In April 2025, Serendipity Books in Chelsea, Michigan, was enjoying the growing trend toward the joy of brick-and-mortar independent booksellers.

Michelle Tuplin, Serendipity’s owner, gazed upon the popularity of her bookstore and realized she needed to expand. But her bookstore was so beloved in her community that she didn’t want to shut it down during the move into a bigger place just down the street.

A lightbulb appeared over her head with a crazy but, maybe, wonderful idea. What if she asked her devoted customers for help?

The response was overwhelming. More than 300 people showed up to form a line from the old place to the new place. They passed each book from one person to the next in line, all the way to the new spot in the new building, down to the shelf location.

The 300 didn’t ask for anything in return. They understood what they were doing. They grasped the significance of building their community through the simple act of passing a book through a long line of fellow book lovers.

That’s where we are today as a nation.

We’re exhausted, yes. Some of us are barely holding on to our wits, our patience, our hope. For some of us, our spiritual whole has been slowly eaten away by a malevolent force nobody quite understands. We’re tired of asking questions. We’re tired of asking why. We’re tired of the overnight posts from a president whose mind has joined his spirit in a barren tomb of grievance, despair, and anger.

Many of us are simply waiting for him to die so we can just move on with our lives. Some of us are praying for it. Almost all of us maintain a sliver of hope each morning when we wake up that today will be that special phone alert day, the one we’ll always remember, the one where we ask ten years from now, “Where were you when?”

Many of us have built friendships here on Substack and other online forums with a bond glued by our hatred, which, let’s be honest, is not the healthiest of bonds. But because our minds are not twisted by grievance, but by love, hope, and goodwill, the glue of that bond has reformulated into kindness and determination and grit.

Through it all, despite the mental exhaustion and anguish and, sometimes, grief, born from the actions of this despicable regime, we have been chipping away at the wall of hate, letter by letter, word by word, brick by brick.

I’m not a video guy. I don’t watch Substack videos, I don’t watch much YouTube, and I’ve probably never spent more than a full hour of my life, cumulatively, on TikTok. I like video for other things: A good movie or streaming television show, and watching sports. And the occasional standup comic (Hi, Josh Johnson!). But not for what we do here.

But I made it a point to watch a portion of the Kennedy Center Take Down. It felt symbolic because the first step in rebuilding this country is taking down this regime, even if it’s one letter at a time.

The takedown happened because you made it happen:

The Contrarian

You Removed the Name — and the Curse — of Donald

You did it, Contrarians. Out of all the over 300 legal cases and matters that your paid subscriptions have helped make possible, few have garnered more attention than our fights to remove Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center and to stop his $1.8 billion slush fund. Now both are finally happening — and that’s good news for our democracy…

Read more

a day ago · 375 likes · 47 comments · The Contrarian and Norman Eisen

ICE was driven out of Chicago and Minneapolis because of people like you in those cities. I realize that the stormtroopers are still there. They are still among us. And they’re still terrorizing immigrants. But they’ve been forced into stealth mode.

Our victories come one letter at a time. One brick removed from the wall.

Now that they have their $70 billion in funding, we can expect more hate.

We’re ready for them. They’ve declared war on American citizens, but it’s a war they can’t win. No matter where you are spiritually, you know in your gut that love always defeats hate. This is a universal truth. If you don’t agree with that, well, hang in there, and remember ten years from now that I said so.

Everything you do helps the cause.

I know. It’s exhausting. My body reacted with extreme violence to the election of this man by stroking me out on the eve of the election. It was as if my body knew before the rest of us what was about to happen.

I watched on my ICU bed, aghast, as CNN’s John King waved his arms around his big video map and destroyed my spirit for one night. An ICU nurse comforted me with a gentle kiss on the forehead and the words, “We shall overcome.”

I woke up the next morning determined to fight on.

A hemorrhagic stroke patient’s chance of surviving the first year is around 25% or so, depending on what medical article you read.

The way I figured it, if I was going to go down, I was going to go down loudly. With my fist raised. With no care, none, if somehow my words stretched far enough to gain enough attention from an insidious regime to put my life in danger, because guess what? It already is in danger.

So is yours. The regime has made it so.

We don’t get to choose how we die, unless we force the issue, and fighting back isn’t that.

This is saying that even if I perish, the quality of your life matters. The quality of other lives matters.

Fighting back is saying, “No, I’m going to push forward and add my one small brick to the cause of rebuilding this country.”

I’m going to start by taking down this regime one letter at a time, just like they did on the Kennedy Center. Then one word at a time. Then one paragraph. After that, an entire book. Whatever it takes.

Whether you know it or not, you are doing the same thing every time you reluctantly read yet another Substack article about yet another insult from a regime that is at war with America.

Make no mistake. We are at war. We have already seen lives lost. This is real. We will see more lives lost, even as this regime finally realizes that it’s near its end. And especially now that they’ve pocketed $70 billion to build more concentration camps and pack out-of-shape, vacant-minded ICE stormtroopers with military grade weapons.

The regime won’t go down softly. Even as it sinks into its own toxic sludge, the soulless creatures who inhabit its haunted domains will scream in anger and blindly fire volleys from their guns at anything that moves.

All we need to do is be prepared as it happens. Let nothing surprise us.

The Kennedy Center Takedown was symbolic. It wouldn’t have happened, though, without you adding to the echosphere of restacks and reposts and comments. We think none of that matters when we, tired and frustrated, hit the repost button. We hit that button because we’re exasperated, not because we really think it will do any good.

Until it does.

It does do good. So does calling your congress critter and all the other things you are doing to help take down this regime one letter at a time.

Our engagement is more important now than ever. This is the part of the marathon where we ask for that extra bit of strength from whatever our personal source is to get us to the end, so that we can begin the process of rebuilding this nation.

How we rebuild will be a big, interesting set of questions. But I’m looking forward to asking them instead of wondering when he will finally die.

We just tore his name off one wall.

Let’s finish the job.

Happy Sunday.

Notes

Speaking of taking a village, here’s an old post I wrote about Hillary back in 2024:

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Restack this if you want to add a letter to our rebuilding process.

By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV

When your kids and grandkids grow up, one of the first things they’ll ask you is, “Who ruined the ‘Knives Out’ movie franchise?

The answer, of course, will be director Mel Gibson, whose production company, Roadkill Enterprises, took over the successful franchise and has issued a reboot so horrifyingly tasteless that you’ll need a shower after watching it.

Remember, this is the guy who thought it would be a good idea to bludgeon the ultimate Peacemaker and graphically depict his torture to unsuspecting Christians in the body horror flick, “The Passion of Christ,” which was well received by fundamentalist Christians (who love a good cross burning, among other dances in the dark) but pretty much reviled everywhere else.

Gibson has rebooted “Knives Out” and made it his own. Out is Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, and in is Kid Rock as Blanc’s son Benny.

The result is a Bizarro kind of world where politicians have become such scumbags that the President of the United States is a co-leader of a massive billion-dollar child sex trafficking empire, and the FBI director and Defense Secretary can’t stay sober.

Gibson’s disdain for politics is understandable, given that the profession doesn’t attract our best and brightest. Still, this movie goes too far by attempting to convince us of a premise so ludicrous that it borders on insult.

The U.S. President in the film is Donald Trump, of all people, but the writers never mention how he avoids the federal penitentiary, where, in our timeline, he began serving multiple concurrent sentences for various sex and white collar crimes in 2017, shortly after his preposterous presidential run.

In “Knives Out,” he becomes president, mostly with the help of another disgraced character from our world, Joe Scarborough, who, instead of being fired from MSNBC for interviewing Trump 40 times in 2015 during Trump’s highly lampooned (and mercifully brief) 2015 presidential run in the Republican primary, becomes a celebrity host with a massive following.

In “Knives Out,” Scarborough and Trump each achieve the pinnacle of success in no small measure by bouncing terrible ideas off each other on live television with the same acerbic and confrontational style we witnessed in our timeline (but in our timeline, we were smart enough to ignore and/or mock the whole mess).

Instead of going to prison, in “Knives Out,” Trump becomes a sort of Reality TV president.

The preposterous backdrop to the plot gets worse. Once president, he oversees a million deaths from a mutation of the SARS virus, which, in our timeline, of course, was quickly contained (Ebola might at least have been more believable).

The president is portrayed as a professional and dangerous con man, but one sometimes gets the sense that the film’s director, Gibson, approves.

As president, the “Knives Out” Trump tears apart science programs and posts weird diatribes all through the night on a renegade version of Twitter his minions create, threatens to leave NATO, and uses the armed forces to go on a bizarre regime-changing binge designed to steal oil from other countries and create insider trading opportunities for his grifting friends and family.

At one point during the middle of a raging pandemic, Gibson has him urging people to inject Lysol into their veins to defeat the virus, demonstrating just how unserious the film is. It’s almost as if the movie was written by South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but, sadly, that is not the case.

Later, during a presidential debate, the cartoonish president claims that immigrants are eating neighborhood cats and dogs. The film can’t decide if it’s a comedy or a mystery. As a result, it becomes a cinematic travesty.

We witness this absurd historical background through the eyes of Scarborough, who is seen in a bar lamenting his relationship with Trump as the world burns.

But Scarborough isn’t waxing melancholy over Trump’s disastrous presidential term. Instead, he’s apoplectic over the fact that Trump has won a second term after Joe Biden serves a quiet and uneventful four years in the wake of halting Trump’s re-election bid.

It’s a ridiculous premise, of course, but the film’s writers apparently thought they needed the device to solve the mystery at the heart of the movie — several murders at Mar-a-Lago. In the film, Mar-a-Lago serves as a palace for a thoroughly debased and aging President Trump, who serves his second term in scenes that could have been lifted out of “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

The role of Trump is played by an AI avatar in the form of an orange-colored, sludge-like character covered by bruised and oily skin. Like a mischievous, odious subterranean creature, he makes occasional public appearances, where he frequently falls asleep, even in televised meetings in the Oval Office.

The writers cook up one ludicrous plotline after another, including a presidential cabinet full of psychos who hold a powwow in the Situation Room trying to figure out how to save the presidency of a marble-mouthed lunatic who can’t put two sentences together, as the world comes crashing down on the pedophile empire he’s running with financier Jeffrey Epstein.

That part, of course, is not shocking to anyone who watched the wretched trials televised during Hillary Clinton’s presidency in our timeline. Under the ruthless interrogations of Attorney General Kamala Harris, Americans were glued to their televisions while Epstein’s and Trump’s worlds came crashing down.

But in the “Knives Out” world, Trump is never fully found out until he’s in office. Once the nature of his crimes becomes known during his second term, his hapless team tries to rescue his presidency with an assortment of Wag the Dog scenarios that defy even momentary belief.

Once the first murder takes place, the list of people with motives is long. Benny Blanc gathers the suspects in a large, gold-plated room at Mar-a-Lago. Whereas in our timeline, all that remains of Mar-a-Lago is a brackish retaining pond on the former property of the disgraced New York huckster, in “Knives Out,” it’s a palatial child trafficking hub.

The first victim is the vice president, JD Vance, who, like in our timeline, is the author of a widely panned book called Hillybilly Elegy. Vance falls prey as part of the fallout from leaks about the Situation Room meeting to the New York Times.

The role of Vance is handled by one of the film’s few non-AI actors, Nate Bargatze, in a comedic role that echoes elements of his Saturday Night Live portrayal of General George Washington crossing the Delaware and waxing poetic about the inanities of the English language.

Unless you’ve had the misfortune of reading Hillybilly Elegy, you probably haven’t heard of Vance, but in “Knives Out,” he’s a feeble-minded power broker wannabe who hangs out with immoral tech bros and D-list movie actors. Almost every suggestion he makes is dutifully ignored by those around him, who only tolerate his presence because they think they have to.

In one admittedly hilarious scene that is introduced as a flashback, when Vance descends upon a donut shop during a campaign stop, workers behind the counter scatter and disappear (a server stranded on the other side of the counter performs a John Candy-like dive over the counter to escape), leaving Vance to tell an empty room that he appreciates their hard work and asking, “Is the camera rolling?”

The Situation Room meetings are led by Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Meryl Streep was somehow talked into this role, and of course, she does a fabulous job as the only redeeming quality of the film, even though it sometimes feels like she’s reprising her role as the President in the sharp satire, “Don’t Look Up.”

Blanc gathers the attendees from the Situation Room meetings together at Mar-a-Lago, where he declares all of them suspects in Vance’s murder. But instead of solving the murder, Blanc has to cope with several more, as one Cabinet official after another is picked off after being accused of leaking the Situation Room meeting to the press in a mysterious tape that appears and then disappears like a smoking Mission Impossible cassette tape.

I realize that reviewers are not supposed to give away movie endings, but I can’t help myself. This film doesn’t deserve a kinder fate. The movie ends with Wiles holding a long knife and grinning ear to ear while a character that looks exactly like Nosferatu looks on.

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Notes

IMDB Image Alt Text:

Fake IMDB graphic featuring the name of the movie, “Knives Out,” and Trump falling asleep in a meeting. The blurb for the movie says:

A zany crew of half-witted white men must find a way to protect the reputation of an American president accused of pedophilia who is governing while in a continuously vegetative state.

When a perpetually drunk Indian-American FBI director tries to take control of the situation, it’s knives out in this politically explosive murder mystery.

The review scores are bad. The Hollywood Reporter is quoted as saying, “The mystery is that it was made..”

Image credits: IMDB image created by the author. “Knives Out” logo is public domain by FLC001, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Last night, a flawed Democratic candidate easily won an important battleground primary to earn a chance to end septugenarean Republican Susan Collins’ 30-year(!) term as a U.S. Senator in Maine.

For some reason, his primary competition was Governor Janet Mills, another septuagenarian (78 years old), who had been Maine’s governor. Don’t these people ever retire?

Maine’s a nice state. Lots of lakes. Take a boat ride or something with the grandkids, Janet. But no. She thought she should run against the other septuagenarian in an ultimate battle of the septuagenarians to try to… oh, never mind. It’s too ridiculous to ponder.

And then, up steps a hardened former U.S. Marine, Graham Platner, with enough warts on his resume that you have to wonder if he’ll even show up sober to his Senate seat on the first day if he wins. Or, worse, will he pinch some lady’s ass?

And then, then(!), Mills removed any real opportunity for Maine’s women to say, “No” to Platner by suspending her campaign when it looked like Platner was becoming too hot to handle.

So, last night, even though Mills was on the ballot, Platner easily won.

But this is not a hit piece on Graham Platner. If anything, it’s sympatico. But I sure am curious what the women here think, and look forward to comments after they finish reading this.

The unfair advantage

What I want to talk about here instead is the unfair advantage Republicans have in all elections. It’s one we don’t hear about often, because it’s not like we want to say, “I really want to run a scandal-plagued candidate for office without all the hassle and controversy.”

The Graham Platner kerfuffle is a case study of this long-standing advantage Republicans have had over Democrats in U.S. elections since Trump entered politics. To put it as simply as possible: Republicans get to scandal, and Democrats do not.

Platner gained attention for a dynamic candidacy as a politically progressive former U.S. Marine who saw significant combat duty. He played the part of a Marine, too, in almost every way you can think of, including a past with unsavory online statements, pride in peeing on dead Taliban soldiers, and a lot of other Marine-type stuff.

And here’s the problem: If he were a Republican, none of it would matter.

Republicans have proven they’ll vote for an adjudicated rapist and an accused child rapist as president.

Republican voters have shown they don’t care about scandals at the lower ranks of government, either.

Worse, the mainstream media only cares about ethics when a Democrat is involved. Democrats are held to a higher standard than Republicans for reasons nobody has convincingly established.

When former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz was allegedly caught with his knickers down on a play date with a seventeen-year-old in 2020, Republican voters yawned and cheered him on by re-electing him to the U.S. House of Representatives. Twice. In 2022 and in 2024. These were not close elections.

The media mentioned the scandal in a few headlines, then moved on to Trump’s latest messaging or rage speech.

After the 2024 election, it got a little hot in the Republican child molestation kitchen, so Gaetz resigned from the 119th Congress almost before it began. He moved on to become a regular commentator on One America News Network, where he enjoys a devoted following.

Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas who doubles as a Texas Taliban crime lord, is a perfect symbol of Republican voter indifference toward crime, grift, and salacious sexcapades.

Paxton voters seem to reward him with increasingly plum electoral victories with every crime he commits or scandal he creates.

Republicans plant operatives and play dirty tricks to increase the scandal level on every single Democratic foible. Meanwhile, Republicans enjoy full immunity from the voting public on the most heinous of crimes, including child sex trafficking, which all 53 Republican U.S. Senators enable by refusing to challenge Trump’s salacious past.

The concept of a Democratic dirty trick is ludicrous because mainstream media barely covers real corruption or scandals by Republicans.

Not even the Trump/Epstein child trafficking empire, which everyone outside of Antarctica knows about, moved the media or voters. Even when the mainstream press does cover a Republican scandal, Republican voters ignore it to such a degree that most of them will get nasty with you if you try to bring it up. There are never consequences at the polling place for Republican malfeasance.

The Epstein files, where Trump’s name appears anywhere between 5,363 and more than a million times, depending on redaction levels and who is viewing them, were not discovered after the 2024 elections. They’ve been around for a long time. So have the accusations that Donald Trump is a child rapist.

The predator-in-chief has long worn his proclivities on his sleeves. When word broke in October 2016 that videos recorded him flirting with young girls, the nation yawned:

In a December 1992 wire brief in the Chicago Tribune, Trump is described as having spotted a youth choir singing Christmas carols at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. He asked two girls how old they were. When they said they were 14, Trump, then 46, replied, “Wow! Just think — in a couple of years, I’ll be dating you.”

On Wednesday, CBS News reported a similar scenario involving a 10-year-old girl around the same time, when Trump was between his first and second marriages.

In footage from the archives of CBS-owned “Entertainment Tonight,” Trump asks the child if she is planning to ride the escalator at Trump Tower. After she says yes, Trump turns to cameras taping a Christmas special for the show and says, “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”

~ Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2016

There was a cackling Hillary to defeat, after all, and nothing mattered more.

But don’t we have to talk about those Platner accusations anyway?

Sure. But only if we start at the beginning of his story.

Platner established his credentials as a conflicted soul early in his adult life. Despite being an anti-war protester, he joined the Marines when he was 19, after being kicked out of a protest against the looming Iraq war.

That was the first sign that he was a complex cat, but hardly the last. Why, it’s fair to wonder, did he sign up with the Marines if he was against the Iraq War? Platner says serving in the military was something he’d wanted since boyhood:

I wanted to be a soldier since I was about 2. I was singing “The Marines’ Hymn.” I was 4 or 5 when I first memorized it. I don’t know why that is. But I always had an attraction to service, and also adventure. In our society, we sell militarism and war in this very romantic fashion about adventure and excitement.

Then — and you can probably understand this, too — there is this weird attraction when everyone tells you that the only way you could ever experience it is to be there. That it’s so unique that you could never get it unless you had seen it. I grew up reading military history books, and I was into Civil War re-enacting. In high school I became pretty critical of certain elements of American foreign policy. Certainly when the war in Iraq was kicking off, I was like, This seems like a deeply stupid idea.

~ New York Times gift link: Interview with Graham Platner

In another interview, he said, “I might have read too much Hemingway.”

The TL;DR version of all this: “I like to fight.”

Yeah, you and every other Marine I’ve known, Graham. It’s okay to admit it.

This taste for rowdiness is part of his appeal to many Democrats tired of reacting to every Republican insult by tipping over on the back of their heels. When the mainstream media writes hit pieces on him, they’re also writing hit pieces on those who are drawn to him. This is not a small number of people these days. How many of us wouldn’t like a chance to pop a Republican in the mouth?

Platner’s complexity is also part of the appeal. Everything you need to know about Platner starts and ends with the fact that he’s a Marine at heart, for better and, often, for worse. Talk to almost any Marine, and they’ll tell you stories about fighting. Fighting with other Marines. Fighting with Navy personnel. Fighting with their own mothers.

They. Like. To. Fight.

Among male Marines, there probably isn’t one who hasn’t uttered a misogynistic phrase in his life. This isn’t okay. It’s very bad. It’s part of America’s rape culture. It’s a disease infecting America’s very marrow.And the world’s, if we’re honest.

But the solution isn’t found in evaluating men who have crawled out of Marine barracks filled with huge institutional problems. The solution is to drag a few Marine generals in front of Congress and force them to make cultural changes to their forces. Maybe having a guy who’s the face of it will help us get there? I have no idea. But “maybe” can sometimes work as an answer.

Does the pathology of the uglier side of Marine culture excuse certain behaviors? Not my call, because the most serious stuff Platner is accused of is unproven hearsay. But the bottom line is that Maine voters have known details of Platner’s life since the beginning of his campaign. He talks about his past in his rallies. Nobody who has voiced support for him should be shocked that he’s rough around the edges.

One of the things he has talked about recently is how war damaged his soul [Source: NY Times gift link]:

In 2005, my vehicle got hit by an I.E.D. outside a place called Karma, north of Fallujah. It was myself and my best friend that were in the back of the truck. Another Marine was driving. And we drove over an I.E.D. and blew the truck up. We all got knocked unconscious.

I come to and the whole front of the truck is ripped off. I thought we had engine trouble. I was all discombobulated. I ran around to the back of the truck, and there’s my friend. He’s alive, but a piece of shrapnel has come up under his helmet and ripped a lot of his head off.

I’m 20 and this guy’s my best friend. We went to infantry school together, we came to the fleet together, we were thick as thieves. I was a combat lifesaver, so I got this training. But they never told me what to do when you’re looking at brains. And I remember standing there being like, I don’t know what the [expletive] to do. This is my best friend and I’m supposed to save him, but I have no idea how to even do that. And then luckily this guy, Doc Huey, spectacular Navy corpsman, comes running up and starts immediately going to work and saves his life. And he survives. But I was, of course, distraught because he was my best friend and I’m a kid.

All this is happening, and there’s also a gunfight going on. So then I’ve got to go get in the gunfight for a while, and we get the vehicle back, we drop him off at the medical station, and then I’m in the back of the truck just cleaning the blood out, mopping it up, and I just remember there was a moment when they were like, Well, we’ve got to go back on patrol in three hours, and you’re just like, Yep. … So there was a hardening at that point for me. You don’t get to engage with this, because if you do, you’re going to be worthless, and you can’t be worthless out here.

I’m pretty sure that if I had experienced this at 20 years old, I’d have become a shitposter on Reddit like Platner did, too. Hell. A bad day on the couch will lead me to dark times.

About Platner’s “Nazi” tattoo

Platner’s troubles started early in the Democratic primary process when it was revealed he had a Topenkopf tattoo, which is verboten (forbidden) in Germany because of its association with the Nazi SS.

But the history of the tattoo is not quite what the mainstream media says it is. One of the first celebrities to wear the Totenkopf was Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who wore it at the front of his furry combat busby (aka, hat) during the First World War.

He wasn’t much of a Nazi, though, once World War II rolled into view. Instead, he remained a staunch supporter of the old German monarchy. He was a World War I war hero, so Nazi punk Hermann Göring hid him away as a Prussian state councillor instead of, you know, killing him.

Mackensen continued to show up at Berlin parties, though, wearing his uniform and his Totenkopf cap, while Nazis stared at him suspiciously in between quaffs of schnapps.1

See, that’s the thing about the Totenkopf and other symbols consisting of skulls and crossbones. It’s a war thing. Soldiers and warriors are asked to bludgeon and murder their fellow humans. They literally wear their mission on their sleeves, their chests, their hats.

The Totenkopf went through several variations throughout German and Prussian military history until it became the symbol of the most vicious national police force in modern history, the Nazi SS. (Stephen Miller says, “Hold my beer.”)

But until the revelation of Platner’s tattoo, I had never heard of the Totenkopf or its background. Had you? If you have, maybe you heard of this version of it, found on the sleeves of the United States Air Force’s 400th Missile Squadron (circa 1995 — 2005):

Or maybe this one, used by U.S. Navy Seals:

The Navy Seals version was inspired by a Marvel comic book antihero named the Punisher. What Platner will not tell you, and I don’t blame him, is that he probably doesn’t remember what his friends told him when they convinced him to get inked, because he was that drunk. For all we know, they said, “It’s the Punisher, dude! You know, Marvel Comics?”

