That phrase was uttered this time by, of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene after she had visited the ultra-secure room in the Department of Justice where members of Congress can read, but not copy, the unredacted Epstein files. Greene’s sometime friend, more often rival, Lauren Boebert emerged from what is now being called “the redaction room” confirming that there are “definitely” more co-conspirators of Epstein than have been revealed and that Ghislane Maxwell, currently domiciled in a minimum security prison facility in Texas, should spend more time behind bars and should not be granted clemency by Donald Trump.

Good luck with that, Lauren, given the implied threat made yesterday by Maxwell’s lawyer that if she is pardoned, she could exonerate Donald Trump and Bill Clinton -- the ability to exonerate meaning that she also has the ability to incriminate.

The big headline of the day was made by Congressman Jamie Raskin, who upon exiting the redaction room told the press that a search of all the unredacted Epstein files – not just the redacted files released publicly – revealed that Donald Trump’s name appears more than one million times. That means Trump is mentioned in one way or another 960,000 more times in the files that haven’t been released than the 38,000 times his name appears in the files the DOJ has revealed. Remember last spring, when we learned that FBI agents had been sent from all over the country to go through the Epstein files? We were told that they worked for weeks. What we suspected but weren’t told was that their job was to black-out Trump’s name every time they found it.

Let’s take a moment to ponder how the name of one man, who is now the President of the United States, appears so many times in what have been called the Epstein files, but in reality are mainly the work product of three separate criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein. These include the initial investigation of Epstein that began in Palm Beach in 2004 for sexual abuse and unlawful sex with minors; the federal investigation of Epstein and four co-conspirators that began in 2006 and ended in 2008 with a corrupt plea deal that cancelled the federal investigation in favor of a guilty plea to a state charge for soliciting a minor for prostitution; and the federal investigation in New York City that began in 2018 and resulted in a 2019 charge for sexually exploiting and trafficking underage girls in multiple locations.

The point is, ordinary citizens of the United States don’t have “files” devoted to them that contain millions of pages of documents. For such files to be accumulated, you have to be under criminal investigation. What we have been calling “files” are actually evidence from the multiple investigations of Epstein. So, if your name appears more than a million times along with the target of a criminal investigation, or in this case investigations, that means you were associating with a criminal.

One of the things reported today by members of Congress who saw the unredacted files was the existence of an email between Epstein and his criminal associate, Ghislane Maxwell, in which they discussed a phone call with Trump during which he admitted that Epstein had never had his Mar a Lago membership revoked because he never had been a member. He was a guest of the club’s owner every time he visited Trump’s Mar a Lago, and as a guest, he had never been asked or told to leave the club. That exchange of emails was written in 2009, the year after Epstein completed his so-called jail sentence that did not require him to actually be behind bars during the day, when he was permitted to be at his Palm Beach office or residence.

So, this piece of evidence from the unredacted files seems to prove that either Epstein or Maxwell was still speaking with Trump a year after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor girl for prostitution. In other words, Trump knew what Epstein was doing with underage girls, a fact confirmed in yet another unredacted file about a conversation between Trump and the Palm Beach chief of police during which Trump confessed that “everybody knew” what Epstein had been doing.

What else is revealed in the 960,000 mentions of Donald Trump that are in the unredacted files that have not been released by the Department of Justice? As of today, we do not know.

What we do know is that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were close friends in New York and Palm Beach. We know that Trump traveled on Epstein’s business jet that was called the “Lolita Express.” We know from photographic evidence that Trump was close enough to Epstein that he appeared in photographs with the woman who would become his wife, Melania, alongside Epstein and his criminal associate, Ghislane Maxwell. We know from the unredacted files that Epstein claimed to have introduced Trump to Melania. We know that Trump appointed two men who appear in the Epstein files to his government – Howard Lutnick as Labor Secretary and John Phelan as Secretary of the Navy. Lutnick now admits to having visited Epstein’s Caribbean island and being in business with him. Phelan is listed at least twice on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” flight logs. We know that Trump contributed the notorious cartoon sketch of a naked woman’s body and poem about shared secrets to Epstein’s birthday book.

We know that these two men are revealed to be very, very close in the files that have been released, and we know there are at least 960,000 more mentions of Trump’s name in the unredacted files that have not been released.

