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.

It’s remarkable how quickly listeners around the world have taken Taylor Swift’s twelfth album, The Life of A Showgirl, and jammed it into their preconceived notions and worldviews. An album written from her emotional mountaintop, both personally and professionally, the twelve tracks [Taylor’s numerology firmly in play here] are an ode to her personal joy, along with some cosplay moments in different roles: having a conversation with legendary film star Elizabeth Taylor in Elizabeth Taylor (or, depending on your viewpoint, writing it from Elizabeth’s viewpoint), mentoring Sabrina Carpenter in the title track, and inhabiting the mind of Scooter Braun on Father Figure (trust me, it’s there if you look closely).

I waited until I’d had a chance to listen a few times and listen to Taylor do some interviews before I wrote this, because over the years, I’ve found that it’s important to know what the artist thought and felt when creating the art. Consumers of art have a tendency to impress their perceptions upon the art, and it’s often said that art is, indeed, what we perceive it to be. When it comes to Taylor Allison Swift, however, everything she creates is done with purpose, which makes her input important when analyzing the output of her creativity.

From a musical perspective, there are a lot of enjoyable rhythms on this album. The chorus on The Fate of Ophelia is an earworm, as is Opalite’s. I’ve found myself humming Opalite a number of times over the last few days—it also forms a lovely bookend with Actually Romantic. Opalite shimmers with a distinct late-90s female rock hue that channels Natalie Imbruglia and Sixpence None The Richer, while Actually Romantic casually strolls in with the cheeky vibe and rhythm of Wheatus’ Teenage Dirtbag.

Speaking of the late 1990s, Wood is built on a brash guitar lick that reminds me a lot of Mariah Carey’s Heartbreaker (Jay-Z version). I’m not going to criticize Taylor for “third-grade lyrics” or “juvenile behavior that’s beneath her,” as some other hipster critics did on Friday. She’s clearly in love with Travis and all of his equipment, and wanted the world to know about it. Heartbreaker was a much, much better song lyrically, but Wood’s staying power (no pun intended) begins and ends with its very danceable music, and makes for an enjoyable song, albeit one I’ll never sing along to at any future concerts. Travis Kelce is a good dude, but I don’t need to sing about his junk.

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A common theme of the post-Charlie Kirk assassination dialogue has been the idea that “we need to engage on issues in good faith” and “we need to have civil dialogue, especially about the issues that divide us.” What I find to be particularly wild is that Ezra Klein, a Jewish center-left opinion writer for the New York Times, has especially dug in on this issue, and I have yet to find any evidence of the obvious query being placed in front of him: Do you believe that you should have civil dialogue with somebody who shouts “Death to all Jews?” Would you have civil dialogue with an SS ober-gruppenfũhrer?

Extreme example? Of course it is. But it’s not unrealistic, especially in this current environment where anti-Semitism has been building to a fever pitch for a decade, where Israel’s government is prosecuting a campaign of genocide in Gaza, where anyone who looks Hispanic can be detained by our modern-day Gestapo known as ICE, and where the government is talking about transgender people being stripped of constitutional rights using language that sounds exactly like Nazis talking about Jews in 1935 Germany.

We are not required to confer legitimacy upon evil ideas, nor should we be. If you think that black women are less intelligent genetically, leave. If you think we should let the government force critics off the airwaves because they don’t like it, that’s unconstitutional and by virtue of that, it is also illegitimate. If you think that we should be allowed to deport people to concentration camps or torture sites, what the fuck is wrong with you? That is not an idea that deserves to be taken seriously and it should not be treated as such.

If you think the President is a king with no accountability, when we literally founded this nation on the premise of not answering to a king, no matter what the MAGA Six on the Supreme Court says, that is not a serious, legitimate idea. If you believe that millions of doctors engaged in a conspiracy to cover up a small percentage of children getting autism from vaccines, and the truth tellers are a long-term drug addicted narcissist and a mediocre actress, seek help. You’re arguing for a position with no evidence, against decades of scientific study, and one in which the disease predates the supposed causation, and I’m supposed to treat those positions equally?

Oh, before I forget, should I take this seriously? Is this a position deserving of engagement?

“Is this a call for violence?” the third paragraph says. “Yes. Explicitly it is.”

“I want blood in the streets,” he added in the column, which ran with the headline “Enough Is Enough … I Choose VIOLENCE!”

Mr. Ingersoll also lays out specific situations in which he says violence should be used. If a progressive activist takes a sign away at a public debate, “She gets instantly clotheslined,” Mr. Ingersoll wrote. “I don’t care if police are present. Do it anyway. In fact, be wildly disproportionate.”

“Measure it in blood if necessary,” he added. “Change requires pain, and you’re either taking it or inflicting it.”

