If you haven’t heard the big news, Olive Garden is rolling out extraordinary new precautions to crack down on pasta fraud. Namely, passholders of the establishment’s coveted never-ending pasta pass must now additionally present a valid photo I.D. (like a driver’s license) to wait staff to reap their reward.

Those who fail to properly identify themselves, or lack a never-ending pass altogether, must sit in silence and, tragically, make do with limited pasta while their peers gorge themselves on greasy goodness. It sounds like an incredible opportunity to widen your waistline while making your family, friends, colleagues, or partner feel insecure and judgmental about your life choices.

Better yet, thanks to the restaurant’s strict commitment to protecting pasta integrity, online Republicans want to see Olive Garden step in and take over our elections too. After all, if they can figure out how to thwart the unforgivable sin of pasta fraud, then surely they can figure out how to stop the two or three cases of voter fraud that happen in every election.

Of course, this meme is referring to Donald Trump’s failed attempts to pass the SAVE Act — election-rigging legislation poorly disguised as election security enhancements. Namely, under the proposed law, every voter would need to submit federal photo identification alongside their ballot for it to be counted.

It sounds so simple, and that’s where people are too easily fooled. Admittedly, even as a so-called radical-leftist, I don’t really object to this in premise; proving who you say you are is a normal part of life these days, whether you’re buying alcohol or even dining at Olive Garden.

But that’s not what this is.

If we’re going to have a national photo identification system for voting, it has to be free and accessible to everyone — that’s not just my opinion, it’s the law.

Unfortunately, the types of ID people already carry in their purses and wallets won’t work for the purposes of the SAVE Act.

Unlike Olive Garden, which only asks to pair a face with a name, the SAVE Act specifies identification that proves citizenship. For the average person, this leaves only a select few options, which tend to be too expensive and time-consuming to obtain before election day.

A driver’s license, even with Real ID, won’t work on its own.

Instead, voters would have to track down a birth certificate (which will only work if it matches their current name) or spend over $100 and engage in a multi-month waiting process to obtain a passport. The first option is inherently out of the question for most married women, at least for those who’ve taken their husband’s surname. That’s why you might have heard other warnings about how the SAVE Act would disenfranchise tens of millions of women — for all intents and purposes, it’s true.

Likewise, having to pay the government any amount of money to be allowed to vote is considered a poll tax, which is explicitly outlawed by the Voting Rights Act and Twenty-Fourth Amendment.

Charging $100 for an unlimited pasta pass is a questionable business decision, but charging $100 to vote is categorically illegal. Attaching any kind of price tag is illegal and fundamentally anti-democratic.

Moreover, the SAVE Act has nothing to do with security in the first place, as voter fraud is so statistically rare that it has never even come close to influencing the outcome of an election. Even the 2020 election, which Trump refuses to admit he LOST fairly to Joe Biden, Republican attorneys and state legislators still don’t have any proof supporting their insane claims that it was rigged or stolen from him.

The SAVE Act is perhaps better titled ‘SAVE TRUMP’S ASS ACT,’ as it’s nothing more than a desperate bid to rig the midterms by giving the feds the unprecedented power to pick and choose who gets to vote. It’s no coincidence then that the only accepted forms of identification under the proposal would pose an undue burden on women and lower-income households — generally speaking, the demographics with the most reasons to hate this administration.

Plus, if you needed any more proof of just how disingenuous this entire voter ID push is, consider the kinds of people who are trying to sell it.

Strangely, the same voices who have spent the past several decades warning us about the dangers of ‘big government’ and the inefficiencies of its bureaucracies are now pretending that waiting at government offices is a fun and patriotic process. As we all know, conservatives just adore standing in line at the DMV — besides, what spells out f-r-e-e-d-o-m louder than paying taxes to vote and giving Big Brother an expansive list of our personal details? America, baby!

The same people, mind you, who lost their minds over being asked to wear masks during the pandemic.

And let’s face it, the deranged individuals who actually pay for an Olive Garden unlimited pasta pass probably don’t take very kindly to being separated from their breadsticks. I haven’t eaten there in years, but I highly doubt anyone there cherishes the idea of having to prove their identities to eat overpriced frozen pasta.

They might even find themselves asking, ‘Is pasta fraud even real?’

In reality, they’re probably just annoyed — just like the octogenarians I regularly see at the grocery store who have to use photo ID to prove they’re not secretly high schoolers trying to get drunk.

This is the truth behind the SAVE Act, an unnecessary ‘precaution’ explicitly designed to annoy people and prevent them from voting. It won’t do anything to stop already nonexistent fraud, but it will give the Trump administration the ammunition it needs to complete the coup it started on January 6.

If you truly believe our elections should be run like the never-ending pasta pass, then I doubt you’ve ever actually eaten at Olive Garden. The same applies to buying a passport, hunting down a long-forgotten birth certificate, and any other bullshit poll tax Republicans want to force us into paying.

Voting should always be free and accessible, and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.

Damn, now I’m hungry.

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With a major election around the corner and the Trump administration failing on every possible metric, Republicans are reviving many of their greatest hits to try and avoid a crushing defeat in November.

Across social media, your favorite red-hat influencers are hard at work scapegoating Dr. Anthony Fauci for the COVID-19 pandemic, warning Americans about the next Mamdani-led communist menace, and, of course, the existential threat of ‘men’ walking into women’s restrooms.

Is anyone else feeling Déjà vu here? With these talking points, it almost feels like we’re right back in 2020 or 2024 again. When in doubt, sow more paranoia.

But here’s a new one I’m guessing you’ve never seen before: what about women walking into the men’s room?

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Captured by the good folks at r/stupidpeoplefacebook, MAGA sycophant Rob Schneider tried to warn his fellow deplorables about the effects of trans-inclusive bathroom policies with a meme depicting a transgender woman peeing at a urinal next to a perplexed cisgender male.

The meme was shared with a simple caption, “that moment you realize maybe you shouldn’t vote for a Democrat.”

Ironically, however, this hypothetical scenario is exactly what’s happening thanks to Republicans’ transphobic bathroom bills. Under the threat of fines and even jail time, most people living in red states are obligated to use restrooms corresponding to their sex at birth.

This sets up the exact scenario depicted in Schneider’s fearmongering tweet — under Republican leadership, women are expected to use the urinal or go to jail. Transgender men, likewise, who even allies too often forget exist, are expected to use the women’s restroom.

Many of whom look exactly like the big, burly, and hairy men Trump spends most his free time lusting over, no less.

That’s right, as a byproduct of their bigotry and complete lack of critical thinking, Republican legislators have essentially mandated the gender-neutral spaces they vowed to destroy — but in a way that leaves everyone feeling deeply uncomfortable.

Let me put this another way: Republicans, not Democrats, want people with busty boobs to use the men’s room. An awfully strange way for them to go about their “war on wokeness,” don’t you think?

Transphobes tend to underestimate just how many of their trans peers are completely passing in public. Most of you reading this have probably even peed (or God forbid, pooped) in the same restroom as someone who’d changed their gender without realizing it. That’s because, unlike what the Epstein protectors in Washington would have you believe, people just want to have a safe space to go without making a scene.

That extends to people of all identities.

And despite the constant fearmongering about them being vectors for harassment, studies suggest that all people — namely cisgender women — are safer in trans-inclusive spaces, not less.

But that’s the entire point of these draconian laws: Republicans want there to be discomfort, fomenting transphobia and leaving vulnerable groups open to jeers and harassment.

As a cisgender male, I just wish people could live their lives without having the government step on their throats. Never has a trans person made me feel threatened in any capacity, not once.

This isn’t just a meme — Republicans have not only made it possible, but legally required, for completely feminine women to risk it inside the men’s restroom. And let’s face it, on the other side of the spectrum, passing transgender men are probably going to have the police called on them no matter which door they step through. I can’t get over how stupid this is.

For all intents and purposes, conservatives want transgender Americans to disappear entirely and not have any public life at all. Some might call it segregation; others might go so far as to call it genocide.

In any case, this is another perfect illustration of how fascists are creating real problems by ‘solving’ fake ones. At the end of the day, as is true for every part of their backward agenda, it’s all performative bullshit designed to make people suffer and become distrustful of their neighbors.

And as the worst part, I almost guarantee you that the same thought process (or lack thereof) that went into this meme is shared among every Trump-worshiping goon in Congress. The same people who are going to reign over us for the rest of history thanks to gerrymandered districts and their oligarch-funded campaigns.

Seemingly, all they have to do to win their re-elections time and time again is to prey upon whatever bizarre genitalia-based obsession is frightening grandma on Facebook.

In that regard, I’m sure this meme reached its target audience.

I’m tired of this nonsense, and that’s exactly why I’m starting up Decoding Conservative Memes, my own personal safe space to rant about the pandemic of idiocy sweeping across America.

These dumbasses need to be called out, and that’s exactly what I’ll be doing between now and election day.

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Just a week before his name was to be placed on the ballot for November, a third major scandal has hit Graham Platner’s Senate campaign. However, unlike his previous controversies, this one isn’t so easily dismissed by a redemption-arc narrative.

While I have not personally had enough time to thoroughly dissect the claims, Maine’s formerly rising progressive superstar has now been accused of drunkenly assaulting, harassing, and gaslighting one of his former lovers. Unlike most spurious claims of misconduct conveniently brought against a leading candidate right before election day, this one apparently comes with receipts — convincing enough at least to cause leading left-wing voices like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to turn their backs on the Marine veteran turned Senate candidate.

Now, even Bernie Sanders himself has asked Graham Platner to step aside.

Some will argue that we all should have seen this coming from miles away. Early in his candidacy, Platner was accused of wearing a Nazi-reminiscent tattoo, which he claimed was an unfortunate relic from his time in the military. More recently, he admitted to sending inappropriate text messages to various women when he and his wife were going through a difficult patch in their relationship.

As someone who lives on the other side of the country and has never even been within smelling distance of Maine, I went from being a harsh skeptic of Platner to being a reluctant believer the longer I listened to him. I can’t begin to imagine how tough it must be right now for Mainers to make sense of this awful news.

No matter what people say, even with the benefit of hindsight, I can still forgive his earlier scandals — at least if they had existed in a vacuum. Putting myself in his shoes, I can understand being peer-pressured by comrades in arms into getting a tattoo I didn’t fully understand the meaning behind. Similarly, I believe claims of infidelity are a strictly personal matter, and in this case, both Platner and his wife say they’ve moved on and grown from the experience. Who am I to judge what an adult couple has settled between themselves privately?

And unlike other recent turncoats like John Fetterman, Platner’s outspoken support for progressive causes like universal healthcare and women’s reproductive rights definitely suggests he might truly be a reformed man, at least in some capacity. After listening to his speeches, abuser and sexist certainly aren’t the first descriptors that come to mind.

Of course, his entire “redemption story” narrative might seem dubious given the newest allegations, but if we can’t provide people and candidates some room to grow and evolve, then what are we actually doing as a movement for change? After winning the Democratic primary, Platner said something along the lines of “If you believe our politics can change, you must also believe that people can change.”

Despite everything that’s happened in the interim, we should still take this message to heart. After all, the last presidential election is proof that there are a whole lot of flawed and broken people in this country — and we surely can’t exile them all permanently. We need to make room for people to better themselves.

Disqualifying someone based on commonly found male character flaws, especially when said person offers a fighting chance to make life better for everyone earning less than seven figures in this country, is the best example of perfection being the enemy of good.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we should get into the habit of electing our own crop of rapists and predators…

No matter how much someone learns or grows from their mistakes, violating consent and disrespecting personal boundaries is a red line our politicians mustn’t cross. If there’s even a small hint of truth to these accusations, and Platner is even half the reformed man he claims to be, then I do believe it’s time for him to read the room and step aside.

Worse, he should have recognized that this was going to be a problem from the very beginning. If this is all true, then what other skeletons could he have hanging in his closet?

Surely his departure from the race is only a matter of time at this point. After all, the Democratic Party of Maine has already pulled its support, and this time, Platner’s defenders are nowhere to be seen. He needed all the support in the world to have any chance of beating the Washington establishment — but now he has nothing.

This story is especially frustrating because Democrats have a moral imperative to unseat his Republican counterpart, Susan Collins, a Trump enabler who has served in Congress for about as long as I’ve been alive. Her votes have sent Americans to die in pointless wars in the Middle East, appointed radical Supreme Court justices responsible for overturning the national right to abortion, and most recently helped strip health insurance away from millions of families.

