The True State of the Union This 2026

trump is going to lie his ass off at tonight's State of the Union address, so here are the facts as you need to know them.

The state of the Union is strong divided. The polling by most Americans show a lot of us are miserable at the direction our nation is turning. And the disapproval is far higher than it was in trump's first run at misrule:

from the NPR report on trump's bad standing before this SOTU.

The division in the country is due to trump's heavy-handed immigration policy, as his ICE and Border Patrol thugs are smashing and shooting their way through too many of our cities and states grabbing families and children. The current regime is at open war with our own communities, dragging us into culture war racism and misogyny that tore the United States apart the last time we went down this path.

The division in the country is due to trump's arrogant and violent handling of foreign policy, threatening unwanted wars against allies and enemies alike while committing war crimes that a majority of Americans can't abide. trump's open calls about attacking Iran over the past month - and growing louder by the day - have little support within his own nation even as most of us are mortified we have nobody - cough GOP Congress cough - in a position to stop it.

The division in the country is due to trump's unstoppable obsession with using tariffs and his overall mishandling of our economy. Inflation is still a problem, the job market is unsteady, and far too many of us are struggling with housing, debt, and other costs. The only economic sector that's chugging along are the stock markets, and even they are one bubble burst away from a meltdown that would make the Great Recession look like a hiccup.

If there's any issue a majority of Americans are united, it's that we need to see more of the Epstein Files documents and more accountability of the elites who engaged (and profited from) in sex trafficking of teens. And on that, trump and his lackeys are clearly ignoring the people's demands - openly committing obstruction by hiding (or worse destroying) documents showing trump's culpability - to the detriment of our country.

So that's where we stand, America, on this eve of trump's lie-fest to the Union.

Gods help us.

We Need To Admit What We're In Now

The anger remains potent even a day after ICE escalated the Republican War on America. (via Cheryl W. Thompson with NPR)

A man shot Saturday morning by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis has died, federal and local officials said.

The man was identified by state officials as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and Minneapolis resident.

The incident marks the third shooting involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month.

"Today, federal agents beat and then shot multiple times and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen, a Minneapolis resident, and a V.A. nurse," U.S. Sen. Tina Smith said in a news conference this afternoon. "Eyewitness video shows, once again, reckless, violent, and dangerous federal agents taking the life of a Minnesotan."

The anger stems from the near-immediate evidence from eyewitnesses and video recordings that Pretti wasn't even resisting the agents when they ganged up on him and shot him in the back (follow-up from Jennifer Ludden and Liz Baker with NPR):

Minnesota officials are pushing to ensure they can help investigate the shocking fatal shooting of 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. After a late night court filing a federal judge granted them a temporary restraining order, ruling that no Homeland Security officer can destroy or alter evidence related to the death Saturday morning. Federal investigators have refused to allow access to the scene, despite the state obtaining a search warrant for public areas.

It's the second fatal shooting in Minneapolis by immigration agents this month, and once again Trump administration officials immediately defended the action as self-defense while blaming the victim — in this case claiming he was a "domestic terrorist" intending to "massacre" officers.

Multiple bystander videos and witness testimony contradict that. Pretti can be seen holding only a phone in his hand before at least six officers tackle him, pinning him face down on the ground and shooting him in the back, firing what sounds like 10 shots. One eyewitness said in a court document that Pretti was not even facing agents when they grabbed him. "It didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help [a] woman up," they wrote.

Pretti was a U.S. citizen with no known criminal record. DHS says he was armed, and the city's police chief confirmed he had a lawful permit to carry. There has been no evidence that NPR has verified of Pretti brandishing his handgun at any time during the encounter with federal agents. One video appears to show an officer take away his gun just before another shoots him.

Even the so-called Second Amendment right to bear arms is meaningless against the Far Right culture war on everything America - civil rights, peace protests, protecting our communities and loved ones - ought to represent.

Even with trump's administration and every major figure in Homeland Security trying to demonize Pretti, they cannot lie their way out of this one. There's too much video evidence, and too many witnesses. And yet, they'll continue to lie and they'll continue to escalate the violence because this is what they want.

This is what decades - if not centuries when you consider this is all fallout from the first Civil War - of drum beating by the conservative wingnuts towards other Americans have led us to. Demonizing Blacks, demonizing women, demonizing Asians, demonizing gays and lesbians and trans, demonizing everyone not of "their" tribe. I keep saying this:

This Republican-pushed Culture War is one not based on facts: It is a war based on grievance of privileges lost (or about to lose), based on fear determined by racism and sexism towards ethnic minorities and women. It's a war based on fantasies derived from Atlas Shrugged and Turner Diaries, where "manly Christian men" rise up against emasculating Godless librul elites to destroy the corrupt world in order to build a new Utopia on the ashes of the old.

It's been going on since before Black Lives Matter, before Ferguson, before Obama's election triggered angry Whites, before the War on Terror, before Pat Buchanan's Culture War speech call to arms, before the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s pushed conservatism further into racist demagoguery. You can arguably trace all this rage and fear back to 1865 when the defeated Confederates refused to accept the freedom of Blacks and waged a terror campaign well through the Jim Crow Era. 

We can't hide from this fact anymore: We are at war.

We Americans are at war against each other, driven by racism, by fear, by ignorance, by the willingness of those corrupt powers in high places to turn our anxieties towards ourselves instead of them. The vast majority of Americans aren't like that, thankfully. But there are enough of them among the angry, the fear-driven, the ones who bought into the Far Right Narrative of "liberals are pinko commie traitors who aren't REAL Americans" to where violence in our own cities - not from protestors but from government thugs - is a given.

None of this needed to happen. Alas, it has. And now every American has to make the moral decision to stand with courage against the tyranny of trump and his lackeys... or let the violence drown us all.

Stay safe, America.

From Kingdom Come, illustrated by Alex Ross

A Tale of Two Shootings

There were two major shootings today. This one you most likely saw on the news (via Juliana Kim at NPR):

Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and an ally of President Trump, died after a shooting at an outdoor speaking event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, according to Kirk's organization Turning Point USA and Trump.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox called Kirk's death a "political assassination."

"This is a dark day for our state. It's a tragic day for our nation," he said.

He added that a "person of interest" was being interviewed and it was not the same person who had been detained, then released earlier in the day. Law enforcement do not believe a second person was involved in the shooting, according to Cox.

Beau Mason, commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, said a single shot was fired around 12:20 p.m. local time at the campus event featuring Kirk. Mason added that Kirk was quickly taken to a hospital, where he later died.

The suspected shooter was dressed in "all dark clothing" and fired from a long distance, potentially on a roof, according to Mason. He added that investigators are reviewing closed circuit TV footage.

I may have mentioned Kirk at this blog once or twice, noting primarily how he was an agitator calling for violence towards other Americans who leaned Left-Liberal on the political spectrum. Kirk was often defending the spread - like a plague - of guns across America as "our" price "we" have to pay for the Far Right's power to shoot anybody they want uphold a twisted understanding of the Second Amendment.

Speaking of the Far Right, they're using Kirk's assassination to paint the entire Democratic party as "the party of murder" even though far too many Republican wingnuts are killing Democrats and threatening more violence towards their objects of fear/hate on a near-daily basis.

In the meantime, here's the other major shooting you're likely not seeing on the major networks (via  Yesenia Robles and Alejandro A. Alonso Galva with Colorado Public Radio):

A shooting at Evergreen High School this afternoon hospitalized four students — three with gunshot wounds, including the suspected shooter.

The students with gunshot wounds were treated at CommonSpirit St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood. After treatment, two of the three — one being the suspect — are still in critical condition.

The third victim has non-life-threatening injuries.

The sheriff's office confirmed in an evening update that the suspected shooter sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

We as a nation are now numb to the near-constant gun violence happening at our schools, in our public places, across our communities. In any other sane nation, we'd have done something to stop the easy access of firearms, to reduce the daily count of the dying and wounded. But we're not sane, are we?

