Alternet2 BAK
oops --> TWO 2 24
merri ok
SEE BULWark kristol
Olympian David Hearn will appear in court on Thursday morning alongside one of President Donald Trump's biggest legal foes: Norm Eisen.
One of the co-founders of CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), Trump has raged about Eisen for years as he loses case after case against the former ethics czar. Trump once referred to Eisen as a “major sleazebag” and “the Lawfare King and Color Revolution Expert” in Truth Social posts. At one point, Trump even blasted CREW, complaining, “Everything I read is Norm Eisen.” According to Trump, “You don’t get much lower than him.”
Eisen responded by saying that it's clear Trump is obsessed with him.
Eisen has taken up a high-profile case in which the administration is accused of trying to make Hearn the "scapegoat" for their own failures around the Reflecting Pool.
This is the "latest scandal of scapegoating and blame shifting and the administration's own failures on the Reflecting Pool," Eisen said in a video chat with former prosecutor Joyce Vance. "They've charged, with a felony, our client with The Washington Litigation Group, my wonderful co-counsel Mary Dorman, Davy Hearn, the Olympic canoeist."
He asked Vance how, as a former prosecutor and former U.S. attorney, she would have handled something like this. She explained that in cases like this, she looks through the lens of someone who not only ran a U.S. attorney's office but also spent a decade prosecuting criminal cases.
In "a properly functioning DOJ," she said, something like this would have been investigated by the National Parks Service before being handed to the Justice Department. In her experience, the NPS typically handles things like smoking cannabis on federal lands, a relatively low-level felony. NPS doesn't "do big criminal cases," she said.
"Your job as a prosecutor is to consider whether that case is significant enough to merit becoming a federal felony," Vance continued. "This case doesn't pass the smell test on that ground, but it also has another major flaw, which is evidence."
Secretary of the Interior
where he was asked directly about the Reflecting Pool and asserted, "It didn't peel off. It was — it was — there was vandalism. There was box cutters. There have been seven arrests." At no point did police find a box cutter on Hearn, who was cycling down to the mall in his bicycle shorts and jersey.
A video from Emily Miller of the arrest shows Hearn talking about the pool scandal being "funny," and later he relayed that he accidently hit the hose from the giant cleaner.
Hearn has said publicly, “I did not remove, I did not damage, I did not rip, tear, break, destroy or harm any part of the Reflecting Pool."
According to him, he dipped his hand into the pool to feel the coating on the bottom, which was supposed to be "American Flag blue."
Vance explained that, unlike in many other cases, there was no grand jury that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro went to for an indictment. They merely filed the case in superior court, which has "less rigorous standards." Pirro has failed to indict several people by going to grand juries in D.C.
In her press conference, Pirro alleged an NPS employee witnessed Hearn willfully and "violently" ripping up about two square feet of the pool's newly installed liner using his bare hands. She asserted to reporters questioning her about evidence, “He damaged the pool! He damaged this pool!”
Pirro's charging document also doesn't say anything about "violently" doing anything. It claims Hearn “ripped a piece of the recently installed blue pool sealant” or “pulled up and removed the bottom liner with both hands."
Miller's video shows Hearn took off one of his padded cycling gloves to put his hand in. He pulled his hand out of the pool and put the glove back on in the video.
"The U.S attorney should have stepped in and said, folks we have a lot bigger fish to fry," Vance said. "But even if this case was an important one, it doesn't have the evidence. I mean, Norm, that's my issue with this case. I just don't see how the government proves its case. I suspect that they'll do everything that they can to keep it from going to trial they've made their splash indicting the case now they're going to try to stay as far away from a courtroom as they can."
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Conservative Bulwark Editor Jonathan Last argued there are two groups of President Donald Trump's voters: Those who signed on to deport 20 million immigrants regardless of whether they had committed any crime, and those who signed on with Trump’s plan to remove only immigrants who were criminals.
