Tag: donald trump

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Cornered Rat — More dangerous to deal with

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 27th 2025

This week’s offensives against George Soros and the city of Portland reflect, not a disintegration of America, but a disintegration of the Donald Trump regime.

The Epstein files aren’t going away, and now, with the election of a new Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona (in a deep red district that went for Trump by 30 points!) Congress now has the votes to force a floor debate and vote on the matter.

Mike Johnson, perhaps the greatest coward in the history of Congress, has suspended congressional business for a week while frantically trying to delay swearing in newly minted Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva. This would under normal circumstances, be the sort of chickenshittery you might expect from Johnson-without-a-Johnson, but what makes this far more remarkable is that it means Congress cannot do anything to avoid a government shutdown on October 1st. Trump is, incredibly, trying to make that part of his plan, which apparently involves firing most of the people that made government functional. While the shutdown would not affect Social Security or Medicare or Veteran Affairs (already damaged by Trump and Musk’s sweeping rape of the government) it would bring to a halt most of the government’s most loved elements—national parks and reserves, monuments, and most other non-essential functions.

We’ve been through this contrived “crisis” a dozen times or more since Newt Gingrich realized it was a great way to extort the country. And sometimes the government has shut down, and Republicans have taken it on the chin each time because the public, for the most part, realized who the extortionists were.

This time is different. Not only can Congress not come up with a last-minute solution to the crisis, but Trump’s answer is to fire all the non-essential workers, ensuring the crisis becomes permanent no matter what Congress does.

The Republicans rigged the “Big Beautiful Bill” to ensure that the most vicious fallout wouldn’t occur until after November 2026, and this will undo in one swipe the palatability for the stupid people who love Donald Trump.

Donald announced a military invasion of “war-ravaged” Portland, Oregon yesterday. This will come as news to Portland residents, who probably thought their greatest adversary was forest fires—and this has been a relatively mellow fire season.

He also declared AntiFa a “domestic terrorism” organization. He needs to set up a new PAC: “Fascists against AntiFascism.”

He has also declared war on George Soros because decades of antisemitic “pro-Israel” propaganda from Faux News means most of his supporters have heard of Soros. But then, Soros is supporting Newsom’s redistricting battle after Texas’ Trump-sponsored move to steal five Congressional seats.

And last week was an unmitigated fiasco for Trump. First, there was the Jimmy Kimmel thing. The only thing stupider than losing to a comedian with twenty million followers is picking a fight with a comedian with twenty million followers in the first place.

Then there was the catastrophe of the UN address. Bad enough that Trump’s staff fucked up the teleprompter, which meant that the wingless Donald had to fly solo, but he went on to tell the assemblage their countries were all “going to hell”, and whined about the teleprompter, an escalator that stalled, and that the UN rejected a remodeling bid from Trump FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

One Blue Sky wit wrote, “Lead your life in such a way that if the escalator breaks, it isn’t because someone wants to kill you.” Seems easy enough advice to follow, doesn’t it? Well, funny story…

So, Donald is on the ropes. He’s scared, he’s desperate.

That isn’t necessarily good news: cornered rats are considerably more dangerous than regular rats. Remember that.

But murderous desperation is showing up in Congress, too. Marjorie Taylor-Greene posted a tweet today telling her members that In the Event Of, she wants them to know she isn’t even remotely suicidal and any unexpected death should be met with a healthy skepticism. Now, MT-G is noted for histrionic persiflage, it is true, but this sounds more like someone who is genuinely frightened. I’ve little love for her, but I wish her a long and healthy life!

Meanwhile, another nasty clown in the GOP, one “John Gillette (R-Kingman), wrote on the social media site X that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was calling for the government to be overthrown and should be hanged. ‘Until people like this, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government are tried convicted and hanged.. it will continue,’ Gillette said in response to a video of Jayapal.’’ [excerpt from Huffpost]

Jayapal’s ‘crime’? Calling for people to get out and demonstrate. That’s all.

I have a feeling that we are rapidly approaching a climax to the rise and hoped-for fall of Donald Trump. But I won’t breathe freely until he is out of office and in prison where he belongs.

