Let Us Praise the Voters in This Midterm: Don't Fuck with People's Right to Be Apathetic

There's a simple rule that you need to follow if you want to do evil, cruel, or even just illegal shit as any kind of leader: make sure you take care of the lives of regular people so they don't notice. Because, see, for the most part, Americans just want to be left the fuck alone and allowed to live their lives, and they'll put up with a load of fuckery in order to be able to do that. Unless it's happening in their backyard (like in Minneapolis), your regular, everyday American, across races, across education lines, across ages, is gonna be okay with whatever, if they're even clued in. But when you fuck up and do something that makes those Americans pay attention, then there is hell to pay in spades. 

See, my theory on the absolute ass-reaming the GOP received on Tuesday in the midterm elections where Democrats won back the House and Senate by margins no one expected, along with governorships, legislatures, and more, is very simple. Yes, absolutely, affordability and inflation were big issues, the biggest by some measures, for voters. And that might have been enough for a decent enough night. But what tilted it into a five-alarm confuckgration was gas prices. There's shit you can absorb and compartmentalize, like your Netflix goes up or the price of Monster Energy Drinks. The accretion of a few percentage here and there is going to be noticeable, sure, but maybe not enough to shake you out of complacency (unless it's 2024 and your social media is a nonstop hate stream against the cost of eggs). 

But then there's gas and diesel. Those prices are in your face all the time. You're driving, biking, walking, taking the bus down the road, you're gonna see the gas and diesel prices at every goddamn station. If you fill it up, you're gonna see a big jump in how much you pay. That's a hit all at once. You fuckin' notice when it costs ten, twenty bucks more to fill your tank. 

I think that led to a thought process that went something like, "Wait. I think I was promised prices would come down. I was told again and again that Trump and Republicans would make life easier. What's up with this shit now? And if they fucked up that, what else are they fucking up?" And that's the moment  when those voters who just wanted to stay in their bubbles looked up for five fucking seconds and realized just how fucked everything has gotten. Like they saw the corruption and the bullshit monuments and the Iran War and everything else on top of the ICE savagery, and they thought, "Oh, shit." It's like walking out of the Trump cave and looking around and realizing, "Wait, the world isn't just shadows projected on a wall by an idiot with dementia? Goddamnit." Once they break the spell that someone can live their lives uninterrupted by their vile depravity, then authoritarians fall. 

Don't fuck with people's right to not give a fuck, and Trump's idiotic tariffs and completely self-owning war in Iran couldn't help but make people give a fuck. And while he was dicking over the American voters, he was outright raping the GOP. That's right. The party of rapists and rapist-enablers finally got raped on Tuesday. You let a rapist get away with it, you give the rapist power, you ignore his expansive criminality, hell, you help make it happen, none of that means the rapist won't rape you when he decides he wants to. Trump couldn't have cared less about Republican election chances and he certainly didn't seek their consent on any of his heinous actions and policies.  It was all about him, from the delusional cruelty to immigrant groups he didn't like to picking absolute fucking loser candidates in places like Texas and South Carolina. He didn't care or didn't know that those moves were turning off voters by the millions. 

Many groups of voters, especially young white males, veered to Trump in 2024 after voting for Biden in 2020, and then, this year, switched back. That's some whiplash, and it's both encouraging and frightening because it means they could be just as fickle in 2028. However, two other significant voting blocs helped completely decimate (to use a phrase Trump used about Iran but, in this case, is actually true) Republicans.

When I kept saying that the Louisiana Senate race was shockingly in play, I was very specifically referencing how fucking pissed off Black voters were about the redistricting fuckery that the GOP engaged in (and Democrats attempted to match). Because of the Callais decision by Trump's accomplices on the Supreme Court, which allowed Louisiana to get rid of one majority Black district and tore up what was left of the Voting Rights Act, Black voters were righteously and justifiably pissed off because, apparently, it became undeniable that making America great again meant rolling back the clock on civil rights, something that families of Black voters and some voters themselves fought and died to secure. In Louisiana, Democrat Jamie Davis didn't win, but he came within 1.8% of Republican Julia Letlow. A little investment of cash and time by the national party, and who knows what could happen moving forward.

As for the Latino vote, some fears existed that Trump would send ICE to polling stations to intimidate and harass Latino-Americans who were voting. Instead of scaring anyone away (and it didn't happen except in isolated cases), that potential bullshit on top of the brutal, horrendous attack on immigrants by ICE thugs energized and pissed off Latino voters, who, like Black voters, showed up in huge numbers to vote for Democrats, shifting back from any gains that Trump and the GOP made with that demographic in 2024. Seriously, Trump murdered any chance of Latino gains with Republicans for a generation with the ICE invasion of cities.

In general, Republicans just pissed off voters continuously, from Vivek Ramaswamy's horrendous ad accusing Amy Acton of lying, even about being raped, to Trump not shutting the fuck up about his goddamn ballroom and helipad. And whoever said they should make Twitch streamer Hasan Piker into a big issue should be whipped out of DC. The GOP freaks had nothing to run on, and they tried to pretend they were some kind of last line of defense against things that no one saw as a threat.

There will be more to say about what Democrats should do with the majorities they now have. But take a lesson from voters. Americans across the demographic spectrum understood that they had one very specific power, and they used it. Because that's what you do with power: use it to make lives better. Or at least make it so you can go back to being left the fuck alone.

Note: As long as I'm doing this, lemme push it a little further. All you need to do is ask some AI bot "Why are gas prices so high?" and then the algorithm will adjust to feed you a dose of reality on your social media. Click on one Meidas Touch post on Instagram and then you'll be inundated with progressive feeds (unless you're on Twixter, which probably just circles the fascist wagons and browbeats you into submission - I don't know - I don't go to that garbage dump anymore).

Vote Because the GOP Is Enabling a Rapist

Every time the New York Times or Politico or even Fox "news" tries to fluff some flaccid minor issue into a fully-erect controversy, I think, "The president is a rapist and that's something that should be talked about every goddamn day." Indeed, as Donald Trump and complicit Republicans pretend that the totally legal dirty trick of putting someone with the same name as GOP Senator Dan Sullivan on the ballot in Alaska is like an electoral crisis that demands judicial intervention, perhaps up to criminal and civil penalties against Democratic candidate (and frontrunner) Mary Peltola, the media is more or less ignoring a report put out by House Democrats detailing more rape allegations against Trump. And I might be a naif in legal matters, but I'm gonna say that supporting an alleged rapist as president is far more important than whether or not Alaskans are too stupid to figure out there can be more than one Dan Sullivan. 

There are a million fucking reasons to vote for Democrats and/or to vote against Republicans, from the Iran War to ICE's brutal rampage to Trump's wanton, extravagant corruption to the disgusting racism of Trump and many candidates to the failure to address Americans' deep anxiety about health care and income and affordability to the future-murdering refusal to do anything to mitigate the destructive march of the climate crisis to the attack on reality with election lies and immigrant lies and economic lies to the harm caused by the diminishment of science, like vaccines, in favor discredited bullshit to the abandonment of Ukraine in favor of Russia, which is a criminal enterprise disguised as a country to the shitting on our allies with threats and bullying to the baffling waste of funds and time on nonsense like ballrooms and monuments and marble and fake gold shit. I could go on.  You could go on. 

Every step of the way, Republicans in the House and Senate have either actively and enthusiastically voted for all of this or they have enabled it through inaction or vociferous support. The same goes for the rape allegations against Trump, and it's one giant reason to vote out Republicans. We have been living with a president who is a rapist, likely a child rapist, and it's time to fucking do something about that. Your vote for the Democratic candidates is one way to start to hold these rapist-loving bastards to account.

This past Monday, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report that detailed aspects of the rape and sexual abuse allegations against Trump and his relationship with serial child rapist Jeffrey Epstein that haven't been public or haven't been put into a coherent narrative by a congressional committee. It's filled with disturbing details, like Trump's rape of Beatrice Keul, a Miss Switzerland who was in New York to compete in a beauty pageant owned by Trump. The rape occurred in the Plaza Hotel in November 1993; a month later, Trump married his second wife, Marla Maples, at the Plaza. Jeffrey Epstein was there for the pageant and for the wedding. 

Obviously, the details of the allegations are fucked-up. But the report is not merely a recitation of horrors and of lies (like that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, which...nope). Many of the victims made statements to the FBI, and falsely accusing someone of a crime is itself a crime. If they were lying, they were doing it with the threat of prosecution hanging over their heads. This is not to mention the possibility of lawsuits from Trump, who is the suingest asshole in the world.

To back up the allegations, the report gives us information like this about one survivor, who went by "Jane Doe 1" since she was 14 at the time: "As made apparent when viewed in the version made available to Members of Congress, but not to the public, Jane Doe 1 was viewed as a credible witness by DOJ investigators and prosecutors, and she was one of four women to testify against Ghislaine Maxwell during her criminal trial under the pseudonym  'Jane.' Jane’s testimony was devastating for Maxwell’s defense." Epstein had introduced her to Trump at Mar-a-Lago (which ought to be called "Meet-a-Pedo" from now on) with "This is a good one, huh?" to which Trump said, "Yes." 

Just think about that: This victim, who was raped or watched others being raped at several Epstein properties, was seen as having strong enough testimony that it could be used in court. 

