TrumpWorld is Riding Until the Wheels Come Off

 

Just so we are clear, when the GOP hit the TrumpWorld Trifecta--they motioned to keep riding the 2025/47 Agenda until the wheels came off. Apparently, though, the vehicle they have chosen is a Cybertruck, so the wheels will come off sooner rather than later.  (Panels, also, too!)  

Best of luck to the State Department on that Tesla contract. Ride in the best of health and luck, which you will need. 

Yes, I am comparing TrumpWorld right now to the Swasticar, 

Musk has fouled the brand of the companies he acquired because of being a wealthy dumbass, not founded because he's not actually what he represents himself as. I don't know why his Frankendick still gets ridden like it is. But it's clearly made up of dead to the game actual founders, who took Elon's money and decided they were good with him doing his thing to their brands.

Shit--Here's a Good TrumpWorld Final Pitch:

 

Difficult time. The US elections are in a few hours. Just want to wish you all peace, guys. But if things go bad, save your families. You know where to go. We do care of YOU.

God bless. pic.twitter.com/qZbol82lxU

— Maria Butina (@Maria_Butina) November 5, 2024

But I'm pretty sure Trump is actually headed for Venezuela because he keeps saying so. Also being back in Russia has done wonders for Butina's health you can tell. She's looking greeeaaaaaatt. 

Look, I could point to all the misogyny Trump dumped out just today, suggesting he might like to hit Michelle Obama, imagining Kamala Harris in a ring with Mike Tyson, his running mate calling Harris "trash", or his racism and the racism of his campaign, such that the campaign only just last week--the final week of the campaign, they fired a white supremacist and that the bizarrely hateful MSG rally still reverberates. 

But I'm going to point to the fact that there is something wrong with thinking after the investigation into the 2016 election, after the first impeachment, after 1/6, some people don't recognize what hundreds of national security professionals have: 

TWGB: Resorting to Crimes

 

Former President Donald Trump "resorted to crimes" to attempt to stay in office after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, federal prosecutors allege in a newly unsealed court filing released Wednesday.

In the filing submitted by special counsel Jack Smith,… pic.twitter.com/lr2ut8tFn2

— PBS News (@NewsHour) October 2, 2024

You know, it seems like it was just yesterday that current Trump running mate JD Vance was trying to focus on the future instead of discussing whether Trump lost the 2020 election, and I love that for him. Corey Lewandowski was also stuck in the same groove when asked--unable to admit His Nibs lost in 2020. 

Judge Chutkan has done the world a favor by airing out Jack Smith's brief regarding how the Trump Team, with reckless disregard for the truth, democracy, the Constitution, public safety or any other damn thing, resorted to crimes in an attempt to defraud the American people regarding our presidential election. Trump and his people did everything they could to delay his reckoning regarding January 6th, but he can't actually delay people being forewarned and forearmed--he lied about one election, and he is just bound and determined to lie about this one. 

What Trump tried to do in 2020 was election interference. This right here right now, is letting you know what he does and plans to try again. Disenfranchising people in swing states, by fraudulently messing with our votes, is something I take very personally. He says bad things happen in Philadelphia, and I may be a bad thing happening in Philadelphia myself, but I am a very legitimate voter and you DON'T try to throw out my vote without me taking it very personally.  

My feminist foremamas didn't hit picket lines and get forcefed in prison for me to not get pissed when someone tried to first of all steal my vote and then use it to support anti-woman policies like banning abortion, birth control, or any other thing that liberates me and my sisters. And I fucking mean as a White lady to correct the past by supporting the right to vote and the right of having the votes counted of the Black and Brown people Trump (and the Republican party) want to exclude.

The GOP and Cheap Grace

 

Johnson: Clay Higgins is a dear friend of mine and a colleague from Louisiana, and a very frank and outspoken person. He's also a very principled man. I didn’t even see it but he tweeted something today about Haitians.

Reporter: He told them to get out of the country by Jan 20th… pic.twitter.com/Y0oFz727WO

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 25, 2024

There's a formula here that the GOP employs again and again: the Tweet/statement/activity was terrible, but this is a good person (because I said so), and while I didn't see the Tweet/know all the details, I will forgive/absolve this person, even though I was not the person hurt by the activity.  Because it's the Christian thing to do. 