Best of luck, everyone!

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Trump’s Terrors — Toujours, mon brèves et mon brefs, toujours!

Trump’s Terrors

Toujours, mon brèves et mon brefs, toujours!

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 22nd, 2025

Fearless Leader has officially executive ordered and deemed AntiFa to be a “Terrorist Organization.” Yes, with the capital letters. Scarier that way, you know.

I’ve never really considered myself a terrorist. My idea of a terrorist campaign would be sharply-worded letters to the editor, or snide memes posted for the edification of the local MAGAts. In moments of extreme rage, I have been known to cancel subscriptions. If I was working for Al-Qaida, I would probably be the bloke who writes the ads for the newsletter.

But I’ve been AntiFa since I was five years old, when I learned what fascists were. They were the nasties who were why some of my classmates had rickets, or were missing older brothers and dads. Prime Minister Churchill hated them, and by gosh, that was good enough for me. Down with fascists! Boo! Hiss!

So if I’m AntiFa (and the past seventy years haven’t offered any reasons to change that stance) does that mean that we now refer to them as just “Fa”? I don’t know. They aren’t very nice people. I don’t really want to be on a first-syllable basis with them.

The thing is, the more I learn about fascism, the less there is to like. I slowly evolved from “Hitler was a mean sort who bombed us and was horrid to his people” to learning about the death camps and death marches to the general horrors of authoritarianism.

Turns out that AntiFa was around back in the 30s. Not surprisingly, Germany, the 1930’s version of America Project 2025, had a communist-aligned group, the Antifaschistische Aktion. This was back when communism was fashionable, and people really believed the Soviet Union would become a Workers’ Paradise.

We learned to admire AntiFa terrorist organizations over the first few decades of my life. Of course, we had different names for them: The Resistance. The Underground. Freedom Fighters. The Irregulars. They blew up bridges and trains and best of all, bridges with trains on them. They were masters of sabotage, both passive and active.

If anyone bothered mentioning that the fascist governments considered them to be Terrorist Organizations, we probably just shrugged it off. They were fascists, after all. Bunch of bloody clots, that lot. Who cared what they thought?

Americans generally shared that view of AntiFa until the race riots and Vietnam protests came along, and the vicarious resistance heroes of World War 2 suddenly found themselves perched on the other side of a very uncomfortable fence. How dare those People demand equal rights, and why are those long-haired hippies be upset about being sent to die in the tens of thousands for no good reason at all? Repress! Repress! Repress!

The fascists, discredited by World War 2, saw an opportunity in America’s somewhat naive authoritarian streak, and began a long, systematic assimilation of the American right, beginning with the McCarthy era and the John Birchers and reaching its apex with the Trump coup. The AntiFa rebels of yesterday were now the settled and jealous establishment. And they prefer law and order to rebellion and idealism.

But there’s this one problem: most Americans, at heart, are still AntiFa. They don’t like authoritarians. They don’t like cowards and bullies and vicious hatemongers. In short, they don’t like fascists. And no number of executive orders is going to change that.

And fascists, no matter how much lipstick they slap on, are still pigs. It’s intrinsic to the philosophy, which is that a select few are superior to the unwashed masses. They are entitled to control, supress, and exploit. It’s the will of God. It’s for the fatherland. Resistance is useless.

This past week’s uproar over the removal of Jimmy Kimmel from his show, and the largely unsuccessful effort to deify the reprehensible Charlie Kirk (more on that in a moment) showed that cracks are starting to appear in the Trump coup as people finally realize exactly what it is they are facing.

Kimmel said this to get banned: “The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” He didn’t attack Kirk, or mock his death, or praise the assassin, no matter what the liars of MAGA say. Just that. That’s all it took to scare the fascists.

The reaction to Kimmel being taken off the air was easily the biggest spontaneous explosion of public rage since the George Floyd demonstrations—and it was both totally non-violent and in a form the right couldn’t infuse with violence. It may have been the biggest single boycott in American history. Millions of people canceled their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu, and millions more sent protests to Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group. Sinclair in particular is a far right concern famed for having its television “journalists” chant fascist talking points word for word. People started compiling lists of companies advertising on the stations of either consortium.

