Tag: donald trump

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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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Why Dictators Stop Being Great — They Fall; Hitler, Stalin…Trump

‪Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 27th 2025

“It’s easy to be cynical about public opinion, but scholars of authoritarianism are pretty clear that there’s a serious difference in what an autocrat polling at 80% and what one polling at 40% can do. Not obeying in advance includes not surrendering to specious narratives of omnipotence.”

Tim Marchman‬, ‪@timmarchman.bsky.social‬

Perhaps the most reassuring item in the news this week was that Trump is cratering in all the polls. Overall, his approval rating is minus 10 (45-55) and he’s underwater on all policy elements, including immigration. Apparently throwing out American toddlers with cancer is, even for the most rabid haters in MAGA, a bit much.

Marchman is absolutely correct about the role public opinion can play in the rise and fall of despots. People don’t like to admit it, but Hitler was immensely popular in the 1930s, not just in Germany, but in the United States as well.

In Germany, once he had established power, Hitler’s mesmeric sway over the German people was almost unbounded. The huge cheering crowds were totally unfeigned, and the girls blowing kisses and flowers at the fuhrer doubtlessly fantasied about having his babies. Absurd as it may seem, the brown-eyed mousy-haired little man, so similar to a famed American comedian of the time, was seen as the exemplar racialist dream. After all, he saved the economy. He beat inflation. He made Germany great again. He rid the country of enemies, foreign and domestic, real and imagined. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

It wasn’t until the tide turned against Germany following D-Day and the Russian resurgence that his popularity began to crack. Like all despots, he banned polls and independent news, but he couldn’t stop people from gossiping and whispering about the empty shelves, the strange lack of neighbors, the lack of any news from overseas, and of course the huge number of families with war dead.

Hitler knew the limits to his support, no matter how propped up it was by propaganda and news control. There was a reason all of his death camps were built outside of Germany and in the occupied territories. His work camps, hardly any less atrocious, were portrayed as happy, productive, genial places with smiling parents watching healthy children playing in the sun.

Hitler had extraordinary influence and popularity in the UK and the US prior to the start of the war. Ken Burns did a three part six-hour documentary about it in 2022, The US and the Holocaust. One example he noted was that after Charlie Chaplin did The Great Dictator, pressure from Germany ensured that America made no more films disparaging Germany and its fuhrer until hostilities actually broke out.

American plutocrats in 1933, envious of Germany’s apparent rise from the depths of the Great Depression and admiring of Hitler’s approach to undesirables, actually staged an abortive attempt to overthrow FDR and replace him with General Smedley Butler. It was aptly known as the Wall Street Putsch.

Despite the fact that Butler had voted for FDR and hated capitalism, American plutocrats, who were no smarter or more loyal than our present bunch, felt he would reverse all the proposed New Deal stuff and return America to the capitalist greatness that had ruined it in the first place. (Trump likes to rhapsodize about the “good old days” of the Gilded Age, from post-Civil War until Teddy Roosevelt, a “golden era” that saw two major depressions, thousands of bank failures, and an appalling standard of living for 95% of Americans.)

Accounts vary on how close the plotters (which included the same prominent families that support Trump today) came to actually pulling this off. Close enough that the NY Times tried to pretend it never happened, anyway. If there had been polls in those days, Hitler probably would have polled better than FDR, at least amongst people wealthy enough to have telephones. (A presidential preference poll a few years later proved catastrophically wrong because it solicited opinions only from those who had phones.)

People don’t like to admit it, but Stalin was also immensely popular in the USSR. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn has a passage in “The Gulag Archipelago” about how the inmates in the prison containing Solzhenitsyn erupted in an outpouring of utter grief at the loss of the leader and father of the working class. Most of those weeping had been unjustly imprisoned for anywhere from ten to twenty-five years by Stalin, for trivial or non-existent “Anti-Soviet Agitation” charges. One such mourner was a man who had been practicing his signature on a copy of Pravda and was impolitic enough to write one of his autographs across an image of Stalin. Ten years in the Gulag for that. Yes, he mourned the loss of his Great Leader.

But the USSR provides a perfect example of just how important the “consent of the governed” can be. It fell, in 1990, the most repressive and brutal regime in modern history, with nary a shot being fired. People were simply fed up, and en masse, the citizenry took away their support.

America has several advantages. First, the dictatorship of both Germany and the USSR arose at a time when both nations were in horrible condition, with widespread corruption, hunger, and humiliation. All the stuff Fox News likes to pretend America was suffering from under Joe Biden, only of course it wasn’t. Second, we have polls, and enough of a free press that we don’t have to take the word of Katherine Leavitt (Baghdad Barbie) as to how well-loved Trump is. And if Hitler and the Soviets were incompetent, capricious, and cruel, Trump is just as bad, only he lacks the wit to hide his mistakes. Finally, the same weakness that allowed Americans to stumble blindly into a Trump dictatorship is also their greatest strength: they have no history of living under dictatorial regimes, and even before it gets off the ground, a majority of Americans want to end it.