We're held hostage by an extremist ideology of the Far Right obsessing over their right - no one else's - to own enough firepower to overthrow any agency, execute any political opponent, to doom an entire nation to suffer to their hates and fears. And with this gun violence now claiming one of their own, they're bound to get worse.

The cycle of violence and stochastic terrorism being inflicted on America - and this isn't new, we've been drowning in this bloodshed since the 1850s - will spiral deeper into the pit until we are in open warfare against each other.

Gods help us. Seriously.

How Republicans Want Justice: For Themselves Alone

Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Please take the time to look at the other articles on this site, and please support the pro-choice groups out there as the wingnut Republicans take away women's rights, especially here in Florida as the idiot governor sneaks in around midnight to sign a restrictive anti-abortion bill without media fanfare while Ft. Lauderdale floods, the bastard...

You want to see the real weaponization of the American justice system?

It's not from state district or federal attorneys going after donald trump for illegal misdeeds he's openly committed (and in the case of the stolen classified documents, something he still brags about).

Watch as the Republican Texas governor openly - HAPPILY - plans to pardon a Far Right shooter who killed a Black Lives Matter protestor right after a jury convicted that shooter for murder (via Bill Chappell at NPR):

One day after a jury convicted U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel Perry of murder for shooting and killing Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he wants Perry to receive a pardon.

Perry, 35, hasn't been sentenced yet, but the state pardons and parole board is already starting to review his case, at Abbott's request.

"I am working as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry," Abbott said over the weekend, via Twitter...

The governor didn't go into detail about why he believes Perry should be pardoned, but he cited Perry's attorney's explanation that Perry shot Foster in self-defense.

"Texas has one of the strongest 'Stand Your Ground' laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney," Abbott said...

The thing is, that jury weighed the evidence presented in court, and didn't believe Perry's claims of self-defense because eyewitnesses testified that Foster wasn't threatening Perry in that moment. It didn't help Perry that he bragged before going to the rally that he "might have to kill a few people." The jury did its job, and yet Abbott declared it 'nullification'.

One of the things I've heard and read about the legal system is how sacrosanct jury decisions are (just Google "juries are the bedrock" and see the results). The appellate system is loathe to overturn jury rulings unless there's proof the jury was tampered with or didn't receive the full facts of the case, and even then it's like moving mountains for the higher courts to do so. 

The matter has barely been settled in a court of law, and already Abbott wants to overrule the whole trial. It's not the jury committing nullification (the refusal to accept the legal facts of the matter and rule in contravention to what the court instructed), it's the state governor. 

Abbott is essentially guaranteeing a "Get Out of Jail Free" card for Perry, and signaling that he will offer the same deal to any other Far Right gunman eager to disrupt any protest or rally that offends their extremism.

Abbott isn't doing this because the trial was unfair, or because Perry is suffering any form of injustice (or requires some form of mercy due to medical emergency or personal loss). Abbott is doing this for partisan reasons, for pandering to the rabid Republican voting base convinced there's a shooting war between themselves and the dreaded Other (liberals, Blacks, immigrants, women, college students, and more). Abbott is doing this to "own the libs," and to make it clear that any protest - even peaceful ones guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution - can become a shooting gallery for MAGA wingnuts.

The Far Right meme of "Librul Hunting Licenses" just got real.

Abbott is doing this because Republicans don't believe in justice for all: Republicans want a skewed legal system that protects only them and punishes everyone else.

Gods help us.

The Threat of Another War Of The (MAGA) Posers

Update: Thank you again to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for including this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment here! Also, go back to the Round-Up and leave a tip, y'all.

Now that the House Republicans are entrenched in Congress, the crazy talk has gotten worse. The fearmongers among the MAGA caucus are openly talking "National Divorce" to separate the Red States from the Blue States. Where Marjorie Taylor Greene (aka MTG (or Empty G)) is happily pushing the idea that there should be permanent division between the states, even as we try to pretend to still be a United States of America as a nation.

There are layers to this bullshit. For the most part, this is Greene basically virtue vice signaling to her insurrectionist MAGA allies that their Culture War "owning the libs" is ongoing. Actual secession - as I and others have noted already - is a goddamn pipe dream that could never work.

But on the other hand, Greene is treading on dangerous ground: She is openly calling for an act of national division that historically leads to violence - every civil war that humanity ever inflicted on itself regardless of nation - and will likely trigger bloodshed no matter how she and her cohorts try to shill this.

Tom Sullivan over at Hullaballoo references what David French at the New York Times thinks of what Greene is calling for, and Sullivan takes a closer look to what the Far Right wingnuts are doing with their rhetoric of division:

French critiques Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s proposed “national divorce” in light of the last attempt at one in the 19th century. Yes, it’s unworkable. And yes, it’s insane. But what’s sanity got to do with it...?

Sullivan quotes French directly:

I’m haunted by James McPherson’s account of the prewar period in his seminal work, “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.” Describing the South in the run-up to secession and war, he says it was possessed by an “unreasoning fury.” The immediate cause was Northern celebration of John Brown, the abolitionist who attempted to provoke a slave rebellion by seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

In McPherson’s account, Northern support for Brown’s cause “provoked a paroxysm of anger more intense than the original reaction to the raid.” Southern paranoia was so profound that Texas’ secession declaration even included claims that Northern “emissaries” were distributing “poison” to slaves for the purpose of killing white citizens.

The South separated from the North and started a ruinous and futile war not because of calm deliberation, but rather because of hysteria and fear — including hysteria and fear whipped up by the partisan press.

So my question is not “Is divorce reasonable?” but rather, “Are we susceptible to the unreason that triggered war once before?”

This is where the decades of Far Right Media - hello, Fox Not-News! - actively misinforming and fearmongering towards their conservative audiences, building up the mindset not only that Americans are divided by Left and Right but also the divisions are unreconcilable. Back to Sullivan:

The fever that spawned the Jan. 6 insurrection has not ebbed, French writes. CPAC may be a shadow of its former self, but the froth of the authoritarian fanboys remains. The demographic shifts fueling their hatreds is not going away. Greene may be clownish, but the audience for her nonsense is serious...

Animosity is so entrenched (stoked daily by right-wing media) that I wonder if even an alien invasion could mend our fences...

Just look at how our nation is responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most Americans actually support Ukrainians' efforts to repel Putin's war of empire-building; but the Far Right leadership and media outlets in America are siding with Russia, claiming Ukraine is at fault, and accusing Biden and Western Europe (NATO) of using the conflict as a proxy war to push global liberalism. If the aliens from Independence Day 1996 showed up, the Far Right media would likely call on the aliens to blow up the White House while Biden was still inside it.

This Republican-pushed Culture War is one not based on facts: It is a war based on grievance of privileges lost (or about to lose), based on fear determined by racism and sexism towards ethnic minorities and women. It's a war based on fantasies derived from Atlas Shrugged and Turner Diaries, where "manly Christian men" rise up against emasculating Godless librul elites to destroy the corrupt world in order to build a new Utopia on the ashes of the old.

You can see it in the "Alpha Male" social media bullshit, in the never-ending ragefests at their conservative confabs, in the nightly railings of Far Right pundits shilling nightmare stories based on rumor and conjecture and not a lick of fact.

If there's any good news, it's that a majority of Americans - regardless of the Red or Blue states where they reside - will not succumb to the calls of violence and secession that the Far Right are making. Whatever fantasy MTG has about a "National Divorce," it will not be a clean split by state because even the deepest Red State (okay, maybe not Wyoming) has a Blue urban metropolis (Texas and Florida have several) that would resist and secede themselves to stay with a Blue United States (Think what will happen when Texas tries to leave only to have Houston, San Antonio/Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and El Paso - four of their major tax bases - refuse and demand their own statehoods with the USA).

