Trump, As De facto Dictator, Ramps Up Lawless Attacks On Critics

Three Yale University professors steeped in the history and techniques of authoritarianism are leaving the United States for new teaching positions at the University of Toronto. They won’t be the last.

As the journalist Donald Trump has said he hates more than any other, I understand perfectly the reasons why these fellow professors, both prominent Trump critics, made their decisions to flee America.

I won’t be joining them, but I also won’t criticize their choices.

The only reasonable conclusion you can come to is that Donald is our de facto dictator, his minions busy consolidating power and removing agents of accountability.

Some of the people I know and trust most in journalism and law have called me this year, fearing for my safety. They’ve all recommended that I leave the country for my own safety and for the benefit of people who follow my work.

‘You need to go,” one long-time and very sober-minded friend said bluntly, noting that I have a dual citizenship daughter in Ontario and qualify on other grounds to emigrate to Canada. “You can do more from there.”

There is very good reason for everyone—including each of you and those you love— to be afraid of wrongful arrest and of being held without access to a court if Trump suspends  the Constitutional privilege of habeas corpus, as he has mused about doing and just as Abraham Lincoln did in 1863 during the Civil War.

And don’t think that should you be grabbed off the streets by “mistake” that you will be set free.

That’s precisely what happened to Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and coach from Venezuela. Barrios, 36, followed every rule to get asylum in the United States. He had legally protected status as a resident alien when the Trump administration deported him because of tattoos.

Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers believed those tattoos showed gang membership but that his family, lawyer, and experts on the issue say show nothing of the sort. One simply identifies Barrios as a loyal fan of Real Madrid, a Spanish soccer team. Another says “Dios,” which you would think ICE agents know means “god” in Spanish.

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Mistakes

The administration has now told a judge it made a mistake. But the rest of the response is terrifying.

Oops, sorry but there’s nothing we can do to correct that mistake, the Trump administration told a federal judge. We shall see as more court hearings loom, but there is plenty the Trump agents could do starting with just asking for El Salvador to let them pick ups Barrios and restore him to the United States..

As the three Yale professors and others who have studied authoritarianism can tell you, correcting mistakes like this just undermines the do-as-we-say-or-else of power mongers. They will fight hard to ensure injustices continue because that enhances their lawless authority.

Timothy Snyder is author of the slim and informative volumes called On Tyranny  and On Freedom.

Jason Stanley, who said he wants his children to grow up in a free country not a fascistic America, wrote How Fascism Works, a similarly compelling book.

Marci Shore‘s scholarship is about Eastern Europe, a region with a deep history of authoritarian rulers.

As for me, I suspect I am much less prominent in Trump’s addled mind than when I was in his campaign and first term when I wrote three books exposing everything form his years of deep entanglement and extraordinary favors for his business associate and pal Joseph Weichselbaum, a major league cocaine and marijuana smuggler, to his plying children as young as 12 with liquor, limousines, and hotel suites because they had money to gamble in his supposedly highly regulated Atlantic City casinos.

Dangers and Warnings

This isn’t the first time I’ve been in a dangerous situation, especially when I was exposing the brutality, criminal, activity, and worldwide, political spying operation of the LAPD.

A friendly senior officer, very much on the QT, warned me that my life could be in grave danger. I told him I had to do what I had to do, but I also wrote a 31-page memo and placed copies of it in multiple places in case I turned out to be dead wrong.

I’m not leaving. It’s my country and I will defend our Constitution and the liberties of the people until my last breath.

And I say that having warned that down the road, whether it’s a few weeks away or decades away, all dictatorships lead to firing squads.

I’m also not going to criticize those who make a different decision.

I’ve had a long time to ponder a Trump dictatorship. I wrote about Donald becoming president in 1988 and again in 1992. knowing what an utterly dishonest, appallingly  ignorant, and ruthless white-collar criminal Donald Trump is.

Con Artistry

I also appreciate his extraordinary skill as a con artist. Just look how far his lies and manipulations have gotten him.

