Donald Trump is ordering the US military to murder civilians on the high seas. We know this is happening because he’s bragging about it. I just want to remind everyone of what the fatuous Chief Justice wrote in response to the dissents in the immunity case last year, in which they evoked the argument that Trump could order Seal Team Six to murder someone and would be completely immune from prosecution:

“The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law. The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next.”

It’s not an extreme hypothetical. It’s reality. And what the majority failed to understand because they were so exercised that Trump The Precious was a criminal who was being held to account for staging a coup, fraud and stealing classified documents was that they had opened the door to a president not only ordering malicious prosecutions against everyone but the previous president, but that he was actually exactly the kind of criminal who would order murders knowing that he was immune from prosecution as long as he was claiming, without evidence, that he was doing it for “national security.”

While he didn’t order Seal Team Six to murder someone, he did order U.S. Navy ships to do it, which I’m sure they did with the understanding that Trump would pardon everyone and would never himself have to face prosecution. It’s happening. And apparently, nobody cares.

Here’s the latest on the Venezuela murder operation:

U.S. military officials are drawing up options to target drug traffickers inside Venezuela, and strikes within that country’s borders could potentially begin in a matter of weeks, four sources told NBC News.

Striking inside Venezuela would be another escalation in the Trump administration’s military campaign against alleged drug targets and its stance toward Venezuela’s government.

[…]

Some Trump administration officials are disappointed that the United States’ military escalation does not appear to have weakened Maduro’s grip on power or prompted any significant response, the official familiar with the discussions said…

The official who is disappointed is Marco Rubio. This operation is his baby. He is dying to depose Maduro who has become his white whale. The fact that the world has not rallied to trump’s side and that Maduro hasn’t reacted to the provocation has made them hesitate to invade. But it looks like they’re prepared to escalate. And invasion is almost inevitable once they start blowing up civilians on the ground.

Trump is “prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice,” the senior administration official said.

There has been no discussion of whether Venezuela is actually flooding the U.S. with drugs, much less whether it’s legal for the administration to just start killing people. It’s just happening, as the dissenting Justices all predicted it would.

For those of you who might be interested in getting into the weeds on the Comey indictment, this X- thread by MSNBC’s Mike Levine says that the case is not what everyone says it is. Not that it’s any stronger, mind you. It’s just a different set of facts than what everyone assumed:

The Justice Department is still offering few details about their case against former FBI director James Comey, but @ABC News has learned that Count 1 of the indictment, charging Comey with making false statements, focuses on his alleged role in having his close friend and former personal lawyer, Daniel Richman, provide information to reporters about an FBI investigation connected to Hillary Clinton

In the indictment, Count 1 says that Comey “willfully and knowingly” lied when, testifying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020, he reaffirmed previous Senate testimony insisting he never “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” about an investigation connected to someone only identified as “PERSON 1.”

“That statement was false, because, as JAMES B. COMEY JR. then and there knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding [the] FBI investigation,” the indictment reads.

Sources tell ABC News that “PERSON 1” is Clinton and “PERSON 3” is Richman.

(w/ @KFaulders @alex_mallin) 

Though Richman was a close personal friend of Comey’s, he also served as an unpaid “Special Government Employee” during Comey’s last two years at the FBI, according to publicly-available FBI and Justice Department documents. Richman’s work with the FBI largely focused on promoting lawful access to encrypted phones, and — as Comey himself later told federal investigators — Richman was “on-site at the FBI a lot” during that time. 

While we still don’t know the exact matter involving Richman that is the focus of Count 1, the House Judiciary Committee has released a trove of FBI documents from a series of leak investigations launched in 2017 that shed more light on Richman’s role as Comey’s alleged “liaison to the media.”

According to the documents, one of the leak investigations centered around a New York Times article on April 22, 2017, headlined “Comey Tried to Shield the FBI from Politics. Then He Shaped an Election.” The article reported that one of the reasons Comey decided to publicly announce his recommendation against charging Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server involved a “Russian document” that could have been used to question Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s impartiality. Some of the information in the article was allegedly classified, and as part of the subsequent leak investigation, the FBI interviewed Richman, the documents show. 

