“I saw the worst minds of my generation destroyed by fascism” –me (with deep apologies to Allen Ginsberg)

America hands machine guns to teenagers and asks them to swear to kill and to die in defense of the Constitution. We call them soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

The Democratic Party’s U.S. senators cannot be bothered to use a dog-eared copy of “Robert’s Rules of Order” or any of the body’s ancient obscure rules to protect the ideas within that founding document.

By now, you’re certainly aware that a handful of Dems in the Senate, led by dusty and spineless Minority Leader Chuck Schumer doing his best Neville Chamberlain cosplay, permitted the soulless Republicans to pass a stopgap spending bill that gives the Trump administration further powers to wreck America and its federal government. It avoided a government shutdown, but perhaps at a fatal cost.

Obviously, fuck Chuck Schumer. The government and our democracy are being destroyed regardless of any shutdown, and he’s encouraging what is supposed to be the opposition party to instead collaborate. Again, fuck him. Fuck all Vichyites.

But what about the rest of us? Are we doing our parts to stop the madness?

I am scribbling my angry little digital essays in my best Jean-Paul Marat imitation (no long baths for me, thank you), but I certainly can do more, some of which I will share and some I may not. We can call our senators and representatives. We can protest. We can boycott. We can strike. We certainly can do more than a collection of useless senators. We can donate and volunteer to help politicians that actually bother to give a shit.

It’s heartening to see Elon Musk’s vital Tesla stock shed value by the hour, and to see his vehicles and dealerships targeted by protests and vandalism.

That stuff works. We need more. Again, as I’ve written before, I do not advocate violence. At least not until the Trump regime goes further off the rails and the citizenry has the moral case to violently defend itself and its democracy and Constitution from these mobster fascists. We will not get to that point if we’re lucky, but I am not optimistic.

Summer 2025 could resemble the long, hot summers of 1967 and 1968 in America and across the globe. We shall see.

More angry but peaceful protests are necessary, and some of that seems to be occurring. More Tesla shaming is vital, especially since it’s been so effective. Musk’s power is derived from his wealth – obviously not his skill at anything – and eventually the sinking stock will force him to give up his leadership role at the vastly overvalued automaker or abandon his evil and destructive DOGE campaign to literally destroy our federal government. Tesla’s board members are selling their shares in expectation of further severe declines.

There’s also been a wave of Trump defeats in the courts (today, it was his military trans ban struck down), enough so that he’s whining publicly that judges that rule against his illegal deportation spree must be removed – and Republicans are trying to do just that. Classic dictator shit, and worrisome enough that SCOTUS Chief Justice/Shithead John Roberts was moved enough to issue a rare encyclical that rebuked Trump’s judicial bullying. Not that it amounts to much. Roberts helped Trump achieve his near imperial powers and criminal immunity and only now is he publicly worried the infamous Face-Eating Leopards he helped unleash are about to eat the faces of judges. But Roberts’ statement trying to defend an independent judiciary is more than any of the Republican cuckold eunuchs in the Senate have managed to do or say.

Will Roberts’ little note stop Trump from targeting judges and eventually forcing them off the bench?

Perhaps, but I doubt it. The note is probably not even a bump on Trump’s speed-run effort to secure dictatorial powers. He’s utterly ignoring direct court orders and has doubled down on his series of Constitutional crises. And the repulsive fascist imps that chitter and scurry about the White House continue to whisper to him instructions and encouragement to further dismantle civil liberties, due process, and laws that constrain oligarchs. I can see Trump, echoing the infamous and probably apocryphal Stalin quote about the pope, cynically asking how many divisions the Supreme Court has.

Still, it’s mildly optimistic that the judges are getting angry. We’re in the literal test case period. Will Trump and Musk fold? We’re going to find out more this week.

I have a hard time envisioning a scenario in which Musk fully abandons his reckless and illegal DOGE operation and or in which Trump halts the unconstitutional seizure and removal of immigrants and anyone it feels is an enemy of the regime. They’re even nabbing U.S.-born citizens off the street, and will continue to do so. It’s clear ICE, the FBI, and all other federal security services will follow *any* order from the Trump regime, no matter how illegal or cruel. Due process isn’t on their radars (see below).

That’s where the real trouble may begin. If these raids and efforts to “disappear” people to secret jails and overseas concentration camps, and to keep them from their lawyers and judges, are left unchecked, eventually there is going to be violence. ICE goons are going to raid the wrong house or try to pick up the wrong person, and there will be armed resistance. Agents will be shot and killed.

