There is nothing that Hollywood likes better than making a meal out of amateur lunch meat, and that’s what happened today when Paramount/Skydance bought Warner Brothers Discovery for a reported $110 billion. It’s being called the deal of the century. It may be, in sheer dollar terms, but it breaks about a hundred of Hollywood’s rules that have been time-tested in the more than hundred-year history of the place.

The first rule in Hollywood is never put up your own money. The deal was apparently closed last night when David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, multi-zillionaire founder and executive chairman of Oracle, called David Zaslav of Warners Discovery and told him papers were on their way over to him with an offer of $31 per share for the company, and Daddy Ellison was backstopping the deal personally, guaranteeing the debt incurred by Paramount in the deal with his own fortune.

You could practically hear the steaks sizzling at Warners Discovery as Zaslav hung up the phone. He got everything he wanted for Warners Discovery, plus.

Not only did the Ellisons guarantee the deal personally, they agreed to pay Warners shareholders $7 billion if regulators nix the deal; they signed on to pay the $2.8 billion “breakup fee” to Netflix that Warners Discovery would otherwise have owed Netflix, and they threw in a $.25 cents a share payoff for stockholders for every month it takes to close the deal.

There were other sweeteners in the deal worth even more billions. Suffice to say, Paramount/Skydance, or should I say the Ellisons, paid a bloody fortune for a company whose stock was as low at $7 a share not too long ago.

Hollywood has seen other outsiders come in and buy studios and try to make movies before. Sony, the Japanese electronics firm, bought Columbia Pictures in 1989. Comcast, a telecom/cable company, bought NBC/Universal from General Electric in 2011. Amazon bought MGM Studio for $8.5 billion in 2022.

Hollywood, that is the people who live there and make movies and television, love it when outsiders take over studios and start trying to do what Hollywood people know how to do and have been doing for decades. After initial cuts and reshuffling of jobs, the newbies start throwing money around like Trump throwing rolls of paper towels in Puerto Rico. The key theory is, everybody is for sale in Hollywood, so the way to get people on your team is to throw money at them.

Every time there’s a merger, people in Hollywood get rich. Even the heads of studios and other executives who get laid off when studios change hands make out like bandits, because at the top levels of Hollywood, nobody is ever really fired. When studio chieftains are let go or otherwise lose their jobs, they’re given so-called “production deals” that include offices on the studio lots and budgets of millions to hire staffs and start looking for creative properties that the studio agrees to buy for them in their severance deals.

Outsiders like the Ellisons think that because they’re tech geniuses and know everything there is to know about chips and computer networks, making deals and making money in Hollywood will be a piece of cake.

The secret, hidden, only-whispered truth in Hollywood is that it’s harder than it looks. And that goes for every level. Writers who have had successful careers as novelists…uh, let’s say me…move to Hollywood to get in the screenplay business because the money is good and it looks easy. A novel is 600, 800 pages, a screenplay is 120. How hard could it be?

Hard. Very, very hard.

The same goes at every level and for every job in making movies and TV shows. The famous screenwriter William Goldman’s equally famous rule about the movie business was “nobody knows anything.” What he meant was, nobody knows what makes a movie or a TV show “good,” what the magic is that will turn a screenplay into a blockbuster at the box office or the Nielsen ratings. “Seinfeld” is a famous example. When it first aired, practically nobody was watching. But the network and the studio took a chance that the show would build, and it turned into one of the most successful enterprises in the history of Hollywood. But nobody knew that would happen when it was a screenplay being passed from hand to hand.

From the outside, Hollywood looks like a slot machine. You keep putting in quarters and pulling the handle and suddenly, there is a cascade of coins, and you’ve hit it rich! Plus, there is the Hollywood glamor – you get to hang out with famous actors, you get to go on the set and watch the magic happen…

Nobody tells the people who come in from the outside that making movies is like watching paint dry. Endless standing around, endless waiting, endless adjustments of everything from camera angles to rain machines, and then finally a couple of actors walk in, they turn on the lights and they say two lines, and everybody goes back to twiddling their thumbs again.

