You may have heard that Cassidy is the Louisiana Republican Senator who cast the deciding vote to formally turn what was once known as the Department of Justice (DOJ) into part of a criminal mob operation by voting to confirm Todd Blanche, the Grifter-in-Chief’s personal attorney, as U.S. Attorney General.

This officially makes the DOJ a state-run law firm in service to the most corrupt criminal presidential regime in American history. That the regime happens to be a racist cesspool doesn’t help matters.

And you thought Pam Bondi was atrocious?

Buckle up, my friends.

Cassidy is the same guy who once claimed he was against RFK Jr. as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) until he wasn’t. He issued a few performative objections during Brainworm’s confirmation hearings, then dutifully voted for his confirmation anyway. Just like he and every other Republican Senator does all of Trump’s nominees.

Occasionally, one or two of them will pretend to get the willies over one of the Cabinet choices, but only if they know the nomination isn’t in danger. It is an insulting game they play, but the mainstream media falls for it every time, so many voters do, too.

Here’s Cassidy trying to justify his latest kneepad purchase:

“The choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche.”

I have no idea what that means.

Now that the deed is done, let’s take a brief tour of the personal history of Todd Blanche, the crime family’s personal attorney, and now the head of whatever we call the DOJ these days. I call it a state-run law firm, and I’ll die on that hill until the orange puffaroon melts into the mantle of the Earth and his toxic sludge burns its way into hell where it belongs.

Let’s do history differently this time, and begin with the most recent awfulness, since we live in a “what have you done for me lately” kind of world.

Todd Blanche: Interim Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General

Blanche’s most recent history is his most important, even more so than all the times he represented Trump in court and managed to slip the snake through various legal holes.

The disintegration of lawfare

Let’s begin our tour with this simple January directive issued through Blanche’s office to 93 US attorneys’ offices during a weekly video conference. The meeting was chaired by a young 33-year-old MAGA maniac named Aakash Singh, who, while frothing like a rabies-infected jackal, told them that Trump is their chief client and anyone who didn’t want to click their heels and raise their hands forward should leave the DOJ.2

This may or may not have something to do with a rather incredible number. Before I reveal the number, let’s be clear that it took barely one year to achieve: Since Blanche became Deputy Attorney General in March 2025, 16,000 DOJ employees have left the department.3

The DOJ has lost one quarter of its attorneys during this exodus. The good news? Many of them are now on our side, fighting the hooligans who remain.

200 of them were fired by Blanche because they previously had worked on efforts to prosecute Trump.4 Blanche reportedly bragged about the firings to various cultists and insurrectionists in the regime.

In fairness, some who have remained are not hooligans, but dedicated public servants hoping against hope they can continue to fight non-Trump crime under the radar.

Some have remained simply because they have work they feel must be completed before they leave, such as a recent case in L.A. where a whole lot of people were busted for child sex trafficking in the Figueroa neighborhood, which had become almost as notorious for child trafficking as the Epstein-Mar-a-Lago crime ring of Palm Beach.5

But you can be sure many more will leave now that Blanche has been confirmed as Trump’s official federal attorney-at-large. Fights against the kind of crime Figueroa (not to mention Palm Beach) experienced will become increasingly rare as the DOJ is converted more fully into Trump’s personal, state-run law firm.

The good news, again, is that many exiting attorneys will join the ranks of the resistance and clobber the people who’ve remained when they meet in court.

I’d like you to ponder, for a moment, the type of person who might remain in the wake of this farce. They’ll either be desperately idealistic career prosecutors hoping they can quietly continue doing their jobs as Blanche continues to transform the DOJ, or they’re insurrectionists unaware of the damage they’re doing to their resumes, which makes them not too smart and thus easy targets for smart lawyers in cases the newly formed personal law firm brings forward.

We’ve already seen this in action. Trump’s state-run law firm is losing case after case in court. The only wins he’s been getting have been through the Supreme Court, which has become as corrupt as he is, but even the corrupt justices seem to have a few limits.

Time after time, the state-run law firm presents a case to a grand jury, and either gets laughed out of court or withdraws its case before the hysterics have a chance to begin.

A classic example of this is the current attempt to prosecute former FBI director James Comey over a seashell display on a beach. That case is about to end in the same result as the recent attempted prosecution of an Olympian, who they tried to charge with ruining the reflection pool, which Trump ruined.

Substack is replete with more examples (Fox News, not so much).

The reason for the consistent failures is that good prosecuting attorneys realize that cases are built on facts, not made-up stories and grim fairy tales. They’d rather leave the DOJ than try to tell tall stories invented by Blanche’s AI machines. Meanwhile, those who remain in the state-run law firm are discovering that American jurisprudence has a long history of legal discovery and application. The regime’s desire to wipe it all out is proving more difficult than they thought.

A Listicle of 20 terrible things Blanche has done as Deputy or Acting AG

Next, let’s do some random bullet points highlighting examples of Blanche’s work on behalf of the insurrectionists occupying the White House and the Republican side of the U.S. Senate. Much of this info comes by way of the very helpful folks at the Justice Connection, a group of disaffected DOJ attorneys with their knives out, chomping at the bit to meet the disintegrated DOJ in court for some retribution.6

I am not a fan of listicles, but I thought the format worked for this, so I made a top 20 list. There’s a lot more for intrepid readers to dig into if they want to.

• In May 2026, Blanche tried to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay insurrectionists, whom he called victims of “lawfare.” The slush fund would have (and still might) even paid those who assaulted police officers during the January 6 insurrection. He did this through a bizarre agreement with the IRS to end the tax agency’s investigation into the Trump crime family’s tax dodges.7

• He ordered the deletion of DOJ press releases regarding the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021.8

• In August 2025, video footage revealed a senior advisor to then Deputy Attorney General Blanche, Jared Wise, urging rioters to “kill” officers during the insurrection.9

• Under Blanche, the DOJ ended its prosecution of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders who were involved in the January 6 insurrection by moving to vacate existing seditious conspiracy convictions.

• Blanche forced the resignation of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, Todd Gilbert, for refusing to fire prosecutors in the Western District who said that a Trump obsession over classified Biden documents was a nothing burger.

• Like every other MAGAt on Planet Earth, Blanche has called for the investigation of George Soros, a money bag guy who favors the left. Specifically, Blanche called for the investigation of Soros’ Open Society Foundation. It’s probably only a matter of time now before a headline creeps out of the DOJ, but Soros is older than Trump, and probably could care less what Blanche tries to do.

• Blanche has repeatedly tried to make an example of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a newsy legal U.S. immigrant, but has been roundly defeated in the courts for his attempts to do so. Garcia was once sent to an El Salvador prison camp, but was freed after normal people blasted the publicity whistle loud enough for courts to hear public outrage. His case is still pending, though, and you can be sure that Blanche will remain transfixed. In April 2025, he put U.S. attorney Erez Reuveni on leave for conceding in court that Garcia should never have been prosecuted.10

• In June 2026, Blanche hired insurrectionist attorney Kurt Olsen as a senior US Attorney. In his new role with the state-run law firm, Olsen helped seize voting machines and related documents in places like Georgia and Arizona and promoted a theory, disproven in courts, that former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro hacked Dominion voting machines to favor Biden in the 2024 election.

• Blanche led the effort to use the DOJ to attack the beloved Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by suing them for allegedly defrauding donors through a paid informant program. In Blanche’s words, the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” It’s another AI-generated lawsuit by the state-run law firm that has no legs and is likely to disappear soon. Still, it’s a window into Blanche’s thinking, which is that all opposition can and should be targeted by the DOJ, especially given the fact that the state-run law firm has unlimited AI tokens.11

• As mentioned, he led the effort to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey over a seashell display, saying with a straight face, “While this case is unique, and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate.”12

• His misdirection, suffocation of evidence, and terrible treatment of Epstein survivors is legendary. Follow American hero Katie Phang for more on this. If Blanche comes to an ignominious end soon, we’ll have her to thank. Seriously. One person. Her.

  Katie Phang

  Law and Disorder

• In July 2025, Blanche interviewed the horror show known as Ghislaine Maxwell, who was moved to a minimum security prison shortly after. Blanche has repeatedly said that Trump was not deeply involved with Epstein, even though he appears in the public-facing Epstein query machine housed on DOJ servers thousands of times, and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has said he appears more than a million times in unredacted files.13

  Christopher Armitage, one of our more reliable, “Can we do something about all this, please, besides just complain?” people, has some thoughts on Blanche’s Maxwell visit:

The Existentialist Republic

Bombshell Uncovered: Evidence Shows Blanche Likely Committed Witness Bribery, Evidence Tampering, and Conspiracy in New Mexico. Those Crimes Carry at Least Seven and a Half Years in State Prison.

The President’s personal attorney now serves as the 88th US Attorney General of the United States of America…

Read more

20 hours ago · 353 likes · 29 comments · Christopher Armitage

• Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, stated in May 2026 that Blanche has had full responsibility over the Epstein Files “from the beginning.”14 A perusal of his record indicates that is not her throwing him under the bus. He’s really the gum in the works. If he doesn’t spend the rest of his life behind bars after all this is over, our next Attorney General will be as much of a failure as Merrick Garland was.

• In April 2025, Blanche disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit, mostly so he could grift in the balmy seas of cryptocurrency with $150,000 worth of crypto himself without snoopy federal attorneys poking around.15

• Accusing the American Bar Association (ABA) of being an activist organization, in April 2025, Blanche barred DOJ employees from participating in ABA events, just one day before the DOJ eliminated $3.2 million in federal grants to the ABA to help train lawyers fighting domestic and sexual abuse.16 The ABA said at the time the defunding was illegal and a result of the ABA’s criticism of the Trump regime.

• In January 2026, Blanche said that there was “no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis.17 He also tried to taint her reputation by pushing an assault investigation against her after her murder.18

• In January 2016, he threatened to prosecute Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over acts of terrorism, saying on Apartheid Twitter, “I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”19

• In November 2025, he urged Federalist Society lawyers to join a war against judges who block efforts to send immigrants to concentration camps.20

You remember who the Federalist Society is, right? Here’s a refresher:

• Strong evidence suggests that he lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings as Deputy Attorney General when he told Senators he had no direct knowledge of the Eric Adams (former New York City mayor) corruption case. However, memos revealed that he and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove were in communication over the case, which Bove recommended be dismissed, and that Blanche agreed with Bove’s assessment.21

Todd Blanche: The early years

One skill we must admit that Trump has managed to hold onto even as his mind continues to be hollowed out by madness, rage, and dementia is his unique ability to find the sleaziest lawyers on the planet.

Todd Blanche is such a slinky rat that he makes the grifter-in-chief’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, look like he spends all day soaping up at the Bar Association’s special bathhouse for reformed lawyers.

Back during the Trump 1.0 years, in a direct sign that there is a god or universe with a sense of dark humor, he represented a guy named Boris Epshteyn as part of his defense efforts for another Russian mole, Paul Manafort.

Manafort should be doing time right now, but he was pardoned by the crime family boss after his conviction for mortgage fraud. New York State tried to convict him again anyway, but the New York Supreme Court said, no, that’s double jeopardy, which, sadly in this case, is correct.

But the fact that he represented a dude named Epshteyn tracks with his life as a criminal attorney who aids criminals and who has spent much of his time lately trying to bury the Epstein files.

Manafort, Epstein, and Rudy Giuliani pal Igor Fruman were implicated in a Trump–Ukraine scandal that everyone has forgotten about. Blanche represented Manafort and Epshteyn while working for law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.22

Before tainting himself with Trump, he was considered an accomplished lawyer and prosecutor. His drift to the dark side appears to have begun when he took on the Manafort and Epshteyn case. He eventually succumbed completely when he bought a beach home in Palm Beach near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago massage palace in 2024.23

You might think, “Well, that’s a smoking gun. He was up to his ears in Epstein.” But that’s not really how crime family lawyers operate. They rarely get their own fingers dirty in the filthy laundry. But for some reason, they seem to get a charge out of protecting those who do.

So, like the good mob lawyer that he is, Blanche went to work and signed up to defend Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He lost that case, but still managed to keep his client out of prison in a series of dark legal maneuvers that we’re all still licking our wounds from.

Blanche went on to represent Trump in three out of Trump’s four criminal cases.

But first, he had to do something most of you will never consider: Fix the awkwardness of being a registered Democrat. So he switched parties.

You might think, oh, a turncoat in more than one way. But, nah, he was probably a registered Democrat because it’s just easier to move around in New York political circles that way. Nothing to see here, methinks.

He eagerly ran up to Trump, got on his knees, and the rest is history.

He was his personal lawyer on three criminal cases, any of which would have buried any other politician.

The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump

Trump was convicted on 34 counts related to the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme. As he often does, Blanche relied more on court maneuvers to delay the trial than he did on evidence to support his client’s innocence. The prosecution summoned 20 witnesses to plead its case. Blanche summoned two.

He repeatedly tried to delay or dismiss the case. He motioned for the judge to recuse himself. He even tried to get the trial moved from state jurisdiction into a federal courthouse because he knew Trump could just pardon himself if he won the presidency after losing the case.

This is how mob boss lawyers operate. They work their way around the darker tunnels of the law, looking for avenues of escape. Blanche has become a master of that dark art.

Even after Trump’s conviction, Blanche’s relentlessness and ability to pile up endless delays led to Trump being given an unconditional discharge after he was inaugurated instead of doing time in a New York state prison. When people said Trump was running for office again to avoid prison, they weren’t using hyperbole.

Trump being Trump, he has since gone on to use the office of the President to formally run his criminal operation from the Oval Office, and he now has his own personal state-run legal firm to accomplish his ends.

Not even Jack Smith could rescue us

Blanche also was Trump’s defense attorney in two cases brought by independent prosecutor Jack Smith on behalf of the Justice Department before it became Trump’s personal law firm.

In one of those cases, based in Florida, United States v. Donald J. Trump, Blanche stumbled into some luck when the random docket process gave him a Trump-friendly judge, Aileen Cannon, who basically killed the case. That case involved Trump’s alleged pilfering of classified documents. Our only bit of satisfaction out of that case was a few memes.

The other case, also called United States v. Donald J. Trump, was a voter suppression case. Smith indicted Trump on four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

Blanche managed to create one delay after another, to the point that by the time it came time to begin the trial, Trump was stumbling into the Oval Office with an awful grin, forcing Jack Smith to abandon the case thanks to the Supreme Court ruling on full presidential immunity.

Hoping for a new verdict

Why Blanche went from a lucrative career to gamble on a guy like Trump, whose reputation for not paying attorney fees was legion, is a mystery we won’t learn about until Attorney General Jack Smith prosecutes him in 2031, Supreme Court Chief Justice Barack Hussein Obama presiding, if there’s truly a god.

Notes

If a Republican argues that you wouldn’t be happy with any other choice for Attorney General that Trump might make instead of Blanche, it’s fair to concede the point and look for ice cream.

One thing you can tell Republicans is that having a state-run personal law firm is much closer to the kind of communism everyone is familiar with than anything Democratic Socialists, who are simply trying to claw back lost social welfare and civil rights, will ever dream up.

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Footnotes (I love footnotes, don’t you?)

Unfortunate, because Stephen Miller is still around. I’ve been mentioning him for a lot longer than I wish. Here’s a little background story on America’s Nosferatu doppelganger in case you missed it:

He was not yet a household word when I wrote that. Now, almost everyone knows who he is, and never for a happy reason.

As long as he’s around, we’ll see headlines like these:

As of July 11, there were 65,765 people in immigration detention in the United States, many of them without a court hearing, which is a violation of constitutional rights.1

Compare that to November 3, 2024, when there were 38,863 immigrant detainees.

On August 3, one of Stephen Miller’s victims, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, died in custody at a place called Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. Delaney Hall has been working on its insipid reputation since Miller first clamped his fangs onto the American immigration scene.

Delaney has been the scene of repeated protests because it’s become a concentration camp with no accountability.

Lopez-Cornejo, 41, was a Salvadoran immigrant who wasn’t important enough for ICE to tell us his cause of death after “suffering a medical emergency” at Delaney Hall.2

He’s not the first.

According to Physicians for Human Rights, Lopez-Cornejo is the 53rd person to die in an ICE concentration camp under Stephen Miller’s watchful, sardonic gaze.3

Jean Wilson Brutus, 41, a Haitian immigrant, died in December 2025 after another “medical emergency.” The medical emergency, and his death, occurred one day after he entered the Delaney detention center. Even ICE admits he entered the facility in good health.4

Let me be clear here. With this regime, nothing they say can be trusted. A medical emergency should probably be considered a beating by guards until the regime can prove otherwise. Or, in Jean Wilson Brutus’s case, I don’t think you need to be a fiction writer like me to suggest that an ICE goon dropped some fentanyl into his stale peanut butter sandwich (look for clues in the footnote as to why I might concoct this crazy story).

The problem in these situations is that we can’t know. If Brutus was giving ICE goons some lip, the goons, already predisposed toward hate, could easily have dropped a little fentanyl sauce into whatever gross food they were giving him.

How would we know? It is impossible to know what goes on behind those locked doors. DHS won’t let anyone in to see what they’re up to.

Nobody is holding ICE accountable aside from the usual crowd of immigration lawyers and activist local politicians like Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor. They try their best to shine a light on these cases, but if we’re honest, Americans are still not particularly outraged when immigrants are seized from the streets and killed unless it’s right in front of their faces.

And even then, let’s be more honest. They’re much more interested when it’s a non-immigrant taken down in the streets during an ICE operation.

This is why Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, has prioritized a stealthier campaign of abductions that focus on courthouses, smaller attack convoys, and airports.

At courthouses, the only people there are suing each other or waiting to see a judge for a variety of other reasons, usually uncomfortable ones. The last thing anyone is going to do when they see ICE in a courthouse is blow a whistle.

At airports, everyone is cranky and just hoping to sit through an uncomfortable, crowded, loud flight without clawing their fellow passengers' eyes out.

“How was your flight, love?”
“It was a win. I didn’t kill anyone.”

So Mullin, who is in trouble with the more radical insurrectionists, like Steve Bannon, anyway, for not lining the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge with the heads of immigrants on pikes, came up with a new strategy: No more “operations” with names like Midway Blitz, where convoys of ICE goons attacked immigrants in broad daylight, which, in turn, lured armies of citizen avengers armed with whistles and camera phones.

Mullin didn’t pull back operations, though. He merely placed them into stealth mode. More arrests are being made now than ever. In July, there were 1,474 abductions per day in the first eleven days, which meant that Stephen Miller’s goal of 3,000 per day looked well on its way to fruition.5

Now, much smaller teams stalk the streets. Instead of five or six vehicles packed with ICE stormtroopers, one or two vehicles roam neighborhoods and much more quietly snatch their victims and flee the scene before anyone has a chance to respond.

And, as I mentioned, they’re in airports, too. You might think you’ll be boarding a flight at SFO (San Francisco), but instead, this happens while you’re looking for the latest Psalm of Vampires book at the airport book bin:

Your friendly TSA agents are helping the process by submitting names and birth dates of travelers to ICE.