To which Platner most likely replied with the clever retort common to drunk marines everywhere, “Blarghhh!”

If you fought in Iraq, you may have seen the Totenkopf grace one of the buildings cleared out by U.S. forces. Known as the Deuce Four Skull, it was slapped onto buildings to induce fear in the hearts of local insurgents:

One form of the Totenkopf symbol or another is used all over the planet by military and police forces. It’s not news when a drunk marine gets inked with one. Even the Calgary police use it in a “challenge coin.”

Platner has stated that he didn’t know about the Totenkopf’s SS history when he stumbled out of a bar one late night/early morning and into a tattoo shop in Croatia. It’s not unreasonable to think that half of the U.S. Marine force has one of these things tattooed somewhere on their person. The other half probably has something worse. Nearly all of them were probably quite drunk when they received them.

A better choice for a staggeringly drunk Marine wandering around in Croatia after midnight might have been this Grateful Dead version of the Totenkopf:

Now, let’s look at the Republican version of this issue, which is somehow not as important to the mainstream media.

When Pete Hegseth proudly displays his Jerusalem Cross ink, the right wing gushes because it’s a symbol adopted by far-right Christo-nationalists. This is expected. However, the mainstream media’s interest is next to zero.

If Platner wore something like this, the New York Times and other supposed mainstream media would be all over it.

What about Platner’s lady friends?

The New York Times recently published a hit piece on Platner (unlike my fair and balanced one!) that claimed Platner was a verbally abusive and violent-adjacent womanizer who drank too much.

The primary focus of the story was a former girlfriend named Lyndsey Fifield, who has since been outed as a Republican operative. She accused Platner of unsavory conduct unbecoming of a progressive, left-wing male.2

I’m usually first in line defending women against masculine bullshit. But the New York Times piece reads like a hit piece to me, with little basis in fact. Consider these three paragraphs:

Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”

Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

Some of the women also raised questions about his trustworthiness. Mr. Platner’s insistence that he did not know that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, Ms. Fifield said. After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as “my Totenkopf.”

In all, the story describes three women, one of whom, Fifield, the Republican operative, says he became physical with her:

Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

In the New York Times story, Fifield admits to being in a dark place and drinking a lot, too, which should probably subject her version of the story to a little more scrutiny than the Times gave it. The other two women raised questions about his trustworthiness and/or concerns about his online posts. No mention is made of anything resembling physical assault.

So the New York Times went with this: Three women concerned about his Oorah personality, and one very loud headline in a New York Times special feature article:

Technically, I guess, “three” is “several.” The article continues:

Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.

In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women did just that, describing Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.

This all looks like hearsay to me, even the positive stuff. His online comments, on sites like Reddit, read like any other midnight shitposter’s do.

Does anyone think that if Platner were a Republican, any of this would even make the back pages of the New York Times?

There are no assault charges. There are no charges that he hit anybody. He may have gotten weird once and locked someone in a closet; but, it sounds like they were both too drunk for that story to ever correctly form, so we’ll never get to the truth of it.

Platner has talked about his shitposting, too (previous NY Times gift link), admitting that it came from a dark place:

I stopped using the internet because I got happy. I sat on the internet for a number of years getting in fights, in the parlance of the times, shit-posting, trying to get a rise out of people, trying to get in arguments because it brought me some form of serotonin boost. Truthfully I was really, really isolated and alone. Very angry. A lot of the worst comments come from the years where I was at my absolute worst, which really is between 2012 and 2017, 2018. I was in a pretty dark place.

That dark place was fostered by a severe case of PTSD, which, as the prescient comedian George Carlin once reminded us, was once more honestly called “shell shock.” Platner authored more than 1800 Reddit posts, many of them offensive, while still loaded up on untreated shell shock stimuli.

They were the kinds of posts that would trigger many of us to hit the block button. And, he drank too much, all the way until at least 2018.

Is the dark place finally lit by recovery and what appears to be a happy marriage? Maine voters will need to decide in the general election. They’ll need to decide if he’s off the booze, too.

In a vacuum, purity tests are useful. Maine Democrats had a chance to visit their primary choices and ask, “Do we want a rough-edged blue-collar ex-Marine to represent the progressive wing of this party?” Enough people answered yes that his main competitor, Maine governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the Senate primary, leaving Platner and the relatively unknown David Costello as the remaining Democratic candidates.

Leave it to Democrats to begin the process of invoking purity tests after the ship has sailed.

This problem extends into the electoral process

Almost every Republican candidate has a core ethical issue by the simple act of supporting Trump. Such support should trigger an automatic slap in the face, since Trump is front and center of the Epstein files. But this support won’t be mentioned by the press aside from an aside.

In a normal world, any candidate expressing support for a serial sexual assaulter like Trump would be outed and condemned. The paradox of Republicans gaining an advantage in ethics, even though we know the majority of them are steeped in toxic sludge, extends to the electoral process itself.

Some of you may be familiar with Trump’s claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. What began as Trumpy shitposts became more than 50 court cases, all of which were tossed aside for lack of serious evidence. Republicans base their frequent attempts to curtail voting rights on a false narrative of election fraud, despite there being such a small amount of voter fraud that it’s statistically insignificant.

When Kamala Harris “lost” the 2024 election, polling researchers discovered numerous anomalies in voting patterns within the key swing states.

Mass voter fraud is hard to accomplish in a decentralized system like the one administering U.S. elections. Each county in the country has its own process for counting votes. Tinkering with voting machines in every county is almost impossible.

Some researchers claim that significant tinkering happened anyway. They point to bizarre patterns, such as those found in Rockland County in New York, where a complaint was filed in the New York State Supreme Court in December 2024 regarding the way the votes of a small community of Hasidic Jews were being counted. The dispute centered on a precinct referred to as Ramapo 35, where Trump received 552 votes while Harris received none.3

Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand received 331 votes in the same district. At the surface, it all seems very suspicious. As it turns out, however, aware that the precinct’s heavily Hasidic population takes its electoral marching orders from local rabbis, Gillibrand’s election team has traditionally worked the precinct hard. She’s built a loyal base, largely by mingling with the rabbis who issue voting instructions.

Eventually, the lawsuit was dismissed by a judge, but not before it triggered a larger conspiracy theory regarding the election that pointed all the way to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service. But if there was/is any meat to the theory, it doesn’t matter. That’s because Trump’s 50+ courtroom losses have turned the notion of election fraud into a joke. As a result, despite a set of impressive technical details in the most viral posts about irregularities in the 2024 elections, the story has been muted by the press and ignored by voters.

Democrats can’t easily claim fraud. Republicans spent so much time and effort pushing bizarre conspiracy theories that, unless a smoking gun the size of a city block is found, Democrats suspecting the same thing face a level of skepticism matched only by the depth of Trump’s malfeasance.

The stakes are high

Whatever Platner is, and the questions facing him are legitimate, the stakes are high. Democrats need to end Republican Susan Collins’ endless term as Maine senator to maintain the smoothest path to taking the Senate from the Republican sycophants who cheer on the Trump/Epstein crime wave like captive Catholic altar boys.

Susan Collins is one of those enablers. She has cast 10,000 Senate votes during her thirty years in the Senate. Among those votes:

• Confirmation of all of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, including Brett Kavanaugh. This helped lead to Citizens United, the destruction of Roe v Wade, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

• Yes to a vast majority of the Trump administration’s lower federal court nominees.

• Yes to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and several other awful Cabinet officials (but she drew a line in the sand at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel).

• Yes to last month’s $70 billion immigration enforcement package to increase funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with an emphasis on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), thus creating the largest national police force in the world, one devoted to street terror, concentration camps, and deportation, rather than crime.

• Yes to Trump regime-backed legislation 95 percent of the time overall. She didn’t vote for the Big Brotherish-named “Big Beautiful Bill,” but did vote to pass it out of committee.

One of Collins’ Super PACs placed a major ad buy to begin on yesterday’s primary election, June 9. Here’s a look at what Platner can look forward to. Believe me, this is a gentle jab compared to the other hypocrisies Collins will throw his way:

Will the automated Republican advantage over ethics built on a foundation of hypocrisy work in the midterms? Or will voters finally see through it?

Stay tuned, I guess. A lot of this depends on you, if you’re an American voter.

Meanwhile, if you’re a woman, what would you do now if faced with a choice between Collins, an occasionally moderate but still horrifically enabling female senator, and a progressive ex-Marine with a possible mean streak, an obvious past of heavy drinking and nutty online posts, and who possibly thinks it’s a good idea to lock a woman in the closet if he is losing an argument?

Yeesh, is all I can say.

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Notes

If you’re wondering, after all this, what type of politics Graham Platner embraces, suffice to say he’s been endorsed by Bernie Sanders. He definitely belongs in the Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez section of the Democratic tent. The chances of Platner becoming another Fetterman (a fear expressed by some Democrats) are almost zero, unless Platner, too, has a stroke.

Additional Sources

A gallery of Totenkopf usage:

Totenkopf - Wikipedia

Sources on possible electoral tampering:

She Won. They Didn’t Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.
How Leonard Leo’s 2021 sale of an electronics firm enabled tech giants to subvert the 2024 election.thiswillhold.substack.com

She Won. Or Did She? Analysis of New Viral “CIA Whistleblower” Revelations
Did NSA ‘authorize’ a forensic audit that found Harris won?michaeldsellers.substack.com

A deep dive into the Rockland County, NY, election results lawsuit
A lawsuit challenging the results of the 2024 general election in Rockland County, New York, fueled speculation about…www.snopes.com

Judge dismisses Rockland election results lawsuit seeking recount of 2024 results
State Supreme Court Judge Rachel Tanguay has dismissed a lawsuit filed by SMART Legislation that was seeking a hand…westchester.news12.com

Inspecting report on ex-CIA whistleblower who allegedly said NSA audit proved Harris won 2024…
A Substack article claimed Adam Zarnowski, a former CIA agent, was involved in an NSA audit of the 2024 election that…www.snopes.com

More info on Susan Collins’ voting record

Sen. Susan Collins
Legislative profile for Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME], the Senator from Mainewww.govtrack.us

More on Graham Platner:

Graham Platner isn’t going anywhere in Maine Senate race after latest controversy
Graham Platner is denying accusations of being physically rough with former girlfriends saying that report in The New…www.npr.org

This outlines Platner’s specific positions:

U.S. Senate — Democratic Primary | Voter Guide: 2026 Primary Election * Maine
From Maine Morning Star | Policy and Politics for the Pine Tree Statemainemorningstar.com

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Footnotes

This is slowly becoming a bit of a series. It began here:

Gabriel: He’s arrived, your Lordship.

Lordship (rearranging a galactic cloud pattern): Who? I’m a little busy.

Gabriel: JC. He’s back from his visit to Earth.

Lordship: You mean that little place I wanted to smite the other day?

Gabriel: That’s the place, your Lordship.

Lordship: Fuck’s sake. Tell JC I’m outside watering the outer rim of that galaxy that has all those nasty fire planets. I’m not in a JC kind of mood today.

Gabriel: You never are, your Lordship. Shall I send him in?

Lordship (muttering): Of all the possible chemical combinations in the universe, my primary progeny turns into a goddamn Gandhi. (Outside voice): Yeah, yeah, send him in.

JC (entering): Hey, pops.

Lordship (launching a planet-eating supernova): Sup?

JC: Gabe said you wanted a report on my visit to Earth.

Lordship: Oh, he did, did he? Gabe! Get in here!

Gabriel (sauntering back in): Yes, your Lordship.

Lordship: Stick around. I’m gonna need some moral support. What have you, JC?

JC: Well, as you know, I visited upon the planet’s denizens, made a few friends, then promptly got hung on two sticks. It was very unpleasant.

Lordship: Yeah, I heard. What an awful place. You know we’ve got a nice, fat asteroid belt next door to that cesspool just waiting to get plucked, right? Why don’t I just take the biggest one? What do they call it, Gabe?

Gabriel: Ceres, your grace. Might be a bit of overkill, sir, as it is classified by the humans on Earth as a dwarf planet and would most likely break Earth apart if they were to collide.

Lordship: You and your science. (Looks at JC): Isn’t he funny, JC? He thinks I care about that shit.

JC: Really funny, Dad. Do you want to hear about this, or not?

Lordship: In all honesty, I’d rather be staring at the next abomination your crazy brother’s got going on in that disease lab he made next to that planet… Gabe, what’s that place called again?”

Gabriel: Uranus, your grace.

Lordship: Your anus. What a stupid name for a planet. That alone should end them. It’s one of the most beautiful planets I’ve made, too. Revolting little buggers, those earthlings are.

Gabriel: Yes, your grace. Their nomenclature patterns could use some work.

Lordship: I suppose you’re going to blame me for that, since I created the little heathens.

Gabriel: I wouldn’t think of it, sir.

Lordship: So, what else you got for me, JC? Today is Fry Day, you know. (launches another planet-eating super nova). Very busy here. Very busy. (Indistinguishable muttering)

JC: Well, I decided to check in on them in stealth mode.

Lordship: I thought I warned you about that. Rapture. It’s always gotta be about a rapture.

JC: No, no, dad. Stealth mode. Not, like, THE return. Just a stealthy look around to see what’s up.

Lordship: Hmm. Interesting. Didn’t the sentient beings you tried that with last time try to feed you to a meat-eating toadstool?

JC: Not their fault, Dad. They didn’t know who I was.

Lordship: Heh, good thing. It would have been worse.

JC (sighing): May I?

Lordship (gleefully clapping his hands after blowing up a ringed gas giant with a comet): Please do. You can start by telling me how you did this whole stealth thing. That must have been quite a trick.

JC: Oh, that was easy. I just occupied the body of a human who acted like me most of the time.

Lordship: How’d you find such a being on a foul little planet like that?

JC: Wasn’t easy.

Lordship: Did he suspect anything? Especially after you left?

JC: Nope. As far as his peeps knew, nothing changed.

Lordship: Remarkable. Who was this guy? We should invite him over for tea.

JC: His name was Tom Hanks.

Lordship: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of him.

Gabriel: I’ll remind you, sir, that you hadn’t even heard of Earth before I told you about that Moses fellow.

Lordship: So I fibbed a little. Sue me. (winks at Gabriel) I bet you wonder what else I (makes quotes with fingers) don’t know.

JC (looking at Gabriel): See what I have to deal with every day?

Gabriel: His Lordship certainly keeps us all on our toes. Oh dear God, what is that foul stench?

Lordship: Oh, for fun, I made a planet called Uranus that I’m thinking of replacing the other one with, just to teach those idiots a lesson. Haven’t decided yet.

JC: Dad, remember that retirement community I told you about at the edge of the universe?

Lordship: Watch it, boy, or I’ll turn you into a screwworm. Now. Go on with your story. And, more importantly, how the hell’s Tom? I love that guy. Plays a mean piano. With his feet no less.

JC: Tom’s fine. It’s the rest of the place that is sort of, as you yourself would say, in the shitter.

Lordship: Well, you knew that going in, didn’t you? I gotta hand it to you, son, you’ve got the patience of a saint. If I had my way, I’d boil all their oceans.

JC: Yes, Dad, I know. Anyway, there’s this guy.

Lordship: Goddammit. The orange one?

JC: You’ve heard about him?

Lordship: Gabe filled me in. It’s enough to make me rethink this whole biology thing. There’s gotta be a better way to make a planet full of a billion little chatterboxes.

Gabriel: Indeed, sir, biology has been a topic of conversation lately.

Lordship: Oh, really. Among whooooooom?

Gabriel: Well, several of us higher angels, your Lordship.

Lordship: I’m listening.

Gabriel: Well, the conclusion so far is that the mathematical probability of this situation repeating itself is approximately zero. Point 00000000000000001 to be precise.

JC: Also? He thinks he’s God.

Lordship: On top of all the rest of it? You know I’m a jealous god (chuckles)

JC: Yeppers.

Lordship: Is he a threat to destroy the planet? Cuz that’s my job. If he is, he’s gone. Like, right now.

JC: No, pops, not unless there’s a way to profit from it.

Lordship: Oh. Alright, then. No Malthusian event. I guess I don’t see the problem.

JC: It’s just that he’s making everyone miserable, Dad.

Lordship: More than I did when I smote people for doing things like dropping a big gold chest on their foot?

JC: Oh, yeah. Wayyyy worse than that, Dad.

Lordship: Worse than locust plagues? Volcanoes and shit?

Gabriel: We ran some numbers, your Lordship. The cumulative toll of all the misery he’s placed upon the people of Earth is second only to their biggest war.

Lordship: Holy shit on a stick.

JC: He’s like my brother’s worst invention.

Lordship (his eyes wide): Cancer?

Gabriel: I’d argue that it’s worse, sir. He eats away at people’s souls. Slowly, but surely. Half the population is certifiable.

Lordship: As in insane?

Gabriel: I’m afraid so, your Lordship.

JC: And he’s been doing it for ten years. Which is a long time in Earth years.

Lordship: Oh, myyyyy. How’s Tom holding out during all this?

JC: Well, he’s Tom Hanks, Dad. So, you know, samesies.

Lordship: Of course, he is. Well, good on him. Do you two clowns have a course of action you might suggest?

Gabriel: Boils, sir. Cover the orange one in boils.

JC: Or bruises. Just, sort of, random bruises. It’s more modern.

Lordship: JC! That’s not like you. This beast must be absolutely wretched.

JC: I’ve never been tempted by violence before, Dad. I wanted to throttle his smelly ass.

Lordship: Bruises it is. Anything else?

Gabriel (giggling): Maybe swell up his ankles a bit. (puts one hand to mouth, giggles again)

JC: Have him fall asleep randomly during public events, just to see if it alarms his cult at all.

Lordship: From what Gabe has told me about his cult, it’s a wart on that planet that can’t be excised. And all of this leads to his demise, I assume?

JC: Precisely. When he perishes from natural causes, there will be street celebrations across the planet.

Lordship: This could be more fun than smashing planets. I love it. The planet will be that joyous?

JC: Without a doubt.

Lordship: What about the goofballs in his cult?

Gabriel: Secretly relieved, we believe, your Lordship.

Lordship: JC? Do you concur?

JC: They’ll be happy as hell at first, then find another target for their wrath.

Lordship: Oooh, and then maybe Rapture time?

JC: Maybe so, Dad. Maybe so.

Lordship: We’ll need to ramp up production on weird-looking Earth animals.

Gabriel: If I may, your Lordships (JC and Lordship both glance his way). I’m afraid that the Rapture will not be the best solution in this case, because many of them believe that the orange one’s presence is the first stage of the Rapture.

Lordship: Oh, come on.

Gabriel: I’m afraid so. It will all be seen as a fulfillment of prophecy.

JC: There’s an easy solution for this. We can just send his cult to live in my brother’s house for eternity.

Lordship: Eternal fire and brimstone! I love it! My lad, I am gaining newfound respect for you. I should send you to barbarian planets more often.

Gabriel: One small problem.

Lordship and JC: Oh, come on!

Gabriel: Traditionally, we let these things play out without such divine interventions.

Lordship: Not my best idea.

Gabriel: Quite. Still, we really do need the consistency.

Lordship: The boils and bruises could take years before the body expires to end the malignancy. And, what if, in the meantime, these morons don’t get rid of this clown on their own?

[Silence for a beat]

Lordship, Gabriel and JC: Ceres!

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Notes

Other stories in the “series:”

And, of course, the first one:

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Sometimes, an old white dude’s gotta sleep.

I know this well. The other day, whilst tending the tomatoes, I found myself on my back, fast asleep, all four limbs sticking straight up in the air like I was being pulled up by tethers from the Marine One presidential helicopter.

This is why I don’t go on job interviews anymore. Have you ever waddled over to a whiteboard during the technical phase of an interview, cock sure of yourself, to map out a quick Fibonacci function, only to fall asleep whilst jotting down “i = 1”?

I have. I mean, who hasn’t, right?

One time, instead of the Fibonacci routine, I drew a clock (Draw CLOCK (Five past ten) ). Just an impulse, I suppose.

Then, they asked me to name animals.

Wait. No. This may have been a different interview.

Anyhoo, TrumpleDeadSkin fell asleep yet again, this time while holding court with his vanilla-colored sycophants in the Oval Office while they were extolling the virtues of coal. Remember coal?

Republicans do, and dammit, they’re going to save every single one of those 45,000 or so coal mining jobs if they have to burn down Canada to do it.

While explaining their plan, Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA (formerly known as the Environmental Protection Agency), yammered on about how Democrats are trying to “strangulate” coal miners out of existence and make them learn coding.

Someone should tell Lee that his AI friends have pretty much strangulated coders out of existence, but that is a different post, methinks.

While Zeldin bloviated, Trump slept.

Breathe deep and relax

We are all distraught over the news lately. I’ve found myself often unable to talk seriously about it much here on Ruminato. I’m exhausted by it all. I’d have one of my staff writers do it for me if I had any.

But I’ve come to a conclusion that I think, believe it or not, is backed by evidence in the cover photo and video in this post.

What we are experiencing is the last gasp of a dying America. It’s an America dominated by a few white men.

In its place will be the vibrancy symbolized by Obama’s presidency. When diversity rears its mighty head in response to this mess, it will be bigger, badder, and more beautiful than ever. It cannot be contained.

I live in Atlanta, which is helping lead a Black Renaissance that is bringing a lot of other groups disparaged by MAGA along with it. The people here don’t care what the regime is doing. They’re moving on without them. And they’re gonna vote in droves.

We are experiencing a significant backlash to progress, yes, but it’s on the clock. Its expiration date is nearly upon us. Its lead jackal, Trump, is himself about to expire. You can see it in the video below. You can see it in the cover photo. You can see it in almost every news report about him we see.

And guess what? We’re all largely intact. We’ve survived. Many of us are wounded. But we survived. And as our wounds heal, we rise up and fight.

The more these old, desperate white men push, the more we resist.

The Senate last night finally pushed through their $70 billion immigration enforcement funding bill. I call it the Concentration Camp Act. This will turn ICE into the largest military/police organization in the country.

We’re ready for it. In November, we will begin to put this old regime, and this even older pile of frightened, old white men, to pasture.

I saw a news story today reporting that both the centrist and left wing of the Democratic Party agree on one thing: justice and accountability for the Trump/Epstein crime syndicate.

We’re in that phase where we will all soon need to end our respite from the battle, pull up our sleeves, and finish the job.

Take a few more weeks. Hug the kids and grandkids. Take them to the beach or to a ballgame.

Then, let’s crush these Neanderthals.

Here’s the full video of the sleeper in chief:

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One fine day in late February 2026, a man who at least half the nation thinks is certifiably insane took to the podium to deliver the State of the Union address.

Unfortunately for the United States, he’s not the only nutcase. Thousands of people placed bets on the online predictive marketplace called Kalshi on (hold on to your morning vodka and OJ) whether George Santos would attend.

Rather than test these people to discover if they have working neurons, somebody, somewhere, decided to keep an eye on George instead.

That somebody was the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which has miraculously managed to squirrel away a small staff of regulators despite all the assaults on modern government by Russell Vought, DOGE, and the various other machete wielders involved with Trump 2.0.

George, you see, posted an item on social media declaring he’d be in the gallery watching from afar:

This, for some reason, fired up a few pieces of hair on the back of the Trumpian scalp of a very bored CFTC lawyer, who snooped around a bit and discovered that George bet on himself on Kalshi, a predictive betting platform (like Polymarket but with a nonsensical name unless you happen to know Arabic) that he would not, in fact, be in attendance.

George placed his bet just before the start of the State of the Union, according to Kalshi.

To summarize: George jumped onto social media to declare he’d attend the State of the Union address. A desperate crowd of people who will gamble on anything then placed bets on Kalshi on whether or not George would attend the State of the Union.

George placed a bet that he would not show up after saying he would. George did not show up. George made money.

George has already had one prison term commuted by the pardoner-in-chief.

Before you place a Polymarket bet on whether he’ll be commuted again, you should know that the Trump regime is investigating its own CFTC lawyers who investigate the prediction markets because the regime really doesn’t want to regulate them at all.1 Nobody knows what they’re being investigated for.

