My Darling Harlot of Hate:

I knew when Bastille wrote that he didn’t stroke out on the eve of this most disastrous of elections that we were on the verge of a cataclysm. Alas, things are much worse than that.

As I stumble through the charred remains of our movement, all I can think about is how I long for the bitter taste of your lips as you push me away with that quirky, loving shove that I’ve grown accustomed to during these last ten years.

Those earliest days of our romance, the blossoming of true love that took hold when I firebombed your house to get your attention, weigh heavily on me as the curtains close on this decade of joyful malevolence. So many memories. Where does the time go?

As I write this, our forces are in disarray. Our standard bearer of hate seems confused and broken, waxing poetic as usual, but this time about reflecting pools and golden arches.

We wait in the trenches for marching orders: Who do we vilify this week? Who should receive our wrath? It’s fair to say that our options grew exponentially in one horrific night.

Instead, we hear from the Veep that the Iran war cost us an election, and instead of serving his head on a platter, our once great leader mumbles something in vague agreement.

This is not the man we so bravely fought for.

But then, just yesterday, our wondrous leader shed his skin of compromise and acceptance in a most spectacular fashion. He delivered a late Friday miracle, as he so often does, away from the headlines and the madding crowd.

I know what you must be thinking. Surely, the news that Commandant Miller is now second in command changes things. We are saved!

Oh, my demonic princess of lustful rancor. I wish. The Commandant will likely be neutered by incompetence. Especially now that his predecessor is gone. Everyone knows that she kept the trains running on time.

Did you know, my sweet cherub of discord, that the legal department can’t seem to secure an indictment against any of our enemies, no matter how many AI-generated tomes we deliver to the jaded heathens on grand juries or to corrupt judges?

James Comey: Case dismissed. Can grand juries not read beach rocks????

Letitia James: Case dismissed. Cassidy Hutchinson, who cruelly testified before the House Select Committee to investigate the heroic January 6th protest at the United States Capitol: Dismissed. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: Dismissed. Mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey: Dismissed. St. Paul mayor Kaohly Her, who dared to criticize the Commandant’s incredible immigration efforts: Dismissed.

And other enemies of the state who criticized the Commandant’s efforts to cleanse this nation of dark-skinned infidels?

State Attorney General Keith Ellison: Case dismissed. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty: Dismissed. U.S. Representative Jason Crow: Dismissed. U.S. Representative Maggie Goodlander: Dismissed. U.S. Representative Chrissy Houlahan: Dismissed. U.S. Representative Rep. Chris Deluzio: Dismissed. U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin: Dismissed. Democratic Congressional Candidate Kat Abughazaleh: Dismissed. Army Veteran Jan “Jay” Carey: Dismissed. Protester Sean Dunn: Dismissed. Congressman Adam Schiff: Dismissed.

Do you see a trend here? That our legal system is broken beyond redemption?

Other misguided critics, too, have been set free from the judicial process by treasonous judges and illiterate grand juries, my wickedly venomous siren of hate:

Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander: Case dismissed. Former Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell: Dismissed. U.S. Senator Alex Padilla: Dismissed. SEIU California President David Huerta: Dismissed. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka: Dismissed.1

Whether through weak-kneed grand juries or judges paid off by Hunter Biden’s laptop, which we all know is full of ghost crypto, all these heroic efforts to imprison these traitors failed. And this was under the watchful eye of Susie Wiles, who acted as a chief operating officer of sorts. I don’t dare to guess how badly our legal department will fare without her organizational guidance.

We are all fighters, after all, not deep state bureaucrats. Susie was our bureaucracy whisperer. Find us some Capitol steps, and we will march on up like gladiators. But negotiating the fetid halls of American jurisprudence and law requires a deft hand, my sweet cherub of strife.

Not that I begrudge the great leader’s choice to place Commandant Miller second in command. No, not at all. But it would have been nice to retain Susie in some capacity, because she knows where the bodies are buried. I suppose, however, that we can be sure of her silence, because Great Leader also knows where her bodies are buried. What a wonderful carousel we all live on, no?

The carousel of life, where we all cheat the corrupt system to such an extent that we cannot possibly betray our secrets to the enemy, lest our own secrets leech into the wrong hands.

Am I insufficiently thrilled about the promotion of our Gestapo leader?

Perhaps I am.

But understand that as I toured Texas in my 1993 Ford Bronco in the aftermath of the election, a great depression settled into my soul.

Surely, I thought, it was only the hedonistic James Talarico defeating the sloppy Paxton that I needed to worry about. Surely the rest of the state was safe.

But then I discovered that 700,000 more voters chose Gina Hinojosa over Greg Abbott to be Texas Governor. How is this possible in a Christian nation such as Texas? I told you long ago that secession was the surest path to final victory, but, as you know, nobody listened to me.

We became so complacent that the tech wizard Elon Musk moved his entire operation to Texas for the obvious benefit of being allowed to do whatever he wanted. What’s good for Elon, my darling dish of despondence, is good for America, I say. So if he wants to abandon the technical marvel that is the Cybertruck, I say, more power to him!

Would I have preferred a fleet of a million Cybertrucks at the ready to slice and dice leftist communist crowds protesting the Commandant’s cleansing policies? Of course. But I trust Elon. I’m sure he’s got something better up his sleeve. Wherever the chainsaw points, I guess.

But now that the Texas House of Representatives has turned communist, along with just about every statewide office in Texas, I must ask: Whither Elon?

The possibility that I’ll no longer witness the aluminum tubes of his grand machines dropping into Texas coastal waters on the regular is enough to make a grown man cry. The communists will demand we protect a few long-necked sea birds, and humanity will suffer the consequences.

You might mock me for saying so, but I wouldn’t be shocked if the communist Hinojosa cancelled all future elections in Texas and installed Greta Thunberg as Railroad Commissioner.

Even worse, what might happen to the grand experiment in social media, wherein Elon built a machine of truth that seemed, until last Tuesday, destined to forever protect the white race from imminent destruction?

Surely, Elon will continue to throw dozens of thunderbolts of his enlightened thoughts into cyberspace, but I sense a looming withdrawal within his target market, as the marketing gadflies like to call it. The young men we previously relied on seem demoralized, their faith in our cause shaken.

This is especially true now that Andrew Tate is being forced to return to sissy London to face the Grand Inquisition of Woke. You can be sure that the transgenders who now rule England will throw him into the Tower of London and live stream the whole affair to try to make a point.

The frightened young men in our once strong nation seem unable to synchronize the need for world stability and a display of American power in the Persian Gulf, which should probably be renamed the American Gulf, with the necessity of paying just a wee bit more for their trips to Lollapalooza or the next Comic-Con.

It’s a small price to pay. But they seem unwilling to pay it. I’m afraid our Founding Fathers were right all along: Only the ruling class should be allowed to vote.

Sacrifice has become a dirty word, unlike “Patriotism,” which is now properly wrapped in the flag of the great white European nation, even as our numbers dwindle and we become threatened with extinction.

And what of the Groyper Wars? I don’t think anyone knows which side they’re fighting for anymore. I know I don’t. One would think we’d all unite under one banner in the face of this defeat at the hands of the infidels, but we all hate each other, so that seems unlikely.

On another note, this will be my 1001st letter to you since your last reply. I understand how busy you are on your own front in this difficult war, so I will soldier on in the hope that you will reach out to me after this letter. If not, I will visit you as soon as the current restraining order expires.

In the meantime, stay safe, my lovely strumpet of Patriotism, and keep the faith as long as you can.

Notes

Other Groyper War letters from the front:

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Footnotes

Even during the Bluenami, the New York Times was busy sanewashing the Orange Puffaroon.

How on earth did they manage that on a night such as that? A night when Texas quite literally dumped blue urinal cleanser into the heart of Texas’ toxic Republican politics? A night in which Congress became the regime’s chief antagonist that will soon replace an army of bootlicking troubadours and sycophants? A night when battleground states became Blue havens of sanity and control?

Simple. They interviewed the most prolific liar in the history of American politics, and then reported on his professed acquiescence to the election results as “honest-to-goodness, oh, gee whiz, I’m so humbled” truth.

The rest of corporate media quickly followed suit.

The Times editors were so excited to be the first to report on his reaction to this regime’s equivalent of the Red Wedding that they forgot who the hell they were talking to:1

President Trump said on Tuesday night that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results of the midterm elections, and was prepared to work with Democrats.

“We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he said in a phone interview with The New York Times. “We’ll probably work something out.”

Thus began a long, otherwise wonderful election night that featured a consistent refrain of Trump “compromise” that the New York Times tried to sell its readers during otherwise pretty good reporting on the results.

The good reporting came from the worker bees on the ground. Their hard work was once again tainted by the newspaper’s editors.

It became impossible for me to watch the live updates roll in that night from the Times and not conclude that the editors were prodding the reporters regularly to remind us that the man who taught third graders the word “narcissism” just by being there had been humbled.

