Conservatives Are Cowards About American History

Over in Munich a week ago, Secretary of State and man who looks like what an old sweat sock smells like, Marco Rubio, gave a speech where he related a fantasy version of the history of immigrants in the United States. He lied about Columbus, he lied about the first European settlements, he lied about how German immigrants were treated, he lied and lied and lied some more. He turned a complex, often dark tale that hinges on slavery and genocide into a happy little story of white people doing everything right and good and noble. Seriously, he didn't even mention the role that Black people played in the actual building of the nation. He didn't say the word "immigrant." It was like listening to some guy tell you that he's fucked all these women, but he leaves out that he's a rapist. (For more on Rubio's speech, head over to my Patreon.)

This isn't just a different perspective on American history. It's not looking at it and emphasizing the good over the bad or some such shit. It's not even revisionism because then you'd expect some remnants of the previous draft of history there. No, this is erasure. It's a bleaching of the complicated, racially-diverse journey this country has been on. It's like the Epstein files, with entire blocks just retracted, like we're not allowed to know or discuss what's really there. The Trump administration, along with the right-wing fucknut ecosystem, is in the midst of a spree of neutering, eliminating, or otherwise transforming the way in which history is presented and discussed, and, goddamnit, they're gonna force all of us to learn it like the good little Nazis they want the remaining population to be.

They're defacing memorials and museums, making them jingoistic and masturbatory. A federal judge this week called out Trump's fuckery in removing information panels that were displayed at the President's House in Philadelphia. The exhibit talked about the lives of the enslaved people owned by George Washington when he lived there. The bastards had taken the panels down in January and the city sued, saying, among other things, the contract the federal government had with the city said that the house couldn't be changed without the city's permission. U.S. District Court Judge Cynthia Rufe (it shouldn't need to be said, but she's a Republican appointed by W. Bush) compared Trump's actions to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984. Excoriating the defense attorneys for saying, in essence, that the government can control any message it wants, Rufe writes, "The government...asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power...An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it."

And, in one beautiful moment before ordering that the panels be restored, Rufe gets in a dig at Trump. She says of Washington that his "presence presiding over the Constitutional Convention graced it with the gravitas and spirit necessary to the creation of our government’s foundational document, and his restraint and modesty radiated strength and wisdom that defines the ideal chief executive to this day." Donald Trump radiates rage heat and shit odor and defines everything that's wrong with the country and the world. Of course, the government is appealing.

This erasure is happening elsewhere, with removals of information about the way indigenous tribes were pushed off land at the Grand Canyon and the Pride flag at the Stonewall memorial. Hell, they're even going after an exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education because it mentions "equity." Imagine.

The bullshit extends to other areas of the government. Brendan Carr, FCC Chair and man most likely to secretly spank it to Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl while whipping himself, has put out a document "encouraging" broadcasters to get more "patriotic" for the 250th birthday of the United States. He wants stations to start the day with the National Anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance. He says they should be "Airing music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, or George Gershwin," which makes me think he knows nothing about 3 out of 4 of those composers. Aaron Copland was blacklisted by the State Department after lobbying from Joseph McCarthy. His passport was revoked in 1953, and his music was banned from libraries owned by the government. Even years later, in the late 1960s, conservatives would protest his appearances. As for Ellington and Gershwin, you might want to look at some of their works, especially Ellington's symphonies about the Black experience and Gershwin's satirical musicals mocking the US government and capitalism. All three of them were woke as fuck. 

Here's the thing: Conservatives are being whiny little bitches about history. You think that taking out all the horror stories makes it better? No, it makes it weak as the shits you take every time some non-white person talks to you like an equal. You're a fucking coward if you don't tell the whole story, shitty parts and all. You think it makes you more powerful to just say the good stuff. But it makes you pathetic because some of the good stuff is how we confronted and dealt with the bad shit.

Telling the truth about the country is patriotism. In her decision, Judge Rufe talks about one of Washington's enslaved people, Oney Judge, who escaped from bondage using the Underground Railroad. Rufe writes, "The President’s House displays recognized Oney Judge and focused on how her struggle for freedom represented this country’s progress away from the horrors of slavery and into an era where the founding ideals of 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness' could be embodied for every American." In order to celebrate ending slavery, you have to be honest about what slavery was and who was involved.

