Oath Keepers escape liability at the Trump regime’s demand: a licence for terror and the preparation for the next insurrection

Reuters

Banana Republic: US judge reluctantly grants DOJ motion to dismiss J6 convictions against several Oath Keepers terrorists. {The Guardian 4 August}

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/04/jan-6-oath-keepers-cases-dismissed

A government now, in effect, in the business of aiding and abetting right-wing terrorism. Another major act of political violence — deadlier than the events of 6 January 2021 — may well lie somewhere on the horizon (sooner rather than later). When it comes, terrorist groups such as the Oath Keepers will play a prominent role in a broader campaign of intimidation directed against Americans who refuse to support this regime. The trajectory of the past decade, and especially since Trump’s return to office, can only result, ultimately, in bloodshed.

I have felt such a moment coming since before Trump's first presidency even commenced: the gradual normalisation of political violence, culminating in demands for personal loyalty to one man rather than to the Constitution or the Republic itself. Many times over and always in a cold sweat and my heart pounding, I have frequently imagined motorcycle gangs, rogue police officers, military personnel willing to ignore their oaths (more than many would care to believe), evangelical zealots, and other assorted malevolents in the #MAGA coalition being encouraged — formally or otherwise — to harass, threaten, and terrorise anybody who does not submit to their will. 

If we cannot at least recognise that the groundwork for both the horrors we have already endured and the greater horrors yet to come hath been deliberately laid — brick by brick and day by day since 2016 — then we have learned nothing from the past ten years. Trump's rhetoric and behaviour are more extreme than ever, and he is an ageing and decrepit man with little left to lose after successfully insulating himself from meaningful legal accountability. Should he conclude that greater chaos serves his interests, nothing in his conduct or character suggests restraint. His most fervent followers — acolytes — have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to excuse anything done by him or in his name. They are complicit motherf**kers, millions upon millions of them.

Terrorism directed against fellow Americans, economic suicide, more wars abroad, disease spreading, civil liberties steadily eroding, infrastructure collapsing, and disorder on every front. What y'all voted for, #Murica.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Freedom does not come with a reimbursement form

generated via ChatGPT

J6 insurrectionists have cost the former United States of America $2.7 billion, and now they want more. {Citizens for Ethics 22 July}

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/january-6ers-cost-taxpayers-2-7-billion-now-theyre-seeking-secret-payouts/

Now they are out to fleece American taxpayers once again. And guess whose side the President and his Department of Justice are on? Certainly not yours — assuming, of course, that one is not a J6 insurrectionist. If any J6 insurrectionists are reading this, kindly remove yourselves from the gene pool, motherf**king thugs. 

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The price of vigilantism

generated via ChatGPT

“A group of Texas protesters convicted of terrorism charges received harsh sentences of at least 50 years in prison Tuesday in a closely watched case that was widely seen as a test case of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.” {The Guardian 23 June}

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/23/prairieland-ice-protesters-texas-sentenced

Four sentences of fifty years, another of seventy, and one of a full one hundred years. These were not mere protesters, as several of them committed extreme acts of vandalism at a detention centre in Alvarado, Texas, and an officer was targeted with an AR-15.

These are not heroes, and vigilantism is not to be celebrated or encouraged. Thus, while I do not wish to condone the heavy-handed actions of the Trump regime and ICE in their treatment of human beings, I cannot shed any tears for these individuals, though I am not entirely convinced that the sentences fit the crimes.

The left-wing militant groups of the 1960s and 1970s were, so far as I can tell, far more organised and did employ violence, yet many of their members ultimately received relatively light punishments, if any at all, and some later found positions in academia. Bill Ayers, for instance, who perhaps should have spent a lifetime in prison, but the world did not spin off its axis because he was released. Patty Hearst, to use another example, would never see the light of day again if that sordid affair went down today.

The testimony in this case revealed that these were largely unorganised, or at best loosely organised, rabble-rousers. These lengthy sentences are thin cover for the regime and its cult followers in the general population to eventually label all dissent under the almost entirely mythical banner of ‘Antifa’, and therefore criminal.

What people need to realise, but are not getting at all, is that there is an absolute chilling effect created by the far right’s ceaseless bemoaning of ‘woke’ bogeymen. Why is it that these right-wing populist types are forever championing freedom of speech, yet spend so much of their time attempting to silence others? Very simply, they care about their freedoms, and not yours or mine.

At some point during the past decade, I do remember, a handful of left-wing radicals did begin calling themselves ‘Antifa’, and a few of those same types used ‘woke’ as a descriptor. A very small number of ideologues, largely concentrated in academia and similar circles, and yet the other side hath successfully used those labels to demonise mainstream liberals, Democrats, anyone to their left, and anyone who criticises their god-king Trump.

It is the ‘you are either with us or against us’ mentality of a movement centred upon a sick man who demands complete loyalty from the citizenry and all around him, and who will go to greater and greater lengths to secure that loyalty as his desperation grows. With millions of dangerous people — cult followers — all too eager to back him up, and most of the general public too tired and cowed to offer any resistance.

And when the #MAGA militias start slaughtering ordinary people left and right, we shall partially have these morons from the far left to blame for helping make it possible.

These are not heroes being sentenced today. They are not to be celebrated, and they are too foolish to realise that they are playing directly into the hands of those who would enslave humanity for their own enrichment (in which they are largely succeeding). Useful idiots for a corrupt government held hostage by international criminals.

Violent thugs are violent thugs, whatever it may be that drives them. The flip side of the same coin as the thugs who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Congratulations. Enjoy thy prison stays.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Premonition: enforced citizen loyalty pledges to Trump are coming to the former United States

generated via ChatGPT

After that public relations catastrophe at MSG on Monday night, I am more convinced than ever that Trump is going to go to drastic lengths to enforce loyalty from the general population. Though he may thrive from confrontation with his chosen media and political enemies, his ego cannot abide by being hated by the masses. I have been having intense visions of this for years, and it came very close to happening, had the January 6 coup attempt succeeded. Now, after ten years, we are nearing the end game and Trump hath never been more wounded. But, we all know what they say about a wounded animal being at its most lethal. He is not going down without a fight, and not without bringing everybody else down with him. Very well could be a forced loyalty pledge that will be universally compulsory, enforced by door-to-door canvassing from an army of Christian nationalist thugs and law enforcement officers. This is going to happen, and most of the gun owners and authorities are going to be backing him. Most will comply in fear of their lives, or because they want fascism (and this is a huge part of the population, no more pretending it is not true). Pray.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Really f**king typical of all you people: #Murica lost its collective bearings over Biden, sits back and does nothing as Trump loses whatever bearings he had left

There is something fundamentally wrong with a populace that, on the one hand, dissolved into a national tantrum in 2024 because the sitting president, a man whose principal defect was the inexorable march of age, appeared momentarily forgetful during a single debate; yet, on the other hand, by late 2025 greets with a shrug the daily unravelling of their self-anointed orange god-king, a visibly deteriorating elder whose lucidity flickers like a faulty bulb.

