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It’s been obvious for some time now that Republicans are diametrically opposed to the idea of democracy. Several decades, actually. Longer if you trace their racist DNA back to Jim Crow, American Nazis, the KKK, and the Civil War. MAGA is just the latest incarnation of America’s original sin: Racist white men who cannot tolerate the idea of sharing power and space with people they do not consider human, much less their equals.

Despite the last 160 years of violence, the racist white men of the right have not been able to stop the march of time. They’ve slowed it down, sometimes a lot, but not stopped it. Now the end of white supremacy is near,1 and they are growing desperate.

Which brings us to this:

President Donald Trump said Monday that Republicans should nationalize elections, continuing to double down on false conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said during an appearance on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast, which he relaunched Monday.

He’s been at this for a while:

Trump’s latest threat to nationalize voting harkens back to a promise he made last summer to sign an executive order bringing “honesty” to the 2026 midterm elections.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote in an August social media post. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

That’s so adorable. It’s even funnier when you remember how hard racist white men have been humping the clarion call of “STATES’ RIGHTS” for the last century and a half. States’ rights to own slaves. States’ rights to own 50 guns and 5,000 rounds of ammunition. States’ rights to force women to carry their rapists’ baby or bleed to death in a hospital parking lot. States’ rights to force school children to learn about Jesus and Creationism and ban all mention of The Gay and Black history. States’ rights to erase trans people from the face of the earth.

But elections? A thing explicitly stated in the Constitution as belonging solely to the states? Well, Trump says the federal government has the right to take those over, and most Republicans are quite mumbly-mouthed about opposing him.

Here’s the thing, though. While most Republicans won't come out and say they’ll never allow Trump to take over their state elections, I believe they’ll quietly fight him tooth and nail. Or put up so many obstacles that, gee whiz, we wish we could comply, Dear Leader, but it’s just not possible! Darn!

Back during Trump’s first time in office, he also tried to get red states to hand him control over elections. They refused. Trump wasn’t pushing as hard or as loudly, so the legacy press just kind of ignored the whole thing. Just another crazy Trump day, right? But the GOP’s refusal to obey was unusual and it said something important. It’s going to say the same thing now. Something I’ve been saying for some time: Republicans do not think Trump is going to win.

But, Ogre, you say, wouldn’t nationalizing elections ensure Trump’s victory? Wouldn’t putting a corrupt regime in charge of your elections so they can be rigged keep Trump in power forever? Republicans want to kill democracy. This is how every dictator does it, right?

Sure…but there’s a problem. Republicans can hand over control of their elections. They can’t hand over control of elections in blue states. Trump can’t march in and seize control, either, no matter what Steve Bannon, close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein, insists the regime is going to do:

Before we go any further, I want you to think back to the last several elections. 2024. 2022. 2020. Do you recall reading about swarms of MAGA meatheads harassing voters? There were a few here and there, as there always are, but do you recall a massive coordinated effort to drive voters away from the polls?2

No, you do not because it didn’t happen. But you may recall reading about the “army of poll watchers” the RNC was recruiting.

Etc. Etc. Etc. Frequently, Steven Bannon is behind these efforts and public announcements that come to nothing. The right would dearly love to interfere with Black and Brown voters at the polls. The problem is that doing so is a crime that could land them in prison for several years. And since it’s also a state crime, not just federal, the Dear Leader will not be able to pardon them.

It’s important to understand that for all of their grandiose talk, the American right is populated by fucking cowards. They are not willing to die for their racist ideology. Kill? Yes. Die? No. They for fuck sure are not willing to go to jail for their beliefs.

Now, ICE may believe that they have “total immunity” when Stephen Miller instructs them to invade polling stations, but I’m willing to bet that an awful lot of them are going to understand that they will not, in fact, be protected. Especially when State Attorneys General, who are already starting to make noise about holding lawbreaking agents accountable, make very loud and repeated public statements that any federal agent who sets foot inside a polling site will be arrested on the spot for election interference. If you don’t think that’s coming, you have not been paying attention to how pissed off blue state AGs have been getting.