“Because people are stupid, that first group of voters believed that there were 20 million undocumented immigrants who have committed felonies. This is not possible,” said Last. “The total number of people in jail in America today — this includes federal, state, local, and tribal land prisons — is just under 2 million. The number of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes cannot be 10x the entire prison population of the United States. If it were, then daily life in America would look like Escape from New York.”
“So, some Trump voters were duped owing to their general ignorance and/or innumeracy. But others were not,” added Last. “Others signed up for Trump because of his second promise (the 20 million deportations) and viewed the first promise (about deporting only criminals) as the pap necessary to get the suckers onboard.”
The question Last wants to answer is how many “dupes” voted for Trump vs the avowed racists who simply want Brown people gone. To get his answer, Last reviewed an AP/NORC poll showing consistent 80 percent support for Trump’s immigration policies among Republicans. Then he compared that to a more recent YouGov poll showing 80 percent of Republicans still "approved" of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement even after they shot and killed 37 year-old U.S. citizen Renee Good in footage that reveals no threat to agents.
“It seems pretty clear that, at best, one in five Trump voters were duped. The majority of them are getting exactly what they wanted,” Last said. "Now if Trump were to lose the support of 20 percent of Republican voters — or even 14 percent — it would be meaningful for Republican electoral prospects. Which is nice. The problem is that having 80 percent of Republican voters actively supporting a fascist race war is meaningful for our societal prospects.”
That’s a lot of racists in one party, said Last, but what’s worse is the tally of avowed racists occupying high federal positions, including “Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem," as indicated by a recent Homeland Security post claiming to seek the deportation of "100 million" deportations.
“There are 43 million foreign-born Americans. Most of them are legal immigrants. In order to perform 100 million deportations, DHS would have to round up every immigrant of any status —even naturalized citizens — and then also snatch 57 million American who are citizens by birth and deport them, too,” said Last.
“Want to guess who those other 57 million Americans might be?” Last asked, before sharing a recent U.S. Department of Labor X post ordering Americans “To remember who you are.” Last said this slogan is a dead ringer from Adolf Hitler’s own iconic “One People, One Country, One Leader” post from the 1940s. Couple that with a volley of blonde, blue-eyed propaganda posts from Trump’s Department of Labor, and you’ve got even more insight.
“On the one hand, it feels weird to say that the U.S. government is attempting some low-key ethnic cleansing,” said Last. “On the other hand, the reality is that we have a masked secret police force going door-to-door attempting to kidnap brown people; one government agency publicly daydreaming about deporting 100 million people; and another government agency saying that the ideal worker is a 20-year-old white guy.”
Last said this information mingles horribly with the White House’s obsession with white Americans’ falling fertility rate and it’s constant citation of “Stuff white people like” including false claims that white men who “did extremely well” in high school are not getting invited to college despite white men having a “significant advantage” during the application process.
Read the Bulwark report at this link.
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RANDOM GOOD ARTL
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“Waste, fraud, and abuse.”
It’s President Donald Trump’s battle cry as he dismantles federal agencies, fires hundreds of thousands of employees, and demoralizes the workers who remain. It’s also another of his false flag operations.
Rather than ferreting out corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government, Trump has undermined the very professionals who have that job: inspectors general.
The Role of the IGs
In the wake of procurement scandals and President Richard Nixon’s corrupt abuse of executive power for personal ends, Congress passed the Inspector General Act of 1978 to establish formally the duties and responsibilities of the office. Inspectors general pursue their missions with nonpartisan objectives and have a central role in holding government accountable.
Approximately half of the 70-plus inspectors general are appointed by the president, subject to Senate confirmation. They are the only independent offices within federal agencies designed to protect taxpayer money and root out corruption, fraud, waste, and mismanagement. IGs also investigate whistleblowers’ confidential claims.
Over the almost 50 years of their statutory existence, they have saved taxpayers billions of dollars.