White, working-class America, by and large (obviously there are plenty of exceptions, just not enough), does not care about competence, mental sharpness, or even basic suitability for office; what they crave and revere is the licence to be as malicious as their hearts incline, unburdened by shame or civic duty. Until 2016, I would have dutifully dismissed the idea as so fantastical and childish that it could not possibly be that simple—but it actually is.

Looking back, so much of the appalling behaviour of so many random people I have been unfortunate enough to know over the years, and the vile ways I myself acted in trying to placate these swine, all makes sense—and yet I am no less staggered. For a bloody decade now, even during the blessed four years when Trump was in exile and a grown man held the helm (a thankless burden, as events made plain), I remain aghast—in a state of perpetual disgust—that so many of you are as wretched, as spiteful, as morally decayed as ever I feared. Nay—far worse.

This nightmare abateth not; it is metastasising. Trump’s devotees will kill—eagerly kill—to enthrone him as dictator-for-life, and nothing in the present climate suggests they will fail. When a nation’s institutions tremble before the phantom of a white, working-class uprising, justice becometh a theatre of cowardice. Were it otherwise, Donald Trump would already be serving a life sentence, accompanied by the entire cohort of witless acolytes who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. And, frankly, by many of those who have enabled, defended, financed, and propagandised this treasonous movement.

Let us not mince words: this sedition endures because the most heavily armed demographic in the country hath anointed Trump as their messiah and awaits only the signal to unleash wholesale bloodshed. Their hatred of the rest of America is so bottomless that what we have thus far witnessed is but the faintest overture.

The Trump regime will order the arrest of Joe Biden, and other high-profile figures deemed as political adversaries, within the coming year. And I expect the public response to be one of mute paralysis—and vigorous approval in many quarters. I likewise anticipate that many of our friends, colleagues, and family members shall begin to vanish, spirited away into the machinery of autocracy… and few will dare speak of it, publicly or privately. Yet through all this darkness, Americans will continue to thunderously proclaim themselves the ‘Land of the Free, Home of the Brave’.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

No more pretences: the majority of the American people either rejoice or shrug their shoulders as the POTUS justifies murder of anyone opposed to him

Imagine but for a moment, if Barack Obama had so much as hinted—let alone declared outright—that a notable conservative or Republican figure had been murdered because his or her deranged slayer had been driven to distraction by the victim’s anti-Obama rhetoric, irrespective of the actual motives or tragic circumstances involved. Imagine, further, one’s disbelief had greater than half the American public responded with a gleeful ‘amen’, or with a shrug of chilly indifference, whilst those who were justly outraged were mocked, dismissed, and threatened with violence. Even a decade ago, in what now feels a more sober age, such a spectacle would have been unthinkable: that an American president would exploit another’s private grief so nakedly in order to menace the roughly forty per cent of the population who oppose him.

We all know precisely what would have followed had this been Obama—or Biden, or Clinton, or even George W. Bush, who long ago fell from favour with the very voters who once rallied behind him in the aftermath of 9/11. But most of all, had it been the black guy. The same #MAGA partisans who now rush to defend Donald Trump’s grotesque exploitation of the deaths of Rob and Michelle Reiner—using their passings as a blunt cudgel to chill political dissent—would be marching through the streets with torches and pitchforks, bellowing (rightly, in that hypothetical) of tyranny and persecution. They know it; we know it; the hypocrisy is so brazen it scarcely troubles itself to counterfeit disguise.

Nay, now it doth not hide at all. Beginning in earnest with the January 6 insurrection, accelerating through the 2024 presidential election and the rise of the ‘manosphere’ that presently poisoneth the hearts and minds of young men at scale, and culminating in Trump’s return to office, #MAGA hath cast off any remaining pretences. What remains is an unambiguous supremacist movement: racial, gendered, and theocratic in equal measure. Roughly sixty per cent of the population is being mobilised—a fair number actively, but more commonly by enforcing passivity and apathy—against the approximate forty per cent of us who resist this nation-killing and soul-killing frenzy. I should like to claim some residue of optimism, yet truthfully I cannot summon the least glimmer of it.

We inhabit a profoundly dark chapter of national life when a majority of the public either tolerates or actively revels in a president willing to rationalise the killing of individuals on account of their political persuasions (or, more to the point, that they hurt his little feelings). We are no longer poised at the brink of the abyss; we have passed within its gate. Trump and his coterie manipulate the American populace with the effortless virtuosity of a master fiddler, and mass bloodshed—spontaneous and orchestrated—is not hypothetical, but imminent.

Most disquieting of all is the truth that remains largely unspoken—though I shall articulate it plainly: many of you reading this are not dreading what comes next. NO… you eagerly await it! For forty-eight humiliating years upon this benighted planet I have sensed, however dimly, that most of you are, at your core, rotten and malign; yet I lacked the vocabulary, the conceptual framework, to name the malignancy. Now I can. And I know, with no small measure of grim consolation, that many others have come to the same conclusion regarding people in general… yet I am entirely alone in my recognition and pain.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Trump post making himself the subject of the tragic murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner tells us all we need to know: he urgently must depart office

As matters stand, the millions of bullies, partisans, and sundry miscreants who idolise Donald Trump will not permit him to be removed from office, and the opposition remains far too cowed by their wrath to act decisively. The four years of Merrick Garland’s diffident stewardship of the Department of Justice demonstrated plainly enough that even the US government, law enforcement, and military are scared of a mass uprising of the coalition of the ‘unwashed’ that enabled Trump to come to power. Yet the necessity of casting him from power could not be more urgent. Were Melania anything other than a spent and useless trophy wife, or had any power over anything whatsoever, she would be seeking immediate and appropriate care for her visibly ailing, elderly husband. Instead, the nation is left in the hands of an unstable, deranged figure who leadeth us, step by step, towards the very pits of Hades.

