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Rachel Maddow has a bit of wisdom that comes in handy a whole lot when it comes to Republicans: Watch what they do, not what they say. Republicans are liars, thieves, fascists, human garbage in every way you can think of. They are also very good at reading the tea leaves when it comes to their political future. After all, the most important thing to an elected Republican is holding onto power, especially their own.

This is why I’ve been making a lot of noise about Republicans and the filibuster since early last year. The fact that they will not get rid of it means they are not convinced Donald Trump and his fascist regime will survive past 2028.

Fast forward to now. Republicans need the SAVE Act. It’s a national voter suppression law, and the only thing that can stop them from being annihilated in the midterms and 2028. I’m pretty sure they called it the SAVE Act because they designed it to save them from Trump.

But there’s a problem:

Some Republicans want to kill the filibuster, but most of them are flat-out refusing, just like I said they would. Why? For exactly the reasons I’ve been saying. Without the filibuster, Republicans risk being wiped out by a Democratic majority passing bills ending gerrymandering, voter suppression, overturning Citizens United, making Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states, etc. etc.

Just as importantly, some of them are smart enough to see handing control over state elections to the federal government as pure suicide, something else I’ve been saying. The SAVE Act sounds great, in theory. It would allow the regime to control elections, meaning they would be able to rig them at will. But that is a one-way street. Once state Republicans hand over control, they cannot just snap their fingers and get it back.

Remember, Trump and his group of bootlicking fascists are really bad at their jobs. They are wildly unpopular and becoming moreso every day. Stephen Miller may have dreams of ICE being his iron fist, subjugating the peasant rabble, but how’s that working out in Minneapolis? A mid-sized city known for…being pleasant? I dunno…did anyone outside of the Midwest actually know anything about Minneapolis before it kicked Miller and his Gestapo in the teeth?

If ICE can’t conquer Minneapolis, and they couldn’t conquer Los Angeles or Chicago or any of the other cities they’ve invaded so far, they’re not going to be much of an occupying force, now or ever.

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But still, the SAVE Act, right? Total control over state elections! Sure, that’s awesome. But only if the government stays in Republican hands. That’s where the Republican certainty that Trump is not the tyrant to end the American experiment comes into play. Like I’ve explained before, the SAVE Act + Democratic President = Doom for the GOP.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s Mitch McConnell, soon-to-be-dead Republican Senator from Kentucky:

McConnell argued passing the legislation could amount to "laying the groundwork for a leftwing election takeover" if Democrats retake the White House and Congress, as it would "make it easier ... to use more sweeping mandates to carry out a complete federal takeover of American elections" in the future. The measure also overrides states' authority to conduct their own elections, he argued.

When McConnell says “a leftwing takeover,” what he means is “red states will no longer be able to cheat in their elections.” Democrats running red-state elections would put an end to all of the “legal” shenanigans Republicans use to suppress the vote. An actual free and fair election would mean devastating losses for Republicans. And that’s before we even consider an end to gerrymandering and Citizens United.

So Republicans are resisting ending the filibuster because they’re afraid of what Democrats will do with that kind of power. They’re also resisting their own election law because they’re afraid of what Democrats will do with that kind of power.

If you’re a would-be tyrant and your own party is convinced, absolutely convinced, you will not be in power in a few short years, you are a failure. Your “loyal” supporters are keeping an eye on the exit and already plotting what comes next. What comes after you, the dictator-for-life.

Republicans are afraid. They’re afraid of us, the public they thought they had crushed under the heel of their jackboots. This November, let’s show them what fear really means as we crush them under a blue wave so vast, all of Trump’s schemes will mean nothing. Then the real work begins. Accountability. Consequences. Exposure. Dismantling the corruption and fascism until the only thing left standing by 2028 is a smoking husk where once stood the mighty Fourth Reich.

Trump is going down. Republicans know it, and they’re trying to avoid his coming destruction.

Good luck with that, fellas. Be seeing you at Nuremberg II, Electric Chair Boogaloo.

