Tag: Gavin Newsom

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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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The Fall Approaches — Wild, hot July presages

The Fall Approaches

Wild, hot July presages

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 24th, 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Well, it’s been a week.

The Jan 6 committee wrapped up what turned to only be the first round of public hearings, showing beyond any possible doubt that not only did Trump fail to act to end the riot (he inspired) to protect Congress and his own Vice President, but that he did fail to act as a matter of cold calculation. Combined with the rest of the evidence the committee presented over the past three weeks, there’s little room for doubt that he planned to ignore the results of the vote, claim he won anyway, and stage a coup in order to stay in power. In most countries, a leader behaving in such a manner would have been hanged by now. Trump is lucky in that the United States is somewhat less barbaric, despite his own best efforts to coarsen the country. He won’t get hanged, but I won’t complain if he dies in prison.

Trump’s die-hard contingent, along with Rupert Murdoch’s fascists-for-hire squad, are still trying to pretend the hearings are just a partisan kangaroo court.

Oddly enough, it was originally going to be eight Democrats and seven Republicans, but McCarthy hit on the cute idea of putting members who may have participated in the attempted overthrow onto the committee. Pelosi rejected the two worst candidates, and McCarthy, in one of the most self-destructive snit fits in the history of Congress, withdrew all Republican candidates, leaving the Democrats to select the committee themselves. They did include two Republicans, both deeply conservative. And of course, most of the witnesses were Republican, including more than a few Trump loyalists. Anyone claiming the hearings were partisan didn’t watch the hearings, and is just depending on what the fascist media, Fox, OAN and Newsmax, are ‘interpreting’ for them.

We had gotten used to an endless parade of farcical “investigations” by Congress during the Clinton and Obama years (Whitewater, Monica, emails, Benghazi, and a bunch of other idiotic conspiracy theories) and so the public was stunned by how well Congress could do when the grownups were in charge. The hearings were sober, deliberate, methodical, relying heavily on sworn testimony and actual evidence, and have proved utterly devastating. Two Murdoch organs, the Wall Street Journal and the NY Post, threw Trump under the bus. They didn’t grow any ethics; they just realized Trump was now hopelessly damaged goods. They’ll probably start promoting Tucker Carlson as their new fascist proxy and hope he doesn’t implode as well.

Manchin of West Virginia ended 18 months of bad-faith “negotiation” with his supposedly fellow Democrats by shutting down proposals to deal with the climate crisis on the same day it hit 104 in London. A vast heat wave gripped the rest of the country as fires exploded across the west and throughout the boreal forests to the north. It’s going to get worse. Much worse.

Manchin and Trump are poster boys for why a sensible electorate should never vote for corrupt plutocrats: wealth doesn’t translate to good moral character and social responsibility. Usually it’s quite the opposite. Both men are vicious, greedy, stupid, and selfish. What makes any voter think they’re going to look out for the interests of said voter?

Boris Johnson’s sad primacy came to a shuddering halt, but don’t worry. It’s too late to save England from Brexit, and the Tories will just replace their version of Trump with someone a bit less cartoonishly evil. Not less evil, mind you. Just a bit less blatantly idiotic about it. Their version of Ron DeSantis, perhaps. It’s England; many toes will have to be stubbed before they stop blundering about in the dark.

There’s a new phrase in the political lexicon: “Hawlin’ Ass” It means to run away from the consequences of actions you deliberately caused. Josh Hawley always was an imbecile. Now he’s just a joke. Neil Gaiman once wrote, “It is unwise to summon that which you cannot dismiss.” It’s one thing to call up a mob, quite another to control one.

It’s heartening how many state Attorneys-General and D.A.s and judges are planning to simply defy the Cobb ruling and protect a woman’s right of access to abortion. The only thing crueler and more vicious than a religious zealot are the toadying politicians who try to cater to them. Frantic Christian fascists in Texas are already trying to make it illegal to leave the state in order to get an abortion. East Germany much? Having already tossed out the Ninth Amendment, the Supine Court will have to now toss the 14th Amendment. By the time those clowns are done, all that will be left is the second half of the Second Amendment.

At that point, all the mindless flag-wavers who love America and hate the United States will learn the hard way that America is just another patch of land, and it was the United States, and its constitution, that made the place special.

I think if the Republicans seize control of Congress, legitimately or not, next November, the United States is finished. Republicans want an autocratic theocracy, and there has never been one in history that didn’t rapidly turn corrupt, incompetent, and murderous. When you are the Authority, answerable only to gods, then you are an Authority with no accountability to anyone, and you can do what you bloody well please and hire shamans to explain how it’s all god’s will. It won’t end well. It never does.

There’s already talk of secession amongst blue states in the event that the GOP complete their coup. Gavin Newsom has taken up referring to our state as “Free California” as opposed to Florida, which is now a fascist shithole.