He hadn’t.

Today, he fired Susie Wiles and replaced her with Gestapo Chief Stephen Miller.2

Wiles, a bootlicker artist whose subservience has turned her into the Frida Kahlo of sycophancy, said this on Apartheid TwitterX in reaction to her becoming the first major West Winger to be thrown under the Trump bus:3

Today is my last day as White House Chief of Staff.

Serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime. I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First.

More than anything, I’m grateful for the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will.

Yikes, Susie. If he puts a gun to your head, you’ll probably praise his choice of weaponry.

If you’re not familiar with Stephen Miller, I love you so much for being able to avoid his Nosferatu glare and his deeply troubled soul. I first wrote about him here, way back in September 2024:

I’m going to reproduce that entire essay here, because it is important that you understand the full essence of this man’s depravity.

Trump, as I figured he would, has decided to double down. Quite the opposite of what he told the Times.

Shocker, right?

Hold on to your hats. Things are gonna be really crazy until the new Democratic Congress marches into town.

Meet Stephen Miller — the Last Man Standing

He has been with Trump since day one. Oh, and he probably wants to kill you

If you work with Donald Trump, you’ll likely get fired. He even starred in a reality TV show about it. If you don’t get fired, you’ll probably quit because the man who brags about sexually assaulting women is insufferable.

This isn’t my usual hyperbole. It’s a well-documented fact. He churns through minions like a ghastly, overfed orange piranha in a fish bowl.

The one exception? Stephen Miller.

Meet Stephen Miller

If you don’t know who Stephen Miller is or have blissfully erased him from your busy mind, I’m here to give you the grisly details of a man who has been the hate cult’s trusted servant since it began its assault against America in 2016.

Oh, and he probably wants to kill you. More on that later.

Miller has been Donald Trump’s faithful attack dog on immigration and white replacement theory since he started working with Trump in 2016. He remains dedicated to creating an American Transylvania through Project 2025, the massive 900-page document created by Trumplestans that acts as a manifesto for transforming the American government into a Trump Republic of hate.

He’s also the one guy who never gets fired from the Trump Reich or never leaves in disgust.

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Miller is a child of immigration

Stephen Miller was born in 1985 to Michael D. Miller, a real estate developer, and Miriam Glosser Miller, whose great-grandmother came from a classic immigration background.

Miriam’s great-grandparents came from a part of the world where anti-Jewish riots erupted after the Russian Empire expanded between 1772 and 1815. Jews from its newly conquered territories had begun to migrate into the Russian interior. This led the Russian government to do a bit of ethnic cleansing by designating specific territory close to Moscow and other interior cities off limits to Jews.

Anti-Jewish sentiment remained so strong during the next century in Russian territories that a new word was invented to reflect the violence that targeted Jews: pogrom. A pogrom is a system of institutionalized violence against a segment of a nation’s population, often through the manipulation of local populations.

Imagine Haitians in Springfield, Ohio during a second Trump presidency, and you’re pretty much there in understanding the definition of the word.

From 1903 to 1906, Imperial Russia embarked on a campaign of violence against Jews in its Eastern European territories. This ultimately led to hundreds of deaths in 64 cities and 626 small towns in Ukraine, Moldova (then known as Bessarabia), and other outlying regions.

Stephen Miller’s great grandparents, Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie, fled the country in a near mirror image of modern Central Americans fleeing political and cartel violence.

The two Ashkenazi Jews, speaking little to no English, came to America in 1906 on the S.S. Moltke, a German ocean liner, so that they could take shelter from ethnic violence within their new nation’s framework of opportunity.

Sadly, from this humble beginning, the final result was a 16-year-old high school kid named Stephen Miller, who wrote a troubling and rambling letter in 2002 to the editor of the smallish Santa Monica Outlook that described his high school thusly in reaction to 9–11:4

“Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”

When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.

He then pivots to sex:

And while we are on the subject of personal accomplishment, should any student accomplish the opportunity to have sex, our school is happy to help. As district policy says: “Condoms are available to students in grades 9–12 in a manner which promotes greatest accessibility.” Problem here?

This sounds like a kid who rarely accomplished the opportunity to have sex. Anyway, go on, young Stephen:

Legally speaking, sex between minors is statutory rape. Not to mention 14-year olds are a little young to be having sex regardless of the law.

Methinks that young Stephen spied a freshman he would have liked to have wooed into his dark lair, but since he was kryptonite in a progressive school district, he had no chance. So he lashed out instead. He continues:

And just in case your son or daughter decides at their tender age that they are gay, we have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality. Do they notify parents if their teenagers have chosen an alternate lifestyle? Of course not.

Yikes, Stephen. I bet you were fun at parties.

The letter rambles on:

At least, one would hope, that on Veterans Day or thanksgiving students are taught about our brave US soldiers or the courageous pilgrims. But no such explanations are given. And rightly so, many misguided people would say.

After some further blathering about the free and the brave, he says:

Sadly, my school has forgotten all of this. That is why we do nothing for American holidays but everything for Mexican holidays.

(Checks calendar): ????

You can read the whole mess here. Too often, young white boys who write letters like this end up in the newspapers, their faces cloaked in hoodies, leaving behind the thoughts and prayers of hapless politicians.

Miller took out his frustrations, not on his high school, but on an entire nation.

This was a kid who yelled at Spanish-speaking kids to speak only English in his high school.

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Miller’s middle school friend, Jason Islas, recalls how his friendship with Miller ended when Miller said to him5:

“I can’t be your friend anymore because you are Latino.”

Miller was 14 years old at the time. Great Grandma Bessie must have barfed in her grave.

As the television network Univision describes it:

He quickly stood out as a contentious and provocative student whose conservative and ultra-nationalist politics put him continuously at odds with teachers, administrators and students.

Univision Noticias spoke with several classmates who said Miller had few friends, none of them non-white. They said he used to make fun of the children of Latino and Asian immigrants who did not speak English well.

Natalie Flores, another student who witnessed Miller’s evolution from middle to high school, said he displayed “an intense hatred toward people of color, especially toward Latinos.” She and other students interviewed for this report recalled that Miller became angry whenever he heard students speaking Spanish in the hallways.

Like Jesus, Miller disappears from history from the age of 14 until his thirties

Well, not quite. It just seems like it.

Seventeen years after rejecting his Latino friend, Miller seemingly came out of nowhere to co-author, with Steve Bannon (he of the non-bathing persuasion), the famous inaugural address where Trump spoke of an “American carnage.”

But it wasn’t quite out of nowhere. Miller had spent those seventeen years nurturing his hatred.

He has said that his first major conservative influence was the disgraced Wayne LaPierre, the corrupt leader of the NRA who stole $4,351,231 from the NRA and was forced by a lawsuit to pay it back.6

I sort of like LaPierre for stealing from the NRA, but whatever. People gotta judge.

Miller went on to David Duke University, where he graduated with high honors.

I kid. He attended Duke University, then worked for one of the first crazies in the far-right movement, Congress Critter Michelle Bachmann. He started hanging around with the likes of Richard Spencer, who you may remember as one of America’s favorite punching bags:

He also became pals with David Horowitz, a renowned anti-immigration blowhard, and white nationalist Jared Taylor, who may have first introduced Miller to the term “Mexican invasion” during a debate that Miller arranged with a Santa Monica school board member.

According to Univision:

In a recording of the show on YouTube , Taylor is heard complaining that the U.S. government is not doing enough to halt an “invasion” by Mexican migrants.

Miller later worked for Jeff Sessions, another notorious anti-immigrant politician, when Sessions was an Alabama Senator.

The Trump Years

When Miller was a close confidant and advisor to President Trump, Sessions was named attorney general in a move that can only be described as, “Name the most terrifying person you can as Attorney General.” Aside from Stephen Miller, of course.

Sessions, during his short tenure as Attorney General, threatened Sanctuary cities with a loss of federal funding, demanded that U.S. prosecutors seek maximum penalties in federal drug cases, steadfastly resisted criminal justice reform, and, of course, helped implement Miller’s family separation policy at the border.

Sessions, like most people who’ve worked with Trump, eventually did not pay sufficient homage to the Orange Ordure and was kicked out of the club.

Stephen Miller, on the other hand, has remained steadfast in his devotion to the Thief in Chief.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s website dedicated a webpage to Miller early in the Trump administration7. It wasn’t meant to be an honor:

The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that Miller apparently has a sadistic side:

In response to seeing photos of children being separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico as a result of the zero-tolerance policy, an external White House adviser, in a Vanity Fair report, said, “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.” According to Miller, the administration’s decision to institute the policy was “a simple decision.”

To justify a rabid anti-immigrant stance, Miller says things like this:

“You’ve seen what it does to living standards. You’ve seen what it does to wages. You’ve seen what it does in terms of transnational cartels. You’ve seen what it has done to the innocent victims of illegal immigrant crime … You have seen the death. You have seen the needless destruction because we can’t secure this border.