This is why Trump is employing the Roy Cohn defense of deny, deny, deny. It is why he has dispatched his former criminal attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to declare on network television that the Epstein review “is over,” when clearly it is not.

This story is not going away. The way the drip-drip-drip of revelations is going, the Epstein files with their repetition of the name of Donald Trump, will still be in the news after Labor Day this year when the midterm campaigns for Congress kick into gear.

When you’ve lost Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom have had a look at the unredacted Epstein files, you have a whole lot to worry about. Trump is cornered by the life of sexual abuse he led in the past. He doesn’t just face allegations from women and a legal judgement against him from a woman he raped. His associations with a pedophile are in files from a criminal investigation. Even his wife, the First Lady, is in the files.

We will be treated to many more midnight Truth Social rants in the weeks and months to come. The Epstein criminal files are much, much worse than we think, that is now for certain.

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The excruciating fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and intensive care nurse, at the hands of federal agents on January 24, has thrust into public consciousness the intersection of gun carrying and public demonstrations.

While many details of the encounter are still murky, Pretti was lawfully carrying a handgun at a public demonstration but did not deploy or display the weapon. From cellphone footage and eyewitness accounts, after being pepper sprayed and wrestled to the pavement, an agent appears to have retrieved Pretti’s gun. About a second later, agent gunfire erupted, with 10 shots fired in less than five seconds. Pretti died at the scene. To be clear, none of this is to suggest that Alex Pretti deserved his fate for lawfully carrying a gun.

He absolutely did not.

Yet almost immediately after the shooting, FBI director Kash Patel said “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.” President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, all criticized Pretti for carrying a gun to a public demonstration.

Gun groups immediately took issue with the comments, including the National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America, which said that the Second Amendment “protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting.”

This fraught political moment has thus found the Trump administration in the uncomfortable position of taking criticism from both liberals who blame heavy-handed federal agent tactics and conservatives who bristle at the administration’s seeming abandonment of public gun carry rights.

On the one hand, civilian gun carry is indeed a right under the Second Amendment according to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Bruen case where the high court said that individuals have a “right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” The court proposed no exception for doing so in a public gathering.

On the other hand, the consequences of such action are clear. Public gun carrying, especially in the context of a public demonstration or similar gathering is, no matter the intentions of the carrier, a terrible idea.

Even though most of those who acquire guns for self-defense say that they feel safer having them, when the public is polled on the matter, the response is fear. For example, when asked in a Gallup poll how safe they would feel in a “public place” that allowed the concealed carry of firearms, 65% of the public said less safe, 25% more safe, and 8% no difference.When asked who they thought should be allowed to carry concealed firearms in a public place, 44% said only “safety officials,” 26% said only those with a “clear need,” and 27% said private citizens.

Public impressions aside, numerous studies spanning disciplines from psychology to criminology make clear that the presence of guns in the presence of others inflames aggression and makes violence more, not less, likely. For example, a study of over 30,000 public demonstrations from 2020 to 2021 found that violence was more than six times more likely to break out when guns were present.

A study from Stanford University of four decades of data found that states that adopted more liberal gun carry laws, and therefore more civilian gun carrying, saw an increase in violent crime of from 13% to 15%. Numerous studies of states that have adopted broad “stand your ground” laws (meaning that people when confronted with a perceived threat in public had no duty to retreat) and that also have liberal gun carry policies have seen significantly higher rates of gun killings. A study of intimate partner violence found that such violence was three times more likely when guns were present. In short, more guns lead to more crime.

Finally, the link between civilian gun carrying in society and mayhem was well understood by our ancestors. From the 1600s to the start of the twentieth century, every state in the country enacted laws that restricted concealed weapons carrying, and three-fourths of the states had laws restricting open weapons carrying.
The Supreme Court has carved out a new right pertaining to gun carrying.

But that does not make it a good idea. The slogan that “an armed society is a polite society” is both wrong and inimical to public safety.

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The post What Happens When the Second Amendment Collides With Public Safety? appeared first on DCReport.org.

Let me begin by revealing a truth about myself: I don’t have any tattoos, not even one, but if ever I get the desire for a tattoo, it’s going to be “Bad Bunny.”

