White Male Right Wingers

ALWAYS BLAME PEOPLE OF COLOR AND WOMEN FOR EVERYTHING that goes wrong under them in power.    Just like the Nazis always blamed Jews and members of other minorities for everything that went wrong, just like Stalin and Mao and all other despots blame others without power or even presence for the consequences of what they do.

Trump and, we can depend on the white, male, right-wingers of the media will blame "DEI" for an air accident that happened a week after Trump claimed to have ended DEI in the relevant agencies ON THE WHITE HOUSE WEBSITE because that's what they do, both because they are racists and sexists and because their base is, at base motivated by their racism and sexism.  DONALD TRUMP GOT INTO THE PRESIDENCY BECAUSE OF THE RAMPANT RACISM OF THEIR BASE AND THE MEDIA BOTH IN 2016 AND 2024, RACISM AND SEXISM WORK FOR THEM.  "DEI" is to Republican-fascism what "Jews" were to their model, the Nazis. 

They can be defeated only a strong coalition of People of Color who favor equlality, Women who favor equality, LGBTQ+ who favor equality and, yes, straight, white males who favor equality.   And if there is something we know about how all of the above vote as groups, not all of any one of those groups favors equality,  the delusion that, somehow, you will be exempt from the fascists' discrimination, recrimination, criminalization and violence effects an important minority of even those groups.  And we know that the mass media, the media addled, the entertainment addled are especially susceptible to that delusion.   One thing we have to do is keep yelling as loudly as we can what is really going on in hopes of shaking some of them awake. 

Not Two Weeks In Office And Trump Is Drooling Out "Condom Bombs"

Trump's combination of Adderall and senile dementia mixed with his congenital rich, white, boy stupidity makes it more necessary every day that he be removed from office and the cowardly Republicans in the Senate have made that impossible due to their installation of a cabinet of corrupt incompetents who know their retaining their jobs depends on the senile Trump being president.  

The crisis is coming on fast and strong and depending on the courts driving back the criminal insanity of Trump isn't going to be dependable even in the short term.  Truth is, the crisis is already full blown, like the start of a massive explosion it just hasn't all happened yet.  

Republicans and the media have brought us to this.  We could be continuing the extreme competence of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris but instead they have put the country in the hands of a senile baby-man.   Billionaires have brought us to this.  They need to be eliminated through leveling, they are the most dangerous class in the world.

Listening to Little Bobby In Front Of The Senate Committee

 I CAN'T RECALL a more slimy, dishonest piece of crap testifying for such a major job and I've listened to virtually all of the Republican-fascist testiliars for Supreme Court seats,  many of those in previous Republican-fascist and Republican administration who were plenty slimy, dishonest and shitty. 

His refusal to answer Senator Warren's questions about him personally profiting from the scummy lawsuits his law firm has brought and will bring against vaccine manufacturers and others, pretending that she was asking him to not bring law suits even as she pointed out, repeatedly that that wasn't her question constitutes perjury.  

I was never all that far gone on the Kennedy mystique even as I admitted that, generally,  Edward Kennedy recovered from his slimy past and became a generally good Senator.   Caroline Kennedy gave an unprecedentedly scathing assessment of her cousin, calling him a predator and someone who has led many, his own close relations and People he has influenced through his for-profit anti-vaxxer hypocrisy, to their deaths and the deaths of their children.  

His confirmation will probably go through, Republican-fascists put Hegeth through they'll put anyone through, and it will be a milestone in the descent of this country into the most depraved of corruption.  They've never given a shit for the health of the American People only he profits of the corporations.   And now we know Little Bobby Kennedy is all in on the same sort of thing.  He is a good example of the worst of the play-lefty left, which is never far from self-interested depravity especially as practiced by millionaires, billionaires and their slimy heirs.  It's a rare one who won't turn on a dime like he does as soon as he sniffs his interest goes in another direction.   He's the kind of person who makes me hope I'm wrong about hell because he deserves to burn in it.

As The Republican With The Neo-Nazi Handle Rages

 Right, unlike your NEW ground of calling Republicans Nazis and insisting any criticism against the Dems is racist/sexist/fascist/homophobic, etc.

Really, I'd have thought you'd realize by now that I read a bit of history now and again.  Hell, a lot of that I remember reading as current news.

It's not new and it started well before Trump's owner, Elon made his two Nazi salutes during the Trump II inauguration.*  But I won't go all that far back.   Here's what the Republican friendly "The Hill" said last spring.

Former President Trump has once again stoked outrage for his flirtation with Nazi rhetoric, this time with a video posted to his Truth Social account that used the phrase “unified Reich.”

The video drew swift condemnation, including from the Biden campaign, which spent the day on the attack and noted it was just the latest instance of Trump using or promoting language often associated with Nazi Germany or World War II dictators.

Here's what the cowardly, FOX lite, Trump enabling CNN said: 

Donald Trump dabbles in Nazi allusions too often for it to be a coincidence.

The latest example is a video posted on the ex-president’s social media account that features a fake headline implying the US could become a “unified Reich” if he wins a second term in November. The video replicates what appears to be World War I-era newspapers. But the term “Reich,” which means a kind of empire, is also synonymous with the later Third Reich of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign insisted the sharing of the third-party video on Monday was the work of a staffer and not Trump, who was in court. It was eventually taken down hours later on Tuesday.  

Here's what they said on a previous occasion when Trump was talking to a "right leaning "news" organization:

 Former President Donald Trump said in a recent interview that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” using language that is often employed by White supremacists and nativists in comments that have drawn rebuke from one prominent civil rights group.

“Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country,” Trump told the right-leaning news site The National Pulse in a video interview published last week. “It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”

Trump’s comments, which gained traction online this week, drew condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leader called the remarks “racist, xenophobic and despicable.”

“Insinuating that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ echoes nativist talking points and has the potential to cause real danger and violence. We have seen this kind of toxic rhetoric inspire real-world violence before in places like Pittsburgh and El Paso. It should have no place in our politics, period,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said. 

You'll note that even the goddamned ADL hack, a previous Obama appointee couldn't ignore the Nazi language of Trump, the reference to the Pittsburgh Synagogue attack and the El Paso shooting by another neo-Nazi makes it clear he and those who quoted him recognized Trump's neo-Nazi rhetoric for what it is.   And that's just Trump, someone whose first wife said his bedtime reading was of a book of Hitler speeches some rich asshole figured should feed into his diseased mind. 

And that's just Trump,  Republicans, such as yourself, are overtly Nazi adjacent as American white supremacists have since the rise of Nazism.  It was largely Republican businessmen and anti-New Dealers who promoted "doing business with Hitler." Those ties go all the way back to the beginning even as Hitler cited American white supremacy as one of his inspirations.   The white supremacy that Republicans took to their heart in the Goldwater-Nixon "Southern Strategy" is our own and far more enduring and influential form of it and you, Herr neo-Nazi name, couldn't be a more representative specimen of it if you put on the brown shirt and arm band.  

It's the Republicans who were anti-Nazis who need an explanation, not the ones who are all in on it, now.  Even the Goldwater era survivors are largely appalled at what their party has wrought.  Those who weren't all-in on it from 1964 onward.

America's white suprmacists are, by and large, OK with Trump's and Musk's and your neo-Nazism, CNN right now is,  as I've pointed out last week, even the ADL is OK with it because things are a lot worse than they wanted to believe they were last spring and they're cowards.   The billionaire tech-bros are all in on it, though Trump's idiocy will probably get them to turn on him because he's going to soon cost them a lot more than they hoped he'd hand over to them for the bribes they're giving him and his crime family.  Vance's owner,  Peter Theil isn' going to be less of a danger than Elon, once they've pushed the senile, fat old neo-Nazi aside, though he's probably less likely to do Nazi salutes on ketamine.

*  Here's just a bit of what I was aware of as far back as the late 1960s

In the nostalgic memory of some liberals, William F. Buckley is fondly recalled as an avatar of a more cerebral and genteel conservatism, one that rejected extremism. In this misty-eyed view of the past, Buckley was the type of conservative liberals could get along with, open to debate and willing to denounce extremist cranks like Robert Welch, founder of the conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society.