Does any of that rhetoric remind you of someone?

Never mind that the only flames of destruction we’ve seen coming out of Texas lately have been in the heart of climate denial country in the Texas Panhandle:

This all is doublespeak, of course, anyway. His agenda should be clear to you by now.

Unfortunately, Miller has been so tenacious with his vitriol that the majority of Americans now lean anti-immigration, according to most polls.

It probably won’t be long before Republicans finally acknowledge climate change, but blame immigrants for it.

After the failed Trump presidency

Stephen Miller has remained steadfast in his opposition to diversity, and especially immigration, since Trump lost the 2020 election.

While other Trump minions devoted their energy to making up lies about a so-called “stolen election,” Miller has been pounding the American social conscience with lies that immigrants are bad for America, bad for the economy, and have a direct impact on crime (which trended downward during Biden’s presidency).

As a result, Americans are blaming immigrants for everything from housing costs (instead of blaming the huge corporations and private equity firms that dominate rental properties) to crime.

This fiscal year, the Biden administration is spending $25 billion on border security. Biden has drifted right, when he should be drifting left, because most Americans now believe that immigration is a threat to their way of life, instead of the essence of an American dream that has always spanned oceans.

The latest rounds of stochastic terrorism against Haitians have Stephen Miller written all over them. That’s what he does: He works behind the scenes searching the country for places to attack. That’s been his role in life since he was 14 years old.

If Trump hadn’t overshot the net by such a wide margin with his “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” remark that became a viral song, the Haitians of Springfield would be facing even more danger than they are.

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Immigrants are the backbone of America

Always have been, always will be. They are not a threat to you. They never have been, and they never will be.

The typical day for new refugees from violence goes something like this:

Wake up at 5:00 am. Pound a mug of strong coffee. Spend ten or so hours sweating through day labor doing something nobody else wants to do. You don’t see a lot of dudes in red MAGA hats slinging shingles in the Dallas heat.

Often, new refugees take a second job. Maybe they’ll drive an Uber, or work at the local Walmart. Maybe they’ll bus some tables. But they rarely sit at home, even after a tough day of work. On the weekend, they hustle over to the currency exchange to cash their checks and wire a little money home.

When I say a little money, I mean, you know, like half their earnings.

They probably take a night class of some sort, too. Usually to learn the weird English language, which has about as much structural logic as a Trump golf course next to a shooting range.

The vast majority are thrilled to be here. Try to do a little America-bashing Bastille-style to an immigrant, and he/she will set you straight in a flash.

“America is a great country. It’s been very good to me,” is the most common refrain you’ll hear from a newly settled migrant.

He’s not competing with you for a rental unit in your neighborhood. He’s renting out the kind of place you don’t want, probably with a few other migrants.

He is, however, making sure that you’re drinking out of a clean glass when you are at the sushi restaurant scarfing down California rolls.

The bans on immigration keep growing

Restaurants and other consumers of cheap labor are passing their higher costs of labor to you as America imposes ever-tighter immigration restrictions. Many Americans, including people who should know better, blame Biden when the cost of their pizza goes up while they’re cheering on border security.

Miller has been laser-focused on removing as many immigrants from the nation as he possibly can since his arrival in Trumpland in 2016. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, which separated kids from their parents and resulted in children being imprisoned without any criminal charges.

Miller is also the architect of Trump’s attempted Muslim ban. That effort failed, but since he left the White House a lot more judges who are friendly to Trumpistan have infested the court system. A second attempt to ban Muslims will have a good chance of success because of places like the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where Trump installed six new judges for life.

Now that he’s out of the White House, Miller calls the existence of immigrants an invasion, harkening to his old pal, nationalist Jared Taylor:

He has encouraged people like Texas Governor Greg Abbott to ship penniless migrants to big cities across the country as political pawns. This has created division in big cities like Chicago, where many migrants often find themselves in hostile territory because they get sent by chartered busses to impoverished neighborhoods.

This has been a classic Republican strategy since the days of slavery (when Republicans were called Democrats and vice-versa): Find a couple of groups with limited resources, and get them to fight each other for the scraps left behind by the one percent.

Slavery obtained its initial support in no small part because poor whites considered Black people a threat to their access to the tiny slice of pie American society offered them in the 1800s. They were concerned that Blacks might interfere with their limited opportunities, so they preferred a formal incarceration system for all Black folks.

In the heart of 21st-century Chicago, Blacks and migrants are now competing for crumbs in the parts of the city that offer the least opportunities.

This is part of a grand strategy that Miller has been pushing since Trump was kicked out of the Oval Office by sensible voters.

While other Trumpstans have been pounding the table about their failed re-election, Miller has been hard at work trying to destroy the fabric of America’s social contract with the world as a haven from dysfunctional governments and violence.

He’s doing this while maintaining close ties to Trump.

Vanity Fair Magazine has referred to Miller as Wormtongue, and who am I to argue?

The two champions of hate have each other on speed dial, and they’re not satisfied taking down immigrants.

The great replacement theory

If you’re an aspiring white male writer, one way to break through the clutter is to complain that your white maleness is preventing you from success.8

That’s what Brian Beneker, who has been a script coordinator in Hollywood for twenty years, did when he tried to coordinate a turn in his career to become a scriptwriter himself.

Unable to land a script writing job with the Paramount drama series “SEAL Team”, he turned to Miller to coordinate a lawsuit complaining that diversity initiatives were shutting him out.9

Beneker claims that “heterosexual, white men need ‘extra’ qualifications” to be hired as writers on CBS’s shows.

As a “heterosexual, white man,” this makes me want to punch seals. I am happy to report that there is, indeed, more diversity in the creative arts, but it doesn’t come at the cost of blocking good talent. It may, possibly, come at the cost of blocking some mediocre talent, but is this really a problem?

Stephen Miller’s organization, America First Legal Foundation, thinks so.

America First Legal Foundation is a genuinely evil enterprise that Miller started in 2021. If you can think of a nefarious task, Miller is probably using the foundation to litigate a way to accomplish it, including using it to attack diversity in the arts with lawsuits like the kind he has helped file on Beneker’s behalf.10

It’s all part of Miller’s plan that even if Trumptrolls lose the election, they will try to change government policy through an antagonistic and activist court system.

Miller is a proponent of the Great Replacement Theory, a wild conspiracy theory that began in Europe mostly through a book by Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement, which has become source material for European right-wingers freaking out over non-white refugees flooding into Europe.

The conspiracy theory holds that white Americans will eventually disappear. If you had my mottled white skin, you’d be justified in thinking this is not a problem even if true. In fact, shit. Bring it on.

Miller would prefer to express his beliefs in a new administration, especially through Project 2025, which deserves a Substack exclusively dedicated to exposing the nearly 1,000-page document outlining its detailed plan to wipe out the bureaucracy and replace every single person in it with MAGA loyalists.

Stephen Miller probably wants to kill you

Remember at the beginning of the article I said Stephen Miller probably wants to kill you? Miller’s America First Legal Foundation has found a new attack vector on Obamacare. His foundation successfully launched a lawsuit that may soon arrive in the Supreme Court’s loving embrace that could end the ACA’s mandate for making health insurers pay for healthcare prompted by pre-existing conditions.11 12

If this happens, many people will die.

Stephen Miller didn’t kill a bunch of kids when he was a wild-eyed lunatic in high school.

He’s making up for that lost opportunity in a bigly way.

And if we end up with Trumplestein 2.0, he’ll have direct access to the levers of power that will leave nobody safe from his grasp.

He may be the last man standing as the country finally burns to the ground. Get that man a hoodie.

Update

At least some of the folks (if not all) who perished in the March 2024 Baltimore bridge collapse were migrant workers. So not only do they keep your glasses clean at the sushi place, they are fixing your bridges as you whiz by them in your computerized auto.13

Update #2

As many of you are aware, somehow, the orange blobbish creature, possibly from the Planet K2-18b,14 was temporarily (hopefully) reinstalled into the Oval Office after this article was published.

Notes

This is a Stephen Miller hit piece. I make no apologies for it. I did not create the political environment that necessitates this kind of article.

There are a lot of articles on the web about this goon, and some of them come from surprising places.15 16

Thanks for reading! Please restack this to counter all the hate.

Get well soon, Chris Murphy!

A special get well wish to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who won’t see this, so it’s just a “put it out to the universe thing.” He suffered a stroke last weekend. It is said that he is doing well, as the stroke affected the thalamus portion of his brain, affecting the use of one of his arms.

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Footnotes

The big news last night in Texas was James Talarico winning a Senate seat and Gina Hinojosa surprising the crap out of everyone by beating Gregg Abbott for the Texas Governor’s seat.

