On Thursday, Trump added yet another massive construction project no one wanted to his list of shit no one asked for. This time, he wants to build the “Trump Promenade,” which he totally didn’t pick the name for. It would be a walkway connecting the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac. Just another huge waste of money for him to put his name on in tacky gold lettering.

Via CNN:

Trump said the project would revive what he described as the memorial’s original intended design.

“The Lincoln Memorial — the front was supposed to be the back. The back was supposed to be the front. It never got built, because they built two roadways behind it after it was built, and it shut off the gateway to the water,” he said.

“That was really going to be the main entry, and we’re going to be doing that,” the president said, adding that “we have a way of beautifully going over those two roads.”

Like his plans to add his name to the Kennedy Center, this isn’t going to work out, either. But good luck in your desperate quest to steal some of the glory of better presidents (and men) by co-opting their national monuments for yourself, you bloated fascist pile of pigshit.

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Personally, I’m thrilled that Trump is putting all of his time and energy into self-glorification. The entire country is watching a dying toddler scream, “ME! ME! ME!” at the top of his lungs while they look around and see a country in a dire financial situation.

It doesn’t matter how hard the press is working to ignore the wheels falling off the economy; everyone can see it. Everyone can feel it. Something is dangerously wrong and getting worse. And where is our leader elected to keep it from all falling apart? Playing with Legos in the Oval Office, demanding more worship and praise.

Meanwhile, credit card debt has reached an all-time high of $1.39 trillion (with a “T”), burying the average American in debt. Worse, unlike the last time this happened, these are cards with high interest rates, meaning it will take years, if ever, to pay them off.

At the same time, people are starting to default on their mortgages. People are starting to default on their subprime auto loans. If that word “subprime” caught your attention, it should. Those are the types of predatory loans banks used to make billions before the crash of 2008-2009. Laws were passed to prevent banks from offering subprime home loans. No one said they couldn’t offer predatory car loans. So here we are, looking at another banking bubble. Fun!

Student loan delinquency is rising as well, and the regime is abusing its power to put liens on borrowers’ paychecks. Surely this will contribute to the economic well-being of the nation.1

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Trump, Republicans, and the press will, of course, point to the nation’s ok (not great, but ok) job growth and the stock market to claim everything is just fine. They will point to the GDP and say everything is great. They will ignore the fact that the AI bubble is the only thing keeping us out of a recession on paper and keeping the stock market from collapsing. But the hundreds of billions Silicon Valley is spending on data centers doesn’t, ahem, trickle down to the rest of the economy. It doesn’t even really produce any jobs. When that bubble pops, the collapse will be fast and hard.

Trump’s oil shock will be here within a month or so, and the strain on the economy will reach a breaking point. The recession the press has been pretending doesn’t exist will be undeniable. And where will Trump be? What will he be doing? Still obsessing over his fucking ballroom and fucking arch and now his fucking “promenade” and whatever other stupid shit someone tells him he can slap his name on to convince everyone that he was the Greatest President To Ever Live.™

Trump will fiddle while Rome burns, and the entire country will see it. Millions of families living on the edge will be pushed into poverty. Those already in poverty will find themselves begging just to survive. While that’s happening, Trump will be bragging about the size of his swimming pool, and Republicans will be smiling and nodding their heads because there is nothing else those fucking cowards can do when the Mad King orders them to praise him for his cleverness and wisdom.

Republican voters will be disgusted and stay home. Independent voters will swing even further to the left than they have so far. Democratic voters, already highly motivated, will turn out in even larger numbers. The midterm wipeout will become an apocalypse.

Trump’s entire plan to steal the midterms depends on close elections he can take to court and have corrupt judges overturn. They have to be close, otherwise the public will not accept it. Throwing out 10,000 “illegal votes” is plausible. Throwing out 500,000 in a single state is not. Like I keep pointing out, stolen elections have to be plausible. Stealing multiple Senate elections will not be plausible. Stealing enough House seats to hold on to the majority absolutely will not be plausible. Especially after Trump spends the next six months jerking himself off on TV while millions struggle just to buy groceries.