Trump wants to end Wikipedia. He is trying to end a free media. He is arresting judges. He doesn’t like stories about how he’s throwing American children with cancer into his El Salvador death camp.

But even if he manages to still those voices, people will talk. And notice the privations, the loss, the ‘disappeared’ and the vicious cruelty that dictatorial regimes always employ.

With a free press, the end will come quicker.

Stay informed.

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Lost Signal — Even by Trump’s standards, this was dismal

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 27th 2025

The breaking story about the Signal chat group conversation leading up to the bombing of Houthis in Yemen was already one of the most egregious and bizarre in the annals of American history.

Accidentally inviting the top editor of one of America’s most renowned journalistic magazines, (Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, in case you’ve been on the far side of the Moon this past week) to a group chat about a pending military attack is a bit like being in an NFL team huddle and glancing up to see the stadium announcer is also in the huddle, holding a microphone, listening carefully to the play plan and nodding thoughtfully.

Of course, to stretch that simile further, in this particular huddle there’s no assurance that any of the guys wearing your uniform are actually on the same team. You already know the coach is working for the other guys, after all.

The participants, caught out, have been throwing excuses and lies around madly in all directions like custard pies in a Mack Sennet movie. They’ve tried claiming that the transcript was a hoax, that they didn’t discuss classified information, and that Goldberg made it up because he doesn’t like Trump.

Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t seem to know what country she was in during the discussion. Well, you know how it is: you see one Asian country, you’ve seen all of them. At least one participant was in Moscow during the chat.

Speaking of Moscow, it seems that the reason the Pentagon had issued a blanket order the week before to never use Signal for any official reasons was because Russia had successfully hacked the encryption of the app. And while the Russians may not have been involved with this particular breach, it seems that the names, phone numbers, emails and passwords of all the participants in the session were available online.

About the only people who didn’t know were the American public. But by inviting Goldberg, they got that covered.

To call this a clusterfuck is a bit like saying the Fyre Festival didn’t go well. It’s damning with faint praise.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, the man who somehow invited Goldberg to the chat room, claims he never met Goldberg and had no idea who he was. Evidence, including photographs, says otherwise. It’s not quite clear how inviting a total stranger to a top-secret national security chat is somehow better than inviting the editor of the Atlantic. Apparently one guy there was awaiting confirmation to his government post!

But never mind all that. One person was conspicuous by his absence: Le grand citrouille, King Pumpkin, the Donald.

You seen scenes where a major military operation is underway, and they release photos of the president and his cabinet all sitting around, looking tense and serious as they rescue hostages or grease bin Laden or whatever.

Not in this case. The closest to presidential leadership is when one of the participants says vaguely that he thinks Donald approves of what they’re doing here. Evidence suggests that Trump had no idea what was going on. To paraphrase the famous Watergate investigative question: “What did he know, and does he know that he knew it?” It seems pretty clear that the President of the United States was absent simply because he had nothing to offer.

Trump himself seems to have no idea what the scandal is about, and is mostly reduced to his boilerplate deflection and denial, some of which may actually be valid. It’s pretty clear he has no idea what Signal is, but having discerned that something called Signal was involved, he has declared it defective and wants people to look into it. After all, it let that Goldberg, who was mean to him in the past, in. Something must be wrong with Signal.

He’s variously tried claiming the transcript was a hoax (that backfired: Goldberg released more to show it wasn’t) and that the Democrats were to blame somehow, and that no secrets were discussed. (Several of the participants have tried making that claim, stopping just short of saying the dog ate their homework.) He is, in a word, clueless.

He doesn’t even have the wit to address the specifics, but is just generally doing The Donald, the things he always does when he’s feeling defensive. He’s the old guy with the cane batting at imaginary insects.

He finally realized that there was something to all this confusing ‘signal’ stuff and described the event as a ‘glitch’ and boasted that it was the first glitch in the two months of his administration. A sardonically amused Rachel Maddow that evening spent a full half hour running down the glitches so far. She didn’t pad it or speak slowly. It’s an impressive pile of glitches, worthy of Inspector Clouseau.

But no worries: Trump will have Clouseau’s real-life equivalent, Inspector Hegseth, in to determine what, if anything, happened.

In addition to the blatant incompetence, malice and possible treason, public discourse needs to include whether Trump has any control over this gang of fascists, crooks and subversives or is just their little smiley face for the public. Are the lights on? Is anybody home?

The next day we learned that a) four US soldiers were missing in Lithuania and b) nobody had bothered to tell Trump about it.