See, Trump and his MAGA cretins don't get that what makes America great isn't how white people did a bunch of shit. It's how all of us did a bunch of shit, good and evil, and somehow, at least prior to this vile administration, we were able to progress towards a more perfect union. What's patriotic is not to say you've gotta get down on your knees and blow Uncle Sam all the time. No, it's admitting that we've fucked up and we're trying to do better and we're gonna fail sometimes but at least we try. Or we did.

Of course, that's the opposite of everything these absolute pieces of garbage in the aptly-named White House believe. They can never admit error or complicity or guilt. They can never be held accountable, even in the telling of the story of what really happened. And that's why we cannot let them get away with gutting our past like they're gutting the present and murdering the future.

Taking Stock of How Very Fucked We Are

This has been a bad week for the future of (gestures at everything) the world. Decisions have been made that will fuck us for years, if not forever. As the savagery of the administration of Donald Trump, our rapist president, snowballs, as the 10,000 person concentration camp warehouses are purchased, as corruption of a scale that should make Warren G. Harding come back from the dead and sodomize Trump with his teapot dome happens on a daily basis, as the rights of speech and assembly and press are routinely flushed down the law enforcement toilet, it's become clear that if Trump isn't going to do anything good for the world to make sure he's remembered, he may as well wreck the joint so he's never forgotten, like a wound that will never heal. 

How fucked are we? Extremely. Just two examples:

We're fucked when it comes to fighting disease. This week, the Food and Drug Administration (motto: "For some reason, we're run by people who seem to hate both food and drugs") declined to review the application for an mRNA flu shot from Moderna. I'm not gonna pretend to know the science behind it, but mRNA vaccines are more effective and more easily updated, and a flu version would save a fuckton of lives. Oh, and the reason the FDA gave, having to do with how Moderna conducted its clinical trials, is a fucking lie. We can go fuck ourselves with our older, less effective vaccine, which you should totally still get, that our Department of Health and Human Services will not encourage anyone to get.

The extra-ironic part of the whole thing is how much the United States has invested in Moderna in order to get mRNA vaccines going. That includes billions of dollars in grants in 2020 to get a Covid vaccine done, which was done quickly because of all the research before, again, thanks to the United States. Remember Operation Warp Speed? Remember who was president then before he realized that he needed the love of the antivax nutzoids? That's fucked in the head, in the ass, everywhere.

How fucked is it? Even before this, because of the decisions of noted toilet seat coke snorter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Moderna had decided to not invest in any late-stage vaccine trials. Said the CEO, "You cannot ‍make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market." So that means that mRNA research on, say, vaccines for Lyme disease and HIV, is done at Moderna, as is, likely, the development of more effective cancer therapies. Also, the trials for a general norovirus vaccine, which would help prevent the next pandemic, may well be scuttled. It's just fucked. And it's one of those things that fucks us far into the future.

The question is also what is going to be permanently fucked, as in we'll never recover. Sure, we may one day catch up on where we should have been with medical research. But some shit never gets better. It's like the difference between breaking your arm and losing it in a giant meat grinder. In one of those situations, you are never going to be the same, no matter how cool your robot arm is. 

So it went when Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, another Trump administration official who looks at least 15 years older than he really is, smarmily announced that Trump was undoing President Obama's 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases that led to regulation of emissions. It was an attempt by the Black president to do some goddamn good on the climate crisis, so, of course, in a White House filled with people for whom science is something you do when you saw the head off a beached whale for your own "research" and totally not so you can feel what it's like to fuck a whale skull, it had to go. 

The absolute dickish press release on it said, "The Trump EPA chooses consumer choice over posturing to climate change zealots every time." Apparently, simply believing in climate change makes you a zealot. I was going to quote from the press announcement from Trump and Zeldin, but just reading it made me want to throw the computer across the room. Just know that at one point, Trump dismisses any concerns about public health effects with "Don't worry about it because it has nothing to do with public health. This was all a scam, a giant scam. This was a ripoff of the country by Obama and Biden, and let's say Obama started it and got it rolling" and then he talks about prescription drug prices because of course he does.