A lot of people will openly celebrate that. Others will lionize the slain agents as heroes of the regime even if they were kidnapping and torturing innocent Americans and legal visitors.

Perhaps that is the regime’s plan. It’s the sort of morally obscene scenario a swine like Stephen Miller would cook up: Let ICE run lawlessly rampant and provoke people into defending themselves. Then use the killings as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, further suspend due process and the Constitution, and maybe even declare martial law. That allows the regime to deploy its full white nationalist segregationism plans and its vision of dismantling the government to turn American into a profit fiefdom for the Silicon Valley and Wall Street oligarchs, all under an openly fascist police state.

There was a time that writing those sentences would have seemed like Leftist hysterics. That time has passed. The crisis is here. We are living in historic times, the shit that ends up in history books, if free speech manages to endure this clumsy Orwellian regime that also is terribly bungling the domestic and global economy. So again, I am asking: What more can we do? What will get you angry enough to do something?

Will it take sports being canceled to roust most Americans out of their ignorance and apathy? Do NFL and college football games have to be shelved because of a National Emergency? Or will it be Social Security payments being halted or clawed back? Medicare and Medicaid being choked off so that seniors and the poor die in needless misery? Or something more extreme, like the arrival of Third World-style power outages, gas lines, and food shortages amid mass unemployment?

Do we have to descend into hunger, poverty, panic, and boredom? Will it take a new Kent State Massacre? Something worse? We tolerate our school children being slaughtered, so maybe our democracy and our freedoms just get thoughts and prayers?

My fear is that our democracy and norms oxidize into something like Thailand. I spent my honeymoon for a few weeks in June 2014 in Bangkok and Phuket, shortly after the Thai military toppled the civilian government and took control in the latest of a long history of coups d’état.

Life mostly continues as normal across Thailand. A decade ago, when the coup was new, there were some tanks and armored vehicles on the street (the old M-60 tanks I saw had been built in a plant just a few miles from my house in Michigan), with bored young soldiers just standing around like bored young soldiers everywhere have for all for all of history. A few government buildings were sandbagged with troops standing guard, and a curfew shuttered everything at midnight. But during the day and evening, people went about their business. You largely couldn’t tell anything had changed. People went to work, went home, went to shop and to eat and to party or to temples. The scooters and tuk-tuks continued to reign supreme on the streets.

Even prior to the 2014 coup, the Thai people already lived under a 1908 lèse-majesté law that forbids anyone to criticize or insult the constitutional monarchy (or even the king’s pets). The military junta used the lèse-majesté laws among its justifications for the coup to topple the democratically elected national government, and Thai courts have jailed regime opponents under the law for sentences lasting years or even decades.

It’s not hard to see Trump and Musk demanding and getting similar laws here to silence criticism and accountability. Do you see this Senate or Supreme Court preventing that?

Thailand’s capitalism at all levels thrives amid such draconian rules. It’s a beautiful nation with friendly people and they don’t broadly dislike Americans because they do not have a significant history of colonial occupation and Yankee fuckery like other places have endured. Business booms, including the controversial sex tourism trade that attracts legions of Westerners. The famous Kathoey entertainers and the bar girl Connect Four sharks do their thing. Tourist lines are deep at the Golden Buddha and other famous sites. Profit and poverty exist side by side, under the bright sunshine and tropical humidity of a Graham Greene novel.

Thailand is a thriving free-market reactionary Buddhist monarchy run by generals. I can envision of thriving free-market reactionary evangelical dictatorship run by Trumpists here. The tech-fascists openly dream of tax-exempt “freedom cities” that are run by CEO-kings and are exempt from regulation, laws, and civil liberties, creating nothing more than neo-feudalist enclaves were residents are endlessly working tech serfs.

(Aside: This season of Thailand-set “The White Lotus” is far too languid, even with Sam Rockwell’s epic monologue and dong-hanging Jason Isaac handling Chekhov’s gun)

That lack of full civil liberties and free press amid a bustling commercial atmosphere is something I worry Americans would be willing to endure. That they will trade the Bill of Rights to preserve their comfort, their sports, their gambling, their reality TV and superhero movies, their video games, their two-day Amazon Prime delivery, their cheap weed and booze, their SUVs, their fast food. Trump and his allies are well aware of the utility of bread and circuses, but it’s an open question if whether they would fumble the distractions, too. America may only be saved because these people are fucking idiots.