Just saying “Bad Bunny,” is to fight and win the culture war. I mean, look at the words, absent any other context. The idea of a bunny is rooted in nearly everyone’s life as a toddler, even a baby. It’s soft and cuddly and as unthreatening as an animal could possibly be. So, the idea of a bunny being bad in any context of that word – as slang for good, as a descriptor of strength and the willingness to stand up, as well as “bad” used to describe something that you don’t want to mess with…

The words work on every level, and to take it as a moniker tells you everything you want to know without hearing a verse of even one song.

Let’s get the Super Bowl appearance out of the way with the word spectacular. The performances of hugely popular acts in previous Super Bowls had the advantage of being either at night or inside a domed stadium so the place could be blacked out and lighting and effects like smoke could be deployed to heighten the drama and help tell the story. I wondered how Bad Bunny would handle the California daylight. Perfectly, it turned out. He used it to make the field into Puerto Rico. I’ll echo all the other praise of the performance – it was as joyful a celebration of Latin culture, specifically Puerto Rican, as you could imagine. Using Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin broadened the appeal without taking away from the focus on pride in being who Bad Bunny is, who people of Spanish origin are. If there was a theme, it was pride.

And that’s what drove Trump and his MAGA followers crazy. It was like waving a red flag at racists. They responded perfectly, staging that lame “answer” half time show starring a lip-syncing Kid Rock and some country musicians studiedly out of the star firmament, as if they didn’t even want to attract a counter-audience. Photos from Trump’s Super Bowl viewing party at Mar a Lago showed the Bad Bunny half time show on screens surrounding the ballroom or wherever they held the thing. It was like an admission of failure.

Trump, of course, responded on Truth Social with what he clearly thought was a takedown of Bad Bunny, calling him “an affront to the greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, and Excellence.” It’s as if he took the words everyone was saying about Bad Bunny’s show and turned them inside out and upside down.

Where he hit his political statement out of the park was when he wrote “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” What, none of his advisors told him that 40 million Americans speak Spanish as a first language or regularly use it at home?

That’s 40 fucking million, grandpa.

Take that number and chop it up anyway you want, and you’re talking the margins in elections down to dogcatcher, not to mention the House and Senate in the midterms and every presidential race from here on. Every. Single. One.

You have to guess that Trump is attempting to appeal to his base, but his base doesn’t need appealing to. The base belongs to him for crying out loud. There’s a focus group or a poll every week that establishes the utter immobility of his core followers. All the recent polls that show his approval rating dipping below 40 percent for the first time are important to demonstrate the unpopularity of what he’s been doing with ICE and the inflationary effects of his dumb tariffs, but they’re even more important as evidence that there is a granite floor under 39 or wherever he is that’s somewhere in the low 30’s, and it’s not going anywhere, even if he shoots someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue or turns up in a video with a 14 year old girl.

There is simply no upside to attacking Bad Bunny and Latino pride, which is what he did last night on Truth Social, and from which he will never back away. He has thrown away the support he gathered in 2024 from Latinos, I mean, he has just trashed it. And every Latino in this country knows this truth: Trump would never attack Italian American or Irish American culture in the way he trashed Bad Bunny and Latin culture. “A slap in the face to our country,” he wrote, as if an entire swath of the southwestern part of this country did not derive a large part of its character from Spanish colonization, complete with language, food, music, architectural style – you name it.

Coming at the end of the week that Trump posted the video showing Barack and Michelle Obama as apes – oh, my god, could he have made it any worse?

Going to war with Bad Bunny is a period at the end of his racism, or maybe it’s a comma, spreading it beyond Black people to specifically include those with Brown skin. One of Trump’s lackeys, Laura Loomer, posted something that said the half time show wasn’t “white enough for me.” It clearly wasn’t white enough for her idol, either. That’s going to tell a tale in numbers, in votes they’re not going to get next time around or the time after that. He’s gone and done it, as they say, and he’s left himself no wiggle room to get out of the hole he just dug.

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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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Sometimes, the legacy press makes me weep tears of absolute despair. Even when acknowledging the horrid racism of the American right, they just cannot stop themselves from expending tremendous effort to whitewash it.

