s happening here. He is not rational right now. He is destroying our world reputation or potentially our economic opportunity or economic might and power around the world because he is being petty.” Gallego understands. He was sent to Iraq for another war that was completely unnecessary, and that was by order of a president who was rational. Donald Trump is completely off his rocker, and everyone refuses to admit this is not normal.

America will not recover from this if they go through with blowing up NATO. Any other nation that would work with us or ally with us will not be able to trust anything, from our word to a signed treaty. They will have to consider that our people not once, but twice, elected a madman. Once can be forgiven. Twice is a deliberate choice that says, “yep, cost of living is too high, and we think the guy who ran every business of his into the ground is the one who can fix it.” Quite honestly, a lot of people internationally probably believe that we, the American public, are also irrational and dangerous.

It is also surely not lost on them that our political system is failing to act. It’s one thing to try and fail, but nobody in either party has made a serious effort to use the constitutional mechanisms to remove a President who shredded the Constitution within days of returning to office. Failure to even try, to allow our laws and international laws to be steamrolled with nothing more than a shrug, will shame us for centuries. Refusing to act when we destroy the NATO alliance for a frozen wasteland that might have valuable minerals will join the Munich Treaty of 1938 in the most ignominious annals of history. The United States will become a pariah at the level of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.

After that, what will a narcissist hopped up on testosterone do when everything crashes down around them? We may find out uncomfortably soon.

Renee Good awoke yesterday, unlikely to have contemplated the thought of death. Like most parents of a young child, she was almost certainly preoccupied with getting him ready for school and then going about her day. She was driving with her wife in a Honda Pilot, glove compartment brimming with stuffed animals for her young son, thermoses in the cupholders between them, and their dog in the backseat when they came across an ICE operation near their home.

Early reports said that Ms. Good was a trained legal observer and it appeared to be the case that she was recording the ICE agents on the videos taken by witnesses. In this video that has been widely disseminated publicly, her vehicle was perpendicular to the lead ICE pickup truck. The wheels are angled as if to indicate she was going to turn around. The first vehicle pulls around her and leaves. She doesn’t ram it, she doesn’t try to prevent it—she is waving it past, and attempts to wave the Titan pickup truck past as well, except those agents get out and march at her vehicle. They bellow at her “to get out of the fucking car.”

Good’s wife becomes panicked, according to bystanders. Good’s deceased husband, father of her yong son, must’ve been on her mind. She couldn’t protect him. She can protect her wife. ICE has violated numerous laws and locked citizens and immigrants alike in inhumane conditions. Police and ICE both shoot dogs at astronomical rates during arrests and raids. For anyone trained in legal observation, for anyone who has studied police violence, all of this will be in the back of their minds. She puts the vehicle in gear to flee. She is protecting her wife and her dog.

The agent who was in front of her vehicle pulls his weapon before she’s moved more than a foot or two. His name is Jonathan Ross. Last year, he was dragged by a vehicle driven by a violent felon, requiring three dozen stitches. In that incident, he only deployed his Tazer. This time, he went straight for his gun and fired through the windshield even though she was turning away from him and then he fired twice more through her open driver’s window. The car crashed into another. The witnesses are screaming in horror. Meanwhile, Ross (who ICE Barbie Noem claimed was hospitalized) casually walks towards the Honda Pilot. His fellow agents went back to their own vehicles. There was no concern for Good, or even for Ross, really, because they didn’t even try to check on him right away or stop him from approaching the vehicle of a woman he had just shot without any plausible threat to his life.

They were nonchalant, and then the nonchalance turned to callousness.

There is an abundance of video evidence from the past 353 days that shows the hair-trigger violence of ICE agents and other DHS officers towards the American public. There is an abundance of findings by judges that ICE and DHS lie about the violence they deploy, who they deploy it against, the reasons they use violence, so on and so forth. In the immediate aftermath, one ICE agent levied his “nonlethal” weapon and shot a man point blank in the face with some sort of chemical agent.

Renee Good isn’t the first person shot without cause by ICE in the last year. She’s not the second, nor the third, nor the fourth and fifth and so on. She’s the fourth person to be shot in their car by ICE in the last 60 days. There’s a uncomfortably long list of these incidents that keeps growing. This is the inevitable outcome of an unaccountable, well-funded, poorly-trained, unprofessional secret police force. History shows us how these forces attract the sociopathic, the thuggish, the undisciplined, and just plain violent people in society. In a stampede to try and prevent another 9/11 terrorist event, to save America from disaster, we created the means in which to destroy it from the inside.

Tonight, a six-year-old child has no father and no mother. He is not the first, nor will he be the last, but one day, he will grow up and learn that his mother was murdered in broad daylight by an agent of the government on video for the world to witness. It is as undignified a way to have one’s life ended as is possible, and her child will suffer unimaginable trauma for years, if not decades. We owe it to that child, and every other family torn apart by this un-American neo-Gestapo to not only abolish ICE, but dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. They utterly failed in their mission. They not only didn’t keep us safe, they became the biggest threat against the rule of law, the citizenry, and the fabric of the nation we face.

We will never be able to live in peace if we don’t.

“The government of the US launched an unprecedented military aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It constitutes a terrible stain on the development of bilateral relations through that military operation,” she said.

She added that Venezuela “will never again be anyone’s colony – neither of old empires, nor of new empires, nor of empires in decline”.

—Venezuelan vice-president/acting President Delcy Rodríguez

It was the last weekend of the holiday break for the world, and so, with all of us trying to enjoy a respite from the chaos of everyday life, Donald Trump decided it was the perfect time to abduct the leader of a sovereign nation, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. You will find no defense of Maduro here—the man is a thug who stole his last election and ravaged his country. He is fairly similar in many ways to former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, but lacked Noriega’s cunning. For example, Noriega had very openly shared in the drug money of the Colombian cartels in return for allowing Panama to be a banking haven and staging ground for smuggling flights, while simultaneously receiving CIA protection from DEA investigations because he would provide intelligence on the smuggling of rival cartels. Noriega had a secret police that not only ran amok on its citizens, but sexually assaulted American citizens and murdered American military personnel based in the Canal Zone. Furthermore, Noriega’s status as a paid CIA asset ($200,000 yearly salary) had allowed Noriega to buy time until the last days of the 1980s before President (and former CIA director) George Bush Sr. came calling with an overwhelming invasion.