This leads to scenes like this, via the New York Times:6

The woman and her 9-year-old daughter were walking through Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, heading to their gate to fly to Miami to visit a relative, when a stranger in plainclothes approached.

“Angelina?” he asked.

“Sí,” she responded.

Minutes later, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was on her knees, crying, as two immigration agents were handcuffing her in front of her daughter.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the DHS who seemed to relish her role as a Queen of the South determined to tear families apart during her tenure there, said at the time:7

“The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home.”

Did I mention that Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was arrested at the airport while her terrified 9-year-old daughter looked on? Republican family values, Queen of the South style.

Speaking of flights, Stephen Miller’s Gestapo regime sent 147 Venezuelans by charter to Venezuela just yesterday.8 This is one of the perks of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and keeping him locked up in his own special cage.

Deportations, with the coerced and staged cooperation of a newly subservient Venezuelan government, worked out so well after a similar charter flight carrying 146 Venezuelans in June that the regime, clapping its hands in glee, sent more.

What became of those 146 Venezuelans isn’t entirely clear, because just eight hours after the charter plane landed, an earthquake hammered the city they arrived in, La Guaira, killing more than 5,500 people and leaving about 24,000 people homeless. The building the deportees were detained in collapsed, killing dozens of them.

It was a wet dream scenario for Stephen Miller, who reportedly had sex with his crazed wife while watching a snuff film of the event (I may have made that up, but would it surprise you?).

What better thing to do, this regime obviously pondered, than to send more charters to a land devastated by a major quake?

This is a regime that loves using AI for everything. It’s not unfair to wonder if someone poses questions like this to ChatGPT: “What is the shittiest thing we can do to our Venezuelan immigrants?”

ChatGPT:

I’m glad you asked that question. You’re so impressive with these amazing queries. Why not send immigrants directly into harms way? Venezuela just had a major earthquake, so its resources are quite strained. It is very unlikely they will be able to support a transport plane loaded with a hundred and fifty or so impoverished souls.

What a country we’ve become.

Notes

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Footnotes

Aside from an occasional flaring nostril aimed at extremely rare disagreements, Rand Paul has knelt before the mad clown just like the rest of the subservient Republican Congress, destroying the libertarian and Tea Party dream of a United States run like a lawless and unregulated Mad Max nation.

His dad, Ron, served as a Representative in Texas’s 22nd congressional district from 1979 to 1985 and in Texas’s 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013.

It could be argued that Ron was libertarianism’s most important and dedicated cheerleader and that, without him, its place in history would have remained where it belonged: three or four angry white middle-aged men yelling slogans while waving tattered Ayn Rand books in a dilapidated rural Texas church basement.

Rand Paul’s dad became enough of a libertarian icon that he ran for president under the Libertarian Party banner in 1988. He is considered by some to be the godfather of the Tea Party and a key reason for its existence.

So what were libertarian Ron Paul’s policy positions?

He opposed federal government activity in almost every area of public life. He considered social welfare programs abhorrent. He opposed a federal income tax. He wanted to strip the federal bureaucracy down to nothing by eliminating every Cabinet position.

He even hated the Federal Reserve, which helps protect your money from bank runs and, flaws and all, traditionally does a pretty good job of managing inflation and unemployment by setting fiscal policy and interest rates. He introduced a bill in Congress every year to eliminate the Federal Reserve.

He was also a proponent of the gold standard. He has consistently warned against the cost of military spending.

He was against the war on drugs and the war on terror, which might have attracted more young people if he hadn’t been against everything else.

He also consistently railed against the military-industrial complex. This was always a core part of libertarianism. One might disagree, for good reason, with libertarianism’s other policy stances, but its devotion to that one creed lured a large number of young people into its lair.

When the libertarian-minded Tea Party first began clutching the heels of the Republican Party to drag it into its cesspool, the one question on everyone’s mind was, “Why are so many young men gravitating towards this movement?”

But the reason was always simple: Young Republican men, much like Captain Bone Spurs, would have sacrificed their mothers to avoid military service. Railing against the military-industrial complex was a convenient but, as history has shown, cynical posture used to lure other young men into the Tea Party’s clutches.

Ron Paul, as it turned out, was libertarianism’s only true believer.

Libertarianism was essentially a vote against government intervention of any kind, so, in that sense, opposition to the military-industrial complex made sense. But the Tea Party went on to create budgets for the military that have never been experienced before. It was all bullshit. It was a show. A cover for Christo-nationalism, hate, and bigotry that finally begat Donald Trump, who then proceeded to dismantle its precepts with wild abandon.

In July, led by Tea Partier Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives passed a $1.15 trillion Defense Spending Bill, beating historical records into absolute submission.1

This unprecedented military budget isn’t about leveraging current military trends like agile drone warfare. Its sole purpose is to feed the monster. American defense manufacturers will be lining up to produce obsolete weapons of unimaginable cost — big beautiful machines that will get blown to bits by $50,000 Costco drones. They’ll suck more money from the budget in one minute of activity than you’ll see in your lifetime.

The military budget is state welfare for defense contractors. The rest of us get to starve or hunt for scraps on the tail end of the dead libertarian dream that has only managed to gut social welfare while building a military that small nations will almost develop a hankering to take on thanks to new strategies in warfare.

All that’s left of libertarianism these days is a wild-eyed Kentucky Senator with apparent psychological problems.

In November 2017, Paul was viciously attacked by a neighbor over a clutch of tree branches on their property border to such an extent that he had to have part of a lung removed. He suffered five broken ribs, including three displaced fractures, in the assault.2

While the mainstream media heaped sympathy upon Paul, I wondered at the time how a few tree branches on the edge of Paul’s property could set someone off that much. Conservative media, unsurprisingly, said that his attacker loathed Trump, but Rand Paul was not and is still not Trump.

You have to be in a serious, consistent conflict with someone to trigger that kind of outrage and assault.

Anthony Fauci is intimately familiar with Rand Paul’s likely psychological issues, being victimized himself by them.

But one can fairly argue that Rand Paul’s larger crimes are against the libertarians he claims to represent, especially his own father.

His consistent and reliable votes for Trump policies and bills have wrecked whatever there once was of libertarianism.

His dad, Ron, must be rolling in his grave, before he even gets a chance to climb into it.

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Notes

Libertarianism isn’t the only thing that’s dead in America’s authoritarian atmosphere:

Footnotes

Yesterday, another Wildberries warehouse in Russia went up in flames. It almost doesn’t matter when you read that sentence, because a Wildberries warehouse is getting blasted by Ukrainian drones almost every day.

“Wildberries” is Russian for “Amazon.” It’s their version of the Amazon retail empire. They’re getting hit by Ukraine ostensibly because they sell drones and drone parts. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a wily fellow and certainly knows that disrupting the Russian version of Amazon is going to draw the attention, and ire, of Russian citizens.

I take no joy in the knowledge that blowing up warehouses is likely to lead to civilian Russian deaths.

But the Russian people are out of excuses. They have been willfully blind to Putin’s brazen savagery against their neighbors (and, in many cases, friends and family) for more than four years, just as our own population of MAGA clowns and drug addicts and deviants have been supporting the blatant and growing authoritarianism of a sexual predator posing as a president in the ruins of the White House for a total of more than six years.

Russian citizens have access to the same information we do, just as MAGA insurrectionists and Epstein cheerleaders have access to the realities behind their hero’s gruesome exploits.

Russian citizens cower under the excuse that their versions of Fox News create a news monolith on behalf of Putin that they can’t escape. Truthful information about Ukraine and Putin, though, is available via the Telegram app, which is almost as pervasive in Russia as Facebook is in the United States.

Dylan Combellick, who basically monitors the Ukraine War for a living, also reports that Wildberries facilities in Penza, Russia, and Sarapul, Udmurtia, also in Russia, were hit last night.

Ukraine isn’t just hitting warehouses. It’s decimating the Russian oil infrastructure that has propped up the Putin regime since it first invaded its neighbor to the west.

Every major Russian oil refinery has been hit, per United24, a Ukrainian news service:

• Omsk Oil Refinery: Russia’s largest refinery (22 million tons/year capacity); struck on July 6, 2026.

• Kirishi Oil Refinery (KINEF): Leningrad region capacity of 20–21 million tons/year; repeatedly targeted.

• Ryazan Oil Refinery: 17.1 million tons/year capacity; repeatedly struck, causing prolonged suspensions.

• Kstovo Oil Refinery (NORSI): Lukoil plant near Nizhny Novgorod processing 16 million tons/year; hit multiple times including July 2026.

• Yaroslavl Oil Refinery (Slavneft-YANOS): 15 million tons/year capacity; struck multiple times.

• Volgograd Oil Refinery: Lukoil plant with 14.8 million tons/year capacity; targeted in drone operations.

• Perm Oil Refinery (Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez): 13.1 million tons/year capacity; hit in late July 2026.

• Moscow Oil Refinery: ~12 million tons/year capacity; hit in multiple waves of strikes during summer 2026.

• Novokuibyshevsk Oil Refinery: 8.8 million tons/year capacity in the Samara region; damaged and partially halted.

• Syzran Oil Refinery: 8.5 million tons/year capacity in the Samara region; struck by long-range drones.

• Bashneft-Novoil (Novo-Ufimsky) / Ufa Refineries: Bashkortostan facilities processing over 7 million tons/year; hit in repeated operations.

These numbers and bullet points come directly from a Ukrainian news source, so it’s reasonable to expect a propaganda flourish behind them, but I fact-checked most of the incidents, and various other sources around the interwebs seem to confirm the numbers.

The reliable Combellick, who maintains a daily report on the Ukraine War on the Medium platform (with a decidedly Ukrainian slant), describes the most recent attack on Russian oil infrastructure:

The Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez (PNOS) was hit by Ukrainian drones.

PNOS, part of the Lukoil Group, processes over 13 million tons of oil annually, produces high-quality gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation kerosene, and lubricating oils. The refinery is a key industrial facility in the region and one of the most technologically advanced in the country, supplying fuel to both the domestic market and export markets.

— Dylan Combellick

He also reports that the port in Taman, Krasnodar, a Russian oil depot that is used to transport oil, is on fire, probably from Ukrainian drones.

The attacks have resulted in queues at Russian gas stations that would look familiar to Americans who tried filling up during the Yom Kippur War and OPEC Oil Embargo of the 1970s.

The average Russian is now feeling the effects of the war in ways they can no longer ignore. Some of them are even fighting each other for gas, according to Combellick and other sources, such as Nadin Brzezinski, another reliable source on the Medium platform (also very pro-Ukraine).

Another reporter, and apologies for not remembering who, described the situation in parts of Russia as something out of a Mad Max film.

During the years since the war began, Ukraine has become a drone superpower. Its drones can, and do, hit deep inside Russia to the point where the Russian oil infrastructure is in danger of collapse.

Russia is responding by killing women and children while targeting apartment buildings from Kyiv to Lviv in Ukraine.

Like our own madman, Russia’s is becoming increasingly desperate as the strength of internal dissent grows and the vultures begin to circle.

In the United States, where our own madman has handed the keys of the Strait of Hormuz to a belligerent, tyrannical authoritarian theocratic regime, his own allies, even the crazy ones, are turning against him.

Alex Jones, who for some reason is still able to broadcast his mindless rants even after having his income sucked dry by the courts punishing him for unforgivable lies toward the victims and parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School, has joined a growing “impeach him” chorus within MAGA.

Today, Republican Senators, for now, gave up on trying to confirm the Predator-in-Chief’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, although I don’t expect any resilience in opposition there. The fiend in the Oval Office will rouse himself from his sleep long enough to spew methane out of his mouth and do some kind of horrible thing to take our mind off it, and then Republican Senators will confirm Blanche, because that’s what cowards do.

Still, there are a ton of cracks in the walls of MagaLand, and the reason for this is that no matter how firmly piles of excrement set, eventually a wall with that kind of foundation collapses upon itself.

I won’t reiterate the various signs of collapse here. Most of you are inundated with enough Substack articles to know what’s going on.

The man is dying, and the only question remaining is how many people he wants to bring down with him.

We are fortunate, ironically, that he is fooling himself into thinking he’s built a legacy worth protecting.

But I don’t know that Putin is crippled by that same weakness.

Ukraine is winning the war Putin started four years ago. Its drones are sought after by every military in the world. The phrase “economic collapse,” in the wake of at least a million dead soldiers, is a legitimate one in describing Russia’s imminent future.

So the fate of this most dangerous hour probably rests in the hands of Trump’s closest ally, a man thousands of miles away whose grip on power is unknown. We can be sure, though, that the vultures are circling there, too. An authoritarian’s worst enemy is almost always his friend.

Buckle up.

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Sometimes, it’s not about politics.

Barack Obama’s politics are far to the right of mine. Some of his policies, such as drone strikes in Afghanistan, made me want to scream into the night. As a president, he was a centrist. I most certainly am not.

If he emerged from a hot tub time machine into the 1970s, he’d be a moderate Republican like two other former Illinois senators, both Republican: Everett Dirksen and Charles Percy.

Sometimes, it’s not about politics.

Just before he won the presidential election, I believed him when he said he was a blank slate. That was typical centrist posturing, but it was honest. I squirted a few tears of joy on that election night. I had no misgivings.

Obama possesses a core decency that has been missing from American politicians for 250 years. He’s a unicorn. He’s the family man that no Republicans, who once claimed to own the mantel of family values, can even speak of in their current fugue of malfeasance, hate, and sex crimes as they continue to fall over each other in service of a man whose name is said to appear one million times in unredacted versions of the Epstein files.

Obama’s integrity is even more remarkable when you consider the nature of Illinois politics during his ascension.

If he’s a crook, he’s the sneakiest summabitch whoever lived and has earned every penny of his ill-gotten wealth.1 So even then, I’m giving him his props.

Also? I think we all know he’s not. And this is part of what makes him special.

Illinois politics was steeped in corruption during Obama’s Illinois political career

One of life’s great mysteries is: How did he do it? I’ve never read an Obama biography or autobiography except for parts of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Maybe the answers lie in one of his other books.

I won’t try to explain it here beyond some (mostly) guesswork at the end of this essay. Instead, I’m going to describe the cesspool from which he came so that you can marvel at his achievement and better appreciate how remarkable his political journey was.

In Illinois, 1,913 public officials ended up behind bars after federal trials in Illinois’ Northern District between 1976 and 2012.2

Four out of nine governors before current governor JB Pritzker found their way to the hoosgow.

Thousands of dollars were found in Secretary of State Paul Powell’s shoe boxes and various other hiding places such as strong boxes and briefcases in the 1970s.3

Illinois’ career Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2025 on ten felony counts for federal bribery and wire fraud. He was a fixture of Illinois politics during Obama’s days in Illinois politics, but Obama miraculously avoided the Madigan corruption machine.

Chicago and Illinois had already developed a reputation as a wild place for unrestrained political corruption under the Daly Machine, led by Mayor Richard J. Daley, who ruled Chicago with an iron fist from 1955 until 1976.

As Chairman of the Democratic Party, all roads to political success ran directly into his office, where favors, bribes, and ultimatums decorated the walls like Trump gold.

Daley was never convicted of anything. His son, Richard J. Daley, who was also a Chicago mayor, seemed much less interested in harboring corruptioneers. But hundreds of people surrounding Daley Sr. were jailed for various corrupt practices.

With that culture firmly in place, subsequent political bosses like Madigan fought to develop their own fiefdoms in the wake of the Daley empire, like Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Antigonus carving up the Alexandrian empire after Alexander the Great’s death.

Madigan came out on top, but the entire state became a cauldron of relentless crime and graft, with hundreds of corrupt politicians scrambling for as many illicit proceeds as they could get their hands on.

Authors Dick Simpson and Tom Gradel, who co-wrote Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism and Criminality, reported in that book that such a rate of corruption is matched only by Louisiana and Washington, D.C., where the population of affected citizens is much smaller.

I would argue that no jurisdiction in America can match the graft of the Illinois and Chicago Democratic machine.

I would also argue that Obama’s influence, in addition, of course, to more than a thousand politicians scooped out of the political swamp and thrown into federal prison, has led to significant reforms that have transformed Chicago and Illinois politics into something more benign. Today, Illinois more closely resembles the common kind of political graft we see in other states governed by one-party rule, rather than rampant crime everywhere, all the time.4

The gauntlet of Chicago’s Democratic machine

The gauntlet of the Illinois Democratic machine’s corruption that Obama had to work through is too large for a minimal Substack like this to fully document. Entire books have been written on the subject. I’ll cover a few highlights so you can get a sense of the political environment Obama had to navigate.

Michael Madigan

Madigan built an empire. An empire of crime. Not in the way Trump has. Not quite as much in your face, although he didn’t make much of an effort to hide things.

Madigan was Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1983 to 2021, except from 1995 to 1997, when Republicans managed to sneak in a couple of years as the state house’s majority party. He was the main tollbooth through which all Illinois politicians were required to pass.

The gates of the tollbooth were operated by cigar-chomping men with the kind of criminal connections that made federal prosecutors’ heads spin.

U.S. District Judge John Blakey said, while sentencing Madigan, that he was the “central command post” of a massive, ongoing bribery operation between mega-utility Commonwealth Edison and Illinois politicians lining up to grease their palms for favors.

Blakely wrote:

“It was a nauseating display … of perjury and evasion. You lied, sir. You lied. You did not have to.”

But the Commonwealth Edison bribery case was notable not for its corruption, but as being the one time Madigan was caught with his fingers in the cookie jar. He had established a sparkling reputation as a local prince of corruption long before his indictments.

Federal prosecutors were unable to obtain convictions on Madigan’s (alleged) full criminal career that most Illinois political observers would describe as a “yearslong criminal enterprise to enrich himself and his political allies,” in the words of pre-Trumpian CBS News.5

In all, Madigan and co-conspirator Michael McClain originally faced a 23-count indictment for racketeering, conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and extortion covering the majority of his years as speaker. Federal prosecutors were surely disappointed that they couldn’t obtain convictions on all of them.

Jurors also convicted Madigan on three counts of wire fraud for his attempt to buy a state board seat for Chicago Alderperson Danny Solis, who was himself accused by the FBI of funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars from campaign funds into his personal bank account.

Chicagoans greeted Solis’s behavior with a shrug. It was business as usual; a typical alderman (that’s what they were called in those days, since politicians were mostly men).

Most importantly, Madigan was essentially the party boss during Obama’s Illinois political career.

Obama being Obama, he wound his way through the Madigan muck with a clever grace, which I’ll get into later.

Rod Blagojevich

Where do I begin?

Former Illinois Governor Blagojevich is also a unicorn of sorts. Somehow, he managed to transcend the criminal underworld of Illinois politics to create his own unique brand of what might best be called “criminal buffoonery.”

He went to prison like any good Illinois governor should, and was accused of a world of pay-to-play schemes, but America had a favorite: Using his office as governor to sell the United States Senate seat that Obama vacated, after winning the presidency, to the highest bidder.