This is not satire.

This is the United States in 2026.

Now, back to the Strait of Hormuz War.

What a country.

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Footnotes

Longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley is pissed.

In a 10 am staff meeting Monday morning, he tore into Bari Weiss, the CBS News Editor in Chief recently installed by Trump surrogate and pal David Ellison, saying she “murdered” the long-time news fave of many Americans, “60 Minutes.”1

He then went after new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton, who was hired last week by Weiss, despite, like Weiss, having no substantial experience in broadcast journalism.

According to the New York Times:

In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

Pelley laid into the two after Bilton resisted claims he’d turn “60 Minutes” into a glorified TikTok, but couching those assurances with his belief that “60 Minutes” was part of an outdated institution: broadcast news in general. When Bilton continued by saying Bari Weiss was committed to the integrity of “60 Minutes,” Pelley went ballistic. That’s when he called her a news murderer.

Weiss herself didn’t arrive at CBS with the strongest credentials. She spent some time with the Wall Street Journal as an op-ed and book review editor, then was hired by the New York Times during Trump 1.0 in a sorry effort to answer criticism that its editorial leanings were too leftist.

After spending a few years there, she ran a Substack publication called the Free Press before being handed the CBS job. The Free Press billed itself as a partisan-free zone, but its editorial content was decidedly right-wing to reflect Weiss’ personal sentiments.

It would be like if I opened Ruminato to other writers and claimed it was bipartisan. Would you believe that? Of course not. My readers are the smartest on Substack, but even a casual look at my writing dispels any notion that I have any interest in “fair and balanced.” No such thing has ever existed in American media. Why start now?

At the Free Press, Weiss publicized the case of Palestinian professor Refaat Alareer after he gained a following as a critic of Netanyahu’s response to the October 7 attacks.2 He was mostly an unknown dissenter in those days, but Weiss went after him hard on her Substack, and he became a target of the busy right-wing hate faction.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed him shortly after that, along with six members of his family, in an airstrike designed to shut him up. We’ll never know how much Weiss’ big mouth helped lead to that attack, but I’ve never seen her utter any words of regret.

Let the desecration begin

One could say that the desecration of “60 Minutes” began when Weiss killed a 13-minute report by Sharyn Alfonsi about CECOT prison in El Salvador. That’s the place, you’ll recall, where Kristi Noem posed in front of a big iron cage filled with newly deported Venezuelans (some were even heavily tatted!!!).

In an act of brazen cruelty that Noem gushed about like Oprah giving away cars, the regime sent Venezuelan men to a prison in a country these migrants knew nothing about.

Weiss stomped all over Alfonsi’s ten years of experience as a “60 Minutes” reporter by pulling the story a day before it was scheduled to air.3

This kind of direct interference was a first for “60 Minutes.”

Alfonsi put up a public fuss, writing staff members:

“In my view, pulling it now — after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Alfonsi was cut loose last week as part of Weiss’ larger overhaul of “60 Minutes,” which didn’t need an overhaul.

That may have happened because Aflonsi was vocal about CBS’s apparent transition into a Trump propaganda machine:4

In the coming days, network leadership may attempt to hide behind corporate euphemisms like ‘modernization’ and ‘restructuring’ to explain away my departure. Don’t be misled. This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom. Fearless, independent reporting has always been the defining standard at ‘60 Minutes.’ Today, CBS management is abandoning that mission, choosing access journalism over accountability and protecting power rather than scrutinizing it.

The wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down. Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not. If this continues, the result will be a broadcast that looks like ‘60 Minutes’ but lacks the courage and character to produce journalism that matters.

Weiss then fired Tanya Simon, a “60 Minutes” stalwart who spent the last three decades helping the program become the most popular news program in television history.

Tanya Simon’s exit follows her predecessor by a year, Bill Owens, who said during the purchase of CBS by David Ellison’s company Skydance:5

“Over the past months, it has also become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it. To make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

Owens was another cherished “60 Minutes” veteran. His departure was a big blow to the morale of the “60 Minutes” production crew, but they soldiered on when Tanya Smith and her three decades at the show took over.

Weiss also cut loose correspondent Cecilia Vega. Vega wrote:6

I very much fear what comes next and for the future of the legendary broadcast…

…I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity. I am far from the only ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?

This week, she found out.

Anderson Cooper also left, leaving only vague hints that it might be because Weiss is in charge. If there’s anybody in the world less interested in burning bridges than Anderson Cooper, that person has not been revealed, so it’s not surprising he slipped away without fanfare.

Weiss has made all these changes while claiming the show needed to be revamped. But “60 Minutes” remains perhaps the most respected news program in the business and a ratings behemoth, especially by today’s standards. People may not watch much unrecorded TV these days, but when they do, they’re often watching “60 Minutes.”

Now that it’s in the hands of a MAGA tycoon and her Free Press stooge,“60 Minutes” is probably dead and gone.

Will Weiss’ new “60 Minutes,” for example, provide us with a deep dive into the origin story of the latest wild collection of crazed Trump social media posts?7

This was part of one of the madman’s recent insane Truth Social binges, which included one set of rants consisting of 52 posts in six hours while normal Americans were sleeping. No wonder he falls asleep at ceremonies honoring the dead.

None of this would be happening if nearly 77 million people hadn’t thought a second round of a rageaholic with a deteriorating mind (“they’re eating your cats and dogs”) was preferable to electing a qualified professional woman to lead the country. This wackadoodle decision has had many more consequences than a sudden spike of inflation or a large-scale, sustained attack on immigrants, women, and people of color.

It also gave us Bari Weiss, because the election results also gave us David Ellison, Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s son, who used insider tactics in the Trump regime to acquire CBS shortly after the election.

Time of death: July 7, 2024

CBS News died on July 7, 2024. That was when a media organization nobody aside from cinephiles knew about, Skydance Media, announced that it had agreed to acquire Paramount Global to form a $28 billion megamedia firm.

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Skydance, not even twenty years old at the time of the merger, was basically the progeny of Larry Ellison, by way of another unfortunate oligarchy birthing incident that begat his son David. David grew into an adult body, then formed Skydance because he liked movies.

Skydance quickly formed a production and distribution partnership with Paramount Pictures. Little did unsuspecting fans of Star Trek realize that every time they dropped a few dollars for the newest Star Trek reboots, they were helping to finance the end of CBS News.

It didn’t take long for Ellison and Skydance to gain street cred in Hollywood, which was trying to move on from the dominance of Harvey Weinstein after his Hollywood walk of shame.8 Ellison’s production company cranked out hugely profitable hits such as the Mission Impossible franchise and the sequel to Top Gun.

Ellison specialized in creative financing deals, such as one with Apple TV’s streaming service that guaranteed Skydance $25 million for each film.9

Ellison’s company bartered and clawed its way to an eight-billion-dollar purchase of Paramount, which, by that time, also owned CBS.

The FCC, now managed by sycophants at the Trump regime, approved Skydance’s buyout in July, shortly after Paramount bent the knee to the grifter in chief to the tune of $16 million. That’s the amount Trump sued CBS’s “60 Minutes” for airing an interview with Kamala Harris, who had the temerity to point out his many flaws.

Paramount paid up.

When Paramount coincidentally and abruptly pulled the plug on Stephen Colbert’s late-night TV show, a few folks wondered if there might be a connection with the concurrent FCC approval process.

Enter Project 2025

The FCC is helmed by a fella named Brendan Carr, the mad clown’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Carr was originally nominated as an FCC commissioner by Trump in 2017.

Carr wrote Project 2025’s chapter on media policy as envisioned by MagaLoons. He is also a member of the Federalist Society,10 which is part of a shadow government that has installed several United States Supreme Court justices and often actively solicits favorable outcomes through bribery. I wrote about this way back in August 2024 (with more hat tips to ProPublica than I have hats to give):

It wasn’t until Carr signed off on the Skydance acquisition of Paramount that the regime gave its final okay. Carr and the regime demanded two things in return for the merger’s approval:

1. A full reversal on DEI

2. The installation of a mediator/monitor within CBS who will watch for socialist teachings (my words).

3. Cancel Colbert (?) (Yes, that’s three things in total, but I didn’t count this last one formally because it’s a valid assumption, not a reportable fact).

The merger put a Trump supporter in control of another major American news organization. Right-wing supporters now control or own:

• Paramount/CBS

• Fox Corporation (Murdoch Family): Fox News, Fox Business, and various local Fox affiliates.

• News Corp (Murdoch Family): The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, HarperCollins (a major book publisher), and other news properties.

• Sinclair Broadcast Group: Owns 185 TV stations11 in 86 markets, and was a major player in blocking Jimmy Kimmel during another First Amendment kerfuffle instigated by King TrumpleThinSkin.

• Salem Media Group: Conservative radio stations and digital properties like HotAir.com, RedState, and PJ Media.

• Newsmax Media: The bonkers Newsmax TV, known for some of the craziest MAGA and right-wing commentary around.

Right-wing podcasters like Joe Rogan and Candace Owens have also swarmed Spotify. Candace Owens is so popular among airheads that Polymarket even poses the question: “Candace Owens for president?”

There’s also a massive spiderweb of right-wing YouTubers, independent podcasters, and even nutso Substackers adding to the fascist-leaning media mix.

The media landscape is now dominated by the right wing, yet the right wing is never satisfied, so they continue to complain and write about a phantom left-wing media.

This media landscape, along with the madness of the mad King of Bling, has enormous influence on young minds, especially young men and teenage boys, who flock to new right-wing podcasters and conservative sports blogs like Barstool Sports, which hosts podcasts from the types of jockstrap munchers who still think the idea of making slingshots out of bras is funny.

It’s not a pretty picture, and I have no idea what the fix would be if a Democrat took over tonight, much less more than two years from now. That’s two years more to shape minds and fill them with hate, grief, and rage, most of it because their own policies are creating levels of strife throughout the nation that will leave the next administration with the responsibility of cleaning up the mess before even thinking about how to solve gut-punch problems like climate change.

Even worse, the next government will inherit the extra burden of establishing a crime commission tasked with calling to account the massive grift infecting the nation on behalf of the Grifter in Chief. The call for unity will be heard long and loud during those early years, especially from, and mark my words here, the Republican Never Trumpers who are currently allies.

The well-known Never Trumper Substack Bulwark will create headlines, for example, reading like this: “Why Democrats Should Seek Unity Instead of Revenge.”

The next government cannot afford to heed those calls. But even more importantly, the next government will need to thread a dangerous needle: How to fix the media landscape without trashing the First Amendment.

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Footnotes

Restive Souls is an alternative history novel in which the Brits win what in our timeline is called the Revolutionary War, and emancipate North American slaves in the wake of the war. Still (forever?) in final edits, so there may be goofs, evil dangling modifiers, and other shenanigans.

This excerpt did not make the final cut, but will instead be part of a second book that follows the first volume of the Restive Souls series.

Elliot Fae was introduced in a previous chapter as the warlord who runs Savannah, Georgia, in the midst of the growing African American nation that surrounds it, called the Carolina Union. He is a lone holdout who has figured out a way to maintain slavery, as the Union does not yet have the military resources to deal with him.

In this excerpt, the reader is aware that he’s about to begin a celebration over the Phalaris Bull, a sinister event that only someone like Fae could conjure.

This excerpt will only be available for a limited time.

Excerpt from Part II of Restive Souls: The Story of the Phalaris Bull (1820)

Ultimately, all was right with Fae’s prized bull. The evening of the feast descended upon Savannah at the end of a humid May day that dripped sweat from the Spanish moss dangling from two grand live oak trees in front of the entrance to the congregational courtyard. The two facing trees met in an embrace over a long walkway filled with pedestrians attending the festival.

“You look grand,” said Mae Tanner to Fae as hundreds of guests finished settling in at their tables. Servants had built a wooden platform for Fae that circled the Phalaris Bull. Mae was with Fae inside the rectory on the north end of the courtyard.

Fae was shorter than Mae, who was an average-sized woman for her time. She straightened his white collar and offered his ephod from behind his shoulders. The ephod was embroidered in the Old Testament way, with gold, blue, purple, and scarlet yarns. The ephod bore the Breastplate of Judgement, consisting of twelve square stones stacked in rows of three. Each was a different stone: emerald, topaz, amethyst, beryl, onyx, and more. Fae glided his arms inside and turned to face Mae.

“Thank you, my dear.” Mae was twenty years his junior and quite smitten by Fae. Along with a coterie of other women from town, she had done much to organize the festival. Fae had never recovered from the death of his wife, who had been killed by a horse in a coach accident many years prior. He was not at all inclined toward Mae but appreciated her interest in him.

She was a beautiful English woman with perfect manners and a delightful thin smile that at times weakened even his pious heart. He sometimes allowed for a rush of that heart, just for the feeling of it, but he also thought Mae to be a likely Jezebel, someone who could ruin the piety of the Savannah he had spent so much effort developing.

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Her wide brown eyes blinked at his as she said, “I am so looking forward to the speaking of the bull this year, Elliot.”

Fae smiled at that. “Yes, yes, that is your favorite, I know.”

She looked out the window. “The moon is red,” she said, marveling at the engorged red orb ascending over the trees. An orange tint colored by the setting sun reflecting through thin clouds distilled the scene into a perfect painting.

“Tis a Pentecostal blood moon.” He gently touched her forearm. “You will walk me to the encirclement?”

“Of course,” she smiled with a show of unnaturally straight teeth. Fae always noticed them; perfectly white, clean, straight, whereas his were ungracefully decaying as if they were ragged stumps along the banks of the Savannah River, mangled by its eroding sediments.

He couldn’t understand what she saw in his somewhat portly exterior. He was certain she saw nothing, that it was his interior that she felt drawn to. “That’s fine,” he said, thinking that, but also in response to her charms.

Abara’s drum shook the building. Fae’s garb was traditional except for his head covering, which was not. Rather than the expected turban that had become common among East Coast clerics, Fae wore his old top hat, which he grabbed from a table and placed upon his head.

Mae hooked an arm around his elbow as they walked to the stage circling the bull. She clung tightly as they strode up the five steps to the stage. Then she released him and disappeared into the crowd.

Fae watched his audience. The crowd was seated in groups of twelve, each group at a round table. The seating arrangements were designed to represent the twelve apostles who, on Pentecost, received the Holy Spirit. The tables were draped in red cloth. The live oak trees inside the courtyard were trimmed of any moss, which was replaced by long streams of red fabric of many shapes and sizes and origin, all designed and crafted by various Savannah families.

The bull was at least twenty feet away behind the circle-shaped stage upon which Fae would deliver his sermon. Fae knew that, even at that distance, he’d feel the heat from the red fires lit under the bull’s belly, which would create a most glorious incense that would blow through the bull’s nostrils and fill the surrounding air as he spoke. By the time his sermon was over, Fae knew, his body would be sweating profusely. It was all part of the holy sacrament that made up this holy day.

Fae motioned for the Man of Light, who appeared in a long red vestment threaded with illustrations of fire along the length of his chest. The man’s face was covered by a red hood as he made his way to the Phalaris Bull carrying a long, lit torch. He bent down and lit the bowl underneath the bull. Fae motioned for the chattering crowd to be silent.

“We are here today,” he began, “to ingest the Holy Spirit, to formally take in his presence. We must feel the fullness of our sanctification in our blood and bones.”

The bull began to smoke from its nostrils. Sparks shot out of its nose, producing red, glowing flashes of light.

“Above, in the sky, my brethren! The moon is the blood red that it was when our apostles first breathed in the Holy Spirit. As it is said!” Fae began to quote from the Bible’s Acts. “And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved!”

He stopped to survey the crowd. “Listen!”

The bull made a horrific noise, a tortured bellow, but songlike as if a great tenor was acknowledging his torture with full acceptance and grace while expressing the purity of his punishment in an overture of his dying outcry. “That is the sound of Satan you hear, my brethren! He is wounded by your acceptance of the Holy Spirit, and oh, oh, how he moans!”

The crowd gasped in astonished unison. Many in the crowd closed their eyes as they clasped their hands together in prayer. Most had witnessed the same scene in previous festival years. The bull continued its beautifully horrific sonnet. Smoke poured from its nostrils. Mattingly, thought Fae, had tuned the instrument well.

He continued quoting from the Bible:

“Brothers, I may say to you with confidence and as it is written about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’

“Let all the house of our great city therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

Fae stopped, satisfied with the crowd as nearly everyone by now was in solemn prayer. “Alight, Satan! Be gone!” he cried out, knocking his hat off his head, then squeezing his temples with both hands. At that, the red and brown smoke from the bull’s nostrils turned white. The moaning from the bull became an eerie whistling silence. Soon after, only the crackling of the fire beneath the bull could be heard.

Fae paced around for several moments on the wooden stage in silence. His audience lost none of its patience as he looked across the tables at his raptured followers.

“Once again we are required to fulfill a heavy destiny,” he said in measured solemnity. “Today, the day of this feast, marks great celebration, but also a tradition I am always loath to embark upon.”

Everyone remained silent. Most knew what was next on Fae’s agenda.

“‘Tis the Day of Reckoning, my friends. The day one of you must come forth and confess to his or her attempt to interfere with the faithful progress of one of our dear Servants of the Lord.” He then returned to his louder voice. “I believe most of you know how this works. I will walk amongst you, and one of you shall confess to your sins.

“For it is said, in Malachi Chapter two, verses two and three: If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart. “Behold!” Fae bellowed. “I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it!”

After retrieving his stovepipe hat from the stage floor, Fae walked down some steps at the front of the stage. He began to walk among the tables and mingle with the crowd of happy but somewhat stricken festival diners. There were fruit baskets, straw plates of bread, and large iron plates of beef in the middle of each table. The plates of beef were held above sets of small, fat candles by thin crisscrossing iron bars. Each table also had large pots of boiled corn.

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“Mr. and Mrs. Holcombe,” he said to the first table he encountered. “You look well. And your little one, Beth, why, she’s grown a foot since last week!” Fae reached toward Beth to gently tweak her nose. Beth, a young girl of about five, giggled shyly.

“And you,” said Meeker Holcombe, “The Lord has been good to you.”

“Ha!” laughed Fae. “The Lord saw fit to distribute his good looks to your fine family instead of me, and I graciously accept his decision.” As he began to circle the table, Mrs. Holcombe offered him a small rose. “Thank you kindly, ma’am. Your heart is blessed by our Lord.” He meandered about the rest of the round table with similar bouquets of opulent charm.

Before proceeding to the next table, he halted. “I hope our transgressor, who sits amongst us, will not have forgotten the duty God imposes upon us. For our sins, we repent! But God also forgives. Never forget that, my friends. Be not struck down by shame, lest God strikes you down for the appalling lie of your refusal to repent.”

Fae then proceeded to charm another table.

Fae never mentioned the transgressor he had in mind as he made his rounds. These were what he called comfort visits, designed to welcome even the most established congregants into the fold as if it were their first visit to a congregation event. After he circled each table, he announced the importance of repentance.

Fae was certain of one thing. Someone had given aid to several Servants of the Lord and helped the miscreants leave Savannah territory. Whoever had provided this assistance did it out of ignorance. Fae was certain of this. His congregation was filled with people who held no malice in their hearts. One can forgive a breach in judgment, but it was important, he thought, that the transgressor be named publicly, and this was the correct forum for doing so.

Fae therefore paced, made his rounds, and preached. He hoped for an outcome like the familiar ones of past festivals. Yet he sensed a hesitancy among the people on this day, a resistance, powered most assuredly by the devil himself. Rooting out the transgressor was proving to be most difficult on this day.

As the feast continued, Fae at last alighted upon his last table. He had reached deeply into the Bible, yet there was still no confession forthcoming. He was becoming irritable as he fantasized about Shick flogging each man at every table until the devil’s many sentries were flailing about the grounds like demonic, ghostly entrails.

“Perhaps,” he said, eyeing his final direct audience, “The instigator of this crime shall not part with his deed, and will keep it close to his chest.” This was a break from his usual warmth toward the diners at this feast, and those sitting at the last table, full of wine and bread and meat, must have wondered where they had gone wrong to draw his ire when others hadn’t.

“Who have we here?” he asked. “Why, I see Ennis and Portia McGinnis and their fine boy Aladdin. Such a curious name, Aladdin,” Fae sniffed with an upturned nose. “Curious indeed. Not a very, is it rude of me to say this? Not a very Christian name, is it?” Fae bent down into Ennis’s gaunt face. Ennis was a young cobbler and no saint. Thin but strong, he was well known in town for becoming mired in brawls within the boozy thickets of late nights at the local public houses along the docks.

“Ah, and the beautiful Rachel Williamson,” who sat alone next to the McGinnis family, sandwiched between them and the newlywed Porters of Hastings Street. “How does such a lovely lass remain un-betrothed for such a length of time as you?” he wondered aloud with an impish grin that pushed one side of his long, curling mustache to the right side of his face. He tipped his hat and moved to the Porters.

“Interesting that you sit next to Mr. Porter here rather than Missus, is it not?” Fae shook his head and clicked his tongue in a sign of disgust. “Very improper. I shall have to speak to Miss Tanner on this highly visible affront to our Lord.”

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Rachel Williamson stood up to face Fae. “For a prostitute can be had for a loaf of bread, but another man’s wife preys on your very life,” she said resolutely. “How would you have him be?” she said to Fae angrily as she looked at Brian Porter, who didn’t return the gaze as he stared ahead with glazed eyes.

“Ah, Proverbs chapter six, verse twenty-six,” said Fae, returning the determined stare. Rachel was taller than Fae. They stood toe to toe, Rachel showing no fear. Fae nodded. “You know the Word. That at least is very commendable.”

Rachel firmly grasped Fae’s shoulders and whispered into his ear, “And I know my men.” She promptly sat down and folded her napkin delicately over her lap. Fae found himself strangely amused by the incident and wondered what might be uttered in the Porter household after the event.

Undaunted, he continued to circle the table.

He stopped, alarmed, looking at a tall man in a red cape; a freeman colored like a cherry-tinted dark whisky. Fae’s heart raced at the ghastly sight. The man was almost unspeakably perfect in design aside from his unfortunate color. He wore a peculiar ensemble, not of this region. Under his heavy red cape, much too heavy for this climate, Fae thought, was a tight white shirt, of cotton, Fae believed, not at all becoming a gentleman. Fae could see multiple stretches and layers of finely toned muscles under the cape that gave evidence of substantial athletic prowess. He wore long, flowing blue pants that several people could have fit in, so much bigger were they than necessary.

“I don’t know you,” Fae hissed.

His alarm magnified tenfold when he noticed who was sitting next to the stranger. How had he missed it? The Mayor of Savannah, James Wayne, stood up. “My friend,” said Wayne. “You look like you’ve seen an other-worldly apparition.” The stranger also stood up. “I’m afraid I owe you an explanation. This is Ransom Cane. He disembarked only moments ago, and I snuck him into your fine celebration,” laughed Wayne.

“I’m sure I don’t understand,” stammered Fae, still dumbstruck.

“Mr. Cane represents the Seminole Nation. He is here on a trade mission.”

“The Seminole Nation.” Fae was horrified. He had heard stories that the Florida peninsula had been overrun by savages, but this man appeared to be an appalling amalgamation of two inferior races — the natives of Florida, presumably, and the slave race. Cane’s head was wrapped by a purple turban topped by one small feather and dotted with semi-precious stones such as emeralds and rubies. The turban didn’t fully cover the top of his head, revealing black curly hair that looked like it was sprinkled with large grains of salt. He was more African than Indian, thought Fae, more slave than Indian, more savage, he assumed, than either.

Cane’s face featured almond-shaped eyes and a wide nose that further gave notice of his heritage, but his skin, although brown, contained a modestly reddish tint accentuated by the reddish light of twilight. He wore one small ring in his right nasal passage that made Fae want to strike the man down on the spot. He wondered what kind of horrific false idols the man worshipped. More hideous than Baal, no doubt, he thought.

Cane was only slightly taller than the average man, but he appeared taller than most of the people around him; his athletic, wide body dominated the surroundings. The man who had been sitting next to Cane was an even larger specimen, Fae noted. The two men were like the dominant buildings of a small town.

