Who's Got Next?

Well well well - it's going to be Jerome Powell.

Trump's been leading up to it for a while, and now - probably - he'll test the boundaries again by insisting on firing the Fed Chief.

Which will give us the next big Oh Fuck moment, which will push the previous Oh Fuck moments out of the news cycle.

Trump’s tariffs are ‘highly likely’ to push prices up, Fed chief warns

The top official at the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, ratcheted up a warning about the inflationary effects of President Donald Trump’s trade policies.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are “highly likely” to spur a temporary rise in inflation, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell said Wednesday, cautioning that those effects could end up being longer-lasting.

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In remarks before the Economic Club of Chicago, Powell said more persistent risks to inflation — and the Fed’s ability to avoid them — depend on how much tariffs end up affecting the economy and how long it takes trade policy to pass through to prices. Powell said many of the administration’s policies — on trade, immigration, fiscal matters and regulation — are still evolving. But higher inflation and slower growth are probably in store, he said.

“The level of the tariff increases announced so far is significantly larger than anticipated,” Powell said. “The same is likely to be true of the economic effects.”

Powell also said that as the Fed sets interest rates, it could end up in a place where its two mandates — stable prices and maximum employment — are “in tension.”

Typically, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to combat inflation by making it more expensive to get all types of loans. The Federal Reserve lowers interest rates if it fears the economy is slowing too much and needs a boost. That could prove difficult if inflation is rising in the midst of a broader downturn.

Prices aren’t rising significantly so far, and there aren’t widespread signs of a broader downturn. Small-scale job losses, or the anticipation that prices could go up soon, would not be enough to push the Fed to act.

Yet Powell’s warning comes as the economy and the Fed enter yet another uncertain chapter. After spiking to 40-year highs, inflation has been slowly easing toward a more normal 2 percent. Officials had been optimistic they were inching closer to the coveted “soft landing,” in which inflation returns to normal, the job market stays strong, and the economy keeps growing. But that path risks being thwarted by Trump’s trade war and looming uncertainty for businesses and financial markets alike.

At the same time, the financial markets have been in turmoil. By midday Wednesday, the Nasdaq was down more than 2 percent, and the S&P 500 had dropped more than 1 percent, extending losses of 14 percent for the year for the Nasdaq and 9 percent for the S&P. Plus, investors are fleeing Treasurys and the dollar, assets usually considered safer when volatility hits markets.

Fed officials routinely say their outlook depends on how Trump’s policies unfurl. Part of the difficulty also stems from policies that change in a matter of days. Last week, the White House paused many of the steep import taxes on most countries for 90 days, while further hoisting tariffs for China. It left in place a baseline 10 percent tariff on all imports from most countries and continued tariffs on imports of steel, aluminum and autos.

The shift prompted many forecasters to pare back their expectations for a recession. But that possibility is still on the table.

Earlier this week, Fed Governor Christopher Waller described new tariff policies as “one of the biggest shocks to affect the U.S. economy in many decades.” There’s plenty of uncertainty based on how large the tariffs are, for example. But Waller said it’s possible the effects on prices, while steep, won’t be permanent, so long as expectations around longer-term prices stay grounded. Still, aggressive tariff policy could slow growth to “a crawl” and push unemployment up, he said.

Fed officials ultimately having to parse short-term shifts — like a temporary rise in prices — from more lasting effects, like inflation or a broader slowdown. The distinction matters because officials set interest rate policy with the long-term health of the economy in mind, rather than reacting to blips or individual pieces of data. And they have been wrong before: when inflation started rising on the heels of the pandemic, central bankers thought those increases would be temporary. By the time they rushed to raise interest rates, high prices were already pulsing through American life.

“I can hear the howls already that this must be a mistake given what happened in 2021 and 2022,” Waller said in his Monday speech. “But just because it didn’t work out once does not mean you should never think that way again.”

Under other scenarios, Fed leaders would also be hesitant to raise interest rates if the economy is slowing too much. That isn’t happening right now. The job market has stayed strong through upheaval in the federal government, and the unemployment rate is at a low 4.2 percent. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge was at 2.5 percent in February.

But there are other concerning markers on the Fed’s dashboard, too. Retail sales jumped in March, with economists attributing the rise to consumers panic buying before tariffs take hold. Industrial production fell for the first decline in four months in March. Stocks have also flashed red since Trump kicked off the trade war.

Trump has publicly pressured the Fed to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. The Fed closely guards its independence from politics and takes pains not to get involved in fiscal policy. But Trump has historically ignored those norms, recently telling Powell to “stop playing politics!” in a post on X.

“He is always ‘late,’ but he could now change his image, and quickly,” Trump wrote earlier this month.

Today's Hypocrisy

There are no chants of "Lock him up"

The public and the Press Poodles are letting it slide

It comes as absolutely no surprise on either count. Hypocrisy is just not a thing for way too many people.

We've got an "administration" filled with complete bozos, and there's so much going wrong - so often, by so many - we can't keep up with the shit we hear about, which has to mean there's all kinds of shit going wrong that we don't know about. 

USAmerica Inc is following the tried-n-true formula for the descent into fascism.

And it's like a lot of us are getting tired of criticizing the bad shit, as well as getting a little bored with hearing about it.

Waltz and staff used Gmail for government communications, officials say

Trump’s national security adviser is trying to manage his way out of a crisis. But new revelations about his team’s operational security are piling up in the inbox.

The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.

Waltz has had less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents, said officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what they viewed as problematic handling of information. The officials said Waltz would sometimes copy and paste from his schedule into Signal to coordinate meetings and discussions.

The use of personal email, even for unclassified materials, is risky given the premium value foreign intelligence services place on the communications and schedules of senior government officials, such as the national security adviser, experts say.

NSC spokesman Brian Hughes said he has seen no evidence of Waltz using his personal email as described and said on occasions when “legacy contacts” have emailed him work-related materials, he makes sure to “cc” his government email to ensure compliance with federal records laws that require officials to archive official correspondence.

“Waltz didn’t and wouldn’t send classified information on an open account,” said Hughes.

When asked about a Waltz staffer discussing sensitive military matters over Gmail, Hughes said NSC staff have guidance about using “only secure platforms for classified information.”

Waltz has also created and hosted other Signal chats with Cabinet members on sensitive topics, including on Somalia and Russia’s war in Ukraine, said a senior administration official. The existence of those groups was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

Hughes said that Signal “is approved and in some cases is added automatically to government devices.” He acknowledged that it is not supposed to be used for classified material and insisted Waltz never used it as such.

Waltz’s creation of a Signal group chat that discussed sensitive information and included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic and a prominent critic of President Donald Trump, has rankled the president and frustrated other Cabinet members whose communications were exposed on the chat.

Publicly, Trump has strongly backed Waltz, but on Wednesday he met with Vice President JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and others to discuss whether to keep him on. A day later, he informed aides he was not firing Waltz, but it was largely out of a desire to avoid giving the “liberal media a scalp,” said a senior administration official.