Another woman, under the pseudonym of "Katie Johnson," sued Trump in 2016 for rape and sexual abuse. She dropped her lawsuit and has gone silent, but she had reported what happened to her by Trump and Epstein to the FBI. Other documents involving complaints to the FBI had been withheld by the Department of Justice in its release of the DOJ-selected Epstein files. Members of Congress had access, and that's why their content is discussed. 

There's more, so much more, in the 53-page report, yet you're not going to hear about any of it or about the fact that Republicans didn't want this to come out. You're gonna hear about the Alaska non-scandal or the tiff between insufferable loser Haley Stevens and rising star Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or every tiny mistake by a Democrat blown up into a full-on breaking newsgasm. But you're not gonna hear more than something in passing, almost like, "By the way, Trump was accused of more rape. I know. Yawn, right?" instead of a five-alarm fucking blare that the president has been credibly accused of rape and assault by over a dozen women.

Why is it hidden by the corporate media? Perhaps because of the complicity of the billionaire owners of media companies? Perhaps once a media outlet goes down that road, it's all or nothing. If you start reporting that the president is a rapist, then you gotta follow that to its logical end: that president being removed from office and sent to prison.

A fuckton of voters do care about this. They care about the Epstein files. They care that the president is a rapist. They care that Republicans will never do anything about it. And if they give Democrats the keys to Congress, those Democrats better be ready to tear down the rapist-in-chief. As for you, dear voter, your decision is either to side with rapist-lovers or vote them out. You know what you need to do.

Vote Because It's Your One Chance to Make Some Billionaires Sad

My father fucking hated rich people. I mean, he despised the hell out of them as a group for simply existing. Some of this was born of his hardscrabble upbringing on the streets of Brooklyn in the 1950s. He went from struggling working-class kid to lower middle-class family man by the time he died at age 46, with some stops along the way to solidly middle class and to food stamps-needing poverty. But it wasn't simple resentment. He didn't aspire to be rich. He aspired to not have to worry all the time about money, a far more humble dream. Rich people were pricks, see, because of their material indulgences and their seeming freedom from consequences for their actions. He took great joy whenever a rich person suffered some fall from grace. Seriously, few things made him happier than seeing a rich man sad. This midterm election would thrill him.

If you look at a list of the 10 biggest individual/family donors to political campaigns this year, it's pretty fucking clear who the billionaires, as a whole, support. There is exactly one, George Soros, who gives primarily (or exclusively) to Democrats. The other nine give primarily (or exclusively) to Republicans, including sad, ranting pestilence Elon Musk, movie villains the Winklevi, and legit nutzoid cockscab Paul Singer, along with assorted investors, shipping magnates, and other assmites. They all desperately want the GOP to keep the majority in at least the Senate because they can slap down the House's subpoenas and investigations. But if the entire Congress is Democratic, then some shit is more likely to go through the fan and actually land on these pampered and powdered pussies. It's easier to defund Starlink contracts if you have both houses.

Early voting has gotten and is getting and will be getting under way across the country, and if you need to motivate someone to fucking vote, for fuck's sake, and vote for Democrats, then tell them that this is a rare chance to make some billionaires sad. I mean, really, how many chances do you, average Joe or Jane or  Jordan (to include a nonbinary name), get in this life to do something that might cause Elon Musk to cry? They are precious few, and not buying a Tesla isn't really one of them. This is like walking onto a yacht and kicking Jeff Bezos in the nuts. "Yeah, even rich balls can feel pain," you might yell.

Musk is going to end up dumping around a half-billion dollars into this election, if his current donation rate holds, to try to buy his way out of congressional oversight. The sad part is that this amount of money doesn't affect his wealth at all. He'll have made it back by the end of November, probably more. The sadder part is that our post-Citizens United campaign cash orgy has gotten so out of hand that the safe words have been abandoned and the billionaires are just fucking democracy to death with fistfuls of cash and laughing that no one is doing a goddamn thing to stop them. 

But what Musk can't buy is your ability to walk into a voting booth or a little voting cubby and click the machine or mark your ballot for Democrats. Even if he gave you a thousand bucks before you went to polls or filled in your mail-in ballot, you can still do what you want once it's you and a list of candidates. Musk can't stop what I hope is coming if Democrats get investigative power. Hell, Musk himself has even "joked" that if Democrats look into how he dicked over the world with his DOGE bullshit, including the mass murder of millions through his actions, he'd go to prison. 

It's not just Musk. All of those crypto dicks and AI douches, who are going in big for Republicans, would be looking at the potential (and, goddamn, they better not fuck it up) for genuine oversight from a Congress that actually acts like a co-equal branch of the fucking government and not Trump's ass wipe dispenser, cleaning him up after he shits all over himself and everyone else. All those clips of "Ruben Gallego Destroys Some Asshole at a Hearing" are functionally meaningless beyond making you feel good. However, if Gallego is part of a Democratic-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, he has the power to genuinely fuck up the shit of, say, Open AI's Sam Altman, who simply declined to go to a recent hearing. 

Maybe I'm just my father's son, but, goddamn, I wanna ruin the days of some rich fucks who think they're untouchable. Maybe they'll prove to be. Maybe Democrats are so corrupted by their billionaires' funds that they'll choke on taking a few down. But if you wanna at least try to put the ultra-wealthy on notice that their days of being above or beyond the law are over, you gotta be willing to make them cry. And with one simple action, you can can make that happen. Get out there and do it. You'll feel really good about yourself if we succeed. 

Ongoing Bullshit About Statues of Christopher Columbus, Genocidal Maniac

Christopher Columbus was a genocidal maniac and con artist who didn't know where the fuck he was going when he set out on the Atlantic Ocean to find passage to China. His calculations on his journey were so wrong that Portugal told him to go fuck himself with his yardarm. Motherfucker thought until the end of his greedy, murderous, enslaving life that he had found a passage to Asia. It's not even clear that he was Italian, despite the pathetic idiots who cling to that identity; various sources say he was Portuguese and Polish or maybe Catalan and Jewish. It's pretty telling that none of these groups are trying very hard to claim him, like "No, we're good, you keep that prick." (Note: I am Italian. Fuck Columbus.)

Starting a few years ago, a number of people decided that maybe it was some fucking bullshit to have statues everywhere that honored someone who encouraged and even rewarded the slaughter and mutilation and rape and enslavement of indigenous people. So dozens of them were torn down, removed, or moved to less prominent locations, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. Bringing attention to racial injustices and bullshit tributes spread from Black people to other groups. When you hear people criticize "wokeness" (or "Woke 1," god help us), they forget that almost all of it was a valuable reassessment of how we have built a society around racism and racist symbolism. So suck all our dicks, Columbus statues.

Now that the country as a whole has shifted from approving of wokeness to now being against any of the progressive connotations of the term, and now that we're run by a cabal of dickheads who would gladly go back to forcing slaves to dig for gold for them under threat of a behanding, all of a sudden, people want their fucking Columbus statues back. 

Just as you'd expect, a statue of Columbus now sits on whatever remains of the White House grounds. President Donald Trump, who always loves when he can honor a fellow rapist, has been cheering on Columbus like he's a crazed woman who wants to marry an imprisoned serial killer. In March of this year, a replica of a statue that had been tossed into the Inner Harbor in Baltimore in 2020 was plopped in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building like a pile of shit in human form. 

Trump has for years gone all-in on sucking Columbus's dick and, by extension, the dicks of Italian-American leaders who embarrass the rest of us with their worship of both. Apparently, "the radical left communists hate Columbus and they want to abolish Columbus Day. They're still trying very hard," Trump blurbled. He claimed that he's "resurrecting Columbus," like he's Jesus with Lazarus or some shit, and he called Columbus a "hero," which is like calling Ted Bundy "an expert in sorority rooming management."

In that same speech this past week, Trump demanded that the city of Columbus, Ohio, restore the statue of their namesake that had been taken down in 2020. Then, Mayor Andrew Ginther, who is still mayor now, said that it represented "patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness" and something better should be put in its place. A recent community group report said the statue, which is in storage, should be displayed in a "community facility" with proper historical context that doesn't involve lying about what a son of a bitch he was. 

The movement to restore Columbus is taking place elsewhere in the country. In Chicago, an Italian-American committee is trying to get three statues, including one in Grant Park, put back, even reaching out to Trump for help, which probably means Trump naming some random activist citizens so his idiot hordes can inundate them with doxxing and death threats. There's an ongoing battle over a statue in Syracuse, NY; that one should have been removed two years ago, but constant litigation has kept it in the center of town. The removed statue in Wilmington, Delaware, may end up returning when a move to prevent that failed at the City Council. Bridgeport, Connecticut, debated whether to put the statue back up and it looks like it will be restored. You get the idea: little battles everywhere a statue was taken down.

There's something so sad about a nation that can't give up its myths even when it's shown that the myths are bullshit, the heroes are pedophiles, and we can very much have a say here in how the Columbus clusterfuck of atrocities tale is told. It's of a piece of Trump and the nutzoid GOP's war on anything that would make white people look bad. Making people believe lies about Columbus rather than teaching them the truth about Jim Crow or migrant workers or the genocide of indigenous people is just easier than telling them the truth. "DEI" means just that: stop lying about the awful shit from our past and in our present.

One last note: the Columbus statue in Baltimore was in that city's Little Italy. In May, on the pedestal that remains, liberated from the colonizing madman that once stood there, an activist named Duane "Shorty" Davis placed a toilet. One local legislator got all upset because the local police said they weren't bothering to investigate, which seems exactly right. All the statues of Columbus should be reshaped into shitters that we can all use, especially on Indigenous Peoples' Day. 