It's the beginning of the end for the Clear Air Act, which is where the power to regulate greenhouse gases was found to come from by the Supreme Court in 2007. It's also of a piece with all the rollbacks of regulations and undermining of clean energy research and projects, with Trump's weird antagonism to windmills driving public policy. Instead, the Pentagon is being forced to purchase coal as a payoff to fossil fuel donors, and that's like saying, "Fuck satellites and cell phones. The military will now be investing in Morse code tappy things."

The laughable part of this EPA shit is the claim that it will save $1.3 trillion, a number that is an insult to asses to say that's where it was pulled out of. That will all come in the form of cheaper cars, which apparently is more important than a future for the planet. Emissions will grow until they are 3 times what they are now, according to one analysis. Beyond climate crisis weather, pollution will cause more death and illness, shit that, like measles, we thought we had mostly figured out how to move beyond (with some notably awful exceptions, like Cancer Alley in Louisiana). One estimate says it will cost $4.7 trillion in added expenses over the next two decades, and that's not even counting for the loss in research and innovation on other sources of power. As we're lapped by the Chinese and, well, just about every other industrialized economy on solar and wind and nuclear power, it will make us into the backwards third world shithole filled with dumbass white people, which I assume is when we'll be great again.

So, yeah, it's hard sometimes to comprehend how overwhelmingly fucked we are. But you gotta take stock and see where we are as we try to figure out how to unfuck some of this.

Trump's Goddamn Name

One of the more unpleasant things about living in the NYC area used to be that you were damned to see shit with the Trump name on it. That changed starting with Donald Trump's first election to the presidency. Then the people who lived at Trump Place on the west side of Manhattan pushed to have his big goddamn name taken off the front of the condo complex, and it was. They call it "Riverside South" now, which is what it was before Trump dick-stamped it. Used to be when you drove down the West Side Highway in the 70s, you passed a "Donald J. Trump" Adopt-a-Highway sign. That's gone, too. A lot of shit that Trump made agreements to hammer his goddamn name on no longer have that name there due to contracts not renewed and the fact that property values go down if that name is associated with it. 

It's one of those things that demonstrates what a moronic ego monster Trump is. He wants you to think his name is still associated with luxury (even if the supposed luxurious shit was never even remotely special) and success (which, well, other than tricking rubes into voting for him, raping girls and women, and laundering Russian oligarch cash, he isn't). And he wants some sense of permanence, a way to stay in this world even as he slips his morbidly obese mortal coil when he finally dies long after his expiration date.

Late last week, news came out that Trump made an offer to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a man who would fold with a full house in his hand. Back in October, Trump froze spending on an immensely needed new train tunnel between New Jersey and New York City, as well as expansion of the Second Avenue subway line. He then told Schumer he would release the billions of dollars if Schumer could get Washington, DC's Dulles Airport and New York's Penn Station named after him, Donald Trump. You got it? Critical infrastructure to the nation's largest city, which was delayed because another dickhead Republican, Chris Christie, had killed it, is being held hostage because the president of the United States needs to have his goddamn name plastered on it. He can't just do it himself, as he did with the Kennedy Center (which he really couldn't do by law, but it's not like anyone is gonna enforce the law with this chucklefuck) and the US Institute of Peace, just forcing his name on the buildings like they're 15 year-olds at Mar-a-Lago. 

Seriously, our simpleton president thinks his goddamn name needs to be on anything he's associated with, like he's spraying the furniture like a cat. It's like he saw "Obamacare" and thought, "I want that," forgetting that "Obamacare" was originally a derisive name that Republicans gave the Affordable Care Act because they thought it would fail. Now, like with his fake "university" and his garbage steaks, Trump keeps forcing the government to put his name on shit. There's Trump Accounts, which opens an account with $1000 in it for "every American child born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028." The funds don't come from Trump. They come from the US Treasury (with some donations). But Trump Accounts are what they're called, you unpatriotic twatmite. And there's TrumpRx, which purports to be some fantasy of cheap drugs with prices negotiated by the federal government, except the prices are easily lower elsewhere, and you aren't buying drugs from the government. No, that would be socialism, you commie leech. TrumpRx gives you a coupon with a discount code to take to your pharmacy, just like Good Rx or your local supermarket flyer. Indeed, Good Rx or Mark Cuban's website are cheaper than TrumpRx, which just seems to exist to funnel funds into Trump's gaping maw.

