Such is the case today.

An American President was hit late last night with convincing evidence issued by legislators that he raped several women and that his personal attorney, now the chief prosecuting lawyer of the United States as the Attorney General, has consistently covered up evidence, meaning he, too, is actively committing crimes against the American people.

And the New York Times has so far ignored it this morning:

The maddening thing about the New York Times is that it employs several journalists who expose all kinds of horrors. But the newspaper’s editors and publishers continue to sanewash Trump and refuse to cover his most odious character traits.

This damages the reputation of those who toil for them. It’s extremely unfair to the good reporters at that paper who bust their asses to reveal other headline grabbers.

It often seems that the editors and journalists who work for them are wildly out of sync.

I’m starting to wonder who is slipping money under the door of the publishers and editors in the middle of the night.

The Allegations

Perhaps their excuse is that the allegations aren’t new. Well, some are, but gosh, the dude has racked up so many sexual assault allegations, what’s one more?

Last night’s release by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee might seem like a political ploy given the season: we’re late in the Midterms election cycle. Let’s drop a few fireballs.

And, hey, maybe the timing of that is by design. Who cares? The document is full of testimony and evidence that points to the very likely reality that we are being governed by an extremist band of sexual perverts who don’t care at all about the best interests of this nation.

The carousel of grift seems almost designed to provide cover to a crime family and its henchman in case the worst (for them) happens during these Midterms and beyond.

But you know what? If Trump has even a spark left in that withered stump of a brain stem of his, he’s in negotiations with Vlad Putin right now on an escape plan to a pervy dacha on the Black Sea near Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Krai, Russia.

Here’s why (quoted directly from the document released last night):

The new allegation, one that the Times apparently didn’t see the need to cover in any substantive way, is the case of Beatrice Keul. It’s worth repeating, over and over, what the report says about this new allegation:

Beatrice Keul credibly alleges that Trump violently raped her at a November 1993 pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and that Epstein, Trump, and others used this pageant as a “hunting ground” to prey on vulnerable young women and girls.

A hunting ground.

Violently raped.

Vulnerable women and girls.

Hello, Cornell.

The New York Times probably does have a story on this. Somewhere. It didn’t show up in my email feed, and it isn’t on the front page of their website as I write this.

The top headline on their website should look like this:

This is the story of our times. It is the news story of the century. Full stop. Nothing else comes close. It should be front and center every day.

They covered Watergate every day for months. In comparison to the Epstein scandal, Watergate was nothing more than a few drunk campaign aides tipping over a vending machine to snag some free Zapp’s voodoo potato chips.

If the new accusation was a siloed event, I could understand a modicum of skepticism on the part of editors. If it was the first time someone has come forward and it feels like an October surprise? Sure, I can understand some hesitation. Politics being politics, and all that.

But Trump has faced a litany of credible accusations ever since he appeared on the public scene. He was recorded years ago flirting with preteen girls on an escalator. It wasn’t some spurious claim by a disgruntled aide. It was a recording.

He admitted to “grabbing pussy” to an entertainment bozo with a tape recorder. E. Jean Carroll has been kicking his ass all over the planet for his attempt to cover up the truth behind his sexual assault against her. He failed at that, and the Supreme Court told him to pay up. There’s a court record of this. He sexually assaulted Ms. Carroll and spent years trying to cover it up.

The new accusation in this report didn’t appear out of a vacuum. Neither will the next. Todd Blanche, the cover-up expert of all time, must use AI to keep up with the dizzying litany of sexual assault charges against this grotesque, inhuman, bipedal pile of orange toxic sludge.

More from the report:

Read that last line again:

Maria Farmer described how Epstein had to actively prevent Trump from preying on her late at night after Trump confused her with a teenage girl potentially victimized by Epstein.

Epstein had to actively prevent Trump from preying on someone he thought was a teenager.

Epstein is the one who had to slow Trump’s roll? Really????? How was this not the first thing out of every American anchor person’s mouth this morning?

This report is full of enough headlines to keep New York Times headline writers busy every day for the next two years.

Each of the allegations in this report deserves its own headline. Every single one should be front and center of the news cycle. Not just with the New York Times, but CNN, Fox, yes, Fox, and everyone who cares about what should be the most basic, simple law of morality known to humans: a woman’s body is sacrosanct and is not a plaything for boys or men.

This is not a complicated topic. This should not be something open to debate, no matter what podcast bros say to each other during their endless misogyny fests.

The same media entities that covered Cornell (as they should have) are ignoring the same kinds of allegations against a U.S. President.

Why? Who is paying them off? Just how deep is this Epstein crime ring? Does it include editors and publishers?

Well. Of course it does.

Else, they’d not be so damn gun shy about covering it.

1997

That’s how long mainstream media has been dancing around the Epstein/Trump crime spree.

If this reminds you of something else I wrote recently, glass clink.

Trump views women as chattel. News at ten.

The report goes on to detail how Todd Blanche, Trump’s official cover-up boy toy, has used the Department of Justice as Trump’s personal law firm to cover this scandal up.

It’s the crime of the century.

But the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media keep ignoring it.

Notes

Here is the full House report on these scumbags (PDF):

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2026-10.hjc-dems-staff-report-epstein-and-trump.pdf

A real journalist would probably say that Blanche has “allegedly” covered up crimes. I’m going to go out on a very thick, sturdy limb that could support a hundred Republican deviants and say that he has, and if he sues me, he can present the evidence of a fully unredacted set of Epstein files showing that he hasn’t. I think we all know how that will go.

But okay, allegedly. There. Now, Blanche, fuck right off. I used the magic word. As the king of cheating the law, this should make you happy.

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Thanks to the Big Bullshit Bill, the regime now has an almost incomprehensible $240 billion to spend on Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing programs.

Some of that spending is now funnelled into places you’ll never hear about, such as local police departments.

ICE has developed a federally funded program that pays local police departments $100,000 for vehicles, $7,500 for each cop who joins the program, and federal funding to cover quarterly performance bonuses involving deportation numbers, salaries, and overtime.

The program recruits local municipal police agencies and county sheriff departments.

ICE is transforming your local police departments into centers of terrorism against their own citizens.

According to this ProPublica report, “More than 1,900 agencies in at least 30 states have signed up for ICE’s task force model, with more than 29,000 deputized officers. With their help, ICE recently hit a record of immigration arrests, totaling more than 50,000 in August.”

This is a story about one of their new stormtroopers, a local cop in Ingram Texas who has singlehandedly deported ten percent of his town.

And it’s about a town where the streets have gone silent as its residents cower in fear.

There’s no way I can do justice to this article. I’m not going to try to blow you away with my usual snark. Partly, because I’m too freaked out about the growing police state we have become, and partly because I want the facts to do the talking.

So you’ll need to read the story on ProPublica, which is free, no paywall, no nagging popups, no ads. Just pure journalistic integrity, a rarity during these times:

A Texas Cop Signed on to Help ICE Deport His Neighbors. It Tore the Town Apart.

Read it here

If you come back when you’re done, please restack this. It’s important. And vote.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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This reporting comes from the Chicago Tribune, which used to be a reliably Republican newspaper famous for a crazed Colonel and an editorial staff of conservative editors:1

PARIS, Ill. – In his dreams, Jose Fiscal Belli is still living an all-American life with his all-American family.

Each day, he comes home to his wife, a hazel-eyed, small-town preacher’s daughter. Together, they raise four children and run the Main Street Cafe, where they serve country fried chicken and eggs to a feisty bunch of regulars. He also co-owns a Mexican restaurant just across the state line in Clinton, Indiana.

Everyone knows Jose in Paris, Illinois, located about 165 miles south of Chicago. He coaches Little League. Police officers ask for his help as a volunteer Spanish translator. He is known to donate whole meals to the local soup kitchen. When 8-year old Crosby Allen needed a new bat but didn’t have the money, Jose gave him one.

He fits right into the mostly white town of roughly 8,000 people where a laundromat offers free laundry day for those who can’t afford it and a local group builds wheelchair ramps for disabled residents.

Now, Jose is in an ICE concentration camp in Louisiana.

This, after being moved out of one of the makeshift ICE concentration camps that rural county sheriffs are providing to ICE. ICE sent Jose to Oldham County Jail in La Grange, Kentucky, by way of Clay County, Illinois, because I guess Oldham County sheriff deputies ran out of meth users to lock up.

Even more insidious: Jose was pulled over by Indiana State Police after, and I kid you not, he parked in the wrong spot at a government building. From there he went to a county lockup in Clay County, Indiana, then to Oldham County Jail, then to Louisiana.

According to Paris Mayor Craig Smith, “They had him in Clay County and moved him in the middle of the night to Louisiana,” Smith said. “That’s what they do. We’re living it. It’s happened here.”2

His wife Courtney posted on social media that amidst rampant violence, Jose’s Louisiana concentration camp has one bathroom for 147 detainees, the lights are on 24/7, he is perpetually stalked by surrounding inmate violence ignored by Gestapo guards, and that he was transported through Louisiana’s stifling heat in a metal van without air conditioning.

Indiana. Kentucky. Louisiana. Three beet-red states happy to be of service to Stephen Miller’s Gestapo.

Paris is a town of about 8,000, the vast majority of them white and Trumpy.

When Miller’s ICEStapo snatched one of their own, they suddenly were not so sure anymore that they signed up for all this.

You can yell at them all you want, but it won’t change any of the facts on the ground. They were brainwashed by a combination of Fox News and Vladimir Putin’s social media propaganda troll farm in St. Petersburg, Russia, with a big assist from Elon Musk’s Apartheid Twitter hate box.

You weren’t brainwashed. I understand that. But some people were, and that’s the hand we’ve been dealt. The propaganda effort on behalf of the regime is so extant that not even viable rumors that the man in the Oval Office is a pedophile have been enough to destroy his 30% forever wall of support.

Since then, prices have soared. The national debt has reached obscene levels. Data centers are sucking up farmland. Tariffs are destroying small businesses. The presidency has become an endless carousel of grift. Diesel is driving farmers into bankruptcy from a crazy, lost war. Trump has sold out to Russia and can’t blather out one paragraph of words without sounding like he just fell off a tomato truck.

Most of these can’t be covered up by the brainwashing machine.

Conservatives in rural towns across America are wondering what the fuck is happening because it’s all in their faces, every single day.

The Prairie Press, Paris’ local paper, ran a front-page cover story reflecting the town’s mood after Jose was snatched by Stephen Miller’s ICEstapo:

I would like to suggest to the fine editors of the Prairie Press that all immigrants are one of ours, but I’m going to try to stick with empathy for now until I see how Paris votes in eleven days.

In the meantime, I’ll let the Prairie Press pick up where the Chicago Tribune left off:3

By Victoria Leitch vleitch@prairiepress.net

For years, Jose Fiscal Belli has been known around Paris as the man who showed up.

He coached Little League games, sponsored youth athletics, helped feed local teams, supported community fundraisers and recently opened Main Street Cafe in downtown Paris with his wife, Courtney.

Now, as the husband and father of four sits in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, it is his family, friends and city leaders who are asking the community to show up for him.

The call came Monday, July 27, during the Paris City Council meeting, where a resident stood before city leaders not to debate an ordinance or ask about city services, but to ask how an entire community could help one of its own.

“I am here as a citizen of this community, and I would like to find out about one of our citizens who is in trouble,” the resident said. “I’d really like to help and gather other people together who might like to help, but I don’t want to do that if it’s not in the best interest of the family at this time.”

Mayor Craig Smith responded by explaining that the City of Paris has already reached out to federal officials but has little authority in an immigration case.

Instead, he said, the family needs the community’s voice.

“If you want to do something, call,” Smith said. “Get your friends to call. The calls seem to work better than anything else. It shows them that he is an active person in the community. He’s a good person.”

The online version of the article then lists numbers to call. Wouldn’t it be great if a call-in effort went national?

Hint, hint.

Here are the numbers suggested by Prairie Press:

More from the small Paris newspaper:

Family friend Nick Conner, who organized a fundraiser to help the Fiscal Belli family, said Jose was brought to the United States from Mexico as a minor by his father, who came seeking work to support relatives back home. After immigration officers conducted a raid on the apartment building where they were living in Minnesota, Jose and his father were detained and later released because they had committed no crime and were not the intended targets of the operation.

Soon afterward, the family relocated to Indiana for work.

According to Conner, an immigration court notice was mailed to the family’s former Minnesota address after they had already moved. Because neither Jose nor his father knew about the hearing, they missed it, and a removal order was entered against Jose in 2011 while he was still a minor.

Conner said neither the family nor Jose’s immigration attorney knew that order existed for years.

Despite that, Jose continued building a life.

He married Courtney in 2021, and together they began the legal process for him to obtain permanent residency through a marriage-based green card.

According to Conner, every step of that process had been approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Smith likewise told the council that Jose had been working with an immigration attorney for approximately four years and had already advanced to the second stage of naturalization, with a required family interview even being waived because he had no criminal record.

Then, last week, everything changed.

Smith said Jose traveled to Indianapolis on restaurant business.

“He made a mistake,” Smith said. “He went to Indianapolis to get a license for the restaurant in Clinton. He parked in a 10-minute meter area. He exceeded the 10 minutes. They gave him a ticket, ran the plates, bingo! ICE was contacted. Just a crazy, crazy deal.”

Because of the years-old removal order, Jose was taken into ICE custody.

Townsfolk consider Jose to be a community leader. He coaches Little League, mentors kids, and, through his restaurant, feeds those who can’t afford it. The town is heartbroken.

One article about Rural America after another is showing up, even in the corporate media, reporting on how rural voters feel betrayed. This is one of the more visceral, punch-to-the-gut stories.

And I feel for them, I really do.

But I’ll be watching the results of the election in Paris very closely on November 3. Because they might not understand that Jose is a fairly typical example of the Mexican culture the regime is trying to drive out of the country.

Let’s see if they mean what they say about Jose. Paris Mayor Smith told a crowd of Illinois Parisians who gathered recently to see what they could do, “This is not political. This is what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Elections have consequences. And actions speak louder than words. I’m watching you, Paris. We’ll see how much you care soon enough.

Footnotes (and full articles relating to this)

3

Leitch, Victoria. “This Is One of Ours.” The Prairie Press, July 29, 2026. https://prairiepress.net/stories/this-is-one-of-ours,156836.

---

Today’s music isn’t white and Trumpy, it’s White and Nerdy, by Weird Al

Let’s finish by lightening the mood a little. And, as always, thanks for reading!

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I don’t know Marina (not her real name) well. She worked with me for a couple of years remotely from her home in Lviv, Ukraine.

I know her well enough to recall that she was a hard worker, had a pleasant disposition, had an awesome accent, an adorable child, a devoted husband, and a very nice curio full of figurines and other collectibles in the living room.

Sometimes, during our Zoom “standup meetings” (everyone always sits for these), her squiggly toddler would pop her head in and smile and fiddle with something. “No, don’t do that,” Marina would say, mildly, about as annoyed as a kid lapping up an ice cream cone. She was a mother first, a software engineer second.

Then, one awful day in the middle of one of our software projects, she became a Ukrainian first, wondering if Vlad Putin was going to blow her curio, her home, her child, to smithereens.

That's what recently happened to the child being held in the top photo a little more than 4 years later.

Marina’s boss, the lead engineer for the Ukraine development team on our projects, began to tell us in his daily status reports over Zoom that there was a small chance a code change might be delayed a day or two because he'd be busy making Molotov cocktails that evening. He'd try his best, he'd say, but, well, the Molotovs came first. “I hope you understand,” he'd say to dead silence from the American team because we were still stupefied by the insanity of the invasion.

This was before the line of Russian tanks began to stall on the outskirts of Kyiv. This was when everyone thought it was only a matter of time until kids who write code for a living would be throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks rolling into Lviv, just 40 miles away from the Polish border.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, I was struck by how similar her home was to millions of homes in the United States, and I wondered how we’d fare if a nation with Russia’s firepower rolled across our border and attacked us.

When Marina later dialed into a meeting from a church basement in Poland as a refugee, with her toddler in tow, the difference between my situation and hers became stark.1

Putin the humanitarian

This week, TrumpleSnakeSkin’s busiest diplomat, billionaire real estate Tycoon Steve Witkoff, called Putin a humanitarian during a meeting with him, most likely to discuss a new business partnership.2

This is the same week that a Russian strike killed the baby you see in the picture at the top of this essay.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of Ukrainian children have had their lives snuffed out by Witkoff’s humanitarian. When the news of this particular child’s death hit the interwebs this week, I thought of Marina, and the hundreds of times her city was struck by missiles during the last four and a half years when she and her child could have been one of the humanitarian’s victims, too.

Ukraine wasn’t the first

In 1999, Vladimir Putin ordered the complete destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny.

The Russian military laid waste to Grozny, killing tens of thousands of civilians. In Putin’s own words, his troops “fulfilled their task to the end.”

These paragraphs, written for Boston’s local NPR affiliate WBUR, are typical of the reports of the media summarizing Vladimir Putin’s destruction of Grozny when Chechen nationalists tried to secede from Russia.3

Here’s more (bold is mine):

By October 1999, then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the complete takeover of the Chechen capital of Grozny. From December 1999 to February 2000, the Russian military laid siege to Grozny. Putin vowed that the military would not stop bombing Grozny until Russian troops quote ‘fulfilled their task to the end.’ They finished in February 2000, when the BBC’s Andrew Harding stepped foot into Grozny, a place the U.N. declared the most destroyed city on Earth.