These wins fulfilled a whole lot of empty dreams that began with Beto O’Rourke, whose get-out-the-vote infrastructure never went away after his close election loss to Ted Cruz in 2018.

But wait. There’s more. A lot more.

Democrats take over Texas

Take a look at this vote for Lieutenant Governor in Texas:

Dan Patrick has been a pain in the ass for Democrats for years. He’s gone.

Next up: Attorney General, formerly held by serial criminal Ken Paxton, who lost last night to James Talarico.

I don’t even know who Mayes Middleton, who wanted Paxton’s vacated position, is. And I don’t care.

Paxton used public funds to once proudly proclaim on the Texas Attorney General website that he had filed 100 lawsuits against the Biden/Harris administration, mostly because he wanted to be a pain in the ass to Democrats.

Now, the Texas Attorney General's Office is in the hands of Democrats. Ken Paxton might want to book an Aeroflot flight with Trump to Moscow, stat.

What about Railroad Commissioner? I know, that doesn’t sound important, but in Texas, it is. That office doesn’t commission railroads. It regulates the oil industry. How’d that go?

The oil industry in Texas is now answerable to a Democrat.

The Republican, a guy named something or another French, was an avowed racist who made himself famous by complaining about “those” people celebrating a University of Texas football win. Now, we don’t even care about his first name. He will return to beneath the rocks from whence he came.

One reaction I saw on Fox News for the thirty seconds I watched that insipid network came from a Republican who said, “Maybe we should stop nominating clowns.”

What about other Texas state offices?

More Democratic wins:

What about the courts? Ditto.

See the asterisks next to all those Republican names? Those are incumbents. Four losses for Republicans. Democrats are now on the verge of controlling Texas courts. Even the Supreme one, where four of nine justices were up for reelection, and all of them lost to Democrats.

Even the new judicial system that Greg Abbott created to favor the oil industry took a hit.

Yes, Greg Abbott created a new judicial system so that the oil industry could do whatever it wanted.

I’ll let Texas Scorecard explain this, because I cut my thumb opening my fiftieth bottle of beer last night (just kidding, I don’t drink, but if I did, whoowee, would I have a headache this morning!):

The Texas Legislature established Texas’ Fifteenth Court of Appeals in 2023, and it began operating in September 2024. Unlike the First through Fourteenth regional Courts of Appeals, the Fifteenth Court is a statewide court, set up to hear civil appeals involving state government and appeals from the Texas Business Court.

The Fifteenth Court currently has three seats, including a chief justice and two justices, but is set to expand to five seats in September 2027. Justices are elected statewide to six-year terms, of which today’s election was the first. Their terms are not staggered.

When the Court began operations in 2024, Abbott appointed Chief Justice Scott Brister and Justices Scott Field and April Farris to serve for two years, before the first statewide election would take place in 2026. All three Republican justices sought re-election.

For the position of chief justice, Brister was defeated by challenger Jerry Zimmerer (D).

For Place 2, Field was defeated by challenger Tom Baker (D).

For Place 3, Farris was defeated by challenger Marc M. Meyer (D).

So Abbott created a court for the oil companies to rely on when faced with lawsuits. Then Democrats took it over during the Talarico sweep.

How’s that Texas book banning process coming along? Well, until last night, just fantastic — for those who believe in censorship. Then, last night, four Fahrenheit 451 freaks got iced.

Not a sweep, obviously, but censorship took a serious hit last night.

Even the Texas House of Representatives is contested as I write this, with 70 Democratic winners and 60 Republicans out of a total of 150. Even if Republicans hold on to the House, it won’t be by much, and they will need to work with a Democratic governor to get anything done.

They literally won’t know what to do with that information after all these years of Republican dominance.

The only solace for Republicans was the Texas Senate, where they still hold a clear majority. There, incumbents for both parties won overwhelmingly, which is weird, given the results from the rest of the evening.

You can keep up with Texas legislature results here:

https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2026

The Tejano Wave

The Tejano vote in Texas was a sleeping giant.1 The regime’s insane immigration policies woke it up with a vengeance. If the regime had merely done what the wrecker-in-chief promised during the 2024 presidential election, which was to restrict deportation efforts to criminals, many Tejanos, especially those living along the Rio Grande, would have given a thumbs up. There’s a low tolerance within a large minority of Tejanos for folks who don’t come across the border “the right way.”

Open immigration people like me can critique that all we want, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground, or opinions. Stephen Miller did that for us.

My main concern about Texas was that it is so easy to vote a straight ticket there. Turns out a lot of people did. For Democrats.

‌Georgia is now Blue

Meanwhile, Georgia has turned blue. Why? How did this happen?

Say hello to Stacey Abrams:

After she lost a close Gubernatorial race to Republican Governor Brian Kemp, she vowed to establish a permanent get-out-the-vote (GOTV) infrastructure in Georgia, especially within the Black community. She accomplished her goal.

You can also call this the “Black Churches Gone Wild” election. Black churches launched a massive GOTV campaign under the banner, “Too big to rig.” And that’s exactly what we got across the nation.

This is not to take anything away from Jon Ossoff, who became a force of his own as he mercilessly took down Trump almost every day during the campaign. But without Abrams, it wouldn’t have mattered. Someone needed to fix the Democrats’ election machine in Georgia, which was broken. Abrams has been working on that problem for years.

The same problem exists in Florida, where Democrat Angie Nixon, who lost a close Senate race, has vowed to do the same thing as Abrams did in Georgia.

In other words, it’s reasonable to say this: You’re next, Florida.

What Ossoff did was just as cool, of course, because his easy win created a coattail effect that swept every single statewide office into Democratic hands. He’s now an obvious leading presidential contender. The fact that Georgia now has a Democratic governor, who would appoint a Senator to replace Ossoff if he runs for president, helps pave the way.

To be clear, Ossoff is not Joe Manchin. He’s a progressive Democrat. Progressives are proving their viability in the voting booth, and Georgia is becoming a template for other Southern states.

As I write this, Democrat Scott Colum is leading by about 30 votes for Senator of Mississippi.

What’s that they say about everything Trump touches?

Impeachment and conviction are now on the table

Republicans will be looking for payback. One beautiful thing about this country is we love us some retribution. Republicans will sputter invectives about Democrats before moving on to the real source of their pain: Trump.

It’s possible that when Democrats impeach Trump again, this time they’ll get a conviction with help from fed-up (and still classless) Republicans seeking to punish someone for their heavy losses.

UPDATE(S)

It’s not just Georgia and Texas. Quoting the New York Times:

The Democratic surge on Tuesday netted at least 330 state legislative seats, from New Hampshire to Arizona, giving the Democrats full control of 22 state governments and making them the majority in a dozen statehouse chambers where they had been the minority party.

The Texas State House of Representatives is officially in Democratic hands, too.

This is huge. Capturing state legislatures takes away the power of Republicans to gerrymander and otherwise circumvent the federal system.

Also: It looks like Democrat Scott Colum has won a U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi.

Notes

Thanks for reading! The screenshots of election results come from the New York Times:

🎁 Ruminato Gift Link:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/11/03/us/elections/results-texas.html 🎁

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Footnotes

Welp, here we are. Election Day.

I didn’t stroke out last night like I did just before the most recent presidential election, which means that the long-rumored Democratic Tsunami is really gonna happen. As a few of you know, my body monitors these things. And if you don’t know, check the footnotes.1

I’m watching all kinds of things and local races, but I thought I’d pull out one silo and focus on it for this post.

You may have heard that Kansas’s U.S. Senate seat is in play.

Yes, Kansas. As in “What’s the Matter with Kansas” Kansas.

Someone wrote a book on that whole thing not so long ago.

Now that a famous pastor of a Kansas megachurch is running for the Blue side, Republicans are suddenly blue about their prospects there.

Let’s take a look at eight Christians who wear their faith on their sleeves and are trying to show Republicans that Christianity isn’t supposed to be the intolerant hate machine that Republicans say it is.

1. Texas state Rep. James Talarico

Running for U.S. Senator in Texas

He defeated one of my favorite political critters, House Representative Jasmine Crockett, in the Democratic primary in Texas. He’s a Presbyterian seminarian who is in his last year of doctoral studies.

He’s a real theologian, not a crackpot like most Republican fake Christians who think that Christianity is about lording over women’s bodies, banning books, yelling at the LGBTQ+ community, and enabling Epstein sexual fanatics.

He’s currently leading in the polls, in no small part because the heavy-breathing Orange Puffaroon helped fanatical Satanists in the Texas Republican Party kick incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn to the curb.

Cornyn was a loyal sycophant, but apparently said something at one time that pissed off TrumpleThinSkin, so the grifter-in-chief endorsed a serial criminal, Ken Paxton, for the Senate seat, and now Republicans might be on the verge of losing Texas in a statewide race for the first time in so many years I can’t count.

I’ll believe it when I see it. This battle for the soul of Texas is probably the race of the night.