“This incident badly damaged Waltz,” said the official, who noted that the national security adviser was told after the meeting that he needed to be more deferential to Wiles. The Wednesday meeting was first reported by the New York Times.

Data security experts have expressed alarm that U.S. national security professionals are not more readily using the government’s suite of secure encrypted systems for work communications such as JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.

Most concerning, however, is the use of personal email, which is widely acknowledged to be susceptible to hacking, spearfishing and other types of digital compromise.

“Unless you are using GPG, email is not end-to-end encrypted, and the contents of a message can be intercepted and read at many points, including on Google’s email servers,” said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

National security experts have expressed alarm over the administration’s denial that the leaked Signal chat contained classified information.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s comments in the Signal chat detailed the sequencing, timing and weapons systems in advance of the Trump administration’s March attack on Houthi militants in Yemen, potentially jeopardizing U.S. airmen headed into harm’s way.

In the chat, Waltz offered a brief but highly specific after-action report of the strikes, revealing that the military had “positive ID” of a senior Houthi leader “walking into his girlfriend’s building” — pointing to what intelligence sources would later confirm was Israeli surveillance capabilities shared with the United States. Israeli officials expressed frustration that their capabilities were made public.

U.S. officials say Trump is much more upset about the inclusion of a liberal journalist on a confidential group chat than he is about exposing secrets to foreign adversaries. But White House officials have found Waltz’s denials increasingly hard to believe.

Waltz, who added Goldberg to the chat, told Fox News: “I take full responsibility. I built the group.” But he has subsequently said Goldberg’s contact information was “sucked into” his phone somehow and that he’s never met or talked to the journalist despite a newly circulated photo of the two men near each other at an event at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington.

“He’s telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me. That’s simply not true,” Goldberg told “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“This isn’t ‘The Matrix.’ Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” he added.

Waltz, the first Green Beret elected to Congress and an adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney, has long pontificated about the importance of classified information and harshly criticized the Justice Department for not pursuing charges against Hillary Clinton for using a private email server as secretary of state.

“What did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,” Waltz wrote on social media in June 2023. The FBI investigated Clinton’s use of the private server and concluded no criminal charges were warranted. FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi have given no indication that Trump officials’ use of Signal for sensitive information will be investigated, with Bondi saying the material shared was not classified.

While most Trump administration officials have downplayed the Signal breach publicly, some have acknowledged it was a significant mishap.

“Obviously, someone made a mistake. Someone made a big mistake,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters during a trip last week to Jamaica.

Rubio and his staff, who have years of experience with classified intelligence from his former role as vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, are known for taking operational security seriously, said a senior U.S. official.

Rubio noted that his contributions in the Signal chat were minimal.

“Just speaking for my role, I contributed to it twice,” Rubio told reporters. “I identified my point of contact, which is my chief of staff, and then later on … I congratulated the members of the team.”

On Sunday, Trump dismissed the controversy as a politically motivated attack. “I don’t fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts,” he said.

Hughes, the NSC spokesman, said that “Mike serves at the pleasure of President Trump and the President has voiced his support for the National Security Advisor multiple times this week.”

While Democrats have seized on the incident as evidence of incompetence, some in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party have assailed Waltz as a George W. Bush-aligned neoconservative, circulating a video from 2016 in which he condemned Trump as a draft-dodger, saying “Stop Trump now.”

“The chattering of unnamed sources should be treated with the skepticism of gossip from people lacking the integrity to attach their names,” Hughes said.

When asked about the senior aide’s use of Gmail for highly sensitive topics, Hughes said it is “unreasonable to ask for comment on an email you refuse to provide for my review.” The Post accepted the emails on the condition that it would not disclose the materials in full.

A key mark in Waltz’s favor is that the breach was discovered by a left-of-center media outlet and not conservative media, officials said.

“The one thing saving his job is that Trump doesn’t want to give Jeff Goldberg a scalp,” said a second administration official. “Despite all of Trump’s attacks on the ‘fake news,’ he still reads the papers, and he doesn’t like seeing this stuff.”

I promise - I get it - there is such a thing as too much secrecy. We need some good old fashioned disinfecting sunlight to keep government relatively clean. And there are no "sides" to the need for people to know a lot of what's going on.

But we have to be careful not to get so amped up about "the deep state" that we actually flop over into the Anti-Government camp, where they're not just wary of Big Gubmint, they say they're hostile to any and all government - unless of course, it's The Daddy State.

Pretty much every time something like this happens, I'm more convinced that the contradictions are part of the plan.

We can stop saying, "Make it make sense." It doesn't make sense because it's not supposed to make sense.

Daddy State Awareness

• The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
• The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
• Lying about everything creates chaos, which helps condition us to stop thinking, and look to them for "guidance".
• Once we're totally dependent on them, we'll accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to destroy reality

so they can dictate reality to us

On Tyranny

Twenty Lessons, read by John Lithgow by Timothy Snyder

Key selections from On Tyranny, for viewing and sharing

Read on Substack

Why Greenland?

Turns out, we need Greenland to bolster our Strategic White People Reserves.

I found the New York Magazine Intelligencer piece she referenced. (it's behind a pretty stout pay wall - you can get 1 or 2 freebies, or a trial for $4).

The pertinent part of the story is yellow-highlighted near the end, but the background on DonJr and Vance and various other Broligarchs is good info too.

The Age of Don Jr. How the ultimate failson became an edgelord whisperer and bona fide power player.

Before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump that precipitated Elon Musk’s MAGA conversion in the summer of 2024, there was at least one prominent member of Trumpworld who had been courting Musk in public for years. In May 2020, Musk posted, “Take the red pill,” with a rose emoji, to his 34 million followers on what was then known as Twitter. In a quote tweet, Donald Trump Jr. responded, “Welcome.”

Six days after the January 6 insurrection, Don Jr. posted a video to his Facebook page to ask, “Why doesn’t Elon Musk create a social-media platform?” Twitter had just permanently suspended his father for using the service to incite violence, and Junior was mad. “Elon, why don’t you do that?” he demanded. “Get out there and come up with a concept … I think you are literally the guy to save free speech in America.” A year later, after Musk’s successful takeover of Twitter, Don Jr. posted a screenshot of a Musk post that read, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Junior captioned it: “This times 1000.”

He was the first major political figure to suggest that Musk take on government inefficiency, the crusade that has since turned Washington upside down. The day after Musk hosted a forum with Trump on Twitter, now rebranded as X, Junior posted, “Who else loves the idea of Elon Musk heading up a government efficiency committee to eliminate the likely trillions of dollars of waste we have in our bloated bureaucracy? I can’t imagine a better person for the task. Trump will make this happen!” The post got 3 million views.

This is not to suggest that Don Jr., who did not respond to requests for comment, was the puppet master pulling the strings that made Musk the the power behind the throne in Washington. But there’s no denying that the principal way in which the second Trump administration differs from the first is in the rise of Musk’s strain of tech-bro fascism — a school of political thought cultivated in online cesspools and gamerworld and disseminated via shouty podcasts that the elder Trump, whose technological know-how is limited to scrolling through his Spotify playlist at Mar-a-Lago, has little interest in. No, it is the extremely online Junior who is steeped in this world and has brought its luminaries into his father’s orbit.

