Shakedown Street

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

What's the difference between Organized Crime and the Trump administration during a shakedown? Mafia Dons aren't stupid enough to do it in front of cameras and microphones.

    When this administration finally crashes and burns like the Hindenburg, people will wonder why Trump didn't unilaterally sign an Executive Order renaming Pennsylvania Avenue Shakedown Street. Between Trump handing over total control of the largest government in the world to a Nazi South African sociopath to offering a path to citizenship for $5,000,000 to openly bribing oil executives with whatever they wanted for a one billion dollar bribe, the White House has become a mere front organization for a global criminal enterprise.

    Today's spectacle was a case in point. Trump had Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and immediately proceeded to verbally give him noogies and Dutch rubs. For good measure, someone finally found Vice President JD Salinger wandering around the Beltway, brushed the pork rind crumbs out of his hobo beard and brought him to attend and contribute to said spectacle.

    Yes, a curiously invertebrate Marco Rubio was also there in barely more than spirit, looking like a dog when asked if he chewed up the toilet paper when Mommy and Daddy were gone. Brian Glenn, most famous for shtupping Marjorie Taylor-Greene, actually asked Zelenskyy why he wasn't wearing a suit. It was like watching an old episode of Romper Room in which the children were part of an LSD trial experiment.

     So there they sat in front of the fireplace, where Trump has fond memories of burning incriminating documents that he couldn't flush down the toilet, to hold a dog and pony show with arguably the most courageous world leader in the world and treated him like an immigrant shopkeeper in a heavily mobbed-up Lower East Side neighborhood.

    Zelenskyy was in Washington to sign a mineral rights deal that would've handed over 50% of Ukraine's rare earth minerals to pay back the money we'd already committed to Ukraine's defense against Russia's invasion over three years ago. In exchange, Trump sorta floated the vague possibility that maybe, perhaps we'll put boots on the ground and protect them Russia. In other words, no guarantee of protection in this protection racket.

    Here's another difference between Don Trump and a mafia Don: At least when you sign over a percentage of your earnings to the mob, the mob actually provides the protection. Your mafia bosses are pragmatic enough to know that if you don't hold up your end of the bargain, the shopkeepers no longer have any incentive to hand over protection money.

      And, as stated, Trump is treating this like any of his disastrous real estate deals in which his only motivation is lining his pockets and committing some moral and/or legal larceny along the way just for shits and giggles. And, in the process, by yelling at and talking over Zelenskyy, Trump and his hirsute appendage JD Vance exposed their geopolitical idiocy for all the world to see.

"Where's My Gratitude?"

To anyone who doesn't paint murals with their fecal matter could see, Trump was acting like a fat and old Scut Farkus, with Vance playing his top toadie, Grover Dill. Those of us on Zelenskyy's side were no doubt hoping he would go all psycho Ralphie on Trump's fat pasty ass. But, to his credit, Zelenskyy kept his composure and acted like a head of state while not giving an inch to Trump and his insane demands. Zelenskyy was actually in Washington today to sign a modified version of the original mineral rights deal in which Trump wouldn't get everything he wanted.

      If you think I'm overstating my case, here's a snippet of what was actually said in the Oval Office in front of cameras and microphones:

 

    The only miracle  was that Elon Musk wasn't there standing behind Zelenskyy, with his vestigial twin Little X on his shoulders, threatening to revoke Ukraine's Starlink access (which he's already done). At the end of this shit show, Trump was yelling about Hunter Biden's laptop. No, really, he was. He was with a world leader who actually stood up to him and, like a typical autocrat unused to opposition, he lost his shit.

     Over the decades, we've seen presidents have over heads of state in the Oval Office. The collegiality, even if it's fake, was always there and decorum was maintained. Because, above all, there was mutual respect for the offices. Because every Chief Executive before Trump understood that they were representing the most powerful nation in the free world and that we had to maintain our moral leadership and authority on the world stage.

    All that changed with Trump, who perpetually acts like the mob bosses with whom he'd done business for decades. That's why it shouldn't have surprised anyone that Trump would act like a bargain bin Tony Soprano in dealing with a world leader. What surprised everyone, even Reagan-era Republicans, was how blatant he was about it.

    While Trump and Vance were berating Zelenskyy for "relitigating" the ongoing war, Trump was busy relitigating his grievances over people having the temerity to notice his obvious collusion with and deference to the Russians, something Zelenskyy called him out for. And, being the semi-functional moron that he is, Trump obviously had the wrong expectations of Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy was there to see to the interests of Ukrainians, not ours or Russia's. He wasn't there to pay tribute to Trump like some vanquished warlord. But all that was lost on him.

 

 

    As proof of this collusion, Trump even tried to let a Russian spy into the Oval Office. That's right. That would be the same state-run, Soviet-era TASS that was the only media outlet allowed in the White House in May 2017 when Trump had two high-ranking Russian officials in that same Oval Office. Luckily, Karoline Leavitt kicked him out. But Zelenskyy wasn't far behind because Trump kicked the Ukrainian delegation out of the White House.

     The (usual) joint press conference was therefore cancelled, and no mineral rights deal was signed. In a curious turn of events, Trump fucked up so badly and so completely that neither the US nor Russia got what they wanted. Afterward, Trump acted like the stereotypical pigeon: Knocking over all the chess pieces, shitting all over the board and strutting around as if he'd won. I imagine he'll be getting a call from the Kremlin soon from a certain person warning him not to stand in front of a window higher than the ground floor.

My Private Idaho Security

     Dr. Teresa Borrenpohl thought she would attend a town hall meeting in Kootenai County, Idaho. Maybe she thought it would be like the Norman Rockwell painting, in which an average Joe stands up at a town hall to speak his piece while those around him listen attentively and respectfully.