The Cornell Rape Case from 2016 Shows How Not Much Happens Even If It's Handled Better Than Jane Doe's

The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper at Cornell University, published an article on February 1, 2016, that said, "A female student reported she was sexually assaulted at approximately 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, after the perpetrator led her to a bedroom." The assault occurred at the Psi Upsilon fraternity house in the early morning of January 31, when "a white male, approximately 170 pounds, around 5 feet 9 inches tall, with a medium complexion and wavy dark brown or black collar-length hair" attacked the female student. As for what happened, he lured the woman to his room, and "he then locked the door, pushed the woman against the door and tried to have sexual intercourse with her twice from behind. He is also accused of forcing the woman to have oral sex with him and pushing her onto the bed where he allegedly sexually abused her with his fingers, records show."

A Deputy Chief of the Cornell University Police Department said that "Reports like this are relatively rare in our community because sex offenses are significantly under-reported." Unlike the 2024 horrific gang rape of Jane Doe, the CUPD's referral to local law enforcement in Ithaca and Tompkins County was acted on. A warrant was issued for an arrest. Still, Tompkins County DA Gwen Wilkinson blamed "underage drinking" for rapes and sexual assaults. 

The fraternity was given a temporary suspension from any activities while this was an ongoing investigation.

By the end of the first week of February, 21 year-old Wolfgang Ballinger turned himself in to face the felony charges: "attempted rape, criminal sexual assault, and sex abuse." Ballinger was the president of the Psi Upsilon chapter at Cornell where the rape took place. (Note: I'm using "rape" because forced oral sex and penetration with fingers are rape in the way any normal human understands the word, even if legal definitions vary.) 

Ballinger's father ran the very popular music venue Webster Hall in New York City where Wolfgang worked bar. Every woman is feeling how chilling that thought is: this guy in charge of your drinks.  Because Ballinger came from money, which inevitably means lawyers throwing everything at the prosecutor to derail the case, he wasn't formally indicted until July 2016 and only for one charge, first degree sexual abuse. 

In April 2017, Ballinger took a deal where he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of "forcible touching." In 2017, current DA Matthew Van Houten had taken over from Wilkinson, and he said that the victim "is wholeheartedly in support of this resolution." She did not want to have to go through the trauma of a trial. 

At the sentencing hearing, the woman made a statement, and you should read the excerpts in articles here and here for how the rape affected her and her family. This part really got me: "The day I went to the hospital for my rape kit, I had to first wait for another woman to finish being seen. When the nurse finally arrived at my room, she looked at me with sad, sunken eyes. ‘On average, 1 in 10 rapes are reported. That means 20 girls were likely assaulted last night because two of you went to the police today.’ I just looked back at her quietly. I didn’t feel lucky to be one of the women with the courage to come forward, I only felt grief. I am standing here today for the 18 other women that wanted to deal with their assault on their own terms.”

And this: "No matter how much money or status he has, it doesn’t let him take what he likes without consequence. Because there will be consequences. I will not stop. You cannot break me." 

Ballinger had already been expelled from Cornell, although he had started taking classes at NYU and Hunter College in NYC. He was sentenced to six years probation and given a fine, the strictest sentence allowed for the misdemeanor. His probation conditions included needing to stay away from children, relatives excepted, and a prohibition "from entering establishments where alcohol is sold 'for on-premise consumption.'" Oh, but he had an exception for his job at Webster Hall. He could still serve drinks to women there. Now, he's a "hospitality professional" who managed a hotel.

As for Psi Upsilon, the fraternity had its recognition by Cornell revoked for a 3-year period because of this case, other incident reports (including fights where racist words were flying at non-white students), and violating the interim suspension by having a party during it. And then, after an appeal, the Vice President for Student and Campus Life reduced it to 1.5 years. In an unexpected turn, the Board of Governors for the national Psi Upsilon body closed the Cornell house completely in September 2017 after a racist incident.

There you go. That's what happened when an on-campus rape allegation followed the proper process. It's pathetic, sure, but it's something, and that something is sadly reflective of the outcome of rape cases across the country. 

But here's the thing: Cornell knew what was going on at its fraternities and still let them continue. It knew how bad things were. It knew to the point that in December 2022, the Student Assembly issued a resolution "Condemning Greek Life" at the university. Among its assertions, "Cornell has a known rape culture where victims are silenced and perpetrators are often never held accountable for their actions" and "24% of undergraduate women who experienced nonconsensual sexual contact reported the most serious incident occurred at a fraternity chapter house or annex." It also mentions the 2016 case. 

The resolution didn't directly call for an end to fraternities at Cornell, but that's what should happen there and everywhere.

Trump Blames Biden for Things Biden Had Nothing to Do With

We know that President Donald "Wipe me, Natalie" Trump and his entire syphilitic administration love to blame every possible negative thing on President Joe Biden. Every blemish in DC, every policy that they don't like, every statistic that doesn't go their way, every hike in prices, every fucking thing. Hell, I'm sure Trump blames Biden for the fact that Melania would rather masturbate with a fake gold cherub than touch her husband. Any chance any of them get, they fucking blame Biden, despite the fact that, to my knowledge, Biden hasn't been anywhere near the levers of power for nearly 20 months. 

Of course, often, shit has nothing to do with Biden or is an exaggeration. Today, in fact, Trump said, "Oil is less expensive now than it was under the Biden administration." And, sure, if you measure by 2022 prices, it is lower. It went up to around $116 a barrel due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and now it's at, roughly, $95. But when Trump took over from Biden, it was down to $75 a barrel, and by my awesome ability to do basic math, I can state with certainty that $75 is lower than $95. 

On Thursday, September 17,  Trump had one of his Dinner with the Rich Yokels events where he invited heads of hunting and fishing organizations and corporations to watch him sign some executive orders making life easier for them and shittier for the environment. One of the EOs was about a couple of things that irritate some fishing businesses: a NOAA rule that ordered a speed of "no more than 10 knots applying to all vessels 65 ft (19.8 m) or greater in overall length in certain locations and at certain times of the year along the east coast of the U.S. Atlantic seaboard" in order to protect migrating whales, and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which was designed to prevent overfishing and other issues that can harm that industry and the oceans. Fun fact: The Stevens is Ted Stevens, the longtime and now-dead Republican senator from Alaska. 

Here's how Trump described what he was doing: "The Biden administration tried to bludgeon the boating and maritime industry with a ridiculous boating speed limit of no more than 10 miles per hour" and "This order also expands fishing seasons and fishing quotas, undoing another Biden disaster." Wow, that Joe Biden really loves sea life. 

Except facts will fuck your shit up and here are the facts: That rule on the speed limit? That was finalized and put into effect in 2008 when the president was, in fact, George W. Bush. The Magnuson-Stevens Act on fishing limits was initially passed in 1976, when Gerald Ford was president, and renewed in 2006, when, yeah, it was Bush. I mean, sure, Biden was a senator and the vote was unanimous, so there's a slight connection. By the way, both houses of Congress were under Republican control in '06. 

The Biden administration had nothing to do with either thing. But that doesn't stop Trump from fucking that glory hole with the name "Biden" above it in black sharpie again and again. He doesn't even care if there's a mouth on the other side. He doesn't care if he gets splinters. He'll keep fucking it until his dick falls off.

Trump made it sound like he was changing everything on these two issues immediately. "You can go slightly faster than 10 miles an hour, like 120 miles an hour if you're crazy," he assured the fishing industry people, "but you can go as fast as you want. We have that order. It's all signed, sealed and delivered." Except, of course, that's not what the EO even did.  It "does not repeal or suspend the existing vessel speed rule. The current 10-knot limit remains in effect for most vessels 65 feet or longer in designated Seasonal Management Areas along the East Coast." In both cases, it simply directs relevant agencies to look into changing things. It's not a done deal. It might well turn out to be. But you cannot "go as fast as you want." 

Trump doesn't even understand what the hell he's signing. He's said as much earlier in the ceremony, when he signed the other EO. That one actually was undoing Biden policy, "a nationwide ban on the use of lead shotgun ammo for waterfowl hunting because of the material’s known toxicity for waterfowl and other bird species," according to noted anti-hunting rag Field & Stream magazine. But Trump had no idea what the hell that means, and that's coming from him:

"This order also protects the use of affordable, traditional... Well, this is pretty good. I never knew this was a problem, Doug. You're going to have to educate me, but you put it in, lead ammunition. Is ammunition... Lead ammunition was a problem, huh? Is it better than other ammunition, I assume, huh? That's pretty good. I don't know what the hell that means but I know one thing. You wanted it. You wanted it. And I'm here for you."

In other words, Trump hadn't seen or heard of the executive order before putting his name on it. He didn't give a single, solitary fuck. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asked for it and Trump didn't even care what it was. Not even one single moment of curiosity about the effects of lead ammo. It gave him an excuse to attack Biden on gun rights, and that's all he wanted to do.

And then, swear to fuck, he went on to tell the goddamn story about whether he'd rather get eaten by a shark or electrocuted underwater in a sinking electric boat again. At this point, I'll take the fucking shark.

A Totally Real Memo (Wink!) from the Department of Defe...War

A. From the Office of the Secretary of WAR, MOTHERFUCKERS!:

In accordance with Secretary of WAR, MOTHERFUCKERS! Pete "Peter" Hegseth's memo from this summer where the Secretary [note: Can we get that changed? Makes me sound like a chick- PH] informed our brave men (and women, for now) in uniform that no one is allowed to "be a pussy," and on wise, medically-sound guidance from Secretary of "Health" and "Human" Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is one of the good Moslems, we will begin testing all male service members at age 30 and over to ensure that the service member's level of the hormone testosterone (T) is acceptable. 