The newly-released FBI documents say that while “Comey instructed the FBI to hire Richman as a Special Government Employee” — with “a Top Secret clearance” — to work on “Going Dark” matters, “Comey also used Richman as a liaison to the media.”

“Richman contacted journalists to correct stories critical of Comey, the FBI and to shape future press coverage,” the FBI said in a September 2021 report on its investigation. “Richman did this both when he was an SGE and after he resigned from the FBI.”

Richman, however, told the FBI during its investigation that Comey never asked him to talk to the media, according to the documents.

The newly-released documents, which are heavily redacted at some points, suggest that in at least one instance, Richman spoke with a reporter about sensitive information.

The documents say that in a meeting in his office January 2017, Comey privately told Richman that one of the many reasons he decided to make a public statement about the Clinton email investigation was the classified information that could potentially undermine Lynch’s credibility. As Richman himself recalled to the FBI, shortly after his meeting with Comey, Richman spoke to one of the New York Times reporters who later published the April 22, 2017, article and discussed the classified information with the reporter, though “Richman claimed [the reporter] brought up the Classified Information and knew more about it than he did,” the newly-released documents recount.

Nevertheless, after more than four years of investigation, the FBI stated in its report at the time, “The investigation has not yielded sufficient evidence to criminally charge any person, including Comey or Richman, with making false statements or with the substantive offenses under investigation.” 

Stephen Miller says that Comey staged an attempted coup and that’s why he’s being prosecuted. If that prosecution is based on these facts, it would seem he’s being prosecuted for a coup against Hillary Clinton.

.@StephenM: Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Obama, Monaco, all conspired together to try to sabotage the democratic institutions of this country. I cannot find words harsh enough to condemn the conduct of these conspirators — these insurrectionists. pic.twitter.com/wb1Ck9qXeI

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 27, 2025

Just a smattering of today’s headlines:

🚨 The @DailyCaller just published an article explicitly calling for mass violence against Democrats. pic.twitter.com/J3Nw4RF1o8

— Micah (@micah_erfan) September 27, 2025

It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

We are now an authoritarian state

There is no denying it anymore, even if the mainstream press will. Whatever red lines remained for Donald Trump to cross he crossed this week with the indictment of former FBI director James Comey. Ty Cobb, Former White House Special Counsel under Trump 1.0, told PBS that the Comey indictment is “wholly un-American and really despicable in the way it was done.”

We are now an authoritarian state. Led by a madman. Backed by a cult primed to punish his enemies.

GOP Official Calls for Democratic Congresswoman to Be Executed

Daily Caller Opinion Column ‘Explicitly’ Calls for Violence

If the Department of Justice can indict a James Comey on Donald Trump’s say-so, the government can sic his prosecutors on anyone. You. Me. Anyone. A commentator last night insisted that attorneys will need to band together to provide pro bono defenses for far more ordinary people who will inevitably face charges, perhaps by the thousands.

Like this gentleman: Justice Department Seeks Information on Georgia D.A. Who Prosecuted Trump

Trump declared in a “national security” memorandum issued this week that his administration now considers dissent terrorism. It is a masterpiece of up-is-downism. Perhaps you didn’t know, but there is a vast, left-wing conspiracy afoot in the land.

This order got lost in the flood of insane actions from Trump this week. So much so that there is little commentary on it this morning. There is too much in here to unpack, but here is a thread that makes a stab at it.

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Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

The lights went out. Then the water system failed.

When Helene came to visit WNC on this day last year, things didn’t look too bad in this neighborhood until I tried to leave it. Downed trees blocked every road out. The power was out for nine days. Water for 17. And that was for a neighborhood otherwise pretty much unscathed. (It was worse in rural areas and for people on wells.) Internet was unusable for a week. With so much devastation and relief work going on, it was three months before we toured the county to survey the worst. The pharmacist who gave me my Covid booster in July last year died when his four-plex was swept away in the flooding. Our house painter lost his best crew member. His body wasn’t found until sometime in December. While for much of the region things have gotten back to normal, cleanup and recovery continues to this day.