The millions of my fellow Americans who voted for him—especially those of you who did so a second time in 2020 in the middle of COVID, and most tellingly a third time in 2024 (granted, the opposition’s betrayal of President Biden yielded a wretched and pitiful alternative)—ought to have both their heads and hearts examined. FULL STOP! Folk must grow a spine and demand, en masse, that this man resign for the good of whatever remains of the country. They must also call upon the legions who still profess loyalty to him to relinquish the fantasy at last: they backed a loser; they encouraged cruelty; they have erred grievously; and they cannot forever lay blame upon others for their (largely) self-inflicted miseries and myriad failures.

Whatsoever the cost, the rest of us must take a true and resolute stand against those among us who have enabled this degeneration—at the very least since his grotesque mishandling of the most severe public-health crisis in over a century, which he then compounded by fomenting a coup attempt when the election did not go his way. Nay, the reckoning ought to have begun in 2016, when he mocked a disabled reporter on national television. That moment told us all we needed to know about his character, yet millions revealed the poverty of their own by embracing him nonetheless.

And even now—after the passage of a number of years, after the catastrophic failures, after the felonious convictions, after all said and done (or not done)—they double down repeatedly, not from conviction but from spite, for to afflict the rest of us hath become their only animating purpose. The rest of us must, urgently and collectively, cultivate a backbone and cease tolerating this madness: whether from the president himself or from every soul that hath aided him across this ill-starred decade.

Enough.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Blue wave? 2025 off-year elections in the former United States: false hope, and the ballad of a dying democracy

image generated via ChatGPT

Honest question: how elated ought we truly to be that the Democrats have swept a smattering of off-year elections held almost entirely in a few blue and blue-leaning states and districts? I do not relish being perpetually the voice of gloom—though, as an independent, I am happily no mouthpiece nor cheerleader for the Democratic Party, particularly after the disgraceful manner in which President Joe Biden was treated by his own. Far more vital than my opinion of that ineffectual rabble, however, is the task of subduing and removing from power the Christian-nationalist populists and other right-wing zealots who enable our criminal president and have debased the GOP. None of that, not even a faint suggestion of it, occurred on Tuesday.

Indeed, in one instance—namely the election of an actual Marxist zealot as Mayor of New York City (as opposed to the traditional liberal who routinely gets mislabeled as such by right-wing twats)—they have very likely galvanised the #MAGA base. You should have voted for Cuomo, citizens of Gotham. This Zohran Mamdani fellow is becoming the new emblem of why the Democratic Party can no longer command majority support in the former United States, even under the most propitious of circumstances.

How many times over the past decade have we thought something along the lines of, “Right, this is it—at last, the Trump farce is finished; he’s going down this time”? Even on the single occasion when he was genuinely defeated—the presidential election of 2020—we were denied any true sense of vindication, for Trump spent the remainder of his term propagating demonstrably false allegations of electoral fraud, before proceeding to mount a coup attempt (albeit a botched and lamentably inept one). And yet, scarcely a soul speaks of it now.

In any other era of American history—or indeed in any other modern, civilised democracy—he would have been charged with sedition and condemned to hang. Jair Bolsonaro now languishes in a prison cell for attempting the same stunt in Brazil. Plain and simple, it was an act beyond criminality, and yet not even the faintest slap on the wrist was administered to Donald Trump in the four years between his reigns of terror. If the American people could not bring themselves to compel their populist folk hero to face justice under a Democratic administration—and make no mistake, the reason that administration did next-to-nothing to stop Trump was because of fear of a mass uprising by the growing ranks of armed rednecks and assorted yokels that are holding all of us hostage—there is ZERO possibility whatsoever of it now that the tyrant has been restored. The US presidential election of 2024 represented the public’s tacit endorsement of sedition and decay—with a conspicuous torrent of old-fashioned American racism. Still, this truth is almost universally dismissed—shrugged off—even by many who claim to detest Donald Trump, and most stridently of all by those whose silence rings the loudest.

A principal reason—the predominant one—that this nightmare has persisted for so long is that the average white American despises the Democratic Party. Whatever electoral victories the Democrats secure at the national level following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 are almost invariably the product of exceptional circumstances or catastrophic failures on the part of the GOP: Watergate; the manifold disasters of the Bush 43 presidency—the Iraq War, the calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina, and the economic collapse of 2008; and, of course, one man’s historically deranged and criminally negligent mismanagement of a global health crisis in 2020. Yet every one of these transgressions by Republicans is swiftly forgiven by the American people. The electoral reckoning of 2008 gave way, within two years, to a Republican landslide in congressional races; and in 2024, Donald Trump was received once more with open arms by an adoring white-majority public that wanted nothing whatever to do with being governed by a black woman—and it scarcely helped that the woman in question possessed neither charisma, integrity, nor honour, nor any genuine solutions to anything. But that is a tale for another time.

The Democrats control very little beyond the major cities and a miniscule number of states with Democratic super-majorities in their legislatures, yet we are expected to believe that a Democratic wave is imminent in 2026 because they secured the governorships of two states that are reliably blue in presidential contests, and because an extremist on the party’s fringes captured the mayoralty in perhaps one of many five-to-ten municipalities—large or small—out of approximately 20,000 in the entire nation that would entertain such a candidate. When will we learn not to count our chickens before they hatch?

Indeed, my instinct tells me the GOP will enjoy a resounding year in the 2026 mid-terms, even as everything collapses around us and Trump’s dementia-fueled buffoonery continues to stun and amaze. He mishandled the gravest public-health crisis in a century and then blundered through a half-baked coup attempt; at present, millions go without sufficient food because he is toying with their benefits for political sport. Yet upwards of sixty per cent of Americans either cheer him on or avert their gaze, while most of the remaining forty-ish per cent dash about like headless chickens, either vainly attempting to halt this fascistic delirium or just avoid suffering a nervous breakdown.

Add to that the gerrymandering and other institutional barricades now entrenched by Republican legislatures across most states, and the alarming speed at which young men are being radicalised and politicised within the online Manosphere, and one begins to discern the outline of an electoral bloodbath—one that shall greatly delight the orange god-king and effectively transform the former United States into one-party rule. ALL OF THIS is both enabled and sustained by tribalism, not reason, nor any sincere concern for the nation’s welfare by the majority of its citizens. The American people no longer yearn to heal their country; the majority do not even bother to vote, but they do yearn to hurt and kill one another.