Disney, out 4 billion dollars in stock value and millions of subscriptions, backed down and reinstated Kimmel. It remains to be seen if the authoritarians at Sinclair will broadcast him. It’s too early to declare victory, but the administration and Disney got a taste of what damage a determined underground can do.

Then there was the grotesque Horst Wessel rally masquerading as a memorial service for Charlie Kirk. Curiously, few of the speakers, including Trump, seemed to give a wet shit about old Charlie, but instead put on their best Nuremberg presentations. Of particular note was Steven Miller, who for some reason doesn’t have a large black swastika tattooed on his billboard-sized forehead.

He said, “We will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen. We stand for what is good, virtuous, noble.”

He continued: “To those who are against us? “What do YOU HAVE? You have NOTHING, you are nothing! You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are hatred, YOU ARE NOTHING! You can build nothing, produce nothing, create nothing. You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk? You have made him immortal.”

I’m sure it sounded better in the original German. It was, almost word-for-word, a translation of the speech Joseph Goebbels gave in a paean to dead Nazi nobody Horst Wessel.

It is no longer possible to disguise what these people are, and the threat they pose to all of us.

There’s a reason Trump calls AntiFa a “Terrorist Organization.” He fears us. We are AntiFa in our tens of millions, those who understand how important freedom and rights really are.

There are reasons we glorified The Resistance in the fifties and sixties. They were brave and steadfast in the face in ultimate evil.

We need to remember that, because Fascists don’t go away if you ask them nicely. Be prepared to resist. This week we showed that it can be done without violence or even defying the law (Executive Orders are not law). But we have to be firm. We have to be resolute. We have to be brave.

Nous sommes toujours la résistance!

 

 

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Adolf Jesus Trump — Honks from heaven above

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 8th 2025

I could write a hundred essays about the incompetence, cruelty, corruption and sheer stupidity of Trump and his fascist minions, and the main reason I haven’t is simply because thousands of other people are all writing about it, and a lot of them are doing a better job of it than I could. I’m not going to make a difference of any sort if my content boils down to “What Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Lev Parnas all said.” It’s all I can do to avoid writing in the same cadence with which Rachel Maddow speaks!

It doesn’t mean I’ve nothing to say; I just don’t want to be a “me too” voice in the crowd.

So I watch for something that may not get a lot of attention normally, but which I think is important and could really matter.

Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) gave me that opportunity yesterday when I found he responded to Christian Nationalist footpad Marco Rubio’s honks about how “’our rights come from our creator…” Kaine, who actually went to school and studied history, called Little Marco’s remarks “extremely troubling.”

If it had ended there, it would have been dismissed as a sincere but utterly ineffectual complaint from a member of a Congress completely neutered by Republican corruption and cowardice.

But then Dim Donald, that exemplar of Christian Nationalism, the figure who Adolf Jesus looks up to from his swastika-shaped cross, decided to jump in with both swollen feet.

He wrote. “Under the Trump administration, we’re defending our rights and restoring our identity as a nation under God, we are one nation under God and we always will be. The need for this commission has never been more clear than it was last week when the ineffectual senator from Virginia, a man named Tim Kaine, stated that the notion ‘our rights come from our creator’ is ‘extremely troubling’ to him. Isn’t that terrible, how he would say something like that? The senator from Virginia should be ashamed of himself, for many things! For many things, for things even beyond that, but in its own way, nothing is more important than those words, they were terrible words. We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”

Donald has captured perfectly the essence of the philosophy of Christian Nationalism: the arrogance, the intellectual and moral dishonesty, and the towering hypocrisy. He IS the face of Christian Nationalism, right down to the child raping and wanton murder for political convenience.

For any Christians reading this, I’m not talking about your religion. I know a lot of Christians who are good, kind people who respect themselves and respect others. I’m talking about Christianity’s dark cousin, the vicious mean-spirited fundamentalists who in this incarnation call themselves Christian Nationalists. Christian Nationalism bears the same relationship to Christianity that National Socialism does to Democratic Socialism: that is to say, it’s nearly the exact opposite.