This has been the last thirty years of conservative politics and the entire right-wing media project: advancing false statements, bad faith critiques, racist pathologies, conspiracies about expertise, with the occasional call for full-blown violence. It is all aimed at tearing down every foundational piece of society that allows for a functional nation, and for what? Why have they pushed this so hard, and destroyed so much of the fabric that keeps America together? So billionaires can become trillionaires? So a bunch of racist white Southerners who still aren’t over losing the Civil War can run the country—and claim the mantle of Jesus while doing it? So Peter Thiel, one of the Afrikaner claque of right-wing racist chuds from that ugly apartheid family tree, can force AI down our throats because “the antichrist will destroy us if we don’t?”

We, as Americans, have been fed a gospel of hate by bad actors who wish to keep us divided while they ravage this planet, deplete our resources, and will then flee to their bunker complexes where they’ve got the ability to wait out the collapse of society. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, David Sacks, Jeff Bezos—they are plundering our wealth and our resources. They are spending ungodly amounts of cash to convince us to connive in our own destruction. The AI data centers are destroying water tables and polluting small towns. They program their AI products to reflect their credo of greed, hate and selfishness. They force it into our lives through Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini and Grok and ChatGPT and every other shoddy, half-baked, ill-designed “intelligence” showing up in places we do not need it and in ways we did not ask for.

It has utterly shocked me that there has not been more reporting on the fact that Musk, Sacks, Thiel, and Roelof Botha (grandson of the last apartheid foreign minister of South Africa) co-founded PayPal together. Thiel was born in divided Germany and grew up in a community in South Africa where they greeted each other with Heil Hitler salutes. Musk went to all-white schools in Pretoria, with a deeply racist father (who still lives there) and a grandfather who helped architect apartheid in the country before dying in a plane crash. Botha is the descendant of another founding family of apartheid and continues to argue that Afrikaners are the real victims of that nasty half-century in human history. Sacks was born in South Africa and then grew up in Tennessee in a South African expat community known for its racism and opposition to civil rights.

These are the people who put the money into the “institutes” and “think tanks” and other nonprofits that churn out the sort of crap Charlie Kirk loved to peddle on social media, on his speaking tours, and on his podcast. He wasn’t the only one, just a particularly skilled practitioner of this trade. These outlets swarm people with tawdry, ignorant, and downright angry ideas that influence our discourse through their sheer volume and frequency. Steve Bannon, the godfather of the current methods for purveying this junk (and indeed, the owner of the media outlet that hosted Kirk’s show daily), said in 2018, “The opposition party [Democrats] don’t matter. The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with that is to flood the zone with shit.” In other words, they can’t fact check you if you overwhelm them with too much to fact check.

They want us always arguing, always angry, always divided, while they reduce our arable land, destroy our freshwater sources, kill off undesirables through wars and police state actions, and turn shared resources into a distant memory. This is why they are advocating for these “techzone cities” or “government-free zones.” It’s the next step. Create parts of the planet where there is no authority but their whims, where they don’t have to pay taxes, where there’s no public utilities, where they control everything. DOGE came and went, having permanently wrecked the parts of our government that ameliorate the terrible conditions of those in poverty, in resource-poor regions, who suffer from famine and war. They wrecked people’s faith in their basic programs like Medicaid and Social Security. Once they’ve destroyed the alternative, it’s a lot easier to force you to accept their feudalistic society.

People like Ezra Klein need to wake up. If you want civil debate, start with ideas that aren’t designed to destroy civility altogether and people who constantly act in bad faith. Call it out for what it is: bullshit.

Charlie Kirk did not lead his public life with grace, to put it mildly. I detested his politics, detested that he became wealthy by spreading lies to benefit white supremacy, detested that he told people that empathy was bad.

I can believe all of those ideas above and also believe that his murder was atrocious. It was an assassination, a single targeted shot at his carotid artery that killed him as surely as Oswald’s rifle shot to John F. Kennedy did on November 22, 1963. Just like Kennedy, Kirk may have made it to the hospital, but there was no saving him. Despite how many times that assassinations or near assassinations have taken place in this country, directed at politicians and public figures, we continue to do nothing of substance.

We are currently enduring a two-year period in which two attempts were made on the life of Donald Trump, in which a conspiracist shot up the Centers for Disease Control, in which a conservative activist murdered two Minnesota lawmakers and family members, and now in which Mr. Kirk is now dead, almost simultaneously with a school shooting in Colorado by a teen boy radicalized by far-right provocateurs like…Charlie Kirk. Mr. Kirk himself helped organize the “protest” in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, before it morphed into the violent insurrection. He praised the attempt on the life of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. He recently called for violence upon transgender people. He said that gun deaths are a regrettable part of the right to own guns.