The man next to Cane was dressed somewhat differently, Fae noticed. His head wore a thick blue wrap, the same general color as one wrapped around his neck, except that the one around his neck had a much lighter shade. Another turban, thought Fae as a chill struck down his spine, cursing under his breath the presence of infidels. The neck wrap covered something that looked to Fae like leopard skin, prompting him to wonder if there were leopards in Florida. He didn’t seem to be wearing pants, but instead a long, flowing, rippled blue skirt the same color as Cane’s pants. Given only a glance, and Cane’s billowing pants, Fae would have had a difficult time discerning which man wore the skirt.

Cane bowed respectfully and offered a hand. Fae reluctantly shook it.

“A word,” said the mayor, gently handling Fae’s elbow to lead him away from Cane and the table. Cane, aware of the situation, nodded graciously and sat down.

“He arrived on an ironclad steam frigate not an hour ago.”

“That explains why I haven’t seen you here until now,” said Fae. In truth, Fae hadn’t noticed. He held little regard for the powerless mayor. Then he found himself again taken aback. “Did you say an ironclad frigate? Are the French in league with these heathens from Florida? And do tell. What, precisely, is an ironclad frigate?”

“The man didn’t let on as to its precise technical specifications, but she was seen ashore by dozens of witnesses. It is a large warship, Elliot, wrapped in metal. T’isn’t a wood craft, nor with sail. Mr. Cane and his entourage arrived by way of a set of smaller craft, leaving the metal beast off the docks.”

“Did you see this thing?”

The mayor nodded. “Indeed I did.”

“Guns?”

“None that I could see. But she was too far out for me to truly ascertain.”

“This is the work of the French, no doubt. Or perhaps the Spanish.” Fae thought about this quietly for a moment. “What in heaven’s name could be their game?”

“There’s more. While I was accompanying Mr. Cane and his entourage, he informed me that his Seminole Nation has sent five warships to Haiti, to enforce a treaty, he said.”

“Nonsense. It’s all a demonic ruse of some kind. Sounds like something the Spanish would do rather than the French, does it not? Such a ruse?”

“I couldn’t say. But the Seminole have rousted the Spanish from Florida some time ago.”

“What other outlandish news have you for me?”

“Only this. Mr. Cane is the elder statesman for the Seminole Nation.”

“By this, you mean to suggest he believes himself to be the barbarians’ head of state?” chuckled Fae.

“I’m afraid so.”

“I will need to have the premises cleaned and well sanitized after the feast. God knows what parasitic creatures live on that beast. Why must you have brought him here to me? Could you not have kept him above a tavern by the docks with the other malodorous trollop-chasing heathen from the Caribbean who occasionally infest our port?”

“Would I have known you should have preferred that I could have considered it,” snorted Wayne, who enjoyed wordplay. His straight, perfectly trimmed eyebrows always angled upwards but in a more pronounced way with those words. Fae marveled at how Wayne’s brown-gray hair seemed to stand straight up as a permanent fixture without being affected by wind or rain as a gusty breeze whipped through the festival grounds, then dissipated. He wondered if the hair consisted of a set of thin decorative wires.

“And if he is as wicked as you appear to think,” continued the mayor, “perhaps he would have found his way to your rice coast and lured the Servants of the Lord toward his cause, and Savannah would have found a similar fate as so many other port towns along the most southerly portions of the coast.”

Fae held one finger up. “I did not imply any wickedness. I merely am pointing to his barbarian ancestry. Never mind all that, I thank you for the information. I’ll oblige him with the respect I’d offer any head of state. And in that regard, I shall remind him we have several gunboats of our own, quite within the vicinity.”

“I don’t believe he has come here to deal in threats.”

Fae hoped that was so. He knew well that the Admiral of the Savannah Fleet was an ancient mariner whose time had long passed and would have trouble outmaneuvering his command ship around a large floating tuna carcass. “What, then?”

“Trade.”

“Indeed?”

“I suggest you hear him out. Based on his surname, one can assume he will propose what he considers a sweet offer.”

“I have my doubts, but I shall be gentlemanly, if only to curry favor with the Lord, who insists we treat world leaders, aghast as it makes me breathe such words regarding heathens, with appropriate respect.”

Wayne nodded as the two men ambled back to Cane’s table. When Fae approached Cane, Cane stood up and bowed slightly. “Mr. Cane, I am told by the good mayor you represent the Florida peninsula’s trade interests?”

Cane smiled wryly.

Notes

Image credits: Adobe stock.

This excerpt was not paywalled. My upcoming chapters for the sequel to Psalm of Vampires will be my first paywalled story. All non-fiction and most other fiction will remain free. New novels will follow the “serial” format of yore.

As for Restive Souls’ release date, sorry, I still don’t know yet.

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Let’s take a look at each crazy morsel for this week, with the caveat being that I’m only picking either the wildest stuff or the stuff that interested me the most.

Pam Bondi Duct Tapes Her Mouth and Neck

Normally, I’d be reluctant to make fun of someone with a recent cancer diagnosis. I had a hemorrhagic stroke not so long ago, so I suppose I wouldn’t like it if someone made fun of me for appearing at a hearing with a big bloody bandage attached to the back of my head as some kind of bizarre showpiece.

Or maybe I’d ask RFK Jr. if he knows someone who can drill a hole in the back of my head in such a way as it shows off my suffering but doesn’t kill me or let earworms enter through my new brain orifice.

(To be fair, I say “Just kill me now,” almost every morning when I see my first news headline).

But here we are, with Bondi showing up at her congressional “deposition” hearing prominently displaying a bandage on the front of her neck for all to see. I can sort of hear her mumbling to herself as she gets ready for the non-event: “One more button? Sure. One more,” as she loosens her blouse. But then someone talks her into rebuttoning it on the way into the hearing, so we peons miss out on that thrill.

After duct-taping her tracheotomy hole, or whatever the hell that was, she then duct-taped her mouth in the hearing and refused to even take an oath to answer questions honestly. And, really, who can blame her? If I had devoted my entire term as Attorney General to hiding the pedo president’s long, sordid relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, I’d avoid taking oaths, too.

Just for grins, she decided to say that TrumpleThinSkin’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, who replaced her as Attorney General, was responsible for handling the redactions and the very limited release of the Epstein Files. (Note: She did not say this under oath.) So, you know, nothing to see here, but if there is, there’s your guy, the boss’s lawyer.

The only Republican at the closed-door congressional hearing was House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who had to be there because, well, he’s the chairman, and because he’s needed to thwart any attempts by Democrats to find a semblance of accountability.

When the final reckoning for all this comes due, the Democratic Party should buy a fleet of buses for all these goons to run each other over with. They can use the Jan 6 slush fund to pay for them.

Aaron Parnas also reported that Bondi threw Kash Patel under the bus, presumably because everybody else in the regime is doing that these days, so why not?1 “About what?” You might ask. Who knows?

What matters is that the survivors remain without answers. They keep showing up for these hearings and keep getting treated like the Trump regime treats women more generally.

Women like E. Jeanne Carroll.

Is E. Jeanne Carroll under formal harassment protocol? Or not?

Somebody leaked to CNN that E. Jeanne Carroll was under a formal harassment protocol by the Department of Justice as this week’s installment of TrumpleThinSkin’s hate, grievance, and retribution campaign.

The harassment protocol was deemed an “investigation” by the mainstream media, which knows better but doesn’t care. When the man who was said by whoever leaked the story to CNN to be heading the “inquiry,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, of Illinois’ Northern District, found out he was outed as the lead harasser, he quickly released a statement saying the leak was untrue.

Most likely, TrumpleThinSkin’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, cut open that leak as part of the predator-in-chief’s never-ending harassment campaign against women, and E. Jeanne Carroll in particular.

Ms. Carroll is one of the few people who have trounced the mad clown in court. If the walking malignancy wasn’t able to let go of one short statement by Texas Senator John Cornyn about the clown’s electability, you can just imagine how much his grievance against Ms. Carroll has spread throughout his body. Might explain the cankles.

Likely story length: One day.

Ongoing harassment: Forever.

Broadview Six in Chicago released by… Andrew Boutros!

Speaking of Andrew Boutros, he had to let a bunch of ICE protesters go because his office completely fumbled its case. Apparently, members of his crack team engaged in a bit of (grand) jury tampering while seeking an indictment.

Grand jury members were contacted outside of the courtroom, where it was politely suggested that they vote for an indictment. When this was discovered, the judge in the case became furious, and Boutros crawled into the courtroom on his hands and knees, apologized, and then said his office was dismissing the charges.

One of those protesters was Kat Abughazaleh, a local journalist who should have won the U.S. House of Representatives Democratic primary seat she ran for but hasn’t yet figured out how to drain oil sludge out of Chicago’s machine politics, where Democrats are almost as dirty as Republicans. She’ll figure it out next time.

Ms. Abughazaleh has been at the forefront of Chicago protests against ICE. She’s also got a lot of guts and is frequently in the face of ICE goons and regime stormtroopers.

January 6 Insurrectionist Slush Fund put on hold

You’ve probably heard of the $1.8 billion the Insurrectionist-in-Chief wants to distribute to his fellow Benedict Arnolds on the January 6 insurrectionist team. This slush fund is supposedly to pay off people the regime claims were harmed by legitimate Biden-era criminal complaints and convictions, most of which were wiped out by grifter pardons.

You might not have been paying attention to how he got there. This was “accomplished” by withdrawing a lawsuit against himself.

I know, wacky. There’s no way for normal people to really grasp all this, so it’s best to leave the details to folks like U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, who on Friday said, in effect, “Look. You manage the IRS (the government entity he and his family sued). You can’t have an adversarial relationship with your own government agency, since you’re the chief executive.” So she said that he had to reopen the case.

Wait, the inrepid reader wonders. Why reopen a case without an adversarial relationship? Ah, that’s the beauty of it. The case will get thrown out of court, and the slush fund will go poof in the night.

As an added bit of icing to this cake, U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia, Leonie M. Brinkema, ordered a halt to the slush fund because, almost as soon as the slush fund was announced, people who have been harmed by the Trump regime put in their claims for some of the cash, which means that the government can’t be a fair arbiter of who gets the money.

I sometimes think the regime’s lawyers sit around in a room and play a shot-drinking game before coming up with their various grifting strategies.

When I was in college, we played a cool one. We called it, “Roll that hot pencil.”

The gameplay went like this:

A player rolls the pencil on a table. If the label comes up at the very top, you do a shot. Very simple.

This kind of game is why college kids sometimes die from alcohol poisoning. I strongly recommend this to any of my MAGA friends out there. Play it every night for a few months. It’s fun for the whole family. Hide the guns.

New $300 billion slush fund proposed for Iran War

The clown-in-chief continues to try to slither out of the on-again/off-again Strait of Hormuz War he started, while the crime family and friends get rich off market fluctuations from various pronouncements.

“Boss,” Invanka-husband and real estate magnet Jared Kushner must have said in the wake of the halt to the insurrectionist slush fund. “I got an idea.”

Why not, Kushner must have mused, create a $300 billion slush fund to develop a real estate empire in Iran, hopefully with lots and lots of taxpayer dollars?

I can imagine the brochures now: “Come to Qom, where you can meet real-life Iranian clerics and share the age-old chant, ‘Death to America’ with locals while haggling prices for Persian rugs.”

The boss, feeble-minded and barely able to utter basic vocabulary words like “that’s” and “stupid,” must have nodded his head whilst half asleep and pursing a bubble out of his lips.

Somehow, that’s the latest “idea” coming out of the negotiations involving Kushner and wealthy real estate dude and developer Steve Witkoff (net worth $2.3 billion), they of the highly successful Gaza tourist attractions that are popping up all over Gaza while Israel continues to strip the land of Palestinians.

You might recall that the Witkoff/Kushner tandem declared that the Gaza Strip could be turned into a glistening beachfront tourist mecca to help people forget about the killing fields of Netanyahu.

That’s working out so well that the pair has proposed a similar deal for Iran, which you can imagine is desperately eager for a commercial alliance with the Trump regime.

Earlier in the week, Trump threatened to blow up Oman, a small sheikhdom on the Arabian peninsula, because it indicated a willingness to pay tolls to access the Strait of Hormuz. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who keeps sticking his nose in foreign affairs, reduced the threat to sanctions, then punched a Cabinet member in a restaurant in Georgetown (I might have made that last part up).

President Cankles is in perfect health

According to Navy physician Captain Sean Barbabella, seen here posing for Trump in the newly installed cage-fighting arena on the White House Lawn (under construction), President Cankles is in perfect health.2

Barbabella released a three-page medical report late Friday night stating that this perfection demonstrated a lower level of leg swelling than last year’s report, which reported “normal blood flow and no leg swelling.”3 I guess that means negative leg swelling?

Using AI, the good doctor discovered that the Cankles’ cardiovascular system is so pristine that it is 14 years younger than his chronological age. This is where most Substackers refute such nonsense by including photos of his bruised hands and swollen canckles, but I respect my readers too much to display parts of Donald Trump’s body, especially on a Saturday morning when they may be nursing a slight hangover and already feeling a bit nauseous.

No mention of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), which occurs when leg veins struggle to return blood to the heart. Apparently, the doctor considers this a normal condition, along with whatever blockages are preventing the kind of brain function that allows normal speech patterns and prevents people from sleeping on the job every day.

My favorite part of the report was, “Circulation to the extremities remains intact.”

This doesn’t quite convince me that one of these days we won’t see one of his legs dangling by itself from the middle of the steps of Air Force One as he stumbles his way to the top, but sure, okay, whatever you say, doc. (Future book title about the life and times of Cankle Trump: No Leg Left Behind), with the movie version by David Cronenberg.4

Overall, the report raises the question: What are the criminal penalties for lying about a president’s health, especially one whose cognitive decline is noticed by every American not named Hannity?

Meanwhile, the healthiest president in history paid his third recent visit to Walter Reed hospital. Rumors are all over the place with this one, but one thing most medical experts agree on is that presidents don’t go to Walter Reed for checkups. Something serious is going on, and Dr. Barbabella will face a day of reckoning for hiding it.

Cornyn strikes back with a tale about scorpions

Republican Senator John Cornyn, who was defeated in the Texas U.S. Senate primary by an insufferable, corrupt Texas Taliban criminal named Ken Paxton,5 shot back at the grifter in chief for endorsing Paxton by telling a folk tale.6

As reported by Heather Cox Richardson, Cornyn posted this:

“A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across.

The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river.

The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion.

Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both.

The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’”

I’m excited about the next phase in their relationship.

According to Ms. Richardson, there now appears to be six Republican senators willing to not abide by every foul move he makes. I want to believe this, but I’ll believe it when I see it. We don’t yet know the true source of their cowardice.

Celebrating 250 years with a Trump $250 bill

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took another break from restaurant fighting by proudly displaying a new $250 bill with the serial rapist’s mugshot at a news conference. This kind of thing requires Congressional approval, but, as usual, that appears to be a hurdle the regime isn’t interested in.

However, a federal court has blocked the effort anyway, since it’s illegal to put the image of a current president on U.S. currency.

This set off the toddler-in-chief on an epic tantrum on True Sociopath, his private social media site.

Maybe Bessent can get Peter Thiel to print some $250 bills on a private currency printer and hope Americans don’t collect them with the express intent to burn them. I know plenty of people who’d spend $250 to burn Cankles in effigy, especially if he deposited his mugshot on U.S. currency.

Peter Thiel moves to Argentina

Speaking of. He’s moving to Argentina. Or so he is promising us. A guy like that doesn’t really “move” anywhere like you and I might. When we move, we hire movers and swear a lot. Someone like Thiel buys massive properties in foreign countries and calls the place home for a few months.

That’s what he’s done now that he’s discovered the joys of hanging out with Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian who views the state as the ultimate “enemy,” considers government a criminal organization, and who proposed a “chainsaw plan” (sound familiar?) to eliminate the Central Bank and government agencies, including entire ministries for education, health, and women’s affairs.

So, of course, Thiel moved his family there. At least until he gets bored.

We can hope he stays there, but the chances aren’t great, despite his conviction that the U.S. is on the verge of some kind of collapse and somehow doesn’t think that collapse, were it to happen, isn’t his fault and the fault of the moron he helped put into power.

Judge throws out Kennedy Center name change

Remember when President Misfit added his name to the Kennedy Center and triggered such an exodus of performers that he decided to shut the place down for two years under the excuse that it would be another one of his construction projects?

Well, Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said this week, “WTF, simpleton? Only an act of Congress can change the name.” The judge also ordered him to reopen the damn thing, even though he’ll be lucky to get a bigger audience than JD Vance and his Frankenstein-bride-to-be, Erika Kirk, to attend.

Kenya says no to US Ebola victims

The regime’s plan to punish Americans who contracted Ebola in Africa by sending them to a quarantined location in Kenya was shot down by a Kenyan court, citing obvious health concerns.7

It’s fitting that the regime would want to punish these people, since they’re likely people who are in Africa to help other people. If President Cankles could put the entirety of the Doctors Without Borders group in a room to gas them, he probably would.

No word yet on the next country the regime will try. Presumably, Susie Wiles will use her AI machine using the prompt, “Name the most dysfunctional nation on the planet, preferably one without a functioning judicial system.”

Ozempic is changing the brain

What’s left of the Washington Post is reporting that Ozempic, the wildly popular weight loss drug, appears to change the salient network of the brain. The salient network governs such things as decision making and the interpretation of outside stimuli.8

An assistant university professor who made the discovery, Allison Shapiro of the University of Colorado Anschutz, was engaged in a different study when she discovered that the drug was making extensive changes to the brain:

“We didn’t expect to see this effect, and we really don’t know what it means,” Shapiro said.

So the next time someone surprises you by coming at you with a meat cleaver after years of mellow behavior, ask yourself if they’ve lost some noticeable weight over the last year.

“We stole Iran’s Crypto!”

Speaking of someone I can imagine coming at you with a meat cleaver…

…Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is known to enjoy fighting in Georgetown restaurants with other members of the regime, took a moment out of his busy day of picking fights to show an audience at the Reagan National Economic Forum the side of the hand he uses when one of them tries to challenge the Trump regime’s absolute abandonment of Reaganism.

“Just a forceful palm slap, as opposed to a backhanded slap,” he said.

I may have made that up, but he did crow during the forum about the Trump regime stealing cryptocurrency from the Iranian regime. “Just outright grabbed the wallets,” he boasted like the small child he is. Oh, and guess what???!!! “Some of them may be typing in right now and might not realize their wallet had been grabbed.”9

Oh, you clever devil, you.

Meanwhile, the phone alert watch continues, as we wait for that one final medical report we all yearn for.

Have a great weekend!

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Notes

Please forgive any typos, etc. I’m dealing with a lot of eye strain today. On an unrelated note, I intend to reward myself with ice cream later today.

I’ll leave you with this video of RFK Jr playing with Republican interns, via Jeff Tiedrich:

Footnotes

2

The White House released this official report:

Page One:

Page Two:

Page Three:

When we last left our Texas antihero, Ken Paxton, he was escaping the clutches of yet another in a long list of process servers, this one named Ernesto, in a scene that was part Monty Python and part Taylor Sheridan. Catch up if you missed it:

Paxton, who just beat long-time Senator John Cornyn in last night’s Texas Senate primary, is a Stephen Kingesque villain. It is very possible, although I have no direct evidence, that he squirrels away the brains of children and keeps them in a freezer.

He’s that bad a guy. You can assume, based on existing public revelations, that his entire life is a basement of sordid activity that would force King into a 2100 page book were he to take on Paxton’s biography.

When you Google “Paxton,” Google’s Gemini dries up large portions of the Columbia River Gorge to accumulate all the stories about his corruption. You can check out the footnotes to see a summary of official charges brought against him pulled together by Google’s Gemini (official advertising slogan: “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses.”)1

The mad king puffed out a last-minute endorsement for Paxton, which resulted in last night’s victory over 74-year-old-old John Cornyn, who has been a U.S. Senator in Texas since right around the time the Civil War theoretically ended.

What did Cornyn do to earn trump’s wrath? He said something about trump’s electability several years ago. The grievance machine that twists and turns inside trump’s toxic brain matter pushed Cornyn’s foolish statement into the forefront of his otherwise biologically empty hippocampus, then lodged it there permanently like a gold-plated engraving.

Cornyn repeatedly voted for everything the mad king wanted in legislative votes, but it wasn’t enough to appease trump’s broken mind. Cornyn also probably would have trounced the Democratic candidate for the Senate, James Talarico, in the general election.

While Cornyn was dutifully servicing the madman’s every need, Ken Paxton whiled away his time with repeated efforts to turn Texas into a Christian version of a Taliban state through his role as, believe it or not, the state’s Attorney General.

He also spent his time ruining his very Christian marriage by cheating on his wife in daylight brighter than a Texas afternoon.

That’s where the fun stuff with Ernesto comes in. And, yes, I’m linking to my own post twice in the same story, because I think it’s that important that people understand who this guy is :

Why Texas’s Senate seat may go to Democrats

We can fumble around all day with hysterical reasons why trump might have sacrificed the Texas U.S. Senate seat to Democrats. It doesn’t matter, really. What matters are numbers. Take a look:

James Talarico: 1,103,371
Jasmine Crockett: 943,168

Those are the numbers of voters who voted in the Texas Democratic Primary for James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett.

Now, let’s look at Republican numbers:

Ken Paxton: 885,949
John Cornyn: 501,725

I’m not great at math, and my vision is so bad that I’ve been known to mistake orange-ish humans for orangutans, but when I scan those totals, I sense a ton of enthusiasm on the Democratic side and not so much on the Republican side.

Calculator time:

Democrat vote total: 2,046,539. Add in Ahmad Hassan’s 27,211 votes just for grins, and you get 2,073,750 votes.

Republican vote total: 1,387,674

(With 95% of the vote counted as I write this.)

I lived in Texas long enough to sort of understand some of its Republican voters. It’s not possible to live there long enough to understand Paxton voters, but that’s not really necessary. Nor is it healthy to dwell upon.

Cornyn is very Texas. Very conservative. Very religious, but not really in your face. He had a reliable voting block that vanished this time around, but he’s 74. People had zero enthusiasm for him.

Paxton, despite his corruption, has built a rabid, but still relatively small, in electoral terms, following, but it’s not because of his personality. It’s because of his relentless gnawing away at democracy, an endless number of state-funded lawsuits against Democratic presidential administrations, and, especially, his zealous anti-abortion and anti-immigration stands.

But he has also faced steady opposition from more moderate and/or honest Republicans in Texas, and there are a lot of them. There were enough of them for one of them to become Speaker of the state house, who drove an effort to impeach Paxton.

This effort failed, but just barely. Politically, Paxton emerged stronger than ever, but the opposition remains. There are powerful Texas Republicans who truly hate the man.

This opposition is reflected in statements like this from a 2023 opinion piece from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:2

Attorney General Ken Paxton enjoys a fervent base of voters who have stuck with him for a decade, no matter what he’s done to disgrace his office. Even as most House Republicans voted Saturday to impeach him, seeing strong evidence of bribery and other crimes that merit a Senate trial, his fans vow to fight for him until the end.

The shorthand for why they do so is that the (now suspended) attorney general is a “true conservative.” But it looks a lot like the cult of personality that surrounds Donald Trump. In other words, they support Paxton because he “fights” and he makes the right people mad. Substantively, they’re wrong. But politically, they’re powerful.

Take just a second to unpack that passage. The people who have lifted Paxton high enough to rise above his mountain of corruption are not so powerful that they can overcome his corruption and personal flaws, flaws that grievously insult the typical, quiet, church-going Texan who isn’t as impressed by power as much as she is by simple, silent faith.

Enter James Talarico.

Born in Round Rock, Texas, a conservative but somewhat diverse northern Austin suburb. Graduate of the University of Texas at Austin.

In other words, he’s a Longhorn. You’d be shocked at how much weight that alone carries in some parts of Texas (except, of course, among Aggies).

He won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, but then he entered another Texas power structure by earning a Master of Divinity from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary while serving in the Texas House. His grandfather was a Baptist preacher.