It was such a terrific blend of criminality, brazenness, and silliness that Americans very nearly developed a sort of fondness for the guy, enough so that when the Grifter-in-Chief pardoned him in 2025, many of us felt a sense of relief that America’s silliest governor copped some forgiveness within the scope of this cold, cruel world.

Blagojevich served as governor from 2003–2009, the final two years of Obama’s term as an Illinois Senator (not U.S. Senator from Illinois, but instead a member of the Illinois Senate).

One reason Blagojevich was able to retain some affection from voters despite his criminality is that he was a progressive governor who helped set the template for Illinois’ current governor, JB Pritzker.

Blagojevich was ultimately convicted on 17 corruption charges. All Obama needed to do to avoid any accusations of connections with Blagojevich was avoid walking into the governor’s office for a chit chat, which Obama studiously did.

Edward Burke & Jesse Jackson Jr.

In the grand scheme of Chicago corruption, these two were minor players. But they were contemporaries of Obama. The temptation to hang with Jesse Jackson Jr., especially, must have been great, considering Jackson’s father’s legacy.

Jackson Jr., who was a U.S. Representative from 1995 to 2012, pleaded guilty in 2013 to wire and mail fraud for redirecting campaign contributions for personal use, primarily the purchase of luxury goods. He served 30 months in prison.

Burke was a career Chicago alderman, serving from 1969 to 2019. Like Madigan, he had a long, distinguished history as a career criminal whose antics were as well known to Chicagoans as Wrigley gum. Like any good Chicago Democrat, he was convicted of racketeering, extortion, and bribery.6

He was a local kingmaker, but Obama avoided Burke like he was a nasty pox specializing in explosive diarrhea.

Antoin “Tony” Rezko

There comes a time in most political careers when the lizard pays a visit and invites you into his den to dine with him on an endless feast of corruption. For history’s worst president, that moment came when he was a young real estate carnival barker in New York City chasing Black people out of his tenements. One day, one of Joseph McCarthy’s sleazy lawyers, Roy Cohn, paid him a call, became his mentor, and the rest is history.

For Barack Obama, the lizard was a real estate developer named Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Rezko ran a company, Rezmar Corporation, that interviewed Barack Obama when he was still a student at Harvard, where Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. Luckily for us, Obama didn’t get the job, and the young, ambitious scholar instead took a job with a law firm that focused on civil rights litigation, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.7

Although Rezko didn’t offer Obama a job, he did recognize some of Obama’s obvious traits and strongly encouraged him to look into a political career.

Whether Rezko had the same kind of intent as Roy Cohn did toward Trump is impossible to know. But it’s fair to guess that when someone encourages your calling, and then you become successful at that calling, a soft spot develops towards the person encouraging you.

All indications point, however, to Obama always taking counsel with himself first, and never letting one person control his destiny or play too large a role in his success.

This may have been his superpower as a young man, and it saved him from the snares that Illinois politicians might have led him into.

Rezko was a political huckster who made one of the first contributions to Barack Obama’s earliest campaign efforts via two food companies. It was a modest contribution, $2,000, but Obama was running for small potatoes: a seat in the Illinois Senate. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody cared.8

Although they remained on friendly terms, Obama never allowed himself to get caught up in Rezko’s world of graft, which eventually included the usual mix of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, and extortion, for which he was indicted in 2006 and eventually convicted.

Later, Rezko grifted his way onto Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign finance committee, which eventually pulled in $14 million in campaign contributions, but he wasn’t the top dog there, and there are no known improprieties.

Reporters tried to cast shade on a real estate transaction Obama made with Rezko after Obama cashed in on book royalties. Obama purchased a home next to a lot owned by Rezko’s wife. The accusation: Rezko sold a ten-foot parcel of his wife’s land to Obama at a higher than assessed value to make Rezko’s wife’s land less attractive to local developers.

A bit of a stretch to call that corruption, but Obama conceded the point anyway in later interviews, expressing regret over the deal.

Can you imagine the current occupant of the Oval Office fretting about such things?

Reporters, and even Hillary Clinton (during their 2008 presidential primary campaign), tried to tie Obama more closely to Rezko, but failed.

Rather than view his relationship with Rezko from the lens of corruption, it’s more useful to view it from the larger field glasses of a young man veering out of corruption’s way, but being smart enough to slap the occasional crooked shoulder so prevalent in Chicago politics.

Rezko was as close to corruption as Obama ever tread, and that wasn’t very close.

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel was the perfect partner for Obama during and before Obama’s presidency. He has just enough Chicago in him to be dangerous, but he doesn’t appear to possess the penchant for corruption most other Illinois Democrats have.

Personally, I think this is because he was a ballet dancer in his youth. He turned down a dance gig with the Joffrey Ballet in favor of politics, and somehow danced his way through Chicago politics, cozying up with Barack Obama enough to become Obama’s Chief of Staff after Obama was elected.9

Emanuel’s biggest crime is that he’s a Clinton corporatist. He started his political career progressively enough, as a political operative for Paul Simon (the Illinois Senator, not the singer/songwriter).

Later, he worked for Clinton, where he became deeply involved with NAFTA, which eventually became a war cry for MAGA, but was also frowned upon by many on the left.

Some would also call Emanuel a Zionist, but I don’t like getting into those arguments because that part of the world was ruined by Europeans after World War Two more than it was by the people caught in the conflict created by the Palestinian Mandate imposed by Great Britain and others.

Emanuel is certainly Jewish. His middle name is “Israel,” after all, and his father was born in Jerusalem, where he took a bullet during Arab protests for Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization.

Emanuel wants to be your next president, an unlikely event, mostly because his past associations with Israel will obliterate10 him during the Democratic primaries.

He’s now a fierce critic of Netanyahu.11 He delivered a speech earlier this month in Tel Aviv urging the withdrawal of U.S. aid unless Netanyahu’s policies are rejected by Israeli voters, but this is a bit like someone snatching a winning lottery ticket from its owner as she hands it to the clerk and then laying claim to the prize.

But during the Obama years, Israel wasn’t drawing the same attention as it is now, even though its apartheid-like policies against Palestinians were firmly entrenched. Israel still had the sympathy of much of the world, leveraged by support for those who argued that it was a nation surrounded by hostile neighbors.

In Illinois, Emanuel served as a political mentor of sorts for Obama, but he also served as a guy who’d take some of the punches aimed for Obama’s head, a task he also performed as Obama’s Chief of Staff.

How did Obama escape all that?

Picking the right people to chill with has always been one of Obama’s many skills. Rahm Emanuel might not be my idea of progressive politics, but he was a handy torch for Obama to carry into meetings with power brokers, and has stayed out of trouble.

When Obama found mentors, they were clean. Obama served as the main driver of a shadow effort by U.S. Democratic Senator Paul Simon, a man considered to have been of pristine integrity, to force state legislators to put together a set of campaign ethics laws for Illinois. The result was a new law called the Gift Ban Act. According to the political publication Stateline:12

The 1998 law prohibited politicians from using their campaign funds for personal use, banned fundraisers in Springfield during legislative sessions and required candidates to file their fundraising information online, so the public could see who was paying for a campaign before the election.

Nobody was likely more important as a mentor than Emil Jones Jr., who was the President of the Illinois Senate when Obama arrived. Jones was constantly in Michael Madigan’s face, but, more importantly, Jones acted as an armour coating for Obama when Obama was still green and learning the state’s political ropes as an Illinois senator.

He moved Obama through the line of hands you must shake in Illinois when Obama ran for the U.S. Senate. Obama needed Jones’ help, because he most certainly wasn’t going to get it from Michael Madigan, who feared Obama’s reform efforts.

Madigan campaigned for Obama’s opponent in the Senate primary, Dan Hynes, instead. This led to Hynes getting 63 percent of the vote in Madigan’s home 13th Ward of Chicago, to Obama’s 15 percent. But Jones said to Obama, “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” Obama won the primary, and the rest is history.13

The combination of clean mentors and active efforts at election and political reform resulted in two simultaneous messages from the young, charming, ambitious, and funny politician from Chicago, Hawaii, and, through ancestry, Kenya: “I’m an up-and-coming politician you need to pay attention to, and I’m saying ‘no’ to the land mass of Illinois corruption.”

After he became the president of the United States, corruption in Chicago suddenly became taboo. Not nonexistent, but no longer the game that must be played to advance a political career. Obama became a new template. Citizens began to demand more Obamas and fewer Madigans.

What is happening on a national scale today will ultimately land in the same place. Americans are seeing Chicago-style corruption on a nuclear scale.

But they’re also furious. The blowback will send hundreds of politicians to jail when Jack Smith or someone like him becomes Attorney General/Jailer during the next administration.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll also get a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court named Barack Hussein Obama.

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Footnotes

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The city of Chicago awarded a $13.5 million grant to Yellow Banana, a Cleveland-based grocery logistics company, to reopen six shuttered grocery stores.

The grocery stores served food deserts1 on the city’s south and west sides. Folks in places such as Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the city’s far south side were finally getting an opportunity to satisfy a long-term hunger for real food in real grocery stores.

The food deserts appeared when name-brand stores, including Whole Foods, pulled out of these neighborhoods. Whole Foods pulled out of a much-ballyhooed location in Englewood four years ago. It was replaced by a discount grocer named Save A Lot under a separate program set up by the city (one that is also in trouble).

After receiving its grant, Yellow Banana then contracted with Save A Lot to bring the six other shuttered supermarkets back to life.

All of these stores have one thing in common: They serve communities in Chicago in dire need of reliable, reasonably priced grocery stores. These are communities containing neighborhoods with a heavy dependency on the federal SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps.

But now, all six Save A Lot stores under the $13.5 million grant will be shut down on Saturday (July 25) unless an investing angel or other bright light swoops in to save them. The Save A Lot that replaced Whole Foods is also reportedly closing.

The primary reason?

The Save A Lot stores have lost 26 percent of their SNAP sales since the Trump regime gutted the SNAP program through the “One Big Beautiful Bill” of death (aka: One Big Bill of Death) passed on July 4, 2025.2

It all started with the decimation of the SNAP program

The One Big Bill of Death cut an almost inconceivable $186 billion from the SNAP program, affecting approximately 42 million people.3

The MAGA Congressional Republicans who wrote the bill then developed an onerous set of new requirements for receiving benefits:4

• Expanded Work Requirements: The bill raised the age limit for “able-bodied adults” expected to work to qualify for receiving benefits, from 54 to 64 years of age. Even veterans were affected. Anyone with four working limbs is now required to work 80 hours per month. Single mother? Too bad. Off you go. Chances are, you won’t make enough to cover child care. New rules now also apply to veterans, adults with children over 14, and the homeless.

• Food price inflation is no longer taken into consideration. The MAGA Republicans used the Orwellian term “Restricted Benefit Calculations” to establish cost neutrality in future benefit adjustments. In plainer English, this means that when prices soar like they have under the regime’s insane Hormuz Insider Trading War, there is no adjustment made for inflation.

• Legal immigrants and refugees seeking permanent residency and/or asylum, victims of domestic violence, and human trafficking victims were cut out of the program.

• State Cost-Sharing: The bill requires states to pay up to 15% of their residents’ SNAP benefits. This, in turn, has forced many states to look into imposing stricter requirements from its struggling citizens to minimize their costs. Red states, of course, were already eager to do so.

• Elimination of SNAP-Ed: Federal funding for SNAP nutrition and education programs was also eliminated.

Republicans warned us of these changes with their manifesto of hate, Project 2025, long before the election that saw 78 million people reject yet another overqualified woman as their president. [Page 300 of Project 2025]

Acknowledging that the extreme MAGA cuts to SNAP benefits have severely impacted these stores, Save A Lot spokesperson Sarah Griffin then hid under the standard corporate dodge of “financial headwinds” to explain the company’s exit from neighborhoods that desperately need grocery stores:5

“As a result of this [the SNAP reductions] and other financial headwinds, Save A Lot made the difficult decision to end our arrangement with Yellow Banana. Yellow Banana is exploring alternatives in order to keep the stores open. If they are unable to find an alternative, the stores will cease operations, effective July 25th.”

You might be wondering, “Hey, what about that nice grant they received from the City of Chicago? Aren’t there obligations?”

Indeed, there are. According to Peter Strazzabosco of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, the former Whole Foods store must remain open until the middle of this year, but that is covered under a separate program than the bigger grant. The six stores covered by the grant must be reopened within a year, although it’s unclear who is responsible for that and what the enforcement mechanism is.6

That Yellow Banana might be rotten

Unfortunately for people residing in Chicago food deserts, Yellow Banana appears to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Yellow Banana contracts with Save A Lot to run its stores, but it appears to be doing a terrible job.

How bad? Bad enough that Thomas Lys, a Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor, took a look at its balance sheets and said way back in 2024 (ancient history in our current beleaguered timeline):

“When I look at this balance sheet, it’s a company that’s not good at doing whatever it’s doing. I don’t see anything here that would give the people on the South and West sides any hope. Understand, all I know is what’s been conveyed to me. But this is a company that can’t pay $800 for its utility bill.”

The Chicago Sun Times identified this and other problems with Yellow Banana almost from the moment the grocery company entered the Chicago market.7

SNAP cuts affect every grocer in the United States

It’s fair to say that in the case of Chicago’s Save A Lot, the 26% drop in income generated through SNAP was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that camel was probably going down anyway thanks to Yellow Banana mismanagement.

But grocery stores not named Kroger and Albertsons often run on paper-thin margins anyway. That 26% loss of SNAP income would be substantial even for them. And the drop in SNAP income has affected every grocery and supermarket in the country. The biggest among them will respond by raising prices, if they haven’t already.

$100 billion in SNAP benefits go to 250,000 food retailers, comprising five percent of sales nationwide.8

The One Big Bill of Death has stripped the SNAP program down to a husk of its former self. The largest retailers can survive the hit. Smaller grocers can’t, especially if they’re running damaged balance sheets the way Yellow Banana does.

Say hi to your Walmart greeter

Walmart collects 24% of all SNAP spending, much of it from its own employees.9

In 2018, before the One Big Bill of Death, the nonprofit organization Big Hunger calculated that 202,500 Walmart employees received SNAP benefits, amounting to $618.4 million in corporate welfare annually.10

According to the Government Accountability Office, in 2020, “Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every state.”11

Although there are no reliable numbers in the wake of the One Big Bill of Death, we can assume that a good chunk of these employees will no longer be eligible, given that between 2 and 4.5 million Americans have lost their benefits, including one million children.12

For example, Arizona saw a 55 percent drop in food assistance from July 2025, just after the One Big Bill of Death was passed, to April 2026.13

I guess that’s one way to beat corporate welfare: Just cut everyone off.

I (and others) call it corporate welfare because SNAP has traditionally provided the side benefit (for Walmart and other large companies) of subsidizing their policy of paying workers low wages.

Walmart has since raised its hourly wages, but anyone who has fought with the welfare system knows that being knocked out of the pool of SNAP recipients with a somewhat higher wage has its drawbacks and can sometimes feel worse than before the wage hike.

Even the big chains are closing shop

Well, we’ve established that it’s just the smaller grocery stores that are affected by all this, right? Maybe a few food deserts get a little bigger? No big deal.

Apologies for misleading you, but that’s not the case.

Profit margins at even the big box stores are tiny. Overall, profit margins sit at around one to three percent, depending on which article you read.

Big grocery stores are disappearing, too:14

• In June 2025, one month before the Big Bill of Death passed, Kroger announced it would close 60 stores, 5% of all Kroger brand stores, during an 18-month period. These guys aren’t stupid. They read Project 2025, too, and they’re paid to anticipate government policy.

• Discount grocery chain Grocery Outlet announced 36 store closings in March 2026.

• Albertsons announced this year that it is shutting down about a dozen stores in several states and Washington, D.C. The megachain has 2,000 stores that it plans to evaluate now that a merger with Kroger has fallen through.

• In addition to stores carrying the Albertsons name, the chain has closed an Acme store in New Jersey, a Balducci’s in Connecticut, a Randall’s store in Texas, Safeway stores in Washington, D.C, and California, and two Vons stores in California. There are more on the horizon, as Albertsons is always fighting for its life.

• Dollar General ran a nice little “optimization review” (I love corporate speak!) in 2025. The conclusion? Close 96 stores, all of them by January 2026 (in other words, hurry!). It also planned to shut down 45 PopShelf stores. The company has announced that it plans to keep expanding, too, but the trend for them, like all retail, has been away from the food deserts that gave life to the chain in the first place.

• Texas’s beloved HEB is reviewing the status of all 440 of its supermarkets in Texas and Mexico. It recently stunned Austinites by closing the doors on a location in Austin’s Spicewood Springs neighborhood that had existed since the 1980s.

• Amazon is closing every single one of its 70 Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores, ending what it once called a grand experiment, saying in its corporate announcement, “While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.” Amazon, for now, is saying that most of these stores will be reopened or rebranded as Whole Foods stores.

• Southern grocery giant Piggly Wiggly recently closed a store in Phenix City, Alabama, leaving that small southern city’s 38,000 residents with one less decent-sized grocer to choose from. The company has announced the closure of stores in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Sumter, South Carolina, too, without explanation (oh, SNAP!).

• Winn-Dixie, claiming a rebranding strategy, slammed the doors shut on almost all its stores outside Florida and Southern Georgia in late 2025, including, according to mashed.com, “seven Harveys Supermarkets in Georgia and one in Florida, 12 Winn-Dixie locations in Louisiana, 18 in Alabama, one in Georgia.” Winn-Dixie says it plans to sell some of its closed locations to other grocery companies.

• Even Aldi is closing stores. One store, in Peru, Indiana, the heart of MAGA country, shut without warning, with customers finding out when they drove into the parking lot only to see a “closed for business” sign. Another store, in a north Milwaukee food desert, abruptly closed in January 2026, leaving many local shoppers without a reliable grocery store. The company had already shut down 30 stores in 2025, the first year of the One Big Bill of Death’s draconian SNAP cuts.

I’m not silly enough to claim all these store closings are because of federal SNAP reductions. Some of them are just standard comings and goings based on corporate whims.

But we know for certain that the decimation of SNAP has led several Save A Lot stores in Chicago to the verge of collapse. The company told us so in a rare belch of truth before smothering it with corporate-speak.

Other grocery companies, which also operate on profit margins thinner than a crazed president’s lies about reflection pools, are less likely to be as forthcoming. Instead, they’ll keep shutting their stores and blather about things like “market conditions.”

So it’s up to us to give them no benefit of the doubt, and evaluate the facts on the ground as they come in using our set of standards instead of theirs.

My set of standards is based on one thing: The vast majority of corporate CEOs are still, even after all we know about the child-rapist in chief, willing to give him cover as long as their bottom lines are protected by the massive tax breaks the One Big Bill of Death gave them.

Late-stage capitalism has drawn the battle lines clearly. Retail grocers will continue to build out ever-slicker stores with higher markups, in an effort to end the scourge of low profit margins. During this process, we will all keep paying more for groceries. And some of us will simply do without any real groceries at all, living on canned “food” products that are little more than ladles of corn syrup and food dyes.