Walsh counters this sentimental myth by noting that

 "the relationship between the far right and the “respectable” conservatives was far more intertwined than Buckley would later suggest. Not only were Welch and Buckley once friends—Buckley had approached Welch in 1955 for seed funding for the magazine that would become National Review—but many of the men in Buckley’s orbit blurred the boundaries between the respectable and radical right…. The first book review editor for National Review, Revilo Oliver, was a professor of classics at the University of Illinois who believed that communists and Jews were behind the civil rights movement and that the ultimate goal was the genocide of white people. Oliver would eventually become a major figure in the American neo-Nazi movement."

Walsh’s concept of a “right-wing popular front” is extremely clarifying. We can see how this popular front functioned in popularizing Holocaust denial. This subject is described in a superbly researched article, “The Pre-History of American Holocaust Denial,” by John P. Jackson Jr., which appeared in American Jewish History in 2021. Jackson, who teaches at James Madison College at Michigan State University, documents that “Holocaust denial, far from being the sole province of the extreme antisemitic right, was often embraced by the mainstream right wing of American politics.”

There's only one motivation for Holocaust denial, it's because you like Nazism or are at least OK with it and that stuff has been present in the mainstream of the American right before the Holocaust happened and, so, the Republican Party since at least the 1930s.   I remember the news coverage of the 1964 Republican Convention, the one where those who left the Democratic Party after the adoption of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts let their freak-flags fly for the first time,  the acts which the Roberts and, before him, Rehnquist Courts were overturning even as Republicans in the Congress had voted to reconfirm them, including that head-case Clarence Thomas.  It's all the same thing as those who had to fight against the Klan in the 1920s knew.  You are part of our indigenous equivalent of Italian fascism and German Nazism, which is why you're OK with it.

Atheist Hate Mail

OR IS IT "DEIST" hate mail?

The YOUNG Thomas Jefferson was sufficiently bothered by there being no naturalistic formulation from which he could assert the self-evident truth of rights that inhered to "all men" so he appealed to the late 18th century "enlightenment" idea of "nature and nature's god"  because he had no rational alternative.   If he had appealed to God, the God of Moses, Jesus, he would have had to really take the equal endowment of rights and he could not have done that and pretended that slavery, genocide and land theft that his wealth, the wealth of his fellow slave-holders and the financiers who would be voting on his Declaration of Independence rested were compatible with his declaration.   

All human inventions, including constitutions and governments and everything else, including the products of science are in some way deficient, all of them are in some way bound to fail.  Many of those deficiencies are a product of the impossibility of human beings controlling all parts of any problem or project, which is why science is not the exact view of the physical world that the ubiquitous common superstition that originated in the 17th, 18th and 19th century "enlightenment" asserted it was.  It was one of the great discoveries of early 20th century science that science cannot ever be an exact description of even one electron, as I am still smug about forcing an especially arrogant physicist to admit about fifteen years back. 

Other deficiencies in human inventions and creations aren't a product of unintentional omissions, they are a product of generally unadmitted human intention based on baser motives.  The defects in our Constitution flow from the moral and intellectual dishonesty and crookedness that was on display at the original Constitutional Convention, perhaps most evident in the repeated and successful blackmail by the slave-power, especially the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina as can be seen in the arguments made in favor of accepting that blackmail by Northern delegates such as Alexander Hamilton* and Oliver Ellsworth made to their fellow Northern aristocrats. 

In that short description of American history I gave this morning, showing how, over and over again through slavery, genocide, the Civil War, the replacement of de jure slavery with the de facto slavery of Jim Crow, the grinding economic inequality against working People and the destitute, the Great Depression, the ongoing reimposition of white supremacy by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, etc. the Constitution has proven its deficiencies and dangers.  Most if not all of those deficiencies and dangers are based on the various blackmails made at the Constitutional Convention and accepted on the kinds of bases that Hamilton and Ellsworth argued for them AND ALL OF THOSE APPEALED TO THE SELF-INTEREST OF THE WEALTHIEST MEN IN AMERICA.   They weren't based on equality or the Golden Rule.   Until we face that those corruptions are baked in to our governing document and the dishonest lies made up by Constitutional scholars, lawyers, judges and "justices" and bought by us all despite the clear lessons of leaving those corruptions in the Constitution those corruptions will bite us again and again.   

The imaginary god of the 18th century deists is clearly morally inferior to the God of Moses and Jesus.  And, unlike God, it's stupid as well.  We've tried the god of the deists, the naturalistic claim that allowing the wealthy and the poor the kind of liberty and law that would make it illegal for billionaires and the destitute to sleep under bridges and the rest of it and it's gotten us the fruit of that kind of laissez-faire liberty,  Trump.   Pretending that materialism, atheism, scientism is going to produce more than that is, I hold, an idea that has failed in the failure of "liberal democracy" as that started in that 18th century Constitution and was copied by others.   Though some 20th century constitutions have learned a bit from our bad example, they have their own problems. 

*  Here, from a post I did about eight years ago:

But the part of that piece that inspired me to go back to what I would say has been the most important book I've read all year, so far, and revisit my idea of going over large parts of it to debunk the mythology of the "founding fathers" and the brain cancer of "originalism" or "Constitutionalism" or whatever that is certainly more to blame for Republican fascism than The New Testament.  The book is an old one, first published in 1844*,  The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact:  or, Extracts from the Madison papers, etc. selected by Wendell Phillips.  I would recommend that Charles Pierce read the words of Madison as a balance to what sounds like a hagiographic biography of James Madison by Noah Feldman.  I haven't read Feldman's book, though I have to say that what I've read from him in the past wouldn't lead me to suspect it is anything like a rigorously objective reading of the primary record.  Reading his own words as published by Phillips, not to mention the other "founding fathers" in the book, I don't see how anyone could not be skeptical of anything he had to say which would be productive of egalitarian democracy.  The sordid materialism of the founders, discussing not only slaves but free working people as chattels and in terms of useful productivity is truly disgusting.  I hope, this week, to go farther into the discussion starting with the section impeaching the Northerner, the "abolitionist" Alexander Hamilton on the basis of his part in promoting the original corrupt bargain in our politics, the selling out by even such supposed abolitionists as him to the slave power on the basis of advantage to the commercial class in the Northern states.   This extract, alone, shows how Hamilton's legend is pretty much a fiction.

Article 1, Sect. 2, provides --- "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed,  three fifths of all other persons,"

Here, as in the clause we have already examined, veiled beneath a form of words as deceitful as it is unmeaning. in a truly democratic government, is a provision for the safety, perpetuity and augmentation of the slaveholding power  a provision scarcely less atrocious than that which related to the African slave trade, and almost as afflictive in its operation,  a provision still in force, with no possibility of its alteration, so long as a majority of the slave States choose to maintain their slave system  a provision which, at the present time, enables the South to have twenty-five additional representatives in Congress on the score of property, while the North is not allowed to have one,  a provision which concedes to the oppressed three fifths of the political power which is granted to all others, and then puts this power into the hands of their oppressors, to be wielded by them for the more perfect security of their tyrannous authority, and the complete subjugation of the non-slaveholding States. 

Referring to this atrocious bargain, Alexander Hamilton remarked in the New York Convention  

" The first thing objected to, is that clause which allows a representation for three  fifths of the negros.  Much has been said of the impropriety of representing men who have no will of their own. Whether this be reasoning or declamation  (!) I will not presume to say. It is the unfortunate situation of the Southern States to have a great part of their population, as well as property in blacks. The regulation complained of was one result of the spirit of accommodation which governed the Convention ; and without this indulgence, NO UNION COULD POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN FORMED. But. sir, considering some peculiar advantages which we derive from them, it is entirely JUST that they should be gratified. The Southern States posses certain staples  --tobacco, rice, indigo, &c., –  which must be capital objects in treaties of commerce with foreign nations ; and the advantage which they necessarily procure in these treaties will be felt throughout all the States." 

If such was the patriotism, such the love of liberty, such the morality of Alexander Hamilton, what can be said of  the character of those who were far less conspicuous than himself in securing American independence, and in framing  the American Constitution? 