But let’s also be clear, this is a country of 340 million people. ICE and CBP combined just are not large enough to disrupt voting in blue states. And if they target specific deep blue precincts on election day, everyone is going to know what they’re doing and why. That will backfire so spectacularly, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where it works out in the regime’s favor. As I’ve said a number of times, the most important part of rigging an election is plausibility. If everyone sees what you’re doing, it’s no longer plausible, and you cannot claim legitimacy. In a country this large, that’s a recipe for guaranteed disaster.

So, no, ICE will not be taking over election sites across the country. These Nazi clowns can’t even successfully take over a single medium-sized city in Minnesota. Are you fucking kidding me?

But let’s bring it back to nationalizing elections. Red states resisted once because they didn’t think Trump was going to win, and I’m fairly certain that will continue to be the case. It’s too much of a gamble. What happens if they hand over their election infrastructure to the federal government and Trump loses?

It’s the worst-case scenario.

Now, a Democratic president controls all of the election infrastructure in red states. Republicans can’t just demand control back. I mean, they can, but all of the infrastructure is gone. All of it will be run by the federal government, which will be under no obligation to hand it back over. Red states voluntarily gave away control, tough shit, buddy.

Red state elections run by Democrats would be catastrophic for Republicans. The GOP will scream it was rigged, but “rigged” in this context would be “free and fair.” No voter suppression. No ballots thrown out because they come from minority communities. No polling places closed a week before elections in Black communities. Voting machines that work. Enough ballots so everyone can vote. My god, what kind of election rigging bullshit is this?!!?

It would destroy the Republican Party as we know it.

So, if you were a red state, would you risk it? I know I wouldn’t, no matter how much the Mad King stomped his feet and shat his diaper.

This brings us to the other Republican gambit: The SAVE Act. This is a voter suppression law Republicans would really like to pass in the Senate. The Republican-controlled House passed it last year, but it died in the Senate because of the filibuster. Or has it?

President Trump’s call for Republicans to “take over” voting procedures in more than a dozen states and “nationalize” the midterm elections has Republican senators debating filibuster reform to get around Democratic opposition to a bill that would require voters to show proof of citizenship.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a staunch Trump ally and chair of the GOP’s Senate Steering Committee, says Republicans have power under the Senate rules to force Democrats to hold the floor continuously to filibuster and block the SAVE Act, legislation that would require voters to present birth certificates and passports when registering to vote.

The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions and, the hope is, lock in Republican power. But that’s only if it passes. And only if it survives challenges in the court. And if it works as intended. There have been previous attempts to disenfranchise voters that pissed them off so much, it ended up increasing voter turnout and cost the GOP dearly.

If Republicans nuke the filibuster, even for just this one election bill, they are playing Russian Roulette by themselves. Republicans will get one shot at this. Maybe two. Maaaaybe. Then it’s bang, lights out.

If they pass the SAVE Act in time to fuck with the midterms, they have to pray it’s enough to swing the elections in their favor. If not, Democrats will have two full years to smash Republicans over the head with it in the court of public opinion and just regular courts. If it doesn’t work to steal the midterms, it’s even less likely to steal a presidential election and then Republicans are fucked in every way imaginable.

This is something we’ve discussed several times. Remember, the filibuster is the only thing protecting the GOP from an extinction-level event. This is why they haven’t gotten rid of it despite Trump’s attempt to kill democracy. Again, Republicans do not believe the regime is going to survive. They are thinking ahead to 2029, and a Democrat in the White House with a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress.

Nuking the filibuster for even a single election bill opens the door for Democrats to do the same. And now the asteroid comes to wipe out the GOP.

Oooooffff. Only a slight exaggeration. It’s important to remember that Republicans have spent decades building their voter suppression machine and undermining voter rights.

It would take Democrats just a few months to undo all of it. We would have done it already if it hadn’t been for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two pieces of shit who whored themselves out to the highest bidder.

One bill to end gerrymandering. One bill to end voter suppression. One bill to get money out of politics. Those will be passed right after the Supreme Court is expanded to 15 seats with 6 new 30-year-old progressive Justices with lifetime appointments.

Within two election cycles, the Republican Party would be reduced to a regional party. They know it. That’s why tampering with the filibuster is like juggling a nuclear bomb with the safety off. It’s fun and edgy, but one fuck up, and there’s nothing left but a smoldering crater and lingering regrets.