As the recent poor showing at the CPAC convention this weekend proves, there's not a sustainable audience for Far Right outrage (It didn't help that scandal with the organizers scared half the GOP leadership away). While millions may have voted for donald trump in 2020, only mere thousands showed up for his January 6th Insurrection. Most Americans do not have the desire to inflict violence against their neighbors.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there ARE enough Americans among us who ARE willing to be violent towards their neighbors. As every mass shooting teaches us - almost every day now - all it takes is one wingnut Angry Guy with a military-grade assault rifle to break (or worse, destroy) a community.

This is not going to end well. At best, we need to remove the insurrectionists and secessionists from office as soon as possible. We still need to prepare ourselves for the violence that's sure to follow when those secessionist decide to make their bloody fantasy their reality.

Gods help us.

Escalation and Evasion

Over the weekend, the Republican War on Everybody escalated when a deranged man - prodded on by years of Far Right demagoguery - broke into the California home of U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and physically attacked Nancy's husband. The details are not pretty. Quoting from Nicole Narea's reporting at Vox:

It’s now clear the speaker was the target of Friday’s attack. The assailant broke into the home looking for her, reportedly shouting, “Where is Nancy?” — echoing what insurrectionists called out when they breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and saying that he would wait “until Nancy got home” as he confronted Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s husband suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands that required surgery after the assailant bludgeoned him with a hammer. The attacker faces federal assault and attempted kidnapping charges.

It gets worse, because the bastards who pushed the violent rhetoric are now (of course) evading their accountability, blaming it all on the victim, blaming it on "urban crime," blaming it on everything but themselves:

Republicans have dismissed any connection between their rhetoric and the attack. Instead, they’ve blamed Democratic policies on crime and suggested that growing political violence may be the result of general anxiety around election legitimacy. Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who was cheered by Republicans when he bought Twitter last week, has advanced a right-wing anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory around the circumstances of the attack. Though he deleted his post, it remained on Twitter long enough to be amplified and repeated by many on the Right...

The conspiracy rumors hinged on the Far Right's homophobia, and was utterly unproven, and yet for days the Republican Party leadership and their Congressional candidates made jokes and insults at the Pelosi family's expense.

Never mind the reality of what investigators got out of the attacker's statements to the police. Via Julia Jacabo at ABC News:

The suspect accused of attacking Paul Pelosi told authorities he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi's kneecaps to show members of Congress that there are "consequences to actions," according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court Monday.

The new revelation came Monday as the Department of Justice filed federal charges of assault and attempted kidnapping against the man suspected of attacking Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, last week...

(The accused David) DePape was charged with one count of assault of an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He is also charged with one count of attempted kidnapping of a United States official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison...

The attacker reportedly broke into the house - it remains a huge question why the Speaker's home didn't have tighter security - and confronted Paul Pelosi with the same threats and challenges that the Insurrection rioters on January 6th were chanting. DePape was caught with the same zip ties the rioters carried with them in case they caught themselves any congresscritters that day, and DePape had even bigger plans than just assaulting Speaker Pelosi (back to Jacabo's report):

DePape allegedly later told officers "that he was going to hold Nancy hostage and talk to her" and that he wanted to use the House speaker to lure another unnamed individual, the affidavit states.

The suspect also allegedly told investigators that he intended to break Nancy Pelosi's kneecaps if she didn't tell him the "truth" about "lies told by the Democratic Party" and said she would have to be wheeled into Congress, therefore showing other members of Congress that there are "consequences to actions," according to the criminal complaint...

DePape's agenda was to intimidate and injure a sitting Congressperson, especially the House Speaker who is technically the third-most powerful person in the federal government. He was motivated by the anger and ambitions that the Far Right have been openly screaming - to hunt liberals, to punish Democrats - for almost 20 years. And he hoped to target someone else higher on the GOP's Hit List than Pelosi herself.

This is where we are in the violent rhetoric constantly drummed and shouted through the televisions and video clips of the Far Right media. The George Tiller Effect in full display, where the demagogues on Fox Not-News push their Narrative of "Evil Democrats" that deserve punishment, and who then sit back and let their foot soldiers among their audiences do their dirty work for them.

And when presented with the evidence, those same demagogues laugh it off, claim "it wasn't us," and nowadays even joke about the damage done in their name.

Gods help us. This is a clear example of stochastic terrorism - the violence of extremism - and the Far Right fearmongers are going to keep escalating even as they evade accountability.

It won't be just the congresscritters next time. The goddamn wingnuts of the Fox-watching Proud Boys/Oath Keepers brigades are going to target ordinary Americans on a bigger scale than before, all because they were told to. And all because they can.

Setting It Off as trump's Followers Cross One More Line (w/ Update)

Update 8/16: Many thanks again to Tengrain for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please take some time to review the other stuff that's got me ranting all week long...

Just noting for the record, I feel sympathy for the poor guy who has to manage the Wikipedia page on donald trump's ongoing civil matters. It is interesting to note the web encyclopedia made all the criminal investigations into separate pages, but still at any moment the way things are going there's bound to be two to three new civil court filings by now.

Speaking of, if you're looking for the stuff on "trump espionage" it's actually under "FBI Search of Mar-A-Lago," have fun.

In the meanwhile, this weekend post-warranted search has seen a bit of uneasy response from the Far Right regarding donald trump's pending troubles involving the theft of Presidential Records (18 USC 2071), destruction / obstruction of records involving federal investigations (18 USC 1519), and possible espionage (18 USC 793).

In that acts of violence took place, committed by likely MAGA true believers triggered by the news that their Lord and Savior donald trump is facing serious legal trouble he can't lie his way out of.

On Thursday, a gunman attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati with both a nail gun and an AR-15 rifle, then fled the scene and chased into another county before one last shootout killed him. More details from Elisha Fieldstadt, Ken Dilanian, Tim Stelloh and Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News:

Officers fatally shot the suspect (Walter Shiffer) after failing to negotiate with him, an Ohio State Highway Patrol spokesman, Lt. Nathan Dennis, told reporters.

The man raised a gun and officers opened fire, Dennis said.

It wasn't clear whether he fired, Dennis said, nor was it clear who fired the fatal shot. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, which Dennis described as a rural area off Interstate 71.

No officers were injured, and a motive is still under investigation, Dennis said.

The two officials said Shiffer appeared to have posted in recent days about his desire to kill FBI agents after former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence was searched...

Shiffer was seen at the Capitol on Jan. 6, although it's unclear whether he breached the building, said three people aiding law enforcement who saw him in photos. Shiffer frequently posted about going to the Capitol on social media.

In the days after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump's compound in Palm Beach, Florida, he appeared to post multiple times on Trump's social media platform, Truth Social.

In one comment, he appeared to call on people to prepare for "combat." In another, his apparent account said users should kill FBI agents "on sight..."

Brian Murphy, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI who’s now an executive at the open source intelligence firm Logically, said Wednesday that his company has observed a big rise in threats against FBI personnel and facilities on social media platforms since the FBI searched Trump's home...

And there's the doxxing attempts by media agitators especially Breitbart's media outlet - which received an unredacted copy of the search warrant from trump's people that included the names of the FBI agents overseeing the search - and a former aide to trump Garrett Ziegler who named those agents and issued threats bad enough that trump's own version of Twitter (Truth Social) had to delete his posts (via Alia Shoaib at Business Insider):

"This is one of the two feds who signed the 'Receipt for Property' form, which detailed—at a very high level—the fishing expedition that the FBI performed at Mar-a-Lago," Ziegler wrote on both Truth Social and Telegram, per the outlet.

Along with the message, Ziegler shared the FBI agents' date of birth, work emails, and supposed links to family members' social media accounts, according to the outlet...

As anyone who pays attention to domestic terrorism activity, what Ziegler did crosses into the threshold of stochastic terrorism. Ziegler claims he's providing "transparency" about "illegal FBI actions" but why the hell drag those agents' families into this mess?