It's a lie. They aren't forgiving a "real" transgression (to them), and they don't care if the person is a good person--that person is "good enough for the political moment" and requires a permission slip. The permission slip has been pre-written, and we are only really just viewing what the in-group's tolerances are.

This type of cheap grace applies to Higgins, to Mark Robinson, to JD Vance, and entirely explains Trump. 

Instead of this statement vouching for Rep. Higgins, who is not noticeably repentant, I would throw it back to Speaker Johnson--why do have such a nasty racist for a good friend? 

This Was "America's Mayor", Once

 

Watch "America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani call Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis a "ho," and the Christian audience at the ReAwaken America tour go wild for it last night. pic.twitter.com/yy68oan7lg

— Stephanie Mencimer (@smencimer) June 8, 2024

He's not half racist and misogynistic, is he? It reminds me that he went out of his way to defame, and continued to defame, two Black, female election workers, also in Georgia.  But because my government name ends in the same vowel as his, let me help him with the pronunciation of Ms. Willis' name:

And she isn't a "ho"--but an adult female who can socialize with another adult person. Are we going to sit here in 2024 and pretend a professional adult woman is not allowed to have adult relationships? That "dating" is some form of harlotry?

Is this the Middle Ages?  I do not want to hear sexual slurs about anyone under the sun from this sleazeball. 

Deep in the Dark Heart of Texas

 

BREAKING: Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardons Daniel Perry for killing BLM protester Garrett Foster pic.twitter.com/lSn3WafPE4

— BNO News (@BNONews) May 16, 2024

I could just blog about how TX Gov.  Greg Abbott is a signifying sociopathic fascist who is pardoning a racist and pedophile murderer to send a chilling message to his state about his values, but I need to point out that he is not just following through on a political promise, but that the Texas Pardon and Parole Board recommended it. 

Let me repeat that: this was not without the consent of other people who sit in judgment over who gets pardons or parole, but with their express approval. Greg Abbott isn't a brand-new baby governor trying to feel out the ethos of his state--he is a monster who has figured out that many people will clap for a particular kind of monster. 

In Texas, anyway. 

Who the Hell is Charlie Kirk?

 

Imagine someone in their teenage years won a whole fucking Star Search category for Mediocre White Male and thought that actually made them sufficient in their own right to judge someone who spearheaded a movement for civil rights, and said, aloud, "Nah, who's that?"  because maybe, just maybe, he knew exactly how to speak to people not of his milieux about whom they should and should not admire--and he wanted them to vote Republican. 

You know, to the extent his party wants Black people to vote at all or have their votes counted. 

Anyway, when I think of this big-headed manchild with a bad gum-to-chiclet ratio, I recently think about how his quotes about the estimable Ketanji Brown-Jackson sums up everything in this worldview: He doesn't realize that successful Black people were saying they got the foot in the door they needed to demonstrate they could do the work. 

Musk is a Dangerous Prat

 

There was a moment when I almost liked Musk. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, realizing climate change was a problem, wanting to spread our species across at least the solar system. It felt idealistic to me in a way--maybe I saw in him a touch of D. D. Harriman, I don't know. 

But then I realized he was a prat. 

It's the anti-woke stuff, you know. The idea that the "woke-mind virus" or diversity is going to prevent us from being a multiplanetary species is sheer twattery. We aren't actually going to be able to do it any other way.*

But anyway, Apartheid Clyde recently achieved a new low in a recent accelerating downward trajectory--no, not the thing where he's blaming ADL for his losing the multiple billions of dollars of value in Twitter that are actually his own stupid fault for letting the fascists and fucking child porn people back on his platform, but also destroying functionality (like analytics) and making people senselessly pay for things that were free and actually increased productive engagement. 

No, I mean the sabotage of a Ukrainian naval mission because he's a prat. 

Imagine being a contractor who decides to go so entirely outside of one's lane as to contact Russian authorities having been apprised of Ukrainian intent to do anything, and then believe the war criminals and just shut down the service they were contracted for. 

Do you think the heads of Lockheed Martin for a moment ever stop and go "You are using HIMARS for war stuff?! WTF!?" 