Trump’s Escalating War on Independent IGs
For Trump and his allies, independent inspectors general have been a nuisance and worse. Following acquittal in his first impeachment, he replaced IGs for the intelligence community, State Department, Defense Department, Health and Human Services, and Transportation Department.
In his second term, Trump has moved more broadly and more rapidly. Typically, IGs remained in place when new presidents took office, underscoring their nonpartisan roles. But in violation of the statutory 30-day notice and “for cause” requirements for termination, Trump fired 17 of them during the first week of his second term. He had appointed several of them during his first term.
So the next time Trump and his allies say they’re eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, remember that Trump is actually doing the opposite: clearing away key guardrails of accountability.
During post-termination interviews with the New York Times, the fired IGs said that their biggest concern was the “chilling effect” that their abrupt, unlawful, and unjustified terminations would have on others. Professor Timothy Snyder calls it “obeying in advance.” The inspectors general used similar language to describe their fears:
“Self-censorship”
“Why would you want to write a report that will get you fired?”
“Installing someone who has more loyalty to one person than to the mission of the office.”
“If you do the work that you’re intended to do and it’s not popular, then you will be punished.”
“Who will speak truth to power?”
The concerns were justified. Trump doesn’t want anyone speaking truth to his power.
On Tuesday, February 11, the inspector general for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Paul Martin, issued a report criticizing Trump’s proposed dismantling of that agency and outlining the disastrous consequences. The next day, Trump fired him.
Final Act of Destruction
On September 28, 2025, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that effective October 1 it was defunding the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. It was a strategic kill shot because the council is the umbrella agency supporting all of the inspectors general offices.
Beginning on October 1, what had been the website for the council stated only:
Due to a lack of apportionment of funds, this website is currently unavailable.
The same line appeared at numerous Office of Inspector General websites, including the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Justice, Interior and Veterans Affairs, and by those of AmeriCorps, Export-Import Bank of the United States, Federal Trade Commission, International Trade Commission, National Archives and Records Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Personnel Management, Smithsonian Institution, and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
Contacting the watchdog website for the National Labor Relations Board’s OIG page resulted in a “404 error.” The Architect of the Capitol’s IG page said “Not found”; another new page offered only hotline information and blamed the change on a “funding issue impacting Oversight.gov functions.”
The council also runs Oversight.gov, which houses over 34,000 reports from most of the OIGs, and operates 28 OIG websites that host legally required hotlines for whistleblowers to report suspected cases of government corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. That site was down too. The council site’s link to the “Inspectors General directory” stated only: “Not Found—the requested URL was not found on this server.”
Not a Funding Issue
But the so-called “lack of funds” asserted on the inoperative council website was not the result of the simultaneous government shutdown. The council’s budget did not require additional congressional authorization.
Rather, the OMB under the leadership of Director Russell Vought decided not to fund it. Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, was a primary architect of Project 2025—a 900-page blueprint for expanding executive power (“the unitary executive”) and imposing an ultraconservative social vision. During the 2024 campaign, Project 2025 was so toxic that Trump repeatedly disavowed and claimed to know nothing about it; as president, he’s boasting about working with Vought to implement it.
Asked about its defunding decision, the OMB asserted without evidence that it shut down the IGs because they had “become corrupt, partisan, and in some cases, have lied to the public.”
Republicans Are Concerned?!
Even Senate Republicans were outraged. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called on the White House to release the funding immediately.
So far, it hasn’t.
So the next time Trump and his allies say they’re eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, remember that Trump is actually doing the opposite: clearing away key guardrails of accountability.
And remember that when Republicans in Congress say they are “outraged” at some action Trump has taken, don’t expect them to do anything about it.
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no lnx
alternetThere's no 'waiting it out'
There's no 'waiting it out'
D. Earl StephensNovember 23, 2024
I have an admission for you: I never took even a single second to consider the terrible residue of a Democratic loss in this month's elections, precisely because of the terrible things that happened last week.