I worried within months of meeting him that he just might get to the White House and that if he did, it would be the end of the greatest civic experiment in human history — exactly the kind of impassioned popular error the Framers fretted about as they drafted our Constitution and the reason they made change possible, difficult and, especially, slow.

Since 2015,  I’ve been warning people that Donald is a wannabe dictator, a man with a well-documented history of consorting with and doing favors for heavyweight criminals. His excuse that he had no choice being in New York City real estate is bunk, as I’ve shown in fine detail over the years. He has plenty of criminal pals  with no connection to the New York real estate industry.

Trump Dictatorship Begins

On February 15 he declared that so long as he thinks he is saving our country he can break no law. Days later the Trump White House tripled down on this notion, sending out images of Trump wearing a real crown with the caption “long live the king.”

Namby-pamby

Unfortunately, our politics reporters and pundits reacted to these declarations with anything but bold descriptions of the facts. Instead, we got namby-pamby coverage along the lines of “what can Trump possibly mean?”

One of the most serious problems in America right now is all the journalists (both news and opinion)  and academics who cannot bring themselves to recognize the obvious. Similarly, Congress is infected with quisling Republicans who bow down to Herr Trump and a large number of Democrats who think they can appease him.

The awful truth is that Donald believes he is above the law, has proclaimed in writing that he is above the law, and acts as if he is above the law, which is the very essence of a dictatorship. He’s always thought this way.

Labels don’t matter. The focus by some journalists and academics on weather the Trump administration is “fascist” misses the point and is counterproductive.

I’ve spent my whole career, back to high school when I got my first journalism job in 1966, reporting what politicians do, not just what they say. That’s been the theme of DCReport from the start.

Unfortunately, far too many of my peers in national journalism focus on what politicians say, and far too little on their actions, conduct, and policies.

Pay attention to what Donald and his acolytes are doing – banning more than 250 words, censoring tens of thousands of Internet pages that show anyone but white males, grabbing people off the street over matters as trivial as a college newspaper opinion column, and taking the side of the murderous modern czar in the Kremlin against democracy and liberty, the values our country had stood for from the beginning.

First Ally Lost

Now the leader of Canada says the U.S. is no longer its ally. Quite right, but if you missed that news its not surprising. It got little play here.

From this and much more, the only reasonable conclusion you can come to is that Donald is our de facto dictator, his minions busy consolidating power, instilling fear, and removing agents of accountability. Columbia University bowed down as did at least two big law firms and Disney, a war-profiteering company in World War II, its conduct contrasting sharply with the other Hollywood studios.)

It took 40 years for Rome to transition from a republic to a dictatorship. Hitler destroyed German democracy in 53 days. It only took Donald Trump 26 days to become our dictator.

Days ago he asserted in an executive order that he will set the rules for the 2026 and later elections. That he lacks authority to control the elections is immaterial. So long as he continues to run rough shod over statutory law, case law, regulations, and his Supreme Court appointees prove their fealty to him he can do as he chooses.

He’s already taking the first step to seizing control of the military, removing valorous and extraordinarily competent generals and admirals, though he has not yet filled all of their positions. Just wait. those posts will go to loyalist officers promoted out of turn.

Replacing patriotic military commanders with toadies is one of the most classic signs of an authoritarian takeover. Watch top military promotions closely, very closely.

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This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

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If you haven’t read about it by now, Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man with no criminal record, was grabbed by ICE and sent to El Salvador to be tortured in a supermax prison. ICE knew he was not a gang member. They knew he was not supposed to be there. They knew, explicitly, that a judge had ordered a hold on any attempts to deport him several months earlier:

Officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. The Monday court filing by the government indicates that officials knew Abrego Garcia had legal protections shielding him from deportation to El Salvador.

“ICE was aware of this grant of withholding of removal at the time [of] Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States. Reference was made to this status on internal forms,” the government told the court in its filing.

And then they did it anyway, claiming it was an “administrative error.”

All of this is horrific enough. Garcia was accused of someone without evidence of being in a gang. That, alone, was all the “proof” the Trump regime needed to send him to prison. A country where just an accusation is enough to erase you from society is a country without freedom. Those in favor with the regime can destroy their enemies with a lie or for the right price. Perhaps a small bribe to the right official. Best not to run afoul of those in good standing.

