Month: November 2025

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But his emails…! — House Oversight releases twenty thousand documents

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 13th 2025

We expected to glean from yesterday’s release that Trump was vile, amoral and an inveterate liar. Of course, many of us knew that already, but the new light would shine so brightly that even the most gullible true believers in MAGAland would start to have serious doubts about their fuhrer and savior.

I will mention that the vast trove of Epstein’s emails are on-line and searchable at https://splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app/ It’s free to use.

And there are such reports: hours spent alone with Virginia Guiffre, the late author of “Nobody’s Girl.” Reports of him in company with a 14 year old “who looked much younger.” Evidence of him engaging in transactions with Jeffrey Epstein as late as 2017, long after their supposed falling out and after Trump had become President of the United States.

In one email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. (Victim’s name redacted, but believed to be Guiffre) spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.”

The White House is declaiming yesterday’s release as fake news, of course, and Baghdad Barbie even came up with the amazing claim that it wasn’t her boss they were talking about, but someone ELSE who was ALSO named “Donald Trump.” Even by the standards of this regime, that may mark a new record in the realm of idiotic bullshit.

In the searchable tranche above, Trump is mentioned over 1,000 times (the round number leads me to suspect the counter only went up to 1,000). By way of comparison, Bill Clinton is mentioned 756 times, and of course there is a fair bit of evidence showing that he took many trips to Epstein’s island, reportedly because Epstein owed him some favors.

But what is striking is that even among the rich filth pervading Epstein’s racket, Trump was considered a step too far in terms of creepiness and moral depravity. Epstein in 2018 wrote that Trump “feels alone, and is nuts !!! , I told everyone from day one. beyond belief mad, and most thought i was speaking metaphorically, its obvious he could crack. stormy daniels. ? lies after lies aflter lies.”

What does it tell you when a serial child rapist and sex trafficker calls you “evil beyond belief.”? This doesn’t exactly fall under the category of ‘glowing reference”. Apparently, based on what he wrote there, Epstein had been repeatedly and publicly calling Trump ‘mad’ for quite some time.

Per the Guardian’ “I have met some very bad people,” Epstein wrote in a 2017 email. “None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.” In other messages, Epstein described Trump as a “maniac” showing signs of “early dementia”.

In a Thursday, August 9 2018 email to someone named BS Stern, Epstein forcefully argued for a third party candidate in 2020 as being greatly superior to Trump being reelected or the Dems finding a winning candidate, something Epstein wasn’t willing to bet on. His politics were vaguely liberal-centrist and he clearly didn’t want to see Trump redux. Of course, most people didn’t.

Other, heretofore uninvolved public figures may be ensnared in the vast trove of data the House Oversight Committee released. For example, Brett Kavanaugh, Supine Court Justice. Sean Morrow wrote on Bluesky yesterday, “Jeffrey Epstein advised Steve Bannon that the lawyers representing Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing should accuse Christine Blasey Ford of being on medications that cause false memories or memory loss.” Obviously Epstein was an expert at discrediting women (and girls) who made accusations of rape, and while this exchange doesn’t even hint that Kavanaugh had any knowledge or consent of the exchange, the question must be asked: Why would Epstein volunteer his vile expertise to the cause of ramming through the Kavanaugh nomination? Conspiracy, or just a perverted sense of professional courtesy?

It will get even worse for Trump going forward. The House will vote on the discharge petition to release all the Epstein files, since Squeaker Johnson’s belated and highly reluctant swearing in of newly minted Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona, Adelita Grijalva, brought the vote to the needed 218. With Trump’s sway over the party disintegrating in earnest, there are reports that some 50 to 60 Republican members will vote for the release. Trump, who campaigned on releasing the files “on day one” of his new term reportedly tried pressuring two members, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert, to retract their signatures on the petition without success. Anyone who still thinks Trump is innocent and has nothing to hide has to be as crazy and/or dishonest as he is.

The country might survive the damage Trump and the Republicans are doing, over time. But Trump himself is unlikely to survive this.

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No Tariffs? Oh, SNAP! — Revolt against Trump grows

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 2nd, 2026

Trump got two ginormous setbacks in his efforts to turn America into a libertarian paradise with himself as the Howard Roark figure this week.

The first was a court ruling, when U.S. District Judge John McConnell ruled that the administration had no right to deny use of emergency funds as a stopgap measure to continue SNAP, and that the administration acted illegally in denying SNAP benefits to some forty million people, noting that those benefits had continued without a hitch during the 2019 shutdown.