When others brought it up, I would simply defer and say something that tasted like this: “I can’t allow myself to go there, because the consequences will be too grave to even imagine. My focus and energy need to be on ONE thing: WINNING. We must get Kamala Harris into the White House. Losing is just too devastating to contemplate.”
Now that might sound naive and foolish, and I guess I get that, but I am not built to consider losing. As a half-decent athlete in my younger days, and a high-octane competitor always, there has never been a game, or a contest, or a political battle that I engaged in when I ever considered losing.
I grew up in the days of Hall of Fame football coach and Democrat, Vince Lombardi, who famously said, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing.”
ALSO READ: How to find hope in a near-hopeless time
I went onto become a sports writer and then a sports editor before shifting to news, so I’ll spare you the 172 clichés that apply to what just happened in America.
And before I leak too much testosterone all over this page, I am not for one minute comparing some football game to the most important election in American history.
What I am telling you is that a lot of people laid their time, treasure, heart, and soul on the line the past eight years, only to end up right back where we started.
This wasn't just some gut-wrenching loss, it was the end of an America that fancied itself a place that doled out liberty and justice for all. Instead of being a beacon for democracy across the world, we now provide safe harbor for murderous fascists.
This could not have been conceivable even 10 years ago.
I am not writing to knock you further into despair today, good people. I’m really not. I have written during the past week that there are ways out of this, because there simply have to be. Namely, we must not submit.
Except that is exactly what many in our Democratic leadership seem to be doing right now, and it is positively blowing my mind.
While we are being steamrolled by Trump and his nuclear-powered propaganda machine fueled by greedy, blood-thirsty billionaires, Democratic leaders are pointing fingers, and climbing over one another to tell us all what went wrong in the election.
While they draw attention to themselves in all the wrong ways, the morbid Trump is settling in to what he hopes will be a long and comfortable dictatorship, and picking one revolting loyalist after another to staff his cabinet and inflict as much pain on us as possible.
Consider what happened on Wednesday alone:
Joe Biden symbolically surrendered to the repulsive Trump in front of a roaring fire in our White House (talk about a terrifying metaphor), and actually said, “Welcome back!” This is the guy Biden himself has warned about in the starkest terms, and over and over again.
This is the guy who instead of gracefully conceding defeat attacked our country, did nothing about it for hours, and then told the people who did it that he loved them.
HE TOLD THE PEOPLE WHO ATTACKED US THAT HE LOVED THEM.
This is the guy who is a convicted felon, and a rapist. But, sure, how do you take your coffee, Donald? Would you like some cookies with your shit-eating grin?
And of course, Trump’s billionaire boss, the absolutely repulsive Elon Musk, was in tow, because, well, that’s completely normal ...
And forget the fact, the America-attacker has NOT yet signed (nor will he) the Presidential Transition Ethics Agreement as required by law ...
He deserves nothing but scorn, not public congratulations and warm welcomes by the fire. And if Biden just HAD to do this, why so damn soon? My God, most of us haven’t gotten over the shock yet.
Some never will.
Then there’s news Special Counsel Jack Smith will be quitting, rather than making Trump fire him, and that is pathetic. And has anybody heard from Merrick Garland since he crawled underneath his bed? He, more than anybody, is responsible for this terrible mess we are in by failing to do the most important part of his job: protecting America.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who I like very much, is literally everywhere saying we need to take the high prices in America more seriously, as if Vice President Harris didn't talk about this endlessly on the campaign trail. Unlike her ghastly opponent she actually had a concrete plan to help correct this, and not some bullshit “concept” of one. Again, why so soon, my good man?
Fully five people in Democratic “leadership” have let it leak that they will be running for president in 2028, as if there will even be an election in 2028. They will get no mention here.
Talk about grave-dancing …
And, hey, go ahead and slam me for not considering the consequences of a Trump win, but at least I got the same memo that Harris did. We both understood Trump is a fascist, and is not really keen on elections.