I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t violent rhetoric from corners of the left. I know it’s out there. But it was nonetheless astonishing to see two completely different worlds out there in the immediate aftermath of this shooting. On Bluesky, a largely center-to-far-left platform, my entire timeline was people saying, “Don’t cheer, don’t post anything violent, don’t say anything you’ll regret later.” It took at least an hour for something vaguely resembling celebration to show up. Meanwhile, on the platform formerly known as Twitter, violent threats to destroy the left and transgender people flourished immediately. Posts went around saying that everyone on Bluesky was celebrating (again, not at all true). Jason Chaffetz went on Fox News before Kirk’s heart had even stopped to say it had to have been a transgender shooter. That has proven wrong, as Tyler Robinson, a Mormon from a MAGA-supporting family that soured on their politics, is apparently the assassin. This has not prevented the same bad faith actors desperately portraying Robinson’s roommate as transgender and his lover…something that has no independent confirmation (it’s hard to take the FBI, run by a cross-eyed troll who helped build the MAGAsphere, at its word these days).

That night, Donald Trump went into the Oval Office and joined his old aide Steve Bannon’s online show to declare "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we're seeing in our country & it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity." The same man was silent when conservatives murdered people on the left, including the Minnesota lawmakers murdered by a MAGA supporter in June. He cheered on the insurrection four years ago; indeed, he helped stoke it. He has used violent rhetoric for a decade, but blames the left for violence now.

The irony is palpable.

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Since that night, neo-Nazis and other far-right scumbags have been getting people fired from jobs across the country for the crime of…repeating Kirk’s words in social media posts. An Office Depot employee was fired for refusing to print laudatory flyers for a Kirk memorial. The Justice Department began openly threatening any left-leaning organization with terrorism charges, and today the chairman of the FCC went on another far-right podcast to blatantly threaten ABC with fines and license removals if they didn’t remove Jimmy Kimmel from the air. Kimmel has long been a scathing critic of Trump, just like Stephen Colbert, and just like CBS did to Colbert, ABC capitulated.

Within four hours.

Kimmel has been suspended “indefinitely,” which is PR-speak for “until we figure out how bad our exposure is legally by violating our contract.” Sinclair Broadcasting, yet another far-right conglomerate of which there are far too many of in this country, said that its ABC stations would air a tribute to Kirk on Friday in Kimmel’s usual spot, and said that they would not air Kimmel ever again unless he apologized and donated to Turning Point USA, Kirk’s advocacy group.

You might think, boy, Kimmel must’ve said something truly awful to get this sort of overkill, and you would be sorely mistaken. Kimmel uttered an incredibly mild condemnation, not even of Kirk, but of the fascists using his death as an opportunity to turn to violence against the left and crush dissenters. He said that in between all of the finger-pointing, they even found a little time to grieve for Kirk. That is it. That is all that Jimmy Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk, and the FCC acted as if he’d uttered about a dozen f-bombs on broadcast television during a children’s show.

I won’t reiterate what has become an incredibly worn-out maxim about not capitulating in advance. It is clear that, despite an unpopular president enforcing a deeply harmful agenda and creating his own personal Gestapo, corporations have chosen to throw in with fascism. The cowardice reeks like New York’s Fresh Kills landfill. These people have seen Trump repeatedly renege on his agreements for a lifetime, let alone this year, and believe they can somehow come out on top. This bloated fascist gasbag, who has recklessly driven the economy to teeter for months with his lunatic tariff policies, who is squeezing the rest of us in the workforce out of being able to afford to live, and who could cost these corporate cowards everything with one ill-considered tweet, is somehow winning against people who have the upper hand.

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It’s unsurprising, of course. The corporate monoliths couldn’t even keep their pledge to not donate funds to election deniers after the failed insurrection. They could have prevented the fall of democracy by simply choosing to not support the politicians destroying it, because it is only through the grace of those corporate donors that the airheads dominating Congress can outspend more qualified opponents to reach that particular hall of power. The lobbyists for those corporations decided after a year, after normalcy began to return to governance, to turn funding back on as if the people they’d stopped funding had changed their ways when every public statement they made demonstrated their commitment to the Big Lie. The lobbyists believed Trump was headed to jail, so they could return to the old ways, dangerously ignorant of the fact that those ways had been burned to the ground by far more people than just Mango Mussolini.

The less charitable opinion of these lobbyists would be that they preferred fascism, and I’m sure at least some of their paymasters (see: Sinclair, Miriam Adelson, Stephen Schwarzman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk) do think that way. One only need look at Target, though, to see the dangers for these corporations. Target deeply angered much of their core shopping audience by bending to the racist administration demands to remove all diversity programs and products, and has been losing money since as a result of a coordinated and sustained boycott taking place completely under the radar. Other large companies and retailers are also likely to suffer. I imagine the cancellations of Disney+ will be substantial, and Disney/ABC is deeply invested in that platform’s success.

