The Opinionated Ogre is 100% reader-supported. Please help me continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

I was just finishing up breakfast (half a cup of cereal and half of a corn muffin) and getting to write a nerdy article about Marjorie Taylor Greene being…shudder…right about something (for all the wrong reasons) when I came across a piece in Political Wire: Trump Takes Reins of U.S. Economy.

The phrasing of the headline told me immediately that I was going to be annoyed. And, motherfucker, I was:

“With the major components of his agenda now coming into focus, President Trump has already left an indelible mark on the U.S. economy. The triumphs and turbulence that may soon arise will squarely belong to him.”

“Not even six months into his second term, Mr. Trump has forged ahead with the grand and potentially disruptive economic experiment that he first previewed during the 2024 campaign. His actions in recent weeks have staked the future of the nation’s finances — and its centuries-old trading relationships — on a belief that many economists’ most dire warnings are wrong.”

Oh go fuck yourselves sideways with a pineapple, NYT. The unmitigated gall to look at the Republican economic disaster they just unleashed on the country and wonder, “Will it work this time?”

NO IT WON’T FUCKING WORK THIS TIME! In the 50+ years I have been on this planet, Republicans have been cutting taxes for the rich and slashing the social safety net. Let me count the number of times the economy has improved:

Never. Not fucking once.

There WAS that one time Republicans cut taxes for the rich and services for the rest of us and the economy got worse.

And then there was that other time it happened. And then that OTHER time, and the other time after that, and several more times after those. In fact, every single time Republicans have cut taxes for he rich and slashed services for the rest of us, the economy tanked.

But the New York Fucking Times thinks THIS time might be different because something something “Donald Trump.”

You lying shitweasels. No you fucking do not beleive that even for a second.

“But Ogre!,” you say, “They’re just giving Trump the benefit of the doubt!”

First, Trump and the GOP have done nothing to earn it. This exact same economic “plan” has been run over and over again with the exact same results. Doing it on steroids with extra cruelty is going to, what?, make it fucking work this time? Bish, please. If the NYT really believes that, they should shut down the printing presses, lock the doors, and burn the building. They’re too fucking stupid to call themselves journalists.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Fuck you, NYT.

Second, the NYT did not give Joe Biden the same “benefit of the doubt.” While Biden was empowering unions and reining in monopolies and expanding workers’ rights and investing hundreds of billions in American manufacturing, the Times and the rest of the legacy press were aghast. There was no prediction of possible “triumph.” Only four solid years of “Are we about to enter a recession?!!?”

Mind you, the press asked that every single month for four years, even as we experienced the most sustained period of economic growth in over half a century. Trump “the populist” is running the same failed GOP playbook of fucking the poor and middle class and the NYT marvels at the possiblity of gold raining from the heavens. Biden runs a successful playbook that supercharges the economy and the press insists the sky is falling.

But wait, maybe the NYT has learned a lesson about pessimism!

Oh, you fucking wish.

May I direct your attention to the ongoing temper tantrum the NYT is throwing over Zohran Mamdani?

He is seeking to become mayor of NYC and implement several economic policies, some of which, as far as I know, have not been implemented in the city on a sustained basis. Free buses. City-owned grocery stores in food deserts. No-cost childcare. Rent freezes. BABY BASKETS!!!! The horror…

He also wants to implement several policies that HAVE been done before to great success. Raise taxes on the rich, who will remain rich. Increase the minimum wage, which has yet to bankrupt a city, increase inflation, or close down millions of small businesses as repeatedly predicted. Enforce the rule of law so the rich stop preying on the rest of us.

NYC is expensive. The cost of living is out of control and people are struggling. Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo are offering more of the same, plus a heaping side dish of corruption. And Cuomo is a sexual predator.

Is the NYT giving Mamdani the “benefit of the doubt?” Hellll fucking no! They went to war against him. The Times is so opposed to his entire platform, they are willing to put Adams, the literal criminal, or Cuomo, the serial killer/sexual predator, back in power.