What Maduro did do was tamper with an election that he had lost, as Noriega had, and possibly took a share of drug money from cocaine and marijuana being smuggled out of Caracas. Neither of these things, along with looting the rotting remnants of the Venezuelan economy, come close to Noriega’s actions. More relevant, however, is that those making the accusations about Maduro’s supposed leadership of the gang Tren de Aragua or of a drug cartel simply are not credible people, and everyone knows it.

For those pushing this regime change, like Marco Rubio, Trump and Vance, what really matters is that Venezuela sits on top of the largest oil reserves in the world. It was extremely telling that after braying on about supposed fentanyl smuggling by Venezuela (a complete lie—China produces the chemicals for it and Mexican cartels manufacture it), Trump got up at a podium Saturday morning and proclaimed it really was about the oil.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he said.

Trump said it wouldn’t cost the U.S. anything to “run” Venezuela, pointing to the country’s oil production, saying, “The money coming out of the ground is very substantial.”

Later, he told reporters, “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”

J. Dickless Vance, who used to be against regime change wars and wars over oil, tweeted about Venezuela refusing to return our stolen oil (funny, I didn’t realize that oil underneath Venezuela belonged to us, especially since we tried to seize their oil tankers in the last two weeks). Reuters reported on how American oil executives were being told that if they want to get back money owed from Venezuelan seizure of their licensed oilfields, they have to put money into rebuilding Venezuelan oil production first.

So what does this mean? First, the United States has chosen to go the route of early-1900s imperialism, an age that was believed to have long passed its sell-by date in the wake of two world wars fought over imperialism. This has now made the entire world edgy about what America does next. Are we going to invade Panama and regain control of the Panama Canal just because Trump thinks it's 1966? Do we wreck NATO by trying to seize Greenland from Denmark because Trump has some weird fucking obsession with that frozen wasteland? Katie Miller, former administration official and wife of Stephen Goebbels, erm, Miller, seems to think that’s coming.

Secondly, we’ve also created an inherent permission structure for the other strongmen of the world to depose national leaders. What Donald Trump did here was to pull out the foundation of the rules-based order for the world, and declare a free-for-all resembling the Great Game of the late nineteenth century. Xi Jinping in China now has the excuse he’s always wanted to seize Taiwan. Vladimir Putin now believes he’s got a free hand to wipe out Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, or any of the leaders of neighboring nations Lithiuania, Latvia and Estonia—all of whom are NATO nations. NATO has a lot less firepower without the United States backing it, and Trump clearly finds NATO to be a burden, not our allies as they have been since 1949. That combination of factors might give Putin the opening he craves to complete his mission of rebuilding the Soviet Union’s power and landmass. Absorbing economies that are far more functional than Russia’s kleptocracy would automatically make it more productive, and causing NATO’s collapse would be a bonus. Does anyone believe Donald Trump would defend anything but his own interests? Does anyone believe that JD Vance, who is just praying that Trump croaks every single night so he can sit in the big boy chair, would defend Europe when he uses every opportunity to insult them?

That’s the world we’re living in now. I know that this administration of Koopa Troopas and Goombahs don’t think that far ahead, but that’s the truth of the matter. This idiotic imperial action, clearly driven by Lil’ Marco Rubio (more on that in a moment), makes the chances of world war increase tenfold. With the possession of nuclear weapons at an all-time high (do bear in mind that this doesn’t mean the total number of weapons, but instead how many nations possess the ability to launch a nuclear war), such a conflict would be certain to end in mass destruction.

Back to Marco Rubio, who holds the dual positions of national security advisor and Secretary of State (matching the feat of Henry Kissinger without the intellectual capacity of that conniving psychopath). He’s made it quite clear he wants to attack Cuba next. It was used-car salesmen like Rubio that tanked the rapproachement with Cuba that President Obama completed a decade ago, because they think the only way that we can have peace with Cuba is at the end of a gun barrel. This has been Rubio’s long-term goal in politics after his family was forced out by the Castro revolution in 1959—the same sort of Oedipal bullshit that drove President George Bush Jr to invade Iraq in 2003. It’s astounding that Rubio has gotten as far as he has with his low-wattage intellectual capacity, and even more astounding that he’s achieved the level of influence with Trump that he has after the 2016 presidential primaries, where Trump maliciously wrecked him so much that Rubio came close to losing his Senate seat as well.

I’m not sure whose memories are shorter at this point—members of Congress, the media, or the electorate, all of whom helped enable this moment where America completed the crossing of the Rubicon from “defender of freedom” to “evil imperial colossus.” So many of us warned about this for years, and we kept being ignored because egg prices were too high and 80 million of our fellow citizens loved having a bully as president because they remember a great economy (that he inherited!) during his first term, a million dead from COVID and an insurrection be damned. This will end poorly, and Trump will not live to see it himself. Why else is he rushing to splash his name on everything in D.C. that he can?

As the old saying goes, Everything Trump Touches Dies, and sadly, that now includes America itself. Happy 250th birthday. 😒

I’ve spent the last five weeks trying to write for all of you that read me. Five weeks of seeing something I want to write about and being unable to finish it. Five weeks of being unhappy with everything I’m producing. Five weeks of struggling for inspiration. This is seasonal depression, and it’s so very real.

I’ve written before about my mental health struggles. There’s something almost cruel, though, about how you can deal with something year-round, year after year, and then a certain month means you begin to be more miserable. Substantially reduced daylight hours, days without seeing the sun, sudden temperature shifts—all of this leads to reduced motivation, reduced productivity, and a struggle to simply get through each day without wanting to hide in bed.

I haven’t even gotten to the effect of world events on a struggling human with lifelong mental health issues.