This spirit of evil and bloodlust was simply not in the air when I was young, in the 1980s and 1990s. There were plenty of racists, though they were almost always discreet about it and sometimes semi-apologetic when such views were expressed in private conversation, even among exclusively lily-white people. At least that was my experience growing up in the greater Boston area of Massachusetts. There were always problems: crime, poverty, pollution, corruption, religious zealtory—but citizens and authorities were a lot more level-headed about addressing these maladies. It was a far less ideological age, but the clear beginning of the end came on 11 September 2001. We never recovered from that day—and we shall never recover from having permitted a crooked property magnate and television showman, beholden to sworn enemies of the United States in Moscow, to occupy the presidency.

No, a so-called ‘blue wave’ is not coming, so let us be realistic and cease giving ourselves false hope; nothing in this rotten world wounds more deeply than hope betrayed. There is no crueller evil one may visit upon oneself. Please, stop doing this to yourselves. It is over but for the shouting. We must now turn our thoughts towards bare survival. And if I am wrong, then so be it. It is far safer to presume the worst in all things, for thus one is spared the full weight of disappointment—and may even feel a flicker of relief when events prove only half as dire as feared. —Arthur Newhook, 7 November 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Cognitive decline & the cult of the blithering idiot: how Trump and his #MAGA mob won infallibility as the world burns

Reuters

{Daily Beast 29 May} Noted speech expert declares that Trump is in cognitive decline.

And where are all the media and general public that were hand-wringing and panicking over President Biden’s (real or perceived) feebleness now? Once again, this orange motherf**ker gets a pass from the American populace. The most privileged American to have ever lived – and who, precisely, is responsible for allowing that? As H.L. Mencken said all the way back in 1920: “On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” Another quote of his: “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” Even he’d shudder at today’s cult of a blithering idiot, where white masses worship a conman and rage at any hint of dissent.

Ten bloody years, the remaining sane folks of this country have been harangued and harassed by this conman and his legion of followers. Not one single person in the entire history of this polyglot nation has ever been granted such consistent immunity from accountability. Indeed, no other person would have ever gotten away with fomenting an insurrection. And he got away with it because, I believe, the halls of power are scared to death of a violent uprising by rednecks, hillbillies, theocrats, and other assorted right-wing factions. Nobody has ever been more coddled than Trump, and the ordinary goobers who dominate these former United States, who are all around us, are to blame. When this is all said and done, I pray every last one of them faces some measure of accountability for being so deluded, even if their leader never does. —Arthur Newhook, 29 May 2025. 

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 on X-TWITTER, and at the same handle on FACEBOOK. BLUESKY - @arthurnewhook.bsky.social. REDDIT - https://www.reddit.com/r/StopTheIdiocracy/new/. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED at https://tinyurl.com/ArthurNewhook.

One in three NCAA men's and women's basketball players faced abuse from bettors, including death threats, during this year’s tournaments

Angel Reese. Photo: Getty Images

NCAA: 1 in 3 star athletes receive abuse, threats by bettors {ESPN 5/18}

Methinks I am not sufficient of a constitutional scholar to know if the federal government hath any legitimate authority to regulate gambling, and I generally do despise any nanny state tendencies I detect in others. All said, I really do hate gambling. Years ago, I laboured in gas station convenience stores and felt like a glorified drug pusher with all the scratch tickets I did sell to Massholes. Most of the folk buying them were downright pathetic, but I digress. Furthermore, I have long turned a blind eye to gambling in my waning enthusiasm for horse racing, knowing that it hath always been the lifeblood of the industry. Yet, for the life of me, I shall never understand why any individual would desire to play with money. It maketh absolutely no sense.

Absolutely nothing of goodly import is emerging from the explosion of legalised sports betting currently taking place. When combined with the endemic, regressive, and all-pervading hatred raging in the United States at this time, it doth create a deadly combination. The ESPN article notes that female collegiate basketball players are about thrice more likely than their male counterparts to receive abuse. One day, somebody is going to get killed, but it will not matter to the puissant interests invested in the commons casting away coin they cannot afford to lose. It ought to go without saying, this is beyond shameful and yet another sign, among thousands, that the people of #Murica are, in laymen’s terms, losing their s**t.

Alito J6 controversy ‘another blow for Supreme Court under fire’ - Lifetime tenure for Justices was a huge error of foresight by our nation’s founders. {AP 5/17}

President Biden signs a significant aviation safety and airline reform bill into law. {Reuters 5/16}

Cost of living crisis. Suze Orman warns ‘If you don’t have at least $5 million or $10 million, don’t retire early’. {Yahoo! 5/16}

Copyright 2024, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 and @FloydEtcetera on X, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, BLUESKY - @arthurnewhook.bsky.social, and @arthurnewhook on POST. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED at https://tinyurl.com/ArthurNewhook.

#OTD 1923: The infamous Beer Hall Putsch unfolded in Munich, a foreshadowing of what is happening to #Murica today

Bundesarchiv

#OTD 1923: The infamous Beer Hall Putsch unfolded in Munich, a Nazi coup d’etat bid against the Weimar government, quelled by the next day. Yet, its chief plotter, Adolf Hitler, was foolishly sentenced to but five years in prison, and freed after a mere nine months. No need to recount what followed, for we all ken the horrors that came to pass when this madman seized power in 1932. Or do we? For in our dear #Murica today, a leader who, in office, too led a failed coup, yet faces no true justice for his sedition and treachery, at most, a mere slap on the wrist. Clearly, America and much of this world hath not well heeded the lessons of history. Willful ignorance and malice that led so many in Germany to embrace Hitler, and the same holds true today in America with Donald Trump and his adherents. In 2024, cast thy vote as if thy lives and nation hang in the balance, for truly, everything is at stake this time.

Copyright 2023, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 and @FloydEtcetera on X, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, and @arthurnewhook on POST and THREADS.