That’s the definition of fascism.

But that wasn’t enough for the Trump regime. After admitting they had illegally and unjustly sent this man to be tortured for no reason, they took advantage of the outrage to send a message:

The government nevertheless argued in its filing that the court can’t order officials to bring Abrego Garcia home because he’s not in U.S. custody. The Trump administration is paying El Salvador to jail him, but the U.S. can’t force El Salvador to return the jailed men, the government claims.

It can only “entreat” or “cajole” its “close ally,” according to the filing.

To translate from fascist to English is easy enough: “We can bring Abrego Garcia home at any time. We do not want to. We are showing you how easy it is to make any of you disappear at any time.”

This is why it’s important to resist fascism every step of the way. They’re deporting “bad people” so who really wants to argue against that? Oh, it turns out they just deporting anyone who isn’t here legally? Well, I didn’t speak out when I thought they were bad people so it’s kind of awkward to say something now.

Oh? Now they want to deport people who are here legally, too? I’m not comfortable with that but those people said mean things about Jews so, really, it’s their own fault, yeah? Just co-authoring an op-ed in a school newspaper doesn’t sound all that bad but I’d really rather not get involved. Why make such a fuss over some kids who are kind of anti-Israael?

Now we’re at the point where people are being disappeared just on the strength of an accusation. Literally nothing else. And the regime is claiming they are powerless to bring them home after they illegally remove them from the country. Oh well! What could go wrong with that?

There are plenty of countries that will happily run concentration camps for the United States for a massive profit. That solves the problem of keeping them here where the public can see them and protest the inhumanity and illegality of the entire process. The regime can pretend the courts have no jurisdiction. When people start to die by the hundreds and then thousands? Well, that’s not OUR fault! El Salvador is a third-world country. We can’t be responsible for what they do to their prisoners!

And underlying it all is that message: We can do it to you at any time. We are weeks or months away from an “administrative error” putting an American citizen in a concentration camp in another country. First, it will be a naturalized citizen who had their citizenship “revoked” without a hearing which is not a thing. Then it will be another. And another. Then it will be people born here to undocumented parents, their birthright citizenship stripped, also not a thing. Then it will just be anyone the regime deems “dangerous,” including people born here to two American citizen parents.

The unmarked vans with masked agents will rove the streets, looking for “troublemakers” to disappear. Perhaps they’ll kick in your door at 2 AM and drag you away, claiming your social media posts prove you’re a terrorist or a danger to national security. Off to a supermax prison in another country you go before a judge can stop it. And once you’re there? Oh well, there’s nothing the regime can do to bring you home. Such a tragedy. It’s out of our hands.

Will you keep looking away because you’re not Abrego Garcia? Listen to me carefully: You are. You will be. Abrego Garcia is just a name on a piece of paper. Your name can be on a piece of paper just as easily and if your MAGA neighbor decides you are not loyal enough? You will be on that plane wondering why no one stopped this before it was too late.

Now is when you speak out. Tomorrow is too late.

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It seems apparent that the Trump administration war on Civil Rights is stranding thousands who have filed complaints about mistreatment or bias.

We can only guess that Donald Trump’s culture war stances against “wokeness” leave him at ease with rules, government procedures, business and policing practices that leave those who find themselves on the short end of the stick for circumstances they do not control.

His administration took big swipes last week to drop civil rights law enforcement at the Department of Education, the Social Security Administration, the Justice Department and several agencies overseen by Homeland Security. At the same time, he took a swipe at museums, criticizing exhibits he said were based on incorrect perceptions of race and identity in America. And he ordered national review of state voter rolls to clear out non-citizens by some magic Elon Musk technical review.

It is interesting that Trump, who like other politicians of all stripes, likes to single out individual stories in the American quilt that match his partisan point of view, is silent about the effects of all this on ordinary citizens in a pluralistic country. Instead, he repeats his general pitch about radical leftists using diversity, equity and inclusion as an activist agenda to unfairly hire, promote or even recognize achievement by anyone not white, male, and straight.

