It shouldn’t
come as a surprise that people like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Karoline
Leavitt, Russ Vought and many others in the Trump administrations are
spokespersons for Project 2025, whose goals is to replace the “New Deal” with
the “real deal”—the far-right white supremacist fantasy that promotes those who were once only fringe characters with latent or outright fascist and racist impulses and beliefs, who only
needed a “leader” who was sufficiently well-placed to attract the support of those who believed that only authoritarianism could achieve the kind of world they wished to live in, and through means both
desperate and foul could find themselves with the power to act on their own aggrievement against a world that didn't recognize their personal "greatness."
The "leader" is a man, as bankruptcy law specialist Jonathan Lipson has written about, whose Atlantic City casinos, which he treated like simple real estate property with no clue about the “market”—was just one of many failures in selling “product” because of the false notion that just because someone has a known “name,” that doesn’t mean that people necessarily see any quality in a "name" over those well-established and trusted.
Trump’s casinos floundered because they were paid for not by Trump’s own money, but by high-interest debt that they could not possibly pay off. But Trump—who bragged to the Washington Post that he made “great deals for myself,” made sure he got his million-dollar paydays while thousands of low-paid employees lost their jobs and investors lost their shirts.
Lipson has written that Trump’s incomprehensible ability not only to survive but to convince people to ignore his failures both moral and ethical as well as criminal is dependent on an “unrivaled capacity to voice grievances of those that other mainstream politicians have not—meaning those who have a feeling of powerlessness and voicelessness,” which somehow managed to transcend seemingly disparate socio-economic classes.
This would explain why groups as seemingly at odds as racist white nationalists and racial minorities would vote for him at all: They are hearing the same things from him that they are “interpreting” in different ways. Many think he is defending them from the “others,” while the “others” think the opposite. Yet when the truth came out, that Trump really is a racist white nationalist 1, who considers “merit” as defined by “loyalty” and sycophancy, going full blitz on anti-DEI hypocrisy and mass deportation, was it really that “surprising”?
“America for Americans” was the new slogan as enunciated by Miller at the infamous Madison Square Garden campaign event that some thought should have put a fork in Trump’s election chances, yet apparently only proved that we live in country that still has considerable racial grievance in its heart.
It should be recalled that MSG was the site of the infamous 1939 American Nazi Party rally. We are learning that Doug Emhoff has been dismissed from the board of trustees of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by the Trump administration because, it seems, he refused to sanction Trump’s politicizing the Holocaust for personal gain, since it dishonors the memory of the victims. We should not allow ourselves to be unaware of the hypocrisy of Trump’s “war” against “anti-Semitism” is that he himself employs the same anti-Semitic stereotypes regarded in other venues and places as “bad,” as being “good”—i.e. being “good” with money and useful in serving his often unethical and unlawful personal and business practices.
This thing about “anti-Semitism” on college campuses isn’t new, and Trump has been using it in his war against academia since his first administration; it is amazing how people forget that his first administration was only different from the current one in that this time there are no experienced government officials serving as “guardrails” to prevent Trump from going completely off the rails. And let’s not forget one other thing: “anti-Semitism” evolved as a racist device by Europeans and today still mostly employed by white supremacist and neo-Nazi types; accusing, say, Palestinians of a term used to describe discrimination against and the mass murder of Jews by white people when some people call what is happening in Gaza today by the far-right Israeli government “mass murder” is self-serving at best.
History, of course, doesn't provide as much comfort as those with racial grievances would wish. White Europeans didn’t ask Native Americans for their “permission” to steal their lands—they just stole what they wanted and complained when the Natives fought back. In an 1813 letter to Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Jefferson rather mendaciously speaks of the “the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the Aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities” yet if they do not agree to “assimilate” on Euro-American terms, then we must “pursue them to extermination.”
The Trump and the Project 2025 anti-DEI campaign clearly shows that anyone not white (or not an “honorary white” as many of Indian extraction seem to be) are to be shunted aside, particularly from any place at the table that allows them to have any input in policy decisions. Of course this stems from long-standing practices in this country—not just from the Dred Scot decision, but from the very beginning of European settlement, which "necessitated" the gradual genocide of the Native American population, which even if we take a “low” population estimate of 2 million in 1600, along with births during the next three centuries, the population being reduced to less than 200,000 by 1890 means that probably at least 95 percent of the Native American population was exterminated through “guns, germs and steel” as written by Jared Diamond. Although this took a little longer to accomplish, it ultimately was a far worse genocide than what occurred during the Holocaust.