Putin's cruelty upon Ukraine backfires onto Russians; Remembering Queen Elizabeth II, and a lot more from September

DEATH OF HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II

Queen Elizabeth dies at 96; Britain’s longest-serving monarch. {NYT 9/08} 

King Charles III says he feels 'weight of history which surrounds us' in first address to parliament as monarch. {Sky News 9/12}

J.D. Tuccille: Maybe a constitutional monarchy can show the way to a less powerful state - ‘Harmlessly satisfying an appetite for pomp while threatening nobody's liberty is a decent attribute for any institution.’ {Reason 9/12}

Prince Andrew heckled by protester along the procession from Holyrood Palace to St. Giles’ Cathedral -  Not condoning what Prince Andrew *allegedly* did (which should go without saying) but that little puke in Edinburgh yelling ‘dirty old man’ during the middle of a funeral procession deserves a good thrashing. Not the time and place. {Sky News 9/12}

Anti-monarchist arrests spark criticism in Britain - Seeing there are some extremely over-the-top fabrications being spread online - best I can tell, mostly by Americans - alleging that British citizens were being arrested for speaking out against the monarchy. Cut the crap: These individuals - of which there were only a scant few out of millions of Britons - were not detained for their precious ‘free speech,’ but for disorderly conduct. A criminal offense even in a country of loud and belligerent imbeciles such as America. Disorderly conduct: Meaning, one is expected to conduct themselves properly and respect others while out in public, especially during a time of mourning. We know that many people have lost all perspective and common sense when acting like a monkey in public is demanded to be a fundamental human right. Crying ‘tyranny’ when there is none is a grave insult to those individuals in this world who are suffering real oppression and deprivation. {France 24 9/13}

WATCH: Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in full. {Sky News 9/19}

Andrii Marienko

PUTIN’S WAR OF AGGRESSION AGAINST UKRAINE

Putin announces partial mobilization, Russia’s first since World War II, and threatens nuclear retaliation in escalation of his war on Ukraine. {The Guardian 9/21}

Leading Russian economist warns his nation’s economy will ‘die by winter’ as a result of the mobilization - No scenario now where Russia can avoid catastrophe, such is the path their insane leader has taken. {Fortune 9/26}

A ‘bald-faced land grab based on lies.’ Putin announces Russia will be illegally annexing Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. {AP 9/29}

Open anti-semitism on the rise in Russian state media as war effort falters. {Jerusalem Post 9/29}

Mass grave discovered in the liberated town of Izium; over 400 bodies found. {DW 9/15}

Russians murder civilians out of desperation as they retreat from numerous Ukrainian towns, a direct violation of the Geneva Convention - Declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism and Putin a war criminal, starting yesterday! {Business Insider 9/13}

Liberated villages describe Russian troops dropping rifles and fleeing. {WaPo 9/11}

Russian reservists 'told to find their own first aid supplies' - Putin cannot even provide basic supplies for his troops, forcing these men to leave home and making them pay out of their own pockets for the privilege. {The National News 9/30}

Leo Correa/AP

Confirmed number of Russian equipment losses in Ukraine greater than the total inventory of the UK, France, or Germany - The key word there being ‘confirmed,’ as real losses are believed to be substantially higher. Ukrainians have captured and repurposed many of these vehicles, and possess intimate knowledge of their workings. Frankly, it is stunning to see what was a feared military being exposed as a paper tiger, while Ukraine is showing itself to be one of the world’s great fighting forces. But a wounded animal is the most dangerous one: Russia’s only chance of winning this war will be to resort to the unthinkable - the only leverage they have left - and Putin flat-out told the world this past week that he will use all means of destruction at his disposal. {Yahoo! 9/23}

Sham referendums calling for annexation to Russia held in four Donbas regions under partial Russian occupation, residents forced to vote at the barrel of a gun. {Reuters 9/23}

Ordinary Russians stuck between a rock and a hard place: Estonia warns Russian nationals they will be banned from the EU if they answer Putin’s draft notices; meanwhile, Finland is set to ban Russian tourists from entry. {Sky News 9/24}

Citizens in the country of Georgia protest against allowing in more Russian dissenters. {AFP 9/28}

U.S. intelligence: ‘Russia is looking to address the shortage of troops in part by compelling soldiers wounded earlier in the war to return to combat, recruiting personnel from private security companies and even recruiting from prisons.’ {AP 8/31}

‘Germany has announced a €65bn (£56.2bn) package of measures to ease the threat of rising energy costs, as Europe struggles with scarce supplies after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.’ {BBC 9/04} 

Despite not having a shred of proof, Russia formally presses for investigation in Geneva on whether the U.S. violated the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention by placing bio weapon labs in Ukraine. {NYT 9/04}

At least twenty-three civilians dead and twenty-eight wounded following Russian missile attack on convoy of cars in Zaporizhzhia. {Reuters 9/30}

Putin always chooses escalation - A quote on the mood in Russia: ‘People are ready to lead their children, husbands and sons to the slaughter. It’s downright evil… People don’t need therapists anymore; they need psychiatrists.’ {The Moscow Times 9/29}

Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images

Bret Stephens: Ukraine’s achievement is President Biden’s, too - The White House has been ‘providing Ukrainians with the kind of battlefield intelligence that enables them to maneuver, target, strike and evade in ways they otherwise couldn’t.’ Untold numbers of Ukrainian lives have been saved, and much infrastructure spared, because the Ukrainian military is receiving much of the firepower needed to repel the invaders (though more is needed still.) If the Ukrainian military were not composed of some of the world’s fiercest and most determined fighters, and if Western nations were not providing aid and support, Putin *would* have achieved his stated goal of taking over Kyiv in mere days. Just imagine how emboldened Putin would be had his forces secured the quick victory that he was counting on. Poland, the Baltic Republics, and perhaps Finland would all possibly be under attack by now. All of whom are either current or likely soon-to-be NATO countries; meaning all of NATO would be obligated to enter the fray and, with it, the start of World War III. Yet, most #Muricans haven't a clue as to what is at stake, and millions are embracing Putin and Ukrainophobia (funny, since most couldn’t point out Ukraine on a map or know a damn thing about the place other Trump and company told them it is a ‘Nazi’ state ostensibly housing secret U.S. bioweapon labs.). I never cease to flabbergasted these days; but back in normal times (say, prior to the mid-2000s and the backlash against the ‘neocons,’ and before Putin’s propaganda machine was up-and-running in earnest) the country would have understood the stakes and have acknowledged their president is doing his part to prevent armageddon. But #Muricans today are too busy arguing over a cartoon character’s skin color, whining about gas prices, and banning classic novels from school libraries because some lilly white kids may feel bad after learning the actual history of this country. What a disgrace. Glory to Ukraine! {NYT 9/13}

GEOPOLITICS

Mikhail Gorbachev is laid to rest in Moscow; Vladimir Putin does not attend the ceremony. {Times of Israel 9/03}

Putin and the Saudis conspire to prop up global oil prices - Just keep on being the great Americans you all claim to be, #Cult45; blaming President Biden for high gas prices even as all evidence points toward America’s mortal enemies as the culprits. {NYT 9/14}

‘President Biden’s nominee to take over the U.S. military’s nuclear arsenal and missile-defense operations warned on Thursday that China’s rise as a nuclear power poses historic threats and challenges requiring a reevaluation of current policies.’ {WaPo 9/15}

