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Do You Hear the People Sing
Jun 14, 2025
In honor of Pride Month, singular acts of courage and "being brave, strong and gorgeous," cue the glad spectacle of four drag queens dolled up to kill, see Les Misérables, and crash Dear Leader's first visit to a Kennedy Center purportedly scrubbed of wokeness. Yet here they were - buoyant, sparkling, cheered by a crowd that moments before had loudly booed the ugly tyrant and his MAGA cohort. The queens' gist, said Mari Con Carne: "You can’t erase us."
The queens turned up for an evening already bursting with irony if any MAGA goons and losers were capable of it. Amidst a Pride Month he refused to recognize - and fierce pushback to his hate - the Bigot-In-Chief who already decimated a time-honored institution devoted to art and open-mindedness witlessly chose to attend a beloved show about an oppressed people fighting back against tyranny much like his.
Accompanied by the grotesque likes of Vance, Bondi, Loomer, RFK Jr., Kellyanne Conway and a fragile Gym Jordan who visibly cringed when he walked past four people who don't look like him, Trump et al were roundly booed by the modest crowd. There were also shouts of "Felon!" and "Rapist!" - what a time to be alive - along with a muted, incongruous chant of "USA!" on behalf of the cretins who are working so hard to destroy it.
In full, defiant finery, the four drag queens - Tara Hoot, Ricky Rosé, Vagenesis, and Mari Con Carne - were greeted by the audience with joyful whoops, cheers and applause as they sashayed in and took their seats below the presidential box. Their tickets had been donated by season ticket-holders through Qommittee, a national advocacy network of drag artists and allies led by survivors of high-profile hate crimes like the Pulse and Club Q mass shootings.
"It was delightful,” said Hoot, stressing their "message of inclusivity" but adding, "I love musicals. I mean, I’m a drag queen." "Kudos to all bringing art to the world," she said. "Unfortunately, there were some other people there too, but I think we brightened the audience as much as we could." In family story time events, she noted, "I often read books about being brave (and) true to who you are. Showing up (here) with my fellow drag stars allowed me to live those words. Here's to being brave, strong, and gorgeous."
Trump, ever uncouth, left before the lights came up. Still, Mari Con Carne felt it was "crucial" to be there before him. As a drag queen and an immigrant, "I wanted it to be known you can prevent us from performing on your stages, but you can’t erase us...We aren’t going anywhere and we will face you head-on with every ounce of courage we have." When Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables, he was shocked by thesilence of his compatriots before "the negation of all law, equilibrium resting on iniquity." This week's troupe of "delightfully audacious" drag queens might give him hope.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
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Shame Shame Shame: What American Justice Looks Like
Jun 10, 2025
Today in our deportation police state: ICE goons in combat gear like they're on recon in Fallujah abduct 4th-graders and dishwashers at taco joints; Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a big-time human trafficker; and tear-gas-and-assault-rifle-laden National Guardsmen roam L.A. in a "massive overreach of authority" by a racist, flailing "chaos-junkie" - "BRING IN THE TROOPS!!" - intent on using Americans' righteous anger as a pretext for the unbridled despotism he hungers for with tanks and Marines on the way.
The festering authoritarianism has been escalating for weeks as public opinion turns against a rancid regime's blundering "policies," from a big ugly bill cutting vital services to sowing fear by abducting the guiltless brown people who do much of this country's work as their families and neighbors weep, grieve, and protest. "You’re going to see (more) enforcement than you’ve ever seen," bragged racist ghoul Tom Homan, who admits many victims have committed no crime except paperwork failures. “We’re going to flood the zone." Facing a malign, doubled quota of 3,000 arrests a day - 'cause these are numbers not humans - Deputy Chief Nazi Stephen Miller reportedly just "eviscerated" minions too focused on finding alleged criminals, "screaming" they need to go after more innocents: "(He) wants everybody arrested. 'Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?"