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There are only 258 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Have you had a look at the pantload Trump has nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations? His name is Jeremy Carl, a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, a parking garage for right-wing fools and outright racists who are between jobs in the federal government. Carl is a Holocaust denier and author of The Un-Protected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. That would be pretty much all you need to know about this asshole. He’s one of those screaming racists the MAGA right has dressed up in a suit on given a haircut and put forth to represent what they figure is racism cleaned up enough for government work. He’s frequently referred to as a white nationalist, as if exchanging “supremacist” for “nationalist” is going to make him more palatable.

Carl wouldn’t even be worth mentioning in polite company if the job to which they want him confirmed hadn’t become an unexpectedly hot potato after this year’s Munich Security Conference, a Cold War relic that was begun in 1963, when the USSR was threatening Europe on a daily basis with so-called “theater nuclear weapons” that could wipe out the entirety of Europe in about a nanosecond. Every year, a whole bunch of the world’s national security professionals get together in Munich to discuss how best to protect the West from everybody East of Poland and the Baltics, which for those without an atlas handy, would be Russia and China.

The Munich Security Conference became a thing in 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine, giving the national security professionals something real to talk about for the first time in quite a while. Everybody in Europe and Canada and the U.S. pulled together to support Ukraine, and things stayed pretty stable until Trump took office in 2025 and sent Vice President Bible Thumper to Munich to scold everyone and tell them a new sheriff was in town, and he wanted five percent of European nations’ GDP contributed to NATO, and by the way, all you guys we’ve been best friends with since 1941 have gotten the whole democracy thing all wrong. We didn’t mean it when we said we were opposing totalitarianism and wanted to “tear down that wall” after all. What we really meant was, you’ve got to stop letting in all those brown and black and Muslim people and clean up the whole “free speech” thing we used to talk about. What we mean now is, Europe is for white people and free speech is for the following people…kind of like Viktor Orban is doing in Hungary. And oh, by the way, Trump’s buddy Vlad isn’t such a bad guy, because he’s been attacked and vilified and discriminated against just like Trump.

That didn’t go over very well in Europe. So, this year, Trump sent “Little Marco” Rubio, his house Velvet Glove to Munich to make nice. The problem Little Marco had was that Trump’s White House had recently released its National Security Strategy which said pretty much nothing bad about Vlad and Russia and lots of bad shit about Europe, which was accused of having become “unrecognizable” because of the “civilizational erasure” of its immigration policies. That would be, in case you don’t have a copy of Mein Kampf handy, European nations are letting too many people who are not white and Christian through their borders.

The right wing in this country has a convenient shorthand for this attitude called “the great replacement theory,” which holds that there is some kind of conspiracy by someone to “replace” white people with Black and Brown and Other people, which they fear would make the United States “unrecognizable” by about 2040, or so the demographic estimates say.

So, the solution to all of these “civilizational” problems is to appoint a screaming Holocaust denying, great replacement theorizing, White People defending lunatic to the position in the State Department that is charged with seeing to international organizations and meetings like the Munich Security Conference. Jeremy Carl had some problems last week at his Senate hearing, however. Asked by Senator Chris Murphy what he meant when he referred to the “erasure of white culture,” in his book and his writings for the Claremont Institute, Carl stammered out a string of blather. What is different about “white culture,” Murphy wanted to know. Carl explained that the “white church is very different from the black church in terms of its tone and style on average.” Uh-oh. What could be next? “Food ways could be different,” Carl explained.

You could almost see Senator Murphy wondering if he was going to “go there” and mention the Super Bowl show that had riled up the Right so badly only a few days before. Carl did not disappoint: “Music could be different. You look at the Super Bowl halftime show that was not in English.”

A look of astonishment on his face, Murphy asked, “So our ability to access white churches, or white food, or white music is being erased?” Suddenly, it was as if Carl had been waiting for a pitch he could hit out of the park: “I’m concerned with the majority common American culture, that we had for some time, that particularly through mass immigration, has become balkanized, and again, I’m not running away from my comment, and I’m not apologizing for it.”

Apparently not satisfied that he had made himself clear to Senator Murphy, Carl took to Xitter after his testimony to explain himself: “The ‘White culture’ that I was referring to was simply the culture of the overwhelming majority of Americans who lived here prior to the passing of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, which radically transformed American demographics. It incorporated everything from the sports we played (football, baseball etc.) to the foods we ate (Hamburgers, pizza etc.) to the music we listened to and the TV shows we watched.”