Maybe if the demented pile of rotted orange peels hadn’t surrounded himself with bootlicking toadies, someone would have the courage to tell him to stop. That he was destroying himself and his party. But Trump only wants empty-headed sycophants, so nothing will stop him from self-destructing. The downside is that he’s going to take a very large part of the country with him in the process. The best we can do is use that pain and suffering as a cudgel to beat the GOP to death and never let them inflict their brand of fascist stupidity on us again.

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There are only 150 days until the midterms, and Trump is failing on every front. He is desperate and dying. Keep the pressure on and burn his corrupt regime to the ground. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

There Are Ways Democrats Could Focus and Amplify Their Message

The Democrats need a designated spokesperson. President Trump can get his message of the moment covered in news and media because he is president. One person, speaking as head of the government and head of his party. One person for media to cover. One person all media know that if they cover what he’s saying they’ll get lots of hits from people checking it out. Both those who will like what he says and those who won’t.

On the other hand if, say, the candidate for governor of California, whichever one is running second in the polls, says something about what Democrats should do if they regained the House or the Senate, or both, or the presidency too in 2028, a relatively few people will check it out. Likewise if it is the governor of some middle-sized state, or the second in line on the Congressional Ways & Means Committee (ranking member of the minority party), or even the head of the Democratic organizing committee. Some people would pay attention but most would not know who these people are, or would assume they have no authority other than in their own domain, or that what they say is just their opinion and can’t be taken with confidence that that’s what Democrats would do.

It’s difficult for either party to have a focused message when they don’t have a president in their party to make statements. The only other time that works is when the presidential election is coming up and some leading contender has become the default spokesperson for the party.

So how to overcome that? Designate a spokesperson. One person designated by the party to make as much of a news splash as possible, as often as possible. Every other day if possible. Go to the border and talk about how the wall is a waste of money. Go to Minneapolis and talk about how any deportations that should happen, should happen in a just and humane way. Go to Alabama and talk about how Democrats would not have just redistricted black voters out of being able to elect their own choice. Go to some place in the middle of the country where there have been large layoffs due to AI and declare what Democrats would do to make AI help workers rather than replace them.

A caveat here. Of course, Democrats, if in power, would have to be effective at delivering on those issues, whereas generally they have not been taken as effective in those ways. Although until Trump reversed a lot of things there is a lot to be said for what Biden did on many of these issues. In any case Democrats have to first make their case, then have that lead to regaining power, then follow through. Step one could be greatly helped by a designated spokesperson.

They would have to be someone who is not running for an office anytime soon so the party is not playing favorite to someone. They would have to have some credibility like perhaps a retiring member of Congress. Dick Durbin, the retiring senator from Illinois, would be an option. Someone with the charisma to convey a message. (Durbin would be middling in that regard.)

They would have to stick to general themes. To take one issue, say the wealth tax, some elected Democrats, or ones running for office, would support that and some wouldn’t, so you can’t promote that as something Democrats agree on. But they could talk about making taxes fairer, and about making the whole economy more focused on how well the people doing the work are doing in it. There are also things that are non-negotiable. For instance, that all policies of the government should give full respect to all people, white and black and brown, gay and straight, everyone.

It would take time for such a spokesperson to be at it until the media becomes convinced this really is the voice of the party and so cover them regularly. The president will always get more coverage, but this could add up to a strong boost to an alternative message. Certainly better than the messaging happening now.

I’ve tried to talk to some Democratic leadership about this idea to get their reaction and have either gotten no expressions of support or even criticism insisting that they don’t need any messaging improvement. I’ll write more about all of that later.

So why aren’t they doing this? Why aren’t they using every means available to stir up support? Well, if you’re a Democrat or a supporter, maybe you should send this along to your Representative and ask them that.

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The post A Designated Spokesperson for Democrats? appeared first on DCReport.org.