There is something so gut-level pathetic here, like Trump's pathological need to be loved has merged with his carnival barker scammer self and his fear of dying without leaving anything worth a fuck on this earth. But the other element here is the one that overrides everything, and that is his mob boss belief that everything he does needs to be some deal that is advantageous to him personally. "What are you going to do for me?" is the way his lizard brain operates, even if doing something for him has nothing to do with things like congressionally-appropriated funding for a desperately needed project. The corollary to that is "What have you done for me?" and that came out in a couple of dumps on Truth Toilet. There, he posted that he was approving disaster relief funds for Tennessee and Mississippi, both states, as he points out, "I won three times!" 

We can't live like this, with the whims of a single insane man determining who wins and who loses, with him insisting that we all must call everything associated with the federal government by his goddamn name. But we also can't live with this pathetic loser desperate to be recognized as having done something great because to do so is to reward him for lying. He made up wars that he "solved" to get his name on a Nobel Prize. He claims to have done "more" for the country than any president ever, a demonstrative falsehood as prices climb higher and unrest is growing in the streets over the ICE savagery. He put his fucking flabby face on the annual national parks pass so you have to carry around his scowl for the year. He wants a fuckin' coin made with his dumb head on it. It's all part of a propaganda effort to take his incompetence and violence and corruption and turn us into one nation under him. Jesus fuck, even Victor Orban isn't this needy. Even Vladimir Putin doesn't spray his name on anything he can like an anxious toddler scrawling his barely-readable letters on walls and toys to claim them as his own. Even Xi Jinping isn't tossing his shit at everything to leave a smear to show he was there. 

Trump's goddamn name will need to be purged when he's gone. Jackhammered away, cut out, or bureaucratically removed. When he dies, we need to rid our nation of his monuments like they were Confederate statues made of Nazis.  I'm tired of that goddamn name, its ubiquity, its use as a weapon, its omnipresence. It's not marketing. It's abuse. 

Maybe we do need to leave his name on something, just to remind ourselves of what a shitty, destructive thing we did to the world. Maybe a monument to the defeat of MAGAism, a half-melted statue among a bunch of eternally burning red hats. Or maybe, if he ever is incarcerated for the insane number of crimes he's committed, we can name the prison he's held in after him. The Donald J. Trump Penitentiary for Traitors, War Criminals, and Donald Trump. 

Why Are We Not Purging People in the Epstein Files from the American Government?

I’ve been trying to write something about the newly-released tranche of Jeffrey Epstein files for the past couple of hours, and every time I tried to come up with something worth saying, I'd come across some absolutely terrible thing that's repulsive or chilling or in someway stomach turning and, you know, I don’t even know what point to make anymore about all of this. We know it’s awful, we know it's fucked. 

I mean, like you read emails between people who are procuring "young girls" for Epstein, you read this from someone to Epstein's assistant Leslie Groff, where someone was obviously grooming a girl but then failed to close the deal and says, "I have to tell you that unfortunately my meeting with the girl didn't go well yesterday. I knew this young girl for a while. I thought she is easy going and open mind. I couldn't talk with her over the phone about anything. So, we finally met and I realized that she is very conservative," and you just wonder how many people fucking knew and you figure it must be dozens, at least, and I'm talking beyond the victims.

I’ll come across something that that reveals just what a complete utter fucking douche Jeffrey Epstein, and everyone around him was and how all of these people were just begging for his approval and blessings and access to his "pussy network," as one puts it, and I just want them all burned to the ground, even if that includes Bill Gates or Noam Chomsky. Oh, sure, I suppose I could say something about about the various people that have come up. There's Epstein messaging Deepak Chopra at what I assume is the Aspen Ideas Festival, another circle jerk of celebrities and rich pukes, "my very close friends joi ito. head of mit media lab, ehud barak former defense ministere and prime misiter of israel are both in aspen with you, i have sent them notes that you are one of the family, they will find you if you don't find them first." The fuck does that mean, "one of the family"? Creepy shit right there. And why can't he fucking type? It's like one hand is on his dick at all times.