1890 also happened to be the year that the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred in which half the dead were women, children and elderly men. This massacre was instigated by an unreasonable “fear” by white settlers of the meaning of the so-called “Ghost Dance,” which supposedly would make warriors “bulletproof” and thus implied they would be more willing to engage in war. In an article in Diplomatic History in 2004, historian Jeffrey Ostler wrote "Wounded Knee was not made up of a series of discrete unconnected events. Instead, from the disarming to the burial of the dead, it consisted of a series of acts held together by an underlying logic of racist domination."
Shortly before the massacre, Gen. Nelson Miles wrote to his superior in Washington DC that "The difficult Indian problem cannot be solved permanently at this end of the line. It requires the fulfillment of Congress of the treaty obligations that the Indians were entreated and coerced into signing. They signed away a valuable portion of their reservation, and it is now occupied by white people, for which they have received nothing."
And nothing was done to correct this. To make the massacre appear “justified,” it was pointed out that 25 soldiers were killed, but it has also been noted that the Natives who were armed were more reacting to fire from the soldiers, and that most of the soldiers were likely killed by “friendly fire,” especially from the four Hotchkiss cannons that indiscriminately fired into the camp. The two-dozen Medals of “Dishonor” that were subsequently awarded ignored the fact that most of the women and children (all unarmed) who were killed had run from the camp only to be hunted down by crazed soldiers.
In this part of the country, history is also conveniently watered-down in regard to relations with Native American tribes. Among the fables is that of Chief Sealth, who Seattle is named after; besides waging brutal wars against neighboring tribes, Sealth was viewed as a traitor to tribal interests in his “friendship” with white settlers, which included signing a treaty with the territorial governor that he had no authority to do that forced other tribes off their lands, and during the subsequent war, provided “military intelligence” to white settlers. Although Sealth gave-up the land that now constitutes Seattle in exchange for his name, an 1865 city ordinance banned Native Americans including himself from residing in the city.
Isn’t real history fun? None of that “DEI” stuff? Besides guns and massacres (many claimed to “avenge” attacks while ignoring the reasons for them), European-Americans also introduced smallpox that devastated Native populations, and not just in the Great Plains. In a Historylink.org article on the smallpox epidemics that raged in the Pacific Northwest, Greg Lange writes that “By the 1850s, when the first EuroAmerican settlers arrived at Alki Point and along the Duwamish River, diseases had already taken a devastating toll on native peoples and their cultures,” and
During the 80-year period from the 1770s to 1850, smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases had killed an estimated 28,000 Native Americans in Western Washington, leaving about 9,000 survivors. In mid-June, while exploring Semiahmoo and Boundary bays on the east side of Puget Sound, members of the expedition landed near a large deserted village that they estimated was large enough for 400-500 inhabitants, “Tho,” (Archibald) Menzies stated, “it was now in perfect ruins – nothing but the skeletons of the houses remain’d.”
Thus it should come as no surprise that this country has a “history” of dealing with “uppity” minorities who are essentially “in the right” when it comes to rights, which Trump and his minions are trying to erase from the national memory. Europeans (before or after the creation of this country) didn’t ask if it was “OK” for them to come and steal Native American lands, or as Gen. Miles stated, allotted them rotten land without the promised compensation.
Fast-forwarding to today, it should be observed that Native Americans were not granted blanket citizenship until 1924, and Trump’s partisan-weaponized DOJ is using the language of the Elk v. Wilkins decision—which denied the right of a Native American to vote in a U.S. election because he was not a “citizen” despite being born in the country his people had resided in for tens of thousands of years--in order to support the revocation of birthright citizenship.
History can be unforgiving, especially to white nationalists who think they are the ones being “discriminated” against as is their way of life, which is dependent upon not being reminded of it or made to feel annoyed about evidence on acting on such “principles.” Merit? WTF does that have to do with anything? Insidehighered.com tells that half of college graduates—including Asians—are “underemployed five years after graduation, meaning they could not find jobs commensurate with their degrees (perhaps already filled by “legal” human trafficking in the form of cheaper help from India), and are in jobs that do not require college degrees, and that ten years on, most of those who did not obtain a college-required job immediately are still answering phones or doing data entry. Of course in the Trump administration, the only “merit” required is being “nice” to him and pleasing Der Fuhrer by carrying out his racist wishes.