Yeah, that’s the problem all right. You just can’t find a good burger or pizza or Perry Como song or “Leave It to Beaver” show on TV anymore, can you?

This guy is the person Trump wants to represent the United States on world stages such as the DAVOS and Munich Security conferences. We won’t even get into the idiocy of his mention of pizza that was here before the evil Hart-Cellar Act came along and substituted Thai food or something even weirder. And of course we won’t get into the fondly-recalled Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the precursor to the evil Hart-Cellar that was designed to specifically limit immigration from Southern Europe, like say, Italy, with all those pizzas that would come in and “replace” burgers.

In fact, this is one of those places where I just want to give up trying to make sense of these fools. Rubio babbled on in his speech at the Munich Security Conference about our “shared” culture by mentioning the Rolling Stones, as if citing a British rock and roll group whose first two albums were devoted entirely to covers of Black blues, and whose music remains rooted in what we might call “Black culture” rather than “White culture” made any more sense than Jeremy Carl and his babble.

What are these people thinking? Nothing, is all I can figure. I guess what they’re doing is reacting in a quite natural way to their own instincts, which are racist to the core. This is the government that is now running things in Washington D.C. and is in charge of our national defense and what remains of our standing in the world. It’s the government that just murdered two American citizens while trying to rid this country of people who they believe do not represent “White culture.” It’s the government that wants to appoint a Holocaust denier racist loon to a high position in the Department of State.

It’s the government of Donald Trump.

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On question about how artificial intelligence will affect jobs and productivity, the honest answer is that the actual empirical evidence is pretty thin. In part, this is because the new AI tools have arrived so recently, and are evolving so quickly, that don’t yet have much experience with their effects–or much data to separate the effects of AI from other changes in the economy. Eric Fruits and Kristian Stout offer an overview of what the emerging evidence has to say in “AI, Productivity, and Labor Markets: A Review of the Empirical Evidence” (International Center for Law & Economics Issue Brief, February 5, 2026). For those just getting up to speed on the subject, one especially useful part of the article is that the reference list is annotated–that is, there’s a brief discussion of what angle is taken by each of the references, with weblinks as possible.

The authors emphasize that most of the predictions about effects of AI are essentially driven by underlying assumptions: what share of tasks in in what share of jobs might be affected by AI; to what extent will AI complement workers and shift the tasks that they do in a given day, or replace them; how quickly will AI diffuse across varying sectors of the economy; how quickly will complementary investments be made to support the effects of AI (in everything from electric power generation to education to robotics); if AI requires large-scale organizational redesign, how long does that take; will AI expand overall output or make the distribution of income more unequal; and so on and so on. Choose your assumptions, and you can choose your outcome. As the authors point out, for example, its also possible to have effects that start in one direction and then swerve to another direction: for example, it’s straightforward to build a “J-curve” theory in which the adjustment to a new technology first has a negative effect during a transition period as firms face the cost of making adjustments, but then later has a very positive effect.

However, some themes are begining to emerge from actual research on the use of AI in different settings, like call centers, accountants, law students doing complex legal tasks, software developers, professional translators, randomized experiments with groups given certain tasks to perform, and others. Here are some themes that emerge:

First, such studies consistently show substantial gains in specific areas of both quantity and quality of output.

Second, the gains can be highly variable, even on tasks that may appear similar. For example, a given AI tool might be enormously helpful and reliable for certain tasks or up to a certain level of complexity–but then become highly unreliable beyond that point. Those using the tool may see that it works well in lots of cases, and then start trying to use it everywhere–even where it doesn’t work well. Thus, several of the studies emphasize the need for “verification protocols” to double-check quality of output and to provide feedback to users.

Third, another theme across these studies is “skill compression,” as the authors note: “Across settings, micro-level evidence points to skill compression. AI tools disproportionately boost output among lower-performing workers, narrowing performance gaps within job categories. This pattern recurs across productivity studies and carries distributional implications: AI can reduce inequality within occupations, even as it reshapes demand for certain entry-level roles.” In other words, access to AI tools may have the biggest benefit for the productivity of workers with less experience or skill, and smaller benefits for workers who already have greater skills. (This pattern may also help to explain some evidence that the number of jobs in sectors exposed to AI for young workers may have fallen: when AI boosts productivity of these younger workers, firms end up hiring fewer of them.)