     

     This is the way it should've gone.

 

     But this was Idaho, so this is how it went, instead.

     The Kootenai County Republican Party hosted a town hall in which the only lawmakers in attendance were, naturally, right wingers. Then at one point, Dr. Borrenpohl began asking questions about Medicare and reproductive health, two topics that Republicans hate to talk about and, when they do, let their feelings on the subject be known.

      Before she knew it, she was swarmed by two private security guards and the county sheriff, some right wing stooge named Bob Norris, who filmed the whole thing on his cell phone like a 13 year-old live-streaming throwing a brick through a window. They hauled her out of the town hall and arrested her on a charge of battery (she bit one of the anonymous goons). 

      They brutalized her to the extent that she had to go to the local hospital to be treated for her injuries. The battery charge was quickly dropped when the DA's office reviewed the video evidence (here's a video from CBS News showing the whole sordid incident). It came out a short time later that the two goons that Norris had sicced on her work for Lear Asset Management, Inc., a private security firm. The City of Coeur d’Alene has since revoked the firm’s license.

     A GofundMe for Dr. Borrenpohl has been set up and, at last count, she's gotten over $320,000, including five grand from Graham Nash (Yeah, that one).

     But that's not the only reason I'm writing this article. Yes, it's horrifying that speaking up out of turn at a town hall gets you treated like a Jew during Kristallnacht. Yes, it's horrifying that our First Amendment rights to free speech, freedom of assembly and our Fourth Amendment right against illegal search and seizure can be so easily violated the minute the Powers That Be hear something they don't want to hear.

     Yes, this is the horrifying reality of Mr. Trump's America. But my main reason for writing this is Ed Bejarana, the emcee of the town hall. This is what Bejarana said while Borrenpohl was getting mauled by a couple of for hire goons.

     “The reality is, there’s a whole bunch of great things that are happening, the problem is we’ve got a bunch of rabble-rousers who just won’t allow it to be spoken. So the thing is, what I’m doing up here is, I’m simply overtalking you because your voice is meaningless right now.”

     Apparently, the "great things that (were) happening" was the assault and battery of ordinary citizens speaking their mind. At a town hall.

     You will note in the lead image that Eddie fancies himself a book narrator. But he doesn't just narrate anyone's books. They have to have a certain... well, let's call it what it is, a certain Nazi sensibility.

     His website tells us that when he was in the military, he served in Germany (no surprise there). And, lest you doubt where his political sensibilities lie, note that on his Facebook page, he has a picture of Trump's mugshot, as if it's a perfectly good idea to elect a guy who was arrested four times in one year and was convicted on 34 counts of fraud.

     Again, Ed is also, in case you haven't guessed, an audiobook narrator. Here's his Audible page, if you want an idea of the kind of tripe he chooses to narrate, such as that deathless opus, Climate Change: A Convenient Truth, the book that dares to ignore the concept of melting ice. And, speaking of deathless prose, here's a link to his own alternative to literacy. Go leave a review. It looks as if he could use something other than one star ratings.

     I'd strongly recommend you contact Audible directly and let them know one of their narrators is a cryptofascist. Or you can email them right here. If you have difficulty getting through to Audible, you can lodge a complaint against him via ACX.

     So why am I going after this miscreant? Well, let's just say that when I read and heard his sneering remarks, calling Dr. Borrenpohl a "little girl", something inside me just snapped. There's just something about the smug fascism of this right wing cocksucker that makes him the perfect synecdoche of the entire neonazi MAGA movement. And it just provoked a visceral reaction in me that I haven't felt in years, maybe decades.

     And why do I think I can do anything about him? Well, never underestimate the power of social media, as I proved recently when I put on my Facebook wall the lead image. To date, it's gotten over 200 reactions and close to 1800 shares, meaning people are taking me up on my initiatives and putting the word out about this asshole. And the activity is showing no signs of letting up. I want to destroy this motherfucker's career. I want to personally put him in a refrigerator crate in the Back Bay of Boston so he can suck cock for MBTA subway fare.

     And I want him to know who took him down. I want him to know it's me. And if he wants to come after me, well, as the saying goes, FAFO. I've taken down bigger and better assholes than him. Hal Turner can tell you all about that.

Nice Country You Got Here...

     Perusing the news these days isn't so much news aggregation as it is an assault on basic human sensibility. I can't think of one day in the last 37 in which we haven't been traumatized by one atrocity, insanity or blatant criminal act.

     Donald Trump's Cosa Nostra style of "governance" is something that would make most Mafia dons blush. His attitude toward Ukraine is a prime case in point.

     He's essentially told Zelenskyy that he'll only put American boots on the ground if they sign over half their mineral rights without offering any guarantee that we'll live up to our end of the bargain. And, most alarmingly, Zelenskyy is said to be more than seriously entertaining this "offer" and is about to sign a mineral rights deal with a guy who was not long ago convicted on 34 counts of fraud and is infamous for breaking promises and contracts.

     Anyone who seriously thinks that Trump will militarily confront Russian forces in Ukraine just because he strong-armed Zelenskyy into a crooked mineral rights deal should get their head examined. Europe's major powers are wise to Trump. French President Macron told Trump at the White House that American military involvement would be crucial to Ukraine's stability. Trump wouldn't officially commit to it. British Prime Minister Starmer is planning on going to the White House soon in another doomed quest to get a promise of US military involvement.

     Meanwhile, this is how much Russia fears us.

