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So, here’s the bad news: fascism isn’t coming to America; it’s here.

We are long past the warnings of an approaching existential threat looming on the distant horizon of our story. The nightmare is no longer a future improbability but a present reality.

The current President kept his 2024 campaign promise to be a “dictator on day one,” wiping out decades of protections and partnerships with the stroke of a pen.
He filled his Cabinet with the absolute moral dregs of humanity, people committed to nothing but him, and the power and wealth that sycophantic devotion affords them.
He and his soulless accomplices have quickly dismantled every system and safeguard that, up until a couple of years ago, were established givens.

And the only question left is: do we have the strength to stop them?

History is a really good teacher.

If we pay attention to her, she reminds us that populations don’t become monstrous overnight, that nations don’t abandon humanity in a single moment, and that generational human rights atrocities don’t form in an instant or a vacuum.

Collective sickness is never sudden. There is always a slow, deliberate, almost imperceptible pattern, and we’re seeing it now:

Manufacturing fear: misinformation, fake emergencies, and abject lies all designed to create an unnecessary urgency in the heads of easily manipulated people and to make them feel hopelessly assailed.

The crafting of surrounding enemies: encroaching threats to tangibly embody the nightmares they have made in their heads; someone to go to war against, to take back their country from—someone these leaders can save them from.

The weaponizing of religion: making the manipulated believe that their mission is not just important or right, but holy; that they are being obedient to God while eradicating other human beings.

In that state of frantic, perpetually terrorized self-righteousness, they begin to allow everything. They can justify all manners of cruelty, all denials of care, every act of violence, because they are purifying and protecting their divinely curated country.

Once this happens, once-ordinary, rational, even compassionate people begin to lose their ability to see the humanity in front of them—it’s too late to help them see clearly.

This is how holocausts and genocides happen.

This is where historic national malignancies grow.

These are the first steps down a road that at the beginning seems unthinkable.

Decent Americans, we need to listen to History right now.
She is warning us that we are on the precipice of a free fall.
We can’t afford to go to sleep now.
We need to wake ourselves up.

America is not yet near where Germany was at the peak of Hitler’s power, but Germany wasn’t always there either, and that is the point.

That hideous transformation (like so many before) required targeted propaganda, fake news streams, dehumanizing rhetoric from leadership, an uninformed electorate, coercive religion, and a marginalized population to serve as the focal point for the holy war.

Most of all, it required a large number of decent people to be silent, which is why we will not.

It would be completely irresponsible and reckless to suggest that the United States in 2026 is Germany in 1941, but it could very well be Germany in 1933.

We cannot let the myth of American exceptionalism numb us into imagining we are above devolving into inhumanity. We have every ingredient in place to abandon the best of ourselves and to become something monstrous, something History records as yet another shocking failure of the center. It can and will happen here unless we refuse to allow it.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that America will give birth to something as tragic and sickening as we have seen. Still, we’re stupid and arrogant if we don’t believe ourselves capable, and that we aren’t already seeing the warning signs of bigotry and prejudice irreversibly taking root.

The question is whether or not we have enough good people who are willing to push back and to move together across lines of politics and religion and race and nation of origin and orientation and to declare our independence from fascism.

Do we have the energy, the diligence, and the courage to join our disparate voices into a single, furious choir that refuses to stop singing songs of freedom for everyone?

Do Americans have the attention span and intestinal fortitude to fight as they’ve never had to fight before because they’ve never had to go to war with their government in this way before?

Will we refuse to tolerate injustice in the name of national greatness or divine will, to reject and oppose denials of people’s worth and humanity even when it comes from our party or our church or our families?

And perhaps most of all, do we have the humility not to imagine that we are too intelligent or spiritual or informed not to become as monstrous a nation as we have seen others become?

My money says we do.

Yes, the bad news is that fascism is here, but the good news is that so are we.

Dictators don’t oust themselves, horrible regimes don’t leave on their own, and oligarchs don’t tire of devouring up nations, but fortunately, decent, brave, and organized human beings like us aren’t gonna wait around for that.

We have a month left to transform the what is into the what will be.

May we be our best selves in this moment, so that History one day tells our story as one where disparate humanity twisted the plot.

Now that fascism is here, let’s make sure we drive it back to the hell it came from.

We can. We must. We will.

Take heart, good people.

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The Only Thing Donny Has Ever Been A Success At…

…is keeping us outraged.

Seriously, what is it going to take—what line needs to be crossed—to get this lunatic removed from office? Because it’s becoming increasingly obvious he has no intention of ever leaving voluntarily.

Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of Donny Says Stupid Shit, the show where our Very Special President gets away with blurting out the kind of crazypants dumbfuckery that would immediately end the political career of any mere mortal who said the same thing.

“And again, remember. With the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay. for keeping the world safe. For keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let ’em take— let it— let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take our San Diego. That’s— this is a very small price to pay.”

Wait a minute — did this depraved shithead just give Iran permission to nuke a couple of our cities? Did he actually call such an act ‘a very small price to pay’?

Is Preznit Fuckwit … joking? Is he serious? Is he so demented that he has no idea what he’s actually saying? Does it even matter why Donny said what he said? Dude is clearly unfit for office, and growing worse by the day.

This is probably a good time to note that my What The Fuck Is Wrong With You Challenge™ is now in its 2,371st day.

Where are you, worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press?

Imagine that Sleepy Joe Biden’s autopen had blundered its way into an unwinnable war, and then invited our adversary to nuke the shit out of us. The press would have had a field day, falling all the fuck over themselves in a mad dash to file their stories.

Jake Tapper would have orgasmed on the spot.

Where are the calls for Donny to resign?

