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 they tell 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.)

We Cannot Forget That the Climate Crisis Is Coming For Us All

Look, I know, I know, I fuckin' know that with all the more immediate threats that are looming over us, from outlawing dissent to anti-vax madness to the destruction of the economic safety net, your brain might not have the bandwidth to also include the climate crisis in your daily incantation of everything that's going to wreck us, but that motherfucker is coming and we're now on a path that not only doesn't mitigate it but leads to our end. Trump and his savage band of grotesque industrialists, cancerous capitalists, and greedy shitheels are in the midst of gutting anything that would allow the earth to take a fucking breath and slow down our imminent descent into floods and fires and famine. 

For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency, a name that was never meant to be ironic but here we are, is working on a plan to "eliminate all limits on greenhouse gases from coal and gas-fired power plants in the United States." That seems insane, right? Like against everything that nearly every scientist has been saying for decades? Well, the Trump EPA has that covered: they're just gonna say, "Nuh-uh." Actually, it's a little more nuanced, but only a little: "Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants that burn fossil fuels 'do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution' or to climate change because they are a small and declining share of global emissions." You got that? Because of the reduction in greenhouse gases due to policies that recognize the climate crisis is real, it's okay to increase greenhouse gas emissions. It's like when you lose a little weight and you decide you can eat cake more because that won't make you gain it back. That always works. 

Oh, and they want to shitcan the "2009 E.P.A. finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health" because that makes it easier to "regulate carbon pollution from power plants, vehicles, oil and gas infrastructure and other sources," which seems like a good thing. That's a regulation too far. And if you believe that more greenhouse gases are a bad thing, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the EPA, says you belong to "the climate change religion." That one pisses me the fuck off because, see, I can show you a thousand things that prove climate change is real. You can't show me one that proves your god is.

This administration's war on the future is starkly clear in its refusal to not only acknowledge the climate crisis but in its effort to actively make things worse. Trump issued another executive order of the damned to go after states that try to do anything to mitigate the crisis, like suing California for its stricter emissions standards on cars or Vermont for wanting fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up some of the mess they've made. The EO says, dickishly (which is the mode they're in all the time), "Many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated 'climate change' or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security." Yes, the phrase "climate change" is in quotes, as if it's "so-called" instead of abso-fucking-lutely real. But if your state wants to try to make life livable for even the short foreseeable future, you live in a dream.

The fuckery doesn't end with the climate crisis. Last month, the Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of Interior put out a proposal for commentary: "Rescinding the Definition of 'Harm' Under the Endangered Species Act." See, the ESA has allowed the FWS to say that harm can be done through the modification of a species habitat, like the destruction of a forest or the polluting of a lake. Now the evil fuckers at Interior want to limit "harm" to when someone "takes" an endangered species, as in to "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct." So, in other words, if you shoot an arrow through a bald eagle, you broke the law. But you can build a plant that exists to burn coal for no reason and if that kills hundreds of bald eagles, you didn't do any harm. Like I said, evil fuckers. 

What got me on this whole subject today was that I woke up this morning, probably still drunk on last night's whiskey bender, thinking very quickly I should just start drinking again, and opened up the BlueSky to get a link to a CNN story titled, "The birds on this tiny, remote island are so full of plastic their bellies crunch," which is exactly as fucked and disturbing as it sounds. And then I saw this one: "An ecological disaster has been unfolding on Australia’s coast," about a toxic algae bloom in the ocean that you can barely see but kills sea life and sickens humans. The bloom was about 4000 square kilometers in size a couple of weeks ago, propelled by climate change that keeps the ocean warm. 

And that's the kind of shit that, with just a tweak or two in the circumstances, could lead to a massive die-off, tilting the very balance of the ocean ecosystem that would then tilt the balance of the entire earth's ecosystem, which, as much as we try to live in our silos of denial, will fuck us harder than any Trump-made dildo of dead democracy. 

It keeps going. Trump fired the 400 climate scientists that were working on the National Climate Assessment. And don't even get me started on the demolition of NOAA and FEMA, which is like firing the military, considering how vulnerable it makes us.