(Saturday night, there was a suicidal car driver who slammed into a Capitol building barricade and shot himself as his car burst into flames. Until the police can find out if the guy had a motive, this is as much as should be said about it)

Not to mention the armed people protesting outside of an Arizona FBI field office on Saturday.

Also: Kind of need to mention the reports of how "The Dark Web" of Far Right secret Internet servers are on fire with talk of civil war.

In short: Yeah, the pro-trump violence is ticking upward.

I almost saw this coming, barely a month ago. I wrote back then the reality we're in the early stages of a second civil war. I knew it was going to be something involving trump getting held to account for any number of his misdeeds surrounding the 2020 elections, the January 6th insurrection, or maybe even one of the big civil lawsuits like the one in New York (where trump had to testify in person and ended up pleading the Fifth Amendment over 440 times). Here's what I wrote:

You can feel it: We are one final step from the "Cannons Firing on Fort Sumter" point of no return. The battle lines are drawn over the January 6th Insurrection and the recent extremist Supreme Court rulings. All it's going to take is one more nudge from the goddamn wingnuts and we will be quoting Fred Thompson's "We will be lucky to live through it" line until the shooting stops, and either the United States remains intact but with the conservatives shattered for 100 years or with the nation broken under an authoritarian bootheel...

I'd bet good money - okay, 50 bucks, I'm a librarian I'm not rich - it's going to involve donald trump freaking out in some way, and most likely over criminal charges that would interfere with his plans to retake the White House in 2024. Thing is, there's a number of separate criminal charges he's still facing...

In that article, I gambled on the likely trigger being the Georgia grand jury investigation into trump's attempt to bully the state's Secretary of State - who oversaw the election results - into throwing the votes out for Biden and giving trump (falsely) the state's Electoral votes.

I honestly didn't even think about the simmering situation surrounding trump's failure to turn over Presidential Records until this February as the possible trigger. To be fair, the Justice Department had kept a tight lid on their investigations into - even in June when they pursued the remaining boxes of classified materials trump STILL hadn't turned over - the possibility trump violated the Presidential Records Act.

Who knew - other than the DOJ - that the case would also involve even more serious allegations of espionage?

As it stands, among all the other possible criminal matters trump is facing - in Georgia, in Arizona and Wisconsin involving "fake electors", with the January 6th investigations into various legal violations the House Committee has already uncovered - this one right here revolving around trump's illicit hoarding of national security/classified documents could well be the first big criminal charge trump will face between now and the end of the year.

And as I noted in my previous article, the minute trump gets charged with actual criminal felonies, his followers will erupt in violent madness. As Zach Beauchamp notes at Vox:

What we are seeing is shocking, but it’s part of an established pattern. Trump engages in some kind of egregious misbehavior, prompting official scrutiny and condemnation of his actions. He treats these actions as unjustified persecution, proof that the “deep state” is out to get him, a claim that the Republican Party and conservative press dutifully echo. His most radical supporters become even more radical, even contemplating violence.

None of these investigations is a witch hunt. In each case, there are serious reasons to believe that the president violated the law. If prosecutors chose not to even investigate Trump, that itself would be politically motivated — a tacit admission that if a political figure is popular enough, he is above the law.

But the result of prosecutors doing their job is predictable: Trump reacts by casting it as proof that he is under attack by nefarious forces...

The litany of grievances, the sense that Trump has been forever persecuted by the government, the unfounded implication that the FBI was “planting information” at his house — all of it screams victimization, that Trump is the target of a vast and shadowy conspiracy pulling the FBI’s strings.

The fact that a Truth Social user had just been radicalized by such talk — posting violent threats on the site before attempting an armed breach of an FBI building — isn’t deterring Trump at all. He is, as the political scientist Julia Azari puts it, a nationalist who has no concept of a nation; a narcissist who abuses the language of patriotism without any commitment to the underlying idea that he has some responsibility to preserve order and cohesion in the polity. In fact, he does the opposite — sowing division and stoking violent distrust if it helps him.

Perhaps Trump’s talk wouldn’t be so dangerous if the rest of the GOP would work to tamp it down. Yet it’s become excruciatingly clear in the wake of his emergence as the GOP’s standard-bearer that Republicans are not taking Trump’s transgressions and troubles as opportunities to dump him, but rather to dig in, right by his side, in similarly radical terms...

The Far Right cannot cut themselves off from trump because trump has given the Far Right everything they've ever wanted and still left them angry and violent for more.

If there's any good news, it's that the rabid trumpian fanbase won't attack the rest of America in large numbers. For all the millions of "true Americans" they think have their back, most Americans - even among the 74 million who voted for trump in 2020 - will not rise to violence when the call goes out. The simple fact is that a lot of them - even the ones yelling and screaming the most - have obligations in the real world that would not allow them to go off and live out the militant cosplay some of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers revel in. Most people are not that violent.

The bad news, obviously, is that in this day it doesn't take a lot of people to commit enough violence to cause grief. Even one gun nut with an AR-15 and MAGA outrage can ruin a small town's entire day.

Like it or not, we're facing dark days ahead. If the Justice Department pursues criminal charges on trump, it will escalate the current civil strife we're in to the next level of open warfare. If Justice is not pursued, all it will do is encourage trump to keep violating more laws, safe with the knowledge his mob rule overrides the rule of law.

Best to hold trump accountable. Let justice be done though the heavens fall. Best to face facts: trump is proving himself a clear and present danger to the safety of the United States itself, and the sooner he faces jail for his crimes the better it will be... in spite of the violence his followers will unleash on the rest of us.

Just be ready for when the day comes, America.

The Fuse Likely To Set It Off

My last post was openly considering whether we're one step away from a Second American Civil War, with the realization we're more likely in the opening stages of it akin to a Cold War buildup before the powderkeg goes off and the shit gets real.

I mean, c'mon, there's already a Wiki page about Civil War 2: the Trumpening (and don't knock Wikipedia. It may be open-source where anybody can show up to edit, but it has standards and citation requirements to make it a reliable reference. It's just high school and college students who get lazy tend to copy and paste whole entries into their schoolwork and pass off that plagiarism as their own work as though teachers don't check for that with their Grammarly or TurnItIn databases. My mom was a teacher, and in the years before she retired she cursed Wikipedia because even her IB students were pulling that stunt. Anyway, I digress). While it's all talking about the hypotheticals, that article lists a serious number of incidents - most of them increasing in number ever since trump seized the national spotlight - that set up a solid argument that we're in the early stages of honest-to-Dog insurrection.

This is akin to the buildup to the First Civil War, throughout the 1850s when the political partisanship of the time - the fight over the Fugitive Slave Acts, Bleeding Kansas, the Sumner Caning, John Brown's raid -  led up to the final act of Abraham Lincoln's victory for the Presidency in 1860 that triggered half of the southern slave states to secede.

You can feel it: We are one final step from the "Cannons Firing on Fort Sumter" point of no return. The battle lines are drawn over the January 6th Insurrection and the recent extremist Supreme Court rulings. All it's going to take is one more nudge from the goddamn wingnuts and we will be quoting Fred Thompson's "We will be lucky to live through it" line until the shooting stops, and either the United States remains intact but with the conservatives shattered for 100 years or with the nation broken under an authoritarian bootheel. 

So what will it be then, what will be the match that starts the inferno?

I'd bet good money - okay, 50 bucks, I'm a librarian I'm not rich - it's going to involve donald trump freaking out in some way, and most likely over criminal charges that would interfere with his plans to retake the White House in 2024. Thing is, there's a number of separate criminal charges he's still facing.

The investigation trump has to fear most is the one in Georgia involving his attempts to pressure that state's Sec of State to "find me enough votes" to negate Biden's win there. There's a grand jury interviewing not only Raffensperger but several others, and the jury may yet get testimony out of several trumpian lackeys before it's done. The legal experts argue that this matter - where trump is caught on audio interfering with election results - is a clear violation of state and federal election laws, and given its straight-forward situation should be ruled on by the grand jury relatively soon.