2. Pastor Adam Hamilton of Kansas

Running for Senator in Kansas

Hamilton is the founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas.

His opponent is incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, whose closing argument was this hysterical ad defending how, as an obstetrician, he just had to use a collection agency to go after his constituents.

Beautiful stuff.

Highlighting the fact that he was the only OB serving 40,000 residents while Republicans continue trying to tear down Obamacare would have been funny enough, but then he continues with more inanity.

Marshall has described Hamilton, the founder and leader of a 25,000-member Christian congregation with nine locations dotted around the Kansas City area, as “too woke.”

In October, President 666 spewed out some toxic thoughts that included mentioning that Hamilton “openly mocks Jesus.” For realz. He said that. The Epstein guy who blows innocent people out of the water in the Caribbean, kills girls in their schools in Iran, and sells Trump Bibles and holds them upside down when he promotes them. That’s the guy saying other people mock Jesus.

What will Hamilton’s positions be? Probably woke, praise Jesus. He preached at the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral during Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013.

3. Iowa state senator Sarah Trone Garriott

Running against incumbent Republican Zach Nunn in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District

Ms. Garriott is a Lutheran minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Despite the “Evangelical” in its name, her denomination is not a bastion of fundamentalist hate, and is actually one of the more liberal Christian denominations.

Instead of banning books, Ms. Garriott does things like serving as Coordinator of Interfaith Engagement for the Des Moines Area Religious Council Food Pantry Network.

On her Facebook page, she recently wrote:

“My faith teaches me to help my neighbor. That's what I've done working as a hospital chaplain, as a parish pastor, at the DMARC food pantry network, and in the Iowa Senate—and that’s what I’ll do in Congress.”

Another thing in her favor: She drew the ire of fundamentalist Christians for her support of an invocation delivered by a Wiccan priestess at the Iowa state Capitol in 2015. Her retort, published by the Des Moines Register, took Christo-nationalists to Sunday school:

“Christians specifically should be aware that Jesus engaged with pagans multiple times throughout the New Testament and always from a place of kindness and compassion.”

The Cook Political Report rates this race a toss-up, so keep an eye on it if you’re looking for the blue tsunami.

4. Leader of Vintage Fellowship Robb Ryerse of Arkansas

Running for Congress in Arkansas’ Third Congressional District against incumbent Republican Steve Womack

Ryerse is the leader of a Christian fellowship group called the Vintage Fellowship, which he describes as a fellowship where “everyone is welcome regardless of faith (or lack thereof).” He was raised by fundamentalist Baptist parents, and left the Republican Party because of its current insanity.

Sadly, current polling shows his opponent far ahead in the contest, 61.3% to 38.7%. There will be some pleasant surprises tonight, but this seat in the heart of Arkansas MAGAt country isn’t likely to be one of them.

If this guy does win, the traitor-in-chief better purchase a one-way Aeroflot plane ticket to Moscow.

5. Former United Methodist Church (UMC) pastor Anna Golladay of Tennessee

Running for Congress in Tennessee’s Third Congressional District

Every congressional district in Tennessee was divided to heavily favor Republicans, which means the state won’t elect a Democrat to the House unless Tennessee Democrats can find a way to tear the state away from Republicans at the state level, or a new Supreme Court reinstates the Voting Rights Act.

After the Roberts Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee Republicans immediately redrew all nine of the state’s U.S. House seats. Winning one seat will be a challenge because of the way each district snakes around the state and strategically includes small slivers of Black demographics.2

To give you an example of the Tennessee gerrymander, take a look at Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional district:

That little footstool you see at the bottom left is a slice of Memphis, which was cut up to serve Tennessee Republican racism.

Anna Golladay, who’s on the cover image of this post, is in the Third Congressional district, and is well behind in the polling.

Anna was fired as a United Methodist Church (UMC) pastor for officiating a same sex wedding, and is an open ally of the LGBTQ+ community.

Her district stretches from Chattanooga to the outskirts of Knoxville, and covers a lot of blood-red MAGA rural parcels where meth is the primary export, import, and God.

So her chances are also slim. A victory by Anna should act as another argument for President Krasnov to seriously ponder that one-way Aeroflot flight.

6. Chaz Molder of Tennessee

Running for Congress in Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District

He’s not an official church leader, but Molder knows enough about Tennessee’s broken Christianity to loudly proclaim his family’s active participation in the First United Methodist Church in Columbia.

It won’t help much unless things really go crazy, but he’s only behind 5-8 points in the polls, so this one might at least be interesting. Keep an eye out for this one if you’re looking for a Blue Perfect Storm Tsunami.

7. Presbyterian chaplain and four-term state representative, Lindsay James of Iowa

Running for Congress in Iowa’s Second Congressional District

Ms. James is supported by a group with one of the best names around, Vote Mama. That alone should win her votes, especially since she’s a mama of two kids. She’s a Presbyterian chaplain with a normal outlook on life, which of course draws the ire of Satanic fundamentalists.

Vote Mama says its mission is about…:

…growing a movement across all fifty states to ensure everyday moms have a voice in the decisions that affect our families. From who can run and serve to the policies our elected officials prioritize, we are building the Mama Lobby one pissed off mom at a time.

Ms. James is currently leading in the polls against her Republican opponent by about three to five percentage points, depending on the poll.

It’s a pretty MAGA-centric part of the state, but even the Polymarket bro culture has her ahead, so keep an eye on this one.

8. Pastor Frederick Haynes of Texas

Running for Congress in Texas’ Thirtieth Congressional District

Pastor Haynes is Jasmine Crockett’s pastor, and is running to fill the seat she left vacant when she ran in the primary against Talarico.

This seat is not in question. It’s pure blue.

The real question is, where does the supremely gifted Jasmine Crockett go from here?

Most reports are indicating a record turnout everywhere

Meanwhile, it looks like people are motivated to slay this monster. It’s been a rough two years. People seem poised to let their feelings known.

Early exit polls are suggesting that even a significant slice of MAGA country is rebelling against the human virus that is filling each of our days with toxic rants.

Praise be.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

Yesterday I posted that I might open up the chat here for the elections if there was interest. There was very little interest, so unless things get really twisty and weird, or unless the vote is so catastrophic for Republicans that I just need to yell out in celebration online somewhere, I won’t be doing that.

Frankly, I’m just always glad to be given one more day of life (especially another Election Day!).

If things go south for the good guys and gals, then, like everyone else, I’ll be reconsidering everything, so an immediate reaction won’t be forthcoming.

Happy electioneering!

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Footnotes

But I was thinking that a live chat here tomorrow night might be different. If there’s an advantage to being a comparatively tiny Substack (about 1800 subscribers, the vast majority free), it’s that a live chat might make it possible for my most engaged readers to participate in a meaningful chat with one another and act like a community of sorts, which is a goal we often hear Substack aiming for.

If I do this, the chat will be available to everyone, paid and free subscribers alike. I’m not concerned about trolls on a chat this size, but if it happens, it’s easy enough to kick them off.

My regular readers know that I complain about the New York Times almost once a week or so, but when I unsubscribed a year ago, they offered a deal I couldn’t refuse, so I took it. Their election infographics are great. They make it easy to make predictions about final results because it’s easy to zoom in on precincts that have already reported and precincts that haven’t.

And I know where to look.

There are other sources for this, of course, but those at the Times are the ones I’m used to, so, assuming I run a live chat, I’ll rely on them to offer my opinions (also known as snark and sarcasm) and prognostications. I’ll probably have a better idea of whether Talarico is going to win before our friends at the major political Substack venues will, and I say that with the utmost humility.

For example, even though I was in the ICU at the time, I knew Kamala was cooked early on. That was a rough night, and not only because of the election.

My readers are top shelf in terms of knowledge, so you folks will have great insights into your local elections, too. It could be quite enlightening.

Anyway, I will probably base my decision at least partly on feedback here in the comments. None, or only one or two comments expressing interest, will mean no live chat. I might not even do it if there is strong interest. I just don’t know yet. I’ll post my decision and pin it to the top of the comments sometime tomorrow.

I’m not a big fan of Substack’s live chat feature. I have no good reason for this. It’s just not my jam, same as video is not my jam. So I’ll probably close the chat after election night is over. It’s just not something I have time to monitor.

About that New York Times Alaska primary election “controversy”

Speaking of the New York Times, what a joke.

As some of you know, they published what they thought was a gripping exposé on the alleged efforts of the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Alaska, Mary Peltola, to massage the open primary in Alaska by recruiting a guy with the (almost) same name as the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan, to run in the primary.

This is an old trick that both parties have used for a long time whenever they get a chance. It’s an old enough trick that it has a name: “stacking the ballot.” But the Times thought that it would be fun to try to interfere with the election by creating controversy where there is none.

The ballot stacking effort, even if it were confirmed as real, is not illegal, and hardly the only occasion that it has happened, but that’s not the problem here.

