Trump and Hegseth Make the World Weirder and More Dangerous

I'm not particularly sympathetic to military officers, but I had to feel a little sorry for whatever generals made the 15 hour flight from South Korea to Washington, DC, to have a pissant little TV bitch tell them that they're fat and then watch a barely awake president blather about his signature and his problem walking down stairs when he wasn't talking about how awesome it would be for troops to kill Americans in the city streets of the United States. I mean, beyond "this could have been a fucking Zoom call," imagine spending your whole life immersed in the ethos of the military, of the (at least theoretical) discipline and respect for the Constitution, and you gotta travel until your ass is numb to listen to two dumb motherfuckers say you should forget all that and just fuck shit up because the bulbous orange blob man is ordering it.

The speech by Secretary of Defense (sorry, it's not really the Department of War until Congress makes the change) Pete Hegseth, a drunk who beat his wife, for the forced-gathered leadership of the US military yesterday veered between embarrassingly masturbatory Patton fantasies and genuinely disturbing shifts in policy. Mostly, he wasn't really speaking to the generals, who were there as set dressing for a reel on Instagram. He started by announcing, "The era of the Department of Defense is over... the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: war-fighting, preparing for war and preparing to win. Unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit. Not because we want war. No one here wants war, but it's because we love peace." Which is kind of confusing. If you're the "Department of War," that seems to indicate you're going to start, you know, wars; whereas, the Department of Defense would be more concerned with maintaining peace than waging war. I know it's all nuance and bullshit, but the fucking chest-thumping is completely ludicrous. And when was the mission of our military not "war-fighting"? Isn't that what all the guns and bombs and training are for?

Of course, every single person sitting in that room knew that, had lived that, and understood that this fucking shit-for-brains telling them that was a goddamned insult. 

So much of what Hegseth said was childish, ignorant, and deranged. "You kill people and break things for a living," he chest-pounded. "You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society. We are not an army of one. We are a joint force of millions of selfless Americans. We are warriors." Goddamn, he sounds like an incel desperate for likes while live-playing League of Legends on Twitch. Again, this fucking amateur, this pretender, this boy in grown-up clothes is saying this to hundreds of men and women who used to know exactly what the mission was but had that all scrambled for them. And let's be clear: the vast majority of people in the military, like 80-85% (if not more) are not frontline fighters. There's support staff, intelligence, logistics, maintenance, medical personnel, and more, and that's not counting the warriors whose job entails sitting in a trailer in the Nevada desert, piloting drones remotely for recon and for blowing shit up. Oh, and the IT departments that keep all that running.

Hegseth was wantonly, flagrantly insulting, whether it was his fat-shaming rant or his even stupider attack on beards (I guess those religious exemptions don't matter). And he said, "We fight not because we hate what's in front of us. We fight because we love what's behind us. You see, the Ivy League faculty lounges will never understand us, and that's okay because they could never do what you do." This moronic bitch doesn't get that a number of veterans are on Ivy League faculty, including former generals. And just calm down there, princess. It's not like defending the country is the hardest fucking concept to get your head around.

Now imagine the admiral who had to travel 20 hours from Manila to DC just to listen to a sleepy, deranged commander-in-chief talk about walking down stairs. No, seriously. Nearly an hour into his truly bizarre, disturbing, dementia-driven ramble about, fuck, I guess "stuff," Trump mocked Joe Biden for falling down stairs, which led to this extended...something...stream of consciousness? Inner monologue said out loud? Haints in his head he's having a conversation with? Honestly, I don't know...but this is really the president of the United States:

"I'm very careful when I walk downstairs, I'm on stairs like these stairs. I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn't work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don't want that. You walk nice and easy. You don't have to set any record, be cool, be cool when you walk down. But don't bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I've never seen him. Bop, bop, bop. He'd go down the stairs, wouldn't hold on. I said, it's great. I don't want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president."

That's the guy who told the leaders of the military, who have had it hammered into them and hammer it into the soldiers they command that, as very clearly stated in the US Constitution, the US military doesn't wage war against Americans on American soil, that they will wage war against Americans on American soil. Trump said, using the quaint colloquial term for the n-word, "In our inner cities, which we're going to be talking about because it's a big part of war now, it's a big part of war."

Trump described the future battles this way: "The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within...Last month I signed an executive order to provide training for quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it's the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once you're involved at all."

Every single one of those cities has seen a drop in crime. In New York City, shootings are lower than they've ever been. Murders are down. Robberies are down. If you send in troops, they'll just be picking up garbage like the National Guard soldiers are forced to do in DC because there's nothing else to fucking do because the police actually have a handle on the crime situation. Fuck reality, though. Fuck it raw.

One thing I don't get is why police unions aren't pissed off about all this talk. Yeah, we can say a lot of shit about how terrible cops are (and we should), and there are plenty of reasons that crime is down that have nothing to do with policing. But the president saying that troops need to invade cities in order to bring order is a fucking insult to the police in those cities. It's saying that they aren't doing their jobs. I mean, Christ, they already have all the military equipment they could want. It's redundant to send the actual army in. 

Unless, of course, your goal isn't to stop crime but to pretend bad shit is going on so you can take over the cities and intimidate the population and be the mad king you were always destined to be. 

It probably doesn't need to be said, but one thing that our military is not trained to do is be police (except for the ones trained as military police), and every general there knows it. I'm sure there are military leaders who are batshit crazy and would love to use "inner cities" as a "training ground" to attack "the enemy from within." But most aren't. Most know that if they are ordered to, it will be time to decide whether or not they are loyal to the obvious dementia-sufferer-in-chief or to the Constitution and the country.

Trump and Hegseth essentially undermined everything the United States is supposed to stand for, and they admit they don't give a fuck about history, about stability, about the rest of the world. In their very weird and very disturbed way, they have made life more dangerous for everyone on earth.

And now that Trump has declared that we are in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, that's going to be his and Hegseth's and squamous tumor Stephen Miller's excuse to level what's left of the country they have already wrecked.

Kimmel's Suspension Isn't the Worst Thing Trump Has Done, But It Should Scare the Hell Out of You

It's really important to get this part right: Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was not insulting or even talking about Charlie Kirk when he said on Monday that last weekend we saw "the MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." Under pressure from the federal government, ABC, owned by Disney, suspended Kimmel's show indefinitely, which is censorship by any measure. The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, who looks like the creepy uncle who touches you too much, claimed that the real issue is that Kimmel "misled" people on the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, Kirk's murderer, and that's not allowed.

Except that's not what the actual words there are doing. What Kimmel and his writers were saying is that Donald Trump and the entirety of MAGA world is distancing itself from Robinson. We don't know what Robinson believes. We have various hints, but we don't know. Before we knew even the small amount we know now, the MAGA media machine, including the president and his administration, accused everyone from George Soros to Rachel Maddow to "Antifa" for being somehow responsible for the murder, and, again, with no evidence, called for organizations and individuals on the left to be declared terrorists and silenced, forced into poverty from lawsuits, and arrested. That wasn't misleading? 

The other thing Kimmel said is simply undeniably true. Trump and his minions and accomplices are exploiting Kirk's death. Because I'm damned to be included on the mailing lists of assholes, I've gotten multiple emails from right-wing organizations seeking to raise money off it. It's being used as a cudgel against anyone daring to do something as terrible as quote Charlie Kirk on Instagram. They are wallowing in the opportunities the murder has provided them. Indeed, they keep accusing the "left" of "celebrating" Kirk's death (and, yes, there have been some people who posted things cheering it), but the real celebration is on the right as they engage in an orgy of self-righteousness and performative outrage. Which is their First Amendment right, as it is the First Amendment right of anyone to say that what they're doing is scoring political points.

What makes the Kimmel suspension and Carr's promise that "we're not done yet" so insidious and, yes, frightening is that it lowers the bar from mocking Kirk's death to any criticism of Trump or the MAGA movement being reason enough for censorship, intimidation, and punishment. Even worse, as Greg Sergeant points out, is that Carr is making it clear that this really is about Trump by using the FCC's "public interest obligation" as a sledgehammer. But, see, "public interest" is now not about the Constitution or even, really, the public. The administration is saying that "public interest" tied to Trump, that if you attack Trump, you're undermining the public interest. The FCC is saying that what's good for Trump is good for America and everything needs to follow that. If a plane was carrying the Epstein files, I assume Trump would shoot it out of the air and claim it's for the good of the country.