With many Hispanic workers concentrated in a few fields - construction, restaurants, landscaping, farm work - ICE thugs have in fact doing often-brutal sweeps of those workplaces. In Tallahassee, a horde descended on the site of a college student housing complex to terrorize - "GET ON THE FUCKING GROUND!" (and stop building stuff amidst a housing crisis) - and arrest about 100 people; neither ICE nor the company seems to have any idea why they targeted the site or who they abducted. The resulting mayhem is often similarly, simultaneously inept and terrifying, from the so-called DOJ quietly deciding to allow ICE goons to do warrantless searches if they suspect the presence of any dreaded "alien enemy" to Homeland Security releasing a list of immigrant “sanctuary” jurisdictions so riddled with mistakes they later said oops never mind and took it down.
Still, the mindless rupturing of families and communities soars. ICE agents arrested 4th-grader Martir Garcia Laura, 9, of Torrance, CA, when he and his father went to a scheduled immigration hearing; each is now detained in separate facilities.In Milford, MA, they arrested high school honors student Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, who came here from Brazil at age 5, on his way to volleyball practice; he was released after families turned out to declare, "Hands Off Our Kids." In Tucson, residents complained goons were pretending to be Tucson Electric Power workers to ensnare a longtime neighbor from Honduras (TEPtold the goons to stop); ICE lurk outside courthouses to grab immigrants whose cases are abruptly dismissed as organizers take shifts to warn them it's a trap; while there, ICE were so eager for victims they mistakenly detained a deputy U.S. Marshal. Atypically, they let him go.
Many others still languish. In D.C., Chief Judge Boasberg of the U.S. District Court is still trying to keep alive and get habeas corpus relief for the 130 mostly innocent Venezuelans summarily disappeared to El Salvador's hellish CECOT, comparing their plight to Franz Kafka's The Trial in which K., like them, never gets one. Even more bizarrely, ICE atrocities have "reached the art house film phase of ironic cruelty" with the news of eight immigrants - from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico, South Sudan - originally banished to Sudan until a judge said nope not on my watch and halted the flight, thus stranding them and the 11 ICE agents who kidnapped them in an airless shipping container at a US Navy base in searing, malaria-ridden Djibouti; the brilliant move by the sages of our police state was so rash and random they didn't even get any shots, so there are a lot of bathroom trips.
Echoing authoritarianism from Nazi Germany to McCarthy's Red Scare, the stupid, baneful, xenophobic fear-mongering keeps coming: Foreign students banned, foreign scientists harassed, research destroyed, universities assaulted by the moronic likes of Ice Barbie who, straight-faced 'cause her face can't move, charges Harvard is "coordinating with Chinese Communist Party officials on training that undermined American national security." Asked on Fox News to "lay out" the Marxist threat, she babbles, "Oh, they absolutely. Harvard has perpetuated Communist China priorities and students on their campus...participating in para-military activities that supported them and feeding information back to our enemy which is Communist China," and look even their leader's daughter has a degree from Harvard and a "They Died Hungry" sign decrying genocide and what the fuck.
Seeking to cover up their hateful ineptness, they also quietly brought back Kilmar Abrego Garcia (sans fake MS-13 tattoos) more than two months after illegally shipping him to El Salvador. In a bravura deflection, they then threw a wild concoction of after-the-fact, Godfather-level charges at him, claiming he was part of an international trafficking conspiracy who over a decade hauled thousands of "illegals" from Texas into the rest of the country - children, women, men, for good measure "many of whom were MS-13 members" - to "further the aliens’ unlawful presence in the United States." The indictment stemmed from a 2022 traffic stop by the Tennessee Highway Patrol for speeding in a vehicle with eight individuals and no luggage. He claimed they'd come from a construction site, and the officers let him go without a charge or a ticket. Now, if convicted, he faces 10 years in prison for each "alien" transported.
His lawyer says the regime is "playing games" with the courts. "They'll stop at nothing, even the most preposterous charges imaginable, just to avoid admitting they made a mistake," he said. "This is an abuse of power." Though Abrego Garcia is the only "conspirator" named in an alleged "conspiracy" and the regime tossed in other grisly claims - murder, minors, drugs - absent from the indictment, Pam Bondi trumpeted at a presser, "Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice.” Asked what had changed since the traffic stop, she said, "Donald Trump is now president...Thanks to the bright light that's been shined (sic) on Abrego Garcia, this investigation continued with actually amazing police work, and we were able (to) stop this international smuggling ring." Too stupid to comprehend irony, she added, "This is what American justice looks like."