So, yeah, this shit hasn't stopped mattering, and it's still a fucking crisis, and the United States is now in the midst of fucking over the entire world. We better be ready to fight this battle, too. 

There Is No "America" Without Birthright Citizenship

Something has bugged the shit out of me about the whole attempt to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US whose parents are visitors or, dear heavens, undocumented migrants. And that's the way those who seek to gut the first section of the 14th Amendment, you know, the one that says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," keep wanting to tie it to what they say is the original intent: to make sure that freed slaves and their children are US citizens. 

Now, I'm not a historian of the Constitution and I'm not gonna give you my sub-Wikipedia summary of what I know about the Reconstruction Amendments or how the 14th Amendment is also a response to the heinous Dred Scott decision, but I can tell you this: if the congressmen and senators debating this in 1866 (it was ratified by the states in 1868) had intended it to only apply to the children of freed slaves, they would have fucking well said so. It's not like this country was shy about segmenting off populations in its founding legal documents. They decided "all persons," not "all those who were once bound to Service" (to use the language of the Three-Fifths Compromise in Article 1). 

The Trump administration's and their ideological fellow fucknuts' argument is, "Well, they meant slaves because that's all they were really thinking about then." It's what Donald Trump himself pissed out over on Truth Toilet: "We didn’t have people pouring into our Country from all over South America, and the rest of the World. It wasn’t even a subject. What we had were the BABIES OF SLAVES." It's what Solicitor General Dean John Sauer said to the Supreme Court this past week: "Our primary contention is that the Citizenship Clause related to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens who weren't even present as a discrete class at that time."

Now that's a motherfucker of a thing to say because if you take that logic with the 14th Amendment, that they couldn't have known about undocumented migrants because we didn't define immigrants as "legal" or "illegal," then how does that fuck with the other amendments? The authors of the Bill of Rights couldn't know that arms would advance to the point that one person with an assault weapon can tear the bodies of a classroom full of children to pieces. They just knew muskets, flintlock pistols, and various bladed things. And almost no one was gonna own a goddamn cannon. What about the First Amendment? Would they have been so keen on a free press and free speech if they knew that giant corporations and ultra-wealthy fucks were going to control the press and that certain points of view wouldn't get heard? A Thomas Paine ain't gonna publish enough pamphlets to overcome the Fox "news" shit wave. Maybe they would have guaranteed equal time or something. Who the fuck knows? 

In other words, it's a bullshit argument that is, as I said, undone by the fact that they could have limited it but they didn't. Indeed, despite the argument over the "subject to the jurisdiction" phrase, which has been ongoing for years on the savagely white nationalist right, the only way to get around the 14th Amendment is to argue that the children of undocumented migrants aren't actually "persons" by some weird and contorted mad legal reasoning, and, you know, I don't put it past these twatmites to pull that kind of shit and for at least Alito and Thomas to agree as they fellate whatever billionaire is funding their next vacation. (By the way, if they take away the humanity for one group, that can pave the way for shitcanning the rest of the first section of the 14th Amendment, which is about how habeas corpus rights are for every person, not just citizens or legal immigrants.)

But what galls me and what ought to gall everyone is this simple idea: the United States is what it is because of immigration and birthright citizenship. The very concept of "America" is that it's always been a mongrel nation pasted together by people from fucking everywhere, man, all, in theory, working towards that mythical "more perfect union." We're the only country in the world that has even attempted to do this. We're an incredibly diverse, and an incredibly inclusive country, and if you don't see that as a strength, then you don't actually understand who the fuck we are. 

And I know, I know, I fucking know that much of this exists in the realm of theory, not practice. I know that, in practice, this country has been dickish and oppressive and violent to every new group that came here (and that's not getting into how we genocided the indigenous population). Fuck, in 1856, the Know Nothing Party accused Democrats of getting Irish and German immigrants naturalized in large numbers so they could vote for James Buchanan (a plainly shitty president, by the way). Fuck, we have the concept of "illegal immigrants" because of a late 19th-century freakout over Chinese immigrants "taking our jobs" or some such shit (or, you know, racism). Hell, in this cursed century, we've seen the mass mistreatment in the United States of people from the Middle East, AAPI people, and the migrants from Central and South America. The vast majority of them are not coming here to fuck anything up or take anyone's jobs. Stephen Miller and his ilk don't believe in this country. We who want immigrants here and welcome them are the ones who do.