Frankly, she is one of the few who has accorded herself well though this ordeal, and while I have no proof of this, it is starting to feel to me like she is being hung out to dry. Nancy Pelosi can’t stop letting it be known that Biden should have stepped down sooner, and there should have been a primary to determine our Democratic candidate for president.
She might be right about that, but she is dead wrong for intimating we would have got a better candidate than Harris, who ran just one helluva campaign, and is a top-notch person. I’d still run through a brick wall for her, because she is everything right about the nasty world of politics.
Ya know … I’m not advocating a violent attack on America like Trump did, but I am advancing the fact that the Democratic Party needs to stand up straight and tall, and show some damn backbone and grit.
We are fully capable of doing both a thorough autopsy on our terrible loss, while sending the message loud clear that we still have plenty of damn fight left, and aren’t going anywhere — that fascism has no place in America.
There is a prevailing feeling among many outside the Beltway that our leadership has abandoned us, at the very time we need them most, and this will not be forgotten.
It feels like a catastrophic storm has come ashore, is gaining steam and will slowly and methodically wipe out everything in its path. I cannot tell you how many hardworking and good-hearted Democrats who have told me, “Fuck it. I’m done.”
This is how a bad situation gets even worse.
I talked with one of the smartest people I know about this Wednesday night. Christopher Webb is a Democratic Strategist in California, and he’s seeing and hearing the same things I am among the Black community, who are the greatest patriots among us:
“Black folks are tired right now. Sick and tired! Especially Black women. They do the heavy lifting every election cycle. They always lead the way, and this time we had a supremely qualified Black woman nominee, but we had to watch her torn down by racism and misogyny coming from the right. We constantly had to hear that she’s dumb. Where are her policies? She’s a DEI hire. She’s trash. She slept her way to the top. Black women activists put anger aside and pushed back with the facts: Kamala is supremely qualified, and here’s why. She’s here to fight for us. Here are her policies. But it didn’t matter.
Post-election, there’s a lot of anger, frustration, and even hopelessness within our community.
We love the party, but it feels like the party does not love us back.”
“But it feels like the party does not love us back …”
Man, this makes my blood boil. That Democratic leadership I have been trying to slap some sense into here need to hear this. We ALL need to hear it.
I want to add that Christopher said he’s “more than ready” for the fight ahead.
Me too.
While, I totally get the inclination to bolt, I am not done. I will stand here and fight, but I need to know just who in the hell is with us. I need to know who is out there speaking for our concerns and not capitulating to fascists.
We cannot surrender. There is no “waiting it out.” We must take the fight to these b-------- right now because we — not them — stand for what is most certainly good and right in this country.
Or as Lombardi said: “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.”
NOW READ: America is at a crossroads
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.
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alternet-Home | Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump
Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump
D. Earl Stephens
September 15, 2024.
We have a complete madman running for the President of the United States, and it would be about damn time our national media started reporting it this way.
We are just over seven weeks from a landmark election that will determine America’s standing in the world, and her ability to protect the rights, welfare and lives of her citizens.
With all of this on the line, we have bitterly learned that we can no longer count on the fourth estate.
It’s a terrible thing. They have catastrophically failed us like never before.
We have been forced to wait helplessly, and wonder if these incompetent, ponderous idiots will ever stop ignoring what is so clearly right in front of our tired eyes: a dangerous maniac backed by a massive propaganda network that disgracefully fills his dark, billowing sails, allowing him to rumble unchecked and uncovered across the American countryside, taking a blowtorch to the truth, dead aim on our vote and our election workers, and repeating insane, dangerous and racist conspiracy theories that assault our senses, and could well result in the death of our democracy and many of our citizens.
That run-on sentence has never needed writing more, because while I typed it, our media continued to massively underreport, and even disgracefully normalize its chilling message.
This is NOT OK, people.