Don’t expect things to calm down. August might bring about a bit of a respite, but this fall is going to be a monster of a time. Back in April of 1945, the London Times wrote that “Events seem to be occurring with exceptional rapidity.”

This fall is going to be another one of those times.

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Recalling Newsom — Trumpenproletariat have a(nother) bad day

Recalling Newsom

Trumpenproletariat have a(nother) bad day

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 16th 2021

I was hoping for a 57-43 result in Tuesday’s California recall election. I had little doubt Governor Newsom was going to survive the recall process, but I wanted to see him get a convincing win. He got 60% of the vote in the last gubernatorial election, and between some instances of bad judgment, a rocky economy, the pandemic, and the fires, I expected to see some ‘slippage’ in support. Newsom isn’t perfect, but he’s at least reasonably competent. So I figured 57% of Californian voters would consider him worth keeping.

It looks like he won it with over 63% of the vote! Turnout state wide was 42%, slightly higher than I expected, and that may have been part of it. But I suspect that a lot of voters who didn’t have strong opinions on Newsom one way or the other came out and voted because they absolutely despise Trump and Elder and all their violent, vicious, and arrogant followers. People are horrified and appalled at stories of people being attacked for wearing masks—even kids at school—and hospitals being sued for not trying to treat COVID with worm medicine. There’s a growing realization that a large number of followers of Trump are fascists at best, Nazis at worst, and deeply oppose democracy and freedom for anyone other than themselves. Elder had the crack-brained notion that Newsom could be blamed for the fires and didn’t seem to realize that most people understood that it was climate change that has made the fires so much worse—and that Elder was one of the strongest voices claiming climate change wasn’t real.

Obviously there are Republicans who don’t subscribe to the filthy and corrupt views of Trump and Elder. But they didn’t apparently didn’t bother to turn out to vote. Elder got 42% of the ‘replace’ vote, and the second two candidates, both conservative moderates, failed to get 9% apiece. And most of the rest of the field were absolute clowns, ranging from Jenner who managed to support a woman’s right to choose AND the Texas anti-abortion law, to the goofball with the bear for a running mate. Elder, a poisonous blend of Trump, Rush Limbaugh and Uncle Ruckus, was the candidate of choice of a large plurality of Republicans.

The GOP is a diseased and ethically broken party, antithetical to normal American values and standards, corrupt, cruel and convinced they deserve to rule us. Less than 20% of them found a way to vote for a normal candidate who wasn’t trying to destroy the United States and disenfranchise most Americans.

As the results rolled in, Newsom tweeted, “Californians voted ‘YES’ to, ‘Women’s rights. Immigrant rights. The minimum wage. The environment. Our future.’ Newsom added that voters ‘rejected cynicism and bigotry and chose hope and progress.’”

I think that’s a pretty fair assessment, and kudos to Newsom for realizing that Californians saw a bigger picture than the political future of Gavin Newsom. Trump and his filthy acolytes weighed heavily on the minds of voters. They looked at the partisan and corrupt hacks Trump had put on the court and wanted no part of it. (And no, Amy Coney, saying you aren’t a partisan hack at the McConnell center doesn’t mean you aren’t a partisan hack; it just means you can make such a ridiculous claim in such absurd surroundings with the total lack of self-awareness of the standard religious zealot.)

Californians looked at the utterly demented verging on murderous actions of various red-state governors and realized that Governor Larry Elder would be killing thousands of Californians with the same lunatic adherence to the gospel of Saint Donald.

People who lived among the chaparral fires of central and southern California got tired of being told it was their fault because they didn’t manage the forest properly. And those of us in the forested areas got tired of being told that proper management meant cutting the mature commercial stuff and leaving the doghair and understory.

The vote came against a backdrop of scandal and mobs at the gates. The fencing went back up around the capital against possible violence during Saturday’s J6 rally. Cases against the insurrectionists were delayed, not because of Republican foot-dragging, but because the amount of evidence against them continues to grow at a pace the lawyers can’t keep up with. Reports came out that a top American general, Mark Milley, told the Pentagon to clear it with him in the event that Trump would order a nuclear strike in the final days of his presidency. Think about that for a minute. Trump and the Republicans turned the military into a comedy by Stanley Kubrick.

Larry Elder showed that he was entirely a creature of Trump by posting on his website, declaring he had unearthed hundreds of case of malfeasance and fraud at the polling stations all across California. Most people, aware of the duplicitous and dishonest efforts of Republicans to overturn the results of the 2020 election, would have been doubtful anyway. But Elder couldn’t even be arsed waiting for the actual voting to occur: he posted all this the day before the election.

Elder doesn’t think his supporters are idiots. He knows they are.

Trump and the idiot trumpenproletariat that support him aren’t going away soon. In addition to religious nuts, there is no shortage of corrupt and partisan hacks, and bountiful flat-earthers and anti-science clowns to keep Trump going for some time to come.

But the recall election shows the actual political weakness of Trump’s fools’ parade, and the results deeply undermine their claims to be the heirs to the American dream.

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