Not quite, say over 70 judges, lawyers and law professors who've filed an ethics complaint against Bondi with the Florida Bar accusing her of “serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law" and political bias that weaponizes the DOJ, from firing a lawyer for telling the truth about a deportation made "in error" to threatening lawyers who fail "to zealously pursue the President’s political objectives.” And Bondi continues to offend: The indictment led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a longtime federal prosecutor in Tennessee, most recently the chief of the criminal division, who charged that the case against Abrego Garcia was pursued for political reasons, period. For 15 years, "The only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons," he wrote in his resignation letter. He didn't need to add, No more, with ghouls and lackeys in power.
And for now, they are. They are orchestrating massive, mindless, vicious assaults on brown people, sowing fear, terrorizing communities, rupturing families, disappearing the nice taco guy who daily dices the red chilis in a nationwide campaign of "pure public intimidation," cosplaying as soldiers in a racist, inequitable war, "cruelty disguised as policy." Last week they raided the Taqueria y Birreria Las Cuatro Milpas, a south Minneapolis taco joint in a majority-Latino neighborhood rocked five years ago by the police murder of George Floyd. A phalanx of ostensibly law-and-order federal acronyms - FBI, ATF, HSI, DHS, DEA - gathered in full combat gear, camo fatigues, guns, masks, with their flash grenades, tear gas, zip ties, stationing their squat HSI Bearcat armored car with mounted sound cannon in front of the popular restaurant, below its awning breezily urging, “Make Tacos, Not Walls.”
A crowd of wary residents began to assemble. Police, who weren't notified of the feds' action, hastened to clarify it was "not related to immigration enforcement" but what Homeland Security called “a groundbreaking criminal operation" to "confront complex, multidimensional threats" - drug smuggling, money laundering, trafficking. There were no arrests, but people were pissed by the "small-dick Nazi energy" of so much kitted-out law enforcement in the hood. "Imagine needing all that military gear to protect yourself from taco-makers," said one. "This is an intimidation campaign." Also: "That armor isn't designed to handle guacamole...DO YOU FEEL SAFE YET, CITIZEN?...Great to see a Mexican restaurant in Afghanistan." "We are a whisper away from Jim Crow," warned A.G. Keith Ellison. “If they want to inflict fear (and) discourage cooperation, they achieved both those goals."
In San Diego, it was both worse and better. At dinnertime last Friday, having gotten a tip about possible undocumented workers just like at Hell-a-Lago - a tip from 2020 that resurfaced months ago - ICE stormtroopers kitted out in full, bulky, combat gear stormed the popular restaurant Buona Forchetta in South Park for alleged "violations of hiring and harboring illegal aliens and false statements." After their big-bang entrance, they handcuffed the entire staff of about 20 before arresting four workers for the crime of trying too hard to find a job. Outside, meanwhile, over 250 angry residents gathered to protest "cops cosplaying like they were taking down Osama bin Laden" under the false pretense of "safety" against, not criminals but a community's wait staff and health aides and abuelas watching the kids. "This isn’t safety," said one City Council member. "It’s state-sponsored terrorism."
"Someone must have told these guys they were gonna be invading Fallujah," marveled Rachel Maddow of agents "in full battle rattle with helmets and long guns and flak jackets and goggles and masks...This was bananas. The whole neighborhood came out to say, 'This is what you're coming to save us from? The terrible menace of, like, the nice waiter at our favorite restaurant?’" As a GoFundMe launched to raise money for those abducted and DHS insisted they're "working day and night to remove murders (sic), pedophiles and gang members from our communities," the furious crowd confronted goons who, unclear on the ethics of shooting middle-aged white people, set off flash grenades and nervously backed away. "Shame shame shame!" yelled residents chasing them to an unmarked Gestapomobile. "Yeah, back up! Get the fuck out, you fucking Nazi cowards! Go!" Go, San Diego!