In other media, Twitter/X has lost an immense amount of users since Elon Musk steadily turned it into the Daily Stormer after buying it in 2022. The Washington Post has lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers since they began their purge of Black voices this year from their op-ed section and driving out quality journalism to kiss up to the molting President.

Enough is enough.

Constitutional rights, human rights, they are not privileges to be bestowed upon us by a ruling class. They come to us from the rule of law, from centuries of human advancement, and depending on one’s belief system, derive from Yahweh/God/Allah/Jesus Christ. The very definition of a right is that it is immutable, not to be bargained, traded, or stripped. It was the literal basis for founding this nation, and far too many have utterly debased its meaning and our principles by forgetting it.

Furthermore, there has to be some degree of decency for society to function. Running around murdering each other only leads to civil war. We have been here before, in the late 1850s, and it was bad enough that James Buchanan sat passively by and did nothing to stop it. Now, 175 years later, the president is a man who is throwing gasoline on the fire. Maybe he thinks that he won’t get burned. I’m sure Charlie Kirk thought he’d never be shot by a sniper, either. The irresponsible incitement to violence has to stop, and by every quantitative measure, it is incitement driven by the right wing. You know, the people who built gallows on January 6, 2021 outside of Congress. The people repeatedly being arrested for threats on the lives of Democratic politicians. The people murdering legislators. The people who tried to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer here in Michigan. The people responsible for the overwhelming majority of political violence and terrorism in this country for the past two decades. You know that set of facts is true because the Trump administration deleted the report from the DHS website. Can’t have that pesky evidence lying around, right?

The vast majority of us on the left are more than happy to be nonviolent, because we condemn murder irrespective of who is the victim of it, you know, the way God commanded. The right has, repeatedly, loudly, and publicly refused to do the same, despite their equally loud claims to be true Christians. I could cite all sorts of Scripture to demonstrate what charlatans they are, but it’d be a fool’s errand. It won’t change their behavior. The only way America finds its way out of this spiral of violence is to refuse to partake in it. My fear is that is far easier said than done.

When I was young, I idolized my Uncle Ron. He was a high-powered attorney and spoke with authority, and he engaged me with respect on questions I asked about various issues, even though I was not an adult. He didn’t treat me as a child, and would share with me court filings of his when I asked about a case, believing that I had the ability to understand. I would work at his law office from time to time assisting with office tasks or research, such as locating specific case volumes in the law library, or searching briefs for specific terms and highlighting them. Small stuff, but to a young teenager, it mattered. I once strongly considered going to law school as his daughter did, but instead I headed down the path of a writer. Not that I got anywhere professionally with it, despite my best efforts, but I tried my hardest and stay active as a writer. One day, it may still happen for me. I may yet become a professional writer. Persistence is important, and I’ve always believed in it. I’ve also spent my life believing in the law, because of my uncle, and the faith he held in it.

When I look out at the world right now, I find myself extremely torn. I’m naturally someone who bends very far along the moral arc of justice. I do not give up in situations where I believe I’ve been wronged, or when others are wronged. I believe in fighting against any abuse of power, small or large. I recognize that part of what allows me to do that is that as a cis white man, I get much more leeway from society than many others do when they choose to fight. There is supposed to be equality under the law, but right now, it is getting to be as bad as the Civil War period. It is why I understand and greatly sympathize for those who are afraid, vulnerable, and looking over their shoulders wondering if today is the day some masked government thugs are chasing them so they can be tied up and thrown into a random vehicle, then sent to a jail without access to a lawyer, or a phone call, or any of the rights we are promised by the Constitution. It is so much harder to fight when those are the obstacles facing you, and every single person who lives under that threat is a hero in my eyes.

These threats are America’s most dangerous enemy right now—the subversion of the legal system makes it far more difficult to believe in the law—and the enemy is indeed within. There is little to separate our legal system from that of any other nation any longer. While injustices occur in any legal system, because injustice is an inherent part of anything built upon the rule of law. Injustice cannot be avoided under any method of rule, or any legal system built upon the rule of law. Injustice is an inherent part of life itself. Good people seek to minimize injustices, and both the enforcement of the law equally and the construction of the rule of law itself are methods towards that goal.

What is occurring in this country is something completely different. Anyone who serves in government takes an oath to the Constitution. They are entrusted with guarding our laws, and the legions of MAGA faithful in the government is perverting those laws. The Trump administration, top to bottom, is committing open lawfare upon the citizenry of America. Lawfare, a term coined by USAF General Charles Dunlap after the Kosovo intervention by NATO, is the use of the law as a weapon of war. They are at war with the idea of America itself, a nation inclusive of many ethnicities, genders, faiths, and ideologies. Despite the best efforts of so many, the plain language of our Declaration of Independence cannot be argued: we are all created equal. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution states that our rights are guaranteed, and all of us receive equal protection under the law.