Well, at least Ellison The Younger has made a few movies with Tom Cruise, so maybe he’s over the stars-in-his-eyes stage. The fact that he moved quickly from buying Paramount to buying Warners Discovery seems to indicate that he has already learned that the other thing hotshots do in Hollywood is make big deals, and he’s made himself a whopper of a deal now.

But now comes the dirty work of making movies and TV shows and managing streaming networks like HBO. And then there is CNN, the television news network that is part of Warners Discovery that has now landed in the lap of two of Donald Trump’s biggest tech-boy fans. Ellison The Younger was at Trump’s big and ver-r-ry long State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, and Ellison the Elder has contributed tens of millions to Republican superpacs that have backed Donald Trump’s political career, and he played a key role in Trump’s…what can we call it…transfer of majority ownership of TikTok to American control, chiefly to Trump lovers like Ellison himself.

Ellison the Elder just announced today that he will move his primary residence from Hawaii to Palm Beach, where he has paid $173 million for an estate just a couple of blocks from, you guessed it, Mar a Lago, the Trump hotel/residence/club/crime headquarters. That’s how chummy they are.

Trump has been on what amounts to a campaign to get oligarchs friendly to him to control media empires and news outlets of every sort, from Bezos’ running of the vaunted and now-vanquished Washington Post, to Ellison The Younger’s recent purchase of Paramount that included CBS News, to both Ellisons’ take-over of Warners Discovery that will include CNN, to the Sinclair family’s network of local television stations that run conservative local news shows, to Rupert Murdoch and his ownership of Fox News, the Holy Grail of Trumpian round-the-clock lie-production and fascism-spread.

But once again, the outsiders are learning that running media empires ain’t as easy as it looks, either. Jeff Bezos, another billionaire who thinks he’s a genius and everything he touches turns to gold, is currently running the Washington Post right into the ground, laying off half its news staff, ending its book review section, slashing its foreign bureaus, cutting costs everyplace he can find because he thinks profits come from moving money around, not producing news that people want to read. Before Bezos got started on his latest round of cuts, dozens of the Post’s best reporters and writers took buyouts or just resigned and went elsewhere. He stopped cutting fat long ago, moved on to cutting meat, and now he’s removing organs from the carcass that was the Washington Post.

Ellison the Younger thought he could do something similar with CBS News, the storied House of Murrow and Cronkite. He installed Bari Weiss as executive in charge of news at CBS, and she proceeded to fire or cause the resignation of dozens of people who had turned CBS News and shows like 60 Minutes into massive successes. Predictably, ratings have crashed, she’s lost news stars like Anderson Cooper, and CBS news seems to want to be in competition for the same red-hats who already have Fox News on in their living rooms, garages, diners, and offices.

It’s not working. It’s rumored that Ellison The Younger will give CNN to Bari to work her magic on. That means they’ll be closing foreign bureaus, because hey, who wants to watch news about all those foreigners we’re keeping out of our country. She’ll start laying off people, those who decide not to resign in advance of layoffs, and it’s pretty much a sure thing that Anderson Cooper won’t be sticking around, among others, I would assume. There will be the same kind of talent-stampede there has been at the Washington Post and CBS.

Conservatives have a thing about talent. They don’t like it. Talent gets in the way of stuff like “messaging” and “lying” and “loyalty” and “hero worship” of bottom feeding hogs like Donald Trump. Look what happened today: the rock ‘n roll band Radiohead demanded that Kristi Noem stop using their hit song “Let Down” in the ICE social media accounts boosting hiring of thugs to put on the streets to gas, beat, and kill people. Take note, please: ICE wasn’t using a Kid Rock song, or a Ted Nugent song. They used Radiohead because…talent. When you haven’t got it on your side, steal it. That’s the Trump way, that’s the Kristi Noem way, that’s the way of fascists across the board.