This crisis also reminds me of the Prague Spring in 1968, when Czechoslovakia’s communist government opted to liberalize some policies to permit free speech, uncensored independent media, and legal non-communist opposition parties. It was called “socialism with a human face.” Such reforms rattled the hardliners in Moscow, so the Soviet Union orchestrated a massive invasion that grew to 500,000 troops and hundreds of tanks from several Warsaw Pact allies to crush it all.

Ordinary Czechs protested and gathered by the thousands, but after a week it mostly petered out. Why? The Czech government stayed in power rather than being replaced by a more pro-Russian puppet government (for awhile), and the middle class, aware of Russia’s violent suppression of a similar movement in Hungary in 1956, didn’t want to lose what comfort and privilege they had under the repressive system. So they went home, and the hardliners began their purges amid a process called “normalization.” The Iron Curtain crashed back down on Czechoslovakia.

Certainly that was deeply disappointing, but at least the Soviet invasion and oppression planted the seeds for the successful and largely peaceful Eastern Bloc revolutions of 1989. It also inspired Czech dissident writer Milan Kundera to write “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” that inspired the excellent 1988 film of the same name. Both are worth your time.

This past weekend, both Hungary and Serbia, which have modern versions of right-wing repressive governments, saw massive public demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of opponents of those regimes. The autocrats are rattled and promising repression.

That’s hopeful. When dictators have to call out the police and army in force, they’ve already lost.

And I hope like hell that growing anti-Trump and anti-Musk sentiment continues to expand in the United States. You see some but not much traditional media coverage of it, while on Bluesky you can witness evidence of a deep and growing unhappiness and revulsion from ordinary Americans. And it’s not just about the fucking price of eggs. They’re angry and repulsed by the fascism and chaos they’ve witnessing. They’re scared. But there’s not enough people scared and angry yet.

As mentioned above, people have taken to shaming and protesting Musk’s Tesla business, with genuine success. The stock, which is vital to Musk’s power as human history’s wealthiest dipshit fascist, is steadily tanking with only occasional small rebounds. He’s a fuck-up and vulnerable, even with Trump and his boot-licking dunce attorney general, the useless Pam Bondi, yowling that protest and action against Tesla are illegal and deemed domestic terrorism.

That is what authoritarians do: Label anything they fear and anything critical of them, or that attempts to hold them accountable, as the work of terrorists and subversives and outside agitators that must be silenced and punished. So they’re arrested by masked goons and whisked away. Lawyers and judges cannot help them. It’s frightening and effective. The loss of jobs, family, and freedom can be terrifying, especially when you do not see the Democratic Party doing much to defend us. And institutions like universities are turning on their own students because Trump is illegally withholding funding.

No one is coming to save us. It’s up to us.

There’s zero difference between what Trump’s doing and any shitty totalitarian regime of the past. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Stalinist North Korea, communist China, and everything little third-rate tin-pot dictatorship do the same thing, with the same official impunity. America is just at its dictatorial starting gate. Again, what comes next is up to us.

If you’re wondering how ordinary Germans allowed the Weimar Republic to quickly crumble into Adolf Hitler’s overtly and arrogantly evil Third Reich, it’s this. It’s what is occurring every day, all around us. It’s millions of ordinary Americans being willfully unaware of what’s going on. Or doing nothing. Or worse, they approve of it. Trump’s approval rating, while still under 50 percent, is at an all-time high.

That’s soul-crushing, but won’t last as his policies and chaos eventually come to every doorstep. Still, for all the protests we see, there seems to be an equal number of vindictive oafs and cruel petty tyrants that approve of the regime’s tactics and want more. They celebrate the terror and misery, and will tolerate personal privation and insult as long as they have the freedom to kill their brown-skinned neighbors and use slurs. And even the so-called intellectuals atop the Democratic Party are willing to sacrifice trans people as a sop to gain votes on the Right in a morally doomed effort to regain power.

Fuck that. Fascists can never be satisfied with exterminating one scapegoat. They will not stop with the erasure of trans people. There must always be the looming threat of another bogeyman to keep the masses angry and scared and donating and voting. That’s not just how fascism works, but conservativism generally. It’s the raison d’être for Fox News to exist. Denying trans people their humanity and civil rights today means someone else gets fed into the woodchipper tomorrow. Remember, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were not broadly popular when passed, and MLK was a widely hated figure at the time he was murdered.

Doing the right thing isn’t always the popular thing. The calcified, imbecilic, spineless, and soulless pundits leaders in the Democratic Party still cannot grasp that concept. Empathy and humanity are negotiable to them. Appealing to the ugliest desires of the mob is a moral obscenity, particularly in the ambition for power.