So while Trump has a “deal” with India’s Modi to “accept” 18,000 deportees which accounts for 2.5 percent of all Indians in the country illegally, the Trump administration is desperate not only to fulfill the neo-Nazi Miller’s raging desire to rid the country of those ugly brown-skinned people from lands in south of the border in one great “final solution” regardless of its effect on the economy, especially in agriculture and dangerous work like roofing…
…while claiming that a shocking 0.3 reduction in GDP is either “good” according to Peter Navarro, or “Biden’s fault” according to Trump (make up your fucking minds, you morons) due to Trump’s absurd tariff paddle-balling and disrupting the labor market because of his mass deportations in the quest of “returning” manufacturing to the country. It has been pointed out that this is a fantasy; businesses will not invest in labor intensive manufacturing, which is why even China has “offshored” such work to cheaper labor in other Asian countries (ever wonder why our trade deficit with Vietnam seems so “unusually” high?).
But all of this is sidelining what Trump and his fascist thuggery wants to accomplish, as exemplified by the Civil Rights Division under Hakeem Dhillon, whose only “qualification” is that she has discriminatory caste cultural beliefs (even as a Sikh) which allows her to pedal Trump’s election lies and use the division to fight “anti-white racism” and the voting rights of the “others.”
Still, it is also becoming increasingly apparent that Trump mass deportation crusade is starting ever so slightly to be questioned, as CNN mentions a new poll that while a majority still supports Trump’s border policy, a majority no longer thinks the way mass deportation is being carried out is being done in the “right way.”
Naturally, Trump blames this on the media, and while Bondi and Leavitt continue to exaggerate and lie, implying that everyone being deported—even U.S. citizen children with Stage 4 cancer—are “murderers, rapists and drug traffickers,” this is starting to sound “desperate.” This desperation is apparent in the littering of the White House lawn with mug shots of those at least accused of crimes, apparently random selections found on the Internet, since many of them seem to be U.S. citizens, given their “American” names:
No doubt this was Miller’s idea. This pathetic attempt to justify actions unlawful and unconstitutional by attempts both desperate and hypocritical (given the questionable histories of certain members of the administration, including Trump and his 34 felony convictions). According to the Trump administration, everyone they arrest is a member of a gang, even women. Well, wait, what about those U.S. citizen children who were deported? They are here wasting huge amounts of taxpayer money, says Neo-Nazi Tom Homan, providing them “due process” by putting their names on a deportation order before a judge can hear their cases.
The desperation of the administration to find as many bad things as they can about Kilmar Abrego Garcia may serve its purpose for some people, but it should not be forgotten that he was deported for one reason: that he was allegedly a gang member, like those 179 Venezuelans who were sent to that terrorist concentration camp in El Salvador, who like Abrego Garcia had no criminal record, and the DOJ and DHS claim they can’t reveal the source of their “evidence” that they are gang members because it is a “state secret.” But it’s OK for Pete Hegseth to reveal classified military intelligence on his personal phone?
This is what you call “desperate”:
In his interview with Terry Moran, who Trump claimed he chose because “I never heard of you” and then whined about him “not being nice to me” for fact-checking him to his face, Trump refused to acknowledge that the “M S 1 3” lettering was not “real” but photoshopped in, which is clearly shown to be faked in this close-up with the fake lettering obviously more “clear” than the blurred actual tattoo:
Just ask Mr. "Western Decline," which I think has something to do with making America "dumb" again, like this guy is. Desperation is also apparent in the continuing false claim that Tren de Aragua is “terrorizing” the country. In New York City, police detective Jason Savino told USA Today that Tren de Aragua has been unable to organize enough to pose a true threat, especially compared to other gangs operating in New York. He said the group has been pinned to less than five violent crimes the past two years. “They are driving retail theft and scooter crime,” he said. “However, when it comes to violence, they pale in comparison.” It is also noted that gang does not use tattoos as “identifiers.”
But that won't stop the real “terrorizing,” which is ICE’s gangsterism, here an agent checking one brown-skinned “suspect” in front of a church for any “identifying tattoos”—that is to say any tattoos:
Racial profiling, you think? We are learning that ICE agents have been allowed to go rogue for a long time, violating civil and due process rights; racism seems to be the most important qualifier for the job. Take for example Michael Hetle, a 20-year Navy veteran who could have just “retired” but instead for some reason decided to take a job with the Bellevue Police Department.