Are Republicans desperate enough to risk utter annihilation? Maybe. The public is really angry and already demanding Nuremberg Trials with three years still left to the Trump regime. But there’s a chance that the party can throw Trump under the bus and rebrand themselves as the Tea Party 2.0 after the regime falls. They got away with it once after the collapse of the Bush regime. That has to be a more appealing option than gambling with guaranteed destruction at the hands of an unshackled Democratic Party.

We’ll know soon enough, but I’m betting Republicans will follow the course of maximum cowardice. It’s in their nature.

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There are 269 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.

I was going to use “No Words” as the title for this column and run the picture of Michelle and Barack Obama depicted as apes, but I decided not to reproduce that disgusting racist image from the loathsome and hateful post Trump put on his Truth Social account sometime last night. And it turns out that I have a few things to say.

Trump’s racist post shows the whole world who he really is, and it is a threat to our national security.

Can you imagine how news about the President of the United States posting the racist image of the Obamas was received by other countries? A country’s national security depends on a lot of factors – treaties like NATO with other nations; a country’s own military defense on land, in the air, and at sea; its own economic health; its manufacturing base; the size of its population; the resolve of its people to keep themselves safe from invasion or attack by hostile nations.

We are one such country. We rely on all those factors ourselves. Because we are as powerful as we are, we also rely on the goodwill of other nations, all of which understand the enormity of our military and economic power, to come to the aid of the biggest kid on the block. Why worry about the big guy when everyone knows he can defend himself?

You can write the willingness of weaker nations to help the strongest nation into the words of a treaty. The free nations of Europe did it after World War II by approving Article 5 in

the NATO treaty, which states that an attack on one nation is an attack on them all and commits the signatories of the NATO treaty to come to the defense of each other.

But Article 5 is just words on paper. It is what lies behind those words that counts, as we learned after 9/11, when NATO nations committed troops to Afghanistan and Iraq to counter the threat of Islamic extremism that had given birth to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. George W. Bush was the President of the United States on September 11, 2001. When he asked for help from NATO, signatory nations responded. The number of troops they committed, the amount of firepower, the financial size of their effort was not what counted. What mattered was that it happened. Article 5 was invoked, and NATO nations responded.

It is not out of the question that this country might come under attack again by hostile forces. Forget the leaders: What do you think the people of the NATO nations would do if it happened while Donald Trump is our president? Trump has already pissed off the countries of NATO with his insane obsession that the U.S. should “own” Greenland. How much enthusiasm do you think there would be among the people of Europe to come to our aid, to risk the lives of themselves and their children, when everyone knows that the leader of the United States is an avowed racist and proud of it?

As we have learned over the last 10 years, our Democracy is not a game. It is the bedrock of our nation. As we learned with Greenland, mutual defense is not a game, either. The world is not a playground where the biggest bully gets to make the rules and tell everyone what to do. We rely on each other like links in a chain.

6,000 years of history has taught that racism is like rust. The soul of civilization is eaten away by its evil. The supremacy of any race is a lie. We disrespect each other as people and as nations at our peril.

He thinks it’s a joke. It’s not. Donald Trump and his blatant and prideful racism has put us in danger.

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Here is what we should do: We need to figure out another way to deal with Donald Trump at night, and Donald Trump in the morning. One way would be to prevent him from ascending the stairs or elevator into the residential rooms of the White House, because that’s where he comes up with the shit that drives everyone crazy the next day.

He goes up there and he cranks out Truth Social posts, or he gives podcast interviews and says wild stuff. I’m going to take over Greenland one way or another. Or, Putin’s not such a bad guy, I get along with him very well. Or, Iran had better watch out how many protesters they kill, because I might bomb them back to the stone age. Or, We should take over the elections in 15 states, we need to nationalize the elections.

We should thank our lucky stars it’s still cold in Washington, and he flies down to Mar a Lago every Friday and spends the weekend on the golf course and ordering burgers and well-done steaks on his dining patio, or he would be posting and bellowing Saturday and Sunday, too.