It gets worse. Even as unlikely compatriots like Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson decry the federal government's insertion of itself into TV content moderation, we have a parade of right-wingers saying that maybe they don't think the First Amendment is all that great. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, who looks like she's waiting to see you drink the tea she put cyanide in, said, "Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore." So I guess our rights didn't come directly from God, as Republicans are fond of saying. 

Trump himself threatened to strip networks' affiliate stations of their licenses to broadcast, saying, in essence, the hell with the right to free speech: "When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something—when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that." 

Except they are. That's the whole point of the First Amendment. The freedom to shit-talk someone, even after death, even Charlie Kirk, is one of the founding principals of this country. The Declaration of Independence is a long shit-talk about King George III. The founders themselves regularly shit-talked each other (when they weren't, you know, dueling), sometimes in print, sometimes in debates. In a letter written for publication in 1800, Alexander Hamilton accused then-President John Adams of "disgusting egotism,” “distempered jealousy,” and “ungovernable indiscretion." That's just a little sample of vituperation leveled at Adams. There's nothing more American than shit-talking the president.

Indeed, you could argue that the real patriots are the ones willing to shit-talk Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and anyone else. And while, yes, obviously, there's a difference between suffering personal consequences for what you post on social media and the government demanding you be silenced, I'd argue that the government has a responsibility to come in and tell, say, a university that fired someone because a couple of trolls got a screenshot of single thing a professor wrote on Instagram that it's violating that professor's First Amendment rights. (I'm pretty sure that public universities, which are government institutions, will have this come up in lawsuits.)

Instead, what we're getting is everyone on the right cheering on the mass censorship of anyone who would dare suggest that Charlie Kirk said the things that he actually did say, which were awful and violent and degrading. But none of that matters because this is an opportunity for the totalitarian right to use this to force its demented control over the speech and actions of the country. It is, to put it simply, a chance to outlaw much of what the left says and stands for. It's a low-rent version of Naomi Klein's idea of the shock doctrine in action: using a "crisis" in order advance a harmful political agenda. Usually, it involves natural disasters or a terrorist attack. This wasn't the latter, but they're trying to make it into one and respond accordingly.

Look, I know that what's happened to Jimmy Kimmel pales in comparison to what the US government is doing to migrants (or what we're funding in Gaza, for that matter). Kimmel is a wealthy man with all kinds of resources at his disposal, and I'm hoping that he tells ABC, Disney, Trump, Sinclair, and everyone else to go fuck themselves as they try to force him to apologize to Kirk's widow (which would be weird since he didn't insult Kirk), give her money, and donate to Kirk's hate group (fuck you, that's what it is when you're on the receiving end of the hate), Turning Point USA. I'm hoping that he says he wants to sue the Trump administration and goes for it. Hell, Disney is a big damn, wealthy corporation run by rich pukes who, of course, want to protect the bottom line for their investors because that's all the morality capitalism can muster. 

But surely they have to know that it's never going to be enough for these monsters in the White House. ABC paid Trump off and had George Stephanopoulos apologize for saying that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll, which, you know, he did. It wasn't enough. Kimmel didn't say a damn thing about Kirk's politics and even sent out sympathies to Kirk's family and expressed horror over the shooting. It still wasn't enough. There is no satiating them, there is no end point, and they will always, always, always find another way to extort and threaten and blackball and punish. People with the means to do something need to fucking well do something. As I and many others have said, what's the use in having "fuck you" money if you don't occasionally say, "Fuck you"? It's not even that big an ask. George Soros just gave $10 million for the redistricting effort in California. The money's there. Whatever a lawsuit would cost will be far, far less than the next round of extortion.

Meanwhile, the rest of us without deep pockets or portfolios that would allows us to retire are left to wonder how we can react to this. I have friends in red states who feel like they're risking their jobs if they express an opinion on Facebook that isn't "Charlie Kirk is the awesomest human ever and I will bless him every night in my prayers which I definitely say before bed." I wanted to write something savage about the whole situation, but I didn't because I didn't want to wonder if I'd become the next target of Libs of Suck My Cock or whatever (sorry - I'm not going cold turkey). 

That's the way this works. It starts with Jimmy Kimmel and some professors and other workers, and it causes fear in others in media, entertainment, and anyone who writes or posts. That's of a piece with how this administration wants to spread fear, whether by picking up people in the country legally for protesting the war in Gaza or drone-murdering a boatload of Venezuelans or by deporting migrant children in the middle of the night or deporting migrant adults to countries they have no ties to or sending masked goons out to terrorize communities. It's the same with detention facilities and defunding universities and suing law firms. Fear and compliance are their tools. The counter to that is courage and protest and refusal, but that is far easier said than done.

We need some leaders here on this, but, sadly, we are bereft of them. There's a line that's been haunting me from Tony Kushner's  A Bright Room Called Day, a frighteningly prescient play about artists facing the rise of Hitler in Germany. A character comments on how he and his circle are not ready for what's coming, "This age wanted heroes. It got us instead." Maybe Kimmel can be that hero. Maybe AOC, who delivered a hell of a speech on who Charlie Kirk really was while most Democrats just meekly acquiesced to a vote on an official day of remembrance. Hell, maybe it's you or me. Just know that this fight is gonna be hard and it's gonna end up hurting a lot of us as they contort all the tools of the government to serve themselves and wreck the rest of the country. You should be scared now. But not too scared to act.

Well, Shit, I Guess I Gotta Write Something About Charlie Kirk

Before yesterday afternoon, I was debating what to write about today. The legitimately fucked-up birthday letters to Jeffrey Epstein were a strong possibility because they do a good job of revealing one of my favorite facts: ultra-rich people are often incredibly stupid and have no taste whatsoever. Like there's not a good joke in the whole batch. It's all just smug, wink-wink, boy, Jeff sure loves to fuck young chicks and, hey, here's a lifetime of sexual assaults written off like boys-will-be-boys shenanigans. There's an air of desperation, too, like they all really liked being in this club and are begging for the cool dude at the top to pat them on the head. And that's before you get to the rape and sex-trafficking. Surely, those who participated in this parade of horrors need to be prosecuted and buried in prison cells, up to and especially including Donald fucking Trump and, if needed, Bill Clinton.

I totally could have done that pretty easily, but I took a pass. 

I was absolutely sure I was going to write on the budget deadline coming up and how Democrats need to leverage the little power they have now, right fucking now, in order to extract something from the Republican brutes who behave like hungry jackals rampaging through the savanna. Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate are negotiating a pretty fucking low price on Democratic complicity in a budget resolution that will allow the Trump administration to continue to wreck lives, consolidate power, and get his party to coalesce around a metastasizing fascism whose end is, frankly, the suppression if not elimination of the Democratic Party. Yes, subsidies for people who get their policies from the Affordable Care Act are important, as they keep insisting, but it's pretty thin gruel. That's like negotiating over the price of a car and saying, "If you give me a pine-scented air freshener, I'll pay the sticker." The ask should be restoring all Medicaid and Medicare funding, forcing the president to release all funds that Congress had budgeted and he rescinded, ending the immigration torture camps, and more. Fucking fight to win, even if you're gonna lose. Sometimes it's more noble to get punched in the face than cower in a fetal curl, crying, "Don't hit me." 

Unfortunately, I had to move on from that because Charlie Kirk died.

It would have been a no-brainer to write about the United States straight up drone murdering a boatload of Venezuelans by claiming they were gang members importing drugs, which is fucking deranged even if it's true. We have a goddamn Coast Guard that can stop boats and apprehend the suspects. They do it all the time. Then everyone stands in front of piles of perfectly good cocaine or meth or fentanyl about to go to waste, like they just bagged the biggest crocodile in the Nile. You could get Vice President JD "The 'D' is for 'douche'" Vance to use his patented shit-gobbling smirk while posing with the haul or the suspects instead of sending him out to act like a sassy bitch on X defending the obvious crime. And now that we know that not only was the boat turning around when it was hit, and not only do we not have any proof that it was carrying drugs and not, say, migrants, and not only has the Venezuelan government said the people on boat were not the supposed terrorists in Tren de Aragua, but we hit the boat "multiple times" in order to kill everyone on it. There is no scenario here where we're not the bad guys. 

Yeah, I could have gone on about that, but, you know, Kirk was murdered.