I could bring up all of these other scholars and other people who were some reason enamored by this fucking guy. The thing that gets me is Epstein was shit, a garbage person. His own messages and emails are loaded with dudebros and chicks all talking about pussy. Literally. One email exchange is Epstein asking someone whose name shouldn't be redacted, "Any pussy today?" and getting a "thumbs-up" photo in reply. Another is Epstein asking someone else (a woman, I think), "Any dick or pussy yet?" In another long text exchange, he brings up what he'd say to Congress: "With sasse calling for a senate hearing, I guess I can mimic kavanaugh. Yes senator I like pussy , pussy, yes. Don't you senator." Another email is just him sending someone a link to a photo of "huge pussy lips." Or this exchange where someone asks him, "What would be the 3 questions you would ask to Paul Allen if you were meeting him today?" Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. He gives two serious ones and then "third questions would you like to see my pussy." It's just the shittiest people acting in the shittiest ways all the goddamn time, like they never grew after hitting 12 years old, like most men with any money or power. (Yeah, I put "pussy" into the search field for the files. Someone had to.)

It's not just that people flattered him for money. They really truly believed (and perhaps were) friends with him, ready to defend him even when the worst charges were coming out, like Chomsky did in February 2019. We get all of these just unexpected people in there like Roger Schank, who was an early AI theorist, because Epstein believed he was part of some intellectual vanguard, working with great "thinkers" to lead the way to the future, which I assume included being able to round up and fuck all the young girls he wanted, you know, part and parcel of the insanity of rich people thinking they can get away with everything because they are rich and enough fucking idiots think that endows them with some kind of supernatural insight and that convinces most of them that they really do have that kind of insight and that's how we get people like Epstein and Trump and Elon Musk.

So I guess what I keep coming back to is we know who’s involved here. We know that, in some way, at some level, perhaps extensively, starting with being a child rapist, Donald Trump is implicated. We know that US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is in there planning to visit Epstein's pedophile island. There's Musk, Steve Bannon, and all these people that are still somehow involved in our public life, and yet there’s no price, and I can’t get my head around that. I mean, I understand that rich people don’t get punished, but I also understand that rich people don’t get caught. That’s the thing. That’s why rich people get away with it. They don’t get caught. Everybody here is caught. 

Or at least accused, and accused with such detail and, in Trump's case, such consistency of stories, and so publicly (and we don't know what else still waits in the millions of pages that haven't been released, let alone the video recordings and photos), that it boggles the mind that we're not talking about a complete meltdown on Capitol Hill, if not the entire goddamned country. I remember when Barack Obama sat in the church where Reverent Jeremiah Wright preached and because Wright had occasionally said some controversial things, it almost undid Obama's candidacy in 2008. I remember Republicans (and some Democrats) losing their minds over the association and his presence in the space where Wright was. That proximity was enough. That was just with someone exercising multiple First Amendment rights. Here, it's with a motherfucking pedophile pimp who was convicted of hiring a child prostitute and was arrested for a shit-ton more a few years later. If you hung out with that guy, if you sent women to work for him, how does that not reflect poorly on you?

At the very least, Democrats and the Republicans who have made this a huge issue should be demanding a special counsel to investigate all of this, but that would mean independence from Trump and that shit just doesn't happen in this government. They should still push for it. And it should be in the front of voters' minds: you give us a majority and we will purge this government of the pedophiles. We will get justice for the victims who were treated so horrifically.

Wouldn't that be a delicious irony? According to QAnon, Trump was supposed to bring down the pedophile-filled Deep State of Democrats. Instead, he installed the pedophiles and protected them. And Democrats are the ones who could bring it to an end. Emphasis on "could."