Here’s an article from last week in The Atlantic about how the death of St. Charlie the Bloodless has “unleashed” antisemitism on the right:

You can love Yair Rosenberg, or you can hate him. You can cry bloody tears about Zionism or point out that he’s punched neo-Nazis in the nose for years. Whatever your feelings, that’s for you. Me? I’m looking at this rose-tinted view of Republican politics with a massive amount of aggravation:

Before his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet, Charlie Kirk was trying to save the conservative coalition from turning on itself. To liberals, the late activist was known for debating left-wing students on college campuses. But on the right, Kirk was waging another battle, against people on his own side.

For years, Kirk was dogged by the overtly racist followers of the young white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. An avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, Fuentes sought to subordinate racial, religious, and sexual minorities to white Christians.

…

Kirk recognized that this crude conspiracism was poisonous to his project of popularizing the conservative cause.

Rosenberg is being extremely generous to Kirk here. OK, that’s a lie. Oh, not me. Rosenberg. He’s lying. Sorry, not sorry. Charlie Kirk was a Christian Nationalist. More specifically, he was a White Christian Nationalist. A point Rosenberg goes to great lengths to gloss over.

He aspired to forge a broad conservative coalition that could outlive Trump and bridge the traditional Reaganite GOP with the rising new right. As Kyle Spencer, the author of Raising Them Right, a book about Turning Point’s ascent, put it: “Charlie Kirk arrived on the scene as a kid who just graduated from high school in 2012, saying, ‘I have a vision. It is possible. This party is stodgy. It’s outdated, it’s old white men. We need to attract young people, Black people, Latinos.’” In 2024, when Kirk quarterbacked the Trump campaign’s ground game, it looked like he had finally pulled that off: The former president made major gains among nonwhite and low-propensity voters, and he finally won the popular vote.

This ignores who Kirk actually was, which is convenient for Kirk. But it’s bullshit. Kirk was not just a Christian with political ambition. He was a Christian who believed America should be run explicitly based on a specific vision of biblical fascism. The “Seven Mountain Mandate” calls for theocrats to seize absolute control, or “dominion,” of family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. Kirk said this out loud. If I know this, Rosenberg knows this.

If you’re not familiar with this movement, also called “Christian Dominionism,” I strongly urge you to read up on it because it is the basis for Project 2025. It is an explicitly white nationalist movement. There is no room for you if you are not white. It is explicitly misogynistic. Women are to be subjugated. It is explicitly anti-LGBTQ. They consider any deviation from heterosexuality to be a sin punishable by death. Finally, all other religions are heretical. The Bible does not call for tolerating heretics and living in peace with them. It calls for their death.

That would include Jews. If I know this, Rosenberg knows this. So why he feels the need to lie about it, I cannot say. But Charlie Kirk was not subtle about his Christian Nationalism.

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Now, it’s true that Kirk defended Israel and pushed back on open antisemitism. But the why matters. It wasn’t because of his love for humanity or innate decency. Charlie Kirk was a racist piece of shit. He hated Jews just as much as he hated Blacks and Asians and Latinos and and and. We were not his brothers. We were, as all Christian Nationalists see us, useful idiots.

It’s important to understand that the eschatological1 prophecies of the Evangelicals require the existence of an Israel populated by Jews. If all the Jews left Israel2 and it became a Muslim-only country, that wouldn’t work. It has to be Jews in Israel for the End Times to come, and all the “good” Christians to be saved by Jesus, blablabla. What happens to all the Jews? They convert or die and spend eternity in hell.

This is the vision of Christianity Charlie Kirk pimped to his audience. We Jews were never anything more than disposable pawns, destined for genocide. Christian Nationalists hate us. They’ve always hated us, and when they have the power to do so, they will “deport” us to Israel whether we want to go or not, so their beloved prophecy can come true. And when it doesn’t, they’ll probably drop a bunch of nukes on us in frustration. After all, when Christ doesn’t return, who are they going to blame except the Jews?

Charlie Kirk was not saving the right from antisemitism. He was keeping it hidden. Buried out of sight so we would still play along with the charade.

Here’s the thing, though: The right’s lurch to antisemitism did not start after Kirk died. These motherfuckers right here? They were marching back in August of 2017:

They were chanting “Jews will not replace us!” while Charlie Kirk was still quite alive and breathing.