As the old saying goes, never in all my born days did I ever imagine that I would one day be writing an obit for 60 Minutes, the CBS News magazine every columnist this week has been calling “venerable.” The word they use to describe 60 Minutes is correct. There has never been another show like it on television, and there never will be. I was interviewed on 60 Minutes three times. It was one of the great honors of my life.

That’s the root of my sadness. The Ellisons, father and son, having bought Paramount, came into possession of the Columbia Broadcasting System, as it was originally called. It’s a painful fact that CBS started as a radio company, way back in 1927, because it was less than two weeks ago that its new owners shut down CBS radio, which had been on the air for nearly 100 years. 100 years of history! Gone! Just like that. They announced it as a “business decision,” of course – the radio division wasn’t making enough money. Eighty people lost their jobs. That’s what a “business decision” really means.

Now, in the name of right-wing ideological purity, and in deference to the urgings of the Sick Man in the White House, Ellison and son are preparing to run the CBS television network into the ground. They started, as we know, by buying the anti-woke company owned by Bari Weiss and putting her in charge of CBS News. We’ve read, Ad infinitum, that Weiss has no “broadcast experience,” as if that were a necessary qualification for the job she was given: killing CBS outright. That she has begun her disassembly of the network by going after its marquee program, 60 Minutes, is entirely unsurprising, given that Ellison’s master, the Sick Man in the White House, had sued CBS for a wholly bogus reason, revenge for what he considered “unfair” treatment by 60 Minutes. First, they settled with him for a $16 million payoff to his “library fund.” We now know, of course, that the Trump Presidential library, whenever it comes to pass, will not be an ordinary presidential library, but rather another Trump tower housing his usual grouping of crap, everything from retail space to a hotel to condos, and it will be owned by Donald Trump, meaning, unsurprisingly, that the $16 million from the Ellisons has gone straight into Trump’s pocket.

So, when 60 Minutes ended its season last week, Weiss hired Nick Bilton as the new executive producer of the program. Bilton is a British-American former tech columnist and blogger for the New York Times and Vanity Fair who is also being described as a “filmmaker” because of his involvement in producing and writing a documentary for HBO. Along with Weiss, he is also described as having no experience in broadcast television. But of course. He wasn’t hired to “broadcast” 60 Minutes, in the sense that CBS was once the Columbia Broadcasting System. He was hired to turn the program into a propaganda outlet for Ellison’s friend, the Sick Man in the White House. This will strip 60 Minutes of its prestige, audience, and profitability, which is the point. Weiss ran the CBS Evening News into the ground with her appointment of Tony Dokoupil as anchor. The program was already third in the ratings behind ABC and NBC. I don’t know how you fall further than third in a three-way contest, but somehow, that’s what Weiss has managed to do with the show that for decades led the ratings among the network evening news shows.

Everything has changed in the world of over-the-air television, now referred to as analog TV. Ratings have gone down, down, down, as people have moved to streaming platforms, many viewers now consuming entertainment and news on their phones. Every time I read a story about artificial intelligence, I may as well be reading an obituary for All Things Analog, beginning with network and cable television. Everything is going to be digital, we’re told. Artificial intelligence will know what you want to see and hear and consume before you do.

So, does that make a show like 60 Minutes, which used to be called “appointment television,” a dinosaur? Who knows? The Ellisons and their hand-puppet Bari Weiss certainly seem determined to fossilize 60 Minutes. They fired the show’s star correspondent, Scott Pelley, after he committed the crime of talking truth to power at a contentious staff meeting to introduce Bilton to the staff. Pelley told Bilton his qualifications for the job were “thin,” and noted that Weiss was utterly unqualified to run CBS News. Before that, they fired the show’s former executive producer and two correspondents. There are just three remaining on-the-air people at 60 Minutes -- Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and L. John Wertheim – and they are said to be considering whether they will stay with the program or resign, probably in advance of being fired or replaced anyway. The words “YouTube” and “TikTok” have been mentioned in reports about the direction Bilton wants to take the show, so the proverbial handwriting would seem to be on the proverbial wall. Every time anyone has attempted to “improve” serious journalism by chopping it up into bite-size pieces because of a decline in audience attention span, it has meant the death of the journalism and usually the platform on which it appeared, whether print or broadcast.