Just to summarize:

Let’s not kid ourselves. The New York Fucking Times is telling us who they are every single day. They’re STILL, right fucking now!, writing articles about Joe Biden.

They’ve written more articles in the last six months about how unfit Biden was than they have about how unfit Trump currently is. That’s a deliberate choice and goddamn them to hell for it.

A year from now, when the Trumpcession is in full swing and inflation is strangling what’s left of the economy and unemployment has exploded, the NYT will take up its new role of spreading the blame. “Washington” has failed the country. “Congressional gridlock” is the problem. “Tribalism” is getting in the way. Because if everyone is guilty, no one is.

Meanwhile, we won’t be talking about how Trump’s economic policies are ruinous because, well, that’s not the narrative the press will want to tell. Maybe they contributed a little but, really, it was out of his control, y’all.

I will continue to repeat this until the legacy press is burned to the ground and replaced with real journalists: Republicans are not held to a lower standard. They’re held to no standard at all.

The legacy media has abandoned us in favor of sucking up to oligarchs and fascism. Find voices you trust (other than me) and subscribe where you can. Independent voices like the Opinionated Ogre will be needed in the coming days, and we require your support. This newsletter is free, but for $5 a month or just $50 a year, you can keep the lights on.

🖕FUCK THE LEGACY PRESS!🖕

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

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 117 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Well, another day of dancing on the damaged desktops of right-wing media figures over their freakout about the collapse of the Jeffrey Epstein files story. Conservative and liberal columnists alike are having a field day excavating podcast appearances by Kash Patel promising that if he was in power, he would release all the stuff the FBI has on Epstein immediately. “Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," Patel bellowed on the YouTube show of Trump-promoter Benny Johnson in 2023.

Dan Bongino, the conservative radio host turned Deputy Director of the FBI, made a career out of promoting Epstein conspiracies, beginning with the theory that Epstein didn’t commit suicide in the Manhattan Correctional Center but was murdered to end his prosecution for sex trafficking and coverup the scandal of “elites” who were Epstein’s “clients.”

MAGA world wasn’t happy yesterday when an FBI memo leaked, blowing up the entire Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracy Industrial Complex. The FBI released video tape taken in the federal prison in lower Manhattan from the night Epstein died in 2019 showing no one entered his cell from 10:40 p.m. when he was locked down for the night, until 6:30 the next morning when he was found dead. Conveniently, the FBI memo concluded that Epstein never had a so-called client list that MAGA world had contended he used to blackmail business leaders, celebrities and political figures.

There was much chortling in February when Attorney General Pam Bondi, with great fanfare, released binders titled “The Epstein Files: Phase One” to a gaggle of right-wing influencers who had been invited to the White House. The binders turned out to contain news stories about Epstein and other publicly available material. Bondi attempted to explain away the disappointing “declassified” public material by telling reporters that the DOJ was going through a “truckload” of Epstein material provided by the FBI. Questioned on Fox News about the Epstein client list, Bondi claimed, “It’s sitting on my desk right now.”

Look at what happened within the walls of the White House today: Trump, Bondi, and Patel appeared before the press and tried to explain away the sudden collapse of the Epstein story. Bondi claimed she wasn’t referring to an Epstein client list but rather to an Epstein file that was “sitting on my desk, along with the JFK, MLK files as well. That’s what I meant by that.”

Trump jumped in, replying to the question by bringing up the tragedy of the drownings in Texas in comparison: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking — we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.”

“This creep” was a close friend of Donald Trump’s in Manhattan for years. Trump and his wife Melania were photographed with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his fixer and pimp, at a Manhattan party, and there are many other photos of Trump and Epstein together. Could that explain the backpedaling, dodging, and chasm-jumping that the White House, DOJ, and FBI are doing today about Trump and his friend?