     If Trump is naive enough to rely on Russia's forbearance (especially considering how Russian state TV openly mocks and jeers him and calls him, "our boy"), then he's more stupid than most give him credit for. Remember, this is the same tyrant who put a bounty on the heads of American troops and in Helsinki in 2018, Trump took Putin's side against that of his own intelligence agencies. You're damned right Putin would have no problem killing US troops in Ukraine and you're damned right Trump would let him and even lie about the circumstances.

     And when Trump says that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine either time if he was president, Vladimir Putin laughs into his elbow.

     And if that isn't enough, you have Elon Musk putting pressure on Ukraine to capitulate by threatening to cut off Ukraine's Starlink access, which they never should have signed up for, to begin with.

     What Trump is doing is a shakedown, a protection racket, minus the protection. The so-called negotiations in Saudi Arabia in which Ukraine was pointedly locked out, saw arrogant Russians, led by Lavrov, offering absolutely no concessions whatsoever. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio looked as if he was a hostage in a terrorist video with a K-Bar knife to his throat.

     I've said it before and I'll say it again: Trump is teeing us up for WW III and, unless something is done to stop that lunatic, the first shots will be fired in Ukraine. Ukraine's sovereignty and value to Europe cannot be overstated. It's the largest nation in Europe by far and provides an invaluable physical bulwark between Europe and Russia.

     Since the war started three years and two days ago, NATO has been slow-walking Ukraine's membership for this very reason that Russia's physical presence there would automatically trigger Article 5 and mandate all 33 NATO nations to send troops to Ukraine's defense. But Trump has chosen to make Article 5 conditional on whether or not Ukraine sells half its mineral rights to us. And if Ukraine gets NATO membership, it'll be at least most of NATO against a nuclear power.

     And Trump couldn't care less if that happens. Because that's what happens when you put a sociopath in the Oval Office.

As the Old Saying Goes...

     ...never underestimate the stupidity of people in large numbers.

     It's obvious that the idiots who voted for Trump last November 5th never heard of the parable of the Scorpion and the Frog. Because, out of all those who had, the only ones benefiting are white male One Percenters, starting with Elon Musk.

     The lead image above is one that I suspect we'll see in different iterations over the weeks to come. People have relatives and friends who are losing their government jobs and are bleating to the deaf ears of the administration. Take this pair of tweets from "MAGA Marilyn":

     She cheered the termination of federal workers that she and other MAGAts decided to hate on because Donald Trump told them to. Then her daughter lost her job with the federal government and, because it affected her family, she started singing a different tune.

     And these morons who voted for that bloated orange boa constrictor usually slithering on the 18 holes at Mar a Lago just don't get it. They still want to see The Purge because it's the Democrats' fault for letting government get so big. And even when they criticize the administration for hurting them personally, they still do so with kid gloves on.

 

 

     Because, you see, they voted for Trump for the same reasons that pimps use pimp sticks- They voted for him so he would hurt the "right" people. They think their vote for Trump somehow makes them invulnerable to all harm, as if their vote for him is the magic blue armor on Doom. They want to see the world burn but they don't want to get singed.

     This is remarkably similar, if not identical, to the mindset of evangelical Christians who pray to a deity with the full expectation that He will drop whatever He's doing to attend to their needs.

     It's really the ultimate sense of entitlement, like this stupid twat who went to Mexico and yelled at a Mariachi band for playing Mariachi music, as if she was expecting them to play something by John Tesh.

     Last year, Trump got an astounding and incomprehensible 42% of the Latino vote even though he largely ran on a platform of hatred for anyone whose skin color approximated that of a paper bag. Even more astoundingly, Trump got 16% of the Black vote (twice what he got in 2020, which was twice what he got in 2016), although he recently claimed it was 40%.

      And yet, it never occurred to these idiots that Trump hadn't put a single Black or Latino in his Cabinet or given them any significant government positions. That isn't to suck up to a demographic whose vote he no longer needs. That's by design because he simply hates people of color. He made that plain over half a century ago when he and his racist father Fred were hauled into federal court for refusing to rent to black people. He made it plain when he spent tens of thousands of dollars in full page ads in New York's largest newspaper calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, five people he still insists are guilty. He made that plain when he testified before Congress and claimed Native Americans didn't look Native American to him and, most recently, when he repeatedly called Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocohantas".

     And he made that plain when he took the side of white supremacists and Neo Nazis in Charlottesville in August 2017. He made it plain when he denigrated people from "shithole countries" and wondered in the next breath why we couldn't have more immigrants from Norway. And, in the Friday night massacre, he fired the only Black on the Joint Chiefs and the only woman.

     And the so-called chosen people, those who voted for Trump. are all butt hurt because his chainsaw policies are hurting them and their own. Even Jesse Watters is asking Trump on his show why his friend lost his government job.

     The thing is, unlike 2017, when Trump broke virtually every major promise he ever made on the campaign trail, Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. The morons who voted for him with the full expectation that he would hurt only liberals have no right to be surprised when they get in the way of his wildly swinging chainsaw. 

     When Hitler got elected Chancellor of Germany, he did each and every single thing he vowed he would do when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1925. And, despite pretending not to know anything about Project 2025, Trump is rapidly making that nightmare come true. Project 2025 is just the English translation of Mein Kampf.

      It's incomprehensible why so many Americans remain so blind to Trump and his palpable evil while those of other nations see this Satanic cunt for exactly what he is. And it's no longer even accurate to claim this is a cult, anymore. Cults don't topple nations or kill democracies. Cults inevitably fall. This is something else.

     And I don't think we even have a name for what we're seeing these days.

The Mango Candidate

 

     There are reasons why Russian state media alternates between mocking Donald Trump and cheering him on like some disabled but compliant athlete in the Special Olympics. And this is the major difference between Russian state media and American state media- The Russian government doesn't lie to its fourth estate and they give them the straight skinny. American state media, happy to be glorified stenographers, are fed bullshit and keep coming back for more.