So, what happened today in Hollywood, and what happened with CBS, and what will happen with CNN is the consolidation of Donald Trump’s attempt to control the media like his pal Vladimir Putin has done in Russia. But the Ellisons and Bari and Bezos and Trump and the rest of them are going to find that ownership of media doesn’t mean people are going to pay attention. The Washington Post has lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers. CBS News ratings numbers are reaching new lows. If you want to make money in the United States, you have to get in the Capitalism sandbox and start competing for eyeballs and wallets.

Putin doesn’t have to do that. He started his media takeover by getting oligarch friends to buy up newspapers and TV networks. Then he starting making competing media outlets illegal. Then he just nationalized the whole thing, so media is basically run by the state in Russia. The Ellisons and Bezos’ and Baris of Russia don’t have to make money for their companies, because they’re backed up by the government.

As much as Donald Trump would like the own the media and put his name on it, like he’s doing all over Washington D.C., the U.S. government isn’t going to own television networks and newspapers. The ones that are friendly to Trump will have to compete with all the other media outlets for eyeballs and wallets. And while all this consolidation is going on with the Big Boy Billionaires, independent outlets like Substack and YouTube channels are exploding all over the place. People are getting their news and entertainment on their phones as much if not more than they get both from television or newspapers and magazines.

The ground is shifting under the feet of the billionaires. They don’t know any better than anyone else what makes people want to watch a movie or a TV show or pick up a newspaper and read it. AI isn’t going to help them, because AI is fucking boring. All it does is regurgitate what it’s been fed by its “learning” algorithms. People don’t want to be regurgitated to. They want to read and watch and listen to something new that comes from someone talented.

I just can’t wait for Paramount and Warner Brothers under the ownership of Ellison the Younger and Elder to start generating right-wing red hat crap to force feed to the masses. You’ll be able to ski down the graphs of their companies’ profits and ratings. It’s harder than it looks.

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This is a story about how difficult it is to maintain a coverup and what happens when it begins to unravel. The coverup of Trump’s appearances in the Epstein files and what he is accused of by victims is the most important coverup of them all, and it is beginning to come apart at the seams.

As you may have already read, Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, learned of some missing victim interview files and visited the secure room in the DOJ where the unredacted Epstein files can be viewed by members of Congress. There he found FBI evidence logs for documents that were provided to attorneys for Ghislaine Maxwell prior to her 2021 trial on charges of sex trafficking. The logs listed interviews with 325 witnesses involved in the Maxwell investigation and trial, but Garcia found that 90 of the interviews were missing.

The missing files are FBI “302” documents, which are produced each time an agent interviews a possible witness in an investigation. Maxwell’s lawyers apparently considered calling several dozen witnesses at her trial but ended up calling only a few of those in the logs of FBI “302” interviews.

There are references in the FBI interview logs to four interviews with a victim who called the FBI after Epstein was arrested in 2019. There are also references to three other “interview notes” with her, according to a report by CNN that was published yesterday. Only one of the four interviews with the victim is in the Epstein files. The other interviews with the witness, along with the “interview notes” are missing. A report on NPR, referenced by CNN, said that NPR had analyzed the serial numbers in the logs of FBI interviews and found 53 pages of “interview documents and notes missing from the public Epstein database.”

The woman who called the FBI in 2019 described meeting Epstein in 1983 in South Carolina when Epstein responded to an ad she had placed soliciting jobs as a babysitter. She was 13 years old at the time. In the interview found in the Epstein files, she described being raped by Epstein in South Carolina and then being flown to New York by Epstein, where she was abused and raped by several “prominent men.” She describes being forced by one man to perform fellatio on him, and when she hesitated, he hit her upside the head. She provided the FBI with a photograph of Epstein with Trump and asked if the photo could be “cropped” to hide the identities of other individuals – there was only one, Trump – because she was afraid of “retaliation.” The FBI interview notes that the photo was a “widely distributed” photo of Epstein and Trump.

NPR reports that the details in the FBI interview files “line up” with information in a victim lawsuit filed after the 2019 interview. The woman ended up withdrawing her lawsuit against the Epstein estate and was not part of the victim settlement by the estate, but she settled privately with the estate later.