Hell, I could have written about the batshit insane story of the South Korean workers who were in the US completely legally but were rounded up, shackled, and detained by ICE while setting up a Hyundai plant in Georgia that would provide thousands of jobs for the state. I could have gone on quite a bit about the bugnuts Trump-fellating GOP congressional candidate who called in a "tip" about the plant and has pretty much fucked the state and possibly a good chunk of the American auto industry which depends on relationships with South Korea. I could have also gone into what we're learning about the subhuman conditions in which we're holding people in detention. I could have tied that and the boat story into something about the end of due process in this goddamned country. I could have added in about the racist cuntmites on the Supreme Court making it legal for ICE or the cops to stop anyone who looks Hispanic and ask them to prove right then and there that they're citizens or face being imprisoned in horrific detention facilities. I would have had all kinds of names for the justices, like John "Bitchface" Roberts.

I might have spent my time writing about a hundred other important things that touch the lives of so many people, so many nightmares ongoing now, so much awful shit, the disgraceful and embarrassing and dangerous things being done in our name by our government and by governments in red states, like the attempts to destroy universities over false antisemitism accusations, cheered on and enabled by sad, greedy fucks who never even went to college but pretend that they have insight when they really are fucking idiotic losers who attracted rich fascist pukes to give them tons of money to spread their hate or we would have never heard of them, like...well, you know.

I thought about writing on this 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks about how we're in as much danger as we were before then because of the rank incompetence of our supposed security leaders in DC, like Kash "Always Looks Like Someone Told Him He Got Syphilis From the Donkey He Fucked" Patel, and the fucktastrophe of mass firings across every agency that was created to prevent this shit. But now, apparently, it doesn't matter if it's all dismantled and instead of dealing with real threats, the entire security apparatus is devoted to making sure that migrant families are tortured before deportation. 

But, of course, I can't write about any of that because someone shot Charlie Kirk and killed him. So I'm obligated to say something about him. And what I'll say is this: over the years on this blog I have written virtually nothing about Charlie Kirk because fuck him and fuck Turning Point USA. He objectively, intentionally made life worse for millions of people and he's not worth wasting my time on. I stand by that. 

And now I've written something about Charlie Kirk, like a good pundit should.

Why It Matters If Trump Is Dead or Incapacitated Beyond Who Is President

Let's be completely honest: There are lots of people we'd like to see die. And we're not saying we want to kill them. There's a wide, wide gulf between wishing someone stopped existing and putting in the time and effort to make that happen. I'll put it this way: I'd love to eat a piece of a really great chocolate cake, but I'm not gonna spend months learning how to bake one and ice it properly. But if someone puts a slice of a cake they made in front of me? Hell, yeah, I'll gobble that up and compliment the baker. 

We don't even necessarily want most of our hopefully-soon-dying humans to die horribly. I mean, I don't give a shit if, say, Pete Hegseth falls into a wood chipper feet first or if too much coke stops his heart and he drops before he knows what's happening. I'd like Alex Jones to spend a few years homeless and begging to blow drunk dudes for their "protein shakes" before he has a stroke that leaves him unable to speak or move for years and no one has the decency to let him die. Don't get me started on Stephen Miller. But, again, it's all chocolate cake. Gimme a big ol' chunk of it, but I'm not cooking.

When it comes to Donald Trump, you'd think I want him to suffer. You'd think I'd want him to shit out his insides on live television as he begs for someone to help him, his orange glaze melting off his sweaty, pasty face while his wisps of hair become greasy strings against his bald head. You'd think I'd want him to be left alone in a room of women who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked when they were girls, each of them holding a straight razor. And while I don't not want those things, mostly, I just want him gone. Done. Gone or done.

For a brief, gleeful period of time this past weekend, speculation was running rampant that the absolutely thinkable had happened. Because he hadn't appeared in public for a couple of days or made one of his screaming mimi calls to some nutzoid right-wing outlet, over on BlueSky and Threads and, I assume, X (because fuck X), people were thinking that it meant Trump had fucking died. The thoughts and prayers of the hopeful varied from tentative "what if" to full-bore "pleasepleaseplease." You can say it's ghoulish or morally wrong or whatever weak-ass sentiment you want to put out there and pretend you're better than those of us who think it's actually more moral to hope that someone who is actively hurting millions of people is gone. But, goddamn, it was a beautiful few hours, like it was possible we'd get through this nightmare.

Now that Trump seems to have lumbered around a bit in front of distant cameras that can't get a real focus on him as some kind of fucked-up proof-of-life, the talk has shifted to whether or not he's had a stroke or a series of mini-strokes. We've been here before where Trump's obvious decline has been attributed to his failing heart or decaying brain. On top of that, we've had lumpy bearded skink J.D. Vance say, with little prompting, that he's ready to take over the presidency should he need to.

And that's the obvious reason it matters whether or not Trump's mobile and coherent enough to pretend to still be president. We can have all kinds of arguments over whether or not Vance would be worse than Trump (I lean on the side of him being more easily controlled and thus less chaotic, but I totally get believing he'd be a complete fucking nightmare - Trump but with a lifespan). But that's not why I think Trump being dead or incapacitated matters so much to so many of us.

Since he lost (no, really, he fucking well lost) in 2020, the speculating punditocracy has wondered if the MAGA (or Trumpist, if you prefer) movement could continue without Trump. The discussion has been around whether or not all this can possibly still go on once Trump is out of the picture, mostly as in not being able to run for president again in 2028, although, you know, that's still to be determined. And if there's one thing we learned after 2020, it's that Trump's presence as a figurehead of the MAGA movement looms large because he can still endorse and bitch endlessly online and at his rallies of the damned. So he'll be there whether or not he's trying to dare the Supreme Court to prevent him from having a third term (or if he just ends elections altogether and stays in power).

That's why, to my mind, the real question is what happens when Trump is really gone, as in not there. I genuinely believe, as I've said before, that this whole thing falls apart without Trump, and everyone around him knows that. If they thought this was sustainable without Trump, they wouldn't be rushing to kiss his ass endlessly and prop him up like a decaying stuffed walrus. The problem with a cult of personality is that without the personality, there is no cult. As I wrote when Trump announced back in 2015 (when I was right about him wrecking the GOP field but wrong about whether he would beat Clinton), "many voters simply will overlook [his many faults and fuckups] because he's the most goddamned entertaining clown in the circus, the only candidate they know, and his pop culture status has given him the aura of earthy wisdom instead of nonsensical shit-tossing." Also, "the voters are fucking dumbasses."

Yes, Trump tapped into their racism, ignited their religious fervor, and fed their fears like they're starving puppies, but the devotion has always been to Trump. You think that all those voters who like the funny TV man are gonna get their asses of their couches to go rally for Vance? This has always been about Trump over everything else. They'll buy his shit, they'll vote for who he endorses, and they'll give up their health and safety for him. They'll turn against their family and neighbors, they'll plaster their houses and cars with memes portraying him as a superhero or Rambo, they'll hate who he tells them to hate and love who he tells them to love, but once he's not there to do it, there is no one take his place. Not his terrible children. Not any of the Fox "news" troglodytes he's elevated. And certainly not any of the politicians who have latched onto him like desperate remoras on the side of a lumbering whale shark. 

You can call me blindly optimistic, even deluded. You can say that he's unleashed something in Americans that will never go away. Yeah, it takes a while for a poison to get out of your system, and it can leave you permanently damaged. But you're alive. It'll take a long time to completely extricate ourselves from his filthy grip - hell, I don't expect to live to see us fully recover - but that starts with him just being fucking gone.

(Note: I don't expect Trump's 2 p.m. "announcement" today to have anything to do with this. It'll be some shitty action, like renaming the Department of Defense to "Department of War" or maybe he'll say we're invading Chicago or Venezuela or maybe he'll say they're arresting Democrats. He'll slur his way through it, perhaps even in a pretape, before disappearing again.)