We must demand that our collective media FINALLY removes their blinders and their heads from their asses and starts reporting on what WE KNOW they have been seeing and hearing from the 300-lb. sack of dirt, and his revolting followers in Congress who swoon at his fat, little feet to provide him cover.
Donald J. Trump means America harm, goddamnit, and he is getting sicker and crazier by the minute.
So tell me: At what point does this become the only thing worth leading every major media outlet in this country????
At its core, the mission of the working press is cut and dry and pretty easily executed: Reporters and news departments are assigned to cover various beats and report out to the American people about what is happening in their coverage areas. The press has the privilege of being where we too often can’t, so that they can tell us what has transpired on the football field, or the court room, or a theater of war, or the school board meeting, or on the election trail …
We depend on them to be our eyes and ears, to describe as vividly as possible what is happening where they are. We depend on them to provide this information to the editorial leaders in their respective newsrooms, who are tasked with processing it all and giving it the weight and “play” it deserves.
We depend on their news sense and professionalism to understand what is important and what isn't.
We depend on them to be accurate and credible, because without those two things, they are done, and we all suffer for it.
Again, it really isn’t that difficult a job to carry out, but man, is it monumentally important.
Well, right now our incompetent and potentially bought-off media is making a complete and utter mess of things, and only a damn fool would rate their coverage of this election as even remotely accurate and credible.
It’s an absolute disgrace is what it is.
The Republican candidate for president is a complete madman. A racist. Unhinged.
Even the slightest amount of fact-checking and casual observation would confirm this.
So WHY isn’t it being reported this way????
We are in the middle of a national emergency, and I am going to continue to use my small but sturdy platform built on years in the newspaper business to ask just one more time:
What the hell is going on in our nation’s newsrooms? WHAT can they possibly be covering that is more important than the most serious internal threat to America since the Civil War?
We must ALL keeping asking these questions until we get a damn answer. Our safety and our democracy depend on it.
The guy they are normalizing is a slovenly, dirty old man incapable of cogently reciting even the most basic political policy. That should be the very least we expect from a candidate — even policy that was written FOR HIM like Project 2025.
The guy they are bucking up as some legitimate candidate often forgets where he is, and confuses people all the time. He talks up murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and talks down leaders — even American presidents — who have stood with us for decades.
This is what traitors do.
He doesn't understand or respect NATO, geopolitical affairs, or even American history. And he damn sure doesn’t understand the economy. Trump’s hotel and casino businesses have declared bankruptcy SIX times. He couldn’t even sell steaks, for crying out loud. So listen to me, you media suckers, and take this note:
Trump inherited a perfectly good economy from Barack Obama in 2016, who brought us back from the brink after Republican George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, and left it smoldering in flames by the time he finally exited the scene by taking a torch to our Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Were any you watching this????? Seriously, WERE YOU????
Look, just because he SAYS he built a great economy during his repulsive four years in the White House does not make it so. Why not do some real reporting, and look into that?
He often gives answers to even the easiest questions as if he were auditioning to be the star of some deranged carnival. Here’s but one answer of hundreds like this, he offered up about providing affordable child care last week:
Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it — in this country, you have to have it.
But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.
Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.
We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care.
I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, that I just told you about.
We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.
Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.
Well? That’s a direct quote right there.
Time and again, you sanitize all this crap as if it were your job to listen to the nuclear-grade bullshit he spits out about God knows what, and twist yourself in a pretzel trying to explain to your readers what you think he was trying to say.
That is NOT your job, you fools. Your job is to simply report word for word what he said. And if it doesn’t make any sense, well you better damn well report it that way.
And what about Tuesday night’s debate? That one should have mercifully ended his career forever. He was so overmatched, so insane and so revolting, that the very least one of his gross lackeys could have done was lasso him and use a two-ton winch to drag him off the stage.
Instead, the aforementioned Rubio called it “a big win” for his master.
Senator Lindsey Graham said he had “the best closing in presidential debate history.”