There are other references in the FBI logs to another set of interviews with a second witness who described being taken by Epstein to Mar a Lago and being introduced to Trump. Epstein reportedly said, “This is a good one, huh?” to Trump as he introduced her. She was 13 years old at the time. The interviews, included in the “302’s” provided to Maxwell’s defense lawyers, detail abuse by both Epstein and Maxwell when the victim was 13.

NPR reports that this interview with the victim was deleted from the Epstein files after their initial release on January 30 and then returned to the files on February 19. Several interviews with other witnesses mention this 13-year-old victim. One “302” FBI interview with a mention of Trump by the victim was removed from the Epstein files database and then returned last week.

Elsewhere in the Epstein files is a note written way back in July when the FBI had moved 1,000 agents to Washington D.C. to scour the Epstein files. The FBI agent wrote that Trump’s name appeared in the files of FBI interviews for the Maxwell case in an interview with a victim who claimed that Trump had also abused her, but she “ultimately refused to cooperate” with the FBI investigation. This note appears to line up with the first 13-year-old victim, three of whose interviews are listed in the FBI logs but are missing from the Epstein files themselves. This was the victim who reached a settlement with the Epstein estate separate from the victims’ fund settlement. Many such settlements include non-disclosure agreements that may explain her later refusal to cooperate with the investigation after her initial interviews with the FBI in 2019.

And so the unraveling begins, and so the unraveling continues. There are FBI interviews with victims from the original federal investigation of Epstein that was begun in 2006 and ended when federal prosecutors signed a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein at the time of his conviction on state charges in 2008. There are interviews with victims, many interviews in fact, from the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021. There are more FBI interviews with victims who came forward after Epstein was arrested in 2019.

All these interviews exist on “302” interview forms that were logged at the time they were conducted. When Pam Bondi ordered a thousand FBI agents to Washington D.C. last year to go through the FBI files, the “302’s” are among the files they went through. Apparently what happened is that they were instructed to flag those that mentioned Donald Trump. Some of those “302’s” were deleted or otherwise not included in what we now know as the Epstein files, but the mentions of them in the FBI’s logging system were not deleted.

Now the DOJ is scrambling to re-insert some, but not all, of the “302” interviews back into the Epstein files, but they are still withholding the interviews with victims that mention Trump.

For the FBI agents that were tasked with going through the gigantic Epstein files, the whole thing became a confusing mess in which they couldn’t keep straight what they had deleted or why the deletions had occurred. They apparently missed references to Trump that were hidden in interviews with one victim who spoke of other victims who had been introduced to Trump by Epstein. It would be like going to a big party and then later trying to remember not only who was there, but who talked to who, and what they talked about.

This is the problem with coverups. It happened during Watergate, when employees of the White House and Nixon’s reelection committee were so numerous that they couldn’t all get together and strategize a way to keep their stories straight, so information began to leak out piecemeal. But when it was put together, the information began to point to specific crimes by specific individuals.

That’s what is happening now. Victims who did not know each other, were abused at different times by Epstein and Maxwell and “prominent men,” and they grew up and left their teenage years, so they were replaced by new teenage victims, who also didn’t know each other, who were abused and raped by Epstein and the same or different “prominent men.”

When the FBI got involved in 2006, and then again in 2019 with the Epstein investigation, and again in the investigation of Maxwell in 2021, it became almost impossible to keep straight which victim had been interviewed when and whom they had implicated. Rudimentary efforts were probably made to cross-reference the interviews during and between the various investigations – that is probably what the logs are – but there were so many underage victims over so much time involving so many alleged abusers that the whole thing became a wilderness of mirrors.

Donald Trump’s problem is that his reflection appears in too many mirrors. This is a very, very big development. Watch this space.

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As if the US public health system wasn't fucked enough when RFK Jr. was somehow, inexplicably, I-fucking-hate-this-timeline confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, Donald Fucking  (I think that's what the J stands for) Trump nominated someone for the position of Surgeon General who has never treated a patient in an unsupervised setting.

Let that sink in for just a second.

Let it sink in for a few more seconds. Feel free to scream if you like, because there's more.

