Category: Insurrection

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Unbalanced Battle — A ‘civil war’ would be uncivil

Unbalanced Battle

A ‘civil war’ would be uncivil

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 27th 2025

I’ve been hearing more talk of late about an actual civil war breaking out in the United States. An actual war, and not the ongoing struggle that has been the 150 year legacy of the Civil War. There are, sadly, reasons for this. Trump and his backers are pushing more and more to create or at least plausibly claim an insurrection so Trump can declare martial law and sweep the bill of rights and elections aside for a fascist dictatorship.

Certainly in the lead up to the No Kings protest October 18th, there were a lot of people openly hoping for widespread violence that could provide the impetus for Trump and his Project 2025 backers to shut down the United States once and for all. (Oh, people would still have their flag and anthem and even fake elections, because empty symbols are all that’s needed for a lot of people).

But the American people did themselves proud. Of the seven million plus protesters who turned out, exactly ONE was arrested nationwide. And he wasn’t arrested for violent or seditious behavior: Alabama cops hauled him in because he was dressed as a giant inflatable penis. Truly, he stood tall and proud for his country, but even Trump would have trouble calling that violent rebellion.

Interestingly, twenty-two others were arrested that day. All of them were Trump supporters who threatened or harassed peaceful protesters.

Needless to say, the online propaganda about how the protesters were domestic terrorists who hated America vanished in a puff of smoke. But have no fear—it will return. This bunch of wanna-be dictators lack creativity or originality—all of their tactics and even the phrases used in their propaganda are straight out of the well-worn Nazi playbook. They can’t even create their own agitprop, but this sack of losers think they can run a 21st century economy?

Still, the danger is very real, and so talk of an actual insurrection and possible civil war will continue, on both sides of the fence.

People tend to think of war as having distinct sides, along with battle lines and territories that are identifiable as being one side or the others. But even in the case of the actual Civil War, it was far more complicated than the simplistic maps in the history texts suggest. Both sides of the Mason-Dixon line had groups of resistors; saboteurs, propagandists, assassins. While the military lines were distinct, the populace was far more amorphous, with towns, neighborhoods, families and households all having their own civil strife. It’s unlikely that any state in the war had better than 80% support amongst its peoples.

It’s unlikely that the sort of strife being bandied about in America now would even have military lines. World War II was probably the last war that saw that phenomenon, and in an era of drone warfare and satellite surveillance, “frontlines” have become meaningless.

What is far more likely is an asymmetrical war, such as the ones the US fought (and lost) in Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. It’s unlikely any states will formally secede until things have well and truly collapsed and it may be that a counter-coup occurs before such an eventuality.

What you will see the the rise of resistances nationwide. They will employ the timeless tactics of resistance fighters, planting IEDs, blowing up bridges, powerlines, roads, and canals. They will conduct whisper campaigns, claiming atrocities (some real, some not), and terrorizing suspected traitors to the cause. On local levels, Trump loyalists would be likely to adopt similar tactics.

Psychological warfare will play a big role. Trump will continue wildly waving the flag, the bible, and warning of “others” out to poison the pure blood of MAGAts. The resistance will hobble Trump forces anyway they can, and in a time-honored tactic bound to be extremely effective with Trump, try to poke the government forces into vicious overreactions. Does anyone for an instant think that Trump can’t be provoked into doing something really stupid and ill-thought out? Anyone? Remember, this is the toddler who just slapped an additional 10% tariff on Canadian goods because the premier of one province aired a commercial that accurately showed Ronald Reagan warning of the destructiveness of tariffs! (BTW, remember all the red-baiters who screamed about communism meaning the government took over the economy? They’re all supporting Trump’s strongarm economic tactics!)

Militias will play a role, although from what side will vary widely. Only the most utterly deluded would seek open battle with US military units since even the ones with military training would be no match at all.

The position of the military itself is of considerable concern. Morale under Trump is eroding rapidly—I see just today that members of one National Guard unit deployed to an American city to “restore order” are openly saying they will not obey any illegal orders and will uphold the Constitution. And I honestly have no idea how the Pentagon will go on all this. They know Trump and Hegseth are jokes, and that both stand in opposition to the Constitution. But we’ve seen other institutions take the knee: law firms, universities, the big news stations (granted, bought out by cowardly and/or malevolent corporate forces) so it’s by no means certain that patriotism and loyalty will carry the day for the United States.

It’s a future far too likely to happen. I hope it doesn’t, because it will ruin tens and possibly hundreds of millions of lives, kill millions and possibly tens of millions of people, and wreak so much damage on the United States that it will take generations to recover—if it ever does. And the safety and security of anyone reading this will be gone. For your sake and your family, let’s hope this scenario doesn’t eventuate.

Right now the resistance is peaceful and thinking very clearly, and hopefully that will be enough to defeat Trump.

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No Kings Day — With luck, it will become a national holiday

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 18th ,2025

I was watching a clearly rattled Trump tell a Faux News reporter, “No, really, I’m not a king. Not a king.” He somehow failed to be very convincing.

The “No Kings” protest is under way, with possibly ten million people turning up in at least 2,600 locations to protest the Trump regime. There are another 100 locations in Canada and across Europe. The people are rising, and the Trump regime is fearing them.

There’s a saying in America: “The government should fear the people. The people should never fear the government.” Millions of people across the country have remembered that lesson.

The final pre-demonstration note of the regime’s efforts to frighten, anger, gaslight and lie to us came yesterday when Trump commuted the sentence of the repulsive and disgusting George Santos, who emerged blinking into the sunlight this morning. Trump wanted liberals to erupt in fury, but he’s been to that well so many times that liberals didn’t take the bait. We already knew that Trump was a vicious, amoral, senile piece of shit, and nobody excepts him to be any better than he ought to have been.

He wanted anger and loss of control from the demonstrators. What he got was weary disgust, loathing, and contempt.