In 2016, Junior lured Peter Thiel to speak at the Republican National Convention, whose MAGA attendees were visibly unnerved by Thiel’s admission that he was gay. But Thiel’s early endorsement and $1.25 million donation was a radical step among Silicon Valley supremos who were largely still Obama Democrats. Eight years later, they are nearly all paying tribute to Trump, with Musk, Thiel’s fellow PayPal mafia, doling out $288 million from his own pocket in 2024.

Junior has made alliances with all sorts of people who have been outside not only Republican circles, but MAGA ones, too, such as Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. (About the latter, he smirked in 2024, “I love the idea of giving him some sort of role in some sort of major three-letter entity or whatever it may be and let him blow it up.”) Most importantly, he brought J.D. Vance onboard. Vance, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist who loves the “debate me” style of trolling of the online right, had called Trump “loathsome” and an “idiot” and “cultural heroin” and compared him to Hitler. But in 2022, Junior’s onetime aide Andy Surabian, who was working on Vance’s super-PAC during his run for the Senate in Ohio, put Vance on the phone with Junior, and by the end of the conversation, he was a Vance convert, soon encouraging his father to endorse Vance in the Republican primary and tweeting an alternative history of Vance to his millions of followers: “Enough with the lies being told about this guy.” When Trump had to choose his vice-president in 2024, Don Jr. used all his clout to plump for J.D.

What’s crazy about this is that Junior has any clout at all. How did Donald Trump Jr. — spurned nepo boy, the designated Fredo of his father’s first term, the failson to end all failsons — emerge as the conduit between his father and powerful Silicon Valley edgelords? How did he become, in the span of the four short years his father was in political exile, the family’s crypto point man, a prince among old-money Republicans and the MAGA faithful alike, and one of the most powerful figures in the country? The story of Junior’s rise is equal parts scandalous and unlikely, granting his father near the end of his life the son he has always wanted — and perhaps even a political successor worthy of his name.

Born on New Year’s Eve 1977, the first of Ivana and Donald’s three children, Junior was always the surly, underperforming son. He liked to joke that Dad had demanded his birth be induced for end-of-year tax reasons. Trump was a distant father even before he left Junior’s mother for Marla Maples. After witnessing a ski-lodge confrontation between his mother and “the showgirl,” Junior didn’t speak to his namesake for at least a year. “He hated his father,” one adult friend of his told me. Another observer who spent months around the siblings during the 2020 campaign thought all three of them were “terrified” of their father.

The relationship always had a Kendall/Logan vibe. There was famously that time when Junior, a hard-partying frat boy at Wharton nicknamed “Diaper Don” for his penchant for passing out and wetting himself, was humiliated by his father in front of all his friends when he came to pick him up for a Yankees game. “Don Jr. opened the door, wearing a Yankee jersey. Without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor,” his former classmate Scott Melker wrote on Facebook in 2016. “He simply said ‘put on a suit and meet me outside,’ and closed the door.” (A spokesman for Don Jr. has previously denied these stories.)

After college, Junior spent a year in Aspen bartending and drinking in relative obscurity (the name “Trump” wasn’t top-shelf in the celebrity-thick ski town). Eventually, he returned to Manhattan to take a job in the Trump Organization and married the pretty model Dad introduced him to (then pulled a classic classy Trump move by agreeing to stand in front of the New Jersey jewelry store and “give” his betrothed, Vanessa, the free engagement ring the shop had provided in exchange for some advertising). Together, they spawned five kids.

Junior also tested his Wharton degree on endeavors beyond the family business. But he wasn’t so great at making money. Trump Senior had to take over a $3.65 million loan to rescue a South Carolina real-estate investment Junior had made. Many of his ventures involved his friend Gentry Beach. Beach and Junior are godfather to each other’s kids, hunting buddies. They had a charming rapport. In 2006, Junior sent an email to a group of men with the subject line “Gucci Camping or (jhunt),” in which he wrote, “The first annual Madison ave camping trip has officially been scheduled for sunday sept 3rd. All goyem bring your guns.” Beach responded, “Jews, the other white meat. Look like chicken taste like fish.” A Junior-Beach business, Eden Green Technology, was hit with a lawsuit that indicated the company was in financial trouble due to “gross project mismanagement.” The suit accused Beach and other executives of paying themselves exorbitant salaries and spending more than $19.4 million in the first nine months of 2018 — while only generating $9,000 in revenue. (The parties reached a settlement soon after the lawsuit was filed.)

By the time the 2016 campaign rolled around, Junior was kind of a joke, weak-chinned and beaver-eager, packed into a business suit but not ready for the ratfucking style of politics his father had learned at the knee of Roy Cohn. He notoriously set up the Trump Tower meeting with Russians after being promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that “would be very useful to your father.” Junior took the bait — Dad might have done so, too — but, JFC, he left a record. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Junior wrote in an email eventually made public. (Trump, who eschews email for exactly this reason, would later dictate the exact words Junior should use to get himself out of that jam: Pretend the meeting was about Russian adoptions.)

The Russia meeting became a key point in the “Putin owns Trump” narrative. Reporters also ferreted out Junior’s 2008 brag that Russian money was key to the Trump Organization’s budget: “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” It was all sort of embarrassing, piker corruption. In 2018, he flew to India to leverage Dad’s presidency to sell Trump condos to rich pals of Narendra Modi.

There was something feral about Junior. He didn’t have the slick panache of Ivanka and Jared, who tried — and failed — to grasp for the Trumps a Kennedy-esque respectability and beauty and glamour. In the White House, some administration members joked that, of all the Trumps, Junior was the most likely to someday walk in with an automatic weapon and “go Columbine.” Junior’s love of firearms and hunting, rooted in boyhood summers in Europe in the woods with his Czech grandfather Milos, also had a vicious aura, with pictures of the Trump boys grinning next to the corpses of leopards and elephants. Junior once bragged that he shot 4,000 birds in Argentina — in a day. (In February, Italian authorities accused his hunting party of shooting a protected breed of duck in wetlands near Venice. He didn’t personally deny it, but his spokesman said, “Don takes following all rules, regulations, and conservation on his hunts very seriously and plans on fully cooperating with any investigation.”)

Halfway through the first Trump administration, Junior’s marriage fell apart. Vanessa filed for divorce in 2018. (She is now dating Tiger Woods.) In 2020, he proposed to MAGA diva Kimberly Guilfoyle. The California-born lawyer, nearly ten years older than him, had a long and colorful history in politics already, as the former wife of California governor Gavin Newsom. And as a Fox News personality, she distinguished herself as possibly the only female the company has sacked for sexually harassing her staff. Guilfoyle knew how to make money. Junior complained about his ex-wife hitting him up for incidentals in addition to the monthly alimony. One of their friends told me Guilfoyle handled these calls from Vanessa.