Notes

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I recently received an “unsubscribe” notice from one of my cherished readers saying they’re leaving because they are looking for more hard news. My feeling is that there are plenty of Substacks out there keeping us up to date on today’s doomscroll. I’d rather avoid regurgitating the same 50 headlines I see in my inbox every day. It’s exhausting and fruitless.

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Footnotes

First Lady of Malignancy Melania Trump today announced that she would follow Spain's lead after it edited Trump out of World Cup celebration photos.

“Today I’m announcing that I will be editing my (gag! blargh!) husband out of all existing photographs on the internets. This will be my greatest contribution to society and you will all be happy!”

There was no comment from Trump’s propaganda network, True Sociopath.

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Buy it here!

Like most of you, I didn’t watch Thursday night’s train wreck where the Mad Clown drunkenly told us he was going to try to interfere with the Midterm Elections. I love my readers dearly, but you’ll probably never see a “I watched Trump’s speech so you didn’t have to” post. Like you, I value the remaining nuggets of my sanity.

However, unlike you, I have Dr. Harry Hemogoblin III on the Ruminato payroll. For every consultation, I send him a pile of Tide Pods, which he enjoys snacking on after a midnight stroll through one of the shadier parts of town.

Dr Hemogoblin is said to be a psychiatrist. Although this claim has undergone some dispute, I think he’s qualified enough to provide commentary, in the form of annotations, on the world’s first advertisement by a world leader for electoral interference.

So grab yourself a nice bottle of warm Malört (fellow Chicagoans know this fine beverage well), and let’s dig in!

The Transcript

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Prezident of the United States:

Musical intro for your enjoyment whilst reading the transcript and Dr. Hemogoblin’s annotations:

Good evening. Before we begin, I’m proud to report that our country is safer, stronger, and far wealthier than it has ever been before. We are doing great.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is an understandable opening coming from someone who has added about $2 billion to his personal bank account since the destruction of the East Wing. So far, no lies! Drink!

Less than two years ago, we inherited an economic and social disaster after the worst inflation in 48 years, the wide open borders with millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, including criminals of all types, and 11,888 murderers, many of whom killed more than one person.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

You’ll find that central to his many catalogued psychiatric disorders is a pattern of unprecedented lying. I once had a friend who hated his roommate’s dog so much that he peed all over the apartment and blamed the roommate’s dog. The prezident is a bit like that.

We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

First of all, I need to thank the amazing, incredible, testosterone-rich, and wonderful Charles Bastille for the Tide Pods. I may have eaten too many, however, because upon reading “We had transgender for everybody,” I rushed to the mirror on the doorway and dropped my pants for a looksee. Apparently, my naughty bits are placed exactly as originally intended. Not that there’s anything wrong with alterations, but “we had transgender for everybody” appears to be a bit of an exaggeration.

For a sanity check, I examined the rosters of every U.S. female professional sports team and found no men. However, I am willing to offer my services, pro bono, as a member of the Prezident’s Council on Genitalia Examiners.

Finally, as for the whole world laughing at us, they aren’t laughing now, are they?!!!! Drink!

Two years ago, our country was dead.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

One of many bizarre comments, even for this guy. I’ve identified this as a symptom of what some of us (me) in the pyschiatric field call, EverythingIsDeadolepsy, a rare disease thought to infect only one human at a time every thousand years.

Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This statement could be challenged by a review of world temperatures, but there’s no denying many of us have been under a very unpleasant heat dome of late. Drink!

America is respected like we have never been respected before.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I just got off a Zoom call with 8 billion citizens of the world who all said they’d like to see the United States sucked into a vortex and eaten by Canada, while a horde of zombies invades the place screaming, “Winter is coming!” In other words, the world not only does not respect us, they’re mad as hell for allowing all this to happen, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

We have more money being invested in the United States than at any time in the history of our country.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is a form of delusional projection. More money has been invested in him than in any president in the history of our country, so the patient here assumes that this means the entire country is receiving investments.

More Americans are working today than ever before. This week, it was announced that inflation saw the largest monthly decline in more than six years, just happened. It was just given out. The media reported it and we accept it, the best in six years.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

In the psychiatric world, this sentence is known as gobbledygook. The prezident appears to be surrounded by men with similar symptoms as he, because this was a vetted speech that passed the scrutiny of so-called speech writers whose command of the English language is, to put it charitably, questionable.

The tax cuts in our Great Big Beautiful Bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars, like with the provisions, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors, along with the interest deduction on a loan used to purchase a car, but only if that car is made in America.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I was just on a Zoom call with 200 million Americans. Here’s a screenshot of a reaction to the comment “The tax cuts in our Great Big Beautiful Bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars:”

And a 100 percent expensing for our job-creating businesses.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I just finished a Zoom call with 20 million business owners across America. Here’s their reaction to this comment:

Our stock markets are at their highest point in many years, but we can actually say of all time.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The unchecked urge to say something that we should never say, especially when untrue, is a form of Tourette Syndrome known as Orange Depravity Syndrome.

And your 401(k)s, pensions and retirement accounts are setting records every single day, the highest in history.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Personal note: My broker moved all of my stocks into an AI-based oil futures account that moves funds according to anticpated prezidential statements related to the Hormuz Insider Trading War. So far, so good. Drink!

For years we paid the highest price for prescription drugs anywhere in the world.

Now we pay the lowest price under my Most-Favored-Nations policy, because I was able to get the rest of the world and the pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly. Drug prices are coming down by 70, 80 and 90 percent. Trumprx.gov, this will ultimately reduce the cost of health care. You have to go to Trumprx.gov and take advantage of it.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Just finished a Zoom call with about 230 million Americans, and this was their reaction to “You have to go to Trumprx.gov and take advantage of it:”

But the cost of health care is coming way down because of what we’ve done with prescription drugs.

And with Trump accounts, every child in America now has access to a tax free investment account to save for their future. Billions and billions of dollars are being invested, put in by companies and individuals to take care of our children, so that at age 18, they will have potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in their account, and they’ll get off to a great start in life.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The failure to mention that they will all be dead and have no heirs is presumably a part of his unbridled narcissism.

So for that, go to Trumpaccounts.gov and sign up your child or any child you’d like to sign up.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I’m not a computer security expert, but I don’t recommend visiting any website with the word “Trump” in it, unless you have a strange urge to be stalked by a deranged Argentinian man:

Our previously wide open borders have been transformed into the most secure borders in the history of our country, with zero illegal aliens being admitted to the United States in the past 14 months. That is zero.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This seems like a moment to pause and count the dead.

Nobody thought it was possible. We had the worst border in the history of our country, and now we have the best.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I can confirm this. Some previous borders didn’t even include the Louisiana Purchase! And what the hell is this shiz????

Crime is plummeting nationwide…

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This brings us to one of the most fascinating aspects of the prezident’s personality disorder. He frequently calls others “losers,” and doesn’t like to be outdone by anyone. It is my theory, as the world’s greatest psychiatric mind, that the reason he has turned the White House into a global casino and crime syndicate is so that he can have the highest crime rate per capita in the history of these occasionally United States.

…with the murder rate at its lowest level since 1900 - or more than 125 years ago. We’re making a record investment in our armed forces, and we have the strongest and most powerful military by far anywhere in the world. I built it during my first term and, unfortunately, we’re forced to use it now. We won in Venezuela, which is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

There is a lot to unpack here. I’ll keep it short: “Hello, Cuba. Aren’t you glad you have no oil? Yes, the prezident has turned off all your lights through the embargo, but, and just trust me on this, things could be worse. Oh, and for those of you who can afford a boat, I don’t recommend boating in the Caribbean until Hurricane PedoPrezident has breathed its final breath.”

We are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

My son, Renauldo, has already cashed in on the fruits of that labor by hacking into my American Express account and ordering bizarre incarnations of Lego sets I never thought I’d see.

America is back and doing really well. But we still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed, because no country can be great without fair and honest elections. You have to trust your country because, if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Ruh-roh. Here we go.

And that’s very simple — no trust, no greatness. For many years I’ve called for bold, swift and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. Every American deserves to know that, when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure.

One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible. Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.

This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes, like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference. Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people — our beautiful, our great American people.

But that all changes right now. The documents we will release starting tonight have been gathered by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, a great group of people, along with the staff of the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, supported by our top intelligence agency chiefs who have all personally reviewed the findings we are presenting this evening and fully confirmed their authenticity.

You can see these documents for yourself at whitehouse.gov, that’s whitehouse.gov, go check it out. Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly, and that’s what we’re doing.

The documents cover five major areas of concern. First, they show that, over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The phrase we most often use in psychiatry for this is “willful stupidity.” This is complicated by the fact that the prezident most likely is aware that anyone can acquire U.S. voter files for a price, even me. In fact, I have done so. I then contacted all of them for a Zoom call. If you haven’t heard the sound of 220 million people laughing simultaneously, let me tell you, friends, it’s quite a treat.

That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening. This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence even shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.

Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the Deep State — a very, very famous group of people, in many cases — in our intelligence agency, worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible.

US spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020, when they discovered that tens of millions of voter data — think of that, tens of millions of voters’ data — in 18 states have been bought, stolen or hacked by China. Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The inability to let something go (aka, “obsess”) is part of a larger set of pyschological disorders that are well known within the prezident. These include:

Rumination: Repeatedly replaying past mistakes, conversations, or negative events without reaching a solution. It is very common in depression and generalized anxiety.

Obsessions: Intrusive, unwanted thoughts or urges that cause significant distress or anxiety. This is a hallmark of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), where the mind gets “stuck” on a fear.

Fixation: An intense, prolonged focus on a particular thought, person, or object (see Obama, Barack, Hussein).

Hyperfixation: A state of intense, all-consuming focus on a specific topic or task.

They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else. And to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress. In fact, all they kept saying is, this is the most secure election in the history of our country — a standard, very pat line that was divvied out to say.

The cover up of this colossal security breach is even more disturbing in light of the additional information showing that China engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The following paragraph is difficult to decipher, which is unusual for a scripted speech. It is possible that the AI Speechwriter software suffered a glitch:

They did not want — and they just didn’t want it. They fought like hell not to have it, Donald Trump to win, and for good reason. As the documents we are releasing show, CIA reporting explicitly stated, and I quote, in mid-2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president in an effort to reduce the US president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.

Isn’t that nice? Also, in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the US midterm elections and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself. Separately, in mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the US president.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I am working with collegues to define a new psychiatric disorder that officially names the disorder that would cause the prezident to release documents that demonstrate the exact opposite of what he says they do.

They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

A personal comment: Mr. Prezident, we do not need the Chinese to tell us you are the worst human to ever enter the Oval Office.

And they did everything possible to do exactly that. Going on this document says, and this is by the CIA, the strategy included efforts to use Chinese contacts with big US companies to influence US business leaders to turn against the president of the United States of America.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Let’s give the prezident a pass on his psychotic behavior here and just assume he has somehow missed the oligarchs lining up on their knees to… well, this is a PG-rated Substack, so I won’t continue.

The Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could and they didn’t care what they said. The Chinese government wanted US president to lose the next election.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Ummm, Bastille, you are getting all this money from China and all you pay me is a few Tide Pods? You’re a monster.

And the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them. Charged them billions and billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs and built the strongest military anywhere in the world. We have the strongest military anywhere in the world. These are exact quotes from the CIA reporting. The name of the person doing the quote is now under review, but it gets even worse.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I am confused by this statement, and am unable to provide analysis.

Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden. Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing.

These were briefings I would get almost every day; everything was kept out that was of importance. One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election. Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running, quote, a shadow government, unquote, to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press.

Other officials who witnessed such efforts perceived the motivations to be blatantly political. Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags information, and this is a group of bags that were used to destroy information, given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned, it was supposed to be burned.

These bags were supposed to be at a different level by different people, incinerated and checked, but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky. We believe this was not done on purpose, but rather through gross incompetence of the people that were supposed to burn the bags. But the findings are stunning.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is sort of amusing, but if you really enjoy fiction, I recommend you bookmark this Ruminato section:

https://www.ruminato.com/s/fiction?sort=top

The remainder of the speech is essentially a set of fictional scenarios disproven by years of court cases and investigations. There is no hope for the individual spelling out this stuff.

Today, I’m asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden. To fire those involved in the cover up and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people.

Yet concealing China’s meddling was only the beginning. The third set of documents we are releasing proves that for many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems, dishonest, almost all.

They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that. Tonight, we’re publishing a series of previously classified US intelligence community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack. As one assessment states, we judge that the United States’ adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure.

That’s unquote but that’s some statement, isn’t it, made by supposedly great patriots of our country? The document goes on to further state that, quote, we assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter registration databases, poll books, and other official election websites are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use this access to these systems to disrupt election processes within the United States of America.

Tonight, we’re releasing all of those findings and spanning from January 2020 to June 2026. This is a cyber threat aimed at the very heart of our democracy. Many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results on these terrible machines.

Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that’s exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. And that’s what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop, to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.

This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past. The fourth set of documents reveals that even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up. Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large scale voter registration operation in Michigan.

In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat Get Out the Vote Organization, corrupt group in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found. They were just so concerned, they couldn’t believe it, actually, that they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced.

Now this word from a Ruminato sponsor: Satisfy your craving for Tide Pods with our new flavors: gumball goobers, berry crunch, rainbow rinse, and for the adventurous among you, clove cannon! Available at a store near you.

In other words, it was pay, play and cheat. The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it. Tonight, I’m asking the FBI director to ensure that the matter is fully investigated and to work with the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible for any crimes.

Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.

Hundreds of millions of US voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.

And yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail. As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of LA and governor, was held on June 2nd, long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago, on July 10th. Think of that, much more than one month.

Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.

In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about, because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot.

They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country and that’s true; you can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multibillion dollar in value airways for absolutely no money.

They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multi-billion dollar assets. Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.

Every American, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, independent or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest, and fair election system anywhere in the world. Secure elections should be a partisan — really, should just, we should be together Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody, and it should not be a partisan issue.

It should cause to unite us, not to divide us. This should be a cause, we should be united, not divided. In light of the brand new and irrefutable information, I have revealed tonight my administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People’s Republic of China and many others.

We will be working closely to mitigate any harm and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.

Tomorrow, the Secretary of Homeland Security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems.

They are bad. We’re in the process of informing governors, Senators and members of Congress of potential issues in their states. If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states, and we are committing to fix it and we’re also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.

We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest. I’ve also ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately. But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act. How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat.

The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way. This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that? Could I have your photo, please? Photo voter ID. All voters must provide proof of citizenship.

Are you a citizen of our country, please? And hopefully there will be no corrupt mail-in ballots, which, if you watched California and so many other places, mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt. So, you would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel if you’re going away on business or vacation.

These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I’ve mentioned. To all Americans, I ask you to pick up your phone tomorrow, call your Representatives in the House and Senate and demand that they pass the SAVE America Act without delay. Together, we will restore faith and confidence in our country, and we will be bigger, better and stronger than ever before.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless our great military. And God bless America. Thank you very much.

R-rated final response from the Ruminato team: “Oh, fuck off, you nitwit.”

Notes

As a rule, I do not use AI for anything. I made an exception with the song because I was experimenting. Feel free to yell at me. I wrote the lyrics, but AI did the music. I am sorry. Also, I have posted it before. Sorry again.

Fun fact, though: After I created that little diddy, I saw that the Lego people who do Iran’s propaganda also produced a video with that same voice. Do they use Suno, too? The world wants answers.

Primary reference for some facts in this story: HCR:

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I’m only a partisan Democrat because I have to be. There is currently only one legitimate political party, and even that is largely beholden to corporate interests. Aside from a few token guardrails, almost everything you see coming out of the Democratic Party requires a group chat with its corporate sponsors.

The other national “political party” is a crime syndicate that consists exclusively of insurrectionists, murderers, child abusers, misfits, thieves, and other criminals who do the bidding of a sick wannabe king.

A big reason for this decapitation of democracy is that, as you know, elections are dominated by money more than ever.

The electoral capitalization frenzy became endemic when the Supreme Court declared in Citizens United that corporations are people, too.1 That ruling made it impossible to run for office without massive budgets resulting in headlines like “record spending” during every campaign cycle.

Elections became sponsorships. If politicians were honest, they’d wear sponsorship logos on the front of their suits and dresses. Preferably on the crotch.

I lead off with this to point out that the insurrectionists who control all three branches of government benefit from a compliant corporate media that covered the recent passage of a reasonably decent housing bill by describing it as a Republican effort that somehow miraculously became a bipartisan one, even though their Dear Leader refused to sign it.2

What has been left mostly unsaid is that one of the bill’s most important provisions comes through an amendment authored and sponsored by Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, one of the few politicians in our broken system that we can say appears to be one of the good guys.3

The only impact Republicans had on this part of the bill was that they looked the other way and pretended not to notice.

Called S.Amdt.4343 to H.R.6644, or, more appropriately, “F*ck institutional investors,” it bans the purchase of homes by entities that own more than 350 single-family homes.4

That seems like a lot of homes for one entity to own. And it is. But before the bill passed, there were no limits.

When Senator Warnock introduced the amendment, he stood with supporters in Paulding County, Georgia, a rural county in the Appalachian foothills near Atlanta where corporate investors own nearly 4,000 single-family rental homes.

Metro Atlanta is even worse. There, more than 70,000 single-family homes are owned by large corporations or institutional investors. According to Warnock’s office, this amounts to one quarter of all Atlanta single-family home rentals.

The homes get rented out, refurbished and flipped, or, more often than you’d like to think, remain vacant.

In January 2026, there were approximately 4600 homes for sale in Atlanta, according to MLS data. One institutional investor, American Homes 4 Rent, owned 6000 single family rental properties in Atlanta in 2025.

The company’s financial reports make it clear that they specialize in the kinds of homes that young people would like to own as their first real estate purchase. The typical American Homes 4 Rent house in Atlanta is a 2200 foot, $235,000 structure.5

This kind of activity snatches homes away from young buyers. You wouldn’t be hearing so many stories about starter home buyers plopping down cash and pushing those who rely on mortgage loans out of the market were it not for these big companies eating up local housing markets.

Warnock admits his amendment to the bill is just the first step. Nobody needs 350 single-family homes. Especially private equity firms that use them as investment vehicles designed to shut out people looking for starter homes.

But the problem when cleaving that number is that there are a lot of small operations consisting of people who invest in two, three, four, or maybe five properties. For legislators governing a late-stage capitalist system, the question becomes one of where to set the limit. Ten? Probably not. Not in America. Twenty?

Hey, how about 350? So that’s the number they came up with.

The 3% fallacy

Opponents of the amendment have tried to argue that the nationwide rate of corporate or private equity single-family home ownership is only about 3%.

Numbers are not easy to reconcile among multiple sources, but recent trends indicate that private equity and large investors have been scooping up single-family homes at unprecedented rates.

Some estimates claim that institutional investors have bought as much as 40% of homes during the last few years. BatchData’s Investor Pulse Report puts the 2025 number at 34%.6

Interestingly, that same report headlines that institutional investors sold 23% more homes than they purchased. But digging through the data in the report reveals that most of those sales are to other institutional investors.