The BBC managed to find a Cleveland mom now in limbo with unresolved complaints about educational services for her 13-year-old adopted son who is not receiving school services for his fetal alcohol syndrome, ADHD and other mental health problems, Eliminating the civil rights staff at the Department of Education’s Cleveland office (and six others)  leaves the family with an unfinished mediation and no one to call.

Nor can they call the Social Security Administration, which has dismissed — under court challenge — 200 enforcement officers who follow on complaints about the disabled.

And at the General Services Administration (GAO), which manages federal property and contracts, the Trump administration has removed a rule that prohibited federal contractors from allowing segregated facilities. The GAO memo applies to all civilian federal agencies, said the prohibition was not in line with Trump’s views on diversity.

Justice and Homeland Security

The Justice Department’s freeze on civil rights litigation and formal decision to pursue policing reform agreements has created a series of live legal cases abandoned.

A simple internet search shows a long list of dropped cases involving Alabama and Virginia purging voter rolls and Texas adopting challenged election maps, state immigration enforcement challenges, police and fire discriminatory hiring cases, lawsuits involving a shelter provider sexually molesting migrant kids, a North Carolina case challenging the state ban on transition treatments for minors and a Utah suit about prison placement for trans prisoners, among others.

The dismissal of most employees in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and two separate DHS ombudsman offices seem intended to eliminate legal roadblocks to its immigration crackdown efforts. Interestingly, the legal streamlining effort comes just as issues surrounding deportations are running into court challenges. Separations will take 60 days.

As The Hill.com reports, the layoffs at DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and two ombudsman staff who hear complaints, were in response to Justice Department belief that these offices “have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”

The eliminated Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman provides a platform for those to bring concerns about the immigration process, while the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman is a route for the public to flag issues about the problems facing those held in immigration detention.

Homeland’s statement was that “These reductions ensure taxpayer dollars support the Department’s core mission: border security and immigration enforcement. “These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”

Redefining Civil Rights

The fallout from the Homeland decisions will affect specific individual complaints, of course, but also the politics of Trump’s mass deportation politics.

Rep. Bernie Thompson, D-Miss, noted that Homeland is silencing those who provide a critical review of its policies, a bid overall to end oversight of Homeland Security operations. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus added that civil rights oversight is “not a bureaucratic hurdle if you don’t break the law, geniuses.”

The Trump administration and the courts are warring over whether immigration policies are being based on legal and constitutional footing, on the procedural aspects of roundups and deportations, and on whether the administration is actively ducking court orders on administrative law. Claiming the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as justification for forgoing due process before immediate deportation to El Salvadorean prison camps, for example, crosses all those lines.

From a broader perspective, the Trump Justice Department wants to prosecute or otherwise investigate cases that the Biden administration would have sought to protect, including transgender treatment cases or racially discriminatory policies followed by policing agencies.

Through its actions, the Trump administration is redefining what civil rights means by target and by whether there is anyone to take up the complaint of discrimination.

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It is one of the tragic truths of military life that oftentimes a soldier has to die before anyone notices where the soldiers are and what they’re doing there. This was the case last week in Lithuania when four soldiers from the First Armored Brigade of the Third Infantry Division went missing after their M88 armored recovery vehicle disappeared in what is described as a peat bog during a training exercise near the border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia.

The bodies of three of the four soldiers were recovered Monday after a week-long effort to pull the M88 from the swampy bog. Their names have not been announced by the army, and efforts continue to find the body of the fourth soldier who remains missing.

President Trump was asked during a press availability at the White House last week if he had been briefed on the disappearance of the soldiers in Lithuania. He replied that he had not, and the questioning from reporters moved on to other topics.

