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 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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MAGAland is giddy after last week. The long-promised indictment of the long-hated James Comey is upon us! Now he will pay for his crimes! So many crimes! He’ll spend the rest of his life in prison! Maybe even the public execution QAnon has been demanding for years!

None of that will happen, of course. The case against Comey is so weak, the first Trump-appointed U.S Attorney who was ordered to fabricate the charges quit rather than engage in such a waste of time. Erik Siebert, a staunch conservative prosecutor, knew there was no way to win this case, and anyone bringing it to court would look like a moron. Which is why Trump found just the moron to do it in Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience.

Good luck!

This all happened after Trump ordered his puppet Attorney General to start indicting his enemies in a public tweet most people believe was supposed to be a private message. Supposed to be, but Trump was too stupid or deranged and accidentally made it public.

So…the great and mighty MAGA purge is upon. Trump will now rain down his revenge upon all who wronged him. What’s the problem? This is what Republicans have been dreaming of for years, isn’t it?

Well, not so much, it turns out:

Mr. Trump’s campaign to imprison, fire or otherwise punish his political foes and use government power to crack down on free speech he does not like has broken norms that stood for generations. But it has also established new standards for what a president can do that even some conservatives worry may come back to bite them. Power claimed by one party is then eventually available to the other. Limits ignored by one administration may no longer seem binding on the next.

If the precedent set by Mr. Trump takes hold, America may be entering a period when each new administration takes aim at the last one in a cycle of retaliation, a what-goes-around-comes-around pattern more familiar in authoritarian countries than in developed Western democracies. Even presidents more restrained than Mr. Trump may succumb to the temptation to follow at least some of his example.

The New York Times article is actually quite hilarious. It’s attempting to preemptively frame what happens after the regime falls as “retaliation.” It’s quite literally scolding Democrats in advance.

But the fear among the right and the legacy press is very VERY real. Last week, I explained how Republicans are not acting like a party convinced it will be in power forever. Hell, they’re not even convinced they’ll be in power after the midterms, much less after 2028.

If they don’t believe Donald Trump’s Stephen Miller’s Thousand-Year Reich is going to last past next year, they must be thinking about what happens when Democrats retake power and survey the damage Republicans have done.

This is where the flop sweat and mounting panic come in. Specifically, the concern over Trump shattering norms is keeping them up at night. And for good reason.

Since the Civil War, there has been one singular constant in American politics: We do not hold treasonous white racist men accountable for their actions.

We did not hang the leadership of the Confederacy.

We did not hang the leaders of the Business Plot.

We did not hang the seditious pro-Nazi members of the government (mostly Republicans) during and after WWII.

We did not imprison nearly enough of the treasonous criminals in the Nixon, Reagan, or Bush administrations.

Most importantly, after Trump led an insurrection at the end of four years of lawlessness, we dithered and “followed norms.” Because we don’t like to hold administrations accountable for the crimes they commit.

It’s really important to understand that this “norm” exists overwhelmingly to protect Republicans. Are Democrats perfect saints? Of course not. But when it comes to violating the law, Republicans vastly outperform, which is why the press does not directly compare the lawbreaking by the two parties. Rather, they resort to their favorite method of obscuring the truth: Bothsiderism. Because if everyone is guilty, then no one is.

Of course, this is like comparing a local shoplifter to a corporate embezzler. Sure, they’re both thieves, but one is stealing a couple of hundred dollars while the other steals millions. Only a lying sack of shit, or the legacy press,1 would treat them the same.

But Trump is shattering this norm of “looking forward for the good of the nation.” Prosecuting “political enemies” is a thing now, and Trump will continue full speed ahead. The press will have a choice: Normalize it to protect Trump from a damaging public backlash or make a lot of noise about how dangerous and terrible this is to protect Republicans from future repercussions.

They will, of course, normalize it. It’s an ingrained reflex at this point. But they know, THEY KNOW, how dangerous this is for Republicans. The legacy press knows, just as Republicans do, that Trump is not the glorious leader of a Thousand-Year Reich. Unless things go absolutely perfectly for the GOP, the regime will fall and Democrats will retake power.

Then, seditious white racist men of the right have a problem.

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The norms that protected them for over 150 years are gone. Trump destroyed them. The public will no longer recoil at “political enemies” being arrested and charged. It won’t matter how loudly the press and the GOP squeal that it’s all a witch hunt and unfair and politically motivated. They set the standard under Trump and taught the public that this is now normal.

Here’s the thing that’s really freaking them all out:

Under Trump’s revenge campaign, it’s unlikely a single person will see a single day in jail. The cases will be sloppy and stupid and politically motivated. Assuming grand juries don’t toss them out of a window, judges will be merciless, and regular juries unsympathetic. “Being mean to Trump” is not actually a crime.