For the rest of the GOP, things are just as bad. The leaked emails from the Young Republicans, thousands of lies, smears, hate and self-pity, merely cemented the public perception that the GOP had not only lost its way, but was completely in thrall to the worst humanity has to offer. These aren’t young Ayn Rand idealists: these are the sorts of people who shot Jews in the back of the head and kicked their still twitching bodies into corpse-filled ditches. JD Vance did himself no favors with his avuncular chuckle and a “boys will be boys” defense; it just shows what an utterly empty and amoral vacuum this slick little opportunist really is.

ICE may have begun its campaign of terror aimed at undocumented workers, but as it became more and more obvious that the effort to frighten and cow was aimed at everyone in America, the campaign has backfired. People saw the images of politicians and judges being arrested and roughed up, innocent bystanders trussed and thrown to the ground like sacks of potatoes, and naked, bound children being herded into Uhauls to be taken who-knows-where, and recoiled in disgust. These pitiful, masked, vicious little Nazi cowards, some of them the desecrators of Congress on January 6th, were the antithesis of everything America stood for.

There’s a brilliant meme circulating on the web that anyone who believes the ICE propaganda should read.

It goes, “ If you’re using undocumented people’s tax records to find them and kidnap them, then it was never about them not paying taxes.

If you’re showing up at their place of employment, then it was never about them not working.

If you’re showing up at courthouses, it was never about getting them to do it the right way. If you’re kidnapping women and children, it was never about criminals.

If you’re not giving them due process, it was never about the Constitution. And if you’re spending billions of dollars to do it, it was never about the economy.

And if you’re doing all of this in the name of a 34-time convicted felon, then it was never about following the law.”

History has tales of such police state bullies, be it Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (better known as the NKVD), or East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (aka Stasi). All eventually fell, and the members spent the rest of their lives hiding their gruesome past, living in constant fear of exposure, knowing friends and neighbors would spit on them, and children disown them, should details of their past emerge.

That is what the future holds for the strutting cowardly bullies in ICE. They will suffer for what they are doing now.

Decent people are repulsed by the scapegoating and cruelty of the Trump regime against immigrants, gays, and trans. Knowledgeable people know this is just the start, and they will come for the rest of us.

The Lord Ha-Has of the right wing media, oblivious to what eventually became of Lord Ha-Ha, continue to pump the party line that the “No Kings” rallies are “Hate America” riots, and that the demonstrators are all paid to be there, and that protest has become an industry. Let’s see: ten million demonstrators at $500 a head would be five billion dollars. About the only people who could afford that would be the over-entitled dirtbags who inflicted Trump upon us in the first place. Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Let’s face it: they aren’t about to return anything to the people who made their obscene wealth possible in the first place.

The shutdown was supposed to be the GOP’s final consolidation of power. The idea was they could use the shutdown to avoid any accountability to Congress, blame Democrats for the shut down, and use it as an excuse to further dismantle the United States. At the very least, it would be enough to keep their own followers in line, and they saw no need to give a fuck what any non-Republican thought.

But that’s disintegrating as the shutdown approaches its third week. They tried claiming that Democrats simply preferred to “waste a trillion dollars in tax money.” And of course the usual dim-wits tried claiming that if the government shut down, nobody would miss it.

Of course, tens of millions of people are already missing the thousands of services and programs, big and small, that have been halted by the shutdown.

And an unlikely ally has shown up: Health insurance providers. In thirteen states this week, they projected the increases in premiums people would face if the effort to dismantle Obamacare hidden in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” wasn’t rescinded—the main point the Democrats are fighting the budget update on. For the luckiest people, the new rates are horrifying. For most, they will be devastating, and may, for thousands, be a death sentence.

According to Health System Tracker, “Enhanced premium tax credits that make coverage more affordable will expire at the end of 2025, driving up out-of-pocket premium payments by over 75% on average. This is expected to cause healthier enrollees to drop their coverage and create a sicker risk pool.”

In some cases, out-of-pocket premium costs could quadruple. For some people, this seems a poor trade-off for richer, happier billionaires. The people who made who made Trump, the senile pederast, possible.

Family matters meant I had to stay home this morning. But it didn’t stop me from making my own voice heard through this piece, and to show my solidarity with the protesters.

As they say in Portland, “Ribbit!”

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The Battle to Keep America — A Portland in the storm

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 6th 2025

Trump is was sending some 300 National Guard from California to Portland, Oregon, a city that Trump describes as “war-ravaged” and Trump’s stooges in the Pentagon are claiming are being sent “to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”

Trump had tried to send Oregon National Guard into the city, but yesterday, a Trump-appointed federal judge, one US district judge Karin Immergut, blocked the deployment, citing “a lack of evidence that the recent protests in Portland justified the move.” Governor Newsom of California has promptly filed a motion to prevent Trump from deploying his guard, citing the same specious reasoning.

[Note: this morning the same federal judge, US District Judge Karin Immergut, who banned deployment of Oregon national guard extended her ruling to include the national guard of all fifty states. It remains to be seen if the lawless Trump obeys this, and hope his vicious supporters don’t bomb her home like what happened in South Carolina yesterday.]

Portland is quiet and calm. There are no riots. There aren’t even any sizable demonstrations, and the demonstrations that have been occurring have been small, and sedate.

But the fascist provocateurs at Fox and Newsmax and similar trashy “news organizations” have been playing video of the disturbances from the George Floyd demonstrations five years ago over and over, apparently leaving a hopelessly addled Donald Trump convinced that Portland is in the throes of huge, violent riots. Obeying their masters at the Heritage Foundation and in Project 2025, they want to spark a casus belli in order to provoke martial law.

It’s the same thing they’ve been trying in Washington DC (where demoralized and idle guardsmen eventually were reduced to picking up trash in the parks because DOGE had laid off the federal workers tasked with that job) and Chicago (which has a lower violent crime rate than most cities run by Republicans) and Broadview, Illinois, where ICE thugs apparently shot someone yesterday. The horrific “Hup! Hup! Hup!” ICE raid which involved dropping masked and armored goons onto an apartment complex resulting in the grotesque arrests of dozens of people guilty of nothing more than sleeping in their beds was yet another provocation by an administration willing to risk civil war rather than have it’s dirty secrets and drive for dictatorship exposed.