This is sadly typical of what happens when soldiers are lost in training accidents, which happen all the time. When soldiers aren't at war, they are training, and much of what they do is dangerous. The M88 is what amounts to a 140,000-pound armored tow truck, equipped to pull other armored vehicles such as M1A1 tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers that have either broken down or somehow gotten stuck in mud or snow or in a ditch. The army hasn't announced what the mission was that the soldiers were on, other than to say they had been sent out to recover another vehicle that had broken down. It isn't clear yet what happened to send the M88 into the peat bog, but it is suspected that the vehicle was moving down a road and somehow slipped into the swampy waters of the bog. I were to guess, I'd say the M88 was probably lost at night when visibility was poor, and the road through a dense forest was unmarked.

The thing about armored vehicles is that, protected by their thick armor, you feel safe until something goes wrong. Then, as apparently happened with the incident in Lithuania, when the vehicle gets trapped and sinks into the bog, the crew is unable to escape.

Here is what may have happened. The M88 and its crew were being held in reserve and were sent out on the recovery mission when news came in over the radio that another vehicle was in trouble. Using a powerful winch, the M88 recovery vehicle can pull something that weighs up to 140,000 pounds out of trouble or lift a vehicle weighing up to 35,000 pounds using its crane-like boom. The M88 typically has a crew of three: a vehicle commander, a driver and a third soldier to assist in extractions. The three bodies that were recovered were found inside the vehicle. It is not known what happened to the fourth body, but he was probably the vehicle commander and was standing in the commander’s cupola at the time the M88 slipped off the road into the bog and was able to jump free, only to get sucked into the bog along with the M88.

I don't know how long the Third Infantry Division has been in Lithuania, but I do know what they're doing over there. They are deterring Vladimir Putin from any thought he has that he and his puppet president of Belarus might decide to roll over the Baltic states and Poland when Russia gets through with Ukraine, as unlikely as any of that might seem at this point in the three-year war Ukraine has fought for its survival.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Salon. To read the rest of the column, go here:

Out of sight, out of mind

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♀️HANDS OFF, CREEPS!♀️

When I deleted my Twitter account several months ago, one of the few things I regretted about it was that I wouldn’t be able to keep tabs on the continuing rapid descent of the right into a swamp of racism and misogyny. It’s not that I particularly enjoy wading through the cesspool of the right but you have to know what kind of fucking imbecile bullshit you’re dealing with before you can, you know, deal with it.

Fortunately, several accounts I used to follow on Twitter1 made the move to Bluesky. Lovely, wonderful Bluesky which will pass 34 million users sometime in the next 4-5 days. Small compared to Twitter? Sure, but the legacy press cried an awful lot of big sobby tears over a little tiny social media platform. One wonders why…

Anyway! One of the people that made the move is @AskAubry.com. She has made it her life’s work to expose toxic masculinity and the general depravity of the right. As you can imagine, she has a lot of material to choose from so her Blussky feed is an endless stream of shitty men being shitty with the occasional tradwife selling out other women. Aubry is awesome. Tradwives, less so.

This particular post of hers caught my attention because it neatly captures just about everything wrong with how the right views masculinity, women, and life in general. It’s…a lot.

She’s way nicer than I am. I wouldn’t block out the name or the face. But I have a pathological disregard for the feelings of assholes.

Anywho! Let’s look at Mr. Manly here:

If you’re leading with “unvaxxed,” you’re announcing to the world you’re an imbecile but, sure, let’s go with that.

People who anoint themselves “controversial” are, by default, people who are desperate for attention. If this schmuck was actually “controversial,” he wouldn’t be a litany of right-wing talking points. “Controversial” people think for themselves and Mr. Chicken here does not appear to have ever had a single original thought in his life other than maybe, “Which arm should I hold the chicken in?”

Homeschooler? Come on, buddy. You already told us you were an anti-vaxxer. We don’t need a reminder that you’re stupid. This is redundant.

“Ambitious, mature, calm, established, old-world values.” LOL. This is a 40-year-old man demanding a submissive virgin. Nothing about him suggests calm, mature, ambitious, or particularly bright. One imagines his “old-world values” include slapping his property wife around. Like a real man. 🙄🙄🙄

Oh, it gets worse:

So…he wants a wife and a big family but…also “ethical non-monogamy?” And, look!, he’s soooo edgy! He defies convention and the status quo! What a rebel!