Trump doesn’t necessarily want to put his enemies in prison, anyway, although that would be an awesome bonus. He wants to drag them through a trial. He wants to cost them time and money and have his propaganda machine drag their name through the mud. In other words, he wants them to suffer the indignity he experienced as a (legitimate) criminal defendant.2 Because how fucking DARE anyone hold the Great and Powerful Donald J. Trump accountable for the crimes he committed?! That is for lesser beings!

He wants his enemies humiliated and hurt. When the cases fail, he’ll just use that to rail against the courts and further weaken the system because that was always part of Project 2025 and the dictator’s handbook. An independent judiciary is intolerable to fascism.

On the other hand, and this is the source of consternation, when Democrats come for Republican criminals, those cases WILL stick. Are Democrats better at fabricating charges? Are the courts stacked with corrupt liberal judges? Are juries tainted with Antifa?!

No, of course not. Republicans are criminals. Worse, they’re stupid and arrogant criminals who flaunt their criminality in our faces, confident they’ll never be held accountable. The regime brags about the laws they’re breaking because the press has rewarded them for their brazen corruption over and over again.

After all, if the regime were REALLY committing crimes, they wouldn’t be confessing…would they?

The press knows better, but they’re complicit, so they help with the cover-up. But that only works if we maintain the norms Trump is currently smashing. Whoops.

The New York fucking Times is showing us how they plan to protect Republicans after the regime falls, but I do not believe it will work. They will only put up mild protests as Trump continues his revenge tour, preferring to focus the bulk of their coverage on normalizing the disgraceful weaponization of the DoJ. By the time the regime falls, it will be far too late to pivot back to “We don’t prosecute the opposition! That’s an outrageous abuse of power!”

And once those cases go to court, the glut of evidence will see Republican after Republican convicted and handed down VERY long prison sentences.

The GOP will rage. The press will be professionally appalled. After all, there’s nothing more un-American than holding treasonous white racists accountable for the criminal actions they take. We just don’t DO that here! It’s not fair! It’s not proper! It’s indecent!

Well, too fucking bad. Should of thought of that before you paved the way for fascism. Because when the regime falls, and it will, we are coming for all of the criminals. The legacy press will demand we “look forward” in order to “heal the country.” That “revenge" will “divide the nation.” But they don't give a flying fuck about that. The press, like the GOP, is terrified of consequences. They know that facing the music for what they’ve done will cripple the GOP for decades. That by the time they recover, there won’t be enough racist white men left to sustain a white nationalist movement and rebuilding a new fascist movement without white racism is hard. Breaks my heart. Really.

In the meantime, pay attention to how the press covers the Trump regime manufacturing charges against its enemies. Pay VERY close attention to the language they use to blame “both sides” and to normalize it. And then compare it to how they demand Democrats never EVER charge a single Republican when the regime falls. That will tell you everything about who the legacy press works for and, believe me, it will not be the rule of law, the people of the United States, or democracy.

If they’re freaking out now, they will be hair on fire screaming in terror when the regime falls and the bill comes due for the criminals of the Republican Party. All thanks to Donald Trump’s unquenchable thirst for revenge. Ha. Ha. Ha.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 35 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted yesterday by a grand jury in Richmond, Virginia on two lame-o made up counts – perjury and obstruction of justice by committing perjury. The U.S. Attorney who went before the grand jury and presented the government’s case was Lindsey Halligan, whose only qualification for being anywhere near a grand jury is that she graduated from law school and passed the bar. She is in her job because she went to one of the museums in Washington D.C. earlier this year and took note of a display of art that mentioned race. She made a big deal of this, so Trump hired her to work in the White House and put her in charge of stripping DEI or woke or something anyway from museums in Washington. Halligan was the only signature on the indictment. The previous U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whom Trump appointed, had refused to take the Comey case to the grand jury and was fired by Trump. Assistant U.S. attorneys in the office also would not participate in the prosecution of the former FBI Director.

But this column is not about Halligan, it’s about Donald Trump. Comey and Trump go way back to one of the early days of Trump’s first administration when Trump noticed him across a room full of DOJ and FBI people he was meeting. At Trump’s behest, Comey walked across the room and shook hands with Trump. Comey is very, very tall, like basketball player level tall. He towered over Trump. Trump doesn’t like to be towered over, so he invited Comey to the White House for a private dinner, during which he apparently planned on intimidating the very tall FBI director so he could keep Comey in line.

Trump infamously asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to him – to Trump – multiple times at the dinner. Comey demurred each time, finally pledging that he would always be honest in carrying out his job. Not long after that, while testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, in answering a question from a congressman, Comey said that the FBI had had the Trump campaign and Trump himself under investigation for its contacts with Russians since July of 2016. Trump fired Comey, who still had six or seven years left on his 10 year term as FBI director, and then he threw a fit when he learned that Comey, on the day he was fired, had been in Los Angeles on FBI business and flew on the official FBI Gulfstream jet back to Washington to clear out his desk.