Remember Joe Biden’s last year in office? The press had their knives out. Every time Joe stumbled over a word, or took too long to reply to a question, every newspaper in the land would shit out editorial after editorial, calling Biden icky and old and smelly, and demanding that he resign immediately, ‘to serve his country.’

Where are you now, O Glorious Editorial Writers? Donny is in fact icky and old — and he probably smells like shit. Have you seen one call for Dear Leader to step down, to serve his country? I haven’t. Why the fuck not?

Come on, Donny can’t hack it any more. Most of the time, he’s just blithering incomprehensible nonsense.

“You need to be a student at the top of your class at MIT to turn on a lawnmower nowadays, you know? But I got rid of all that stuff. Now you can have a LAWNMOWER. Boom!!”

What is this fucking idiot — this pampered fool — who has never done a day’s labor in his life, imagine he’s done to improve lawnmowers? What ‘stuff’did he ‘get rid of’?What is he hallucinating about?

ast summer, I bought a new lawnmower. It was the same as every lawnmower I’ve had since the 1960s. You pull the string and it goes vroom-vroom. Hey Jake Tapper, maybe you can explain it to me. What exactly has Donny done to Make Lawnmowers Great Again?

Why is the crowd clapping like trained seals at Dear Leader’s fever-swamp bullshit? My god, they’re just as brain dead as he is.

Again, Donny has been getting away with this shit for literal years, nattering on and on about stoves that don’t light, or toilets you have to flush a million times. Where are the worthless scribblers?

And when Donny’s not confabulating, he’s just outright lying.

“It’ll end very quickly and prices are gonna come down very sharply. You might say, ‘please, please, sir, it’s going down too fast!’ You watch. You watch what’s going to happen in a very short period of time.”

Ohhhhh, okay. This unwinnable don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran — the one that was only supposed to last one day; the one that Donny has claimed we’ve already won twenty times or more — now, it’s going to end very quickly. Any day now, just you wait and see — and then prices will plummet, and big, strong cultists, the afternoon sun rippling off their massive biceps, blinded by the uncontrollable tears of joy coursing down their ruddy cheeks, grateful for cheap gas like few thought possible, and the easy-to-start lawnmowers like no one’s ever seen before, and the radioactive craters where Los Angeles and San Diego used to be — they will all come up to Dear Leader and go ‘sir! sir! we can’t stand it any more! it’s going down too fast! Sir!”

And then, pigs will start flying out of my ass. 

Donny never stops promising us that there’s going to be so much wining, we’re going to get tired of all the winning. Fuck that noise. I’m still waiting for the winning to start.

Wouldn’t you love it if our press would spend even ten minutes honestly reporting on any of this shit?

Look at CNN, dancing around the issue of Donny saying the very thing we all heard him say.

Top California officials denounce President Trump after he appeared to suggest Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego

Ohhh, Dear Leader ‘appeared’ to say what he said. How helpful of you to point that out, CNN. I can’t wait for CNN’s report that San Diego ‘appears’ to be a smoking ruin.

Apparently, if you want accuracy in reporting, you need to cross the ocean and read the Guardian.

First Thing: ‘Deranged’ and ‘dangerous’ Trump calls for Iran to strike US cities amid historic ratings low

That’s more like it. Are you paying attention, US press?

Sigh. I thought not.

It’s time for a palate cleanse. Let’s watch in awe as Davram Stiefler of the Good Liars tries and fails to get a gang of cultists to answer the age-old question, ‘why are socialism?’

Davram Stiefler: “Is everyone worried about socialism?”

MAGA: “Oh, 100%. It never works”

Stiefler: “For the viewers, what is socialism?”

MAGA: “Socialism is pretty much, I mean, it’s control of everything, I mean, they want control and there’s no… uhm… I don’t even… how to explain it, but… you have no control at all. I mean it’s just, it’s their way or the highway”

Stiefler: “But as an economic form of governance, what is it?”

MAGA: “Socialism”

I can’t even with these dumbfucks. The definition of socialism as an economic form of governance is socialism. Thanks a lot, Brainiac. You’ve really done us a solid with that simple explanation.

Jack Smith was spotted at an outdoor music festival this past weekend, wearing a ‘No Kings’ tee-shirt.

Naturally, this caused the entire MAGAverse to shit one massive brick. How dare Jack Smith exercise his First Amendment right to express a personal opinion — while also listening to music at the same time! Treason! Treason!

And, of course, no one whined louder than our whiny Whiner-in-Chief.

Maybe Donny should invite Iran to nuke Jack Smith. Y’know, kill two birds with one stone.

And again I ask…what is it going to take to have him removed from office, ecause it’s obvious the Grim Reaper isn’t up to the job.

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Here We Go Again

I. Just. Can’t. Anymore.

I guess it’s time to pull all those masks out of storage. Especially with my health being what it is.

Because if you think Trump’s government did very little last time, and it reaches our shores (as it inevitably will) they’re going to do even less this time. It will be up to each of us to protect ourselves when we’re out and about. And if you think the MAGA crowd fought masks last time, buckle up sweetheart. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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Am I The Only One Who Misses This?

Damn it! Another AI generated image that isn’t immediately obvious.

At first image this looks like a real photograph. But then I noticed something was off about the CDs in the racks. They weren’t square, nor were they in the long-box packaging that briefly flourished in the 90s to thwart shoplifting. Then I noticed the generic posters hanging over the racks and then the shopper’s feet in the foreground.

Here’s a real photo of the glory days:

Amoeba Records, Haight Street SF, August 1998

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Being A Desert Rat…

Yeah, it’s AI generated and the architects readily admit it’s not a real project yet. But I love setting and choice of materials. I could live there. I just wish they’d published a floor plan.

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