The thing is, we need to pay attention to his bellowing and whining and conspiracy theorizing, but we don’t need to let ourselves get driven up the wall by it. The day after he started talking about nationalizing elections, all the stories cited his claims of fraud in Democratic Party controlled cities, and it took them 10 paragraphs to write the sentence that contained the words, “without evidence.” Of course there is no evidence of fraud, because there isn’t any. They counted ballots in Fulton County, Georgia in 2020 until the things were practically in tatters without finding any fraud. The claims by Rudy Giuliani that were promoted by Trump about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss passing a thumb drive back and forth ended up with a gigantic defamation verdict in their favor.

It’s bullshit. Trump ordered the DOJ to get a warrant and investigate Fulton County election fraud. Somehow, his Director of National Intelligence ended up skulking around the FBI raid, and what’s happened since? Tulsi said Trump ordered her to go on the raid, Trump said he didn’t know who gave Tulsi the order, then Todd Blanche “distanced” the DOJ from the whole thing, then Trump said it was Pam Bondi, then Karoline Leavitt tried to say it was Gabbard’s idea and Pam’s, they were both in on it, then Trump blamed it on Bondi again.

Why is everyone pointing fingers at one another? Who the fuck is in charge here?

What does that tell you about the entire business of re-auditing the already over-audited Fulton County election results? Are you suffering flashback images of the “bamboo ballot” recount of the thrice recounted ballots from Maricopa County after Trump lost Arizona in 2020? Are visions of Cyber Ninjas dancing in your head?

After almost a year of fucking around in some mothballed basketball arena, the Arizona Senate, which was involved in ordering the ridiculous Maricopa audit, had to announce that Biden got 360 more votes in the county than they thought, and the finger-pointing started in Arizona. Who was going to pay for the $2 million they went over budget with the audit?

Steve Bannon pops up from whatever Epstein bunker he’s been trying to hide in and babbles something on his “War Room” podcast that “of course” Trump is going to order ICE agents to surround poling places, and there’s another freak-out.

Steve Schmidt had a wonderful column this morning pointing out what experts have confirmed, that “The states are sovereign, and the states administer elections. The states created the Union, and the Union is bound by the Constitution. Case closed.” This is what we need more of: rational talk from rational people about reality. Schmidt put it this way: “There is too much talk about Trump’s sick fantasy and too little talk about the consequences of his trying to achieve it. The right to vote will — to say the least — not go gently into that good night.”

Amen.

NBC News has a report about local election officials in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta “pushing back” on Trump’s absurd crap about “nationalizing” local elections. To sum up the lengthy NBC story, it ain’t gonna happen. “We all know the President’s playbook by now,” Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deely said in a written statement. “His remarks on elections are an effort to change the conversation from the fact that the federal government is killing American citizens in Minneapolis. We must be careful and keep our eyes on the ball.”

A-bloody-men.

There is a lot of good news this week. A Quinnipiac poll came out that put Trump under 40 percent in approval, with only 37 percent of voters approving his job performance, and 56 percent disapproving. On the economy, Trump was similarly underwater, as pollsters put it: 39 percent approve, 56 percent disapprove. On immigration, 34 percent of voters approve of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws, while 63 percent disapprove. Fifty-eight percent of voters think Kristi Noem should be fired. Only 34 percent approve of the way the Chief Dog Shooter is doing the job of running the Department of Homeland Security. Another poll had 90 percent of voters wanting ICE agents to wear body cameras, while 5 percent oppose. DHS is spending just over a month training their ICE masked men. I’m not even going to give the negative figures: 76 percent think they need longer training, 75 percent think ICE needs stricter recruiting requirements.

I could go on. These are terrible numbers for Trump, for ICE, for everything. He’s underwater on inflation. Someone in Iowa yelled out at his rally to correct him when he tried to tell his supporters that they are paying $1.85 at the pump for gas. “It’s $2.69,” a guy yelled.

Trump’s lies are hitting a brick wall. People are not believing his bullshit. The two people killed by his agents in Minneapolis were not “terrorists.” They were innocent Americans. His bullshit about Greenland hit the brick wall of an emboldened Europe and Wall Street investors desperate not to have him tank the world economy by pitting the U.S. against its NATO fucking allies.