Comey gave congressional testimony damaging to Trump and continued to speak out about his abuses of power for nearly a decade. Trump has been bellowing about Comey ever since. I’m sure you have seen some of his recent bellowing – Comey is “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to,” “he has been bad for this country for so long,” Come is “a dirty cop,” and on and on.

Asked about the indictment of Comey at a press availability at the White House, Trump claimed not to know anything about it. Later, he crowed that Comey is “a destroyer of lives” and that he must “pay a very big price” for lying.

Everything that Trump has said about Comey, especially his statement that he is “guilty as hell,” will be used by Comey’s attorney when he files a motion to dismiss the indictment for selective and vindictive prosecution. Legal experts are saying there is ample evidence in Trump’s own statements to prove vindictive prosecution, so it is thought that Comey will prevail with that motion.

Donald Trump has a lot of problems. Comey is just one of them. Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is coming back to bite him in his copious ass.

But one of the biggest problems Trump has is getting competent lawyers to work for him. Halligan is just the latest example of this problem. Kash Patel is another. His posts on X about the killing of Charlie Kirk were out of control. He has been regularly flying back and forth to Las Vegas on the official FBI Gulfstream for unknown reasons ever since he took office. Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, managed to bury Trump under a blizzard of Epstein mania with a single statement at a cabinet meeting that amounted to dismissing the entire Epstein matter as a nothing-burger. The DOJ under her alleged “leadership” has shed hundreds of experienced attorneys who have worked there for years.

Donald Trump wants to wreak vengeance on his enemies. He treats the Department of Justice as if it’s his personal Department of Retribution. No president in our history has used his position to punish his political enemies like Trump has. Not even Nixon attempted anything even approaching what Trump is doing. Trump wants to use the DOJ to prosecute donors to the Democratic Party such as George Soros, whose only offense is supporting the political party that opposes Trump. He is going after his former national security adviser and U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, because Bolton wrote a book that Trump didn’t like. The FBI has already searched Bolton’s home and office, and there are reports that he will be indicted for some sort of offense involving retention of classified information, with which Trump has much experience.

Trump’s obsession with revenge puts us all at risk. If he can indict James Comey and put a target on the back of Senator Adam Schiff because he ran one of the two impeachments of Trump, none of us is safe.

Trump associates his ability to punish his political enemies with power. The power he has as president is vast because it is written into the Constitution and because he has been able to so completely control one of the two political parties in this country that it will do anything he tells it to do.

Trump’s campaign of revenge is going to backfire on him. It has already cost him much of the professional cadre of the Department of Justice that he needs to carry out his revenge campaign, because skilled top officials in the department have either resigned or been fired. So, Trump is left with the likes of the inexperienced Halligan as acting U.S. attorney in Virginia and the equally incompetent Alina Habba as acting U.S. Attorney in New Jersey.

At some point, it is going to occur to at least some of those currently working in the Trump administration that revenge cuts both ways: The next Democrat who becomes president will have the same prosecutorial powers Trump has arrogated to himself. Republicans who are out of power the next time the political worm turns could be subjected to investigations by a new FBI director and a new attorney general who are likely to remember what was done to otherwise innocent former government officials by Donald Trump and his revenge puppets.

Our politics could be consumed by a whirlpool of revenge and counter-revenge and counter-counter-revenge that will drive competent people out of government service because they don’t want to risk being destroyed by the political storm wrought by Donald Trump.

You would think that at some point, cooler heads might prevail, and things could go back to something approaching political normalcy.

And then you look at the current cast of characters on the Supreme Court and the political party that put them there and the ruling they made that presidents are beyond the law, and all the crap they’re doing with the “shadow docket,” and you think…

Not.

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If Donald Trump had showed up at the United Nations General Assembly with a gas can and a blowtorch, he would not have been much more subtle about his disdain for all that the 80-year-old organization stands.

What the world saw was an hour-long, belligerent rant against internationalism, global immigration, the climate “hoax,” and the UN itself was a nails-on-blackboard, blanket dismissal of treaties, cooperation and empathy writ large.

His remarkably rambling, ugly remarks skewered friends and foes alike in a gush of self-preening and rude difference with predecessors that both played fast and loose with fact and showed Trump incapable of distinguishing among gripes personal, public or political. It was all one long gripe, as freed from solution as from validation.

By now, you’ve heard the themes: Europe and other countries are letting themselves rot over migration and dissolution of national culture, over politically correct adherence to the “con job” of climate concern from “stupid people,” and over the thought of doing anything that would not involve adherence to Trump’s own outlook. It was easy to read a subtext of pressure for continuous unregulated business development and billionaire investment.

He spent much of his time re-buttering his own bread to credit himself with dubious achievements at odds with the obvious realities: He has ended seven wars (to the surprise of some of the combatants), he has turned the world away from nuclear war by dropping heavy bombs on Iran’s development facilities, ended inflation and runaway prices at home and is righting the globe against the evils of wind- and solar-powered technology.