     Yesterday, a former KGB chief put out an extraordinary post on Facebook that essentially told us what we already knew for years, that Donald Trump is a Russian mole working for Moscow, that they began courting him as far back as 1987, that his wife Ivana once worked with the Czechoslovak security service surveillance, or the Státní Bezpečnost (StB).  In fact, the Soviet Union began keeping a close eye on her comings and goings about a decade before Trump.

    We knew all this, thanks to a Russian general familiar with the Soviets grooming Trump to one day be their willing goon.

    What we didn't know was Trump's code name with the KGB: Krasnov.

    Why is Alnur Mussayev now coming out with this, now that Trump has been successfully shoehorned back into the White House through fraud? Well, maybe it had something to do with this:

      "In 2007, he fled the country after accusing the government of widespread corruption in the form of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from Western oil giants. Exiled to Austria, in 2008 he survived an attempted kidnapping which he attributed to the Kazakhstan government."

     Which is to say, Putin put out the hit on him.

     So, it could be delayed vengeance, which hardly seems efficacious if the idea was to expose the corrupt Russian government for something it had initiated 38 years ago or undermine Trump, who's well on his way to making his Dr. Strangelove nuclear war fantasy come to fruition.

     But, since this Russian seems to be the real deal, I think we can take what he says at face value, namely that for the first time in US history, our "president" is actually a Russian mole and an asset for Moscow.

     Now, for those of you harboring an unhealthy sense of denial that Trump is a Russian asset, consider just his actions over the last month he's been the "president". He's seriously considering lifting the crippling Russian sanctions that were placed on them during the Obama and Biden administrations. He's making noises about pulling us out of NATO. He proffered a "deal" for Ukraine's mineral rights that would make a protection racket mobster blush. He's all but assured Ukraine that all financial aid would cease and, at that travesty of a negotiation in Saudi Arabia, in which Ukraine wasn't invited to attend, Trump gave away the farm without Russia making one concession. 

     That was just in the last month. I haven't gotten into all the shit he did for Russia during his first stolen "presidency", including taking Putin's side over that of his own intelligence agencies regarding Putin putting bounties on the heads of US servicemen and barking at anyone who even suggests his obvious collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign. He also pulled us out of the INF treaty that basically allowed Russia to ramp up its nuclear program.

      No wonder Russian officials and state media are virtually guzzling vodka in public these days.
     In short, everything Trump does or tries to do somehow benefits Russia as if it's, I don't know, all according to a plan, as if Russia has been, I don't know, playing the long game regarding Trump.

Good Times at Gotham City

 

Priorities

 

     God knows there's a lot of shit going on out there. Our government, starting with Musk and his vice president, Trump, are robbing America blind in real time and removing any regulatory and enforcement mechanisms that before, in a slightly more law-abiding age, could've stopped them. 

     And over the last two and a half weeks or so, I've tried to keep up a steady output for my fiction as well as adding to this blog every day that I can. And, don't worry, I'm not going anywhere on either front. But sometimes I have to prioritize one over the other. Up until 17 days ago, I was prioritizing this forum more out of a sense of alarm and outrage over what's been going on. Then I decided to step back from that a bit.

     It was as much a mental health break as anything else, if not moreso. But I've been plugging away on a short novel since last spring then, after making good progress on it, I got stuck on a plot point on chapter 18. For months, I added not a single punctuation mark to the book. It made me feel more guilty with each passing day. It was also frustrating because I'd doped out the ending not long after I began the book.

     So I somewhat staved off my incipient sense of guilt by pouring all my literary energies into this blog in the run-up to the election because I felt I had something of a patriotic duty to do so. The existential threat facing this country was real and serious and, since the inauguration of a 34 time convicted felon, we've come to find out that the reality was actually worse than the gloomiest of the doomsayers were predicting.

     Then, 17 days ago, I decided to finish this book in one last, mad push. Since then, I've added exactly 30,000 words to it. If you want a synopsis of this book, click on the image and maximize it. The blurb is on the back cover.

     It's a Scott Carson spinoff featuring just Kelley (whom you might have met in The Doll Maker and Hollywoodland). Virtually the entire book is told from her point of view, which is something I'd always wanted to do since I wrote Hollywoodland in 2020. 

     Except for fairly regular blog posts and dabbing away at one novel or another that would remain unfinished, I hadn't completed and published a new book since Hollywoodland first launched in December 2020. Barbara's condition and then her death paralyzed me and I couldn't concentrate on anything. And between the emergence of her dementia in 2019 and her death in 2023, I'd transitioned my identity from that of being a writer to being her caretaker. And even after her death, it was damned near impossible to fight and reclaim my writer's identity.

     So that's when I decided enough was enough. Barbara, always my #1 fan, would've wanted me to keep writing. Paralysis was useless, needless and illogical.

     Nearly a year ago, I was on Facebook and I saw a post that someone had written about the murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell, a Bridge expert and Wall Street investor who was shot and killed in his home on June 11, 1920. The Elwell murder was something out of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan-Doyle because it was a real-life locked room murder mystery. The doors were locked from the inside and the windows were barred. In other words, the killer had no means of escape let escape they did.

      Now, to a historical psychological thriller author like yours truly, that's like catnip, especially when I find real-life cases within the timeline of my work's chronology for my characters to investigate. Elwell's murder on June 11th 1920 dovetails perfectly with the timeline in Hollywoodland when Scott and Kelley get married in LA that month. But she has to solve Elwell's murder while preparing for her departure from the New York Times.

