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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Whiny Little Billionaire Crybaby

Published by digby on March 31, 2025

Note that all that’s happening in that video is a handful of women yelling at a cybertruck driver who threatens to break the fingers of an elderly lady if she touches his precious Muskmobile.

Musk is the snowflake of the century. He makes Trump look like a stoic Viking by comparison.

Elon Musk, who is leading Donald Trump’s unprecedented purge of the federal workforce, claimed it doesn’t make sense that people dislike him because he’s only ever “done productive things” and has “never done anything harmful.”

Americans — to an ever increasing proportion — disagree. .. A slew of recent polling has found that an increasing majority of Americans view the billionaire and his hack-and-slash treatment of the government negatively, even if they support major reforms. 

After a judge found that DOGE and Musk “violated the Constitution” in a number of different ways, he went on Fox News and whined, claiming that the only people who are complaining are criminals:

Musk appeared on Fox News and discussed a recent string of protests as well as attacks and vandalism against Tesla vehicles and dealerships — claiming it’s happening because he and DOGE are uncovering fraud. 

“It turns out, when you take away people’s, you know, the money they’re receiving fraudulently, they get very upset, and they basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we’re stopping this, this terrible waste and corruption in the government,” Musk said, adding: “Bad people will do bad things.” […]

“Tesla is a peaceful company. We’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve only done productive things. So I think we just have a deranged — there’s some kind of mental illness thing going on here, because this doesn’t make any sense.”

Waaaaah!!! And naturally, it’s a conspiracy because Musk is a creature of the far right now, totally red-pilled by Twitter bullshit:

“There are larger forces at work as well,” he told Hannity on Tuesday, speaking about the Tesla attacks and protests. “I don’t know who’s funding it and who’s coordinating it, because this is, this is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this.” 

Right. Those little old ladies and protesters chanting “shame” are all Soros-paid Antifa warriors.

He’s got Daddy on the case:

He whines like a little bitch wherever he goes now:

It’s called schadenfreude. Read a book.

That’s a lie. Nobody knows what the hell Big Balls and the rest are doing but from what we can tell they are slashing and burning everything in their wake without even the slightest concern about the harm it’s doing.

The genius last night in Wisconsin trying to buy an election for a fascist:

The man standing on a stage literally handing out million dollar checks to people for voting for his candidate is blubbering about George Soros:

More lies and boo-hoos:

Note the weird Stasi language in so much of his rhetoric:

He goes on and on and on. His Twitter feed is full of this petulant caterwauling. He’s right up there with Trump crying about how unfair it is that people are being mean to him, they must all be paid to do it because everyone knows he is really universally beloved.

Wealthy man-children all think they are worshipped because everyone around them is always licking their boots. They are unaware that most of us either don’t care about them or actively loathe them for being the entitled jerks they are. That knowledge exposes their fragile little psyches.

The rich techno-nerds are especially living in a fantasy world in so many ways and are shocked to find out that the rest of us aren’t particularly impressed with their visions. And then they get mad, like the spoiled little princess they are.

Our Future

Published by digby on March 31, 2025

Much of what Trump is doing, whether he knows it or not, is modeled on Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the right’s favorite modern authoritarian state. This is what we have to look forward to.

Ann Applebaum in the Atlantic (gift link)

Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward.

Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

I think there’s no escaping this. Trump and his enablers and exploiters want the culture war victory that Orban’s model would give them. The rich guys don’t care because their wealth insulates them. The rest of us are stuck if they have their way.

I would just add that the world’s military superpower being in this condition is a recipe for serious disaster.

Just Another Day In The U.S.A.

Published by digby on March 31, 2025

Back in June of last year as I was still high on the hopium of dispatching Donald Trump and his MAGA cult once and for all, I recall reading a piece by Asawin Suebsaeng and  Adam Rawnsley in Rolling Stone with the provocative headline “Trump’s Not ‘Bluffing’: Inside the MAGA Efforts To Make a Second Term Even More Extreme.” I read it with interest but it sounded crazy. They quoted a bunch of Trump insiders saying things like “Yes, we do really want to burn it all down” and when asked about potential court challenges they replied, “Who cares?”

I didn’t take it totally seriously at the time. Trumpers are often blowhards just like their boss and at the time, I confess I didn’t believe that America would restore Trump to the White House after what he did on January 6th, the stolen classified documents and the felony convictions. Why would people want to buy that mess again?