ACA subsidies allowed to wither and die by a Christofascist cabal of lunatics in government. Rob and Michele Reiner murdered by their son. An antisemitic slaughter in Australia. A maniac’s vengeful armed assault on students at Brown University. The continued rise of a neo-Nazi secret police snatching citizens off the street. Vindictive prosecutions of protestors after having repeatedly assaulted them on camera. Economic decline. Independent media being deliberately strangled to death. A Supreme Court making up rules as they go to protect their flabby fascist-in-chief. The President being so amped up and thoroughly alone on Christmas Eve that he unleashed a tweetstorm of over 200 tweets (Truths, to use his stupid Truth Social name) that night into Christmas Day. TWO. HUNDRED.

That’s just in the last six weeks!

I cannot turn it off or look away. I am not a woman, but this article from The New Republic about the “Cassandras” of the Trump decade hit home. I, too, have spent the last decade endlessly speaking out about the dangers of electing Donald Trump, and then protecting him with the many powers of the presidency. The feeling of being consistently gaslit or ignored is that much harder for those with mental health challenges. The desire to choose flight, to run from the issues, becomes ever more acute. Why burden oneself with more depressing events? The answer, at least for me, is that to not know is too dangerous. Ignorance would not be bliss, because my desire to know wins out in every scenario. I cannot handle not knowing.

I’ve tried to find solace in other things I enjoy, such as reading history or biographies, because it does often work, and pulls me into another time where I can immerse myself in mental exercises: What would I be if I lived during _________? How would I have believed about ________? Consequently, this has also contributed to the lack of output on my behalf, because I’ve been on a tear. I’ve read the following since that last post I made: The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962 by Sir Max Hastings; This Is Only A Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War by David F. Krugler; The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy by Seymour Hersh; Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough; and Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate by Ken Hughes. I’ve now started on during my holiday break Masha Gessen’s seminal examination of Vladimir Putin from 2012, The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

These aren’t small books, in most cases, and demonstrates why I’d have issues writing for having read that much, I hope.

In any case, I felt that an explanation was owed to all of you. I’m hoping that time away from work to pursue things I enjoy and help fight off the emotional weight of anxiety/depression will leave me renewed so I can resume my writing productively. I never wanted Letters From the Wasteland to be boring, and if I’d forced myself into producing content for the sake of it, it would be boring. I believe most people who write do so because they want their words to have meaning, to matter to others. I know I’ve lost some subscribers during this blackout period, and I appreciate everyone who has stuck with me, because it means I’ve done something worthwhile.

A couple of months ago, it seemed as if Donald Trump were rampaging through American government, its constitution, and its politics. Despite his growing unpopularity, and the stubborn inflation he made worse with his ill-considered tariffs, there seemed to be nobody able to stop him.

Then the Ghost of Pedophiles Past came for a visit, in the form of a simple House Resolution entered by libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).

The resolution called for the Department of Justice to follow up on the campaign promises made by Donald Trump and his surrogates, such as now-FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, and now-Attorney General Pam Bondi, to release the full files that the DOJ and FBI had on Jeffrey Epstein. This meant all of the gathered evidence, emails, photos, etc. Let everyone know how deep his global ring of sex trafficking of teenage girls went. In February, Bondi called in a bunch of MAGA influencers and media types, gave them binders that looked official, and then filled them with nothing but information already made public in years past. Once these people realized it, they were steamed and publicly said they’d been had. This laid the foundation for everything to come.

This should’ve been an easy one. Donald Trump claimed repeatedly he’d cut Epstein loose long before his 2019 arrest and…untimely death in the Manhattan Correctional Center. He claimed he’d done nothing wrong. Virginia Giuffre, the most prominent victim of Epstein, who doggedly pursued justice against him and his girlfriend/partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell, had said she had not witnessed Trump committing any crimes or molesting any of the teenage girls being trafficked. It seemed like he was covered, and his claims that prominent Democrats would suffer greatly if he released them would, if true, cement his stranglehold on American politics.

It didn’t happen, though. Trump and Bondi refused the request. Massie, in a fit of high dudgeon, tried to submit the bill to the floor to make it binding upon DOJ. Speaker Mike Johnson, who looks like the sort of man that has behaved inappropriately with teenagers behind closed doors, refused to let the bill come to the floor of the House. A determined Massie then went office to office, gathering signatures to reach the majority of 218, which would force a vote on his bill. Johnson, determined to avoid holding the vote, sent the House into recess for weeks. When Adelita Grijalva won the special election for her late father’s congressional seat, one of the items in her campaign was a promise to be the 218th signature for the discharge petition to get Massie’s bill, now co-sponsored with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), its vote on the floor.

Johnson proceeded to dig in further, refusing to swear in Grijalva while also pretending like she wasn’t doing her job, even though she legally could not do her job because he refused to swear her in (it would seem that some constitutional amendments are needed on this score—more on this at another date). The government shutdown then happened, and Johnson continued to leave the House out of session, an extremely odd maneuver that has never taken place during a government shutdown. It became very clear that the Speaker was bound and determined to make sure those files did not become public.

Why?

The likely answer here is that during this interim period from the House going into recess until now, the attorneys for the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, who are still unwinding his business deals, paying settlements to victims, and scouring his electronic records six years later, have been more publicly occupied. They turned over the entirety of 18,000 emails from Epstein’s Yahoo email account (jeeproject@yahoo.com) to Bloomberg Magazine, which has been busily combing through them for information. In response to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, Epstein’s Gmail accounts and other documents (he weirdly kept spreadsheets with the real estate holdings of all of his neighbors, Trump included) were turned over to them.

And this week, it all came crashing in. Grijalva was sworn in and signed the petition immediately. The White House, in a panic, tried to strongarm Marjorie Taylor Greene, the living avatar of MAGA id, to remove her signature. She refused so strongly that her and Trump have now broken, with her claiming that he’s forgotten what MAGA means. Bondi and Patel then arranged a meeting with Lauren Boebert, another MAGA diehard with more zeal than brains, and proceeded to drag her into the White House Situation Room, where she couldn’t bring her phone and record anything. Reports are (almost certainly based on what Boebert told aides/friends afterwards) that she was alternately cajoled and threatened for an hour, but refused to budge. Nancy Mace, who has awkwardly made sexual assault a cornerstone of her campaign for South Carolina governor after spectacularly firebombing her congressional career by going through staffers like a dog through a box of Milk Bones, has also not yielded.