Most single-family rental homes owned by corporate investors, like in Atlanta, are starter homes rented out to the same people who would, in better economic times, rather take the plunge into owning their own place.

Protections against shell companies

You might expect that the first reaction from private equity firms will be for each of them to call their corporate attorneys and try to spin off a few thousand shell companies to deal with Senator Warnock’s restrictions:

“Saul, we’ve got 3500 single family rental properties in Chicago. How soon can you spin off ten shell company LLCs? 24 hours? Great! Make it so!”

But not so fast. Warnock wasn’t born yesterday. He grew up in public housing in Savannah, Georgia.7 He thought this through. The law specifically addresses the inevitable shell game. So he added language specifying the following rules defining an owning entity:8

The term ‘‘large institutional investor’’—

1. means an investment fund, corporation, general or limited partnership, limited liability company, joint venture, association, or other for-profit entity that is a legal entity structured in a manner that is not afore-mentioned that—

   1. is engaged, in whole or in part, in the business of investing in, owning, renting, managing, or holding single-family homes; and

   2. alone or in concert with 1 or more other entities, beginning after the date of enactment of this Act, directly or indirectly has investment control of not less than 350 single-family homes in the aggregate, not including any single-family home purchased in an excepted purchase made after the date of enactment of this Act; and

(ii) does not include any local, State, Tribal, or Federal government entity or instrumentality thereof.

There’s more in the Footnotes regarding how ownership is defined, too. Just click or tap the cute raised number!9 Footnotes are fun for the whole family. Check ‘em out.

Let’s talk about this

This is where you come in.

The only way to fight mainstream media’s right-wing bias and servility to the Trump administration is to help bring awareness of stuff like this to low-information voters who will be swayed by headlines like “Republicans Pass Housing Bill.”

How you do that is up to you. It can be as simple as just calling it Raphael Warnock’s Housing Bill. Nope. He didn’t write it all. But this was his amendment. In an era of disinformation, this is more than close enough.

Notes

I was hoping to release Chapter Two of Vampire Elegy, the sequel to Psalm of Vampires, today, but the narrator, Jade, is in Romania hunting down Andrew Tate and chilling with other vampires. He tells me that there’s a particularly harrowing bit of information regarding Charly he wants me to include in Chapter Two, but I can’t provide any more teaser than that because that’s all he said about it.

But you haven’t read the prologue or Chapter One yet, anyway, have you? Well, now’s a good time:

(I think the name is changing to something cooler, but not yet!)

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Footnotes

Hello, fellow agents of political misfortune (it’s turning around for the better, though!).

I’ve been in the middle of a move (done!), and am trying to crank out Chapter Two of the Psalm of Vampires sequel (a day away?).

In the meantime, I leave you with this self-explanatory image. I made it all by myself and everything. No AI, because I’ve been using Photoshop since it was Barneyscan.

If you don’t get the joke, you deserve accolades for avoiding the doomscrolling this weekend.

I hope you have a blessed day.

Notes

No AI. No reservoirs were drained in the making of this image.

Joke hint: The image is based on an image of Mitch McConnell and his happy wife, Elaine Chao, that some people are saying is AI. Laura Loomer, she of the “more insane than even other MAGAts” faction of the insurrectionist band of murderers, racists, crime families, and haters, is especially worked up over the image released by McConnell to prove he’s not dead.

This updated image is proof that the image is real.

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I contacted the Museum of Aviation’s Aircraft Exhibit Gallery at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia to verify this frightening turn of events.

I’ll update this post when I hear back.

In the meantime, graphics mavens on Apartheid Twitter had a field day, nearly doubling local electricity prices with AI while creating a series of responses like this:

And this:

The New York Times continues, ten years into the insurrection known as Trumpism, to carefully massage its headlines and story priorities to avoid the most important news story of this century: The takeover of the United States by a Christo-nationalist insurrection led by a psychopath whose mind is dangerously eroded, and whose best friend for years was a convicted sex trafficker and child rapist.

Every day should be filled with articles about this crisis. Every other event that occurs on Planet Earth should be relegated to Page Two status. Related events that result from the madman’s actions, such as the attack on Iran, should be labeled as the insider trading war that they are part of. It’s all relentless grift, and nothing more, although it has cost the non-Trump world plenty.

Other stories, like the extrajudicial murders of boaters in the Caribbean or the re-ignition of ICE’s war on American citizens,2 should fall under a new section of the newspaper called “Fascism Today.”

This is true for every news media organization, but it’s especially true for the New York Times, which tries to lay claim to the left side of the political divide.

Let’s look at what happened in Europe while the New York Times was focusing on what would ordinarily be a quiet shakeup in a Maine Senate seat that is probably not going to go the Republicans’ way no matter how the Times tries to wash it:

• As I mentioned, he said that the “Islamic Republic of Japan” attacked (aircraft carriers?).

• Once again, the mad clown had to be led around the rooms by European leaders gently pushing around a doddering, senile old man. There are videos and everything! It is embarrassing for a nation that calls itself the world’s superpower to watch foreign leaders lead our head of state along a kindergarten trail.

• He attacked Spain as a “wasted cause” and threatened to “cut off all trade” from that nation for failing to meet his idea of NATO’s defense spending targets. You can be sure that when Spanish bonds and the pan-European Stoxx 600 tumbled as a result of his spluttering, the mad clown’s grifty minions started vacuuming money. The New York Times barely mentioned the event, and made no noise about the connection to markets.

• He declared the U.S. ceasefire with Iran “over,” which immediately rocked equity markets worldwide and spiked global oil prices. You can be sure that his circle of grift cashed in on that, too. The Times mentioned market reaction, but buried it so much that nobody saw it but me and a few others who read past the first few paragraphs.

• He fired up his “I want Greenland” obsession again. European leaders mostly ignored him this time when he called Denmark’s resistance “a big problem,” the same way we ignore old drunk guys digging through dumpsters and screaming about Armageddon.

• The Europeans are now managing Trump like you’d manage anything else that is broken. They are withdrawing from every dependency on America they can. The Wall Street Journal, owned by one of Trump’s most important early enablers, Rupert Murdoch, has laid out the details. See the footnotes for more on this.3

• When Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported to a roomful of NATO leaders that there were no refineries in Russia that hadn’t been damaged by Ukrainian drones, the grifter-in-chief, who never admits to backing the losing side, promised Zelenskyy they could clone American Patriot missile systems.

• I’m not sure if the business with Zelenskyy happened before or after the walking brain stem referred to the Ukrainian president as “President Putin,” an event which, sadly, might explain why he made the Patriot missile promise. It’s very possible he thought he was talking to Putin.

When these kinds of things are covered by mainstream media, including the New York Times, they’re treated as if they’re part of any normal diplomatic routine among nation-states instead of under the shadow of a gravely ill sociopath.

Their excuse is that they can’t demonstrate Trump’s mental illness conclusively. This is no longer merely a lame excuse. It’s a lie. The evidence appears before us every day, usually multiple times. There can’t possibly be a New York Times newsroom editor who can tell you with a straight face that Trump is sane or mentally fit.

The coverage of every Biden gaffe was wall-to-wall. The coverage of a dying, demented president’s mental and physical health is nil, even though newsrooms like the New York Times understand the gravity of the situation more than almost anyone.

There are a few journalists at the Times who manage to do good work anyway. One day, if we survive all this, we’ll hear their stories about how they managed to get their stories out of the sanewashed edifice that is the New York Times.

Until then, we continue to be no our own.

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Footnotes

The first movie made by Witkoff Kushner Productions explores the tender romance between a man suffering an unknown bout with death and his loving wife, who visits China when she learns that he’s been stricken.

Ruminato’s crack team of somewhat drunken journalists has obtained an exclusive look at the initial movie poster.

Notes

Image credits: Image of Elaine Chao by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image of Mitch public domain via Facebook; Image of coffin licensed from Adobe Stock; image smashup by author. No AI. No reservoirs were drained in the making of this goofy fake poster.

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There are still people defending Graham Platner, although not many. Most of them are named Graham Platner.

His former supporters have told him to please immediately leave Maine’s midterm U.S. Senate election. The world, after all, has had enough of 73-year old Susan Collins, and he has become a stain upon the effort to dethrone her as Maine’s forever Senator.

There are also a few voices (one is too many) claiming that Jenny Racicot’s rape accusations against Platner were politically motivated. That would be pretty weird for someone who agreed with his policy positions to do.

If a set of allegations were coming from the Republican operative, Lyndsey Fifield, who made some other accusations against him, I could see why people might hesitate, if only briefly, enough to dig a little deeper. But if Ms. Fifield’s story bore the characteristics of Ms. Racicot’s, that hesitation would die, too.

Buried in the news cycle is this key part of a story CNN released when it interviewed Ms. Racicot:

CNN spoke with two people close to Racicot who she previously told about the incident. One, a then-boyfriend who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said that Racicot opened up to him about the assault when she had trouble with intimacy after about ten months of dating in 2023. It was clear that something had happened to her, he explained, adding that she told him a previous partner “didn’t take no for an answer” and had sex with her non-consensually.

“She didn’t say the word rape,” the then-boyfriend explained, rather describing the encounter to him as a sexual assault. “I think the only reason she didn’t use the word rape is because I think she felt weird because she was kind of dating [him]. If all that went down on a first date, I bet she would have called it rape,” he told CNN.

CNN reviewed a text thread from 2023 between Racicot and her then-boyfriend where he wrote “I know you were assaulted” in a message.

CNN sort of buried the lede in their story. An ex-boyfriend came to her side. There is substantial evidence that she reported the rape long before Platner became a political trendline.

Ms. Racicot herself seemed hesitant to make the accusations. You’ll find out why she finally did later in this short post.

Anyone who has experienced sexual assault understands her hesitation.

For those of you not familiar with the allegations, the TL;DR version of Ms. Racicot’s description of the events is that Platner came to her house dead drunk, raped her, then fell asleep.

CNN had to press her on the “rape” word. Because that’s the word survivors have so much trouble saying out loud. If you haven’t been raped, you might question why that is, but nobody who has been raped questions it. The hesitation comes from deep in the soul. It comes from a wound that never heals, no matter how much therapy, anger management, or drugs and alcohol are applied. It is a gash that bleeds forever, even when time reduces it to a slow, festering sore that occasionally opens up by a trigger, one that can surprise and startle even the mostly healed.

Her interviewer, Jake Tapper, asked if she now considered the incident a rape. Ms. Racicot said, “By definition yes, absolutely yes.”

According to the same CNN article, Platner has stated that he doesn’t remember that night. Yet he still claimed that the allegations are false after the megastory hit everyone’s newsfeed.

“Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false,” he said in a video statement.

How can an event you participated in but don’t remember be categorically false? If you remember nothing of a night, then anything said about that night can be true.

Dismissing an accuser’s accusations by instinct is predatory behavior.

I suspect that by the time I hit the “publish” button for this Substack, he will have quit the Maine Senate race, an important race for Democrats to win if they’re to retake the Senate.

After he quits, though, there are still important lessons. The biggest one I can think of is that we (men, especially) hold those red flags up higher when we see them.

Not too long ago, I wrote a Substack post about Platner that defended him, especially his Totenkopf, which is a common tattoo within the U.S. military.

Platner himself said that he had a severe drinking problem. So, number one, perhaps that should be a disqualifier. We’ve seen what active, rampaging drunks like Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth are doing. I’m a strong believer in recovery of all kinds. That doesn’t mean we should accept a past like his from a sitting Senator. Especially when the drunkenness only abated a few years ago.

Here’s where my mea culpa really comes into play, though. It’s called ignoring obvious warning signs. In my first article about Platner, I wrote:

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

Instead of saying, “Whoa, stop right there, get me off this Platner train,” I did what too many of us do when we see questionable behavior from someone on our side of the political fence. I shrugged my shoulders and told myself that his alleged recovery from drinking had cured him.

Democrats are not like Republicans. Most modern Republicans would still be coming to Platner’s defense if he were on their side. His behavior towards women is a feature, not a bug. Democrats, however, are, rightly, throwing Platner to the curb.

I’m willing to admit to some desperation. The nightmare we are living under needs to end, but not at all costs. When I saw that the only report of any physical altercations involved a Republican operative, I suspected foul play by Republicans.

But Ms. Racicot's statement should have informed the survivor in me. Let’s again review what she said several months ago:

“When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

She was referring to numerous misogynistic quotes on his Reddit account. The red flags were there. I ignored them. Am I really that desperate to see MAGA defeated?

We all know how this stuff goes, too. The Republican operative, Ms. Fifield, said, “his offensive online posts reminded me of just how much he hated women.”

It won’t surprise anyone if she also has a more gruesome tale. Hopefully, she won’t need to tell it, since she clearly doesn’t want to. Hopefully, by the time you read this, Platner will have quit the race.

I’ll repeat my mea culpa: I dismissed a woman who said she was a Republican operative. Who also said he hated women. Why wasn’t my thinking aligned like this corrected line instead?

A Republican operative. Who also said he hated women

I take a tiny dash of comfort knowing that even Ms. Racicot hesitated at first. Per the CNN article:

“I really agree with his politics. I think we need someone with those political stances,” she said, adding that her shared political views were one reason she didn’t come forward sooner.

Then, she talked to Cheyenne Hunt, a Democratic-leaning social media maven who has helped expose sexual assault by other politicians, including former Democratic House Representative Eric Swalwell in a series of revelations that sent his political career into a permanent death spiral.

Ms. Racicot explained:

Racicot said Hunt provided a support network for sexual assault survivors that made her comfortable with publicly sharing her story.

“I’m getting the support now that I needed all along,” Racicot said.

This will sound familiar to anyone who has climbed the switchback known as sexual assault survival, where names and the word “rape” often become the last utterances from a survivor’s lips.

Now that the allegations have expanded and include support via statements made to Ms. Racicot’s friends before anyone knew who Graham Platner was, there can be no doubt about his future. He’ll return to oyster farming where he belongs. If we’re extra lucky, he’ll run into a hungry orca while pulling in a net.

Maine Democrats, who never seem to have a coherent strategy, will need to figure out a way to pick up the pieces and find another candidate. And do so in a hurry.

And, speaking merely for myself, I need to remember to hoist those red flags a little higher next time I see stories like Platner’s emerge from the cesspool of American politics.

Sources for this story

CNN report on Platner interview

Gordon, Allison, and Jake Tapper. “Woman Alleges Graham Platner Raped Her in 2021 While They Were Dating, Which He Denies.” CNN, July 6, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/us/graham-platner-racicot-allegation-maine-invs.

This outlines Platner’s specific positions (for reference):

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

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Footnotes

In the wake of a troubled nation’s 250th anniversary that highlighted its failures instead of its successes, it’s worth repeating.

Luckily, a photograph by Cheney Orr does it for me.

During the July 4 weekend, one lone woman rode a Washington, D.C., Metro train car. She had no reason to think it wasn’t just another day. She was heading to wherever she was heading. Nobody knows where. Nobody knows who she is.

Then, this happened.

Members of an insurrectionist group called Patriotic Front, too cowardly to show their faces, surrounded her. There were no known active threats of violence against her. There didn’t need to be. The hateful garb did that for them.

The look on her face became the iconic expression of a 2026 Independence Day holiday in the midst of insurrection. She became all of us, and we became her.

What’s beautiful about her expression is that it doesn’t display fear as much as it reflects our current battle. It reflects our war against the Christo-nationalist insurrectionists who have taken over the U.S. government.

It is a look of innocent defiance. For me, it has a look of “Sure, I’m scared, but don’t you even think of trying something.” It is a look that says, “Our whistles will defeat your guns.”

I suspect there are dozens of other ways we can interpret her expression. Only she knows what she felt in her heart.

Yes, we are all scared. But we are defiant. We are the rebellion against a king. We are July 4.

Sadly, because this is America, there will be a concerted effort, not just by doxxers, but by reporters from mainstream media, which regularly mainlines on America’s depraved celebrity culture, who will seek her out and try to identify her.

I hope they fail, unless she wants to be heard.

Meanwhile, we all gain from her experience. In one instant, she became an unwitting hero who probably just wants to be left alone. This makes her like all the rest of us, doesn’t it?

None of us wants what the diseased orange flesh in the Oval Office is offering. We want to finish our day in peace. We want to go to work, to school, to our dance and yoga classes, and talk about anything but him.

When you wake up in the morning, do you look forward to learning about the latest babbling from the lunatic in the Oval Office? Did any of us rush to YouTube or the news channels this weekend to hear the words of a toddler's mind speechifying at Mount Rushmore with stuff like this?

There is nothing like what we are doing. The birth and survival of the American nation under God is quite simply the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands ever. That is ever, ever, ever.

The only people interested in what he had to say were those eager to generate AI gifs of the toddler-in-chief in diapers. And a few desperate MAGA holdouts. And perhaps, if we’re feeling generous, a few psychiatrists and mental health professionals.

The Mount Rushmore speech was full of gems like this:1

Our rights here given to us by the God who made us and those rights shall not be infringed. Americans believe in self-reliance. We look at success with envy not, and I say that, some people are envious and some people are not. We are not, but with admiration and we earn it and we will always earn it and we will always respect it. We are an incredible, good, kind, and generous people, always ready to help a friend or a neighbor in need.

The First Amendment certainly protects the rights of an American President to babble incoherently.

But it doesn’t protect the rights of the Patriot Front to exist, much less speak its hatred.

A unanimous Supreme Court opinion in 1919, Schenck v. United States, made that clear. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the decision that freedom of speech and freedom of the press under the First Amendment did not exist in circumstances that present “a clear and present danger.”2

This is where I ask you to look at the image by Cheney Orr again.

It deserves this caption: “A Clear and Present Danger.”

Understand who Patriot Front is before you diss the “Clear and Present Danger” argument.

The lady in the photograph was surrounded by men covered in hateful imagery. The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s stalwarts against racism and now a target of the insurrectionist regime’s Department of Injustice,3 describes the hate group as follows:4

Patriot Front is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism. Patriot Front focuses on theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country.

Its imagery is an act of violence.

Vanguard America was a hate group that mostly broke apart shortly after the August 12, 2017, “Unite the Right” rally.

Insurrectionist literature is in boldface everywhere the Patriot Front is. Here’s a sampling:5

“The time of the Republic has passed in America as the system grows too weak to perform its duty. … The damage done to this nation and its people will not be fixed if every issue requires the approval and blessing from the dysfunctional American democratic system. Democracy has failed in this once great nation.”

“The American Identity was something uniquely forged in the struggle that our ancestors waged to survive in this new continent. … To be an American is to realize this identity and take up the national struggle upon one’s shoulders. Not simply by birth is one granted this title but by the degree to which he works and fulfills the potential of his birth.” — Patriot Front manifesto.

“An African, for example, may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American. He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people as well as to those who do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”

— Patriot Front manifesto.

Patriot Front’s founder is an insurrectionist named Thomas Rousseau.