So, fuck all with abolition, there was indigo and tobacco to trade.   Which anyone who wants to groove on and boogie to "Hamilton" might want to consider before they buy the Broadway tripe as accurate history.   I, somehow, doubt it's going to keep Rosie O'Donnell from buying her 32nd ticket to the thing   It's got about the same intellectual status as Star Wars, so why not?

Update:  In discussing the corrupt and infamous 3/5ths provision which counted slaves by that fraction in giving the slave-states Congressional representation AND IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE,  it shouldn't ever be forgotten that one of the defects of the Emancipation after Reconstruction was ended was that, when the slave-holders regained power and prevented freed Black People from voting, they got the entire 5/5ths of representation and Electoral College power on exactly the same basis that they had it during legal slavery at 3/5ths.   They benefited by two-fifths on the basis of Jim Crow.

The Roberts Court in overturning the Voting Rights Act, in allowing the gerrymandering of districts has revived that increased white supremacist power in Congress and in the Electoral College and, so empowered racist white supremacists across the country.   John Roberts is a genteel Virginia white supremacist as are the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Supreme Court, including the mentally ill Clarence Thomas.  And the original defects of the 18th century Constitution are in full and enhanced effect, right now.

As Entertaining As It Would Temporariy Be

to just keep posting off of the neo-Nazi who is going all OC over what I post, he's going over too much old ground.   Like "neo-classicism," "neo-romanticism" and most other brands of neo prove, nothing gets old faster than the neo.

That doesn't mean it's not necessary to keep on with what their gods like Elon and Trump are up to, just that we can't allow them to set agendas.  They are liars and cowards and if there's something the right wing media, FOX, CNN, the networks and bots and now the major dailies like the NYT and WaPo practice, when what you say is unattached to reality, you can just keep lying up anything.  I haven't gone into the role "opinion journalism" has played in our descent into fascism in a while, have I?

Reality is what's real, it's what's important.  The Trump crash is happening a bit faster than I anticipated and the most mentally deficient president in our history isn't going to learn what tariffs are and who pays them.  He'll NEVER, EVER admit that he didn't know what he was talking about, like any spoiled rich asshole baby man like himself, he'll insist that he was right and everyone else is wrong.  You know, like Bruno Ganz acted out  when he was told Steiner's attack wasn't going to happen.   Republicans and the 30 or so percent of Americans who voted for Trump have put the big, fat, stupid despot into power for the next four years and they are going to crash everything like when they put Coolidge and Hover in office.   I hope and pray there is real and deep Constitutional change this time when the country turns to democrats, perhaps Democrats to save them, yet again.   Only hopes and prayers aren't enough.  We tried to save democracy with keeping the Constitution after the Civil War and slavery was abolished in its de jure form, after the Great Depression, after Jim Crow was temporarily overturned and it has never worked.  We need to dump the presidential system with fixed terms and we need, more than anything to level billionaires out of existence.   We need a whole new thing and this time it has to be based on equality, not libertarian notions of liberty.  "Nature an nature's god" doesn't automatically right things if you just let them sort themselves out.  You need rational judgement to carry out moral imperatives and equality is one of those, do to others what you would have them do to you needs to be the basis of the law, the economy and society.

Reading The Denials Of Elon's International Pro-Nazi Acts And Talk

it's not my fault but from now on I see driving a Tesla as a pro-Nazi act.  Driving one is making a statement whether or not that's the intention, it would be like someone driving a KdF here in 1942.   

Elon should be deported, not supported. 

Support the Lincoln penny, it's beyond symbolic that Musk wants to dump the Emancipator.

As Trump And His Neo-Nazi Brain Musk Forfeit The United States Leadership

of not only the free world but torches our economic relationships around the world,  you should add up the enormous cost of that as the cost of American racism.   

When I said that the American racism, white supremacy that has thwarted American democracy is probably the greatest unproductive cost to the American common good, the common wealth, that was exactly the kind of things I meant.  

The Chinese government simply by a show of respect to the countries Trump and the white supremacists are insulting and flaming on social-disease media is overtaking the United States, as Trump overturns all of the good will that Joe Biden cultivated.  

Racists are costing America everything and no one is pointing that out.   Remember that as American racists whine about the cost of coffee.  Though they'll probably be duped into blaming Biden for it.   They're America's idiots, after all.

As I Have Proclaimed On My Masthead

and unlike the neo-Nazi who is trolling me whose latest screed which I have not posted has a list of imaginary lefty billionaires* he claims I've never slammed, I would destroy all billionaires by leveling their amassed wealth out of existence, reducing them to equality with the least among us.  AND REMOVING WHAT IS INEVITABLY AND CLEARLY A DANGER TO EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, THE ONLY LEGITIMATE FORM OF GOVERNMENT THERE IS.

When I say I "Level Billionaires Out Of Existence"  I MEAN EVERY ONE OF THEM. 

As well as liars, right wingers are cowards because they kick down at those without the power to rob them and keep them under water instead of those on top who do that to them.

Conservatives are either those deluded into believing they can become the rich or the many, many millions who are cowards who are afraid to face the reality that their real enemies are rich and so powerful  Their racism makes them stupid, their cowardice keeps them struggling.   They're really just not as good as they love to believe they are.  I've never held back in criticizing the left but at least they have some notion as to where the real source of oppression lies. 

*  Here, from his latest lies about where I stand:

And had no problem with these billionaires (and many more) getting involved in politics:

Arthur Blank (Atlanta Falcons)
Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg, former New York mayor)
Neil Bluhm (Real estate)
John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins)
Amy Goldman Fowler (New York real estate)
Avram Glazer (Tampa Bay Buccaneers)
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)
Robert Hale, Jr. (Granite Telecommunications)
Amos Hostetter, Jr. (Cable)
Bruce Karsh (Oaktree Capital Management)
Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)
Seth Klarman (Baupost)
Henry Laufer (Renaissance Technologies)
Stephen Mandel, Jr. (Lone Pine Capital)
George Marcus (Marcus & Millichap)
Michael Moritz (Sequoia Capital)
Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook)
John Pritzker (Hyatt hotels)
George Soros

Is it me or does that list not seem to be rather top heavy with people with Jewish sounding names?    Anyone who wants to see how unimpressed I am with the billionaire would-be liberals,  all they have to do is look at my archive.  Here's a representative sample of my thinking on billionaires during Trump I:

Friday, July 13, 2018

Abolishing Billionaires And Multi Millionaires Would Do More To Protect Democracy Than Just About Anything Else
 

Yesterday's outrageous show trial by two House committees under the control of thugs proves that government by the hirelings of even American billionaires will end up, inevitably, turning the Congress into a den of traitors.  Trey Gowdy,  Bob Goodlatte, the mentally defective Louis Gohmert, and the rest of the Republican thugs prove that while Trump is a fully owned asset of the Putin crime family, the Republicans in Congress are owned by Putin's American associates.

I wonder if even with this display of  Putin collusion by the Republican caucus in the House will lead people to admit that our domestic billionaires have no sense of patriotic duty or a sense of obligation to the United States, the People of the United States, our allies who have shed their blood on our behalf, etc.   It's obvious that the billionaires who put a lot of these thugs in office,  Murdoch, the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson own the likes of Gowdy, Goodlatte  and Gohmert, not to mention Paul Ryan and Jim Jordan, when you see them in action you are seeing the will of those billionaires being put into effect by the government of the United States.

That American billionaires and those like Rupert Murdoch who came here to corrupt the United States happen to have legal citizenship doesn't make them any less dangerous to American democracy or even American security than billionaires who speak Russian or are part of the Chinese mafia establishment.  While a few, like Sheldon Adelson makes some kind of pose of dedication to Israel (from what I understand, lots of Israeli's don't welcome his malign influence there) or perhaps his fiefdom in whore houses and gambling dens in Macau and other Pacific venues, none of the billionaire patrons of the Republican Party seems to have any feeling of loyalty or obligation to American democracy.

As I've been mentioning over the past few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that falling for the pretense that the great struggle for democracy has been against anti-democratic ideologies was a smoke screen.   All of them, the Nazis, the fascists, the communists were first, foremost and last gangsters who exercised power to steal stuff and land and enslave people.   That is how the Soviet Union turned seamlessly into what developed into the Putin crime family, the Maoist dictatorship into China's Victorian capitalism on steroids as communism, all in the hands of a class of billionaires largely formerly members of the communist establishment.