There is a problem with all the fun MAGA world has been having with the Epstein story: He was a pedophile, and his victims were young girls who were lured to his Manhattan apartment, Palm Beach mansion, and other properties, including his private estate in the Virgin Islands, with promises of acting and modeling careers. Instead, they were sexually assaulted by adult males including Epstein himself and a member of the British royal family, among others.

I cannot attempt to even imagine the hideous experience of being abused like the young victims of Jeffrey Epstein. The sexual abuse of underage girls and boys is not a story. It is a horror that has involved the Catholic Church, protestant religious denominations, and the entertainment business. The horror knows no boundaries. It happens down the street from you and me. People you know, both male and female, have been abused as children.

It is a sad commentary that it takes a public figure like Jeffrey Epstein, or a prominent Bishop, or celebrity television preacher for this terrible behavior of our species to become public, and it is even sadder that the abuse of children became a spectacle that today landed within the White House, the office and residence of the President of the United States.

That Donald Trump’s Attorney General was questioned in his presence about her handling of a sex scandal involving one of his personal friends is an enormous outrage that in another time, involving another man, would have brought down a president. That in itself is a terrible commentary on how low we have fallen as the nation that put that man in that room in that previously august national treasure known as the White House.

But it is too easy to lose sight of the story behind the scandal, the very real damage that has been done again and again, over and over, to little children who were powerless to stop the powerful men who destroyed their innocence and scarred them for life, whether those men were presidents, businessmen, celebrities, or their own fathers, uncles, or neighbors.

The story of Jeffrey Epstein and the crimes he committed is not a political story. It is not something that should be bandied about by podcasters and television news hosts, or in posts on platforms like X and Facebook. Child abuse is a civilizational tragedy and a crime. All those who have abused children should be prosecuted and put behind bars, no matter who they are or what their station in life.

Period.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

I’ve owned this mug for twenty-five years now. Bought in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera in New York on my first ever trip to America, which I doubt I shall ever visit again. The mug, in art nouveau style, celebrates Pucchini’s La Bohème, which we might have seen there. I forget what we saw from the cheap seats, high up. The colours are badly faded after a quarter-century of machine washing, which suggests that its manufacture was cheap, though it has served me well through different places. Sometimes it disappeared for weeks on end into other people’s offices and I had to mark “property of Chris Bertram” in indelible marker on the base. But all sign of that writing has now gone.

Clinton was President then, and the Twin Towers still standing. We went to the top. Terrible things had already happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but we didn’t think they might happen to us too, as now we do.

I was surprised by America, how cheerful people were and large the food portions. It all seemed to work and the buildings went upwards forever. We stood in the street and looked up, up, up. That journey made me see America as human and not just an abstraction of ideas and power. When 9/11 happened I got angry at my British friends who said they got what they deserved. Those were actual people in a place that really existed.

My youngest child got sick there on that trip. Appendicitis. Luckily we had insurance, which paid. We resisted their demand that one parent should fly back with the other child, not knowing if the operation had succeeded, or not. Lenox Hill Hospital was nice once you got past the ER with people shouting about gunshot wounds and others behind transparent screens demanding that you show that insurance. The nurses, mostly black, were friendly and made conversation with us about the NHS.

The mug is not all that remains. I have some amber cuff-links from the New York Public Library gift shop, a tie bought at Macy’s, photos (one with a banner behind us “CAPITALISM MADE FRESH DAILY”),the drawings our children made of the skyline and a cartoon book about the appendicitis. But the mug I see daily.

I’ve been back many times, visited many US cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Providence, Boston, Chicago, Madison, Tucson. But nothing quite matches that first glimpse of Manhattan out of a plane window, the immediate raucousness of the airport, the taxi ride from JFK, the first multi-decker sandwich with pastrami, the cacophony of different voices, colours, accents, possibilities. So much gone, and I will not return. But I still drink my morning coffee from that mug.

(Inspired by Jenny Erpenbeck’s “The Pressure Cooker” in her Not a Novel.)

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year.