UK: Liz Truss wins Conservative Party leadership race, will take over as Prime Minister - Can this one be trusted to stand up to Vladimir Putin as strongly as Boris Johnson has? Time will tell, but my gut says Labour will be back in power sometime in the near-future. {BBC 9/05}

British Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announces a controversial tax cut package, and the UK pound sterling promptly falls to a 37-year low. {DW 9/23}

Reuters

Italy elects right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni as its leader - Giorgia Meloni: A name we’re going to be hearing a lot of, and decidedly a bit easier on the eyes than Mussolini. As is the case with just about every neo-Fascist movement in today’s world (including and especially #Cult45 in the U.S.), Meloni and her supporters insist they are ‘conservatives’ and take offense at being labeled for what they really are; even as they lap up and circulate every conspiracy theory thrown out there, and even as they endlessly rage against immigrants and persist in extreme natalism. Likely to become Italy’s first woman leader, and almost certainly its most dangerous since the aforementioned ‘Il Duce.’ Let it be noted that this one is very much on the radar of #Cult45 leaders, having appeared at CPAC and at the National Prayer Breakfast. A severe warning to this duplicitous woman, and to the Italian people: We are not going down this route again, and there are going to be severe consequences if you step out of line. {Ruth Ben-Ghiat, The Atlantic 9/23}

Spanish Foreign Minister on Giorgia Meloni’s victory in Italy: ‘Populism always ends in catastrophe’ - Truer words have rarely been spoken, yet human beings never learn their lesson. {SBS News 9/26}

The European Parliament declares Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is no longer a democracy, but an ‘electoral autocracy’ - Another reminder that this is the model the GOP and #Cult45 openly wishes to impose on the United States. {New Voice of Ukraine 9/15}

Teacher shortages in Hungary and Poland - Borderline theocratic governments that have put so many restrictions on teachers, and pay them so poorly, that nobody wants to teach anymore. Sound familiar? I wonder how these governments, and the GOP in #Murica, are going to explain it to their nativist citizens, in about ten years or less, when they’re being forced to recruit teachers and medical personnel en masse from wherever they can be found - India, the Orient, sub-Saharian Africa - just to keep the schools and hospitals running. {AP 9/03}

The U.S. Treasury places sanctions on Iran’s so-called ‘morality police’ following the death of a young woman in their custody and subsequent mass protests in Tehran. {Reuters 9/22}

Argentina: VP Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner unharmed after point-blank assassination attempt. {Reuters 9/02}

Getty Images

POLITICAL S**TSHOW IN #MURICA

President Biden calls out Trump supporters for conducting themselves as Fascists; Trump supporters so enraged they immediately set out to prove the president correct with death threats, calls for violence - As hard as it for my cynical self to believe, maybe there are a subset of #Cult45 that are being sincere in their rage over being called out by the president. Perhaps they really don’t realize what they’ve become or fully understand what it is they are supporting. Perhaps, as ridiculous as it appears to even consider, they really are naive and haven’t figured out that this whole Trump thing has basically been nothing more than a giant ‘f**k you’ from a large plurality of the nation to the rest of it, right from the moment Donald Trump came on the political scene. Trumpism is certainly not any sort of valid governing philosophy, but merely an endless airing of grievances. Populist types all around us - left and right - run purely on emotion and almost never on logic, and that’s a big part of how we got to this place. It has long been my experience in life that the willfully ignorant, bullies, and other assorted reprobates never appreciate being called for what they are. (Perhaps, to be fair, I’ve even been among those reprobates at certain times and places, but never when it came to Trump: The record shows I recognized he and his cult for what they were well prior to him receiving the GOP nomination in 2016; yes, I am proud of this and will boast, yet am also supremely frustrated and sickened that six f**king years later we are still having to argue with these people over the bloody obvious.) In some cases it is because they haven’t come to terms with reality, but with most of these people it is just plain gaslighting and bullying. ‘I’m not touching you!’ Most of #Cult45 are plenty aware of what they are, but rarely will most any admit it. Maybe some are very internally conflicted, but let me not risk giving anybody too much credit here. The point is, if gaslighting the rest of us wasn’t so much fun and remained so effective, perhaps they would just proudly admit they are Fascists by now. Beginning with Trump himself. Any and all pretenses are disappearing in spite of their denials, and will continue to do so. In the meantime, those of us who don’t need a national daddy figure should nonetheless be grateful we have a man in the White House vowing to defend the constitutional republic at a time when it hasn’t been under this level of internal threat since the 1850s. {Yahoo! News 9/02}

Trump vows pardons, government apology to Capitol rioters if elected - The man is openly and boldly claiming that he is financially supporting some of the defendants (whether that is actually true or not, Lord only knows), that the attack was not a crime or an act of insurrection, and that judges are merely being ‘mean’ to said defendants out of spite. Yet, we’re supposed to believe he did not coordinate January 6, and wanted to call in the National Guard before hand, but Speaker Pelosi stopped him; or that the rioters were far-left agitators posing as ‘conservatives,’ or whatever crap excuse or conspiracy theory any given #Cult45 member is spewing on any given day? When people are going to absurd lengths to defend blatant absurdities, it is because they’re desperate for ‘protection,’ such as it is, against a society they hate and believe has failed them. Virtually all Donald Trump supporters at this late stage know exactly what he is and what they’ve become (Fascists), but they continue to double down and stay loyal because this man gave them license to openly hate you and I - anybody who does not share their populist worldview, anybody who they perceive as weak, anybody who live lifestyles they do not approve of, anybody who is not a white Christian. Hurting the other half of society is paramount to everything, and bullying, intimidation, and gaslighting are their modus operandi. They’ll continue to keep spitting in the face of reality, and they will play up their phony indignation at being called ‘Fascists’ to the hilt, because they have no respect for the majority of their fellow citizens’ intelligence. It cuts a lot deeper than simply a lack of respect: As long as human beings exist, the innate desire to dominate others will be with us. As will charismatic charlatans who stand ready, willing, and waiting to take advantage of malcontents for the sake of self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment. In other words, Trump and #Cult45 really do deserve one another, and deserve to fall together. {WaPo 9/01}

Former AG Barr: No ‘legitimate reason’ for Trump to have had classified documents in his possession. {WaPo 9/02}

Former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb: ‘I believe former President Trump to be a deeply wounded narcissist, and he is often incapable of acting other than in his perceived self-interest or for revenge.’ {CBS News 9/09}