Simultaneously, the Democrats on the Oversight Committee performed one of the most spectacular bait jobs ever, a stunning feat for a party that usually ties its own shoelaces together. They released three Epstein emails from the subpoena response, which all reference Trump in some way. Republicans retaliated by saying, we’re not going to let you cherry-pick, here’s all the emails! Over 20,000 of them, and when Zeteo News organized them, they found that over one thousand emails between Epstein and others revolved around Trump, including emails where Epstein told associates that he was at Trump Tower after the election, and was at Mar-A-Lago for Thanksgiving in 2017. More damning, Epstein was regularly meeting with Steve Bannon, who helped steer the MAGA ship, and also with Vitali Churkin, the shadowy figure attached to Moscow’s influence operations—which included the 2016 election interference. Epstein would later relay information about how to negotiate best with Trump to Moscow via a third-party ambassador in the emails released as well. Finally, and amongst the most curious entries, when Epstein was discussing the reopened investigations into him, he replied to a friend thusly:

Compromising material is hinted at in many of the emails Epstein writes, and by the time one finishes reading, it becomes very easy to believe that Jeffrey Epstein did not commit suicide. That feeling only grew reading this.

If this all feels like it should have been preventable for Trump, well, it was. In his first term, he had competent people working for him. For instance, a ruthless attorney general in Bill Barr. Barr was a veteran of the Reagan and first Bush era of Washington. He knew how to perform the dirty tricks. He knew how to cover up the real nasty shit. He was incredibly skilled at it —consider how he made the Mueller investigation become irrelevant and then made Epstein’s death disappear quickly from media coverage, all with no damage to Trump’s approval ratings. I guarantee that when Barr decided to dump Trump over the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, he knew that Trump wouldn’t come after him too hard, because Barr made the biggest threat to his presidency and his freedom disappear. Yes, that last sentence means what you think it means.

Trump’s biggest weakness is that this entire term is about revenge and greed and sycophancy. He does not have anyone capable working for him. He has fired every single capable person in the upper echelons of government and replaced them with cretins. Therefore, every attempt to stall or cover up or hide is failing miserably and he’s resorting to outright thuggery, which only works until the pushback overwhelms the thugs. It is a lot easier to perform a coverup when it involves an issue that you can disguise by raising all sorts of hell everywhere else (see: Trump’s insane profiting off of the office with pardons for cash). That’s how Trump’s gotten away with so much to this point.

Now he’s faced with something that automatically focuses everyone’s attention because it has been in our consciousness for years. How did this billionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend/assistant Ghislaine Maxwell manage to get away unscathed for nearly three decades trafficking teenage girls around the world? It’s far more difficult trying to distract from this because it is something that makes even the casual person sit up and think, hmmm, this is fishy. There’s been endless documentaries and lawsuits and conspiracy theories, and these emails demonstrate that, while there necessarily isn’t a “cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” there is the elites of this world and they will band together no matter what.

Whether it’s modeling agency owners being besties with Epstein despite having the safety of dozens of teenage girls under contract to them as a responsibility, or university presidents and professors discussing predatory behavior towards female students and/or subordinates, or investment bankers wanting to make the next big stock move with the billionaire, or famously puritanical prosecutors happily and zealously defending a serial sexual abuser, the elites stood together. Money and power, or proximity to power, washes away many sins for the elite. Epstein was simultaneously “best friends” with Trump while also calling him evil; helping Trump get elected, apparently, despite his disgust over certain parts of his agenda, while also advising the Russians how to negotiate policy with Trump. Trump double-crossed Epstein on some investment opportunities as well, yet they still maintained their relationship.

That’s the real rot at the heart of the Epstein scandal—an elite class that believes it can behave with impunity because it has for decades now. From buying politicians to evading justice for criminal acts, these people have turned America into their plaything, like a monarchy of old. Epstein merely followed that model in his own actions. That’s why we need to release all of the files. Let’s have a full accounting of the guilty and wash away the elite influence from the halls of power.

Look at that. He’s triumphant. He won without having to negotiate. He won without doing anything but act like a twelve-year-old and inflict pain on the most vulnerable people deliberately. Even that subhead does not come close to describing what he did: deliberately hurt those he took an oath to serve in the name of political power. “Punishing actions” like starving the poor and not paying government workers and shutting down air travel. Breaking the law at every turn by firing federal workers and threatening no back pay. Refusing to disburse SNAP funds already budgeted to prevent the poor from being hostages, and then threatening prosecution of any grocery outlet or food bank that gave extra help to SNAP recipients.

Meanwhile, what did these losers get?

NOTHING.

• They got a bill that would fund SNAP through next year (money that already existed in the contingency fund).

• They got rehiring of all federal workers fired by Russ Vought during the shutdown (that ain’t happening, because the GOP never enforces the law against Trump, and he’s not going to do it because his puppetmasters Vought and Stephen Nosferatu Miller won’t let him).

• They got “a promise of a vote on restoring the ACA subsidies,” which especially doesn’t mean a goddamn thing, because Speaker of the nonexistent House Mike Johnson said he won’t hold a matching vote before the senators even voted to reopen the government.

Just what in the hell were they thinking? They got two things already required by the law and one thing that is an empty promise, while not getting the one thing they said they wouldn’t back down on. What was the point?

Ladies and gentlemen, your political opposition.

Donald Trump’s approval ratings slid to historic lows. He was loudly booed conducting a citizenship ceremony at the Washington vs. Detroit NFL game yesterday. MAGA support was cracking. The courts were holding firm against the illegalities. A senior judge appointed by Reagan resigned after forty years to specifically speak out against the creeping dictatorship. The opinion polls showed that the public rightly believed Republicans were responsible for this mess, because they are.