Trump is a cornered rat, but the real danger are the vicious, sleek fascists propping him up, hoping he can drive the US into the more repressive dictatorship in modern human history.

To that end, they are employing the same tawdry tactics that every repulsive group of despots have used thousands of times to afflict humanity. Push people until they resist, and the call the resistance a “violent insurrection.” Far too often it works. Nearly all the worst, must murderous regimes in history have been built on the foundations of Horst Wessel murders (think Charlie Kirk) and Reichstag fires (something Trump has tried to provoke in Washington, in Los Angeles, in Chicago and now in Portland.

But there’s a reason it isn’t working as well here. Ordinary citizens have an absolutely unlimited ability to record and disseminate the actions and activities of the Trump regime and its thuggish troops. Trump is using the tactics that Hitler and Putin and every other dictator has used to gain power—neutralize and cow the press, rope in the support of fundamentalists, lie constantly, scapegoat and fear monger and falsely claim to be saving the country from nefarious activities.

But the government can’t control the images people are taking on their phones and uploading to the web. No matter how many time the Nazi provocateurs at Fox News put up five year old images of Portland in flames, there are thousands more images showing a city at peace, and with orderly and lawful gatherings to protest.

If Trump can’t control what people see and hear, he can’t win. For every captive news organization Trump controls, like CBS and ABC, there are thousands of voices, armed with evidence, telling different stories. For every Jesse Watters there are a thousand Thom Hartmanns. For every misleading image on Newsmax, there are a thousand more representative images of the same events on social media.

And this is how we defeat Trump and the fascists. Turn out and demonstrate wherever Trump tries to instigate, pull out your phones, and RECORD EVERYTHING. True, 95% of it will just take up disk space and be discarded later, but the other 5% may be vital evidence that helps forge public awareness and opinion, and defeat the propagandists and liars in their efforts to control and narrative and thus control you.

They want to write the history books. But you are the ones who will make the history.

Bear witness. You will win.

 

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Sorry Charlie — But We Have Other Things To Discuss

Sorry Charlie

But We Have Other Things To Discuss

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 14th 2025

Charlie’s a good Nazi. That’s all I have to say about that.

Because our servile corporate media can’t think of anything else to talk about this week, let me fill you in on some of the other, apparently less important stories, going on right now.

NATO has invoked Article 4 in the wake of the Russian drone attack in Poland. The Russians claim the incursion of 19 drones, many of them armed, into Polish air space was “unintentional.” The Poles shot four of them down, and the Russians seemed disinclined to object to that. Article 4 isn’t a declaration of war (that’s Article 5) but it’s the equivalent of when a skunk starts tapping his forepaws and lifts his tail. It means “Back off. Now.” Putin clearly thinks that America is too cowardly and weak to call his bluff because he knows the American president is too cowardly and weak. But even without America, the EU has an economy 40 times the size of Russia’s and a military that, while not as huge, uses well maintained equipment and ordinance from the 21st century. Also, if Putin is hoping Trump will support him when the chips are down, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.

Some idiot MAGA wannabe named Tori Branum put in a SWAT call to ICE to raid a Hyundai plant and the Icicles promptly rounded up some 475 people, 300 of which were actual Korean nationals there on Visas to train American workers. Only one didn’t have his papers in order, and there’s no evidence he did so intentionally. South Korea is furious. They got their workers back, but none of them want to return to the plant in what many of them doubtlessly now think of “that shithole country.” It may cost the US a half trillion dollars in planned investments, and Japan and Vietnam are both openly rethinking making manufacturing plants in the US. That idiot congressional wannabee and the cowboys at ICE just negated the whole rationale behind the tariffs.

A district court just ruled that Trump doesn’t have the Constitutional power to levy tariffs unilaterally. That was clear to anyone who knew anything at all about the law and separation of powers, but it came as a huge surprise to the Pedodent, who is screaming that it will cost the US (imaginary) trillions in revenue. Now, the Supine Court may make one of its secret rulings that Trump can continue the tariffs for a few decades while they pretend to think it over (now their favorite ploy for supporting the Unitary Executive, or what historians refer to as “the dictator”).

In a bit over two weeks, funding for the government runs out. This is a crisis we’ve seen far too often, dating back to Newt Gingrich and his scheme to blackmail America, but the difference this time is that because of Trump’s gratuitous and illegal use of Rescission (reallocating or just flat-out stealing budgeted funding) there’s no point in passing a budget and so the Democrats can’t be arsed unless and until someone puts a choke collar on the Trumpster.

In Brazil, where corporate interests haven’t totally neutered the government, the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, was found guilty of plotting a military coup. Four out of the five Supreme Court justices tasked with judging the former leader found him guilty. He got over 27 years in prison. Hey, remember when we had a real supreme court that didn’t have six fascist clowns in black dresses? If the Suck-ass Six had been trying Bolsonaro, they would have put him back in office while they spent twenty years claiming to decide if he should have been voted out.

Netanyahu may have finally overstepped with the fascist right that support him, bombing Qatar. Supposedly they were bombing Hamas terrorists with those magic bombs that never hurt innocent people. The Qataris were not amused, and for a wonder, neither was the United States, usually head supplicant to Benji.