The existence of billionaires is the greatest danger to democracy, certainly the greatest danger to egalitarian democracy.   While I'm sure you could identify billionaires who haven't been, some who seem to favor democracy over oligarchy, they are more than made up for by those who aren't only ready to sell us out to their fellow billionaires in other countries, they already own the Congress and the Executive and are about to have bought themselves the Supreme Court, too.

And I'm not that impressed with the record of the most allegedly pro-democracy of billionaires.   George Soros has been making all kinds of noise and spending money for "civil society" for a long time and look at the results, no time since 1945 has there been a greater danger from fascism in Europe, North America and elsewhere.   The Hungarian fascist leader Viktor Orban, who is kicking Soros' Open Society group out of Hungary was someone Soros nurtured, financing his study in Britain.   I would like to know exactly how "Open Society" has worked to counter the promotion of fascism by the Putin and other billionaire organized criminals because I'd like to know just where it's alleged to have worked.  I don't have any confidence in his judgement and as he doesn't seem to be changing direction, I'm not confident in his actual intentions.

With the explosion in the number of billionaires, with the hoarding of such a huge majority of the wealth of the world into a tiny percentage of the world's population has come a decline in the material well-being of people which softens up people for the appeals of fascism and neo-Nazism, communists having pretty much given up any pretense of socialism in favor of ultra-capitalism, which turns out to also be a mafia style of economics.   I don't think anything but squeezing the hoarded wealth out of billionaires will do it.   Which won't be easy, among other things the civil liberties industry which has so many liberals hoodwinked will fight against economic justice and equality under law on the basis of "freedom".   As I've also pointed out many times, they have had a large role in producing this catastrophe in the United States. 

Whenever you hear someone say "Soros" as the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Republican-fascists do (if you'll excuse the tautologies) what they really mean is "Jews" in exactly the same way proto-Nazis, Nazis and previous neo-Nazis have said it AND THAT'S PRETTY MUCH THE ENTIRE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST PARTY AND THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN MEDIA, THE "FREE PRESS" THESE DAYS.  As for Jewish billionaires who support that, like the widow of the pimp of Macau do, they are Nazi dupes.   The irony is that it's their Zionism that has led them into league with those who want to murder them.   But that's a larger and more interesting discussion.   Wealth tends to make those who pursue it or inherit it or marry into it stupid.  Any billionaire is rightly suspected of mental illness, their obsessive wealth craving is an irrational obsession.  Egalitarian democrats should cure them of it, definitively and permanently.

The United States Is Ruled By A Mentally Defective Nut Case Loon

and our media is OK with that.  

This is what the entire American establishment, legal, judicial, political, media, financial, etc. has brought us to. 

America has forfeited the leadership of the free world under Biden to Donald Wack-a-Doodles with the absolute power the Republican-fascists in the Congress and on the Supreme Court have given him. 

We can't avoid it, the Republican-fascist Party is incompatible with American governance.   Europe, other democracies have to face the fact that America has degenerated to the point to where they can't depend on it for leadership and they will have to do the best they can without it.   And it's our establishment, from the media right up to the Roberts Court and the American billionaires who run them that has done that with eyes wide-open.

As The White Supremacist Churns - Hillary Clinton Is The Most Massively Exonerated Human Being In History

Republican-fascist thugs in the 1990s, the 2000's, the 2010s and now in the 2020s have been claiming that Hillary Clinton was corrupt and a criminal, they have unleashed Congressional committees, their staffs, special prosecutors (including the massively money spending Starr and others), the FBI, countless other governmental agencies and, certainly, private investigators to build a case against her,  they have had corrupt Republican-fascist Attorneys General trying to nail her AND THEY HAVE COME UP WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ON HER AND NEXT TO NOTHING ON HER HUSBAND.

Lie it or not, you racist, misogynist, HILLARY CLINTON IS THE MOST EXONERATED HUMAN BEING IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS.   

And Donald Trump is a convicted felon and an adjudicated sexual criminal. 

Hate Mail - Racists Are Stupid

or, perhaps, stupider than they would be if they gave up racism.   That's as clear as the American racists who put Trump and Republican-fascists in power AND IT WAS AMERICA'S RACISTS WHO PUT THEM IN POWER.   No amount of disaster within recent lived memory educates them.  I used to expect them to get it when they made a huge mistake:

Nixon, his crimes, his continuation and expansion of the war he lied about having a plan to stop in 1968:

Reagan-Bush I and the economic disaster they created:

Bush II, his and his National Security Director, Condi Rice leaving us vulnerable to the 9-11 attacks, him and his brain, Dick Cheney using the ignorance and racism of the majority of Americans to sell them the even more horrific disaster of their Iraq invasion and war AND YET ANOTHER AND BIGGER ECONOMIC DISASTER (you'd figure that one of those of that size would have educated the Repubican racists, but, no).

Trump I with the economic disaster, the hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million AMERICANS DEAD from his Covid criminal insanity.  But, again, no. 

Racists, from the most ignorant bro-kulcha sub Joe Rogan cultist to the intellectual racists in the Ivies, their law schools, on the Supreme Court are stupid or stupider than they'd be if they gave up their racism but they're too stupid to think their way out of it.  Such stupid people are endemic among the billionaire class, apparently, and especially the ultra-billionaires.  If Elon can achieve that status, it's clear you don't need brains to harness the corruption of our laws and legal system which are kept in place and enhanced by our racist residual slave-power.  

I don't much care what clap trap of academia promoting erudition you can mount in a comment to me, if you can support Trump and Republican-fascism, you may be primarily motivated by your greed - another thing that makes People stupider than they might normally be - but I know it's your racism that is the foundation of it.   You will never forgive Democrats for nominating and electing one Black Man - what gave us Trump instead of a less stupid white-supremacist, Republican-fascist to start with - and you'll certainly not forgive Joe Biden for choosing a massively qualified Black Woman as Vice President and for Democrats for believing that she could, through reason and appeals to moral judgement, overcome the media-promoted racism and sexism that put Trump in power, again, after the debacle of his first regime.  

How stupid your racism makes you is indicated by how stupid your man-god is,  and he's world-class stupid.   Here, you can listen to this piece about how even Brit Conservatives know it and talk about it among themselves. 

The Republican Criminal Class

IT COULDN'T BE more obvious that the reason the most criminal president in American history pardoned the hundreds of criminals who tried to keep him in power in 2021 is to encourage those criminals in their insurrection against America's electoral democracy to benefit Republicans and their sponsors.  This is part of a long, concerted effort to normalize the idea of armed violence used by neo-fascists, even neo-Nazis politically.   It's what the ever more permissive court and, especially Supreme Court gun legislation* has resulted in, the Roberts Court's criminally insane presidential immunity and overt corruption on the layaway plan of last year were issued even as they knew that the likely Trump II regime would pardon his criminal army of thugs and they enabled him, anyway.   I'll forego detailing my suspicion that the drug-addled, demented and impotent Trump gets off on the violence and the prospect of violence, though I'm sure that figured into it for him, too. 

Democrats, both those who aren't members of the Democratic Party and those who are, have to face the fact that the Republican party is a fascist party who have no use for the rule of law and certainly have no use for honest elections and that lauded peaceful transfer of power.  That's as true of those on the Supreme Court as it is for the thugs in the Congress and the criminals in state houses and governorships and in the Trump II regime.   Much as I respect and admire Nancy Pelosi, her statement that the country needs a normal Republican Party and those others who long to go back to the normal of some past are deluded.   You can't reconstruct any past, never mind the one that once saw Republicans vote with Democrats to pass clean-election legislation after witnessing the crimes of the Nixon regime.   That past is as dead as the likes of Jacob Javits and Edward Brooke.   Every time a Supreme Court ruling pushes the boundaries away from the old ones, those have fallen fully and forever.   The only way to change that is by changing the words of the Constitution that the "justices" used to push those boundaries or to break them down and unless the legislative branch removes the Marbury style power grab they use to do that, that resetting of the boundaries is for naught. 