Democrats, for their many, many faults, some of which I’ll be getting into shortly, do not hold a majority in any part of the federal government. This is a government run by Republicans solely for the purpose of benefiting wealthy Republicans and screwing over “the woke left,” which is anyone that isn’t white enough, Christian enough, or wealthy enough for their tastes. There was a lot of evidence that the poorer MAGA supporters saw their safety net disappear and finally realized that their Lord and Orange Savior Donald Trump was screwing them.

But no, The Cowardly Eight™ panicked and lost their nerve. It felt inevitable that at least two of the eight would cave in at some point, especially Fetterman, who might as well switch parties since his politics are incoherent post-stroke and he just seems to want to rage-bait others. Republicans are masters of rage-baiting without doing any useful work. So glad I spent effort and money getting him elected!

But this, this seems ridiculous. Durbin used to have something resembling a spine, and he just quivered and collapsed into goo. Shaheen’s decision was such trash that her own daughter released a statement declaring how terrible it was.

Imagine being such a fool that your own kid points out at the very top that Mike Johnson’s refusal to hold a vote in the House means you made no deal at all. You just capitulated. These people are embarrassing, absolutely pathetic at the basic art of politics. They think we’re in some era where the other side has basic decency and principles. Are you blind, deaf and dumb all at once? Are you so high on your own supply of stale platitudes that you do not recognize what is happening?

The Republican Party is, in many quarters, openly embracing neo-Nazis. They are cheering on, funding, and actively defending state-sponsored terrorism by ICE. They defended the most racist Supreme Court ruling since Korematsu, and do not even try to stop the worst impulses of the President and his deeply terrible cabinet secretaries. The President posts an AI-generated video where he literally dumps a planeload of shit on top of protestors and their response is, “I didn’t see it.” THE HELL YOU DIDN’T. The President sends people to torture prisons and they shrug. The President orders the military into American cities where they are assaulting innocent bystanders, arresting citizens, and destroying property, and they do nothing to rein him in. The President takes billions of dollars in bribes and pardons criminals, and they do nothing.

THIS IS WHO YOU MADE A DEAL WITH????

I have witnessed a quarter-century of gross political ineptitude by Democrats across the nation, and somehow stomached it. I registered as a Democrat only when it became necessary to vote in primaries, because as a progressive, I’ve often been left of the party itself. I have absolutely had it this time. Chuck Schumer, that worthless excuse for a “leader” in the Senate, not only got steamrolled by these clowns, but is so worried about Israel that he’s letting this country mutate into Nazi Germany redux through his lack of will. The Onion put it best Monday morning when they republished this from March (itself very telling).

Schumer’s been quoted again recently that he believes that he needs to be a guardian of their [Israel’s] interests here. If he wants to be their ambassador, the door is to the left, and you can leave your resignation with the governor of New York, Chuckles. This spineless creep voted for a sexual assaulter because he couldn’t bring himself to support a Muslim. He refused to support the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor of the city of New York, a city he represents, and he has the fucking nerve to tell us we should always vote for Democrats?

The same goes for Hakeem Jeffries, whose AIPAC sack of cash is so heavy that he could barely make it to NYC in time to endorse Zohran Mamdani the last week before the general election. The American Israeli Political Action Committee hates Zohran Mamdani for loudly condemning Israel’s wanton genocide of the Palestinian people. They have spent years donating millions to New York Democrats like Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Ritchie Torres (that useless pinkwashing scumbag), Jeffries, so on and so forth, to ensure that they always got aid for Israel, no matter what. A Muslim who called them out on their bullshit and is a better leader for everyone? They couldn’t have that! So, they activated their bought-off politicians and their “liberal” pawns like actress Debra Messing, and they told the people of America that it was better to vote for the guy who sent the elderly to their deaths in nursing homes during COVID and sexually assaulted his female subordinates because he supported Israel.

Just what city do they think Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo were running to lead?

The Democratic “leadership,” who are supposed to be looking out for the best interests of Americans, who embarked on this standoff promising to fight for our healthcare, couldn’t keep it together for more than six weeks. Yet when it comes to the heavily-armed, nuclear-armed ethnostate that is murdering an entire race of people in the most perverse twist of history, unity was maintained for a full year! Who are they representing? Americans or Israelis? Americans elected them to represent us. Tens of millions of Americans are going to lose healthcare without the ACA subsidies. The rest of us are receiving reduced quality of coverage at increased costs because the downstream effects from the ACA subsidies ending means everyone’s coverage got more expensive.

While this is happening, food inflation continues to skyrocket, and tariffs have made everything else more expensive too, because the dementia-riddled dimwit in the Oval Office thinks you can grow coffee and bananas in America, and slaps tariffs on their import. The alleged opposition, the marshmallows known as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, what have they done? Schumer couldn’t keep eight people in line through Thanksgiving so the people could know without a shadow of a doubt who was starving them and denying them healthcare? Jeffries couldn’t be bothered to actually fight against this draconian regime instead of repeatedly telling us, “it’s in God’s hands?”

Enough.

I will not accept any longer the false binary put in front of us. I will not support weak-kneed, spineless, cowardly, past-their-prime, mushy-headed excuses for leadership. I will not vote for, donate to, or volunteer for weak politicians who cannot be counted on to hold firm against tyranny. I will not make any more excuses or rationalizations for leaders who cannot play the best hand they’ve had in over a year with any competency. I will not accept the tepid, lukewarm, insipid “ideas” that beg the question, in the immortal words of Jeff Daniels on The Newsroom, “If liberals are so smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?”

That’s another thing too. The reason progressives got so sick and tired of being called liberal, and came to wield it as a slur, is because liberals became light-wing conservatives. Liberals got us into the Iraq War with the neoconservatives. Liberals gave us the ACA and not universal healthcare, or even a public option to buy into Medicare. Liberals gave us compromises on stimulus and made the common folk deal with austerity while they, the powers that be, maintained their six-figure salaries. Liberals continued the Patriot Act, and the drone murder program of “terrorists” that usually turned out to be somebody’s wedding party or some poor kid herding sheep. Liberals left Guantanamo open. Liberals continued using expanded executive power for the worst reasons, and didn’t ever try to bend it for the best ones. Liberals kept telling us that the things we’ve been crying out for since we were paying $5/gallon for gasoline and drowning under housing debts and prices in 2008 are “wishful thinking” and demanded we accept incrementalism.