Moreover, Brett Kavanaugh, whom Susan Collins cast the deciding vote to confirm to the Supreme Court, also battled claims of drunken sexual misconduct during his vetting process. On that occasion, all he had to do was tell senators “I like beer” to get his lifetime appointment.

Even if the accusations against Platner are all true, he’s still arguably a saint compared to Collins and her deplorable colleagues.

Graham Platner may or might not be a rapist, but Susan Collins has spent the past three decades partaking in the institutional rape of everything we hold dear. Hell, each time she votes to advance one of Trump’s measures, she’s working hand in hand with the Epstein class itself.

And then there’s the president of the United States — someone who, in his own words, boasted about committing sexual assault on a daily basis in the Access Hollywood Tapes. Someone who was later held liable by a jury of his peers for assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll.

Someone, mind you, whose name appears in the Epstein files more than any other ‘innocent’ person.

Not once, twice, but thrice, Republicans nonetheless decided this was the man who best represented their moral principles — and who even now deserves to have his face printed on money, passports, and potentially Mount Rushmore itself. That’s who reelecting Susan Collins empowers.

That said, there’s no room for whataboutism here. The predator mindset is incompatible with the politics of liberal democracy, and we mustn’t pretend otherwise. Red or blue, rape is never something we should forgive or normalize, even if that’s what Republicans do. Tattoos and text messages are indicative of redeemable character flaws, but drunken sexual assault is an entirely different story.

Still, we might never know if the accuser is telling the entire truth here; Platner vehemently denies all this, so there might still be more to his redemption story than we’re giving him credit for. Innocent until proven guilty, as they say, but given the ghoulish crop of villains in D.C., the political standard often works the other way around for good reason.

We already gave him the benefit of the doubt twice in the past year. Three times, involving something as serious as SA no less, is really pushing it.

If things look bad from the outside, they’re probably worse in reality.

He could be the victim of another elaborate smear campaign, or be keeping a secret shrine to Hitler in his basement. Sadly, for myself and the millions of other voters across the country, we never really know who these people are behind closed doors.

However, this story very clearly establishes one thing: both sides are definitely NOT the same. For Democrats and progressives, mere allegations of sexual misconduct are enough to sink even the most important of campaigns. For Republicans, on the other hand, rape and pedophilia are practically becoming prerequisites for the job.

Graham Platner stepping aside will surely set back Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate and fending off the forces of fascism this November, but we can only hope that voters will ultimately reward them for doing the right thing, something the other side has been completely allergic to.

In a perfect world, Platner stepping down should give a head start to whoever becomes his successor, especially if they run on the same blue-collar platform.

On the other hand, as we all know too well, the United States is the farthest thing from a perfect world right now, and if the 2024 election is any indication, any 11th-hour change of candidates is likely to be a losing proposition given humanity’s declining attention span.

In other words, Susan Collins, one of the wickedest witches in all of D.C., might win another undeserved term in the Senate because Democrats held their candidates to a higher ethical standard.

No matter what happens, I guess we can at least rest more easily in the camps, knowing we had the moral high ground in the end.

And as an extra word of advice, if you or a loved one has ever been sexually assaulted by a major political candidate, could you please find the strength to document and share that history as early on as possible? It’s never easy to come out about that kind of trauma, but doing so when voters have a chance to make a course correction could spare hundreds of thousands of other people from making the same mistake and allowing an untrustworthy abuser into their lives.

It’s exactly that kind of unusual timing — with the most serious accusations coming out only after the primary concluded — that leaves me at least partially doubting the victim’s story. Nevertheless, who am I to question the advice of Bernie Sanders? If Platner is guilty as charged, he owes all of us a tremendous apology — and should never show his face in public again.

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Earlier this year, Democrats and progressives expected to leverage Trump’s plummeting approval to lead an uprising against the Republican establishment later this November — not only in the battleground states, but deep-seated conservative strongholds as well.

In the Texas and Maine Senate races in particular, this finally looked like the year that the president’s allies would finally face a reckoning at the ballot box.

But after these bombshell revelations, that blue wave is now in doubt.

Namely, James Talarico, who was seen as the best positioned to flip Texas blue for the first time in over thirty years, might secretly be a vegan hippie.

Even worse, it appears that he might even be dating a vegan hippie girlfriend— the scandal!

Vegans, IN TEXAS!? A disturbing development indeed.

Similarly, Maine senate candidate Graham Platner, one of Bernie Sanders’ blue-collar proteges, has found himself in hot water once again for potentially sending some spicy extramarital text messages to various women. This follows the controversy around an oddly Nazi-like tattoo he had received during his time in the military, which he covered up early in his Senate campaign.

In other words, these are the most outrageous and damning things an American politician has ever done, ever.

Or, at least, that’s how the narrative the corporate media is trying to sell us for clicks and profit.

Personally, I find it completely absurd that any major news outlet still finds the time or energy to deliver moral judgments in the current era of politics.

After all, over the past 2–3 years, we were essentially told that although Donald Trump and his sycophants were a bunch of lying and cheating sociopaths, they deserved to have a seat at the table because they represented the other half of America and promised to make things better.

Nevertheless, the moment true working-class voices like Platner and Talarico emerge to challenge the status quo — promising to establish health care as a human right, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and hold billionaires accountable for their lifetimes of theft and corruption — suddenly a few character faults are treated as being enough to doom a political campaign.

And while I can at least understand the claims brought against Platner, who has gone out of his way to acknowledge his past mistakes and ignorance around certain topics, placing Talarico’s made-up veganism into the same conversation is downright laughable.

Republicans are essentially arguing that the Texas Democrat has too much empathy for animals to be considered for public office, even though there is plenty of proof to the contrary that he’s a serious BBQ-devouring carnivore with a ten-gallon hat.

Welcome to the American South, where showing too much compassion towards the environment and other living beings is actually viewed as a negative quality for those seeking public office. If you were to ask me, I think we already have enough cold-blooded killers in the Senate; we could easily do with one less.

Meanwhile, I could care a whole lot more about the claims involving Platner if Republicans weren’t collectively hiding the Epstein files from the public, and by extension, protecting an entire international sex trafficking ring from federal prosecution. Their messiah, likewise, Donald Jesus Trump, has already been married three times and seems to have an unnatural desire for his own daughter. So no, I don’t want to hear them lecture about “family values” or infidelity a second longer.

It’s really hard for me to care in this day and age, and I know I’m not the only one.

And that’s without mentioning Donald Trump’s mountain of misconduct accusations — where he has even been found liable by a jury of his peers for inappropriately touching advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in a department store changing room. As we’ve seen on numerous occasions, whether this behavior is considered right or wrong hinges entirely on political affiliation.

Boasting about raping women in the Access Hollywood tapes? Forgiven.

Sending violent rioters to the U.S. Capitol to attack police, lawmakers, and threaten his very own vice president? Forgiven.

Stealing classified documents and hiding them next to his toilet at a private resort? Forgiven.

Covering up the Epstein files and denying justice to the victims of child sex trafficking in a clear betrayal of a signature campaign promise? Forgiven.

Forgiven. Forgiven. Forgiven.

Being a vegan or sending some naughty text messages? Straight to Hell.

In my opinion, Republicans have forfeited each and every one of their past and future moral arguments by continuing to stand behind the Antichrist of our times. Adultery, theft, betrayal, revenge, and jealousy; it’s always okay when Trump or one of their guys does it.

Sin is always a virtue unless it involves a Democrat.

So, what if Graham Platner had a weird tattoo and sent a few inappropriate text messages? You’ve already established that character flaws aren’t immediately disqualifying — or are perhaps even desirable. At this point, the accusations only make me like him even more, purely out of spite.

And what if Talarico is a tree-hugging vegan? Let the cows vote!

This November, vote for James Talarico and Graham Platner in their respective elections. That’s all the rest I’m willing to say.

Republicans can manufacture all the fake outrage they want, but they’re still going to lose.

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In the words of George W. Bush, what happened over the weekend was truly “some weird shit.”

At the planned White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel — the same building an attempt was made on Ronald Reagan in 1981 — a would-be assassin targeting Trump and the line of succession was apprehended by Secret Service near a security checkpoint.

This series of events was already strange enough. The gunman — who reportedly wasn’t even a ‘shooter’ as there are conflicting reports about whether or not he ever fired a shot — ran through the building at lightning speed as Secret Service agents fired bullets everywhere in his direction, never hitting him.

Despite the Secret Service being comprised of some of the highest-trained law enforcement officers in the world, they all apparently missed their target, as the suspect was quickly arrested with only minor injuries after being wrestled to the ground. One Secret Service agent took a hit to their bullet-resistant vest, which now appears to have been a friendly fire incident amidst the chaos.

As the event was packed with journalists and second-rate influencers, attendees wasted little time sharing their front row experiences. Some posted duck-face selfies online; others, like CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who lost one of his shoes in the panic, would remark about the quality of the restrooms and the salads served at the hotel, among other crucial details.

Actually, even Blitzer didn’t seem to have a full idea of what was happening that evening. Nevertheless, across CNN, his peers are calling him a hero, saying he reported with the same vigor as his days of covering the Iraq War from the front lines.

Perhaps Jake Tapper will eventually release another book detailing how the network secretly covered up his colleague’s age-related cognitive decline another few years down the line. Or maybe only Biden gets that treatment, who knows?

Meanwhile, a close-up picture of the perpetrator was quickly shared on Trump’s Truth Social that evening, which showed the would-be assassin pinned to the ground, who was almost completely naked for some reason. I assume he lost his clothes during the scuffle with the Secret Service; that, or perhaps he planned to enter the event pretending to be an exotic male performer. Trump loves his big, burly men, after all.

And although I jest, the president does seem to have picked up some unusual fascination with the suspect’s physical prowess.

“You know, he ran 45 yards, they say, and he just to it, and then boom, he popped through it … I think the NFL should sign him up,” the president told Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes. “He was fast — when you look at it on tape, it’s almost like a blur.”

Then there’s the matter of the Correspondents’ Dinner itself — a supposed celebration of the First Amendment — accomplished through a lavish dinner party complete with entertainment, roast sessions, and more alcohol than you could ever imagine. For me, the fact that so many journalists would freely decide to attend this event alongside such a corrupt and autocratic administration speaks volumes about their unseriousness.

Wannabe muckrakers like Kaitlan Collins spend all year giving the president ‘tough questions’ and highlighting the government’s historic crackdown on the free press, yet have no qualms about showing up to an expensive dinner party alongside actual fascists while wearing bright handcrafted attire that almost looks like it came out of the Hunger Games.

For that matter, this was supposed to be the first Correspondents’ Dinner Trump would attend as president — presumably because the media is only now friendly enough to his administration that he could consider sharing a room with reporters without being completely humiliated. CNN in particular is being acquired by a MAGA-aligned media dynasty, so this tracks. For other networks like CBS, the right-wing takeover is already complete.

Any journalist worth their salt boycotted the event, as Trump did every year our country truly had a free press. Now, the alphabet soup news is no more than a sad group of sycophants answering to their billionaire Republican gatekeepers. These days, they’ll do their part to normalize anything.

And to address the motives of the non-shooter suspect, the manifesto uncovered by the media contains an odd set of contradictions. Despite allegedly being a teacher and a Caltech graduate, the suspect’s writing is vague and doesn’t make much sense.

For example, he claimed the president and his yes men are a bunch of rapists and pedophiles — arguably a factual statement at this rate — but specifically mentions that he wanted to spare Kash Patel, the cross-eyed, publicly urinating FBI Director, from the assassination attempt. Patel is arguably one of the most unqualified members of the Trump administration and is directly complicit in covering up the president’s role in the Epstein Files. Why Patel deserved special treatment, according to the suspect, is not elaborated in any way.

A lot of people have jumped to the conclusion that this was an orchestrated inside job — ironically, mostly among the MAGA base itself — based on the unexplainable set of circumstances. However, when it comes to this administration, never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained through incompetence.

Knowledgeable career officials have been purged throughout the federal government over the past year, and I’m guessing the Secret Service is no exception. Plus, the Washington Hilton, which remains open to the public and continues normal operations during the president’s visits, is notoriously difficult to police. Meanwhile, to explain the disjointed manifesto, the suspect was probably also suffering from some kind of undiagnosed mental illness, which is almost always the case in these situations.

