“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world — bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson (2002)
“This isn’t America! This is un-American!”
[loud wet fart sound]
Nonsense. Rubbish. Hogwash. Bullshit.
This is exactly America.
Some arrogant masked agent of the regime’s paramilitary ethnic cleansing squads murdered an unarmed activist poet on the street in broad daylight and is getting away with it while the MAGA choir sings his praises and smears her as a terrorist.
A man gets angry and kills a woman that didn’t unquestioningly obey him instantly with respect? That’s the most American fucking thing possible.
And it comes on the heels of the U.S. of A invading a country for oil, kidnapping its leader, and promising more of the same in Colombia and Cuba and Mexico and Greenland while the enfeebled senile rapist president proclaims himself god-emperor of the world limited only by his own desires. It’s the return of gunboat diplomacy by gangsters.
Oh, and last night the chairman of the Federal Reserve posted a video accusing Trump of trying to extort him to get interest rates lowered. This is insanity, in real time. The entire federal government is built around extortion and racketeering by drunken bigots and sadists and perverts and child molesters.
The second year of Trump 2.0’s increasingly iron-fisted rule, unshackled from guardrails and law and basic human decency, has been a disaster for the United States and the world. If you’re a Nazi or an arms dealer or an oil tycoon or some other brand of white collar criminal or oafish white nationalist thug, it’s probably a golden age.
For normal human beings these are evil days. We’re seeing the progress we have slowly made being undone by utterly repulsive shitheads.
Most or at least many Americans still subscribe to our founding mythology and the ideals written in ink on those old parchment papers. Wait. Lemme rephrase that: Most WHITE Americans credulously buy into the bullshit. I did for a long time. But non-white people have understood what America really is for more than 400 years, and it’s mostly fraud, racism, and violence in all its forms in the service of a largely white reactionary ruling class. It’s painful but good that the rest of us are slowly awakening to that bitter and brutal reality and something maybe finally can be done to get us back on track to finally living up to the noble promises of equality and liberty in those old documents.
Unless they kill us all first. Orwell’s pigs standing on two legs, with whips in their trotters, are alive and well and on American streets attacking with impunity anyone that opposes them or hurts their feelings. The president of the United States this weekend sanctified the murder of Renee Nicole Good because she was disrespectful to her executioner.
If you don’t respect Cartman’s authority, he’s allowed to kill you.
The sleazy regime said it plans to send to Minnesota hundreds more ICE agents – they’re recruited from the ranks of the Proud Boys and other racist groups, employing Third Reich-style imagery, and given just 40-some days of rudimentary training before being handed a gun and turned loose on the streets with Trump’s personal permission to hurt or kill anyone they want.
Clearly, the administration seeks confrontation so it can bring more violence against its critics and opponents and use the inevitable clashes to suspend civil and human rights. Authoritarians do not abide dissent in any form, and will label every critic a domestic terrorist that must be crushed for national security. And capital will pour billions into fascism at the hint of having to pay taxes.
Many Americans are happily obedient to whatever sociopathic authority is in charge and would turn in Anne Frank without hesitation for a reward or advancement. Loyalist serfs have always plagued humanity. Millions more are just so overwhelmed by trying to survive that they’re barely aware of what’s unfolding across the country. Others just feel helpless in the face of the enormity of it all or just believe it’s someone else’s problem.
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference,” Elie Wiesel said in 1986.
But just as many Americans are willing to put their bodies in the streets to oppose the Trump junta’s Temu stormtroopers. It’s those brave people in the street, absorbing the tear gas and pepper spray and blows from batons and rubber (and now real) bullets, that are America’s true patriots. Not the flag-humping townie oafs cosplaying in camouflage.
Shows of resistance infuriate Trump and his fascist ilk. Not believing their grotesque, feeble lies is the first line of resistance.
Do not be shocked if the upcoming midterm elections are canceled and even martial law declared at the flimsiest pretext and lies. The Trump regime understands it’s likely to lose one or both houses of Congress, and it’s very possible that a Democratic-controlled House and Senate will move to impeach and remove him – and the battle over the independence of the Fed gives that a few additional percentage points likelihood of really happening. Fucking with Wall Street and the donor class eventually will catch up with Trump, unless the financial greedheads believe that they can survive and thrive in a full dictatorship (Hint: The monster eventually consumes everyone and everything, as the German elites eventually discovered in the 1930s and ‘40s).
I’ve been trying to write this essay for a couple of weeks, and each time I am overtaken by tragic events. By the time you read this, Trump and his far-right cronies will likely have moved on to their next sloppy, bumbling crime and wonton cruelty. Maybe it’s an invasion of Greenland and destruction of the NATO alliance. Maybe it’s Bay of Pigs 2.0 in Cuba. Maybe it’s abandoning Taiwan to China. Maybe it’s allowing Russia to annex Ukraine. Perhaps more lurid monuments to Trump’s vanity as we loot and plunder and pillage the world. It could be killing more Americans in the streets and in custody. It’s impossible to tell with these ridiculous fascist shitheads.
President Humbert Humbert at least has dropped the bullshit about drugs coming from Venezuela because what he craves is the oil wealth and he lusts for immortality by way of conquest.