Russian troops drive into Grozny, the city they destroyed in order to capture. In the suburbs, we saw mile after mile of total devastation, not a single house or cottage intact. Giant craters everywhere. Most streets are still too dangerous to walk down. Thousands of mines and booby traps have been discovered by Russian troops. Not always intentionally. ... This is unreal, it’s like walking through a World War II film set, this was the center of Grozny. These were 12, 15 story apartment blocks. Now there is nothing left here…

…This was an oil town, a prosperous oil town of half a million people. And it was flattened totally, block by block, ruthlessly, efficiently, deliberately. With every single weapon short of nuclear that the former Soviet army had.

Nobody really knows how many people were killed in Grozny.

Putin’s been at it ever since.

Georgia

In 2008, he ordered ethnic cleansing in the nation of Georgia, a hop, skip, and a jump away from Chechnya, his earlier killing field.

192,000 people in Georgia lost their homes during Georgia’s attempt to break away from Russia. Putin relied heavily on a proxy, the armed forces of a place called South Ossetia, which was loyal to Putin. Human Rights Watch, an international agency with a name that describes its purpose, declared the region an ethnic cleansing zone led by South Ossetia, with Putin and his Russian troops applauding from the sidelines.4

Ukraine

Alexander Nimayeva was a father of five living in the freezing realm of Siberia whose experience with guns most likely centered around taking a shot or two at a furry Siberian varmint. Suddenly, one fine day in February 2022, he was on his way to fight Ukrainians.

According to his wife, a journalist in the southern Siberian region of Buryatia, Alexander received a summons to report “to an urgent 4 a.m. meeting where it was announced that a train had been organized to bring men to the city of Chita,” according to the New York Times.5

“My husband is 38 years old, he is not in the reserve, he did not serve,” Ms. Nimayeva said in a video addressed to regional officials.

Despite their Russian-sounding names, many Russians in the Siberian hinterlands are not ethnic Russians, which makes them supremely expendable in the eyes of vampire Vlad. Russian demographics and geography give him a built-in advantage: It’s easy to gather non-Russians and conscript them into his war against Ukraine by simply feasting on large geographic regions of the Russian Federation that are full of them.

According to the New York Times, folks in Yakutsk, which for me was, curiously, always a favorite target when I played Risk as a kid, were “being taken by airplane out of remote Arctic villages.”6

The Russian defense minister at the time, Sergei Shoigu, claimed on Russian state-controlled television that “only” 300,000 men (as if that’s not a lot) were being marched into conscription. Reports around Russia indicated much higher numbers.7

The Nova Gazeta, a former Moscow-based newspaper shut down by Putin and now publishing out of Ukraine, reported at the time that “The secret seventh paragraph of the decree on mobilization allows the Ministry of Defense to call up one million people.”8

Putin ultimately conscripted a lot more than that. The casualty list within the Russian armed forces looks like something from a world war: 1,572,790 killed or wounded.

Many of those killed were men like Alexander Nimayeva, the father of five living in the freezing realm of Siberia. We don’t know where he is today, but there’s a good chance he’s buried six feet deep in the Siberian tundra.

Meanwhile, Putin has been threatening the world with nuclear annihilation if his fortunes in Ukraine don’t turn around, which they never do, even when he rains missiles onto Kyiv.

Putin understands terror.

In the war’s early days, when the war seemed to be going his way, he sent troops into seized Ukrainian territory door-to-door to take a vote among the terrorized people still living there.

This was a typical scenario:9

“Do you agree that your territory is now a part of the great Russian motherland?” a tipsy Russian soldier, armed with a Kalashnikov and his face hidden by a balaclava, would ask a terrified homeowner. The poor woman, shaking and just wanting to get back to her beet borscht because that’s all there was left to feed her kids, shakily nodded her head as the soldier jotted down her reply.

I’m not sure what the result would have been if the answer had been “no”, but I’m also pretty sure the answer was never “no”.

Teachers, too, were subjected to a form of terror that only a sadistic mind like Vlad’s could conceive:10

In the Buryatia region, teachers have been tasked with distributing draft notices, according to Vladimir Budaev, an activist with the Free Buryatia Foundation, an antiwar group based abroad. An acquaintance there received his summons at 11 p.m. on Wednesday from a teacher knocking on the door, he said.

And you thought we treated teachers like crap in the U.S.

One more quote from that New York Times story:

On social media, activists in regions like Kabardino-Balkaria in the Caucasus and Yakutia in northeastern Siberia kept a running tally of the summonses that had arrived in various villages. A woman who has already lost one son in the war told a New York Times reporter that three buses carrying newly mobilized soldiers had left her town in Dagestan, in the Caucasus, one of Russia’s poorest regions.

And this:

In Neryungri, the second largest town in Sakha, also known as Yakutia, video footage appeared to show dozens of men being gathered at the Gornyak football stadium and loaded on to buses bound for recruitment centres, as family members bid tearful farewells. Many of the men appeared to be in their 30s and 40s.

People in Russia quickly learned how to say their goodbyes:

CNN reported at the time that some Russian citizens who had the temerity to protest Putin’s call-ups were rewarded for their chutzpah by getting drafted at police stations immediately after getting arrested for protesting the war.

Meanwhile, the more sophisticated members of Putin’s army (in other words, the soldiers who aren’t running away from Ukrainian bullets) held guns to the heads of nuclear workers at Zaporizhzhia while its poor workers tried to prevent a nuclear catastrophe during the initial Russian invasion.11

Every day one of Putin’s missiles lands near the plant is another opportunity for a meltdown that would make Chernobyl seem like an insignificant fireworks accident.

So much for the argument that he won’t lob nukes because of the threat of fallout.

And there’s this, from the BBC:12

Sergei — not his real name — has already been called up.

The 26-year-old PhD student and lecturer was expecting a delivery of groceries the night before the Putin address, when two men arrived in civilian clothes handing him military papers to sign.

That, my friends, is Putin’s version of humanitarianism. Back then, the referendum and other armed forces “recruitment” tactics were well known in European circles. Along with the constant threats of nukes, it scared the pants off our European friends.

Putin has made it clear from the beginning of this long, World War One-style war that there would be no limits to Russian war tactics against Ukraine. Including nukes.

You can be sure that Ukraine’s current attacks on Russia’s refineries have turned the already dark-minded Putin into a seething demon with visions of genocide dancing in his head.

Putin’s “humanitarianism” started early in the Ukraine War.

One of the first things that Witkoff’s humanitarian friend Putin did in this war was repeat his Grozny frenzy by destroying the Ukrainian city of Mariupol when he was unable to seize it with his ground troops.

First, he laid siege to it for four months, cutting it off from everything, including food supplies. Folks, this was when the war was going well for him.

Ukrainian troops tried to take shelter in Mariupol’s Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, but were smoked out by terror bombing, and eventually surrendered.

The Red Cross, which has seen a bit of fighting and isn’t known for hyperbole, called Mariupol’s situation during the siege “apocalyptic.”13

The humanitarian’s terror bombing included strikes against places like a children’s and maternity hospital, which was full of women in labor when it was destroyed.

This has been Putin’s modus operandi since his initial invasion of Ukraine. His current tactic is to try to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in time for winter so its people can freeze to death.

Even his successful manipulation of the Trump regime, which has resulted in the Startlink/Starshield service intermittently dropping service, which in turn results in Ukrainian defense drones dropping from the skies, is a form of terror. Imagine trying to program your drones to rely on such a thing. Imagine trying to protect your troops this way.

The maestro of violence

Like the great Russian cultural masters, Putin is a master choreographer. He has turned Russia’s tradition of cultural magnificence on its head by turning violence into an art form.

The Russian master of violence poisons Russian defectors even after they leave the country.14 He locks up his political opponents at home.15

Alexei Navalny, once one of Putin’s rare political opponents, was flying one day from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk to Tomsk, a city on the Tom River in Siberia.

Before his flight, according to the Guardian, Navalny ordered a cup of tea at an airport cafe. He fell violently ill shortly after boarding his plane:16

“He started feeling really sick. They struggled to bring him round and he was screaming,” Lebedev said. Realising Navalny’s condition was grave, the pilot made an emergency landing at Omsk airport. Navalny was wheeled off on a gurney. Video from the scene showed a supine figure, looking pale and distressed. Medics loaded him into a yellow ambulance. They drove him away.

More from the same Guardian story:

Over the next few hours, the scenes at Omsk hospital number one were ghoulishly awful. According to Yarmysh, medical staff initially acknowledged that Navalny had probably been poisoned. Soon, however, police turned up, flooding the corridor outside the patient’s room. After that the doctors were less forthcoming. They were seemingly terrified of speaking out.

Navalny tried to recover from the poison attack in a Siberian gulag. Then, he died.

Violence is the new Russian art form. Nobody has mastered it better than Vladimir Putin, whom the Trump regime refers to as a humanitarian and who is now being treated as our new ally.

Putin incites conflict in Europe and faraway lands like America. Brexit, after all, was one of his St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency’s first successful initiatives. It was a practice run for the American elections.17

When Western economies or governments struggle, the Internet Research Agency shifts into high gear. You can be sure its troll farm is heavily involved in France’s current social unrest, no matter how genuine much of it is.

This is the same troll apparatus that helped the Con-in-Chief beat Hillary in 2016, something she’s keenly aware of these days, considering she’s one of the few Democrats who have consistently spoken out about Russian interference in American politics.

Putin’s war against America

Putin hasn’t directly attacked America. Instead, the Russian impresario of violence used the internet to sow divisiveness and hate while he helped install a sociopathic president. Years from now, his actions will be studied in war colleges around the world, if they aren’t already.

He’s been waging a stealth war against the United States pretty much since he gained power after the disastrous term of Boris Yeltsin, who never met a glass of vodka or an oligarch he didn’t like.

Putin famously aimed his internet army at U.S. social media sites to influence the election because he correctly saw the Orange Mouth of Methane as an epicenter of American destabilization. Russian influence on the bloviator’s henchmen is alleged to include such charming individuals as Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort, both of whom managed the Orange Puffaroon’s presidential campaign.18

According to the Mueller Report, which we’ve all forgotten because it was buried by the administration being investigated, there were multiple Russian/Bannon connections, including:

The sharing of polling data with an alleged Russian intelligence operative, a practice begun by Bannon’s predecessor Paul Manafort, continued into the period while Bannon was running the Trump campaign. Manafort was also in contact with Bannon during the period.

Bannon also played a key role in setting up the meeting in the Seychelles between Trump adviser Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the sanctioned, state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund, and subsequently discussed the meeting with Prince.

— The Moscow Project

Steve Bannon’s ability to stay out of a federal penitentiary is now legendary in the right-wing world of snakes and snarls. Even when it looked like he’d be swept up in the tide of Mueller’s investigations, he continued to blather in his “War Room” podcasts as if he would remain untouched forever.

Then Merrick Garland became Biden’s Attorney General, and decided to take a long nap with his feet on top of his desk in a remarkable display of lazy intellectual flatulence that will be studied by law schools for the next hundred years.

One would think that once the Orange Pestilence was elected, Putin would have been happy with the victory.

One would be wrong, because humanitarians like Putin are never happy.

Putin then went after American women, proving that it isn’t only Republicans who have disdain for the better gender.19

Russia’s army of internet orcs staged a sustained attack on a Women’s March in 2017, which was the first significant protest against the head of New York’s luckiest crime family after he snuck into the Oval Office with fewer popular votes than “Lock her up” Hillary.

They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners. But one message performed better with audiences than any other.

It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Ms. Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.

18 months, 152 Russian social media accounts, and 2,642 tweets later, Russian attacks on Linda Sarsour, the original leader of the Women’s March, were so successful that her name became synonymous with the disintegration of the movement’s organized effort against their worst enemy.

Russia continues its attacks on America through social media to this day.

Most of us think things like, “those dumb rural idiots and their love for the Moron of Mar-a-Lago is sheer madness,” without considering the very simple and quite discoverable truth that their thinking is significantly shaped by Russian intelligence officers tapping at their keyboards in St. Petersburg, Russia.

This sustained attack has produced meme after meme after meme, trying to influence Americans. They post on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, TikTok, and others in an attempt to shape opinion.

Short of war, there’s not much you and I can do about this. But we can do one thing: Realize that most of the trolls you see on a variety of social media sites are paid by Vlad Putin’s oil money, which American President Krasnov has now helped unleash at a level not seen since Putin’s war against Ukraine began.

What is Russia without its despots?

Sadly, Russia has a long history of despotic rulers. The nation, for all its cultural immensity, has always had a bit of an inferiority complex.20

But now, its people are paying a nasty penalty for their subservience. They looked askance as the war grew, pretending that their favorite American brands were leaving because America is mean.

Now, Putin is calling more of their children to war and forcing Russian citizens into gasoline queues reminiscent of American gas lines during the OPEC crisis of the 1970s.

More than a million of its young people have been killed or maimed by Witkoff’s humanitarian.

We can’t know yet if the worst is yet to come, or how much worse it can get if it does come.

But the fact that the Trump regime is trying to turn someone like this into an ally can only mean one thing. The United States is now a part of a new Axis of Evil.

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Footnotes

2

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.

Today, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton told Kara Swisher: “I continue to believe that Putin has things on Trump. I continue to believe that he is holding photos, videos, whatever it might be.” Clinton reiterated that Trump “is a willing Putin puppet to help Putin. Putin’s not going to stop with Ukraine…. I guess Trump has this idea that he wants to divide the world,” Clinton said. “He gets the Western Hemisphere, Putin gets Russia and Europe, and Xi Jinping gets the rest of the world.”

Letters from an American

October 21, 2026

Everything feels out of whack in the United States…

Read more

a day ago · 2381 likes · 226 comments · Heather Cox Richardson

Of course, I’ve gone further than Hillary in the past on just how compromised the Traitor-in-Chief is. It all began in the 1980s:

Hillary has long been one of the very few prominent Democrats willing to accuse him of being in Putin’s lap.

One advantage to letting a novel sort of drift away for a bit is that it helps me become as close to a second pair of eyes as I can be without actually having that fresh pair of eyes.

The novel is set in an alternative world where the United States is formed not by the illusion of the magnificence of the European tradition we were all taught in high school, but on, instead, a failed Colonial revolution and a subsequent, and immediate, emancipation of North American slaves who nurture a different economic and governing style.

As the historian who annotates the novel says, the emancipation is one “final tax by the crown.” The early emancipation is not an act of kindness. Instead, a bitter King George III considers it a form of enduring punishment in retribution for the revolution.

A victorious Cornwallis grants the Colonials most of the things they originally asked for, but the Brits are convinced that by releasing all of the slaves, the new nation that eventually emerges will become bogged down, and the existence of so many freed Africans running around on their own will neuter any hopes it might have of becoming a world power.

Instead, the opposite happens. All those newly freed slaves harness their creative resources, and a Black renaissance begins in the majority-Black Carolina Low Country that spreads across the Atlantic to Africa, which never endures stifling European colonialism.2

I bring this up on a Sunday because one of the essential aspects of the novel is that a form of Christian theology quite different than Eurocentric Christianity becomes central to the new nation that eventually forms.

The opening of the novel begins with a Bible passage that represents this profound difference:

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.

— Acts 22:44-45

A form of governance called congregational economics takes hold. The newly freed Africans embrace theology as a central tenet of government. But it’s not the kind of theology we are used to. There’s no shariah law here. It’s a form of government that believes in the kind of Christianity that was buried by 2,000 years of patriarchy in our timeline.

To give you an idea: One of the new nation’s leaders is a gay high priestess who leads one of the most powerful congregations in North America. Congregations own the means of production and become equivalent to our corporations, but instead of assigning wealth to a few, congregants hold all the money and power.

Is that kind of world even possible? Not to us, it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter much, because the ideas behind the novel aren’t presented as a viable alternative to our world so much as an allegory of complaint about our current system.

In this alternative world, there was no “Trail of Tears” because of a tricky (at first) alliance between the indigenous population and the newly freed slaves who eventually seize power in the South. A different kind of world emerges.

This is presented in a Restive Souls teaser novella set in the modern world. The full novella, a whodunit of sorts, is here (no paywall):

And there’s also this adjacent Restive Souls short story about a guy from our timeline who somehow (the “somehow” is never explained because it’s irrelevant) wakes up in the alternative world of Restive Souls:

Restive Souls is a world that can’t imagine the heroism behind killing a 16-year-old boy carrying a semi-automatic weapon into an elementary school to slaughter children.

The dichotomy of this heroism is part of my fundamental conflict with the society I live in. Yes, I’m glad someone was able to jump into his pickup truck and put an end to what could have been a tragic slaughter similar to Sandy Hook. That should go without saying.

But I can’t celebrate a bullet-ridden 16-year-old boy, either. Such an outcome is one of the many failures of our society.

We are all restive souls seeking to free ourselves from the captivity of oligarchs who are determined to keep us pinned down and divided. They encourage factions to face off against one another because they mistakenly think it will keep them in power.

If I blame you for something, it cuts into my power to blame them.

But restive souls never bargain with their tormentors once they discover they have the power to set themselves free.

That’s what the restive souls in my novel discover.

Oligarchs are poised to discover the same thing. If they someday find the key to life that extends hundreds of years, that extended life will exist in a cloak of misery of their own making, in a soulless world full of nothing but toys and automatons.

The oligarchs are pouring money into the Midterm Elections because they sense the rising tide against them. They think they can win by manipulating society with their social media platforms and money.

But chains can only keep a restive population captive for so long before they’re broken.

Because I’m an optimist, I must believe that winter is coming for the oligarchs.