California, which still maintains American values, made it illegal for peace officers to wear masks or conceal their identities. In pre-Trump America that may have seemed a no-brainer, but now that Trump has his own secret police made up of January 6 rioters, mercenaries and other bottom-feeder thugs in masks, it’s become necessary. Steven Miller, poster boy for Gay Nazis Who Pretend to Like Jews, is planning to double down on ICE raids in Los Angeles. If they show up with masks, I hope the LAPD arrest them. Not holding my breath, but Californians are going to be asking them hard questions if they don’t.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing the word “Stagflation” more and more. Those of us alive in the 1970s remember it well: 15% annual inflation combined with 8% unemployment, the result mostly of the “oil shock” when OPEC doubled oil barrel prices. Ah, good times. The Republicans (!!!) tried the experiment of government control of wage/price freezes (Whip Inflation Now) which compounded the disaster. Republicans are weird. They hate all the good things about socialism (universal healthcare, schooling, child care,etc.) but when the heat is on, they embrace all the worst elements of communism (wage and price freezes, hiding unfavorable statistics, and economic coercion of corporations). Oddly, they insist socialism and communism are the same thing.

Meanwhile, farm workers, documented or not, are avoiding the fields because of ICE raids, and tariffs are driving the costs of all imported foods up. In July, the wholesale price of produce jumped 38%. Yes, in just one month. And we’re just now coming up on the main harvest time, and tariffs are just starting to bite. Job growth was already starting to slow when Trump took office as the Biden boom ran its course.

So there’s all that to consider while nervous talking heads on TV try to suck up to the MAGAt extremists. Just so you know, there’s more to talk about other than some asshole whose only redeeming feature is that he got shot, or as I like to call him, “2025 School Shooting #46.”

Oh, yes. Release the Epstein files!

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Jerk Release Program — Child rapist 20 year sentence reduced

Jerk Release Program

Child rapist 20 year sentence reduced

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 12th, 2025

Just days after Trump’s corrupt lawyer/slash DoJ assistant attorney general met privately with convicted child sex felon Ghislaine Maxwell, then serving twenty years for child rape and child sex trafficking, she got moved to Club Fed, a luxurious minimum security prison reserved only for the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful criminals.

Now Maxwell’s on a work release program. The sort of thing someone gets if they get a speeding ticket and can’t pay the fine.

Frankly, I don’t expect her to live long, and I’m perfectly fine with that. Someone’s going to kill her—one of her nearly a thousand victims, perhaps, or relatives of same. Or one of millions of Americans who feel death is about the correct penalty for child rapists.

Or, of course, at the orders of Donald Trump. There’s a saying, attributed to Arabia, that goes, “It is unwise to know the secrets of a king.” And Maxwell has known Trump extremely well for many decades; there cannot be any possible doubt in her mind as to what a loathsome and vicious creature Trump is, and she also no doubt suspects he had something to do with the death of her partner, Jeffrey Epstein. I’m sure Trump would love to order her murdered.

I have absolutely no doubt that she has tons of evidence of her exploits, and Trump’s role in them, stashed away somewhere very safe and secure, held in abeyance by a “dead man’s switch.” She probably told Todd Blanche, Trump’s fixer, that someone, somewhere, had the files and other evidence, and they would remain hidden only for as long as she stayed alive.

It wouldn’t have worked with the Biden administration because there wouldn’t have been any evidence to incriminate them. While there were doubtless some Democratic politicians who availed themselves of her young charges, none had the power to entrap the US government into such a sleazy and sordid deal as the one Maxwell was able to wrangle with the once-proud Department of Justice. Yes, Clinton is on a lot of people’s lists of perpetrators involved with all this, but he’s been out of office for twenty-five years. There’s very few Democrats who won’t agree that if he was involved, then they should throw his ass in jail, too.

I suspect Trump effectively put the National Capitol under martial law because he knew this work-release was coming, and he wanted to try to distract the public. I think he has very badly miscalculated, based just on the initial responses I’ve seen on line.

Trump’s relations with his cult following were already badly strained before this. Most were betrayed by his flip-flop on the Epstein files, and this is going to blow that deep unease sky-high. It comes at a time when the general public is deeply fed up and disgusted with his incompetence, his cruelty, and his obvious lack of interest in anything other than scamming more money.

The military are deeply unhappy with him. Many suspect—correctly—that he doesn’t have the national interest in mind, and regard this week’s meeting with Putin with serious apprehension. His stunt of imposing federal troops on Washington DC on the transparently false excuse of a crime wave is going to result in American soldiers being taunted and booed by their fellow Americans. Further threats to deploy troops in New York and Chicago, following the fiasco in Los Angeles, have further angered military leadership.

And with the on-again off-again tariffs finally in place, and the farm labor force effectively scared out of the fields, the economy is going to take a huge hit and prices are going to explode. People who were whining about 12% inflation in 2016 better brace for 20% inflation starting now.

The possibility that Trump may be brought down by a coup is increasing to levels not seen in America since the crisis of 1933. That was a time when the economy was in utter collapse, and nearly a third of states were using scrip and barter, because they didn’t expect the dollar to be around for much longer.

People were pissed at the incompetence and lack of willingness by the Hoover administration to fix the economy back then, and it was several years, and one half-assed coup attempt, and a strong economic recovery on the strength of the New Deal, before the government was out of the woods.

Now, we face similar factors, combined with a deep and rapidly growing moral disgust with the government. Trump is every bit as incompetent and ineffectual as the hapless Hoover was, but at least people respected Hoover as a human being. Trump is moral filth, and his followers are now realizing it, and they, and an appalled military, realize that Congress and the Court are too compromised by the moral rot and cowardice to solve the matter.

Trump must go, or America dies. There’s no middle road any more.

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After July 3rd, 2025 — Comes the independence movement

After July 3rd, 2025

Comes the independence movement

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 4th, 2025

Between the infiltration of fascists on the Supreme Court (name the traitors: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney-Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh) and in Congress (too many to name, but almost unanimously Republicans, and willingness to either commit or bow to treason almost unanimous amongst those Republicans), there was only one result possible. The United States of America never stood a chance.