The problem is that Alaska, as a ranked voting state, has the solution to that kind of chicanery baked right into the process.

The only thing people who wanted the correct Dan Sullivan to win had to do was vote for both of them. In ranked voting, you pick your favorite, then your second favorite candidate. If you really want Sullivan to win and somehow didn’t know which one to pick on the ballot, all you had to do was choose both, because that’s how ranked voting works.

Pick one. Then pick your second favorite. Boom. Issue solved.

New York Times deputy politics editor Amy Gardner, who led the defense team on the New York Times during some posted discussions to address withering criticism over their curious choice to make this an issue, apparently never took Politics 101 as an elective in college, so she is unaware of how ranked voting works, I suppose.

Someone might also tell Amy that most Alaskans know what the word “incumbent” means. If they don’t, they probably shouldn’t be voting anyway (I assume there are ballots available in translated format).

The only difference between my image below and the Alaska ballot is that the word “Incumbent” wasn’t highlighted in yellow on the real ballot.

Maybe the Times should do an exposé on why the Alaska Secretary of State didn’t add that helpful highlight. If they can prove the Peltola campaign paid off the Secretary of State to avoid highlighting the word “Incumbent,” they might finally have a story.

More on New York Times sanewashing

One more note on the conflict at the New York Times between some of its journalists, who try to expose MAGA corruption, and its editorial staff, which undermines their efforts. It’s something I’ve been trying to understand for quite some time.

It turns out that the clues have been out there for awhile. An article by the Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto provided one of them in January 2025.

The article concerns the Times assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, Patrick Healy:

According to Ms. Lopatto’s article on the Verge:

Healy, who’s worked at the Times since 2005, has a fascinating track record with judging newsworthiness. There’s his bizarre fixation on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage (resulting in a column from the now-defunct public editor desk at the Times that found, among other things, that parts of Healy’s story belonged in “the trash can”); his sexist focus on Hillary Clinton’s laugh; and his frankly misleading (and heavily rewritten) coverage of Donald Trump’s “audacious attempt” to “remake his image” on immigration.

Perhaps most notably, Healy was, as a reporter, one of the driving forces in the “but her emails” nothingburger in the Times’ 2016 election coverage, a news cycle so pointless and destructive that it had newsrooms everywhere rethinking ethics around hacked and leaked sourcing (but not, apparently, Mamdani’s hacked and leaked college application).

More recently, longtime columnist Paul Krugman blamed Healy for his departure from the paper, complaining that “Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages” resulting in Krugman saying he was “putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.”

I’m not going to pin it all on two editors, but names are beginning to surface as more people call the newspaper out on the sanewashing of the most corrupt regime in American history (and the competition is not close).

You might fairly argue, “Dude, unsubscribe again.” But the problem is that the paper needs to be saved, not ignored. It has too many outstanding journalists still toiling away in the face of bad editors. We need to openly support the good journalists, and out the bad editors like I just did.

The far right has enough of an advantage in media already. The last thing we need is for the New York Times to fall under its sway, too.

Take my poll!

If you don’t feel like commenting on whether or not you're interested in a live chat, you can just answer anonymously here.

Keep in mind that I won’t be offended if zero people show interest in a live chat. My query is another way to ask how people are spending election night. I don’t feel invested either way, other than, hey, maybe this would be fun (unless somehow the Democrats don’t sweep).

Thanks for reading!

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And the coming divorce based on “Biblical grounds?”

If not, here’s a refresher.

It’s my second most popular Substack article (this is not a huge accomplishment). I think most of the credit for that goes to a determined process server named Ernesto, whose story I passed on in that Stack. Thanks, Ernesto. I’d offer you royalties, but I think it’s illegal to cut a penny in half.

Anyhoo, you may have heard that there is a battle for the soul of Texas between a normal Christian who believes that you should embrace and love everyone Jesus-style, and a fanatical XenoChristian (Paxton) who thinks you should embezzle like a fiend and lock up anyone if they have a darker skin color than a Finnish king.1

This battle is for a U.S. Senate seat that Texans, for reasons only they can explain, never seem willing to relinquish to Democrats. It’s a classic example of voting against your own interests, which they’ve been doing ever since the pastor class there, often in association with Epstein types, took over politics and turned the place into a laboratory for Margaret Atwood’s Gilead from “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

It’s a state where “shush” is the most commonly spoken four-letter word, even though it has five letters. Christianity, honey, is a little different there than it was for the bearded one preaching the Sermon on the Mount. In Paxton’s version of Christianity, you take the “Mount” part, and leave the rest.

James Talarico, the seminarian running against Paxton who knows a thing or two more about Christianity than Mount Paxton, has been riding a wave of semi-disgust with Paxton’s antics, but we won’t know until Tuesday night if he’s found a way to fight off the one superpower of the Epstein class in Texas: It’s awfully easy to vote a straight ticket in Texas voting booths (especially Republican), and then skedaddle.

This is one reason that even the latest news about Paxton might move the needle no more than a McLennan County meth head’s toe tag during autopsy.

And what is this latest news, my patient reader asks? By Paxton standards, it’s just another Monday, but for many of us, it might be more, especially Pope Leo, who, when he voted in these midterms, called the vote historic, but not for the reasons the media said he did (see Footnotes).2

You see, it turns out, Mount Paxton has been carrying on with a woman of ill repute for longer than a Texas minute.

Wait, she’s a prostitute?

Oh, hell no. No way I’d call someone in the oldest profession someone of ill repute.

No, my friends, this is ill repute of the real kind. Paxton’s love interest is an evangelical Christian self-help influencer wannabe, which is a long title, but it’s Texas, and they go big in Texas.

If you haven’t muttered the joke yet, I’ll do it for you: Now we know what Mrs. Paxton meant when she said she was divorcing Mount Paxton on “biblical grounds.”

The fine lady in question is currently called Tracy Duhon, although this could change, considering her line of work as an evangelical Christian self-help influencer wannabe. Also, she’s Mount Paxton’s current whatever these people call themselves. This kind of proximity to someone who commits more crimes in a week than Lex Luthor almost guarantees a future name change, if only to cut down on legal bills.

Her whole schtick is that as a member of the great holy class of fundamentalist Christians, it’s really okay to sin like the dickens because God forgives you.

James Talarico, the seminarian, would probably agree. The God he talks about isn’t a judgemental monster out to castrate all the Texas men whose loins are too swollen to mount a horse.

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Okay. Where was I?

Oh, right, so, yeah, that’s her scam. Sin, but do it with a smile that makes the local Pastor happy, and confess gleefully to said Pastor, if he happens to be around and isn’t chasing some kid around the altar (if he is chasing some kid around the altar, forgive him).

Tracy spends most of her time in New Orleans, which would be kind of cool if she wasn’t cavorting with a guy like Paxton in her free time.

As I mentioned in a previous article, here are some of the highlights of Paxton’s illustrious career, according to the Texas Tribune:3

Paxton has fought criminal securities fraud charges for most of his tenure

Top employees accused Paxton of bribery and abusing his office

Whistleblowers sued Paxton, claiming he retaliated against them

Paxton tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in other states

He was also recently under investigation by the FBI for corruption involving a wealthy donor.

During the final days of the Biden Administration, Paxton settled a seven-year Justice Department investigation against him by paying the DOJ $300,000 to leave him alone. In that case, he was accused of bilking investors.4

A couple of weeks ago, video caught him hanging out in Dubai with his new friend Tracy and some fugitives who donated nearly $200,000 to his Texas campaign for the Senate.5

The Paxton campaign has spent about half of Elon’s $190 million Paxton campaign donation keeping Tracy hidden from public view so that exhausted Christian ranchers hunting for affordable diesel fuel don’t find out about her.

Tracy wrote a book

I like people who write books. And I like people from New Orleans. So I’d probably like Tracy (although I’m fairly confident that she would not like me). I also like the concept of forgiveness, unless it involves bipedal orange pustules with tiny hands and weird hairpieces.

So this isn’t about her, aside from, again, perhaps questioning her taste in men, but even then, hey, live and let live.

In the book she wrote to soft-launch her career as an evangelical Christian self-help influencer wannabe, she tells her readers, “I never could have prepared myself for the dark, painful path God would lead me down to realize my heart’s desire.”6 God, I love AI.

This statement says a lot. My guess is that this fine gal from New Orleans has some issues that still need to be worked out, and that Paxton is part of a cruel lesson on her way to a vicious bottom, kind of like when a drunk embarks on a DUI rampage and is forced into AA. I have empathy for that.

During her long, dark march to this bottom, Tracy married a New Orleans multi-millionaire car salesman, which seems like something out of that classic New Orleans tome, The Confederacy of Dunces. It isn’t hard for me to imagine Ignatius J. Reilly pontificating extensively about a millionaire car salesman and his young blonde wife.