Fourth, the studies of AI and jobs do not involve a random selection of jobs. Instead, the studies tend to focus on jobs where it seems intuitively plausible that the gains might be substantial. Thus, it would be clearly incorrect to extrapolate the patterns from individual studies across the economy as a whole.

Fifth, the new AI tools seem to be leading to a surge of new companies. Moreover, these companies are often smaller in terms of employment than average start-ups in the past. authors write: “AI substitutes for managerial, operational, and technical tasks that previously required additional hires or cofounders. By lowering the minimum viable team size, AI reduces entry costs, increases the number of entrants, and strengthens downstream competition.” The emerging pattern here may be large and concentrated “upstream” companies doing the foundational research on AI and owning the actual computing power, w while the new startups may be smaller competitive “downstream” users of this technology. Of course, the share of these start-ups that eventually succeed and grow it not yet clear.

Sixth, the growth of the new AI companies depend on other factors in the economy: availability of finance, a non-hostile and non-fragmented regulatory environment, a supply of science and engineering workers, capacity for training new workers, capacity for computing power and supporting infrastructure (like electricity and telecommunications).

I think we don’t yet have a clear sense of what these AI tools will actually be in the medium term of, say, 5-10 years. (See above discussion of how assumptions will determine predictions.) But I strongly suspect that no high-income country, if it wants to remain a high-income country, is going to be able to a to sidestep and avoid the new AI technologies. It’s worth remembering that in the long-run, the average standard of living in a society rises when the average productivity per worker rises. In turn, greater productivity pretty much always requires change, sometimes disruptive change.

The post Some Evidence on AI, Productivity, and Labor Markets first appeared on Conversable Economist.

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for over 15 years, and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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One of the things I’ve learned about white nationalists is that if you let them talk, they will expose just how fucking stupid they are. You really don’t have to be witty or insightful or ask deep, probing questions. They do all the heavy lifting because, ultimately, these peak racist white men are fucking imbeciles. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be white nationalists in the first place.

We saw this happen last week on national TV as Senator Chris Murphy (D-Hero) asked a few simple questions and let Jeremy Carl, a Trump nominee, eviscerate himself.

Trigger warning: Watching Carl crash and burn is so cringey and embarrassing, it’s hard to watch.

It is pretty funny watching Sen. Murphy and the people behind him start laughing, though.

I haven’t written about this in a long time, but if you ever have the chance, ask a dumbfuck white nationalist or some other nitwit pounding their chest about “white pride” and “white identity” blablabla to explain it. Explain what the fuck they’re so proud about. It really is hilarious to watch them flail about. It’s like asking a dog to explain 2+2. It should be really simple. Basic stuff. But they can’t. Ever.

Dogs have an excuse, of course. They’re dogs. Cute. Man’s Best Friend. Not mentally equipped to do math. Can’t speak.

Racist white men, though? Marginally smarter than dogs. A lot less cute. No one’s best friend. Not mentally equipped to do much of anything except be a precious little snowflake. Can, unfortunately, speak and they never EVER shut the fuck up.

Still, white pride and white identity are the core of literally everything they do. It’s the foundation of their temple of hate and violence. You’d think they would be able to explain it in granular detail and at great length. Instead, they humiliate themselves every single time.

I know this because I stumbled across this phenomenon maybe 15-17 years ago on Facebook. This was during my “Who the fuck are these assholes?” phase, back when I was trying to learn what motivated the American right. It turned out to be way less complicated than I thought. It’s racism and misogyny, that’s it. Nothing else. But I didn’t know that at the time.

Still, I started poking around right-wing Facebook. This was back before Facebook was taken over by right-wing propaganda, so I had to go find it. But I did, and I found several groups filled with patriotic, ‘Murika-lovin’ white people who were just so darned packed with white pride and love for whiteness.

I asked the simplest of questions: What is it about whiteness that you’re proud of?