Someone once said that the fall of Rome was most understood by the average Roman when the local bridge or road went out and no one came to fix it. Things that had always been, no matter how imperfect, just … stopped. That’s how the American republic will collapse in a late-capitalism orgy of racist fascism and greed: Shit will just stop working and not get fixed, from the federal level trickling down to the local. Trump already gutted FEMA and told states they’re on their own for natural disasters. Social security and disability checks will stop. VA facilities will close. Mail service will be spotty at best. Big projects will come to a halt. Electricity will become unreliable. Store shelves will grow barren and hellishly expensive. Water and sewage and trash services will be inconsistent. Medicines will grow increasingly hard to access. Internet service will falter. Websites will stop working. Knowledge evaporates. There will be sporadic violence, and nothing is done about it. The cops and fire fighters and EMTs will largely be gone.
Calling 9-1-1 will bring voicemail or no answer at all. But hey, some rich assholes get richer! Did you do your patriotic duty to increase shareholder value? And no taxes! Yay! [dies of typhus from drinking untreated water]
Life will go on worse for everyone in our decaying, corroded empire except the insatiable ultra-wealthy, and even they will live in constant worry and fear that the filthy mobs of hungry, angry peasants, i.e. most Americans, will come for them. So they’ll surround themselves with paid goons to act as their praetorians. They will eventually abandon them, too. But that’s far in the future, and today these shitheads are still among us cracking skulls, shooting people, and violating human rights while a cabal of rich barbarians cheer.
This is the American age of Caligula and Nero.
Without its nuclear arsenal and its enormous fancy military, America would be a second-rate power today. As a nation, we’re rotted: Morally, ethically, politically. Our basic infrastructure like roads and highways and power grids and whole towns and cities are crumbling faster than they’re repaired or replaced. It’s a nation allowing itself to be hollowed out in every way, and its top elected leaders are actively encouraging the decline because it enriches them and their donor class financial patrons. Profit is in endless treatment, not cures. We’re not even bothering with the treatments anymore, literally, as healthcare grows insanely expensive and society turns against vaccines and medicines because they prefer the sweaty conspiracy theories of loud YouTube charlatans selling them horse paste or doomsday snake oil.
America is about short-term gains, fuck the future. As the Michael Jordan meme says: Fuck them kids. The planet is burning up and dying, the seas are warming and poisoned, the air is harder to breathe is so many places … and American politicians and business leaders see only profit opportunities in avoiding fixes. Just a little more deregulation and tax cuts, bro, and it’ll all be better. Bro, I swear! It’ll trickle down this time, bro, I know it.
These are obscene, perverse times, and our society is basically a casino now where the house always wins. Monsters are real. I have no idea how this ends. No one is coming to save us, so it’s up to each of us to do our part to preserve our democracy, our true history, all we have learned with science and medicine and law and human rights.
What’s especially galling is that we *have* made progress on many fronts. Not enough, not quickly enough, but there was measurable progress. MAGA in all its forms exists to roll all of that progress back. I don’t just mean recent progress like legal same-sex marriage, but the Civil Rights Act, birthright citizenship, and anything that threatens what they consider the divine right of white men to rule everyone else. It’s all neatly laid out in Project 2025, a sinister plan to remake America into a modern Confederacy that’s half-way completed in a year.
MAGA wants to return to antebellum America where white Christian men – publicly heterosexual, ahem – rule without question. They will go to any brutal, cruel lengths to achieve their goal of a Confederate Gilead. That’s why their militias are in our streets, terrorizing everyone in their path. They want to hang a gargantuan WHITES ONLY sigh over an obedient America.
I’ve been screaming this for more than a year.
In the 12 months since he regained power, Trump has unleashed America’s demons. We have federal government agencies, taking cues from openly white nationalist ghoul Stephen Miller, tweeting shit that’s basically “The fatherland’s blood must be kept pure from these infidel mongrel races!”
We are poised on the edge of permanent Night. It’s galling because it’s being done by the worst, most embarrassing low-rent, bottom-shelf freaks possible. They, along with our half-assed dipshit new outlets that are increasingly craven courtier state media owned by MAGA-aligned billionaires, are attempting to usher in a new era of imperialism but by racist child molesters. The conquistadors are back, but as sleazy gangsters perverts than can barely read.
You’re not getting benefits that your tax dollars are supposed to pay for because that money is needed to subsidize Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhillips rebuilding Venezuelan oil infrastructure, something expected to cost tens of billions or even hundreds of billions.
Are you not enraged? Do you approve of this shit? Do you like it?
Never forget: As much as you lick the boots of the masked security forces and the rich, they’ll never allow your to wear them. So you might as well join the effort to drive the jackboots back into the sewers.
The United States is on a speed-run toward a violent internal change that feels impossible today, then afterwards will have felt inevitable. But what the change ends up being is up to us. Our grandchildren will ask us, “What did you do during those days?”
What each of us does now will be the answer to that question. I prefer to answer it without shame or dissembling: I fought them on every front possible, online and in the streets.
What will you do? Don’t ponder too long because the hour is later than you think.
“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” — Hunter S. Thompson (1973)
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Unpaid Bills 
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