Hopefully, someday soon, Restive Souls will also be coming… to a bookstore near you, if I can find a publisher not beholden to the oligarchy that owns the vast majority of our media.

Notes

I’m shopping the book again to agents and independent publishers after a major revision.

If you’re an agent interested in seeing a full manuscript, you know where to find me. If I’ve contacted you and you sent me a form letter replying that it doesn’t “fit your list,” well, it doesn’t fit any other list either, and since I need an agent who believes in the concept and who has a somewhat active imagination of her own, I think that it’s fair to agree we aren’t a fit. So, good job!

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Footnotes

I’ll start with this mainstream media post from one of the usual sanewashing suspects, Semafor:1

Senate Democratic candidates are posting eye-popping third-quarter fundraising numbers, cutting into Republicans’ midterm spending advantage across the map. James Talarico raised $64 million in Texas, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff brought in $33 million, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown brought in $28.2 million between his fundraising committees, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper raised $19.5 million, former Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola took in $17 million, Kansas Democrat Adam Hamilton raised $10.6 million, and Rep. Chris Pappas raised $8.1 million in New Hampshire. The GOP Senate Leadership Fund super PAC brought in $273 million while Democratic Senate Majority PAC raised $151 million. But the individual campaign numbers are important because candidates get better ad rates than outside groups. Talarico’s haul earned a “holy crap” from Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio

When the mainstream media is unable to deny the obvious train coming, I think it means things are looking up if we all vote. Early indications are that everyone and then some is turning their anger towards the congressional enablers of the most horrific regime in modern American history.

Of course, Semafor had to add a qualifier from Moreno in the name of fair and balanced, which I didn’t include here.

The Semafor numbers are supported by our friends from The Downballot, who produced a comprehensive review of fundraising in every Senate and House election for these Midterms.

Here’s a screen capture of just part of it (numbers are in the thousands, meaning that Democrat Mary Peltola raised nearly $16.4 million in the third quarter, and Dan Sullivan raised $2.6 million):

The only state in that small group where Democrats were outraised is Alabama, which is still considered a lost state.

Alaskan U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola, who lives and breathes the Alaskan life and is about to walk away with a win there, is wiping the floor using Dan Sullivan’s greasy red hat. She’s going to be a little more conservative than some of you will like, but it’s Alaska. Take the win.

No surprise with John Hickenlooper, who’s a reliable, consistent vote-getter for Democrats in Colorado.

Samesies with Chris Coons in Delaware.

The big surprise to me is Angie Nixon (that’s her at the top of this post), who I have a somewhat unhealthy crush on for a man my age. She pulled in $7.5 million compared to Republican incumbent Ashley Moody’s $2.4 million.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is pounding his opponent Mike Collins with such merciless takedowns that a new word should enter the lexicon, raised $32.12 million compared to Collins’ $2.73 million.

After the cremation Collins experienced in the most recent debate, it’s time for that new word. Here is how to use it:

“You really got Ossoffed by that guy.”

“Careful, or I’ll have to Ossoff you.”

“You’ve been Ossoffied.”

“Do your homework, or you’ll get the Ossoff treatment”

“I hereby sentence you to ten years of Ossoffication.”

“What happened to you? You look like you’ve just been smacked down by an Ossoff.”

Oh, and the Stacey Abrams get out the vote (GOTV) infrastructure is alive and cooking in Georgia. Democrats in Florida and other Southern states should take notes.

Meanwhile, Paralympian Josh Turek is winning hearts and minds in a U.S. Senate campaign for Iowa. I repeat: Iowa. And he’s winning the fundraising battle now, too, with $13.6 million coming his way in the third quarter compared to Ashley Hinson’s $3.2 million.

This is all grassroots fundraising. It means that people like you are spending their hard-earned money to defeat the oligarchy, which is best represented by Elon Musk, who spent… are you sitting for this?

$168 million to try to bolster the campaign of serial criminal and Christian fundamentalist adulterer Ken Paxton, whose wife divorced him on “Biblical Grounds.”

But Musk’s ill-gotten money hasn’t slowed down Paxton’s opponent, James Talarico, who raised $59.63 million compared to Paxton’s $10.2 million during the third quarter using traditional fundraising techniques.

What is Paxton using all that money for?

Chances are, he’s pocketing most of it, which shows you that Musk is not as smart as he wants you to believe.

I’ve also learned from one of Ruminato’s imaginary satirical correspondents, Bob Woodward-Ruff, that the Paxton campaign has used some of the money to develop a new campaign strategy. Here is an exclusive look at two of the campaign flyers his campaign has been leaving on local doorknobs:

And this:

These might be the figment of my imagination. But they might not be.

With $168 million to work with, anything is possible. We can only be sure of one thing with a crook like Ken Paxton. At least half of Musk’s gift will end up in his pocket. No matter how he fares in the election, he’ll be a richer man than he was at the beginning of the year.

Here’s the full set of fundraising tables from The Downballot:

The Downballot

The Downballot's 3Q 2026 Senate and House fundraising reports roundup

Quarterly fundraising reports for congressional candidates covering the period from July 1 to Sept. 30 were due at the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 15 by midnight ET…

Read more

11 days ago · 38 likes · 14 comments

The fundraising numbers tell us that people are ramping up for a historic blue tsunami.

If this election proves anything, it will prove that citizen involvement can beat dark money and oligarchs.

Notes

The Semafor numbers conflict a bit with The Downballot’s, but only in dollar amounts, not in any difference in proportions. Both sources show significant Democratic advantages. The difference is probably attributable to different reporting dates.

Image credits on the fake Paxton campaign ads:

Me, using shirtless Vlad Putin memes and Paxton campaign images. No AI.

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Footnotes

Restive Souls is an alternative history novel/trilogy 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.

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. The Union does not yet have the military resources to deal with him.

Ransom Cane is the leader of the Seminole Nation, who is making a diplomatic visit with a little support from his ironclad (Technology is more advanced in this world because the skills of a huge chunk of the population weren’t hidden by slavery during these formative years).

Bolo’s Notes are annotations by a fictional historian that are littered throughout the novel as a means to provide historical perspective to readers, as if they are reading it from the alternative timeline.

This scene occurs during a scene where Fae conducts a yearly ceremony and feast to expose city residents who help slaves escape his domain.

This excerpt will only be available for a limited time.

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

Ransom Cane eyeballed the strangely pubescent-looking man’s shocking lack of color. The man’s long mustache did little to conceal a lurking immaturity. His tall hat was surely a compensation for his unimpressive stature. Cane’s immediate instinct was to thrust a sharp blade into the man’s protruding gut.

“I invite you to a late tea, or coffee if you prefer, after the festivities are over, and we can discuss your motives for visiting our fine city,” said the shadowy malevolence.

“Have you rum?” replied Cane.

“I’m afraid not, but some fine whiskies. Will that suffice?”

Cane nodded his head. “It would be my pleasure.” He sat down at his table, and the man named Elliot Fae left the table and began to sound out his complaints again to his captive audience.

Sitting next to Cane was Ring Marlton. He and Cane had fought many battles together before the Seminole Nation, called the Ikaniúksalgi among Cane’s people, was born. The bond developed over blood, but the friendship was a long brew within the vast distillery of commerce. Marlton was the Very Reverend Ring Marlton of the St. Augustine Seminole Congregation, which was modeled strongly after a similar congregation on the Carolina Coast started decades earlier by the famed Guillaume Diderot.

“I believe that is acacia,” said Ring, pointing to an altar hoisted next to Fae’s stage by a small troupe of sweating Afrikers. The setting sun was doing little to relieve the swelter.

“Indeed. And the men bringing it about. Who are they, I might wonder?” responded Cane with suspicion. “Those do not look like well cared for congregants, despite their muscular nature.”

“I see whip marks, magistrate, around the lower neck.” The men were dressed in white drawstring pants and aged brown shirts roughly cut at the shoulders. Their faces were gaunt and strained.

“I do not see these.”

“Just as the collar ends, you can see them on two of the men.”

“What have we here?” asked Cane, leaning toward them.

“The congregants at these tables for this ceremony are almost all of European descent. This place reeks of evil.”

Cane nodded.

“And look there,” continued Ring. “Four horns, one on each corner of the altar. Covered in bronze.”

“Exodus twenty-seven,” said Cane.

Ring’s marvelously perfect teeth revealed themselves in a wide smile. “My friend, after twenty years you are beginning to quote the scripture I’ve been teaching you for thirty.”

“And look there, the poles that the men are using to carry the altar, bronze, covering, I reckon, wood,” said Cane.

“He is mimicking the Bronze Altar of Exodus,” replied Ring.

“Indeed he is. Not offensive in itself, but I suspect this heathen rallies the Old Testament to accomplish sinister deeds. There are dark rumors, as well. Kidnappings of descendants of the homeland in the northern city of Philadelphia. Some just a score ago in Charleston. Children. Being brought here, to Savannah. I may believe these rumors now.”

“And that bull,” said Ring. “Such a curious and, I say, non-biblical presentation.”

“Curious indeed. What do you make of it?”

“Its origin? From a historical perspective?”

Cane nodded.

“I cannot guess. I have never seen such a thing. Perhaps it originated in the man’s head. If I were to guess, I’d suggest it is the bull of the sin offering.”

“Leviticus,” said Cane as he glanced at a younger man of his party. He said to the man, “I want you to return to The Archimedes and establish a protocol of high alert. We may not be leaving as peaceably as we arrived.” The young man stood up and slammed his fist to his chest and left.

“A fine lad,” said Cane.

“He feasted well on the most recent Mexican incursions, pathetic as they were.”

Cane smiled at that recollection. “The Spanish left Florida with their tails between their legs. It is sometimes humorous to me when the feces they scattered about the continent attempt to drift into our territory.”

“My friend, you are a hopeless barbarian,” laughed Ring. Ring was the largest man Cane had ever known. Not necessarily the tallest, but the largest. Not full of fat, but full of layers of muscle all intertwining endlessly throughout his body. His dark brown arms could have served as tree trunks in an old-growth forest. His face was almost perfectly round, with two large hoop rings under the bridge of his nose. The top of his head was bald but for a tall indigo mast of hair in the back that rose stiffly before arching to a fall that swung wildly when he walked. But on this day, it was covered by his blue turban topped by heron and egret plumes.

Ring often called Cane a barbarian, but in Cane’s estimation, it was Ring who looked like one. He was a beast of a man, but as gentle as a quiet egret on a still lake. He loved him like a brother, although unlike his blood brother, he was quite sure he wouldn’t lose him to the Spaniards. “As a man of the cloth,” said Cane, “does not this man Fae’s vestments urge you to strike him down?”

“Cane, you would strike down the Pope if he offered the slightest hint of disfavor.”

Cane nodded without expression. “I would, wouldn’t I?” Cane was not a temperamental man, but he believed deeply in the effectiveness of swiftly administered justice, with he often being the judge. The Seminole Nation was an unruly place, in need of a strong pair of hands. Modeling Seminole government according to the admirable democracies that were building the lands north of Florida would have to wait.

Democracy was part of the plan, in fact. Cane had no faith in the concept of succession. Unless it was Ring, who showed no interest. Besides, Cane figured they’d both die together someday. Ring had been the perfect companion to Cane during the conquest of Florida.

He preferred, though, that someday, the Seminole might develop a representative form of government. Guillaume Diderot’s congregational system of government had enveloped the entire East Coast and was quickly spreading inland. Cane found much to like in it. So he had latched onto Ring’s church in St. Augustine years ago and helped persuade Ring of the merits of congregational economics. Ring was a natural. He was part businessman and part preacher. The St. Augustine Seminole Congregation quickly devoured smaller congregations and denominations across the Florida peninsula, some through the persuasive volley of Cane’s fists.

Ring introduced Cane to the teachings of Shyllandrus Zulu, the famous High Priestess of the Carolina Union’s All Saints Congregation, who, as High Priestess for the Vanguard of Mary Congregation, had developed a devoted following. Her beloved book, The Egyptian Gospels, based on the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas, was a sensation across the continent.

“I would,” Cane repeated. “But that’s because the Pope is an ass.” Ring chortled as the two men watched Fae command the attention of his captive audience again from the stage next to the strange bronze bull. A small blind man with muscular arms far out of proportion to the rest of his body was sitting on a stool pounding a miraculous-sounding drum that thundered with such force that Cane thought it would reach the Florida swamps.

“We have a repentant soul!” Fae announced gleefully. A sad, scrawny man had joined him on stage. The man was dressed in a black, short-fronted tailcoat with a fitted waistcoat over a white linen shirt adorned with a great, flowering and intricately tied white linen neckcloth. His tight pantaloons were tucked inside black Hessian boots.

“I do believe that poor man is about to be skewered,” said Cane with amusement.

The mayor, James Wayne, who had been quiet since receiving Fae, broke in with, “Quite.” Cane had forgotten about the mayor, and he glanced his way and raised his eyebrows. Wayne continued, “He is soon to receive the dung of repentance.”

“Good God, do I want detail? I think not,” said Cane. “Whatever might that mean?”

“Watch,” said Wayne, his tone indicating that he was not an admirer of the coming proceedings.

“Behold, as it is said in Malachi chapter two, verse three, I will rebuke your descendants, and I will spread dung on your faces, the waste from your feasts, and you will be carried off with it!” Fae was screaming wildly. Then he quieted down. He tilted his head toward the man, stood on the tips of his toes, and nearly touched the man’s chin with his nose as he spoke softly, “Tell us what you have done.”

The man looked down. “I provided provisions to a Servant of the Lord so that he may attend a family gathering in the Jersey.”

Fae yelled out, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing!” He paced a few circles around the man, looking him up and down, before saying, “Romans seven-nineteen. My dear brother, you have taken from the Lord himself in order that this man, this servant of the Lord, can attend a party. A party! And now, this man’s soul is without God. He is without our help, and he is beyond God’s touch.”

Fae motioned with his hand, which prompted a man in a red hooded robe and vestment to climb up the stage with a bronze bowl. “I take this cow dung,” said Fae, “and streak it across your face in the words of Malachi. Come forth.” The man stepped closer to Fae. “With this shall ye do penance.” Fae reached into the bowl and lifted out brown clods. He streaked the mixture across the man’s face and his linen neckpiece. “Go now. Sit with your family and let them understand what you have done and bestow your penance upon them. Be gone!”

The man scurried away as Fae dipped his hands into another bowl carried by the same man and washed them.

Cane and Ring stared at one another. Then Ring laughed so loudly, with such a deep baritone guffaw, that the noise resonated against the surroundings, much like, Cane thought, the great drum of the blind man.

Cane wasn’t surprised by the events. Fae was tedious, possibly mad. Someone was bound to confess because every man, woman and child was surely eager for Fae’s silence. Cane wondered if the festival guests surreptitiously drew lots to become the sacrificial lamb in order to cease the fool’s musings.

Many people were staring at Cane and his company at the last table near the entrance of the courtyard holding the feast. Cane knew that the way to stop the staring was to somehow interfere with Ring’s laughter, but he was not about to try to control his old friend’s behavior. When Ring noticed the stares, he finally ceased, but then a final quick snort burst through his straightened face.

Cane leaned into the mayor. “Our apologies, Mayor. We are not accustomed to such proceedings.” Unfortunately, that remark initiated another guffaw out of Ring, who had to wipe tears of laughter with a napkin.

Mayor Wayne seemed unaffected by both the events and Ring’s rapturous laughter. “We are proud of our faith in Savannah, Mr. Cane. We understand here that it requires sacrifice. The Lord requires this of us.”

“Does he indeed?” Cane said as more a statement than a question. “I have never been made familiar to those parts of the Bible that delight in public shaming. In fact, I remember most fondly a story concerning stones thrown. Does Savannah have no need for that story?”

“Indeed it does,” replied Wayne. “But not at the expense of its many other teachings.”

Cane nodded. “Tis your land,” he said graciously. Still, he harbored great curiosity about these Servants of the Lord that Fae referred to. He asked Wayne to tell him more about them.

“They be but the most cherished amongst us, Mr. Cane. They are honored as direct servants to the Lord. Truly the greatest honor that can be bestowed upon any living creature. They earn this right by toiling in the rice fields along the great Savannah River, allowing our economy to prosper and trade. With the likes of you, I might add.”

“Well, we certainly could do for some rice in our hungry nation.” He wanted to mention that conquest made men hungry, but he refrained. “Might it be possible to receive a tour of the Servants of the Lord’s encampments? To gain a better understanding of their circumstances?”

“I’m afraid that is not possible. Not even The Reverend Fae’s feet can touch those holy grounds.”

“Who then? Who surveys their work?”

“The Lord’s Shepherd. Peter Shick.”

Notes

Readers of the novel at this point are aware that the revelation that Peter Shick oversees the work of the “servants” is an ominous one.

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

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When 19-year-old Alexandros Paporakis, a cashier at Taco Bell, visited the Sri Venkateswara Swami Balaji Temple in Aurora, Illinois, last Sunday (October 11), he tried to shoot a random worshipper from his car, but his gun jammed.

Like many young, male incels these days, he was so filled with Apartheid TwitterX hate fuel that he felt confident enough to call a coworker at Taco Bell and tell him that, although he had failed, he’d try again.

He then sent his coworker a video of the gun that jammed, an AR-15. He intended to go inside the busy temple and massacre worshippers, according to local police, but when the gun jammed, he fled the scene. He said to his coworker that the man he wanted to shoot was “certainly saved by his God today.”1

This was in the wake of spending several hate-fueled days at Taco Bell telling coworkers that he couldn’t wait to kill Indian people, and that “it” would happen soon.