A Poem for the Laborers

"New American" 

by Huascar Medina 

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

striving in New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just striving 

in a New America

In New America I am

a full-time student 

overtime worker

volunteering in my free time

if I plan enough ahead for free time

if I can even afford the free time

if my free time is approved

I work hard in New America

3rd shift warehouse 

2nd shift my house

always on call

no days off

freelance for life

4 jobs a week

blue and white collar

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

surviving in New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just surviving

in a New America

This is New America

student loans for all

high rent 

higher utilities 

low pay

rising healthcare costs

the cost of living

—deadly

no living wage

living enraged 

my cousins encaged 

for wanting to live in

a safer part of

New America

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

living in New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just living

in a New America

Strong and proud

able to withstand 

the distance I have traveled

the distance from my family 

the distance between us

the distance of our dialects

the distance in our churches

the distance in our homes

the distance between my ancestors

and my grandchildren

the distance from the streets

to the dorm rooms

the distance from the field

to the corner office suite

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

dreaming of New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just dreaming 

of a New America

Old America

don’t be afraid

we are all America

North America

Central America

South America

We are all Americans

We all strive in Americas

We all survive in Americas

We all live in Americas

They are all the same America

We all dream of a greater America

I want you to be paid a living wage

live in affordable housing

without college debt

or medical debt

or credit card debt

or national debt

I want no more racism

I am speaking of a New America

I am part of New America

whether you like it or not

so join me, please

Where the Hell Have I Been?

I know, I know, I fucking know that I haven't posted here. But I'm busy, goddamnit. I'm in Scotland at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a (mostly) non-political show I wrote and directed, Midnight in Nashville. It's about a country singer who was popular in the early 2000s but she shot and killed her abusive husband and went to prison for 20 years. Now she's out and she has one night in a recording studio to make a comeback album. We've been getting some fine, enthusiastic audiences. We're waiting for the big reviews to come out, so that's all kinds of fun.

Anyways, it's madness here, and I've seen some great stuff, including a new stand-up set by the amazing Sam Jay, who goes all in wrecking the American political crisis. But that's left me almost no time to post shit here, although I'm blue-balled because there's so much I wanna say.

I'll give writing a new post a try, but I'm off to annoy tourists with flyers for the show. If you know anyone here in this insanity, tell 'em to get their asses over to the Zoo Playground at 8:15 p.m. every night except Monday for the show.

Hey, Democrats: It's Okay to Be Outraged That a Rapist Might Have Committed More Rapes

You need to start from one assertion: Donald Trump is a rapist. A jury said it was more likely than not that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and the judge in the case made it clear that it's only a quirk in New York State law that prevented the jury from using the r-word. In the way any person would understand "rape," it was rape. And that makes Donald Trump a rapist. When you start by saying that, everything else becomes so much easier to understand. 

What I mean is that it would honestly be surprising if Trump wasn't one of the "clients" of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I'm not going to review the accumulation of accusations, confessions, and video evidence that show just what a sleazy, grabby, rapey shitheel Trump was and is. You can check all that out pretty easily and you likely have heard about or seen much of it. 

The fact that Democrats don't constantly highlight that Trump is a rapist is political and moral malpractice. It was barely mentioned in the 2024 election, and it should have been the beginning of any conversation about Trump. Now, Democrats should react to any interaction with Trump in the way any non-rapist would react to being in the same room with a known rapist. They should treat Republican members of Congress like you would treat someone who is covering up for a rapist. If you say that norms or traditions don't allow you to act that way, then you have no understanding that a norm only works if everyone involved is adhering to it. Otherwise, you're just a sucker. And whatever bullshit social contract made Democrats the standard bearers of eternal comity, that shit was broken when Republicans made a rapist their leader and got him elected president again. 

One of the things that has bugged the hell out of me around the whole Epstein files affair/scandal/cover-up is that too few people are behaving like what's at stake here is whether or not the rapist president committed more rapes, whether he raped children, and whether he provided aid and comfort to the scuzzy fuck who procured the girls for Trump and others to rape. At the very least, it's worth knowing if Trump was aware of the awful shit that Jeffrey Epstein was doing and didn't tell anyone. Trump said that they had a falling out over some cheap property they were each trying to buy in Palm Beach, FL, in 2004 and never spoke again. We know that Epstein was being a fucking monster during the time that he and Trump were friends. We know that Epstein committed multiple rapes in his Florida mansion and that Trump knew about Epstein's fondness for women "on the younger side." But, like I said, that's a rabbit hole you can go down. I wanna talk the politics of this moment.

Republicans have taken the position that Trump didn't rape Carroll, didn't rape or assault any of the women who have accused him, and didn't rape girls provided by Epstein. That is, frankly, an objectively repulsive position, especially because, again, a judge and jury declared Trump a rapist in the civil suit and, just last month, a federal appeals court upheld the verdict. The GOP has decided that its everyone else's problem and we all just have to deal with it when it comes to there being a rapist leading us.

To a large extent, until recently, Democrats have simply accepted that framing and, as usual, let the GOP dictate the rhetorical parameters and the terms of doing business in DC. The Epstein files fuck-up by Trump gives Democrats a chance to reframe things and present them in the way they should have been presented all along: the president is a rapist who might have committed more rapes, including the rapes of children. If you don't want all the facts to come out about it, then you are covering up for a rapist. And what the fuck is wrong with you if you do that, Mike Johnson? What the fuck are you so worried about? Hammer them constantly about their complicity with a rapist. The Democrats' revulsion should be visceral, visible, and intense. Let voters know that, at long last, there is some shit you will not eat. Trump's closeness to Epstein is their problem and they have to figure out how to deal with it. Some Democrats are getting on board with this strategy, but they need to go harder. On an interview show, you can say when asked about anything, "Well, the president is a rapist, and we always need to start with that."

To any Democrats who think that this is somehow not the issue that voters care about, that voters want "kitchen table" issues discussed going into the midterms, that it's a distraction, as former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stupidly said last week, I'd say give me a fucking break. This is a righteous, necessary battle. There are real people, victims, here, women whose lives were fucked up by the actions of these rapists, including the rapist president. It's as fucking kitchen table as it gets in that it's the kind of thing that people actually talk about around the kitchen table. You shout out to Americans that the vile Attorney General had 1000 FBI agents scouring the Epstein files for any mention of Trump and that shit will go viral because what the fucking fuck. (Odious blow-up doll Pam Bondi is scrambling, and it's kind of delicious.)

And anyone who says that Democrats don't want the Epstein stuff out there because it might implicate Democrats like Bill Clinton doesn't fucking understand Democrats. We have no problem tossing someone to the wolves. Ask Anthony Weiner. Ask Andrew Cuomo. Ask Al Franken. We're ruthless when it comes to wrongdoing being revealed. You mean if we sacrifice Bill Clinton, we might get rid of Trump? Fuck, yeah, that's a fair trade. 

The corporate media is already declaring that Trump has surfed his way through this wave of scandal and come out dry on the other side again. But it sure doesn't seem that way, with Tucker Carlson breaking with Trump, with MAGA drones at each other's throats (and some saying others have "Epstein Derangement Syndrome," which, yeah, get a new fucking phrase, assholes), with Bondi wanting to question imprisoned Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, maybe even offering a pardon if she can bail Trump out by saying he was never involved. And Trump himself is throwing every fucking piece of red meat to the slavering MAGA hordes to try to get them off his scene. The latest is arresting Barack Obama for completely made-up bullshit about how Russia helped Trump win in 2016. 

In the end, like at the start, Trump is a rapist. Everything flows from there. I think that the best case scenario is that Trump’s a rapist who covered up for other rapists. The worst case scenario is horrific. Democrats should be acting like it's the worst case and what they do and say should reflect the disgust and outrage they should have. 

The MAGA Meltdown Over Jeffrey Epstein Is the Stupid Climax They Deserve: Bongino Agonistes

In the heady days before he was nominated to be the deputy to FBI Director Kash Patel, who always looks like someone just told him he's got flesh-eating bacteria on his taint, bald, Democrat-despising meatloaf Dan Bongino was telling his podcast audience how the walls hiding those who were protecting the files of monstrous pedophile and sex trafficker and rich Jeffrey Epstein were going to come tumbling down when Donald Trump started huffing and puffing on them. 

"The Jeffrey Epstein case is back," he frothed spittily on his Rumble show (Rumble, if you don't know, is the right-wing jerk-off's live streaming service of choice) on February 5 of this year, when Trump was already back in office. He then gleefully ranted something about Barack Obama's "fixer" (everyone is always given some kind of mob-related title): "Let me just give you a little litany and rundown of everything Obama's fixer was involved in fixing and what the hell was she trying to fix with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal? Are there some high level Democrats like the Clintons, who may have needed some stuff to go away with this?" You might look at that and think, "The fuck is this maniac going on about?" And that just means you aren't filling up your poor, overstimulated brain with the worms from the fevered swamp of nutzoid conspiracies, where everyone who opposes Donald Trump is fucking children and some of them are murdering them and drinking their blood and I wish I were making that up but you have to understand how many stupid and crazy people there are in this country right now.