And he clearly believes delusionally that he is a free speech crusader despite threats to prosecute political enemies, and a force for law and order, even if it means putting troops on U.S. streets. Coal is clean in Trump world, it is soldiers being killed in Ukraine and Gaza, not civilians, the strongest military is to declare peace and to attack cartels, regardless of international law. Night is day.

He couldn’t even stop himself from saying he would have done a better job as a developer for the aging UN building complex or claiming positive political polls. We can credit Trump mainly for not masking his true character.

An Inside-Out View

“What is the purpose of the UN?” asked Trump, if the world’s nations do not act as the U.S. wants – -in the Trump mold, the only way things should be. He mocked an institution of international debate and one that offers aid to the vulnerable as ineffective and wasteful of the dwindling U.S. support payments he is throttling.

He refuses to recognize UN intervention, then complains that it is insufficient — or worse, not promoting the interests of the United States.

As if we needed it spelled out, Trump insisted he only does business with leaders he likes and made sure to underscore that he likes Russia’s dictatorial Vladimir Putin more than others. Still, he called on Europe and NATO countries to stop all purchase of Russian oil, though the U.S. has withheld issuing sanctions for doing so.

The continuing wars from Russian invasion of Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas in Gaza provided a sobering background of reality not embraced by Trump’s long speech. If anything, the talking heads were taken with a change in attitude from world leaders towards the United States as Trump’s “America First” message is pushing alliances around the U.S. rather than with this country.

Among other things, Trump insisted that Christianity is the most persecuted religion on Earth, which may come as a surprise to Jews, Muslims (he attacked the Muslim London mayor personally), or even followers of the Dalai Lama.

The speech was prelude to individual meetings with other leaders and a press conference in which Trump said NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft that cross their border, but that U.S. backup “depends on the circumstances.” How’s that for an ally?

And then Trump turned around after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to say Ukraine should be supported — through NATO payments — to win back all its territory from a “paper tiger” Russia? Any questions here?

The ending note — a plea for countries to fight for their homelands and native cultures — was strangely at odds with his plea for recognition for a bristling United States that he insists is forcing peacemaking to break out among warring nations.

Is the world better off today than it was a year or two ago? Is it because of Trump?

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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 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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It’s no secret that the Trump regime is run by a twisted death cult. We knew back in 2018 when Adam Serwer gave us the proper framing when he said “the cruelty is the point.” But that was cruelty visited upon the people the right despised. Women. Blacks. Immigrants. Students. Children. The poor.

This? This is something else. This is a kind of cruelty that the public won’t even understand. That the MAGA base won’t even see, much less be able to furiously masturbate over, in their sick need to wallow in the suffering of others.

The cruelty of dangling a “treatment” for autism is something that cannot be understood unless you are an autism parent.

Let’s be clear on what we’re talking about here. We are not talking about the people with autism who can get up, get dressed, make their own food, go to school/work, and live a life more or less on their own terms. The majority of these autistic people either consider their autism a blessing or, at worst, a nuisance. Even if they consider it a major nuisance, it’s still a nuisance. Annoying, perhaps, but something they can live a functional life with, even if they would choose not to.

Instead, we are talking about the autistic people who cannot function on their own. Who cannot live life on their own terms. The children and adults who are so severely impacted by autism that they cannot be left unsupervised for long, lest they injure themselves. Or die from circumstances outside of their control.

My son Jordan is in this latter group. And we’re lucky. At 17, he’s on the more independent end of the scale. He can eat unassisted. He can use the toilet. He can shower and brush his teeth and floss, although he requires regular reminders to do these things properly. He can get dressed on his own. He can move about his school without an escort.

But Jordan cannot cross the street safely. We have been trying to teach him this for over a decade. Just last week, he still started to walk in front of a moving car, completely oblivious. I was there to stop him. And for the rest of his life, someone will always have to be there to stop him.

If Jordan is lost, he does not know how to ask for help. Or even really understand that he is lost. He knows our address but he’s not great with answering questions unless they’re asked in a very specific way and how would a stranger know how to ask? Fortunately, Jordan is very tall and very noisy, making him difficult to lose in a crowd. But not impossible. That 10 minutes I lost track of him in the Museum of Natural History a few years ago were the most panicked I’ve been since he was little and swallowed a peach pit.

Jordan cannot be left home alone for more than 15-20 minutes. Not because he does anything dangerous, but if a fire broke out in the building, he wouldn’t leave. He would sit at his desk and die from smoke inhalation before even thinking about escaping. If he did hurt himself while home alone, he wouldn’t think to go get help. He would just wait, crying in pain, until mommy or daddy came home.

So, no, autism is not a blessing for Jordan. And his autism is mild in comparison to millions of children and adults on his end of the spectrum. There are so many others who cannot function even at his limited level. Who cannot use the toilet. Who can barely feed themselves. Who cannot put on their own clothes or shower.