I cannot find the original post, but someone on Bluesky recently wrote that millions of people are functionally no different than ignorant medieval serfs. They approve of a strongman. They want a king. They credulously swallow any insane propaganda (see below). They’re fine with the loss of civil liberties as long as the scapegoat and bogeyman of the moment are being harmed – minorities, liberals, LGBTQ people, women, trade unionists, academics, intellectuals, scientists, doctors, etc. They’ll sacrifice anyone.

The Trump regime’s supporters – from 4chan and Reddit trolls to the openly Nazi Proud Boys to the anti-democracy tech overlords to antivax Facebook cranks to the run-of-the-mill suburban evangelical whites in their red hats – are loud and ugly. But it’s unclear how many are willing to genuinely go to the mat for Trumpism. Do they really drink the Kool-Aid, or are they merely racist and greedy opportunists? Certainly, some will kill and die for MAGA, but many will slink away if things get truly bloody out there.

When Berlin fell in May 1945, lots of ordinary Germans claimed to be underground anti-Nazis. Everyone suddenly was a Hitler hater. I suspect the same will occur on the Right once Trump and his fascist movement are dead.

In the meantime, Orwell’s pigs are in charge.

Now, some categorized thoughts on what’s going on the news recently …

CRUELTY PORN: One of the fascist aesthetics of Trumpism is its official social media accounts publishing images and videos of alleged criminals and immigrants being shackled and led away, often with a snarky comment. This is the law and order appeal, taken to Bull Conner levels. Autocrats get off on such things. The American banality of evil has a particularly cruel patina.

It’s reasonable for any nation to want to rid itself of violent people that have illegally entered the country. But due process is mandatory. After World War II, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan’s leaders were given due process before they were executed, imprisoned, or set free. Due process is what sets us apart from dictatorships and anarchy. It’s the foundation of a civilized civil society, because the innocent are equally at risk when due process is absent.

In unconstitutionally trying to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for use against immigrants, Trump isn’t interested in due process, for anyone. His cheerleaders cannot grasp that the horrors of being “disappeared” eventually will affect them, too.

But it’s more than just due process. It’s also competence.

The alleged Venezuelan gang members flown out of the country to El Salvadorian concentration camps in defiance of a federal judge’s orders – how do we know they’re guilty of crimes? How do we know they even gang members? Because Trump’s lackeys say so? Do you think they’re vetted at all? There’s growing evidence that the rubes in charge of determining who is and who is not a gang member are jailing innocent refugees, asylum seekers, and even mere visitors. Trump’s apparatchiks are lazy, sloppy, and lack compassion. And the regime claims it doesn’t need to present any evidence of guilt.

Remember, this is the same administration that, in its feckless hurry to cripple the federal government, fired the men and women in charge of protecting our nuclear weapons arsenal and had to grovel to them to return (then did more cuts). Why would Trump be given any benefit of the doubt when it comes to immigrants, a class of people he and his ilk openly oppose whether they legal or not?

Fascist incompetence is still fascist, just as bank robbers dressed as circus clowns are still bank robbers. There’s zero reason to trust a single word out of this regime. None. And the Republican Party will rubber-stamp anything Trump and Musk want, so they’re fully complicit in these crimes.

It’s a tragic sinister fact that the Trump regime is disappearing people, which has unfortunate U.S. precedent. First, it was a pro-Palestinian activist living here as a legal permanent resident, with a pregnant American citizen wife, at Colombia University. He was brown-skinned and espoused views many find distasteful, making him an easy target.

But that’s the entire point of the First Amendment. Shitheads like the Klan or Nazis, or decent people critical of dictatorships and genocide, can say shitty things as protected speech unless the words expressly meet the legal definition of violence incitement and terrorism. I have no idea what Mahmoud Khalil actually said, since the government has refused to produce any evidence or even say he committed an actual crime. It’s the lack of due process again.

Without evidence, Khalil is nothing more than a political prisoner.

Do you genuinely believe that critics of Israel’s genocide will be the only people targeted?

I do not. They’re eventually going to try to round up critics of Trump and Musk and their policies. First, critics will be labeled unpatriotic, then called criminals. Trump accused CNN and MSNBC of illegal reporting and called for their suppression (and he is shuttering the Voice of America).

Fuck these Nazi pigs. More of us need to get off our asses and protest and strike before jails and camps are filled with not just Mahmoud Khalil but anyone that dislikes Trump and Musk.

The hour is growing late.