The courtly respect shown for "Constitutional scholars" is absurd, considering the ease with which such scholars, especially those at legal knocking shops like Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, etc., knock down the previous erudition of their guild generally for those who can pay the best or for the most ignominious of reasons.   An enormous amount of such erudition is expended in holding the line against racial equality by genteel white supremacists such as John Roberts,  enhancing electoral inequality in favor of Republicans, coming up with wealth enhancing legal theories for the wealthiest - lawyers being far more accomplished and compensated gold-diggers than those reduced to prostituting their bodies.   Only the top ranks of "journalism" being more well compensated whores to wealth.   The few, the very, very few such scholars of Constitutional lore who maintain the pose of it being better than it has ever proven to be as a potential, are rather whimsical mythicists than students of reality.

If you are hoping that the consequences of the Trump pardoning of his army of violent thugs will move the judiciary in consequential numbers for the better,  I can only say that I doubt you are right.    I think we're in for worse than we've seen and in a big way.   

If we ever do manage to recreate a democracy it had better make that level of change that I've been talking about because any attempt to go back to some imaginary better past will only make it certain that all of those corruptions will come back, probably faster and with even worse consequences than before.   This reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my college teachers about the idiotic book In Defense of Anarchism by Robert Wolff.   I'd been somewhat impressed with some of his arguments, it was the period of police violence used against civil-rights and anti-war protesters and other excesses of state and police power.   She cut through them in one sentence to the effect that having to recreate civil authority would probably include all of the worst aspects of it happening all over again.  We can't go back to any previous time in that evolution, not the 1850s, not the 1950s or the sixties or 1970 - it's impossible to recreate any past and it's stupid to want to.   We have no alternative but to change what the enemies of equality and democracy have used, including the First and Second Amendments, the liberalization of the first got us Trump, the liberalization of the second one got us his armed thugs. 

The choice is between that and the descent into fascism that we are on right now.  It's as clear a choice as that.

* It's time to call what the Court does by what it is, the usurpation of the legislative function in direct violation of the Constitution as it's written.   The Marbury v. Madison power grab has repeatedly and now more boldly than any time since Dred Scott been used by corrupt "justices" to further political ends and in the Roberts Court its blatant Republican-partisan character couldn't be more obvious.   It is well past time that Democrats in the Congress and Executive stripped them of that self-created power, it's time that Democratic voters insist that they do that at the first possible opportunity,  the dangers of the descent into Republican fascism is a direct consequence of Supreme Court power grabs, the Warren Court, stupidly and unintentionally and the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts with calculation and deliberate damage to American democracy.  

The Entire Leadership Of The World

 knows what the American media, the private, corporate, billionaire owned and controlled media keeps from the stupid part of the American public THAT THE UNITED STATES IS RULED BY ABOUT THE STUPIDEST PERSON LEADING A MAJOR WORLD POWER.   Donald Trump's claims about other countries paying the tariffs he's about to impose EVEN AS PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TELLING THE STUPID, STUPID MAN HOW AMERICAN TARIFFS WORK! is still stupidly claiming what anyone who knows what a tariff is knows, that Americans will pay those tariffs.

The irony in this is that the very thing that would make it possible for the United States government to levy fees against what other countries get from us is a slave-power imposed restriction which was put into the Constitution at its drafting and which has never been removed from it.   Our system has such stupidities in it that benefit rich men with power to control our system which other countries largely don't have in theirs.   And even Britain which has had such massively stupid jack asses as Boris Johnson in charge generally have some protection against the massive and pervasive idiocy that Trump II is going to be through the parliamentary system.  The idiocy in Britain comes pretty much from the same source as ours,  a corrupt media that corrupts a decisive percentage of British voters under a corruptly unequal apportionment of representation, such as is built into the American system, as well.    If Britian changes that under this current Labour government, as it did not during the rule of the Blair government,  I have serious doubts but they might.   There is no prospect of that happening under our 18th century Constitution and the cult of worship for it built into our law and civic culture.   

In the fifth day of Trump II, as he has shut down the CDC from informing the scientific and medical community about the about to explode bird flu pandemic, it's no time to mince words over tender feelings.   I think it's time we really consider saying it the only way that Trump and his cult would understand it,  he's mentally retarded.   And so are they. 

Via RMJ And Bluesky

 David Maraniss
‪@davidmaraniss.bsky.social‬
The Washington Post editorial this morning essentially equating Biden's questionable pardons with Trump's outrageous Jan. 6 pardons was unconscionable. The newspaper I've been part of for 48 years has utterly lost its soul.

BACK WHEN SOME FEW newspapers were owned by eccentric, idealistic owners, most of those I knew of from wealthy families, though some of the best of them small-town weeklies bought by actual newsmen or women, those few newspapers employed reporters and a few non-reporters who could work on the basis of professionalism but most newspapers an just about all electronic media were staffed by those who worked, essentially, as whores of the intellect, what Harry Truman called "presstitutes.'  Many of those who worked as reporters were somewhat shielded from the whims and financial and social interests of the pimps above them in management and, ultimately the owners so long as their reporting didn't impinge on things the owners cared about or would be financially impacted by though those who were a higher class of whores, the "opinion journalists" dealing in opinion were, for the most part, pretty much whores.   

When the internet was young the long gone blog Media Whores Online - reportedly owned and run by a former journalist - told many of the truths of what the media, the friggin' "free press" really was during the Bush II years and, the Gingrich Republicans dishonest and vindictive use of congressional investigations against the Clintons and Democrats, MWO dealt with the contrast between the media part of that from the New York Times down to the Murdoch owned gutter press and the cabloid brothels. MWO briefly spawned a number of "watch" blogs such as the excellent Sully Watch (documenting and covering the then ubiquitous racist piece of right wing crap, Andrew Sullivan) but that didn't last long, either.  

It's funny how twenty brief years of the laughably called "information age" has resulted in even the dismal performance of what's now called "legacy media" in the freest period of "free press" in the history of the world back then to have degenerated into the owner of one of the now handful of major newspapers, the Washington Post, being one of the billionaire clowns to have gotten top seating at Trump II, what is now obvious as an American Satyricon only I think Trump and his crew outdo the figures in that novel by a long shot.  None of those fictitious degenerate Romans had any actual power.  Our degenerates are very real and have very real power.

I have gone on and on for years about the damage to the United States that  resulted from the Sullivan Decision, the 1964 decision of the Warren Court that stupidly,  massively stupidly opened the floodgates of overt political lying with impunity by the American media, lying that has had its only real political impact in empowering Republicans, and the worst among those, from within four years of the decision being handed down.   It has been the foremost vehicle in bringing ever worsening men and women into office THROUGH THE WORST OF THE MEDIA WHICH WAS ALWAYS READY, WILLING AND ENABLED BY THE SUPREME COURT TO LIE THE WORST INTO OFFICE.   Nixon was the first and most obvious beneficiary from the media freed to lie the lies of him into office.  Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump - and that's only the criminals and crooks that it put into the presidency.   It also led to the elevation to power of Newt Gingrich and his faction of Republicans in the Congress.  

But it was all done through the media, the free press that magnified every flaw and petty corruption in every Democrat and invented flaws and corruptions when flawed Democrats didn't provide them any.   The ubiquitously observed mythology of the crimes of Hillary Clinton - including blaming her for the infidelity of her husband - what led directly to the elevation of Trump is now typical of the lies told by the entirety of the American media, the New York Times as directly responsible in that as the Murdoch gutter press.  The Washington Post, once owned by one of those eccentric old-family idealists mentioned above, followed it, especially once the heirs of that old family sold it off in the way typical of such corporations.  Though the Sulzberger-Ochs didn't need to sell the NYT to achieve the same effect.  Oh, they retain a few reporters who, through, I'd guess, choosing their beats, haven't totally whored out but loads of the NYT reporters are whores as those who lied about Hillary Clinton's impending indictment did right before the election that elevated Trump I.  The NYT celebrated their role in the Sullivan Decision a decade ago, its role in the corruption of American politics, leading directly to Trump should stand as the real life consequences of that.   I'm kind of surprised that someone like David Maraniss is so shocked at his experience of the ultimate corruption of the free press, freed to lie in service of billionaires, millionaires and the politicians, lawyers, judges and "justices" who service them in a parallel line of prostitution.  