My favorite part is that he’s an “experienced husband and breeder.”

If that sounds weird to you, allow me to translate: “I am a divorced middle-aged father who does not see his children. I am trying to make up for my previous failures as a husband and father by embracing manly manliness I saw on YouTube.”

Fucking loser. Hopefully, his ex-wife got full custody and she moved to another state to get the kids away from this scumbag.

Here’s the rest:

Ugh! The bloodline stuff is just straight-up eugenics white nationalism crap. I’ll bet you a nickel he’s obsessed with his “Viking” heritage after finding out he’s 2% Norweigian or some shit like that. Probably throws axes in his backyard to prove how masculine he is.

Please note that Mr. “ethical non-monogamy” is also “possessive and jealous.” I guess that means non-monogamy is just for him aka “I can fuck anyone I want but you are my property.” Because he’s mature and calm and has “old-world values.” Like adultery.

It’s pretty much the total package of everything wrong with how right-wing men view the world. They are lords of all creation. Their every whim and desire must be catered to. Dissent will not be tolerated. Submission is sexy. Women exist to produce babies because their manly bloodline is all that matters.

Women who have sex outside of marriage are whores but they, as a man, can have sex with anyone they want. Their wife must be pure and virtuous but they can fuck anything with a pulse. After all, they are men and their sexual gratification is paramount.

This, not coincidentally, is the exact mindset, deeply encouraged by the right, that leads to rape. Men are sexual beasts that MUST have sex. They crave it. They DESERVE it. And women won’t give it to them, it’s their god-given right to take it. It should be noted that this does not apply to gay men who have no right to take the sex they want from other men. That’s wrong even though they are also men. You see, women are sexual objects. But JUST women.

This whole Tinder profile is like reading the fanfic of a 13-year-old who has been watching rape fantasy porn since he was 9 and has never talked to a girl in his life. Except this is an adult male who was supposed to have grown up at some point. But he didn’t.

That’s the part that stuck out for me the most and is, ironically, the least openly offensive. Not offensive, per se, although I’m sure most of the women reading it saw it as the red flag it was, even among all the other red flags: “… encouraging your man. Be my peace and comfort.”

For a very VERY long time, women were (and still are) expected to be “mommy” to grown-ass men. Do the dishes. Clean the bathroom. Cook dinner. Raise the kids. Now, if she’s a stay-at-home mom, sure, I get it. Her job is mom and homemaker. That’s MY job and I usually cook dinner and vacuum and keep things clean. Debbie has not scrubbed a toilet in almost two decades now.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Not entirely. While I’m sure this cockbite expects his submissive virgin wife to be his domestic slave, he also expects her to be his security blanket. Her emotional labor is his to drain at will with no reciprocation.

“I had a hard day at work fucking chickens, honey. Make me feel better.”

“I had a hard day raising our six children all by myself. Can we talk about my feelings?”

“No, you fucking harpy! Why does it always have to be about you?!”

You know exactly what I’m talking about. And I know this jackass’s ex-wife does, too. Hence, the “ex.”

This, more than anything else, is what is fueling the epidemic of male loneliness. Women stopped settling and instead of stepping up, men were told to become bitter. Even as the right tells men to better themselves physically, which, OK, that’s not the worst thing, it tells them to close themselves off emotionally more than ever.

Why? Because men who feel emotions other than anger and hate are men who look at the right with disgust. Empathy, compassion, and vulnerability are antithetical to fascism and theocracy. You cannot oppress those you see as human. You can exterminate or subjugate those you see as subhuman. And toxic masculinity teaches nothing if it doesn’t teach that women and those who disagree with you are less than.

But it’s all a trap. A manipulation. The more “manly” they become, the less they appeal to women and the less able they are to find a companion. Thus, men trapped in this lie become aggrieved and resentful, told to blame the women they’ve driven away for their loneliness. That rage is then harnessed by the right and turned to other groups, like immigrants and Jews because hate is fungible. That’s the game.