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Now there is the "immigration enforcement operation” in the largely Hispanic Paramount area of L.A, quickly spiraling into martial law. It began peacefully at Home Depot, just like Goebbels wanted, with ICE hauling out people - "workers, fathers, mothers being terrorized" - arresting over 40 and cuffing them in the basements of federal buildings. As crowds of protesters grew, agents in full tactical gear escalated to tear gas, pepper spray, flash grenades, "non-lethal" rubber bullets. They corralled groups holding Mexican flags chanting, "Fuera ICE!" - ICE, get out - manhandled and arrested a union president, tossed a tear-gas cannister at two female ACLU attorneys who asked to see a warrant. As usual, they attacked randomly, not criminals like they keep absurdly claiming. "That's never, ever, ever been the case," said one L.A. Council member. "When they come for one of us, they come for all of us."
When Trump took the rare move of asserting federal control over California's National Guard - an act the GOP and Nazi Barbie had decried in the past as an attack on states' rights and razor wire - Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted it as "purposefully inflammatory." With LAPD and county sheriffs serving as safety but not ICE enforcement backup, he insisted, the presence of the Guard was "not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis." "They want a spectacle. They want the violence," he said. "This is not the way a civilized country behaves. It is completely deranged behavior." It is also, says a former US Army War College professor, a legally dubious, "crazy broad," "massive overreach of POTUS authority" essentially functioning as "a show of force against a powerful blue state that (MAGA) have cast as an existential threat to the rest of America" - the "stuff of dictatorships throughout history."
Dems agreed calling out the Guard is "a completely inappropriate and misguided mission" aimed at "sowing more chaos and division." Particularly ominously, Trump's memo vaguely asserts the right to employ "members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary" against protests he calls "a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” He doesn't name LA or California - Lincoln, invoking the Insurrection Act, specified it targeted rebel southern states - paving the way to use the military against protestors anywhere on American soil, a "dangerous precedent" when "forces are there to aid/abet the actors provoking the community in the first place." Typically for this evil clown show, troops also came "wildly unprepared"; photos show them sleeping on concrete floors, having arrived without plans for food, water, lodging or bathrooms, expected "if you actually want law and order instead of chaos."
But who needs toilets amidst MAGA's frantic rhetoric about "a dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels," aka dishwashers and carpenters. Kash Patel: LA is "under siege by marauding criminals.” Drunken Hegseth: "Assaults on ICE (are) a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK." As usual "world-class hater" Goebbels wins the hysteria prize: Protests are "an insurrection against (US) laws and sovereignty," LA is "occupied territory" in "a fight to save civilization," California "conspired to facilitate the invasion of the United States.” The Mad King raved "a once great American city" has been "occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals" with "insurrectionist mobs...swarming." But once his flunkies "put an end to these Migrant riots, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free.” Meanwhile, evidently admirably unfazed by said "insurrection," he attended a UFC fight in Newark later that night.
As to inconvenient truth: "L.A. is not a war zone." Kai Ryssdal, “I live in Los Angeles. The president is lying.” Another: "This is beyond delusional. It needs its own terminology for how devoid of reality it is...I am out doing errands. L.A. is like it is on any other day, with a few hundred protestors in a couple of spots in a city of nearly 10 million." In A Letter to Home from A Weary ICE Agent, Peter Birkenhead writes he and his "brave compatriots, fresh from a six-week Patriotic Abduction training course at a strip-mall karate studio," await orders to confront "a force of (up to) 11 or 12 of the enemy cleverly disguised as “dishwashers,” “nannies,” and “landscapers"....armed only with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of high-capacity automatic rifles, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, tanks, helmets, Kevlar vests and night-vision goggles" to protect them from a possible small stone "hurled our way by a weeping child or hysterical mother as we pry their loved ones from their dastardly hands."