Unlike grifters like, well, everyone on Fox "news," Bongino was a true believer in the Epstein conspiracies. He believed that Epstein was murdered in prison, and he believed in the list of clients Epstein (or his scum-sucking co-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell) kept and that it contains Bill Clinton, Obama, and an array of "Deep State" players who are trying to bring down his one god, Trump, who he was so fucking sure was going to blow this whole thing sky high and bring hellfire down on the sinners. 

Just last year, on September 9, 2024, Bongino repeatedly orgasmed on the air and into his pants describing what Trump said in an interview with some fucking tech bro professor. In that conversation, after Trump insists twice that he never went to Epstein's rape island, Fridman says, "It's just very strange for a lot of people, that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public." Trump responds, "It's very interesting, isn't it? It probably will be, by the way, probably." And then he says he'll release the list in the weirdest fucking way possible: "I'd be inclined to do the Epstein. I'd have no problem with it." He keeps insisting he isn't involved in a way that makes you think he's totally involved. But this isn't about Trump. It's about Bongino, and this segment is the New Testament.

This is the fucking angel heralding the arrival of Orange Jesus for Bongino. "People are gonna lose their minds if the Epstein client list is revealed," he says, not even trying to hide his elation. A few minutes later, he goes all in on the list: "Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal because it speaks to an enormous problem we have in this, in this country. It is that there is a connected class of insiders that feel that they can get away with anything because they can...But the reason the Epstein client list being revealed is so important is because I want you to understand that there is a class of beknighted folks who beknighted themselves in a little round table who are not subjected to the same rules you are...Good folks, you're gonna see a lot of names on that. The Epstein client list, I believe, based on what I've heard from sources and the story I just told you, basically it's gonna rock the political world. There's a reason they're hiding it." And, yes, goddamn, Trump is gonna show it to the world.

If you go through transcripts of Bongino's show, a task I damned myself with, you will see Epstein brought up constantly. Bongino repeats, many times, a story he swears he heard from a valid source, no, really, about Bill Clinton going to the back of Epstein's plane with "young girls." He had an episode in January 2024 with the title "The Epstein Files Reveal the Shocking Truth." The Epstein files, list, coverup, and Trump bringing everyone to justice were a driving force for Bongino, who, it should be said, is a fucking moron, but the motherfucker believed with all his heart.

So imagine how Bongino must have felt when the Department of Justice and the FBI, the government entity he is deputy director of, released a statement about its investigation into their files on Epstein and announced, "This systematic review revealed no incriminating 'client list.'" And I gotta tell ya: thinking about Bongino watching his entire world crumble in front of him, sledgehammered by people he thought were his allies, like Patel and our demigorgon of an Attorney General, Pam Bondi, that shit just makes me laugh. He had to deal with the fact that all these supposed friends who, like him, like Trump, like nausea personified, JD Vance, all who said that the list was real, who claimed they had seen the list, were either lying then or lying now. Bongino had already had the soul-wrecking moment of saying that Epstein killed himself, according to Patel's FBI. Now this. Fuck. I wish someone had recorded it because it would be my new porn.

Imagine it. Imagine when he understood like the rest of us that there are only 2 possibilities for saying there's no list: that there was never a list and he was played and played hard, like everyone in the MAGA movement has been, that he's a rube like the rest of them. Or that his beacon, his one true love, his idol, and his surrogate father Donald Trump is on the list, that Trump fucked kids, and so that list must be disappeared like so many migrants in South Sudan. And that Patel, of all the goddamn people, is good with this.

So he lost his shit. He reportedly blew up in meeting with Bondi and Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and is considering resigning. He didn't show up for work on Friday. Trump claims he still is working for the FBI, but no statement has come from him.

And now Bongino, in a job he isn't remotely qualified for, has to face this reality: He can leave and return to the conspiracy-mongering, with an audience of pissed off, betrayed, potentially ex-MAGA freaks (but still freaks), awaiting a new leader. Or he can stay and, oh, fuck, this is just (chef's kiss) perfect, become part of the loathed Deep State.

This meltdown is everything Bongino deserves. 

The Republican Budget Bill Is Going to Fuck Us Forever

It's going to take months, if not years, to figure out how much President for Life Donald Trump and his bitch Congress have fucked us with the Bullshit Bastard Bill. Top of the list is, of course, the vast expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, filled with pissy, armed incels kidnapping people and guarding concentration camps. Some of the worst shit, like the Medicaid work requirements that are so dumb and unnecessary that it will destroy the program, won't take effect until 2027, after the midterm elections because, you know, Republicans count on people not giving a shit until they can't get cancer treatment. While that will lead to unnecessary loss of life, it is something that can be restored, although it'll cause some long-term damage to the health care system of the country, especially in rural areas. 

The Barfy Bollocks Bill also contains some things that are pretty much guaranteed to permanently scar our futures on the only planet we have and thus will fuck us forever. We will never escape the effects of the depraved defunding of any effort at all to mitigate the climate crisis. Trump and the savage fucknuts in the House and Senate are not just behaving as if every other day doesn't bring another climate catastrophe. They are actively making it worse, as sure as the methane from Trump's Big Mac farts do. 

Much of the damage is done by cutting the funding that had been appropriated under President Joe Biden, in an action called "rescission." And many items in the bill are just rescissions that seem benign until you dive into the details a bit.

So, for instance, the bill calls for "Rescission of amounts for forestry," which says, "The unobligated balances of amounts appropriated [in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022] are rescinded," with the sections listed. If you go to the IRA and look at that section, you can see exactly what Trump and the little bitches are rescinding. It includes "$50,000,000 for the protection of old-growth forests on National Forest System land," as well as $400 million in grants to help farmers and others mitigate the risk of fires and $100 million in administrative costs. Why is this money still available? Because Biden's bill said the funds are "to remain available until September 30, 2031" and so it could be pulled. Biden should have just flooded the country with the funding, but now it's gone.

In this abomination of a bill, when you get to Title VI: Committee on Environment and Public Works, you see this shit: 

Take just one of those: "Rescission of funding to address air pollution." That says, "The unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out section 60401 of Public Law 117–169 (136 Stat. 2079) are rescinded." Public Law 117-169 is the IRA. Section 60401 appropriated $32.5 million for "to support data collection efforts relating to (A) disproportionate negative environmental harms and climate impacts; and (B) cumulative impacts of pollution and temperature rise." Also, it would "establish, expand, and maintain efforts to track disproportionate burdens and cumulative impacts and provide academic and workforce support for analytics and informatics infrastructure and data collection systems." And it would make sure that data is available to members of the communities affected. But that is too woke because it acknowledges that pollution does cause bad shit to happen. However, if we pretend it doesn't, then, I guess, magically it won't. That always works out well. Every single thing in that list is something that was trying to unfuck us and give the planet a future. But I guess if I were a cruel, unhealthy asshole who has been living on borrowed time for at least five years, I wouldn't give a shit, either.

It just goes on, all these little details in the bill that we won't even understand until we wake up in a scorched or flooded hellscape, but at least we won't be wondering how this happened. 

Some of it is just confoundingly dickish. Like, shit that was meant to create jobs, which Trump could totally have taken credit for, was cut. "Section 50142 of Public Law 117–169," the Brutal Bunghole Bill says, "is repealed and the unobligated balance of amounts made available under that section is rescinded." That's the section of the IRA for Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing, including, "funds appropriated by this section may be used for the costs of providing direct loans for reequipping, expanding, or establishing a manufacturing facility in the United States to produce, or for engineering integration performed in the United States of, advanced technology vehicles." Why was it just shitcanned? Because the funds can be used "only if such advanced technology vehicles emit, under any possible operational mode or condition, low or zero exhaust emissions of greenhouse gases."

See? By wholesale repealing it, you can make the libs cry, give a gift to auto manufacturers, and ruin the earth. Was anything added in the bill to encourage advanced technology vehicle manufacturing? Fuck you. You know it wasn't because those are electric vehicles and only pussies drive things that don't burn fresh, tasty fossil fuel.