Then there are the ones who cannot regulate their emotions and constantly lash out in anger. Or suffer from sensory issues so severe that their skin feels like it is constantly on fire. Or loud noises terrify them. For whom bright lights are intolerable. Who are nonverbal and struggle to communicate in any meaningful way or simply do not communicate at all.

Autism is not a blessing for them, either.

I am explaining this because you need to understand how stressful it is to be an autism parent. It is a lifetime of fear and anger and sorrow and stress and struggle. All the while knowing that when you are gone, no one will be there to take care of your child.

And then comes along Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promising you a “treatment” for autism.

If you’re desperate enough, you will believe anything that promises a way out.

Maybe you believe autism is a disease that can be cured.

Maybe you believe you “caused” your child’s autism.

Maybe you know that your “real” child is trapped inside, just waiting to be freed.

Maybe you simply cannot live another day with the struggle, abandoned by family and society.

Because that’s a thing we don’t talk about. Many families pull away when a child is diagnosed with autism. Our did. So did many of our friends. Nevertheless, we persisted and built a new support system and a new family. Not everyone is able to do so.

When Jordan was young, we had the fortune of living in NYC, which had a phenomenal early intervention system in place. Most cities and towns do not. The vast majority of people, including us, simply cannot afford the services Jordan needed back then. Later, we moved to Northern Virginia, where we were able to continue those services.

But that is not the case in wide swaths of the country. And those swaths are set to become even wider as the Trump regime guts the Department of Education and strips billions from special needs services.

The number of autism families that are struggling will grow by leaps and bounds. Three cheers for the “compassionate Christianity” of the Republican Party. May they burn in hell for eternity.

But hey, there’s a “treatment now, right?

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The Ogre REALLY hates RFK Jr.

These desperate families will hear the word “treatment” and think it means “a cure.” But there is no cure for autism. You cannot even treat it the way Kennedy is suggesting. You cannot alleviate autism or make someone “less autistic” any more than you can make them less short or less Irish or Mexican or Japanese.

But desperate parents won’t understand that. Or they won’t care. They will stuff their children with this “miracle drug,” and then nothing will happen. They will wait for weeks and weeks and weeks, waiting for things to get better. Waiting for their “real” child to come out.

When that doesn’t happen, because it can’t, the despair will be beyond anything you can possibly imagine. It will be so far outside of your experience, you do not have a frame of reference for it.

This is why this cruelty is not for the MAGA base to consume like so much of the performative sadism of the Trump regime. They cannot possibly understand it. It will be utterly alien to them. But it will also be THEIR suffering because autism doesn’t give a flying fuck about your politics. Just as many Republican kids are autistic as Democratic.

It will actually be worse for Republicans because they will be more likely to believe that shit-eating charlatan Kennedy. That means more of the GOP base will experience the life-destroying disappointment of a failed “cure.”

And it gets worse.

It might be years, or longer, because the CDC will not collect the data under RFK Jr., but we will, someday, learn of the surge of family destruction occurring a year or 18 months from now. Family destruction is the sad but very real phenomenon where an autism parent1 (it’s not JUST autism parents but that’s who we are talking about now) will reach their emotional and psychological breaking point. Once this happens, they kill their child and then themselves.

It’s really easy to judge them as monsters, but, and this will not be a popular opinion, until you’ve walked in their shoes, you cannot possibly know the isolation and fear they’ve lived with for years on end without a moment of peace. That doesn’t justify it, but you cannot judge what you do not understand.

Now imagine those parents, already dangling by a thread, grab onto this lifeline. This miracle. This “cure.” This will save their child. This will save them. And then…nothing happens. Because nothing CAN happen. If you don’t think this would be enough to snap that thread and push them over the edge into suicidal despair, you really do not understand the struggle they live with. But I do, and I promise you, people are going to die because of this. I also promise you, someone told RFK Jr. that people are going to die because of this. Because of this monstrous lie of his.

He doesn’t care because he’s a fucking soulless monster. A serial killer on an incomprehensible scale.

What comes next? What happens when the “treatment” doesn’t work? How many more ways can we hurt the autism community? So many more.

Grifters will target these vulnerable parents to steal their money, promising to sell them that “special extra step” to make the “cure” work. The wellness industry will drain billions from frantic parents begging for someone to tell them what to do to “fix” their child. They’re already doing this but Kennedy will be the wind beneath their wings. A pox on their houses.

Later, Kennedy and his followers will eventually get around to blaming the parents for the lack of progress. Especially the mothers, because everyone knows women are the root of all evil. We’ve been blaming mothers for autism since the 1950s:

The term “Refrigerator Mothers” refers to a controversial and now largely discredited theory that gained prominence in the mid-20th century. This theory suggested that mothers of children with autism were emotionally cold, distant, and unloving, and that their emotional deficiencies were the primary cause of their children’s autism spectrum disorders. These mothers were metaphorically likened to refrigerators, believed to be incapable of providing the emotional warmth and nurture that their children needed for healthy development.