It’s impossible for Paxton to fight that kind of religious street cred. One of Paxton’s supporters (doesn’t matter who) said immediately after Paxton smothered Cornyn in the primary, “Talarico is a commie.”

That kind of sentiment might work on 885,949 Magabots. But not on the rest of Texas citizens, many of whom probably woke up this morning saying, after shaking the dust off their chaps and slapping the dirt off their palms in the middle of a long morning on the ranch, “Holy shit, there was a primary last night? And Cornyn lost? To that idiot?”

Let me just say this one more time:

2,046,539 Democratic votes to 1,387,674 Republican votes.

A corrupt asshole versus a Texas-born seminarian with Baptist roots. In an environment that is threatening to destroy the livelihood of Texas ranchers.

Who you got?

Notes

I’m old enough to remember Beto O’Rourke being the great blue hope, too, but Talarico feels different. I watched Beto do a crazy (in a good way) meet-and-greet throughout Texas via his daily Facebook road trip streams and was excited about his prospects. He lost to Ted Cruz anyway, but it was close, 50.9% to 48.3%.

But this, my friends, feels different. IF the Texas Democratic Party pulls its weight on the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) front.

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Footnotes

Old John Brown's body is a-mouldering in the dust,
Old John Brown's rifleís red with blood-spots turned to rust,
Old John Brown's pike has made its last, unflinching thrust, 
His soul is marching on!

This was the scene one early May morning in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when nearly 10,000 newly emancipated slaves gathered around a race track to honor not only Union soldiers, but to celebrate ten days of effort by two dozen African Americans from Charleston, South Carolina.2

The two dozen newly freed slaves had spent that time digging up the graves of Union soldiers from a mass grave site left by Confederate soldiers, bringing honor to desecration.

The confederates had piled the bodies into a mass grave site at a Confederate prison.

To honor the Union soldiers, those two dozen freed slaves re-interred the bodies and created several rows of graves. They didn’t do this unpleasant work at the end of a whip. They weren’t forced at gunpoint. Nobody shoved the point of a bayonet against their neck. I’m also pretty sure they didn’t do it cheerily. They were moving human corpses, not rocks or lumber.

This was grueling, ugly work, but they felt that it had to be done. It was their way of saying thank you to the soldiers who gave their lives to end slavery.

Locals from all walks of life, mostly Black, but many allied white, too, decorated the finished graves and helped introduce a new tradition called “Decoration Day” to honor those who fought in the war to end slavery. There was much food to be had at the end. It’s fair to wonder if the precursor to the Weber grill also found its origin story in those early moments after the Civil War.

The ceremony spread quickly.

Decoration Day eventually became Memorial Day.

So far, the racist U.S. regime has yet to erase all of this history from government archives:3

One early memorial day account occurred in Boalsburg, PA, where a trio of women decorated the graves of fallen soldiers in October 1864. Another was held in Charleston, SC, where Black freedmen and White “Northern abolitionist allies” hosted an enormous and historically significant program on May 1, 1865, at the “Martyrs of the Race Course” cemetery where 257 Union dead were buried.

The message conveyed by this largely Black assembly honoring U.S. troops on land previously occupied by wealthy White southerners expressed the same message as Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs when he appropriated the Robert E. Lee estate to become Arlington National Cemetery. Unlike that scenario, Charleston organizers could not have foreseen the temporary aspect of the racecourse site; the Army removed the dead to nearby Beaufort National Cemetery within a few years.

Between 620,000 and 850,000 people from both sides of the war, most of them soldiers, died during a conflict that still shapes what’s left of American politics. In 1870, the U.S. Census counted 38,558,371 souls.4 The war impacted every one of them, and never in a good way.

It’s a war that ended with an armistice, not a formal truce. The end’s formality consisted of nothing more than a surrender of General Robert E. Lee’s troops.

No peace treaty was signed. This became quickly evident by behavior from the racist quarters of the South, who went back to work immediately to find ways to oppress Black citizens. This process has climaxed into today’s American condition. In fact, the Confederacy has expanded. It includes places like rural Utah, rural southern Illinois, Indiana, and even swaths of California.

Nothing exemplifies the expansion of the Confederacy better than the simple fact that blue New York City spawned the ultimate demon of the Confederacy, who now sits raging at 3 am in a truly bizarre, sick, cancerous outgrowth of America’s worst internal conflict.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that the actions of the Trump regime are a true, “The South Rises Again” response to social justice and reform. But it’s also a reminder that the sickness that gave the Confederacy political and military legitimacy was never cured.

To many of us, the Confederate flag has become a symbol of hate similar to the Nazi insignia. To others, it’s displayed with pride, and as a middle finger to those of us who understand that the Civil War was fought to fight for the equality of “men” (mid-19th century wording, not my fault) in the face of declarations of secession like that of Texas, which stated:5

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

Subsequent wars, such as World War Two, gave rise to the Antifa movement, which simply refers to “anti-fascism,” and has no organization or even organizing principle, no matter what the racist regime in Washington, D.C. tries to tell you.

Even our many conflicts after World War Two were sold as noble causes. The Iraq War, which violated international law, resulted in more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths (some estimates say as high as one million), and gave rise to ISIS and other terror groups, was, in theory, an Antifa war against Saddam Hussein.

Many folks question whether or not we should celebrate Memorial Day.

My answer is that the Civil War lives on.

George Floyd, Renee Nicole Good, Alex Jeffrey Prett, and many others whose names have slipped my feeble memory became unwitting foot soldiers in the extension of a Civil War that never truly ended.

So, no, we don’t celebrate. Instead, we participate in a ceremony of honor. And just like those incredible Black originators of the holiday, after we pay homage to those who have died for the Antifa cause,6 we enjoy a little food with our friends and family to continue the tradition.

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Footnotes

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on!

The boss has another deal with Iran!

Hold on, I’ll make a graphic! Tell everybody!!!

(Editor’s note: Yes, this is a real graphic from the White House)

Isn’t it beautiful? Yay us!!! Largely negotiated again!!! Various other countries included! Bibi call went well! Final aspects going well and being discussed!

New York Times reporting it as if we wrote it for them! I love this job! Even though they don’t pay me!

Hey, lookeeeee! Bitcoin went up! Like, immediate and all that! Check it out, homies!

Everybody underestimates us! But not Bitcoin people! Smart people. Yay, Bitcoin! Call Joe Rogan!

Wait, what the hell is this? What are those Iranian bastards doing????!!!

Issue a statement! Issue a statement!!!!

Ok, that should help. Whew. Release to all media outlets! Stat!!!!!

Crisis averted!! Polls still at 37% approval! Word is that boss is planning farm subsidies! Go team!

Wait, wait, wait. What? No! No! Nooooooooo! But I only released my cool graphic an hour or so ago.

So you’re telling me that Iran is saying the boss is making stuff up again?

Okay, let’s think this through. Is Kash still not taking my calls after I yelled at him for hitting on me? Screw it, I’m texting him anyway.

Hi Kash. It’s okay. I know you were drunk. Water under the bridge. Did you know about the Iran shit?

Okay, Kash says he’s got a fix in. I’ll issue a press release!

Shots fired! Shots fired!!! Deflect! Deflect!

That poor gunman. I hope we paid him well.

Okay, hopefully everybody forgets that whole business about Iran.

Hey, what about Bitcoin!??? Still at 76.75?

Nice job, Kash!

What, Kash? No!!! That would be inappropriate. I’m only 17.

Fine. I quit.

Polymarket sure had a crazy day, Bob.

Dad, can I borrow $100,000? I’ll pay it back in three days! Promise! Love you, Dad!

And that, my friends, is Saturday’s Iran news summary.

BREAKING UPDATE

According to Politico’s sanewashed story on this (Headline: “A turning point in the war?” Lolz), the adults in the Republican room are having a very adult conversation about whatever this is:

There was nothing vague about Mike Pompeo’s criticism: He said it seemed to “[p]ay the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.”

“Mike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about,” White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote.

“No one asked you bro,” Alex Bruesewitz shot back at Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) concern about the deal. “Hush, child. The adults are talking,” Cruz responded. “I’m not your ‘bro.’” Bruesewitz had the last word: “Sorry you’re still salty that I prevented you from getting a picture with Nicki Minaj after you came running after her like a school girl. You’re going to get wiped out in 2028, clown.”

I love ‘MeriKa, don’t you?

Let us pray on this Sunday that the grifter in chief sleeps in most of the day. Or better yet, Mother Nature rewards us for our suffering.

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Ruminato has obtained an exclusive look at a draft version of the email before it was sent to employees. The draft version features Mark Zuckerberg’s notes in

and with suggested edits via callouts, strikethroughs, and italics. Word is, he wanted a more honest approach. Good for him, I say!

Frantic human resources staffers scrambled to release the email without Zuck’s proposed changes.

The original draft email

Dear _____

As previously shared, we have decided to reduce headcount as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.

Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated as part of today’s reorganization.

Before sharing additional details, we want to thank you for all you’ve contributed to Meta. We appreciate the important role you’ve played in the company’s journey.

We understand you will have questions as you process this news.

Please read below to learn more.

We also encourage you to view the Alumni Portal (Meta.com/alumni), which you can access within an hour of losing system access and has additional information and resources to assist you. More information about the Alumni Portal is below.

Non-working notice period

From today through [redacted] (your “Termination Date”), you are in a “non-working notice period.” During this time, your internal access will be removed and you do not need to do any additional work for Meta.

You will continue to accrue PTO until your Termination Date, and your remaining PTO will be paid out in your final paycheck at the end of this period. During the notice period, you will be paid “Notice Pay,” which you will see on your payslips and is the same amount as your salary.

Leave of absence (if applicable): Your employment will end on your Termination Date that was communicated to you. Any leaves of absence will end on your Termination Date. Please note that to the extent applicable, you may still continue to receive disability benefits after your separation date if your disability meets the disability plan requirements.

Your benefits and compensation will continue through your Termination Date.

You will continue to receive your full salary and benefits through your Termination Date, as well as any RSU grants that have vested on or before your Termination Date as provided in the Equity Incentive Plan.

To support you in your job search, you will also have access to three complimentary months of external job search assistance through Lee Hecht Harrison (”LHH”), as further detailed in the enclosed LHH Outplacement Services flyer.1

Severance details

Attached is a non-signable version of a Separation Agreement with full details of your individual package (do not sign this version).

A signable Separation Agreement will be sent to your personal email address from [redacted] later today with full details of your individual package. You must sign your Separation Agreement to receive your severance payout.

If you do not receive an electronic signable Separation Agreement by the end of the day tomorrow on your personal email, please check your spam folder. If you still haven’t received the agreement, please submit a case via the Alumni Loser Portal.

(Note: If you apply for and accept a different position at Meta no later than one week prior to your Termination Date, you will remain a Meta employee and therefore this Separation Agreement will be void and you would not be eligible for severance under the terms of the Severance Plan.)

As a Regular Employee (FTE), you’re eligible for the following severance offer:

Severance payment of 16 weeks plus two weeks for every year of completed services, minus your notice period. Please see the cover sheet of the attached Separation Agreement for more details on this calculation.

Payment of COBRA (health insurance) premiums for you and your family (if they are dependents on your current plan) for 18 months.

Immigration (if applicable)

We know this is especially difficult for those whose visa and work authorization is sponsored by Meta.

The Alumni Portal has general immigration guidance to help address your immediate questions. The guidance also contains the contact information for your assigned law firm.

You can also open a case via the Alumni Portal if you have specific questions about your case.

System access and office information

Since you have entered a paid non-working notice period, your badge has been deactivated and your access to internal Meta systems will be removed this morning.

If you are already in the office, we ask that you please gather any personal items at your desk and head home. If you have personal items that need to be retrieved, instructions are available on the Alumni Portal.

Getting more information

We know this is a lot to process, so we’ve compiled resources about pay, benefits and other considerations for you in the Alumni Loser Portal. You can access the Alumni Loser Portal within an hour of losing system access today as mentioned above. You will need your employee ID, which is provided at the top of this email, to access the site.

Finally, we want to say again that we’re grateful for your contributions. Your impact at Meta has been an important part of our story.

Sincerely Good luck, sucker

Meta Leadership

Notes

The original Meta Layoff statement can be found here, via Business Insider:

https://www.businessinsider.com/read-meta-layoff-email-employees-2026-5 (paywall)

In the Good News Department

In a separate matter, in Chicago, Block Club is reporting:

Charges Against Broadview Protesters Dropped After Feds Admit To Grand Jury ‘Errors’

The Broadview protesters are Chicago area protesters fighting ICE who were arrested by ICE stormtroopers during the ICE siege of Chicago. More here:

https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/05/21/trial-date-for-broadview-protesters-vacated-just-days-ahead-of-expected-start/ (free, no paywall)

This story was getting interesting already, but I refrained from writing about it because it was developing and changing so quickly. This news just came in as I finished this silly but also important commentary on our current condition.

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Footnotes

Trigger warnings: Some AI music at the end. Also, satire, and if you can’t figure out where, you need to stop doomscrolling for a few days. Love y’all! Also, more Epstein shiz, which is a trigger category for a lot of us, even after all we’ve read.

Trump celebrated his big primary “wins” last night by announcing he is rebranding the “GOP” as the “TEP,” and that the Republican Party is now under his full control:

The good news for normal people is that even though there are clearly many, many very sick voters still in the United States, these psychos may have just handed Democrats a Senate seat in Louisiana. Better still, the leader of the nation’s largest crime syndicate in history endorsed serial criminal Ken Paxton for Texas senator, which will finally put a Texas Senate seat in play for Democrats for once.

If Texans don’t vote for Rep. James Talarico over Paxton, Texas deserves whatever happens to it. There’s just no nice way to put it.

I wrote about Paxton previously. He’s a real piece of work, that boy is: Here it is in case you missed it:

Let’s finish this post off with another regurgitated Bastille thing. Hopefully, the rebranded Republican Party will take it up as its official anthem. I wrote the lyrics, and (sorry!) let AI do the music part.

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If Kamala Harris were the president, this would be a clickbait article. But not with this regime, not with its drunk criminals, grifters, and serial killers running the show.

Remember when the mad clown withdrew the United States from the world’s primary international pandemic relief organization in January 2026?

It’s hard to remain a glass-half-full guy, let me tell ya’. Especially with eyewitness accounts like these:

“When Ebola arrived in our village, we did not yet know what it was. My younger sister was the index case of this 16th outbreak in the DRC.

“After returning from working in the fields, she began to suffer from severe headaches. She was pregnant and nearing the end of her pregnancy. We took her to the hospital, but the treatments had no effect.

“Then, one Monday, she started bleeding from her nose. That night, she passed away. We still did not know what she had died from, but she had just given birth to a baby girl. So I stayed at the hospital to care for the newborn, not knowing that the child had been infected by her mother.

“A few days later, the baby also died. Then one of my aunts fell ill. She died too. After that, another aunt. And then it was my turn to be struck by the disease.

“I remember the moment I realized I was infected. I was vomiting blood. I had no appetite. I went days without eating. I started praying to stay alive.

— Chantal, Ebola survivor, from a story told to a staffer from the International Red Cross and Red Crescent

"From one day to the next, I saw my wife begin to vomit, have diarrhea, and then bleed from her orifices. Two days later, the tests revealed she was positive for the Ebola virus. She died the following day.

— Alydor, Ebola survivor, from a story told to a staffer from the International Red Cross and Red Crescent

If you thought Trump’s handling of Covid was bad, wait until you add RFK Jr. and Ebola to the mix. In case you’ve forgotten, Trump oversaw the growth of a highly preventable pandemic. He has since withdrawn the U.S. from the world’s primary medical organization for handling pandemics, the World Health Organization (WHO), which the U.S. helped found in 1948.

He has gutted the CDC, convinced 30% of the country that vaccines are bad, and sent scientists fleeing to other nations.

The now-famous virus from Wuhan should have been a footnote in medical history (not that several deaths are footnotes to the families involved). It should have been something nobody really heard much about.

You see, my friends, twenty years before COVID came along, there was precedent for solving pandemics like Covid. This precedent is recorded by history as the first SARS epidemic in 2002. Like its more famous cousin COVID-19 (aka SARS-CoV-2), the original SARS (aka SARS-CoV) was a coronavirus thought to have started in a Chinese outdoor market.

SARS-CoV spread to 29 countries with 8422 cases and 916 fatalities. This was considered a big deal at the time.

According to the National Library of Medicine:1

After an unprecedented global public health effort, the epidemic was controlled within 7 months of its original occurrence. The scientific effort demonstrated unusual international cooperation and was facilitated by electronic communication. Media coverage was incredibly accurate and provided worldwide pictures to augment scientific data.

A bit of luck helped science prevent the virus from spreading further, but the international medical community learned important lessons.

So when, on January 5, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a fairly routine report of an unknown virus presenting SARS-like symptoms in Wuhan, China, the United States should have been prepared.

It wasn’t.

Americans have erased Trump’s disastrous response from memory.

I, however, have not. And I’ll remind you again: Trump and JFK Jr. have gutted the CDC and withdrawn the U.S. from the WHO.

We are not ready for anything more than a common cold virus.

The Timeline of The Trump Virus

Here’s a review of the 2020 COVID timeline using Trump’s own words (with annotations) so that we can remind ourselves of what kind of horror may be in store for us as he shit posts against his enemies while the rest of us bleed from our eyes.

January 24:

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

January 30:

“We only have five people. Hopefully, everything’s going to be great. They have somewhat of a problem, but hopefully, it’s all going to be great. But we’re working with China, just so you know, and other countries very, very closely. So it doesn’t get out of hand.”

February 2:

“We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

February 10:

“Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. I hope that’s true. But we’re doing great in our country. China, I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard. And I think it’s going to all work out fine.”

February 13:

“In our country, we only have, basically, 12 cases, and most of those people are recovering and some cases fully recovered. So it’s actually less.”

February 24:

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

February 26:

“When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Feb. 27:

“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

On February 27, Representative Lloyd Doggett expressed deep concerns and a bit of outrage over the administration’s handling of the pandemic:

On February 28, the WHO raised its risk assessment of a world pandemic from “high” to “very high.”

At this point in the timeline, it's important to remember that nothing is more important during the early stages of a pandemic than for governments to develop a rapid response.

February 28:

“We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

March 2:

“You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?

Then, separately…

“A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4:

“Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild.”

Then, separately…

“If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5:

“I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

Then, separately…

“It’s going to all work out. Everybody has to be calm. It’s all going to work out.”

Then, separately…

“The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6:

“I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

Then, separately…

“You have to be calm. It’ll go away.”

Then, separately…

“Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right?”

Huh? Then, separately…

“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Yeah. Maybe. SMDH.

March 7:

“I’m not concerned at all.”

On March 9, the White House announced that the U.S. had tested one million people. In truth, only 4,000 were tested.

March 10:

“Just stay calm. It will go away.”

Then, separately…

“This was unexpected. … And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

On March 11, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the WHO had determined that “COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.”

March 11:

“The vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low.”

Then, separately…

“It goes away….It’s going away. We want it to go away with very, very few deaths.”

Then, separately…

“The vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low”

March 12:

“You know, you see what’s going on. And so I just wanted that to stop as it pertains to the United States. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stopped it.”

March 13:

“I don’t take responsibility at all.”

On March 13, a total of 14,000 tests had been administered, despite administration promises of between 1.5 million and 4 million tests per week, depending on which administration official was making the promise.

March 15:

“This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.”

March 16:

“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,”

March 17

“This is a pandemic. … I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

March 21

“HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains — Thank You!”

On March 23, the WHO’s Tedros said, in response to Trump’s reckless Tweet, “Using untested medicines without the right evidence could raise false hope and even do more harm than good.”

This locked Trump into grievance mode. After that point, the WHO was an enemy. They are no longer part of the United States’ arsenal against disease thanks to Trump's withdrawal from the organization.

Tedros then pointed out that the growth of the pandemic was becoming exponential. Whereas it had taken 67 days to grow from one case to 100,000, it only took 11 days to reach the next 100,000, and four days to reach the next 100,000 cases.

Nations across the globe were locking down.

March 24:

“Easter is a very special day for me. And I see it sort of in that timeline that I’m thinking about. And I say, wouldn’t it be great to have all of the churches full?”

“We’ve never closed down the country for the flu. So you say to yourself, what is this all about?”

Meanwhile, on that same day, at an emergency world summit, the WHO’s Tedros said, “We are at war with a virus that threatens to tear us apart.”

On March 26, the United States became the country with the most coronavirus cases, despite the virus originating in a country with more than a billion people.

Well, lucky for us, we won’t have a repeat of that, because the Lunatic-in-Chief has withdrawn the U.S. from WHO.

April 3:

“I’m feeling good. I just don’t want to be doing — somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful resolute desk, the great resolute desk, I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just don’t. Maybe I’ll change my mind.”

April 14:

“Today I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.”

April 19:

“Now we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people [dead from the coronavirus].”

On April 20, the death toll passed 40,000.

April 23:

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

That statement prompted the makers of Lysol, a popular disinfectant, to warn people2 to never, under any circumstances, inject themselves with their product. It is unknown how many of Trump’s dedicated followers attempted to do so anyway.

“You see states are starting to open up now, and it’s very exciting to see.”

By April 23, more than 26 million jobless claims had been filed. The death toll reached 50,000 on April 24, just four days after it had reached 40,000.

People were freaking out. Remember? No?

Why? Because the memories are painful of seeing loved ones die? Of course, that’s fair. But Trump’s destructive behavior was just getting started.

It’s not something we should be forgetting.

April 29:

“It’s gonna go away, this is going to go away.”

On April 29, the death toll reached 60,000.

On May 5, one of the many root causes of inflation triggered by the pandemic that would later be blamed on Biden began to take hold as consumer debt hit its highest levels in history.

On that same day, the death toll hit 70,000.

May 5:

“There’ll be more death, that the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal.”

On May 6, 2020, The Brookings Institution issued a report stating that American children were facing a level of food insecurity “unprecedented in modern times.” Democrats attempted to launch a program to expand the food stamp program, but the attempt was blocked by congressional Republicans.

On May 7, it was reported that 33 million jobless claims had been filed since the start of the pandemic, up 7 million in a little more than two weeks.

May 9:

“This is going to go away without a vaccine.”

On May 11, the death toll hit the 80,000 mark.

It is worth mentioning here that most studies indicate that death tolls were underreported during these early months.

Right-wingers, of course, claimed the opposite was true, blaming COVID deaths on everything from the flu to bad molars.

May 11:

“Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere. Big progress being made!”

On May 22, the government reported that more than 38 million jobless claims had been filed since the beginning of the pandemic, an increase of five more million from the previous week.

On May 27, the U.S. death toll reached the 100,000 mark.

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May 29:

“We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization”

When Trump left office, he left more than 450,000 dead Americans in his wake. Another half million would die soon after because of a virulent anti-vaccination campaign that began at his and his cult’s urging. Most of the people who died perished because they weren’t vaccinated.

They died because The Trump Virus became Trump himself.

The collapse of the economy under Trump

Trump’s response to the COVID crisis also created an economic nightmare that Biden and Kamala Harris spent four years fixing while receiving almost no credit.

Remember those government checks you got? Those and other pandemic-related rescue programs cost the U.S. government $5 trillion. This is the very definition of inflationary government behavior. They were a good thing. Some of them happened under Biden, too. But they came at a cost.

Americans weren’t told, of course, anything like this:

“We’re gonna give you a couple of thousand bucks to tide you over, but eggs are gonna triple in price in two years. K?”

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the government’s assistance programs…

…contributed to strong consumer and business demand, which tightened labor markets (between mid-2021 and early 2022 the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers doubled), putting upward pressure on wages and prices.3

The fresh cash created a bottomless pit of demand, which clogged the ports to the point that container ships were lined up in the ocean outside ports such as Savannah and Long Beach.

One of the first things the Biden administration realized it had to do was to fix those ports, so the administration quickly enacted programs and legislation to improve port infrastructure. It took them barely a year to unwind the worst of it, much to the surprise of international logistics experts.

Biden inherited a crisis and quickly solved it. He then secured more than $500 million in port infrastructure projects and attacked the problem so thoroughly that such seemingly minor details as intermodal container chassis shortages were addressed.