Of course, the president’s answer to what happened on Saturday wasn’t to focus more on solving America’s guns and mental health care crisis — but to renew his efforts to build a ginormous gilded ballroom at the White House.

“And I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure,” he said of the planned East Wing ballroom shortly after the assassination attempt. “It’s got, it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass — We need the ballroom.”

Trump insists he isn’t a king, but during a time when working families across America are struggling to afford groceries, rent, and the ability to see a doctor, it’s telling that his primary focus is to build himself a golden palace.

And, of course, all of his allies fell in line in short order.

Like the US-Mexico wall during his first term, the ballroom is being pitched by conservatives as the solution to nearly every problem in this country. Over the past few days, almost every elected Republican in Washington has stressed its importance — making it sound like the president’s life and the future of national security depend entirely on its construction. A ballroom designed to entertain guests and hold dinner parties, mind you.

If that’s the case, then every school in America needs to have a ballroom of similar scale, for security reasons of course. Moreover, is Trump just supposed to sit in the ballroom all day long and never venture outside again? The lack of a ballroom has never placed the president’s life in danger on White House grounds, and this narrative insinuates that Trump will never be seen outside once it’s built.

And like the wall, the narrative about the ballroom’s funding is changing every day. Last year, when Trump demolished over 100 years of history inside the East Wing of the White House to make room for his renovations, he promised that donations would cover the expenses. Nevertheless, a group of Republican senators led by Lindsey Graham has now introduced legislation that would pay for the $400 million 90,000-square-foot building using taxpayer dollars.

In other words, there’s no money for food stamps, health care, cancer research, or anything that improves the lives of the average family — but the president gets a carte blanche to build himself a giant palace no matter the cost.

First, they said it would be Mexico and private donors funding these bizarre pet projects; once that didn’t work, they said it would be tariffs, which, as we know, also never happened. Ultimately, it’s always us who end up paying for these gaudy monuments to the president’s fragile ego.

In other words, everything that happened in Washington over the past week almost feels like some elaborate satire. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I do believe in jokes, and this one has the worst possible punchline — us.

We’re living in the dumbest imaginable timeline where journalists, Secret Service agents, heads of state, and even presidential assassins don’t seem to have the faintest idea of what they’re doing or where we’re headed as a nation.

Considering all of the above, I will leave you with this: what the absolute fuck?

To the guests of the Correspondents’ Dinner who calmly stayed at their tables and kept eating and drinking as shots rang out around them, I understand.

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Last December, President Donald Trump was bestowed with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, a coveted first-of-its-kind award celebrating advancements in global peace and mutual understanding.

Yes, you read that right  —  FIFA, as in the international football organization, or ‘soccer’ as we yankees like to call it. Clearly, this was a genuine effort to promote peace on Earth, not merely an act of groveling before a world leader for the sake of money and prestige. No sir.

“This is what we want from a leader; A leader that cares about the people,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said as he presented Trump with the award. “We want to live in a safe world, in a safe environment. “We want to unite  —  that’s what we do here today, that’s what we’ll do at the World Cup.”

Only five months later, however, and to the shock and horror of the sporting community, the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize winner has threatened to commit genocide in the Middle East.

Needless to say, they might have made a small, perhaps infinitesimal, mistake in their selection process.

Ahead of the White House’s deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping  —  which has been closed in response to the United States’ assassination of the Iranian supreme leader  —  the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize winner is threatening to massacre the entire Persian civilization overnight if the regime refuses to comply.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the FIFA Peace Prize winner wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t want that to happen but it probably will. We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

Dark humor aside, these might be the most terrifying sentences ever crafted by a world leader in the past century. For those of us with more than two functional brain cells, it was obvious from the beginning that Donald Trump was not emotionally or cognitively prepared to assume the responsibilities of commander in chief  —  and that was all the way back in 2016. This, however, takes the cognitive decline rumors to a whole new level, and in a sane society would warrant the president’s immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment.

When you’re a Republican, however, they let you do it.

And while the FIFA Peace Prize winner’s statement could mean the deployment of nuclear weapons against Tehran, the optimist inside me (yes, he shockingly does exist) says that the “whole civilization will die tonight” line is typical Trumpian hyperbole. After all, he has already claimed to have sent Iran back to the ‘Stone Ages’ and has won the war at least a dozen times already.

Nevertheless, the threat of death and destruction is still very real for the Iranian people, even if realized through conventional weapons.

Trump explained his plans in more detail over the weekend, specifically threatening to destroy all civilian infrastructure unless the regime complies with his ultimatum. In a profanity-laced Easter Sunday Truth Social message, he warned that power plants and bridges would be the first targets to be struck past the deadline.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped in one, in Iran,” he wrote. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in HELL — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah, President DONALD J. Trump.”

Even if Trump doesn’t use a weapon of mass destruction against Iran, the complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure would achieve a similar effect, and would be considered a war crime all the same.

Namely, the destruction of power plants and the resulting national blackout would essentially shut down hospitals, which would lose access to refrigeration and life support machines; sick and injured civilians, including children, would die. There is also talk of the U.S. striking water desalination plants, which would deprive the entire population of clean drinking water, which in Trump’s terms would create a humanitarian crisis, ‘of the likes nobody has ever seen before.’

Don’t get me wrong, we’re talking about a brutal theocratic regime here, but the Iranian regime also has its faults. Like the Christian nationalists in the White House, the Islamic clerics running Iran have killed political dissidents and have forced a draconian interpretation of religious scripture on their population. Needless to say, the people of Iran deserve to live free and without the threat of being persecuted or killed for their beliefs.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s liberation narrative falls flat when the United States is outright threatening to massacre Iran’s entire civilian population  —  or in other words, a genocide. I don’t doubt that there was a great deal of celebration surrounding the Ayatollah’s death, but I can’t see Iranians cheering on the destruction of their homes, schools, hospitals, and drinking water. Once Trump’s mythical ‘regime change’ actually happens, they will have nothing left to come home to besides rubble. If they lose access to drinking water, they won’t even have tears left to cry.

This is a war between two different flavors of evil, but there is no question about who the aggressor is. If you want to turn the entire Iranian population against the United States and the western world, this is exactly how to do it.

Hopefully, this will be another example of TACO  —  short for Trump Always Chickens Out  —  but tomorrow morning, we could all be waking up to the next major escalation in World War 3.

Donald Trump is a violent maniac, and anyone who voted for him under the expectation that he would usher in peace on Earth is an absolute moron. For that matter, the uncommitted Muslim voters from Dearborn Michigan who famously protested against Biden and Kamala Harris for appeasing Israel sure have a lot of explaining to do, given how their de facto candidate has taken America into a costly war of choice on Benjamin Netanyahu’s behalf.

In any case, I hope the president is both the first and the last recipient of the FIFA Peace Prize, because if Trump doesn’t bring about nuclear Armageddon, I fear the next winner will.

Leave it to a soccer organization to move the goalposts regarding what ‘peace’ actually looks like. Whatever the definition is, it certainly isn’t Donald Trump.

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Former Special Counsel and FBI Director Robert Mueller, who investigated claims of collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government, has passed away at the age of 81.

Given Donald Trump’s rampant corruption over the years, it’s often easy to forget where it all started, and we arguably have Mueller to thank for that. Tasked with investigating foreign interference in the 2016 election, he became the first of many high-profile public officials to slow-walk justice for the criminal mastermind we now call president of the United States.

Bleeding heart liberals, such as myself, eagerly awaited the day the fabled Mueller Report would expose Trump as the Russian agent he so clearly is. Unfortunately, that day never came, and the whole saga became a bitter disappointment.

Despite generating several leads that screamed of foreign corruption and conflicts of interest, alongside repeated instances of obstruction of justice from the administration, Mueller’s investigation ultimately ended with a whimper. While it did nothing of the sort, the report’s inability to connect any dots directly back to Moscow gave Trump all the ammunition he needed to declare himself completely exonerated from the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”

Similar to Merrick Garland’s inability to prosecute MAGA’s crimes during the Biden years, Mueller, who was nominally a Republican, helped let Trump off the hook — at least in the public consciousness. Above all, Mueller’s inability to produce evidence of a criminal conspiracy solidified the notion that the president was the victim of partisan witch hunt purposefully designed to hurt his public image.

Regardless of whether it was ever the special counsel’s intention, Donald Trump owes Mueller a huge debt of gratitude for helping to solidify his messianic cult status among American conservatives. Right-wing Christians love a persecution complex, after all.

How does the president repay Mueller, then? In the finest exercise of presidential norms, by celebrating his death and taking a victory lap around his corpse, of course.

While I had initially expected this to be a work of satire, being too low even for the president’s deplorable standards, Trump’s knee-jerk reaction to Mueller’s passing was all very real, unfortunately.

“Robert Mueller just died,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Of course, I already know I will be accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome for writing this, but we have now reached the point where celebrating the deaths of political adversaries — or in Mueller’s case, a lawyer doing the barest minimum of his job — is accepted behavior from our leaders.

Another unmistakable leap toward fascism.

Last year, liberals were purged from their jobs and targeted online merely for critiquing the openly racist and misogynistic ideology of Charlie Kirk after he was gruesomely assassinated on a college campus. Anyone who refused to participate in elevating a white nationalist to martyrdom was then accused of justifying murder and supporting domestic terrorism. People from all walks of life, including university professors, were terminated without a second thought.

Meanwhile, Trump and his sycophants are allowed to glorify death on a daily basis, as long as it targets the regime’s ‘undesirables,’ ranging from liberals to non-MAGA Republicans. Within the past year alone, Trump has made fun of President Biden’s cancer diagnosis, accused slain filmmaker Rob Reiner of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and even praised the ICE thugs who executed Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

Civility is officially dead, and we can no longer pretend that it isn’t.

In an ideal world, we should always have some respect for the dead, regardless of what we thought about them in life. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, what goes around comes around.

At 79 years old, Trump is not exactly long for this world either, and given the new precedent he’s set, it’s only appropriate for the rest of us to respond in kind once that day inevitably comes.

“To quote Donald Trump…”

And when future Republicans demand that we ‘show some respect’ for our fallen leader, I will go back and point precisely to this moment.

Trump might be obsessed with gold, but he clearly has no understanding of the golden rule. If he truly wants a place in Heaven, as he has so often said, I don’t imagine this is the best way to do it.

The hypocrisy is blinding.

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Over the past year, the U.S. administration has ushered in a new era of peace on Earth — thanks to American intervention, Venezuelans and Iranians are excitedly celebrating the deaths and arrests of the despots who have ruled over them for decades.

Or, at least that is the narrative I keep seeing from the MAGA sympathizers and New York Times-aligned war hawks. The downfall of dictators and religious extremists is always worthy of celebration, sure. However, I will not be joining Iranians or Venezuelans on this particular occasion.

At this point in time, it is impossible to predict how Washington’s foreign entanglements in Iran and Venezuela will ultimately affect the citizens of their respective nations. History shows us that American-led regime change rarely works out well for those caught in the crossfire, but that is largely beside the point of this essay.

Frankly, it’s a dumb argument. After all, the majority of U.S. voters celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, but that did not mean their lives would get any better because of it.

In any case, I am more concerned by the precedent America’s actions have set for the future of global politics, which will invariably come back to haunt us for the rest of our lives.

Namely, the ends did not justify the means in either case.

The arrest of Nicolás Maduro and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were not only acts of war ordered without approval from Congress — they were also unprovoked unilateral acts of aggression.

In the case of Venezuela, the Trump administration claims Maduro’s arrest and extraction were justified by his illegal possession of firearms and alleged drug smuggling schemes — violations of U.S. domestic law.

Similarly, the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader is being rationalized around his brutal anti-American regime, which has murdered thousands of peaceful protestors over the past year alone. Importantly, there was no visible indication that Iran was planning an attack against U.S. assets before Trump and Netanyahu launched their ‘preemptive’ strikes.

Pairing back these arguments to their most basic elements, Maduro was deposed because he broke domestic U.S. law, and the Iranian Supreme Leader was assassinated because his theocratic belief system was incompatible with Western norms.