Another Execution by Death Squad in Minneapolis

As I said nearly a year ago, it's clarifying when you decide that those who are doing harm are simply evil. You stop looking for explanations for their terrible violence or goals for their open criminality and you accept that sometimes people are just evil and should be treated like they're evil. We are one year into the second administration of Donald Trump, and we are reaping the whirlwind of the evil he and his monstrous enablers commit. It is killing this country in ways big and small, one of those cancers that metastasized so quickly that you realize it's gone from your skin to your bones before you ever even identified the disease. 

This weekend in Minneapolis, we saw the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end of the Trump administration's barbaric war against immigrants and anyone who opposes the war against immigrants. On Friday, the general strike that had been called in Minnesota as a response to the murder of Renee Good was a huge success, with thousands marching in the -20 temperatures and hundreds of businesses, schools, and offices closing in support. On Saturday, the morning murder of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents (who have no reason at all nor the legal authority to even be in Minneapolis, which isn't within 100 miles of a border) was such a brazen act of criminality that it shook even those not previously shaken by Good's killing (which was equally brazen but motherfuckers who have drunk the MAGA chowder deeply couldn't get their heads around it and decided that they couldn't see what all of us with eyes could). 

The videos of Pretti's killing, shot as many as ten times while on his knees and then on his back, left no room at all through which you could squeeze your ideological blinders. It was clear that the gun Pretti legally was carrying was taken from him before the shooting and that he had never had it in his hand to threaten the BP officers who had shoved a woman to the ground and pepper-sprayed her and Pretti. It doesn't help the disinformation campaign in full swing now that Pretti was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital, beloved by his co-workers and patients. Every single video analysis shows that he was filming ICE and BP actions as a legal observer (as all observers are), not interfering in any way, and the porcine chodes in their douche vests and punk ass masks decided to fuck with him and the woman near him. The chodes surround him and beat him as he tries to cover up from the blows and then one of the chodes pistol whips him after another chode takes his gun. Every single video analysis shows the gun being taken. Every single video shows he was not a threat. Every single video shows he was fucking executed like it was a mob hit, just like Renee Good. The Border Patrol and ICE are a bunch of gutless thugs who want to murder some libs and don't have the balls to try without a uniform on. 

And yet...the simpering, smarmy fuck stains from Homeland Security and right-wing media insist that Pretti was a "domestic terrorist" who was "assaulting" the murderous BP officers, who, as dick dribble of doom Greg Bovino said, are the real "victims" and that Pretti and Good were "suspects." Except they weren't. See, to be a "suspect," one has to have a crime to suspect them of committing prior to approaching them. We all know who the criminals were and they had taped over badges and hidden faces. Along with Bovino's bullshit, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti was there "to perpetuate violence" like he was a puppy that whined too much, and slithering vermin fucker Stephen Miller did his dance of disinformation like the Nazi spoogebucket he is. 

But it's not working this time. For one thing, the people of Minneapolis are goddamned warriors and they deserve every bit of support they can get. They haven't backed down, and, if anything, each assault against their city and their fellow Minnesotans has made them even more pissed off and engaged. The other thing is that the Trumpistas went too far in condemning Pretti for having a gun, which, again, he had a legal permit to carry. FBI Director and man who looks like he just sharted in front of Sydney Sweeney, Kash Patel, said on some Sunday gab show, "You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. You don't have a right to break the law." 

Except Pretti wasn't breaking any laws, and you can, in fact, bring a firearm to a protest if you live in a state that allows open or concealed carry of firearms. And that's gotten the gun nuts all up in, well, arms.  And that's made them take another look at the videos of the execution of Pretti. And they don't like what they see. See, MAGA and Trump only succeed when people don't have any actual beliefs, but gun humpers are true believers in their perverse interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Fuck with that and they will let you fucking know. These are the pricks who worshipped Kyle Rittenhouse bringing his assault weapon to murder a protester. They have one thing they are consistent on, so, hey, welcome to the party, assholes. Yeah, it is constitutional overreach. Now let's work together to stop it.

You need to remember, though, that we are dealing with evil motherfuckers in the Trump administration. And they are going to keep escalating until something, somehow stops them. I don't think we can last until January of next year, assuming that Democrats win back at least the House in the midterm elections. That's why I say it's the end of the beginning. If they can make it worse, they will. 