🖕FUCK THE LEGACY PRESS!🖕

Last week, when Elon Musk threatened to start a new political party in retaliation over being pushed out of Trump’s inner circle, I predicted that the legacy press would be openly hostile to the idea.

My reasoning was very simple: The legacy press is extremely predictable about certain things. If it’s bad for Democrats, it’s legitimate. If it’s bad for Republicans, it’s not.

Thus, RFK Jr. was a legitimate “independent” candidate until he became a threat to Trump, then he was damaged goods. Hacked emails were a legitimate story until the emails were Trump’s, then the press rediscovered journalistic integrity. Writing headlines about American bombs being used in Gaza was very important until Trump was president, then no one wanted to talk about that anymore.

Third parties are bad for Democrats and the press LOVES them. Despite not being a serious candidate by any metric and clearly a Russian asset, the press always gives Jill Stein all the oxygen she could ever want. The press hyped up Andrew Yang long after his expiration date came and went. Remember Third Way? The legacy press had such an embarrassing crush on them, it bordered on stalking.

But here’s how the New York Fucking Times is reacting to Elon Musk’s newly announced third party:

Well, gee golly! They don’t seem to be excited about a new third party in America! That’s so weird! The legacy press is always going on and on and fucking on about “both sides” and how broken the two-party system is. Funny…you’d think the NYT would be super jazzed to have a new entry into the electoral field.

Instead, they really want Elon Musk to know all the reasons there’s just NO WAY he’ll be able to pull this off!!!

Mr. Musk boasted on Sunday that his plan to radically transform American democracy would not be difficult — suggesting he had spent little time studying state ballot-access and federal campaign-finance laws.

…

Qualifying a slate of 435 House candidates, were Mr. Musk to take his idea national, would require about three times as many petition signatures as putting a presidential candidate on the ballot in every state and could cost more than $50 million just in signature gathering, Mr. Winger said.

$50 million! Where would the world’s richest man worth over $400 billion find that kind of money?! Best to give this up right now!

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre has many deep thoughts...

The NYT also wants Musk to know it’s a lot of work to build a political party and keep it going. Musk is notorious for losing interest in things and the people he hires will be targeted by the regime for punishment. Who’d risk it?! Better to just give up, buddy, before the grifters come calling:

That could leave Mr. Musk dependent, at least somewhat, on the mercenary types who populate the world of minor parties and ballot-access campaigns, and who may be willing to suffer reputational damage with national Republicans if the paycheck is big enough.

In recent days, cash-hungry ballot-access operatives have been conducting frenzied research and developing proposals with the hopes of getting them in front of Mr. Musk, according to one person doing just that. Some of them have begun spending inordinate amounts of time analyzing his social media posts.

It’s important to note that the Republican Party is infested with these exact mercenary types and operatives with nary a word from the deeply concerned NYT. But isn’t it nice how they’re looking out for their good buddy Elon?

Now, here’s where the Times gives the game away by explaining what their real worry is:

On his social media site, Mr. Musk has floated the idea of holding an American Party Congress this August in Austin, Texas. He suggested that he would be interested in keeping a “laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts” in the 2026 midterms. And if those candidates were to win, he said, they would “caucus independently,” but “legislative discussions would be had with both parties.”

An independent caucus would be much easier to do and well within reach of a man with $400 billion. That cannot be allowed.

So why, exactly, does the NYT find this so threatening? Why aren’t they cheering one of the few people in the country with the unlimited resources needed to kick off a new party or create a caucus capable of, ahem, holding “both parties accountable?”

Again, this is not complicated and I touched on this last week. Musk is not creating a centrist party. He is incapable of creating one. Elon Musk with his very-well documented history of white nationalism and hate speech and tongue-fucking Nazis on Twitter can no more create a centrist party than I could fly over to South Korea and become the lead singer of BTS.

Putting aside the fact that my girls would spontaneously combust from the eternal cringe of me getting on stage, I do not speak the language. And neither does Musk. He speaks fluent hate and rage. He does not speak fluent moderate. So how is he going to attract moderate voters, especially from the left?