Makes You Wonder (UPDATED)

 

Although the video with the above fascist symbolism with Ron DeSantis superimposed was posted by, and then deleted by, a fan account, the troubling specter of That Gay Ad having been produced by a staffer with DeSantis' campaign does make me wonder. 

See, we've seen this before. Fascist imagery just showing up at random starts to show a pattern that doesn't really feel all that random at all, but more like a test-balloon. The atmosphere in Florida is a bit cozy for the Nazi-lovers, and the GOP in Florida seems kind of okay with their existence (and assistance). 

It's how I feel about the history curriculum in Florida whitewashing slavery. If it can be called ignorance, it's ignorance of a very deliberate kind (a kind Ron DeSantis himself is very much in step with.) Radicalization is a choice. (I don't even know where to begin with the idea of the Chiclet-heads of Prager U having anything to do with school curriculums.)

It's not just DeSantis, it's the party. It's just not usually as ham-fisted as the above, and of course, it was posted by a fan. (My gut says "Plausible deniability" after the Pride month ad.)  But whatever it is DeSantis seems to be doing, it looks like telegraphing to the white supremacists and Christian nationalists to get onboard with him. And that test-balloons like these are flying is a four-alarm fire.

UPDATE: And it was apparently right to wonder- the person (now fired) who made the video was...an aide with the campaign.

UPDATE: This piece by Tim Miller describes just who this Nate Hochman is--a Generation Z edge-lord who considered Nick Fuentes "based" and was going to be putting the words literally in DeSantis' very large (I think his jaw unhinges like a boa constrictor!) mouth.  But here's the part that sort of reveals what the game is:

He went on to discuss the merits and demerits of one of America’s most vile humans, saying the fact that he has said “super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can actually accomplish in politics.”

“Edgy” is definitely one way to describe Holocaust denial!

When the Dispatch asked him about his Fuentes remarks, Hochman acknowledged that he said some “really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe”—but did not apologize.

"Edgy" is like "ironic" or "just kidding" or "sorry, not sorry". Walk-backs and obfuscation are tactics.  In the meanwhile, while we're just shitposting on the good old socials and all, just making our memes, some of the message gets through, and some more people are just a little radicalized. It's incremental and excremental. 

It's why I'm not putting all my hope on the youth--some of them are already on a pretty shitty path and after all, there were Boomers who were radical liberals and "didn't trust anyone over thirty" and my generation X had its share of folks who were about to "sell out" and some but not all millennials count as "woke". Grown people are supposed to demonstrate leadership and set examples. Just like we've got a lot of Gen Z young folks who are fed up with the system that put them through shooter drills and told them to expect less bodily autonomy than previous generations, we've also got some racist incels who legit think Elliot Rogers had a point. And that current is what deeply concerns me, because the pose of irony and the dismissal of actual empathy as "virtue-signaling" and "shitlibs" and being "snowflakes" is all a way of keeping the baby Nazis from wandering off and trying to be human.

But to bring it back to Meatball Ron--back when he was a teacher, in addition to getting history wrong, he was fraternizing with the kids and trying to be cool.  That's him also in this campaign--extremely online and led by callow youth instead of being capable of "leadership" until forced to fire an alt-right dickhead in the midst of also firing 1/3 of his campaign staff. (Which is still not leadership.)

What I'm saying is--I really don't wonder. The GOP invited the alt-right in and that's what they are going to be. 

TWGB: Trump Doesn't Have to Be Explicit

 

It seems that people are wondering why the story that an armed man who participated in the 1/6 insurrection was arrested in Barack Obama's neighborhood after wandering about a school while armed and oh! the important thing--after Trump posted former president Obama's address to his Truth Social (which no one is flocking to in the pending demise of Twitter, and which has already accrued some insider trading trouble) isn't given more attention. 

I don't exactly know this for a fact, but it feels like the media have trained themselves to ignore that Trump is always crowdsourcing violence. He has been from the very beginning. The wouldbe gunman, Taylor Taranto, said he chose the school because it was close to the home of Rep. Jamie Raskin. Ponder that. 