I quickly discovered what Sen. Murphy showed the nation: These racist motherfuckers had no goddamn idea what whiteness was. None whatsoever. I alternated between laughing and being really mad. How the fuck do you masturbate over the color of your skin all the time without being able to explain why? Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?! How do you not know what white pride is?!

That wasn’t entirely true, though. They didn’t know what whiteness was, but they sure as fuck were eager to tell me what whiteness wasn’t.

Not one conversation I had failed to talk about Black Pride and Hispanic Heritage Month. Why does B.E.T. exist? When do we get a White Pride Month?! On and on and on about this group and that group and everything and everyone else EXCEPT whiteness.

They really could never tell me about whiteness by itself. They could only talk about it in reference to other groups, groups they despised. You can see the hapless dimwit Carl struggle the same exact way. He cannot explain white culture without referencing Black culture or Asian culture as a reference point.

Here’s the Big Secret1 why, and, frankly, I doubt Carl and most racist dipshits even understand this: Whiteness is, and always has been, a culture of exclusion. Whiteness exists to define outgroups in order to preserve the power of whoever we decide is “white.” It’s a photographic negative. It only exists in relation to what it isn’t.

It amuses me greatly that Carl talks about the Irish as being a part of his precious white identity and white culture because it wasn’t that long ago that the Irish were considered “not white.” Not only were they “not white,” they were quite literally considered equal to Blacks.

Ye Olde Racism was not fucking subtle.

This is the difficulty racist shitheels like Carl face when spewing their nonsense. The core of their belief, as Sen. Murphy says, is that white culture is superior. That being white is better. But the only reason these knuckledragging assholes can give is “White is better because it means I’m not Black/Latino/Asian/Arabic/A Dirty Jew.”

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Saying that out loud, of course, sounds racist because it is racist. So they can’t really say that. They WANT to say it, but they can’t because racists always have to cloak themselves in victimhood. Announcing to the world that you’re superior and everyone you hate is inferior, so that’s why you should be in power, makes it exceptionally difficult to maintain the perpetual fiction you’re a martyr. “Boo hoo! Woe is me! Why can’t all these lesser races see that I’m their genetic master?!” is not a winning message.

Some of the more clever racist shitweasels tried to claim that white people invented everything. Accomplished everything. White men got us to the Moon blablabla. See? That’s why white people are the best!

That’s always fun because I politely ask them if white Russians really celebrate white Americans landing on the Moon. How about the British? The Swedish? How about the white Australians? Do they walk about bragging about how white people landed on the Moon? Or do they talk about Americans landing on the Moon and take no specific pride in it other than maybe, “Cool, the human race did that!”

The same goes for almost any invention, discovery, or achievement. No one except racist dingbats says “white people did that!” They talk about the country the person is from. National pride? Sure. White pride? Completely artificial.

Then comes the whining about Black pride and Asian pride and Latino pride and whine whine whine bitch bitch bitch. And again, if you cannot define your culture without referencing or contrasting someone else, you do not have a culture. Black culture is quite distinct. If you’ve ever watched a Black pride event, they don’t talk about anyone else but Black people and Black history. They don’t need to talk about anyone else. Same for Latinos and Asians, etc., etc.

Go to a white pride event, and all it’s about is how glad they all are not to be something other than white. And usually country music, which isn’t really white. It’s “borrowed” just like most white music. The most important element of any white pride event, of course, is crying big sobby tears about how your precious “white culture” is under attack. You know, the culture you can’t really define? But it’s 100% being destroyed! For sure!

Jon Stewart highlighted how ridiculous the whole white culture is being erased thing is last week:

Yeah, how tragic for Lee Brice and all the white people in America who can’t drink a beer, go fishing, and punch a trans kid in the face. My heart fucking bleeds for their suffering. Won’t someone think of their culture before it’s gone forever?!

Whiteness was always a construct. It was never anything but a schackle to put Those People in bondage to The Privileged. It’s why racists are so terrified of a future without white supremacy and white privilege. A world not designed to cater to them is a world where their mediocrity will no longer be hidden. Having to compete on a level playing field against people you’ve been taught are inferior and discovering you’re not actually special would be devastating. Better to burn it all down than allow that to happen.

