The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

By Hunter — November 23, 2023
One of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' more bizarre moves has been the establishment of the Florida State Guard. This during a gubernatorial tenure that has seen DeSantis lurch to the far, far right on everything from civil rights to public education to whether or not people suspected of "drug smuggling" ought to be summarily executed upon crossing our southern border. The guard was announced with some pomp in 2022 and premised as an alternative version of the state National Guard under the orders of nobody but the governor himself and would be focused on emergency response in case of natural disasters or other state emergencies.

Why DeSantis needed his own alternative to the National Guard was always sketchy, and critics warned from the beginning that the authoritarian-minded, vengeance-obsessed DeSantis was exactly the sort of political leader who should not be given his own dedicated paramilitary force. The suspicions were that Florida Republicans were not creating an "emergency preparedness" force, but a state-sponsored anti-federal militia.





Those fears quickly proved to be grounded. Last June, scandal erupted when a founding supervisor and other volunteers quit, warning that the training program for the new state guard was "heavily militarized," with "marching drills and military-style training sessions on weapons and hand-to-hand combat." The governor's office then appeared to bend the previously stated purpose for the guard, telling The New York Times the group would help "ensure Florida remains fully fortified to respond to not only natural disasters, but also to protect its people and borders from illegal aliens and civil unrest."

That gave the game away. DeSantis and Republican lawmakers may have sold the program as one of emergency preparedness, but the training appears to be focused on an imagined future of armed and hand-to-hand combat with "illegal aliens," or with the state facing "civil unrest."

Last week, the Miami Herald broke the news that the DeSantis administration had hired Stronghold SOF Solutions to recruit and train guard volunteers. The paramilitary-minded company "trains police and military members on tactical shooting, explosives and urban combat," reports the Herald, and "lists as one of its instructors a former U.S. Navy SEAL accused of war crimes."

The Southern Poverty Law Center is now weighing in as well. The SPLC normally dedicates itself to tracking hate groups and potentially violent anti-government militias. Now it's issued an unusual analysis warning that the Florida State Guard appears to be rapidly transforming into a true oddity: a state-sponsored anti-government militia.

“I would be worried that people who harbor more extreme antigovernment views are going to be eager to join up,” [Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection]’s policy counsel Jacob Glick told Hatewatch. “This [FSG] is a state backed carbon copy of how a lot of these illegal, private militia groups operate.” He noted that antigovernment extremists “fantasize about being recruited by Far-Right authoritarian politicians to do their dirty work.” Glick worries FSG establishes a structure whereby such groups as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys can terrorize their perceived enemies with the air of state-sanctioned legality. Glick isn’t alone in these types of concerns.

Jason Van Tatenhove, who served as a high-ranking Oath Keepers official and now speaks out about the perils of the antigovernment movement, warned Hatewatch that FSG seems to be playing the same public relations game his old militia group did – saying FSG focuses on emergency preparedness when it actually concentrates on paramilitary and combat training. He described FSG as a “professional, private paramilitary organization that is extremely well funded.”

Why DeSantis needed his own alternative to the National Guard was always sketchy, and critics warned from the beginning that the authoritarian-minded, vengeance-obsessed DeSantis was exactly the sort of political leader who should not be given his own dedicated paramilitary force. The suspicions were that Florida Republicans were not creating an "emergency preparedness" force, but a state-sponsored anti-federal militia.

Last week, the Miami Herald broke the news that the DeSantis administration had hired Stronghold SOF Solutions to recruit and train guard volunteers. The paramilitary-minded company "trains police and military members on tactical shooting, explosives and urban combat," reports the Herald, and "lists as one of its instructors a former U.S. Navy SEAL accused of war crimes."

The Southern Poverty Law Center is now weighing in as well. The SPLC normally dedicates itself to tracking hate groups and potentially violent anti-government militias. Now it's issued an unusual analysis warning that the Florida State Guard appears to be rapidly transforming into a true oddity: a state-sponsored anti-government militia.