Here is what I think: The Atlanta FBI raid is a sign of a desperate man who knows he and Republicans are going to lose so big at the polls in November, it will go down in the history books not as a wave, but an earthquake. Trump is shaking in his overstuffed lace-ups that the Senate will go to the Democrats. You and I and Donald Trump know what that means. He will be impeached again in 2027. Even if he’s not convicted, he’ll have a Congress that will never approve his big plan for a Macho Arch on the D.C. Mall. Everything built there, from monuments to museums to sidewalks and benches has to be approved by the Congress, and it won’t be his Congress anymore.

Don’t listen to Donald Trump when he wakes up hallucinating tomorrow morning on Truth Social or farts his way through another vanity performance in the Oval Office. He’s so full of shit, he’s about to blast off from the Resolute Desk on a blue flame, and we should be treating him like we’re watching the lift-off and laughing at his increasing desperation.

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Beyond acceding to Donald Trump’s fondest dreams, what are we possibly to make of the FBI seizing 700 ballot boxes, voter machine tapes, digital data and voter rolls reflecting 2020 votes from a Fulton Country warehouse? How could we possibly not see this as Trump-fueled revenge and a blinking warning about the kind of challenges to expect in November’s elections?

Days later, the FBI’s execution last week of a judicially signed search warrant served by armor-clad agents clearly still feels extraordinary both politically and legally, and it represents a significant escalation in Trump’s breaking of democratic norms. It certainly reflects Trump’s obsession with having been declared a loser and a warning that he will do anything to influence this year’s elections.

But what exactly is supposed to happen with these ballots and tapes? What are they supposed to  show? There still is no justification for what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was doing at the search. Even if we accept that she has decided to worry about election “security,” nothing offers a reason to be present during the serving of a warrant to gather evidence.

Though even the optics of a seizure may appease Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, what is the practical outcome here? Aren’t these the same votes and ballots recounted multiple times by the state officials responsible for them? Aren’t these the very results that were the arguments in Rudy Giuliani’s loss in court of a defamation suit worth $148 million charging fraud by two election mother and daughter election workers?

Trump blamed results in Georgia for his loss to Joe Biden, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,781 more votes. Recently, he promised anew to prosecute those responsible for rigging the election. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 legal cases across the nation seeking to overturn the 2020 election results — all of which failed, even those before Trump-appointed judges.

Can Trump Find His Votes?

The warrant said the materials to be seized might be “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.” It cited stiff criminal penalties related to “the procurement, casting, or tabulation” of fraudulent ballots. Weirdly, this material already had been requested in a state-federal lawsuit, but release was held up by court order.

We don’t know what evidence or argument was presented to the judge who signed the search warrant; only the FBI presented its reasons. There is no suggestion of new evidence emerging, so the timing is off. A search warrant does not mean a crime was committed or by whom. Rather it means that there is probably cause to look at these elements.

Even a cursory look at the seizure raises a host of questions.

The first is what does the FBI hope to find that no previous investigation or recounting determined? In 2023, Giuliani conceded that while acting as a lawyer for. Trump, he made false statements by asserting that two Atlanta election workers had mishandled ballots.

Then there is the timing. This is 2026, and the voting was in 2020. Most federal and state election laws seem to have a statue of limitations clause that expires after five years. Can any “evidence” unearthed here even be submitted to a court in a criminal trial?

Who is going to review these records, if not the state and county election officials? Is the FBI going to do its own recount, or perhaps hire an outside private company whose background and political lean will be put under endless scrutiny? Who designates that they are not altered once out of the hands of election officials?

How is anyone reviewing the ballots supposed to determine “intent” as required by fraud laws?

And, of course, if Trump’s FBI and Justice Department magically “find” 11,781 votes, do we replay the last six years and re-install Donald Trump as president. Or better yet, determine that he already has served twice as president and cannot Constitutionally finish this would-be third term?

An Egotistical Warning

We’re left with the other conclusion possible here. There is no practical way for Trump to un-rig the 2020 election, but he can use his Justice Department and FBI to harass those who dare to suggest that he lost.

While such dreams may serve the infantile Trump ego, the real value is in signaling to an already wary electorate that Trump, who is not on any ballot in November, still wants an outcome that will leave him with a Republican Congress that will stand down from oversight and questioning of his administration.