Under Donald Trump, we are backsliding into an authoritarian regime, where the emperor’s wishes are the substitute for the rule of law. Instead of making honest attempts to honor their Constitutional oaths, his subordinates are doing their best to turn his whims, his cruelties, and his ignorant rants into law. Back when the Soviet Union existed, the KGB was called “the sword and the shield of the [Communist] Party,” and in America, ICE has become Trump’s sword in service of fascism, and Congress is shielding him by their inaction in the face of what James Madison described in Federalist No. 48 as “the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter.” What Madison described is currently happening. False emergencies are being declared to allow tyranny to descend on the American people. Cities governed by what the British system calls “the loyal opposition” have soldiers walking the streets, manning checkpoints and asking for papers from citizens, a development that this nation has never once imposed upon us. Cities governed by political allies, meanwhile, are free from this use of the military, despite far more closely meeting the criteria for deployment that this administration is using as justification.

When it comes to the Supreme Court, it’s somehow worse than Congress’s abdication. Justices are not meant to be politicians. There have always been some terrible justices in the history of the Court, but they are supposed to approach the law with a degree of respect and reverence. The MAGA Six majority has stopped doing that, choosing to blatantly ignore the law when it doesn’t suit their end goals—which miraculously coincides with nearly every time that Donald Trump simply ignores the law altogether and dares somebody to stop him. The Supreme Court is writing decisions solely based on political goals, and not interpreting the law as they should.

The repeated use of “emergency orders” and the “shadow docket” that, except for two instances, have always come down in favor of the President is a real tell that they have stopped trying to interpret the law. As I was writing this, they issued two more decisions that fly in the face of the law and of precedent. The first is the decision allowing Trump to fire Federal Trade Commissioners without cause, as an “emergency order” without ruling on the merits of the case. Why? Because on the merits, they’re wrong. The law, written in 1914, states that termination can only occur for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” None of those criteria have been met, and in fact, have not been offered by the administration. The argument that the Solicitor General has made on behalf of Donald Trump is simply that he can fire anyone from any agency whenever he chooses because he rules over the “unitary executive,” that awful chestnut left by the George W. Bush administration.

This is the third or fourth time (I’ve lost count) that there’s been a case this year where Trump fired or dismantled Congressionally-authorized agencies and the Supreme Court has granted emergency relief to allow the terminations to stand while the case is still being argued at the lower levels. They are making radical decisions to alter the law without proper procedures or even hearing evidence. If you let the terminations stand while deciding the case, even with no evidence of justification, then you are both signaling you will eventually rule on the merits in favor of the administration and declaring that evidence doesn’t matter. The merits hearings will be pro forma, since the termination has already occurred.

The second case allows ICE to resume its patrols where they can detain anyone solely on their ethnicity. If you have “appear Hispanic,” are in a location considered a “gathering place for migrant workers” and/or work in a low-wage job, they can arrest you and hold you. That isn’t evidence, it’s stereotyping. We know from court filings and news reports that ICE has repeatedly held American citizens and even deported some of them with no due process at all, a gross violation of multiple amendments to the Constitution. Children receiving cancer treatment, families of non-citizens who are citizens themselves, veterans of our military—it makes no difference to the Reichsfuhrer Stephen Miller, who is ordering ICE around despite being a mere deputy chief of staff. Miller hates any skin darker than whatever grey-white blend his pasty skin is, and wants anyone who isn’t out of this country.

Even for those detainees that ICE has eventually released, they hold them in conditions that violate basic rights, they deny access to counsel, they refuse to tell attorneys where their clients are being held, and they subject them to abuse. ICE is a violent paramilitary secret police that is solely out to terrorize the American people, and the Supreme Court has just signed off on this terror. Again, this is in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. The color of a person’s skin is not just cause for unequal treatment under the law. Five white justices and the only black KKK member, Clayton Bigsby….excuse me, Clarence Thomas (Harlan Crow’s personal Uncle Tom) have decided that if you’re Hispanic, you don’t get equal rights.

If the MAGA Six on the Court are not granting emergency relief to the administration, they simply send a case back to the district court, tell the lower courts they’re wrong, but refuse to provide an explanation. The reason for that is clear—their error is ruling against Donald Trump. If the MAGA Six cannot explain by pointing at legal precedent, legislation, or the Constitution when declaring lower court decisions are wrong, then they are not acting under the law. The Supreme Court may have the power that the law has given them, but if they cannot provide a law that supports their decisions, then they are acting illegally, and that is frightening. It makes them an equally clear and present danger to the Constitution as the MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump. Look at this graphic from June of this year. It only covers two months of rulings, but observe the difference:

This is not normal. The district courts, contrary to their portrayal by right-wing media, are divided evenly for the most part, because Reagan and both Georges Bush were able to appoint many judges. The appeals courts are tilted conservative now, thanks to Bush Jr and Trump, and yet despite all of that, both levels repeatedly found the administration to be guilty of illegality or abuses of power. The Supreme Court, the same MAGA Six justices, have been rubber-stamping Trump’s decisions without even bothering to hear evidence or decide the merits. They’re saying, “he gets to do what he wants, and maybe we’ll call it illegal in a year, but it won’t matter by then.” They politically agree with Trump and want him to succeed in his decision to rule as a king.