If you don't know what or whom I talking about, Trump nominated grifter/supplement salesperson Casey Means, MD (yes, she has an MD...I'll get back to that) as US Surgeon General. In the land of "Let's Nominate Wholly Unqualified People for Very Important Posts", this may be the second most egregious selection (after Bobby Fucking Kennedy, of course).

Let's first talk about who the Surgeon General is supposed to be: the nation's doctor. The spokesperson on all things public health. The main advisor to the head of HHS on matters of public health and scientific issues. And the head of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which consists of 6500 health professionals who are to be dispatched immediately to any public health emergency. Every US Surgeon General has been a qualified physician with vast experience taking care of patients, and almost all have public health experience and qualifications (C. Everett Koop is a notable exception, though he became one of the more influential public health figures in the role).

And now let’s talk about qualifications. Not vibes. Not branding. Not podcast lighting. Qualifications.

Dr. Means graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and received her MD degree. That makes her a doctor, but it does not make her qualified to see patients. You see, after medical school, doctors in the US must complete a residency in their selected specialty, which can take 3 to 8 (or more) years. Means started an ENT residency...and then dropped out a few months before completing it. She claims that she dropped out because that just wasn't her path. She supposedly saw the evils of Big Bad Medicine and decided that wasn't for her, she'd much rather become a wellness influencer and supplement saleswoman. Now, for non-medical readers: residency is not decorative. It is not an optional side quest. It is the part where you learn to independently diagnose and treat diseases, manage complications, and not harm people. It is where you go from “has a degree” to “is a physician in practice.”

Now if you're shaking your head wondering if your eyes are messed up, nope, you read that right. The nominee for Surgeon General never completed a residency, never saw patients outside her residency, has never been board certified, and doesn't even have an active medical licence to practice medicine. The person who is supposed to be the pinnacle of public health can't even write a prescription.

FUCKING WHAT NOW?

After leaving residency, Means moved into functional medicine (which is nothing more than a buzz term and is meaningless outside "wellness" circles), metabolic health advocacy, tech entrepreneurship, and wellness media. And supplement sales. She co-founded a health tech company. She built a significant online presence. She became a voice in the “chronic disease is a systems problem” space.

That’s not illegal. It’s not even inherently wrong. Yes, the healthcare system in the US is a disaster compared to many other countries around the world. They spend more there for worse outcomes, and it needs a complete overhaul.

But none of her "experience" qualifies her in any fucking way for Surgeon General, who traditionally has extensive clinical experience, public health leadership roles, or both. They’ve run departments. Led agencies. Managed crises.

Casey Means has done exactly ZERO of those things.

OK, BUT HAS SHE SAID ANYTHING BAD?

Well, I'll just start by saying that though Dr. Means has not successfully completed a residency, she has successfully learned how to say yes while actually saying no. That is to say, her answers were much more political and much less scientific.

At her confirmation hearing a few days ago, Means stated she believes vaccines save lives. Good. Excellent. Bare minimum baseline achieved.

Then came the autism question — because it of course always comes, and rightfully so.

She acknowledged that evidence does not show vaccines cause autism. Also good. But then she added that “science is never settled.”

Because of course she did.

Now philosophically, sure. Science evolves. Data refines. But when you’re auditioning for the role of national public health communicator in an era of vaccine hesitancy and the largest goddamned measles outbreak (and first measles deaths) in decades, this is not the time to sound like you’re moderating a school debate club.

The Surgeon General’s job is clarity. Not epistemological nuance.

When she was pressed on whether she would recommend routine childhood vaccines, she didn't say 'yes'. She repeatedly emphasised the importance of individualized decision-making over strong population-level messaging. Instead of just emphatically saying "YES", she wavered, equivocated, and stuck to her "BUT BUT BUT INFORMED CONSENT" bullshit, which is just thinly-veiled antivax rhetoric.

OK, WAS THERE ANTHING ELSE?