The fascists don’t tell their people that. They take power, smash everything, and even give their supporters some of what they want. They don’t tell them to suck it up and accept crumbs. They aim for big things and do whatever they can to achieve them. It’s why they gain followers when all reason and logic say they shouldn’t have this level of support. People long for leadership and for somebody to be open about what they believe in. It perversely explains a lot of Donald Trump’s support. He’s openly corrupt and they accept it because he’s not hiding it. He states a goal, no matter how grotesque it is (mass deportation, terrorizing the populations of large cities), and he is seen to follow up on it. We hate those things because they are morally evil, illegal, and counterproductive, but he maintains a baseline of support because he stands for something.

The Cowardly Eight™, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, and so many more in Democratic leadership have not stood by anyone. They’ve thrown minority groups to the wolves. They promised to be tougher on the border and immigration than the guy who’s recreated the Nazi SS within ICE. They abandoned trans kids, who weren’t even thought about by everyday Americans five years ago until the fascists turned them into a punching bag for the supposed immorality of the left, and now those kids and their parents are going through hell because of hate campaigns against them, care restrictions, and banishment from athletics. They refused to let Palestinians into the DNC last year for fear they’d “make a scene,” even though their only grievance was that their government was providing the weapons used to perpetuate the genocide of their families and friends in Gaza and the West Bank. When Donald Trump accused Haitian immigrants of eating the dogs and cats from their neighbors, Harris, Schumer, Jeffries—none of them could be bothered to fly to Springfield, Ohio and appear on camera showing support for these innocent people. The only crime of these Haitians was to be maligned in a video a racist freakshow posted to social media making these wild accusations.

To everyone involved in this unilateral and appalling surrender, including the incompetent leadership, I have three words for you: RESIGN. GET OUT. You have doomed us by showing there is no principle Democrats won’t abandon if Trump bullies the nation enough. The hell with all of you. You betrayed America. You betrayed all of us who believed in you. You betrayed the very cause of democracy by selling out to a wannabe tyrant by further enhancing his sense of imperviousness.

Here is my mission statement going forward: I am supporting challengers. I am declaring bright red lines for any candidate that I donate money to, volunteer for, or otherwise help in the next year. If they are against these, if they won’t even consider these, then the hell with them too.

• A promise to vote for new leadership in whichever house of Congress they are running for. No more seniority rules. No more choosing the gerontocrats over the skilled youngsters when they’ve got terminal cancer or early onset dementia. We need leaders, not craven careerists.

• A pledge to vote for an immediate ban on insider stock trading by Congress. No more trusts, no more managed investment funds. No spouses or kids handling it and “not telling you what activity is taking place.” Sell your stocks, and purchase no others until you leave office. You’re in public service, not private enrichment.

• Require AIPAC to register under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act). They need to play by the rules and go through the same scrutiny as everyone else.

• Disavow AIPAC funding to your campaign.

• Support the prosecution of every criminal in the executive branch from Donald Trump on down for the dozens of laws they’ve shattered. From trading bribes for pardons to accepting luxury jets as personal gifts to using ICE as a Gestapo and violating the rights of millions, this cannot be waved off. That’s been tried once and it failed. We warned you after January 6th.

• Refuse to vote in favor of supplying any more weapons to Israel until they actively end their genocide and depart their illegal settlements, returning all of their post-1967 land back to its rightful owners.

• Support statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. Alternatively, hold a referendum on independence for Puerto Rico. It’s 2025, and colonies are so passé.

These are starting points. I also believe constitutional amendments badly need to be returned to the forefront of American politics. We need the ability to hold recall elections for Senators so they remember who they are answerable to. We need an end to the Electoral College. We need a vastly reformed Supreme Court, one that isn’t so partisan, reactionary, and above the law (Sorry, Uncle Clarence, no more yachts and RVs for you!).

We need the Equal Rights Amendment to protect every gender, sex, ethnicity, and disability from discrimination. We need the guaranteed right to prosecute any president for criminal behavior, past or present. We need to reduce the conviction threshold for impeachment. It hasn’t worked once in our history even when it was completely called for (Johnson, Trump). If you can’t ever convict someone in an impeachment trial, then it’s a toothless article. Laws that cannot be enforced in any meaningful way cease to matter. We need guaranteed reapportionment of House seats that properly and fairly recognize the population where it is at, and end this unfair distribution of a fixed number of seats that leaves large cities underrepresented or vast geographical swathes covered by a single person. Neither is good for democracy.

Incrementalism is dead. The nation’s very existence is in danger at the hands of these thugs. A lawful revolution is necessary for our democracy and freedom to live. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez gets it. Bernie Sanders gets it. Zohran Mamdani gets it. Mallory McMorrow gets it. To Democrats who are wavering or stuck in the old ways, either get on board to save America or your names will only be spoken in Hell when it’s all over.

I couldn’t quite tell you when the first time I heard Bruce Springsteen on the radio. I do know, that as a child of the 1980s, Born in the USA was inescapable, and if anyone asked me as a kid who I listened to, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Van Halen were the answers. Now, when I say listened to, that means about a half dozen songs total between the three, because I didn’t pay close attention to music outside of that until middle school.

As I grew older, that would change. MJ would fade from my scene, but Springsteen grew larger within it. A football teammate, Pat Macek, created our highlight video in 1997, and he put the classic Glory Days on there for our homecoming game. The match was lit. I suddenly realized I wanted to listen to so much more from the man who I’d only known for three songs up until that point: Born in the USA, Streets of Philadelphia, and Secret Garden (from the Jerry Maguire soundtrack). I began buying his cassettes (playing CDs in your car in the 90s was a nightmare) and listening often enough that I started wearing some of them out.

