STRAIGHT TALK AT LAST
Aug, 1 seems to have been the pivot
When Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more blatantly covered up the Epstein Scandal and ordered Texas elections to be henceforth and forever rigged, it seems the media infrastructure that was treating Trump news as more “conservative politics” started to collapse.
From Rachel Maddow, to Thomas Friedman to “Charlemagne Tha God” a new willingness to, perhaps, with a new do-or-die urgency, state it plain.
As these collect, I will collect them here, along with empowering plans for next action. To wit: Please make plans to find a protest Labor Day, Monday Sept. 1. See you there. Below is the best transcript I have of Rachel Maddow’s searing indictment last night. This is just beginning.
Illustrating Rachel tonight with the cover from the old Village Voice, when it was all just some stupid joke, for an article by the wonderful Lucian K. Truscott IV, who, like me, has found a warm home here on Substack. His work is essential reading. Please subscribe to him.
Rachel Maddow, Aug. 4, 2025:
It’s August. It’s a Monday. Every day the sun rises and the sun sets. And there are sports and movies and there are new hit songs. There are scandals here and there. There are crimes, everybody’s personal quotient of dramas and health worries and money worries. And people falling in and out of love. And in and out of faith.… None of our personal lives have stopped. And at the same time life in the United States is profoundly changing, is profoundly different than it was even six months ago because we now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge.
We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.
And it sounds melodramatic to say it. I know. But just go with that for a minute… Think in cinematic terms. Think of a certain level of caricature of what a dictatorship looks like. It’s secret police, right? A massive, anonymous, unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable, internal police force without limited funding, but no identifiable leadership. In that kind of caricature dictatorship you’d have a scapegoated minority group to blame for all things. In our case immigrants, a show of force by the Secret Police. All these shows of force will be framed as “necessary“ to stop this internal enemy they are trying to make into a national entertainment: to threaten to feed immigrants to alligators in South Florida, make them eat off dishes on the floor as if they’re dogs at the Krome detention center in Florida. They want to sell T-shirts. Then Trump says that the home-growns are next and he muses publicly about who he intends to strip of their citizenship. In a cartoon caricature of a dictatorship, displays of military might is not just be for the countries, external enemies, they’re for the country’s own people. Because, in an authoritarian country, you turn military force, inward, toward the people of that country. And so now we’ve got these large and expanding military zones from nearby military bases to extend hundreds and hundreds of miles by land so they can give active duty US troops the power to arrest people on US soil. The Intercept and US News report that Trump plans to permanently integrate active duty US military with immigrant enforcement. We will have military forces to do immigration enforcement, as in the LA protests.
BTW: Still in the woods upstate. But not looking away.
We took a hike today.
The Schmoo liked it almost as much as the nap!
New work Monday.
Hitler's secret Commando Order illegally stripped Allied commandos of all the protections of the Geneva Convention. Through their embrace of the antidemocratic and unconstitutional notion of the 'unitary executive' and their bent for a supreme leader, the extremist majority on the Supreme Court has effectively neutered the high Court and Legislature, and given Trump the go ahead to strip any of us of our civil rights. Certainly the Leo Supremes and Republican majority were hard at this before Trump appeared on the scene. Project 2025 is as much a declaration of authoritarianism long in the works as it is a roadmap for Trump2.
We must be our own allies in defeating what the GOP has become and what Republicans have authorized the Trump administration to be. The examples of our resistance must provide reeducation for the public. And our electorate - at the ballot box - will have to serve as the prosecutors and judges of the 2026 and 2028 American 'Nuremberg' trials.
Rights for me but not for thee... We now live in the nation of tRumplandia where it becomes more an more likely by the day that tRump's goons will start coming for critics like us. He also will be thinning his base by relieving them of their access to healthcare, food, and jobs they can survive on.