In the past, such a “fix” has at least had the aim of extending the life of the magazine or newspaper or TV news program. Not now. The aim of the Ellison-Weiss campaign with CBS is to kill it program by program and hour by hour. We’ll be told that the most profitable show on the entire network isn’t profitable anymore, so a “business decision” must be made. 60 Minutes will die a slow death, with shorter news pieces, more fluff, a more “conservative” angle on the world. Then it will collapse altogether.

I don’t think they’re trying to create Fox News Lite. Fox viewers want Fox, not 3.2 beer Fox. What I think is happening is this: The Right in this country has been trying to win the culture war for decades. Nothing they’ve tried has worked. Just look at Trump’s lineup of musical acts that were supposed to perform on the D.C. Mall this month in his “Freedom 250” celebration. That’s what passes for right wing “culture.” Failing to win the culture war, they decided to just buy it. Trump tried making himself chairman of the Kennedy Center and putting his name on it. Not even his MAGA minions would show up to support his version of the Kennedy Center, so he ordered it shut down for “renovations.” Now a federal court has ordered his name removed from the building. It is unclear what will happen to his “renovations.”

The Ellisons and Bari Weiss are doing to CBS what Trump did to the White House. 60 Minutes is the CBS east wing. They’ll tear it down and try to build a cheap, gaudy and ugly monument to Trumpism. It won’t work.

Capitalism will have the final say. The “renovations” of CBS will lose a little money at first, then a lot. The Ellisons will blame Weiss and get rid of her. They’ll get rid of Bilton and blame him for the death of 60 Minutes. Eventually, they’ll tire of the CBS red ink and try to sell it. By that time, it will be like trying to unload a Trump crypto coin on Ebay.

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I had a terrible time walking Ruby this morning. All I could think about was Al Franken and how the Democratic Party strung him up after he was caught up in a scandal that was just terrible! There was a photo of him pretending to feel the breasts of Leeann Tweeden when they were on a USO tour in Iraq in 2006. That she waited 11 years, until 2017, to make her objections public didn’t seem to matter to the poohbahs of the Democratic Party. Several other women came out with allegations that Franken had put his hand on their butts or kissed them on the mouth without being asked.

You will obviously recognize that all this happened in the Before Times. Even though Donald Trump was in the White House in 2017, and the world had already been treated to complaints by some 25 women that Trump had sexually assaulted them, Democrats were just horrified that Al Franken was such an uncouth putz. His fellow Democratic senators lined up to denounce him and demand his resignation. Chuck Schumer, who had been elected Minority Leader in 2016 and was just beginning to flex his muscles, told Franken he had 24 hours to resign his Senate seat or he would be censured and stripped of his committee assignments. Franken resigned the next day.

Then came the regrets. Democratic Senators, realizing they had done the Republicans’ work for them, began coming forward and apologizing for running Franken out of the Senate. Words like “railroaded” and “denied due process” were used.

And of course there is everything we have learned about Trump since the time of the Al Franken “scandal.” Uhhhh….the name Jeffrey Epstein sound familiar? Pedophilia, anyone? I could go on, but you get the picture. Trump isn’t uncouth. He is and has been all his life a wilding sex criminal and corrupt thief and fraudster and liar.

You know where I’m going with this: to Maine, where candidate for U.S. Senate Graham Platner has been exposed as yet another uncouth jerk. It was discovered a few days ago that Platner had sexted with a woman who was not his wife in 2023. There were no allegations of unwanted touching or kissing or adultery or the kind of sexual assault Donald Trump was found by a civil jury of having committed against E. Jean Carroll. Just sexting.

Plus, he has a tattoo of a Nazi symbol he got as a Marine when he was drunk with other Marine buddies one time in Croatia years ago. As I said, putz.