If you need more evidence of how feckless, reckless, and anti-American this junta is, consider the following exchange between Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut and alleged Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

HIMES: Do you think it’s responsible for you, as head of the intelligence community, to retweet posts from individuals affiliated with Russian state media?

GABBARD: That retweet came from my personal account.

HIMES: Personal account? You’re the Director of National Intelligence, not an Instagram influencer. There’s no such thing as “personal” when you’re elevating Kremlin propaganda.

GABBARD: I have the right to share information—

HIMES: Information? You mean Russian disinformation. You sit in high-level intelligence briefings, then turn around and boost the same narratives Moscow is pushing. Should we just CC the Kremlin on your next meeting and cut out the middleman?

GABBARD: This is just an attempt to smear me—

HIMES: Smear you? You lied under oath in a Senate hearing yesterday, claiming you knew nothing about classified information, while sitting in Signal chats where war plans were discussed. You retweet Kremlin-backed sources, then act shocked when people question your loyalties.

GABBARD: I’m focused on national security—

HIMES: National security? While pushing Russian propaganda and pretending you’re clueless about intelligence leaks? If a Democrat had done half of this, you’d be screaming treason on national TV.

GABBARD: This is about free speech—

HIMES: Free speech? You’re the President’s top intelligence advisor, not some random guy on Twitter. Every word you amplify has consequences. And right now, you’re handing America’s enemies exactly what they want—straight from your “personal account.”

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1904907517261705605

Speaking of Twitter, I’m a bit surprised Musk wasn’t one of the participants. I suppose he’s too busy destroying the United States, though. That can keep a man busy, you know.

Or maybe he’ll join the chat when they discuss bombing Toronto. Hopefully the Russians will leak that before it happens.

 

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The Rise of Emperor Trump — After the Don, Darkness

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 16th, 2025

That Donald Trump is mad almost goes without saying. He has been a pathological malignant narcissist his entire life, going back to a loveless childhood with a cruel and vicious father, a wraith of a mother; no friends, not even pets.

Long before he entered politics, he was widely hated and despised for his cruelty, his dishonesty, his open contempt for women and his hatred of minorities. His wealth protected him from the consequences of his mental illness, but his history of civil suits tells a squalid tale of lust, greed, viciousness, and open thievery. He is and always has been a wastrel, a moral and ethical sewer of a man. Had he been born poor, I am certain he would have died in prison long before he reached thirty years of age.

His unrestrained presidency has been the absolute nightmare many of us feared, as he throws away an entire nation for his own aggrandizement. Manipulated by fascist billionaire scum, given a army of servile and ever-compliant underlings to wreak his will, Trump is rapidly tearing apart the fabric of society, replacing the United States with…

Well, history tells the tale. People may consider this time utterly insane, a time of nihilistic orgy and abandonment of human mores, but historians recognize this. Oh, yes, we’ve trodden this path before. I’ll give a few examples shortly.

I caught some of Trump’s characteristically windy speech at the Department of Justice the other day. It was the same as the SOTU and his stump speeches. People are stupid enough to let him mar memorial services and other solemn occasions with the same self-serving bullshit. The same litany of lies, defamations, whinging, racism, hatred of all who are different from him, and bellicosity. And I realized: that’s all he’s capable of doing any more.

We know that in his first term, “Doctor” Ronnie Jackson saw fit to administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test to Trump. It’s a simple fifteen minute test used to set benchmarks for onset or continuing development of dementia and/or Alzheimer’s. It’s not something a doctor would ask of a sitting President of the United States without a damned solid reason. I don’t know if they administered any such test to Reagan in his second term, when his mental decline was becoming evident, but he and his staff were together enough not to blurt it out to the public. Trump actually boasted about it, repeatedly, and never realized that just the fact that someone thought he needed to take such a test raised a whole host of questions.

Age-related dementia is progressive and irreversible. It progresses at various rates, even in individuals, and along with increasing loss of cognitive abilities, it can cause catastrophic personality changes. While it can take people who have been pleasant all their lives and turn them into utter horrid monsters, I’ve never heard of a case where a life-long jerk got compassionate or thoughtful.

Trump is well into dementia, and propped up by his toadies and never held to account, so he’s only going to get worse.

I suspect that’s why Elon Musk has effectively co-opted Trump’s office. He’s a young, vicious, soulless libertarian with his own set of mental problems, exactly what the fascists want, and he’s there to “be” Trump long after Trump has forgotten he’s president.

I repeat. It’s only going to get worse.