And it just keeps going. Here's another section:

That's all under a header "Termination of Green New Deal subsidies." Except the Green New Deal was never passed. So Republicans are just pretending it was to get the blood of the ignorant all angered up, probably at AOC. Most of what's here just moves the date funds must be spent from 2032 to September of this year, thus disincentivizing the extra expense of some of these efforts at clean energy for the home and vehicle. 

And here's the deal: It would be one thing if they were doing all this destructive shit and saying, "Well, that's how we're funding our terrorist police force." Then you could point to a reason and think, "Hey, it's a totally fucked-up and evil thing to do, but at least it makes some skewed logical sense." But the Bonkers Boneheaded Bill is such a boondoggle of debt due to tax cuts and cruel spending, to the tune of several trillion dollars added to the deficit, that all of the money in these efforts could have been left untouched and it wouldn't have mattered more than a tiny bit to the overall cost of the fucking thing. 

They're doing it because, like most evil motherfuckers, they just like doing evil shit. We made them feel bad about the climate crisis for a couple of years so now they're taking their revenge on everyone, especially generations yet to come.

We won't understand what harm this viperous, villainous Congress, vacant of anything approaching morality or empathy, has really done for a long time. There's so much fuckery in the details buried in the bill that it will all need to be parsed and interpreted and litigated. But one thing is for sure: they have fucked us. We need to get our spiked dildos of justice ready to fuck them back.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court Try to Erase Gay People in Mahmoud v. Taylor Decision

The logic of fucked in the head Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s fucked in the head opinion in the 6-3 decision in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor is it’s wrong that LGBTQ+ people exist and it’s wrong that they deserve happiness. The six conservative fucknuts, using the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religious worship, say that it’s wrong if a school district allows books with LGBTQ+ characters in their classroom libraries and it’s wrong if the teacher is going to read the book aloud. Also, the school has to allow the parents to opt out their precious little pure angels or they might be taught the horrors of life in a diverse culture. It’s so dumb and so backwards that it’s an insult to teachers, to religion, to the Constitution, and it is of a piece with the majority’s infantilization of the population in their decisions. 

Without going into the whole case, here’s a quick summary: “Montgomery County’s school system expanded its English Language Arts curriculum in 2022 to include books with LGBTQ+ characters, part of an effort to better reflect the diversity of families in the county’s religiously diverse and politically liberal population… A coalition of parents from a variety of religious backgrounds — Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic — protested the curriculum updates, and three couples and the organization Kids First sued the district. The parents said they were not trying to change the lesson plans or remove any books from classroom shelves. They just wanted to have the option of saying their children would not participate.”

Now, there’s a part of me that says, “Well, fuck it. They should have just let the kids of the stupid parents sit out.” And the school district did have a policy allowing that, but they stopped allowing it. Why? Well, because there was no requirement to teach the books that the parents had an issue with. And the books themselves? Alito goes to great pains to portray them as these evil texts that will hinder the “religious development” of their kids. In his drama queen way, Princess Alito says, “We reject this chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.” 

And what’s causing this chilling vision? One of the books is Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, where Chloe, a little girl, learns her favorite uncle, Bobby, is getting married to his boyfriend, Jamie. Chloe doesn’t give a shit that Bobby’s gay. She gives a shit and is upset because Bobby is the party uncle who does all kinds of fun stuff with her. It’s a story that has been told a million times, and the only difference here is the couple is gay. Chloe learns marriage doesn’t mean Bobby will stop being Bobby, and so they have a party. But that’s the sinister part for Alito, who really writes that the wedding “is presented as a joyous event that is met with universal approval… there are many Americans who would view the event that way, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. But other Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.”

So, in other words, the simple existence of a gay couple, and, believe it or not, they do exist, and the fact that they experience joy, which, I can confirm, they do, is an abomination to people who believe in a certain kind of invisible sky wizard, who will be very angry if you accept the gays. It’s absurd. And it gets stupider (and stick with me, because the stupid will reach a crescendo in a moment).

Another book, Intersection Allies (a terrible title that makes my teeth hurt, to be honest), is filled with people who are different from regular ol’ middle class white kids. It’s got a kid in a wheelchair, a kid whose family speaks Spanish, a poor kid, an Muslim kid, and a bunch of others, including a transgender kid. It’s like one page of the book, and the whole thing is about having compassion for the different types of people a child in the 21st century might meet or even have in their class. But, once again, Alito is having none of it: “The book and the accompanying discussion guidance present as a settled matter a hotly contested view of sex and gender that sharply conflicts with the religious beliefs that the parents wish to instill in their children.” Yeah, but what about the religious beliefs of the parent who are letting their transgender 7 year-old express their gender identity? Don't those beliefs or lack of beliefs matter?

To put it simply, conservative religious beliefs trump everything else in the majority’s reasoning. As several commentators have pointed out, this could lead to complete anarchy. Should Mormons and Muslims be able to opt out of readings that involve drinking alcohol? Should people who belong to racist religious sects be allowed to opt out of learning about slavery? What if they’re reading a book about a woman president and that offends the sexist fundamentalists in various faiths? It’s all fucking ridiculous, and to avoid a total clusterfuck of dickhead parents allowing their prejudices to dictate the curriculum, most schools will just avoid anything but the most anodyne shit. You might wonder why the hell don’t the kids just go to religious schools, ah, but Alito says that because the families are too poor to afford that, it’s on the rest of us to affirm their crazy.

Students can learn shit in school that they don't agree with. Parents have a right to teach their ignorance to their kids. Alito's just worried the kids will think the ignorant parents are fucked in the head like him and that their religious development is worthless. Yet Alito is saying that the parents’ religion takes precedence over everyone else’s right to not have religion imposed on them.

It’s something that Justice Sonia Sotomayor states pretty fucking clearly in her dissent. She quotes the First Amendment and emphasizes that “prohibit” is the key word: “The Clause prohibits the government from compelling individuals, whether directly or indirectly, to give up or violate their religious beliefs.” In other words, the government can’t force you to believe a certain way. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn shit. 

Sotomayor remarks that the majority’s decision fails “to accept and account for a fundamental truth: LGBTQ people exist.  They are part of virtually every community and workplace of any appreciable size. Eliminating books depicting LGBTQ individuals as happily accepted by their families will not eliminate student exposure to that concept. Nor does the Free Exercise Clause require the government to alter its programs to insulate students from that ‘message.’” Right. Your stupid fucking parents and your dumbass church can teach you, say, all the creationism you want. But get that ludicrous shit out of the public school science classroom. 

But some of you may still be stuck on the whole “Fuck it. Let the poor religion-abused kids stay home on LGBTQ day. The district should just reinstitute its policy of opt out.” Except there is a policy in place that the parents in this case could have used, which Sotomayor mentions: "Rather than avail themselves of the district’s established process for challenging objectionable instructional material, petitioners sued the MCPS Board in federal court.”

And this is the crescendo of the stupid. Yeah, the parents had options. But right-wing groups, like the odious Moms for Liberty, got their legal claws in this and wanted to get the frothing mongrels in robes on the high court to put us further on the road to their Christian nationalist vision for the country. Alito even quotes the local leader of MFL as if she’s just an interested parent: “Some parents showed up at the [Montgomery County School] Board’s public business meetings to express their concerns about the storybooks’ content.  In an early 2023 meeting, for example, one parent represented herself as ‘a voice for parents in [her] community, many of [whom] are actually working today and unable to attend.’” That concerned mom was Lindsey Smith, head of the Montgomery County chapter of the maniac Moms. She’s also testified before Congress about how terrible it is to tell kids that gay people are real.

And there you have it. The set up. The lawsuit. The pay off. A successful attack on LGBTQ people, as well as on the education of students based in reality and not some backwards-ass fantasy world that they want to use to subjugate the rest of us, all under guise of supporting the Constitution that the majority ignores like it’s a homeless queer kid on the streets of DC. 

How ridiculous is this? Here’s Alito: “In making this argument, the dissent seems to confuse our country with those in which laws enacted by a parliament or another legislative body cannot be challenged in court. In this country, that is not so.  Here, the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of judicial review protect individuals who cannot obtain legislative change.” And this was on the same day they said that courts should not be allowed to do national injunctions. 

There is no actual legal theory at work here, no consistency, no real beliefs in anything but letting conservatives get everything they've wanted. 