The passage of the hideous, ironically named “One Big Beautiful Bill” is the capstone to the collapse of America. Yes, it is cruel, vicious, and designed to punish the poor and weaken the middle class into insolvency. It increases the already hideously disproportionate disparity of wealth and power of the top 1% to levels that far exceed those of pre-revolutionary France or Russia. That comes at the cost of a trillion for health care for the people, hundreds of billions more to feed the poor, and education. It will make the US a scientific, intellectual and educational backwater. It will, in time, eliminate accessible health care for most of the population, and weaken and degrade public, secular schools into irrelevance.

But the very worst part is that it erects the most efficient and oppressive police state in the history of the world. It provides more funding for the hated and vicious ICE secret police force than the US Marines get. Coupled with Elon Musk’s vast, comprehensive data theft of virtually every government record on everyone in America, it makes for a vast and omnipresent police state that would make Josef Stalin groan with envy.

Even now, I see people, mostly Democrats, chirping that the Republicans have really fucked up this time, and how we’ll make them pay in the off-terms next year. These people are fools: the Republicans have absolutely no intention of holding free and fair elections. None.

Some people take hope that the bill just signed into law delays some of the worst, most rapacious elements of the shredding of the social safety net until after November 2026, and point to that as a sign the Republicans are nervous about those elections.

Nonsense. They just want to hold what will be utterly fraudulent and meaningless elections to make sure their apparatus of control is rock solid and that they need never worry about any election going forward.

Oh, there will be an election. It will even look fairly convincing, in that Republicans will at least lackadaisically campaign, and if the people controlling the vote count are even half-way competent, the results will all fall into a convincing 10 point range for most of the Republicans. There may come a time when they can run unopposed and win 99% of the vote, like in the Soviet Union, but for now they have to pretend there’s still a United States and it is still a democracy of the people. As long as people can PRETEND the country is still theirs, they are less likely to rise up, you see. To that end, Republicans will wave many flags and pound a few Bibles in order to keep their believers glassy-eyed.

But they don’t intend to allow the people to have a meaningful voice. The bill Trump just signed had an approval rating of just 29% during the final hours of debate. No bill still pending before Congress was ever more unpopular. Ever. And when you have people like Joni Ernst sneering “We all have to die sometime” to people complaining that their children can’t get necessary medical care, or the psychotically racist Laura Loomer talking about deporting all 65 million native Latinos with a grin from the president, you know they have stopped pretending. Trump spent yesterday complaining about how farmers were at the mercy of “Shylock” bankers and crowing that he was going to throw a trashy UFC bloodfest on the White House lawn. They’ve quit pretending. They can’t be arsed giving a shit. They’ve won, and they know it.

But they still fear us. They know that if the people withdraw consent, and simply and peacefully refuse to cooperate, they cannot maintain power. The Soviet Union, the most efficiently oppressive regime in history, fell with hardly a shot being fired simply because the citizenry of the USSR withheld their support and peacefully resisted.

I’ve said before that once-a-month demonstrations aren’t going to cut it. People are going to have to go out every day and protest, and there’s certainly no shortage of things people can protest. The worthless corporate media will largely ignore it, but the internet is building its own fourth estate. Corporate news is rapidly falling into the same niche as Pravda and Izvestiya did in the Soviet Union and RT does today.

The government will make it harder and harder to defy. They may make demonstrating illegal, and even defiance of any sort. Who’s gonna stop them? Clarence Thomas? Mike Johnson? The law will be what they say it is, and it won’t be there to protect you.

But there are hundreds of ways to resist. They still need you, and even though they’ll never admit it, they need the support of the people in general.

Make Trump supporters feel unloved. Don’t miss an opportunity to discuss the failings and deceptions of the Trump regime. Make Trump supporters doubters, and eventually adversaries. When dealing with officials, drag your feet in every way possible. Do it legally, do it peacefully, but do it. And if they try to outlaw resistance, find less obvious ways of resisting, but never stop resisting. The apparatchiks of the Trump regime are human, and will slowly succumb to social pressure. Make them feel unloved.

Trump is a dying man. He isn’t plausible as the face of the fascist revolution now, and it’s only going to get more and more strained as his mind, never much to begin with, erodes. While we don’t know who will replace him, he won’t have whatever cult following Trump still retains at that point, so keep the pressure on, and make it unceasing. Most of Trump’s closest clique are weak and amazingly stupid opportunists, and they will make a lot of mistakes. Make them pay.

This regime can be brought down in ways in which the founders of the United States would approve. But be prepared to be stubborn and unyielding. Make them feel unloved.

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Da Week Dat Wuz — Things rapid enough for ya?

Da Week Dat Wuz

Things rapid enough for ya?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 15th, 2025

 

The past ten days have been about as wild as it gets. It reminds me of an observation the then-prestigious Times of London made in late April of 1945, in the wake of Roosevelt’s death, the collapse of Germany, and Hitler’s suicide: “Events seem to be happening with extreme rapidity.”

We’ve seen huge impromptu demonstrations in Los Angeles (and spreading rapidly to other cities), an assassination (with the assassin, apparently a Trump supporter, still on the loose), a Senator manhandled and briefly arrested at a press conference for asking a question, a planned demonstration that its organizers claim attracted 12 million people nationwide, a war in the middle east threatening to engulf the world (like most conflicts there do at one point or another) another war between two nuclear powers that has only grudgingly slowed down to hurling insults, a landmark court decision determining the limits on presidential ability to call out the national guard, and increasing chaos surrounding the fate of what may be the most problematic budget bill in American history.

In the background behind much of this was the constant incompetence and stupidity of the Trump administration. To paraphrase the late great P.J. O’Rourke, “What in most administrations would be considered roadblocks in this administration is usually the road.” You have the Speaker of the House calling for an arrest of a governor (of California, no less) for disagreeing with a President about the illegal deployment of troops. Note that it wasn’t the governor breaking the law in this instance.

The month began, as so many weird and crackpot things do, with Trump’s Truth Social account, which reposted an utterly demented conspiracy theory that Joe Biden had, in fact, been assassinated in 2020 and replace with something called “a robotic clone.” Um, does that mean the original Biden was a robot, and if so, why clone it when you can just swing by Radio Shack and build a new one?