It’s looking to me like Democrats are doing Republicans’ work for them again, this time in Maine. It also seems to me that Democrats are going to have to make up their minds whether they want to finally beat that two-faced liar and Trump supporter Susan Collins and gain a seat in the Senate, or do they want to stand on some instantly-generated rule and say, we just won’t support someone who sexts with a woman outside of his marriage!

Look at what is going on with this ginned-up controversy. Platner fired back by calling the stories about sexting “gossip” and “journalistic malpractice.” Then mainstream media outlets doubled down on the story and reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had “flagged” the existence of the sexual texts to Platner’s senate campaign last year. Then she made a video saying she was “angry and disappointed” that the media was “spreading gossip instead of talking about the real issues that Graham is running on.”

And down the sex scandal rabbit hole we go – who did what to whom and what did they say about it and what did they mean and what is their reaction in retrospect and what are we supposed to think about it all years later.

Democrats are doing this at the same time we just learned that Trump has his Department of Justice looking for some way to prosecute E. Jean Carroll for allegedly lying at a deposition in her lawsuit against Donald Trump for raping her. I’m not saying Democrats should shed their standards for behavior by candidates running for office, but don’t there have to be limits to what counts and what doesn’t as bad behavior that would disqualify someone from running as a Democrat? What are we going to do? Start running polygraphs on candidates and make them swear on penalty of perjury that they are squeaky clean and never kissed a girl as a teenager and got slapped because she wasn’t into it?

I realize that this doesn’t have perfect logical and moral consistency, but when are we going to start taking seriously the stuff we talk about when we say, if Obama did what Trump or some other Republican is accused of, they would impeach him in a split second?

We need to work up some whataboutism of our own. If we’re going to run Graham Platner down for sexting with some woman three years ago, what about the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, Ken Paxton, who was keeping a mistress and using public money to pay for her apartment, all while running enough grifts on the public purse that prosecutors couldn’t manage to keep up with it all. Now Paxton is all over his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, for saying nice things about trans people!

What planet is the Democratic Party living on? Planet perfection? Or planet let’s beat their ass and win the House and the Senate?

So what if Platner lied to his wife about sexting three years ago. She forgave him. It’s between them. So what if he got a drunk SS tattoo between his four combat deployments 19 years ago. So what if he tosses the word “fuck” around like he used to be a Marine. He was a Marine! So what if he went to a preppy private school because his parents had more money than would qualify them to be “working class.”

Fuck that shit. Get out and vote for Platner and run that squirmy liar Susan Collins out of the Senate. She would vote to end Medicaid and Medicare in a second if Trump told her to, and she would tell us right up until the last minute that she wouldn’t do it. We need to reject every single fucking ignorant Federalist Society judicial candidate Trump nominates in his last two years in office. We need to reject Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires. We need to use every committee in Congress to investigate his corruption. We need to investigate Trump taking bribes for pardons.

We need a Democratic Senator from Maine, not a poster boy for purity.

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On Sunday, Charles R. Davis at The Redoubt published a rather eye-opening piece about Greg Bovino. Remember that little Nazi fucker? The one who liked to parade around in a custom-made trench coat that looked suspiciously like it was patterned after the coats worn by SS officers in WWII? The one who pushed ICE to be so violently aggressive they murdered two American citizens and sparked such a massive public backlash that the regime had to pull back on Stephen Miller’s plan to turn ICE into his own personal Gestapo?

Well, the entire time he was goosestepping around the United States, terrorizing minority communities, the legacy press refused to draw any “unfounded” conclusions about his affinity for fascism and a certain German political party from the 1940s. Somehow this curious oversight continued even as Bovnio was a prominent featured speaker at a major gathering of literal Nazis in Portugal:

No media outlet in the English-speaking world covered the fact that a former Trump administration official was at a gathering of the world’s leading fascists to promote “remigration,” a far-right euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the United States and Europe.

Major media outlets also ignored the presence of Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club. A spokesperson for the group — informed of the extremist views (and criminal convictions) of those attending — told The Redoubt that it would “never apologize for standing alongside our European brothers and sisters.”