It doesn't take some wild leap to recall Cesar Sayoc, who sent improvised pipe bomb-like things to the journalists and political figures he believed to be on Trump's hitlist. Or maybe this reminds you of the Pelosi home invasion. Or because this violent individual was also a part of the 1/6 insurrection, it can't help but remind you of those fools for Trump, doing his dirty work. 

The Spirit of 2016 and the Illegal Meme

 

For some people, it's never stopped being 2020, and for the immuno-suppressed and their families, I get that. For me, it's never stopped being 2016, when begun, the meme wars were. The 2016 presidential election had an extraordinary amount to do with digital presence, and I don't think we've yet absorbed all of the lessons from how foreign influencers and Pepe-heads took over the conversation and suppressed part of the vote or rendered the importance of the franchise to "vibes". 

I have talked about the Brad Parscale/Internet Research Agency dual strategies at targeted voter suppression a few times in the course of TrumpWorld Grab-Bags because the similarities in tactics were tandem and synergetic. The Trump campaign in 2016 deliberately worked to target Black voters and peel them off of from the Democratic candidate. The same thing was done with the IRA. 

So if we take a look at recently convicted Douglass Mackey, who created voter suppression memes during 2016 as part of his online "Ricky Vaughn" persona, we see an individual not necessarily directly associated with a campaign or foreign influence, who nonetheless tried to influence an election through fraud. The text message, the option to vote via text, was inauthentic. The line was real, if not a valid way to vote. 

This Is the Modern GOP

 

The 26 Republicans who refused to denounce white supremacy
1. James Comer
2. Jim Jordan
3. Mike Turner
4. Paul Gosar
5. Virginia Foxx
6. Glenn Grothman
7. Gary Palmer
8. Clay Higgins
9. Pete Sessions
10. Andy Biggs
11. Nancy Mace
12. Jake LaTurner
13. Pat Fallon
14. Byron Donalds pic.twitter.com/mlcvE9rPsM

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) March 8, 2023

The next time someone hits you with how the Democratic party was a part of segregation or slavery or the Klan some long time ago, here is your answer: the GOP right now can't say "Boo" with respects to their racists. They see calling out white supremacy or the great replacement theory as a trap. Given the easy opportunity to denounce white supremacy, they did not. Given the opportunity to denounce replacement theory they could not. 

The Gaga Saga of Scott Adams, MAGA

 

The funny thing about Scott Adams is, he had a really good thing--he did satire about office politics and stuff that was mostly unstupid. Managers that didn't understand the technology or the mission, and rules that were made for the institution, not the individual workers, were very relatable, and made for a cool syndicated cartoon berth that also generated dollars from swag like mugs and calendars--the kind of things worker bees had in their cubicles. 

And he also got to write books about other stuff--like how he thought Donald Trump was a winner--and that's not a big deal. People can have their politics after all--big, free country. No one cancelled him for being a Trump fan. It's cynical to say Trump wins because facts don't matter to him and then like him for that very reason, but whatever. 

Scott Adams defended Trump regarding his apparent support for the white supremacists in Charlottesville, by claiming he never really said the thing everyone absolutely understands him to have said. Didn't get cancelled for that, though. 

He also was full of shit when he said that, because he also was mad at Trump for continuing to say it. 

This particular kind of thing is called "right-fighting". He'd rather people concede that he is right than actually get right. 

Tulsi Gabbard was On Fox and Said a Thing

 

Tulsi on Diversity in The Biden Administration: They’re proud to be selecting people based on race.. It’s based on genetics.. Where do we see that connection? These are the very same core principles embodied by Nazism and Hitler. pic.twitter.com/bI2HoumYaw

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 25, 2023

I get that the Fox Mushroom Farm infotainment network has no respect whatsoever for the clickers that they mutant cordycep-pilled over the years, but having mule-faced Jesse nod while obvious op Tulsi lays the line on his viewers that the eliminationism of Hitler and the inclusivity of the Biden Administration are the exact same thing should insult the fuck out of even someone whose brain is 75% taken over by fungal rot.