In all likelihood, both were removed from power in a battle over natural resources (oil), but let’s continue with this narrative for a second.

In other words, U.S. law — not international law — now applies to foreign heads of state regardless of where they live, and every dictator who mistreats their citizens deserves to be blown apart by guided bombs.

I will not argue against the merits of removing these two horrible human beings from power, but the international precedent this sets is too dangerous to ignore.

While it is practically too extreme a comparison to make, the Trump administration is also guilty of murdering peaceful protestors in cold blood. Alex Pretti, a registered nurse, and Nicole Good, a loving mother, were both killed in bloody extrajudicial executions conducted by taxpayer-funded law enforcers. Young children, likewise, are being detained, separated from their parents, and forced to sleep on the concrete floors of repurposed warehouses. Their health and well-being, currently, is purely a matter of speculation. These could be death camps, for all we know.

In other words, we’re not exactly saints either right now.

If you showed these fundamental abuses of human rights to the average Trump supporter on Fox News, and told them this violence was being perpetrated by Islamic extremists — rather than Christian nationalists — they would probably be up in arms about it.

While these examples are not directly comparable to the hardships faced by the people of Iran, they are abuses of Western democratic norms nonetheless — does that give foreign countries, perhaps Russia, the moral imperative to begin bombing our cities?

As an unpleasant reminder, most foreign dictatorships either kill or suppress their political opponents, but most of them, like Saudi Arabia, are close allies of the United States.

Similarly, the Chinese Communist Party considers Taiwan to be an inseparable component of its empire, even though the island nation has been self-governed for nearly the past century. Does that give Beijing the legal right to kidnap and extract the president of Taiwan in the middle of the night for committing tax evasion?

In both cases, I hope your answer is a resounding no.

Trump’s unprovoked wars of aggression are not necessarily ‘wrong’ on a rhetorical level, but they are clear attacks on international law and territorial sovereignty. His administration is merely using convenient norms to defend its actions in the court of public opinion (badly).

In reality, Washington deposed two heads of state over the past year, not because they posed an imminent threat to international security, but because the U.S. government unilaterally decided that it would be the best course of action.

Again, with the intent to seize strategic resources (oil) — the acts of a ‘rational’ actor according to realist IR theorists.

When you remove norms from the equation, Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine (or special military operation) under the same pretense — the Kremlin believed Russia would be better off if it got rid of Zelenskyy and reclaimed its former territory.

Trump’s foreign policy supports an anarchic system of international relations where the strong may freely exert their power on the weak. Whoever has the biggest guns, and the most of them, can pick and choose the leaders of other countries — and most importantly, the flow of natural resources.

Of course, this marks a return to the era of great power politics that ushered in both world wars. If history is any indication, the new age of imperialism (and IR realism) being practiced by America, Russia, and China is unlikely to help the human condition, especially where regime change is practiced.

Developing countries around the world — even Greenland — see what is happening in Venezuela and Iran. The answer to their predicament is simple: arm for war, or become the next targets of an imperialist power struggle. In the end, they no longer have any way of trusting their neighbors’ intentions.

Needless to say, diplomacy and short-term negotiations have no place in this anarchic system. In the 1990s, Russia signed a treaty to guarantee Ukraine’s security in exchange for its nuclear weapons, and Kyiv agreed. Two decades later, Moscow attacked.

Similarly, during Obama’s presidency, the Iranians let in a team of international observers to prove they were not developing nuclear weapons. Tehran upheld its end of the agreement, but Donald Trump scrapped the deal and killed the Ayatollah.

Meanwhile, North Korea is every bit as brutal and repressive as Iran, but since it has nuclear weapons and the ability to fight back, it has largely been spared from any foreign aggression. Based on this precedent, dictators in possession of strategic resources now have an even greater incentive to develop weapons, recruit soldiers, and suppress dissent than they ever did before.

These days, negotiations only happen at the barrel of a gun.

Of course, this also means there will be less worldwide resources devoted to solving food security or providing people with dignified health care. This will even be felt in the Western world, where most Americans have already been deprived of life-saving social safety nets in order to pay for their government’s war machine.

All while climate change is intensifying the struggle for basic human resources.

Call me a pessimist, but I frankly do not see the benefits of reverting to such an aggressive and unpredictable stance on international relations. At the end of the day, it only benefits the dictators, like Putin, who have been arming themselves to the teeth while patiently awaiting the collapse of the liberal international order.

If America, formerly the leader of the international community, can freely experiment in regime change, then we can too.

Nobody should grieve for fallen tyrants, but Donald Trump’s foreign policy is as dangerous as it gets. Anarchy has deadly consequences, and we are seeing it in action around the globe.

International law and multilateral cooperation should mean something, but clearly, it doesn’t.

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Overnight, in conjunction with international war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, the ‘president of peace’ launched another series of deadly attacks on Iran in an unmistakable act of war — reportedly killing most of the regime’s government, including the supreme leader.

If Allatoya Ali Khamenei is not already dead, as is widely suspected by Israeli intelligence, then he is living on borrowed time. Likewise, if his fledgling nuclear program wasn’t already dismantled from earlier attacks, it has probably been completely erased in the latest strikes.

Therefore, officials from the Trump administration will soon emerge to declare ‘mission accomplished,’ as they have always done after bombing foreign countries and civilians in international waters. Nevertheless, historians will record this moment as one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history.

No matter how America’s newest experiment in regime change ultimately pans out, Trump’s war on Iran is not the victory for world peace that Republicans will be programmed to think it is.

Far from it.

While it might be hard to believe in hindsight, the violent end of the Iranian regime was almost unthinkable just ten years ago.

Before Donald Trump came to office and began upending world politics to America’s detriment, the Shia theocracy was largely abiding by international law and was showing early signs of adopting liberal societal reforms — at least by Iranian standards.

Under President Obama’s Iranian Nuclear Deal, international observers had been allowed to freely monitor the status of the regime’s nuclear program — ensuring that their scientists were not actively developing weapons that could jeopardize regional security. By all accounts, Iran was honoring the agreement and showed no intent to build weapons of mass destruction.

For the brief time it lasted, the Iranian Nuclear Deal was a triumph of liberal foreign policy. The primary driver for international conflict throughout history — mutual suspicion — was taken out of the equation.

Western nations and the Gulf states had security in the knowledge that Iran was not procuring nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime could rest easy knowing that the United States did not have an immediate motive to bomb Tehran or conduct mass government assassinations. In a win for Iranian reformers, the Allatoya was spared from having to invest in weapons, militarization, and widespread suppression to protect his existence, giving a realistic pathway to progress in the country without violent regime change.

Nevertheless, as soon as Trump was elected to office in 2016, his administration immediately began scrapping the Iranian Nuclear Deal. Ultimately, it was the United States, not the Iranian government, that broke the agreement and abandoned the promise of international cooperation.

By the end of Trump’s first term, the United States was back to warmongering and infringing on Iran’s sovereignty — most notably through an airstrike that assassinated one of the regime’s top generals, Qasem Soleimani.

Make no mistake, that itself was an act of war.

Unsurprisingly, this firm betrayal by the United States prompted Iran to double down on its development of weapons — ranging from ballistic missiles, suicide drones, and, in all probability, nuclear warheads. Likewise, over the past few years, the rest of the world has watched in horror as the Iranian regime has brutally massacred thousands of pro-democratic protesters to fend off internal regime change.

From a purely realist perspective of international relations, the Iranian regime was left with no other choice in the matter. The Trump administration’s unprovoked abandonment of the Iranian Nuclear Deal was proof that Washington could not be trusted to uphold its side of negotiations. Following in the footsteps of other ‘respected’ pariah states like North Korea, members of the Iranian regime believed that their only hope of long-term survival depended on military might and nuclear brinkmanship.

Last night, their fears were vindicated, as Donald Trump’s decapitation of the Iranian government was the final nail in the coffin for the American-led liberal international order. These days, diplomacy means nothing without the weapons to back it up.

The Allatoya is now dead — all because his regime trusted America to keep its word and be faithful to its own agreements. Had Iran accelerated its nuclear program during the Obama presidency, it likely would have been in possession of warheads by now, and that would have been enough to deter the Israeli and American strikes.

In a similar case of North Korea, Kim Jong Un has been no less authoritarian than the Allatoya, yet his state has been largely untouched by American foreign policy since procuring nuclear weapons. In fact, he enjoys a distressing level of camaraderie with Trump on the few occasions the two have met in person.

The Trump administration has sent a clear message to the rest of the world: develop weapons of mass destruction as soon as possible, or become targets of regime change.

Thanks to the president’s actions in the Middle East, any hope of a diplomatic solution to nuclear proliferation is now just as dead as the Iranian supreme leader. This is unlikely to be solved in our lifetimes, as the rest of the world does not look at American foreign policy in terms of red and blue.

They see our actions from a holistic perspective, and the picture is depressing. Here’s what they see: After a Democratic president negotiates in good faith, Republicans will be instructed by oligarch-owned media to elect a warmongering psychopath every other 4-8 years, who will then break those agreements and begin dropping bombs without provocation. There is no long-term stability to American foreign policy, and every other country is forced to prepare for the worst.

Even our long-time allies cannot trust us anymore, as Trump has made unfounded threats to invade Canada and Greenland. The results of the 2028 election will not change this overnight — even if a new era of peace and cooperation is to follow, foreign governments will be quietly bracing for the next cheating American conman.

For that reason, I will not shed a single tear for the passing of the Allatoya this evening, but I will mourn the complete destruction of the fragile liberal international order that has preserved peace between major powers since WW2.

Contrary to the stated objectives of the president’s “Board of Peace,” the United States can no longer be trusted to be a peacemaker, and we have Trump to thank for the innocent lives that will consequently perish over the coming decades.

If you were, however, ‘bored of peace,’ then I have good news for you.

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Although we haven’t even made it a full month into the new year, 2026 is already shaping up to be an inflection point in American history. Namely, the Trump administration has already proudly executed two Minneapolis residents, both American citizens, in cold blood.

Many more have been maimed or arrested without cause.

At the beginning of the month, Renee Nicole Good, a loving 37-year-old mother, was shot in the face at point-blank range while legally observing ICE operations in her city. No more than two weeks later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked extensively with veterans, was similarly beaten up and then shot to death by a large gang of DHS agents while he was peacefully filming a protest.

Immediately after these murders, the Trump administration accused both victims of being violent domestic terrorists and ‘professional agitators’ who meant to inflict maximum harm on officers. Greg Bovino, Trump’s Gestapo-cosplaying immigration enforcement czar, even claimed Alex Pretti arrived on the scene with the intent to ‘massacre’ law enforcement with a semi-automatic pistol — even though footage clearly shows he never brandished a weapon at police.

Moreover, by the time he was executed, with as many as (eleven ?) bullets dumped into his back and head by Trump’s orcs, Alex Pretti had already been disarmed by one of the officers and no longer posed any threat — if he ever did to begin with.

At this point, we can only speculate that he carried a weapon for self-defense, as he was reportedly a legal gun owner and had an explicit right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.

Surely, if he were truly looking to attack officers or commit a mass shooting, he had no shortage of opportunities to do so. Nevertheless, it appears he was only guilty of ‘shooting’ officers with his camera — a tool far more dangerous to ICE than any gun, capable of inflicting a small measure of accountability on masked cowards.

The government’s slander campaign is the worst part of all this. When Nicole Good was murdered, Trump officials, including the president himself, claimed that she rammed officers with her car and sent an ICE agent to the hospital with serious injuries. Nevertheless, video evidence proves that she never hit anyone with her car, and was driving AWAY from law enforcement at the time of her death. News agencies and local police further confirmed there were NO reported injuries in that incident aside from Nicole Good’s ICE-perpetrated homicide.

The rush to judgment is completely unacceptable.

And of course, neither victim matched the profile of a domestic terrorist as claimed by the administration. On the contrary, Alex Pretti’s last action in life was to check on the safety of another person at the scene who had been violently pushed to the ground and pepper-sprayed by DHS.

He was a nurse through and through; even in his final moments, he was dedicated to helping others.

Nicole Good’s final recorded words, meanwhile, were that she wasn’t ‘angry’ at the officers who had stopped her car and later killed her. Again, not the words of a domestic terrorist.