Testing procedures:
1. Groups of male service members will sleep in designated barracks the night before testing.

2. In the morning, Secretary Hegseth will go around to each bunk prior to service members waking and check to see if each member has an erection. If a service member does not have a full erection, Secretary Hegseth will engage with the service member's penis to bring it to full erection while an assistant times the length of time it takes to achieve full tumescence. Note: Secretary Hegseth requests that, if you wake up during this part of the test, you should continue to pretend you are asleep. AT NO TIME MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH SECRETARY HEGSETH. 

3. In groups of three or four, male service members will be brought into a room and asked to masturbate to ejaculation into a provided cup. Secretary Hegseth will be seated in a chair to watch each service member masturbate to ensure proper ejaculation occurs. The Secretary requests that service members only wear a white t-shirt and athletic socks as they enter the room. The Secretary will ask questions about the libidos and sexual activity of service members while they masturbate. Masturbation duration will be timed, with notes made if it take too long or too little time. As with the previous part of the test, DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH SECRETARY HEGSETH. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. 

4. Secretary Hegseth will personally test each semen sample by tasting it. He will be able to tell if the semen contains the correct minimum amount of testosterone by comparing it to the taste of his own semen, which he will provide for himself. Service members must stand at attention right after they have completed ejaculation while the Secretary tastes their semen and comments on various attributes he perceives. Even if Secretary Hegseth asks a direct question, DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH HIM. THE SECRETARY PERCEIVES ALL EYE CONTACT AS A THREAT AND MAY ACT ACCORDINGLY. 

5. Service members whose T is low will be forced to take regular injections of it in order to improve the service member's masculinity. If a service member refuses to receive the injections, they will be deemed "transgender" and forced to leave military service. 

6. Service members whose T is normal will be put back into regular duties.

7. Service members whose T level is above that of Secretary Hegseth's will be assigned to strip nude and oil wrestle the Secretary so he can prove that "You're not so tough." During these nude oil wrestling matches, DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH SECRETARY HEGSETH. HE CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THE VIOLENCE THAT WILL FOLLOW. THE SECRETARY MAY BE INTOXICATED AND HAS NO IMPULSE CONTROL EVEN ON GOOD DAYS.

8. If a service member defeats Secretary Hegseth at oil wrestling, that service member and his family will be deported. Probably to Liberia. 

9/11 Is Tired of This Dance

Staring in the mirror, 9/11 sighs. Even though it's generally only once a year now that anyone cares that she exists, she knows that 25 years means something magical to people, as if numbers that end in 5 or 0 carry a mystical force when, really, it's just the nature of humans to find arbitrary significance in things that are inevitable. 25 years was going to happen, she was going to be there for it, and she knows people will want her to look her best. She works on her eyelashes.

What 9/11 hates most about these kinds of anniversaries is the willful amnesia, where names like "Bush" and "Cheney" are intoned with reverence, as if they weren't the same monsters who regularly burst into her apartment and jacked off on her and made her march around with their cum on her face, calling anyone who came to her aid a "traitor" and sent out the squamous, smirking Karl Rove to destroy them. Now, on these occasions, she gets to hear perhaps how Bush tried to unite us or maybe some kind of insulting assertion that they weren't as bad as Donald Trump. They were, she knows, she knows, and she wants to scream. They were just as bad. They used her as an excuse to try to break down the nation and the world and rebuild it in their gnarled, corrosive image, with everyone an enemy until proven otherwise. And they would make her appear regularly and dance for their pleasure. 9/11 remembers all those nights in the Oval Office, with Rumsfeld and Rice pawing each other frantically, supremely aroused by her swaying and shaking, laughing as Colin Powell tried to avoid staring at her when they stripped her and dragged her into a threesome that left her empty and lost. Cheney and Bush sucked on their cigars and laughed. They put so much heroin into her veins those days so she couldn't protest. God, it was so many foul years before they finally let her be.

She puts on her lipstick. Yes, those filthy times may be at an end for her, with many of the worst of her rapists gratifyingly, finally dead, but 9/11 knows that what they did to her and in her name was the template for what came after, for the worthless wars and the whores in conservative media, whether radio, TV, podcast, online, everywhere, making bank on tearing the citizens of the country apart, and the politicians who ride that hatred hard, like it's the fastest horse at the Derby. Without her, so much might have been different. Or maybe they would have at least found someone else to drag around and exploit.  

Jesus, she thinks, at least Giuliani has become such a disgrace that no one dares to try to redefine him as some kind of benevolent, elderly statesman whose dignity is missed in false comparison to the indecent mongrels leading the nation now. And it almost makes her giggle to think of Giuliani contemplating that it is, in fact, a Muslim mayor who will lead New York City through this day, a Muslim man who is genuinely beloved and admired and who, it seems, has no interest in watching 9/11 dance.

But dance she must, even if it's only every fifth year. 9/11 has aged in the last quarter century, "but who hasn't?" she thinks. She knows her responsibilities. It moves her deeply that she is the first world event that impacted the lives of many who were children when she was forced into her current existence in fire and blood. 9/11 wishes, oh, she wishes that it wasn't the case, that she was just another day. 

She checks herself out, her dark but not black dress still fitting, the slit not quite as high up on her thigh, but open enough to let her move. She can't stare too long or she'll burst into tears. She thinks about bin Laden, how he knew that they would torture and parade her and use her as an excuse for every destructive impulse they ever had. She think that it's laughably tragic that he understood the United States better than most Americans.  

She's ready. Reluctant but ready. 9/11 is tired of the ritual of dancing so everyone can behold her and honor her and condemn her and mourn for her and mock her and more. She'll do it because she has no choice. For her, for 9/11, for the country where she lives, for the endless manufactured crises that may not be in her name directly but have their origin in her, it will never stop being 9/11. 

A Poem for the Laborers

"From 'Be Recorder'"

by Carmen Gimenez

they work their fingers 

to the soul their bones 

to their marrow 

they toil in blankness 

inside the dead yellow 

rectangle of warehouse 

windows work fingers 

to knots of fires  

the young the ancients

the boneless the broken

the warehouse does too 

to the bone of the good 

bones of the building

every splinter spoken for

she works to the centrifuge 

of time the calendar a thorn 

into the sole dollar of working 

without pause work their mortal 

coils into frayed threads until 

just tatter they worked their bones 

to the soul until there was no 

soul left to send worked until 

they were dead gone

to heaven or back home 

for the dream to have USA 

without USA to export

USA to the parts under 

the leather sole of the boss 

they work in dreams of working 

under less than ideal conditions 

instead of just not ideal 

conditions work for the 

shrinking pension and never 

dental for the illusion 

of the doctor medicating them 

for work-related disease 

until they die leaving no empire

only more dreams that their babies

should work less who instead

work more for less 

so they continue to work 

for them and their kin 

they workballoon payment 

in the form of a heart attack 

if only that’ll be me someday

the hopeless worker said on 

the thirteenth of never 

hollering into the canyon 

of perpetual time 

four bankruptcies later

three-fifths into a life 

that she had planned 

on expecting happiness 

in any form it took 

excluding the knock-off

cubed life she lived in debt

working to the millionth

of the cent her body cost

the machine’s owner

Yolanda Berta Zoila 

Chavela Lucia Esperanza

Naya Carmela Celia Rocio

once worked here

their work disappearing

into dream-emptied pockets

into the landfill of work

the work to make their bodies

into love for our own

Democrats Have One Job This Year. Anything Else Is Bullshit.

If you put a gun to my head, I honest-to-fuck couldn't pick Hasan Piker out of a lineup that included Grimace, that pirate thing from Backrooms, and Sadie Sink. I'd probably say, "I don't think he's big and purple, but maybe he's small and redheaded" You're having one of a couple of reactions to that petty little bit of snark. One is "How can he possibly not know about Hasan Piker, left-wing firebrand and one of the most popular Twitch streamers and podcasters? Doesn't he know that's the Joe Rogan of the Left?" And that's fair to think that I, who have wallowed in the mud pits of political commentary for far too much of this one precious life, would have more than a passing knowledge of someone who is getting so much ink and spittle spilled over some of his more indulgently pseudo-extreme statements. 

Another entirely fair reaction is "Who the hell is Hasan Piker and why should I care?" To which I would only tell you that you don't need to care. Really. No matter how many times some random Democrat is asked about Piker or some other idiot Democrat puts out a statement condemning some Piker remark about Israel or, even worse, condemning a fellow Democrat for talking to Piker, you don't have to give a dull tortoise fuck about him. 

But it seems like, for some fucked up reason, Democrats from Cory Booker and John Fetterman in the Senate to Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Dingell in the House, as well as reliably old and disconnected consultants like James Carville and David Axelrod, have all taken the bait and attacked Piker for comments about Israel that are frankly not that different than what acceptable pundits like Ezra Klein have said.  I'm not going to go into the whole issue itself, except to say that it's the mainstream of Democratic voters' beliefs to disapprove of Israel's genocide in Gaza and to want to stop arms sales to the nation. Indeed, you could say it's not just the minority view among Democrats to support murderous pricksore Benjamin Netanyahu, but with any support now at around 20% among Democrats, you could call that the extremist perspective. 