Well, they bought it and I don’t know about you but it’s actually been worse than I anticipated. Even having read that article and many others about what he had in mind, the fact that “guardrails” would be completely torn down and he would be hiring nothing but ruthless henchmen to carry out his whims and wishes I was still unprepared for his reckless lack of restraint in ways that were never discussed prior to his winning the election.

Sure we knew that he was going to enact the Project 2025 blueprint and appoint a bunch of MAGA extremists to the cabinet. I don’t think we thought he’d stoop so low as to choose someone as unqualified as Pete Hegseth for the important job of Defense Secretary or RFK Jr for Health and Human Services but we probably should have known he’d have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to ensure the extreme loyalty he required. And I think we were all aware that he was going to use all the power at his disposal to exact revenge on his political enemies. (I did expect to see more resistance from the powerful institutions he’s targeted.)

The deportation campaign of undocumented immigrants is about what I expected although the sickening spectacle they are making of it is even more grotesque than I thought it would be. DHS Secretary Noem is showing a previously untapped theatrical talent, with more frequent costume changes than Beyonce on tour. I didn’t expect the expulsion of foreign students and scientists who have expressed views the government does not like, however, especially the use of creepy masked secret police to haul them off the streets with no notice and throwing them into distant detention camps.

And yes, we knew he would foul up the economy with his obsession for tariffs, which he called “the most beautiful word in the English language” and nobody even thought it was weird. I suspect that most people assumed that he would simply do what he did in the first term and make a big show of it without actually killing the golden goose of a good economy. It appears that was far too optimistic. He’s planning what he’s oddly called “liberation day” on April 2nd when he says he’s going to throw a bunch of tariffs on everyone although even his closest economic advisers say that he’s deciding minute by minute what he’s going to do.

But for all the outrages we’ve seen in these first couple of months, and there are so many, Trump has come up with a few that are so beyond the pale that you have to start questioning his sanity — and the sanity of those who are enabling him. But when you consider everything he’s actually doing I think you have to take him seriously.

For instance, I guess we knew that he had mentioned buying Greenland during his first term, (or exchanging it for Puerto Rico) after someone one had told him that Denmark was having trouble supporting the island and he thought it could be an acquisition like Alaska. (Trump’s folly?) Nobody thought much of it but now it’s quite clear that he actually means to do it, as if territorial expansion is a perfectly normal thing in the 21st century.

And then there’s the crazy feud with Canada which seems to stem from the same impulse as the Greenland obsession. Trump looks at a map and thinks he can consolidate all of North America into the United States, perhaps even change the name to Trumplandia for all we know.

This map is what gets him excited.

Consider that incredibly bizarre meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at which he publicly floated the idea of forced relocation of the Palestinians to other countries where they would be provided with nice houses and the U.S. would take over Gaza and turn it into an international resort. He hasn’t mentioned it recently so maybe someone finally explained to him that it would be better to put that idea on the back burner, but he was quite serious about it when he said it.

Trump has always been a narcissist but it has now become full blown megalomania. These are peculiar, radical, extreme ideas far outside even the MAGA mainstream, that are nonetheless being taken very seriously by people in his orbit and around the world. JD Vance, the alleged true blue MAGA America Firster, went to Greenland on Friday and basically proclaimed it to be American territory.

I don’t know if any of this will or can happen but considering how many of his proposals that we previously thought were completely mad are actually being implemented I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss the latest daft idea that he can run for a third term.

I know that his former adviser the influencer Steve Bannon has been floating that for a while, largely based upon some very fringe ideas from an activist lawyer named Mike Davis. The vast consensus is that it’s impossible because the Constitution clearly forbids it. But when asked by Kristen Welker in a phone interview on Sunday if he was joking when he said that he might run for a third term he said no. He said that he is so popular, more popular than any president in history — in the high 70 percent — that it might make sense. (The highest approval rating he has gotten so far is 50%)

He said:

Well, there are plans. There are — not plans. There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know.

She asked if he was talking about the idea that JD Vance could run for president with him as vice president and then hand it back to him on the day after the inauguration and he replied, “Well, that’s one. But there are others too. There are others.”

I have no idea what those plans might be but it is true that there has been talk that the Vance hand-off might actually be doable under a certain reading of the constitution.