The Taco Bell coworkers, who live in a multi-ethnic city and were doubtless not pleased to hear of the Musk fanboi’s plans, alerted authorities, who then paid a visit to his home.

Receiving no cooperation from his mother, they found enough military equipment to fill Rambo’s apartment (or Sly Stallone’s $35 million Palm Beach, Florida waterfront estate), along with an eight-page manifesto full of hatred towards Jews, Blacks and people from India.

I should mention here that I used to toil in Aurora as a route driver, and I have strong affection for that river town about 40 miles west of Chicago. I am sure that there was not a substantial Indian population at that time, because I’d remember chomping on lots of delicious Indian food. After I left the Chicago area, South Asians began migrating to Aurora. I would have loved that for a lot of reasons.

The incel’s diatribe stated he wanted to kill as many “subhumans” as possible, not, perhaps, understanding that he, along with the TwitterX master of ceremonies, Elon Musk, are subhumans who would best serve the planet by retreating into subterranean caves for a few hundred thousand years, where they can live the life of Morlocks.

Why am I bringing Musk into this?

The Center for the Study of Organized Hate tells us that the number of South Asian hate messages on Apartheid TwitterX increased 240% from January 2024 to June 2026.2

Anybody notice anything about that time period?

The group Stop AAPI Hate has documented a huge spike in physical threats to go along with that.3

TwitterX is a hate platform. It is fueled by Elon Musk’s consistent, well-documented racism. He posts dozens of hate-filled screeds per day when he’s jacked up on ketamine or obsessing about filling the planet with more white Musk babies.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government is now a hate platform, too. According to reporting by the New York Times:4

As part of the rollout of a new tip line to report truckers suspected of fraud, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image on Sept. 9 of a “Transformers” character facing off with a Sikh man, along with the words: “America for Americans. Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.”

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, at your service. I think we were better off with the dog killer, but that’s a separate post.

The temple’s Executive Director, Sravya Tadepall, said that the growing unease of South Asians under the hate cult that runs the White House is validated by events like the incel’s foiled plot. “Anti-Hindu and anti-Indian hate are escalating to a point of putting our community in danger,” she said.

Aurora Alderwoman Shweta Baid, who became the first Aurora Indian-American alderwoman five years ago, says her family worships there. U.S. Congressional Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi and his family were there on Sunday.

They might all be dead, but not for a few folks working at Taco Bell who finally had enough of the incel’s rants and contacted police. They arrested him this weekend.

We often ask ourselves what’s wrong with this country. Although there is plenty wrong, and plenty of diseased, craven minds out there who don’t need encouragement, keep in mind the boost they receive from the current regime and from the world’s largest “Listen to Me!” social media platform, one that happens to be owned by an active racist.

Midterms are coming. Accountability begins soon.

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Footnotes

I wrote about Putin’s inability to deliver diesel to the United States here:

But an important caveat is that Trump is actively undermining Ukraine enough to possibly turn the tide of Putin’s endless crusade against Ukraine in Russia’s favor.

If you haven’t read about what Trump is doing to Ukraine, you need to. There are Substack posts all over the place covering it.

What I’m going to do is remind you of one of my own in which I provided the history behind Trump’s long association with Russia and asked a simple question:

I have nothing more to say on this topic. Read the post above, which I wrote in March. It digs into the long history of Donald Trump, aka President Krasnov, and his association with Russia. Restack it if it alarms you. And remember this: I’m not revealing any information that isn’t already in front of the public.

All I did was present it in logical, sequential order: A history of Trump’s relationship with Russian intelligence services since the 1980s.

It’s up to us to decide what to do with the information.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

Midterms are coming. This is our last chance. VOTE.

Hate subscriptions? Yeah, so do I. You can make a one time donation, instead, which helps motivate me to keep writing:

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Marco Rubio and his trusty AI assistant, Marty, set forth a plan to deliver a speech for the ages. An epic speech, filled with big, beautiful metaphors about classical Western history.

He gave a Nationalist speech in Greece in front of the Acropolis that should stand your hair on end. He’ll be giving a lot more speeches like this when Trump dies and opens up opportunities for his successor.

I’ve included the entire speech here, but really, you can just focus on my TL;DR parts for the official translation. Ready? Grab your early morning or afternoon hard liquor beverage, and settle in for today’s lesson in fascism!

Mario Rubio’s Acropolis speech

There are great ruins all across the world.

TL;DR: We are working on adding many more. We especially like making ruins out of occupied schoolhouses.

In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself: remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond living memory.

TL;DR: h/t to Marty! Many more to come!

But the Acropolis is different.

For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world. Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it – they’ve looked to it with wonder and they’ve looked to it with awe.

Now time has a tendency to dull the senses: great victories and catastrophic defeats, they seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook, another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget. But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory. They call us back to them, again and again.

480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island. But there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of the age at bay for days. They were eventually overwhelmed. The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground but when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. And decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon.

For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow. And the progeny of the men who built it – the sons of Athens and Rome – have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth.

Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now – I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain – I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.

TL;DR: But my ancestors didn’t arrive on those stinky slave ships filled with heathens and savages. We arrived properly, with really nice Greek artifacts that we stole from Greece, because what’s cooler than a big vase to help decorate a huge sugar plantation full of Africans with yellow fever.

The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city.

TL;DR: We love it so much that we are slathering it all with gold trim.

The city where our Constitution was born – Philadelphia – is itself a Greek name.

TL;DR: Editor’s note: Did y’all know that the main character of Psalm of Vampires is the nephew of Alexander the Great?

Advertising time out!

The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well-read in history —

TL;DR: Just like our hate cult!

— they were vividly aware of their unique place in it – but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity. Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist. No, the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.

Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American Founders – and, for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary – words like democracy, tyranny, the word “politics” itself – found its origins here.

TL;DR: Fair warning: This is where Marco begins to try to build an argument for white nationalism. Read at your own risk.

Now, all of that is true. But the things we owe to this place – as Americans, and as Westerners – are actually far far deeper. These institutions and ideas – these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks – qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.

Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristic of a people – expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.

TL;DR: White people, specifically.

To know them is to know ourselves.

What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man. The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself. Much about – much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outwards to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world.

Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait – it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.

TL;DR: I mean, others could build things, like pyramids in Central America and Egypt, and stuff like that, and, well, lots of stuff in China, and, well, a few other places that don’t count, but, nobody builds them like we do. Besides, other cultures’ main goal was subsistence. Fig trees. Stuff like that.

But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known.

TL;DR: Thanks, Marty!

The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood – and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.

TL;DR: Marty’s on a roll.

This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine. Our philosophy, ethics, and religion. It paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe. and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology – of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.

TL;DR: In other words, this is the origin of the white Jesus. It’s a beautiful thing.

It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology – a common view of man and his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.

TL;DR:

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle – to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards.

We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

TL;DR: Our society no longer strives for those higher goals, and has accepted mediocrity.

Then, my boss came around and said, “To hell with mediocrity! Let’s create the most disgusting, horrific, putrid regime possible. Let’s make it so that people wake up every morning talking about at least one terrible deed emitted directly from my underpants. Today, ending USAID; tomorrow, blowing up San Diego! Onward, Christian soldiers!”

The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction – from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.

TL;DR: Ruh-roh. Here it comes…

Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.

The word “nationalism” became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.

TL;DR: Make “Nationalism” great again! Oh, and can somebody buy some urinals for the USS Abraham Lincoln now that it’s finally docked back in its home port?

And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.

TL;DR: The UN sucks.

But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left – the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.

TL;DR: ChYna sucks.

And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

TL;DR: The transformation of the Strait of Hormuz, aka the Trump Strait, from an international waterway to one fully owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran is our signature accomplishment as we take back our critical supply chains. But we can name many more examples, from tariffs to the loss of access to Canadian toilet paper, which will increase the manufacture of toilet paper in our own country, where it belongs.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Now for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive. They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail. They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.

TL;DR: The Greeks understood that a foreign policy should be built on one principle and one principle alone: Bullying other countries. Bonus points if this includes extrajudicial murders at sea and blowing up a few fishing boats in the Caribbean.

This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim – reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.

We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.

TL;DR: This is why Elon Musk, who has contributed $300 million to the cause of white nationalism during these crucial midterm elections, donated money to and helped encourage the far-right German neo-Nazi party, Alternative for Germany, which recently won big in Saxony-Anhalt and has gained a significant share of seats in Germany’s legislature, the Bundestag.

There are already signs.

Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague.

Greece has been at the center of this shift. The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike, on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally.

And it’s our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example.

Though passions may, at times, have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them. Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age.

And we can. Because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum. Quite the opposite: our vision is of an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a vision we saw in action just last month, in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland – an agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO. All three partners in that deal emerged victorious. All of Europe – and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it.

We want to win together. We must win together.

TL;DR: I don’t understand why y’all hate us so much. Is it too much to ask that you strip away the rights of migrants and kick Ukraine to the curb?

Now it’s has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people. And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.

They believed – fiercely – in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds.

TL;DR: This includes becoming powerful enough to hire a new trad wife to change his diapers.

But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself. The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

TL;DR: This is why we continue to buy media properties. We realize that to continue brainwashing our cult to believe that the high cost of diesel, to give you just one example, is a sacrifice worth making for the greater good of our mad king, we need to spend oodles of oligarch money.

We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life. We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans – surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia – who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty. And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life – but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.

These – these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination. From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.

TL;DR: As an aside, we are prosecuting the cowardly sailors who tried to jump off the USS Abraham Lincoln.

This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.

Our heroes – our heroes may be willing to die for their cause; but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles. Now, we take the West’s conception of these things – heroism, honor, duty – we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence. The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo. The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, and then Galileo, then Kepler, and in Newton.

The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon. And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortes.

And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew. An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition. The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit. The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.

The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers – born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.

Together, we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point – an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization.

The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.

National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.

And now, there is war again.

TL;DR: All hail our great leader for starting a war nobody understands! We don’t need to understand it during these times of immortality and bare chests. We only need to find a way to quietly protect the masculine heritage so beautifully represented by the courageous men of Cornell University.

There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.

TL;DR: That we, the United States, are now the threat is merely a testament to the greatness of the classics, and even to Edith Hamilton, may God rest her soul.

And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together – understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them. And that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.

We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece. In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration.

Our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation. When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle. Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster, he delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American republic.

And he began by calling their attention to everything around them. This is what he said in his speech; he said: “This free form of government, this popular assembly… this practice of free debate, and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind… even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.”

TL;DR: Gold trim included.

Those words are as true today as they were when he said them. And all of us – not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West – must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.

The history of Greece – the history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse – it does not offer a glimpse of our institutions in their earliest forms. The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves.

It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud – that we should be intensely proud – of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West. From them – from them – we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.

Thank you.

TL;DR: And thank you, Marty!

(Applause.) (From one lone man from Saxony-Anhalt.)

Notes

Just for grins, I ran Rubio’s speech through Pangram. It rated it as 100% human written. This tells you all you need to know about the worth of Pangram. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Emergency: Musk is trying to buy the Midterms

This is off-topic, but it’s important.

According to an article in The New York Times (free link here), Apartheid Elon is spending $300 million on the midterms at the last minute, distributing right-wing propaganda like this:

Find a normie candidate near you and try to chip in if you can.

Thanks for reading!

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I said no.

Doing that would end any hope of reaching more than a tiny percentage of potential readers, for one thing, but there are other reasons.

One reason is that I, a humble, broke author, should not have to pay the price for voters rejecting Lina Khan. More on that later.

Another reason is that a boycott is not just futile, but logistically impossible.

To understand what I mean, you need to look at some software code. Bear with me. I’ll make sure it’s not painful. Here’s the code:

img src=”https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hcCR!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Febffef32-aea0-4a2f-ab7a-1c2dafb4f516_1200x675.jpeg”

This is part of the rendered HTML code used to display an image in the post where the comment was made. Do you see this part…

media.s3.amazonaws.com ?

That code references part of the web address where an image is stored on an Amazon server managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

My always vigilant readers might be wondering, “Why is Substack storing images on an Amazon server? Doesn’t Substack have its own servers?”

Nope, most likely not even one. Almost every moderately sized website in the Western Hemisphere rents space on a set of servers managed by AWS or one of its competitors, like Microsoft’s Azure or Google Cloud.

This one simple line…

media.s3.amazonaws.com

…provides a wealth of information to the technically curious. It says, “We here at Substack use AWS for our primary infrastructure needs.”

The reason for this is that AWS is incredibly efficient at something we in the web software biz refer to as “scalability.” To put it in the simplest terms, this means that when a website gets slammed with lots of traffic, it can spin up a new server at the push of a button to handle the increased load.

Nothing, of course, is ever that simple. The largest websites in the world have entire software teams responsible for rolling out production code after quality assurance tests are completed on new code or bug fixes. You can make some pretty nice coin as a software engineer who specializes in AWS.

The point of this is that when you tell me to stop doing business with Amazon’s bookselling biz as an author, you are asking me to abandon 90% of my potential readership. Or whatever Amazon’s book market share is. 90% is probably an exaggeration, but it’s so high that I’m not going to look it up.

If I’m asked to abandon most of my potential readership, I’ll need to ask for something in return.

I’ll need to ask anyone who urges me to stop doing business with Amazon if they’re going to stop using the internet, because AWS currently powers 58,902,751 active websites.1

Depending on your source, somewhere between 30% to 40% of cloud-based web services run on Amazon servers. The others mostly use Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

To truly boycott Amazon, here is what we’d all need to do:

1. Stop reading Substack.

2. Also? Stop using the internet.

3. Since you can’t do that, try to discover the 58 million sites that pay AWS and stop using those. These include Amazon-owned services such as Twitch (livestreaming), Audible (audiobooks), IMDb, and Wondery.

4. No more watching anything made by Amazon-owned MGM, a film and TV production studio with numerous affiliated companies. This means you are no longer allowed to watch “The Wizard of Oz” and many other old classics. You’re not in Kansas anymore.

5. No more Whole Foods Market, Woot!, or Zappos for you. Amazon owns them, too. That’s okay. The Whole Foods buffet ain’t what it used to be.

6. You can’t eat any food from companies that sell on Amazon. This is everyone. All companies. Everywhere. All the time. Even obscure stuff like this:

   

7. Don’t use any products that are sold on Amazon. This is all products. Everywhere. All of the time.

8. Since you can no longer engage with the modern economy, you will need to become a survivalist, but don’t buy any survivalist products from companies that sell their goods on Amazon. This is almost all of them. You’ll be left with an old knife and a tent from the 1950s.

9. Just in case that’s not enough, you can’t buy or use anything marketed through one of the 58 million websites that use AWS.

Wait. How did this happen? Why didn’t anybody tell us Amazon owned the world even though we kind of knew?

When I was a software engineer for big tech firms, the teams I worked on spent all day coding and programming. We didn’t worry about deployments much. That was someone else’s job. The only time I had to think about deployments was when I was asked to manage production rollouts, but that was mostly a process for merging different versions of the code base from (for example) a successful test environment into the production queue.

The process was arduous because it sometimes involved merging thirty or forty different code base versions (branches) into one.

The process of managing things like server loads and other arcane (to most people) tasks related to software deployments was handled by teams of what we called “release engineers.”

For a long time, companies managed all of that internally, but as AWS built its cloud, it lured companies into outsourcing an ever-growing number of production release processes.

At first, this mostly meant server management. If a company encountered a spike in web traffic, all they had to do was click a button (I’m greatly simplifying this process to illustrate a point), and additional servers could be added to handle the load.

This process works well for startups, too. If you can focus on code development, and your release team can be whittled down to a couple of people who know how to work with and deploy to AWS, you can cut your costs significantly because you don’t need to worry about buying computers (which, compared to people, are almost free, but bean counters have their principles).

AWS makes it easy to start small, and if you’re lucky enough to hit the big time, it’s easy to scale up.

The number of your AWS servers might start at two, but quickly expand to thirty or even a hundred once your new business idea starts turning into a gold mine. You can see why AWS grew quickly. Everyone loved it. And it was done well. There were few glitches in the process.

As time marched on, a cottage industry was born. Technical specialists with expertise in AWS filled the skies, eager to help the next company that wanted to deploy via AWS. AWS grew in complexity. It became a behemoth that no single person could master.

One of the classic case studies of a company transitioning to AWS is Netflix, which in 2008 suffered catastrophic database failures. Yury Izrailevsky, who was Vice President of Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering when the eight-year transition to AWS was completed, explains what prompted the move:2

Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. That is when we realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud. We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our cloud provider because it provided us with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features.

There’s that phrase again: “single point of failure.” There’s another phrase there that matters: “distributed systems.” That sounds like tech bro talk, but all it means is that Netflix’s databases are no longer hosted at a single Netflix data center in Campbell, California (its HQ city) or wherever they were before the transition to AWS.

When I worked at eBay a million years ago, we actually had a server room. It was a dark, scary place with a lot of blinking lights guarded by hooded dudes in sunglasses gripping a karambit.

Don’t tell anybody, but I even hosted a small public-facing test application from a single Linux box in a cube a few steps away from me. That doesn’t happen these days. Not without getting fired. Or smoked by a hooded dude with his karambit.

These days, everything for most companies, including Netflix, is hosted in several different locations within the AWS infrastructure. Data corruption is considerably less likely to ruin the company because several more sites, in multiple locations, host the data than before the transition.