That concept is something to strive for. It's worth saying that, yes, we want you to come to this country and we want you to do amazing shit that makes your life better and perhaps the lives of others better and if you have kids here, awesome, they are citizens and they're welcome to the fuckin' party, man. Fucking hell, if I sound like I'm in some kind of punk-ass meltdown over this, it's because one of the few things to be genuinely proud of in this country is that idea, however imperfectly or even badly actualized, that we don't just welcome people from elsewhere, we fucking want you here. And I've seen that lovely idea betrayed over and over in our hysteria over migrants, almost all of whom just wanna come here, do some work, and live their lives, but I've never seen this shit that the Trump administration is trying to do in getting rid of birthright citizenship. We're not a white man's nation. We're not a Christian nation. We haven't been for a long, long time.

As SCOTUSBlog pointed out, during the hearing this week at the Supreme Court, "although the court’s liberal justices were the most outspoken in their belief that Trump’s order [ending birthright citizenship for some migrants] violates the Constitution, there was no support voiced by the other justices for Sauer’s contention that it does not." I'm not holding my breath that the conservatives don't dick the nation over as they have so many times before. But even Brett Kavanaugh was aghast at the logistics of what the Trump administration was asking for. Maybe even they see what we lose when we give up what makes us an actually great country. Or at least one that used to like to pretend it was.

Stop Buying Republican Bullshit on Immigration: There Is No "Invasion"

The red lights flashing the word "pretext" were turned up to 100 in a presidential "proclamation" last week (if by "proclamation," you mean, "a steaming, stinking heap of buzzwords guaranteed to make the yahoos go dick-punching mad with rage"). "Over the last 4 years, the United States has endured a full-scale invasion of aliens entering and remaining in the country illegally, causing a relentless onslaught of crime, vagrancy, violence, and death in countless American communities," it says. This "lawless invasion" has apparently made it harder to get into a hospital or go to school. 

Now, you, being a hopefully rational human or freakishly smart animal, might think, "Umm, isn't crime at historic lows?" And you'd be right. You might then question whether there is a "relentless onslaught" of anything but hard workers who commit crimes at a lower rate than the fucked-up Americans who are accusing them of committing crimes. In fact, even as the numbers of people crossing into this country at the southern border surged to record highs in the post-Covid era in the first couple of years of Joe Biden's presidency, the crime rate dropped, which, frankly, could be used to suggest that crime goes down when more migrants come here (I know that's not the reason, but I'm saying that the bullshit inferences politicians make can go both ways). 

Meanwhile, Republicans are going completely bugfuck insane on deportations and lies about our immigration system. Today, President Trump himself shat into his Truth Toilet, "Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order, and if we aren’t allowed to remove them because of a radicalized and incompetent Court System, the USA will quickly and violently become a CRIME RIDDEN THIRD WORLD NATION, NEVER TO SEE GREATNESS AGAIN." And then he went on to scream about winning the 2024 election and how that lets him do anything he wants, as if that's how the fucking government in this country works.

Meanwhile, the man who is no doubt the infected cockhole creating the racist deportation policy, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who looks like he brags about how he jacks off to videos of starving Palestinian children, makes Trump look like a model of rationality as he screams on various news shows about how much he loves "Americans," which means, you know, "white people." He gave away the game on the rhetoric being used by the White House and the rest of the Nazi right. "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended at a time of invasion," Miller slurped lizardly. "So I would say that’s an action we’re actively looking at." And while the White House insists it's just for undocumented migrants, I mean, come the fuck on. Of course not. Of fucking course not.