      So, in my mind, this is the spinoff I always wanted to write plus it had to be written for several reasons. Number one, I had to get my writer identity back. Number two, like many writers, I like being prolific and coming out with at least one new title a year. I've never gone for anywhere near four plus years without a new book launch. And lastly. the timeline of Elwell's murder dovetails perfectly with part of the timeline in Hollywoodland.

     Plus, as stated earlier, I'm at the point where I desperately need a distraction from the madness billowing from the Beltway like a sewer gas leak.

      I'm up to well over 66,000 words and I haven't taken a day off in those 17 days. Since I'd set a word limit of 80,000 words, which would make it my shortest novel by far, that means I should have this book's first draft knocked out in a week or so. Then there will be revision, copyediting and reformatting and I should definitely have this out on the market by this spring.

     In the meantime, if you're able, please make a Paypal donation to help get me to my next check later this month. $25 or more will get you a free Kindle copy and $50 or more will get you an autographed paperback that I'll mail to your house at my expense.

     So, as Rachel Maddow says, "Watch this space."

We Need to Prepare for a Reckoning

 

     Over the last 26 days since Trump has been fraudulently shoehorned back in the Oval Office, there has literally been not one day without some horrible news. Tens of thousands of civil servants have either been summarily fired or were stupid enough to voluntarily quit after being seduced by a buyout that likely will never materialize. 

     An unelected, self-interested sociopath whose name isn't Donald Trump has brought in a gang of juvenile delinquents into our most important and vital institutions and have been acting like conquering Vikings, getting their hands on our private data and threatening those who resist them with arrest by the US Marshal's Service.

     Immigrants and American citizens alike are being rounded up by masked ICE agents as if it's Orwell's 1984 and many are getting sent to Cuba.

     Aid organizations, including USAID, our biggest agency that disburses aid to over 60,000,000 needy people all over the world, has seen its workforce slashed from 10,000 to fewer than 300. Trump is threatening needless trade wars with allies that will result in an economic crash that will make 2008 look like a slight blip.

     He's given away all his bargaining chips regarding Ukraine before negotiations even start. NATO is now fast tracking Ukraine's membership, meaning, with the Russian occupation, all the other 33 member nations will be forced by Article 5 to jump into the fray against a nuclear nation run by a madman. Essentially, Trump is teeing up WW III.

     Nations are turning on us left and right and imposing retaliatory tariffs on us. Many of them are preparing to help lead a planet without a United States. It's only a matter of time before Trump pulls us out of NATO, which would seriously damage if not outright destroy NATO.

     Virtually all mentions of female and minority contributions have been erased and craven corporations like Google have been following suit, even to the point of renaming the Gulf of Mexico  the Gulf of America. Others have axed DEI programs. Obey in advance, or else.

     The government is built to withstand change but incremental change through lawful executive action and deliberately ponderous legislation. It was not built for sudden, reckless change for its own sake. The government, our democratic republic, is being treated like a passenger in a car crash and whip-lashed into paralysis. It's only a matter of time before our nation course-corrects or breaks down entirely. One or the other will happen. It's only a matter of time. The only question is what the final outcome will be.

     And most people in this country, particularly what passes for our free press, seem unable or unwilling to grasp the fact that a major Reckoning is coming and may even be overdue. Whether it's brought about through violent, bloody Civil War or impeachments and trials remains to be seen. But we all share a hideous debt for what we'd allowed and every debt has a reckoning, a due date.

     What remains to be seen is how exactly we confront that debt, that reckoning.

     The rule of law, thanks to right wing activist judges and justices and corrupt officials who'd appointed and confirmed them, has been turned into a bitter joke. It seemed we had the most corrupt one of them all on the ropes. Jack Smith was going after him on two fronts, for inciting a riot at the Capitol that ended nine lives and for stealing classified files.

     Now. all those prosecutors, investigators and law clerks are on the run as if being chased by a pack of rabid hounds.

     So, it doesn't look as if we'll be getting any relief or justice from our federal criminal justice system any time soon.

     We are all responsible for this chaos whether we contributed to it or not. Saying, "I didn't vote for him" then turning away is not an option. What is an option (actually, it's a patriotic duty) is rebellion and disobedience by any means necessary.

     The nation was not founded 251 years ago by obedient men ready to bend a knee to a tyrant. Granted, roughly half the Continental Congress were Loyalists who still thought of themselves as British subjects and were shaken by the idea of armed conflict against the Crown. In fact, it was so dangerous to be in the Congress at that no time were all the members together. In 1774, at least in the eyes of the British government, the members of the first Congress were little better than dissidents and traitors. In fact, many were unsure if there would be a second Congress.

     The rest is history. What started with attempts at reconciliation with the British eventually turned into blockades then outright revolution. The Founding Fathers hardly knew what they were doing because they were trying to build a democracy like the world had never seen, a republic modeled after others that, without exception, had already fallen to the wayside. (Remember what Ben Franklin said: "We have a republic... if we can keep it.") They quarreled, they debated yet somehow found compromise, consensus over what should be done.

     To anyone who knows even the rudiments of our nation's history, such a rape on our institutions, spitting in the faces of our oldest allies, should be intolerable. My God, people, isn't it? Aren't you horrified by what you see?

     How comfortable are you that the greatest experiment in democracy that the world has ever seen is in danger of ending because of one aging, demented sociopath who can't even hold a glass with one hand?

Out of the Mouths of Babes

 

     A few days ago, we were treated to an unprecedented spectacle. The closest we'd come to seeing anything like it (Typically, also in a Trump White House) was when Trump had Sergei Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Oval Office on May 10, 2017. It was the day after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey via Twitter. The only documentation we have of that meeting, in which Trump spilled secrets to the Russians regarding Israel's intelligence gathering, was a single photographer from Russian state media, Tass. Trump had kicked all western journalists out of the Oval Office. There's even a picture of Lavrov standing right behind the Resolute Desk

    Then three days ago, Trump seemed bound and determined to confirm the fears, suspicions and beliefs of many watching this co-opted administration by letting Elon Musk hold court in the Oval Office and standing more or less in Lavrov's footprints.