Do I think it’s probable? Not likely. He’ll be 82 in 2028 and he’s already losing a whole lot of steps. Even saying “there are plans” out loud is a sign of instability. But the way things are going I think it would be a huge mistake for the opposition to just ignore this talk. These people have an extreme, autocratic, authoritarian agenda and we are seeing it unfold in real time before our eyes. Literally nothing is impossible.

Salon

Tomorrow In Wisconsin

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 31, 2025

And preaching to the choir

Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford.

Admittedly, I’ve not spent much time on Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election tomorrow. Here in N.C., we’re STILL trying to settle ours from Nov. 5. An appeals court decision on that race could arrive as early as Wednesday (1st and 3rd Wednesday decisions).

But you/we need Judge Susan Crawford to win her seat tomorrow in Wisconsin and put Elon Musk and his corrupt puppet in their places. You can still help. Because oligarchs like Elon Musk aren’t even being coy about buying elections anymore.

Don't let this be the future of "democracy." Elon Musk has already bought Brad Schimel. He wants to buy voters as well. Get out the vote for Susan Crawford.

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler.bsky.social) 2025-03-31T10:57:11.816Z

We’re not on the Road to Dystopia. We’re there. And we’re headed for Hungary. So….

Don't just get mad. Get even. Join a phone bank, knock doors, or donate to help elect Susan Crawford and beat Musk's puppet Brad Schimel: peoplevmusk.org

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler.bsky.social) 2025-03-31T13:16:47.962Z

Stop them in their tracks. This guy knows what’s going on.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
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

Big Sister Is Watching You

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 31, 2025

Can a parking ticket get you deported now?

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/27/columbia-let-me-down-how-indian-scholar-expelled-by-trump-fled-the-us

Flying is already unpleasant enough. Judging by the crashes and near misses lately, it’s gotten more dangerous. Maybe not statistically so, but enough to make the cost and inconvenience more of a nuisance. So something I just ran across may make us even more reluctant to enter an airport.

It is the case of Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian doctoral student at Columbia who learned that, for reasons unknown, her visa had been revoked about the time immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil. Agents came twice to her door, and the Fulbright recipient pursuing a Ph.D. in urban planning did not answer. Before they could return with a judicial warrant, she packed some belongings and hopped a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.

The New York Times from March 15:

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that characterized Ms. Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer and accused her of advocating violence and being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization.” The department did not provide any evidence for its allegations.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, posted surveillance footage on social media that showed Ms. Srinivasan lugging a suitcase at LaGuardia as she fled to Canada. Secretary Noem celebrated Ms. Srinivasan’s departure as a “self-deportation.”

Noem is ghoulish enough, especially after her Frau Schmerz video from El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center, but it’s that surveillance footage in the tweet below describing Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer that’s really unnerving.

“I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home app to self deport,” Noem says. I guess that means CBP didn’t have a chance to check Srinivasan for tattoos.

WTF? Does the CBP Home app trigger a video capture of a departing foreigner? It doesn’t mention that on the website. Or is CBP surveilling everyone in the airports? (I’m naive, I know.)

It seems Srinivasan had her visa revoked for not reporting dismissed tickets on her visa renewal. And those summonses were for what?

Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.

She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.

“She was taken in with roughly 100 other people after being blocked from returning to her apartment and getting stuck in the street,” said Nathan Yaffe, one of her lawyers. “The court recognized this when it dismissed her case as having no merit. Ranjani was just trying to walk home.”

Ms. Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form later in the year because her case had been dismissed in May and she did not have a conviction.

You know, in answer to “Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty, or other similar action?”

Apparently, “crimes against the American people” extend to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, jaywalking, or a parking ticket. You are a terrorist sympathizer or an actual terrorist if DHS says so, and no further evidence required. The Trump 2.0 administration and freaks like Stephen Miller and Noem have us well on our way to being a police state.

Update: The Trump administration’s roundup of student protesters is genuinely shocking

“The defining feature of American democracy, you could be forgiven for having thought, is that you can say what you think without having to fear that you will be arrested, locked up or deported for it.”