Spit-Balling Things That Politicians and Local and State Governments Can Try to Do to Slow the Trump Fuckery

I get it: the protests are important. They show that you are not alone in your hurt, in your rage, in your desire for something, fucking anything, to be done to stop the deranged orange ego monster in the White House from dicking over the nation completely. And events like the massive No Kings marches and rallies do serve a purpose in that they show just how many people fucking care. There was never a single day when Tea Party hate rallies were as large as each of the two protests against Trump so far this year, yet the teabaggers (as we loved calling them because it denoted them sucking on nutsacks) were treated as a country-warping movement when it was far fewer Americans involved, and they were just cranks cranking.

But there are concrete things that Democrats in Congress and in localities around the country can at least try to do slow or stop the invasion of their communities by Trump's unholy cabal of twits, twats, and tweeters. Between messaging that might scare the hell out of some cowards to actions that a brave mayor or governor can do, knowing that they will be the recipient of the usual shitstorm of death threats and mockery that comes with crossing the tangerine nightmare. This is not to mention the inevitable lawsuits upon lawsuits because Trump is the most litigious son of a bitch who ever lived. 

Still, it's worth it because you're going to be saving lives and possibly saving souls. Check it out. 

1. Look, Trump's gonna pardon as many people as he can, like the nearly 2000 blatant terrorists, thieves, drug dealers, and violent dickholes he already has pardoned or commuted sentences for. But chances are, he's not getting around to pardoning the thousands of government employees who are doing the dirty work of his filthy administration. So I'd send a message to Big Balls, to ICE agents, to everyone who is passing the paperwork from one shit appointee to another, and I'd tell them that Democrats will come after them when Trump is gone and a Democrat is in charge. Of course, many will think that the Trump dynasty or the MAGA reich will never end because that's the foolish mistake that all tyrant-humpers make. But more than a few would think it might be better to get the fuck out and work somewhere else. Part of this is making clear what laws are being violated and by whom. And part of it is putting out there what the penalties are if someone is found to have broken particular laws. You don't get to get away with it. A few Democrats have already said something to this effect.

2. This is a big what-if, but if we're gonna be serious about slowing the rampage that Trump's stormtroopers in ICE are on, then you gotta push shit to the limit. With Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (or masked men who claim they are) going to hearings that legal immigrants are attending in order to stay legally in the country and arresting those immigrants for minor or no reason, then, fuck it, do not let ICE into the courthouses. If ICE can block members of Congress from conducting legal oversight for detention facilities, then the cities and states can prevent ICE from going, well, anywhere they want. Set up a perimeter around a federal courthouse for “security” on land the state or city or county controls and then force anyone to go through a security checkpoint, and refuse to allow ICE agents to enter. It's a pain in the ass, but the only way ICE gets anything done is through the cooperation, capitulation, or blind willingness of local authorities allowing them to do it. 

You may say, and justifiably, "Won't ICE officers just be assholes about it?" And I'd answer, "Yes, but they're assholes about everything." ICE's own directives originally stated that they can only act "where such action is not precluded by laws imposed by the jurisdiction in which the civil immigration enforcement action will take place." But then they rescinded that this month, which means they don't give a fuck about any laws or jurisdictions. So they know it's wrong. They just don't care. So fuck 'em. Take them on. In other words, if a locality says that they will not allow its sidewalks to be used for potential illegal actions (which, let's remember, many of ICE's actions are, especially when they refuse to identify themselves or provide warrants, let alone participating in denial of habeas and other civil rights), then block the bastards who are doing it. Yeah, it's a roll of the dice on the ultimate legality. But you gotta throw some blocks on the track just to slow the runaway train down.

3. You've seen the videos of the unmarked SUVs pulling up somewhere, blocking traffic, racing off after snatching someone like our government is run by Pinochet on meth (and it kind of is). Well, motherfuckers can't just break laws without some kind of indication that they are, in fact, law enforcement. Stop any vehicle that is violating state law, like with a blocked license plate or windows that are too dark. Arrest the people driving and search the vehicles, especially if they are unmarked and have no lights or sirens. Arrest the assholes when they hide their faces and refuse to identify themselves. Yeah, most of them will be out quickly, but you might end up saving, say, someone awaiting an asylum hearing from being sent to an El Salvador hell prison just because Stephen Miller needs more arrests to maintain an erection. Shit, they're rescinding student visas and ordering people to leave the country over speeding tickets. Well, if beefy ICE toad runs red lights and speeds away after grabbing a mom picking up her kids at day care because he's afraid of anyone stopping him, that shit doesn't matter. Pull 'em over. Cuff 'em. Let the chips fall where they may.

(Of course, it should be noted that cops break traffic laws all the time with no consequences because, well, ACAB. That doesn't mean the laws don't exist. Use what you have. Get creative.)

Obviously, the reaction to some of this will make Trump lose his already lost goddamn mind, and he'll threaten to withhold various funding or arrest local officials. But courts have so far blocked the funding bullshit. Besides, ICE agents are taught to be the biggest assholes possible to force people into giving up their rights or allow them to get away with breaking the law. If your defense is that you want everyone to follow the law, that's a pretty fucking good one, and federal jurisdiction doesn't get around everything. 

A big part of the goal here is to publicize just how lawless the Trump administration is with its mass deportation horror. How lawless and cruel and useless, how sociopathic and self-defeating. You're dealing with savages who only know force. There are ways of using force that aren't violent. We're not helpless here. We just need the will to push things further. And if you say this is provoking a crisis, I'd just say that the crisis is here. We're trying to end it.

We're Finally On Our Own: Trump Vs. America

There is something you need to understand about Donald Trump and a whole bunch of old motherfuckers from a particularly vile segment of his generation: We look at the Kent State Massacre and think that it was a goddamn nightmare moment in 20th-century American history. Trump and his debased ilk look at it and think, "Too bad the National Guard didn't kill more of those fucking commie hippies." In fact, they look at the protests against the Vietnam War and think that cops should have busted more heads and the military should have opened fire to teach those America-hating kids a thing or two about who has power. The same goes for protests for civil rights, women's rights, and LGBT rights. They wanted more protesters killed as a way of ending the marches and what they saw as violent mobs (who, yes, occasionally did riot, especially when faced with police repression) because, see, they wanted to prove they love this country by purging anyone who didn't love it the same way. 

So you should know that, to most of us out here in Sanity Town, the protesters who blocked ICE officers in Paramount, California (after they had raided the local Home Depot and Dale's Donuts in Los Angeles County and picked up migrants who were not committing any crime other than the misdemeanor of being in a place without the right papers) might be heroic. But to Donald Trump, it's a chance for a re-do of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a perfect opportunity to show What We Should Have Done when a right-wing nutzoid was in the White House and didn't feel hindered by laws or morality. Trump has had a hard-on for murder for his whole pathetic, worthless life, valorizing mobsters and fellating dictators, pining for the chance to enact the dream of crazed conservatives since Kent State. 

Over on Truth Toilet, Trump has proclaimed, "A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals.  Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations — But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve." There are no riots, only a few tense moments. The protests have been led by Americans. The deportations have rounded up legal immigrants. But that hasn't stopped Trump from calling on his slavering administration of dead-eyed drunks, pedophile enablers, puppy killers, and Stephen Miller to launch a potential military attack inside the country and "to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free." This is in addition to ordering 2000 National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles (and declaring victory before they ever hit the ground). By the way, you know how you know it wasn't "Migrant riots"? Because if it was migrants, ICE and federal agents would have used lethal ammo and not flash bangs or tear gas. 

In a memorandum to the dead-eyed drunk, the pedophile enabler, and the puppy killer, the rapist president said, without a hint of irony, "To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States." You got that? If you slightly inconvenience the mass arrest of peaceful people, it's a rebellion. If you, say, rampage through the Capitol, vandalize the building, attack law enforcement, and prevent the constitutionally-mandated certification of the electoral votes in a presidential election while threatening to hang the vice-president, that's just patriotism, motherfucker, and fuck you if you say otherwise.