They love to claim a God that is responsible for the very rights they are trying to destroy: the right to chose representation; the right to freedom from religion; the right to personal bodily autonomy; the right to fair and equal justice. The “god-given rights” was a rhetorical flourish added to the Declaration of Independence over Thomas Jefferson’s strident objection, Ever since, they’ve done what religion always does and stolen credit for the good & ethical things humanity has come up with.

Want proof? Take a look at the list of rights Jefferson had in mind, and find anywhere in the bible where such rights are mentioned, let alone supported. You can find long lists of offenses for which people should be executed, such as eating shellfish or getting tattoos, and cheerful advice on how a woman should be forced to get an abortion if her husband claims she has been unfaithful, or advice on tearing children apart for making fun of a prophet, but not much about secret voting or freedom of speech. About the only ‘god-given’ right the Constitution had was the right to own slaves, and the Constitution got over that.

I’ve often stated that theocracy is the worst form of government humanity has ever invented. It demands obedience and blind belief to begin with, but unlike regular tyrannies, there is no Leader who must eventually take responsibility for his autocratic cruelty, but instead tyrants dressed as supplicants who can foist any accountability off on an invisible and silent god (and all gods are silent and invisible for the same reason unicorns are), making them much less accountable.

And since most holy texts are utterly horrifying, it’s assumed that any nearby deity will rubber stamp various and assorted atrocities.

Most fundamentalist leaders are utter phonies, and nobody with an inkling of history should be surprised that Donald Trump would be quick to seize the opportunities of being a Christian Nationalist leader. No belief required. Or ethics. Or honesty. Or even humanity. If he does it in the name of God, he can get away with anything.

The only thing more dangerous than a sociopath as a religious leader is a sincere sociopath as a religious leader. The nut who wants to carry out his notion of the will of God is pure schizophrenia legitimized by religious fervor. Fortunately, Trump is just your garden-variety thuggish con artist. That makes it easier to limit the damage he’s doing.

Christians are going to have to stand up to Trump’s ecumenical bullying and take their religion back. They have to join everyone and rise up to bring Trump and his toxic crowd down.

 

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Gavin the Grinner — He who smirks lurks, a danger to the sanctimonious

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 23rd, 2025

“I have trouble buying the argument that Americans have lost their moral perspective. Let’s be honest—who’s being accused here? Isn’t it true that older Americans are the backbone of Trump’s support? And aren’t older people the least likely to suddenly shift their values? If that’s the case, then who exactly is it that supposedly “changed”? Did we suddenly forget God? Start stealing from our neighbors? Did we run to the riots and loot the stores? No—we didn’t. Something else is going on.”

A right winger who normally isn’t very rational wrote that. He’s one of those sorts who thinks anyone who doesn’t support Trump is living in a “moral cesspool.” Not that he would ever generalize, right? But he raises a good point here, I think, one that we should stop and think about.

A lot of people, myself included, say things like “America lost its collective mind” or “The US abandoned morals” in electing Trump, and then electing him again. There is a built-in unfairness to that characterization, of course. Sixty-five percent of American adults did not vote for Trump in either election, and current polls show 62% of respondents think he’s doing a lousy and even criminal job.

And while I might seriously question the values and ethics of anyone who supports Trump, even there would be a few caveats. While a number of Trump supporters are aware of at least some of the myriad failings and nihilism of Trump, many simply disbelieve the reports, or are so low-information they have simply never heard about them.

To pick a seemingly minor example: the number of people sputtering with rage and disgust at California Governor Gavin Newsom’s brilliant take-down of Trump’s ‘style’–the erratic, over-the-top and often nonsensical posts, and the vast library of tractor art showing a buff, tall, noble Donald Trump in a variety of heroic poses doing manly things. They honestly seem to have no idea that Trump himself had been doing exactly that for ten years now, and Newsom was parodying (and mocking) him. Given that this silliness is the beating heart of Trump’s voter outreach, it seems preposterous that so many of his followers knew nothing of it, but here we are.