Short answer: He can’t.

Long answer: He abso-fucking-lutely can’t. He can, however, attract Republican voters who really REALLY hate Trump. There are a lot of them and that number is growing. These are people who will never vote for a baby-killing godless pedophile liberal but they’re mad at Trump’s warmongering and tax cuts for billionaires and cuts to Medicaid and breaking Social Security and and and. They’re also conditioned to follow wealth and power. Musk has both.

Musk can easily “laser-focus” on a handful of seats. He won’t make any headway flipping blue seats but claiming several red ones? He can do that with his pocket change. What are Republicans going to do? Complain that he bought the elections? Citizens United, sweetie! Money is free speech. It’s what you wanted!

Maybe they could insist that Musk is bribing elected officials? Oh wait! Bribery is legal now, thanks to the Republicans on the Supreme Court!

And this is clearly what is freaking the NYT out. Musk can very easily take control of a chunk of the GOP and bring everything they try to do to a screeching halt. Now, that’s fine when Republicans obstruct Democrats. It will not be acceptable when Musk interferes with the GOP’s next round of tax cuts and funding to ICE.

Worse, if Musk does seize control of a caucus, he’ll control it long after Trump is gone. The GOP was not very kind to Musk when he was exiled. Don’t you think he’ll remember that and continue to seek retribution? Malignant narcissists are not known to be very forgiving.

Again, this will impact the GOP and the GOP only. Musk is not going to scoop up any blue seats, only red. Thus, the New York Times views this correctly as a threat to one party and one party only. And in the eyes of the deeply compromised NYT, the wrong party is under attack. Splitting the GOP risks leaving the field open for the left and, well, fuck that noise. What if Democrats nominate someone like Zohran Mamdani for president?! The Times editorial board is already setting its own ethics on fire in a desperate bid to stop such a “dangerous radical” from becoming mayor. Can you imagine what they would do to stop one from becoming president?

Keep an eye on this. Should Musk move forward, with either building a caucus or an entire party, watch for the reaction from the NYT and the press that follows its lead. They’re already nervous and it’s going to get ugly as they fly into a full-fledged panic. Watch them and you’ll see exactly whose side they’re on. Hint: Not America’s. Not democracy. Not the rule of law.

The Opinionated Ogre is 100% reader-supported. Please help me continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

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

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 118 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

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?

Last week, as Republicans yucked it up over their MAGA Murder Budget that will result in tens of thousands of Americans dying from lack of healthcare and homelessness and malnutrition and and and, they were also slapping themselves on the back over opening a concentration camp on American soil.

They gave it a cutesy little nickname. They blasted it all over the news and social media. They’re selling merch. It’s the most obvious propaganda campaign imaginable to normalize something we burned half of Europe to the ground to stop: A literal concentration camp meant for mass murder.

Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year and we’ll get through together.

👊Punch Nazis👊

How do we know this is what the regime is planning? Professional monster Laura Loomer jumped the gun and skipped ahead a few steps in the PR strategy:

Hahahaha! It’s just jokes, though, right? That’s just Loomer being Loomer! She’s cray-cray! Ignore her! Lulz! Why are you libtards always so uptight? It’s just a joke!

It’s always “just a joke” with the right, though, isn’t it? It’s always “locker room talk” and “boys will be boys.” Republicans never mean what they say! It’s just rhetoric! It’s just “jokes.” But then they do exactly what they said they were going to do and everyone is shocked SHOCKED that they weren’t kidding at all.

Because it’s never “just a joke.” Especially when it comes to genocide.

There’s a panel from an X-Men comic, “Years of Future Past,” set in a dystopian alternate future. There, who is allowed to have children is strictly controlled in order to weed out “undesirables.” In this panel, the character Colossus explains to two teens how it always begins with “a joke.”

The Trump regime started its purge of non-whites by claiming to target “the worst of the worst.” Murderers. Rapists. Gang members. That lasted weeks if not days.