The National Weather Service today is sucking wind in the middle of hurricane season after eight months of Trump 2.0:

Some National Weather Service staffers are working double shifts to keep forecasting offices open. Others are operating under a “buddy system,” in which adjacent offices help monitor severe weather in understaffed regions. Still others are jettisoning services deemed not absolutely necessary, such as making presentations to schoolchildren.

The Trump administration’s cuts to the Weather Service — where nearly 600 workers,or about 1 in every 7, have left through firings, resignations or retirements — are pushing the agency to its limits, according to interviews with current and former staffers.

Weather dot com:

Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine Forms, Imelda Likely Soon

Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine has officially formed in the Caribbean, and Tropical Storm Imelda is expected to form this weekend. Tropical storm alerts have been issued for the Bahamas. The storm is expected to batter the Bahamas with heavy rain and strong winds as it moves toward the Southeast coast, where we could see a landfalling named storm next week. The exact track of the storm is still unknown because of several potential driving factors like a stalled frontal boundary that is draped across the Southeast and Hurricane Humberto, which continues to strengthen nearby in the Atlantic.

When severe weather threatens since last fall, people around here get a touch of PTSD. Like now.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Blue Ridge Public Radio (@blueridgepublicradio)

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Celebrating World Gorilla Day!

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund:

Today commemorates the day that Dian Fossey founded her Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda 58 years ago – the longest-running research center dedicated to gorilla conservation.

Dian worked tirelessly to save mountain gorillas, which she originally projected would be extinct by the year 2000. But today, because of Dian Fossey and the bravery of many men and women since her time, they are the only non-human great ape increasing in number. But, we can’t stop now.

There are only about 1,000 mountain gorillas left on the planet. Not to mention, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we have lost as much as 60% of Grauer’s gorillas in recent decades, and they are now listed on the 25 most-endangered primates list. It’s imperative. We must save gorillas.

Today, will you help us ensure the survival of this extraordinary species? Give today and see your donation matched, because of a generous gift from Gorilla Grip – up to $25K: https://save.gorillafund.org/campaign/714100/donate?c_src=social Thank you to SouthState Bank for sponsoring our World Gorilla Day campaign

Happy World Gorilla Day! 🌍 🦍

Today commemorates the day that Dian Fossey founded her Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda 58 years ago – the longest-running research center dedicated to gorilla conservation.

Dian worked tirelessly to save mountain gorillas, which she… pic.twitter.com/zL0FGMxxQl

— Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (@SavingGorillas) September 24, 2025

We're impressed: this little gorilla is pretty good at holding still while her mother, Akariza, grooms her! 💛

📸 Alliance Umwizerwa pic.twitter.com/VESmXmotSN

— Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (@SavingGorillas) September 20, 2025

We’re celebrating our juvenile western lowland gorilla ‘Okabe’. This gorilla delights us every day with his curiosity. At two years old, Okabe is still nursing from his mom ‘Yewande’ but is showing independence – just check out his acrobatics! 🦍#YourZooYYC #WorldGorillaDay pic.twitter.com/j8YedheFmU

— Calgary Zoo (@calgaryzoo) September 24, 2025

The Cincinnati Zoo has a 4 day old baby!

Happy #WorldGorillaDay! 🦍

Rwanda celebrates two decades of community-centered conservation, highlighted by the recent #KwitaIzina20 milestone.

📹 Learn how communities living near @VolcanoesPark benefit from gorilla tourism through the Tourism Revenue Sharing Program, which… pic.twitter.com/X8sfidjCQE

— Kwita Izina (@Kwitaizina) September 24, 2025

Happy World Gorilla Day! My Favorite Animal. 💕
This Mama Gorilla Is Cradling Her Sweet Baby Just Seconds After Giving Birth. #WorldGorillaDaypic.twitter.com/gi8i32dezN

— ∼Marietta (@MariettaDaviz) September 24, 2018

If you’ve never seen “Gorillas in the Mist”, the movie about Dian Fossey starring Sigourney Weaver, it’s well worth watching. You can rent it on YouTube and a bunch of other streamers.