The cognitive dissonance is encouraged by the paid liars at Faux News and Newsmacks, who feign shock and outrage that an important personage like the Governor of (shithole, failing!) California would stoop to such immature, goofy, even insane antics. After a few dozen such repetitions, their viewers manage to forget all those posts on Truth Social and the often Groucho Marxist executive orders. Trump is noble, mature, reasonable, and measured. It’s that silly little Newsom who created this horrible style!

The dissonance goes well beyond that. Every day, I get mail from people who declaim that California is a horrible place, overrun with drugs, homeless, gangs and “illegals,” and these are people who happily live in California. I always ask them why, if it’s such a shithole, why they just don’t move to a prosperous, well-run state such as Mississippi or Oklahoma, and they inexplicably erupt in rage. At least, the few who even try to answer that one. You should see their faces when I point out the rural California county I live in actually has a higher over-all crime rate than does Washington DC.

People who cheer the locking up and/or deportation of “illegals” always hate when I tell them that using that term to describe groups of humans makes them sound like goddamned Nazis. What a dehumanizing thing for me to say! Unlike Nazis, all we want to do is defend our noble fatherland against vermin poisoning the blood of loyal patriots! They steal, they cheat, they’re like rats! They dwell in their ghettos and conspire to world domination. We’re nothing like the Nazis, who targeted weak groups of people to hide their corrupt Nazi deficiencies!

Voltaire supposedly uttered the phrase, “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” The far right have spent billions of dollars flooding the American consciousness with absurdities and flat out lies, repeated endlessly, for years.

The result is that many people who see themselves as sane and decent, and who, without the endless Nazi propaganda, would probably be sane and decent. But they have been persuaded to commit atrocities in the name of sanity and decency. People who revere their right to appear in court to contest a speeding ticket have no problem with forcibly deporting people—some of whom didn’t even have their papers in order—to a horrific skein of concentration and death camps in places like El Salvador and Uganda. The same people appalled by a brief encounter in public between an Attorney General and a President under investigation on an airport tarmac see no problem with a criminal president and his vicious stooge of an Attorney General saying proudly that “We are liberating American cities to crack down on crime, especially by those filthy ‘illegals’.”

They also believe in Trump and his propaganda machine, who work endlessly to convince them to excuse even the most vicious and heinous actions against their scapegoats, against their country, and even against themselves because they, and not the alien and subhuman rabble, stand for all those things.

And now, the notion, rapidly growing, that the child rape allegations are made, not by over two hundred victims and rafts of evidence, but by anti-Americans, probably Newsom and illegals, to defame a noble, proud man. Why, I bet they’re the real child rapists, so there!

As long as Trump and his billionaire backers can continue to mind-fuck the 30% or so of Americans who have fallen into this moral and mental abyss, that 30% will remain convinced that they are resolute and just, and those who oppose them are the ones in a moral cesspool. They don’t rob, they don’t steal, they believe in God, they believe in country.

It’s a solid wall of smug, self-satisfied sanctimony, but it has a key vulnerability.

When does the charm finally break? Credible reports of child rape haven’t done it. History shows that it sometimes requires the deaths of millions and the destruction of entire nations to manage that.

But not always. Mark Twain once said, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Another quote comes to mind: “The tyrant fears laughter more than the assassin’s bullet.”

People like Gavin Newsom, Steven Colbert, South Park and many others have found that vulnerability in the humorless wall of right wing hate and lies. And it may be what saves America from itself.

 

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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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Meet Donald Dead, the 48th President — Captain Petard encounters Corporal Hoist

Meet Donald Dead, the 48th President

Captain Petard encounters Corporal Hoist

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 2nd, 2025

An acquaintance of mine, one married to endless conspiracy theories, does a pretty good job of keeping me up to date on what’s happening out on the further reaches of the human psyche. The West—not Putin—invaded the Ukraine because nearly all the world’s adrenochrome is made there. The evil Zelenskyy has entire factories filled with Russian infants to meet the world’s demand. Putin is a fine man who is working hard to save the world from the Illuminati. Hillary seeded the world’s truth-seekers with the false information that she was running a sex cabal in the basement of a pizza joint that had no basement in order to discredit them. The real pizza joint does have a basement!