It remains unproven that Trump was upset when someone posted “TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out” in the Wall Street Journal. But that didn’t stop the most idiotic and corrupt Attorney General in American history (yes, even worse than John Mitchell) from stating that anyone calling Trump a TACO would be arrested, thus creating a viral meme that threatens to be bigger than the dumb blonde arguing with a white cat, or even “Hitler finds out.”

A rumor made the rounds that FIFA was considering pulling the World Cup out of the United States. People knew it was a joke when it was reported FIFA was upset about the corruption and ineptitude of the administration, which is a bit like hearing the drummer for Blue Cheer requesting the band play a bit more quietly. No, FIFA isn’t pulling the World Cup.

Trump and Elon Musk had a breakup that was done with all the class and dignity of a drunken hair-pulling brawl amongst the girls backstage at a seedy strip club. Trump’s endlessly fascinating association with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein came up during their quiet discussion.

Trump had his grand military parade yesterday, and it had about the same spirit and verve of baseball fans leaving a stadium after a three-hour rain delay turns into a cancellation. Trump just sat there and reminded everyone of the old Leslie Gore song, while a girl, presumably a niece or something, chewed on a miniature American flag behind him. One headline snarked “By the tens, Americans turned out to cheer for Trump’s birthday.” Even the troops seemed unenthusiastic, with several groupings not even marching in step. It’s one thing to be proud and military; quite another to be used as a prop in a Marx Brothers movie.

I’ve been saying for several weeks that we’ve seen the high water mark of what historians might end up calling “the Trump madness.” We’ve already seen the twin towers of his economic policy—tariffs and the Ayn Randian wet dream in his “Big Beautiful Bill”—effectively collapse.

Trump’s Hitlerian dream of ridding America of “vermin” now seems to be falling apart. He thoroughly pissed off and dismayed his most stridently racist supporters by floating the idea of a “gold card” for Visas that could be purchased for just five million dollars by any Russian plutocrat or Columbian drug lord willing to put up the money. Trump seemed to think most agricultural workers and hotel maids had a few million or so laying around, and that this scheme would generate five trillion or so.

And now it seems, with demonstrations spreading and Trump’s standing in the polls deep underwater on his biggest political strength—throwing out eleven million people—ICE is being ordered to rethink their priorities. A memo was released by a ranking Gazpacho officer, Tatum King, that said, “please hold on all worksite enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meatpacking plants), restaurants, and operating hotels…other case types/investigations such as human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are ok, however we are not pursuing non-criminal collaterals.”

It’s unlikely that Jesus came to Trump in his sleep and told him “Try to act like a fucking human being.” More likely Trump was dismayed by the spread of the demonstrations, his loss of support on what had been his centerpiece campaign stump item, and, most likely of all, intense pressure from the corporations and special interests that exploit and make billions on immigrant labor—hotel and restaurant chains, Big Agriculture, and other parties that profit from the near-slavery conditions imposed on people trying just to survive. Many of them are, of course, Republicans, because humans exist to make money for their betters, right? Trump was seriously interfering with that.

It’s a hard and very welcome slap on Steven Miller’s gleaming pate, but there’s no shortage of little shit states with mad dictators who would welcome someone with Steve’s unique personality and talents. He’ll find his own little Holocaust to run and do fine. Meanwhile, I bet the administration is already Photoshopping him out of the group pix already.

I don’t expect things to calm down, but I do think Trump and his minions will continue to see their power ebb.

At least, one can hope.

 

ADDENDUM: Trump just tweeted this: “Our Nation’s ICE Officers have shown incredible strength, determination, and courage as they facilitate a very important mission, the largest Mass Deportation Operation of Illegal Aliens in History. Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People. ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.

“In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.

“These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland! I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day. The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos. That’s why I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.

“Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States,” he concluded. “To ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department, you have my unwavering support. Now go, GET THE JOB DONE! DJT”

So make of that what you will. I wonder if Miller wrote it. “Remigration” sounds like something Hitler might have come up with.

 

 

 

 

 

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One Big Beautiful Bukkake — Plutocrats Plan Our Gangbang

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 26th, 2025

While everyone has been distracted by Trump’s demented and often Naziesque antics, the true fascist mien (cough) of the GOP has been revealed for all to see. Donald is just using his often-cartoonish viciousness and cruelty to keep his most mindless followers hooting in joy as the GOP contemplates its long-held dream of raping America to death.

The House passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (so named by Donnie, who knows how to engage the most stupid people around) by only one vote. I wish I could say that the handful of Republicans who opposed it did so on some sort of moral or ethical principles, but the sad fact is they hate the bill because it doesn’t go far enough. They’re worried about the estimated $4.3T in debt it will add to the existing GOP-created flood of red ink. But rather than eliminate the estimated $4T tax cut that would go to the billionaires, they want to completely eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

You? Oh, your taxes would go up. Not a lot, but then, forty years of Reaganomics hasn’t left you with much to tax, has it?

One estimate is that 99% of the tax cuts would go to those making more than $4M a year, while people making $17,000 or less would see a tax increase of $1,000 a year. You don’t mind giving up your health care and pension so Bezos can send another bevy of trophy wives into the stratosphere in a giant phallus, do you? Sure, just as long as it owns the libs.

Nobody really knows how many nasties are hidden in the bill. Here’s the ones we’ve found so far.

It extends the “state of emergency” Trump declared over the wholly imaginary Venezuelan invasion of the United States. This means among other things that he can unilaterally declare martial law, and delay or even cancel elections.

The bill has a provision to federalize elections (they are mandated to the states by the Constitution) which means that Trump’s utter corrupt and politicized Department of Justice under Kristi Noem would have complete control over who could vote, how they could vote, and even eliminate the secret ballot in the name of fighting “voter fraud.”