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
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

QOTD: A Cult Member

Published by digby on March 30, 2025

This one’s a U.S. Senator

Markwayne Mullins on Meet the Press this morning:

SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN:

What everybody needs to know, and I think they already know this about President Trump, is he doesn’t bluff. His words have meaning. And when he’s done, he is done and he’s moving onto plan B. The president is always looking down the road. He always has alternative plans. He wants to do plan A, plan B, plan C. But if that doesn’t work, he’ll go to plan D. And where we’re at right now is diplomacy with Russia hasn’t been working because Putin hasn’t been negotiating on good terms.

The president now with you, and the American people, he’s putting Putin on warning, saying, “Hey, listen. You better pay attention here. If you don’t come to the table and negotiate an end to the killing like I said I wanted to do, then we’re going to have alternative plans here and this is the first alternative. And by the way, we have three more plans behind this if this doesn’t work.”

KRISTEN WELKER:

We also talked about tariffs, the president saying these auto tariffs that he has just announced are permanent. And, of course, he’s continued his vows to make Canada the 51st state after imposing these new auto tariffs. I want to play for you a little bit of what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had to say in response to these tariffs.

[BEGIN TAPE]

PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY:

The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economics and tight security and military cooperations is over.

[END TAPE]

KRISTEN WELKER:

Senator, has the United States lost Canada as an ally?

SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN:

No. We haven’t lost ally – Canada as an ally. They need us more than we need them. The fact is we have been subsidizing their economy by the tunes of billions of dollars every single year and they know that. What President Trump is saying is, is enough is enough. Right? If you want to have a relationship with the United States, it’s going to be an even playing field, a two-way street. We want reciprocal tariffs. We want to be treated the same. We want to have access to your economy like you have access to us. And if you want to have fair and balanced trade, then that’s fine. But our economy is not subsidizing your economy anymore. What Canada knows is that the United States has given them a sweetheart deal for them to have access to us, access to our economy. At the same time, we protect them.

Now they do fight with us. They are an ally of us in every war that we’ve had. We appreciate that. But at the same time, we need to be treated equally. And if they don’t want to come to the negotiating deal and realize that we are in this fight together, our economies, our border, national security means national security for all America, not just – not just the United States. And if they want to have that type of negotiation and that type of deal with us, we’re willing to do that.

But they’re not wanting to. They’re wanting to keep the same old sweetheart deal they’ve had in place and President Trump is willing to say, “Enough’s enough.” It’s about time. Because what President Trump is doing is he’s protecting America’s future. America’s economy going down the road. Our workers have suffered, our farmers have suffered, our manufacturers have suffered because we’ve had weak leadership in the White House and President Trump isn’t putting up with it anymore. So, thank goodness we have a tough leader finally that’s standing up against these people.

A tough leader who is finally standing up to “these people.” The Canadians.

God Bless Dear Leader.

By the way, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s worth watching the whole interview if you have time. The stuff he said about the Signal security breach is unbelievable.

I am sure that Oklahoma could do better than this. This man is very, very dim.

A Wingnut Babymaker Conference

Published by digby on March 30, 2025

This isn’t a new movement by any means, but now it has money behind it. Rich Silicon Valley incels are all about populating the earth with their “superior” genes.

Organizers behind a pronatalist conference with far-right ties in Austin, Texas, this weekend have set up matchmaking events for attendees that include the option of getting married onsite as part of their greater effort to repopulate the world, WIRED has learned.

According to its website, the sold-out Natal Conference, taking place March 28-29 at a hotel operated by the University of Texas at Austin, has “no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren.” But the event, an earlier version of which was promoted by Elon Musk, features speakers like Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and Crémieux, an online pseudonym linked, according to The Guardian, to Jordan Lasker, who discusses falling birthrates and promotes eugenics.

Natal Conference organizer Kevin Dolan, a father of at least six, according to Politico, has previously stated that eugenics—the belief that white people are genetically superior—and the pronatalist movement are “very much aligned.”

Ya think? Recall from a couple of years ago this story about Musk:

It is no secret that the most prolific innovator on the planet, Elon Musk, took an engineering approach to reproduction, and his first five boys came into this world via IVF, and the last girl was delivered using a surrogate mother.

The Tesla mogul and his former wife, author Justine Wilson, welcomed son Nevada Alexander Musk in 2002. Nevada died of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, at only 10 weeks. After losing their firstborn, Musk and Wilson turned to IVF to grow their family. She gave birth to twin sons Griffin and Xavier Musk in April 2004. The couple also used IVF to welcome triplet sons Kai, Saxon and Damian in January 2006.