The Select House Committee looking into the January 6th Insurrection has already produced a number of actionable grounds to charge trump on various federal felonies, not just incitement to insurrection but also wire fraud for milking $250 million out of his followers on a fundraising scam. Thing is, the committee can't charge trump directly... but they can refer the charges to the Justice Department. Then it becomes a question if Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland decides to take it.

Either matter could take months if at all, but of the two the Georgia case threatens trump the most. It's a reason why rumors are coming out that trump wants to announce his 2024 campaign before August of this year, under the belief that prosecutors are reluctant to go after Presidential candidates out of fear of politicizing matters (trump would definitely scream that the criminal charges will interfere with the "people's right to vote for me").

Thing is, I doubt the Georgia DA will be intimidated by that. Given how much of trump's biggest criminal trespasses have been in the political arena, going after him on a political felony would be necessary. So I do expect the election interference/intimidation charges in Cobb County to go forward.

And that will be what triggers open war.

Even if trump doesn't stir up the shitstorm, the Far Right demagogues in the mainstream media and social media will. This will be, in their eyes, a blatant attempt by "them" - the evil libruls - to silence their Great Leader / Savior. 

I don't think it will drive Red state governors into secession mode, but it will send the gun-nut Proud Boys/Oathkeepers/Patriot Front/Brownshirt militias out into the streets to hit every easy target they can to express their rage. But then any attempt by Homeland Security or any law enforcement to shut the Far Right militias down will trigger Red state secession. 

This situation may seem avoidable if the prosecutors decide not to charge trump on any criminal matters. Problem with that is that everyone knows letting trump off the hook again - after all the other times he's been let go after every other bankrupting fraudulent act he's committed the past 50 years - will just embolden trump to pursue even darker criminal misdeeds. And the violence that follows in his wake will get worse anyway.

It's an unavoidable no-win either way. Better to hold trump accountable - at long last - and prepare for the storm that will hit us all.

Just be ready for it to be bad. Real bad. There has been 50-plus years of pent-up rage in the Far Right epistemic bubble: We've seen only bits of it here and there, at its worst with the Oklahoma City bombing and with all the gun violence just adding to the body count the last 20 years.

We will all be lucky to get through this. It's a slim hope, but it's all I have now.

Dreading The Oncoming Storm

Update: Thank you again Batocchio for linking this blog through Crooks & Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up! Good luck everybody... 

I've probably left enough clues on this blog by now that I live in Florida, have been ever since my family moved down here when I was seven. I've also left enough clues that I'm really hating the growing realization that this state leans too far conservative on political issues, and I'm stuck here surrounded by coal-rolling Bible-thumping MAGA morans.

But this past month in June - especially as the Far Right Roberts Court issued their extremist legal decisions on abortion, voting rights, prayer in school, and finishing up with gutting federal regulatory power - that constricting, painful feeling became overwhelming.

I've had conversations in-person with two different people this past week, both of them talking about fleeing for the safety of Blue states and which ones were the easiest to move to (I'm partial to Virginia, but I hope Youngkin is a goddamned aberration up that way and the residents learned they got hoodwinked).

One of my co-workers honestly asked me, "Are we going to have another civil war?"

I once blogged I believed another civil war in the United States was a bad idea, that it was coming from cranks and foreign "experts" who were shilling fantasies over reality. However, ever since trump bullied and lied his way into the White House, with the Far Right media gaslighting and calling for open insurrection, and with more than a third of our nation actually believing his Big Lie of stolen elections I've been reconsidering the insane partisan rift between Far Right and The Rest Of The Nation has become too violent to ever get repaired.

I'm not the only one worried about this. Stephen Marche at the Guardian sees the same divide and believes it's no longer an "If" it's now a question of "When and Where":

Accelerating political violence, like the attack in Buffalo, increasingly blurs the line between the mainstream political conservative movement and outright murderous insanity. The question is no longer whether there will be a civil conflict in the United States. The question is how the sides will divide, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses will determine the outcome.

The right wing has been imagining a civil war, publicly, since at least the Obama administration. Back in 2016, when it looked like Hillary Clinton would win the election, then Kentucky governor Matt Bevin described the possibility in apocalyptic terms: “The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren,” he told supporters at the Values Voter Summit...

The struggle over abortion has already revealed how the divide plays out. Anti-abortion factions control the pseudo-legitimate court system and the poorer states in the Union. Pro-choice factions have responded, first of all, with their superior financial resources. Oregon started the Oregon Reproductive Equity Fund with $15m. New York is establishing a fund to make the state a “safe haven”. California governor Gavin Newsom plans to add $57m to the state budget to deal with out-of-state patients...

Incipient civil conflict in the United States won’t be formal armies struggling for territory. The techniques of both sides are clarifying. Republican officials will use the supreme court, or whatever other political institutions they control, to push their agenda no matter how unpopular with the American people. Meanwhile, their calls for violence, while never direct, create a climate of rage that solidifies into regular physical assaults on their enemies. The technical term for this process is stochastic terrorism; the attack in Buffalo is a textbook example.

The leftwing resistance is more nascent but is also taking shape: if you’re rich and you want to stay living in a democracy, the time has come to pony up. If you’re an engineer, the time has come to organize. The conclusion is not at all determined. Neither side has an absolute advantage. Neither side can win easily. But one fact is clear. The battle has been joined, and it will be fought everywhere...

I've noted before, unlike the first Civil War where the geographic boundaries were distinct, this second Civil War will be more along demographic dividing lines within each state. The Far Right won't likely have states seceding, but will have their governors, their wingnut preachers and pundits, and other regional elected officials rallying their followers into terror attacks on liberal targets (they know they won't survive attacking military forces head on, they'll go after civilian targets like schools and nightclubs and stores like they've already been doing the last 25 years). The Progressives and Center-Left populations will likely take non-violent routes like street protests and calls for strikes, but will come to rely on whatever remains of a Democratic-led federal government responding to the insurrection as they are now (with arrests, court trials, and pleas to sanity).

The results of the coming midterm elections will determine the "where" and "who" this civil war will decide itself. 

If the Democratic Party retains control of both parts of Congress, the Far Right will scream "stolen votes" and declare all Dem results within Red States invalid, throwing elections to Republicans in spite of the voters. This could trigger outright secession efforts in battleground states like Texas, Georgia, or Florida.

If the Republicans flip control of Congress - or gain control of either the House or Senate - the Democrats will point to Republicans' extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression and denounce the unfairness of Republicans' minority rule. It's unlikely the Blue states will call for secession - as it would undermine President Biden's authority and go against the liberal viewpoint of federal powers exceeding the states - but more likely throw as much of the legal system into chaos nationwide as well as interfere with any Republican attempt to impose their wingnut laws on everyone.

How bad the fighting will get depends on which way the United States military intervenes in all this. While they're not supposed to fight in our own borders against technically our own people, if open secession and/or insurrection takes place, whoever is President can employ the Insurrection Act and call on the armed forces to act then. donald trump wanted to use that law to declare the 2020 election results illegal and the Blue states in rebellion, but the legal experts and military leaders told him no (It's believed if counter-protestors had gone to Capitol Hill to fight against trump's rioters, he could have justified it then. But when it was just his own people committing violence, he couldn't declare them in insurrection and so didn't do it). If Biden is forced by escalation of violence in the streets by the Far Right, he could invoke the Insurrection Act against them, but it will depend on which way the Joint Chiefs and the rest of the military will accept it (there is a possibility that a sizable percentage of personnel are Christianist extremists and could start undermining military effectiveness at the least).

Given the nature of the partisan division - that it's along party lines across every state, and that it's along educational and ethnic and income lines within every state - there really is no safe place in America when (not if) the extremism of the Far Right - either in denial of a Democratic midterm victory or in vindication of a Republican one - triggers a series of violent acts in soft target areas (The Far Left, for all the complaints from conservative pundits about the dangers of Antifa and Black Lives Matters, are not that violent).