So while methods to legally stop the President and his Cabinet from acting outside of the boundaries of the law exist, the current situation demonstrates the shortcomings of them. The federal court system, and Congress, both have powers designed to check these abuses, but are completely abdicating their responsibilities. They are clapping like sealions because Trump is achieving the end goals the majority of both Congress and the Supreme Court want realized. It doesn’t matter, to them, what rights are being lost. They think they’ll have power and so it won’t matter if our rights are stripped.

Let me tell you something. It matters.

Today, the attacks are against Hispanics and anyone who is transgender. They consider Hispanics to be untermenschen, like the good Nazis they are, and they believe transgender people to be the same. It bears remembering that the very first burning of books in Nazi Germany was not that of the Jews, or the Socialists, but instead all of the research and writings done at the world’s first clinic for gender dysphoria, Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. The institute was founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish physician who posited that gender was a spectrum, not a binary, and separate from sex. The reason that transgender people are being treated as some new phenomenon caused by “woke” is because the Nazis destroyed the first attempt to properly diagnose and treat gender dysphoria. They set back knowledge for decades with their actions. Transgender people are considered a threat, different, a step too far for conservatives, and so they want to render them less than human.

From refusing to acknowledge their stated gender in legal documentation to openly declaring them to be sexual predators to threatening to take away their Second Amendment rights (so much for never abridging those rights, National Rifle Association!), transgender people are being scapegoated by the goverment. And while they are not, in Mencken’s phrasing, sons-of-bitches, their defense is certainly not popular or well-supported. They are an easy target because much of society finds them detestable. That is how tyranny begins. The out group or groups are persecuted first. “Illegal immigration” is nothing more than a concept we created when America began to grow too self-sufficient in melanin. It’s especially rich given that we stole this land from its native population, but such is the power of propaganda.

You may not like these people. You may not like their politics. You may think they have mental disorders or sneak in to “steal our jobs.” They still must be given full and equal protection under the law. If we allow a government to take their rights, we have created precedent for ours to follow. There is not a single authoritarian regime that stops after a certain aggregation of power. Their very existence depends on the continued aggregation of power and the denial of rights to others. There is no sacrifice that will appease them. It is incumbent on us to all be each other’s keeper, to join together against a government that seeks to reinstate the monarchy that we threw off nearly 250 years ago. If we want that anniversary date to hold meaning, if we want an America we can be proud of and one that stands up, then each and every human being deserves our support and defnse of their rights. Nobody is free unless we are all free.

For at least a decade after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the vast majority of Americans treated the arrival of the date on their calendars as an opportunity for remembrance. Where we were, what we did, who we called, how we felt, and most significantly, who we lost. It was, for a short time afterwards, considered a unifying event for the people of this nation, but by the time we reached the first anniversary, it was quite clear that unity was a mirage. The divisions that had been building—accelerated by the rapidity of technological development—burst out from the veneer holding them in and made it clear to anyone who was paying close attention that bipartisanship was a dead duck. The midterm campaign ads that fall were some of the most grotesque displays of calumnies known to political history.

Despite that black mark, for the first fifteen years afterwards, it was the one day where regardless of your political affiliations, you shut up about politics and recognized that the day was bigger than any one of us. Like many things, though, Donald Trump broke that unwritten rule in 2016 and it hasn’t been the same since.

Collectively, we have been wrong about its impact on our national story. What we should’ve understood, for a very long time now, is that it is the red line of our history. There’s a before and after to 9/11 that little else in our existence can match. Even the Civil War took a full century to ultimately shake out, as the descendants of freed slaves were still lacking their full, equal freedom. But with 9/11, the switch from what America was to what is is now was fast.

Within a couple of weeks, the Patriot Act was passed with nearly zero dissent, a harbinger of much darker legislation to come. The Department of Justice began targeting men of Arab descent, regardless of citizenship status, regardless of their religion. The Pentagon opened up detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which have never closed, and where the CIA began bending the law in torture sessions with those we captured. Black sites were opened in other nations for the same purpose, so the law could be broken there outright by government officials in interrogations. FBI agents began seizing library records in actions that recalled the Red Scare of the 1950s. A program called TIA (Total Information Awareness) was floated by the Pentagon but the public outcry was so great that it was binned…or so they said.