Make no mistake, Alex Pretti and Nicole Good could have been any of us — law-abiding, professionally-employed American citizens who were gunned down merely for observing federal law enforcement activities in their communities. The fact that they were both white is likely to be another wake-up call to even the most MAGA conservatives, illustrating that this really could have happened to anyone.

Ultimately, the only real ‘professional agitators’ mentioned in this story are the DHS agents themselves. Eventually, the rest of the population has to realize that these easily provoked sociopaths aren’t being sent into our neighborhoods to make us safer.

Seriously, how are they protecting us by killing us?

The administration’s specific crackdown on Minneapolis isn’t coincidental, either. Donald Trump obviously has a score to settle with the state’s Democratic leadership, specifically Governor Tim Walz, who previously ran as his party’s vice presidential nominee. In other words, the prime target for revenge.

And in contrast to Minnesota, Republican-led states in the deep South, like Texas and Florida, are the real statistical capitals of illegal immigration, yet have been conspicuously spared from heavy-handed enforcement campaigns.

There are clearly partisan motivations in play.

Ultimately, the administration isn’t flooding blue states with paranoid and poorly-trained federal law enforcement agents to protect citizens from illegal immigrants. Rather, Trump, Bovino, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem are intentionally throwing fuel onto a lit fire, expecting an explosion. They want to see death, chaos, and destruction, as it serves as an excuse to enact martial law, seize voter rolls, and perhaps even suspend federal elections. All while making life a living hell for liberals — a win-win.

Let me tell you, I have never felt threatened by a brown person, but masked men wearing brown is a completely different story. Will I become the next ‘domestic terrorist’ to be felled during my next trip to the grocery store?

Trump and his band of misfit morons could stop the bloodshed tomorrow if they wanted, simply by withdrawing their forces and reviewing their tactics, but they have decided to double down on cruelty instead.

They have made themselves complicit in the violence.

By hiding the suspects, preventing local investigators from accessing the crime scenes, and sharing cruel memes to slander the victims, we can only assume these fatal outcomes were their intent all along.

On account of the federal cover-up, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti aren’t being treated as accidental casualties of a botched operation, but as enemy ‘combatants’ who were worthy of execution at gunpoint.

Again, we are talking about an ICU nurse and a loving mother here. The administration truly has no shred of empathy.

The administration’s message to federal agents is unmistakable: you are allowed to kill whomever you want, whenever you want, for any reason. Regardless of guilt or negligence, we will protect you from prosecution and manufacture a state media narrative that absolves you of responsibility.

This is practically a declaration of war against the American people.

These are the actions of a hostile invasion force — like Russia in Ukraine — not a serious law enforcement agency. Even soldiers deployed to active war zones abide by stricter rules of engagement than your typical ICE agent.

Federal agents need to be withdrawn from Minneapolis immediately; otherwise, this already tragic chapter in American history is about to get a whole lot darker.

When the election results started to trickle in on November 5th, 2024, I expected things to get gnarly, but I never quite expected to see full-on-murder levels of evil.

We often say elections have consequences, and as of 2026, those consequences now extend to the lives of your neighbors.

Vote responsibly.

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A disturbing text exchange between Donald Trump and Norway’s prime minister on Sunday night revealed the full extent of the president’s cognitive decline. As he weighs invading Greenland, Trump no longer feels obliged to pursue ‘peace’ after being denied the Nobel Peace Prize.

Perhaps better yet, he criticized Norway’s leader for not giving him the award, even though the Norwegian government has no involvement in that process.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” Trump reportedly told Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støre.

“Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also,” he added.

“The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

When Trump promised to ‘Make America Respected Again,’ I don’t think this is what most people had in mind.

And while this lengthy list of personal grievances almost reads like AI-generated satire, the Norwegian government later confirmed its authenticity.

“I can confirm that this is a text message that I received yesterday afternoon from President Trump,” the prime minister verified. “Norway’s position on Greenland is clear. Greenland is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and Norway fully supports the Kingdom of Denmark on this matter.”

“As regards the Nobel Peace Prize, I have clearly explained, including to President Trump what is well known, the prize is awarded by an independent Nobel Committee and not the Norwegian Government,” he added.

Trump’s insistence on annexing Greenland — with the use of military force still on the table — is dystopian enough already. As the Arctic island is a territory of Denmark, and therefore a member of NATO, the United States would be declaring war against Europe, including our longtime allies France, Britain, and Germany.

In response to Trump’s aggression, those countries have already sent over small numbers of troops to explore the establishment of a multinational defense campaign.

These are nuclear-armed world powers, mind you.

The icing on the cake is that Trump’s primary motivation for starting World War III isn’t going to be for national security or even natural resources (Venezuela) — rather, it will be part of his ongoing temper tantrum over losing the Nobel Peace Prize.

Newsflash: if the only thing preventing you from seeking world domination is losing out on an award, chances are you were never truly qualified to receive such a ‘peace’ prize in the first place.

Once again, I find it impossible to fathom how this imbecile actually won the popular vote last election. The writing was on the wall from the very beginning; Trump told us exactly the type of ‘leader’ he would be in the Access Hollywood tapes — a rapist.

Nevertheless, nearly half the country cheered him on.

The outcome of his civil lawsuit with E. Jean Carroll — in which a jury held him liable for committing sexual harassment against her in the mid-1990s — was a second obvious wake-up call voters decided to ignore. Now, given his administration’s extensive cover-up of the Epstein files, it seems increasingly likely that he even participated in the sexual exploitation of minors.

Make no mistake, this is the picture of a sociopath who doesn’t respect consent nor takes ‘no’ for an answer. Whatever he wants, he’ll ‘grab by the pussy,’ in his own words.

Deny him a gold medal, and he’ll claim unilateral ownership over an entire hemisphere — no matter the human cost.

In their infinite wisdom, American voters twice had the opportunity to elect a qualified and level-headed woman in his place, but decided not to. By staying home on election day, or backing Trump as a ‘protest vote,’ the majority endorsed this very agenda, whether they choose to believe it or not.

Of course, Trump did promise to be a ‘peace president,’ but nobody in their right mind should have trusted the word of someone who routinely forces themselves on women, and perhaps even children. There was never a reason to expect his treatment of foreign countries to look any different.

Now, if encouraging people to inject bleach into their arms during the pandemic, inciting an armed insurrection on the Capitol, attempting to overturn the results of a legitimate election, pardoning 1,500 domestic terrorists, shooting protestors in the head, or stripping health care away from tens of millions of Americans under his ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ weren’t reasons enough already — the threat of an unprovoked war against NATO should be the last straw that finally prompts the mad king’s permanent removal from office.

If there was ever a time to exercise the 25th Amendment, it’s now.

By continuing to support his deranged and emotion-driven agenda, which now risks armageddon, every Republican in Congress and member of the president’s cabinet has made themselves complicit in war crimes and the impending collapse of an already-fragile international order.

A demented rapist sits in charge of the most powerful military on Earth, and as demonstrated by his special military operation against Venezuela, retains enough support from the Pentagon to freely execute illegal orders.

Calls likening Trump to Putin or even Hitler were never hyperbole — each day he remains in power invites catastrophe at an unprecedented scale.

He was never fit to lead, and unless those in power decide to take action to stop him, the whole world will soon pay the price for Americans’ ignorance and sexism.

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To my great disappointment, Aftyn Behn, a rising progressive star from Tennessee, did not flip her House district on Tuesday — resulting in Congress gaining another Trump sycophant in Matt Van Epps.

Nevertheless, the race for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district produced favorable results for Democrats, especially considering its hostile (and heavily gerrymandered) demographics.

According to election results published by the New York Times, every county within the district experienced a sizeable leftward shift compared to November 2024. In Davidson County especially, which cuts through Nashville, Aftyn Behn outperformed Kamala Harris’s results by a whopping 20-point margin.

A loss is still a loss, but if this trend holds at the national level, there are plenty of close elections across the country that are now within striking distance for Democrats. At this point in time, a blue wave is the most likely outcome for the 2026 midterms.

If the average results of this year’s special elections are an accurate bellwether for next November, then Republicans are going to be washed out to sea — even more so compared to 2018.

Better yet, this latest outcome was achieved despite Behn embodying all the usual pitfalls of electoral politics in rural America — being educated, being a woman, and genuinely caring about other people. Moreover, Republicans found an old soundbite of Behn admitting her distaste for country music and Nashville’s status of a tourist trap, which would ordinarily be a political death sentence for someone in her position.

Because, as we know by this point, these races are basically just grade school popularity contests where policy and substance don’t matter.

Even so, Behn cut down the GOP’s advantage down to single digits (around +8 at the time of writing), while Trump last carried the district by a colossal +22-point margin. While I hate to admit it, a country-loving moderate male Democrat might have been able to narrow down the results even further.

Nevertheless, I doubt this is the end of her story. Although she won’t have a seat in the U.S. House — where she easily would have become my next congressional crush — she will remain a Tennessee state representative for the near future. They might not realize it, but her local constituents are incredibly lucky to have her.

Overall, last night’s outcome was still an incredible outcome for Behn and the Democratic Party as a whole.

And with her newfound national notoriety, Behn could just as easily build on her success to make a potential run for Senate, whenever conditions are more favorable. This was the approach taken by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who transformed his losing House election into a successful campaign only a few years later — helping turn a Republican stronghold into a competitive purple state. Perhaps after spending some more time building up her brand, Behn could find similar success in Tennessee.

In any case, the fact that Trump and his allies are now having to sweat over the results of congressional elections in deep red (and heavily gerrymandered) districts is an undeniable sign that America is beginning to sour on the president’s demented agenda.

Let’s hope these trends hold next year.

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Earlier this year, Donald Trump — often considered the “peace president” among his supporters — was in contention to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, he’s due a trial in the Hague.

Understandably, after losing said prize to Venezuela’s pro-democracy opposition leader, the peace president has since directed his newly-renamed “Department of War” to bomb the ever-loving shit out of the country — including the execution of defenseless, stranded sailors.

With the regime mulling the expansion its air campaign to strike targets deep within mainland Venezuela — hitting suspected drug dealers or perhaps even the government itself (oil, baby!) — Trump’s attacks against smugglers in the Caribbean have escalated into full-blown war crimes.

Most recently, the Department of War has come under fire for ordering follow-up strikes against a sinking boat suspected of carrying illicit cargo, solely to slaughter any surviving sailors left over from the first bombing.

Reportedly, Secretary of WAR Pete Hegseth, likely adjacent to a near-empty bottle of booze, verbally commanded the military to “kill everyone” on the boat, regardless of the survivors being wounded, defeated, and defenseless.

Predictably, Trump’s press team has pushed to normalize the violence as standard military procedure. When questioned, Karoline “Lying” Leavitt made no effort to deny the existence of a second round of strikes, and MAGA Mike Johnson even brought up Obama’s drone war as justification to leave no man alive.

As always, the radical-left Democrats in Congress are making a fuss about nothing — using their crooked college vocabulary like “international law” to distract red-blooded Americans from the terrific job ̶d̶a̶d̶d̶y Trump is doing to protect our families from illegal drug smuggling.

Oh wait, what’s that? Trump is personally pardoning the former president of Honduras, who was handed a life sentence for enabling one of the most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world? One the smuggled thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States? Forget that.

Cocaine is actually great, just ask Don Jr.

All jokes aside, explicit orders to execute defenseless and or surrendering combatants — especially at sea — are among the earliest recognized war crimes, listed in both the Geneva Conventions and applicable military law.

Members of the armed forces and other persons mentioned in the following Article, who are at sea and who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances, it being understood that the term “shipwreck” means shipwreck from any cause.

Such persons shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Parties to the conflict in whose power they may be, without any adverse distinction founded on sex, race, nationality, religion, political opinions, or any other similar criteria. Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated.

“Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” the Department of Defense Law of War Manual adds, noting that the only exception occurs when shipwrecked sailors continue to fight.

“In order to [receive protection], the person must be wholly disabled from fighting. On the other hand, many combatants suffer from wounds and sickness, but nonetheless continue to fight and would not be protected.”

Importantly, in this case, the slain suspected drug smugglers were only combatants in a very broad sense of the word — wherein the illicit goods they were trafficking would indirectly harm the United States. Otherwise, they were never truly armed soldiers, nor were they waging a traditional war on our country.