The legacy press plays its part but putting the blame for male loneliness on…women who refuse to sacrifice themselves on the altar of toxic masculinity. More than one article has insisted women need to rescue men by lowering their standards. Are men ever told they need to stop being whiny little babies who need coddling from mommy? Of course not. We never hold men, especially white men, accountable for their behavior.

I do not know the way out. There is an endless supply of money to promote the Joe Rogans and Jordan Petersons and Andrew Tates. There will always be an endless conga line of toxic men preaching hate and rage to young men who will grow up alone and bitter and isolated because they listened to people who do not care about them, only how to use them.

I do know that the way to begin is for our country to stop pretending that this is not happening and that men are not responsible for their actions. Every child has to grow up sooner or later and we are long overdue to stop tolerating childish bullshit like Mr. Chicken Fucker here as normal.

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

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The Speech Some Democratic or Progressive Leader Could Make and Start the Change

What would be in such a speech? First, they should skip the long list of what’s wrong and the horrible things happening. Go directly to stating what they would do if they had enough voters. Things like:

• Implement automatic industry-wide collective bargaining, as it is in Germany and still in a few U.S. industries, giving employees the leverage to get what their work is really worth.
• Minimum hours guarantee. If the employer later finds they don’t need you for as many hours as they said, that’s on them. You still get paid for the hours you agreed to work.
• Fixed schedule. If you’re hired for the day shift, you can’t be switched to the evening shift, or not without compensation.
• A very aggressive prosecution program against wage theft.
• Automation compensation. To whatever extent a company gets richer because automation reduces work, the employees get to share in that increase. As far as possible, rather than laying off workers, keep the same workers but for fewer hours but for the same pay.

Note that the items above are not social programs. Government help is needed and will be needed on some issues, like child care, but the core push is to have the rules of the economic game refocused on giving people what they should be getting in the first place, but aren’t. Social-program help is good where appropriate, but enforcing that people get what their work is already worth is much more solid and much more powerful.

Note also that these items are not just goals, like, “Young people should not go broke or in debt because they want to go to college or a trade school.” (Senator Bernie Sanders at the recent Fight Oligarchy tour.) A noble goal, but just a wish, dependent on budgets and other factors. The items listed above are more in the realm of real steps that could be done in short order, and are about people getting their proper share of the wealth they are already creating.

Another item a leader can declare is about messaging. It’s something they could push from within a progressive White House, from the bully pulpit: A call on media outlets to give an alternative to the daily stock market report that comes with almost every newscast. Yes, people are somewhat affected by the stock market if they have a retirement account, but the subtext is, this economy is not about you. It’s about the big investors. But imagine a few seconds every day on some people-news as well. There are lots of people-centered numbers that could be reported too. Such as, has the level of employee confidence in being able to find better jobs changed? Has the employee share of national income changed, how the pie is sliced? How are we doing on the percentage of people with some preparation for retirement? What’s an initial estimate on the amount of wealth the work of all workers has added to the nation today?

Can a president influence media this way? Well, we’re learning a president can intimidate law firms and colleges and make wealthy donors kiss the ring. I’d bet an ethical, but bold, leader could get lots of media to add this little piece to their reporting.

All of these steps and a hundred similar ones need to be pushed with an emphasis on functioning within the constitution, and on being fiercely inclusive of all. Yes such steps fall short of some social goals, such as DEI. But you get these kind of leaders in power, and the people themselves in turn more empowered, and people feeling more economically secure, and you have a country in a condition much more open to dealing with the many other issues it needs to.

These steps are radical, because radical change is needed and wanted, but they’re also centerist. They apply to everyone. Democrats who feel the need is to be more progressive, and ones who want to be more centerist, should both be able to get behind these.

Finally that leader needs to say, “I don’t have the votes for this. We leaders don’t have the votes for this. But this is about doing things. Here’s your part, what you can do. Let your commitment to vote for these leaders and these changes be know. Get everyone you can to join you. The popular vote was lost by less than 2%. For now we’ll resist in every way we can until, in a year and a half at the Congressional elections, we start the big changes. Then complete that by your votes regaining the next White House and a new wave of daily news of big changes will start flowing. A very different kind of big changes. Ones that are for you.”

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