But, goddamn, this murder and the blatant, obvious lies and the reaction to those lies (including the New York Times saying flat out that the Trump administration is "lying") and the passion of the people in Minneapolis and other places under attack, makes me think it might be the beginning of the end. Hell, Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats have said they will not support DHS funding in this week's appropriations vote, which might end up partially shutting down the government. 

So maybe, just maybe, it's the beginning of the end. Surely, there will be more violence. Idiots with guns will always be idiots. And surely there will be more resistance. We are shaken but unbowed.

And it all comes back to Trump, too. If he decides the optics of execution by death squad aren't helpful to whatever the fuck he things he's doing, then he might fire Bovino or Noem as a sacrifice to save face. But, most likely, he'll figure out what the most dickish, evil thing he can do is, and just fucking do that.

Martin Luther King Would Still Fuck MAGA's Shit Up

It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, or "That day when conservatives say that one line from King and pretend that's all he ever said." Or, really, considering how the entirety of the MAGA movement, pissy politicians and prickish pundits, are simply denying that civil rights laws are needed, maybe they'll just ignore King altogether. 

It might be best for the motherfuckers to not fake it because, see, they get so much wrong about the "content of character" line from MLK. Just as a reminder, he most famously said it in his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 and this is the full line: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." 

The way that line is interpreted so often by the right is that non-white people will somehow magically earn the right not to be judged by skin color by white people. Except there's a flip side to that, and it's something King would expand on in later work in the last few years of his too-short life. See, it's not just non-white people who are judged by their skin color, but also whites by non-whites. White people were (and are) the fucking problem when it comes to race relations, and King was also implying that they needed to step up if they didn't want color to be the most defining characteristic.

In a keynote speech at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in September 1967, King spoke about the role of social scientists in the fight for civil rights, and he was pretty goddamn clear about who needed some character-building:

"White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions-the Negro himself.

"White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro's desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come."

Later in the speech, talking about rioting and discussing how the product of it was damage to property and not people despite the violence against the bodies of Black people, King quoted Victor Hugo: "If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."

And he explained, "The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man."

King would fuck MAGA's shit up because he would look at what's happening in Minneapolis and point out that the real criminals aren't the workers and parents and children trying to live meaningful, peaceful lives. No, you can figure out who the villains are by the violence they use to terrify and punish people for just existing. And I believe he would demand widespread civil disobedience, leading it himself. 

As I've said every MLK Day for over 20 years, King was a radical, and the effort to erase his radicalism is one of the successes of the conservative revision of American history. While our hateful leaders pretend that we moved beyond the need for laws protecting the rights of non-whites, as MAGA freaks irrationally scream about "diversity" like it means "holocaust," we have to remember that the job of a society is to lift people up, or it's not worth saving.

Random Thoughts on a Murder and the Motherfuckers Who Are Responsible

1. The murder of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross should be one of those pivot points in our history, much like the murder of George Floyd less than a mile away in 2020. Like with Floyd, we shouldn't even be talking about whether or not the murder was "justified." While I get that law enforcement is rarely punished because we're just fucking perverse cop worshippers as a whole in the country, any rational view of the videos of the incident show, clearly, that Ross wasn't in danger, wasn't being threatened, and wasn't hit by Good's SUV while trying to leave the street where she and her wife, Rebecca Good, were observing and recording ICE doing its brutal and illegal work in the streets of their neighborhood. Hell, Renee Good peacefully told a raging Ross, "That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you" just before the ICE cuntmites escalated the whole thing and Ross, ignoring every training that cops get, briefly walked near the front of the vehicle before moving to the driver's side window as Good started to drive away and shooting Good point blank at her face three times.