To that end, he has endorsed and promoted congressional gerrymandering changes in multiple states, he is threatening to outlaw mail ballots and voter machines that are state controlled, he is choosing candidates to primary any congress member who challenges him, and he is encouraging the social media doxing or prosecution of political enemies. He is pushing for closing of polling stations in Black districts believed to favor Democrats.

And the example of ICE armies and National Guard deployments  in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington show that he is willing to have the appearance of military law in place to squelch voter turn-out.

Of course, he wanted the FBI to seize ballots and tapes, even if there is no prosecution case to develop sufficiently in the months before the election. His own reputation as a constant winner and his hatred for those who stand up to him are way more important than retaining a democracy.

Happy 250^th America.

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The post Seizing 2020 Ballots in Georgia appeared first on DCReport.org.

You wish that you could say it’s what money does to them, and that can be part of it, but it’s not all. You wish it could be ascribed to people with wealth that is inherited, or wealth that has been recently come by, but people from both groups are among them. You wish that it isn’t about money and privilege and, yes, race, but it is. And you wish most of all that it wasn’t true, that there aren’t people who are cruel, people who are so self-centered that they have no feeling for others, people who have no feelings at all, people who are soulless and empty, people who expel with every breath air that stains and pollutes the earth’s atmosphere for the rest of us, but you know that there are such people, and we know some of their names.

You may know, and I do know, rich people who are not like them, who are like us, who listen to and support NPR, who have shown up in basements and churches for meetings to help the poor or heal the planet or work for peace. So, it’s not just about money. It’s about something else.

With certain of them, and I think you know who I’m talking about, it is always about power, about the will to amass power, about the will to use it for personal gain, about the drive to abuse power by employing it to damage others, about what we can only call the evil that power can bring with it. We ask ourselves, where does that come from? We look back in our own lives and find examples from what you might call ordinary life – bullies on the playground, in school, in jobs, in relationships we may have had. We asked ourselves as children, as young adults, and again when we got out in the world as adults, where it comes from, the drive to dominate and harm others. We examined our own experience to find if there was some of it in us, if we had misused power of whatever level when we achieved it, or when it was given to us, and if we were honest, we found ourselves guilty. There was someone who asked for our help, and we were too busy, too self-involved, too unthinking for whatever reason to lend a hand. There were those we were just mean to.

We feel shame, and we find that we changed, and sometimes we even made amends. In other words, we acted like human beings.

But what of those who are – there is no other word for it – inhuman? I remember with great clarity the day I discovered that all of this is nothing new, that it has been studied for centuries, indeed for millennia, that great tomes have been written in search of answers. I was a junior in high school taking honors classes and I took an elective in philosophy, and one day, the teacher walked into the room where only about a dozen of us sat at our desks, and he introduced the topic of “man’s inhumanity to man.” I was fascinated. He asked us if we could think of any examples. I was from an Army family, and I raised my hand and answered, “war.” The teacher said yes, but there were other, less obvious, examples, weren’t there?

We spent the next two months on that topic alone in that philosophy class, I guess because it was so bottomless.

Later in life, I came to learn that people make war on each other for many more reasons than imperial ambitions or revenge for perceived losses, or because of belief in religious doctrine. People are not inherently cruel or born in sin as some religions would have you think, but they are like faulty engines, flawed inside themselves in some way, and because they are human, the flaws cause them to act in ways that will hurt others.

But this stuff we are in the middle of, these daily revelations from – I will not use his name – those files, are something different and, if it is possible, worse than the big shooting wars countries make against each other, and the little wars we wage against each other in our ordinary lives. This is in so many ways beyond our comprehension, or at least that is how it feels until we remember the scandals of abuse of children by the Catholic church, the scandal of the Irish mother and baby homes, the scandal of the “schools” for native Americans and Canadians that produced such terrible abuses of children in the name of one authority or another.

And we remember the horrors visited upon children alongside their mothers and fathers in the Holocaust.

It is not necessary to ask ourselves which is worse, because it seems all of a piece. Or is it?

What makes it different this time is that these horrors seem recreational. There is no reason other than satisfaction of desires and urges that are untethered to anything other than pleasure. This is where money and wealth and power have made possible what we read about in those files but does not explain it. To gain wealth, or have wealth, has not made these men do what they have done to the more than 1,000 children who were their victims. As Susan Brownmiller taught us in her groundbreaking book, “Against Our Will,” rape is not about sex, it is about power.