Of course there was, because grifters gonna grift. Senators also revisited her past public statements criticizing hormonal birth control, including language characterising risks in stark terms such as:

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I’m going to restrain myself and not point a flamethrower at Never Trumper Tom Nichols today. While his Atlantic article, “The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem,” conveniently absolves him of any personal responsibility for the state of the modern GOP, Nichols does not pretend Trump is The Thing That Went Wrong with his party. Just as importantly, he resists the urge to both sides the problem.

Be still, my fluttering heart. Are the Never Trumpers…learning?

It’s important to understand that, for Never Trumpers, generally speaking, everything was Just Fine prior to 2016. It was only after Trump showed up that Things Went Wrong. That, of course, is bullshit. The Republican Party has been speeding towards this exact disaster for decades. We all saw what was happening. Most refused to acknowledge it.

I guess hindsight is a little clearer sometimes, even for a Never Trumper:

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried [Pat] Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Nichols, at this time, was very much a part of this fire-breathing hate machine. He was more professional about it, of course, but he was not interested in honest intellectual discourse. But I’m going to put that aside because, for once, he is accurately assessing WTF is wrong with the GOP. He doesn’t pretend Trump is the toxin that made Republicans into monsters.

Here, he does something very important, he goes back much further than even Gingrich, who really did teach the American right to talk about the left as an irredeemable evil, and Buchanan, whose white Christian Nationalism is everything we are seeing play out in real time today. Here, Nichols goes back to when the Republican Party explicitly embraced racism as a tactic:

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

The number of Never-Trumpers willing to say that out loud can be counted on one hand. The number of “journalists” whose job is to accurately report reality who would also say it out loud is just as small.

America has gone to great lengths to avoid the truth: The Republican Party deliberately remade itself into the party of racist white men.

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Now, Nichols does something that almost made me spittake on my monitor. Not only does he, more or less, accurately describe why the Republican Party became a racist shithole and who did it, he takes it a step further and explains the mechanism that allowed extremism to murder the GOP and put the entire world at risk:1

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Please put aside the obvious lie that Nixon and Reagan did not govern as racists. The War on Drugs was designed explicitly by Nixon to crush Black communities, and Reagan was openly hostile to Black voters. But, I’m taking a deep breath and moving on because, holy shit, to hear the rest of this from a (temporarily misplaced)2 Republican is jaw-dropping.

They simply do not admit to this. Ever. Republicans do not ever EVER look in the mirror and say, “Yeah, we let the crazed lunatics in the tent. Everything we did for the last 50 years, the gerrymandering, creating our own media bubble, sneering at the educated voter, all of it, created a party that could only lead us to this dead end.” It’s a brutal self-assessment.

To my eternal surprise, Nichols even manages to NOT do the one thing Republicans are almost genetically conditioned to do when criticizing their own party. He does not engage in bothsiderism. He does the exact opposite, you’ll notice. While explaining how the GOP turning itself into a party for white people made them vulnerable, like a monoculture crop is vulnerable to disease, Nichols points out how the Democratic Party’s diversity makes it far more immune to extremism.3

Nichols really hammers this point home:

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

If he were being less polite, Nichols would have said, “Fuck your both sides bullshit.” But he’s writing for the Atlantic, and he’s not a foul-mouthed ogre. Still, that is what he’s saying. On our worst day, our most extreme elements are still a far cry from what we are seeing in the Republican Party. Radical socialists want insane things like Universal Healthcare. Universal Basic Income. An end to homelessness. Fully-funded schools. My god…the fucking horror of it all.

But to the hate-soaked brain of most Republicans, UHC is somehow no different than murdering 100 million people for not being white enough. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.4

It’s really important, ugh, I can’t believe I’m saying this, to pay attention to what Tom Nichols is saying in this article. He is not soft-selling the problem. He is not downplaying what is happening to the GOP. He is not pretending it’s just a tiny fringe that will go away if we close our eyes and wish upon a star. The Republican Party has a Nazi problem. Which means, as Nichols points out, America has a Nazi problem.

I’ve written about this more than once, and it’s good to know that I’m not shouting in the wilderness for a change. The GOP has turned itself into a party uniquely vulnerable to extremism. Now it has no off-ramp. There is no way to escape the death spiral it is in. Trump was an accelerant, but it started down this path long before I was born.