In 1999, the E Street Band reunion tour with Bruce was announced, and tickets went on sale the morning of my high school graduation party. We had to go around and pick up catering and balloons, but my dad said he’d get the tickets if I ran the errands. DEAL. I drove to all the different places, and then came back and picked him up from Harmony House. Kids, once upon a time, we had to stand in line at record stores to purchase tickets to concerts. Shocking, I know! About two weeks before the show, we were having dinner at the kitchen table with a little TV in the corner that had the local news on, as always, and they said the show was postponed from its original date on August 17th to September 8th. That change, disappointing at the time because it meant that I’d be attending after I started college and had to worry about classes in the morning, took on a whole different meaning soon thereafter.

My father died on August 17th, 1999.

Three weeks later, on September 9th, I was at the Palace of Auburn Hills with one of my best friends, Jeff, instead of my father. It was both the first time I’d gotten to do something that made me smile since my dad had passed, and yet, when Bruce was singing Factory, I burst into tears. My dad had worked the factory life, all the way until the end, and Bruce’s lyrics, about his own father, resonated so deeply with me.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life

End of the day, factory whistle cries
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight
It’s the working, the working, just the working life

I recovered afterwards, but that was an emotional gut punch. Since that night, I’ve always declared that it was the best concert I’d ever attended, but I’ve never had just one reason I’ve stuck with. Was it because they played for three-and-a-half hours without an opening act and tore the house down? Was it because it was my father’s final gift to me? Was it the emotional connection with the lyrics of one of the songs and my life? I still can’t answer that question.

Since that night, a lot has transpired, including the release of Bruce’s memoir, Born to Run. He spent seven years writing it himself, determined to tell his story his way. By that point I had religiously listened to the music of Bruce Springsteen for a quarter century, and I still was amazed at how much I did not know. The lyrics to Independence Day made it clear that Bruce’s relationship with his father was rocky, but the memoir filled in the lines with a depth that we did not know. It was extraordinarily brave of him to commit that to paper.

I don’t claim to have any special relationship with any artist, but after finishing Born to Run, it felt clear to me that there was some sort of cosmic link between our lives—fathers who weren’t able to express their love in a healthy way when we were young, who worked in factories to try to ensure a good life for their children, depression and anxiety that really grabbed ahold of us when we were young adults—and I could not fail to note that Bruce’s struggles, the ones that also birthed Nebraska, happened right as I came into the world. It was at that same time, months after I was born, that right after having a baby boy, my father was laid off from his factory job during the 1982 recession, a job he would not regain for close to three years. Looking back with the perspective of history, I think it was just a dark time for many people, in so many different ways, and that darkness was represented in fashion (dark brown had a far too lengthy moment), in world affairs (resumption of Cold War violence and arms buildups), and, more directly, in Springsteen’s music. From 1978 through 1982, his songs took on a moroseness both direct (Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Drive All Night, Open All Night) and indirect (lyrics for The River, Johnny 99, Reason to Believe, Highway Patrolman, Nebraska, Atlantic City, Downbound Train, and more). They are haunting, gripping, incredible art. I wish I could say that my belief in a cosmic connection meant I’d contributed the level of art to humanity as Bruce Springsteen has, but I never reached the same levels of creative brilliance.

That was an admittedly long prologue to set up Tuesday, my 44th birthday, when my wife Andrea and I went to see Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere at the theatre. I’d been very excited to see the film because it starred the two Jeremys, Strong and Allen White, and Stephen Graham, all of whom are fantastic actors. Moreover, it had the blessing of Bruce himself, who was out promoting the film everywhere, it seemed. I expected a great film. What I did not expect was how deeply director/screenwriter Scott Cooper would delve into Springsteen’s soul, the depression that overwhelmed him because of his inability to form good relationships, the anxiety he felt about making the leap into superstardom, the hurt that unresolved issues with his father from when he was a child left him with. It’s one thing to read about the alcoholic, mentally unstable father, and quite another to watch Stephen Graham bring those dark forces inside of Douglas Springsteen to life.

Without giving away too much, there’s a scene where Bruce is very vividly reliving all of these feelings, flashing through different sequences, and then Cooper slows to a shot where the adult Bruce gazes upon his father from twenty-five years ago, and the younger Douglas turns to him from his bottle at the table. Their eyes lock, and Bruce says, “I just wanted to hear your voice again,” before walking down a hallway, and I lost it. I stifled the sobs that were pushing against my chest because I didn’t want to disturb anyone else in the theatre. Instead, tears flowed down my cheeks and I shook in my seat as I held back the urge to completely fall apart. For anyone who has lost a parent or both of them, as I have, there’s things that you hold on to as long as you can, so the loss does not feel so permanent, so final. You don’t want the hole inside of your heart to be so vast, and you cling to whatever you can to avoid it growing. And yet, because time and memory are fickle, you can’t keep them, especially if the memories are not preserved on some sort of physical media. They slip away to a buried subconscious.

Over twenty-six years have passed since my father left this Earth, long enough now that I do not remember the sound of his voice. When White, as Springsteen, uttered those six words, the emotional force was so violent that any time I’ve thought about it since has brought me to tears all over again. I struggled so long and so hard as a child to feel my father’s love, and it wasn’t that he didn’t have it inside of him, but he didn’t know how to demonstrate that love. He wasn’t a bad person, he didn’t drink or smoke or hit my mother or any of those things—he was just incapable for well over a decade of being able to process his emotions in a healthy fashion. That meant that he set goals that I could not possibly meet, and my failure to meet them led to punishments that a child could not comprehend the reason for. His mother, my grandmother, who spent a lot of time watching me as a child since both my parents worked, frequently intervened to tell him he was being unreasonable, but it didn’t stick beyond that moment. The cycle repeated itself often, leaving both of us unhappy and me avoiding him as often as possible.