Former U.S. attorney details how the Trump-era DOJ pressured him to bring cases against Trump’s enemies in new book - Good going, #Cult45. You elected a man who, at every turn, used or attempted to use taxpayer dollars to settle personal grudges. That anybody is still conned by such an obvious conman, or wishes to play along with the con, makes my Anglo-Saxon blood boil. {ABC News 9/12}

Trump allegedly offered the West Bank to Jordan’s King Abdullah II, in spite of having no authority to do so. {Insider 9/14}

Author Luke Mogelson on the far-right, the militia movement, and the threat of Trumpism - The pity party never ends. Appealing to grievances and crying oppression are timeless and nearly-foolproof ways tyrants win popular support. Populist movements always collapse in time, but only after causing great damage to their countries. History has shown this repeatedly, but #Muricans are really not very good students of history. {Lit Hub 9/12}

Mass. woman charged with making fake bomb threat to Boston’s Children Hospital, motive being some sort of misinfo and/or disinfo on the hospital’s transgender surgery program - Do not let them or anyone else sugarcoat it: #Cult45 is quite invested in demonizing, and even terrorizing, various sectors of society. Not just liberals, blacks, or illegal aliens, but anybody at all deemed to be a threat to their largely-fictional and feeble-minded conception of the American way of life. They seem particularly determined to make transsexuals and homosexuals the Jews to their Nazis. An ancient prejudice that will never die so long as individuals feel confusion and shame about their personal identities. Or, for that matter, as long as people are incorrigible busybodies and self-righteous moralists. When was the last time we’ve heard these people rage against Islamist terrorists, the murderers who slaughtered close to 3,000 Americans on that fateful day in 2001? Maybe about 2014, 2015 when ISIS was at the peak of its reign of terror and Obama was still in the White House? Not anymore, as now they’re too busy raging against their fellow Americans. Anyone who isn’t completely in lockstep with their nationalist populist pity party and doesn’t march in lockstep with their orange demagogue is viewed as an enemy of the state. A large plurality of society has been radicalized, with their mission being to dehumanize the rest of us. How can such a brainwashed and hate-filled force ever be reasoned with? I fear especially for all of the LGBTQ folks, for they’re in greater danger than even most of them likely realize. Furthermore, a lot of people who are not gay, lesbian, or trans are going to be falsely accused and targeted. All Hades is breaking loose, and if I had the means I would have been gone from this collapsing country several years ago. {WBUR 9/15}

Right-wing media figures claimed bomb threat against Boston Children’s Hospital was a false flag up until the FBI named a suspect - A rudimentary but effective tacit of disinfo agents anytime there is an ‘inconvenient’ occurrence (for lack of a better way of putting it): Just cry ‘false flag’ and ‘fake news,’ and millions will follow your lead. Never mind facts, never mind evidence, the narrative is all that matters to propagandists, bigots, zealots, and hopeless partisans. {Media Matters 9/16}

Sandy Hook parents describe the horrifying impact of conspiracy theories and lies accusing them of being ‘crisis actors’ in alleged government plot to revoke Second Amendment rights - Alex Jones is fortunate he will only have to pay monetary damages, and his acolytes who sent death threats to grieving parents will not face justice. In a sane and moral country, they’d all be in prison, or hanging from the gallows. {NYT 9/29}

Man who pinned D.C. police officer in door frame during January 6 riot convicted of seven felonies. {CBS News 9/13}

Totally not a cult: Man murdered wife, shot daughter after being sucked down ‘Q rabbit hole.’ {Daily Beast 9/12}

Fear of violent crime and mass shootings leads to a massive drop in the number of Chinese citizens planning to visit the United States - And I don’t think the Chinese are the only ones staying away in droves. {South China Morning Post 9/13}

Javier Cruz Acosta/Shutterstock

#Murica: ‘If current trends continue, Christians could make up less than half of the population, and as little as a third, in 50 years’ - Any wonder why people are turned off when 95% of the purported ‘Christians’ in this sick country so gullibly follow a world-class a**hole and decidedly non-Christian conman as their protector? While also working overtime to silence opposition and impose Fascism on the rest of us? If this is supposed to be who ‘Jesus’ is, then naturally normal people are not going to want anything to do with that guy or his followers. No more than they would want anything to do with the Prophet Muhammad after witnessing decades of Islamic Jihad around the world (exactly the path these heretics are going down; J6 was just a start.) {WaPo 9/13}

Louisiana gym teacher accused of offering $5.00 to students to beat up a classmate - A woman, no less. I do not know if this was a Trump supporter (it is the South, so highly possible), but this is a prime example of the atmosphere of cruelty, degradation, criminality, and immorality Donald Trump has - more so than anyone else - made acceptable in the United States. A grown adult putting out a hit on a child, get me the hell off of this sinking ship: The USS #Murica. {Shreveport Times 9/14}

Trump-endorsed election denier wins GOP Senate primary in New Hampshire - Even here in the liberal Northeast, Republican voters are putting on their tin-foil hats and goose-stepping toward Fascism. {NYT 9/14}

Trip Advisor

Planeload of Venezuelan and Colombian migrants arrives at Martha's Vineyard Airport, and Florida’s governor takes credit for sending them - Here’s an idea. Since these yahoos consider all migrants to be dangerous criminals - which some of them inevitably will be; I’m not advocating for wide open borders and universal amnesty here - and whereas simply leaving purported or actual criminals on another state’s doorstep without notice or permission is apparently acceptable now: Alright, let’s send some of the prisoners in facilities across the Northeast to places like Key West, FL, or South Padre Island, TX, and tell the natives, ‘good luck with that, your problem now.’ I don’t think that would be very well-received, would it? Bullies never like getting a taste of their own medicine. The people of Martha’s Vineyard are being very generous, but obviously this is not a sustainable situation. Massachusetts or any other northern state ultimately bears no legal responsibility for these individuals. Take care of your own problems, stop pointing fingers and diverting responsibility, you bellicose hayseeds. {Vineyard Gazette 9/14}

Lee County, FL, Republicans consider branding the World Health Organization as a ‘terrorist’ organization, and barring IRS and FBI agents. {Florida Politics 9/12}

U.S. Army doctor and wife charged with spying on behalf of Russia, allegedly planned to share information on patients at Fort Bragg medical facility. {BBC 9/30}

The U.S. Army ‘saw a 10% drop in aptitude test scores during the pandemic,’ and ‘up to 70% of potential recruits interested in Army service are disqualified in the first 48 hours due to obesity, low test scores or drug use.’ {Army Times 9/15}