During the 2020 campaign, all three Trump siblings campaigned for their father, each with a role appropriate to their public personas. Junior was dispatched to fluff the MAGA rabble, pique the QAnons with conspiracy-theory wink-winks, and roll his eyes about pronouns. All that pandemic summer and fall, he would often stroll onto rally risers unmasked, business shirt tucked into jeans, no jacket, and in a nasal rapid-fire declare his bona fides: “I’ve had more blue-collar jobs than Joe Biden!” His favored sign-off was, “We will make liberals cry again!” Meanwhile, as Trump’s 2020 campaign finance chair, Guilfoyle offered to give a lap dance or share a hot tub with the highest donors.

Trump lost the election, bringing him to his lowest point as a politician. Ironically, this is when Junior’s prospects, for the first time, began looking up.

If Don Jr.’s staff had had their way, he might not have been on the Ellipse on January 6. Junior’s adviser Arthur Schwartz had texted other aides that Junior “didn’t approve jack shit” about showing up at the Stop the Steal rally — until he learned his father would be there. “Once my father’s speaking, then, you know, I feel obligated to obviously do it,” he later told the House committee investigating the insurrection. “I’m going to help my father, you know, when I can.” For her part, Guilfoyle had been furious and angry, according to texts, about not being on the rally speaker list because the couple were due to get $60,000 from Turning Point USA for the appearance. She fought her way on to the stage and told the crowd, “We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections,” before Don Jr. told the crowd to “fight, stand up, and hold your representatives accountable.” In a video he took of the family just before Trump sent his “patriots” to assault the Capitol, a giddy Junior selfies himself and Guilfoyle boogies to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”

Don Jr.’s ticket to influence was the Big Lie, which for a time isolated his father from the Republican Party and led Jared and Ivanka to scurry for the hills. The ignominious end of the first Trump administration coincided with Junior’s continued promotion of his 2019 book, Triggered. In the Biden interregnum, as Dad went about raising money for his legal defense and fended off one prosecution after another, his namesake did what he could for the cause, spewing Biden global corruption conspiracies and shrieking about the weaponized deep state. Junior’s growing popularity as a MAGA red-meat tosser got him a seven-figure podcast deal from Rumble.

Personally, he had been evolving. His weak chin had disappeared under a beard, which gives a strong teenage-werewolf vibe. Casual consumers of X posts and right-wing media today know Junior as a bright-eyed pocket mouse of a man whose lib-baiting jackhammer monologues have spawned suggestions that he is a drug user. “Cocaine News with Don Jr.” is a regular feature on The Daily Show. But he has insisted cocaine is “not my thing.” And people who know him say that it’s “highly unlikely” he has a drug problem. He once barfed all over a hotel after a few hits of powerful weed. Another friend told me Junior, in contrast to his college days, is now noticeably “judicious” around alcohol. “I watched him say no,” one friend said. “I never thought we were in the presence of someone with a problem.” It is possible the hopped-up Triggered podcaster is a party persona. “One-on-one, he is phenomenal,” another friend told me. “We had intelligent conversations. When the posse are around, he is the leader of the pack. If a fanboy showed up, maybe there was a little peacocking.”

He launched a few business endeavors, including a right-wing publishing company with pal Sergio Gor (now the White House director of personnel). He also helped found a hunting lifestyle magazine, Field Ethos, which bills itself as a digest “for the unapologetic man.” The magazine got good reviews, but it felt like Junior was more interested in continuing to make liberals cry.

As his father began to reassert his control over the GOP ahead of the 2024 election, Junior was amplifying voices in the neofascist tech-reactionary world, radicalizing the MAGAverse even more. Racist pseudoscience and quasi fascism were always in the water around Trumps, of course. Two years ago, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Junior’s bodyman in the 2016 cycle, posted, “Whiteness is great. Be proud of who you are.” But the Richard Spencer version of the so-called alt-right was giving way to new strains of technocratic authoritarianism and manosphere revanchism, all of which swirled around Junior and Vance and others who capitalized on the period of Trump’s exile from power. They were part of Thiel’s universe, where people like Curtis Yarvin were pontificating on the need for monarchy to rule the dumb masses. Junior and Vance were also keyed into a misogynistic white-supremacist subculture that includes Bronze Age Pervert, a Romanian American defender of masculine virtue, and Raw Egg Nationalist, a British fascist and manly wellness influencer.

Vance is among the 76,000 X followers of Captive Dreamer, an anon who has identified himself as a translator of fascist classics in French and German and who was one of the first to claim that Haitians were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. Junior hosted white nationalist Darren Beattie, who has said various Black people need to “learn their place in society” and take “a knee to MAGA” and has called for sterilizing “low IQ trash” at least seven times on his podcast in the last two years. Beattie is now a top official at Marco Rubio’s State Department.

As his father prepared to storm back to the White House, Junior was also upping his girlfriend game. Bettina Anderson is an actual to the manor born WASP, from the enclaves of Palm Beach that used to look down on the Trumps. She is nine years younger than Junior, and she doesn’t appear to have submitted to the Mar-a-Lago face restructuring popular among many ladies in Palm Beach MAGAland. Palm Beach society is a little surprised at Anderson, since Junior “is the most despised member of the family; he’s an asshole, a spoiled heir,” according to one insider.

But everyone understands why a smart girl might hook up with a president’s son. With German efficiency, Dad announced Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece on the same day in December that the Daily Mail broke the news of Junior’s new beau, showing them holding hands on the way to her birthday party. “Bettina wanted her out of the area,” a People source said cattily. The course was clear, in more ways than one, for Don Jr. to jump to a new echelon.

It goes without saying that Trump 2.0 is raking it in. A modest accounting in mid-February of the money the family has made since the election — and that’s a tally only of the known knowns — is $80 million. Junior’s role in this windfall has been both pivotal and personally enriching.

Junior, along with Vance, is the conduit to crypto. Dad had been calling crypto “a scam” for years, but in September, he rolled out, with Junior and Eric, a murky endeavor called World Liberty Financial. The purpose of the WLF enterprise is unclear — an exchange? a crypto bank? — but ethics experts and Democrats have suggested the venture could eventually involve potential conflicts of interest surrounding Trump’s financial ties. Chinese crypto investor Justin Sun, under SEC investigation for alleged crypto-fraud activity and fresh off spending $6 million for Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana (he videotaped himself eating it in Hong Kong), was the first big investor, dumping $30 million into WLF just before the election.

Junior met WLF co-founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman through the son of Trump’s fellow New York real-estate mogul Steve Witkoff (now Trump’s Russia-Ukraine and Middle East negotiator). Even in a business rife with shady dealers, Herro and Folkman have colorful résumés. Herro has a few misdemeanor convictions under his belt and hundreds of thousands in unpaid back taxes. Folkman’s business ventures include Date Hotter Girls, a dating-advice service that he advertised with the line “You’re going to be ripping their clothes off and throwing them up against the wall.” Junior had praised Herro and Folkman, saying, “You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs, and they’re going to smoke the people in the room.” But they seem as astounded as the rest of the financial world. “If you would have thought six months ago that Donald Trump is dropping a decentralized finance project, would anyone have believed it?” Folkman asked on the livestream announcing the project, according to the New York Times. The event’s moderator called the men “two crypto punks.”