When the regime falls, and it will fall, the party will flail about for a bit and do what it has done each and every single time after a defeat: Lurch to the right. But since it’s already a party of white Christian Nationalism, there is no place left to go but to full-blown Nazism. One gets the sense the Nazis understand this lurch is coming, which is why they’re already sliming their way into the GOP.

This is going to happen. We are going to have to deal with an American Nazi Party and a legacy press trying to gaslight us into believing they are legitimate instead of genocidal monsters to be beaten to the ground on sight. If you don’t believe me, well, listen to a Republican telling you exactly the same thing. What are you going to do? Call Tom Nichols a hysterical libtard?

Good luck selling that to the crowd, buddy.

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There are 249 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

I even walked Ruby listening to him on WVIA, the local public radio station.

Having endured every syllable of that nightmare, I can tell you that what he did was very studiedly and purposefully not give a State of the Union speech. He didn’t have anything to say on the major policy issues he is losing so badly on, so all he did was introduce a dozen or so audience-plants he thought of as either heroes or victims, and then turn his head to face them in the gallery as the applause began. The gold medal winning Olympic hockey team got the biggest applause of the night, and then for good measure, he awarded the goalie a Presidential Medal of Freedom. That got another flood of applause. He was on a roll, so he also gave out two Medals of Honor, and he probably would have thrown a Bible up there to someone if he had thought of it.

He must have figured out that the applause would keep going as long as he didn’t turn to face the Congress again, because if he did, they would stop clapping, thinking he was going to return to his speech. So he would just stand there facing whomever he had introduced and let the applause keep going, eating up more and more of his time. I haven’t seen a breakdown of the speech, but I would bet that he spent half his time making long and often lurid introductions and then letting the applause run on and on.

When he was finished, he hurriedly nodded at the applause and moved away from the podium. For reasons we can only imagine, he rushed out of the chamber faster than any president has ever left one of these speeches. He hardly shook anyone’s hand, he was in such a rush to leave. Maybe he was trying to protect his right hand, which once again was deeply bruised and covered with sloppily applied pancake makeup.

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Last week, I wrote about the Heritage Foundation’s Saving America by Saving the American Family: A Plan for the Next 250 Years. The plan is, essentially, to make women drop out of school, marry young, have tons of babies, rely financially on their husbands, be unable to divorce, and wind up in the poor house if they don’t follow these rules. But I wanted to zero in specifically on the policy section of the piece, which comes at the very end and which I haven’t seen get the coverage it deserves. Because what the Heritage Foundation is proposing is a massive cash transfer from poor single mothers to better-off married couples. This really is the plan: Take from the poor to give to the “right” kind of families. Make poor mothers work, and pay better-off ones to stay home. Further impoverish single mothers to force them to marry.

The Heritage Foundation wants to eventually end cash welfare as we know it (“Credits designed specifically to benefit poor single mothers may be well intended, but they have proven to incentivize single motherhood in poor communities,” Heritage laments). They don’t propose totally doing away with welfare benefits here, I suspect because they realize that would be a nonstarter. But they do propose taking resources that currently mostly benefit poorer families and redirecting them to wealthier ones, so long as those wealthier families have married parents. The Heritage proposal would only give its proposed benefits to married couples (policies should “privilege marriage as directly and explicitly as possible,” Heritage writes, emphasis theirs). It would only give benefits to married couples in which one partner works and makes above a certain income. And it would incentivize women dropping out of the workforce… unless they’re poor or single.

Here are the specifics.

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1. Child tax credits only for married couples who are the child’s biological parents, who are working, and who make at least $30,500. The Heritage proposal would get rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit, because that credit gives more money to struggling single parents than better-off married ones, as well as the Child Tax Credit, and replace them with what they call a Family and Marriage (FAM) tax credit of $4,418 per child per year for four years. But this credit would phase in for families once they’re earning $30,500 per year — in other words, poor families wouldn’t qualify. It would only go to married parents — single parents wouldn’t qualify. It would only go to biological parents — step parents wouldn’t qualify. A person could be working full-time, but even if they’re earning above minimum wage, they may not qualify for this tax credit.