Oh, did I mention that you need to stop watching Netflix if you want to boycott Amazon? I forgot, didn’t I?

Izrailevsky continues:

Leveraging multiple AWS cloud regions, spread all over the world, enables us to dynamically shift around and expand our global infrastructure capacity, creating a better and more enjoyable streaming experience for Netflix members wherever they are.

We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.

Yay, another tech bro phrase: “multiple AWS cloud regions.” Another one he uses (not quoted) is “redundancy,” which simply refers to the fact that there are multiple instances of things like databases that duplicate the same information or functionality as other instances.

The AWS cloud is distributed at several different points throughout the globe (see map above). For years, as the AWS infrastructure grew, new Amazon data centers seemed to pop up at least every month around the U.S., then the globe.

AI, of course, has taken the concept of data centers and multiplied their reach and environmental impact exponentially in just a few years.

This brings me to another question for anyone asking authors to stop using Amazon to sell books: Do you use AI for anything? You do if you use Google, because Google now defaults to an AI query on everything you search for.

Lina Khan to the rescue

Back when we thought there was a chance the United States would not be menaced every day by a mobster with a sordid sexual assault history, an old fella named Joe Biden teamed up with a sharp gal named Lina Khan, who wrote a fantastic thesis called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” while studying for her Juris Doctor degree. It was published in the Yale Law Journal in 2017 and was a big hit among the few anti-trusters still willing to speak up in the wake of the mad cow’s first election.3

When Biden won the presidency, he named Khan a commissioner of the United States Federal Trade Commission, where she evangelized breaking up Amazon. The idea, at least in some quarters, grew into the concept that one part of the company would become a bookstore, another a grocer, another a web services company (AWS). These would also be monstrous companies, but they’d at least be separate ones.

Unfortunately, 77 million Americans had another idea, and the dream ended, and so did Lina Khan’s influence on American government.

So, no. I’m going to keep trying to sell my books on Amazon. This isn’t a choice I am thrilled about, but it’s one I’m stuck with, just like you’re stuck with interacting every day with Amazon, no matter the grand pronouncements made by boycott enthusiasts.

In a perfect world, a new, independent bookstore would be created that offered the same self-publishing capabilities that Amazon does through its self-publishing services.

In another perfect, alternative world, Amazon would face regulation forcing it to stop cranking out AI slop from that same self-publishing arm.

In that alternative world, Donald Trump never took control of the Oval Office.

All change begins with his removal from not just the Oval Office, but the American political scene.

But even when/if he goes, Americans don’t seem particularly interested in combating oligarchy and/or breaking up monopolies.

The bigger problem

In all my many years on this planet, I've never seen an American electorate willing to vote for substantial change — the kind where society demonstrates a willingness to toss out the red meat of its routine to sacrifice together for the greater good. It has always voted to protect itself, whether from outside forces or enemies invented by screeching preachers posing as politicians.

Nothing is more sacred to Americans than the status quo. Almost all major change has been incremental and has arrived in the face of rugged resistance.

One might argue that the Trump cult is an exception. Didn't that change the country substantially? Didn’t his voters vote for change? It did change the country, in about as bad a way as possible. But that cult wasn't voting for change. It was voting to preserve an extinct society that never offered even its most animated adherents anything beyond bitter, luminescent grievance.

The predator-in-chief claimed to give them power, when, in fact, he took it away.

Meanwhile, over recent decades, the rest of us have done little more than tinker.

How slow is the pace of change in the U.S.? We can't even get consensus on a national healthcare program, something every other nation in the West has maintained as a core policy for decades.

Tell a European about the misery of bankruptcies at the hands of healthcare profiteers, and she'll just shake her head in bewilderment. “Such primitive creatures,” she'll mutter.

One of these days, maybe I’ll write a small communist manifesto explaining how I really feel about corporate America.

If I do, I’ll self-publish it on Amazon, because no modern publisher will want to touch it.

Notes

The map in this essay shows AWS regions. When one region goes down (it happens), a whole bunch of websites go down with it. As you can see, AWS has worldwide reach. The map is sourced from Wikipedia, which is one of the few huge websites that doesn’t use a cloud service. This is referred to as “Using our own metal.”

I’ve always provided a non-Amazon option as the first option for purchasing my new short story anthology.

You can purchase a PDF of all my Substack Fiction from a source that doesn’t involve Amazon or any other giant retailer. It’s only $4.99. That’s less than a Starbucks Venti Latte (you should probably be boycotting Starbucks for its resistance to unions). I haven’t checked under the hood to see if the site I’m using to sell it uses AWS.

Buy Now

The book, of course, is also now available on Amazon/Kindle in ebook, paperback, and hardcover formats (the Kindle version is free if you have Kindle Unlimited):

Buy on Amazon

If you are a paid subscriber, it’s available free here on Substack as a Perk. Just go to the “Perks” page via the Ruminato web page menu to find it.

Thanks for reading!

You can help me reach more people by subscribing (paid or free), sharing, restacking, and commenting.

Subscribe now

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Footnotes

The diesel fuel lie

Let's start with the Russia diesel thing.

The mentally ill mobster of Mar-a-Lago wrote this on True Sociopath:1

I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement. Additionally, it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

You’d think by now Natalie would have learned how to break these things up into multiple paragraphs, but I digress.

The key takeaway is “immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel.” Natalie, why the title case caps? Busy multitasking? Changing diapers and taking dictation? Ah, but I digress.

As incapacitated as he is, Diaper mouth nevertheless knows that Russian diesel production has been hammered by Ukrainian drones.

As of September 2026, Ukrainian drones were hitting Russian diesel refineries about once every three days. According to Reuters:2

Half of Russia’s six top ​diesel-producing refineries were forced to significantly cut back or completely halt output in September due to ‌damage sustained in drone attacks.

The conflict in ​Iran has undermined global fuel supply, while Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s refineries in recent months have led ​to a decline in fuel production in the country and forced Moscow to restrict exports of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

According to the ‌market-sourced ⁠data, six plants — the Omsk refinery, Kirishi, Taneco, Volgograd refinery, NORSI and Perm — account for about half of Russia’s diesel production.

Kirishi has been fully shut down, while the Volgograd refinery and NORSI are operating at about one-quarter of their nameplate capacity, according to sources.

Diesel production at those plants is several times lower than normal levels. Taneco was ​attacked by drones on Sunday, ​but sources said it ⁠was not yet possible to assess the consequences of the attack.

In early September, Agent Krasnov (Putin’s pet name for TrumpleThinSkin) made a curious request. He asked President Zelenskyy to please stop attacking Russian refinery capacity.

Now you know why. He had cooked up a “deal” with Putin, who obviously probably wouldn’t fulfill it if he could, but he can’t, so the question is moot.

Russian farmers and ranchers who rely on diesel are as hopping mad as ours are. They don’t have midterm elections like we do to let their feelings be known, but Putin’s not going to send what little diesel he’s got to the United States. It’s easier to just lie, although, last I looked, Putin had not confirmed the grifter-in-chief’s numbers. He had only acknowledged that a deal of some kind was in the works.

It’s all a lie. But the people in the U.S. who buy diesel have, like everyone else, grown exhausted from all the lies. They’ll see diesel prices continue to climb and vote accordingly, or sit at home if they don’t have the stomach yet to vote for people who aren’t part of the hate cult.

A lot of those folks are Texas ranchers near the Rio Grande.

A lot of those ranchers near the border have Mexican ancestry.

The early vote returns are pointing to a Republican wave of destruction

Let’s take a look at the earliest of early returns from midterm voting. These are showing a massive turnout of Latinos, who are enraged about the regime’s Gestapo tactics against them. Early numbers indicate that they are voting in higher numbers than during the presidential election, which never happens during the Midterms.

Even the young male voters who dissed Kamala are reversing themselves. According to TargetSmart, which is, in fairness, somewhat biased because they’re a Democratic campaign strategy firm:3

White men under 35. This group backed Trump over Harris by 9 points in 2024, 51% to 42%, but now favors the Democratic congressional candidate by 11 points, 50% to 39%, a striking reversal in a single election cycle. Hispanic voters are moving in the same direction, just from a different starting point. Their 8-point Harris advantage in 2024, 52% to 44%, has widened into an 19-point Democratic lead on the generic congressional ballot, 55% to 36%.

They’re quoting Harris here, which is a non-biased polling firm.

In other words, most of those young white boys who refused to vote for a woman of color have learned their lesson. And since they would like to get out of mom’s basement to rent an apartment, but can’t because housing costs too much, they’re motivated to vote.

Pete Kegsbreath’s livestream execution fantasy

In between shots of bad whiskey, Pete Hegseth, who normies call “Kegsbreath” for obvious reasons, spluttered some noise about livestreaming an execution of the man who shot up Fort Hood in 2009.

Nidal Malik Hasan massacred U.S. armed forces personnel at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. Hasan murdered 13 people and injured 32 more, so no sympathy from me no matter what happens to him, but being outraged by a livestream execution isn’t about him.

Hasan’s execution is now scheduled for December 3, although, like all executions in the U.S., it will certainly be delayed by court filings.

Kegsbreath said:4

“He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be. We’re going to make sure people are able to watch it, that it’s public.”

The two homicidal maniacs, the grifter and the drunk, have killed at least 238 people in Operation Southern Spear,5 which is the U.S. armed forces’ terror campaign against Caribbean boaters. In April, they decided it would be fun to add federal firing squads to their list of atrocities.

Now, Kegsbreath has claimed they’ll livestream this first one. Grab the kids and watch?

Not so fast.

Not even the tech bro bootlickers for companies like Twitch (owned by Amazon) and Meta have expressed any interest in providing the hosting services for this scheme. I guess I can imagine Musk helping out, but he seems busy right now trying to repopulate the disappearing white race with his own offspring.

Kegsbreath would have to break his own Army’s regulations to do it, too, although breaking the law and/or regulations is never a dealbreaker with this regime. According to Snopes:6

Chapter 2-5 of regulation 190-55 lists who may and may not witness a military execution. According to the chapter, no person younger than 18 years old may witness an execution and the Army must approve the list of witnesses beforehand.

JD Vance threw some cold water on the idea, too, saying, “I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” although I can imagine Vance saying that regarding about 95% of what this regime has done shortly before they did it.7

Properly done, a firing squad execution “essentially vaporizes” a person’s heart, according to Mississippi death penalty lawyer Jim Craig.8 But this is Hegseth’s army, which means they won’t properly do it, which means Hasan is more likely to die a slow, agonizing death from bleeding out. This won’t elicit much sympathy in most quarters, but do you want your kids to see it?

This hairbrained idea is most likely just smoke being blown as part of the regime’s shock and awe campaign to freak American voters out while appealing to the base of MAGA, who love any kind of snuff film they can get their beady, drug-laced eyes on.

No, nobody is nuking San Diego or Los Angeles

There are only a few nations in the world with nuclear capabilities. Iran isn’t one of them.

That was just the PedoFührer trying to get your attention because his diapers were full from being scared shitless about the Midterm elections, and Natalie wasn’t around to tend to them.

Did it work?

Another year, another no Nobel Peace Prize for the Orange Puffaroon

The mad king had thoughts about international jurist and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay winning the Nobel Peace Prize. This was a seriously long tome. I’m sure Natalie helped write it. My favorite line was probably, “I have created a soon to be very prosperous Arctic.”

I’m gonna go ahead and give him credit there. Nobody else has created a soon-to-be very prosperous Arctic. I’m going to be first in line to buy ski lift tickets at the Kushner Ski Lodge in Ittoqqortoormiit, in East Greenland.

Anyway, if you enjoy trying to puzzle out what the mad king is trying to say when he posts to True Sociopath, here’s a looksee. Have fun:9

This is the woman who received the Nobel Peace Prize over the Great United States of America, whose Representative, ME, settled eight Wars, and many other things. I know nothing about this woman, and neither does anyone else! In fact, to the best of my knowledge, no one ever heard of her other than the fact that she, very obviously, hates Israel. I don’t know what the woman has done. I settled 8 Wars, with letters being sent from every President and Prime Minister from the countries that I helped to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and I’m about to settle, or win, two more, Iran and, Russia/Ukraine. They’re both happening at breakneck speed but, forget them, it’s the 8 that I’ve already settled, any one of which, in particular, Pakistan and India, would be far more than necessary to win the Nobel Prize. In actuality, I should have won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1. The 8 Wars are:

Cambodia and Thailand

Kosovo and Serbia

The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda

Pakistan and India

Israel and Iran

Egypt and Ethiopia

Armenia and Azerbaijan

Israel and Hamas

Additionally, I stopped Iran from having a Nuclear Weapon, and blowing up the entire Middle East and, ultimately, far beyond! I saved more lives than anyone in History and, as Maria Corina Machado, a truly fine person, stated to the Media when she gave me her Nobel Prize of last year, “Donald Trump settled many Wars, and deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than any person that has ever received it.” Based on my record of PEACE, a record like no one else has ever achieved, I agree! I got back all of the hostages in Israel, including the final 28, both living and dead, and worked with Hamas to do it — Nobody believed this was possible! I removed the World’s Evil Dictator, Nicolas Maduro, from Venezuela, and am in the process of making Venezuela a rich Democracy. Likewise, with Iran, I stopped them from destroying Israel, the Middle East, and Europe. I am also preventing, on a constant basis, a War between South Korea and North Korea, and Japan and North Korea. Add China and Taiwan, and numerous other hot spots, which have not been involved in Wars, only because of President Donald J. Trump, and the United States of America. I am responsible for having NATO countries increase spending from 2% to 5% of GDP, creating a stronger alliance and defense, another thing that everybody said was impossible to do. I have negotiated the release, and secured the return, of more than 900 political prisoners from multiple countries in Eastern Europe. Additionally, I have brought 196 hostages HOME from captivity, from all over the World, and did it without having paid a ransom, unlike Biden and Obama who would pay Billions of Dollars. On top of it all, I have created a soon to be very prosperous Arctic. Despite all of this, the Nobel Prize was given today to a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of. In all of the Wars that I have settled, I never spoke to the United Nations—they were of no help. The United States of America, represented by me, as your President, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but didn’t. This is an indelible stain on Norway, one that will never be forgotten. The Nobel “Peace” Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of Radical Ideologues who are Anti-Democracy, and Enemies of Civilization! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I assume the mainstream media doesn’t have access to his social media account after being kicked out of the White House press pool. Else, they’d report on his obvious mental decline, which is in full evidence every time he speaks or “writes.” Surely they’d report on this. Right?

You can be sure that the timing of his sanctions against the International Criminal Court,10 where Navi Pillay presided as a judge in several cases, is not a coincidence. He’s not good at many things, but holding a grudge? Nobody is better at that than the head of America’s worst-ever crime family.

The list of grift

Democracy lawyer took time out from his busy schedule of legal smackdowns against the Trump crime family and its enablers to collate this top ten list of Trump grifts. It’s quite a collection.

Eisen probably needs to be on the short list for the next Attorney General, because when we retake the Oval Office (and hack off all the gold trim), we need people willing to relentlessly seek accountability and justice for the regime’s crime spree, even if its CEO has finally congealed into the ground as a smouldering, toxic EPA Superfund site.

Here it is:

The Contrarian

“Honey Please”— Stop Stealing From the American People!

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.... You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all that will show. Please…

Read more

15 days ago · 98 likes · 8 comments · Norman Eisen

A lot more happened this week (including another ICE shooting, which deserves its own post), but I’ve got a headache now, and headaches always alarm me, for reasons some of you know.

Have a merry weekend, and remember, it really is looking like a Blue Tsunami, but you have to vote, and you have to find a way to convince at least one person who isn’t interested to vote, too.

If everyone does that, we win. No amount of election interference can change that in a decentralized election like the Midterms.

Thanks for reading!

You can now purchase a PDF of all my Substack Fiction. Only $4.99. That’s less than a Starbucks Venti Latte.

Enter SUBSCRIBER_SPECIAL to get a 20 percent discount.

Buy Now

It’s also now available on Amazon/Kindle in ebook, paperback, and hardcover formats (the Kindle version is free if you have Kindle Unlimited):

Buy on Amazon

If you are a paid subscriber, it’s available free as a Perk. Just go to the “Perks” page via the web page menu to find it.

You can help me reach more people by subscribing (paid or free), sharing, restacking, and commenting.

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Footnotes

Detective Adebayọ always enjoyed a good cup of tea but was hesitant about accepting one in a house of poison, even though it was five minutes before midnight and she was exhausted.

Her earbuds giggled. “Don’t be silly,” said her AI. “You’ve already solved the crime. It’s a Pu-erh tea. You’ll enjoy its earthy tones.” Adebayọ wanted to ask how the AI knew the kind of tea, but before she could, the teacup was almost in her face by the hands of Jocyln, her agitated host.

“He hated AI,” said Jocelyn, an affable young woman with a complexion that reminded Adebayọ of the chestnut-colored tapestries on her mother’s walls, the home’s only adornments in those early childhood years.

Adebayọ graciously accepted the tea and sipped, still somewhat anxious. “Yes, that we knew,” said the detective. “Didn’t we, Sonar?”

The earbuds responded with a cheerful affirmative.

“Is there more to worry about?” asked Jocelyn, glancing at her tea.

Adebayọ shuddered. “Sonar?” She knew the answer but wanted formal clarification.

Adebayọ’s earbuds replied, “Everything originated at the prepackaged food delivery factory in Dallas. One shipment of Indian cuisine to this address.” The reason for Indian food, Adebayọ knew, was that abrin had a slight licorice bouquet, easily hidden within the complex swarm of Indian spices.