But even if the fan club don't feel like what's left of their basic intelligence has been insulted, those of us who can still appreciate what's in front of us know that's straight-up Orwellian doublethink. Inclusivity and elimination are opposite things. Gathering in people so they can contribute and prosper and cutting people out in the hopes they are destroyed are obviously not the same thing. To say that--to say what she said, isn't a mistake. It's seeding the ground for resentment. What she's doing is telling straight white cis males that the inclusion of other people is their exclusion. That if people who deviate from their default humanity are featured, it's the exact same thing as one of them being annihilated. 

Competition for roles in a society is not annihilation but regular order: may the best person win. If the assumption is some people are by identity simply better suited--what are the deets on their CV? What is the real-life contribution they are making? Saying something that stupid out loud and so obviously biased would have been seen for exactly what it is if Watters said it by himself. Why Tulsi Gabbard is so willing to say it is justified by her getting to be on Fox. 

This is why exactly nothing she ever says has any value to me. Nor should it to anyone else. 

TWGB: They Aren't Joking

 

There's a funny thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that if she and Steve Bannon were at the head of the 1/6 insurrection, they would have won, and they would have been armed: she says she was joking, now. But she certainly was not.  We know this because we know her record. She was explicit about what she stood for--talking about "the price of blood" pre-election.  We know in December 2020 she was at the White House meeting with other GOP electeds. We know some 1/6 insurrectionists actually were armed.  What she seems to be saying, and pretending to walk back, is that she would want more bloodshed of Capitol police and possibly her own colleagues in congress. 

Ha ha. The conservatives are getting better at humor, and the libs don't like it, indeed. (See latest iteration thereof.)  Actually, we know what "only joking" means to fascists. (Can't you take a joke? Why are you punching yourself? I'm not the problem, you have no sense of humor. etc.)

When the NY Young Republicans, who I used to think were just twenty-somethings who looked like forty somethings and had the values of the 1950s and wanted to undo the civil rights movement, has VDARE's Brimelow and Posobiec, I start to think we've got people in their thirties and forties who look like they are traitors and have the values of would-be herrenvolk and want to undo Reconstruction. 

So, color me pretty alarmed by that. Also alarmed by Justice Kavanaugh hanging out with the Schlapps, you know, the CPAC wanna-be domestic terrorist Orban enthusiasts. Just a Supreme Court justice hanging out in the most partisan and kinda-fash-leaning crowd, and we're supposed to shrug about that? (And shouldn't RW SCOTUS justices be more on guard about their propriety since we know they are cozy as hell with activists? I mean, Clarance Thomas' wife is a whole activist, which is as cozy as things get.)  

It isn't a joke. 

The Supremacist Who Worked for FL GOP (UPDATED)

 

In a story I want to highlight for obvious reasons--Lil Marco Rubio took a break from posting on Twitter as a Vacation Bible Camp fortune cookie and told us that one of his campaign canvassers was put into the hospital for just being a Republican, which is a horrific thing to be happening in Hiahleah, Florida, 

It quickly turned out that the young man in question had a long history of being associated with hate groups and had been paid by the GOP in FL for a while, apparently without them noticing or caring he was a part of the Unite the Right Rally or had been arrested previously for jabbing a Confederate flag at people.  

The first assailant who had been caught is probably not even political. A second man has been arrested, but nothing there reinforces Rubio's Republican persecution story, either. 

So, I guess what I want to know is, did Rubio point out that a person associated with Charlottesville and was a known right-wing provocateur in all innocence of who he actually was in the hope that people would honestly consider Republicans to be martyrs facing an underdog battle in (consults notes) Hiahleah, Fl, against militant liberal antifa hordes just roughing up innocent canvassers left and right, or was he trying to get in front of the story that RW/Proud Boys, etc. type guys were now a regular part of the GOP political scene by spraying the sanctity of a martyrdom beatdown all over him? 

Sometimes a Flute is Just a Musical Instrument

 

Sometimes I struggle with the diagnosis of being "terminally online". I prefer to think of myself as only "critically online". What I do know is, as a blogger, I don't love that my blog muses occasionally insist on my dealing with whatever messed-up thing is going on with the Online Discourse. 

I try: "Please," I bargain. "Let me do other stuff. The Discourse sucks. The people are terrible. I hate it here."

And the answer I get is hollow, mocking laughter. "This is the price you pay for your remit: the culture, white supremacy, radicalization, misogyny. Do your thing here, or we won't let you do the other stuff." 