You get the idea. Of course reasoned debate is out of the question, so mostly I just nod and look quizzically interested.

I can’t resist poking the bear a bit, though. He once surmised that my ancient Ford Explorer was actually made in Russia, and I said that this would explain why the “R” on my column transmission display was backwards. Here I thought Ford was just being clever and put “Reverse” in reverse. From the look on his face, I’m sure he snuck over very late that night and peered in to my drivers’ side dash to see if that was true or not. To this day, I have no idea why he thought Dora was made in the Soviet Union. Not going to ask: I don’t want to remind him I pulled a practical joke on him.

This morning, he was declaiming that Putin was our friend and meant us no harm. “What about the nuclear sabre rattling we’re hearing from Medvedev?” I asked. “Trump’s moving nuclear subs toward Russia now!”

He sighed. “Look, I know you’re a Democrat…”

“Independent”

He waved that away. Anyone who denies the obvious truth about chemtrails and claims the planets are millions of miles away is a Democrat. Stands to reason, dunnit?

“Let me tell you about this ‘Trump.’” I could hear the scare quotes.

“The man I voted for was six foot three and was in peak physical shape. The guy they replaced him with is short, fat, and stupid.”

I had to concede the point. The guy everyone is calling Donald Trump is, in fact, short, fat, and stupid.

But I had questions.

He went on to explain that he had photographic proof that Trump was shorter than Justin Trudeau or the Queen. Well, by the time they met, the Queen was very old and I doubt she cleared five feet in her tiara. I got a mental image of Trump as Danny DeVito wearing a Harpo Marx wig.

“The queen of the Neverlands” he clarified. Ah, well, a not disprovable statement, that.

“So what became of the Trump you, erm, voted for?”

This resulted in a long and detailed rant which both saved me the trouble of asking more questions and prevented me from asking more questions. It was a happy confluence of tactics.

It seems the real Trump, now probably dead, learned about the Illuminati’s secret plan to allow a cabal of the world’s richest and most elite to take over the United States and basically sell the whole country for parts and make slaves of all Americans. Being Trump, he resolved to stand against these evil, Zionist monsters and protect the lives of all Americans, the way he tried to in 2001, when he tried to prevent the attack on the Twin Towers, which he secretly owned.

After a while my dog tried to bite him and he took the hint and my dog (16 years old and twenty-five pounds) and I resumed our walk. Gave me time to ponder the latest samizdat from Alex Jones Land.

Trump spent years flogging the Epstein files as a conspiracy theory that he would reveal to a breathless world “on the first day” and we all know now how that came around to bite him on the ass. And of course the reason people believed Trump was 6’3 and weighed 225 pounds is because he has stridently insisted that he meets those particular dimensions. (Those happen to match Mohammad Ali in his prime, so there’s that.)

No matter how insistent Trump is on this point, and no matter how gullible his believers, the simple fact is that he is nowhere near 6’3” and probably hasn’t seen 225 pounds since his Wharton days. But rather than simply admit that Trump was fibbing about his height and weight (and it’s a normally harmless thing that a lot of people fib about) they decide that the real, honest and brave Donald Trump has been replaced by this shambling, foul, pathetic excuse.

Of all Robert A. Heinlein’s books, one of my favorites is “Double Star,” which tells the tale of a hack actor who is brought in secretly to be a stand-in double for an immensely popular and charismatic politician who has been badly injured in an assassination attempt. What makes it such a great read is that Heinlein richly detailed all the intricacies and pitfalls involved in such an impersonation, no matter how gifted the actor or how distinct the mannerisms of the politician.

The obvious logical question is how anyone could be fooled by the vast difference between the imaginary Donald Trump and the real one. The answer is that millions were fooled; they honestly believed that Trump was tall and athletic and brave and noble. So, now that the truth is impossible to ignore, they’ve decided the real Donald would never lie or deceive them; so he must have been taken down, even killed, for a variety of nefarious reasons.