At the end of January, Trump Media — the litigation-plagued holding company for Trump’s Truth Social — announced it was pivoting to financial services tied to crypto. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump Organization, led by Eric, was in talks to purchase a stake in crypto exchange Binance, at the same time that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao is in a position to receive a pardon from Trump for a conviction related to money laundering. Meanwhile, Trump made David Sacks his “crypto czar,” and in March announced the creation of a “strategic bitcoin reserve” to shore up crypto markets and keep them humming.

Since the election, Junior has been invited onto so many boards and has been cut in on so many deals that his head must be spinning.

A week after the November election, Junior joined 1789 Capital, a Palm Beach–based $150 million venture-capital firm that aims to invest in companies with “deglobalization” and “anti ESG” policies and whose founder, Omeed Malik, was fired by Bank of America for allegedly making unwanted advances toward multiple women in its prime brokerage unit. (Malik sued for defamation, and the bank settled.) Malik hosted a fundraiser for Vance in 2022, with Junior an invited guest.

A week after that announcement, drone-maker Unusual Machines announced Junior had joined its advisory board. Its stock hit a new record on the heels of the announcement, but the company dismissed the idea that the move was designed to take advantage of Junior’s connections in Washington.

In December, months after Trump Media went public through a SPAC, Trump moved all of his shares, worth $4 billion at the time, into a trust controlled by Junior, and PublicSquare announced that Trump Jr. had been appointed to the company’s board of directors. Headquartered in West Palm Beach, the company aims to be an anti-woke Amazon, with offerings like consumer financing for the shooting industry and pro-life diapers.

In January, Junior was named an “adviser” to GrabAGun, an online firearms retailer founded in 2010 that plans to go public this year in a merger with Omeed Malik’s SPAC Colombier Corp II. The same month, he joined the prediction market Kalshi as a strategic adviser, stating that he and his family had used Kalshi on Election Night “to know we won hours ahead of the fake news media.”

In early February, digital pharmacy company BlinkRx announced that Junior would be joining its board of directors. A week later, Dominari Holdings announced he and Eric joined their advisory board.

“No one picks him for his acumen, competency, or charisma,” said Gil Duran, a San Francisco journalist. “His sole value is that he’s Trump’s son. He is clearly a middleman in the new alliance between the tech authoritarians and his father.”

But Junior isn’t just cashing out. The day after the fourth anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt, a Boeing 757 painted “Trump Force One” with a little Donald Trump action figure mounted on the cockpit descended on the capital of Greenland. Rumors that Junior was coming had been around Nuuk, a town of 20,000, for a day or two, but the government did not send a representative to meet him. “Nobody knew what to do,” a Greenlander told me. “Go meet him? Call the police, send special forces?”

The American expeditionary team that strolled into the airport in bomber jackets (personalized with their names and the words “Trump Force One”) included Junior, Charlie Kirk, and Sergio Gor. Junior started speaking, his yelling rat-a-tat delivery a little much for people used to hunting fish and bear in silent expanses of snow and ice. “To our ears, it sounds like a cannon shooting,” a witness recalled. “People had to put their fingers in their ears. They could not believe it.” Junior explained that he came as “a tourist” who loves wild animals. His team then passed out MAGA hats and little American flags. The crowd drifted off.

The Americans made their way to the Hotel Hans Egede, where a right-wing local blogger had reserved two tables for them. But the restaurant was kind of empty. Bad optics! Social-media fluffers were dispatched to a small park that attracted panhandlers and drug addicts. For the price of donning the red hats, the outcasts were happy to chow down on whale heart with the Americans. “All the drunks and beggars say yes. And now all these people are sitting there eating free food,” the witness said.

Junior dialed up his dad, who crooned over the speaker that the United States needed to take over Greenland because there are “ships sailing around, and they’re not the right ships.” A few handshakes later, the Trump Force One team dashed back to the airport, where the pilot gunned the jet back toward America.

The trip mystified everyone except those in on the joke. Besides giving Trump an opportunity to do some American chest-beating, the stunt was an extended dog whistle to a subculture of Silicon Valley geeks and woke-enraged white male academics who have been dreaming of an American imperium and the breeding of a race of alabaster-skinned supermen in Greenland.

Greenland has mythic significance for the race pseudoscientists surrounding Musk, Vance, and Junior, who are enamored of what 20th-century Italian fascist Julius Evola called “fabulous Hyperborea” — Arctic regions that are supposedly the primordial homeland of a divine race of white-philosopher priests. It is highly unlikely Junior is unaware of the connection. Bronze Age Pervert, for example, has been open about his hope to “rebreed the original Aryan race” in the Arctic, and the white nationalists in his circle have been known to post maps of an American empire that, like Hitler’s lebensraum, show the incorporation of all the “white” nations — Russia, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, and even South Africa — into a single unit. The fantasy of a white nationalist beachhead in Greenland is something an Xbox sword-wielding hero homunculus would dream up — the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. Greenland has become so central to the MAGA imaginarium that Vance is sending his wife Usha there later this week.

After Junior left Nuuk, a small team of social-media creators stayed an extra day for content, bribing truant teens to stand before cameras and recite support for an American takeover. “They were walking around and giving everyone $100 and a MAGA hat to make videos where participants were told to say, ‘Yeah, we want to join the United States,’” a Greenlander told me. “These kids are schoolchildren, maybe skipping school. Of course, the parents, after they saw these videos, were like, ‘What? You gave my child a hundred dollars and a stupid hat?’”

Afterward, Dad got the president of Denmark — a woman — on the phone. He was so rude, so vehement about taking Greenland for America, that witnesses described the exchange as “horrendous” and “like a cold shower.” Sending No. 1 Son on such a mission suggests trust, of course, and Junior was later dispatched to Serbia to support both its beleaguered president and his family’s real-estate deals there. A January poll of Republicans found that Junior trailed only Vance among possible candidates for president in 2028. Whether that sits well with a father thinking about a third term is another question. Asked about the possibility of running for president, Junior freaked out: “Oh, God,” he said. “No, no, no, don’t get me into trouble.”

Call It What It Is

Today's WTF

Seriously - what the fuck are we doing?

At CPAC yesterday

More Warning Signs

It's a coup, and the red flags are all over the fuckin' place.

THE ROAD

TO TYRANNY

IS CROWDED

WITH PEOPLE

TELLING US

WE'RE OVERREACTING

A Quick Meme

Trump has issued an Executive Order that stops the production of the penny? Really?

• Bird flu has wiped out dozens of bald eagles, 20,000 ducks, and 20 million chickens - which continues to push egg prices up towards the rafters
• We've got bird flu in the dairy herds, and now it's spread from Nevada into Arizona
• There's a TB outbreak in Kansas that's the worst they've ever seen
• The measles outbreak in Texas is in three counties now, and suspected in a 4th - and it's put a dozen or more kids in the hospital
• People Flu is the worst it's been in 10 or 15 years: CDC estimates that there have been at least 24 million illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations, and 13,000 deaths from flu so far this season.
• Aircraft are falling from the sky at a pace not seen since the 1920s
• People in California, North Carolina and Florida are still having trouble getting help to recover from disasters
• Congress critters can't get their heads outa their asses long enough to figure out a budget that doesn't fuck everybody but 0.1% of the population
• China's coming for us in the Pacific
• Russia's about to revive itself ...