Arguably, once their boat and its cargo were on the way to the bottom of the ocean, their only source of “combat” against the United States was finished. In turn, this should have granted them hors de combat, or in layman’s terms, protection from follow-up strikes — and the responsibility to be promptly rescued.

Moreover, over the past year, the military has humanely apprehended the survivors from earlier drug-related strikes, so it’s unclear why they are now being murdered at sea rather than being rescued.

Likewise, before the orange felon took office, the Coast Guard had successfully interdicted thousands of tons of illicit cargo bound for the United States under previous presidents, usually without any excessive displays of lethal force. If you were to ask me, we shouldn’t be bombing anyone; if we actually cared about stopping the drug trade, we should be arresting smugglers and sending them to court, where their testimonies could help apprehend buyers and sellers.

Now, I already know what some of you might be thinking as you read this story: why should we care so much about sparing the lives of alleged narco-terrorists? After all, I sense there is probably some bipartisan overlap among those in the states who are more than happy to see smugglers sleep with the fishes.

In this case, it’s not about the targets or the justification behind the strikes; rather, we should all be deeply troubled by the Trump administration’s startling disregard of legal due process and basic human rights.

It’s a microcosm of a larger problem.

Regardless of the charges, everyone accused of a crime deserves the ability to argue their innocence in front of an impartial jury, and the government itself has laws it must follow. Neglecting this premise is the origin for many of the world’s most brutal authoritarian regimes.

If you haven’t noticed, Republicans have been throwing around words like “terrorist” and “radical” all too frequently — particularly in reference to Trump’s favorite non-existent boogeyman: Antifa. In other words, at least rhetorically, there is little to no separation between how the administration views No Kings protestors and legitimate, violent criminals.

Admittedly, although the United States has never exactly been the best at adhering to international law in foreign conflicts, even under liberal presidents, Trump’s deprivation of basic human rights in the ever-escalating drug war definitely hits a little bit too close to home.

If the regime is willing to commit war crimes in broad daylight — merely in routine law enforcement operations — the same standards might eventually be applied to anyone Trump considers to be an enemy of the state.

Meanwhile, we already have masked men stalking the streets of America who are legally empowered to racially profile and kidnap anyone they want, even law-abiding American citizens. It’s not too much of a stretch to fear that they might begin murdering anyone who they consider a threat, including protestors.

Alongside gutting healthcare for low and middle-income Americans, Trump’s Big Bullshit Bill has more than tripled ICE’s annual budget, and has increased the department’s lethal weapons budget by more than 600% over previous years. Certainly, you don’t spend millions of dollars in weapons that you don’t plan to use.

Right now, it’s a matter of shipwrecked non-combatants being murdered at sea. Tomorrow, it might be a matter of depriving ICE detainees of food and water, leaving them to starve in Holocaust-adjacent conditions. Next week, we could see No Kings protestors being run over by tanks similar to Tiananmen Square.

If the government can freely murder suspected drug smugglers in international waters without trial, extrajudicial executions will eventually be normalized within our own borders — that’s not a matter of if, but when.

Given how often Trump refers to Democrats as enemies of the state, even encouraging the murder of prominent veterans like Mark Kelly, this is not a scandal we can afford to forgive.

Fascism is already here folks, and I’m tired of pretending it isn’t.

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After Jimmy Kimmel was indefinitely suspended earlier this month, I assumed his late-night comedy show was gone for good. In my last story, I labeled it as an outright cancellation  —  not a temporary reprieve.

I hope you can forgive me for this, because whenever a much-beloved media personality is pulled from television for saying something their network disagrees with, there are usually no second chances.

Thankfully, on this rare occasion, that wasn’t the case. Within the span of a week, the MAGA crusade to cancel and censor Jimmy Kimmel crumbled, and now it almost feels like it never happened.

Moreover, the right-wing local affiliates that were largely responsible for the initial suspension  —  Nexstar and Sinclair  —  eventually backed off their threats and uncensored Kimmel without having any of their fascist-sympathizing demands met.

Finally, some good news.

Nevertheless, the whole ordeal was equal parts disturbing and frustrating. Even though ABC and Disney were happy to continue broadcasting Kimmel’s show, their affiliate stations continued to preempt Kimmel’s monologues  —  preventing millions of Americans from watching an important moment in history. For example, anyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest, like yours truly, had to wait to watch the show on YouTube because it was deemed too radical and extreme to air on television.

It was a pertinent reminder of just how fragile free speech is, and of the stranglehold right-wing corporate interests hold over every facet of American media.

Indeed, it truly was a mask-off moment; local channels and their associated newsrooms project a veneer of independence, but in reality, they’re all conformist propagandists parroting the narrative set by their billionaire gatekeepers.

Nearly every local affiliate in America has been bought out over the past decade to kill independent journalism. Let’s call it what it is: a hostile takeover to bring Fox News into every living room.

If you thought Kimmel had it bad, recognize that every local news host employed by a Nexstar or Sinclair affiliate station  —  right down to meteorologists and sportscasters  —  is dealing with the same degree of censorship.

The difference, however, is in the subtlety. Most people don’t immediately recognize that their local meteorologist is contractually obligated to downplay the effects of climate change, but do notice when their favorite late-night comedian is forcibly silenced for promoting thought crimes.

Likewise, there comes a point when cancel culture turns into a failing business strategy. I do not doubt that the heads of Nexstar and Sinclair are primarily focused on pushing a partisan agenda first and foremost, but larger corporate entities like ABC and Disney are solely profit-focused. This presents an obvious point of conflict in their business relationship.

Namely, there is a substantial difference between companies that exist to serve the objectives of Christian nationalism and those that bend the knee to Republicans solely to gain an advantage.

We’ve seen it play out before  —  ABC, CBS, Paramount, Disney, CNN, NPR  — the big alphabet soup networks always play nice with whoever is in power, expecting favorable treatment in return. They don’t kiss ass because they love Trump, but because they want to make a lot of money.

That’s where the Kimmel cancellation failed. It was completely unwarranted and a giant leap toward authoritarianism. A comedian was being censored, not because he said anything wrong or provocative, or because of bad ratings, but because the president of the un-United States disliked his narrative.

Allegedly, this attack on free speech inspired upwards of 1.7 million disenfranchised Disney+ customers to cancel their subscriptions  —  a massive gut-punch to the company’s bottom line.

As it turns out, cancel culture isn’t free, and censorship has a cost. Fascists are bad at a lot of things, but they are especially bad at culture. Unless someone has been effectively brainwashed by a decade or more of watching nothing but Fox News, mainstream audiences don’t enjoy authoritarian propaganda and unwarranted censorship being forced down their throats.

As another example, look no further than Trump’s administration of the Kennedy Center, which has transformed a once-lively performing arts community into a complete ghost town. Republican cancel culture isn’t just a “culture” of canceling people they disagree with  —  they are actually killing culture itself.

Even though it is well established that America’s media conglomerates will surrender themselves to the highest bidder, the Kimmel suspension saga proves that they still have their limits. Unless they can get rid of Trump’s critics slowly and quietly without losing too much money  —  like what is happening with Colbert  —  becoming outright propaganda apparatus is a losing proposition.

This is how we fight back in the era of late-stage capitalism: vote with your wallet, anywhere and everywhere. If you can help it, don’t give a single cent to Trump’s sycophants. In all likelihood, your dollar means more than your ballot. Corporate oligarchs control American politics, and money is the only language they speak.

I have no doubt that Republicans will continue to intensify their attacks on free expression, but to what extent businesses are willing to play along remains to be seen.

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There you have it.

As of Wednesday, Kimmy Kimmel  —  by far Donald Trump’s fiercest late-night critic  —  has been cancelled with immediate effect.

Make no mistake, Kimmel wasn’t terminated because of poor ratings or a lack of critical acclaim, but because he used his platform to share opinions critical of the governing regime.

His show defined late-night comedy for two decades, but running afoul of the MAGA thought police was all it took for him to lose his job  —  just months after it was announced that Stephen Colbert was going to be taken off air under a similar pretense.

On this occasion, however, the network was far more transparent about its partisan motives.

Disappointingly, the suits at ABC argue Kimmel’s latest statements about the death of Charlie Kirk justified their decision, implying that the late-night host was spreading provocative rhetoric and misinformation.

“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse,” the network claimed.

As you might expect, this corporate editorializing is hardly accurate. I strongly urge everyone to listen to what Kimmel actually had to say.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Jimmy Kimmel said during his final monologue.

Later in his show, he would go into more detail about Trump’s reckless and inappropriate response to the shooting, including the president’s fixation on building a gold-plated ballroom at the White House, rather than mourning.

There was no hate, no misinformation, and no jokes glorifying violence  —  just a condemnation of Donald Trump’s signature hypocrisy. Kimmel was tactful, especially considering his usual style of low-brow humor.

Just a beloved comic sharing his opinion about something that happened.

And although the exact political leanings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin are not fully understood, the best reporting suggests that he was raised by a family of gun-loving conservative Christians in Utah. Based on geography alone, there’s a strong chance he voted for Trump in the past  —  just like the shooters behind both of the president’s assassination attempts.

Likewise, this directly contradicts early misinformation spread by MAGA extremists, including the president of the United States, that the shooter was either transgender, a person of color, or some sort of militarized far-left agent directly motivated by Democratic rhetoric.

Therefore, when it comes to political violence in this context, Kimmel’s framing was right on the money. By all accounts, he had every right to criticize Republicans for using a senseless tragedy to promote an unashamedly anti-free speech agenda.

Indeed, MAGA conservatives have done everything in their power over the past week to turn Charlie Kirk’s death into their Reichstag fire moment  —  or better yet, their Horst Wessel  —  even before there was any verifiable reporting about who the shooter was or what their motive might be.

Jimmy Kimmel’s termination is direct proof that they’re succeeding.

Plus, check out Kimmel’s heartfelt condolences to the Kirk family. Nobody could possibly spin him as being a hatemonger.

It doesn’t matter if what you’re saying is right or wrong anymore  —  if the president of the United States doesn’t like what you’re saying, you’re going to be shut down by his corporate accomplices.

“Insensitive” opinions are only ever acceptable if you’re wearing a red hat or inciting rioters to beat police officers over the head with MAGA flags. Otherwise, any minor breach of decorum or civility is unacceptable.

Fox News pundits can glorify violence against Democratic lawmakers all day long  —  or even support the systematic execution of every homeless or mentally ill person in America  —  but once you share an unwelcome, albeit logical opinion about a conservative martyr, you’re done.

Just imagine if the tables were turned and Fox News had decided to cancel Greg Gutfeld or Jesse Watters at Joe Biden’s or Kamala Harris’s direction  —  Trump’s supporters would have (perhaps rightfully) lost their minds.

While that sounds unimaginable, this is exactly what has happened to Kimmel and Colbert, and we’re all just supposed to accept that.

This is what cancel culture really looks like.

When Trump returned to power in January, I suspected that Kimmel and other anti-authoritarian truth-tellers would eventually be shut down, but I never expected the corporate capitulation to happen this quickly.

It was my personal bellwether for shit hitting the fan, and here it is.

The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS, Disney, Paramount  —  everywhere you look, the corporate media has systematically endorsed MAGA-sympathizing narratives with a zero-tolerance policy for insubordination.

Eugenics, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are all sacred topics, but speaking truth to power is a bridge too far. Tow the official narrative, or find yourself out of a job  —  and that extends to academia.

Corporate media is state-run media, and it took less than a year.

Independent journalists are more important than ever, so support them.

Let me tell you, if Jimmy Kimmel and Colbert joined together to start a joint podcast, they would put Joe Rogan’s viewership to shame.

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If you haven’t noticed it yet (lucky you), things have really gone to shit over the past year  —  real deep shit. Worse than I ever could have imagined.

America is led by a 34-count convicted felon president, a belligerent drunk runs the newly-renamed Department of War, the Epstein files are a Democrat hoax, Elon Musk is poised to become the world’s first trillionaire, and a deceased hatemongering podcaster is a national martyr.

Nothing makes sense anymore, and it all feels like a bad fever dream.

But thankfully, the president of the United States  —  Donald Jesus Trump  — finally said something that helped me connect the dots.

Allegedly, 300 million Americans perished sometime last year due to fatal drug overdoses. That accounts for roughly 90% of our total recorded population. Statistically speaking, 9 out of 10 of my readers have died since Trump took office  —  which also might partially explain my struggles with online engagement since January.