The bottom line: "Everything that’s happened over the past six months has been a response to an imaginary crisis. There is no immigrant invasion. No trade crisis. No scientific or governance crisis. Just people completely high off their own supply trying to fundamentally reorder society. None of this had to happen." In this, Trump - "Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” - has "turned to a familiar script," "casting the sprawling city of L.A. in shades of fire and brimstone, a hub of dangerous lawlessness that required urgent military intervention (to) be contained." Such rhetoric is "an authoritarian trick," says fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat: “You create a sense of existential fear that social anarchy is spreading, criminal gangs are taking over. This is the language of authoritarianism all over the world. What is the only recourse to violent mobs and agitators? Using all the force of the state."
As images emerge from social media of brown restaurant workers, likely soon to be abducted, helping wash out the eyes of sheriffs' deputies hit by tear gas - and as TACO man memorably, patheticallyfalls - the Marines are pointlessly sent to add to the fear and lies. Remember, notes Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, "In order to build a mass deportation machine to round up and deport 4% of the entire goddamn population, you must first build the police state." As it accrues, it behooves us to maintain calm and clarity on what is and isn't real threat. From Connor Simon last month after ICE raided his Pennsylvania pizzeria: "It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armor come to take him away is somehow the good guy.”
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Lethal Petty Bigots 'R Us
Jun 04, 2025
As the country tumbles into fascism, we are consoled by tee vee host, sexual predator, inept alcoholic, definitely-not-gay serious person and Defense Secretary Whisky Pete Hegseth taking on the big issues of the day and hewing to his obsession with "warrior ethos" by ordering the Navy to strip the name of gay rights icon Harvey Milk from a U.S. Navy Ship - with a pointed, delectable twist of performative cruelty, during Pride Month yet. Whew: One less gay ship to worry about.
According to reports from Military.com and CBS, the scandal-plagued, staggeringly petty leader of the world's largest military force sent a memo to Navy Secretary John Phelan, the official with actual ship-naming power, ordering him to rename the oiler ship USNS Harvey Milk, a civilian-crewed ship typically used for transport and resupply vs. a military-crewed USS, United States Ship. In a statement, Phelan said Hegseth "is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos," never mind that five-time-deferred Private Bonespurs obviously knows zilch about the "warrior culture" except in his fever dreams. But sure: Go lethality!
It turns out Harvey Milk was far more a warrior than either TACO Man or Pete Kegsbreath. Part of a family with a history of naval service, Harvey served in the Korean War from 1951 to 1955 as a diving officer on a submarine rescue ship; he was forced to resign and accept an “other than honorable” discharge due to his homosexuality. He continued battling bigotry for the rest of his life: He became one of the country's first openly gay elected officials when he won a seat on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in 1977, and had become an icon of the gay rights movement before he was assassinated at 48 after years of facing off against threats. "If a bullet should enter my brain," he once said, "let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
In 2009, President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, after a group of LGBTQ veterans spent years lobbying for it, the USNS Harvey Milk was christened; Obama's Navy Secretary Ray Mabus called the action not just the honoring of a veteran and gay hero but "the righting of a wrong." Harvey's ship is part of a class of oilers recognizing the late "Conscience of Congress" John Lewis, whose name is on the first one; they all aim to honor "great people that represented the best ideals of our country," now threatened:- RFK, Earl Warren, Sojourner Truth. Recommended future ones: Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Dolores Huerta, Lucy Stone, Cesar Chavez and Medgar Evers.
Any of these righteous warriors could be targeted next - despite naval tradition that renaming brings bad luck - by a white nationalist man-child intent on foisting MAGA's bigotry on us all by eliminating the evils of diversity, aka "that DEI woke shit," from pulling books about equality off military shelves to trashing/firing women officers to restoring Confederate names to military bases 'cause they were cancelled by libs but wait now he's cancelling gay icons, who are evidently worse. One critic calls Hegseth's "rampage" to eliminate anyone from U.S. history who is not a heterosexual White man "an affront to the LGBTQ community and decency itself...There have been gay members of the military since there was the first military, and to ignore or erase that is just bigoted and small-minded."
Stuart Milk, Harvey's nephew and chair of the Harvey Milk Foundation, decries the loss to members of the military of "a reminder that no barriers of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity (will) restrain their human spirit.” Nancy Pelosi calls the offense to "our Harvey" a "shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American dream...His spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warrior’ ethos...It is a surrender of a fundamental American value: to honor the legacy of those who worked to build a better country.” It's also childish, mean and impossibly dumb: Doesn't Mr. Combat Ready With the Make-Up Studio have anything more important to do than change the names of boats, like maybe stop all those $40 million planes from falling into the ocean?