But sure - let's put our efforts into something important like worrying about the penny.

This guy seems pretty fuckin' worthless. But hey - at least we're good and distracted form the whole Fascism Comes To America thing, right?

Driving On

It has to be pretty obvious by now that everything Trump and Elon are doing is aimed at pushing towards that magic moment - The Constitutional Crisis.

I don't think we're there yet, but I can't deny we're practically on the brink. 

Trump's gang is attempting to line up as many issues as possible at the edge of the abyss so it would only take a fairly minor instigating incident to get enough people amped up - so it could all crash over the edge - seemingly as if it was inevitable and nobody's really to blame.

There could still be a Reichstag Fire, but if you have all the pieces in place, you don't really need it. In fact, you don't want that. You just pull the last lever, and all the other levers are activated, and away it goes, practically all by itself.

You want people to go fascist a little at a time, so it feels like a seduction instead of a rape.

Anyway, here's another step towards the edge. 

Fourth judge blocks Trump’s birthright executive order

A fourth federal judge blocked President Trump’s executive order to restrict birthright citizenship in the U.S., yet another blow to the president’s controversial idea.

In a pair of lawsuits, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin agreed that a group of 19 states and the District of Columbia as well as nonprofit organizations were “exceedingly likely” to prevail on the merits of their claims against the Trump administration.

“It is difficult to imagine a government or public interest that could outweigh the harms established by the plaintiffs here,” Sorokin wrote. “Perhaps that is why the defendants have identified none. Instead, they point only to the Executive Branch’s discretion in matters of immigration.”

Sorokin argued that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by 14th Amendment in the Constitution and has been moved “beyond the bounds” of executive authority from the president.

The attorneys representing an anonymous mother and immigrant groups celebrated the judge’s decision.

“We are gratified by today’s ruling,” Oren Sellstrom, the litigation director for Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in a statement. “Birthright citizenship is a sacred right granted by our Constitution, and the President cannot change that with the stroke of a pen.”

Hegseth responds to blowback from Ukraine, NATO remarks

On his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order narrowing birthright citizenship by limiting the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship guarantee to exclude children born in the U.S. to parents without permanent legal status.

Sorokin’s ruling joins him with judges in several other states who have blocked Trump’s executive order.

Just days ago, a judge in New Hampshire granted an injunction. Two nearly identical injunctions were granted by two other judges, both criticizing the decision and protecting birthright citizenship across the country, at least temporarily.

The legal battle kicked off immediately after Trump signed the executive order. The original injunction, set forth by a judge appointed by former President Reagan, was set to expire when the two near-identical injunctions came in.

A 10th lawsuit was filed Thursday afternoon challenging Trump’s order, this time from the New York Immigration Coalition.

In his ruling, Sorokin pointed to the 1898 Supreme Court decision that allowed birthright citizenship and noted that the Trump administration could try to revisit that case, but it would have to be brought to the Supreme Court. Still, Sorokin said there have been no presidents in the past who have had issue with the more than a century-old ruling.

The judge slammed the Trump administration for not having a “legitimate interest” for the order and said it has not attempted to demonstrate how the continuation of birthright citizenship would harm the American public. The judge also pointed out that birthright stood under Trump’s first term.

It's The Unitary Executive, Stupid

American Bar Association:

Misty Roundtree - JustLaw

The Unitary Executive

In American law, the unitary executive theory is a Constitutional law theory according to which the President of the United States has sole authority over the executive branch. It is "an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House". The theory often comes up in jurisprudential disagreements about the president's ability to remove employees within the executive branch; transparency and access to information; discretion over the implementation of new laws; and the ability to influence agencies' rule-making. There is disagreement about the doctrine's strength and scope, with more expansive versions of the theory becoming the focus of modern political debate. These expansive versions are controversial for both constitutional and practical reasons. Since the Reagan administration, the Supreme Court has embraced a stronger unitary executive, which has been championed primarily by its conservative justices, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation.

The theory is largely based on the Vesting Clause, which singularly grants the president with the "Executive Power" and places the office atop the executive branch. Critics debate over how much power and discretion the vesting clause gives a president, and emphasize other countermeasures in the Constitution that provide checks and balances on executive power.

The Commander in Chief Clause has also been interpreted to reinforce the unitary executive theory, as it makes the president the highest ranking officer of the United States Armed Forces.

Historically, as part of the campaign to support ratification, Alexander Hamilton contrasted the powers of the presidency and that of the King of Great Britain. Namely, the King exercised powers in military affairs that would be delegated to Congress. In the 2020s, the Supreme Court held that, regarding the powers granted by the vesting clause, "the entire 'executive Power' belongs to the President alone".

Today's Quote

Almost straight outa The Daddy State Awareness Guide.

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.

With such a people, you can do whatever you want."

Hannah Arendt

14 OCT 1906 - 04 DEC 1975

German historian and philosopher

Today's Jen

The politics of disgust.

"They just won - why are they still mad?"

Because we haven't been wiped out. And that may be the key.

MAGA hired this guy to annihilate us. So as long as we're still here, he's failing.

Unfortunately, since their side owns the power right now, they'll likely expect some pretty nasty things be visited upon us to get us to knuckle under.

Jen Rubin and Robert P Jones

What White Christians Have Wrought

Like other social scientists and scholars, I’ll spend the next weeks and months scouring pre-election data, the exit polls, and the first wave of post-election surveys trying to understand how a majority of American voters chose to return Donald Trump—a twice-impeached convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who incited a violent insurrection when he lost the last election—to power.

Because elections are won and lost at the margins in a deeply divided nation such as ours, most of that analysis will rightly focus on which subgroups (like Latinos and young men) shifted most significantly away from the Democratic Party’s winning 2020 coalition. But that focus, while strategically important, will obscure the deeper peril facing our nation. Authoritarianism, when it blossoms, emerges from the deeper soil at the center.

With the Republican presidential candidate regularly spewing racist, misogynistic, and even Nazi ideology (such as claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country), the most remarkable thing about this election is not which groups shifted marginally in his direction, but which groups continued to provide him with supermajority support. Namely, we must talk about how thoroughly Christian nationalism has infected mainstream white Christianity.

Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 was made possible because, as noted by the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, 77% of white evangelical Protestant Christians, along with 57% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 64% of white Catholics, lent him moral legitimacy and gave him their votes. Even after watching Trump implement cruel policies such as separating migrant children from their parents and putting them in cages, even after witnessing his impeachment for abusing the power of the presidency to try to get a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election, white Christians continued to support him. White evangelical Protestant support for Trump in the 2020 election ticked up to 84%, while non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics generally held steady (57% each).