But sexual abuse of anyone – male or female, adult or child – is not explained as a question of power any more than war is explained as a question of imperial ambition or revenge or dominance in trade or any of the other reasons given for the wars that humans have waged against each other since the beginning of recorded history. We know that war happened before anyone could record it on the walls of caves or on tablets of clay or etched into stone.

It feels like going in a circle, doesn’t it? An unsatisfying journey through something that cannot be explained or understood in any way other than the inhumanity of these people, most of them but not all, men. But if it is yet another instance of man’s inhumanity to man, do we find the connective tissue in the root “human?” Or do we find it in that other word, evil, that has been employed to explain the things we cannot understand about ourselves and our world?

I don’t have an answer, but I do know this: We are different from them, because we have the capacity to feel.

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Welp! Hell has frozen over. Almost. And I don’t mean because a large chunk of the country is covered in “snowcrete” and it’s snowing in Florida.1 This is an actual headline in The Guardian today:

I have absolutely no idea who Jan-Werner Müller is. His write-up says he’s a professor of politics at Princeton University so, I guess he’s smart? And yet, he doesn’t quite stick the landing. But, man, he’s definitely onto something and I really REALLY hope he sinks his teeth in like a starving dog on a bone:

The basic idea is that self-declared moderates claim equally to oppose extremes on the right and on the left – but hard-hitting criticism is reserved almost exclusively for the left (partly, perhaps, because the presumed audience is expected to already know how bad things are on the right).

This perceptive observation was inadvertently vindicated in thousands of columns that contributed to a moral panic about “wokeness” and “identity politics”. It convinced readers that, sure, Trump was horrible, but what was happening “on campus” (translation: anecdotes from one or two elite places, endlessly recycled) was also putting US democracy in peril.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter or listening to the podcast for more than ten seconds, you know exactly what Müller is talking about. I’ve been screaming about this shit for years, before I even had the proper vocabulary to describe it. I didn’t even know the word “bothsiderism” until several years ago but I knew the alt-left was doing it way back in 2017 and the legacy press was doing it even longer than that. These are the two groups that ratfuck us nonstop.

Müller is talking more about the legacy press than he is the professional “far-left” (who fully supports white nationalism, somehow). The “very concerned” journalists who can’t seem to tell the difference between a progressive pushing for universal healthcare and a literal Nazi demanding the mass execution of progressive pushing for universal healthcare. It’s all so very confusing! They’re both so extreme in their demands!

Müller gets this aspect of bothsiderism:

The point is not that what progressives do must never be criticized; the point is that the relentless drive to find fault with both sides equally results in a sense of (false) equivalence among those taking cues from supposedly trustworthy centrists.

But then he misses the mark again:

This dynamic may well have not made a difference in the election outcome in 2024.

The fuck it didn’t. People voted for Trump because the legacy press and the alt-left created a permission structure for them to do so. Sure, Trump had staged an insurrection. Sure, Trump was a rapist. Sure, Trump was a thief, a liar, a literal traitor who had stolen classified documents and “lost” dozens of them. Sure, half a million Americans had died on his watch as he let Covid run rampant on fucking purpose.

But my goodness! Look at how extreme Democrats are! They support trans kids playing sports! They support unions! They support immigrants! That’s just fucking insane! And did we mention the trans thing!? Did you know Joe Biden is old? He’s soooo fucking old! And Kamala Harris is a woman with no policies. Or too many policies. No, Trump doesn’t have any policy proposals at all, but we’re not talking about him right now!

My god, what about Gaza? Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are blood-drenched monsters! So much worse than anything Trump could possibly do! Honest! Why, nothing in Trump’s decades of rabid racism could ever suggest he would be worse for Gaza! Democrats are clearly the warmongers!

We watched the legacy press and the alt-left spend a full year shamelessly spreading these lies over and over again. Of course it helped put Trump back in power. That was the point. There was even a word for what the press did for Trump: “Sanewashing.” The deliberate act of taking the insane ramblings of a deeply sick and dying man and laundering them for public consumption. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s every stutter was proof he would be dead before November.

If Trump dies before Joe Biden, it will take every ounce of my self-restraint not to find Jake Tapper and slap him across his smug fucking face.