Then they started to arrest “anti-Semites” who threatened “national security” by “supporting terrorism.” Curiously, in this context that appears to have meant “protesting Israel while brown.”

The arrests quietly expanded to any undocumented migrants with even minor infractions on their record. Then none at all. Then the regime moved on to legal residents who had a criminal background of any kind. Drunk driving 30 years ago was a sufficient excuse.

Now the regime is seeking to strip naturalized citizens of their citizenship. First it will be people who engaged in fraud to become a citizen. But within months, or probably weeks, the regime will be trying to strip citizenship from any naturalized citizen for crimes they committed after becoming an American.

Because, you see, the regime does not see them as “real” Americans. And once that becomes a perfectly routine thing to do, why not strip citizenship from people born here if they’re a “danger to national security?”

And who will qualify as a “danger?” Exactly as Colossus says: Whoever they want.

• The sick because they drain our resources

• The homeless because they spread disease

• The mentally ill because they’re “dangerous”

• The handicapped and autistic because they can’t “pay taxes”
  

• Democrats because they’re “anti-American”

• Activists because they’re “terrorists

• Intellectuals because they “spread lies”

• Homosexuals because they’re “pedophiles”

• Journalists

• Muslims

• Native Americans - The right has always hated Native Americans

• Chinese

• Of course, Jews. Always the Jews.

Loomer was “just joking” but she told us what the right wants. They want a white America. They want an America purged of all of the things Fox News tells them to hate. And that’s all of us. That’s more than half of the nation and you cannot “deport” that many people. The only way to remove them is through mass extermination.

That’s what Loomer is talking about. That’s what the concentration camps are for. That’s what they are planning.

Here’s a handy chart explaining the ten stages of genocide with an additional helpful bit inserted to highlight where we are. I’m sure you’ll figure out which part I added:

The jokes to normalize the mass murders have started. It’s really important to understand this for what it is. These jokes are meant to introduce the idea and condition us to it. Then normalize it, then make opposing it abnormal. At that point, it would be “rude” to speak out.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

I live to be rude to Nazis!

Pay attention to who scolds us the loudest for raking the regime over the coals for “jokes” like this. Those will be the same people denying it ever happened a decade from now. Smile at them, tell them to fuck off, and put them in the column with the other collaborators. This is the time to make everyone profoundly uncomfortable about what is happening. The harder people work to “get back to normal,” the louder we have to be to disrupt that.

No one gets to say “I didn’t know.”

Now, here’s the important bit: Document everything. If you find out what company is supplying the concentration camps, document it. If you find out the name of a guard, document it. If find out that Google Earth is deleting pictures of the mass graves, document it. Document everything.

When the regime falls, and it WILL fall, every single person who helped the coming atrocities occur will be held accountable. The rapes, the murders, the illegal medical experiments, the child trafficking, the mass executions, all of it. The legacy press will spill more ink than the regime will spill blood to make it all go away. They are as allergic to accountability for racist white men as incels are to taking a shower and not asking women online to send naked pictures.

That cannot be allowed. They all have to be arrested, tried, and then enjoy their last meal before swinging from the gallows for what they’ve done. Live the Nazi life, die a Nazi death. This has not been a controversial idea in America for over 80 years, don’t fucking tell me I’m suddenly an extremist because the GOP has embraced genocide and fascism. We execute mass murderers and smile while we do it. It’s an American tradition I’ll be proud to uphold.

Do is it sound like I’m fucking joking to you?

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!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

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

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 119 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

I challenge you to go back through your memory of the last five months when coverage of the DOGE cuts to government departments and programs and coverage of the Big Bullshit Bill were in the headlines and see if you can recall the word “consequences.”

I can’t. There was a lot of reporting about 600 people laid off here, a thousand laid off there, and the word “probationary” came up a lot as the Trump administration used it to explain away the people whose jobs were cut. But there wasn’t much debate about the bill in either the House or the Senate. In fact, one story I read last week was about how the nearly 1,000-page monster was pushed through with few committee hearings and little testimony about what was in the bill.