On Reddit, people raged against Hegseth's hateful, homophobic, obsessive, manly-man, "bigoted punk" fascism: "What an asshole. What a snowflake. What a fucking thin-skinned loser. Ain't no hate quite like Christian love. Grandstanding and performative bullshit. History will not be kind to you." Projection is mulled: "At some point it's just gay to think about gay stuff all the time. Pete’s totally not gay." Questions abound: "Will Harvey turn other boats gay? Are ships manufactured gay out of the factory? Or do they choose to be gay after experimenting in ship college?" New names are offered: USS Jack Daniels, Tom of Finland, Stonewall Inn. Also: "Finally our long national nightmare is over" and, "What a fearless warfighter - he really showed that warship who's boss." And on our current, tawdry, spirit-draining timeline, "Too much, too stupid."
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A Receipt For Your Humanity: Actual Waste and Abuse
Jun 02, 2025
Finally. Last week, the "worst ultra-billionaire on earth," higher than any of his SpaceX rockets ever got, lurched to the end of his rampage through humane governance, leaving in his feckless, malignant wake unparalleled devastation - agencies ravaged, services gutted, a multitude of jobs and the expertise behind them lost, 300,000 people around the world, two-thirds children - 103 an hour - consigned to early death. "We’ll miss you,” said no one ever. Fuck that guy.
Musk's reign of terror as a moronically named "Special Government Employee" - did he get stickers? - heading a made-up "Department of Breaking Shit You Don’t Understand" officially, suitably wrapped up in a surreal farewell scene at a gaudily tricked-out Oval Office where, still grovelling, he declared the once-somber, now-trashy landmark site "finally has the majesty it deserves." Sporting a black eye, black "Dogefather" tshirt and wildly hallucinatory air, he thanked his dark overlord for "the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending" while his dementia-ridden boss praised him as "a friend and adviser," with coincidentally deep pockets, whose "service to America is without comparison in modern history," which you can take alotta different ways. "This isn't the end of DOGE, it's more the beginning," said Musk. "It's a way of life," also of needless, barbaric, untimely death.
Trump nodded along sagely before babbling, "Elon gave an incredible service," which isn't a thing. "He’s done a lot of things," he added helpfully. "He's a very good person." He's also perhaps the most despised person on the planet, except maybe for Bibi, which is why Trump evidently cut him loose well before mid-terms. "We have to get a lot of votes," he blurted at one point. "We can't be cutting - we need a lot of support." Of course now so does Musk's floundering business empire, probably because in his private and public efforts he applied the same toxic move-fast-and-break-things attributes - ignorance, arrogance, entitlement, carelessness, a sociopathic lack of empathy his addled mind deems "weakness" - with the same disastrous effects. It's thus unsurprising his short brutal tenure at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has met with "deservedly vicious reviews."
"Elon Musk'sLegacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death," declared The New York Times. "Go, Elon, and Never Darken Our Doors Again," intoned the appalled American Prospect, which noted, "It's hard to think of any other unelected official who has done so much harm (in) such a short period of time." They went on, "Musk is one of the most malevolent people ever to hold a position of influence in American politics. His actions, without exaggeration, have devastated the health and security of American society and directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people all over the world, with millions more to follow given the course that he has set." The Daily Show's Leslie Jones offered a more succinct and profane, but similarly themed take on the catastrophic debris left behind by the pernicious likes of Musk et al: "I can't believe America may be ended by these fucking loser incels."
Many skeptics warn Musk's much-touted departure is in fact a "fake retreat," with his "mess of half-realized plans" and over-stated, badly executed "achievements" simply taken up by an army of about 50 young, unvetted DOGE tech bros and flunkies who like their boss don't know how things work, aren't interested in learning and don't care how many people they hurt. Embedded by executive order in agencies across the government and digging in "like an autonomous termite machine," they're just as intent on mining data, cutting services, greenlighting corporate abuses and otherwise wreaking havoc. "Musk's departure obscures but does not actually change the continuity of DOGE's staff and mission to destroy everything that protects the public from the depredations of the most rapacious oligarchs," said one oversight expert "DOGE is still hungry. We've still got to feed the fucking dog."