There's a storm coming. Stirred up by decades of Far Right Culture War bullshit.

I keep saying this: None of this will end well until Republicans are completely out of power and their wingnut foot soldiers all in jail for the bloodshed they're about to inflict on the rest of us.

Gods help us.

Update 7/27/23: To the nine people following this blog, you probably know I submitted this article with several others to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, and this morning I got word that "Oncoming Storm" reached the Semi-Finalist stage! 
 

The Madness of Gun Worship

There's a statistical chart going around on social media about the uptick in gun violence in the United States:

It's from this source:

The surge in firearms homicides that began in 2015 has an important feature not highlighted in the recent CDC report.

Prior to 2015, nonfirearm homicides and firearm homicides tracked each other well (figure shows raw CDC data).

In 2015, these trends diverged. https://t.co/bf3bgcQf1L pic.twitter.com/2MtLr0YU8N

— Andrew Morral (@AndrewMorral) May 16, 2022

And it's horrifying to watch that "Firearm Homicides" number spike upward like it's the Himalayas. The only time the Non-Firearms chart spikes that high was 2001, when Bin Laden sent his peeps to attack the United States on Sept. 11. 

How telling is it that the NRA is building up a body count equal to America's deadliest terrorist.

There's been some talk that the uptick of gun violence is due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, which forced a lot of people into their homes during the early quarantine months... and which triggered an uptick in domestic violence cases. That alone is a horrifying reality, where the "safety" of home gets subverted by the easy access to a gun amid abusive relationships. But that sharp increase in the charts seems to start before 2020 and the pandemic (with a noticeable bump around 2016), which points to another culprit causing that spike.

If there were anything happening in 2018 and 2019 to affect firearm usage in the United States, I would point to these two possibilities:

1) In response to the mass shootings going on during and after the 2016 election cycle - especially the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 and the Parkland High shooting in 2018 - a lot of Republican-controlled states were passing laws by 2019 towards easier access to firearms, arguing that "more guns = more safety".

Of course, the chart below proves the lie to that belief. The reality is that "more guns = more gun deaths" and it's more than just anecdotal (via German Lopez back in April 2021 at Vox.com)

Using data from a 2016 study in Injury Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mother Jones put together the chart above that shows states with more guns tend to have far more gun deaths, including homicides and suicides. This has been found across the empirical research: “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health...

And of course the gun cult that makes up the Far Right will never accept this truth. They would rather keep making it easier and easier for themselves to own guns - some states are getting rid of regulating and registering gun licenses altogether! - rather than respect the supermajority of Americans who want stricter gun safety laws.

2) The gun violence is ticking upwards as the extremist elements of the Far Right - emboldened by trump's "Make American Great White Again" and the normalization of the "Great Replacement" fearmongering - act out their racism and rage.

We've seen that in Buffalo and we've been seeing more extremist violence since the January 6th Insurrection. The Anti-Defamation League tracked cases up to 2021 and found that three-quarters (roughly 75 percent) of the violent acts nationwide were perpetrated by Right-Wing extremism. By comparison Left-Wing extremism accounted for 4 percent, while Islamic (domestic) extremism counted for 20 percent (there was 1 percent left over for Other). Odds favor you getting killed by a Proud Boy / Oath Keeper before getting killed by a jihadist.

It doesn't help that in the past decade - as the Far Right became enraged by an Obama presidency and stoked by a Fox Not-News media that kept feeding them fearmongering about dirty brown immigrants raiding our borders - our nation has suffered a low-burning civil war of sorts. A culture war between racist sexist angry Whites and the rest of the United States that's pro-choice, pro-immigrant, and more progressive than the mainstream media gives credit to.

For all their public demonstrations of being "Christian" and holy and whatnot, these wingnuts keep proving that they worship the idolatry of the blood-soaked AR-15. The hypocrisy of them proclaiming a holy victory over the rest of us while they shoot up every Black, Hispanic, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ community center they can. 

The fever of gun worship will not end until these wingnuts fall completely out of power, and saner heads passing safety laws prevail.

Get the damn vote out, Americans. We're at war. They got the guns but we got the numbers.

Deep Scars

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please do me a favor and review the articles I'm considering for the FWA Royal Palm Literary awards this year.)

Today was the one-year anniversary of donald trump's Insurrection, the massing and angering up of a mob of his supporters to go smash their way into the halls of Congress to disrupt the Electoral Vote count and prevent Joe Biden from winning the 2020 Presidential election.

And while today's press coverage and blogging memorials provided some catharsis - with President Biden using the moment to speak against trump's ongoing Big Lie campaign, openly calling trump a "defeated former President" without even calling trump by name - the facts remain that 1) we have not yet reached a full accounting of justice for those - from trump himself to all the handlers running "war rooms" in nearby hotels coordinating with the extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who enacted the violence - who planned and executed the riots, and 2) the insurrection itself shows just how broken and divided the United States truly is.

We still have a sizable number of Republican voters - not just the hard-core trumpians but the party in general - who still view the attack on Capitol Hill was "peaceful" or that the violence was overblown. Two-thirds of Republican voters believe trump's Big Lie that the Democrats stole the election with fake votes (either with massive voter fraud that trump's lawyers can't prove or by hiding ballots that favored trump that trump's lawyers can't find).

The problem here is the divide between those who look to the facts and those who look to the GOP Grand Narrative. It's gotten to the point where the MAGA supporters are actively behaving like a religious cult. To refer to that NPR article by Tovia Smith:

This kind of intractability, however, isn't stopping people around the nation from continuing to try to get through to their loved ones. Many are filling up support groups for people struggling to reach family members who've fallen deep down the rabbit hole.

"I get frustrated and angry at my dad," says one such woman, who goes by Rain. "I've always thought of him as so intelligent. But he's being misled, and there's no way to get him to see the light on that."

In a meeting that's run online by Antidote, a group that combats psychological manipulation, the stories are remarkably similar. Shannon, a 37-year-old from Colorado, explains how heartbroken she is that the "big lie" has come between her and her mother. The participants asked that their full names not be used to protect their family members from retribution and so as not to jeopardize their reconciliation.

Shannon tells the group that her mother, who she says was at the Capitol during the insurrection, will barely listen when her daughter tries to bring her evidence that the election was not stolen.

"It's a waste of my breath," she sighs. "I brought up all kinds of information, and she dismisses it immediately. It's blind allegiance. And I've seen it get worse..."

Facts don't matter when the emotional intensity of the Far Right echo chamber means more. This is akin to dealing with a fervent devotee to extremist faith - doesn't matter if it's Christian, Muslim, Hebrew, Hindu, or Unitarian - who won't consider the irregularities or hypocrisy of their own religious texts and insists on the infallibility of the Truth that tells them to strap on a bomb vest and blow up schools. Or if you want a secular analogy, this is akin to dealing with fans of a long-losing football team who won't admit how bad the Washington No-Names are and switch their support to a better-run organization like the Pittsburgh Steelers.

(Awkwardly looks at all the Tampa Bay Bucs gear and memorabilia from the 2021 Super Bowl LV win) Uh, yeah I don't talk much about the years between 1983 to 1996 much... or the 2008 to 2019 years either... But then again I'm self-aware enough to admit the Bucs have been bad... just... um... yeah I can't quit them baby. (I actually got national attention for fifteen minutes ranting FIRE SCHIANO! on a sports blog years ago) ANYWAYS I digress. 

This is how I see how the Far Right is behaving: They are wholly devoted to a Republican Party and Far Right agenda because that is their "team" and they are loyal to the bitter end no matter how racist, sexist, and violent that team becomes (in many cases, they are loyal because of that team being racist, sexist, and violent). 