The administration, intent on blackmailing the country, is complaining that they need court guidance on how to dispense the funds, since they have apparently forgotten how to do it since the last time, a month ago. The admin has to give the court an accounting tomorrow, Monday.

The larger issue of Trump’s capricious reallocation of SNAP funds already allocated by Congress is before the Supreme Court. In normal times, the case would be a no-brainer. Rescission, or reallocation of funds, is permitted only in emergencies and on a limited scale. Trump has simply reallocated (stolen) hundreds of billions in already-allocated federal funds. But knowing this Court, they will rule that they “need to study the matter” further while permitting Trump to continue gutting the country.

Trump, meanwhile, wants to force millions into starvation. At the very least, it would take his lie about how “they’re eating the pets” and turn it into truth. Not that Trump is any big lover of truth.

And the Senate somehow worked up enough nerve to challenge Trump’s takeover of the Congressional power of assessing tariffs and revoked all of his tariffs. As if that wasn’t a big enough slap at his pumpkin face, the vote happened just a day after he was frantically negotiating with China’s Premier Xi in an effort to get China to import at least some of the American soybeans. He had just gotten Xi to agree to import roughly 35% of what it had been importing before Trump came alone, in exchange for who knows what? [Hint: keep an eye on Intel stock. China wants some high-end chips that American heretofore had not wanted them to have because of cyber and military uses]. Xi will doubtlessly hold Trump to whatever they agreed, even though he will no longer have to pay the tariffs.

Soybean farmers are overjoyed, but that will be short-lived. It’s still only 35 or perhaps 40 percent of prior sales, and few business can survive a 60% cut in revenues, especially farmers. Meanwhile, tariffs have jacked the prices of farm equipment and fertilizers, and the draconian ICEcapades of this hateful administration mean a large labor shortage. The farmers are still badly screwed by Trump policies.

Even baseball bit Donald on the ass. He wanted to make a thing of the fact that the two teams were respectively from California and Ontario, since he was already punishing both locales for not being pro-Trump. (A joke making the rounds up north goes: “Canadians are so smart that not one of them voted for Trump.”) He is mad at Ontario Premier Doug Ford (Canada’s answer to Ron DeSantis) who aired an ad accurately portraying Ronald Reagan as being largely opposed to tariffs. Trump riposted by slapping a completely arbitrary 10% additional tariff on Canadian goods, a move so gratuitously capricious that it may have been what sparked the Senate revolt. And he’s mad at California and California governor Gavin Newsom because…well, heh, you’ve seen the things Newsom’s staff have been putting out on social media. Trump may love Trump, but he hates having a mirror put up to him.

If he was hoping to use the World Series to humiliate and insult Canada or California, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays had other ideas. This World Series was a classic, hard fought, not decided until the final out, exciting as hell, with two wildly popular and talented teams. And even the most xenophobic of Trump’s followers couldn’t make some nativist thing out of it: I’ll bet the Blue Jays have more American-born players than do the Dodgers. Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Sasaki are all Japanese, and of course Freddie Freeman is Canadian. LA also has players representing much of Central and South America, as well.

Public sentiment regarding the shutdown, and the House being in extended recess, is turning rapidly against the Republicans. The propaganda outlets all demand the Democrats end the shutdown and pass “a clean CR”, and the Democrats simply note that a “clean CR” would gut medical coverage for tens of millions of Americans, and destroy many vital government services that DOGE hadn’t already ruined. They also note that until the House reconvenes, no meaningful negotiation is possible. Squeaker Mike Johnson (R-What Christianity Might Look Like if They’d Crucified Ayn Rand Instead) is now saying he may not reconvene the House until January 2026. Between that and the increasing gaps in services and funding the government provides for vital social function, public support for the GOP is plummeting. There are off-off year elections this week, including a critical district reallocation vote in California, and while the scope of the elections is small, Republicans are bracing for bad news as public dissatisfaction mounts.

Keep pressing. They’re starting to crumble.

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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.

[Zeppnote:  An alert reader contacted me to tell me this:

The only thing wrong with your post is that the person in the penis costume was a woman!  https://1819news.com/news/item/court-appearance-pushed-back-for-woman-arrested-at-no-kings-protest-wearing-penis-costume
OK, so SHE stood tall and proud…!]

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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