South Dakota’s ambitious governor spent $200,000 in taxpayer funds to pay a noted fundamentalist loon to overhaul the state’s social studies standards - Whitewashing the country’s history and promoting the blasphemous notion of ‘American exceptionalism,’ holding that no nation in all of history could possibly have ever been so great and so blessed from on high. Meanwhile, the kids are rendered ever more dumb and void of critical thinking skills, and #Murica becomes ever more of a global embarrassment and laughingstock. Yeah, we’re exceptional alright. {AP 9/12}

COVID-19

President Biden declares the COVID-19 pandemic over - No basis in reality, just simply telling people what they want to hear. Disappointing, but not surprising: The man is a career politician, and is given to expediency. The opposition is just that awful, and most of his own party are utterly inept and useless, so this president looks very good next to them, and he really is our last best hope. I like President Biden, but he is only a man and not without flaws. This is a really bad call and will come back to haunt him. COVID is not going away, no matter how much anybody tries to pretend otherwise. We may not have even seen the worst of it yet.  {BBC 9/19}

Washington University study: Roughly 6.6 million Americans have suffered brain impairments directly linked to COVID. {Reuters 9/22}

Local wastewater tracker shows COVID-19 cases on the rise again in the Boston-area - Department of Public Health: ‘(C)ases are rising the fastest in kids and teens between the ages of 10 and 19 years old.’ {WFXT 9/29}

AP

CLIMATE CHANGE

Portions of Southwest Florida’s electric grid will need to be rebuilt following the Category 4 landfall of Hurricane Ian - Outages are going to last months. Perhaps all these Floridans sitting in the dark may take a moment to ask themselves why their favorite political party did everything in their power to derail and, ultimately, water-down President Biden’s infrastructure reforms, while failing to come up with any viable plan of its own. #JustSaying. {Protocol 9/29}

Jackson, MS: Troops hand out over a million water bottles in less than 24 hours due to ‘long-running water supply issue’ - So many municipalities in this country are struggling to maintain basic services in recent years, and often in these ultra-’red’ states where Republicans hold nearly full sway. Yes, it happens in other poor areas where Democrats continually dominate elections as well. Another sign, perhaps, the mass stagnation we are experiencing is another ramification of the absurd tribalism #Muricans are giving themselves over to more than ever before. ‘If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking,’ as Gen. Patton wisely stated. And when people are not thinking, not much is going to get done, will it? Right at this moment - when one of the two parties is clearly more dangerous than the other, and is boldly attempting to install a ChristoFascist dictatorship (or are in denial of such) while standing behind a clear psychopath and traitor - is not the best time to be talking about a third party, but long-term we damn well better start getting smart and stop acting like herd animals, for we’re seeing right before our eyes that nothing good comes of it. Absolutely nothing. {BBC 9/02}

Maps show where extreme heat shattered 7,000 records in the United States this summer. {WaPo 9/13}

Over 200 pilot whales dead in mass stranding on the beaches of Tasmania. {Canberra Times 9/24}

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

‘NASA’s Perseverance rover is exploring a long-dry river delta on Mars, and it has seen signs that indicate that the region is full of organics – molecules containing carbon that are widely considered to be the building blocks of life.’ {New Scientist 9/15}

‘Scientists at the University of Cambridge have discovered that water in a one-molecule layer acts like neither a liquid nor a solid, and that it becomes highly conductive at high pressures.’ {University of Cambridge 9/14}

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The stark realization that the America and world I came of age in is no longer

Jose Luis Magana/AP

Donald Trump seriously could shoot an entirely innocent person in the middle of 5th Avenue, and his supporters would rejoice, while those who merely just tolerate him and other right-wing extremist GOP politicians out of fervent opposition to the Democratic Party would twist themselves into pretzels trying to downplay, ignore, or justify it. The rest of us would be justifiably furious, as we always are every single time the s.o.b. does or says something rotten; as usual, it’d basically be to no avail. At this point, Trump would not be charged if he were to maliciously, and beyond any shadow of doubt, literally murder another individual. The only reason the DOJ has not and will not charge him with a multitude of crimes is the knowledge that #Cult45 will officially kick off the new civil war in earnest the moment it happens. Know what we are dealing with, for the American people are showing their true colors like never before. America today is 100% unrecognizable from what it was in my post-war childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, preserving our democratic values was sacrosanct, as was upholding the global order that so many had shed blood to achieve in World War II. Now is a period where Americans have turned exclusively inward and are only - key word - concerned with their grievances against one another. We’re not going to survive; the damage has been done, and was self-inflicted. Maybe someday the tide will turn again toward relative peace and prosperity, but not in this generation or the next, and not before millions are slaughtered.

Poll: About half of Americans say Trump should be charged for his role in the January 6 Insurrection - Major caveats here, starting with the fact that polls are never entirely reliable. But, with the possible exception of Nixon following Watergate, it would have been unthinkable for most any American - let alone 48% of the public, and 58% overall believing he bears at least some level responsibility - to want to see a current or former president of either party put in prison prior to Trump. Paradoxically, what is wrong with the other 52%? To be fair, in this poll ‘only’ 31% actually responded that they do not believe Trump should face any charges for January 6 and another 20% somehow don’t have an opinion. 31% is a large number, just shy of one-third, and to take a ‘guesstimate,’ the ultra-right, nationalist populist bunch probably are roughly a third to 40% of the population. So, this poll may very well be accurate; one-third of the population is more than enough for any tyrannical movement to conquer an already-divided country, and that is exactly what is continuing to happen here. #Cult45 - has been radicalized, and we face a situation here very similar to Iran in the mid-to-late ‘70s: President Biden finds himself in the role of the Shah, while Trump is playing the role of Ayatollah Khomeini; and Ayatollah Trump has millions of acolytes prepared for revolution against modernity, and to serve as enforcers of the crackdown on civil society that is already underway. (AP 6/30)

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Liz Cheney, not mincing words - ‘We are confronting a domestic threat we have never faced before. And that is a former president who is attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic. And he is aided by Republican leaders and elected officials who have made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man.’ (NPR 6/30)

José Luis González/Reuters

Supreme Court rules the president is entitled to overturn his predecessor’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ immigration policy - So, as #Cult45 has itself had a love fest with the high court in the past week, how do they now reconcile with this ruling disobeying their orange messiah? (The Guardian 6/30)

Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

Russia appears to have defaulted on its international debt - Due to a number of factors at play, Russia is not facing certain economic doomsday, but none of this can be making the lives of ordinary Russians any easier. (New York Times 6/27)

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