If this one catches on, it could be very bad news indeed for Trump. It gives his millions of true believers an ‘out’ in which they can reconcile the difference between the ideal and the reality without having to admit they got scammed. And nobody is going to support that shoddy excuse of a replacement, are they?

It could be explosive, and utterly destroy this fake Trump. It’s a very dangerous notion.

But I have faith in you, my readers. You love Trump and wish him well, and so you won’t be passing along what is clearly a demented theory that nobody could possibly believe.

Right?

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The Epstein Girls — Child sex trafficking scandal widens—again

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 13th 2025

“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.

“Why are we giving publicity to files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration?

“They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so‑called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.

“Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files.”

Well, OK then. I am grateful for Truth Social, because Trump is doing a better job of destroying himself through what he writes there than any of his detractors could manage.

The quote above is from last night, Saturday the 12th, and there’s quite a bit to cover. As everyone knows by now, the Epstein scandal first began to erupt in 2008 (when he was accused of sex trafficking and solicitation of a child for sex, but got an illegal sweetheart deal from U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, who went on to become Trump’s sham Secretary of Labor) and he only served 13 months in the federal pen.

In 2019 it emerged that not only were victims not informed of the deal, but were barred from suing Epstein for having been raped as children. Ever since then, there has been a growing movement to uncover the full extent of Epstein’s child-sex-slave cabal, and the powerful and prominent American leaders who frequented it. Trump supporters were particularly vocal about it, claiming that it was organized and run by Obama, the Clintons, and Joe Biden.

I’ve little doubt the rumors were orchestrated by the Trump people, both to defame leading Democrats and to give the whole story an air of ridiculous conspiracy theory, which Trump supporters inevitably did. Remember how Hillary’s child sex slave operation was run from the basement of an unassuming pizza joint? The one that not only lacked a child sex slave operation but even lacked a basement? Or the claim that Obama orchestrated the sweetheart deal for Epstein, even though George W. Bush was still president?

Trump supporters are so viciously nuts that normal people wouldn’t ally with them, even on a credible story about orchestrated child rape and the subsequent coverups. Most people don’t find Trump cultists much of an improvement over child molesters.

Pam Bondi managed to blow the scandal up while at the same time putting Trump in an impossible situation. She said on her first day in office as Attorney General that she had the Epstein files “on my desk” and would be releasing them soon. What was subsequently released was nothing more than a rehash of information that had already been made public. Unrest continued to grow, a forest fire the MAGAts lit in hopes of burning out the opposition.

I can’t guess whose idea it was for Bondi to claim the files never existed in the first place (I do suspect that an increasingly demented Trump ordered it) but it pretty much blew the whole thing wide open, and put Trump supporters in the preposterous situation of having to insist the files existed and the government had been covering them up since 2008, right up to now, or that they never existed at all, even after Biden, Obama, and Clinton wrote them. To everyone’s amazement, many Trump supporters spotted the logical flaw.

In an effort to shut down one element of the Epstein scandal, the administration issued what they said was proof about the night of Jeffrey Epstein’s death; video footage that purported to show that nobody had entered or left Epstein’s cell the night he supposedly committed suicide. Only it took just minutes for forensic investigators to determine the supposedly raw footage had been tampered with in multiple spots with Adobe Premiere. So the video only proved that the administration was lying about what happened that night.

Trump, clearly shaken and on the defensive, berated reporters for continuing to obsess over the Epstein non-story, and that backfired, adding more fuel to the fire.

Then came last night’s post, which pretty much proved that whatever his complicity, Trump has been lying about Epstein, and his well-publicized relationship with him, all along.

MAGAts love to believe that Trump gave up adulation and widespread respect in order to “serve the country.” But by the late 1980s Trump was widely seen as vulgar, dissolute, vicious and an amoral buffoon. He was seen as such an immense turd that child rape would almost be a step UP for him.

It’s taken far too long, but it looks like his past has caught up to him, and his cult is about to implode.