This was a gathering of some of the world’s most high-profile neo-Nazis and at least two Republicans were there. Not only was the American press too busy to notice, but so was everyone else. Weird.

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Davis has a theory why and he’s soooooo close to hitting the nail on the head. Part of it, of course, is media capture by right-wing billionaires:

Right-wing capture of the corporate media in the United States is one response; there’s just no incentive to highlight one side of the aisle’s extremists.

…

These outlets will cover extremism and antisemitism if the dots can be connected to an elected Democrat, no question, but not when it’s the other way around. After all, it is in the interests of their ownership, and the reactionary cause, for right-wing politics to be seen as a necessarily brutish response to the dangers of a loony left.

Then there is the soft bigotry of low expectations:

But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s that we, broadly speaking, demand nothing from the right, even if we don’t share the politics. When illiberal figures behave badly, as they are wont to do — when they give voice to their basest and oft-libidinal desires and hatreds — it is viewed as akin to a mangy dog chewing on a slipper. They are not defying expectations; they can’t really be helped.

Whether from sympathy or condescension, far-right politics are interpreted as naturally occurring in a way that left-wing politics are not. Small-minded, reactionary tribalism is the default setting of the world, or so it is thought. It’s only news, and only interesting, when someone who purports to be better shows that they’re not.

But neither of those is the entire picture. The media has been playing this game loooong before right-wing billionaires began buying up the media landscape and loooong before the GOP became the party of open fascism.

So what happened here? How did this neo-fascist summit take place with someone as high-profile as Greg Bovino quite literally giving a Nazi salute and advertising it on Twitter, but not one single major news outlet could be bothered to mention it?

The full answer lies with the pernicious myth of bothsiderism, which has become so vital to the continued functioning of the press, they will literally erase a meeting of the world’s leading Nazis to maintain it. Allow me to remind you that the Trump regime is currently fabricating a global “Antifa conspiracy” as we speak. The press has been very interested in that. But here is an actual, real-world right-wing version of the same thing, and the press? Well, no time for love, Dr. Jones…very busy, many shiny objects to chase…

Here’s the problem, and this has been the problem for decades: There are two parties in the United States. Two main political movements. Republicans and Democrats. Right and left. For longer than I have been alive, one side has been moving, with increasing speed, in the direction of racism, bigotry, fascism, and cruelty. They have been consumed by conspiracies and a lust for violence. They have become a death cult obsessed with purging those they see as weak and unfit. They have moved to the farthest edges of the political spectrum. Their extremism is so far off the charts, there are few political parties in the world that match them for sheer depravity and insanity

The other side? We’ve been moving further to the left, to be sure. Towards the dreaded SOCIALISM and even more dreaded EQUALITY and even worse, EQUITY. We’ve embraced pronouns and gender fluidity and universal health care and maybe even, heaven forbid, taxing the rich out of existence.

The press would have you believe we are just as extreme as the right. That Democrats are the inverse of Republicans. But in no universe is that true. Put aside the fact the Democratic Party is far too centrist to be the flipside of the GOP of even 40 years ago, never mind the seething cauldron of hate and violence and ignorance the Republican Party is today. Even our most extreme hypothetical positions still do not match the right’s depravity.

Universal Basic Income. Free college for all. Guaranteed reproductive rights. Civil and voting rights enshrined in the Constitution and fully protected. Housing and jobs and food guaranteed for all. Environmental justice. Preventing catastrophic climate change. Stop me when this becomes too terrifying for you. Let me know when we reach the level of the right’s march to ethnic cleansing by way of mass murder. What part of the left’s agenda, its REAL agenda, not the imaginary one created by the right and promoted by the press, actually sounds scary? Pride flags? Black people swimming in your pool? A female president?!

Fuck off. None of that comes within a lightyear of the blood-soaked fantasies your average Republican masturbates to. Death camps. Slavery. Rape gangs. Legalized pedophilia. Genocide. All of which they openly talk about. They’re eager to enact a future of horrors. They’ll gleefully tell you all about it.