Garret Graff wrote an op-ed for the NY Times today. (gift link)

We have seen much debate over the merits and timing of a legal case against Mr. Comey,but any such discussion misses the most important point: We don’t want to live in a country where the president of the United States dictates, publicly or privately, who should be targeted by federal prosecutors and then pressures any prosecutor unwilling to bring said politically motivated charges. The Justice Department and the attorney general are supposed to keep an arm’s length distance from the president, not be his personal score settlers.

[…]

Mr. Trump’s future plans are worryingly clear. Hours before the Comey charges became public, he signed an presidential memorandum that outlined how he hopes the full weight of the federal government will be turned against domestic terror groups. The sweeping order so twists the definition of “domestic terror” that it is likely the intent could be to sweep up progressive activist groups, think tanks, their funders (the MAGA bête noire George Soros appears a likely target) and groups like the League of Women Voters.

Graff explains further in his Substack today:

The oped grew out of a frustrating segment I did Wednesday night on CNN with Laura Coates, where the other two guests immediately got into the weeds about the strength of a Comey indictment and whether or not he deserved an indictment and whether there was a workable case against the former FBI director.

I argued that was all missing the point: The Comey indictment should stand as a bright line — President Trump decreed that Comey should be indicted and found a sycophantic lawyer who was willing to be appointed to a position she was manifestly unqualified for where her sole job is to undermine the Justice Department’s independence and do the president’s bidding. Over the objections of senior and career federal prosecutors, who said there was not a case here to be made under DOJ standards, he then was indicted.

That’s something we’ve never seen in modern times — and a line that every president since Richard Nixon has tried hard to stay way clear of. Exactly a month before the Comey indictment yesterday, I argued America has tipped over that invisible line into authoritarianism and fascism. It’s hard to think of a more clear example of an authoritarian regime than a political enemy being charged with crimes simply because the president wants him to be. As Peru’s fascist leader General Óscar Benavides famously said: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

Today we live in a country where the same standard applies.

It seems depressing to put it that way but I actually find it bracing. Better to be clear on where we are.

There are still vestiges of our constitutional republic that are working as we’ve seen this week. These people are working very quickly and they’re sloppy. The Comey indictment is ridiculous and if our courts are working properly it’s inconceivable that he will be convicted. Perhaps the country needs to see this play out in order to understand it.

ABC and Sinclair both backed off of canceling Kimmell largely, it appears, as a result of the economic blowback. People have power. If we are able to exercise that at the ballot box next year, we may be able to stop some of this before it is totally institutionalized.

The damage will be incalculable and it will take a great deal of imagination and energy over many years to create something new and better out of the rubble but it is possible as long as people realize that they still have the capacity to fight back.

Imagine that

If you read this blog regularly you know that Christopher Rufo is a very talented right wing propagandist. He’s a partisan operative with tremendous influence, one of the major leaders of messaging strategy for the GOP. Imagine my surprise to read the following which is actually a fairly level headed analysis of the recent spate of mass shootings, including Kirk’s.

Let me say upfront that his thinly veiled transphobia is predictably obtuse but considering what most of these people say on a daily basis, it’s pretty mild. But his overall analysis is right:

In recent years, a new form of terror has emerged: decentralized, digitally driven violence organized not around coherent ideologies but around memes, fantasies, and nihilistic impulses. The perpetrators of this low-grade terror campaign do not belong to hierarchical organizations or pursue concrete political aims. More often, they come from ordinary families and lash out in acts of violence without discernible purpose.

At the close of this summer, two such incidents underscored the trend: the attack on schoolchildren at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah. Though the first resembled the school-shooter archetype and the second evoked a JFK-style political assassination, both share psychological and sociological roots that make them more alike than they initially appear.