I do have to mention that Maraniss's accurate phrasing of the WaPo having "lost its soul" should be noticed because all of this is a product of the official secularism of the law and modern academia, such as produces lawyers and law scholars and journalists (they were better or at least when they were the product of apprenticeship instead of college credentialing).   Not that religion is a guarantee of avoiding such corruption but at least it is supposed to start within moral restritions such as business isn't.   One of the most insightful remarks about journalism I've heard recently was the very experienced Keith Olbermann saying the problem with TV journalism was that it was TV, not journalism.  TV being a business, part of corporate culture, corporate culture which is held to be immune from moral considerations, like science is.   That is, it is in fact.  The ersatz substitution of "professional ethics" for even such obvious moral truths that you should tell the truth and not lie went out the window for the "free press" with the Sullivan ruling.   And that was a product of the sloppy, lawyerly drafting of the First Amendment.  Lawyering has always been the whore house that journalism is, always at service to the richest and deepest pockets.   Only, before that ruling lying could cost newspapers and electronic media enough money to make lying costly.   You'd have to sue the billionaire owners for a lot more than judges and "justices" would feel easy about fining them for even the most consequential of lying.   Democracy is dead until things like that are done.   The WaPo is a machine to keep the worst in power as the NYT is as are the networks and the social disease of social media.  Free press free speech has brought us to the darkest period of eutrophic imperial rule.

Trump's Davos Babbling Proves We Have Capone

in terminal stage syphilis as President.  

And the entire American media, the Republican-fascist Party, the billionaire oligarchs and the idiots who bought what they were selling are OK with that.  And it's only day four of four years.   

That friggin' Constitutional crisis they've been fretting over for decades is going on before the eyes of the world. 

I'd Have Expected You'd Have Realized By Now, I'm No One's Sucker - Neo-Nazi Hate Mail

THE GUY WHO uses a white-supremacist and so indigenous American fascist pseudonym keeps railing at me that everyone knows that Elon Musk's overt Nazi salutes to Trump,  Nazi salutes that overt, self-identifying Nazis immediately heiled as validation of their ideology, wasn't what it so obviously was.   Musk's father, recently pointied out that Elon's grandparents were fans of Hitler and moved to South Africa FROM CANADA! because they approved of the adoption of apartheid in 1948.  If that's true, it's no wonder where he got it from.  

And though the corrupt American-Trump creating media and even the discredited ADL here has lied about it being a Nazi salute, many in the United States and even more in Europe aren't lying about it.   I have to say, the excuse that the ketamine guzzling pervert is on the so-called aspergers spectrum (how do you figure that out in a media-addled druggie?) is just absolutely disgusting.   I'll remind you, this is the man that the American right, the Republican-fascists, are OK with running Trump's vestigial brain. 

Right wingers are liars before they're anything else, lying to themselves perhaps but certainly lying about their intentions to everyone because they have no intention for large or small numbers of People to benefit from what they want, especially what they want for governments to do FOR THEM.   The billionaire equivalent planter-financier classes who formed the U.S. Constitution lied about their intentions and about the real character of the document they framed for their own benefit and those of their class.   Those who have and seek power now certainly lie as does the media which enables and services them as those factions of the Trump voters who were suckered by their racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris - yet again - started finding out the morning after the election.   Apparently from the way that "how do I change my vote" trended online on election day, the bullshit buyers remorse started even sooner than that. 

I've let this clearly college-credentialed, I suspect college-employed crypto-Nazi who trolls me  know that I was on to him because I recognized the neo-Nazi pseudonym for what it was,  why he expects me to forget who he is and why he'd adopt such a nom-de-dactylographie or to not recognize the character of what he says, I don't know.  Perhaps where he lives and the milieu in which he operates amnesia is more common than it is in my experience.  Perhaps that's what happens when you operate on the right, you figure everyone is a sucker because so many are.   

It's like the come-on that one of my neighbors got from a big, national real estate syndicate, offering to buy her house at half the assessed value of it.   She was insulted that they'd think she was so stupid as to no know that or to find it out, I pointed out to her that it would only take one person that stupid to make it more than worth their while to run that scam and, no doubt, the U.S. and probably state laws being drawn up for the benefit of crooks with money.  Remember my recent diatribes about how the entire legal profession, including judges and "justices" belongs to a guild that always works for those with the most money and if the politicians pass a law or make a regulation that protects their targets, it gets overturned on the basis of "implied contract" or some other lawyerly lie.

White supremacy is our indigenous fascist element, one that had enormous political and economic power since our founding, one which has ruled, continually in a large percentage of the states and has in every one of them at least part of the time.  America's indigenous fascists have generally had no problem accommodating their kissin' cousins in European and Latin American fascism and Nazism - if Japan hadn't had that treaty with the Nazis that brought he U.S. into the war in Europe, they'd have had no problem with supporting America doing business with Hitler instead of overthrowing him and his regime.  The racism they nurtured and promoted among the poor-whites - now a days they do it through entertainment media - is just a continuation of what they've used against those suckers from the start.   I remember while thinking about the debacle that the Supreme Court installed Bush II wrought in Iraq that the U.S. has paid an enormous price for the racism of the likes of Dick Cheney and the neo-cons, I dare say that America's indigenous racists are probably the biggest factor in non-productive spending all through our history,  their only competition in wasting the wealth of the United States what the equivalent of our present billionaire class has cost us in non-productive spending that is of no benefit to the common good. 

The corruptions and flaws of liberal democracy, having now largely all been normalized through the corrupt practices of lawyers, judges, justices, that 18th century, anti-egalitarian fiction, "liberal democracy,"  "classical democracy," the US style of Constitutional "democracy" is moribund.  As I said the other day once the judges and, especially "justices" have introduced the loophole taking fictions of the law into its lore, there isn't any going back without obliterating the source of those in the language of the Constitution and its amendments, most of all the so-called "Bill of Rights" and most of all in that, the holy of holey holies of American secular credulity, the First Amendment.  Though its certainly as necessary to Supreme-proof the 14th Amendment and, most of all, to force the universal clean-up of our elections and other bases of a real democracy.   

But the biggest change will need to be replacing the folly of libertarian "freedom" as popularly imagined with freedom through equality.   Equality is the real basis of any legitimate government, not libertarianism.   Most of all, getting rid of the notion that money is speech and anything that gives billionaires and others with an interest in peddling lies the ability to corrupt the gullible margin of voters in the way that has plagued us ever since 1968.  

America can choose to continue and complete Republican-fascism or it can make the changes necessary to establish that real democracy hinted at in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and Civil Rights programs.  It's as stark as that.  There is no room for billionaires and neo-Nazis, our indigenous equivalent of that in white supremacy and male supremacy in that narrowly available and, finally, true democracy.   And even once had, it won't be easy to keep.   

The other day I listened to Medhi Hassan say that he had hope because he was a person of faith even as he is pessimistic, I have to say, that clicked with me.  

 

IMPEACH TRUMP. IT WON'T WORK NOW. IT WILL WIN THE MIDTERMS LATER

 

EVERYONE Owns The Right To Outrage Against Overt Nazism AND THE MORAL DUTY TO CALL IT OUT

THE TRUMPED UP, literally, outrage over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying what is obvious, that the so-called "Anti-Defamation League" has discredited itself by defending Elon Musk's not one but two Nazi salutes includes Rupert Murdoch's NY Post accusing her of "Jewsplaining" which, it being the Post and a Murdoch site is to AOC's credit.  "Jewsplaining" being used by a Murdoch lie machine in any circumstances is a red flag that it a term invented for the most dishonest of purposes.   Especially clear in this context by that toilet paper.  

That many Jews and Jewish groups have criticized the ADL and its director over their defense of Elon Musk, the white supremacist,  sponsor of Nazi social media,   Trump's major patron, his co-president, I'd say his brain, such as it is,  defending giving a clear and unambiguous Nazi salute as part of an American Presidential inauguration is not being mentioned much at all compared to using AOC's comment as a weapon against an anti-Nazi democrat.   