UKRAINE: We have the tarnished New York Times framing the latest Trump-Putin exchanges about ending the war as akin to the Yalta Conference where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin began planning the fate of post-war Europe.

That’s absurd. Ukraine isn’t on the verge of defeat as Germany was in 1945. Ukraine has humiliated Russia on the battlefield, reducing the supposed big-power juggernaut to a brutal meat-grinder reminiscent of World War I’s trench warfare. Ukraine also invaded a small part of Russia itself and still holds that territory. Kyiv’s smaller army has held Moscow’s unprofessional formations of conscripts and ex-inmates to a standoff, and driven them back in many places.

No, this isn’t Yalta. It’s Munich 1938 where Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Édouard Daladier handed ally Czechoslovakia to Hitler without a fight (with Poland and Hungary threatening to take chunks of Czechoslovakia, too). “Peace in our time” is how Chamberlain framed the betrayal. Europe cheered. Another major war was avoided … for less than 12 months. The infamous appeasement effort led directly to Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Germany used Czech military equipment to defeat the Poles, and then to conquer France and drive the British army off the continent in May-June 1940.

That’s all appeasement gets you. In Trump’s case, however, it feels less like appeasement than collaboration. He clearly admires Putin’s iron-fist authoritarianism and certainly favors Russia’s stern and austere culture that criminalizes dissent and liberalism. Russia is a reactionary MAGA paradise, and Trump’s wants some of that action for personal benefit. He certainly isn’t interested in anything beneficial to Ukraine, the source of his first impeachment.

That the Times and other mainstream media continue to frame Trump in stilted, formal, and sane-washing terms is enraging. They’re functionally collaborationists with his growing dictatorial aims, and no amount of supplication will save them from his ire.

That ire will grow worse as Putin continues to humiliate and take advantage of Trump in ceasefire talks, which both Russia and Ukraine will not fully agree to despite Trump’s gross thirst for the Nobel Peace Prize while trying to blackmail Ukraine again.

The time for traditional journalism is dead. The fate of the republic and the free world hangs in balance, and that’s not hyperbole. We have a senile mad king making serious threats to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. He’s relentlessly undercutting NATO. He’s caving to Russia’s demands to neuter Ukraine into a satellite state. He’s wiping his ass with the Bill of Rights and murdering the economy.

Our news outlets need to honestly describe what is going on. Many are not.

DOG WAGGING: Trump’s distractions this week from his domestic terrorism are two pieces of ineffectual low-hanging fruit. One was aerial bombardment of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, which is basically a near riskless foreign policy stunt by Trump to look tough. The other was declassifying and release thousands of additional pages of documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy. So far, nothing of interest. We’re a nation of brain-dead conspiracy theorist, so some loons will probably make baffling and stupid connections, but the fact is that we’re not going to learn anything new because the truth occurred as it was publicly seen in November 1963. But Trump has to deliver to his base. Still sitting on the Epstein stuff, however, since he’s clearly deeply connected to that sordid affair.

DEI: By now, it’s blindingly obvious that a load-bearing foundational element of MAGA is racism, as embodied by both Trump and Musk’s words and deeds. In their latest purge of non-white accomplishment, baseball trailblazer and World War II U.S. Army veteran Jackie Robinson was scrubbed from Department of Defense sites. Also removed, and then restored after outrage, were the Marine Corp’s famous Navajo Code Talkers and a Medal of Honor winner who was Black. This is all because of Trump and his bumbling racist wino defense secretary, who calls honoring men like Jackie Robinson “woke cultural Marxism.” This era is the Confederacy’s revenge.

PROPAGANDA: In his best North Korean sportsjuche, Trump posted that he yet again won a golf club championship. He’s an enfeebled 78-year-old obese man, a likely stroke victim, and has noted for his crude style of play. Shit, an entire book was written on how much he cheats at golf. But state media and his followers absolutely buy his boast that he won the championship, again.

“I just won the Golf Club Championship, probably my last, at Trump International Golf Club, in Palm Beach County, Florida. Such a great honor! The Awards dinner is tonight, at the Club,” he wrote on Truth Social this past weekend.

How much of a boot-licking, brain-damaged supplicant do you have to be to believe this? It’s more evidence that MAGA is a dangerous, stupid cult populated by mean fools.

Trump has spent about a quarter of his latest term playing golf, and it’s estimated to have cost taxpayers more than $18 million. In his first term, his golfing cost American $152 million.

I’m sure Elon Musk and DOGE will crack down on such waste and fraud, right?

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