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The press is aware of this. They’ve been aware of it the entire time. To be a journalist is to be acutely aware that one party and its base is a cesspit of mindless rage and spite and evil and the other is…not. But you can’t talk about that. Because if you do, you have to really talk about it. You have to look your audience in the eye and tell them the truth: The American right is fucking evil. Irredeemably evil. Unforgivably broken and sick and twisted and beyond all hope.

But this is America. We do not speak the truth about racist white men. We do not speak of their violence and corruption and perversion. We look away and blame “both sides” because when everyone is guilty, no one is guilty. That means there never have to be consequences for the racist white men we built this entire country to coddle. Consequences for them might make them angry, and that would be bad. Bad for who? Well, everyone, of course! But especially for the racist white men, so let’s just not do that…

This is how there could be a meeting of the global Nazi elite, and the entire Western media missed it. Because it’s not just an American problem, is it? We’ve been allowing racist white men to get away with their crimes for generations. It’s just particularly bad in the United States.

The legacy press is not working for us. It hasn’t been for a very long time. It works to shield racist white men from accountability, especially rich racist white men. The legacy press exists to protect the status quo, the machinery that enables the abuse and oppression of women and minorities and children at the hands of racist white men.

When this is over and Nuremberg II: Electric Chair Boogaloo starts, the legacy press has to be investigated as well. They have been collaborators for far too long to ignore their role in the rise of American/global fascism. Time to take out the trash and start over.

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There are 153 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

In a surprise move that exactly nobody saw coming, the Department of Justice today said that it will abide by a judge’s temporary order not to take any steps to supply to or disperse funds Trump’s so-called “weaponization” fund that would pay-off Trump supporters who say they had been targeted by Biden’s DOJ. The judge’s order applies until June 12 when a formal hearing on the lawsuit challenging the fund is scheduled.

Money for the $1.8 billion cash-for-criminals fund was to be included in a reconciliation bill that would fund the ICE and Border Patrol parts of the Department of Homeland Security funding which has been held up by House and Senate Democrats who have demanded changes to the bill that would constrain the department’s immigration tactics.

Mainstream media reports are using phrases like “backing off” and “scrapping the fund” to describe the Trump administration’s moves today. This is called wishful thinking. The judge’s order puts only a temporary hold on Trump filling his Nazi feeding trough with billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money. Trump could seek to re-start the “weaponization” fund later with a new scam, attaching money for the fund to another reconciliation bill, or he could simply instruct the DOJ to do a mass settlement of lawsuits that are filed by Jan. 6 insurrectionists and use money from the Treasury belonging to taxpayers. The Trump DOJ has already settled a lawsuit by Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to charges he had lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Despite his guilty plea, Flynn claimed that he had been illegally targeted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI.

It didn’t seem to make any difference that the DOJ that prosecuted Flynn was run by Donald Trump at the time. Trump’s current DOJ, the one that was run by Pam Bondi and now by his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, paid Flynn $1.25 million despite the fact that he had pleaded guilty in federal court to the charges against him.

Hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants pleaded guilty to charges that they had breached the Capitol, stolen material, and assaulted police officers. Do you think their guilty pleas make any difference to Donald Trump? No. They’re just evidence that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were doing Trump’s bidding when they launched the assault on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Trump isn’t giving up. He said that he was funding his precious ballroom, which over the weekend he told Fox News was in fact a “monument to myself,” with private funds. Then he turned around and slipped a billion-dollar line item that would pay for his ballroom with taxpayer dollars into the same DHS reconciliation bill that would have paid for his “weaponization fund.”

Don’t watch the pea under the cups, folks. Watch the man running the three-card-monte game in the Oval Office of the White House. He’s been shoving public money in his pockets since Inauguration Day, and he’ll keep doing it until he leaves office. The only thing that will stop other scam reconciliation bills from reaching his desk is Democrats taking control of the House and the Senate in November.

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