During the pandemic, oil was, and I do mean this literally, pegged at zero dollars per barrel for a while because world trade took such a big initial hit.

Its inevitable rise was sure to help trigger price increases, especially as subsidies began to flow into Americans’ pockets.

The triple whammy of clogged ports, a broken supply chain, and huge demand fueled by government assistance programs pushed prices up.

But inflation doesn’t happen instantly. It happened during the space between Trump’s exit and Biden’s second year.

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Guess who got the blame for that?

What exactly was, and is, The Trump Virus? Was it the pandemic he failed to contain, one he seemed to enjoy as it helped him sow division? Or is it Trump himself?

And what will Trump Virus 2.0 look like?

What should we do if a threat emerges in the U.S.?

One thing you can’t do is depend on the federal government. It’s useless beyond measure with the clown show in charge.

If you live in a state like California, pressure your representatives to establish an emergency response system.

If you live in a red state, move, or quarantine yourself like a prepper.

Notes

Facts about Ebola

The following information is directly quoted from the World Health Organization. Don’t expect much information out of the Trump regime, which is too busy transforming the U.S. into a failed state:

Ebola disease (EBOD) is a rare but severe illness in humans (1). It is often fatal.

Ebola disease is caused by viruses that belong to the Orthoebolavirus genus of the filoviridae family (2). Six species of Orthoebolaviruses have been identified to date, with three known to cause large outbreaks:

• Ebola virus (EBOV) causing Ebola virus disease (EVD)

• Sudan virus (SUDV) causing Sudan virus disease (SVD)

• Bundibugyo virus (BDBV) causing Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD).

Ebola disease first occurred in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks: one outbreak was of Sudan virus disease in Nzara in what is now South Sudan, and the other outbreak was of Ebola virus disease in Yambuku, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The latter occurred in a village near the Ebola River, from which the disease takes its name.

While there are licensed vaccines and therapeutics for Ebola virus disease, there is no approved vaccine or treatment for other Ebola diseases, such as SVD or BVD. Candidate products are in development.

Early intensive supportive care including rehydration and treatment of specific symptoms, can improve survival. Seeking early care can be lifesaving.

It is thought that fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are natural hosts of the Orthoebolavirus. The virus can get into the human population when people have close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals such as fruit bats, chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, forest antelope or porcupines found ill or dead or in the rainforest.

People can get infected with the virus from another person by direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with:

• the blood or body fluids of a person who is sick with or has died from Ebola disease; and

• objects or surfaces that have been contaminated with body fluids (like blood, feces, vomit) from a person sick with the disease or who has died from the disease.

People cannot transmit the disease before they have symptoms, and they remain infectious as long as their blood contains the virus.

Health and care workers have frequently been infected while treating patients with Ebola disease. This occurs through close contact with patients when infection control precautions are not strictly practiced.

Burial ceremonies that involve direct contact with the body of a person who has died can also contribute to the transmission of Ebola disease.

Symptoms

The incubation period or interval from infection to onset of symptoms varies from 2 to 21 days.

The symptoms of Ebola disease can be sudden and include fever, fatigue, malaise, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. These are followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pain rash, and symptoms of impaired kidney and liver functions. It is important for health and care workers to be on the lookout for these symptoms.

Despite a perception that bleeding is a common symptom, this is less frequent and can occur later in the disease. Some patients may develop internal and external bleeding, including blood in vomit and faeces, bleeding from the nose, gums and vagina. Bleeding at the sites where needles have punctured the skin can also occur.

The impact on the central nervous system can result in confusion, irritability and aggression.

Diagnosis

It can be difficult to clinically distinguish Ebola disease from other infectious diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever, shigellosis, meningitis and other viral haemorrhagic fevers because symptoms at early stage of the disease are similar.

Confirmation that the person has an Orthoebolavirus infection is made using the following diagnostic methods:

• reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay

• antibody-capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)

• antigen-capture detection tests

• virus isolation by cell culture.

Samples collected from patients are an extreme biohazard risk; laboratory testing on non-inactivated samples should be conducted under maximum biological containment conditions. All non-inactivated biological specimens should be packaged using the triple packaging system when transported nationally and internationally See Diagnostic testing for Ebola and Marburg diseases.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ebola-disease

The Trump regime withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization on January 22, 2026. It was a founding member of the vital international health organization when it was formed in 1948.

If Ebola mutates into an airborne disease or becomes significantly easier to contract through bodily fluids, we here in the U.S. will be the last to know.

Additional Sources

The following are sources used for piecing together the information in this article.

Timelines

Representative Lloyd Doggett’s timeline (which I borrowed from liberally since it’s public domain):

The gutting of American science
Self‑censorship, more stress, tougher recruiting – we asked US researchers how the Trump administration’s science policies have affected them (The Conversation)

Timeline of Trump's Coronavirus Responses
During a hearing , Rep. Doggett questions HHS Sec. Azar on Trump's refusal to take this virus seriously, warning about (Congressman Lloyd Doggett)

A timeline from NPR:

A Timeline Of Coronavirus Comments From President Trump And WHO
How did the president respond to key moments during the pandemic? And how did representatives of the World Health )NPR)

Inflation

Unpacking the Causes of Pandemic-Era Inflation in the US
After several decades of relatively low and stable inflation, in 2021 the US experienced a sharp rise in the pace (National Bureau of Economic Research)

Crime

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2022-crime-in-the-nation-statistics (FBI)

America's zombie "crime wave"
The outset of the pandemic in 2020 coincided with a surge in violent crime in the United States, with murder rates (Popular Info)

Coronavirus deaths

United States - COVID-19 Overview - Johns Hopkins
United States - COVID New Cases, Deaths, Testing Data (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center)

Ports

Biden Announces Measures at Major Ports to Battle Supply Chain Woes (Published 2021)
The Port of Los Angeles will join the Port of Long Beach in operating 24/7 as the administration struggles to address (New York Times)

DOT, Supply Chain Companies Collaborate to Speed Up Movement of Goods, Cut Costs for Consumers
Washington, DC -- Today, at the Department of Transportation, Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Port Envoy (U.S. Department of Transportation)

Biden-Harris Administration Announces Nearly $39 Million in Grants for America's Marine Highways to…
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Boosts Program By $25 Million (United States Department of Transportation Maritime Administration)

Biden-Harris Administration Invests More Than $653 Million in Ports to Strengthen American Supply…
WASHINGTON - Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration (MARAD) announced over $653 million (United States Department of Transportation Maritime Administration)

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If the timeline looks familiar, I lifted it from a previous essay I wrote:

In 2025, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement issued an emergency appeal for funds to manage the Ebola outbreak in Congo:

https://www.ifrc.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/mdrcd047ea.pdf (PDF)

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

Most of you by now have heard about the incomprehensibly vile stories surrounding motherless dot com and its rape culture offshoots.

You may have heard about the French gang rape story, too, which is how I first heard that people were sexually assaulting and/or raping their wives while they sleep. Those aren’t words that even make sense to write down. For Gisèle Pelicot, the French survivor at the heart of the French rape story, it was hard, too.

One quiet day in the South of France, police officers visited Ms. Pelicot. One of them asked them what type of man her husband was. What an odd question, she must have thought, but it was part of a longer set of other questions about him. She replied that he was a great guy. The BBC describes what happened next:

The officer showed her two photos of a lifeless woman lying on a bed. They were among thousands of pictures and videos her husband had taken of her while she was drugged.

“I didn’t recognise myself,” she says. “This woman was lying on the bed as if she were dead. There are men next to her. I didn’t understand who they were. I didn’t know them. I’d never met them.”

Police told Ms Pelicot that she had been repeatedly raped by dozens of men. Although her husband had recorded, labelled and neatly catalogued the videos of the rapes on a hard disk, many of the men could not be identified.

That part of the story is bad enough that it makes for a difficult read. But then I learned that Ms. Pelicot had to endure a trial that revealed she had been raped at least 92 times by 72 different men. Her husband, like the motherless dot com goons who did the same thing, filmed and photographed all of it.

My immediate reaction to this story when it emerged was to assume that it was a one-off. How could it not be? It was too crazy to contemplate. When it was also revealed that her husband was also wanted for murder in a separate case, I felt a sense of restrained relief.

Then news of “motherless dot com” and its 80 million+ monthly views broke.

There has, strangely, been an online argument about the number of people visiting motherless, which Snopes describes as a kink site that…

…hosts videos organized in more than 100 different pornographic categories including “Asian,” “Brunette” and “Lesbian.” The top of the website displayed links with labels including “Videos,” “Images,” “Categories” and “Chat,” as well as an external link reading, “18&Abused.”

The alarms about motherless began to spread when CNN broke a story about a Telegram chat group that French lawmaker Sandrine Josso called an “online rape academy” that was linked from motherless.

CNN built its story on top of prior work done by German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh, who produced several YouTube documentary videos on something that the mainstream media, in its paternalistic zeal to sanewash videotaping your wife getting raped while she sleeps, calls “sleep content.”

You may have noticed that I used the word, “strangely” in describing the online debate over the number of views. This is because one view is too many. How is law enforcement supposed to come to grips with millions, which is a number that isn’t in dispute? German investigators found "dozens of Telegram groups with up to 70,000 members and rape videos reaching millions of views,” according to Snopes. (h/t to Linda Caroll on the Snopes story).

We don’t need to spend time piecing together what part of motherless is a problem or how many views each section gets. Besides, if there’s a “motherless,” we all know about, aren’t there dozens more that we don’t know about? What about the Dark Web? What kind of ghoulish activities do its denizens partake in?

Gender violence is a global problem.

In Nigeria, a community named Ozoro recently held what is referred to by human rights advocates as a rape festival. The festival, which is technically called the Alue-Do fertility festival, an annual event, made headlines, mostly outside of the United States, when videos emerged showing what the BBC describes as:

Groups of young men chasing, stripping, grabbing and assaulting women in public spaces, in some cases while people are filming… Among those detained is a community leader widely named as the organiser of the event.

Local officials deny that it was a “rape festival,” but arrested 15 people anyway.

The South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have experienced deep levels of gender violence for ages. In India, the outcry over the famous (outside of the U.S.) 2012 Nirbhaya rape, which involved the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern on a moving bus in South Delhi, triggered a huge outcry and strengthened rape laws in India after women flooded Indian streets in protest.

Caste-based sexual violence remains rampant in India. We don’t hear about it because mainstream media is still dominated by men. We don’t hear stories like that of an eight-year-old Muslim girl gang-raped and murdered as a message to Muslims to stay away from Hindu areas of Jammu, an area around Kashmir.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, led by its fanatical Republican Guards, relies on state-sponsored gender violence to crush dissent, especially when women had the audacity to rally against rules about wearing the hijab.

According to Amnesty International:

Security forces in Iran used rape and other forms of sexual violence, amounting to torture and other ill-treatment, to intimidate and punish peaceful protesters during the 2022 “Woman Life Freedom” uprising.

The report reveals that perpetrators of rape and other forms of sexual violence included agents from the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary Basij force, and the Ministry of Intelligence, as well as different branches of the police force including the Public Security Police (police amniat-e omoumi), the Investigation Unit of Iran’s police (agahi), and the Special Forces of the police (yegan-e vijeh). Survivors included women and girls who had defiantly removed their headscarves, as well as men and boys who took to the streets to express their outrage at decades of gender-based discrimination and oppression.

This violence included girls as young as 12. The Iranian regime has also been cited for raping virgins before political executions, so that they couldn’t enter heaven, just to name one of the most heinous of the regime’s atrocities against women.

Rape is considered such an integral part of warfare that the media doesn’t bother reporting on it.

In America, women know enough about gender-based violence that they’re forced to think about things that would never occur to a man. An obvious example: Make sure the pepper spray is handy whenever you go outside.

Back in the days before key fobs, many women I knew held the edge of their key between their fingers when approaching their car, because unlocking a car, at any time of day and no matter how many people were around, was a moment of vulnerability.

When women aren’t being hassled online, they’re re-experiencing abuse when cases get thrown out of court or when guys like Harvey Weinstein keep catching “legal breaks.”

Some of those breaks come at the hands of the prosecutors who are supposed to be protecting women. Consider how one of the charges against Weinstein was dismissed. One survivor said she was forced to perform oral sex on him, but the case was dismissed when a friend said that the survivor told her she did it for the promise of getting acting roles. Sounds like sexual assault to me.

Meanwhile, he keeps slipping through the legal cracks, most recently via a mistrial over the alleged rape of aspiring actress Jessica Mann. This was after a rape conviction was overturned by the New York Supreme Court in 2020.

Weinstein will probably remain behind bars thanks to other convictions and the simple fact of how he lived his life. He’s sick, old, and decrepit, but he keeps fighting criminal charges anyway because his desire to abuse women is absolute, and this is the only way he can keep doing it: Keep putting them through the ringer, make them relive the assault in a public forum, over, and over, and over again. It’s a form of sickness that we simply don’t address in our society.

And I haven’t even mentioned Epstein, who, by many accounts, grew a billion-dollar rape empire that left no age untouched. The survivors in that case are struggling to find justice, but the mainstream media is obliging one of Epstein’s protectors and friends, Trump, by accepting every deflective parry the Predator in Chief thrusts their way.

The bear and the forest

The choice between a bear in the forest and a man is a real one. Most women choose the bear. Those who don’t are probably well-trained in the martial arts.

The shocking revelation that women can’t even sleep safely in the same residence as their partners has stunned women who have heard about motherless into a cold rage that men will not overcome without a lot of self-examination. This would need to include a new kind of peer pressure that, for now, seems implausible, and a new kind of mentorship among young boys and men that, unfortunately, has mostly been left in the hands of rage podcasters like Andrew Tate and chest-thumping imbeciles like Joe Rogan.

Most men aren’t doing the hard work of teaching grace and dignity toward the girls and women in a young man’s life. We’re all just leaving it for others, but the others are fostering an insufferable rape culture that is ruining the trust and lives of the women we care about.

When men are young, they’re eager to brag about their sexploits. Many men, especially when they’re young, have no sense of boundaries. And nobody is teaching them.

When women try to raise the subject, they’re shouted down. Change needs to happen, and it has to come from parents on a personal level and from men more generally and more specifically.

The problem is reflected in everyday conversation

If women knew how we talked about them in the locker room (it’s just locker room talk!), they’d hate us. So why talk that way about them? Why do we call what women (at least when I was young) refer to as a nice romantic evening a score?

Men have, for as long as I’ve been alive, looked upon all kinds of relationships with women as a sport.

Speaking of sports…When a sports chat group is devoid of women, what does that say about the men in the sports chat? The dearth of women isn’t because women hate sports. Many, many women like sports as much as men do. The reason you won’t find women in your sports chat is that, unless it is moderated by someone who insists on treating women with grace and respect, women find the chat repugnant.

This is where I will get hit with “exceptions” to the rule. “Not the sports chat I’m in. Women are welcome in mine. They’re very active.” That’s great. I already know that some are cool, so no need to drop that comment. But leave men to their own devices, with no formal moderation, and it’s usually a different story.

Gamergate, in 2014-15, was an online 24/7 attack on women launched by some male gamers determined to root out any concept of feminism in the online videogame community.

There isn’t one man in this world who hasn’t, at one point in his life, engaged in victim-blaming. “Shouldn’t have worn that skirt” might as well be a T-shirt for some of us. If it’s an honest shirt, it should include a graphic of a knife.

I could rattle off a dozen more examples. But enough torture for one day.

Is there any hope of changing it?

One potential solution is simple, and it’s one all men can participate in

Kamala Harris didn’t win one age group in the male demographic. So the first thing men need to do is hire more women to run things. Not because they’re better, or smarter, or any of that. Some are, and some aren’t. But because they bring a much needed feminine perspective to the art of living.

In my novella, The Trial of Summary James, there’s a scene where a woman waits for a man she doesn’t know in his hotel room. She does so without fear.

She’s there to help the story’s protagonist recover from an injury.

It was not designed as social commentary. She just happened. The character introduced herself to me. All I did was relay her brief part of the story (as told by the protagonist):

When I entered, a woman was kneeling at my bed with a small roll-up in front of her. When she heard the door, she rolled the device up, set it aside, and looked at me. All I could do was shake my head. I couldn’t even muster the energy to ask who she was. She was a young white woman with red hair and a wild nest of freckles highlighting pink globes on each cheek. “Hi,” she said calmly.

I waved with the hand that didn’t hurt.

“Your friend Trace sent me. He said you might need me.”

Finally, I asked, “Who are you?”

“You can call me Dr. Feelgood.”

I sighed. “That can mean a lot of things. Feelgood can, I mean.”

“Understood. Tell me what hurts.”

“Mostly my ego.”

“Can’t help with that. What else?”

I glanced at my shoulder. “I think it’s separated.”

“Perfect.” She smiled as she sat on the bed. She patted part of the bed and signaled for me to sit next to her. I didn’t move, so she said cheerily, “Come on, I don’t bite and it will only hurt for just a few seconds!”

“Worse day ever,” I groaned as I sat next to her.

“Good Golly Malloy you are a tall one,” she said cheerfully. She stood up. “You’re almost too tall to fix!” she giggled. Then she grabbed my arm viciously and fixed my separated shoulder in less than a second, I thought. I didn’t even have time to let out a whoop.

“Wow,” I said.

“I know, right? I’m good. Anything else?”

“Well, my hand was busted up but somehow it’s better.”

“Let me see.”

I gave it to her and she kissed it. “Better?”

I laughed. “Much.”

“Excellent.” She got up and headed for the door.

“That’s it?”

“Anything else hurt?”

I laughed again. “No, I’m just tired.”

“Can’t help with that. Get some sleep. Bye!” and she opened the door and left.

The weird part about writing this is that I can’t imagine writing something like that based on our world. Not without, at least, adding an element of fear or suspense to the episode.

But the nature of the novella’s world primed the scene to write itself, almost without my input, it seemed. That’s because the novella’s worldbuilding had already been accomplished.

The novella is based on a timeline of my somewhat utopian, and much longer, novel called Restive Souls, which leverages alternative history to comment on our paternalistic, racist society. In the Restive Souls timeline, women maintain pivotal roles in political, religious, and societal leadership.

The influence of First Settler nations helps establish a maternalistic society instead of the kind we live in today. There is also no First Nation ethnic cleansing in Restive Souls, so the indigenous culture of the Americas spreads and blends and influences.

Women become revered leaders and caretakers rather than the second-class citizens they were in Europe at the time of the Revolutionary War.

In Restive Souls, the British win the Revolutionary War and immediately emancipate the slaves. The novel leaves open to debate a key question for would-be fictional historians:

Do the British do this to reward slaves for their help in turning the war around through Lord Dunmore’s proclamation (by which some historians estimate 80,000 to 100,000 colonial slaves fled to the British armed forces in exchange for freedom)?

Or is it a form of punishment to the colonies administered by an angry king?

The novel doesn’t definitively answer that question. Instead, it focuses on a thriving, emerging nation that blends African, Native American, and, to a lesser degree, European cultures.

A strongly theological nation emerges. But since one of its leaders is a priestess, the egalitarian nature of Christianity’s original intent is nourished, as proclaimed by Acts 22:44–45 from the Bible:

And all the believers were together and had all things in common; and they would sell their property and possessions and share them with all, to the extent that anyone had need.

In Restive Souls, there is no African colonialism, in large part because the newly formed, mostly African-American North American state in the Carolina low country builds a formidable navy. A powerful ally of the new North American nation forms in Africa called The Kinlaza House. It, too, is heavily influenced by a female leader.

A congregational economy develops on both sides of the ocean that sort of shares the egalitarian spirit of original Marxism with the competitive spirit of capitalism. Women play key roles, too. The Tsărăgĭ Congregational Union, led by a woman named Ahyoka of the Ani’-wa’`ya, becomes one of the richest Christian congregations in the world.

This kind of worldbuilding is easy when you can throw out norms on a whim. That’s the advantage of being a writer. We get to play God.

The imagination runs wild when we ask what might have happened if the vast quantities of kinetic creative energy that so many different groups of people were forced to suppress during the struggle to survive had been unleashed for the good of society instead.

What if American Blacks had been able to learn and teach and create beginning in the late eighteenth century? What if the political influences of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that were loosely borrowed by the United States’ Founders had instead seeped into the very essence of the body politic and society?

What if women had become spiritual and political leaders during the eighteenth century?

Humans being human, conflicts would arise in any kind of world. The world of Restive Souls is no exception, if for no other reason than fiction stories often require a good villain or two to keep the reader interested.

But if there is anything we’ve learned over the eons, you’d think that people could agree that it would be nice to see a feminine response to villainy.

Through Restive Souls, I also addressed my craving for a world where a woman can feel safe, or, at least, safer than she does now.

But the problem remains.

It’s still fiction. What would it take to make it real?

We all have distinct philosophies. Mine says that we are all connected. Maybe if enough of us just wish for it to be so, it will become so. Maybe someday, a woman can knock on a stranger’s door, and not cower at the man behind it.

As we wrestle with the ghastly atrocities committed by men, I wonder what the world might look like if it were decorated more by a woman’s touch.

Thanks for reading!

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Trump’s bended knees were no surprise to me. This article will tell you why we are in the twilight of democracy and an emerging new world Axis unless Americans vote in overwhelming numbers in the November midterm elections.

The trend started long ago

It didn’t start with the price of eggs back in November 2024, and it’s not climaxing in Republican attempts to steal an election through redistricting this coming November. It’s been a long oligarchical process that, believe it or not, is not only about the United States.

The United States isn’t even at the forefront of it all.

To truly understand why democracy is in free fall, we must do that history thing, so grab a coffee (throw a little vodka in it if you need to), and let’s take a quick ride through recent world history.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote a TL;DR essay (even longer than this!) for political nerds called The End of History?.1 In it, he declared the death of authoritarianism and the emergence of a permanent, uplifting radiance across the Earth from the immeasurable and glorious light of democracy, which, he said, was shining so brightly that even shaky autocratic governments bossing around developing nations would be unable to shade themselves.

Oops. Sorry, Francis. Welcome to 2026.

Since 1989, two major developments have reawakened history from the Fukuyama slumber: Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in Russia beginning in 2012, and the rise of Xi Jinping as President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013.

Combined, the two countries comprise about 18% of the world’s landmass and, coincidentally, population. Their influence reaches much further. For example, together, Russia and China are Africa’s new colonialists, each scrambling to extract as much as they can out of the mega continent and its people.

More than that, of course, Russia has an oversized influence on how oil is distributed, and China has an oversized influence on how everything else is distributed.

After Trump’s most unfortunate electoral victory, Russians did a victory lap. In response to the election, one of Putin’s political advisers, Putin whisperer and far-right provocateur Aleksandr Dugin, wrote on Elon Musk’s propaganda machine:

“Globalists have lost their final combat.”2

Dugin is among a growing cadre of Russian and Chinese political influencers who insist that fascist authoritarianism is a perfectly fine and legitimate form of government. They are eager for the U.S. to partake of its fruit. Many politicians in both countries no longer pretend that their governments are democratic.3 Sometimes, they’ll try to soften their tone by explaining that authoritarianism is merely a way station of sorts to something better (Checks notes: Peter Thiel also says this)4. But first, they point out, we must get the unwashed masses bathed and neutered.

This is not all that different than when Elon Musk says that when the oligarchs take charge and slash government spending, there will be pain, but it will be pain Trump’s misguided voters should gladly embrace as part of a greater cleanse (Checks notes again: They did not knowingly sign up for this).

In my novel, MagicLand, the oligarchs use their domination of technology and money to kill 99% of us because it turns out that it’s just too much work to deal with such nasty side effects of gross inequity as massive refugee climate-change migrations. Each year, this seems less like fiction than the year before.

Ren Yi, an influential Chinese blogger, wrote that the Trump victory ushered the United States into what amounts to a “techno-authoritarian-conservative alliance.”5

There is a significant opinion brewing among Russian and Chinese political thought leaders (in other words, oligarchs) that war with the United States is not inevitable for the simple reason that the United States is poised to join a new authoritarian axis of world powers under the kind and welcoming tutelage of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. How many of us here in America have difficulty imagining Trump holding hands with the two in the middle while Musk leaps into the air in front of all three like a cheerleading techno-idiot?