I think I remember reading one story about cuts to the FAA budget around the time of all the delays and cancelled flights at Newark Airport. But the coverage of cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) was focused almost entirely on the number of proposed staff cuts and the “savings” they would produce. The budget cuts sometimes showed in tens of millions of dollars and in other reports appeared as percentages. CBS reported back in February that former NOAA officials said that “current employees had been told to expect budget cuts of 30% and a 50% reduction in staff.”

Finally, when tornados recently swept through Missouri and Tennessee and Kentucky, there were a few reports about local NWS office staffing shortages. The reports were explained away the next day by Caroline Leavitt at the White House saying that the cuts had not affected “overnight” staffing at local offices. Follow up reporting proved her statement about local NWS offices to be a lie, but reports about her lies had become so numerous that the one about the NWS just disappeared down the memory-hole with all her other lies.

The tornado that tore through Kentucky happened back in late May. It killed 19 people, according to the Louisville Courier Journal. Do you remember that number? I didn’t. I had to look it up. There was some aerial footage of the destruction in Laurel and Pulaski Counties. There were a few short bios of some of the people the tornadoes killed. One woman died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator she ran when electricity went out during the storms. Another woman was killed by “blunt force trauma,” according to her autopsy. A fireman in London, Kentucky, was found dead atop his wife after the tornado hit their home.

Tornadoes are notoriously difficult to predict. So are flash floods. The NWS puts out warnings and emergency notifications on radio and television broadcasts, and these days there are systems to send out blanket alerts by cell phone. But TV’s and radios don’t work during electrical outages, and cell phone towers are vulnerable to storms, especially tornados. So even if alerts go out, sometimes they cannot be received.

The stories about NWS staffing in Kentucky in May disappeared after the storms had passed and television news stopped putting their drones in the air and reporters went back to interviewing people about inflation and the economy.

Tonight, the Times is reporting that 80 were killed by the flash flood that ripped down the Guadalupe River and its tributaries on the 4^th of July. Forty-one people are still missing. Twenty-eight of the victims were children. Now there are new alerts for more flooding in the same areas hit by the flash flood on Friday, including Camp Mystic, the Christian camp located on the banks of the Guadalupe. Twenty-eight victims of the flood have not been identified.

There are some numbers for you. Nineteen killed by tornadoes in May. Eighty killed by a flash flood in July. Donald Trump, who signed an emergency declaration today that will provide FEMA relief to the affected areas and help to pay for the search and rescue efforts, told reporters “FEMA is something we can talk about later,” as he prepared to fly back to Washington D.C. from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump has called for the dissolution of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has provided relief to areas hit by hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and other natural disasters since it was formed in 1978 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Some $175 billion has been appropriated for FEMA during the last four budgets and continuing resolutions.

And now Donald Trump wants to “wean” states off FEMA and “bring it down to the state level — a little bit like education, we're moving it back to the states.”

That’s what it’s all about. Money. It’s what Trump’s disastrous DOGE adventure was all about. It’s what his Big Bullshit Bill is about, moving money from people who don’t have enough of it to people who have too much of it, and denying it in the form of health care and nutrition to people who need it.

The coverage of what the cancellation of USAID will cause has just begun. We have seen the aid losses in dollars, and now we will see it in the bodies of people who have died from AIDS and Tuberculosis and other preventable diseases, and of course starvation, just as preventable with food aid.

Watch the numbers of people killed in the Texas flooding increase over the next few days. It is hurricane season, so watch for the coverage of those storms and their body counts.

Everybody will forget the numbers in Kentucky and Texas except the families and friends of the dead. The budget “savings” from DOGE and Trump’s odious bill, now signed into law, will be lied away in the White House press room, and two weeks from now, nobody will remember how many died in Texas, the same way nobody remembers how many died in Kentucky. It’s what happens when everything is boiled down to money.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share