I mean, why? Well, we know he likes to kill people. After a bank robbery at the Bellevue Mall, he was responsible for the first police killing that anyone could remember in the city when he fired his weapon 11 times at him, hitting the suspect with 7. There was an inquest questioning why he and his partner fired rubber bullets at the suspect initially, causing the suspect to pull out a gun with real bullets, before deploying their own and endangering customers.
After that Hetle was disciplined for pulling over and menacing a Somalian woman, and then there was the case of the Guatemalan man whose roommate admitted to lying to the 9-1-1 dispatcher about being threatened by a knife because he told her he was leaving for California and she would have to pay the rent for the apartment they shared herself. Hetle arrived on the scene and apparently speaking in unintelligible Spanish, shot the unarmed man while he was trying to find his wallet with his driver’s license.
At the inquest the judge told the jury that "Actual danger is not necessary for a homicide to be justifiable”—and they obliged. Trump, by the way, has just signed an executive order that appears to allow police to go completely rogue without having to concern themselves with “frivolous” lawsuits.
Hetle was “persuaded” to resign from the police. His next stop was the Department of Homeland Security; what he actually did there is unclear (a “director” of what?), but with his “record” he would have been “perfect” as an ICE agent, although it is possible it was thought that it might not be a good “look” if it became known that someone who likes to shoot people was conducting immigration raids.
From there, in statement from NASA to The Daily Beast, Hetle was “a career civil servant who works at NASA Headquarters in Washington in the agency’s Enterprise Protection Program, where he is responsible for the business operations of the directorate and the executive staff, and supports the associate administration in coordinating the reviews of all nationwide and international NASA aeronautics related research programs.”
Why such a man would be hired for any respectable job with his “resume” was not considered a reason for not doing so, and the result was that what eventually happened was “inevitable” for someone with some deep, ingrained racial resentment and an itchy trigger finger. After some “disputes” that seemed to be derived from Hetle’s dislike of having a black neighbor, he shot dead the unarmed man, and threatened to shoot his wife as well:
Hetle’s past history wasn’t much help to him, as he was convicted of the murder of Javon Prather and sentenced to life imprisonment. Of course if he was found “innocent,” he could still find a “suitable” job in Florida by joining a university campus police force, where we are learning from ABC News that campus cops can be “deputized” as immigration enforcement officers, where they will “have the authority to interrogate ‘any alien or person believed to be an alien’ about their right to remain in the country, as well as the power to make arrests without a warrant in some cases.”
This is much more important than promoting
and funding scientific research (sponsored by both the NIH and NSF) on college campuses, which used to be what made America “great,”
but now is considered “waste” by DOGE punks and not in line with Trump’s “priorities,”
which apparently is to make America even less intelligent than Trump to make himself look "smarter."
What has happened to this country? In the past—like, say, during the Sixties—there were young people who questioned the status quo and demanded “change.” Of course many of them grew older and, uh, “wiser.” What I mostly remember about Joan Baez was that Seventies hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” There has been a lot of excuses given why this former civil rights activist…
…who in need of being “relevant” again has “reinvented” herself as a gender activist/“recovered memory of childhood abuse victim”/allowing herself to be used to provide “credibility” by this narcissistic fraud who “speaks” for other narcissists like herself while making sure you know she looks “hotter” than you…
…recorded this song about people who took a “rebel stand” in support of slavery. Well, it’s an “anti-war” song. Huh? The songwriter, The Band’s Robbie Robertson, admitted that as a Canadian he didn’t actually know anything about the “history,” as if ignorance excuses it. But just because a song mourns “loss” doesn’t mean it is an “anti-war” song: it just means it would have been “nicer” if you had won the war, given that the “narrator” admits to have taken that “rebel stand” like his brother, who was killed by a damn Yankee.
Now, the reason why I am bothering with this is two-fold: one is that I finally got around to watching my Blu-ray copy of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which is actually pretty good (I also actually saw Dylan in concert at the university’s arena in the late Eighties), and the Baez documentary I Am a Noise, and kind of wish I hadn’t. People like Baez apparently believe that devolvement from selfless activist for the rights of those less privileged than she was (and is) to someone whose current “philosophy” comes from the same psychological black hole as does white nationalist Trumpism, playing the “victim” in order in order to use it as cudgel to beat on those who can’t (now) defend themselves, represents a "good" example for the current narcissistic, nihilistic generation.