Trump’s 2016 campaign was so explicitly racist and so explicitly appealed to white nationalism, I stopped speaking to my Trump-voting in-laws because I knew, I fucking knew!, that antisemitism was going to spread like a fucking cancer.

My wife, who is not Jewish, did not understand, but I told her, “They always get to the Jews.” Surprise! Two months after Trump was elected, Richard Spencer, the most famous neo-Nazi in America at the time, moved ten minutes away from where we lived so he could be closer to Washington DC and the center of power he thought he would now have access to.3 Several months after that, Nazis were marching in Charlottesville and murdering Heather Heyer.

This was eight long years before Charlie Kirk was killed. The right’s descent into white nationalism has been accelerating the entire time. If I know this, Rosenberg knows this.

Long before Kirk was shot, Greg Bovino was running around the United States dressed like a Nazi. Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem turned ICE into an explicitly white nationalist organization using Nazi propaganda.

If I know this, Rosenberg knows this. He went to fucking Harvard. Don’t tell me I’m smarter and more insightful than a goddamn Harvard graduate. I’d like to think I’m a clever little ogre, but not that clever. I do not have a crystal ball that lets me predict the future behavior of the American right.

What I do have is an unwillingness to lie about it. I have no need to sanitize who and what these people are, which, apparently, Rosenberg does. I was very clear about this back in November of last year. The Nazis are going to win the war to take over the right. They were always going to win:

As I explained, it doesn’t have to be this way, but the American right has never once turned towards the center after a loss. Every defeat has been met with calls for doubling down on extremism. This is the history of the American right from the Civil War until today. If I know this, Rosenberg knows this.

Now the GOP is an openly fascist party of white nationalists. There’s nowhere left to go but to Nazism, the end stage of their ideology. This process started long before Charlie Kirk was born, it was happening while he rose to prominence, and it didn’t accelerate after his death. It’s just continuing down the path it was already on.

The Trump regime burst out of the gate the second time with a fully-formed whiter nationalist agenda ready to go. Stephen Miller’s Gestapo has been rampaging across the country, inciting violence and recruiting the worst of the worst. The regime has been openly appealing to Nazis, knowing that they are losing the minority vote. This is a calculated move that was happening even before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. This is who they are. This is who they’ve always been.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t defending Jews from a goddamn thing. He wasn’t a good person with noble intent, trying to hold back the tide of hate on the right. He was a fucking monster hiding his true face until he ascended the throne. Then he would have gleefully ripped away the mask and celebrated the antisemitism he and his fellow white Christian Nationalists wallow in every minute of every day.

To suggest otherwise is to look at the last year/decade/60 years and ignore what we all saw happening. That may suit Rosenberg’s narrative, but that is not the truth, and I’m sick and fucking tired of people pretending otherwise.

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There are only 266 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

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For a group of people who love to pound their chest and brag about how manly and brave and tough they are, the American far right really is the softest group of whining toddlers in history. Just telling them they’re going to face consequences sends them into a temper tantrum of epic proportions that even the most spoiled brat would find distasteful.

These little punks need a spanking and, dear god, I cannot wait to give it to them.

Monday: How are you going to be the “Master Race” and such giant diaper babies at the same time?

Tuesday: The thing we dare not speak of? Wow!

Wednesday: Double livestream?! Daaaang!

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: Republicans are a cowardly and superstitious lot…

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. Megyn Kelly is Rush Limbaugh in drag - Right-wing influencer sells theatrical nastiness to boost her sick career by Mark Jacob at Stop the Presses

2. How To Tell You’re Being Manipulated By A Story - Three rules of thumb for navigating manipulative waters. by The Big Picture and Shane Snow at The Big Picture

3. The $159 Million Black Box: Why the Government is Ignoring Laws for Peter Thiel -A private monopoly has been building the system of federal surveillance for over a decade. From your Medicaid records to your grocery runs, see how the government uses your data. by Dissent In Bloom

4. The tide is turning as Trump hides from the public. by Robert B. Hubbell at Today’s Edition Newsletter

5. January showed why the Trump administration is failing - Trump’s unpopularity is at its apex and it can’t be explained with just high costs by The Fascism Heckler at A mocking a day, keeps the Fascism away

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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.