We were told over and over again that the government would hunt down the terrorists responsible, and that any curbing of our rights that they did was a necessary sacrifice for our safety. The Bush administration proclaimed they were protecting our freedom. A mere eighteen months almost to the day, we were invading Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or its attacks upon us, an invasion that to this day hangs heavily over our nation. Not only was it morally abominable, it was pragmatically wrong, further botched by the incompetence and hubris of the Bush administration.

One policy change that was largely overlooked at the time it occurred was that by 2007, to ensure we could continue feeding the meat grinder of our endless war, the Defense Department relaxed its restrictions on recruits or volunteers with racist or white supremacist backgrounds. There was great concern at that time expressed by former officers and civilian Pentagon officials that this would slowly eat away at military discipline while allowing dangers to our internal security to gain vital training from those it would seek to harm. We’ll come back to this later.

As these threats grew in the background, our technology accelerated. Broadband Internet spread across the country and social media began cropping up, replacing chat rooms as the arenas in which we discussed and debated current events. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr—name a niche and there was an social media site for that. Text messaging went from a niche segment of cellular phones in 2001 to the main use of those phones within just a few years. We soon had “smart” phones, too, cellphones that allowed us to stay connected to the Internet no matter where we traveled. As our lives intertwined with all of these, the intrusions into what we considered our privacy exploded as well. The government was, with the connivance of the cellular and Internet providers, scraping our data, illegally tapping calls, reading text messages, and winnowing their way silently into our lives. It was a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, until the economic collapse in September of that year forestalled any further debate on it.

And so we come to 2011, the critical juncture that set us down the path to today. Ten years after the attack on our country, the end of the 9/11 era ran headlong into the birth of a new, chaotic, decentralized kaleidoscope of dangers.

That year began with a lengthy government shutdown and a protracted fight over the budget between President Barack Obama and the Republican-controlled House. That control came on the backs of the “Tea Party” Republicans, who the establishment leaders of the party brought into higher positions of power, believing that they could control their radical beliefs. The austerity measures of the 2011 budget, while our economy was still fragile, hurt many people (myself included!) and hindered our recovery. That battle and the lack of punishment for the banking class fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, which occupied Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and were driven out of their encampment by NYPD violence after 57 days. Many of those people who participated would be lured in by conspiracies and angry Internet personalities going forward, a postdated check that would be cashed in during the 2016 election.

America finally located and executed Osama bin Laden in a military raid, putting a stamp of finality on the 9/11 era a mere twenty-four hours after the now-infamous White House Correspondents Dinner where Barack Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated Donald Trump. This occasion was the impetus for Trump’s decision to run for president in 2016. Concurrently, the social media network Twitter became a medium for Arab citizens to organize, mobilize, and overthrow multiple dictators in the region during the “Arab Spring,” most notably Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The immediacy of Twitter, a fairly recent innovation by the fledgling company, was noted and remembered for future use by dictator-in-the-wings Vladimir Putin of Russia.

The big wind-down of our Iraq invasion was at the end of 2011, and with it, we had thousands of disaffected veterans, many of whom were the less-than-stellar recruits of the later Bush years, returning to a society riven by expanding racial backlash against our first, and only, black president. These veterans were lacking the mental health care they needed, and turned to a greatly-changed Internet, where conspiracies freely flowed alongside fact, and an unhinged lunatic in Texas named Alex Jones was becoming the most viewed person on YouTube. Many of Jones’s fans were running for political office, and winning, which provided the veneer of official acceptance to many of his rantings.

As anyone who has watched the documentary Against All Enemies can attest, there were many disaffected Iraq and Afghan War veterans that were part of January 6th (including some active duty military!), or joined militias, believing sincerely that they are protecting the nation from “the danger within.” Many of these people would not have been in the military, received the training that makes them more lethal, and had the deference given to them by people who don’t know anything beyond “they’re a veteran” if this policy had not been implemented. All of the warnings were there, and they went unheeded because we did not teach history properly in American schools, and so we did not recognize what we needed to.

We did not recognize that these sorts of people helped form the Nazi coalition in 1931 and 1932. We did not think it could happen here, because we didn’t teach just how close it actually came to happening here in the 1930s, where the KKK and German immigrants joined forces to form fascist paramilitaries. Many of these fascists were able to join the National Guard in various states and learn about weapons storage depots, naval ship security procedures, and war plans for an invasion. Officers in both police forces and military branches actively sided with the fascists, helped them steal weapons or evade arrest. 20,000 people filled Madison Square Garden for an American Nazi rally. It was no blip, it was an active danger to the country, and after World War II we swept it completely under the rug. We even invited former Nazis into America because we wanted their skill sets for weapons and rockets. We didn’t teach these things, and so we were woefully underprepared for how allowing racists and fascists to join the military and fight in a war of choice against Middle Eastern peoples could, and would, spectacularly backfire on us.