It’s their fault now for taking Tylenol, right? So why not keep that ball rolling? Maybe we can even start drug testing mothers to see if they recklessly took a mild painkiller and criminalize them. Why not? They’re just birthing vessels anyway. It’s not like they have rights when they’re pregnant.

There is no upside to this. RFK Jr. is not trying to help the autism community. He is not advancing legitimate research into autism. He is derailing it with quack science and nonsense to push his own anti-science agenda. He is othering and belittling autistic people and will, without fail, demand they be removed from public life, “for the good of society.”

Because if you can’t “cure” a problem, the next step is to eliminate it. It’s the natural flowchart of eugenics. I promise you, that is where this is all leading. Just like the fucking Nazis because that is who they are.

Over my dead fucking body, you marble-garbling ghoul.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

💩EAT SHIT, YOU REPUBLICAN SCUMBAG!💩

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 39 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Secretary of Whatever Pete Hegseth is nervous. Everyone at the Pentagon knows it. How do they know Pete is shaking in his loafers? That five-sided building is just like a small town. There are coffee stations and lunchrooms and cafeterias all over the building. People talk. And what they’re talking about is how weirdly frightened the boss is.

You want to know what commanders do when they’re scared that they’re losing their grip? They issue new standards about grooming. Haircuts will be to this length on top and that length on the sides. Last month, Hegseth ordered a new standard for facial hair. But it’s not a new standard, really. It’s an old one with a racist twist. Hegseth’s order commanded all servicemembers to be “clean shaven and neat in presentation for a proper military appearance.” It’s been that way forever. But look at the next sentence: “When authorizing individual exceptions, commanders must apply consistent criteria and appropriately consider the Department’s interests in safety and uniformity.”

You want to know what he’s talking about there? Waivers given to Black soldiers who suffer from ingrown hairs and a pimpled surface of the skin on their faces because of the curly nature of their facial hairs. Close shaving can cut the hairs at or even beneath the skin surface and cause the sharpened end of the hair cut by a razor blade to grow back into the skin, often resulting in infection. A common way to deal with this problem in civilian life is to grow a beard, because shaving can exacerbate the ingrown hair problem, causing infections in clogged hair follicles.

The rest of Hegseth’s memo sets out the new process to receive shaving waivers. They must be in writing, and they must be accompanied by medical treatment. If a person still requires waiver after a year of a medical treatment, he can be separated from the service.

Apparently, the previous system of waivers for beards was too woke, too liberal, too DEI for macho tattooed white-boy Hegseth. Those days are over.

The other thing nervous leaders do is try to control their image, the way the press covers them. Hegseth moved to make new rules for the press covering the Pentagon last week. NBC News reported Hegseth’s new rules this way:

“Journalists who cover the Defense Department at the Pentagon can no longer gather or report information, even if it is unclassified, unless it’s been authorized for release by the government, defense officials announced Friday. Reporters who don’t sign a statement agreeing to the new rules will have their press credentials revoked, officials said.”

So, bye-bye free press at the Pentagon. Hello King of All Censors, Pete Hegseth! Secretary of Whatever had already banned reporters from large areas of the Pentagon unless accompanied by an escort officer. He took away the small workspaces that had for years been given to organizations such as NPR, NBC, Politico and CNN and replaced them with conservative outlets like Newsmax, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Examiner. Hegseth posted on X that under his new regime, reporters can “wear a badge and follow the rules — or go home.”

How’s that working out for you, Pete? The Washington Post and New York Times and other news outlets have begun including a paragraph in their published stories alerting people working at the Pentagon that they can contact reporters secretly on their Signal accounts, giving their names and Signal addresses. “Help us report on the Pentagon,” the Post’s alert says. “The Washington Post wants to hear from Defense Department civilians and service members about changes within the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military.”

This week, Hegseth made yet another new rule: All speeches given by Pentagon employees or members of the military must now be approved before they are agreed to. The new rules allow for broad controls on who gets to give speeches where, limiting appearances to groups that the Pentagon considers to be “professional.” Last summer, the Pentagon withdrew several generals and department civilians from appearing at the Aspen Security Forum.

Hegseth, a former host on the Fox News program “The Five,” still regularly appears on his former network.

And then today came news that Hegseth has ordered an unknown number – possibly hundreds -- of general officers and naval flag officers back from their commands to a big meeting at Quantico Marine Base outside of Washington D.C. in Virginia next week. The generals and admirals are ordered to appear with their non-commissioned officer counterparts, who in the army are command sergeant majors. No reason was given for the meeting. The Washington Post reported…from its confidential sources via Signal, apparently…that Hegseth’s order to the generals is “sowing confusion and alarm after the Trump administration’s firing of numerous senior leaders this year.”