Look, Democrats, you have one fucking job to accomplish in this midterm election season, and that's to take the Congress back from Republicans so you can attempt to fuck Trump's shit up. That's it. Everything else is bullshit and a distraction and a waste of everyone's time. Donald Trump is an existential threat to the continuation of the United States as a constitutional democracy, or, hell, as a place where people can even live without fearing disease, deportation, or death. Hasan Piker and the Democratic Socialists of America and trans athletes are not, even if you combined them into one Zord of Fake Shit That Terrifies Moderate Assholes. But that's just dancing to the Republicans' tune, and if you let the GOP set the agenda for what Democrats can be questioned about, if you let the media try to push you to condemn a widely popular opinion within the party's voters, then you're fucking it up.

I get that corporate Democrats are butthurt as hell over some of their chosen candidates losing in the primaries. The people who are whining about Michigan's nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, are the same ones who tell the leftist wing of the party to suck it up and vote for whatever AIPAC- and billionaire-approved centrist gets the nomination. Take your own fucking advice. Shut the fuck up and vote for El-Sayed. Let the man campaign as he sees fit. The shit people say to get elected is not the way that they legislate. El-Sayed will be one voice. If he wins or if any Democratic Socialist-aligned or sympathetic candidates win, they don't just take shit over. It's not a coup. And the corporate Democrats know this yet still are losing their shit. But they've played this game the same way for decades, and all they know is to freak the fuck out when someone slightly left of Bill Clinton gets a nomination. (I use Clinton because the most paranoid of the motherfuckers worked for him.)

Take a lesson from El-Sayed, who parlays each time some media puke tries to swing at him with his association with Piker. Take a page from his opponent in the tight primary, Haley Stevens, who immediately endorsed El-Sayed. 

The thing is that Piker doesn't have any actual power. Meanwhile, the president of the United States is threatening free speech rights, posting videos about going to war with Canada, and wantonly murdering people at sea, along with forcing the country into a useless war we've lost. The Republican Party's top donor, Elon Musk, who was once the second most powerful person in the administration, regularly agrees with genocidal racist sentiments and posts white supremacist statements, and he's meeting with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson because he's giving hundreds of millions of dollars to help the GOP in the midterms. While Republican members of Congress and candidates are occasionally asked about some fuckery Trump has committed, they are, as far as I've seen, never asked to condemn Musk or to pledge not to take any of his filthy money. 

No, some podcaster no one beyond those with terminal Twitter-and-Twitch brain has heard about is treated as more important than the DOGE-ing motherfucker who is personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths so far. That's what's fucked. Ask Republicans if they agree with horrific things that Megyn Kelly has said. Or some buffoonishly sexist or violent thing that Jesse Twatters...sorry, Watters has blurbled lately. Or get some real guts and ask where they stand on the abjectly disgusting things Charlie Kirk would say. A hundred influential conservative commentators say objectively worse things every goddamn day. A hundred conservative members of Congress, too. What fucking farce.

In other words, Democrats, when someone asks you to condemn Hasan Piker, you can kindly ask them to go fuck themselves because you have more important things to fix, like the country. And maybe the world.

America Fucked Crazy and Now Has To Deal With the Mess

As a rude young man, I was given a piece of advice that has stuck with me. It's simple in its wording, but it has helped me immensely throughout my life. Three words: "Don't fuck crazy." It means just don't bone someone who is obviously insane. It's the best way to avoid shit that could make your life miserable. Now, you might one day meet someone and think, "Okay, he seems crazy, but not so crazy. Besides, he's so hot that I gotta roll the dice." We are, after all, only human, with human urges, sometimes intense ones, and human failings, sometimes unavoidable ones. So, yeah, you go ahead.

And it's awesome because one thing about fucking crazy is that the fucking can be incredible. It can make you feel so good, make you cum so hard that you're willing to overlook a whole lot of crazy. Sure, sure, he's stealing your shit and selling it, he's told all your friends to fuck off, he's wrecking your apartment when he's not hanging his shit up all over the walls, he says the most lunatic stuff that makes everyone think you're nuts, too, and he makes you give away your cat, but, you tell the diminishing number of your pals, "His mouth is a black hole that spaghettifies my dick." You gotta ask yourself where the line is. Where is the point where he's gone too far or he's too far gone, where it doesn't matter how hard you nut in his beefy ass? You gonna wake up and see that's not enough? Or are you gonna wait until he burns your home down and kills your mom? You gonna let him tear your life to pieces just because, for a few minutes you felt orgasmic pleasure. It's fucking madness and anyone watching it happen is gonna ask you when is enough enough. If you just keep heading back to fuck crazy more, then you're a lost cause. 

America fucked crazy in 2016 and then decided it hadn't learned its lesson, so it forgot about the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths and decided to fuck crazy again in 2024. And what's happened? Crazy took over the joint. Every other country in the world can look at us and say, "Whoa, that was stupid" as the joint burns down around us all. 

And the thing about not just fucking crazy but sticking by crazy so you can fuck crazy more is that you stop having perspective on just how crazy crazy is. I mean, any objective look around us shows that we are reaching depths of crazy that should make all of us wonder how the fuck we ever recover. It's fucking insane that the President of the United States is spending, as New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman described it, 70 percent of his diminishing mental energy on renovations at the White House and around DC. It's fucking insane that the leader of the free world is more concerned about spooging gold all over statues than making life any easier for anyone. The entire Reflecting Pool episode is utterly deranged. They arrested people for touching floating shreds of the shitty lining and pretended they were terrorists. And Trump is still standing by that assessment. What the fucking fuck? 

Getting used to someone else's crazy means that you completely miss a lot of the crazy. We found out last week that Capital One shut down over 300 bank accounts belonging to Trump and the Trump Organization because they were being used for money laundering. I mean, it's been pretty clear for a long time now that building shit or franchising the use of the Trump name is just a cover, like Walter White's car wash, for laundering enormous piles of cash for...who? Russians? Saudis? Azerbaijanis? Who the fuck knows? But no one is talking about it because that's how crazy it all is, and not talking about it is crazier.

I can't even get into the true horror of the madness, the child rape and the torture of imprisoned immigrants and the families being torn apart constantly for no reason other than to bleach the country white. Or a fucking war that, at best, will not even get us back to where things were before the war started, all because Trump can't handle that anyone in the past did anything worth keeping, whether that's Obama, Biden, or, hell, even George W. Bush. Trump's actions have killed hundreds of thousands all ready, on top of his Covid death toll, and the bloodshed is just really gearing up. 

America fucked crazy. It didn't listen to the most basic of relationship advice. And the thing about fucking crazy and continuing to fuck crazy is that when you finally get over crazy, you can't just pick up your life and continue because crazy has been a goddamn tornado, laying waste to everything, your friendships, your family, your credit rating, your personal shit. If you're lucky, crazy didn't involve you directly in crimes, but, fuck, you might go to prison because crazy convinced you to commit war crimes. It'll take years to get shit back to some kind of normal. We all know this. We all feel like everything is out of control because it fucking well is.

Of course, knowing America, once a Democrat straightens things out, we'll fuck crazy again.

(Note: If you think this is a post mocking mental illness, you can fuck right off.)

The Fauci Hearing Is a Moment to Despair for How Dumb and Deranged We've Gotten

There was another way this all could have gone that I think about quite a bit. I think about the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when virtually everyone was scared to death of a new form of a virus that we knew almost nothing about and the medical community and governments were trying anything to keep us safe, like masking, like social distancing, like wiping our groceries, things that worked and things that didn't. I think about the agonizing images of overwhelmed nurses and doctors, losing more people than they could save in ICUs that were overflowing with patients whose loved ones were forced to watch them suffer from a distance. I think about that period of time when we celebrated the essential workers, from hospital workers to mail carriers, when we beat pans to let them know we knew how desperately they were all trying to keep people alive or keep the world functioning. 

And I know, I know, I fucking know that so much of that unity was an illusion, blown apart quickly by the murder of George Floyd and the explosion of protest that followed. I know that even the kindest, most generous version of this Covid fantasy would have been justifiably broken by the upheaval that occurred. 

But I think about how we could have kept that unity going, how we could have rallied and willingly sacrificed like during World War 2, how we could have celebrated the fact that we had an election during a pandemic, a safe, smooth election, an incredible accomplishment by any measure. Look at how awesome we are as a country, we could have said. Look at what we did in the worst of circumstances. Donald Trump could have taken a victory lap on that very fact had he not sought to undermine the entire electoral system. He could have said that he was the reason it all went so well, and it would have been hard to argue with him. He could have done the same with the quick development of the Covid vaccine, advocating for everyone to get it, touting its safety, and claiming responsibility for the record time in getting us the thing that would save us from the virus. It would have become an article of faith among his followers that they had to get vaccinated, and likely tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives would have been saved. 

Those two things, the 2020 election and the vaccine, would have allowed him to exit his first term with something like grace, even amidst the chaos he caused. But grace is to Donald Trump as ice cream is to the lactose intolerant: even a little would make him more uncomfortably flatulent than usual. 

Instead, we know what happened. We know that skeevy politicians, clout-seeking media whores, and exploitative hucksters all took advantage of the chaos, of the confusion, of the evolving medical advice and evolving understanding of the illness (which is what happens when, again, you have a new virus), of people's natural despair about having their lives shut down. We know that they decided to turn into villains the very people who had dedicated their lives to saving our lives. We know that, despite Trump's praise of him throughout the frightening first part of the pandemic (even using a clip of him in a campaign ad), Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was director of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases for presidents from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, has been and is and will be the focus of a nutzoid right-wing ragegasm due to lies about Covid and short-term memory loss on how the country dealt with it. 