There isn’t a country in Europe or Asia that hasn’t seen a peaceful and beneficial land fall to madness and destruction. Indeed, Trump is just an example of such madness that is presently expanding globally: Russia, Iraq, Iran, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, the list is getting longer. Eventually fascists/theocrats collapse due to corruption, cruelty and incompetence, but they can cost millions and even tens of millions of lives in the process. Best to avoid it in the first place, but humanity is flawed. As history shows:

An excellent summation of History’s Nine Worst Leaders by Conner Brighton can be found here.

https://www.worldatlas.com/history/history-s-9-worst-leaders.html

I have made light edits for clarity in both excerpts.

Commodus was the son of the previous emperor Marcus Aurelius and had been groomed for the position his whole life. However, despite his father’s best efforts, it would seem as though Commodus was destined for a life of selfishness and cruelty.

From a young age, he was justly hated by those around him for his inflated ego and lack of honor. The resentment held towards Commodus only grew when Marcus Aurelius suddenly died in 180 AD and his son came to power.

At no point throughout his twelve-year reign did Commodus show any concern for the well-being of the empire. He was much too concerned with holding lavish festivals, gladiatorial games, and extravagant parties for himself and the few friends he had in the Roman senate.

Commodus was exceptionally paranoid and routinely had members of his court executed for treason without the smallest shred of evidence. He also built up an obsession with becoming a gladiator himself. Something that was considered unbelievably low class for any decent Roman, let alone an emperor.

He would hold “fights” against other gladiators in a vain effort to prove his combat ability. These contests would of course be rigged in his favor. He never did kill any of his opponents but he was known to slice off the odd ear or nose depending on his mood. Commodus would often claim that he was undefeated in the arena and that there was not a man alive who could beat him…

…Commodus was so bad that his rule would spark an end to the Roman golden age and almost prematurely destroyed the Roman Empire.

If that doesn’t bear a ton of similarities to the tale of Donald Trump, I don’t know what does. I could picture him employing AI to stage gladiator fights between himself and his enemies, real or imagined, with predictably vainglorious results. Or continue what he’s already doing now, which is forwarding the absurdly over-the-top tractor art of him riding a dragon or blessing Jesus or looking compassionate and heroic.

There’s a temptation to compare Trump to the even more notorious Caligula, but Trump seems to have stopped raping virgins, and while he’s sent many jackasses to the Senate, he’s never sent a horse.

Robert Mugabe

Almost as soon as Mugabe took power, the standard of living began to decline drastically [in Zimbabwe]. Access to education and healthcare took an immediate dive. Even access to clean food and drinking water became a struggle.

In 1987 Mugabe declared himself the first-ever executive president. This made Zimbabwe essentially a one-party state in all but name. There were plenty of elections held between 1987 and 2017 but all of them were plagued with accusations of Mugabe using violence and political pressure to rig elections and intimidate would-be opponents from running against him.

Aside from the endless examples of political violence at the hand of Mugabe, perhaps his biggest failure had to do with his handling of the economy. By the early 2000s, Zimbabwe’s once thriving agricultural sector of the 1970s was on life support. A series of droughts and decades-long mismanagement by inexperienced and corrupt officials led to massive food shortages.

By 2008 the nation’s economy was in total freefall with inflation reaching an unheard of 100,000%. Mass unemployment destroyed what was left of the middle class and thousands of Zimbabweans fled for greener pastures in neighboring countries.

Summary

Bad leaders come in all shapes and sizes. Mass killings and genocide are certainly good markers for an evil leader but a poor leader does not always need to be at the same level as Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin to be considered bad.

History is full of heads of state that were either way in over their heads or could simply not be bothered with the unique problems that their nations were dealing with. Perhaps through the study of history, we can spot similar patterns with our leaders in hopes of avoiding the same kinds of tragedies and mishaps in the future.

Connor Brighton July 30 2023 in History

That was just two examples. Monarchies often end up with a succession of bad or foolish leaders. Theocracies always turn awful because they all depend on the most talented snake-oil salesman convincing others that he knows what their silent and invisible god wants. It happens to Republics, of course. Some, like Germany or France, recover, usually at a ruinous cost. Some like Russia, just end up with a succession of bad rulers, no matter what they try. By Russian standards, Putin is actually somewhat benign, and believe me, that’s not saying much. On the rare occasions they get a competent and wise leader, such as Gorbachev, they promptly and utterly collapse despite that leader’s best efforts.

Americans have never been at this point before, and the fact that they have no real history of truly cruel and oppressive leaders makes them more vulnerable to this one. Americans used to see that lack as a strength and proof of the superiority of the Constitutional system. They had to do a lot of white washing to arrive at that conclusion, and America is known in Europe as a country that regrows its virginity on a regular basis. In truth, Americans are no better or no worse than the population of any other land, and like all the other nations that have been faced with imminent disastrous dictatorship, they will find they need to resist and fight the problem before it completely subsumes the land. If they don’t, they face decades of ruin and deprivation.

Will enough Americans see the danger in time?

 

 

 

 

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