It completely neuters the courts, mandating that the administration can ignore any court edict for up to a year, and protecting all members of the administration from contempt of court rulings—the one weapon the courts have to enforce compliance. There has never been a country without a strong, independent judiciary that was worth a shit, and America would be no exception.

Back when I was a kid, they used to teach about the “Spoils System” wherein new administrations could replace government functionaries with their own people. Needless to say, massive corruption and incompetence was built into such a system, and the Pendleton Law was passed in 1883 creating a non-politicized civil service.

This bill would restore the spoils system. Good luck getting that permit you need if you voted for the wrong guy in the last election! Need a copy of your birth certificate? Don’t forget to bribe!

Protests and protesters could be tracked and penalized, no matter how peaceful and legitimate. Freedom of speech becomes an empty mockery. It includes individual lawful protest. This essay, completely legal and legitimate in May of 2025, could put me in prison next year. Ex Post Facto wouldn’t exist under Trump. He already has a track record of punishing people for actions that were lawful at the time—many still are lawful, but that doesn’t stop Trump.

ICE, already America’s Gestapo, would see its budget increase by twelve-fold to $43B a year by 2029. By then they will probably have run out of undocumented people to throw in the Gulags and will be branching out to arrest anyone with brown skin or a last name ending in a vowel.

Mind you, most of this has no foundation in US law, and much of it is flat out unconstitutional. But no worries: the courts won’t be allowed to stop it. Read back to see the shit status of countries without a meaningful court system.

As is widely noted, the bill would absolutely devastate all social safety net programs (the ones that Elon and his Randroid thugs haven’t already destroyed, like Meals on Wheels or the Weather Service). It’s no exaggeration to say that starvation would become a serious problem in America.

For the second time in a week, some right winger decided to refute our fears about the bill by citing AI: in this instance, Elon Musk’s apartheid joke of an AI, Grok. I’m still laughing.

That “One Big Beautiful Bill”? No worries. Elon’s bastard cyberchild has a simple answer: it doesn’t exist. And I quote: Existence of “One Big Beautiful Bill”: There is no record in my knowledge of a bill by this name or with these specific provisions being proposed or debated in the U.S. Congress as of my last update.

Oh, well. I guess I need to go back and unwrite this sucker. Would Elon lie to me?

Elon isn’t the only one pretending it isn’t really there. The bill holds off most of the very worst provisions until 2029, after the next (and possibly final) presidential election.

Now, it won’t survive the Senate, which means that the whole thing is still a long way from becoming law. I predict the next budget bill will be yet another Continuing Resolution, which is a polite way of saying “Let’s hang the country very slowly.” We’re not dead yet, in other words.

But for anyone who cares to look, it’s a naked look at what the plutocrats who control the GOP have in mind for us. If enough of this monster passes, there’s no turning back.

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After the Demonstrations — Ways to further block fascism

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 22nd, 2025

New York Times columnist David Brooks has called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to protest the Trump administration. Brooks, who has been with the Times since the invention of dirt, is the ultimate establishment ‘button-down’ conservative. When HE calls for a “comprehensive national civic uprising,” you know we’re well out of normal times.

I was at the local demonstration Saturday, and while the crowd was enthusiastic, it was about two-thirds the size of the rally held two weeks earlier. Part of that was because it was cooler and windier, and because it was on Easter weekend.

But it got me thinking. The 50501 “Hands Off” rallies, while terrific at galvanizing public opinion, aren’t going to be enough. Interest will wane, especially since it would become obvious it wasn’t slowing Trump’s fascist coup against America in the slightest.

Brooks is right; a civic uprising is needed. I’m not thinking peasants with pitchforks and blood in the streets; with a half-billion guns loose in the country, that’s the last thing we need. What we do need are national strikes. Yes, plural. Rolling strikes, areas hit once per week.

When you hear the word ‘strike’ you may think of workers walking off the job in protest. But this is America: only 3% of workers have union protection, and most unions are barred by law from having ‘wildcat’ strikes. And most states have what is laughingly referred to as “right-to-work” laws which generally translates to “at will” employment. You only have a job until the boss gets a bug up his ass, and you’re out the door, usually without so much as a day’s warning.

The fact is most American workers don’t have much more in the way of job security and rights than your typical wage slave in Bangladesh. Most people live paycheck to paycheck, and are perhaps two months away from homelessness. It’s a shit work culture, but it’s the result of 45 years of Reaganomics.

So a strike has to be something much more than workplace actions.

They may have coercive power over you on the job, but they can’t make you buy stuff. There have already been embargoes ranging from one day to one week against major retailers such as Amazon and Nestle, and boycotts against Target and similar outfits that have been ongoing, and they’ve been effective enough to cause worry in the right quarters. The Trump admin already floated the idea of a 5 year prison sentence for anyone demonstrating in front of a Tesla dealership. Elon Musk has already figured out that the widespread hatred caused by his rampage through most government programs isn’t going away, and he has already lost hundreds of billions and risks losing it all. He announced he’s getting out of politics by the end of May. Hopefully he’ll get the fuck out of the country.

But picture this: the manager at the local fast-food joint has already told his employees that if they so much as call in sick on the day of a scheduled strike, he’ll fire them. Yes, in much of the county, a shit boss like him can get away with that crap. Because we still have full employment, jobs are scarce, and he holds the whip.

But come the day of the strike, all the employees he coerced into showing up are standing around idle, because walk-in business has dropped 70%. He’ll send some of them home, of course, and if he’s a big enough a bastard, he might try telling them not to join any protests that might be going on.

If this happens once a week, he’s going to see that his profit margins—which in the fast-food industry are pretty thin—are vanishing. He can’t take a 10% overall loss in business.

And if he starts firing people, he may find he no longer has any control over them, and they may well be standing across the street from his business on days of the strike, adding to the pressure for people to stay away and urging employees to engage in malicious compliance.