This was all compounded by the fact that I was a very high IQ child who was experiencing developmental issues—ADHD that wasn’t diagnosed because it wasn’t recognized by the psychiatric world at the time, a speech impediment that kept me from saying my own name correctly, and bouts of anger or depression, which a child shouldn’t have the way I did. We know now that anger and depression are often tied to ADHD and other conditions, but again, the diagnostics for these problems were in their infancy when I was showing the symptoms. I was simply considered willful, which amplified all of the issues my father had in how to communicate with me, or set realistic rules and goals. Sprinkle in some of the horrible advice proffered by people like James Dobson1 and instead of being treated for my issues, I was disciplined repeatedly. It took years of counseling together and a full year he had to spend at home from two hip replacements for us to finally bridge that chasm between us, for him to see that I wasn’t a rebellious child and for me to see that he did love me quite a lot.

I’m so grateful that the final five years of his life were ones where I could look back not in anger, or fear, or disappointment, but with happiness. All I ever wanted growing up was his love and for him to be proud of me. When he died, I knew he was proud of me, because he was beaming after my senior awards night right before graduation and told me how thrilled he was. He volunteered to work the all-night senior party after graduation, too, which was the sort of school event he usually had not volunteered for. It meant so much to me how many of my friends and classmates came up to me during that night to say how nice my dad was. When he died later that summer, the support I received was incredible. And in the aftermath of it, for a large part of the subsequent year, it was Bruce Springsteen’s music of that time period, written in his own depression, struggling with the memories of his father, that I turned to so I could grieve properly.

The feelings of loss never disappear. I’ve cried more about my father in the last forty-eight hours than I have in years. Deliver Me From Nowhere hit something deep in my heart, reopening all of the complex emotions that marked our relationship, and adding yet more threads to the connection between he, I, and Bruce Springsteen.

Anyone who regularly writes knows that it is hard work. Some days, even weeks, you lose your “voice,” a malady that I’ve been dealing with for the past few weeks. Every time I began to write something, I couldn’t complete it. I couldn’t find my way past an introduction or an idea, and I’d give up and walk away.

When it comes to the spraytanned sleazebag in the White House, though, eventually there’s going to be something that helps me rediscover my voice.

It’s not just that I’m angry. I think most people watching this happen are angry. The man of a million broken promises said he wouldn’t touch the current White House at all with his plans to further turn it into Mar-A-Lago North. Then he said a few days ago it would just be the lobby that would be replaced. Now, today, suddenly they have to tear down a structure that was commissioned at America’s 125th birthday and finished two years later. Not renovate, not modify, destroy. It’s an apt metaphor for what this wannabe dictator, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago (to borrow the name coined by Esquire’s Charles Pierce), is doing to our country.

It also runs a lot deeper than what one would think at first glance.

It’s not just that Donald Trump is destroying America’s stature in the world, its economic strength, its respect, or its reliability. What he’s doing, what he’s inflicted upon this nation since he descended his gold escalator a decade ago, is a deep wound upon our soul. There are many days that I’ve openly said I hate this nation and everything we’ve become, an emotion that springs up from me because I grew up as a child of Reagan’s America, which on its face was about freedom and democracy and welcoming immigrants to this country. I believed, the same way I believed deeply in the Catholic Church as a child, and as a young adult my faith in this country and in that church was forever broken by its deep betrayal of everything I’d been taught as a child.

At least the Church has tried to redeem itself in the last decade.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has reveled in what he’s been able to accomplish. His poisoned brain coming up with poisonous words to enfeeble the people of America. He has successfully convinced a substantial minority of this country (do not be confused, dear reader, by the difference in winning a majority of those who voted with a majority of everyone) to go along with his every action, to support him even when he’s harming their livelihoods and their families.

From the idiotic ramblings during press conferences when thousands died each day from a pandemic to turning the White House into his convention stage (illegal) to leading a failed insurrection against the legitimate government (very illegal) to stealing classified nuclear weapons documents (so illegal that most people disappear down a black hole for that), to constantly questioning any result where he does not get his way, the man has slashed at the remaining bonds we still had as Americans. He’s turned the presidency into a personal piggy bank, and his base shrugs. The billionaires and oil sheikhs are openly bribing him and they clap for him. He’s now demanding that the government which he leads as head of state pay him $230,000,000 for the “crime” of prosecuting him for the many criminal acts he committed. There is nothing now that is not politicized and divided, and the media has largely given up trying to tell the truth, relying instead of a formula of “everything is the same” when it clearly is not.

Now, with our collective national bonds in tatters, one of the few things remaining that we all believed in, the White House, the People’s House, is being mangled by the manchild who wants to be king. He is destroying property that he does not own, that he did not get permission to change, during a government shutdown in which welfare benefits, Social Security checks, and so many other vital government services are closed. He has shown no interest in reopening the government, preferring, as all wannabe kings do, to rule by fiat. The Congress, and especially the House, refuse to rein him in when a thousandth of a percent of this behavior from Joe Biden or Barack Obama would’ve led to an impeachment vote within hours. Speaker Mike Johnson, a true freak, speaks of how busy he is when all he’s done is go on TV and lie about literally everything. He refuses to bring Congress back into session, which thanks to the Constitution, only he can do. All the parts of that document that his Dear Leader is dumping on, though, Johnson can’t be bothered to pay attention to or comment on.

Republicans, who control every branch of government, who have perverted the country in ways I never thought possible, are bleating that Democrats, who hold no power, are responsible for this shutdown. Very few people are buying it, because math is still math (somehow), and everyone knows what the math is on this. They refuse to hold the mad king to account, are heaping blame on those who can do very little, and continue to give away their constitutional power so they can have a gold star from the gold-obsessed goblin serving as President.

Over seven million people protested on Saturday, the largest since the height of the Vietnam War movement in 1970, and it still has failed to penetrate the thinking of these charlatans cosplaying as Christians that we do not want a king. We, the people of America, do not want the White House to be a gaudy palace (Trump’s “makeover” of the Oval Office with gold leaf everywhere is vomit-inducing) with our history demolished so a wannabe king can have his wannabe Versailles ballroom. America was founded on the principle, above all, that we shall not have a monarch. This week’s actions show the necessity of fighting ever harder against MAGA’s hostile crowning of King Trump before America’s 250th birthday next summer.