Baez is part Mexican-American; doesn’t she feel any “commonality” with Hispanics who are suffering the evil of Trump? What about deporting children who are U.S. citizens now without giving families fair warning to provide them the opportunity of leave them with family who are legal residents? What about those tattoos? Texas Judge David Briones ordered the release of a man and his wife in a scathing denunciation of the DOJ's "evidence" that they were "gang members":
Of course this is not the only time in American history this has happened, it is just that today it is being done with “actual malice” and “racial animus.” And what if there is another El Paso-type mass shooting clearly inspired by Trump and his goons' racist propaganda? Do we need ask how they will squirm their way out of responsibility for that?
Of course it could be worse. There are former “liberals” who think “liberalism" has become such hard work that maybe they should give fascism a “look” because, you, know, they sound like they have “common sense.” You know, like Hitler sounds in these audios in which he is speaking in his “normal voice”:
So the ex-liberal Bill Maher meets Donald Trump at the White House for a chit-chat. Maher’s summary of this meeting was satirized by Larry David in The New York Times as a meeting with Hitler, who is really a “nice guy” if you just give him a chance. Ok, so he is mass murderer, but, you know, he didn’t kill all those people himself, so he really isn’t “responsible.”
Life is really tough being President, and sometimes you can’t help but get carried away, especially when you operate from the gut because you hate being told that what you want to do isn’t exactly legal. But hey, I’m the President, and if the dictator (I mean president) does it, it isn’t illegal—even if you send people who are actually innocent of what you accuse them of being to a concentration camp in El Salvador where they might be killed.
We know who Trump is, even if Maher allows himself to be “confused.” When he meets the press for a question-and-answer session, he is never alone, he is too much of a coward for that. He has his henchpersons in attendance to rant and rave for him. Even on the rare occasions that he has that one-on-one with someone from the “liberal” media, the interviewer is always aware that Trump may walk out and leave at any moment if he feels threatened, like being fact-checked on his lies. Too often we see the media moguls cave-in when Trump threatens them with meritless multi-billion dollar lawsuits because he doesn’t take criticism well; this bully can really “dish it out” on Trump Social, but he is in actuality a thin-skinned coward who believes he has a right to lie because he has "good reasons."
Maher obviously doesn’t understand a megalomaniac and narcissist like Trump. He is a man you have to judge by his actions, as if his words are not bad enough. He has done nothing so far that can be called human, save as a “human” reaction to adversity caused by his own actions, and the blackest of human nature. Of course if you approach him as if he is a human being like anyone else despite all the evil he and his henchpersons are doing, he will respond in a corresponding way: “Be nice to me, and I will be nice.”
Of course if you step back and see that what he is doing is not “nice,” but you still only want to see something that is “nice,” like Maher appeared to do, then maybe the “problem” really is your own embrace of far-right politics, as Maher has been accused of. The truth is that once Trump is reduced to having to think for himself, he is merely a simple man with a simple brain; facts confuse him, so he resorts to positive or negative hyperbole, and if you don't call him out on the absurdity of it, he will be "nice."
So we live in “desperate” times that require “desperate” measures. And why is the Trump administration so desperate to keep Abrego Garcia out of the country? Because if one person is allowed back in the country, then that justifies looking at other cases of people wrongly accused of being gang members or even having committed any crimes—and that likely is nearly all of those being accused of being a “gang member” and a “terrorist.” Due process must be denied lest this fact be revealed.
But like all of Project 2025's fascist goals, all of Trump's endless unlawful and unconstitutional executive orders (which of course he has nothing to do with their creation) must be promulgated now to see if any of them survive the smell test. The desperation is apparent as Trump's poll numbers keep falling as people are realizing that Trump really is that dumb to break the things (like the economy) that were not actually "broke" in the first place. It can't be any help to Trump that even Putin is suggesting that he is one dumb SOB for throwing away all his own cards, let alone his own credibility, by being dumb enough to believe in the lie that Putin wants peace on any terms but that which he dictates for himself.
Trump is simply a fool who follows the advice of unfit and unqualified fanatics who see him as a tool to promote their own personal agendas. What does a neo-Nazi social media influencer like Laura Loomer know about national security? Probably nothing, but Trump certainly values her opinion enough to fire people she doesn't like. But she knows her "man," whose mind is fueled by hate, resentment and his elevated view of himself.
As we saw that in the televised cabinet meeting, Kristi Noem--who while governor of South Dakota was accused of being a racist by Native American tribes who banned her from entering their reservations--also knows this, since her fame and fortune depends upon it. Thus we hear Noem and others give Trump all the "credit" for allowing them to advance their own evil agendas. Desperate actions, thus, have no consequences for those making them, since ultimately Trump is dumb enough to take the "credit."
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