      It was obviously a power move on Musk's part. He was there to literally put a happy face on his ongoing sabotage and espionage of the US government. Being the world's richest man and the most protected terrorist in world history, Musk could've had his presser literally anywhere on earth. He could've held it in the WH press briefing room. Yet, he chose the Oval Office, standing beside and behind Trump. With his four year-old kid.

     As if to say, "I own this, you peasants."

 

     As if the optics weren't horrifying enough, it was also partly about what Musk was saying. He actually admitted to lying by saying not everything he says is going to be accurate (in response to a question about the $50,000,000 USAID spent on condoms to Gaza, which was Gaza, Mozambique to help prevent the spread of HIV, not the Gaza strip in Palestine like Musk alleged). Then he inveighed (Yes, he actually said this) against "unelected bureaucrats".

     You know, like him.

     He spoke about how transparent DOGE really is and announced a new website even though at that moment the website was nothing more than a black page containing nothing (more on www.doge.gov later.) 

     Meanwhile, while he wasn't wearing him around his neck like a thick cardigan, the kid began yelling and even picked his nose and wiped his booger on the Resolute desk that was given to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 as a gift from Queen Victoria.

     At some point, the kid ambled over to Trump who immediately turned away from him as if he had lice because we all know how much he hates kids. For one of the few times during that travesty of a presser, Trump opened his mouth and the kid told him to shut up. Yes, Musk's four year-old son told the "president of the United States" to shut up. And Trump sat there and took it like an umber eunuch.

     The kid knows. Even this preschooler knew who was really in charge, who the real billionaire, the real power was behind the Resolute Desk. Daddy speaks freely in front of him when the cameras and microphones aren't around. "Who's the orange guy, dada?" "Oh, nobody. Just some clown who thinks he's in charge." A four year-old child knew the real power dynamic that only a very few members of our so-called media will even dare speculate aloud, however timidly and timorously.

     You think I'm making this up? Check out this clip on Bluesky where "Little X" tells Trump, "You're not the president and you need to go away."

     Seriously, all that was needed to be done was to have Trump forcibly removed from that leather chair and for Musk to take his place behind the Resolute Desk, boogers and all.

     Meanwhile, Trump sat there, trying desperately to look as if he was still in charge, instead looking like a bored kid in church. Rachel Maddow asked on her show that night, "What, they couldn't find crayons for him, maybe a little map you get at Denny's?"

    Something else the press glossed over. Way back on Election Day. Tucker Carlson asked the little kid with the unpronounceable name if he thought Trump would win the election (Because God knows we should be informed by kids who aren't old enough to go to Kindergarten). And the kid said, "Yes," before adding, "They'll never know."

     People sometimes yell at me both in real life and on social media when I say I will never believe that Trump won the 2024 election and that Harris lost. This is one of the things to which I'm referring. That and Musk saying he could prove with an app that Trump won on November 5th a full four hours before the election was called for him. And any computer programmer worth their weight in Cheetos dust can tell you that any voting machine, anything electronic, can be hacked. An 11 year-old girl did it at a hacker conference back in 2018.

     But just like in 2000 and 2004, it was just a lot easier to accept fraudulent election results than to publicly say both elections were stolen. "We need a peaceful transfer of power," they all say, even if that power is obtained through nakedly fraudulent means on behalf of those least suited or qualified to wield it.

     2024 was no different. No guy that spends a quarter of a billion dollars backing one guy in a presidential election is going to do so unless he can personally guarantee the results he wants. 

      But Trump's cowed demeanor while President Musk was holding court that day was eerily similar to the look on his beet-red face in Helsinki after Trump met with a loosey goosey Vladimir Putin for two hours. All he needed that day was a spike collar around his wattled neck. At the rate things are going, Trump by this summer will be sitting behind a Playskool desk signing fake executive orders with a black crayon right next to the Resolute Desk. Trump has been so thoroughly emasculated by the likes of Putin and Musk that he doesn't care if he's really the one with his hands on the levers of power. It's only important if people think he is.

     And regarding DOGE's website, just hours after the spectacle in the Oval Office, hackers broke into the still-empty website and did this. The little boys of DOGE have since taken taken back control (for now) but one has to ask themself this: Why does a legitimate government organization need two websites? Yes, this is the other website that went up about a month ago.

     By now, it's become screamingly obvious that the fictional DOGE exists solely to serve Elon Musk, not the American people. They're being allowed to illegally slash multibillion dollar programs to free up money for Elon Musk's companies, like the tens of billions in SpaceX contracts that Musk has been happily collecting since last December.

      Which is why Musk is about to collect a $400,000,000 contract from the State Department for armored Teslas. And this is the entire Republican agenda in a nutshell. Free up billions if not trillions for Musk and as a giveaway to their billionaire buddies (Keep in mind the $4.5 trillion corporate welfare blueprint that was just seriously advanced by Republicans). It's the usual Republican agenda only on anabolic steroids under Musk.

     Trump is obviously a bloated Trojan horse that Musk wheeled into the White House. Just a couple of days ago, Rep. Eric Swalwell exposed Republicans for laughing at Donald Trump in private and calling him a child. This is part of what Swalwell said:

     "And yes, censorship is occurring, but it's self-censorship, and it's by you all. Because I hear you in our private conversations when you agree that Trump is a child. I hear the people you tell that Trump is a child, whether it's lobbyists or reporters. But you shrink in this room, and you shrink in the chamber, and you self-censor yourselves from speaking out because you're afraid."