And there I am. 

So, for some reason, the right wing online freaked out because Melissa Viviane Jefferson, an American musician and actress known for her ability to play the flute, was invited to play a 200-year-old crystal flute once owned by James Madison that was being stored at the Library of Congress. That's right, a modern popular musician who has done as much for the flute lately as, I dunno, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull or Chris Wood of Traffik (look, folks, I am not young anymore and rock music only ever does so much flute) played an instrument that it would be a damn shame to never get played again, and the racists got all up in arms. 

My "favorite" dumbass comment is probably this one from some guy I never heard of named Pedro who was just openly racist:

He said "The thing that is obvious but people don't want to say is that this is about humiliating white people, about desecrating American history and heritage. That's what you do when you're a conqueror. Humiliate the conquered."

It isn't obvious. This wouldn't humiliate white people who weren't unrelenting racists. She's literally a musician playing a musical instrument. She's an American, She's respecting the awesomeness of playing an antique historical artifact. There was no conquering or desecrating. She just played a flute. It was made to be used by musicians. The entire world this terribly online creature lives in is grievance-based and for no reason at all. 

What he's saying is: she used the wrong water fountain. She sat in the wrong bus seat. He wants to take her existence as an accomplished musician receiving the opportunity to handle a unique object as an affront, but by doing so, can only point to her race as the reason for his discomfiture. Because that's all the outrage is. 

Climate Change is Terror

 

I have never seen climate carnage on the scale of the floods here in Pakistan.

As our planet continues to warm, all countries will increasingly suffer losses and damage from climate beyond their capacity to adapt.

This is a global crisis. It demands a global response. pic.twitter.com/5nqcJIMoIA

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) September 10, 2022

 I know this is a hell of a message to send on the 21st anniversary of 9/11, but I can't hear the skirling bagpipes deliver "Amazing Grace" one more time without thinking about the future pressures of what colonialism and global commodification of the planet will mean for future generations. We've been looking at the war on terror as about a lot of things, but about oil and water, not so much--maybe we should. About self-determination, and the world corporations would leave us to--not so much. Maybe we should.  We were lost, but will we be found? We were blind, but will we see? 

We tend to want to put a face on our terrors and consider the villain as "the other". Nature, in its raw power and inexorableness, seems to us to act in ways so removed from our capability to harness it--but we harnessed the atom. We can make use of the energies of water and wind and even capture lightning in a bottle and the sun in a mirror. I think we should be able to understand that over 30 million people are displaced and maybe thousands have died or will, and a third of a large country is under water, destroying crops and homes and livelihoods, because for over a hundred years, we, humanity, did something to the atmosphere that made storms more potent and the future more uncertain. 

When Mainstream Media Are Trifling

I could charitably infer that Raddatz was intentionally setting up a strawman of Biden encouraging hate speech because what he said would inflame the bigots knowing full well that nonsense was easy enough to knock down, but you know what is so much better? 

Not doing things like that. Not framing things in the way that the fascists' feelings are centered.  You can just talk about the words Biden said without framing in in the terms of how the people he was talking about would react to that, because it is already established that they are fucking kerosine-dipped fuses in a world full of lit candles. 

You can talk about the rise of white supremacist and right wing domestic terrorism. 

The Confederate and the Commonwealth

 

This is gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano, an actual insurrectionist, whose thesis was about a left-wing insurrection (that never happened) and who participated in an attempted right-wing coup. He's wearing a Confederate uniform. That's quite a choice for a person who is already understood to be an anti-Semite who wanted to throw out the votes of black voters in the Commonwealth. 

Sometimes people are exactly who they represent themselves to be. This is that guy. He isn't covering up one damn thing, but is reveling in his White Christian Nationalist identification. 

He really wore a Confederate uniform and wants to represent the Commonwealth where the Gettysburg dead lay hallowed?  Maybe this chuckleheaded culture war signifier needs to wake up and realize that if he wants to represent some "Florida of the North", he might get his wishes more immediately by just making like a New Jersey snowbird and winging his ass to Florida--for good and being a part of the South that he wanted to represent. 

Screw him and his rebel ass.