 

 

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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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Blood Twatter Feud — Bitch-bois slap-party on line

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 6th 2025

Political feuds are common throughout American history. The most famous is the one that resulted in an actual blood duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, with fatal results for Hamilton. There’s plenty that resulted in violence and bloodshed: Matthew Lyon vs. Roger Griswold, for instance, started when Griswold spit tobacco juice in Lyon’s eyes. Then there was John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, which blew up when Jackson blamed his wife’s death on a smear campaign by Adams. Riots ensued. There are instances of Congressionals pulling guns on one another in Congress, although no actual shots were fired. Preston Brooks nearly caned Charles Sumner to death in 1856, exacerbating pre-Civil War tensions. One fellow named “Bowie Knife” Potter managed to avoid some duels by demanding Honor be settled by hand-to-hand combat with…you guessed it, Bowie knives. That was a bit too personal for politicians accustomed to politely shooting at one another from 20 feet.

While often fueled by genuine personal hatred, some of the quarrels could get downright poetic. John Randolph, who engaged in several blood duels, once said of Henry Clay that he was “like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, he both shines and stinks.” FDR, frustrated by GOP obstructionists who opposed Lend-Lease while simultaneously calling him a warmonger, derided the three main characters in a speech in which he intoned repeatedly, “Martin, Barton…and FISH.” After the first such intonation, with finger jabbing, the audience joined in gleefully. It was politically devastating for the three congressmen in question.

Social media has brought a lot of political squabbling, previously largely out of sight in the cloakrooms, out in public and often at about fifth-grade level. While it’s only fair to note that the large majority of tweets put out by representatives are at worst civil, some would be more at home in a school playground. Marjorie Taylor-Greene had been in the habit of closing a confrontational tweet by calling the recipient a psycho until someone noted she didn’t have to sign her tweets.

So the present meltdown between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has plenty of historical precedent. But in this instance, both men have a mixture of self-grandiosity, contempt for everyone else, and a drug-fueled lack of inhibitions. And both own their own social media platforms, so the only constraint on which they write is…themselves. If their falling out was widely predicted, the nastiness of it, as well, was quite foreseeable, although both men have people around them who might at least try to stop them from going to Defcon Five immediately.

The results have been more like a really nasty breakup in high school, where he’s running around calling her an ugly slut and stupid, and she’s telling her friends she ought to sleep with the football squad just to show him she at least can ‘make the team.’ No winners in those sorts of situations.

Given the unearned and undeserved power both men wield, and the absolute lack of constraints either have, the results are like a couple of kindergartners who are having a tantrum while holding flamethrowers. It’s both amusing and horrifying to watch.

Speaking of which, yes, blood feuds are illegal, and I have no problem with that. Besides, I doubt either man could load a gun without blowing their own feet off. Hell, I doubt either could pour piss out of a boot if you wrote the instructions on the sole.

Both are capable of doing immense damage to one another and to the country as a whole. Both have used their wealth for the purpose of perverting power and influence to their own ends, and at the expense of the county. About the only thing more destructive and dangerous to the United States then the escalation of this fight would be a resolution of the fight wherein they rejoin and continue to rape the United States.

The GOP, superficially at least, are aligning with Trump. The ever-servile Mike Johnson said, “I’ll tell you what, do not doubt and do not second-guess and don’t ever challenge the president of the United States, Donald Trump. He is the leader of the party. He’s the most consequential political figure of this generation and probably the modern era.”

Of course, not knowing when to quit, he also said, “I don’t argue with [Musk] about how to build rockets and I wish he wouldn’t argue with me about how to craft legislation and pass it.” Perhaps they should: both have a recent history of gaudy and expensive contraptions that roar off the pad and explode in a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly.” The Big Beautiful Bill is about as flightworthy as Musk’s last few launches.

Frankly, I hope they do destroy one another. Yes, it will cause immense damage to the country, but not nearly as much as what they’ve already done. Trump is destroying democracy and American freedom and wants to be a dictator. Musk wants cyber control of all citizens and to turn the entire country into a debtor-slave economy. Neither will make America great, and will ruin the lives of tens of millions of people.

So a pox on both of them.

Meanwhile, sit back and watch the show. This is better than Diddy Combs and R. Kelly duking it out with running chainsaws in a closet.

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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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