     They don't respect him but they fear him because he's a big baby, yes, but a big baby who's also very dangerous, the giant Trump baby blimp come to life. But no one with working synapses thinks Trump will suddenly turn into a brilliant, transformative president in a way that actually benefits America and not Russia. He's just the empty Trojan horse that contained Elon Musk and we're the latter-day Troy getting hollowed out from the inside.

     So why doesn't Trump do anything about Musk? When will he finally muster some outrage and say, "Enough is enough"? I'd say the 12th of Never. And you know why?

     Because all Musk has to do is go back to the Oval Office, hold a presser and say, "Yes, I stole the presidency for Donald Trump." And it won't be Musk going to prison. It won't be Musk getting impeached. He's only a "special government employee," remember? It'll be Trump. He'll be finished. And he knows it.

RAGE Against the Machine

 

(Hat tip to Salon's Amanda Marcotte)

     Calling Curtis Yarvin the most dangerous man you've never heard of would be quite a stretch. Indeed, Yarvin, one of Peter Thiel's butt boys, used to be fringe. However, his 2012 manifesto delineating a philosophy called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) is getting reexamined. Not only that, it seems that tech billionaires, corporations and right wing think tanks are taking it much more seriously.

     When Yarvin put out the first version of his manifesto, three years before Trump came down the escalator, no one really (except for his sugar daddy Thiel) took him seriously, it was so fringe. What Yarvin called for was for the destruction of the federal government and the president of the United States to be reduced to a mere figurehead while the country was to be run by a CEO.

     Prior to Yarvin's once-laughable screed that called for "parachute ninjas" to land on the roofs of government buildings, the closest analog we have to this in American history was the attempted fascist takeover in the early days of FDR's administration. I've written about this a couple of times over the years but in case your history is a little rusty, let me bring you up to speed:

     Right after FDR was elected in 1932, horrified right wing oligarchs, terrified of Roosevelt's promised left wing agenda, engineered an attempted coup of our government. Remington was supposed to supply the rifles, Prescott Bush the financing and their undoing was to approach Marine General Smedley Butler to recruit an army of WWI holdovers to lead the revolt.

     Smedley Butler, of course, turned out to be the ultimate whistleblower and exposed their scheme before it even got off the ground. Still. despite Butler's revelations before a Congressional committee about the Business Plot, not a single one of the corporate scumbags ever saw the inside of a Congressional hearing room, much less a courtroom much less a prison cell. In fact, less than 20 years later, Prescott Bush got himself elected a US Senator out of Connecticut.

     Yarvin's roots are odd but not unheard of. His parents were liberal and secular. Yarvin's father, ironically, worked for the State Department as a diplomat. In fact, his parents were avowed Communists. It's tempting to see Yarvin instinctively rejecting his parents' values and turned to the dark side. Yarvin is an unabashed neoNazi and white nationalist who canoodles with virulent neoNazi and racist Nick Land.

     But Yarvin's so-called philosophy involves a takeover of government to the point of hollowing it out and replacing them with ideologues that nonetheless have some experience in government. The major difference between this and Elon Musk's current sabotage of the government is to bring in a bunch of punks who have no experience whatsoever in government.

     And Yarvin's dim worldview of American democracy, one that he views as a failed experiment, requires that the US government be replaced by a series of shell agencies subservient to an accountable monarchy, in other words, like a corporation run by a CEO.

     His plan would be considered laughable today if it wasn't eerily prescient of the Project 2025 we're seeing unfolding in real time before our horrified eyes. He's attracted the attention of tech billionaires, the Heritage Foundation that midwifed Project 2025, and even "Vice President" JD Vance. Part Star Trek, part Matrix, part fascist, dystopian nightmare, all it needs is gas chambers and ovens.

     It's not very much of a stretch to see Yarvin's plans for a Nazi takeover of the government  providing a foundation for what would become Project 2025, a 900+ page agenda that hates America and its democratic republic with the fury of 1000 suns. It's a bloated love song to white male Christian hegemony and it's easy to see Yarvin being the godfather of the insanity we're seeing today.

     But instead of ninjas on roofs, we're seeing juvenile delinquents running loose in the halls and offices of some of our most important institutions, with Elon Musk playing the part of some Silicon Valley version of Fagin. Yarvin's plan to take over the fourth and fifth estates we'd begun seeing long before the 2024 election. If you want to know why the major newspapers in this country aren't reporting on this ongoing espionage, consider that the Washington Post and LA Times are run by right wing billionaire psychopaths that refused to endorse Kamala Harris or say anything unflattering about Trump under the risible guise of political neutrality.

     And it's hardly surprising that Republicans in Congress are falling behind this fascist agenda since the Republican Party, for at least a century going back the days of Harding, have loathed democracy with all their black little hearts. They're sailing on a ship, meaning Congress, they're too stupid to realize is under fire from the very man they lionize. The Republican Party for the last century has always been evil, is evil now and always will be evil until it finally collapses under the sheer tonnage of its own corruption.

So Much Winning!

 

     OK, Trump had another weekend infested with unending failure and we made merry over it. He spent the weekend banning the penny, pretending to rename the Gulf of Mexico, imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum regardless of where they come from, getting booed at the Super Bowl and picking the wrong team to win. Ha ha. Look at the tilting, sad, fat man at the twilight of his shit-stained, semen-flecked life.