See, that's the whole thing about the calculated use of "invasion." It's necessary to say that we are under some kind of coordinated attack in order to unleash the unchecked, unreviewable ability to simply jail, deport, kidnap, or, fuck it, murder anyone who gets in the way of the Christian nationalist takeover of the country, starting with the Alien Enemies Act and getting to martial law. And, no, I don't think I'm overstating it. I think with the arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka for trying to find out what the fuck is going on at an ICE facility in his own goddamn city, with the threats to arrest Democratic members of Congress who were there with him, and so much more, including the ongoing effort to disappear non-citizens who say things like "Israel shouldn't murder every Palestinian and take Gaza" (I mean, the war's end would limit Miller's spank bank), but I think with all that, I'm probably not freaking out enough, and I am freaked the fuck out.

What is encouraging about Democrats directly confronting the increasingly lawless actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs and their increasingly brazenly thuggish behavior is that it shows they are finally giving up on trying to stupidly appease Republicans on border policy. Simply put, there is no appeasing them without mass deportations and suspension of constitutional rights. It was stupid when Democrats shifted right with the proposed border deal that Trump got shitcanned last year, and it was stupid when they didn't counter Republican hysteria over every single individual crime committed by an undocumented person. Instead, they leaned into the shift in public opinion on immigration that the fearmongering had achieved and essentially gave credence to the GOP's lies in a moment when they should have said, "No, they are fucking liars." 

Take just one thing that Trump, Miller, and the rest of the liars use: the supposed war being waged against this country by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Remember how they supposedly took over the town of Aurora, Colorado? And Fox "news" and its devolved descendant news outlets went berserker over the idea? Yeah, you know how many gang members local cops in Aurora found there? A dozen in a city of nearly 400,000 people. Either the 12 gang members had a fucking nuclear missile or everyone was lying. Oh, and Trump tried to say that the Venezuelan government was sending these highly-trained drug dealers in to overthrow the country. But a leaked intelligence memo said that was fucking bullshit, as if it ever made sense that the estimated 600 Tren de Aragua cartel members in the United States are an actual threat. Yes, I said, "600." You can arrest them, you know, and give them their habeas rights and then incarcerate them, like you would any other fucking criminals found guilty.

I will say it again: There is no invasion. And it's some punk-ass bullshit to act like there is one, like the United States can't handle a handful of criminals.

Last week, Andrea Flores of FWD.us addressed Senate Democrats and told them that it's time to stop ceding the border issue to Republican scare tactics, that being MAGA-lite lost them votes, and that they needed to come up with actual solutions, not just shit like limiting asylum. They need to come up with paths to citizenship, support for due process, and more. That also includes getting funding for immigration courts while opposing funding for the savage actions of ICE. Hopefully, it's a message Democrats take to heart because if you allow that the savages have a point, then you're pretty much a savage yourself.

Hell, I'd start hammering away on the most blatantly racist thing I've seen in a while: the quick approval of refugee status for white fucks from South Africa. That's literal white privilege. The refugee program was shut down for anyone who was a shade darker than eggshell. But, here we are, letting actual apartheid lovers jump the line. That's an easy story to make people appalled.

Donald Trump on Meet the Press: Because Fuck You, America

Today, in his "interview" (if by "interview," you mean, "a psychotic head trip into a soulless abyss") with Kristen "I'm not a reporter, but I play one on TV" Welker on Meet the Press, President Donald Trump repeatedly told the average American to kiss his gargantuan ass. Time and again, offered a chance to provide comfort, reassurance, or any measure of empathy, Trump's answer was, essentially, "Everyone can fucking kiss my gigantic ass. Just plant your lips on it. There's more than enough room for all you suckers and losers."

You might have heard about the moment that he said that children can go fuck themselves. He insisted, repeatedly, creepily, that an 11-year-old "beautiful baby girl" doesn't need to own more shit. "I'm just saying they don't need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five," he said in response to questions about the effect of his tariffs. Later, pressed again on this point, he added, "We don't need to feed the beast." Now, I'm no fan of people being materialist assholes, but what the ever-loving fuck is he talking about? If a Democrat, like, say, Bernie Sanders, had ever said something as remotely anti-capitalist as this, the red feathers would have been tarred on them immediately by the GOP as they screeched about "Marxism" and "Communism" and probably Hunter Biden's laptop because, fuck it, they always do. It's the Benghazi of email servers. 