That’s not going to happen, of course. The regime is going to fall, and their dreams of a Fourth Reich and permanent white power will die when Donald Trump and Stephen Miller (among so many others) flee the country.

Maybe someday, white people will develop an honest-to-goodness culture of their own. But that won’t happen until they stop defining themselves by what they aren’t. And that won’t happen until they stop allowing racism and misogyny be the animating forces of who they are.

Or maybe we’ll just stop pretending whiteness is real. That “white identity” even exists outside of racism and hate. God knows, fucking idiots like Jeremy Carl can’t explain it to themselves, so why the fuck should the rest of us bother listening to them? In the meantime, whenever you come across this trash online, just ask them to explain what they love so much about their whiteness and enjoy the show. Watching the handful of surviving brain cells malfunction is always entertaining. I promise you.

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There are only 259 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Kristi Noem’s Arizona Remarks Signal Trump Team’s Election Control Strategy

Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem’s portfolio has nothing to do with elections, but in Arizona last week she spoke words revealing the Trump administration’s bold intent to rig the 2026 and 2028 elections, which if successful means ending our liberties. Noem said:

“When it gets to Election Day, we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Lots of luck trying to find her words on the front page of newspapers or the network news shows, however. The excuses for not reporting this are simple: It’s unclear what she meant. It’s not news because it’s not new, just new phrasing. And since elections are not part of Noem’s portfolio her words aren’t significant.

On Friday Trump delivered further evidence of his foul intentions in an outrageously inappropriate speech to troops at Fort Bragg where he appeared beside a GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate.

“You have to vote for us,” he declared.

Fortunately, most of the soldiers remained silent, as they are supposed to. The light applause came from civilians who support Trump and his efforts to politicize our military. News coverage of this was greater than of Noem’s remarks, but still far from robust.

But bad news judgment aside, you should be alarmed at what Noem said. Let me explain the reasons.

Noem’s minions and defenders argue that by “right people” she means citizens and nothing more. That defense is beyond weak because non-citizen voting is extremely rare no matter how often Trump and his acolytes spread his lies.

The Heritage Foundation, source of Trump’s Project 2025 wrecking ball playbook, found only 24 instances from 2003 to 2023. That’s 24 votes out of billions for president, Senate and House over two decades. Bupkis.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian promoting organization with a solid reputation for being principled, denounced this lie just this month in clear terms: Trump’s Claims About Noncitizens Voting Are False. We Can Prove It.

Noem’s second point, about electing “the right leaders,” is harder to defend.

In normal times her remark would be treated as just urging votes for her party or her party segment. But that doesn’t work because the Trump administration considers any vote not for him and his chosen candidates to be illegitimate.

Dictator Donald reigns as the president of Red states and the punisher of Blue. He withholds Congressionally appropriated federal funds from Blue states and cities. He sends armed troops and masked ICE agents to occupy Blue zones. Trump and his cabinet constantly refer to “real Americans,” hoping to stigmatize those who stand up for freedom, integrity, and the rule of law as well as the educated and competent.

There’s no whitewashing Noem’s second part. Trump continues to lie that the 2020 election was stolen. His longtime adviser Steve Bannon said ICE agents will “surround” polling places this year. And as this MS Now report shows, Bannon is not alone in wanting ICE to intimidate voters who aren’t part of the MAGA cult.

Muddying Clear Waters

The most generous interpretation of Noem’s comments would note that she was speaking in Arizona about the proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act (H.R. 22/H.R. 8281). The so-called Save America Act is Trump’s effort  to restrict voting to people who support him and limit voting by anyone who favors other candidates for office. But since her position has zip to do with elections why is she speaking on this? And why is she speaking in what defenders have to say are less than clear terms?

The answer: muddying clear waters is a Trumpian conman game, a way to convey messages without being—he thinks—accountable.

Even if you accept that lame excuse, and I don’t, you should be alarmed at Noem’s efforts to divide Americans and pit us against one another. That’s how early-stage dictatorships work, before they get to the inevitable stage of mass purging of loyalists (like Noem) to ensure struct obedience to Dear Leader.