2. Bonuses for larger families — but only for married couples, only for biological parents, and not for the poor. Additionally, Heritage proposes a 25% per-child bonus to their FAM tax credit for third children and beyond. But, again, poor families are out of luck, as only couples with at least one working spouse qualify, and that spouse has to make at least $30,500.

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3. More money for higher earners, none for the lowest. The FAM credit phases in at $30,500, and goes up from there relative to income. That’s right: This is government family support that gives more money to families that already have more money. And it gives the most money to families that are the most stable: Those with two married parents who make more than six figures. The credit doesn’t begin to scale down until a family makes $110,000, and even then, the wind-down is small (beginning at just 5%). Why set up a program that gives people more money as they make more money? Because “the FAM credit’s phase-in would incentivize work.” All of this means that a married couple with three children making $400,000 a year would get $14,000 additional dollars from the US taxpayer — while a single mom making $20,000 a year would get nada.

   

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4. No help after a child’s fourth birthday. As it stands, parents can claim the Child Tax Credit until a child’s 17th birthday. The Heritage plan cuts parents off when their kid turns four. They claim that these early years are when parents need the most help. But children don’t stop needing food and a roof over their heads once they’re kindergarten age. The Heritage Foundation is clear that the purpose of this plan isn’t to support children, but to incentivize parents to have more of them: “The FAM credit is designed specifically for families with newborns or young children. Lawmakers interested in family policy may be inclined simply to expand the CTC. However, this approach would be inefficient as a family formation incentive. Only a small fraction of the benefit would go toward new parents, while most of it would go to families that are already formed.” They continue: “many other family benefits, such as the CTC, are backloaded to later in life when many parents are on more solid financial footing and may be past their prime child-bearing years.” Emphasis mine, because this is truly stunning: The Heritage Foundation only wants to give parents tax credits for their (expensive) children if those parents (mothers) are in their “prime child-bearing years” and might make more babies. Eggs too old? No child tax credits for you.

5. Pay women to stay home. The Heritage Foundation could have proposed a generous paid leave program, which would allow parents of newborns to stay home and care for them in that crucial first year. But their aim is not to make sure that young children receive the best possible care. Their aim seems to be to get women out of the workforce. And so they’ve instead offered a $2,000 per-child credit for one parent (almost always the mother) to stay home and care full-time for her child — but again, this only applies to married couples where one spouse (almost always the husband) is working and makes more than $30,500 per year. You’re a single mom who wants to stay home with your child? Tough luck, get to work. You’re a low-income married parent who wants to stay home with your child? Tough luck, get to work. If the concern really were for children — if the view really was that young children are best off being cared for at home by a parent — then this policy would apply to all parents of young children. But that’s not the concern. The concern is that women aren’t living their lives in the way Heritage deems acceptable.

6. Fund this whole scheme by getting rid of Head Start. Head Start is an incredible program that has had vast positive impacts, increasing high school and college graduation rates, adult incomes, health outcomes, and overall wellbeing. Studies have found it even decreases child abuse and neglect. This proposal would effectively end it, and use the money saved to give tax breaks to wealthy married couples with children.

7. Pay people to marry young. The final Heritage policy is a $2,500 deposit into a savings account for every new baby born in the US — but the only way to get the full benefit of that money as an adult is to marry well before the age of 30. That is, when an American is born, the government will deposit $2,500 into a savings account for them, which they cannot touch until they either marry or turn 30. At either marriage or age 30, they can start to withdraw from the account, but only over three years — so about a third of the original value per year. They get the full withdrawal amount each year (roughly one-third of the total account value) if, in each year, they are married but not yet 30. If they’re over 30, whether they’re married or not, they pay a tax penalty. In other words, to get the full benefit, you have to marry by 27 — below the average age of first marriage for women (28.6) and men (30.2) alike. Again, the point is not to incentivize marriage; it’s to incentivize women especially marrying as young as possible, despite early marriage being tied to higher divorce rates.

xx Jill