2. Let's put a couple of things into perspective here. First off, it's pretty fucked that Ross put the entire community and other officers in danger with his hair trigger finger. He shot wildly, with one hand on his gun and one hand still on his phone, and he not only could have killed Rebecca Good, but he could have easily offed another ICE agent. And the other thing is that you don't fucking shoot someone driving a vehicle unless you have no other choice because a dead person behind the wheel can't fucking control the car, and the SUV went out of control and slammed into another car, but, Jesus, it could have jumped the curb and hit pedestrians. That shit gets to me: the reckless disregard for anyone in his actions. Ross is a violent prick who was upset that a "fucking bitch," as he called Good after the murder, talked back to him, wasn't afraid of him. His masculine privilege and power, artificially-enhanced by that ICE vest, were being questioned by a woman, and he was not gonna take it. 

3. And then there's Renee Good's justifiable fears in that moment. ICE and the Border Patrol are a bunch of fucking animals, using obviously excessive force to grab and disappear both immigrants and citizens. For Good, it had to go through her mind that if she exited the vehicle, the little-dicked demi-men surrounding her might slam her to the ground, beat her, haul her into the back of one of their SUVs, and take her to a detention center for days or weeks. Frankly, it's stunning that she was as calm as she was as she was leaving, trying to get out of Ross's way as he placed himself in front of the vehicle, filming her with one hand and reaching for his gun with the other (against any fucking training this long-time law enforcement goon had undergone). She didn't panic. She just tried to leave. 

4. The reaction by DHS, Trump, Vance, and the entire Tump cumgobbling right-wing media universe has been to demonstrate what abject savages these pigfuckers are. It would have been so easy for Kristi Noem or someone in the administration to say, "We're unsure what happened and we'll investigate." But that's not how the pigfuckers work. The pigfuckers circle their wagons around the ICE animals and the cumgobblers get busy not just defending the animals, but asserting that anyone who dares to accuse Ross of murder and ICE of being a bunch of dullard Nazis who just want to beat up some brown people and liberals without them being able to fight back are actually terrorists. The pigfuckers keep saying, in essence, that Good was asking for it, that she deserved to be killed, and that if anyone attempts to get in the way of ICE agents breaking the law repeatedly, they deserve to be killed, too.

From the sty in the White House, with Noem and Vance and Trump. to the giant shit pit on cable news and podcasts, with Jesse Watters and Megyn Kelly and the whole bunch of them, you can see them all fucking the pigs in the mud, high-fiving that they've demonized an innocent woman as a monster to the mongrel hordes who can't think for themselves. Meanwhile, on Twitter and Truth Social, anonymous incel dolts jack off to all the memes they've made of Good's corpse, put in a bikini or less by Elon Musk's rape machine, Grok. Repellent motherfuckers, all. 

(And if this is getting incoherent, that I’m mixing up my pigfuckers and my cumgobblers, it’s because writing about this nightmare makes my rage flame roar like it could burn empires to the ground.)

5. Minneapolis is resisting and ICE and the Trump administration don't know what to do. They were expecting everyone to fold. But, if anything, this is starting to look like some kind of tipping point, like a line was crossed here that is moving even those who supported this administration and supported this bullshit immigration crackdown. It's moving those who have only a glancing interest in politics. ICE is going door-to-door in Minneapolis, literally just breaking down doors and looking for anyone they can drag in. DHS is having its largest ever force go in there to punish the city for daring to fight back, for daring to not just knuckle under. 

But here's the thing: if you lie all the time, then you won't be believed. You gotta mix some truth in with the lies. But this administration and their media lie all the fucking time. So you're better off thinking they're full of shit. Chances are you're right. And with the Good murder, we all fucking saw it. We're all witnesses. We saw Ross call her a "fucking bitch" on his own video. We saw him leave the scene of the crime. We've seen his ICE criminal buddies empty his apartment of anything that might be evidence that he wanted to shoot some commies. We saw the shooting and we saw them try to tell us that we weren't seeing what we were clearly seeing. 

This might be the start of something. I feel like we're in a race between those who want to bring this madness to an end and the mad leaders who want to bring us all to heel as they completely gut the rule of law in this country. They want us to be afraid. They are going to do more and more to scare us. It's going to get harder and harder not to let the fear overwhelm us. 

We didn't ask to live in this moment. We didn't ask to be called to action. Yet here we are. But we have to figure out the best way to fight and soon. Or the pigfuckers win.