Troy and Tracy then started a non-profit based on their fundamentalist Christian values that generated $20 million in donations in its most recent tax year.7

Well, enough of this shiz, Tracy must have thought. There ain’t nothin’ more attractive than a Texas Attorney General with a passion for committing more crimes than he solves, so boom! Divorce time! Sorry, Troy. Sucks being a car salesman, don’t it? Even when you sell enough cars to fill a Texas-sized sinkhole.

I understand Tracy’s thinking here. Imagine yourself at a party in Dubai. You’re talking to a guy named Ahmed (no, really, I’m not stereotyping here, so please bear with me).

Mr. Ahmed says to you, “So tell me about your husband.” If you’re a woman, these are the kinds of probing questions you get from billionaires in that part of the world.

If you’re Tracy, would you rather respond with, “Oh, he’s a car salesman!” and see Ahmed’s blank look? Or would you prefer to say, “Well, we aren’t married yet, but I’m spending time with the most delicious embezzler of funds you’ll ever meet, and he happens to be the Attorney General of Texas!”

Ahmed’s eyes would light up like a Dubai skyscraper torched by fireworks. This could very possibly lead to other things.

In Anosh Ahmed and his fugitive pal Sameer Suhail’s case, those other things might include adventures like “defrauding investors out of millions of dollars in real estate projects in Dubai that never came to fruition, in what the plaintiffs called a “Ponzi scheme.”8

To be clear, this particular Ponzi scheme came before Tracy did when she met Ahmed in Dubai a couple of weeks ago. This meeting wasn’t Tracy looking for trouble, hopefully. It was more that she was Paxton’s sidekick while he traversed Arabia’s desert highways seeking additional graft.

But Tracy is living proof that some people find it much more entertaining to attach themselves to the elbows of people who are embedded in the dark arts of international fraudsters than to the elbows of car salesmen.

What a fantastic schtick. Latch onto that non-profit you started with your millionaire car salesman husband, and then become the queen of Christian forgiveness by attaching yourself to one of the worst human beings in all of Texas. It’s fucking impressive.

I’ve said this before: I’m in the wrong business.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

One more day to volunteer/canvass for James Talarico’s campaign:

https://act.jamestalarico.com/signup/volunteer_2026/

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

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Footnotes

1

According to my brief check:

The Brief Kingdom of Finland (1918)

• Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse: After gaining independence from Russia in 1917, the Finnish Parliament elected the German prince Frederick Charles as King of Finland on October 9, 1918 (to be styled as Kaarle I).

And that was it. No kings in Finland aside from Freddie.

There is no clear answer to this, but my gut tells me we’d be living in a different world if we woke up to a splashy story like this:

Instead of this:

Even if we face the reality that no major news outlet would ever lead with a headline that says he’s insane and unfit (he is, though, so no inaccuracy), the choice of the word “unpredictable” to describe his personality is typical New York Times sanewashing.

Being unpredictable isn’t necessarily a negative. It can be a useful trait in negotiations. But he’s not “unpredictable.” He’s batshit crazy. And the New York Times knows it. Pick another word, you numbskulls. “Demented” is fine, but that’s as sanewashy as you should go.

The last part of the headline, “Trump Faces Down the Midterms,” is worse. This is classic New York Times. They consistently portray him as powerful and strong, instead of frightened, weak, and easily manipulated. “Faces down” projects strength, of which he has none.

How weak is he? I have a mental picture of a 13-15-year-old Ivanka slapping daddy in the face for trying something no father should try, him (thankfully) backing off, and then obsessing over look-alikes for the rest of his pathetic, corrupted life.

This is the kind of shit that defines this man.

The New York Times can’t say that, of course, but their reporting should always be informed by its likelihood, as should all reporting, everywhere, all the time.

That the media doesn’t treat him like the social pariah he is is why he maintains an impenetrable 30% wall of support in polls, no matter what he does. (If there’s any good news in that regard, the outer wall has crumbled some, because it used to be 40).

It’s fair to say in response that the Times reporting can’t be informed by a theory some wild-eyed Substack writer concocts about him and his daughter (most of you can imagine that story, however).

Fine. I’ll rephrase.

All of its reporting should be informed by his long-term relationship with Epstein, which should be a daily, screaming headline in the Times and other media outlets until he’s removed from office.

The man in the Oval Office is the worst form of human the male gender is capable of producing. If you were a satanic god monster, he’d be your template for humans.

There is no shame in letting your headlines and reporting be informed by behavior that 70% of the nation recognizes.

A “Before” and “After” look at the New York Times article

I’m going to dive into the meat of the story that accompanies the headline with an imagined before and after.

The text labeled “Before” is the way the New York Times writer, New York Times correspondent Katie Rogers, probably wrote the article.

The “After” portions of the text are how the article actually reads. The “Before” is me trying to make a few guesses on what Ms. Rogers wrote. If I am off in any major ways, Katie, give me a ring! I’m happy to chat about it.

I’ll start, of course, with the lede paragraph1:

Before:

President Trump’s private dining room, located just off the Oval Office, is where he goes to watch television, make phone calls, and ignore stacks of printed-out news articles and documents that eat up most of the space despite his inability and refusal to read them. A spot has been cleared for Natalie Harp, his insatiable lover and sidekick, who now works out of that room when she is not seated behind the president at his desk while she’s thumbing through his hairpiece.

After:

President Trump’s private dining room, located just off the Oval Office, is where he goes to watch television, make phone calls and sift through stacks of printed-out news articles and documents that eat up most of the space. A spot has been cleared for Natalie Harp, a devoted aide who now works out of that room when she is not seated behind the president at his desk.

Before:

Elsewhere, Bill Pulte, the main provider of Trump’s AI slop, spends some of his time making childlike posters. He recently made one of Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, a Republican whose ass Mr. Trump recently openly craved, for the president to display while riding aboard Air Force One.

After:

Elsewhere, Bill Pulte, a top federal housing official and purveyor of A.I.-generated images and memes that make their way to the president’s social media feed, spends some of his time making posters. He recently made one of Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, a Republican whose backside Mr. Trump has admired, for the president to display while riding aboard Air Force One.

Before:

Amid the loyalists, news clippings, poster boards and pieces of art made by his most crazed cult members is an unstable illiterate consumed by the likelihood that the Republican Party will lose both chambers of Congress in next week’s elections, thus paving the way for a series of investigations that will end his regime and possibly finally send him to prison, if he can live long enough to see the day.

After:

Amid the loyalists, news clippings, poster boards and pieces of art made by his fans is an increasingly unpredictable president staring down the possibility that the Republican Party could lose both chambers of Congress in next week’s elections.

Before:

Many G.O.P. candidates in tight races have tried to get as far away as they can from Mr. Trump’s policies, his behavior, and a litany of grift so vast that the American public can’t keep score. Behind the scenes, almost all his allies have begged the president’s aides to keep him away from rallies in battleground states with uncomfortably close races, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

After:

Many G.O.P. candidates in tight races have tried to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s policies, his behavior and the widespread allegations of self-dealing in his administration. Behind the scenes, some political advisers and outside Republican groups have warned the president’s aides that Mr. Trump could do more harm than good by holding rallies in battleground states with uncomfortably close races, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

Before:

But the president, filled with his usual hate, has dismissed polls that reflect the revulsion the vast majority of the electorate feels towards him, and has raged against reporters who dare to reveal even the smallest grains of corruption. Mistakenly thinking that turning midterm season into a referendum on himself won’t collapse G.O.P. support even further, he is set to headline rallies around the country all week, despite the unintended consequences of his spluttering invectives and hate.

After:

But the president, under pressure and angry with naysayers, has dismissed polls that reflect his unpopularity, and has raged against unflattering stories that plunge him into a dark mood. Determined to win by turning the midterm season into a referendum on himself, he is set to headline rallies around the country all week.

Before:

Mr. Trump remains convinced that he is still a king who hasn’t yet tumbled from the castle walls, despite the prevailing winds. But a grim mood has set in around the White House, which has been rocked by turnover, tension among groypers and non-groypers, and anxiety about long prison sentences for sycophants who have spent the last two years catering to his whims, according to 16 (I counted!) current and former administration officials and allies of Mr. Trump’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for obvious fear of retribution to describe private conversations.

After:

Mr. Trump remains convinced that his dominant place in the Republican Party is enough to mitigate a tough political climate. But a grim mood has set in around the White House, which has been rocked by turnover, tension among internal factions and anxiety over what happens should Republicans lose legislative control in Washington, according to 16 current and former administration officials and allies of Mr. Trump’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Before and After:

Danielle Alvarez, a White House spokeswoman, described the president and his aides as unified in their focus.

“There is only one team that matters in this White House, and that is the team focused on serving President Donald J. Trump and the American people,” Ms. Alvarez said in a statement, adding: “The president’s team remains strong, united and focused on delivering his America First agenda.”