Once the poison was found in the food, the case became easier to solve because no additional cases of abrin poisoning emerged.

Adebayọ considered Joceyln’s question further before replying, “This is an isolated incident, Ms. Jones. An unfortunate one. I’m deeply sorry for your loss.”

Jocelyn, the victim’s sister, nodded. “I know you are. Y’all have been great. I’m still a little shocked you even figured it out.”

Adebayọ thought about the moment she told Jocelyn they had cracked the case. And being reluctant to tell her about the perp.

“Should I tell her?” she had asked Sonar. “I mean, now? Instead of waiting a minute?”

“I think now,” her earbuds had responded.

When told, Jocelyn spoke through tears as she said, “So it was personal.”

Adebayọ nodded.

“I mean, but, why?” asked Jocelyn.

The motive question would require more forensics. More work. More research. More hunting through computer records. Adebayọ was visiting at this late hour, warily accepting a cup of Pu-erh tea, to finally answer that question.

“The stupid thing is, he used it all the time,” said Jocelyn. “Used AI for everything. Research this, research that. Then he’d blog about how much he hated it. In one post he wrote, ‘If I could poison the very wires through which AI travels so I could kill the beast, I would.’ ”

“Speaks to motive,” said Adebayọ’s earbuds.

Adebayọ knew they didn’t need motive. They had plenty of evidence. They even had the log file of one AI instructing another to lace the food of one specific individual order in a factory.

“Can an AI thing go to prison?” asked Jocelyn.

Sonar’s voice hacked into the home’s stereo speakers as a deep baritone:

“Don’t be silly.”

Notes

500 words (I enjoy the additional challenge of hitting the exact max word count)

This fiction was written for a max 500-word writing prompt.

Season 1, Prompt 2: Five Minutes to Midnight: Genre Mash-Up

I chose “Creature Feature” from this set:

Genre Set One (Pick one):

• Ghost Story / A Haunting

• Zombie Apocalypse

• Creature Feature

• Witchcraft / Curse

• Folk Horror

Does AI count as a creature for creature feature? I dunno, ask the judges or ask the ghost of Bob Wilkins:

But I’m not here to win. I’m here to play!

(My argument is that if it’s not human and it kills, we gots us a good, old-fashioned Creature Feature).

I chose “Buddy Cop” from this set:

Genre Set Two (Pick one):

• Office Romance

• Buddy Cop

• Heist / Caper

• Legal Drama

• Family Drama

Wait! AI as part of a buddy cop tandem? You betcha!

You can find the details of the original writing prompt here:

Charlie Finch

The October Half-a-Grand Flash Fiction Contest Prompt is Here

Okay people! This is your chance to get in the running for the $500 grand prize and a shot at the title of Half-a-Grand Flash Fiction winner for the month, and maybe even the year! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look HERE for details…

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15 days ago · 146 likes · 273 comments · Charlie Finch

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What you’ll find instead is the story of a female survivor, portrayed by Florence Pugh, shaking her fist at a patriarchy determined to shatter her bones as soon as her pretty face can pull its first quiver from a man’s groin, which, of course, occurs at a very early age.

Steinbeck’s novel was an epic look at two families, the Hamiltons and Trasks, that land in California’s Salinas Valley, which he describes in the opening paragraphs of his opus with less fanfare than what likely lured its migrants:

From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River. In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until sometimes it raged and boiled, bank full, and then it was a destroyer. The river tore the edges of the farm lands and washed whole acres down; it toppled barns and houses into itself, to go floating and bobbing away. It trapped cows and pigs and sheep and drowned them in its muddy brown water and carried them to the sea. Then when the late spring came, the river drew in from its edges and the sand banks appeared. And in the summer the river didn’t run at all above ground. Some pools would be left in the deep swirl places under a high bank. The tules and grasses grew back, and willows straightened up with the flood debris in their upper branches.

The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it—how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

But Netflix’s adaptation isn’t about the beckoning of the West or the determined spirits of settlers faced with the harsh realities of their fool’s gold.

It’s about a relatively minor character from the book, Cathy Ames (Pugh), who discovers early in life that the men around her are like the violent, misogynistic, rapist frat boys of Cornell, unnamed in her world, but everywhere, following her, tracking her every move like lascivious Halloween spectres, until, as a young adult, she is left in a broken, bloody heap crawling to the front door of two brothers, Adam and Charles Trask.

Adam and Charles live on a ranch far east of the mysterious land of California (Eden), which has enough potential to pull one of them, Adam, west while the other, Charles, remains intent on developing their ranch to its full promise.

Their oppressive father had previously left the ranch for Washington, D.C., to tend to veterans’ affairs, a busy job in the wake of the Civil War. As the turn of the century approaches, dad expires and bequeaths significant, but possibly ill-gotten, wealth to the brothers.

While imposing discipline on the boys with a cane, their father had boasted of his Civil War exploits to his friends, but Adam discovers upon his father’s death that it was all war stories of the fictional kind. His limp and cane were left to him not by war wounds, but by an early mishap in that era’s version of boot camp. He was given a discharge by the army before he saw battle.

The boys discovered that he had been a fraud all along. Grand tales of Gettysburg and other exploits told to his friends and sons were fabrications.

But he left them with money. Charles considered it psychological blood money, but Adam, who is portrayed in the series as the softer, gentler of the two brothers, is happy to begin exploring his California dreams.

That’s when Cathy shows up at the door, her broken, bloodied body found by Charles.

Adam nurtures her back to health while Charles looks on with condescension and a prescient fear of what she will ultimately bring to the table. Even through the slits of her swollen eyes, Pugh portrays a woman determined to get the best of the new, hapless men in her life, and to make a mockery of the male ego in the process, even though she can barely utter a word out of her damaged body.

We often hear that “East of Eden” is a long retelling of Cain and Abel, but director Zoe Kazan’s version of it finds Cathy pulling the marionette strings of the two competing brothers, both of whom had strained to seek their father’s good graces but are now competing over the beautiful young patient in their guest bed.

It’s not a competition for her charms. It’s a competition over how to treat an unexpected visitor who has broken a recent truce between the two brothers with her mere presence. Adam, while tending to the patient like a dedicated nurse, slowly, unsurprisingly, falls for her so completely that he quickly loses himself.

Florence Pugh’s brilliant acting makes sure that you understand that Cathy is fully aware that Adam is now her captive spirit, absolutely under her spell, with no chance at all of escape. This takes place early, even as she, bedridden, can barely manage a feigned smile through her tumid face.

Charles, meanwhile, wanted her gone as soon as Adam dropped her damaged body onto the bed. At first, he just didn’t want the bother. But it doesn’t take long for him to declare her a villainous vixen as he warns Adam that she’ll ruin him.

Zoe Kazan, with one long directorial wink of an eye, does a brilliant job of pretending that Cathy is simply a demon happily luring Adam into her clutches as their relationship grows. He begins by dabbing her face with a warm cloth and ultimately proposes to her.

When Florence Pugh’s Cathy says yes, she is winking at us, too, without actually winking, and we all know that Charles was right all along. Adam is doomed.

Thus begins a long journey of meta vengeance, as Cathy demonstrates her opinion about men in increasingly violent fashion, from the moment she leaves Adam to her arrival at the nearest brothel.

Not everyone will cheer this on. But as I watched her use psychological trickery to conquer the madam of the brothel she worked at, I couldn’t help but smile as she walked out of the madam’s room. I, along with Cathy, who walked away with her arms raised, the fingers of her right hand touching the framed wall art as she marched victoriously through the expansive hallway to her room, wanted to raise my arms in delight.

This was the moment when she captured the madam with the same charms she had captured Adam, whom she had not so long ago left in a bloody heap of his own. Terrible, I know, but that was the way of the few survivors in those days who could rise against a patriarchy that gave women no freedoms.

Even Adam, who for so long we were sure was such a gentle soul, had dragged Cathy to California against her will, because, after all, he was the husband. It was his decision. She had no say. The punishment she delivered was swift and pure, even if it makes the viewer uncomfortable.

For Cathy, no man is deserving of a first chance, much less a second, because in her mind, all men are, at their very best, enablers of the torture chamber that her society is for women.

Modern women will notice the allegory.

Survivors of sexual abuse and violence should feel no guilt urging Cathy on, because, after all, it’s only fiction. Not everyone gets to slash and burn their way to victory and justice, but Florence Pugh’s character allows you to vicariously deliver the kind of justice the boys of Cornell and others like them deserve.

Notes

Director Zoe Kazan’s grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the original movie version of “East of Eden,” starring James Dean, along with such classics as “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951), and “On the Waterfront” (1954), both starring Marlon Brando.

You may have heard about Hoon Lee’s performance as Lee, a Chinese migrant. He’s also fantastic in this, and for me was the glue that held the show together in scenes Florence Pugh wasn’t in.

Obviously, this production was made before Cornell entered the news cycle the way it did, but the subject matter is as old as time itself.

I’ve begun re-reading East of Eden, the novel. I read it in my youth and barely remember it.

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And yet, believe it or not, it’s not clickbait.

Settle in with your favorite morning alcoholic beverage, and I’ll explain why. You may need the whole bottle. Or two.

Our story begins in California, where conservatives are outraged over a Republican gubernatorial candidate’s ad that they say is suggestive of (whispers quietly) lesbian acts.

Not just lesbian acts, but (whispers more quietly), the groomer kind, the kind where the innocent hetero female is about to be sucked into a world of depravity and sin.

Wait, my always-alert readership says between sips of their early morning cucumber martini. “Did you say the Republican guy has conservates all in a tither?”

I did indeed.

The super duper, ultra-right-wing Trump thumper?

Yeppers.

Steve Hilton, the Gubernatorial candidate in question, released an ad so stunning in its creepiness that both sides in the election are searching for words to describe it. Democrats have settled pretty much on “ick,” “creepy,” “depraved,” and “borderline pedo” because of the grooming portrayed in the ad. Hey, at least we can all agree on something. Obama’s dream of a purple America lives on!

It would be normal to think at this point that Hilton’s ad must be a too-real portrayal of grooming that is making people uncomfortable as he rails against the Epstein class.

Nope. That ain’t it. The opposite is happening. Hilton’s ad loves the grooming. He loves the Epstein class. That is pretty clear after watching this thing.

There is no way to prepare you for this ad’s video, so if you’re feeling a bit beat up by all the craziness going on around us, I’ll understand if you sit the rest of this one out. Also, trigger warning:

The ad, which appeared last week, opens with two young, attractive hipster women sitting face to face on a bed. Their lips are pierced, and everything! Hipstermania! The kind of people who would never vote for Steve Hilton. Right?

Romantic music is playing in the background.

One of the women is urging the other to try something for the first time, using the most suggestive tones imaginable for an AI ad. The two women are sitting in front of a Pride flag, too. Oh, one more thing. One of them (I’ll call her the groomee) is wearing a shirt that says, “Resist.” This ad redefines the concept: “You can’t make this stuff up.”

As the romantic, soft porn music slithers forth, one of the women (the groomee) says in a halting, almost trembling voice, “I’ve just never done anything like this before. What if my dad finds out?”

Oh, honey, if your dad is a Republican, he’s got this shiz on an autoplay loop.

Anyhoo, her friend’s response? “Just try it. Look,” continues the groomer. “Give me your hand. [More soft porn music] Close your eyes.”

The groomee closes her eyes with a mild tremble, but with curious anticipation.

The groomer purrs, “And I’ll do all the work,” as her eyes point downward.

The groomer then guides her friend’s hand to a mail-in ballot and fills in the circle next to Steve Hilton’s name.

“I think… I think I liked it,” says the groomee. Both gals giggle.

Then comes the headline to this post.

The groomer says, “Now lick it.”

End of commercial.

Feeling strong? Here is the full video. I decided I'd better grab the raw video in case Hilton feels the heat enough to pull the ad from YouTube or X (where it first appeared).

Steve Hilton’s “Lick it” Ad

It’s amazing that someone approved this ad, much less produced it. It insults so many people on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin.

I was even reluctant to report it to you. It’s that insulting. But, sadly, I am easily amused by incompetence, especially at these earth-shattering decibels.

Let’s review some of the comments on the YouTube page that carries the ad, just for grins:

Those were just the first few comments I saw. I didn’t need to scroll down for more to get the overall tone of YouTube viewer response.

The normies were creeped out, but the conservatives were outraged because they felt like the ad promoted “lesbianism.”1

Pastor Jack Hibbs, a Christian Nationalist out of Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills, huffed that word out as he claimed that it’s a “pandemic” among high school and college students. As outraged as he is, though, Jack says he’s still voting for Hilton.

And that only makes sense, because half his congregation will probably squirrel away a copy of the ad and use it for future “reference,” because there’s nothing more titillating to closeted, frustrated Christian fundamentalists than the forbidden fruit.

Just ask evangelical hypocrite Jerry Falwell Jr., who somehow let this photo slip into his Instagram feed and found himself hightailing it out of his lofty positions as president and chancellor of Christo-nationalist Liberty University in Virginia after vigorous objections were raised:

Don’t worry about Jerry, though. After Liberty University asked him to please exit the premises, he sued the pants off them (I’m deeply sorry for this pun). He scored a clean $15.5 million settlement from his getaway.

I swear, I am in the wrong business.

Who the hell is Steve Hilton, anyway?

The guy responsible for the ad wants to be the next governor of California.

The good news is that if it turns out that Californians defy gravity by voting for him over his Democratic opponent, former California Attorney General and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under Biden, Xavier Becerra, he won’t be able to run for president later. He’s British.

He’s yet another former Fox News loudmouth who was once Director of Strategy to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Why the hell is he here making creepy, weird ads? Is this not a deportable offense? Ask Stephen Miller. Maybe he knows.

I think that’s really all you need to know about him. He’s running against a well-qualified guy in Becerra (Gavin Newsom is term-limited), and when he debated said well-qualified guy, the LA Times had a field day:2

Steve Hilton came in with next to no chance of becoming the next California governor, but maybe if he focused on touting the feel-good messages he’s been spouting since launching his campaign in front of the Huntington Beach Pier earlier this year — Make California Gold Again! Califordable! I’m a Legal Immigrant with a British Accent! — he might’ve convinced at least a few voters to go with him.

Instead, Hilton debated like someone already preparing to launch a podcast or beg for his old Fox News job back after he gets walloped. When your solution for solving California’s housing crisis is building 10 new cities, you’re not running for California governor — you’re angling for an influencer job with the Irvine Co.

He whined and grumbled and grinned and quoted someone calling Becerra a “bitch ass,” which would’ve been a funny dig if he wasn’t running to run the greatest state on Earth.

The only reason this kind of thing matters is that this is the type of stuff we will be seeing more of now that the Republican Party has been Trumpified. Especially now that you can create an ad like this without an advertising production budget.

I doubt this ad was produced in the classic sense of the word. Most likely, those are AI girls in the video (and even then, I’m worried that they’ll be subjected to improper treatment by the ad’s producers). Hilton’s ad team probably found some young ladies somewhere to dub in the voices.

If this was a traditional ad shot on a set, Hilton should probably be detained by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Musical interlude

I’ll end this creepy but mercifully short visit to Republiciana with this classic work of musical artistry:

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Footnotes

Republicans hating Republicans

Yesterday, former Illinois House Republican leader Jim Durkin announced that he is endorsing JB Pritzker for a third term as governor.1

His words against Pritzker’s opponent, Republican Darren Bailey, sound like they were lifted out of one of my anti-Republican screeds here on Ruminato.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

“His campaign is going nowhere, and he’s on a foolish escapade,” Durkin said of Bailey, adding that the Republican governor nominee has “a delusional egomaniacal view of the world.”

Durkin remains a Republican, but it sure sounds like he would rather not.

“I’ve worked with Pritzker, and I don’t agree with JB on a lot of things. But the fact is, he and I have worked together,” Durkin said. He cited Pritzker’s investment in infrastructure, the credit upgrades to steady the state’s finances and the governor’s support for “commonsense gun reforms.”

“He can’t hide from his past and who he is,” Durkin said of Bailey. “He is a right-wing evangelist, and he is part of this MAGA fever that has gotten into the party. And this party needs to break that fever like a virus. We need to break that. He has not changed who he is.”

In Illinois, most Republicans hate Republicans and are politically homeless.

This is mostly the result of the Trumpification of the Republican Party even in places where Republicans need to at least pretend to be centrist to survive, like Illinois, which has a Democratic supermajority that is getting stronger, not on its own strengths, but on the outlandish criminality, escapades, and policy positions of the core Republican Party, positions that are rejected by people with a shred of decency.

Bailey got the nomination for governor because extremists are the ones who vote in primaries, so now all those people who voted for to be their congress critter are stuck with a fascist.

Illinois remains a prime example of the dangers of one-party rule: The Democratic Party there has been steeped in corruption itself for decades. But at least they’re not nuts. No wonder Illinois residents sigh whenever you try to bring up politics.

Former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert dies

As a reminder that Herr TrumpEpstein is not the first major Republican politician to chase around kids with his candy van, former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert finally gave us the courtesy of dying after 84 years.2

In 2016, he admitted to abusing teenage boys as a wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Illinois. His bio doesn’t deserve any more mention, so let that be his legacy.

Don’t forget about Gym Jordan

Hastert is not the only Republican wrestling coach with issues.