Following the first of many loyalist purges expect mass arrests of critics and opponents, holding people incommunicado without access to the courts (already being done to those swept up by ICE). Eventually despots turn to firing squads or their murderous equivalents, to maintain their illegitimate power. Think about Putin’s agents using African frog poison to kill opposition leader Victor Navalny and the ayatollahs executing and massacring many thousands of dissident Iranians.

So long as Trump remains in power his regime intends to rig future elections. Bannon, Noem, and Trump himself make that obvious. Not acting today to protect your and everyone else’s ballots will mean paying a much greater price tomorrow, assuming that, like me, you want to restore our democracy and live in an actual land of the free and the home of the brave.

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The post Rigging Elections, Trump Style appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Someday, we will get through this, and the regime will have fallen. We will look over the wreckage and the bodies, and people will still be asking, “How? How did this happen?” They will want sanitized answers like “America lost its way” or “We may never really understand. Only history can judge.”

But they won’t get those sanitized answers and the absolution they bring because there will be people absolute fire-breathing assholes just like me, standing there, with receipts.

“You want to know why and how this happened? Let me fucking tell you. A whole lot of extremely stupid fucking people voted their racism instead of their common fucking sense. These extremely stupid fucking people voted for literal white Christian Nationalists despite being the exact people literal white Christian Nationalists want to murder. Why? Because they thought the, and I cannot stress this enough, literal white Christian Nationalists, hated some of the same people THEY hated, so they thought they would be safe. They fucked around and we ALL found out.”

You know the story of how American Latinos fucked around and found out. We’re watching that play out in real time. Now let me tell you the story of American Muslims and what’s almost certainly about to happen to them.

You see, American Muslims, too many of them, thought that they could align themselves with the hatemongers of the Republican Party. It was a completely nonsensical alliance. They heaped scorn on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for something something “Gaza Gaza Gaza” while holding hands with Republicans to punch the LGBTQ community in the face.

There were a few things that made this “alliance” so historically stupid:

1. Could Biden have done better on Gaza? Maybe. Maybe not. We do not, in fact, control Israel. Netanyahu is a monster and he was always going to do what he’s doing. Biden and Harris were the only obstacles; the only thing holding him back.
   
   On the other hand, to even suggest Trump would not unleash absolute horror after he spent four years cozying up to Netanyahu and spewing hate at Muslims was to be willfully blind to reality. How has that worked out for Palestinians?
   
   Gaza facing worst economic collapse ever recorded, UN trade agency warns

   
   Malnutrition rates reach alarming levels in Gaza, WHO warns

   
   Israeli assaults make 2025 deadliest year yet for Palestinians

   
   Oh, and then there was this:

   

   Clearly, Trump is so much better for Gaza than Biden. But…no. I said back in November of 2024 that American Muslims who sided with Trump had signed the death warrant of Palestinians in Gaza. And so they have. But it was never going to stop with Gaza. They were putting their own necks on the chopping block. They were just too blinded by their own hate to see it.

2. That brings us to the next part of why this “alliance” with the GOP was insane from the start: Republicans hate Muslims. They spent twenty years waging a literal Holy Crusade in the Middle East, trying to lay waste to Islam. Not Islamic terrorists, but Islam itself. If you don’t recall, the Bush regime was very enthusiastic about this “clash of civilizations.”
   
   The Republican-controlled federal government persecuted Muslims in this country in ways that seem almost quaint now. Illegal domestic surveillance. Spying on houses of worship. Paying people to inform and then disappearing and torturing anyone they grabbed. Later, they would be shocked and stunned to discover the information was garbage.
   

   All while this was going on, right-wing media spread Islamophobia on a scale that would have made Jim Crow-era racists blush. Hate crimes spiked. Children were bullied. Women were assaulted. Homes were vandalized. Mosques were burned. But, hey, that was so long ago! I’m sure Republicans have gotten over all of that, right?
   
   No, they have not. Which brings us to the backstabbing part of the article:

What?! No fucking way! The Republican Party is going after Muslims?! The same Republican Party whose center of gravity is white Christian Nationalism is targeting American Muslims and whipping up fear and anger against a religious minority?! But how? Why? What could they possibly gain from stabbing their “allies” in the back after they rushed to embrace Donald Trump in the 2024 election (or at least stay home and not vote)?