What we need to do is set up five zones across the country, one for each workday, Monday through Friday. One day per week, we get as many people as possible to buy nothing (currently such actions exempt small, locally-owned businesses, and that’s a wise distinction to make). Nothing purchased on line, and skip lunch at the chain eatery. Don’t buy groceries that day. (It’s ok to stock up the day before if needed—the bosses will notice the one day slump a lot more than a smaller one-day bump in sales.)

And on those Zone days, everyone who can, protest. It can be as small as a bumper sticker, or a small flag, or even a prearranged dress code (for instance, everyone wear something red on the Zone Action Day.) If you can march and chant and ring cow bells, do so. Just…don’t let up.

And keep the pressure on elected officials. Republicans are already running scared, and they need to realize that Trump and his MAGAts are the lesser of two factions. They are between a rock and a hard place, and you are the hard place.

And talk to people. Persuade them that this is no longer just “politics”; it’s the survival of a free and open America. These aren’t disagreements over policy; this is a fight to stop a fascist coup against the United States, and if we don’t stop them now, then we may face a very bloody war as the final option. And nobody with any sense of decency or intelligence wants to go there.

We fight hard now, or we fight for our very lives later. There’s no point in asking nicely. The fascists aren’t going to simply go away.

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Trump America — Another business destined to fail

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 5th 2025

When the Dow drops 3,600 points—9% of its value—in just two days, it’s pretty safe to say market conditions are ‘unsettled’ in much the same way that Grindavik is unsettled.

My guess is we’ll see a partial recovery Monday, and then the slide will resume. It’s illegal to manipulate markets for a quick and dirty profit, but that’s hardly going to slow down Donald Trump, America’s most powerful con man. He’ll keep right on making announcements that will manipulate the market to his advantage.

The game has already begun. Erik the Moron piped up today, saying that the tariffs were “negotiable” and the first countries to negotiate would get the best deals.

While that made perfect sense to a dimwitted conman, it will also completely blows up the premise behind Trump’s tariffs. The stated reason is that it will force manufacturing to either move to America or start up there. But that means the tariffs have to be inflexible and permanent. Nobody is going to go to the trouble and expense of moving their operations stateside only to find the tariffs have been dropped or reduced and they find themselves competing with competitors back in their previous locales who didn’t move.

The sheer hucksterism of “move now because these deals won’t last” is pretty jawdropping.

Of course, to make a factory that was paying its employees $1.50 a day to set up shop in America means that to make it work, the have to slash pay scales and find a way to greatly reduce all other costs to match what they were paying in Vietnam or Laos or wherever. In other words, to make it worth the overhead of the tariffs, they would have to cut everything to third world levels: no OSHA, no FDA, no EPA, no minimum wage, nothing.

Donald, of course is working hard to get rid of all that crap. It’s patriotic to send your eight year old to work in a poisonous, dangerous place where they might live to be 12 if they’re lucky. Florida is already working on legislation to replace migrant labor with child labor. No, I’m not kidding.

Warren Buffet, who knows a thing or two about the markets, suggested that Trump also inflicted the incoherent tariffs in order to drive interest rates up, something that would also greatly profit the markets. That statement left Donald screaming in rage, which tells you that Buffet pretty much nailed it.

Trump is openly defying courts, ignoring direct orders not to send innocent people to his gulags, knowing that the five fascists on the supreme court will rule in his favor. It won’t be Donald who ends the United States: it will be Thomas, Kavanaugh, Alito, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, none of whom seem to realize that once they’ve ended the country, they will no longer have any importance to anyone. Some of them are rich and will do OK in the new plutocracy, but lawn jockeys like Thomas and religious whack jobs like Coney Barret will find themselves on the outside looking in.

Basically, the plutocrats are working to parcel out the United States and make it an impoverished third-world nation while making off with tens of trillions in profits. It’s the biggest heist in history. Then they move on to the next prosperous zone and conduct a parasitic orgy there. China would be a sensible target since it’s already authoritarian. If they aren’t stopped, your life, and the life of your children, will be one of misery and deprivation.

Think Trump and his manipulators are not out to ruin your life and kill your children? Consider this Raw Story news article today: “A federal judge in Rhode Island accused the Trump administration of “covertly” withholding funds for Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief programs from states that didn’t vote for him, Courthouse News reported on Friday. In March, U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued a preliminary injunction in favor of 23 states that sued the government over its plan to implement a broad pause to state aid,” noted the report.”

A court finding is a bit more than a accusation. The reason McConnell ruled the way he did was because he had solid, incontrovertible evidence that Trump was deliberately cheating people for the crime of living in a state that didn’t vote for him.

Pussy Riot, indisputably the bravest rock group in the world, showed up in Manhattan today to urge Americans stand up for themselves against Trump’s planned tyranny. The cowardice of the Republicans is well documented. Democrats, as always, are divided on the notion of whether ‘tis nobler to be spineless, gutless, boot-licking cowards or not. Fortunately, most are not.

It’s the same as with the American public, where I’ve had people tell me they won’t come to today’s demonstrations because they want to keep their heads down and survive. Understandable, but I have to wonder what makes them think life outside of Trump’s gulags will be any improvement. He plans to leave you in poverty and squalor. That’s what’s in store. At least in prison you’ll get moldy bread and contaminated water, just like you would outside. And inside, nobody expects you to pretend to love Trump. Hopefully.

As most of you know, four American serviceman drowned in Lithuania in a motor vehicle mishap. Their bodies were eventually all recovered, and as the caskets were taken to the airport yesterday for the flight back to America, thousands of Lithuanians lined the streets to pay their respects.

The servicemen landed today, but Donald Trump wasn’t there.

He had a golf tournament to watch. That was more important than losers and suckers.

The rallies against Trump begin in an hour and a half (I’m finishing this at 7:25 PDT). I’m hoping nationwise five million will show up, but I think three million will get the point across. There may have do be more than one day of rallies, and widespread strikes and boycotts. But if we want our freedoms back, that’s what it’s going to take.

In a world of Cory Bookers, don’t be a Mike Johnson.

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