So it was one of the most enraging, embarrassing, and dangerous hearings in a while when Senator Rand Paul, who belongs in a rubber room scrawling manifestos on the walls in his own shit, subpoenaed Fauci to appear before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and have him sit there for hours while Paul and other GOP fucknuts berated him for shit he didn't do. 

Imagine spending your entire life saving millions of lives and now Rand fucking Paul and assorted chodes, Chads, and chuds are trying to get you to fall into a perjury trap so they can jail you for the rest of whatever life you have left at 85. Imagine sitting there and listening to Sen. Rick "What it would look like if Skeletor fucked a python" Scott, who led a hospital company that committed massive Medicare fraud and who himself took the Fifth Amendment 75 times during a civil suit, call you a "villain." Imagine listening to a fucking ignorant goon like Ron Johnson still assert that the Covid vaccine kills more people than the disease and that ivermectin and other quack cures that you helped debunk are effective treatments. 

Honestly, I wish Fauci had followed up every assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights with "And based upon my rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution, I'd like to tell you to go fuck yourself." He could have even done variations, like "Based upon my rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution, I believe you should suck my saggy old man balls" and "According to the First Amendment, I'm inviting you to eat my whole ass, dickstain." I wish he had done that all 111 times. It's not like the crazies are giving him a break for staying restrained during the hearing. They're losing they're tiny fucking minds.

The whole hearing was a disgrace, including the fact that Democrats were such wimps in defending Fauci. They should have been going right at Paul and the rest, accusing them of being grandstanding pieces of shit. They at least should have put the truth on the record, with hard numbers, like the fact that unvaccinated people died at hugely higher rate than the vaccinated. 

But the dangerous part of this is that the hearing was there to degrade Fauci, undermine faith in real scientific research, and make the dumbest motherfuckers on the conspiratorial right happy. And it wasn't enough. They are looking to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. State attorneys general are going to try to charge Fauci with some crime. I mean, one member of Congress called him "Mengele Fauci," to which you can only say, "Oh, shut the fuck up." Truly, Fauci should get the hell out of the United States because these assholes won't stop until they can have a public execution and put his head on a pike outside HHS (although RFK, Jr. would probably take the head and put it in his car to bring home). 

What the fuck is wrong with us that we are so broken. Instead of that unity, instead of admitting that we suffered a mass trauma that needs to be dealt with on a mental health level, we just have been expected to move on from the death and despair of that period. Fuck any sense of a society. Fuck science. Fuck us because a future Dr. Fauci is going to look at this and think, "Maybe government service isn't for me." 

(Note: Of course, there's also a version of the pandemic fantasy where Trump dies of Covid and everyone learns a valuable lesson, but, alas.)

Ten of the Worst, Cringiest, Skeeviest, Shittiest Lines from Trump's WHCD Debacle

Rapist President Donald Trump bombed at his White House Correspondents Dinner speech/stand-up routine as hard as he keeps threatening to bomb Iran. He completely decimated comedy. He died horribly, just not permanently. The WHCD (motto: "Democracy dies because of us") itself is a completely idiotic vestige of a time long since dead, when journalists and politicos would drink and leak and fuck and threaten and drink some more with each other, where the proximity and access to power was and still is more important than telling the powerful to shove it up their asses and holding them accountable for their fuckery. It should have been stopped after Stephen Colbert's evisceration of it in 2006. After this past Friday night's debacle, any member of the media capable of shame should be begging forgiveness to get their reamed credibility back. They sat and let Trump brag and bully, degrade and insult, not in good fun, but with hatred and malice towards them, with the threat of violence looming around him, like Mussolini at an open mic with his Blackshirts eyeballing the crowd. I'd say that it was brave of the gathered press to not laugh, but they gave up courage when they entered the room and stayed as it became apparent they were there for an incoherent rant against them masked as a comedy routine. He came to their party at their invitation and he shit out an egg.

One of the things about Trump's speech is that the jokes, however shitty, were in there, but he bumblefucked the delivery like a brain-damaged clown sucking down instead of blowing up the balloons, swallowing them instead of making animals for the sobbing kids at the disaster of a party. More than anything in his pathetic life, Trump wants to be the uber-showman. He does his little double-jack-off dance because it gets a positive reaction from the idiot hordes. He does his rallies of the damned because he deeply needs to be the jolly entertainer, except he can't help but be his actual dickscab self, head so far up his own ass that he's his own echo chamber. 

You haven't heard many of these lines of Trump's from the WHCD unless you watched the whole thing, and you wouldn't do that unless you're the kind of masochist who loves to get spike-gloved fisted while the vice on your balls is tightened to "rupture."

1. Talking about the previous WHCD, which was cut short by a shooting: "After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, 'Get down, get down,' which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking. Do you believe it? 'Get down.' She’s the only one that really understood what that meant. It’s quite an evening." 

If you told me that this was schtick from Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (or, you know, Robert Smigel), where he does a cringey joke to mock that style of hacky comedy, I'd have believed you. Really, the whole routine works better if you hear it in Triumph's voice. 

2. There was an attempt at a series of supposed jokes about who else could have fought at the UFC event at the White House. "I can exclusively reveal to you this evening that for the heaviest of the heavyweights, we will have sloppy Chris Christie — one of the sloppiest human beings you’ll ever meet — fighting, I would say, I could mention the governor of Chicago, but I’m going to mention instead Jerry Nadler. And they’re fighting for a big piece of cheesecake. Big, fat piece of cheesecake. Who the hell wrote that line?" 

Motherfucker, we all know who wrote the line. He can try to palm it off on a writing staff composed of Joe Rogan rejects, but it was him. You know it was. And no one thinks of Nadler as fat anymore because it's been over 20 years since he lost a ton of weight, so the whole insult of the thing doesn't even work. Don Rickles should rise from his grave to smack Trump's stupid face and call him a "hockey puck."

3. Talking about Bruce Springsteen: "In a recent concert, Bruce — all he did was talk politics. He ought to run for office. That’d be interesting. But all he talked about — he made four political speeches in his three-hour show. The tour has been renamed 'Bored in the USA.'" 

Man, that would have killed in 1985.

4. Trump treated the event as a roast, which just gave him the chance to say the same weak, sub-middle school insults he's been using for years: "They thought about going with a professional clown for entertainment, but Adam 'Shifty' Schiff was not available.You know, I called him — I hate some people, you know. I shouldn’t say this. I’m president. I’m not supposed to hate him. I’m supposed to love everybody, but he’s a terrible person. He’s a liar. And I called him 'watermelon head' because he has the largest head I’ve ever seen with the smallest neck — pencil neck. How does that big, fat, ugly head stand on a little pencil neck?"

I'm sure that Katie Miller, fondling her husband Stephen under the table, gave an extra big giggle, as did everyone in the section for evil scumfuckers who exist to huff Trump's fart fumes.

5. "I thought Kaitlan [Collins] had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can. It was Dylan Mulvaney." 

See, it's allegedly funny because he's saying that Collins looks like an attractive, talented trans woman and that's supposed to be an insult. Trump could have stopped there, but he can't fucking help himself. He's gotta pretend to be the smartest, wisest asshole in the proctology museum, so he went on: "And Dylan Mulvaney cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap. That was the worst commercial ever made, by the way, for those few people that want to hear that. Most people don’t care, but I would. I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan anytime soon. Think of it. They hired Dylan Mulvaney, their market cap has gone down by $35 billion. Who wrote that commercial?" I don't think Mulvaney was even there, so it's just anti-trans shit for the sake of being anti-trans.

6. "I was disappointed that Gavin Newsom didn’t show up. He didn’t show up. He should be here. But I heard that he recently said that we will lose our country if we don’t fight fire with fire. And to be fair, there’s only one thing we know about Gavin, and that’s that he definitely doesn’t want to fight fire with water. He’s got a lot of water, never uses. What a disaster. That should’ve never happened."

Ha, ha, ha, entire towns burned down and people died. Hilarious.

7. Of course, there's the general cockknobbery that he can't help: "[California's] becoming such a horrible and dangerous location that Ilhan Omar, one of my favorites, and her brother are thinking about moving in together, very much in love." 

8. Trump then moved to the racist part of the evening where he tried to dig at Senator Elizabeth Warren, also not present, with his usual "Pocahontas" smear, which led to him at first hedging on the outright racist imagery, but then just plunging in, and then acting coy about it: "Senator Warren did not accept our invitation to debate. I wanted to debate her in various and sundry things, and she decided not to do it. And I decided to bury the hatchet. It doesn’t matter. And she — well, I’m not going to say this next one. Do you want to hear this one? How bad? She wasn’t high up on her totem pole. Who the hell wrote that? No. She’s bad news."

9. Was there blatant antisemitism and Islamophobia? Of course there was: "[Chuck Schumer] is a proud, very proud Palestinian. In fact, I’m going to send him a beautiful Palestinian outfit tomorrow so he can greet Bibi Netanyahu when he comes to town next week, along with the mayor who I’m sure would love to meet Bibi. They’re not treating Bibi too well, but Chuck wanted to join us tonight, but he didn’t want to be violating many parts of the Palestinian rules, regulations, and certainly, he didn’t want to violate Sharia law — his new founding." 