     But it's Monday now and Trump's back in DC continuing to turn the government, and our lives, into a bad, diaper-filling acid flashback of post-Weimar 1930s Germany, only far to the right of the autism spectrum. But just because it's Monday, it doesn't mean the failure ends. Failure billows from Trump like dust clouds from Pigpen. Trump's genius is that he's still able to fool tens of millions of post evolutionary humans into believing the dust clouds are his personally-branded fragrances.

     Trump's already lost several times in court today. Let's start with Hampton Dellinger.

     Now. you might be asking, "Who is Hampton Dellinger?" Well, Dellinger is a special counsel who's the head of the Office of Special Counsel to the DOJ. To put a finer point on it, the Office of Special Counsel, ironically, is described thusly by the AP:

     "The Office of Special Counsel investigates whistleblower claims of reprisal, can pursue disciplinary action against employees who punish whistleblowers and provides a channel for employees to disclose government wrongdoing."

     Dellinger was fired by Trump in a terse one line email until Judge Amy Berman Jackson got involved.

     Meanwhile in Boston, two more challenges were successfully made blocking Trump's attempt to idiotically choke off funding of the NIH to 15%. Three lawsuits were already filed on behalf of hospitals and research facilities and two of them overturned this with injunctions that are almost as common as Trump's moronic Executive Orders.

     Of course, if you're JD Vance, Trump can get away with that pesky illegal mumbo jumbo by simply ignoring court orders and judges.

     Which, as George Conway recently said, will tee up a civil war like we've never seen before.

It's Not a Fifth Column- It's Worse

 

     A fifth column is defined as an attempt to destroy a government from within. In fact this is how Wikipedia defines a Fifth Column:

     "A fifth column is a group of people who undermine a larger group or nation from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or another nation. The activities of a fifth column can be overt or clandestine. Forces gathered in secret can mobilize openly to assist an external attack. The term is also applied to organized actions by military personnel. Clandestine fifth column activities can involve acts of sabotage, disinformation, espionage or terrorism executed within defense lines by secret sympathizers with an external force."

     Let me know if any of that sounds familiar.

     I've been saying for the two decades I've been a political blogger that the Republican Party is nothing less than an unacknowledged, unaccused Fifth Column. God knows we've seen countless examples of Trump undermining the country and its interests, all of them, seemingly, benefiting Russia and other adversaries. And anyone who's been paying the slightest fucking amount of attention  can see that Trump 2.0 is far worse than Trump 1.0 ever was.

     And the reason why the second iteration of a Trump junta is far worse is because this takeover and hollowing out of the government is technically not even a Fifth Column because this unprecedented sabotage is spearheaded by a South African Nazi named Elon Musk who's not even a legitimate government official. Elon Musk was elected by no one, and the tiny fig leaf that Trump gave him (a "special government employee"?!) still should not allow him access to the agencies that he and his Clearasil cavalry have essentially taken over.

     It's an administrative Blitzkrieg, to borrow a favorite phrase from Trump's lexicon, "the likes of which have never been seen". Under the rickety justification of DEI and wokeness, paper and garbage bags have been placed over walls and windows in government agencies in the sloppiest, pettiest censorship in US history. 

     USAID's signage was pried off the building, with a black garbage bag placed over the agency's logo on the front window. The names of women who'd worked for the NSA have been papered over, NASA's website has been purged of any mention of female leadership and contributions by indigenous people. The FBI training academy at Quantico had a wall containing words like "Leadership, "Fairness" and "Equity" covered with gray paint. A wall at a VA hospital dedicated to pictures of LGBT people who'd been in the military? Gone.

     The White House's Spanish language page disappeared, USAID's website also disappeared. The list goes on. And this is just the censorship of history. What Elon Musk is doing is far, far worse.

     They essentially took over the Treasury Department, the EPA, gutted USAID and attached what's left of it to the State Department. He and his little goons have access to all or most of the government's databases, including that of the 70,000,000+ people who are on Social Security. Several courts have weighed in, some of them Republican appointees, and have put a temporary stop to this ransacking of the government's databases.

     But just because a judge places an injunction on Musk to stop accessing sensitive information and orders him to destroy whatever information he's illegally obtained doesn't mean he'll obey the courts. And anyone who thinks Musk will needs to get their heads examined.

     USAID, created by JFK and Congress in 1961, once employed 10,000 people. They now have fewer than 300. It once provided $60 billion a year in aid to poor people in 60 nations. They provided food, medicine and medical care to some of the most disadvantaged people on earth. Food pallets that were loaded with food just prior to this purge are still on loading docks waiting to get shipped and now, they never will.

     Musk and Trump are exactly what Hannah Arendt once called "desk murderers".

     Meals on Wheels? Gone. Head Start (another part of the Kennedy legacy)? Gone. Our nation's entire health infrastructure? Gone. NIH indirect research funding? Cut to a ridiculous 15%. 

     A thinking and perspicacious person cannot help but come to the conclusion that Trump and Musk are trying to kill as many people as possible not just in this country but all over the world. And what makes this truly evil is that it's not a mere misguided attempt to root out fraud and corruption in the government but petty revenge.

     At least five Inspectors General that had been fired by Trump had one thing in common: They were investigating Musk and his various companies. Musk is going after these watchdogs and the agencies for whom they'd once worked out of petty revenge. This is exactly why Trump is trying to purge the DOJ and the FBI of anyone who ever investigated him. It's white male petulance at its very worst because this is how Nazi authoritarians think. They honestly have an inflexible righteousness about everything they do and how dare anyone even investigate much less convict them?

     Don't look for the courts to save us. All they're doing is slowing down the inevitable and, in the absence of any actual enforcement mechanism, don't assume that Musk and his minions will obey the various injunctions placed on them. We're on our own and it's up to us to stop this madness. It's our patriotic duty, plain and simple.Because authoritarianism feeds on silence, inaction and consent.