As Trump staged his political comeback in 2023 and 2024, white Christians had the benefit of witnessing a second Trump impeachment for inciting a violent insurrection in an attempt to remain in office after losing that election, four criminal indictments and a felony conviction, and the most overtly racist presidential campaign since George Wallace (who also held a fascist-style rally in Madison Square Garden in 1968).

Despite all of this, in stark contrast to 2016, there were virtually no major dissenting voices among the leaders of Trump’s most stalwart supporters. Just two weeks before the 2024 election, American evangelical Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, explicitly petitioned God for Trump’s election at a Trump rally in Concord, NC. “There’s a spiritual element that’s at work here. There are dark forces that are arrayed against this man. They’ve tried to put him in prison; they’ve tried to assassinate him twice; he’s attacked every day in the media,” he lamented. “We pray for our nation and, Father, if it be thy will, that President Trump will win this election. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

According to the 2024 National Election Pool exit polls, 8 in 10 (81%) white evangelicals once again declared their allegiance to Trump, as did 60% of white Catholics and similar numbers of white non-evangelical Protestants. (Note: While there are no publicly available exit poll numbers for white non-evangelical Protestants, pre-election polling from PRRI suggests 6 in 10 once again supported Trump).

If we put white Christians’ strong support for Trump into context, we can clearly see their singular contribution to his power. Overall, more than two thirds (68%) of white Christians favored Trump over Harris—a mirror image of the rest of the country, including Christians of color (33%), followers of non-Christian religions (30%), and the religiously unaffiliated (28%). While the proportion of white Christians in the country has been declining over the last three decades, they remain 41% of the population and an even higher percentage of voters. Even a modest decline in the overwhelming level of support for Trump among white Christians would have denied him the Republican nomination or the presidency.

Most disturbingly, this time, white Christians, who once proudly called themselves “values voters,” knew exactly who and what they were voting for. With Trump abandoning the Republican Party’s longstanding support of a national ban on abortion and no Supreme Court justices left to appoint, the fig leaf of abortion fell away, exposing the uglier elements that have always tied white Christians to Trump.

PRRI’s surveys have consistently found strong support among white Christians for the racial grievance and xenophobia that is the deeper DNA of the MAGA movement. Majorities of white Christians agree that “today discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities.” And three quarters of white evangelical Protestants, along with 6 in 10 white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics, say they favor even the most extreme parts of Trump’s mass deportation scheme, described in the survey as “rounding up and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the U.S. military.”

But numerical support for Trump is only one facet of what white Christians have wrought in our nation. Historically, we know that all authoritarian leaders need a mechanism for projecting moral legitimacy, particularly as they accelerate efforts to consolidate power and undermine democratic norms and individual freedoms.

Nearly a century ago, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement coopted the German Evangelical Church. Today we are seeing similar uses of the Orthodox Christian churches in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Catholic Church in Viktor Orbán’s so-called “illiberal democracy” in Hungary—contemporary models both Trump and white evangelical leaders have praised.

Over the last decade, many white Christians have not just selfishly supported a dangerous, narcissistic man who promised to restore their waning influence; they have now willingly blessed the advent of a new American fascism that threatens our democratic future. They are principally responsible for Trump’s rise and return to power—and for everything that is coming for all of us in its wake.

Beau Three Years Ago

Daddy State Awareness Guide

Umberto Eco’s 14 Characteristics Of Fascism

(Ur-Fascism - or Eternal Fascism - is Eco's generic form, as opposed to a particular type of fascism, ie: the Nazis, Mussolini, etc)

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Remember

Keep in mind who this Trump asshole really is, as the Press Poodles try to force us to watch their favorite blood sport (ie: manufacturing "controversy" - putting red ants and black ants in a great big pickle jar, and charging an admission fee to see them fight).

The stuttering old man who knows his shit, and tries to tell me as much of the truth as he can without fucking up national security?  He's my guy all day every day.

Versus that other old man who can't express a coherent thought without taking a giant dump on everybody's head? No fucking thanks. Leave it and walk away.

I'll take a crippled up FDR over assholes like Mussolini and Stalin and Putin and Trump every time.

Donald Trump and fascism

Some scholars have argued that the political style of Donald Trump resembles the political style of fascist leaders. Such assessments were first made during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, continuing over the course of the Trump presidency as he appeared to court far-right extremists, including his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election after losing to Joe Biden, and culminating in the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[44] As these events have unfolded, some commentators who had initially resisted applying the label to Trump came out in favor of it, including conservative legal scholar Steven G. Calabresi and conservative commentator Michael Gerson. After the attack on the Capitol, one historian of fascism, Robert O. Paxton, went so far as to state that Trump is a fascist, despite his earlier objection to using the term in this way. In "Trump and the Legacy of a Menacing Past", Henry Giroux wrote: "The inability to learn from the past takes on a new meaning as a growing number of authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe. This essay argues that central to understanding the rise of a fascist politics in the United States is the necessity to address the power of language and the intersection of the social media and the public spectacle as central elements in the rise of a formative culture that produces the ideologies and agents necessary for an American-style fascism." Other historians of fascism such as Richard J. Evans, Roger Griffin, and Stanley Payne continue to disagree that fascism is an appropriate term to describe Trump's politics. Jason Stanley argued (2018) Trump uses "fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions."

In 2017, the Hamburg, Germany-based magazine Stern depicted Trump giving a Nazi salute and it also compared Trump to neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the book Frankly, We Did Win This Election, authored by Michael C. Bender of The Wall Street Journal, recounts that White House Chief of Staff, John F. Kelly, was reportedly shocked by an alleged statement made by Trump that "Hitler did a lot of good things." Liz Harrington, Trump’s spokesperson, denied the claim, saying: "This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made-up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired."[53] Kelly further stated in his book that Trump had asked him why his generals could not be loyal like Hitler's generals. According to the Ohio Capital Journal, quoting his roommate, politician Josh McLaurin, then-Republican candidate and senator-elect from Ohio, J. D. Vance, was said to have wondered whether Trump was "America's Hitler". Harvard University professor of government Daniel Ziblatt also drew similarities between Hitler's rise and Trump's.  Trump has also been compared to Narendra Modi,[58] and former aide Anthony Scaramucci also compared Trump to Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet.

In a July 2021 piece for The Atlantic, George W. Bush's former speechwriter David Frum wrote that "Trump's no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It's time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose." For The Guardian, Nicholas Cohen wrote: "If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is one. The F-word is one we are rightly wary of using, but how else to describe the disgraced president?" New York Magazine asked, "Is It Finally Time to Begin Calling Trumpism Fascist?" Dana Milbank also believed the insurrection qualified as fascist, writing in The Washington Post, "To call a person who endorses violence against the duly elected government a 'Republican' is itself Orwellian. More accurate words exist for such a person. One of them is 'fascist.'" Dylan Matthews writing in Vox quoted Sheri Berman as saying, "I saw Paxton's essay and of course respect him as an eminent scholar of fascism. But I can't agree with him on the fascism label."