10. And then there's the one you might have heard, but maybe you don't understand what the joke was supposed to be: "The other day, a senator I knew got a text, a great guy, from his wife. And she said, 'When you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me.' And he said, 'I can’t do both.' You know what? In other words, can’t go up the stairs and make love. Does anybody get that?" 

Sigh. For fuck's sake, this is an old one-liner. The joke is that she said, "Come up the stairs and make love to me" and when he says, "I can't do both," he means if he ejaculates on the stairs he can't fuck his wife, which is both a dumb (with a "b") pun and incredibly selfish. So the president of the United States made a jizz joke and he was too stupid to realize it and then explained it in the wrong way. By the way, Trump said that this was "That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole freaking stupid speech that they wrote." It never occurred to him not to give the "freaking stupid speech" if it was so fucking awful.

It really sounds like Trump had a quick, terrible written routine he was supposed to do, and then he just interpolated his entire rally rant on top of it, adding in shit about the fucking ballroom, Iran, the supposedly newly-safe DC, the "Czech crystal" in the chandeliers in the place they were dining, and other complete non-sequiturs. And then, on top of that, he just riffed on whatever dull sparks kindled in his shorted-out brain, like the weather during the UFC match or the weather on July 4. 

And then he sat back down and fell asleep while the rest of us wondered how much longer we had to be awake through this embarrassing, tragic period of history.

My Play Midnight in Nashville to Premiere in London on August 26

So, hey, remember when I went dark for like a month last year? That's because I wrote and directed a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now that play, Midnight in Nashville, is running for a couple of weeks in London (the one in England!) from August 26 to September 7 at the Glitch theatre near Waterloo station. All shows at 7 p.m. Same awesome two actors from Edinburgh (who happen to be American), new director, revised show. 

Here's all the skinny from the press release:

Meet Marcy Aurora, a honky-tonk angel who was headed to the heights of country music fame when she committed a murder she doesn’t regret. Out of prison after 20 years, Marcy is in an all-night recording session in a studio in Nashville, trying to lay down the tracks for a new album, pissed off at a nosy reporter, wrestling with memories of her incarceration, and fighting with Colleen, the sound engineer, about what her real voice is now.

Midnight in Nashville stars Kentucky-born, London-based actor and singer Biz Lyon as Marcy and features Catherine Mieses as Colleen, with Lyon singing and playing live original and old folk and blues songs. It’s directed by Alex Stroming, who last year helmed an acclaimed production of Scenes with girls at the Golden Goose Theatre. 

The show debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2025, where it was named one of the nine shows to see by the Edinburgh Reporter while The List gave it four stars and talked about its “brutal honesty”: “The everyday heartache of Lee Papa’s new play could be set to a million country numbers.” Another reviewer praised it for being about “a middle-aged woman defiantly finding her way back into the world… and that’s a tale that has resonance beyond its time and place.” Check out our Instagram page to see how enthusiastic our audiences were, too. (And follow it, too.)

You can buy your tickets by clicking right here. And here's a cool interview Biz and I did with the blog The Theatre Reviewer.

If you're a reviewer, hit me up to get you in. Previews August 26-27 with an August 28 opening.

I'll be there for the whole run, so if you happen to make it to the show, grab me (at least semi-appropriately) to say, "Hi." 

The Other Trump Administration Speech from Last Week That Tells Us We're All Fucked

Sure, we are rightly aghast at President Donald "Dumpster Load" Trump's simpering whine of a speech last Thursday about totally fake election interference, setting up both an excuse when Republicans likely have their voluminous asses handed to them in November and a justification for all the fuckery they're going to attempt to mess with the election or to overturn it after the fact. We can get into the absolutely weird shit about how the 2020 election was "stolen" because people hid things from Trump, but that's the kind of self-evident confession of incompetence that is like saying you wrecked my car because you got a text from me and glanced at the phone. No, bitch, you were driving. It's all on you.

But the speech, also delivered last Thursday, that really galled the living shit out of me was not Trump's dull, deranged, slurred complaints about non-existent Chinese infiltration of our voting. It was instead Secretary of State Marco "Smells like armpit sweat on polyester" Rubio's sneery attack on alleged left-wing "extremism" and "terrorism" at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism held by the federal government in DC. Rubio's speech (if by "speech," you mean, "a Mad Libs-style pile of anti-left hyperbole that would give Pinochet's corpse an erection") was both a greatest hits of the conspiratorial bullshit spouted on conservative podcasts and an open threat to any progressive groups who would dare to protest Our Orange God.

After reviewing how counterterrorism was focused on Islamic groups, Rubio mocked those who deny a "resurgence" of terrorism from the left "by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions." In other words, by the experts in the field. Then he offered, "A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil.  It is.  But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism" without giving any examples of a Marxist revolutionary bomb planter. Rubio built more straw men than a scarecrow factory.

Rubio really said, "It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror." 

Let's put aside the snide "so-called George Floyd" because fuck Rubio, and let's put aside the violence by police against peaceful protesters at Black Lives Matter marches, which led to lawsuits and payouts. Instead, let's put up another number: 14,000. That's how many arrests were made by overzealous cops, flooding city jails. And the Trump administration had the federal government make arrests and took over cases for the very small number (no more than 300) of people who were arrested for more than things like trespassing. In fact, most people were released without charge. In other words, the country wasn't nearly brought to its knees and cities did not burn down. But that lie has become the truth for the MAGA right.

The real fucked part of the speech is that, after mentioning a couple of recent violent incidents (including one that involved a clash between an ultra-right and ultra-left group in France), Rubio concentrated on left-wing violence from the past, like from 40 or 50 years ago or more. He had to go there because the examples now are so scant. He mentioned the Shining Path in Peru, Castro's guerrilla forces, and the Red Brigades in Italy. Turning to the United States, he brought up the Weather Underground and other groups from the 1960s and 70s. Then he really said, "In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day.  The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists.  Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left." Those bombings were mostly of property, and the groups were protesting the Vietnam War and the fact that the federal government was in open warfare against its citizens, but, sure, fuck it. Yeah, it was violence from the left. And it was a long goddamn time ago. And it ignores that lots of violence by the right, like the KKK and neo-Nazis, was overlooked in favor of scaremongering about hippies by Richard Nixon.

Look, no one is denying that there is violence from the left, especially in Europe (mostly in Italy and Greece). But Rubio is using that as a way to completely discredit any protest against the Trump fascist regime, leaving out any and all right-wing violence, which is rampant in the United States. He didn't mention January 6, he didn't mention any of the Nazi and racist groups, or, more precisely, he didn't mention right-wing extremists because that's the MAGA movement. That's the GOP base.

Still, even when we talk about "leftist extremism" in the US, we're not talking about an arson attack on the power grid, like in Berlin (and that is still under investigation). Look at where he went next: "Americans have seen what those numbers mean – an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes.  A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, 'Where is your God now?'  A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets.  Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president.  And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students."

The number of lies here is stunning. Where is this "all-out assault" on ICE officers? And the sniper attack (singular) ended up killing detainees. The shooter at the Catholic church in Minneapolis was a racist, antisemitic gun nut who, yes, was transgender. but was far from a liberal. We know very little about Trump's wannabe assassins, but at least one of them thought Trump wasn't crazy racist enough and one was angry about Trump raping kids with Jeffrey Epstein. As for Charlie Kirk, fuck that guy. In Hell. Next to Lindsey Graham. Or with Lindsey Graham's femur.

Rubio is promising that the administration is going to be naming more groups as "terrorist organizations" and going after their funding, which they claim comes from foreign governments. The ideological criteria is broad: "This is what radical leftism is.  It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time.  They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist." Except it's not illegal to believe any of those things. You can be a communist in the United States. It's allowed. Or it used to be. 

And the net is going to get wider and wider and "communist" is going to mean "wants health care for everyone," and this effort is going to work hand-in-hand with the voter suppression efforts, one being used as an excuse for the enforcement of the other. Rubio teed it all up: the coming pretext to destroy everyone on the left.

You didn't hear about Rubio's speech because it was followed by a completely batshit insane speech from White House Deputy of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, who looks like Nosferatu fucked a blob fish. Miller jacked off into a Nazi flag and made everyone sniff it. That's his preferred rhetorical style.

The White Working Class Voter Lie

Whenever I hear some shrunken-soul member of the supposed left-wing pundit class opine about how Democrats need to "appeal to white working class voters," I think, "What the fuck are Democrats doing that shouldn't appeal to them?" Of course, the answer is that they need to be a little more racist, a little more homo/transphobic, a little less "woke" (whatever the fuck they think that means), a little more, well, Republican. Oh, and Democrats need to find "authentic" voices, candidates who speak like voters do, who come from their background, who "understand" them. 

That's where I call "bullshit" on the whole thing. Because what white working class voters have shown us in the past decade is that they don't give a damn where a candidate or a leader comes from. They don't fucking care if someone is, say, a pampered, inarticulate billionaire. They don't fucking care if it's some elite-educated, privileged prickmite. You can't look at Donald Trump's wins and think, "Well, obviously, we need to get some farmers or steel mill workers to run for office because that's what voters want." Or, if you do, you're fucking weird. That's like seeing some dude fuck a pig and decide he really would prefer a human so you decide to set him up on a date and he leaves the date early and go fuck another pig because he's a pig fucker and you're an idiot for thinking otherwise.