(And, by the way, 30? 250? Those are pretty precise fucking numbers. I'm betting someone's the dickhead grandpa bitching about all the things his grandkids have.)

Beyond that, look at the absolute disdain wrapped up in what he's saying. "You must do without," Trump's saying. "You must have less so that Elon Musk and I and all our billionaire friends can have more because fuck you. Fuck you for not being a billionaire. Now shut the fuck up before I limit it to two dolls and three pencils." 

That kind of abject hatred of people who have to make do with less than a gold toilet ran through the interview. When Welker brought up prices rising on basic things, like "Tires, strollers, some clothing," Trump found the idea ridiculous. "When you say strollers are going up, what kind of a thing? I'm saying that gasoline is going down. Gasoline is thousands of times more important than a stroller or some place?" Well, yes and no. A lot of people need strollers, which he'd know if he ever took care of a child. And he's lying about gasoline. 

Welker asked Trump if he would consider tariff relief for small businesses, and he scoffed. No, really, he scoffed, "Why do you always mention that. You know, you pick up a couple of little businesses. What about the car business?" Later, he said that he doesn't need to help small businesses because, through the magic of tariffs, they will make more money than they ever have. It's like he realized he said, "I don't give a shit about small business owners. How much money did they ever give me?" and had to throw them the bone of profiting in some undefined future when we have The Greatest Economy Ever.

It's not that Trump was telling Americans, "Let them eat cake." It's that he's telling us all the cake is for him and we can go fuck our selves if we don't like watching him stuff it down his gaping maw. Welker asked him about the price tag for his upcoming celebration of his tiny dick, the military parade he's forcing the armed services to do on his birthday. Like a toddler looking at dump truck toys, he responded that the cost is "Peanuts compared to the value of doing it. We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we're going to celebrate it." Yeah, to the tune of around $45 million. Trump take cake.

"Fuck you, America" was the theme of the interview, just like it's the fuel that's powering this cursed  administration. When Welker asked him, simply, straightforwardly, if he, as president, has to uphold the Constitution, Trump said, "I don't know." So Trump just said something that was so basic, so traitorous, that every American should be calling for his removal from office or the fuckin' guillotine. And he's such a little bitch about everything, constantly saying that shit is up to "the lawyers," as if he's not the goddamn president of the fucked United States. Man up and give an opinion, you dumb motherfucker.

Later in the bullshit interview, he left open whether or not he could run for a third term, which, you know, he can't unless there's an amendment to the Constitution. But he simply can't bring himself to say that he's term-limited because it would slow the fucking grift, like his "Trump 2028" hats. Trump said more legitimately anti-American shit on Meet the Press than Fidel Castro on a rum bender. Fuck, Castro's ghost was probably looking up from Hell thinking, "Oh, I wish I'd thought of that" before being sodomized with a giant lit cigar again.

This post could go on for another couple thousand words about the sheer abundance of ways that Trump demonstrated that he's an evil moron bent on the destruction of the country. But lemme finish with one more giant "Fuck you" to us all. Walking through Trump's whorehouse chic Mar-a-Lago shithole, Welker got Trump to talk about his future plans for his other residence. "We are going to make and build a ballroom, which they’ve wanted for probably a hundred years at the White House. And it’ll be a world-class, beautiful ballroom," he bragged. Now, the East Room has been used for dances and banquets and shit, but Trump wants to build a $100 million expansion to pimp out the joint like the aforementioned brothel. 

Trump says, at first, that he will pay for it. But then he adds a comment that gives the game away: "Yeah, I'm not going to ask the government for money. I'll fund it, and I'm sure we'll have some donations to it. But it's not an inexpensive thing. It'll cost a lot of money." 

He's gonna get a ton of bribe-donations to make his garish, loud, permanent impact on the seat of power. It will be corruption at levels we've never seen before, except for all the times Trump has done it. And no one will do a thing about it because fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck all of us.