This axis is already in view, many in Russia and China say. Putin and Xi have been clubbing around for a long time. They know that Trump, as one of the stupidest power brokers ever to walk the planet, is gullible and corrupt enough to join them. They have both established themselves as presidents for life, although in different ways. Trump would love to do the same, if only to remain out of prison.

A quick Vlad Putin primer

Putin began his career as a former KGB agent who was disgusted by the fall of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union, which at that time included Ukraine and Borat’s6 home country, Kazakhstan, within its boundaries, dissolved into several countries, ranging from the mother country Russia to Moldova and other tiny places.

Putin’s been pissed ever since, and would love to, at the least, regain some of the USSR’s original surrounding territory.

His annoyance has increased as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) has expanded to touch Russian borders.

NATO, of which America is a participant, is a treaty between various European countries and the United States under which an attack on one is considered an attack on all.

To understand Putin’s rage, it might help to think about how American politicians would react to Mexico joining a similar alliance led by Russia or China:

Putin’s rise to power was legitimate enough. Shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was sort of hand-picked by a very drunk Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, but he won a subsequent presidential election fair and square. The problem, though, was that Russia was a bit of a mess in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Rich oligarchs quickly took over key industrial groups faster than you can say, “Gazprom,”7 shortly after the country decided to abandon communism.

Putin quickly went to work.

Over the next decade, he overturned Russia’s fledgling post-Soviet democracy by eviscerating the media and eliminating potential opponents.

For example, one of Putin’s latest victims, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who railed against corruption in Russia, was poisoned in Germany with Novichok, one of the world’s deadliest nerve agents. Novichok blocks neurotransmitters that send impulses telling muscles to do things like twitch and move. It causes wheezing, excessive sweating, convulsions, involuntary vomiting, urination and defecation, and difficulty breathing. Then, usually, it kills you.8

Somehow, Navalny survived, voluntarily returned to Russia vowing to fight on, and was promptly dumped into a Russian gulag in Siberia, where he died.

Putin’s term as president is full of such escapades. He also shuttered one media outlet after another. What was once a lively media landscape of interesting Russian news sources quickly became a flatland of Putin mouthpieces. He employed all manner of intimidation to accomplish this end, from threatening and/or killing journalists to simply shutting down media outlets he didn’t like.

A quick Xi primer

Meanwhile, Xi, in China, was fortunate enough to have a slightly more established infrastructure from which he could build authoritarian power than Putin. The Chinese Communist Party, which is now communist in name only, has never held free elections. Its founder, Mao Zedong, considered human life expendable for the greater good of amassing power.

Mao gained power through a civil war during World War Two. While U.S. forces were busy pacifying a defeated Japan, Mao was busy eliminating Chinese civilians. His People's Liberation Army laid siege to the city of Changchun in 1948 so that he could defeat the forces of China’s government, led by Chiang Kai-shek.

While Japan was licking its wounds from the horrific attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the latter of which saw around 180,000 people die in nine seconds, 160,000 civilians in Changchun died as a result of starvation during Mao’s five-month siege.9 History has recorded this event as, “What? Oh, wow, we forgot about that.”

Eventually, Chiang Kai-shek, after a few additional painful defeats, fled to Taiwan, where he established a rogue government. This, in turn, has created a permanent source of tension between the U.S. and China. China wants to absorb the island into its republic, and the U.S., which relies on Taiwan’s microchip industry to the point that losing it would devastate the American economy, would rather it didn’t.

Mao enacted a variety of pogroms designed to maintain power. For example, in a move that would delight almost any American renter these days, he enacted a policy to publicly execute at least one landlord in every village, which resulted in 1-5 million deaths, depending on which source you check out.10 That’s a lot of landlords.

Mao, ever modest, himself claimed only about 700,000 deaths as a result of his efforts.

His pogroms weren’t limited to those with power over others, though. Mao managed to kill as many as 30 million impoverished Chinese through his Great Leap Forward, which was an attempt to convert agricultural work into industrial labor, such as steel production.11

China was and is a populous nation, so there were too many Chinese for Mao to kill before he died, which allows us to fast forward many years, where we find Deng Xiaoping, who ruled China from 1978 to 1989. Deng famously opened China to capitalism, helping to create a system of capitalism some call “state capitalism,” which is an economy directed by the state that favors some industries over others.12

As a result, China is now the largest car manufacturer in the world, leads the world in shipbuilding, and has entered the aviation industry as it tests its first passenger airliner to compete with Boeing and Airbus.13

Deng opened his nation to trade with the United States, Japan, and Europe, but not its political system. China’s political system is a closed system where a small cadre of Chinese Communist Party leaders chooses a new leader when the current leader ages to the point where they are no longer effective or when Communist Party leaders just feel like making a change.

Before Xi, though, leadership succession was typically a messy political affair in a loud, smoky room. Xi has mastered the system to such a degree that the Communist Party eventually agreed that he would be president for life, meaning someone will have to kill him if they grow tired of him.

The new world Axis

So now we have authoritarian figures who would like to remain in power until they’re six feet under in charge of two of the three superpowers, with a third figure, though no more than a toddler in mind and spirit, hankering to join the party. And, contrary to what the corporate media, which nourishes the concept of impending war to sell advertising, tells you, the two established authoritarians began writing their party invitations to Trump in 2016. They have about as much interest in direct war with the U.S. as Canada does.

And why would they? Xi knows perfectly well that if he launches an attack to regain Taiwan, the oligarchs and Trump will shrug their shoulders and merely ask, “What’s in it for me?” Xi has waited patiently for this moment. He’s not going to wreck the world economy and leave the world a radioactive cesspool after all this work.

Just as they took different roads to power, Putin and Xi are each taking separate roads toward welcoming the U.S. to this new axis of power.

I call it good cop/bad cop diplomacy.

Putin, the bad cop, has launched direct attacks on the American electoral system, along with a failed Blitzkrieg against the breadbasket of Southeast Europe, Ukraine. Xi, on the other hand, rubs the American belly with soft statements like this letter read by China’s Ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, to the 2024 Gala Dinner of the U.S.-China Business Council on December 11, shortly after the 2024 election:

President Xi pointed out that the China-U.S. relationship is one of the most important relationships in the world. It concerns not only the immediate interests of the Chinese and American peoples, but also the future of and destiny of the entire humanity. Both countries stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation. We should choose dialogue over confrontation, and win-win cooperation over zero-sum games. China is prepared to stay in communication with the United States to expand cooperation, manage differences, continue exploring the right way for the two countries to get along with each other in the new era, and realize long-term, peaceful coexistence on this planet to the benefit of the two countries and the world at large.

President Xi stressed that economic and trade relations are an important part of China-U.S. relations. The interests of our two countries are closely intertwined, and the room for cooperation is infinitely vast. The two sides should properly handle differences through equal-footed consultation, and make the pie of cooperation bigger based on our complementary advantages. The success of one side should be an opportunity rather than a challenge for the other, and one’s achievement should help rather than hinder the development of the other.14

Many pundits might interpret such rhetoric as Xi bowing before Trump, as if Xi is part of the Republican sycophantic criminal enterprise. That’s not what this is. Xi is heavily influenced by the aforementioned authoritarian whisperers who now dominate Chinese political thinking. He’ll continue stroking America’s ego, especially if the U.S. continues on its current path, while occasionally mixing in vague threats about Taiwan and trade for the sake of a small, lively group of Chinese Realpolitik foreign policy hawks.

However, Xi’s main interest, presumably above even helping create a new axis of evil, is mercantilism. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon wanted China to join the world’s economic system. They did, and then some.

Trump may or may not impose tariffs on China.

If he does, China will object, then simply redirect its massive state capitalism infrastructure accordingly. This is a country that can build a thousand-mile superhighway in about thirty seconds. Tariffs aren’t going to change that.

Xi may be all about mercantilism, but he’s suppressed dissent like an all-star authoritarian. You can’t step outside in a Chinese urban area without being tracked closely by government technology. These days, even Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, once one of the world’s most respected newspapers, treads carefully.

One of Xi’s authoritarianism whisperers is Xiao Gongqin, who recently received a significant write-up in The New Yorker magazine (referenced earlier).

The dance with oligarchs is an ancient waltz

Xiao sees the migration of the American voter to Trumpism as a rejection of Democratic identity politics, which he says resembles some of the liberal tendencies of early Chinese communism. Yes, these voters are concerned about the price of eggs, so the thinking goes, but what they really object to is the promotion of three types of bathroom gender signage.

Most readers of this Substack will sigh and roll their eyes at such claims, but we’re seeing a rapid advance of this claim in the Democratic Party, too. The old guard of the Democratic Party is fighting tenaciously to remain in power and is itself most likely indifferent to the plight of trans kids.

Their chief interest is the same as the oligarchs they claim to oppose, guys like Musk and Peter Thiel.

Consider the recent tussle between Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over leadership of the House Oversight Committee. AOC wanted the job, but Pelosi didn’t want her to have the job. Pelosi won.

AOC joked when Trump urged her on Truth Social to try again, “Damn, you know it’s bad when even Trump is feeling bad for me.”15

AOC was being gracious. The reason she lost was that Pelosi has a net worth of more than a quarter billion dollars ($273.78 million),16 much of this through a very bubbly stock portfolio stuffed with oligarchy.

AOC, on the other hand, has no stock portfolio, and a low net worth. This is only true money-wise.

Money wins every time. As Speaker of the House, Pelosi was a legislative maestro, which has deservedly won her much appreciation in many quarters, but she’s also firmly entrenched in the American oligarchy.

Consider, too, Biden’s refusal to go hard after Trump’s criminal behavior, especially the Epstein matter, and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to watch from the sidelines as Trump romped through Garland’s embarrassing attempts to bring Trump to justice.

After Biden leaves office, Garland will return home to a lifestyle unimaginable for most Americans. His incentive to take down Trump in a world of oligarchs was as close to zero as can be.

The same holds for just about everything. Many Democratic politicians scream about the Federalist Society’s various bribes to the Supreme Court, but these folks all run in the same circles and clink champagne glasses together at black-tie Georgetown soirées. It’s all strongly worded memos and press statements, then back to the grind of collecting campaign funds.

America’s dance with oligarchs is nothing new. It’s happened before. But this time, the implications of a full transformation are more serious than ever because of the potential of a new alliance fostered by the other two superpowers.17

The truth is, despite the torrent of misinformation being poured upon the country, that “free enterprise” is as extinct as the buffalo. Monopoly control and domination has become virtually all-embracing. The real rulers of our country are neither “rugged individuals” nor “self-made men” nor anything that remotely resembles the mythology so elaborately created by Wall Street’s hucksters. They are dynasties — plutocratic dynasties of parasitic families who have generation by generation grown fantastically richer at the expense of the American people. They are the Rockefeller, the Morgans, the Mellons, the du Ponts, the Vanderbilts, the Guggenheims, the Fords, the Gianninis & Company.

That quote is from an article titled The Reigning Oligarchy, written in 1949 for a Trotskyite organization called The Fourth International.18

But replace a few words, and you’ll find that it is a template of sorts for thousands of modern-day Substacks.

The angst expressed in that article was born from the dominance of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as far back as the late 1800s. There have been brief attempts to change the direction of oligarchy dominance in the United States, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s brief trustbusting regime, but FDR’s New Deal was not one of those.

FDR focused on raising the standard of living for poor people, but oligarchs flourished. He needed them to wage war.

American oligarchy, like the one in Russia, doesn’t care all that much who is in power as long as the oligarchy controls the levers. Like all groups of humans, they sometimes have different opinions. Some of them prefer Trump, some prefer Democrats, but none of them are willing to cede control to the people who are flopping around in the fields and warehouses, hoping for a tiny slice of what’s left of the pie.

Now that Trump has managed to snag 78 million votes, mostly thanks to Elon Musk and his band of idiot young male fanbois, a substantial segment of Democrats beholden to the oligarchy have succumbed to the likelihood of an authoritarian government,19 and have pivoted to figuring out how they can settle in for the ride.

Peter Thiel, Musk, and their fellow tech bros did what they aimed to do: They countered the female vote, despite the incredible appeal of Kamala Harris, who was not the socialist Republicans made her out to be, but was as centrist as can be. They gathered their troops and leveraged Musk’s 200 million Twitter followers like a myopic, craven Band of Brothers, and smacked women right in the face.

And, just like that, the United States is now a far-right nation like China and Russia, unless Biden performs a late Christmas miracle and arrests Trump while giving the middle finger to the Supreme Court’s wacko presidential immunity ruling.

Wait. It gets worse. The world’s far-right momentum isn’t limited to the three superpowers.

Many European countries, often thanks to meddling from Putin’s Russia, are experiencing a far-right electoral resurgence.

For example, in Germany, the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), won a state election in Thuringia, which is a state in what used to be Soviet-controlled East Germany. Voters in eastern Germany have pursued right-wing politics in recent years as immigration has gained traction as an issue.

The vote favored the right-wing party over a party that already leaned rightist, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The AfD gained about 33% of the vote. The CDU received 24% of the vote. This isn’t too much different than Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, which, despite what Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger tell us, has been a brutish, libertarian, theocratic force for more than forty years.

Germany’s neighboring state of Saxony nearly suffered a similar calamity. The CDU squeaked by with about 31.7%, of the vote to AfD’s 31%.

The AfD gained popularity in 2015 during a massive influx of refugees, mostly from Syria. The party began blaring the horns of Islamaphobia, and the East German hordes responded with open arms.

You might not be surprised to learn that Elon Musk recently added his two apartheid cents to German politics in a tweet that declared strong support for the AfD in future German elections.20

Romania has experienced enough Russian interference that its top court recently canceled an election (must be nice).

In France, far-rightist Marine Le Pen has been on the verge of gaining power for several years and has never been closer than she is now after France’s latest elections.

The Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Italy, Finland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic all have far-right parties taking major stakes in Parliament. Hungary was led until recently by Trump pal Viktor Orban, whose goal in life was to chase every immigrant out of Hungary with torches and who won a strange allegiance from the hardline American CPAC conference, which is a festival for Christo-Nationalist hate groups.

What we witnessed in Beijing, and what we witness regularly from Trump through his on-again, off-again love affair with Vlad Putin, is Trump’s instinct to join a new world Axis led by Xi and Putin, each with their own regions of authority.

We can stop it, but not if we are sweating through the midterm election results from the edge of our seats, hoping those urban areas rally with late-night counts. The only way we win this is through an overwhelming get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort that sets records to counter the stolen votes from our Black brothers and sisters.

To give those votes back, we will need to vote in state legislative elections at a record pace, too. The numbers need to be fraud-proof, redistricting-proof, cheat-proof.

Hungarians offered hope, through their recent election, that maybe the world isn’t in worse shape than it was in 1939.

Can American voters do the same during the midterms?

It’s really our last chance. If we fail, it’s every man and woman for themselves.

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Notes

Thanks for reading!

Musical interlude. In honor of the barely movable corpse of Trump's shaky meeting with Xi:

Here are some footnotes:

He was joined by Susie Wiles and a small team of stormtroopers in my very cozy attic apartment in Atlanta.

Unfortunately, there is no video of the interview, because I don’t have enough paid subscribers to pay for someone to hold the phone while we chat.

The transcript follows. Grab yourself a gallon or so of 90+ proof liquid comfort, and have a gander.

Q: Thanks for stopping by. I hope you don’t mind all the electric fans in the room. I’m told you stink like the dickens.

Well, Charles, you’re a loser, but Susie here tells me I need to see how the other half lives sometimes.

(Susie Wiles nods her head, lights a cigar)

Q: Let’s start with this: What are your goals for the China summit?

Well, the goalposts keep moving because President Xi keeps moving them. He’s a very smart man, knows the goalposts, knows how to move them very expertly. So we need to be ready for that. Very ready. And we will be because this will be the greatest world meeting between two leaders in world history.

Very historic. I expect the stock market to do very well. Even better than during Operation Epstein Fury, which has had a tremendous impact on the stock market.

(Susie Wiles rolls eyes, blows out a cloud of smoke)

Q. What about Chinese threats regarding Taiwan?

Well, that’s very simple. When I talk to President Xi, I’ll have a very simple ask. Or suggestion. Is it a suggestion? I don’t know. That’s what everyone tells me. That it’s a suggestion. Here’s what I’m going to propose. I’m going to suggest to the President, who I am on very good terms with, very friendly terms, that Taiwan become the 51st state.

Q. I thought Venezuela was the 51st state

Well, whichever country is lucky enough to be the first 51st state will be. And then other countries, like Canada. And Greenland, which is already part of the United States. They’ll be number 52. And so on. Our flag makers will be very busy. Everyone tells me that I’m the best thing to ever happen to the flag-making industry. Many great flags. Fantastic flags, new ones, new stars. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Q. Dude. Stay focused. Taiwan

Well, Taiwan has much more in common with the United States than it does with ChYna. Taiwan has many microprocessors. It’s the land of microprocessors, I’m told. It has so many microprocessors you wouldn’t believe it. But they all come from the United States.

These amazing microchips come from places like Texas, which is a very good state, a very big state. Almost as big as ChYna. And it’s tremendous because Texas is the first Christian government. So we like that and we need more of that. And we send our best people from Texas to Taiwan to show them how to create these big, beautiful microprocessors. It’s incredible, really. Lots of skill involved. You wouldn’t believe it.

People come from all over just to look at these amazing things. Prefabbed, I think. Then the people in Taiwan, they fix them up a little and send them back to us. So we want to take these big amazing microchip factories in Taiwan and maybe, I dunno…

…Can we put them on big container ships? Susie? Can we do that? And just bring them to the United States.

(Suzie Wiles is unresponsive as she sits in her chair with a cigar in her mouth sharpening a large kitchen knife — I have no idea where she got that thing)

Q. They’ll send the entire factory to the U.S.?

That’s right. Very exciting. On container ships. You put the microchip factories on container ships, send them all to the United States. Tariff-free. I’ll let President Xi know we can do this one thing without any tariffs at all.

These big beautiful container ships won’t have to go through the Strait of Hormuz because, as I understand it, they can cross the Pacific Ocean directly from Taiwan. And I think we can do that and solve so many problems that way.

You know, in ChYna, they have these very big, very large, very strong bulldozers and earth movers. And maybe they can help us with that if we lower tariffs just a little for them. We can make a deal I think for that.

Q. Monday night and early Tuesday morning, you posted on True Sociopath fifty-five times. This included a graphic of Venezuela as the 51st state. Two questions. When do you sleep? And what the hell is wrong with you?

Everyone tells me that I am like a comic superbook hero. I don’t know anything about that. I’ve never read a comic. Susie, what do you think?

(Susie Wiles continues to look down as she sharpens the large knife in her hand)

So I think that must be it. Just a tremendous amount of power in these hands (raises two tiny bruised hands with skin falling off). And in here (points to orange head). When you’re the most powerful person on earth, you can stay up late giving the truth out. If I don’t do that, the fake media will make up all their lies about me and that’s all anyone will hear. Trump did this, Trump did that. It’s a travesty. Even Fox News has started lying about the economy.

Which is growing tremendously, as you know. It’s the most powerful economy in history.

(Susie Wiles spits her cigar out of her mouth after a sudden laugh)

Q. Yesterday, you told reporters that the economy doesn’t matter and that the only thing that matters is Iran not getting nukes. Dare I ask you to expand on that?

Only losers worry about the economy, Carl. We can’t make America great again if everyone is whining about gas prices. Man up, fill the tank, go to work, come home, and quit complaining. That’s how you make America great again.

I have this great, big pulpit in the sky, given to me by God himself, and I can use this to encourage people, don’t you think? I’m a great motivator. Did you see me on The Apprentice? So many amazing people there. They got that way because I am very motivating. It’s amazing what people will do to avoid being fired. Just ask Dan Craine.

Q. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine? The guy who’s bombing Iran?

That’s what I said. Dan Craine. Tremendous guy. Great military mind. One of the best ever, almost as good as me. I was in the war room just the other day, and that’s what everyone said to me. We all sat in a big circle at this tremendous, big, beautiful oval conference table. It was a conference table, right, Susie?

And we went one by one. Each armed services person. And we went one by one, and they all told me the same thing. “Sir, you are the greatest military mind in history. What you’re doing in Iran is mind-boggling.” That’s what they all said. Mind-boggling. What a great word. It says so much. It’s historic. What is happening in Iran. That’s historic. The Strait of Hormuz. Never been so important. Everyone knows about it now.

This is how we teach geography to kids, don’t you think, Susie?

(Susie Wiles glares at him, returns to sharpening the knife)

Nobody heard of the Strait of Hormuz until I came along. Now everyone knows all about it. People tell me all the time whenever they call me. They say, “We knew nothing about this vital waterway until you got it closed down. Thank you,” they say. “Thank you”

And all I can do is just say, “You’re welcome.” I’m here to be served. That’s very much what I’m about. Can you order a Doordash, Chad?

(At this point of the interview, an aide slides over and wipes his mouth with a hanky)

But we’re opening it up again. President Xi is asking us to open it up again, so we will. We may need to bomb Iran’s bridges and oil refineries to get that done. I’ll talk to President Xi about that. I think he’ll agree that’s probably necessary.

We’ll work that a little smarter this time. Maybe drop leaflets on top of school buildings to warn the kids. What do you think, Susie?

(Susie Wiles shrugs)

The Europeans are a problem. The Canadians are a problem. We might need to bomb their infrastructure, too, just to get them to do the right thing. They need to help us open the great Strait of Hormuz.

It’s such a big problem because they lost Orbán. There’s only socialists and communists there. The king of Spain. A communist. All of them. Losing Orbán was a tough blow for us. Very surprising, but Elon’s not helping us rig elections anymore.

(Susie Wiles speaks up: “Shut the fuck up, dumb ass.”)

A rigged election just means fixed in a very good way. We bring in this amazing technology and fix a few voting machines on election night. But without Elon’s help in Hungary, we weren’t able to do this. Very sad day for Hungary.

But we might be able to bring Orbán to the U.S. I’ve told my very ambitious but not so smart vice president, I’ve said, JD, maybe we replace you with Orbán for the third term. He seems open to that. It’s never too early to think about the next election.

You know, Sebastian Gorka is from Hungary. He works for me in counter terrorism. So many left-wing terrorists these days, like AOC. He has a great role. Great role. He’s a great American. What’s his title, Susie?

(Susie Wiles: “Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council, dipshit.”)

Q. Didn’t he live in Hungary for a couple of decades before becoming a naturalized citizen in the US in 2012? Seems like he’d be on Stephen Miller’s hit list

I don’t think you understand how that works.

Q. Oh, I understand.

Q. Let’s move on. Yesterday you posted an image of Obama, Biden, and Nancy Pelosi swimming in a filthy version of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and a headline that said, “Dumacrats Love Sewage.” I guess that was AI. Why are you obsessed with the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool?

Well, the memorial needs to change. I should be sitting there. Abe Lincoln, a great president for his time in many ways, but not a Confederate soldier, so that’s one problem. But he was from a long time ago. The middle of the 1800s, I’m told. I don’t know if that’s true or not. His photographs look fake. I’ll be honest with you.

Q. That’s a first for you. I’ll post “Breaking News” in my Substack headline for this interview

That’s fine. So I’ll be honest. I think it may be that Abe Lincoln never existed. It was all a distraction because the North knew it was losing the war, so they created this great myth. It’s a great myth, isn’t it? A man. A big marble man. Very white. Very strong. Very tall. Fantastic hat. The only part of him that was black was his hat. Like it should be.

And he became this bigger than life hero. Everybody loved this big, white, marble man.

But that was a century ago or something like that. A long time ago, I know that. I don’t know exactly. But it was a long time ago. And he was completely made up. A legend out of nothing. Amazing accomplishment, really, since they had no social media as far as I know. And so, the North is losing this horrible war they started, all because they objected to the perfect solution to labor shortages, which were tremendous, by the way. Massive labor shortages everywhere.