See, Democrats already elected a working class hero. You know who that is? It's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yeah, AOC comes from a background that should make consultants drool. Not only did she work as a bartender to survive after college, her father died when she was young and her mother worked as a house cleaner and school bus driver to avoid the bank from foreclosing on the small house they had been able to afford. How has she been received by the gatekeepers of the white working class on the Republican side? With nonstop mocking for having been a bartender, with endless vitriol about her legitimacy and devotion to workers, with, you know, the usual gleefully cruel racism and sexism that any non-white woman is going to get in this cursed age. 

When everyone was rushing to anoint former Maine Democratic senate candidate Graham Platner as a new avatar of working class authenticity, it was a joke (not least because, unlike AOC, Platner was not from a working class background). It showed that racism and sexism bled over to the left, too, because, apparently, the only way to get white working class voters is with a white man. The Democratic Party is filthy with working class politicians, like Aaron Ford, the AG of Nevada who is running for governor. A single dad who needed food stamps and housing assistance, Ford is the real deal. However, he is Black. The consultants who gave us Platner have made their disdain for non-white voters plain, which maybe works for Maine, I guess. 

My own opinion of Platner until the rape allegations was "Fine, whatever, if this is who Maine wants, I don't care, just beat Susan Collins and get back the Senate, vote blue no matter who." Sure, I liked his platform; it was great to hear someone say all the right things about wealth disparity, health care, corruption, and more. But the defense of his Nazi tattoo and the old sexist and violent Reddit comments was dumb. The dude fucked up repeatedly, but, again, sure, Maine's gotta do what Maine's gotta do. But once it became clear that he went from creepy to criminal, then fuck your precious politics. And still, he was defended. The idea that credible rape allegations might not be a deal breaker for some is pathetic. 

Stop defending Platner. It wasn't an AIPAC plot or Deep State attack or whatever other conspiracy bullshit his remaining supporters are clinging to. You just look like a perverse moron. There are plenty of potential candidates who haven't been accused of rape (or don't have a Nazi tattoo). You know how fucking hard it was for Jenny Racicot to speak out? You know the shit she's likely being dragged through by Platner stans and followers of the media whores who love him. You think she's putting herself through that for kicks? 

The point here, though, is not just about Platner. It's not even about the real working class candidates and elected officials out there. It's that the whole idea that somehow there is some innate need to run those candidates in order for Democrats to succeed. That's a fucking lie. We are told all the time that pampered pricks are men of the people. We heard that about George W. Bush. We heard it about Donald Trump. The truth about them couldn't be further from the image. Jesus, Platner wasn't even winning the voters he was engineered to win.

What Democratic consultants with any brains should do is deal in reality. Sure, Democrats, no matter what class they come from, give more of a shit about the poor and working class than Republicans, who couldn't give a fuck less but sure love to pretend. But if white working class voters think it's more important suck billionaire cock, then fuck 'em. Get the candidate who is going to unify everyone else (and some of those precious white working class people will jump on board because they're not all stupid). Jesus, look at Jon Ossoff. Privileged upbringing, man of the people. It's not that fucking hard. 

No One Hates America More Than Donald Trump

In some ways, President Donald Trump has finally achieved his goal of returning to the New York City of the 1980s when a freewheeling Trump did whatever he wanted, was invited on the big talk shows, was a regular at the great restaurants. But not that part. No, what he has done in Washington, D.C. is recreate the Manhattan of his younger years, when the city was still a wreck, still in its post-1970s hangover, with decaying buildings and toxic air and filth coating the place, where the wealthy might do something like rebuild a ice skating rink rather than help the unhoused and the poverty-stricken and where the same wealthy ignored regulations and unions to build whatever monuments to their egos they desired. It's not just the "greed is good"/Wolf of Wall Street days or a president constantly talking about the threat of "communism" that I'm talking about. It's not just the ethos of the time. It's the actual physical, lived existence of people during that era in the years after Reagan set the rich free from a tax burden that forced them to participate in society, all of these pompous, self-mythologizing hedonists who could now say they loved the country that made them rich while doing everything to demonstrate how much they hate it and everyone here who is not them.

For, truly, if you look at what Trump has conjured in DC, especially in the area of the Capitol, the joint reeks of the urban decay that he would ride and walk past every day in NYC in the 80s. The White House is a construction pit and will be for the foreseeable future. The front lawn is torn up from his stupid UFC thunderdome fight. The Reflecting Pool is still green with algae. Trump has slashed the budget on things that benefit the people, like medical research and food safety and health care and more, to pay for new gilding on statues and monuments and events to celebrate himself. The big "state fair" is a scene of desperately small attendance, un-air conditioned promotional booths, overpriced food, a single ride (a ferris wheel with enclosed seats enclosed in glass pods, perfect for slowly cooking), and a decaying small version of the monument Trump plans to build. I've been to parking lot fairs with more pizzazz and fun. He's attempting to build his golden arch and take over a public park and golf course to build a private one, including possibly plowing down a row of DC's beloved cherry trees, while ignoring any laws or regulations that he is required to follow, much like he wrecked the East Wing of the White House before anyone knew what was happening, much like how he approached his building career in the 1980s.

And that right there is a perfect encapsulation of the contempt with which this president holds the country, its constitution, its institutions, its people, and its traditions. Sure, there are times when unjust laws demand civil disobedience so that those without legislative power can exert people and protest power to spur change. But if you're the president of the United States, you can work to change laws you disagree with, not merely disregard them. You just cast them aside if you think that you are above them, and if you think that, you think you're a king. And if you think you're a king, you hate the United States, a country designed specifically to create a place where kings cannot rule. 

Yet time and again, Trump's actions are those of a wannabe king. While other presidents have tried to exert power, Trump has simply skipped over trying and done it, whether it's something other presidents have done (and not been held to account for) in starting a war without the consent of Congress or something completely unprecedented, like casting aside any worry about corruption and doing everything possible to make himself and his odious family wealthier, to an extent unheard of in the modern age, and, for now, anyone who might hold him accountable is just refusing to. A corollary to this post would be "No One Hates the Constitution More Than the Conservatives on the Supreme Court" or "No One Hates America More Than Mike Johnson."

We have had presidents and politicians who have demonized groups of people in the United States, but I can't think of one who so openly despised not just that people oppose him but that they are allowed to express that opposition. This outright refusal to agree to the American compact on acceptance of dissent was on full display during his speech on Friday at Mount Rushmore. What was supposed to be a celebration of the 250th anniversary of our founding turned into another dark recitation of fake threats and doom. Trump said, despite paying lip service to the First Amendment, "In America, we do not need anyone's permission to say what we think and to live as we please," and then, less than ten minutes after, during a rant about a supposed rise in "communism" in the country (which is a bastardization of "Democratic Socialist"), he said, "You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marx's lies about our heritage, who tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors. They're doing something much worse than slandering our past, they are slandering and attacking our future. Not gonna let that happen. They're trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed to Delaware, who settled the west and conquered the skies."

Putting aside that history is complex and that, yes, we do live on stolen land, and that, yes, many of the Founders were oppressors (as in "owned slaves"), in the United States, you are allowed to believe in Marx just like you're allowed to believe in Adam Smith or, even, Donald Trump. You can, in fact, be a communist (of which there are very few) and a patriot. Indeed, the way these supposed "communists" are gaining power is through the very legal system of our elections. They got elected by voters. What's un-American, what's not "patriotic" is to declare that what you're going to do with Americans who are using their free speech to profess Marxist beliefs is "send them into exile. We will send them quickly away and we will continue to build our country bigger and better and stronger than ever before." What does that even mean? Is he going to round us all up and send us to African countries with Ebola? And that was before he started talking about how Republicans should be the only party elected for 100 years. 

There is no United States for Trump. There is only him, and his every action as president demonstrates that. His arrogance and his insistence that we only talk about the accomplishments of the country and not our flaws is spitting in the face of our history and the struggles of all kinds of people here. His self-aggrandizement is an embarrassment, with his mad cries that he's not loved enough. His hatred of immigrants, women, protesters, the media that doesn't fawn over him, Democrats, non-white people, Muslims, all of it is deeply at odds with the concept of the United States. His insistence that there is only one way to love this flawed experiment of a nation and that is to love him and every horrible thing he does is anti-American. You only believe that if you hate this country, hate its founding, hate its history. He hates that he still faces legal peril when he leaves office no matter how much he tries to make it go away. He hates that the country might hold him to account. 

America's very existence is anathema to what he thinks about himself and the world, and thus it must be destroyed and remade in his image, even as he lies that he is the last defender of some order that died a long time ago, not even the 1980s. More like the 1880s. No one hate this country more than Donald Trump. There is no difference between him and people like Osama bin Laden, except bin Laden actually had a belief system. 

If you watch him speak tonight at the Fourth of July gathering he's centered around himself, know that he is slurring and slurping with disdain for nearly every single one of us, putting out visions of nightmare futures and lying about the present. He'll talk about our founders with the blithering ignorance of someone who despises being told he doesn't know everything. He hates this country, he hates you, he hates me, and he'll do everything he can to let us know how much. And then he'll do his little dance that tells us all to kiss his ass while he continues to drag us all down.

The best way to celebrate our Independence Day is to hate him back. Trust me: John Adams and Ben Franklin would be right there with you.

(Note: Look, I'm not saying our leaders have been perfect up until Trump. Far from it. We have had presidents who criminalized dissent and protest. We've had presidents who have ignored the law. We have had presidents who have enriched themselves. But we've rarely had someone who does all of it, all the terrible things.)