There are 800 generals and flag officers spread out in assignments around the world. Forty-four are four-star generals or admirals. Military commanders in Europe, the Middle East, and from the Asia-Pacific theater are among those ordered to appear at the Hegseth-helmed meeting next week.

Hegseth issued a directive in May that the number of general officers in all the services must be cut by at least 100, including a 20 percent reduction in four-star generals. Hegseth has already fired several of the top generals at the Pentagon, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandant of the Coast Guard and the Air Force Chief of Staff and Vice Chief of Staff. The Washington Post reported that the list of those Hegseth fired “includes a disproportionate number of women.”

Who knows what Hegseth plans to do next week when he has all the top military commanding generals and admirals gathered in one place? I think it’s likely that he will make a formal announcement in their presence of the reduction in the number of generals that he intends to carry out. It’s likely that he will try to reinforce his obsession with ending “wokeness” in the military, perhaps even having the generals and admirals and senior NCOs sign some sort of pledge to end DEI and “woke” practices in the manner Hegseth has already done, by cancelling celebrations like Black History Month. Already, Hegseth has stripped Pentagon hallways of pictures of former commanders who were women or Black.

Hegseth probably suspects that the senior military leadership lacks respect for him. The highest rank he achieved while on active duty and in the reserves was major.

The thing Hegseth likely fails to understand is that the corps of general officers in all the services have had 30-year careers. They served with each other when they were lieutenants and captains and colonels. Many of them are classmates from West Point or Annapolis or the Air Force Academy, or they graduated from ROTC together. There is a bond between them that goes deeper than just friendship. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them served alongside each other in combat. They flew jets off aircraft carriers or commanded ships sent to the seas off war zones. They flew Air Force jets and bombers together.

They know each other, and most of them have respect for each other. They don’t know Hegseth, except for what they’ve read about him in the press or seen on television. They know he had a serious drinking problem and was credibly accused of sexually abusing a woman he met at a conference in a hotel. It was a serious enough incident that he paid her $50,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement and drop her lawsuit against him.

The other thing that Hegseth has no understanding of is what it is like to command a very diverse array of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. The percentage of Blacks in the uniformed services is nearly twice their percentage in the population at large. More than 17 percent of those serving in uniform are women. Latinos make up about 17 percent of uniformed service members.

The generals who will gather in Virginia to listen to Hegseth on Tuesday know exactly what it’s like to command such a diverse force.

I’ll just bet they’re waiting with bated breath to hear Hegseth with his right-wing and religious tattoos tell them all about how Pete’s New Pentagon wants them to command soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Marines.

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Somewhere down in the bowels of the Pentagon, there is an office in which people actually know what they’re talking about. What they know, but aren’t telling anyone, is the reason why Trump startled the world this week when he said he thought Ukraine could win its war with Russia and take its territory back.

Trump’s sudden announcement wasn’t so much a pivot as it was an acknowledgment. Ukraine is stronger than it looks, and Putin knows this. That’s why Putin hasn’t caved into Trump’s demand that he “make a deal” to end the war, even if such a deal would give him much if not all the territory he has taken from Ukraine. Putin won’t make a deal because it will make him look weak at home, something no Russian dictator has ever been able to survive.

Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden in East Germany when the border between Austria and Hungary was opened with a single gate in 1989, and the Berlin wall came down a few months later in November. The fall of the wall was sudden, and Putin ended up being being the guy in the Dresden KGB office who burned some of the KGB and Stasi files and oversaw sending the rest to Moscow.

Back home in St. Petersburg, Putin watched the mighty Soviet Union collapse in real time as the Soviet government itself fell apart when a coup overthrew President Mikhail Gorbachev and placed him under house arrest. Putin was there for the chaotic transition to Yeltsin, and he watched as one puppet state after another declared independence. Putin was there when the Russian Federation was all that was left of the state to which he dedicated his life.

Putin knows how fast it can happen, and he knows that the collapse of the Soviet economy with skyrocketing inflation was as much to blame for the fall of the mighty Soviet Union as was the independence movements in Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, and eventually East Germany.

Putin has bit off more than he can chew in Ukraine, and they are beginning to realize this fact at the Pentagon and State Department. Ukraine has seemingly been fighting what amounts to a rearguard action in the Donbas as they defend their holdings in Donetsk around Pokrovsk and Kupyansk. But it’s rearguard in name only. What Ukraine is doing along the central and northern part of its front lines is to create one Bakhmut after another, sucking Russian forces into extended battles to seize small to mid-size Ukrainian towns that have little strategic meaning at enormous cost to Russian soldiers and military equipment. They are slowly draining the Russian army of soldiers, weapons, money and time.