There’s also Jim Gym Jordan, who has managed to evade formal charges, despite a preponderance of accusations regarding college wrestlers under his purview.3

To be fair (which I kind of hate doing with these clowns), Jordan has not been accused of abuse himself. It’s more that he looked the other way when it happened, if the stories are true.

Sports Illustrated, back in 2023 when it wasn’t an AI machine, wrote a long report about Republican congress critter Jordan when he was in the running to be Speaker of the House instead of the much flashier and impressive Mike Johnson (sorry, no sarcasm font here on Substack):4

They came from the cities and from small towns. They spanned generations and races and body types. Some looked like they could still make weight; others not so much. It was the summer of 2021, and around 30 former Ohio State wrestlers quietly converged on a high school outside Columbus for a meeting. Others joined virtually. It had the look of a team reunion, but the mood was considerably more somber. This was akin to a family intervention, a revival meeting to attempt to repair the program’s ripped fabric.

It had been three years since one of the wrestlers, Mike DiSabato, had come forward with accounts that when he wrestled for OSU in the late ’80s and ’90s, the team doctor, Richard Strauss, had sexually assaulted him. He was, effectively, the whistleblower in what would be shorthanded “The Strauss Scandal.” It would metastasize, and soon hundreds of other former OSU athletes — disproportionately wrestlers — shared their experiences of being groomed, assaulted and in some cases raped by the serial predator who was also the team doctor.

The trauma was compounded by a sense of betrayal. Wrestler after wrestler recalled complaining about Strauss to the head coach, Russ Hellickson, and to Jim Jordan, a onetime wrestling star in Wisconsin who served as OSU’s assistant coach from 1986 to ‘94.

Jordan’s response to one of Strauss’s accusers was, according to the article: “If he did that to me, I’d snap his neck like a twig of dried balsa wood” if he were Strauss.

The article goes on to say:

In all, at least 11 former wrestlers — as well as a wrestling referee — have said the OSU coaches knew and chose to do nothing.

This should have thrown the guy out of Congress, but instead, he’s on Congressional committees directing traffic and yelling at people who don’t like fascism.

I sure wish we had a legit media, the old-fashioned kind, who would ask Mike Johnson, the current speaker, “What’s in your wallet closet?”

I’d ask him myself, but I don’t think he reads Ruminato.

The White House is directing Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s campaign

Meanwhile, Ken Paxton, whose wife is divorcing him on “Biblical grounds,” admitted last month that his Senate campaign against Democrat James Talarico is being run by the White House, according to Politico:5

“I don’t control message or what we’re doing.”

“I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter because it’s all coming — you know — from D.C.,” Paxton reportedly said during a fundraiser.

Paxton also complained that the Predator-in-Chief’s bizarre Midterms Convention, which was more like a satirical vaudeville act than a political event, hurt his campaign. And that of every other Republican. The comedy show, Paxton said, “dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”6

It doesn’t help that the only people who can make sense out of the Orange Puffaroon’s word salads on behalf of Republican candidates are clinical psychiatrists with doctorates in abnormal psychology:

To illustrate the fact that no modern Republican is capable of walking without two faces, it’s worth noting that Paxton defeated incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn with the Grifter-in-Chief’s direct intervention while Paxton called Cornyn a Deep Stater:7

“His money is coming from the D.C. establishment. That’s how they always try to convince us from Washington with their money that we should select their person. Well, I’m not their person and I’m never going to be their person.”

Now, his marching orders come directly from D.C. He doesn’t really have a choice. All his money is coming from outside PAC sources, because it’s hard for crooks to raise money, even in Texas.

There’s so much outside money coming in that yesterday, the Paxton campaign ran national television ads on Fox Sports NFL football games. So if you lived in Chicago watching the Bears game, you saw an ad for a Texas U.S. Senate seat.

Talarico, who has a tiny fraction of the money his opponent has access to, is ahead in the polls by several points despite all this, partly because Paxton is a jailbird in waiting. As one Texan probably once said, “Why vote for a rat if it’s gonna be in a cage a month from now?”

The battle for the soul of Texas continues.

The Mad King and JD Vance tour the red states

Realizing that red states are the only places in the country where they won’t get booed back into their Qatari gift jet, TrumpleThinSkin and his leashed border collie, JD Vance, are touring red states, but they’re not even trying to hide their grift.

Trump announced that he’d give old farts like me a hundred or so dollars out of the Medicare Improvement Fund that was established in 2008.

In his usual broken English, he said that he…8

“…will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts. This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs.”

I’m so excited that I’m already planning on buying a sack of oranges with it, even though what I really need is a set of needles for injecting myself with hallucinogens until this madness is finally over. I’ll take what I can get, I guess.

This, of course, is in addition to his $5,000 bribe attempt, which he would be funding with U.S. tax dollars if it were real.

You’ve probably heard about that one. He has said numerous times that he’ll send $5,000 to everybody if they’ll just please, please vote for two more years of unimpeded madness, criminality, fraud, grift, domestic terror, insider-trading wars, Canada hate, and general everyday mayhem.

But only if Republicans win the midterms. Else, sorry, Charlie, outtaluck.

Hot tip: You ain’t gettin’ a dime, no matter what.

The grift continues: CNN found 13 ads paid for by the government to help promote Cankles and Republicans trying to buy their way into Congress during this midterm cycle.9

As I said, they’re not even trying to hide the grift any longer. Each ad ends with “Paid for by the U.S. Government” prominently displayed at the bottom of the ad.

The ads are the usual self-worship vehicles that the mad king has become famous for. You can read more about it here.

These idiots have a lot of money to spend. I, for one, am glad they’re spending it on highlighting how crazy he is. One of the ads seems to suggest he was brought to us personally by God. Most Christians will argue that we all were brought here personally by God, but of course, you and I both know that’s not what he means.

Can Vance save Alaska?

Tonight, Vance flies to that electoral hotbed, Fairbanks, Alaska (population 31,468) for a campaign event in a desperate attempt, I guess, to try to save Alaska’s Senate seat for Republicans, where Democrat Mary Peltola leads Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan by as much as seven points, depending on which poll you read.10

I can imagine the one-way conversation between Herr TrumpEpstein and the AI tech bros’ lapdog:

Herr TrumpEpstein: “JD, my people are telling me we’re losing in pretty much every state. Why don’t you see if you can find a coffee shop in Fairbanks where the people won’t dive over the counter to escape when you enter the place, K?”

Prediction: When he shows up, people will scatter like they’re being chased by a stalker.

Democrats kicking some butt in current polling

The New York Times email I received a couple days ago says it all:11

Democrats are performing strongly in five reliably Republican states where they are trying to flip Senate seats to win control of the chamber, new New York Times/Siena polls found.

Still gotta vote.

Midterms are coming.

Check your voter registration status here:

https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

Thanks for reading!

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Footnotes

8

Letters from an American

October 4, 2026

On Friday night, just before 11:00, Trump announced that his administration “will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts. This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund…

Read more

20 days ago · 5618 likes · 507 comments · Heather Cox Richardson

The other day, I began reading a Substack that advertised itself in its headline as an interview with a Democratic Senate candidate. I wanted to read it. But a paywall blocked my way.

This is normally fine. It’s a business decision. Paywall away. I’ll read someone else.

But I’ve been told by people like the Substacker in question that we are in an all-hands-on-deck situation, especially as the U.S. midterm elections approach.

I would argue that this should be the one month in your Substack writing career that you make all your posts free. Your paid subscribers will not only understand, they’ll applaud you for it. You don’t need more subscribers, probably, but you’ll still get a few anyway just for being cool beans.

Few can afford all the Substack subscriptions now available. Shouldn’t we be spending what little money we have these days on the candidate you interviewed?

Should Substackers be cannibalizing the communal Democratic election treasury, which is considerably smaller than the megalith that is the Republican election budget, by forcing readers to choose between their Substack and the candidates?

Musk has said he’d spend $400 million on this election. Other oligarchs are spending a lot, too. The flood of negative advertising hammering Democrats has begun. We can argue about whether all these negative ads full of lies work on a jaded electorate, but to ignore the Republican flood of cash is dangerous.

AHOD

All Hands On Deck means that everyone in the resistance community needs to help each other spread information about how to vote and work against the grifting regime that will surely continue to keep trying to make voting difficult.

So your comment areas need to be free, too. This area is a gift from Substack, which, I should add, has oligarch investors like Marc Andreessen, who is a right-wing nutter himself:

The comments area can be used by the community to pass along important information.

Will you end up with a troll problem if you open your comment area? Maybe, but we in the resistance are pretty good at shouting those people down, or, even better, tuning them out.

If you have assistants, you can ask them to help by deleting troll comments without a reply and blocking the trolls. I’ve never seen a Substack that has so many comments that this isn’t possible. It’s just for a month, anyway. Close it up after the election again, if that’s your jam.

Comment areas are also a place to fundraise and cheerlead. Will you see bogus fundraisers? Maybe, but again, the community is great at self-policing these things. Trust your readers to help you. They will. And they’ll do it eagerly.

Nobody has much tolerance for bullshit right now. They will not let your Substack comment area get polluted by fraudsters, right-wing trolls, or even bots.

Make posts and your comment areas free for the rest of the month and until Election Day.

If your Substack is making money, you can afford to make all your posts free for a month

Easy for me to say, right? Well, I can’t speak to it directly because I only make vending machine money here. My Substack business model has always been based on NPR’s: Free content. My generous contributors are mostly showing appreciation or saying “thank-you” with their wallets, and I’m greatly appreciative of that. I try saying “thank-you” in return with a few perks, but that’s it.

So I’m speaking mostly to those political writers who are making a lot more money than I am here on Substack, and who paywall some or most of their content.

This is the one month where you can forego trying to collect money through the Substack anti-Trump industrial complex, which is a virtual cottage industry of anti-Trump blogs.

There are basically two kinds of monetarily successful political Substackers.

There’s the old guard, the early adopters, who got in on the ground floor, and there are the refugees from mainstream media who arrived with name recognition and some street cred.

There are exceptions, of course, but those are the two major categories.

Most of the people who fall into these categories are making a ton of money on Substack. If you lose a few dollars making your posts free for a month — unlikely, by the way — isn’t that small price worth it in the name of the nation’s survival?

This is an election that I view as a last-chance election. I thought the last presidential election would end us, but the nation has decided to put its collapse on hold until the midterm results come in. But we’re clinging by thin vines from the top of a tall building here.

If we fail at this mission, if we lose the midterms, it’s checkmate.

Make your posts free this month. Make your comment area free this month.

Help all of us communicate with one another.

If you don’t, you might be contributing to your own demise, because this nation cannot survive another two years of Republicans running all three branches of government.

If we lose the midterms, we lose this nation. And you’ll lose your Substack, too.

If you agree with this, please restack so that it has a chance to reach at least a few folks who need to read it.

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I kind of buried the lede. In journalism parlance, the “lede” (don’t ask me why it’s not spelled “lead” because I have no idea) is the headline or lead paragraph to a story.

In this case, the lede is that Time Magazine’s recent lengthy interview with the madman in chief was the most effective midterm election campaign material Democrats could ask for.

Unless, of course, he follows through on his promise to campaign for Republican congress critters, who have all adopted the same form of critterness (not a real word) through years of obsequiousness, sycophancy, servility, unctuousness, submissiveness, smarminess, compliance, deference, fawning, groveling, toadyism, bootlicking, brownnosing, subservience, oiliness, self-abasement, sliminess, baseness, cravenness, ass-kissing, and extended, historic arse-licking.1

I should qualify this proclamation by saying that his campaign appearances would be a gift to Democrats, if Americans weren’t constantly in a state of unawareness that will be studied by sociologists for the next hundred years.

See, here’s the thing. You can’t read through the transcript of his Time interview and not come to the conclusion that his mind is completely gone.

I don’t mean “he’s crazy” in a hyperbolic, oh, there goes another anti-trumper attack dude overplaying a few speech defects kind of way. I mean it in a clinical sense. I mean it in a way that will make you ask again why Reagan cleared out all the mental institutions back in the 80s.

I mean it in this sense, for those of you who remember old movies about crazy people:

As proof, I will reproduce the first few paragraphs of the interview. The entirety of the interview is the same. The incoherence, the inability to maintain a shred of cohesive thought, is so obvious that not noticing is denial, not a failure in observation.

Consider this passage (read all of it, I dare you!!), the very beginning of the interview, the very first words coming out of his foaming, rabies-filled mouth, where Time asks about his meeting with Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei:

The entire interview is like this. On and on it goes. You can tell by reading it that the intrepid Time reporter asking the questions is like someone trying to get a chimpanzee to count to a hundred, knowing perfectly well it will never happen, but soldiering on anyway because that’s the job.

His communications director, Steven Cheung, who is possibly even more insane than the predator-in-chief, was there to try to steer him around Time’s questions that a five-year-old would have done a better job articulating answers to.

His new trad wife, Natalie Harp, was there, too, serving as sort of a filler for his vast memory hole.

Neither of these two characters from an absurdist novel helped him much. He yammered senselessly during the entire interview.

Afterwards, the bewilderingly sycophantic mainstream media snatched a few paragraphs out of the rambling display of paranoia and ignorance, and tried to make headlines out of the nonsense.

You can read the whole interview from the link below. I don’t advise it, but if you feel mentally tough today, I guess maybe have a go at it:

https://time.com/article/2026/10/01/donald-trump-2026-interview-transcript/

Meanwhile, the mad king is like Christa Pike (who would be a much better president). Nothing kills the dude. He’s like a cockroach. He’s on his back, his little cankled legs flailing about like the insect he is, but he keeps yammering away, thinking we want more of what he has, while toxins that should kill him flow through his puffed up, orange corpse of a body.

Unless his minions have devised a plan to steal the midterms, his last days as a cockroach on its back spluttering out the same words every half hour or so will cost them both houses of Congress.

If they know something we don’t, and have a plan to steal the elections (very, very difficult to accomplish given the decentralized nature of the U.S. electoral process), the streets will fill up the next day, and they’ll lose a lot more than an election.

Because if that happens, even this aging, semi-functional stroke survivor will be out with the rest of you, armed with a torch, a crutch with a bayonet, and whatever else it takes to inform them of their grievous error.

Notes

The mad king has a $400 million political war chest to work with. You will see billions of negative ads in the next few weeks. Fight back by dragging one person you know to an election booth with you.

VOTE.

I’ve talked frequently about his clinical insanity. For example:

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Footnotes

Every time Ruminato gets a paid subscriber (you know who you are — thank you!), I’m able to hire 47 new correspondents. My secret? I pay Soviet era East European wages because I’m a communist. One of our 47 newest correspondents has received this exclusive transcript of…

Date Night at the West Wing!

Featuring TrumpleThinSkin and his new trad wife, Natalie!

So get yourself a nice warm glass of Jeppson’s Malört, top it off with some ketamine dust (if there is such a thing), and enjoy the show.

Natalie: The new video is ready, pumpkin.

Predator in Chief (PRIC): I hate it when you call me that. What if the fake media finds out that’s your nickname for me?

Natalie: I only say it to you, pumpkin.

PRIC: I’ll allow it.

Natalie (looking up): You don’t have the room bugged, do you?

PRIC: No, of course I don’t have the room bugged. If I did, some communist infiltrator would find them and release the tapes to Katie Phang.

Natalie: She scares the hell out of me. Oh, did I tell you? Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I counted the video cameras on the ceiling. 4700 seems like a lot.

PRIC: You never know when a globalist will try to assassinate me. They’re everywhere these days. Them and the communists and socialists. The NFL is full of them. And all the players are Black now.

Natalie: Why? Are we running out of white people who can play football?

PRIC: We’re running out of white people in general. It’s a travesty. Stephen Miller, he’s a very smart man. A little spooky, but very smart. He helped me win Ohio. He tells me that if we don’t deport all the immigrants by Christmas, the white race will be eliminated.

Natalie (sobbing): Where will I go if that happens?

PRIC: We have fortified shelters in Greenland. Nobody knows about them. But they’re fantastic. State-of-the-art underground bunkers. The best that science has to offer. A few of us will be able to make our escape there until the ballroom is done.

Natalie (whimpering): Will I be able to come?

PRIC: Well, it’s a choice between you and Melanie, but I don’t think Melanie is interested.

Natalie: Melanie?

PRIC: You know, Barron’s mom? I think. I should check with my people on that. Or maybe Don Junior knows. Or, no, no, I’ll ask Kushner. He knows everything.

Natalie: You’re so sexy when you’re confused. Especially when you’re thinking about Kushner, because that means you’re thinking about his wife.

PRIC: My lovely daughter. She’s really terrific. I could have dated her once, but I was a very busy man when I was younger. Okay, great. So what’s the new video about? Heather COX Richardson says it’s fantastic. Is Heather COX right?

Natalie: How does she know?

PRIC: I dunno. She musta saw it.

Natalie: Oh. I must have hit “Send.”

PRIC: That’s okay, we can watch it together (snuggles close).

Natalie (scrunching up nose): Ummm.

PRIC: We may need to make a few more like this so that the American people understand how powerful I am. Maybe a video of me nuking a Democratic city, like Savannah.

Natalie: Why Savannah?

PRIC: Why not? It’s full of communists and transvestites. But it’s not so big that people will care. I think I could improve our Midterm chances a lot in Georgia that way.

Natalie: I like the approach. You’re good cop and bad cop. $5,000 to those who vote for you, nukes to those who don’t.

PRIC: It’s time to really show these dirtbags who’s in charge. And Hegseth has fired all the Biden LGQwhatever DEI generals who would lie to me and try to tell me it’s a bad idea. Bunch of whiners.