Before:

To the few current and former White House officials who were around between early 2017 and early 2021, the past few weeks have given them the same chills as Mr. Trump’s first term. That period was marked by short, explosive staff tenures and infighting, as well as the beginning of the Groyper Wars.

Toward the end, Mr. Trump oversaw a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.

He lashed out as his poll numbers sank, then led an insurrection against the Capitol that most longtime political observers say continues to this day.

After:

To several current and former White House officials who were around between early 2017 and early 2021, the past few weeks have felt particularly reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s first term. That period was marked by short, explosive staff tenures and infighting. Toward the end, Mr. Trump was struggling to govern during a pandemic. He lashed out as his poll numbers sank, then stoked fear and outrage among his supporters with false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, to the point that a large group attacked the Capitol.

Before:

The difference between that term and this one, of course, is that Mr. Trump returned to power with an endless revenge agenda, and with a crew of sycophants, insurrectionists, and Epstein acolytes who stood by him through his years as a political pariah and convicted felon.

After:

The difference between that term and this one, of course, is that Mr. Trump returned to power with a vengeance, and with a crew of loyalists who stood by him through his years as a political pariah.

Before:

Since returning, he has turned the Justice Department into his personal law firm and weaponized it to seek revenge. He has enabled a known racist to oversee the development of a massive, frenzied, and untrained federal militia whose sole purpose is to kidnap, torture, and kill American citizens under the guise of unrestrained immigration prevention. He has continued to trample on the ethical norms that once governed the presidency. And he has two more years to go.

After:

Since returning, he has ordered his Justice Department to carry out a retribution campaign against his perceived enemies. He has unleashed a federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants that has swept up U.S. citizens and, at times, led to deadly confrontations. He has continued to trample on the ethical norms that have governed the presidency. And he has two more years to go.

Before:

Ahead of Tuesday, the stakes are high: Democracy faces an existential threat, and my editors are fuckheads who won’t let us spell out the whole truth on a consistent basis. Whenever correspondents report on one of his sordid actions, we are forced to reword our reporting to project the mad king as a strongman.

After:

Ahead of Tuesday, the stakes are high: Mr. Trump is trying to fend off the oversight and constraints that a Democratic-controlled Congress would bring, and to show that he still commands a strong political base.

Before:

Republicans trying to preserve the House and Senate have tried mightily to keep Mr. Trump focused on policy, but he’s been all ass, so far. The president’s comments about a Senator’s posterior made many Republicans want to run and hide (except, of course, the many closeted ones who cheered him on).

Meanwhile, Barack Obama owned him by saying that Mr. Trump’s gilded White House renovations looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Trump’s withered reply: "The Cheesecake Factory is a very successful company,” Mr. Trump said at a Mississippi rally on Monday.)

After:

Mr. Trump’s recent appearances have included some of the economic policy-related messaging that Republicans have hoped to see. But that message has often been overshadowed by protesters, the president’s comments about the male physique and his venting sessions about Democrats, including Barack Obama, who recently said that Mr. Trump’s gilded White House renovations looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” (The Cheesecake Factory “is a very successful company,” Mr. Trump said at a Mississippi rally on Monday.)

Before and After:

The president also frequently complains about how hard he is working, privately and publicly.

Before:

“I’m working my ass off,” Mr. Trump said in yet another bit of ass messaging, this time in Tennessee earlier this month. “You better get out there and vote.”

After:

“I’m working my ass off,” Mr. Trump said in Tennessee earlier this month. “You better get out there and vote.”

Before:

A person close to the White House insurrection operation who was granted anonymity to describe war strategy said that Mr. Trump’s advisers are aware that his presence in critical states could hurt G.O.P. candidates but that nobody gives a shit because they plan on trying to steal the election.

Nobody thinks the Midterms are salvageable, these strategists say, so it’s best to let him incite what is left of his dwindling hate cult and, in a worst-case scenario, pardon those who kill random innocents with their AR-15s after the election.

After:

A person close to the White House political operation who was granted anonymity to describe the strategy said that Mr. Trump’s advisers were aware of the concerns that his presence in critical states could hurt G.O.P. candidates. But they have largely discounted them, believing, as Mr. Trump does, that he should be the centerpiece of this election cycle, the person added. Multiple advisers say the strategy is simple: Focus on red states and juice turnout.

Before and After:

“The president does have a way of defying history,” Karoline Leavitt, his former press secretary, said during an appearance on “Real Time With Bill Maher” on Friday. “He’s working really hard out on the road to turn Republicans out to vote.”

Before:

While speaking to allies in recent days, Mr. Trump has grossly inflated and lied about the small sizes of the crowds at his rallies, and has frequently giggled at the low turnout of events that Vice President JD Vance headlines.

After:

While speaking to allies in recent days, Mr. Trump has talked up the sizes of the crowds at his rallies, and has noted that Vice President JD Vance, the presumptive Republican front-runner in 2028, has not drawn large numbers to events that he is headlining.

Before and After:

Mr. Vance’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but the White House came to the vice president’s defense.

“Donald Trump is the hardest working person in the country, followed by JD Vance,” Ms. Alvarez said. “Both men are raising money, crisscrossing the country and making sure that candidates are successful these midterms.”

Before:

As the elections approach, Mr. Trump’s newish first lady-ish, Natalie Harp, scours the right-wing media landscape for fawning press coverage, disparaging clips about his perceived enemies, and helpings of flattering photos and “A.I. slop,” as one official put it.

After:

As the elections approach, Mr. Trump is feasting on a media diet of fawning press coverage, disparaging clips about his perceived enemies, and helpings of flattering photos and “A.I. slop,” as one official put it.

Before and After (the Times editor was getting tired at this point):

Mr. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, tends to pop into Mr. Trump’s cabin aboard Air Force One while the president travels to and from rallies, showing him memes, posters and documents related to the mortgage industry. An administration official likened him to a court jester. Mr. Pulte did not respond to a request for comment.

When the president encounters critical or mocking coverage, he has responded with incredulity.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump tuned expectantly into Mr. Maher’s show to watch the appearance of Ms. Leavitt, a trusted aide who left her perch in August. He grew enraged by Mr. Maher’s monologue, in which the comedian brought up Mr. Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and reflected on a cordial dinner he had at the White House in October. “Could not have been treated better if I was Russian,” he quipped.

Furious, Mr. Trump dictated a roughly 1,300-word social media post to Ms. Harp aboard Air Force One. It was posted on his Truth Social site shortly after he returned to the White House on Sunday evening. “You’re not transformative, you’re a Loser! I never watched your show much, but I will never watch it again,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Before:

The president is increasingly cloistered with a small group of acolytes. Ms. Harp, 35, abandoned her makeshift desk in Mr. Trump’s bed in recent weeks, according to several administration officials familiar with the switch.

After:

The president is increasingly cloistered with a small group of acolytes. Ms. Harp, 35, abandoned her usual desk outside of the Oval Office in recent weeks, according to several administration officials familiar with the switch.

Before:

Advisers close to the White House, who are bracing for a blue tsunami, expect Mr. Trump to embark on an epic purge depending on how bad next Tuesday’s slaughter hits. Presidents have typically reset their staffing after rough election cycles.

After:

Advisers close to the White House, who are bracing for Republicans to at least lose the House, expect Mr. Trump to make changes to his administration, depending on how next Tuesday goes. Presidents have typically reset their staffing after rough election cycles.

Before and After

Mr. Trump made one jarring hiring decision on his own when he led the charge this fall to hire Katie Zacharia, a cable news pundit, as his new press secretary. The president, who had grown frustrated with the slow process to find a replacement for Ms. Leavitt, had watched clips of Ms. Zacharia and decided to quickly name her to the role, before a formal vetting process could be completed, according to people with knowledge of the situation. She found few internal allies.

While Ms. Zacharia traveled with Mr. Trump during her short tenure, she was not invited to attend daily senior staff meetings convened by Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to people familiar with the dynamic. After a rocky debut in the press briefing room, Ms. Zacharia was ousted after five days.

Some White House observers viewed Ms. Zacharia’s hiring as a sign of Ms. Wiles’s declining influence with Mr. Trump, so much that they began circulating ideas about who could succeed her. Mr. Trump has publicly pushed back on reports that he is unhappy with or seeking to replace her.

“Susie is here,” Mr. Trump told reporters earlier this month, “and she’s going to be here for a long time.”

Before:

No matter how bad the results are, most of the White House sycophants, including Wiles, have lawyered up.

After:

Deleted.

The original article

The original article can be found here. It’s a Ruminato gift link, no paywall:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/politics/trump-midterms-white-house-mood.html

Footnotes

1

Lede is journalism-speak for the introductory sentence or paragraph in a news story. If it helps to just think, “lead,” that’s fine, too.

---

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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

16 days 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.

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

18 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

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.

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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.

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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!

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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

22 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.

Subscribe now

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Footnotes

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/

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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

a month 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.

Thanks for reading!

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