Rousseau was a member of Vanguard America, the group that led the charge during the 2017 Charlottesville riot. He helped lead cowards in masks toward the death of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer.

Heather died when another insurrectionist, James Alex Fields, Jr., under the leadership of Rousseau, barrelled his car into a crowd of protesters.

Fields is now serving multiple life sentences for his participation in the insurrection. The Insurrectionist-in-Chief would surely pardon him if he could, but Fields was convicted by a state court in Virginia. He also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.6

If pardoning him from those federal hate crimes released him from prison, we can assume the hater-in-chief would do so, but why bother? Fields is in for life on the state charges. A federal pardon will have no practical effect.

Patriot Front founder Rousseau has been explicit in his call to violence and insurrection:7

“Americans are members of the European racial collective. America is a people and a nation as an organic entity and the United States has engaged in a practice of giving citizenship to all manners of other nationalities and all manners of alien races. So, it is very clear that the boundary that the government has of what is and what isn’t an American is very different from the true definition and the true realization that it is a, as it says in our manifesto, that membership in the nation is inherited through blood. It’s not given through ink.”

The Patriot Front manifesto, written by Rousseau, calls for the creation of a white ethnostate in the United States. In other words, the Patriot Front is another Confederacy wannabe. There’s a pretty long list of those.

The young lady in the Reuters image was experiencing a clear and present danger when her Metro car was taken over by Patriot Front riders.

It doesn’t matter how innocent their travel to Trump’s empty festival in D.C. appeared to be. The imagery is the violence.

The imagery is the clear and present danger.

We need to stop being afraid of challenging the First Amendment.

It is not sacrosanct.

Especially now that the government itself has been taken over by insurrectionists.

When Jack Smith testifies in his 2029 confirmation hearings for Attorney General, Senators need to ask him if he’s willing to take these hate groups on.

And Congress will need to expand the court so that the corrupt, racist Supreme Court doesn’t stop him if he says yes.

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Footnotes

Alex Pretti, 37 at the time of his murder, was an ICU nurse who “devoted his life to serving veterans,” in the words of the Immigration Law and Justice Network.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that Pretti was “someone who went to work to care for veterans, someone who was a valued co-worker, someone who relished and lived in this state in a big way, whether it was outdoor activities or being down there on the street as a First Amendment witness to what ICE is doing to this state.”

The insurrectionist government released videos at the time stating that Pretti was a domestic terrorist. He had no criminal record.

His family responded to the insurrectionist lies like you would have: “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.”

Renee Good was also 37 years old when she was shot in the head by insurrectionist stormtroopers.

According to CNN at the time:

A mother of three, Good had two children, ages 15 and 12, from her first marriage, The Associated Press reported.

Her 6-year-old child’s father died in 2023, according to the Star Tribune. “There’s nobody else in his life,” the child’s grandfather told the newspaper.

Never forget.

Insurrectionists murdered the mother of 6, 12, and 15-year-old children. They murdered a loving mother named Renee Good.

A former neighbor in Kansas City called Good and her family “lovely,” CNN affiliates KCTV and KMBC reported.

She is “a neighbor who, you know, is not a terrorist. Not an extremist,” Joan Rose told KMBC. “That was just a mom who loved her kids, loved her spouse.”

On her social media accounts, Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom,” according to the AP. She recently said she was “experiencing Minneapolis,” posting a pride flag emoji on her Instagram account.

Both were people I would have liked to have known.

Today, I also honor the immigrants who keep this country’s promise alive. We must do everything we can to reclaim the importance of immigration in the United States.

I honor the ancestors of the slaves who built the economic engine that we still benefit from. We must do everything we can to reclaim the importance of civil rights and end racism once and for all.

I honor the Native Americans who lost their homes, lives, and livelihoods during the growth of the American empire. We must do everything we can to honor their traditions and help them retain sovereignty over their lands.

And I spit at the January 6 insurrectionists

Now to the headline.

Just a few days prior to Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. hoisted an upside-down flag at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, in protest of Biden’s election and in honor of the January 6 insurrectionists.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s Home on January 17, 2021

The historic “Appeal to Heaven” flag, a historical pine tree flag, now linked to Christian nationalism and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, was also seen flying at Alito’s vacation home on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, in the summer of 2023.

Representative Jamie Raskin reminds us about the revolutionary nature of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has since been co-opted by Christo-nationalists:

The Appeal to Heaven flag is arguably the most radical democratic flag in American history. It was flown by “Washington’s Cruisers,” Yankee privateers who practiced hit-and-run raids on British shipping during the Revolution. They used fast, lightly armed sloops to disrupt General Howe’s supply lines when he was close to crushing the American revolt.

The people who flew this flag fought against everything MAGA stands for today — one-man rule and a mystical cult of personality, state-enforced religion, and the power of financial oligarchs over working people. These Revolutionaries fought for the ideas that Trump’s monarchists detest: liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy.

Although the first recorded evidence of the upside-down flag at Alito’s home was reported as January 17, 2021, there were rumors and circumstantial evidence that the flag was raised on January 6 in honor of the insurrectionists.

The Supreme Court was in the middle of an important election case, Republican Party v. DeGraffenreid, involving how elections in states are administered.

Alito and the insurrectionists lost that case, but he went on, along with a 6-3 majority, to rule that Trump had full immunity for his actions inciting the January 6 insurrection.

Trump, of course, later gave immunity to the insurrectionists themselves by pardoning or granting clemency to all 1,600 insurrectionists for their attack on the Capitol building.

Make no mistake about where we are at this moment of American history on this, a ruined 250th anniversary of the birth of a nation.

The insurrectionists are in power.

There is no sugar-coating it. Everything they do, from the implementation of Project 2025 on down, is a reflection of this.

Today, there is no Republican in Congress willing to denounce the January 6 insurrection. Most of them openly embrace it.

This is not, as the media likes to call it, “The Trump administration” or presidency.

We are living under an insurrectionist government.

We can take some comfort that nobody seems interested in celebrating at Trump’s empty festival in Washington, D.C., but the hardest part of the battle against the insurrectionists who are in power begins now.

We will need an army of volunteers to reach out to voters, even if it’s one at a time, to swarm the polls during the midterms. Failure to take both the House and Senate likely means that the government that follows Trump's impending death will change the Independence Day holiday to January 6, Insurrection Day. They might even call it Trump Day.

If that happens, if you think things are bad now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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Now that the Resistance has forced ICE and its companion stormtroopers from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into stealth mode such that they are no longer actively shooting protesters in the head, one would think, “Whew, glad that’s over.”

Right?

Nope.

The New York Times is telling us that more than 10,000 arrests have been made by regime stormtroopers in the last five days.1

Happy Fourth of July.

I’ll repeat that: 10,000 arrests. In five days.

Most of this has been through ICE.

The White House (Stephen Miller, probably) has issued another arrest quota: 2,000 per day. Miller had previously gunned for 3,000 per day, but despite the massive increase in resources, wasn’t able to hit that goal, in no small part because of Resistance forces in L.A., Chicago, Minneapolis, and Portland, Maine.

The regime also found that shooting white protesters while chasing brown people around town didn’t sit well with the general public.

So they changed tactics, first by dumping the easy target, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, who had become a dog-killing South Park meme, and replacing her with the equally unqualified, but quieter Markwayne Mullin.

Mullin announced that the regime would continue to send stormtroopers out into various cities, but this time they wouldn’t provoke local populations by giving the effort names like “Project Bust Chicago’s Balls” or “Midway Blitz.”

They snatched a nun

The result is a quieter form of domestic terrorism. Stuff like this (quoting the New York Times):

In South Texas, Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun, was arrested on her way to church on Sunday morning, according to Sister Norma Pimentel, her colleague. Ms. Ugboaja is a local nurse who also helps at a parish in the region. Ms. Pimentel called local leaders after learning of the arrest, and congressional officials soon got involved and pushed for her release.

On Sunday, she was let go from ICE custody, and Ms. Pimentel was there to greet her.

Ms. Pimentel said that Ms. Ugboaja was distraught upon her release.

“It took her awhile to be able to talk — she was crying,” she said.

In case you glossed over it because you read things the way I do, with one eye toward the next article in the queue, let me repeat this:

They arrested a nun.

On the way to church.

It turned out her paperwork was in order, but that’s how ICE stormtroopers operate. They arrest nuns, then ask questions later.

It was only a few weeks ago that the mainstream media was sanewashing stories about the latest Republican government shutdowns. After a few strongly worded memos from Democrats, the latest one resulted in Congress authorizing $38.5 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 2

This funding was cobbled together in June under the Orwellian Secure America Act, also referred to as the ICE First, Families Last Act, according to reliable observers3 who don’t sanewash everything this regime and its compliant Congress does.

It is part of a broader $70 billion spending package shared between ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Department of Homeland Security.

The size of the stormtrooper funding package is nearly impossible for those of us dealing with basic living costs to comprehend.

In the original funding bill that Republicans cynically called the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress authorized $170 billion for border and immigrant expulsions for the next four years4

This is more money than every law enforcement agency in the United States put together.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice:5

It is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.

It turns U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, which receives $49 billion, into the largest law enforcement agency in the nation, bigger than the FBI, which comes in at a comparatively meager $11.1 billion.6

The Brennan Center correctly calls the $170 billion in overall incarceration and deportation funding the beginning of a deportation industrial complex. I’ll call it the beginning of a prison industrial complex that the administration has already demonstrated a willingness to outsource overseas to countries like Libya and other dysfunctional, and often violent, foreign nations.

The never-ending case of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García is a highly publicized poster child for the regime’s behavior, but Stephen Miller and his fascist stormtroopers have been quietly sending Americans to concentration camps in other countries since Trump first showed up again at the Oval Office.7

The same tactics, but now with smaller, more tightly focused teams

Under new DHS chief Markwayne Mullin, stormtroopers have changed tactics. Instead of Operation Terrorize aimed at a city near you, the regime is spreading out its domestic terror across a wider net with smaller teams.

Nuns in South Texas. Fathers of terrified 13-year-old boys in Salt Lake City, where a 48-year-old Mexican man named Arturo was snatched from the streets while driving to a soccer game. Salt Lake City will lose his skills as a furniture maker, and mostly not notice, until it notices others missing, too.

While Atruro’s thirteen-year-old son anguishes about life without a father and his mother living in fear and misery, crops will rot in the fields, restaurant owners will jack up the prices of their food while looking for people willing to wash dishes for more than minimum wage, roofs will go unfixed, ever more construction sites will turn silent.

Eventually, the Resistance will figure out how to fight this. But for now, the losses are piling up again.

The good fortune of incompetence

The resistance does have one bit of luck on its side: The incompetence of the terrorists and insurrectionists we do battle with in the courts.

Others have documented the court record of the American Clown Show well enough that it’s sufficient to say here that they’re getting hammered on almost every front, aside, sadly, from the one at the highest level, the corrupt and complicit Supreme Court. I’ve talked about this institution before:

But lower courts have not been kind to the regime. Some of them have exposed the regime to such large degrees of malfeasance and corruption that the DOJ itself has had to issue the occasional mea culpa.

Consider the case of the Broadway Six in Chicago.

For years, the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office was one of the Department of Justice’s most successful and reputable prosecution units.

These days, it’s run by a Trump appointee named Andrew Boutros, who has, in the wake of a grand jury-rigging scandal, thrown 20-year veteran Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg (take note of the gender) under the bus by ordering an investigation of more than 100 cases she’s handled since 2007.

Technically, Boutros is the 42nd U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (often referred to as the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office by the media). He was chosen by the Grifter in Chief for the office in a bit of DOJ subterfuge involving an open-ended appointment that avoids that nasty business of Senate approval, although why the PedoFührer went that route is a curiosity, given that the Republican Senate would probably approve the clone of Al Capone if the Grifter nominated him.

Boutros oversees about 130 criminal and civil attorneys in the Chicago office. Most of these are career lawyers and prosecutors, including Sheri Mecklenburg. But it was Mecklenburg who was accused of grand jury tampering in the Broadview Six case.8

The Broadway Six were accused of blocking an ICE concentration camp transport vehicle, but the case was dismissed with prejudice (meaning it’s over) when Mecklenburg was allegedly discovered talking to grand jurors outside of grand jury proceedings involving the federal indictment. Federal prosecutors were also accused of additional grand jury tampering.

Now that Bouros has ordered a deep dive into Mecklenburg’s past cases, one of two things is probably true: Mecklenburg has a long history of jury tampering, and Bouros is a dedicated reformer, or Mecklenburg is a victim of a Trump appointee’s corruption and was acting on his orders, and he’s trying to bury her for it.

Bouros has the misfortune of being that Trump appointee and has, unlike previous U.S. Attorneys in the Chicago office, lost the benefit of the doubt by his association with the world’s most corrupt regime.

Joyce Vance repeatedly points out that judges and other participants in the U.S. justice system have long trusted the ethics of U.S. Attorneys and the DOJ, but that has changed under this regime.

We’ll find out how this plays out. Either way, the Northern District of Illinois is on its heels where it belongs as long as it keeps fighting against the people it’s supposed to protect.

The regime even tried to prevent a USMNT World Cup goal

I stole that line. I did. I’m not ashamed. I copped it from SF Gate, a San Francisco Bay Area digital news platform run by Hearst. Its headline:9

Donald Trump fought to prevent USMNT’s first Bay Area World Cup goal

How? Remember the Supreme Court decision this week that barely kept alive birthright citizenship, which is explicitly spelled out by the 14th Amendment, by a freaky 6-3 vote?

Well, that case was prompted by the Mad Clown’s attempt to issue an Executive Order squashing that amendment, which, if successful, would have presumably sent USMNT striker Folarin Balogun packing to Nigeria.

Balogun’s story is both interesting and fun. We should be embracing this kind of story with love and excitement during this 250th anniversary. Instead, we find ourselves doing everything we can to avoid TrumpleThinSkin’s various empty festivals.

Turns out Balogun’s parents were en route to England. Airline personnel, noticing that his mother’s tummy had the approximate shape and size of a dinosaur egg, prevented her from boarding a plane home from New York to the U.K., where she lived at the time.

So, luckily for some flight attendants, Balogun was born in Brooklyn instead of on a plane, and instantly became an American citizen courtesy of the same 14th Amendment TrumpleFilthSkin tried to destroy with his outlandish Executive Order.

Lucky for us, Trump’s effort failed as soon as it began, and Balogun is part of U.S. World Cup lore.

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Notes

For a truer picture of America, one Stephen Miller doesn’t want you to see, take the time this holiday weekend to read this review of immigration in America:

🎁 Ruminato Gift Link:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/us/america-identity-ancestry-census.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ulA.wyOc.SHwO8a_2IqDM&smid=url-share 🎁

Yes, I know. It’s the sanewash kings at the New York Times. But when they’re right, they’re right.

Footnotes

7

The regime at one time proposed sending Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, who has since been released, to Eswatini, a landlocked country within the borders of South Africa, a place where Ábrego García has no family or friends. The hard work of immigration lawyers saved him from that grim fate.

Kim, Minho. 2025. “Judge Signals She Is Likely to Order Ábrego Garcia’s Release Soon.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. October 11, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/politics/abrego-garcia-hearing.html.

On June 22, a federal judge (in Tennessee!) called Ábrego Garcia’s case “vindictive,” “selective” and “in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause” and ordered the DOJ to release him. The DOJ immediately appealed.

Staff, NBC Washington. “DOJ Appeals Dismissal of Human Trafficking Charges against Abrego.” NBC4 Washington, June 22, 2026.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/doj-appeal-dismissal-human-trafficking-charges-abrego/4120272/.

The Department of Homeland Security also continues to maintain propaganda against Abrego Garcia with the headline: THE REAL STORY: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 Gang member with a History of Violence

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Kilmar Abrego Garcia Is an MS-13 Gang Member with a History of Violence | Homeland Security,” 2026.

UNSAFE LINK (visit at your own risk)

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms-13-gang-member-history-violence.‌

Well, they done and did it.

They made a Hunger Games for Maga children.

The application process is now live:

https://freedom250.org/celebration/the-2026-patriot-games

Before I go any further, can I trouble you to spread the link around as much as possible so we can fill it with fake applicants? Let’s bomb the hell out of this place (no, Kash, not literally, dumbass). This is why God made BlueSky, after all.

Here’s the application portal link:

https://freedom250.org/patriot-games

I’ve included photos of the full form for your review before you risk losing everything you own by visiting the site. Aren’t I wonderful and amazing? Where else on Substack do you get this kind of assistance?

The Patriot Games Pitch

My annotations are in italics. The rest is all them:

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the 2026 Patriot Games will bring together the nation’s most exceptional young athletes and leaders for an unforgettable competition honoring excellence and the American spirit.

And who among us doesn’t look forward to the idea of exposing our vulnerable youth to even more toxic mayhem, this time up close and personal!

The 2026 Patriot Games is a premier national competition featuring outstanding high school students from across the nation MAGA.

Male and female athletes will be selected to represent their home state or territory on a national stage as they compete in a series of high-intensity challenges designed to test strength, speed, agility, teamwork, resilience, and leadership.

Breaking news: I’ve received word that the agility test will involve a team of Trump regime personnel chosen by Susie Wiles to chase the kids around for a genital check to be sure they are what they say they are.

Over the course of the competition, athletes will face a series of demanding physical and mental challenges, culminating in the crowning of one male and one female Patriot Games champion.

Just being within 10,000 feet of the toxic orange sludge that remains of Donald Trump is enough of a mental challenge to last a lifetime.

Each champion will receive $125,000 in scholarship funding.

Breaking News: Ruminato has learned that the money will be donated to a trust fund in Donald Trump’s name and released if, after examining voter rolls, the winner passes further qualification requirements.

The 2026 Patriot Games will be featured as a nationally televised primetime event in August 2026, showcasing America’s next generation of leaders and athletes to audiences across the country.

The regime has blackmailed ABC, threatening to take away its broadcasting license if it doesn’t cover the games on ESPN and ABC.

Participation includes an all-expense-paid trip for each athlete and one chaperone.

The chaperone will be chosen personally by Donald Trump, and will be him.

Eligibility

• Must be between 14 (Dear Leader’s preferred age) and 17 years old. Eligible contestants must be 14 by June 1, 2026, and 17 or younger on December 31, 2026.
  Exceptions will be made for exceptional 13-year-old beauties, at the Dear Leader’s discretion.

• Legal U.S. citizen (we’ll check!)

• Resident of a U.S. state, territory, or tribal nation

• Student in good academic standing

• Additional eligibility details will follow

The additional eligibility details cannot be provided on a public-facing website without violating various federal statutes.

Wait. They’re gonna pick the contestants and expect them to be ready by August 9? They know it’s now July, right? No wonder Barron is already being declared one of the winners.

The application form

And there you have it, folks.

The Patriot Games, which will somehow be put together with fully vetted candidates by early August.

This means that the regime will choose candidates and make sure they aren’t loony toons armed with long guns and other weaponry in just over a month.

Something tells me that there will soon be Secret Service openings if that’s your jam, cuz they gotta be going crazy right about now.