Of course Musk failed to achieve anything close to his blithe goal of cutting $2 trillion from an allegedly bloated budget. in what experts call "arson of a public asset," estimates of his actual savings by cutting from all the wrong places range from $100 billion to $2 billion, one-thirty-fifth of 1% of the federal budget, "otherwise known as budget dust." Either way, his cuts to vital, profitable agencies like the IRS and National Parks will simultaneously cost taxpayers about $135 billion in lost revenue and rehiring/ re-training costs. A(nother) rich white guy with zero accountability, Musk played the victim, whining about "the banal evil of bureaucracy" and becoming "a bogeyman"; he declined to mention the obscene $170 billion more he's raked in after attacking offices investigating his dodgy businesses, scoring $38 billion in government contracts, and pressing countries to buy Starlink.
Meanwhile, he did incalculable damage. At home, he destroyed thousands of jobs, billions in contracts, mountains of institutional knowledge, especially in science, health care, childhood cancer research. He hobbled Social Security, the National Weather Service, disease mitigation, veterans' services, homelessness programs, the U.S. Institute of Peace, now plagued with rats and roaches. He did the Seig Heil, CPAC Chainsaw, fake savings tracker, White House Tesla mini-mall, cheesehead trying to buy a judge, what-five-things-did-you-do-this-week claptrap. He did lots of drugs - ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD, cocaine, Ambien, Adderall, so much ketamine he's now reportedly incontinent. He famously brought his 5-yrear-old son to the Oval office, where X wiped oblivious boogers on the Resolute Desk, an apt, gross, sublime metaphor for what his heedless father has left us all with.
He also killed many, many people, aka "pioneered new methods of increasing death tolls in emerging markets." Of his multiple crimes and acts of malfeasance, Musk's mindless shuttering of USAid, and the carnage it swiftly caused, is by far the worst. Even the backstory is repulsive: His infamous February post, defining a vile legacy, bragging, "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper." He could have “gone to some great parties," smirked the white supremacist ghoul, but instead he shredded a global agency that has fed and cared for millions of poor, sick, starving, marginalized people, especially children, around the world, particularly in Africa, thus abruptly cutting off almost 85% of live-saving funding because he breezily denounced it as "a radical-left political psy-op” - MAGA-ese for keeping alive thousands of at-risk babies starving, caught in war-torn countries, born with HIV.
Just one example: Simply halting PEPFAR, a landmark, George W. Bush-era program that has saved over 26 million lives by giving mothers a "miracle" anti-HIV drug that costs less than 12 cents a day, has already killed an estimated 54,500 adults and 5,800 children; about 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, and many more will follow. Fact-aversive MAGA denies this: Marco Rubio just told Congress, "No children are dying on my watch...No one has died because of USAid" - a claim called "ludicrous" by many critics. They include Nicholas Kristof, who wrote of one victim of hundreds of thousands. Evan Anzoo was an orphan born with H.I.V. in South Sudan who America kept alive with antiretroviral HIV drugs for five years; soon after a too-rich, blitzed-out, witless white supremacist blocked access to his medication, Evan died of an opportunistic infection.
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald said of Tom and Daisy, "They were careless people...They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness...and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Now erratic Space Nazi Musk, "a poisonous human being" and "an evil piece of garbage," is purportedly, partly moving on while food rots in warehouses in hungry countries around the world and once-manageable diseases rage out of control. "In government," says one bitter advocate, "it’s much easier to tear things down than it is to build things up." Still, at DOGE, "tasked with getting rid of unnecessary bullshit within the government," things are looking up. "We’ve been searching everywhere to find bloated, unnecessary, overrated, overpaid, unwanted, heinous waste to get rid of," reportsThe Shovel: "Turns out he was running the place." And truly, fuck that guy.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
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