Of course, Trump didn’t say what type of drug  —  just drugs. In this case, it wasn’t fent-and-all, as Marjorie Taylor Greene pronounces it, but something far deadlier. When Kamala Harris announced her candidacy last summer, we all overdosed on crystalized hopium. She gave us hope, too much of it, and it killed us.

We’re all dead, and have been for some time. This is Hell, purgatory, or whatever else you want to call the bad ending.

Admittedly, I haven’t gone to church in a very long time, nor do I have any intention of going back for a very long time, but I always remember how pastors would often describe Hell as a Heaven for bad people.

It just clicks  —  practically every bad person you know is doing extremely well and is taking win after win. This is their good ending.

So, you were an accomplice of a notorious pedophile and sex trafficker? Nobody cares as long as you’re rich and powerful! So, you showed up at the Capitol on January 6 to beat up police officers, hunt down lawmakers, and overturn liberal democracy? Pardons for everyone!

Jokes aside, it has been especially surreal to watch Trump’s lies become more outrageous, and more accepted, with each passing month. During his first term, a gaffe like this would have been front-page news for a whole week; now, however, it’s just part of the mainstream narrative.

Drugs are bad, so we indiscriminately blow up people smuggling them, even if we don’t know if they were actually smuggling drugs. Just like how the Supreme Court gave ICE the go-ahead to flagrantly violate the Fourth Amendment and use skin color as probable cause for search and seizure.

In other words, the brownshirts get to do whatever the fuck they want.

But for some reason, there is no real media outrage over any of this. The gatekeepers appointed by their penny-pinching billionaire overlords are intent on selling the big lie that all of this is normal.

It isn’t.

Trump’s wild claim that 300 million of us have died from drugs in the past year is just the latest example of how a lie repeated often enough becomes fact, at least in terms of our national collective consciousness.

Meanwhile, another awful lie is taking shape and is being largely uncontested: Democrats and anyone left-of-center are vicious killers who brainwash youth to become violent political assassins.

Despite being, you know, the ones who are against gun violence and school shootings, including those that happen on college campuses.

Trump’s closest allies, such as Stephen Miller and JD Vance, are promoting the idea of a national doxing campaign to expose anyone who speaks ill of the late racist demagogue Charlie Kirk, or simply doesn’t mourn him to their intense, lopsided standards. It’s already getting people fired from their jobs, and eventually, it will produce vigilante justice  —  with some extremists already demanding blood for blood.

As I stated previously, I was never an admirer of Charlie Kirk, but I can at least admire certain aspects about him  —  namely, his passionate willingness to debate, and to challenge his political opponents in open discussion. It was rarely done in good faith, but at least the premise was sound. Resolving our differences through words, not bullets, is how democracies are supposed to function.

If we accept this idealized version of Kirk, the Trump administration’s pledge to engage in an aggressive crackdown on Democrats anywhere and everywhere, merely for existing and criticizing fascism, is deeply ironic.

Like the rest of us who overdosed on hopium, free speech is effectively dead. If you say something that offends the MAGA secret police, even statements of fact, you’re going to be canceled.

No debate, no discussion, no hope, no nothing.

Every major corporation is complicit.

Genocidal hatemongers like Fox’s Brian Kilmeade get to sell the idea of executing every homeless or mentally ill person in America on live television, and keep their jobs. Yet, if you criticize Kirk’s views, it’s grounds for immediate termination and cancellation.

All by the party that once told us to reject cancel culture and political correctness, no less. All by the party that intentionally incited the Capitol insurrection and pardoned 1,500 right-wing domestic terrorists. All by the party that mocked or ignored the assassination of Minnesota Democrats.

Now, if you don’t conform to their lofty standards of political correctness, you’re done. No due process.

And this is just how it’s going to be, because a lie told often enough becomes gospel as long as it makes its way on Fox News.

And by extension, 9 out of 10 of us are dead, because he said so.

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Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University on Wednesday was shocking, gruesome, and entirely indefensible. Despite its growing frequency, political violence — and, by extension, gun violence — has no place in America.

Not in schools, not in churches, and not on college campuses. Democrats and progressives will always be the first to express this.

Nevertheless, even as the suspected shooter shows no apparent connection to any form of left-wing extremism (quite the contrary, actually), conservatives have instinctively blamed Democrats and the “violent left” for the shooting.

Consequently, a startling number of terminally online Trump cultists have declared “WAR” and “open season” against liberals in their misguided quest for retribution and bloodlust. Rather than helping to bring the country together, they would prefer to fight fire with fire.

Democrats have overwhelmingly condemned Kirk’s murder, yet a horrifying number of Republicans are demanding blood for blood.

As tragic as the circumstances are, Charlie Kirk’s murder has exposed the damning hypocrisy surrounding MAGA’s consistent and reckless embrace of incendiary — and outright evil — political rhetoric.

More specifically, Trump accused the Democrats’ anti-fascist rhetoric of killing Kirk, ignoring the fact that he himself has often referred to his political opposition as “scum” and “vermin” without concern for the potential consequences.

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump complained. “[This was] directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”

Nobody deserves to be shot dead for their opinions under any circumstance, but there is no sanitizing the hateful and bigoted person that Charlie Kirk was. By all accounts, he was fascist-adjacent — if not an outright white supremacist and Christian nationalist.

As a non-comprehensive list of his beliefs, Kirk promoted a wide range of extreme, ignorant, discriminatory, and anti-democratic viewpoints.

• That gay people should be stoned to death, as biblically implied.

• Called the 1964 Civil Rights Act — which formally outlawed discrimination based on race, sex, or religion — as a “huge mistake.”

• Publicly praised the MAGA extremist who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer and said that a “patriot” should bail him out.

• Argued that God-fearing women should abandon their careers and personal autonomy to “submit” to their husbands.

• Had his organization, Turning Point USA, advertise free bus rides and hotel rooms for the violent insurrectionists who attacked police and lawmakers on Trump’s behalf on January 6.

• Suggested Black pilots could not be trusted to fly airlines safely. “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

• Called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and “not a good person.”

• Insisted that horrific school shootings and gun deaths — including his own — were a necessary price to pay to protect the Second Amendment

• Supported forced-birth extremism, arguing that every child conceived must be born, even in cases of rape and incest against 10-year-old girls.

• Did not believe in the concept of empathy, once saying, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up new age term that does a lot of damage.”

Charlie Kirk was often criticized for being a Nazi, because frankly, he was.

Considering the lede of this story, the irony surrounding his death is also inescapable. Putting aside his Second Amendment absolutism, Kirk dedicated his life to fomenting the intolerant political culture Republicans reflexively blamed for causing his death.

His far-right PAC, Turning Point USA, has popularized bad-faith arguments and poisoned the minds of our youth.

Plus, whenever you point out any of his opinions or direct quotations, without editorializing, MAGA hats will accuse you of making evil of the dead. This itself seems to imply that those who lionize him recognize that his beliefs were rotten to the core and fundamentally flawed.

Which begs the question: why did any of these people ever worship him, or any other far-right Trump-loving extremist?

Meanwhile, the same level of outrage has been noticeably absent whenever right-wing political violence erupts against Democrats.

Most recently, in June, when Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota were gunned down by a MAGA extremist on Trump’s birthday, Republicans offered a mix of crocodile tears and outright mockery.

Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband, Mark, and her golden retriever, Gilbert, were shot dead in their homes, and MAGA Republicans responded by laughing about it online.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee, serving in the U.S. Senate, even satirized the targeted assassination. Of course, he received no disciplinary action for doing so, indicating that Republican leadership condoned his actions.

Similarly, Trump refused to call Governor Tim Walz in the aftermath of the shooting, declined to appear at the funeral service of the Hortmans, and did not order flags at half-staff to mourn their politically motivated slaughter. He did everything in his power to help people forget about it.

Of course, the opposite will be true on all counts for Charlie Kirk’s assassination, who was merely a private citizen. His body is even being transported on Air Force Two, a privilege and honor rarely received by even the bravest of fallen soldiers.

Moreover, as more details are being gathered about the murder suspect, it is becoming apparent that Democrats, transgenderism, and left-wing extremism are not to blame for the death of Charlie Kirk, as Republicans initially claimed.

Conversely, the gunman appears to have been an attention-seeking internet “edgelord” who lacked any clear-cut partisan affiliation. For all we know, he could have been a current or former Trump supporter — just like the shooters behind both of the president’s failed assassination attempts.

If Republicans are truly serious about denouncing provocative rhetoric, then they should start by giving themselves and their neo-Nazi agenda a long look in the mirror. Whenever Trump bullies his adversaries or excuses violence against his opposition, they all fall deafeningly silent.

Political violence and incendiary rhetoric must be condemned on every possible occasion, not just when it suddenly affects your side of the aisle.

Otherwise, our nation will never heal.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, you might have noticed that the MAGA-sphere is presently coping through its greatest inflection point since Trump first announced his candidacy in 2015.

Donald Trump — the man who stepped off his golden escalator promising to “drain the swamp” and rid Washington of its elite stranglehold — was almost certainly a client or associate of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

In other words, a pedophile.

At this rate, the administration’s desperate cover-up of the Epstein files has made this fact painfully obvious. Just last week, for example, Republicans expedited their summer vacation plans at Trump’s behest, breaking early for a month-long recess in order to prevent Democrats from forcing a vote on releasing the files until September. Not long after, in one of the greatest Freudian slips of all time, Trump told the press that he never had the great “privilege” of visiting Epstein’s sex cult island.

Excuse me, but the privilege?

Consequently, after a full decade of lies, deceit, and the destruction of the American dream, a significant number of Trump supporters have only now realized their orange messiah is an absolute scumbag, and better yet, a member of the elite societal caste their movement promised to challenge.

The differing approaches MAGA hats have taken to reconcile with this unpleasant reality are even more perplexing than the news itself. Some are genuinely infuriated and are walking away from their fascist movement for the first time; others, meanwhile, have pivoted away from their fixation on the Epstein files to pretend like it was never a big deal.

The millions of “Epstein truthers” who rallied around Trump’s campaign, believing that powerful Democrats were central to hiding and enabling an international pedophilia ring, aren’t bothered by this, or have let it become the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.

I can’t tell which camp is worse.

After spending many futile years trying to rationalize the thought process driving Trump’s supporters and their attachment to the president’s aura, I can now comfortably say that there never was a thought process.

No matter which way you look at it, conservatives’ reactions to Trump’s Epstein connection are completely irrational. Those willing to overlook it are massive hypocrites, whereas those who have dropped their allegiance have outed themselves as complete morons.

Frankly, I will never understand how it took anyone this long to realize that Trump is a massive creep and a presumptive associate of sex traffickers. Aside from the Epstein files, there are innumerable examples of him being a massive sleaze and a generally disgusting human being — offenses that should have disqualified him from ever holding public office.

From day one, it was obvious to me that Trump is someone who exploits women of all ages for the sake of his sexual gratification. It’s one of the reasons why I could never consider voting for him, ever.

For starters, there was the Access Hollywood debacle, wherein Trump boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy,” committing a form of sexual assault, and getting away with it because he’s rich and powerful. Likewise, just last year, he was held civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Caroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.

If that wasn’t bad enough already, Trump has historically held an odd fascination with beauty pageants — including teen beauty pageants. In the 1990s, the same decade he was fondling grown women without their consent, he also briefly owned the rights to Miss Teen USA, a modeling competition for underage girls.

Some contestants, who at the time were as young as 15, allege that Trump would “accidentally” walk in on them while they were changing, with them being either naked or mostly naked.

By their accounts, Trump would apologize by saying something along the lines of “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all before.”

Considering the Epstein connection, that last line sounds even creepier today.

Donald Trump has practically admitted to being a sex offender on multiple past occasions, yet somehow, his followers have only become mildly disturbed by it in 2025.

For those who genuinely cared about bringing pedophiles to justice, how could any of them have ever trusted a creep like him? “Oh sure, raping and violating grown women is ok, but kids is where I draw the line.”

The recent developments in the Epstein saga have helped solve the mystery around why Republicans have been able to get away with so many unprecedented evils. For every cultist who continues to support Trump regardless of whatever immoral act he perpetrates, there is seemingly someone else in the MAGA orbit who is dangerously ignorant of the world around them.