Honestly, it’s almost enough to make me watch the damn thing. What a circus.

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When I tell folks that I’m left of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie, and AOC, they audibly gasp, even if it’s in a chat. I can almost hear them roar, “You’re a communist?”

No. I’m more of a 1970s moderate Republican.

You’ve probably read this next paragraph before. It’s not a new idea.

Donald Trump and the far right that he has empowered are the symptoms, not the disease, of what ails us. He is what happens when a nation becomes apathetic to the steady claw of an insatiable right-wing party that is never satisfied with its latest cruelties. The more the right-wing takes, the more they want, and as its propaganda network grows,1 the more to the right the country lurches.

What began, for example, as the stripping of abortion rights has morphed into a 24/7 assault on contraceptives and women’s bodily autonomy. The Equal Rights Amendment from 1972 has reversed into something not far removed from the Salem witch hunts, except that now women are hunted down for the “improper” disposal of their miscarriages instead of their praise for all things fae.

What began as a demand for lower tax rates became a call to end government as we know it and a dismantling of foreign aid that kept millions of people alive.

What began as a raised fist against what some call excessive immigration (there really is no such thing2) has become a war against anyone with skin darker than a Pantone antique white.

Worse, the majority of Americans originally approved of the Trump regime’s efforts to stifle immigration, according to polls like this one from Semafor:3

We can take some comfort that these poll numbers changed shortly after Stephen Miller became a household name and symbol of Nazi Germany, but many more Americans still resist the blessings of immigration than should be the case.

I’ll add the obvious disclaimer that polls taken by CNBC are most likely not the best gauge of current attitudes, but it’s only been the regime’s vicious approach toward immigrants that has begun to finally eat into consistent polling that has consistently shown that most Americans favor deportations.

Meanwhile, in Texas, they’ve gone full Handmaid and are mandating the teaching of Bible passages in public schools.

Allow me to repeat this for clarity:

There is no such thing as a left wing in America. There are leftists, for sure (see BlueSky if you wish to seek a few out), but there has been no significant leftist movement in the United States for several decades. The rare true lefty has long been considered a gadfly. A curiosity.

Gaza protesters don’t count as left-wingers. Before this era of far-right politics, protesting genocide had never been considered the exclusive domain of the left wing. The nation of Israel was conceived as a worldwide bipartisan reaction against genocide. Everyone in the world agreed that the brutality of killing six million Jewish people required an extraordinary solution. History shows that the solution was flawed and driven by colonialism, but that fact doesn’t erase the awful truth behind the motivations.

Today’s United States consists of two conservative parties. One of them warmly embraces the corporate elite but adds a few weak guardrails, and the other is trying to impose fascism.

The likes of Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Bernie, and a new but still small cast of rising stars exist just barely to the left of what was once the political center in the 1970s. The mainstream media’s coverage of New York City’s Democratic candidate for Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was a reflection of the fear that we might return to the 1970s, not that the nation is imperiled by his so-called socialism, which is not a thing in America any more than communism is.

Fund Me One Time

Let’s unpack what I mean by looking at the policy proposals of those who are now considered to be leftists in the United States.

Education

So-called leftists have long pushed for a variety of publicly funded educational programs.4

But there’s nothing new here. Inexpensive and accessible higher education was a matter of accepted public policy in the 1960s and into the 70s.

Keep in mind that the steady dismantling of our educational system led us directly to Trump. There’s a big difference between poorly educated people and stupid people. The number of stupid people isn’t high enough to result in a Trump.

Most people, in general, aren’t stupid.

So let’s agree to stop calling Trump voters stupid. The ability to reason within the framework of historical context is developed through education. It’s not a brain thing.

Poorly funded public K-12 schools have been a bipartisan problem for a long time, but they’re getting even worse. Democrats, especially centrists like Tom Suozzi (the author of the centrist freak-out), have largely been silent on this, despite outcries from some of their allies in the education field.

The result is that most jurisdictions rely on things like property taxes to fund schools. And who likes those?

So, naturally, K-12 funding is hard to come by.

As Democrats remain silent, many rural counties, because bake sales only bring in so much cash, are moving to four-day school weeks.

When it comes to K-12, this is nothing new.5 Getting the American public to swallow the expense of public education is too challenging for most politicians to consider.

The proposals in Joe Biden’s social spending bill would have released funds for enhanced preschool and free child care options, but West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin killed it.

Democrats being Democrats, the bill died as soon as so-called centrists began to stress over supposed high costs. Manchin’s rural constituents, drunk on Trump juice, will pay the highest price.

The passage of such a bill shouldn't have mattered to red states, because they would have been able to opt out if they didn’t like the bill, but they fought it anyway, because that’s what they do.

If the bill had passed, the economic balkanization of the United States into have vs have-nots states would have continued, since you can be sure that Republican states would not have opted in, for the most part, because most modern-day Republicans are more like miniature death stars than real people.

Many public universities were once free or nearly free.

Public universities were often free or close to it during the 1960s.

I paid just a little more than $300 per semester at the state university I attended in Illinois in 1976. I was able to pay for college by working at the local supermarket.

Today’s kids have to mortgage their futures with burdensome student loans that haunt them the rest of their lives so that they can graduate into the world of Amazon warehouse work.

The University of California was free to Californians until 19756 because the state of California funded 32 percent of the University of California’s budget.

Then, under Ronald Reagan (who else?), in-state tuition fees beginning at $630 were imposed in 1975.

Technically, this was a Board of Regents decision, so we can’t pin this directly on Reagan, but it is noteworthy that the next biggest hikes came under Republican George Deukmejian (1983–19917) when the fees jumped first to $1,296 in 1985, then to $4,354 under Republican Governor Pete Wilson.

Not to be outdone, in 2004, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger lined up a deal with UC administrators to drop public funding to 16 percent.8

In-state tuition under Schwarzenegger ultimately shot up to $14,460. For something called “public” universities.

The trend caught on with the rest of the country in no time because Reagan convinced the entire nation that government spending is bad for you.

The tuition at the school I attended is now $16,000 per semester. I can’t think of any supermarkets that pay that kind of money for a summer job.

The decimation of publicly funded higher education is illustrative of the collapse of the left.

Climate Change

The Environmental Protection Agency was started by Richard Nixon.9

Everyone was on board with climate change back then, although it was mostly called pollution. Same thing, different name.

The world is on fire every summer (see your news feed for more info about heat waves hammering Europe and, for this 250th independence celebration, the United States). High-intensity December tornadoes are wrecking lives in libertarian Kentucky. But somehow climate change is suddenly a question?

That’s almost too weird for words.

The point is, climate change is not a new thing. Everyone pretty much conceded that pollution was a problem at one time. Remember acid rain? If you don’t, it’s because a bipartisan effort ended it.

But Democrats have allowed Republicans to change the messaging. Now, instead of freaking out about Greenland’s melting ice cap, everyone is talking about how we can mine its rare earths while an insane American president babbles about taking it over.

The Antarctic glaciers are disappearing so quickly that some scientists fret that catastrophic flooding could begin hammering world coastlines within a few years.10 But most Americans mostly care more about how tariffs will affect their Temu orders.

Health Care and Vaccinations

Every Republican in the United States over the age of 50 is vaccinated against smallpox, rubella, polio, and others because every Republican in the U.S. was at one time in favor of mandated school vaccination mandates.

It’s not leftist or socialist to be in support of vaccinations or even mandates.

Full stop. Case closed.

Democrats have allowed Republicans to control the messaging on this, too. Science is ignored or cursed, replaced by YouTube videos created by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Would it surprise you that the catalyst for Obamacare was developed by Republicans? Even more shocking is that the basic concept was conceived by what is now the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation.11

The document that spelled out its proposals eventually became the template for RomneyCare in Massachusetts. It was only when a brownish colored man began to sing its praises that the right wing discovered they don’t like a government-mandated commercial marketplace for huge insurance companies to sell their wares.

Before that, of course, Nixon proposed a full-throttled national healthcare system. Because he was a commie at heart, I suppose.

Civil Rights

Remember bipartisan votes? No. Of course you don’t.

But they were a key reason the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed.12 The same one that the Roberts Court has reduced to a single fragment of its former self.

Senate Democrats split their vote 46 (69%) for and 21 (31%) against the Civil Rights Act. Republicans split their vote 27 for (82%) and 6 against (18%).

Believe it or not, the “no” vote consisted of 78% Democrats.

You think Joe Manchin was bad? Well, he was. But…

…Southern Democrats in 1964 led a 74-day filibuster against the civil rights bill, then overwhelmingly voted against it, while moderate Republicans like Everett Dirksen were stalwarts in the fight to get the once iconic and now mostly dead bill passed.

Similarly, the House of Representatives voted 290 to 130 in favor. Democrats split their vote 152 (61%) to 96 (39%) while Republicans split theirs 138 (80%) to 34 (20%). The no vote consisted of 74% Democrats. I’ll let you guess which region of the country they represented.13

There was a time when a clear majority of American politicians agreed that the oppression of Black people was a really bad thing.

Now, you’re a socialist if you think that.

Again, Democrats have allowed Republicans to control the messaging.

Centrist Democrats are even squeamish about pushing back on the disparagement of “Antifa,” a non-entity the current regime has deemed a domestic terrorist network. My dad was Antifa. He plowed into Pacific island shores in tiny troop carrier boats under heavy fire to fight fascism in World War Two.

Antifa is not an organization, but a concept. Centrist Democrats who don’t push back on the far right’s attempt to discredit Antifa are simply enabling the far right, who fear the Antifa concept because they themselves are fascists.

It’s true that the concept of Antifa is their enemy. That is by design. Every time a modern Republican opens his mouth, a new Antifa angel grows their wings. So the growth of Antifa is purely organic and unavoidable. It can’t be halted by intimidation.

Taxes

Hey, not even an old frustrated “lefty” like me wants a 70% tax rate on high incomes. But although there were loopholes and other processes for wealthy folks to avoid taxes, the highest marginal rates were once much higher than today.

One look at the chart below shows the difference and the precipitous drop since the 1980s.

Wow, look at 1945. No wonder Ike (a Republican army general) warned us about the military-industrial complex.14 An awful lot of that money went to the military.

Today, we are at 37% for single-filers making above $647,850. It’s very difficult to push that up even a couple of percentage points in today’s political climate.

Needless to say, no Democrats are suggesting we push the top marginal rates up more than a percentage point or two.

Elizabeth Warren and a few others are seeking a wealth tax. That’s not radical stuff, especially compared to the tax tables of the 1950s, which were considered by some to be part of America’s most prosperous era (it was for some people, but not minorities).

You’d think everyone would be on board with it, but the truth is, if you are in support of a wealth tax, you’re labeled a socialist.

You’re not even a 1970s moderate Republican if you support a wealth tax.

The pendulum has swung so far to the right on every political topic that you’re a socialist if you want to pay for things like we did in the 1950s and 1960s.

And God help you if you protest a war or forget (or refuse) to take your hat off during the national anthem at a baseball game. If you’re a professional football player taking a knee, kiss your career goodbye.

There are no leftist policies in play right now

None of the policies “leftists” have proposed are any more extreme than what moderate Republicans in the 1970s either supported or proposed.

Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and proposed a nationalized European-style healthcare system.

Republicans across the board supported, albeit sometimes reluctantly, tax tables that could never get passed today. At a minimum, they knew you had to pay for stuff. Republicans in those days would never have signed off on a budget bill passed by this latest session of Congress that increases the deficit to almost incoherent numbers.15

Republicans were even, during the Civil War days, back before the script flipped, the main supporters of civil rights. As recently as 1964, they were still on the civil rights train, as proven by their votes at the time.

Most modern Republican politicians love to claim their lineage to Abraham Lincoln when it suits them, even though most of them have nothing but disdain for people of color unless those people of color actively toe the line. But that wasn’t always the case.

This means that in their hearts, many of them know civil rights matter, maybe even Black Lives Matter, even though they can’t come out and say it because of the barbaric cult that Donald Trump has spawned.

But here’s the thing.

It didn’t all start with Trump.

Trump was the slimy climax of ideas pushed by extremists like Newt Gingrich and Phyllis Schlafly that have gradually taken hold of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.

In conclusion…

As the midterms approach, you’ll hear a lot about how the “left” is going to ruin the midterms for Democrats.

If the midterms are disastrous for Democrats, it will be because they parrot the policy points coming from what used to be called moderate Republicans and are always on the defensive when it comes to what used to be accepted policy.

It will be because Democrats continue to hew to the needs of corporate America instead of the person in the street trying to make ends meet, including small business owners who should also be able to rely on Democrats for solutions that worked once and can work again through simple adjustments to the tax tables.

As the November election showed us, the Democratic Party is in a self-sustaining stranglehold of ineptness and mediocrity driven by the desire to cling to a center that no longer exists.

That true center, the one that formed in the 1960s, got blown away during the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.

The Midterms will tell us if it is ever coming back, as we all stand on the back of our heels and wonder why we are living under a right-wing autocracy led by a madman whose best friend was Jeffrey Epstein.

Notes

What follows is the centrists’ letter in full, with my annotations (responses) in

format.

The instigator of this mess is Tom Suozzi, a congressional representative of Long Island who thinks the only way to counter MAGA is to hew as closely to them as possible without fully caving.

Here’s the letter, which can also be found here:

THE PROMISE TO AMERICA

America is stronger than our politics. Politics forces false choices between extremes on right and left. We reject them. Too many Americans have not benefited from the last half-century of economic growth. Americans want an economy that lowers costs, expands opportunity, and rewards the people who work hard every day. Americans want safe communities and institutions that solve problems. We believe in building more to lower costs and expand opportunity. We believe Democrats succeed when we speak to the whole country and value persuasion over purity.

We, the undersigned, make this Promise To America.

Growth, Competition, and Broad Prosperity

We are capitalist, not socialist.

We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy that rewards hard work, innovation, entrepreneurship, and ownership. Full-time work should make it possible to own a home, raise a family, afford healthcare, and retire with dignity. Economic, permitting, and tax policy should expand opportunity and lower costs for workers, families, entrepreneurs, and those striving to join the middle class, not disproportionately favor those already at the top.

Safety, Security, and Human Dignity

We want safety, not lawlessness.

We believe Americans deserve secure borders, safe communities, honest government, and an orderly immigration system that protects the country, strengthens the economy, and treats people with dignity. We believe America remains indispensable to global stability, democratic values, international security, and strong alliances. In a dangerous and uncertain world, America must lead with strength, purpose, and partnership.

Fiscal Discipline

We are responsible, not reckless.

A generation has passed since our party balanced the budget. We will prioritize tackling the national debt honestly. We must pay our bills, and not leave our children in debt.

Government That Works

We believe government should solve problems, not create them.

Government matters, but it must work. Public institutions should be competent, accountable, easier to navigate, and capable of building, innovating, and delivering results people experience in everyday life. Government should make life easier.

Free Speech, Respect, AND Common Purpose

We are mainstream, not extreme.

We believe Americans can disagree without division. We stand for moderation, acceptance, respect, free expression, and democratic pluralism. We embrace a politics of persuasion over purity, contempt, and cultural division.

Confident Patriotism and National Renewal

We are proud, not ashamed of America.

We believe America’s story is one of extraordinary achievement and unfinished work. We honor America’s strengths and exceptional character while striving to build a freer, stronger, more prosperous, and more perfect union.

The excellent editor of Politically Speaking on the Medium platform, Scott Tarlo, once asked me: “Could the definition of leftism be changed as it relates to how it historically was? Just like the Republicans changed over time from the 60s, could what it means to be on the left just mean something…different?”

My answer was that I didn’t even know how to define leftism these days. Back in the 1970s, it meant true socialism — the workers owning the means of production, or, at a minimum, the state controlling many of the levers of industry.

Today? I think it just means anybody who isn’t happy with the status quo. The baseline for defining leftism should be the centrism of what I’ll call Roosevelt Democrats: those who both helped the poor and built a war machine to defeat fascism. Anything left of that would be part of the leftist agenda.

Maybe you good folks have your own ideas on how to redefine centrism and leftism. I’d be interested in your reaction in the comments.

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Footnotes

15

“What Does the One Big Beautiful Bill Cost? | Bipartisan Policy Center.” 2025. Bipartisanpolicy.org. 2025. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/what-does-the-one-big-beautiful-bill-cost/.

‌Check out the prologue to my sequel to Psalm of Vampires:

Chapter One will be here soon. Free for everyone, as usual.

I follow the NPR model. Support me if you can by becoming a paid subscriber:

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No matter what, free or paid, I love my subscribers. Mostly! :-)

There is a violence to the light, the kind that makes you shield your eyes – even at 7am. With farmers unable to work outside, livestock under heat stress and crops failing, the United Nations is concerned that the heatwaves are pushing food supply “to the brink”. Even more alarming is that the extreme heat is causing not just heart attacks, but also kidney injury, affecting sleep quality and exacerbating numerous chronic conditions, including diabetes, respiratory illnesses and mental health conditions…

…The impacts of this year’s heatwave are still being analysed. But for everyone who lived through it, this was a relentless two-month emergency, with no respite. Well into the heatwave – after temperatures remained above 104°F for 40 consecutive days – the Modi government implemented its much-awaited Heat Wave Action Plan.

As with every crisis, Modi had turned this deadly heatwave into a branding opportunity. With cameras rolling and citizens queueing up, government officials were seen forcefully wiping faces with towels whose origins were unknown.

Much like COVID certificates that carried his photo, India’s newly rolled-out “cooling points” – unveiled across the national capital – were plastered with the prime minister’s face, and the taxpayer-funded heatwave action plan is the latest in a series of loyalty programmes that expect the public to remain indebted to the ruling party.

The author, Indian investigative journalist Vidya Krishnan, is describing a national leader who surely sounds familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to Trump over the years. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to insert Trump’s name for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, temperatures reached 116.42 °F. On April 26.

Krishnan writes:

Census workers have died, as have voters who stepped out in the recently concluded West Bengal election. A man who boarded a bus to attend a wedding died before he reached his destination.

Modi, like Trump, is essentially a climate denialist. He’s letting his country burn, and people die, with policies that encourage climate change rather than thwart it.

Krishnan tells us how:

There is an orgy of tree-felling across the worst-affected cities. In Nashik, despite protests, heritage banyan trees that have stood for decades, if not centuries, are being cut down. In Pune, too, old trees are making way for a four-lane highway. In Bengaluru, trees are making way for a metro train and in Kashmir, which has never experienced such heat, mulberry, walnut and chinar trees have to go for wider roads and “smarter” cities.

The Trump regime, as I’ll document later in this report, is also promoting climate change. The methodologies the two regimes use are different. The effects are the same.

In India, summers start early. April and May are the hottest months. After that comes the monsoon season to offer a respite, if devastating floods from torrential rains that often accompany the monsoon season are your idea of a respite.

Monsoon season is highly anticipated in India for its vital rains, which water and enrich the soil for agriculture.

But monsoons also cause a lot of trouble, especially in the lowlands of India’s neighbor, Bangladesh, where coastal areas disappear inch by inch every year from massive flooding.