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Müller, however, makes up for this painful error by exposing the lie at the center of “bothsiderism”:

The other iron law of reactionary centrism – beyond the asymmetry that is hiding behind the seeming evenhandedness – is that only the left and liberals really have agency. The right just reacts – everything is always backlash, never a self-generated political project. As a result, it takes a while to wake up to the reality that, for instance, Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing project is self-generated, and not only a response to “legitimate grievances” about border security.

This is vital to any discussion about bothsiderism. It’s baked into the language the legacy press and the alt-left use. “Washington.” “Congress.” “The Establishment.” “Politicians.” Republicans pass a bill stripping funding for school lunches? It’s “Washington.” The GOP cancels dozens of green energy projects Democrats funded? It’s “Congress.” On the other hand, as Müller notes, Democrats pass a bill to protect voting rights and the “Republican backlash” is all their fault, as if the racist white men of the American right have not been blocking access to the ballot for over a century.

It’s all part of the game the press and the alt-left play to protect the right from the consequences of their actions. If everything the right does is a reaction, if everything they do is because they were “forced” to do it by the left, then you can’t really blame them, can you?

After all, the left made America accept gay marriage, so is it really the right’s fault they became even more homophobic? The left made America stop using racial slurs, so is it really the fault of the right that they became twice as racist? The left elected a fucking ██████ as president, so is it really the fault of the right that they turned to white nationalism and fascism?! Stop blaming poor innocent oppressed white men for everything, you fucking reverse racist! Take some responsibility!

The answer to that, of course, is suck my sweaty Jewarican balls, and if you thought racist white men were oppressed before, wait until the regime falls and Nuremberg II: Electric Chair Boogaloo starts, you treasonous fucks. Maybe going all in on fascism and genocide wasn’t such a good idea. Too late to go back in the Nazi closet now, though. Oh well.

Look, Müller may not get all the notes exactly right, but he’s definitely playing the right tune.2 He absolutely understands how dangerous these assholes are, even if, as a Princeton professor, he’s far too polite to put it that way. He does, however, end his piece with a warning:

The Joe Biden years were accompanied by a chorus of “don’t overdo it”. A post-Trump US may well see a revival of the greatest hits of the reactionary background singers. Think before listening.

Not “may well see,” absolutely 100% goddamn guaranteed WILL see. After the midterm bloodbath and Trump’s failed attempt to steal it, the legacy press is going to fly into damage control mode. There will be any number of columns begging Democrats, who will now be in control of the House and probably the Senate: Please please PLEASE for the love of God! Do not impeach Trump for a third time! Think of the strain on the nation! Think of how divisive it will! Sure, Trump just tried to overturn the results of the misterms and people were hurt in the process, but can’t we just move forward and hold him accountable in the 2028 election!??!!?

Meanwhile, the alt-left will be gearing up to tell people not to vote in 2028. I promise you, they will be out there every single day telling voters that if Democrats get back into power, something something Israel genocide Gaza argle barlge. Sure, Trump gave Netanyahu the greenlight to kill everything that moved, but, really, aren’t Democrats just as guilty? Aren’t they MORE guilty? Aren’t Democrats the REAL monsters controlled by the fucking Jews Israel?!

The legacy press and alt-left will be in overdrive to maintain the lie of bothsiderism. A year from now, the regime will be so far off the edge, the legacy press will have to fabricate from whole cloth Democratic extremism to “balance the scales.” By 2028, the GOP will be openly appealing to Nazis and actual Democrats will be erased from news coverage lest they appear too rational and normal, making Republicans look like the fucking monsters they are. Better to just tell the public how extreme both sides are and let them decide for themselves, right? That’s only fair. And we have to be fair, don’t we? That’s the point of bothsiderism! Fairness, and not at all to hide the utter insanity and soulless cruelty of the GOP.

Still, it’s a good sign that someone in the legacy press is calling this bullshit out. Hopefully, this will not be the last time Müller writes about this. You'd better be goddamn sure it won't be the last time I write about it. Müller may not quite grasp the intentional lie at the center of all of this, but I surely do, and I will never EVER stop calling these ratfucking assholes out until the last one of them resigns in disgrace.

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There are 272 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.