Tens of millions of supposedly functional adults vote based on vibes alone, often informed by non-credible media sources that purposefully or inadvertently promote fringe political views — Joe Rogan, namely.

Over the past decade in American politics, Democrats have perhaps focused too much energy on kitchen table issues when most “undecided” voters seem to care about pop-culture drama like the Epstein files.

Healthcare, tariffs, groceries, these concepts are just too complicated for people.

So much for egg prices — I’m beginning to think that many of the attacks on Biden’s economy in the last election were all a massive diversion so Republicans could focus on selling a winning cultural narrative hideously detached from reality. The Epstein files would be one such example.

Just think about it — the MAGA voters who are only now leaving their movement were otherwise fine about losing their access to affordable healthcare and Medicaid enrollment, experiencing tariff-induced economic volatility, and losing their rights to reproductive freedom.

Republicans are waging war on working-class America, yet Trump doing business with Epstein, something that will never directly affect voters, was the actual breaking point for voters.

Ultimately, these people should have more pressing concerns than this. Being in the Epstein files is gross, sure, but Trump is doing far more damage to America behind the Resolute Desk than he ever did as a private citizen 20–30 years ago.

Logical inconsistencies like these are practically a defining trait of modern-day American conservatism, and why I can no longer bother rationalizing MAGA hats’ thought processes and decision-making. It’s impossible.

I always expected the MAGA base to crumble, but not for such obvious reasons. Trump has always been a massive creep, and anyone who was able to look past that at the ballot box in 2016, 2020, or 2024 is a total lost cause.

In each election, Trump was definitively the sex offender candidate, and yet tens of millions supported him anyway.

I wish I had an answer to fixing the dystopian state of American politics, but with an electorate this ignorant and clueless, I doubt there’s any point.

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Amidst an intensifying conflict with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News over the right-wing media empire’s continued focus on the Epstein files, wherein Trump is now undeniably an accomplice, the 34-count felon and presumptive pedophile has found an unlikely new corporate ally.

Not Newsmax, CNN, or One America News (OAN), but CBS Broadcasting.

In the latest win for Trump, political satirist Stephen Colbert announced that his critically acclaimed CBS comedy show has been cancelled by its parent network, purely for “financial reasons,” of course.

That’s despite how The Late Show With Stephen Colbert had consistently dominated late-night ratings over the past year, reaching an average audience of 2.4 million viewers, blowing competing programs hosted by Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon completely out of the water.

Admittedly, I have not watched Colbert much lately, but nobody in their right mind would ever question his talent or success. If he was somehow failing to make CBS Broadcasting any money, every single late-night comedian in the business should be deeply concerned.

But that’s just it — there’s no way this was a “financial decision,” at least not in terms of Colbert’s ratings or marketability. Rather, this was only the latest instance of a large multi-national corporation bending the knee to Donald Trump in a shameless attempt at winning political favors.

In this sense, The Late Show’s cancellation is only a business decision in the general sense that CBS Broadcasting hopes to get more money in tax breaks from daddy Trump than Colbert’s show makes for them annually.

Or a potential business merger — more on that later.

Alongside Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, and Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert has become a vocal stand-out critic of Trump and his depraved MAGA movement. Across networks, America’s favorite late-night comics have joined forces to expose the evils and corruption of the current administration and corporate climate — making them prime targets for MAGA conservatives’ fragile cancel culture.

By canceling The Late Show, corporate America is unashamedly admitting to the entire world that it cares more about protecting itself from the ire of a criminal and fascist (presumptive) pedophile than it does standing behind the loyal and hard-working talent that has made it successful.

In other words, they are willing to help silence political critics and suppress democratic expression as long as they’re guaranteed preferential treatment by the feds.

And Stephen Colbert’s abrupt cancellation isn’t an isolated incident, either. Last month, for example, CBS and Paramount Global agreed to pay Donald Trump $16 million to settle an egregiously frivolous lawsuit involving Kamala Harris’s 2024 interview with 60 Minutes, where the president accused the network of giving his opponent preferential treatment.

Ultimately, Harris’s interview was relatively unremarkable, and CBS had edited it down to save time, as per typical television news standards.

Likewise, Trump had entirely refused to participate in a 60 Minutes interview himself, making his fairness accusations even sillier. If he was so concerned about getting equal treatment, he had every opportunity to appear for his own interview, but refused, because he’s a senile idiot who can’t answer basic questions without resorting to petty bullying tactics.

Although I admit that I’m not a legal expert by any stretch of the imagination, Trump’s lawsuit appeared to be based around clear-cut exercises of the First Amendment — by all accounts, the broadcast of Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes was protected under the right to free expression and an independent press. Paramount and CBS could have fought the lawsuit if they wanted to, and would have won.

That, however, would have made the mad king angry, and nobody wants that — at least not the filthy rich suits who still have something to lose.

Namely, CBS and Paramount have been planning a corporate merger with Skydance Media, which requires governmental approval from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission to proceed.

Paramount’s $16 million settlement to Trump wasn’t actually a settlement at all — it was a legal bribe disguised as a lawsuit. Over the past year, you can find similar examples of large corporations funneling huge heaps of cash to the felon president using similar means.

As mentioned at the head of the article, Trump is also suing Fox News and the Wall Street Journal for their fixation on the Epstein files. At the end of the day, I expect this is just another avenue for Rupert Murdoch to give the orange felon a multi-million-dollar political donation. With CBS setting the benchmark for brown nosing, all the other networks are now expected to follow suit.

With this in mind, it couldn’t be any more apparent that Colbert’s sacking is an intentional sacrifice being made to improve CBS’s political favor in a sea of servile corporate sycophants. Trump hates late-night comics because they hold a unique capacity to engage and entertain audiences while speaking truth to power.

Donald Trump has always accused the mainstream media of treating him unfairly, but in reality, he owes his entire political existence to the gatekeepers who control the corporate press and 24/7 entertainment. Both in 2016 and 2024, the media ecosystem helped normalize Trump and his brand of bigotry — making his sheer level of ignorance and hatred palatable, if not enviable, to a disturbing number of people.

In that time, late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert were the only ones at their respective networks who continued to be honest with their audience — exposing the brutal truths of contemporary American politics in ways that mainstream anchors were prohibited from.

Now, however, not even late-night comedy is sacred. The suits have to have their greasy paws on everything, all to appease the fascists in Washington. Who will be the next victim of MAGA cancel culture, Jimmy Kimmel? Jon Stewart? I suppose only time will tell.

Ironically, Trump was right about one thing: corporate media and their billionaire gatekeepers are truly the “enemy of the people.” Arguably, their gross complicity is the entire reason we’re in this mess.

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Since retaking power in January, MAGA Republicans have thoroughly debunked the myth that they support a legal pathway to immigration and citizenship. To the shock and horror of the hopelessly naive immigrants who propelled Trump to a second term in office, conservatives’ xenophobia has always been rooted in racism, not legality.

This unpleasant reality has been on full display ever since Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim and Indian American Democratic Socialist, beat Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary election.

The right-wing response to Mamdani’s victory has been predictably deplorable. Rather than debating or criticizing his political platform on substance, MAGA conservatives have instead returned to their time-tested tactic of bigotry and racial fearmongering.

Namely, certain repugnants have even demanded that he be denaturalized and deported from the United States, merely for expressing opinions that the so-called ‘tolerant right’ disagrees with.

You know, completely evil and radical concepts like providing people with affordable housing, healthcare, and groceries. Oh, the horror!

For context, although Zohran Mamdani is a foreign-born immigrant who was raised in Uganda before moving to New York, he eventually pursued a legal pathway to citizenship after graduating from college and was fully naturalized in 2018. He is now well and truly an American, just like anyone else who was born here.

That, unfortunately, hasn’t stopped the fascists from being the sick and twisted bastards they are.

“Zohran ‘little muhammad’ Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York,” scumbag Republican Rep. Andy Ogles reacted after his primary win. “He needs to be DEPORTED. Which is why I am calling for him to be subject to denaturalization proceedings.”

Of course, this story isn’t about Zohran Mamdani or his pathway to citizenship — it’s about how MAGA fascists keep moving the goalposts to vilify and criminalize all immigration, not just ‘illegal’ immigration.

Every day, Republicans are exploring sick, twisted, and inventive ways to illegitimize — and even criminalize — legal immigrants.

After taking over the Republican party in 2015, Trump and his MAGA sycophants have been repeating the same disingenuous narrative: we’re not racist or anti-immigrant, we’re just going after the criminals. Trust us!

Somehow, despite virtually branding all non-white migrants as rapists, thieves, and murderers who are violent by nature (down to their genetics), an alarming number of first generation immigrants trusted the president’s message. In the 2024 race especially, his support among Latinos and Hispanics exceeded all expectations.

According to Pew Research, Trump even came close to winning an outright majority of Latino votes last November. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that they won Trump the election.

Ironically, many of those same voters are now shocked that the non-citizen members of their immediate and extended families are being kidnapped by masked men and shipped away to foreign prisons.

“He said he was going after the criminals, not my husband/wife/son/daughter!”

Better yet, it has become painfully apparent that Trump’s Gestapo ICE agents are going after low-hanging fruit — targeting customers and day laborers at Home Depots, restaurants, and hotels (in blue states, at least). Not rapists or hardened criminals, but people who are putting in an honest day’s work to feed their families and pay taxes.

Ultimately, having the wrong paperwork is the only crime someone needs to have committed to be arrested and deported without getting a single day in court. Republicans don’t care if you’re an otherwise law-abiding and constructive member of society; to them, your skin color, language, and nationality are inherently disgusting and illegal.

Conservatives’ unending hunt to root out ‘illegal’ immigration is just a thinly-veiled cover to justify institutional racism and nativism — isms that go against the bedrock principles that our nation was built upon.

Likewise, there are hardly as many non-citizen violent criminals in America as Trump has portrayed, as most dreamers who move here live honest, peaceful, and productive lives to avoid suspicion and scrutiny.

Instead of admitting this, however, the Trump regime has instead opted to move the goalposts and criminalize legal migrants — people who did have a legal and documented basis for being in our country and did everything that was expected of them by the government.

Paradoxically, following the letter of the law and receiving proper documentation under this administration might actually put you at more risk of deportation, not less.

For example, over the past week, Trump has ended the temporary protected status (TPS) of around 500,000 legally documented Haitian immigrants and refugees who moved to the United States to flee unsafe conditions in their home country.

You know, the same migrant demographic Diaper Donald once accused of eating people’s cats and dogs…

Just like the Nazi regime’s “Final Solution,” Republicans’ mass deportation agenda is an answer in search of a problem. With hearts full of hatred, white conservatives want to bring suffering upon people who don’t look or talk like them and will pursue any rhetoric or justification that enables it.

Worse, they have an imaginary quota for how many Black and brown people they want to get rid of, but can’t find enough criminal immigrants to fulfill it.

Eventually, once they run out of non-citizens to deport, they will begin the process of denaturalizing any legal first or second generation immigrants they dislike — including full citizens like Zohran Mamdani.

That’s why they’re challenging the legal basis for birthright citizenship.

This is the myth of the ‘legal immigrant’ laid to rest — for Trump Republicans, there is no true pathway to legal immigration or citizenship. In the end, any non-white migrants who move to America will eventually become criminals in the eyes of the administration, regardless of how diligent or peaceful they are.

Contrary to his deceptions from the campaign trail, Trump’s mass deportation agenda has nothing to do with securing America, protecting legal immigration, or preserving law and order.

At this point, it’s not even nativism or xenophobia — it’s outright fascism.

While it might sound like hyperbole, it’s important to remember that the holocaust — like most historical genocides — started as a planned mass deportation. Authoritarian regimes usually end up coming to the same conclusion, however, that mass incarcerations (and executions) are far easier and economically beneficial operations.

As such, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Trump regime is allegedly constructing giant new detention facilities within America’s borders. I hope I’m wrong, as I admittedly have been about a lot of things, but when it comes to the extent of Trump’s depravity, I’m usually right.

People are finally waking up to this dark reality and beginning to catch on, but at this rate, I’m starting to fear that it might be too late.

Ironically, if only a few more of Trump’s Latino voters in swing states realized they weren’t just pulling up the ladder behind themselves — but also tossing themselves and their family members into alligator-infested waters — perhaps we could have avoided this whole mess.

If you think you’re safe right now, you’re probably not.

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