These disaffected veterans are now a massive danger to American freedom, providing a fifth column of terror that can be unleashed upon the rest of us when Trump decides to consolidate his power once and for all.

Along with the above-mentioned veterans, there were disaffected workers who were left behind by the botched post-recession response and subsequent enforced austerity of the 2011-2013 budgets, joined by millions of Americans who were resentful of a Black president and then further infuriated by the Black Lives Matter movements that sprang up in 2014. These people combined together in a toxic soup that jointly decided that there was nothing that would deter them from electing Donald Trump president in 2016.

The first Trump Administration would not have been possible without 9/11. It would not have been possible without the Iraq War. It would not have been possible without massive racial backlash. He was the beneficiary of bipartisan foolishness in supporting the invasion of Iraq, and further benefited from President Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship despite a massive landslide and Republican failure in the face of every challenge it faced. It was that commitment to bipartisanship that kept Obama from going after the bankers that caused the 2008 financial crash, and his failure to do so was yet another foundational stone that enabled Trump. The crash had united Left and Right against Wall Street, and Obama whiffed on the hanging pitch over the plate.

Despite the millions protesting this very obvious fascism, the problem we face is that millions more are not rising up. Ian Kershaw, the historian who authored the definitive biography of Adolf Hitler, wrote this about Stalinism in To Hell and Back: Europe 1911-1949:

Half a million party members were recruited between 1934 and 1939. Most were poorly educated and inexperienced. These newcomers now moved in great numbers into the lower ranks of administrative authority -and they liked the taste of power, as well as the status and privileges it brought them. Supervisors, foremen and managers were needed in the factories, not just workers (Nearly 30 million peasants poured into towns from the countryside during the 1930s, attracted by the chance of increased income but unaware of their forthcoming subservience to brutal authority.) The often unbridled ambitions of low-ranking administrators could be served if they in turn served the regime. Ruthlessness for the cause merely mirrored what was happening above them. Despotic managers could, and often did, treat their charges like dirt, knowing that this would bring no sanction, indeed would be welcomed, as long as targets were met. And careers depended on those targets being met. Failure, however arbitrarily it was defined, was too grim to contemplate. It was the core of a system reliant upon millions of 'little Stalins' who made the regime work at the grass roots.

Those boldface parts are the crucial ones we need to keep in mind. There is material gain for those who support the fascism wholeheartedly. There are plenty who will gladly work at “Crocodile Concentration Camp” or whatever the Fascist Doughboy™ calls it, accepting income that they could never earn without an education anywhere else. There are plenty who will join ICE because they get to pair their unbridled ambitions with the ability to be as cruel as they want without any consequences at all. There will be no punishment by this regime for cruelty, because cruelty is their raison d’etre. America has openly become as violent, as uncaring, as cruel and arbitrary as the regimes we criticized and the terrorists we hunted.

Donald Trump holds office today because tens of millions of people willingly chose to be his accomplices. He is terrorizing this nation through the use of secret police forces, using unmarked vehicles and ski masks, jumping out and arresting people in broad daylight. He has deployed the military twice for law enforcement purposes without cause, first in Los Angeles and now in Washington, D.C. He is openly speaking of suspending elections and defying court orders. He has antagonized our allies, supported our enemies, and made over $3.4 billion for his family in illegal schemes with both foreign and domestic businesses. He is, in short, wrecking this nation from the inside.

It surpasses all of the wildest dreams of people like Osama bin Laden, who said over 20 years ago that we had adopted the policies and behaviors of the despots of the Arab world. Today our President is accepting lavish bribes from those very despots, from the investments with his son-in-law by Saudi Arabia to the billion-dollar luxury aircraft from Qatar, and ruling with an iron fist, secret police, and a rule of law increasingly tied to his paranoid, delusional whims. He is supported in this by his sycophantic, intellectually mediocre and morally bankrupt staffers like Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt, and the cabinet secretaries who also embody all of those traits, especially Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem. We are everything bin Laden accused us of now. We gave up our freedoms. We subverted our democracy. We’re locking ourselves inside our borders, destined to become North Korea with a nicer landscape.

We lost the war on terror because we lost our souls, our laws, and our principles. It wasn’t inevitable. Clearly, though, bin Laden and others like him understood our nature as Americans better than we understood it. They surmised, quite correctly, that we’d make all of the wrong choices because we had not the wit to see the world from someone else’s view and we were far too arrogant for our own good.

So now we have a new terrorist threat. The call is coming from inside the house. There are no invaders. State-sponsored terrorism is terrorism of our government against the people, and only the people, united, can stop it from continuing.