Both of these feeble men warned us of the dangers of Trump in 2016. Now they disgracefully run cover for him. Is this no longer worth a mention? Can they ever be trusted again?
Here’s what your headline should have been after that debate:
TRUMP AGAIN PROVES HIMSELF COMPLETELY UNFIT FOR LEADERSHIP
I didn’t see that one anywhere. Why? What debate were you watching?
His despicable attack on Haitian-Americans right now, is no different than his attack on Asian-Americans four years ago, or his attack on Mexican-Americans four years before that. And what about his lifelong attacks on Black Americans, including the repulsive “birther issue” he created in the dark pit that doubles as his filthy mind to attack Obama?
He is the literal definition of a bigot. Why won’t you call him that? Does accuracy scare you?
His is a mountain of steaming hate — the throttle between his addled brain and filthy mouth is now completely burned out and inoperable. He’s the racist drunk at the end of the bar screaming into his empty shot glass and trying to make all his miserable problems everybody else’s.
He’s a convicted felon, admitted woman-abuser, and is charged with violently attacking the United States of America.
There is literally nothing he won’t do to win this election.
NOTHING.
Do any of you doubt he will will continue to incite violence when he loses on November 5th? Do any of you doubt that were he to win he would order his orcs to exact revenge on anybody and everybody he deems disloyal, including you? Do any of you have any doubt he will spread all manner of lies and hate between now and election day that will further muddy the waters of our once unassailably honest election system?
Any doubt at all?
Why aren’t you reporting it then? Why aren’t you giving this the urgency the potential end of our country as we know it demands? People’s lives are on the line, you blithering idiots.
This is the biggest story you will ever cover and you are blowing it so catastrophically I literally shake every time I am forced to address it.
You are cowards, you are worthless, and you have failed in your quest to uphold your most basic responsibility to the public: accurately and credibly reporting the truth.
The end of America is potentially here, and you are either too damn stupid to know it, or worse: complicit in its demise.
Those are the facts, and it would be about damn time you started paying attention to them.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.
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an 2 24
florida public school students start learning about communism in 7th grade. That’s too late for some Republicans in the Florida House, who want teachers to instruct students as young as kindergarteners on concepts such as “cultural Marxism.” But what is it?
The House bill moving in the Legislature doesn’t provide a definition for the term, raising questions about how little kids could understand cultural Marxism.
The Senate version of the bill doesn’t include cultural Marxism in its legislation.
Nevertheless, HB 1349, passed in a House committee on Feb. 1. The bill analysis says that starting in the 2026-27 school year, the history of communism must be included in instruction in grades K-12 in Florida’s public schools. (Currently, there are no standards for the history of communism from kindergarten to 6th grade.) The legislation would include “the philosophy and lineages of Communist thought, including cultural Marxism.”
The bill involves a task force — the governor would appoint the members — to come up with age-appropriate curriculum and academic standards for K-12 instruction of the history of communism and its dangers. The task force would report its findings no later than July 1, 2025, and it “must also make recommendations to the Legislature regarding the creation of a Florida Museum of Communist History,” according to the legislative staff analysis.
The House proposal, from Republican Reps. Chuck Brannan and James Buchanan, gained enough support last week to move forward in the Legislature. But Democrats criticized the inclusion of cultural Marxism as one of the things students will learn about. Brannan represents North Florida counties and a part of Alachua, and Buchanan represents part of Sarasota.
From terrorist manifesto to K-12 curricula
Democratic lawmakers pointed to far-right groups’ usage of cultural Marxism in relation to antisemitic beliefs.
“If you look up the term cultural Marxism, what comes up is the term cultural Marxism refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory, so that’s also concerning to me,” Palm Beach Democratic Rep. Katherine Waldron said during the Choice and Innovation subcommittee meeting last week. “I’m all for kids learning about government and political systems. But I would be against this very specific terminology in training or in trying to educate them on this.”
Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow with ADL’s Center on Extremism, said in a statement to Florida Phoenix that antisemites also use the term to reinforce their longstanding antisemitic trope that communism is “Jewish.”
“‘Cultural Marxism’ is a term, typically used by right-wing ideologues, to attack an array of ideas and concepts they oppose, including multiculturalism, globalism, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights, among others. The term often functions as an antisemitic dog whistle or codeword,” Mayo wrote in the statement.
“Promoters of the term often invoke a conspiracy theory that falsely claims such progressive ideas originated with the so-called Frankfurt School, a leftist intellectual collective active in Germany between the two World Wars. Exploiting the fact that a number of the Frankfurt School intellectuals were Jewish, antisemitic versions of this conspiracy theory link the Frankfurt School, and thus ‘cultural Marxism’ itself, to Jews, claiming that Jews seek to subvert and weaken Western (and Christian) society by imposing their left-wing and politically correct (or ‘woke’) views.”
Over the years, cultural Marxism has gone from being linked with the far-right through terrorists’ manifestos to seeping into the vocabulary of mainstream politicians, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said he views wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism.
“Most of the most violent, the deadliest acts of hate, perpetrated against Jewish people especially in the United States in the last 10 to 15 years have been by far-right extremists. We don’t have cultural Marxists shooting up synagogues. If it were the case, then we should talk about it, but it isn’t,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “You have white supremacists, anti-government extremists who are embracing antisemitism. Of course, antisemitism is on the far-left as well. There has been a rapid, marked increase in antisemitic rhetoric coming out of the far-left as well.”
The terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 and another who killed a woman in the attack at the California Chabad of Poway synagogue in 2019 left manifestos denouncing cultural Marxism’s effect on Europe and blaming Jews for coming up with it, respectively.
Groups like the Proud Boys have also used cultural Marxism as a catch-all term for anyone they view as an enemy, Lewis said.
“What we’ve seen in recent years has been an intentional effort, by far-right extremists to launder antisemitism, launder white supremacy, launder anti-LGBTQ narratives and hate speech against everyone who’s not effectively in this in-group, which is largely white, largely Christian,” he said.
Dangers of communism
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a 45-page report in 2022 about how cultural Marxism threatens the U.S. In it, the think tank states cultural Marxists have infiltrated the country through college campuses and public schools. They also credit DeSantis for showing a path to dismantle cultural Marxism.
“Today’s cultural Marxists believe that the reason economic, social, cultural, academic, and health outcomes (to name just a few) show persistent racial disparities is because of a pervasive, systemic racism that can only be eliminated by smashing the system itself,” the report states.
Subcommittee chair Republican Rep. Alex Rizo of Miami-Dade, last week defended the bill, stating that students don’t learn enough about communism.
“When we talk about antisemitism I equate antisemitism a lot with communism. … I love that this bill will come up with some sort of curriculum to start teaching what communism really does other than an economic theory that was brought up by Marx and Engels, two philosophers, and I use that term very loosely, in the 19th century. Because we do have curriculum in almost every single grade level K through 12 that talks about the sins of slavery, that talks about the horrors of the Holocaust, but does not yet really address the over 100 million people who were victimized, murdered, displaced in about 100 years worth of communism in our society,” he said.
The Florida Department of Education standards related to communism include the evaluation of economic systems in seventh grade and the identification of political ideologies (communism and totalitarianism) that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy in high school.
Lawmakers also discussed last week how the material would be taught in an age-appropriate manner to younger students. Republican Rep. Thad Altman of Brevard said his wife, a first-grade teacher at a Catholic school, teaches kids through hands-on simulations.
“I think these kids understand capitalism and communism more than a lot of college students, especially if they go to an Ivy League,” he said.
Other things students would learn about through the House bill or analysis include atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism, the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, the communist policies of Cuba, and the spread of communist ideologies throughout Latin America.