Krishnan’s article points out that 380 million Indians “are living in conditions that exceed the capabilities of human physiology” as a result of unrelenting high temperatures.

Temperatures similar to those in India are beginning to show up in the United States.

Phoenix hit 118°F on two days in July and August 2025.3 These temperatures are not possible, from a biological standpoint, for humans to endure.

The body reaches a stage where it can no longer cool itself when the temperature reaches 95°F, according to Harvard University’s South Asia Institute.

There were 122 days when the temperature in Phoenix rose to 100°F or more.4

A heat wave hits Europe

As I write this, Paris is reaching temperatures of 105.6°F in a heat wave that has already killed dozens.5

Air conditioning isn’t plentiful in Paris, where most residential rooftops are covered in zinc, a weather-resistant and highly recyclable metal that, unfortunately, absorbs heat.

Paris’ 105.6°F day was the hottest in recorded history, according to France’s national weather service, Météo-France.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu declared a national health emergency as the nation closed the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre museum, and other tourist sites.

In the UK, temperatures hit 97°F and 97.5°F on Wednesday and Thursday. Officials were warning that Friday (June 26, 2026) would see higher temperatures, possibly reaching 111.7°F. London has even less air conditioning than Paris. 1,200 U.K. schools have already been closed during the heat wave. Train passengers are being told to only travel on Britain’s beloved train tracks when necessary.

Spain is recording the hottest June in recorded history, too, and Germany is bracing for the same heat dome to arrive on Friday (June 26).

Overall, the heat wave was expected to impact 94 million people in Europe, according to reports by Agence France-Presse, a French news agency not owned by Rupert Murdoch.6

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The European heat wave isn’t a unicorn event

The World Health Organization, from which the Trump regime withdrew the United States,7 has estimated that more than 200,000 people have perished during the last four years from various maladies caused by excessive heat.8 The headline for the WHO’s statement was: “Nearly all of those deaths were preventable.”

Regarding the current wave:9

“The weather pattern itself is not particularly unusual, but the temperatures are,” said Friederike Otto, the climate scientist who leads World Weather Attribution. “Or at least they used to be, without human-induced climate change.”

In their analysis, the researchers used temperature records to estimate how the odds of heat waves of different intensities had changed over the decades because of global warming. Their results indicate that a European heat wave comparable in likelihood to this week’s would have produced average daytime temperatures that were about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in the 2000s and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in 1976.

The heat dome is being pushed up from North Africa, where it’s also brutally hot. Much of Morocco hit 111.2°F. Egypt has regularly seen 104°F temperatures throughout much of the nation. This same African heat dome is pushing Saharan dust plumes deep into Europe.10

According to Nature Magazine:11

Scientists say the danger lies not only in how hot individual days become, but in the wider climate conditions surrounding them. Drought is amplifying extreme heat, while dry soils are feeding heat back into the atmosphere. Expanding cities trap warmth in concrete and asphalt, increasing exposure at work, at home and in the fields.

A recent study tracking heatwaves in Algeria from 1979 to 2023 found that their number has doubled since the early 1980s, with a marked acceleration since 2017. Average maximum temperatures during heatwaves rose from about 44.9°C in 1979 to nearly 46.8°C in 2023, while the longest recorded heatwave lasted 51 consecutive days in 2023.

“The duration of exposure to heat may be more dangerous than reaching a maximum temperature for one day,” [Geologist Nouh] Rabouh says.

Global warming is spreading disease

Studies show that new pathogens creating new epidemics have been spawned by climate change.12

According to a study led by The Global Health Network at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine involving 3,752 health professionals and researchers across 151 countries, malaria, dengue, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS are increasing across the globe. The report says that climate change, along with socioeconomic disparity and inequality, are the key drivers.

It doesn’t help, of course, that the Trump regime and its cult denigrate vaccines on the regular.

Scientists are also alarmed at the potential of zombie viruses. No, not viruses that can turn you into a zombie, but viruses that have been hibernating in the permafrost for centuries.13

Virologist Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam says:

“We don’t know what viruses are lying out there in the permafrost but I think there is a real risk that there might be one capable of triggering a disease outbreak – say of an ancient form of polio. We have to assume that something like this could happen.”

Scientists are trying to lay down a network of monitoring stations in areas where permafrost is disappearing, but, of course, are getting no cooperation from the Trump regime, which is laser focused on death and mayhem.

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El Niño is coming

An El Niño event occurs when the Central and Eastern Pacific Ocean heats up to higher than normal temperatures. Temperatures there have already been higher than ever in recorded history for 20 days in June.

El Niño is a normal climate event, but climate scientists are worried that climate change is likely to make this one worse, and they’ve already got the goods, via these higher temperatures, to back up their theories.

Climate models can’t accurately predict what kind of climate events El Niño might trigger, but scientists are bracing for massive flooding along the U.S. Western coast.14

Another concern is that El Niño will accelerate the roasting of large chunks of the earth this year.

Climate change has already added 6 to 12 inches of water to coastlines in some locations along the California coast over the last few decades. This year’s El Niño could add another six inches.

You may not have a lot of sympathy when you see videos of Malibu homes crashing into the ocean, but keep in mind that mainstream media tends to focus on calamities facing rich people instead of the millions of poor people who also suffer.

It’s already too late

According to climate scientists, the world has already reached the point of no return on mass destruction and loss of life resulting from climate change.15

The Yale School of the Environment speaks to this in non-scholarly terms that even a Trumpanzee can probably understand:

The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.

The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago.

So what does the United States do under Trump? It withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement.

More from Yale:

Without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate. James Hansen, the Columbia University climatologist who first put climate change on the world’s front pages during testimony to Senate hearings in 1988, believes we could hit 2 degrees C as soon as 2045, a forecast based on several climate models under a high-emissions scenario.

The reason for the escalation is that the climate system is in a pincer grip. First, emissions of planet-warming gases remain stubbornly high, and second, natural carbon sinks are weakening. The result is an accelerating rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2. 2024 saw the biggest jump ever.

The Yalies point out that changes to our lives won’t come slowly. Devastating and sudden climate events will shock us into reality. That’s already started for wildfire victims and many people who live in coastal areas who can’t insure their homes or pay mortgage-like rates for flood insurance (hello, Florida).

The United States has become an active participant in climate change

Now we come to the worst of it all. I’m talking here, of course, about the Trump regime’s cataclysmic disregard for climate change and the policies that were urgently needed a decade ago to get it under control.

The United States’ abandonment of climate change policies, of course, was highly preventable had a small group of (mostly) men (mostly young) not rejected a sane, female professional to be their president.

The following bullet points describe just a few of the many actions the regime has taken to encourage climate change. I’m borrowing heavily here from the words of the Climate Action Campaign, which has been tracking the regime’s systematic attack on Planet Earth:16

• 4/13/2026: The regime “paused the distribution of essential grant funding for NOAA operations, research, and extreme weather monitoring. Climate change is fueling more powerful and deadly extreme weather, and Trump’s actions to withhold funding for a critical agency like NOAA leave states and communities less prepared and more vulnerable when the next extreme weather event occurs.”

• 6/16/2026: “The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unveiled a proposal to revise regulations overseeing grants awards. The rule requires political appointees to approve grants, forcing agencies to overhaul the process for reviewing and dispersing billions in funding to public and private university research and threatening future scientific progress.”

  https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-targets-science-in-ombs-grants-revamp/

• 6/4/2026: The regime “announced a plan to spend $700 million of taxpayer money to prop up 13 current coal plants across the country and build new coal plants in two different states.”

  https://apnews.com/article/trump-coal-mining-power-plant-climate-electricity-0a7126d66de97b10f32eaa39b1af669f

• 6/1/2026: “[The] Department of Energy rewrote the rules governing a portion of an $8.8 billion home energy rebate program to bar households from accessing funds when replacing gas appliances with cleaner and more efficient electric models. The new guidance prohibits so-called “fuel switching,” limiting rebates to households that already own electric appliances.” ” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/energy-rebates-home-appliances.html

• 5/14/2026: “The EPA is delaying pollution limits on light-and medium-duty vehicles for two years, handing polluters another corporate giveaway that will force higher costs on drivers, and cause and exacerbate chronic respiratory disease”. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-epa-proposes-delaying-enforcement-biden-vehicle-pollution-rule-2026-05-14/

• 4/9/2026: The Trump regime initiated a “Forest Service reorganization that will shut down 50 of the agency’s 70 research stations. Experts are very concerned as the closures could cause major disruptions as the Pacific Northwest heads into a potentially severe wildfire season.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/climate/forest-service-research-stations.html

• 4/9/2026: The EPA proposed “weakening protections built around the well-documented risks of toxic coal ash contamination. The proposed changes to coal ash pollution safeguards would exempt more than 100 ash dumps from federal cleanup rules, roll back groundwater monitoring requirements, and weaken oversight of one of the nation’s largest toxic waste streams.”17
  https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026/04/epa-to-loosen-coal-ash-requirements-pro-00865907

• 3/24/2026: “The Interior Department announced a plan to use $982 million of taxpayer money to pay French company TotalEnergies to cancel offshore wind projects in New York and North Carolina. The terms include a requirement that TotalEnergies use these taxpayer-provided funds to instead invest in fossil fuel projects across the United States.”

• 3/12/2026: “Trump’s so-called ‘Energy Dominance Council’ has resorted to releasing 172 million barrels of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to address the spike in prices.”

• 3/12/2026: “The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against California’s clean car rules, which set limits on tailpipe pollution. This follows the Trump adminstration’s rollbacks to Biden-era car efficency standards.”

• 2/12/2026: “Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Department of Defense to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants. The White House also said they would provide funding ($175M) to five coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky to keep them online beyond their scheduled retirement dates.”

• 2/12/2026: “The Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding, the requirement that EPA must protect people from climate pollution. Established in 2009, it empowered the EPA to regulate six greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act. The rollback makes climate denial official US policy. More pollution will lead to more climate change, and more death, destruction and illness.”

• 1/27/2026: The regime withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement.

• 1/12.2026: “The EPA published a final rule to dramatically weaken standards for smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution from stationary sources as it seeks to rapidly accelerate the buildout of AI infrastructure and gas-fired plants to power them.”

• 1/12.2026: “According to a New York Times report, EPA will no longer account for the monetary cost of health harms when setting rules for air pollution, abandoning four decades of precedent at the core of the EPA’s mission. Air pollution costs the U.S. economy upwards of $800 billion a year, and oil and gas pollution alone is responsible for 91,000 premature deaths per year.”

• 12/22.2025: “The Interior Department ordered a blanket pause on offshore wind projects under construction, citing unspecified national security risks. Of the five impacted projects, the administration’s previous attempted pauses on two of them (including one under national security considerations) have been halted in federal courts.”

• 12/9.2025: “OMB Director Russ Vought announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a Boulder, Colo., lab responsible for some of the country’s most important research on extreme weather, air pollution, and the impacts of climate change like warming on ocean temperatures.” Note: A federal court has blocked this plan.

This list only includes climate change acceleration activities occurring this year (and December of 2025). The full list linked in the Footnotes is much more comprehensive.

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The United States has become, thanks to those who created litmus tests they would never have applied to a man with similar qualifications, an active participant in global warming while the rest of the world burns.

More than a few of the young Gaza protesters, for example, who refused to vote for Kamala will, quite literally, be burned alive as a result of their litmus test.

The burning world rests at their feet, as does the current mayhem now overwhelming the Middle East. As does, ironically, the continued oppression of the very people they thought they were protecting. Netanyahu continues to declare that he’s not finished with Gaza, and has since set his sights on Southern Lebanon. Jared Kushner, Trump’s real estate grifter for the Middle East, wants to bulldoze Gaza, remove its inhabitants, and turn it into a glittering tourist mecca. He actually builds this type of policy into the treaties he’s assigned to negotiate in the Middle East.

To paraphrase something I wrote elsewhere: Our world has been seared as if its outer layer has peeled away, like a full onion roasting on a wildly inflamed grill while an idiot cook obliviously stares at his phone.

Meanwhile, thanks to Trump voters and nonvoters (same thing), the nation has become a pariah state, something the next administration will have trouble reversing, given how the U.S. has blown its reliability to smithereens under this regime.

It isn’t the next government that foreign nations will distrust when a new one finally starts trying to mend fences.

It’s American voters.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

Notes

The intensity of storms created by El Niño depend on whether the heated currents of El Niño rise to the surface of the ocean, which is something computer models can’t predict.

European Space Agency image credit:

Esa.int. “Europe Feels the Heat beneath Our Feet,” 2026. https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/06/Europe_feels_the_heat_beneath_our_feet.

The Climate Action Campaign (CAC) is a coalition of groups fighting the Trump regime and tracking its efforts to burn the world into a crisp. It includes:

Center for American Progress, Earthjustice, Environment America, Environmental Defense Fund, League of Conservation Voters, National Hispanic Medical Association, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Climate Action Network, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

‌Some studies suggest that human beings might develop biological defenses against increased heat, especially in high-income areas and/or countries, but leave poor areas behind:

He, Cheng, Yixiang Zhu, Yichen Guo, Jovine Bachwenkizi, Renjie Chen, Haidong Kan, and Wafaie W. Fawzi. “Escalated Heatwave Mortality Risk in Sub-Saharan Africa under Recent Warming Trend.” Science Advances 11, no. 48 (November 28, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ady7379.

I’ve read some articles expressing a firm belief that the American oligarchy will use global warming as a cudgel to knock poor people off the planet. I won’t address that now, but nothing is truly beyond these people. In my novel MagicLand, and especially in the short stories adjacent to it, they wipe us all out with microbes created by technology instead.

You can find additional information on the Trump regime's environmental rollbacks during Clownshow 2.0 here:

https://abcnews.com/US/biggest-anti-environment-policies-enacted-trumps-1st-100/story?id=121125789

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Footnotes

Note: These events are based on a true story

One day about seven years ago, Maynard and Pilchard, two African penguin dudes, woke up in their penguin love nest together to discover that their mutual lover, Aiden, a well regarded lady penguin, had waddled off into the nest of a renegade bachelor named Erik.

Aiden never looked back, but neither did Maynard or Pilchard.

Maynard and Pilchard shrugged their penguin shoulders and said to each other, “Let’s make a go of it, just you and I. Let’s forget the ladies, and just do us.”

Thus began a loving, gay penguin relationship that continues to this day. Seven years later, the relationship thrives.

So far, this has apparently escaped the notice of the human far right, which means that their home in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo has not yet been threatened with closure by the maniacal Trump regime (it helps that the caretakers of the regime are quite occupied with poopy pants and orange slime mold).

Maynard and Pilchard were already in a hot relationship with Aiden, who shared the affection of both penguins with equal, dare I say, aplomb? The three shared a nest, and it’s fair to say that things could get loud in there on those nights one of the three was feeling frisky (in other words, most nights).

If you’re wondering if gay sex or threesomes are allowed in African penguin culture, the answer is a resounding, “yes.”

Not only is it allowed, but, like among the ancient Romans, none of it is even noticed. In fact, penguin society is more like a Roman one than ours, which is only aware of gay sex because, many years ago, Pilgrims and other such broomstick-in-the-arse types waddled around hunting gays when they weren’t hunting witches.

Also like ancient Romans, the world of African penguin romance is a bit of a pecking order thing.1

Except that with African penguins, the pecking order seems to start and end with the ladies, whose choices for mates drive the romance trends of the entire compound.

Anyhoo, Maynard and Pilchard originally began their love nest threesome with Aiden while living off their reputation as swarthy young bachelors building a small real estate empire consisting of more nests than they needed. If this sounds familiar, I guess it just goes to show that the desire to become a real estate mogul is not limited to petty humans.

Maynard and Pilchard already had a thing for each other. Aiden simply jumped in because, well, she was a diva, and that’s what divas sometimes do.

She was very much in demand, after all, and sometimes, the pecking order must accommodate these things.

If she was interested in a bachelor, all Aiden had to do was show up at the nearest watering hole or fish bucket. Her presence alone drove many of the young bachelors into a frenzy of desire. Except, perhaps, Pilchard, who, it has been said, was drawn more to the occasional large fish in her beak than her (I may have not yet told you that he has a reputation for snatching fish out of the mouths of his peers, and that Aiden has a preference for large fish).

It’s possible that Maynard and Pilchard had a more expansive real estate empire in mind. They assumed control over three nests, pretty much two more than they needed. I am questioning the need because they, and Aiden, were happily conjugating on the regular in their original nest. They simply did not need a second or third one.

If they did have plans for a larger real estate empire, said plans might have been thwarted somewhat when Aiden deserted Maynard and Pilchard for a rambunctious fellow named Erik, who was the rebel of the colony, and, rumor has it, will, once he gathers enough confidence, challenge the alpha penguin, Preston, as tribal chief.

This is where it might be helpful to point out that Preston’s been the boss since the colony was started by Lincoln Park Zoo in 2016, and that Erik has needed all this time to gather his confidence and strength for that fateful day when he finally confronts Preston for the top spot in the penguin clan.

The tension of this potential confrontation has been building for a decade, and I am left wondering if Aiden’s sudden entry into Erik’s renegade nest will be what finally gives Erik the confidence to take on Preston and become the new boss.

In other words, is she a kingmaker?

It’s hard to say. Aiden’s diva personality scrambles the odds for Polymarket types, if that’s your jam. She could jump into another penguin’s nest at any time. Most African penguins prefer a steady mate, but Aiden likes to swing.

It doesn’t help that there are rumors that Aiden left Maynard and Pilchard because she became annoyed with Pilchard’s habit of snatching food out of the mouths of other penguins, including Aiden. This became an especially irksome habit because Aiden is a picky eater who generally will only eat the biggest fish in the fish pile.

But, as I said, the two fellas quickly moved on and managed to maintain their real estate empire within the colony.

These days, Maynard and Pilchard are models for a healthy romantic relationship that all of us can admire.

As for Aiden? Who knows? But something tells me she’s doing just fine.

Happy what’s left of Pride Month!

Notes

I may have toyed a little with details, since they were hard to come by, but the eight year relationship between Maynard and Pilchard is solid and well documented, and is a reminder that only fear-mongering humans are hung up on who shares a nest with who, at least when it comes to gender.

The Lincoln Park Zoo has kept quiet on who Aiden’s new mate really was, possibly afraid that the scandal would rock Chicago to its core. So I guessed Erik. Don’t trust me on this.

You can learn more about Maynard and Pilchard here:

Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/06/23/zoo-same-sex-animals-pride/?share=6uimtsonam0t2awaruip 🎁

You can learn more about the personalities involved, including Erik, here:

https://news.wttw.com/2017/07/17/new-series-all-my-penguins-captures-drama-zoo-s-penguin-colony

Admittedly, it’s not much to go on, but, hey, they’re penguins, not celebrities or world leaders.

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Footnotes

1

For more on the Roman sexual pecking order, see:

Potentially Interesting Roman History

Was Everyone in the Past More Gay?

Read more

2 months ago · 12 likes · 5 comments · James Coverley