Back to Smith's article:

These days, identifying as red or blue, or as a die-hard Trumper or anti-Trumper, has become a kind of "mega-identity," as it has been dubbed by Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University associate professor of political science. She says partisan identity has become so fully fused with cultural, religious, racial, gender and geographical identity that it's very high stakes for people to break with their party — or the party line.

"To feel that they are losing all [those aspects of themselves] wrapped together, that's a devastating psychological harm," says Mason. "And people tend to react to that with a lot of not only anger, but really defensive mechanisms."

That's why Mason says no recount or court case is going to be convincing to Trump supporters who are clinging to the myth that their side didn't actually lose.

"At this point, over one year out, I don't think there is any way to get through to them," Mason says. "They've had this entire fever dream, where Trump is really stoking these ideas of 'No matter what anybody else tells you, I'm telling you you're a winner.' And that feels great. That's just like the most primitive human instincts to follow the good feelings, not the bad feelings."

There is no rational way to reach people like the Far Right who have reached an irrational world-view. Like John Cole said in 2009, "I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties (The Republicans) is insane." Only it's not bipartisanship itself that's at risk twelve years later, it's the very nature of the federalist system itself that makes up the United States of America.

I've mentioned it before: The entire model of checks and balances baked into the Constitution and into the operational practices of government itself require acts of compromise and cooperation (forms of "Good Faith" behavior) between all parties. As we've seen during trump's tenure in the White House, almost all of that Good Faith needed for government to function gave way to pandering, policy hostage-taking, and outright grifting that made much of government grind to a halt. The rest of the Republican Party couldn't get much done - outside of a massive tax cut the majority of Americans didn't ask for - because trump kept violating norms even they needed to work with. 

With one major political party broken, the rest of the political structure of the nation itself falls apart. You have states openly dismissing federal guidelines during a global pandemic. You have planned efforts to dismantle electoral systems to guarantee voters have no say. You have federal courts ignoring centuries of Judicial Review to tack towards extreme interpretations of conservative thought just to achieve political agendas against the majority will.

With the political culture broken, the social norms of the United States are breaking as well. We have more angry people lashing out at public workers and nurses than ever before. A violent wave of arrogant privilege towards our neighbors and communities making it harder for people to remain civil at all.

It is in that mood, in this moment, that we need to realize all this public rage and violence are physical markings of emotional scars, deep rooted fears and hates rising up to the skin exposing this all to the world. 

These scars are from wounds that never healed up since the Constitutional enshrinement of slavery, never healed up since the Andrew Jackson years, never healed up from the Trail of Tears and centuries of Native reservation camps, never healed up since the fugitive slave laws of 1850s, never healed up from the Civil War, never healed up after Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crow, never healed up after the union fights, never healed up after women's suffrage, never healed up after the Red Scares and McCarthyist witch hunts, never healed up after Japanese internment camps, never healed up after decades of lynchings, never healed up after the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s, never healed up after gays rights and trans rights and human rights, never healed up after Obama proved a Black Man could lead America, never healed up at all because too many people - mostly white, mostly male, mostly rich - in power and privilege are too terrified that they're losing both to the long arc of history.

These scars won't heal even if we pursue justice to its natural end in arresting trump and his Insurrectionist mobs for the public crimes - all caught on film they can't deny - they've committed. We cannot ignore the law on this: trump and his cronies must answer for the violence they called into existence that dark January day. But we need to realize their arrests and their accountability will not heal these scars, and will not bring an end to the division across America that they promoted, expanded, profited from.

This fight to rebuild America is not over.

What If: Gaming Out The Far Right's War (w/ Updates)

This is where the mindset of your average Far Right trump-worshipping Fox Not-News consuming wingnut is today (via Raw Story (paywall)):

An audience member asked a disturbing and stunning question at a speech given by close Trump family ally and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in Idaho on Monday, but instead of denouncing and disavowing the question itself as being anti-democratic, morally repugnant, illegal, based on falsehoods, and against his repeatedly avowed Christian values, Kirk offered an equally disturbing response.

"At this point, we're living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny," claimed the unidentified man, as Media Matters reports. "When do we get to use the guns? No, and I'm not — that's not a joke. I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?..."

Charlie Kirk tried to downplay it, trying to deflect the blame onto the liberals the wingnuts are desperate to kill:

"They are trying to provoke you and everyone here. They are trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties, the likes of which we have never seen," Kirk fear-mongered...

But Kirk can't hide this reality. Just look at the Far Right today. Driven by trump's Big Lie about a "stolen election" that wasn't. Inundated with misinformation across Facebook and Twitter and Dark Web rabbit holes. Every night Fox Not-News has wingnut talking head after wingnut talking head attacking Dr. Fauci and any vaccination efforts to end the COVID pandemic, clinging to unproven conspiracy theories and desperate to undo any efforts by Biden to bring America back to normal. There's Tucker Carlson violating every journalistic ethical norm shilling a ludicrous "false flag" story about the January 6th Insurrection, trying to both vindicate trump's coup attempt and hide the facts of what really happened at the same time.

The entire Far Right political environment is full of rage and hate right now, has been at this level ever since trump entered the White House and turned into the Hater-In-Chief. And none of this has calmed down after Biden won in 2020 and tossed trump to the curbside.

And this isn't a recent development. How far back to the wingnuts' "Librul Hunting Licenses" idea go, back to Obama's era or Bill Clinton's? Remember the John Birch Society putting up Wanted flyers for JFK accusing him of treason? The Far Right call to violence towards everyone they deem Liberal - and thus in their eyes Un-American - has been going on for decades, if not a full century of post-Civil War "Redeemer" and Klan-led violence.

This is the world we live in now: Daily threats of violence from enraged, ill-informed Far Right wingnuts raiding every school board meeting and driving every county elections official into hiding.

The question(s) remaining: Just how far is this all going to go? Where is the tipping point? When is that "other shoe" finally going to drop?

If you follow the likes of Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice, he's already noted that our nation has been enduring a low, simmering violent insurrection for some time. Not necessarily the violent backlash of the southern conservatives against the Sixties Civil Rights movement (there was kind of a cut-off point in the Seventies), but more along the anti-government flareups of militia groups inspired by the Turner Diaries and anti-immigrant haters feeding off of ancient anti-Semitic "Replacement Conspiracy" bullshit. What's caused all this to flare up now was the reactionary response to having someone like Barack Obama become President in 2008. The so-called Tea Party that rose up to challenge Obama's economic and health care policies quickly shifted into the old habits that kept the Far Right hating for decades.

To Silverman (and others in the Intelligence Community tracking national threats), it's stochastic terrorism: A situation where a person or group (usually ethnic/racial/gender) is targeted with demonization, to the point where an individual or small group is enraged enough to act against that target. In short: Fear-mongers/Rage-mongers accuse others of being EVIL and those mongers' audiences react with violence towards those others.

We've seen it with George Tiller, we've seen it with abortion clinic bombings, we've seen it with Black churches getting burned down, we've seen it in Charleston where an enraged racist killed Black parishioners at a prayer service, we've seen it with attacks on Jewish temples, we've seen it in Charlottesville, we've seen it on the Capitol steps this past January 6th.

We're already in this stage of violence, with no end in sight. As long as the Far Right media spews out their misinformation, as long as they point out others for demonizing, as long as they skirt the ethics of the First Amendment to sell their fear and hate without accountability, we won't see an end of the bloodshed.

What's for debate is the escalation. 

Fear and hate are like drugs. At some point, the same hit isn't going to give you the same high. You start upping the dosage, looking for that high, never mind the damage the drug's toxicity does to your body, mind, and soul.

Just railing against Libruls and Black Lives Matter protestors and Immigrants and Muslims and Jews and Women won't cut it. Someone's going to want to push further into acts of insurrection. Not just the Republican voting base that does all the screaming, but a Republican leadership finding themselves egged on by pressure - from trump, from that rabid base - to openly rebel against a Biden regime they deem tyrannical.