That is as the director of the ADL , Jonathan Greenblatt has been profligately throwing around accusations of antisemitism  against just about anyone who is even moderately critical of the Netanyahu government and its genocidal policies in Gaza makes this exactly what AOC said it was, a definitive discrediting of him and the organization he heads.   "Antisemitism" has clearly become another such marker of dishonest accusation in order to suppress the truth. 

But there has to be a more basic question asked about this issue of Elon's Nazi salute.  Granted Jewish People in the United States and around the world have an unquestionable  right to call out Nazism,  as do members of other groups that the Nazis murdered as policy, groups hardly acknowledged to have been targeted.  Poles, other Slavic People, Roma, disabled People, Gay men, etc.   For members of all of those groups calling out and opposing ANY AND ALL MANIFESTATIONS OF NEO-NAZISM IS  ertainly not only a right but a moral responsibility.   But it isn't a responsibility that is universally or uniformly fulfilled as the ADL and, I'm sorry to say, Deborah Lipstadt* seem to prove in this case.  

But the right and responsibility to do that isn't confined to any of the groups that the Nazis targeted or that the neo-Nazis still target.   EVERYONE HAS BOTH THE RIGHT AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY TO CALL OUT NAZISM,  WHETHER OR NOT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY IS ON THEIR DEATH LIST,  whether or not your parents signed up to fight Nazism, fascism and Japanese Imperialism in WWII.   To not call it out, as our media has not, as Republican-fascists largely have not, is as discrediting of them as it is the ADL and its leadership.  

AOC has that right and moral responsibility as much as anyone who is on the neo-Nazi hit list or on the original one in Germany.   She has a perfect right to call out the ADL's hypocrisy and outrageous forfeiture of credibility.  Those who are slamming her for calling out the ADL which has forfeited its credibility for the richest man in the world,  Trump's owner, his puppeteer, his brain, have discredited themselves exactly as much as the ADL and its leadership have.    I have to wonder how they'd have behaved in Germany or Austria in 1933 at the start of Germany's great evil.    We very well be at the start of America's.   

* And Deborah Lipstadt, who served as the Biden administration’s special envoy combating global antisemitism until this week, downplayed the incident.

“I believe we have much, much bigger things to worry about regarding contemporary antisemitism than this particular issue,” Lipstadt told JTA, saying she was referring both to Musk’s salute and the ADL’s response. (Lipstadt separately told the Forward she accepted the ADL’s reading of the gesture as “awkward.”) The U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum did not respond to a request for comment on Musk’s gesture. 

I used to have a lot of respect for Lipstadt but I have to admit that I don't much respect her anymore.   Especially not over this normalization of Nazism.  This is a definitive discrediting of anyone who is unwilling to slam the richest man in the world who has bought himself an American president.  

The ADL has burned its last shred of credibility to excuse the Nazi salute that thrilled the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who aren't lying to defend Musk.

The ADL is dead to me from now on.  Fuck them all.

Hate Mail

 I don't mind you wasting your time trying to comment here but from here on out this is an American fascist (white supremacist) Republican-fascist (Trumpzi) and neo-Nazi free blog.   Your comments will not be posted.   You are banned.   Go find some secular-liberal sucker with a misplaced sense of fairness to fascists and niceness to Nazis,  I'm not a sucker. 

Went To See A Relative

who is listening to Dame Agatha e-books to distract her from the fall of American democracy.   I hadn't tried reading her since about the age of ten when I didn't like her and never tried her again.  My word, is there a cliched adjective, an adjective you couldn't have predicted two clauses and a few phrases away that she didn't use?    What a crappy writer she was.   Worse than Chandler. 

From Greatest Generation To Greatest Degeneration

FROM WHAT I'M SEEING, the mass media, the billionaire owners of which were all-in on the Trump installation, is selling Elon's Nazi salutes as something they so obviously were not, like not-Nazi-salutes.  

I was deeply skeptical of that short-lived fad of a news-anchor playing historian selling my parent's generation as the "greatest" one, being generally skeptical of the existence of "generations" as other than a mere chronological fiction even as I knew an unusual number of them actually learned something good while fighting against the WWII Axis and having lived through the Great Depression.   Whatever was greatest about them, as compared to my and succeeding "generations" was in their increased percentage who supported equality and democracy and it wasn't anything like even three-fourths of them who were all in on both.    Though even many of the WWII Republicans were opposed to the destruction of electoral democracy,  I mentioned the post-Watergate legislation that the Supreme Court and the ACLU put an end to,  you can say that for them. 

I don't have to ask what my veteran parents would say about Trump and the media-promoted overtly Republican-fascists - and the normalization of overt neo-Nazism - they opposed the far lesser manifestations of that on the fringes even as they had signed up to fight it in WWII.  I'm older than my father was when he died and I can say that I'm seriously thinking about the possibility that my generation may end up taking up arms to fight against American Nazis and white supremacists if things go as they well might.   I don't for a second believe that the process of the law is going to save us, the institutions we were told would protect us have all failed, the media which has been the primary engine of elevating the TV-reality star to the head of world fascism and the normalization of his billionaire financed now overtly neo-Nazi regime is certainly not going to save us.  

If Musk is allowed to retain his position of control over the Trump regime and proximity to power, it will come to that.   If there is one thing that should have been done in the past four years, it was him being stripped of all his assets with national security implications and him deported to South Africa along with his family.   That he wasn't is the failure of the rule of law and the Constitution in doing what both claim their purpose is, protecting the American People from our enemies.   Democracy, if it is to exist in the future, cannot exist in the 18th century framing in which the U.S. Constitution exists.   Equality and an informed pubic steeped in the virtue of equality is the only secure framing for it and that is incompatible with the existence of billionaires and millionaires rich enough to corrupt the media and democracy.    I don't think democracy can exist with the kind of social media we have, it has also been a major engine of 21st century fascism and neo-Nazism.   Keith Olbermann may be right that the ability to post anonymously online has to go.  No one should be able to post online without the ability to be held responsible for what is posted by them.  Bots must be abolished, AI is neither intelligent nor is it capable of telling the truth.

The Significance of Non-Violence And Martin Luther King jr

 

Diane Nash: Managing Fear

 

A Better Place For Resistance Than Despair - Psalm 91

1 Living in the Most High’s shelter,
    camping in the Almighty’s shade,
 2 I say to the Lord, “You are my refuge, my stronghold!
    You are my God—the one I trust!”
3 God will save you from the hunter’s trap
    and from deadly sickness.
4 God will protect you with his pinions;
    you’ll find refuge under his wings.
    His faithfulness is a protective shield.
5 Don’t be afraid of terrors at night,
    arrows that fly in daylight,
6     or sickness that prowls in the dark,
    destruction that ravages at noontime.
7 Even if one thousand people fall dead next to you,
    ten thousand right beside you—
    it won’t happen to you.
8 Just look with your eyes,
    and you will see the wicked punished.
9 Because you’ve made the Lord my refuge,
    the Most High, your place of residence—
10   no evil will happen to you;
        no disease will come close to your tent.
11 Because he will order his messengers to help you,
    to protect you wherever you go.
12 They will carry you with their own hands
    so you don’t bruise your foot on a stone.
13 You’ll march on top of lions and vipers;
    you’ll trample young lions and serpents underfoot.
14 God says, “Because you are devoted to me,
    I’ll rescue you.
    I’ll protect you because you know my name.
15 Whenever you cry out to me, I’ll answer.
    I’ll be with you in troubling times.
    I’ll save you and glorify you.
16   I’ll fill you full with old age.
    I’ll show you my salvation.”

Common English Bible

We We That Stupid In The OO's?

MY RECENT and very short trip down short-term memory lane,  looking at Eschaton again, I was struck at how the same gals and guys - minus the myriads who fled to save their adulthood - were saying pretty much the same bull shit that they were saying when I regularly wasted way too many hours there in the past.   Blaming "the Dems" for losing the election,  carrying, roughly, the Green Party, perennial play-lefty line on that,  making really stupid claims about it all,  the same kind of stuff I remember dealing with a lot back then and when I started writing a blog.  I referenced one of the early conclusions I came to that in contrast to those who would never run for office or, if they went through the motions of running, knew they'd never win an election and so would never have the possibility of actually making new law and new policy,  a real politician knew they had to win and take the office to do anything other than lose, what the Greens and the play-lefties have specialized in doing since the first play-lefty play-party was organized sometime in the 19th century. 