Now, let’s be clear, there are not a lot of Muslims in the United States. There are, at most, 4.5 million. Maybe. They shifted hard to the right, but at least half of them still did not vote to slit their own throats. But an awful lot of them did. Palestinians paid a steep price for their stupidity, and now they’re going to pay as well.

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Here’s the thing: The shift in Texas is being portrayed as a response to the border “calming down.” That’s not entirely true. There are still hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border. Not nearly as many as two years ago, yes, but it’s hard to trust any numbers coming from the regime at this point. It’s definitely down, but how much for real? We can’t tell for certain. But that’s not the point. It could be double and Republicans would still be targeting Muslims.

These are the actual reasons for the shift in rhetoric:

1. The regime has been in power for over a year. It’s important to understand that the overwhelming majority of the hysteria over the border was manufactured by right-wing media and the GOP itself. It was designed to terrify racist white Americans with stories of hordes of dangerous, diseased, drug-dealing immigrants coming to rape their white women and steal both their jobs and all of their government welfare at the same time!

   

   But with the regime in power, it won’t do to keep fearmongering over immigrants swarming the border. If that were still happening, it would mean the regime is a failure. None may dare say such a thing! So, no more hysteria over the border allowed.

2. Texas is a border state, but I promise you, the message will go out all across the country: Islamophobia is in for 2026. Bashing Latino immigrants is wildly unpopular now because of Stephen Miller’s Gestapo. With the midterms barreling toward the doomed GOP at 90 MPH, they are desperate to talk about anything else. But! As I’ve mentioned and as we all know, the GOP is a white Christian Nationalist party. They are filthy fucking fascists. Racism and bigotry are all they know.
   
   They could lean into the trans thing again, but the 2025 off-year elections showed that attacking trans kids has lost its magic as a campaign issue. Just ask the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Virginia. I live here, and I don’t even remember her name. Chances are you don’t, either. She didn’t just lose after running a rabidly transphobic campaign; she was demolished in one of the worst routs Virginia has seen in over 30 years.1
   
   So…can’t talk about trans kids. Can’t talk about immigrants. Maybe talk about Black people? DO NOT TALK ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE. What about Muslims? We can always bash them, right? People are still afraid of terroism and we kind of want to go to war with Iran, don’t we?
   
   Yeah…that’s it! That’s the ticket! Roll out the Muslim-bashing!

It’s Fascism 101. There must always be a new threat (even if it’s an old one). There must always be a new out-group. There must always be someone to fear and hate. For over a decade, that out-group was Muslims. The hate never really stopped. It was just put on the back burner to simmer while trans kids and Latino immigrants got their turn in the frying pan of white Christian Nationalism rage. But now Muslims are getting their turn again.

They thought if they voted their hate, they would be welcomed into the coalition of bigots. After all, they hate the LGBTQ community, too! And even though the GOP professes to love Israel, we can all see the raging antisemitism roiling just under the surface. Aren’t we all brothers-in-arms against the insidious Jew menace?

Just like millions of Latinos voting Republican in hopes of earning their way into the good graces of the American right wing, millions of Muslims are about learn that same harsh lesson: You cannot join the Nazis if you are not a white Christian. They will not accept you. They will NEVER accept you. You will always be used for your vote and then weaponized to scare white people into voting against you when it’s more convenient for you to be the villain. And when they have the power to dispose of you, you will be scooped up and put into a concentration camp as an “Enemy of the State.”

I can’t imagine for a second why American Muslims thought it wouldn’t go this way. Why they thought Republicans would ever, in a million years, bring them into the fold. Why the rabidly xenophobic monsters of the right wouldn’t turn on them at the first opportunity.

But here we are, at the opening stages of the next phase of Republican fearmongering. By November, jihadists will be behind every corner. The border will be overrun with secret Islamic terrorists. Every mosque will be an undercover meeting place for ISIS.

I sure hope voting your bigotry was worth setting your communities on fire. Looks like 2026 is gonna be a rough year for you.

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There are only 262 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.