If you read reports from the Institute for the Study of War or the excellent posts by Shankar Narayan in his Substack column, “The Consis,” you can follow Ukraine’s Bakhmut-style traps as they unfold. The movement of the front line is so slow, it’s like watching paint dry, but it’s not paint that’s drying, it’s the blood of Russian soldiers who are dying and being wounded by the thousands every week. One report this week said that Russia had been able to get its combat losses down to 1,200 a day. A day. Ukraine does not announce its losses, but they are judged by ISW and the British Ministry of Defense to be a fraction of Russia’s.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, Putin is up to his dictatorial neck in problems with recruitment and retention of soldiers they already have. ISW is reporting that Russian soldiers are complaining about corruption among the officer corps. Russian military “leaders” are threatening soldiers with immediate assignment to the front lines if soldiers do not sign “re-up” or reenlistment contracts when their current enlistments are up. ISW reports, that “Russian military commanders, on average, demand that Russian servicemen pay 200,000 to 500,000 rubles ($2,383 to $5,959) to leave the front lines and threaten to commit Russian servicemen to deadly ‘attritional assaults’ in case they refuse to pay. Ekho Moskvy added that Russian commanders formed separate cells within military units for servicemen who refuse to pay and deprive servicemen of state benefits if they complain about extortion by declaring them as absent without official leave (AWOL).” There are also reports of physical assaults of soldiers by senior officers, extortion, and alcohol abuse in the ranks and among the officer corps.

One story I read last week was about tourists from India and Kenya in Russia who were arrested for overstaying visas by a single day and forced into the Russian army. One tourist who escaped his unit in Ukraine and defected described being given one week of basic rifle training before being sent straight to the front lines in Ukraine.

There are other reports of Russian hospitals being “overwhelmed” by wounded soldiers returning from the front lines. ISW says that Russia is even having bureaucratic problems processing new recruits. There are reports of “bottlenecks” in the Russian military administration “which lack the necessary staff to select, examine, and deploy conscripts to their units.”

But here’s the ISW headline that really caught my attention: “The Kremlin remains concerned that the mass return of Russian veterans from Ukraine may destabilize the regime.” When you start seeing words like “destabilize” in the same sentence with “regime,” you know things are not going well for Vladimir Putin’s war effort against Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been quietly building up its ability to launch strikes into Russia itself. Right now, they’ve been hitting weapons depots, refineries and other oil infrastructure with drone attacks far from the Russian border with Ukraine, which tells me that Ukraine has infiltrated drone strike teams into Russia itself and is launching some of the drone attacks from Russian soil.

Ukraine is producing its own Fire Point drones, which are capable of flying nearly 1,000 miles carrying 130 pound warheads. The FP-1 drones are being manufactured in underground warehouse-like structures and shipped directly to front line units. The drones do not have to take off from an airfield. One place the drones are being made started off manufacturing 30 drones a month in 2023. Now they are producing 100 per day.

Ukraine expects it will field its first home-manufactured cruise missile by the end of this year. Called “The Flamingo,” because the first test unit was accidentally painted pink, the FP-5 can travel up to 1,800 miles and carries a 2,500 pound warhead. In August, the Fire Point factory was producing one Flamingo a day. By next month, they expect to be producing seven a day, and they are ramping up from there.

Narayan reported in “The Consis” today that Germany has ordered 600 new Taurus Neo cruise missiles that are being produced jointly by a German company and Saab. It is expected that the order is destined for Ukraine. The Neo missile is air launched – France and Germany have recently committed new fighter aircraft to Ukraine that are capable of carrying cruise missiles. The missile has a bunker-busting warhead that can also be programed to hit area targets like refineries. It flies close to the ground using GPS and ground-referencing guidance, meaning that it does not rely on satellites and is more difficult to jam, and because of its low-altitude capability, it will be impervious to Russian S-400 air defense systems.

None of this is good news for Putin. Ukraine will not have to ask American permission to use its medium range missiles against Russian targets when they have long range missiles of their own. Trump appears to be trying to get around so-called “America First” opposition to our involvement in Ukraine by outsourcing U.S. support to NATO. He has said he will sell weapons to NATO and they can do what they want with them, knowing their destination is Ukraine. It’s a typical hypocritical Trumpian work-around, but with his so-called “pivot” yesterday, the news is good for Ukraine.

All this is happening right now – Ukraine developing and manufacturing its own drones and missiles, Russia’s difficulty with recruitment, corruption in the ranks, non-sustainable combat losses among front line troops, cratering morale, and problems with reintegrating severely wounded and traumatized Russian soldiers into a society that is already having economic problems and is beginning to question what their young sons are doing fighting for more than three years in Ukraine.

The war against Russian aggression is headed shortly into its fourth year. Putin’s army is showing signs not just of wear and tear, but of collapse with the casualties Ukraine’s tactics are costing it. Trump knows he isn’t going to get the Nobel Prize for his phony claims of ending seven wars. Maybe he’s got his eye on the prize in Ukraine now.

We, and Ukraine, can only hope.

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