Trump and his evil criminal crew are making statements that have no basis in reality to a media ecosystem that will report it as fact to an audience that will only ever see the lies. Where we see Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutally rounding up migrants working their decidedly non-gang-related jobs at construction sites and restaurant kitchens, where we get outraged when a legal migrant checks in at a courthouse as she awaits her asylum hearing and ICE arrests her, where we want to explode with anger at the psychological and physical torture of children seeing their parents arrested or being rounded up and zip-tied themselves, the MAGAnistas are making their brain-dead followers believe that, somehow, 21 million criminals got into the country and joined MS-13 or that Venezuelan gang they can't pronounce and they now are taking over cities that the brain-dead have never heard of before Fox "news" yelled it at them. Or, you know, a "Migrant Invasion."

I honestly don't know how we get out of this without the violence that Trump so obviously craves. Everything has been building to this chance, whether it was calling for the Central Park (now the Exonerated) Five to be executed, or encouraging protesters at his Nazi rallies be beaten, or watching to see if Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi were murdered on January 6th, he wants to kill some people so fucking badly so he can join the ranks of those he worships, so he can make up for all those times the Marxist liberal crazies got away with it. Remember that he had to be talked out of unleashing the military on Black Lives Matter protests. He won't be convinced this time.

The hope, of course, is that the people of Los Angeles, with our encouragement and support, will stand firm in the first real test of Trump vs. America. And one place to look for resistance is the unions, which are being decimated by ICE raids on worksites. Because ICE arrested and injured David Huerta, the genuinely beloved president of the Service Employees International Union in California, the thugs have pissed off the roughly 2 million workers in the SEIU. That's going to activate more protests, and it already has, with events called in Boston, Portland, and elsewhere. It's pissed off the local Teamsters in L.A., which called for "An end to the militarization of immigration enforcement that terrorizes communities and disrupts lives." This is on top of the intense union support for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which continues to this day.

Things are getting more intense in California, with protests growing across L.A., with Gov. Gavin Newsom finding his spine and calling for the National Guard to be withdrawn. By the time you read this, shit might have gotten even worse.

You're going to see the protesters blamed, but there is only one person who caused all this, all of it, all this shit that's fucking up our lives, and it's Donald Trump. He could end this by stopping his deranged mission to bleach the United States white. But I think the chaos is his Viagra and he's not gonna stop until he fucks us all.

Donald Trump's Need to Degrade Joe Biden Is Part of the MAGA Revision of History

Lately, Donald Trump, who really is president of the United States for some goddamned reason, has been saying and approving of some really weird shit about former President Joe Biden. At his morose, deranged press conference last Friday, the one where noted drug addict Elon Musk stared around the room like he was keeping an eye on all those winged devils who want to stab his face, Trump asserted that Biden wasn't actually the one making decisions when he was president, and the proof of that was odd. 

After a typically racist rant about brown and Black criminals coming to the United States from underdeveloped countries, Trump asked, "Why would they do that? It's the one thing I can't figure out and I don't believe it was Joe Biden. I really don't. I mean, look, he's been a sort of a moderate person over his lifetime. Not a smart person, but somewhat vicious person, I will say. If you feel sorry for him, don't feel so sorry, because he's vicious. What he did with his political opponent and all of the people that he hurt, he hurt a lot of people, Biden. And so I really don't feel sorry for him, but he wasn't a person that would allow murderers to come into our country. He wasn't a person that was in favor of transgender for anybody that wanted it, to take kids out of families, etc., etc." You got it? A moderate but vicious person, a dummy who let others take control of the presidency but unworthy of sympathy. 

This veered into the autopen "scandal," which is the use of mechanical pen to sign things in the president's name, which led to more assertions with absolutely no proof: "When you see the autopen, I mean, I think the autopen is going to become one of the great scandals of all time. Because you have somebody operating it or a number of people operating it. Because I knew Joe Biden, Joe Biden wasn't in favor of opening up borders, letting 21 million people into this from prisons and mental institutions and gang members. He wasn't into that at all. And you know, who signed these orders, proclamations and all of the different things that he signed that set our country so far back. That was so bad for our country."

First off, it should be said that Biden's evolution on LGBTQ issues has been well-documented. Some even give him credit for convincing Barack Obama to support same-sex marriage. And, you know, when he was first elected, Biden wanted to make it easier for immigrants to become citizens, but Republicans were fearmongering cockheads about it. Trump lying or not knowing something isn't news. What is news is that Trump can't quit Joe Biden. He needs to keep kicking him because it's that kind of thing that gets the MAGA yahoos all hot and bothered. 

Of course, with Trump, weird shit always gets weirder and shittier. Over on his "social" media money-laundering operation, Truth Toilet, Trump re-flushed a post that declared, without a hint of irony, something that makes a bold claim about Joe Biden: "There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. Democrats don't know the difference." You got that? The motherfucking president of the United States spread a ludicrous, extravagantly wrong conspiracy theory that the previous president was killed and replaced with clones and robots. And one can only say, "Why the fuck wouldn't they use a robot that could have kicked Trump's ass at the debate?"

As we know, Trump can't do something just for the sake of doing it. It's always got to have some ulterior motive to degrade and debase and insult some perceived opponent. In his first term, he routinely attacked President Obama and Hillary Clinton. But this time around, there's something even more subversively evil at work. Yes, in his first term, Trump was working to erase everything Obama had done (and undid a great deal, but couldn't bring down the Affordable Care Act). This time, it's a much larger project. Trump and his goons, lackeys, and other assorted ass remoras want to revise history. It's not enough to say, "Biden did something and I didn't like it so I'll do it differently." No, it's got to be that, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Biden failed and Trump has to fix it. It doesn't matter that what Trump is saying about the Biden presidency is almost entirely a lie, one that we should be easily able to prove since we all just fucking lived through the Biden presidency. But he still gets away with it.

Take one recent fact sheet from the White House titled, "President Donald J. Trump is Restoring Gold Standard Science in America." Putting aside the stupid "Gold Standard Science" branding, which is pretty much "how science is done but with Trump's name on it," the statement randomly attacks Biden, drawing on more conspiracy theories from lunatics across the nutzoid right-wing mediasphere. "The Biden Administration manipulated science to achieve political ends," it reads, "and conducted subpar science designed to support predetermined outcomes instead of objective science that informed well-designed policies." No examples are offered because why fucking bother? I mean, there was no reason to even put this "fact" sheet out, as it's bereft of, you know, facts, but if you wanted to have an excuse to gut the funding of science grants and programs around the country, this is the shit you have to do to convince your idiot hordes that you're doing the right thing. 

And it's so blatant. Here's a statement titled "Cheapest Memorial Day Weekend Gasoline in Years" which asserts, "The national nightmare that was Biden’s war on American energy is over" and that Trump's actions will "undo the Biden-era stranglehold on American energy production." But we over here in the real world are damned to know that oil and gas production soared under Biden to its highest levels ever. That's not a stranglehold. That's a vigorous hand job. Biden didn't brag about it because all that drilling sure seems like a bad idea. 

Trump's gotta degrade Biden again and again because it is part of an effort to contort all of American history around his crude, skewed, bullshit view. It's why Trump won't give up on the Big Lie about the 2020 election and is demanding that everyone must believe that in order to be part of his administration. It's a way to make a very small man feel just a little tougher than he ever could even try to be while feeding his hungry, mad hordes more raw meat.

A Poem for Memorial Day

Dirt 

by Garett Reppenhagen

Iraqi dirt is everywhere

in my boots and in my hair

the dark clay that soldiers keep

where they march and where they sleep

to prevent the ache in a mothers heart

white sand becomes penned pure art

we exaggerate and bring to light

when the gravel grains are colored bright

under wheels and under track

dirty bombs reality lacks

stuck to sweat under trigger finger nails

that itches and stings when a child wails

dirt so heavy that one can't hide

inside sand bags that divide the sides

turning to grime when it begins to rain

American pride turned to pain

Scandalous chit chat in day to day gossip

"those veterans are insane they really lost it"

closed minds, mass destruction of innocence

and truth gets a purple heart amidst all the ignorance

red white and blue covered in dust

the color of money, oil, and lust

soiled uniforms brown with taint

breathe uranium air contaminate

Jesus pimps our children like whores

like Uncle Sam's hate crimes that the family ignores

under patriot makeup is the garbage and filth

body bags filled with love, swept under the rug is guilt

scum put on sale, but they put us on trial

it's in our teeth when we bite and we smile

grease fed to the masses on the daily news

if the war never ends we'll never lose

we dig and dig, but they cover the hole

when we discover the truth we pay the toll

an unknown soldier in a shallow grave

burdened and battered and buried alive

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)