The ongoing anti-vaccination movement, for example, has done a good job of getting Republican governors to reject the science and argue for FREEDOM against mandates to get vaccinated for workplaces and schools. Thing is, legal history has supported federal mandates before and even this hard-conservative Supreme Court will be loathe to overrule precedence. So any Republican Red State governor is going to run into a political conflict they might not win.

The pressure from the Far Right base to reject federal authority is going to increase, no matter how the GOP leadership will try to manage the message and keep the anger and violence limited to controllable outbursts. You can see it now from the anger of the mobs at the wingnut rallies. Any threat to the Far Right Narrative - any official investigation into the January 6 riots leading to arrests of the major ringleaders, any official shutdown of trump's Big Lie of a "stolen" election, any successful enforcement of the vaccine mandates - is going to require a disproportionate reaction from the Republicans that could trigger honest-to-God open warfare.

It most likely won't be straight-up secession. The political dynamics of such a move - even for a big state like Texas - would create utter chaos and likely fail (much faster than it did in the 1860s). I could go into greater detail of the problems building a new nation-state in the 21st Century can be, and I might do so later on... 

With secession an unlikely event (for now), what will happen will be an ongoing legal battle between the Red State governments filing lawsuits against the U.S. government: To delay and obstruct any final enforcement of anything long enough for the 2022 or 2024 elections coming into effect and changing the political landscape to favor the Republicans (this is where all the damn gerrymandering of Texas, Florida, and Georgia is gonna suck). Insubordination and obstruction from the state agencies instead of open secession.

But if the Republicans delaying tactics fail, if their attempts to suppress voters and gerrymander things to hell and back fail, if the Democrats hold onto Congress in 2022 and then Biden wins re-election 2024 in spite of Republican howls of stolen votes, we can expect things to escalate even more. Because those losses will only enrage the Far Right base to believe trump's Big Lie even more.

At that point, the arguments against secession would go out the window. Convinced that they are losing power - similar to how they feared things would go in 1860 - and falling to minority status, the Far Right conservative elements will fall back into the desire to just quit what they'll see as a game rigged against them. In spite of the reality they have never proved in the past they were cheated, and likely won't prove it in the future.

So if it comes that far, will we see actual secession?

Any Red State looking to split from the United States in protest will find few overseas allies to help them, for starters: The most likely suspects - Russia, China, and Iran - just happen to be anathema to a majority of Americans, create an open act of hypocrisy (seeing how many Far Right ideologues hate those nations in principle), and create further schisms among their own secessionist ranks.

Those Red States will also find few financial allies. National and global banks will be reluctant to do business with a rebel state, and may pull back doing business with any corporations that tries to operate there. Considering many Red States already have low Gross Domestic Products, and rely too much on federal subsidies, those states will find themselves with economic crises right off the bat.

Even the need to start your own currency - the U.S. government is not about to let a seceding state rely on the federal dollar - would be a major headache. You'd have to consider exchange rates to other currencies, run the risk of inflation, and establish a fiscal policy to manage the money you have (or need to print). With few banks or foreign nations likely dealing with you - lest they anger the United States, which is still an economic powerhouse - any loans to provide a fiscal foundation won't be there for you. Considering the mindset of the Far Right, they'll likely try to set it to a Gold Standard (which could lead to inflation and immediate Panics) or worse go with a bitcoin (which would be vulnerable to speculation).

A small populated state without much of a tax base or commodities of value will find itself isolated real quick. A singular state in secession will get cut off from most interstate trade and shipping. Train shipping will also get cut off. Supply chains could fall apart. Considering the U.S. government will be in a hostile mood, you're likely to see your seaports and airports shut down. Any tie-ins to the nation's power grids will get cut off. If you think you can survive on your own electrical supply, just ask Texas how that worked this past winter.

Of the Red States that COULD pull of seceding on their own, Texas has enough resources and financial wealth to pull it off. However, they'd STILL run into the hostility of the remaining United States government cutting them off from any overseas allies. They'll even run into the hassles of suddenly having Mexico as a neighbor, which could come knocking with an army at the Rio Grande to discuss just where the border really is (remember kids, the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War was with the UNITED STATES, not Texas).

That's not even getting into the trouble any Red State will have with their own residents. Sure, in some Republican-led states the population is thoroughly conservative and eager to fight. But even in places like South Carolina or Kansas or Iowa or Indiana, there are pockets of Democratic Blue. 

A seceding Red State is going to run into the likelihood of their Blue Metropolises seceding themselves. There is historic precedence: During the Civil War, most Confederate state had pockets of resistance from various counties or cities dominated by people who still thought of themselves as Unionists (or hated the slaveowners' political control). The current political landscape is the same: Much of the Republican control in large-populated Red states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio) are only that way due to extreme gerrymandering. The dense metro areas (Houston and San Antonio/Austin, Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa/St. Pete, Atlanta, Charlotte, Cleveland) in those states are reliably Democratic and would resist any secession efforts.

Even then, this isn't 1860. Back then, it took time and effort to flee a state if you were no longer politically accepted anymore. Any Whig/Republican in the South by 1861 either kept their heads down and mouths shut, fled to the safety of a friendly county, or spent time more than once in Confederate jails until Union armies liberated the place.

Any Blue Democrat in 2024 can hop into an SUV with their family, pack up for a month's vacation, get the hell out of the Red State, stay with relatives in a safe Blue State until the secessionists are rounded up by the National Guard, and drive back to file any insurance claims on any damage their Red State neighbors may have inflicted on their homes in their absence. The Red State secessionists may try to blockade the Interstate highways but those would be the first points retaken by federal agents to ensure refugees can get out okay.

If the Red State in question succeeds in seceding, expect a brain drain of the more educated, more wealthy Democratic residents fleeing, reducing the value and business strength of that Red State. Colleges would likely shut down (especially as more liberal young adults will flee for their lives). Any educational investment generated by universities gone.

And if any Red State governor is foolish enough to call for secession, they better not plan on sleeping in the same bed two nights in a row. In this day and age, the U.S. army doesn't even have to drop paratroopers on your location to arrest you for treason: They can just fly in drones to target your cell phone's GPS and make you say bye-bye. Considering how the rest of the world views the wingnut trumpian factions with contempt, the only ones who'll file a war crimes complaint to the UN would be Russia and Bulgaria (maybe Brazil).

That's just the basic stuff I can game out if any Red State Republican leadership - any trumpian cultist - think they can win a fight here against the federal government if things escalate the way they want.

The end result no matter what - until the madness can break, until the liars are held accountable and facts and truth can reclaim our sanity - is still going to be suffering of innocent lives, bloodshed, and heartbreak.

But they can't win. The Far Right just can't win. They think they have the numbers but they don't. They know they have the weapons but they can't shoot us all. They think they have the rich and powerful on their side but the elites will abandon them in a heartbeat if their own asses are on the line. They think they'll own the courts and they believe they'll reclaim the reins of power, but they're not as good at cheating as they used to be, and the Constitution that forged this nation is stronger than they think.

All we have to remember is that we - the real Americans, the diverse, the loving and living, the moderate and the liberal and the progressive - outnumber them, and all we have to do is stand united and fight back.

(Update 11/5/21): Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog to Crooks & Liars ongoing Mike's Blog Round-Up! I'm a bit busy this month with NaNo but I may post every so often if something crazy happens...

(Update 11/9/21): We got demagogues like Dan Bongino out here encouraging his audience to rise up "against vaccine mandates" and that "we outnumber them" when talking about confronting evil liberals. We got Senator Ted "Cancun" Cruz openly talking secession for Texas in front of college students just in case Republicans don't retake the federal government in 2022/24.

This isn't idle talk. This is the ongoing Far Right Narrative pushing the stochastic terrorism of demonizing The Dread Other Libruls to further extremes right up to the point where another insurrection/coup takeover takes place. These wingnuts are spoiling for a fight, and it's horrifying how the mainstream media still laughs it off as "Free Speech" pandering. Right up until the blood spills...