You would think that those who hold college credentials would be smart enough to realize that without having had to be taught that but, clearly, that isn't the case.   I think the refusal to learn that obvious truth is directly related to the whiteness, the affluence, the mostly maleness of the play-lefties whose aesthetic sensibilities are what most of their conception of politics is about.   Duncan Black is a good example of that but no where near as much as his cash cow, or, these days, cash calf.   As I mentioned Duncan used to write a number of actually worth reading posts on infrastructure which were ever more interesting and useful than his political theorizing and tantrums.   Not that his regulars ever seemed to much read those as compared to the tantrums.  

As a now longtime advocate of getting a more adult left going,  I don't see much evidence of that happening.   One that knows, first and foremost, that they have to win elections to do anything and that threatening those who have gotten elected and who know their reelection doesn't depend on the generally undependable play-left is needed more than the entire play-left from now on back.   

I don't think the play-left, affluent, indirectly affected by the Trumpian fascists winning and, then, not that much,  should be part of that because they are gifted at division and election losing.  It's their only talent other than spreading discouragement.    I wasted years trying to talk facts with them.   We're plum out of years to do that. 

Where Do You Think He Got This Idea? - They Send Me Links

 A REGULAR READER sent me a link to this comment made at the baby blue blog.

Steve Simels, blog malignancyMr.Murder 43 minutes ago

Once the SCOTUS interpreted the 1st Amendment as conferring the right to lie with impunity, we were on the irrevocable road to fascism. That was the whole point.

Late Correction

 I just noticed that I left the mistake of saying "Jackson" where I meant "Johnson" stand all day and no one corrected me.   I'm guessing the guys who troll me didn't know the difference and my regular readers who can read and know stuff are too polite to point it out.

The Mendacity Industrial Complex - An Impromtu Reaction

APART FROM him falling for the Israeli apartheid regime's genocide in Gaza, I think Joe Biden has had the most potentially positive administration since LBJ if not FDR.   And it's clear that it is about to largely if not all go for nothing as the Trump regime takes over.  Only not for nothing, for far worse than that.  I don't think in any period since the Lincoln presidency gave way to that of Andrew Johnson have we come close to the drastic contrast that we saw when Biden took office from Trump to its return to Trump, has that transfer of power been more pronounced.   Any country which could go from Trump to Biden and back to Trump is a dangerously sick country, probably in the throes of a fatal illness.

The speech President Biden made from the White House yesterday told some truths I wish he'd told decades ago, though if he'd told them then he probably would have had a short instead of one of the longest careers in government.   He laid out the role that lying in the media, the mass media, the even more enveloping and suffocating social media lies that sandbagged his phenomenally accomplished administration, everything from FOX Lies and down to the goddamned New York Times, NPR and, I will say it, Stephen Colbert style entertainment painting one of our most competent presidents as a senile, doddering incompetent, whipping up lie after lie, spreading and normalizing those - the specialty of the great grey whore of NYC and the minor one of NPR - and many other lies on top of those lies.  

But telling that truth gets you uncomfortably close to the idiocy of the Bill of Rights a forbidden topic, my violation of which led to me adopting the name of Thought Criminal as I was told that was going too far.  Telling the truth about the Warren Court, the Burger Court, Rehnquist and Roberts' Courts, the part that the hollowly hallowed ACLU has played in the empowerment and weaponization of lies, especially those targeting Democratic politicians who attempted to give us democracy, real democracy, egalitarian democracy, starting as soon as the Warren Court issued the first of those deadly rulings in 1964,  the lies in the media that both sank LBJ's administration, the chances of Hubert Humphrey in the next presidential election, the elevation of the previous champion of criminality in the presidency,  Nixon, and the entire half-century of the undoing of American democracy which has paralleled the emergence and financial flourishing of the freest press and media in human history.   The old-style ACLU style assurances that allowing the most flagrant of lies to flourish would be effectively countered by "more speech" has been given the test of time and time has failed it absolutely, conclusively, to the point of being among the most certain of disconfirmations possible in the philosophy of law and governance.  

One thing about the profession of lying, lawyering and its elite branches in judging and "justicing" is that once an avenue of opportunistic lying has been taken, especially in terms of the U.S. Constitution, that that avenue can't be merely closed off by a future ruling but it will have to be shut off at the source, in this case the First Amendment, and that is a forbidden topic of conversation.   The fact is that that is as true for the First Amendment as it is for the Second one, the one which Republican-fascists in power and on the Court has used to arm the fifth column which we certainly have reason to fear will open up on our fellow citizens whenever the oligarchs and their tools in government tell them to.   The sacred language of "Jemmy" Madison and the other amateurs, slave-holders, financiers and crooks of the First Congress set in stone will have to be changed to explicitly un-privilege lies and firmly abolish the "right to lie" that the Court has invented as certainly as it invented presidential immunity.   The problem lies in the vague, inferior late 18th century poesy of the Constitution.   Frankly, with what I've learned about the corruption of the slave-holder-financier founders, every defect in that document is rightly suspected as being lawyerly loophole setting to empower them, so much of the language of that document being used that way by later generations of lawyers, judges and "justices" none more blatantly than under John Marshall and more infamously by the Taney and gilded-age courts as well as the later Rehnquist and, perhaps worst of all, the Roberts Court

With all deference to Joe Biden who has earned my respect in the past four years, he's a little late to this realization though he's still years ahead of almost everyone in the tiny fraction comprising the honest media and the likely even smaller percentages of those in the legal and political world.   As Eisenhower only came to articulate the dangers of the beginning of our oligarchic rule in the military-industrial complex in his last speech, the trained lawyer, Joe Biden has only fully articulated the problem in his last speech.   I have a deep and respectful appreciation for the necessity of a good politician to not go too far and become an ex-politician through losing their next election.  I have less respect for those who work in the media because the stakes of them losing their paying jobs is far less consequential for the American People, other People around the world and the world in general.   I don't have anything at stake in telling you that truth, a truth I was warned against telling when I posted one of my early pieces on this topic at Echidne's old blog.   What are they going to do to me?  Fire me from an unpaid writing hobby?   

Until the language of the First Amendment is changed to make it clear that:

a. Lies are not covered by "free speech-press,"

b. There is no such a thing as a "right to lie,

c. That 'the press" [and other corporate entities] do not have rights, what the fools in the First Congress misnamed those are privileges and that that privilege comes only with an obligation to tell the truth to inform us so we can cast an informed vote for our representatives and for ballot measures,

the First Amendment will continue to be the vehicle to power of lie-empowered oligarchy as certainly as it kept in power the white supremacists in the South and elsewhere and thwarted the struggle for equality and real democracy.

Of course, all of that heavy lift will be for nothing unless the Supreme Court is reigned in, starting with term limits and ethics as President Biden finally endorsed but, more important still, have their usurped Marbury v. Madison powers definitively stripped from them.   The Voting Rights Act which the Rehnquist and Roberts, white supremacist Courts have abolished will have to be restored.  It was only with that law and the Civil Rights Act that America started to weakly live out its promises, as MLK jr. mentioned in that speech which will be desecrated by Republican-fascists, white supremacists and others, next week, that is if Trump's elevation doesn't totally drown out that yearly disgrace to his legacy.   The Supreme Court, it's 'liberal" manifestation in the Warren Court as they stupidly set this catastrophe off with their "free speech-press" ruling and the conservative then fascist dominated ones accelerated as they weaponized those "liberal" rulings, is the penultimate source of this.   That Court has to be harnessed, not to fealty to "The Constitution" but to equality and democracy.   I'd put those in place to what they're supposed to uphold, protect and defend instead of that document.   And I wouldn't give you a pint of piss for democracy without equality.   As we can see in the white-power states, in the Israeli apartheid government, in every dictatorship where there are elections in which an oppressive majority lords it over minorities, democracy without equality is, if anything, as dangerous as outright oligarchy.