The Guardian further reported on Trump's "stand back and stand by" directive during the 2020 United States presidential debates to the Proud Boys and it also made a note of the fact that he had made "positive remarks about far-right and white supremacist groups." During the 2020 debate, Biden asked Trump to condemn white supremacist groups, specifically the Proud Boys. Trump's response was interpreted by some as a call to arms. The United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack public hearings explored the relationships which existed between the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and Trump's allies, with evidence of coordination in the run-up to the Capitol attack.

In August 2022, President Biden referred to the "extreme MAGA agenda" as "semi-fascism". In the Battle for the Soul of the Nation speech September 1, Biden criticized the "extremism" and "blind loyalty" of Trump supporters, calling them a threat to democracy. He added that he did not consider a majority of Republicans to be MAGA Republicans.

On March 13, 2023, journalist James Risen reported that it was discovered that 2021 United States Capitol Attack attendee, Hatchet Speed, was planning to kidnap Jewish leaders, including the leaders of the ADL, and the philanthropist George Soros. Speed was working as a Pentagon Analyst at the time of Risen's investigation of him and his planned attack. Reportedly, he has praised Hitler as "one of the best people there has ever been on the earth".

And then there's this from 2017, hours after Charlottesville:

These are the three reasons fascism spread in 1930s America — and might spread again today

The violent white nationalist rally in Virginia has reawakened simmering fears of American fascism. But the roots of these feelings — and the militant organizations that promoted them — did not begin with the election of President Trump. The last time fascism was brazenly embraced was in the 1930s. The lessons of that crucial decade bear increasing relevance for modern American life. The three big factors that drove the spread of American fascism at that time are still relevant for America today.

Fascist ideas were quite popular in 1930s America

In the 1930s, fascist ideas were increasingly accepted. This was reflected in the energetic growth of Nazi organizations. Ku Klux Klan rallies were common and numerous; Trump’s own father was arrested at one such rally, reportedly while wearing a Klan outfit. A 1941 book found that more than 100 such organizations had formed since 1933.

The appeal of fascist ideas extended far beyond the fringe, reaching prominent citizens such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh went so far as to praise Adolf Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man.” In 1940, Lindbergh’s wife published a bestseller that called totalitarianism “The Wave of the Future” and an “ultimately good conception of humanity.”

At the time, Jews served the same role for U.S. fascists that immigrants, Muslims and other minorities serve today: a vague but malicious threat they believed to be undermining America’s greatness. Surveys of U.S. public opinion from the 1930s are a startling reminder of just how widespread these attitudes became. As late as July 1942, a Gallup poll showed that 1 in 6 Americans thought Hitler was “doing the right thing” to the Jews. A 1940 poll found that nearly a fifth of Americans saw Jews as a national “menace” — more than any other group, including Germans. Almost a third anticipated “a widespread campaign against the Jews” — a campaign that 12 percent of Americans were willing to support.

The careers of anti-Semitic celebrities such as Catholic Rev. Charles Coughlin reflected the popular appeal of fascist ideas. Father Coughlin, as he was known, enjoyed the second-largest radio audience in the country (after President Roosevelt’s fireside chats), frequently quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and praised the Nazi quest for full employment and racial purity. He broke with Roosevelt in 1934, forming his own party, whose 1936 candidate received nearly 1 million votes. Coughlin was finally silenced by the Catholic Church in early 1942.

These voices welcoming fascism were not marginal radicals but mainstream writers, presidents of major associations and editors of popular journals. In his 1934 presidential address, the president of the American Political Science Association — the nation’s oldest and largest organization of political scientists — railed against “the dogma of universal suffrage” and argued for abolishing a democracy that allowed “the ignorant, the uninformed and the antisocial elements” to vote. If these reforms smacked of fascism, he concluded, then “we have already recognized that there is a large element of fascist doctrine and practice that we must appropriate.”

Three factors helped U.S. fascism spread

So what does the history of American fascism tell us about its resurgence? The good news is that the three major factors that drove its expansion are absent today.

The first was a major economic depression and social dislocation that undermined people’s confidence in democracy and led them to look for alternatives. As a U.S. economist complained in 1933, “democracy is neither very expert nor very quick to action” and cannot resolve “group and class conflicts easily.”

"Americans feeling an economic anxiety voted for a strong leader..."

The second factor was fear of communism, which led many leading intellectuals to embrace fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism and as the lesser of two evils. As in Europe, worries about communism intensified fascism’s appeal in the U.S. “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler,” argued popular Christian activist Frank Buchman in 1936, “who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of communism.”

"Obama is an evil genius bent on destroying capitalism so he can give your house, and your car, and your gun to undeserving brown people."

The third factor was the rise of Nazi Germany as an economic and military powerhouse. Hitler’s ascent began a long period of German recovery, economic expansion and the swift end of unemployment in that country. By 1939, Germany had a labor shortage of 2 million people, while industrial production had more than doubled. Generations of historians have debated whether the recovery was real, but the widespread perception of German success attracted admirers regardless of its reality.

"Just look at the strength of Putin and Xi and Kim..."

There could be a resurgence of fascism in the U.S.

Even though these three factors no longer exist, similar problems lurk under the surface of modern political life, problems that could conceivably drive a resurgence of fascist movements. The overall U.S. economy has been performing well, but levels of inequality continue to rise. Wide areas of America are increasingly mired in permanent unemployment and a massive drug epidemic. These are the sorts of economic conditions that drove fascist support in the 1930s; another major crisis like the Great Recession is likely to bolster nationalist appeals even more.

Few people worry about the communist threat today. Yet fear of communism has been replaced by fear of globalists and elite technocrats (still often tinged with anti-Semitism) who supposedly seek to undermine and control the lives of ordinary Americans. The recently uncovered National Security Council memo reflected these sentiments clearly, arguing that Trump’s opposition is made up of a cabal of Islamists, cultural Marxists and global bankers. The extreme right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich, who has been praised by Donald Trump Jr., recently published a cartoon showing national security adviser H.R. McMaster as a puppet manipulated by George Soros, who in turn was being manipulated by a monstrous green hand labeled “Rothschilds,” a historically wealthy Jewish family.

The third factor — the appearance of an ideological rival that seemed to outperform America’s corrupt democracy — is today reflected most clearly in fears over the rise of China. Over the past decade, numerous observers have argued that liberal democracy is being supplanted by the kind of state capitalism exemplified by China, in which a capitalist system of production is undergirded by state ownership and guidance, with little room for democracy.

Americans cannot be complacent about democracy

Over the 20th century, democracy spread from a few isolated outposts to most corners of the world. Today its superiority seems self-evident to people who have been steeped in its moral virtues and material successes. But over the past century, mere moral appeal has rarely been sufficient for its survival. It would be a convenient mistake to accept the victory of democracy as a historical morality play, the predestined triumph of good over evil.

For much of the 20th century, democracy’s success depended on the existence of powerful countries such as the United States, examples to be imitated. More than any appeal to freedom, democracy spread because it promised economic prosperity and political stability. But when democracies failed to deliver, as during the Great Depression, the tide of popular and elite opinion shifted just as readily and just as quickly against democratic institutions. The key lesson of the 20th century is that democracy is more fragile than we might like.