Natalie: This is so exciting. And after that, you can declare martial law!

PRIC: Yep. All the losers and communists will be upset. Even some of the globalist pinkos at Fox will be. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Natalie: If we nuke Savannah, it will be safe to go to the beach again, right? Susie Wiles told me that the beaches aren’t safe there because of all the Gullah Geechee people that are there.

PRIC: The what? What’s that?

Natalie: I dunno, pumpkin, but it sounds scary.

PRIC: I don’t know anything about beaches and nukes. I’ll ask Hegseth. But maybe we can just deport all these Gullah Geechee people you’re talking about instead. You know. Make beaches safe again. What color are they?

Natalie (shrugs): Dark, I think?

PRIC: God in heaven, where the hell do all these people come from?

Natalie: I asked Stephen that just the other day.

PRIC: He knows a lot about this stuff. He’s our immigration expert, you know. What did he say?

Natalie: Uh, huh. He says there’s a big hole in the ground in China, and they let them in through there, from hell, and ship them to us in the middle of the night on big container ships when nobody is watching.

PRIC: That’s terrifying. Does he have video?

Natalie: I think so. But if he doesn’t, can’t I just use AI? They all voted for you in Ohio because they believed the eating cats and dogs thing.

PRIC (sounding angry): They believed it because it’s true.

Natalie: I know bumpkin. But Kamala didn’t believe it.

PRIC: That’s because she’s a globalist Californian from the People’s Republic of San Francisco pretending to be Black. And I beat her in a landslide. The biggest landslide in history, but the fake news media pretended it was a close election because they stole all the votes from the Dominic machines.

Natalie: Dominion?

PRIC: I dunno. Whatever. The machines that Starlink wasn’t able to hack.

Natalie: Oh. I’m so confused.

PRIC: There’s nothing wrong with being confused. The fake media wants you to think it’s not okay, but it’s okay. Trust me. It’s okay. Everything is okay. As long as I’m president.

Natalie: But if Kamala’s not Black, who is?

PRIC: You can’t worry about that. Whoever we say is Black, is Black. It’s really that simple. And there’s good Black and bad Black. Clarence, he’s good. Stephen A. Smith, not so much. But sometimes he is. But I decide. So whenever I say he’s good, we use our media platform to let everyone know.

Natalie: What about Black FBI agents? Are they good?

PRIC: Probably not. Kash is working on that. That’s why he’s been recruiting new agents from cow brothels.1

Natalie: White agents, right?

PRIC: Of course.

Natalie: Should I make a cow brothel recruitment video?

PRIC: Sure, why not? But not now. We’ve got work to do. (snuggles up closer)

Natalie (scrunching up nose): Okay, do you want to see the video I made, pumpkin?

PRIC: Let’s see it.

Natalie: It’s still a little raw.

PRIC: That’s okay, Nat, so are you, and I love you, don’t I?

Natalie: Awww, you’re always so sweet to me. I will love you until the end of time. I will do anything for you. I will march through forest fires to reach you. I will captain a ship full of fools. I will…

PRIC: Damn, turn off Elon’s AI generated-conversation microchip and play the damn video.

Natalie (hitting the play button on her phone and handing it to him): Okay, my love.

PRIC: I look fantastic, don’t I?

Natalie: The word that comes to mind for me is “majestic.”

PRIC: Majestic. I like that. Yes, Your Majesty. I like that, too. Print out an Executive Order: I hereby declare that all Cabinet members from here on out refer to Donald J. Trump, chief executive and president of the United States, Canada, Cuba, Greenland, Venezuela, and the Strait of Trump, formerly known as the Strait of Hormuz, as Your Majesty. (printer whirring next to Natalie in the bed). This directive takes effect immediately. No exceptions, not even Miller.

Natalie: Yes, pumpkin, I love it!

PRIC: Call me “Your Majesty,” or you’re fired.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

Hey, this is a good time to plug my short story about AI microchips that help people generate conversations. Not a humorous story, but not overly dark, either, and with a happy ending! Yay! We need stories with happy endings these days.

Thanks for reading!

You can now purchase a PDF of all my Substack Fiction. Only $4.99. That’s less than a Taylor Farms salad, and a lot better for you! Enter SUBSCRIBER_SPECIAL to get a 20 percent discount.

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Buy on Amazon

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Footnotes

1

I wish I could claim credit for “cow brothels,” but that’s a Wonkette thing…

Wonkette

Some Of Kash Patel’s Best FBI Agents Used To Work In Cow Brothels!

Right here at the outset we want to address any objections to us making jokes about what happened in the Senate yesterday with Kash Patel and the recent changes to the FBI regs that say a handful of youthful sexual dalliances with cows are no longer a dealbreaker for prospective agents…

Read more

a month ago · 219 likes · 620 comments · Evan Hurst

The rest of us will soon be defining what a Texan really is.

Is he the gritty, hard-nosed, but almost always fair mythological hero of a Taylor Sheridan television show?

Or is he Bo French?

We can also ask if a Texan is ever a woman, but, increasingly, given the attacks on women’s bodily autonomy there, the answer seems to be no, unless that woman is a subservient trad wife.

That’s a different topic, as is the incredible resistance from such Texas women as Jasmine Crockett and her persistent supporters in the face of all that relentless feigned machismo.

For the purposes of this post, however, and for the sake of argument, a Texan is the Taylor Sheridan tough guy with a keen sense of honor.

The word “honor” submits to a strikeout in this post because we are about to find out if Texans have any honor left in their souls. Has Texas Republican grift, graft, racism, and misogyny, which grows every year because Republican power there does, finally drained the life out of whatever little honor is left within Texas men?

In a few weeks, these men will make a few big decisions on who to elect to important statewide offices and the U.S. Senate. Texas women will vote, too, of course, but it’s mostly men who put people like Ken Paxton and Texas Governor Greg Abbott into power and keep them there election after election, no matter what barbaric policies they implement.

These aren’t the usual political choices. This election is not about taxes, or land reform, or beef import/export issues, or oil, or drilling, or free enterprise, or socialism, or property values, or business costs, or wages, or immigration, or ranch varmints, or homesteading, or ranches.

This election is about whether or not Texas men are brave enough to finally say, “No, our boys have gone low enough. We will not stand for this.”

Decades ago, many of their fathers voted for Texas Democratic Governor Ann Richards. Maybe they can manage to work through whatever fears they have about stopping the Texas slide into a toxic Musk stew and vote for a few Democrats, who are extremely unlikely to change their lives no matter what the hysterical proclamations of Republican propaganda and bro culture podcasts tell them.

The two most important candidates that are challenging the honor of Texas men are Ken Paxton and Bo French.

I’ve talked about Paxton enough.

Here…

And here…

In the words of every Martin Scorsese villain everywhere: “Enough of this guy.”

Somehow, there’s an even worse Texas varmint raging through the plains of Texas.

“How can this be?” asks my alarmed reader. Worse than Paxton? Unpossible!

Ah, my friends, but the old code of Texas is long gone. There is no honor left, hence the strikeout in the text above. Or, perhaps it was always a hoax. Because Bo French is a loud and proud Texan, and he wants to be the next Railroad Commissioner.

Railroad Commissioner? So? Let the lunatic have his fun for a few years. What harm could an obscure office like that cause?

Well, my dear, exhausted reader, the Texas Railroad Commissioner is basically the Chief Operating Officer of the state. The position is second only in importance to statewide operations in Texas, after the Governor.

The Texas Railroad Commission regulates the state’s oil, natural gas, pipeline, and mining industries. It hasn’t had railroad oversight duties since 2005, when railroad oversight transferred to the Texas Department of Transportation.

The Texas Railroad Commission consists of three commissioners. And, if Bo has his way, it will also feature Bo, who will oversee everything.

And who is Bo French, aside from an avowed and proud racist?

Well, he’s such a lunatic that Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s former Chief of Staff and a long-time stalwart Texas Republican, has said he’d vote for Jon Rosenthal, the Democrat running against Bo.

Rove used to be considered among the worst of the worst back when he was crafting attack messages for George W. Bush’s election efforts. But the Republican Party today makes the Republican Party of Rove’s era look like teenage choir boys begging for chastity compared to the current crew.

And why has Rove turned on Bo so? (Sorry, I couldn’t stop myself.)

The racist tweet started it, as did other racist comments. CNN has the dirt regarding Bo’s unabashed racism:1

A CNN KFile review uncovered at least five removed social media posts from February 2025 in which French, using a previous username from his current account, invoked public executions, gallows or hanging. It’s unclear if the posts were deleted by French himself or removed because they violated Twitter’s prior rules against hate speech.

But it’s very likely that what really got to Rove, who is a master at political massage, was that Bo called for public executions of political opponents. CNN again:

In May 2020, amid Republican backlash to the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, French publicly called for the death penalty for people he described as “Obama conspirators,” invoked death as punishment for Obama himself, referring to the “former president,” and others while he repeatedly used the hashtag #HangEmHigh.

Rather than Rove being on anyone’s top ten list of progressive leaders, he’s always been on national top ten lists of political manipulators. As a deeply informed political hack in Texas, he surely knows Bo well. He’s been in politics longer than most of Substack’s equity partners have been alive, so you can be sure that Rove knows Bo won’t play well even to our badly tainted corporate media. Rove has therefore officially claimed that he will keep his distance.

That said, I’ll believe Rove votes for a Democrat when he sends me a certified copy of his ballot.

Republican John Cornyn, who was ousted by Paxton from the U.S. Senate representing Texas, has also disavowed any association with Bo, and is encouraging people to vote against him. Will Cornyn vote for Bo’s Democratic opponent, Rosenthal? Cornyn spent ten years of his U.S. Senate career occasionally feigning minor belches of outrage over various Trump escapades, but voted Trump’s way nearly 100% of the time. If Cornyn says he’ll vote against Bo, my response is, “prove it.”

Now, he’s looking at Bo French, who is simply an inevitable product of the Texas political system. CNN again:

The more recent February 2025 tweets include multiple calls for executions against government officials he said were exposed by DOGE – the Elon Musk initiative that embedded staffers throughout federal agencies to look for ways to curtail spending, including by ending various programs and obligations.

French wrote at the time that DOGE, which was an acronym of Department of Government Efficiency, should actually stand for “Dangle Officials Gallows Expeditiously,” adding in other tweets he wanted “more than perp walks” and “public executions,” for government officials he said were exposed by DOGE.

A long history of rot in Texas

The Republican rot is so deep in Texas that it would require a thousand-page doorstopper of a book to describe it all. Google “ProPublica Texas” to get a taste of it if you must, or just trust me when I say they’re not only misogynistic racists, but crooks, too.

Let’s consider just one such ProPublica article, one of probably hundreds that have been written since Greg Abbott assumed command of the Republican brand in Texas.

When The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune coordinated with ProPublica to learn more about exactly what lured Elon Musk to Texas and the various helpful laws passed since his arrival, they asked for some paperwork through the Freedom of Information Act. They were turned down. That’s illegal, but there isn’t a court in Texas left that would challenge Abbott. And you can bet your Cybertruck that the feds aren’t going to do anything.

ProPublica described the efforts in an article posted last year:2

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t want to reveal months of communications with Elon Musk or representatives from the tech mogul’s companies, arguing in part that they are of a private nature, not of public interest and potentially embarrassing.

Musk had an eventful legislative session in Texas this year. In addition to his lobbyists successfully advocating for several new laws, Abbott cited the Tesla and SpaceX CEO as the inspiration for the state creating its own efficiency office and has praised him for moving the headquarters for many of his businesses to the state in recent years.

As part of an effort to track the billionaire’s influence in the state Capitol, The Texas Newsroom in April requested Abbott and his staff’s emails since last fall with Musk and other people who have an email address associated with some of his companies.

Matthew Taylor, Abbott’s public information coordinator, gave several reasons the records should not be released.

The best part is this:

Taylor also argued that the communications are confidential under an exception to public records laws known as “common-law privacy” because they consist of “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public, including financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and a governmental body.”

“Intimate and embarrassing” is so on brand for modern Republicans that little guesswork is required about what some of that entails, although when it involves Elon Musk, we can assume it involves assorted sordid tales we’d rather not know. “Too Much Information” (aka TMI) is still a thing among many of us.

But there is no honor left among men in Texas, as proven by the consistent electoral victories of the likes of Abbott and Paxton.

I’ve talked about Abbott’s institutionalized corruption before:

That article describes how Abbott didn’t satisfy himself by simply letting big oil own his office. He created an entire court system to permanently bake big oil into the government.

I could pick on him for a hundred more flagrant violations of human decency, but I’ll leave you with just one more.

Using slave labor to maim migrants

Greg Abbott has been using slave labor to maim migrants since 2024. This sounds like my typical hyperbole, of which I’ll admit I’m rather fond. But it’s not. Women and children are getting maimed on the Rio Grande by razor wire made by Texas prisoners in a forgotten policy Abbott developed a little more than two years ago.

Local journalists at the time only found out about it when women and children began arriving at an Eagle Pass, Texas shelter with lacerations from razor wire made by Governor Greg Abbott’s slave labor workforce. These aren’t paper cuts. According to USA Today:3

In the past week, migrants, including many children, have arrived at the Eagle Pass shelter with an array of injuries: lacerations, welts and open wounds.

Pregnant women have high blood pressure from stress, said Valeria Wheeler, the shelter’s executive director, and migrants have gashes in their heads and faces. The shelter has also been accepting an unusually high number of migrants recently released from hospitals, she said.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Wheeler said. “They’re putting lives at risk.”

These children and pregnant women were injured on the Rio Grande while being pushed around the river by Abbott’s new immigration police.4

Some of it was too much for even the immigration police Abbott tasked to carry out his anti-immigrant agenda.

Whistleblowers at the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) at the time circulated a set of photos that revealed numerous injuries to migrants, including a torso gash so substantial that it required health workers to staple it shut.

Keep in mind that the Rio Grande isn’t exactly America’s cleanest waterway. For one thing, it’s on the Texas border. Texas is not exactly Oregon when considering clean waterways.5

Texas waters are also famous for flesh-eating bacteria and other fun microbes that delight in finding open wounds to frolic in.6

To highlight his mendacity, Abbott is using razor wire that is manufactured in a Texas state prison, according to the Corpus Christi Caller Times:7

A purchase order dated March 11, 2021, which was five days after Abbott announced the border buildup that has sent thousands of National Guard soldiers and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers to points all along the Rio Grande, shows a contract for $865,291 was awarded to Bergandi Machinery of Ontario, California, for a machine capable of churning out 180 feet of galvanized or stainless steel wiring per minute.

The order shows that the unit was being shipped to TDCJ’s Powledge Unit near the East Texas town of Palestine, which has an inmate capacity of 1,137, including 321 for its trusty camp. The unit also has a metal manufacturing plant on site.

In other words, Abbott spent nearly a million dollars on a razor wire-making machine and installed it in a Texas prison, where the labor is free and the way of life miserable.

How miserable? At least nine inmates died that year in Texas prisons because of a lack of air conditioning. While the honorable men of Dallas are enjoying a nice steak in the cool dining rooms at Y.O. Ranch Steakhouse, Texas inmates are dropping dead from the heat because many Texas prisons and county jails have no air conditioning. The old stone buildings they sort of live in become furnaces in the 100-degree heat.

Most of us get to turn our pillows to the cold side when we get too hot in a heat wave. Texas prisoners turn over and die.

Here is a brief story of one Texas slave, as reported by The Texas Tribune:8

Tommy McCullough was exhausted and thirsty, living in a stifling Huntsville prison as the record-breaking and relentless heat wave bore down across Texas this month. But he got up Friday morning and set to work, mowing the sun-scorched fields outside the Goree Unit.

By midday, he’d collapsed, dying of what the prison system says was cardiac arrest. He was 35.

According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), Texas prison inmates earn no money for the kind of work Tommy was doing:9

Inmates are not paid for their work, but they can earn privileges as a result of good work habits.

What happens if they refuse to work?

The TDCJ is happy to explain:

Inmates who continue to refuse to work lose their privileges and are placed in “special cell restriction.”

Umm, do you mean solitary confinement?

Special cell restriction means remaining in the cell 24 hours a day, with no trips to the day room, commissary, or recreation yard. Meals are also eaten in the cell, and personal property is taken away while on special cell restriction.

Oh, well, yes, yes it does mean solitary confinement. Or damn close. Maybe he’s lucky enough to have a murderous, sexually active cellmate. Thanks for that clarification, Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Anyway, that’s the very definition of slave labor.

You might have thought that slavery was ended by the 13th Amendment, which declared an official end to slavery throughout the United States. However, there’s a loophole:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Texas is not significantly more brutal than other states toward their prisoners, but most states are not using slave labor to develop body-slashing materials for swimmers.

The razor wire remains in place to this day.

Even in a beautiful world that sees an end to the likes of Abbott, it’s unlikely we’ll see prison reform anytime soon, so it’s fair to consider that part of this story an unnecessary sidebar. I use it here to illustrate how a mind like Abbott’s works, and how quickly he’s able to develop a system for lacing razor wire into an immigrant mother’s legs, all in the name of protecting a land once owned by Mexico. Need cheap labor? His deviant mind quickly turns to prison inmates. Problem solved.

Taylor Sheridan’s best work happens when he crosses into the gray areas necessary to reveal honor in his storytelling. His most compelling work recognizes the struggles of minority ethnic groups, and especially Native Americans.

If Texas men want to be more like Taylor Sheridan, they should stop voting for scumbags, who, in most Taylor Sheridan shows, usually end up in a ditch.

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