The new terror campaign is defined by a particular kind of psychopathology. It is perhaps tautological that anyone willing to kill innocent schoolchildren as they are praying or to assassinate a popular podcast host in broad daylight is pathological. But in these cases, both alleged killers—Robin Westman (formerly Robert Westman), and Tyler Robinson—left behind several warning signs that were psychological in nature.

Westman, the alleged Annunciation shooter, left a diary detailing fantasies and inner turmoil related to his transgender identity. While he decorated his weapons with pithy slogans, including “Kill Donald Trump,” “Burn Israel,” and “Nuke India,” these were memes and ironies, designed to give the appearance of ideology, concealing a potentially more disturbing motive. He was in the throes of a transgender identity crisis and had fantasized about being a demon and wanting to watch children suffer. The ideology was a brittle shell around a deeper emptiness that could only be satisfied with horror.

Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, reportedly spent thousands of hours playing video games, had an account on sexual fetish websites, and played a “dating simulator” game involving “furries,” muscular cartoon characters that are half-animal and half-man. Officials claim that Robinson had moved in with a boyfriend who identified as transgender and to whom he confessed the crime. Like Westman, Robinson inscribed slogans on the shell casings he used in the assassination, including a message about noticing the “bulge” of male genitalia through women’s clothing. The fact that Robinson waited until Kirk began to answer a question about transgender mass shootings seems to reinforce the point.

In addition to their shared fixation with transgenderism, both Westman and Robinson immersed themselves in peculiar digital subcultures. These online spaces were not hubs of Marxism—or even transgenderism, strictly speaking—but of memes, attitudes, copycatting, in-jokes, and irony that, in certain cases, spilled over into violence. Both men allegedly acted out their fantasies not to advance a coherent ideology shaped by study or political organizing but to gratify an obscure personal urge.

In a note to his transgender boyfriend, Robinson wrote that he wanted to stop Charlie Kirk’s “hate.” While this may hint at a nascent ideology, the remark was perfunctory and incidental to the crime. Robinson did not seek to change policy or dismantle a system of government. He seems instead to have wanted to kill a man who spoke openly about transgenderism and embodied a vague notion of “hate.”

Another striking pattern in these crimes is that, at least from initial reporting, the alleged perpetrators came from ordinary, middle-class, Middle American families. Westman’s mother, for example, was active in her Catholic parish in Minneapolis. These were not visibly broken homes but functional households that nonetheless produced monsters—what we might call “radical normie terrorism.”

Radical normie terrorism poses a new challenge for law enforcement. As a veteran FBI agent told me, domestic law enforcement has no systematic program to identify, assess, and respond to this kind of online radicalization. The Bureau still relies on old-fashioned methods—processing tips, knocking on doors, interviewing witnesses—and, in most cases, cannot intervene against disturbed individuals until after they strike.

These acts of terror reflect something dark in our nation’s soul. The perpetrators were so dissatisfied with their middle-class lives that they sought to destroy the highest symbols of their society: murdering children in church pews, an attack on God; and murdering a political speaker in cold blood, an attack on the republic.

Stopping similar killers in the future will be a major challenge. The Internet is hard to police and culture hard to reform. But we should keep the stakes in mind as we work to protect the things we love and grapple for a solution, however elusive it may seem.

Again, the focus on these two particular shooters’ transgender relationships is misplaced. There are many more examples of this phenomenon in which there is no transgender connection at all. But there is definitely something going on in these dark corners of the internet where alienated young people are finding an identity in violent nihilism and “meme culture.” And whatever is driving it aren’t the easy shibboleths about broken families and urban decadence. These people come from what appear to be, on the surface at least, the quintessential Real America.

It’s hopeful that someone in Rufo’s position is at least admitting that this isn’t ideological. Maybe there can be some common ground after all?

Fighting back works.

If your kid has a fever just let it run. Sure there are serious complications from high fevers but Dr Trump knows best. The rest is completely incoherent and wrong but that’s ok too. His uncle taught at MIT.

Even Nixon didn’t give medical advice.