Later on, Musk began dating singer Grimes, who gave birth to their son X AE A-XII. Earlier in March, Grimes revealed that she and the SpaceX founder had welcomed their first daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, via surrogate in December 2021. And there are claims that Elon and Amber Heard had a legal battle around the cryopreserved embryos.

In recent weeks rumors surfaced that he had two more kids with the board member of OpenAI and executive at Neuralink. Sex of the babies was not disclosed. Considering how busy Elon is, business ethics of such a relationship, and the fact that there are two babies, there is a chance that he just served as a donor.

The article speculated that all of those babies being boys suggested that he was doing sex selection. I wouldn’t be surprised.

He’s had more kids recently (at least 14 total) all apparently conceived through IVF — he says he doesn’t have time for sex. He’s building a secure compound in Texas for all of his children to live together.

He’s the techno-Warren Jeffs. And there are a whole bunch of his acolytes also pushing natalism to keep women pumping out white babies as fast as they can.

A Big Bet On A Crazy Man

Published by digby on March 30, 2025

When Trump took office in 2017, tariff revenue was about 1.5% of total U.S. goods imports. By 2019, he had roughly doubled that to 2.9%, according to an analysis of federal data by the Yale Budget Lab.

  • If the across-the-board tariffs implemented on Canada, Mexico and China this week remain in place the remainder of the year, that number is on track to soar to 9.5%, the highest since 1943.

You may recall that we were in the middle of WWII in 1943.

The 2018 to 2019 tariffs were implemented by invoking Sections 232 and 301 of trade statutes, the former giving the president authority to impose duties on national security grounds and the latter to combat unfair trade practices.

Those laws demand a process of studies and appeals, which slowed their implementation while preventing unintended consequences.

By contrast, this week’s new round of tariffs invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president broad powers with few checks “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat.”

And, by the way, that 9.5% doesn’t include the “liberation day” catastrophe that’s about to happen next week. The unusual and extraordinary threat we face is Donald Trump.

Daddy’s Home

Published by digby on March 30, 2025

And he’s a fascist sociopath

Charlie Warzel at the Atlantic:

On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.

The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced “4o” model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things. The White House did not respond directly to a request for comment, instead referring me to a post by Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr that says, in part, “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

It’s worth pausing here: The internet has been flooded with AI-generated images in this exact Studio Ghibli style. Some people have used it for images of pets or family members. Others opted for a trollish register, leading ChatGPT to spit out cutesy renderings of JFK’s assassination, planes hitting the World Trade Center, and the torture at Abu Ghraib. On X, the prevalence of these images became an event unto itself, one in which the White House decided to participate by sharing a cartoon of a woman crying in handcuffs.

This is how the White House account operates now. In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful.

This isn’t Trump’s personal account. It isn’t some MAGA influencer. This is the official White House account. It makes me want to vomit.

On Wednesday, the account posted a picture of Vice President J. D. Vance shooting a tactical rifle, referring to the bullets he fired as “freedom seeds,” a term popular among gun YouTubers. When Google Maps adopted the “Gulf of America” language pushed by the administration, the White House account celebrated by sharing a video in which the words Gulf of Mexico are wiped off the globe. In February, it posted an AI-generated picture of Trump as an American monarch, wearing a crown. The image’s caption reads, “Long live the king.”

After the disastrous Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the account posted a photo of Vance staring at Zelensky with the caption “Have you said thank you once?” Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.

I guess Big balls and the DOGE boys aren’t the only adolescents they’ve hired in the second Trump administration.

But hey, I guess this is what America voted for.

By the way, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but when it comes to the grotesque cruelty being visited upon immigrants, many of them being proved to be innocent, guess what?

It’s not a huge majority but it’s more than enough to ratchet up the cruelty to entertain the folks.

By the way:

Sorry. Unless we go into a deep recession and we get stagflation not seen since the 1970s and massive suffering ensues among his own people, I’m not sure anything can stop him. (According to that poll, most people still blame Biden for inflation, although that may change once the tariffs really kick in. People don’t like them.)

We have a cultural problem that transcends politics — a large number of our family, friends and neighbors have lost all sense of decency. I don’t know if it’s worse than it’s been in the past but our government has made it operational and it’s dominating our society. This is how fascism takes hold.