And they said, “Hey, let’s create the perfect president.” And since I was not around yet, they came up with Abe. Awww, look at that. Grew up in a log cabin! Was a humble lawyer from a communist state, Illinois. What a vile country that is. JB Pritzker runs that place. A big fat rich guy, but a communist. Terrible person. Did you know he got rid of bail? Can he do that, Susie?

(Susie Wiles shrugs)

Illinois used to be a fantastic place. Chicago, too. Wonderful city. Capone was there. Very underrated. Great leader of men. Michael Madigan was there. Great American. Should have been a Republican, but you have to be a Democrat in Illinois for some reason. And another great American, Governor Rod Blagojevich, who should still be governor. Tremendous hair. Another guy who should have been a Republican.

You know he was just borrowing that Senate seat, right? But the fake news media crucified him. So I pardoned him. Just like I’ll pardon Bondi and all the rest of the people persecuted by the fake news media.

I’ll pardon in advance. I’ll pardon everybody. I can do that. The Supreme Court will let me. John Roberts, he’s a very close friend of mine. His golf game needs a little work, but he’s a very close friend.

As soon as I get back from ChYna, I’ll pardon everyone. Making America great again means we need a stable government. You can’t just go around arresting everyone. It shouldn’t matter what they do. I have complete immunity. This means everyone who works for me does, too. I’m sure Roberts agrees. If he doesn’t, he’ll need to face the consequences for that.

Q. Can you give us an estimate on when the Iran War will end?

You mean Operation Sledgehammer. That’s what we are calling the current operation there. We expect great things from that. Many great things, many oil supply ships. Many great new oil refineries. Some of them rebuilt from scratch.

We have done such a fantastic job there. Did you know that many, many of the oil refineries and other infrastructure there are outdated? So Pete, he had a great idea. And I love our Secretary of War, don’t you? A creative genius. He’s the first Secretary of War that we can call a creative genius.

And he said to me, “We can help update these refineries with our missiles.” Just like that, half the work is done. But here’s the clever part, Carlos. We can use Iranian missiles to knock down these old, outdated refineries, too. So we did. We tricked the Iranians into blowing up some of these old refineries in the Gulf.

People say, “Well, Pete Hegseth is a war criminal.” No. He’s a genius. An economic genius. I had no idea when I hired him. I just saw those half-naked pics of him and those wonderful, manly tattoos, and I said, “He’s our new War Minister.” And the Senate just does what I tell them to do because they know MAGA is very powerful. So they approved him by one hundred percent.

Now, all these refineries, they will get rebuilt brand new, maybe with some Trump signage, maybe not, but I hope so because people should know who made it all possible.

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Q. The deadline for congressional authorization of the war passed on May 1, according to the War Powers Act. When will you seek congressional approval for the Iran War? Never, right?

We don’t need to. We renamed the operation to Operation Sledgehammer. Or maybe Operation Barbarossa. I’m not sure yet. But it will be renamed very shortly. So, no war powers activity there. None. We don’t need Congress. And we have a nice AI program, so we can rename the operation almost at will. Right, Susie?

(Susie Wiles gives a thumbs up)

We’ve already accomplished so much. We even helped Iran. We removed all its leaders and put in new ones. Now we just need to make sure they do what we tell them. That can be not so easy. They are very difficult people. They’re Muslim. They’re all very difficult. They don’t understand what side of their bread is buttered on, as my loving grandma used to say. They create so many problems.

Q. According to a CNN poll, 70% of Americans disapprove of the way you’re handling the economy

It’s too bad there are that many losers in the economy. I only have one word for the American people who don’t understand how things work: “You’re fired.”

End of Part One of this interview

Trump chatted for another 18 hours, so I ‘ll need to break this up a bit.I’m not sure you’ll see the rest of it. It all depends on stuff!

Happy Wednesday!

Notes

One nice thing about “imitating” Trump is that I don’t really need to proofread!

Thanks for reading!

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AI companies have lured millions of users into their lairs by offering their AI models for use at no charge. That’s about to end. Maybe not next week, or even next month, but very soon.

The end of the free ride means that it won't be shame, mangled reputation, or a reconsideration of ethics that stops people from using AI to write. It will be money. The cost of entry will become prohibitive, even if it only costs $10 per month to earn the average $2 monthly writer’s wage.

AI companies are not leeching money or burning through it like the tech bubble companies of old. Comparing the AI bubble to previous tech bubbles is like comparing the mendacity of Trump’s crime syndicate to Richard Nixon’s corrupt little thieves, whose comparative metaphor would have been tilting a vending machine to snag a free bag of chips.

The debt leveraged to continually expand the AI bubble is on the verge of burying all but the most resilient AI companies out of business.

We’ll take a closer look at that in a minute, but to give you a glimpse of the collapsing bait-and-switch scam, a collapse that (hopefully) will put an end to AI writing slop, we need to take a look at the software development world, which is typically a harbinger of the rest of AI.

Changes to software AI pricing models

Software coding has undergone tremendous change since the advent of AI. These days, you can bootstrap entire applications using artificial intelligence. This isn’t a surprise to software engineers, who are used to bootstrapping the skeletons of software applications anyway.

In the user interface world, there’s even a user interface (UI) style library known as “Bootstrap” that has been used for years to apply design styles to fonts and other design elements on web pages.

Bootstrap was released by Twitter long before Elon Musk turned the place into an apartheid watering hole. The UI library became so popular that web developers were able to easily recognize when a website was built on top of it the moment they hit a site’s home page.

Similarly, on the server side of things, libraries like Node.js, a server-side JavaScript library, can be used to bootstrap website server applications, in other words, the server code that handles requests and transactions from users.

Most software development tools, called IDEs, have featured built-in coding libraries that let users pour a bunch of code into a file with the click of a button for years.

All of this tech was around long before AI was much more than a Stephen Spielberg movie about a lonely AI kid and his gigolo cyborg friend (masterfully played by Jude Law, by the way).

What has changed is that AI now has more “intelligent” coding capabilities, so software developers can now “bootstrap” an entire application, not just the initial outline of one. This fits with the essence of AI, which is simply a big probability matrix. In simplest terms, AI knows coding patterns. The predictive model is perfect for a tool that relies on prior art, so it cranks out code like a pro.

Microsoft has been a purveyor of various tech tools through its GitHub service for several years. GitHub is a software repository where software engineers check out code, make changes, and check a copy back in, giving the changed code a new version number so that mistakes can be tracked and fixed, and, when necessary, blame assigned for bugs.

GitHub began life as a simple software storage facility. Microsoft bought the company that runs it and added a bunch of enhancements. When AI took the world by storm, Microsoft leveraged GitHub through its “CoPilot” brand, enabling software engineers to build apps with AI and check them into a source repository under one roof.

GitHub has always offered a free tier, but the free tier has severe limitations that make it difficult to create full applications. For a long time, Microsoft also provided a free trial of CoPilot’s full capabilities. These free trials ended on April 10, 2026.

Microsoft explains why:1

As GitHub Copilot continues to grow, we’ve seen a significant rise in abuse of our free trial system. To protect the experience and integrity of the platform for legitimate developers, we are pausing new GitHub Copilot Pro trials while we investigate and strengthen our protection mechanisms.

Microsoft, for now, is saying the pause is temporary. And by itself, this is not evidence that AI pricing models are about to change.

However, this is:

Again, Microsoft describes the change:2

Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage. Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model.

This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users.

This, my friends, is called an omen.

The metering system is such a change to what some GitHub customers are used to that Microsoft tries to soften the blow with a warning shot:

To help customers prepare, we are also launching a preview bill experience in early May, giving users and admins visibility into projected costs before the June 1 transition. This will be available to users via their Billing Overview page when they log in to github.com.

Yikes. I haven’t seen that before in a price hike communication, have you?

Metered billing (AKA “Pay as you go”) applications are nothing new to the software industry. Amazon Web Services (AWS), which powers about 30% of the world’s websites, has been doing it for years.3

What’s different is that AI has sucked the average non-tech user into its world without that user being aware of such things as tiered tech pricing (gouging).

Microsoft goes on to defend its decision by explaining that the legacy costs for simple queries, like what you find on ChatGPT, were the same as for developers who spun full applications:

Copilot is not the same product it was a year ago.

It has evolved from an in-editor assistant into an agentic platform capable of running long, multi-step coding sessions, using the latest models, and iterating across entire repositories. Agentic usage is becoming the default, and it brings significantly higher compute and inference demands.

Microsoft needed to change that dynamic to stop money leeching out of its coffers.

The bold in the next paragraph is mine:

Today, a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount. GitHub has absorbed much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage, but the current premium request model is no longer sustainable.

Usage-based billing fixes that. It better aligns pricing with actual usage, helps us maintain long-term service reliability, and reduces the need to gate heavy users.

I wouldn’t make an effective corporate communications writer, because I would have written:

“We knew going in that we’d be luring you in with freebies only to hit you hard over the head with a big-time usage bill later. So sue us for bait and switch? Good luck with that, sucker. Hey, maybe Trumplevania will take action against us. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!”

The change means that users pay fees for every use of GitHub’s AI tool, such that a user who pays $100 for a monthly plan receives $100 worth of AI credits, and no more. If you use them up, your software project stalls until you purchase more.

Still, this is only anecdotal evidence that massive pricing changes are afoot across the industry. But wait, there’s more.

Axios discovers that AI workers cost more than human workers

Axios recently reported that efforts to replace human workers with AI are not going as smoothly as advertised:4

"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees," Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios.

And…

Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs.

It’s still early May.

According to Michael Burry, who made news by betting against the housing market before it bankrupted millions in 2008, tech bro company values are overstated by around 42%.5

This is because companies that consume AI are expected to spend $1 trillion on AI in their zeal to fire workers, even though they don’t know for sure that the money they think they’re saving will actually be saved with the AI that replaces said workers.

Max Linder, a software engineer in Stockholm, told the New York Times: “I probably spend more than my salary on Claude.”6

According to the New York Times article:

Generous “token budgets” are becoming a job perk for coders, like dental insurance or free lunch, and some are spending thousands of dollars a month trying to automate as much of their own work as possible.

Consulting firm Gartner expects higher spending on AI worldwide: $6.31 trillion in 2026.

Data Centers are eating the world

Meanwhile, Moody’s, which is paid a lot of money to worry about balance sheets and rate the financial viability of companies accordingly, recently raised another AI expenditure alarm. The company found that the massive investment in data centers by five AI companies carries a $662 billion risk that isn’t even on their books.7

This accounting trick is perfectly legal. Out of $969 billion in future lease commitments to data center buildouts by Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle, $662 billion has been committed to lease contracts that have not yet been initiated, so they don’t need to be accounted for when the companies submit their earnings reports to the SEC (not that the Trump version of the SEC gives a shit if earnings reports are legal or not).

The total build-out from just these five companies is nearly a trillion dollars. This is such a staggering sum of money that it isn’t really possible for humans to relate to it.

What can a trillion dollars buy? Investor News’ Tracy Hughes was so aghast that Tesla was going to give Elon “Apartheid” Musk a one trillion dollar compensation package that she asked ChatGPT what she could buy with it.

A lot of interesting answers, including:8

You could buy every team in the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL — twice — and still have pocket change big enough to sponsor the Super Bowl halftime show for the next decade.

According to AI gadfly Will Lockett, none of these data center outlays can be justified from a fiduciary standpoint:9

According to Harris Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund Praetorian, these data centres make zero sense. He found that AI datacentres built in 2025 will incur $40 billion in annual depreciation while generating only $15 billion to $20 billion in annual revenue. In other words, they are losing money hand over fist in real-world terms.

This is because the microchip technology used to produce the data centers is outdated almost as soon as the first Roomba hits the data center’s concrete floors on its first day in business.

Lockett continues:

Meta found that their AI data centre chips failed at a rate of 9% per year, meaning that after three years of operation, the data centre would lose a whopping 27% of its capacity if these insanely expensive chips weren’t replaced. That is enough to make their operation unviable.

Moreover, computer technology is still advancing rapidly and becoming more efficient. As a result, after just a few years of operation, it will be cheaper and more efficient to replace all the chips in an AI data centre. Therefore, the more realistic lifespan of an AI data centre is three years.

You should read the whole thing. It’s on Medium, but I’ve provided the article as a Ruminato gift link, because I’m nicer than Elon Musk, who only shares social hate.

All these poorly conceived cash outlays are propping up the economy and stock market and creating a few heavy-breathing millionaires, but it’s all funny money unless AI companies can turn it into profit somewhere.

That’s where you come in.

The free ride you’ve been experiencing in both the writing and generative art world is about to end. Besides, you’ll probably not own any of the works you create using AI.

The Supreme Court declared in March 2026, by refusing to consider overruling a lower court decision, that generative art is in the public domain. You can’t license it, you can’t claim copyright on it, and if you try to make money with it, anybody can use it and even claim it as their own (but they can’t copyright it, either).10

The writing is on the wall, so to speak.

This, my friends, is also called an omen.

Lawsuits, lawsuits, and more lawsuits. Everywhere!

You might think that AI companies will continue to use their AI writer tools as loss leaders, but that doesn’t take into account the 90+ lawsuits against them, many of them for copyright infringement.11

The first big case to be resolved, against Anthropic for pirating works, cost Anthropic a billion dollars to settle out of court.

You’ll be helping them pay for that soon, as the class action administrator for the settlement has locked down claims (Full disclosure: I am a member of the class who will be receiving compensation) and will begin depositing money in claimant bank accounts sometime between May 14 and August 2026.12

Joining those 90 lawsuits is another big class action lawsuit filed last week by author Scott Turow (who happens to be a lawyer) and five publishers: Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage, against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.13 This group is making the same kinds of claims as the plaintiffs in the Anthropic case, which focused on copyrighted works downloaded from pirate sites like LibGen to train its LLMs (Large Language Models).

Zuckerberg being Zuckerberg, he’ll probably fight this as long as he can, especially because he’s specifically named in the lawsuit, which claims he personally approved Meta’s pirate downloads. You can’t try to get in the way of an oligarch’s ability to buy half the world without some pushback.

NPR (cited in the footnotes) tells us:14

According to the complaint, Meta “briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers” but changed its strategy in April 2023. The question of whether to license or pirate moving forward was “escalated” to Zuckerberg, after which, the complaint alleges, Meta’s business development team received verbal instructions to stop licensing efforts. “If we license once [sic] single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy,” a Meta employee is quoted as saying in the complaint.

“It’s the most flagrant copyright breach in history,” said Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger in a statement to NPR. “And these voracious tech companies need to be held accountable.”

If Meta loses this case, it will trigger a cascade of additional lawsuits. Somebody has to pay for all this. It’s never the oligarchs who do. In this case, it will be the writer making below minimum wage who (for unknown reasons) thinks AI will give their income a boost.

Copyright infringement suits are becoming more common in Silicon Valley than stuck Waymo convoys.

But there are more serious AI lawsuits springing up, including damaging lawsuits from parents suing AI companies for hurting their children, who have been known to be coaxed into suicide by chatbots like ChatGPT. In other instances, AI chatbots have allegedly coaxed people into murder.15

If you’re a lawyer, you’re lining up your legal staff and sorting out who to sue first, and are so confident of winning that you’re house shopping on your favorite tropical island.

Other lawsuits will emerge from incidents like a recent security incident at Meta caused by a hallucinating AI agent that revealed personal information via an internal Meta AI service during an employee-only chat session.16

The Meta incident was mostly a scare and was quickly contained, unlike a similar incident at Amazon when a crazed AI module deleted an entire AWS code base.17

The code base was deleted, ironically, by Amazon’s in-house AI coding tool, Kiro, which, according to Amazon, made the mistakes because of “user error.” No wonder Bezos doesn’t like the idea of employee unions. It’s much more difficult to fire people who make user errors that cause AI to hallucinate when there’s a pesky union nearby.

The U.S. military’s bombing of an Iranian schoolhouse full of kids was attributed to an outdated Anthropic AI model. There won’t be any consequences under the Trump regime for this kind of malfeasance, but the piper might come calling after this regime finally sinks into its toxic graveyard of simpletons, drunks, and criminals.

These examples are only the kind that have caught mainstream media’s attention. How many smaller companies are getting hammered by faulty AI bots that we don’t know about because they simply cover it up?

Somebody’s going to pay, and it isn’t Sam Altman

Sam Altman, who took over OpenAI and converted it from a non-profit into a profit-hungry but debt-laden monster, is now involved in a highly publicized lawsuit with another tech huckster, Elon Musk.

Only the angelic bean counters at the First Bank of Heaven know how much money is ultimately on the table for this one. Despite reams of stories about the lawsuit in mainstream media, Substack, and elsewhere, nobody really knows what the lawsuit is about beyond two Jovian-sized egos trying to lay claim as the world’s biggest planet-buster.

In theory, it’s about Musk's complaint that OpenAI has redirected itself from its original mission as a non-profit, but Musk long ago abandoned any legitimacy he might have claimed toward the public good, so we know something else is afoot.

One of the clues can be found in some of the injunctive relief Musk is seeking:18 Removal of Sam Altman as OpenAI’s CEO. This is probably for the public good, but the public good isn’t what Musk has in mind. Most likely, he is simply trying to destroy the company.

If he succeeds, OpenAI will have a lot of assets available for cheap. Musk will try to use his new trillion-dollar salary (via Tesla) to snatch some of it, since it has become apparent Musk can’t build a reliable AI system on his own.

What will ultimately come out of all this? The old, crusty software developer in me thinks the usual will happen: A few huge firms will collect the collapsing fragments of the AI economy, and continue to do what they do best: create a world of haves and have nots.

If you’re a writer using AI, you are almost assured of having not, and like the rest of the world, will be outside looking in.

Luckily, there’s a solution: Learn how to write.

Notes

The Taboola ad-style headline was done on purpose, mostly just for fun:

Be sure to check out the Footnotes 👇. There’s mucho sidebar information and detail there, especially about the Musk v OpenAI case.

Thanks for reading!

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Footnotes

Well, today, those zany guys in D.C. decided to do a UFO dump. It consisted of, as the New York Times put it, “murky images that show what could be anything.”

Being a Science Fiction freak, I decided to take a look, and, worse, I’m inviting you along.

Let’s take a quick tour, shall we? Come on, it’ll be fun. Grab some mushrooms if you got ‘em.

I went to this “government” website:

https://www.war.gov/UFO/

First, we see the titillating home page screen:

I would have gone with this, but I guess that’s why I don’t work for the Department of War Crimes:

Scroll down a bit, and you see this:

I’d need to ask a legal beagle, but isn’t anything this website produces not “legal tender,” so to speak, since it is a self-parody? Items on this website are identified as being from the Department of War. But no such entity exists. It’s still the Department of Defense, and will be until/if Congress says otherwise. Therefore: parody.

Anyway, let’s look at that first item, shall we? I think it’s going to be terrific and magnificent:

Oh.

It’s just an envelope.

Hey, I know. Let’s try the “Download” button there on the lower left! Oh, gosh. I’m so excited I could wet my diaper.

Clicking “Download” launches a PDF document (no warning). I have to scroll down quite a ways in the document before I finally find something scintillating and titillating.

I scroll and scroll and scroll.

Finally! Some action!

Fifty cents seems like one helluva bargain to me for a classified document.

Also, one look at it, and I can see why the government has been reluctant to release this information. Next thing you know, they’re going to reveal rumors that ducks fly.

Scrolling down the PDF reveals another fascinating screen (after several boring ones):

It’s cool that UFOs have escorts. I wonder if they’re as expensive as Georgetown escorts in D.C. Someone should ask a married Congressman.

Does our drunken Minister of War Crimes realize he’s releasing the equivalent of the government’s version of a badly done satire of Weekly World News?

Do y’all want me to keep scrolling? Okay, if you insist.

But my patience is wearing thin. I want to see aliens, and not the orange kind wearing diapers and screaming insults at women, thank you very much.

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Oh, look! Flying saucers!!!

Why has the government been holding out on these? What evil lurks inside these sophisticated spacecraft?

Oh hell no.

(Disclaimer: I may have made that one up, but if so, I’m not admitting it).

Upon further scrollishness, I encounter stuff like this:

Reams of this kind of useless stuff. The Minister of War Crimes released a massive “information” dump for reasons only someone sauced from many consecutive days of day drinking can understand.

After scrolling through several dozen pages of stuff like this, I run into this golden nugget:

My pants are, literally, on fire as I review this one.

Speaking of pants on fire, check out Little Marco yukking it up with the Pope over the UFO dump:

I sure get distracted, don’t I? Very sorry. I have more ADHD going on than Trump trying to deliver a speech on Euclidean geometry.

Onward! Next, I found this.

The photo caption says the photo was taken by a fella named Fred Steckling using “a REVERE 8 mm cine-camer, automatic 30 mm powerzoom lens.”

Fred, you were no Susan Niemann. In Fred’s defense, zoom lens tech was not the banger tech it is these days.

More scrolling through countless photos of nothing until I reach this interesting letter from J Edgar Hoover:

Quantum mechanics at play here? What kind of black arts are these? How did J Edgar anticipate the events of today? How did he anticipate Epstein? See my YouTube channel, coming soon (just kidding; I wouldn’t do YouTube videos if the Orange Puffalo paid me all his winnings from the Iran Insider Trading War.)

Anyhoo, on and on it goes. With stuff like this:

Ah yes, scattered sheets of legal paper with a band-aid attached. Thank you, FBI, for not revealing this wicked material to us when we weren’t mature enough to handle this kind of data in the 1960s.

And this (????????):

I have no idea what that is. Except that the individual is naked, so I assume it was misplaced from the Epstein Files. This one probably deserves closer scrutiny.

The scrolling continues. I encounter this convincing piece of evidence that aliens do, indeed, exist:

Question regarding that last paragraph. Now that our perpetually sauced Christo-nationalist Minister of War, Pete Kegsybreath, has distributed this outside of the agency, in obvious defiance of the instructions, can we finally lock him up inside a ten-year alcohol rehab program in Brazzaville? (That’s the capital of the Congo for the geographically malnourished among you.)

Thank you for your attention to this matter. God Save the USA.

Believe it or not, the document contains several copies of this report by the young white female. As I scroll further, I discover that this is she:

This next letter suggests to me that there must be some rule that the FBI records every bit of correspondence sent to it by American citizens, no matter how ridiculous it is.

So I have an idea.

What if every American sends the FBI a letter? Doesn’t matter what you say. Anything to preoccupy the other perpetually drunk dude, Kash Patel.

I’ll even write it for you, so all you have to do is copy and paste. But you have to pay for your own postage unless I get more paid subscribers. Like, about 200 million more.

Here’s my proposed letter:

Dear Mr or Mrs FBI Person:

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

I am concerned that our alleged president, Donald J Trump, is an alien.

He is scaring certain people in this country. I feel like the FBI should be checking into this possibility.

Could you please perform a live autopsy on his carcass post-haste to confirm or refute?

Sincerely,

Your name here

Your fake address here

If we flood the FBI offices with this letter, FBI agents won’t have time to do anything else, like subpoena and arrest journalists and redact the Epstein Files.

And who knows? These fools are so incompetent that we might even score on the live autopsy.

Here is the declassified government document I perused if you’re bored nearly to the point of incontinence:

https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/65_hs1-834228961_62-hq-83894_section_10.pdf

I checked out one more. Here’s the link for that one:

https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/65_hs1-834228961_62-hq-83894_section_2.pdf

It was mostly just memorandums and letters from crazed concerned citizens.

This was the only interesting picture in it:

It appears to, maybe, be a can opener.

Hey, did I ever tell you guys that when I was about ten years old, I created a bunch of palm-sized comics called “The Adventures of Dr. Maums?”

Yeah, so I distributed a new copy every week or so to my classmates. Instead of beating the crap out of me, they all seemed to look forward to the next issue. Dr. Maums was sort of this evil galactic emperor who mined planets with an orbital can opener. Just sayin’. Also, true story.

Okay, well, it’s Friday. I think that’s enough, don’t you?

Have a great weekend. Stop doomscrollling!

~ Your friend and fellow sufferer, Charles.

Thanks for reading!

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Hey, have you read my short story about an illegal alien? Even if you aren’t a fan of science fiction or a bit of humor, you can trust me when I tell you it’s better than doomscrolling. Give it a try!