“I would be worried that people who harbor more extreme antigovernment views are going to be eager to join up,” [Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection]’s policy counsel Jacob Glick told Hatewatch. “This [FSG] is a state backed carbon copy of how a lot of these illegal, private militia groups operate.” He noted that antigovernment extremists “fantasize about being recruited by Far-Right authoritarian politicians to do their dirty work.” Glick worries FSG establishes a structure whereby such groups as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys can terrorize their perceived enemies with the air of state-sanctioned legality. Glick isn’t alone in these types of concerns.

Task Force Butler, a non-profit that trains veterans in research and operations to counter extremism, portrays FSG as possibly the “single greatest direct cash infusion” the antigovernment militia movement has ever seen.

t doesn't take much imagination to envision DeSantis calling up his militia to act as thuggish state-sanctioned guards if, say, student protests at state universities were to run afoul of any of his future unpopular edicts.

An alleged response force trained in military-style combat that exists outside the military and is not answerable to military codes of conduct is a nightmarish scenario for anti-extremism experts.

Kristofer Goldsmith, founder and CEO of Task Force Butler, expressed concerns over the necessity of a police force within FSG and the lack of accountability. He asked, “If the governor of Florida doesn’t think that law enforcement, the National Guard, the military and non-profits that deploy veterans for disaster relief are good enough to do their jobs and serve Florida, then how is the new Florida State Guard, which has been given vast powers with virtually no accountability or responsibility, going to be empowered to make positive change?” Without any accountability or transparency, Task Force Butler says FSG becomes an “extrajudicial” entity like other antigovernment militias.

Of equal concern to experts is that recruiting volunteers to receive free paramilitary hand-to-hand combat, arms training, and military equipment is a very good way to attract and train up anti-government extremists.

Goldsmith agreed with this assessment and noted what type of people are likely to be attracted to such training. “Anytime that the Florida State Guard is doing Oath Keepers training, it’s going to attract Oath Keepers,” Goldsmith said “When they start doing service to communities, they’ll attract people who want to actually serve their communities.” Considering FSG recruits are given military-style equipment and training, Goldsmith asked, “Why wouldn’t extremists take advantage of that new training opportunity?” He said he believes extremists will “gladly exploit” FSG.

DeSantis now has a small private army that's not answerable to National Guard or military leaders if wrongdoing occurs, one that seems intentionally crafted in premise and training to mirror anti-government militia groups throughout the country. The SPLC is right to be worried; there is nothing in DeSantis' past that suggests he would be able to resist using his barely trained new security force for political posturing, in Florida or outside of it. And his targets are likely to be the same groups of Americans he and the SPLC's extensive list of far-right hate groups have already declared to be enemies.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.

https://crooksandliars.com/2023/11/report-shows-desantis-has-private-fascist

he is as much of a threat as Mango

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including The New York Times bestseller “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
—
If the nation learned one thing during Donald Trump’s presidency, it’s that he does what he says he will do.

Which is why recent comments by Trump, the leading nominee in the Republican primary for the 2024 presidential election, once again shattering the norms of political speech, have justifiably raised alarm. On Veteran’s Day, Trump called his enemies “vermin” and spoke of his intention to go after opponents should he regain power. “The threat from outside forces,” he said, “is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” In Trump’s twisted world, the dangers once posed by caravans of illegal immigrants have been supplanted by his domestic opponents. And when he was president, his fearmongering rhetoric was translated into devastatingly real-world actions; his anti-immigrant posture led to policies like entry bans for many and separations of migrant families at the border while in office.

So it’s essential to understand that, besides deploying an autocratic vocabulary to whip up support among those who love him and intimidate those who do not, Trump’s words rest on a broader vision for a vast expansion of presidential power. This is not just an imminent threat because of what a Trump presidency would represent, but also because, given the lessons of the history, future presidents could be emboldened by it as well.

Trump has been working with the Heritage Foundation to map out a plan for filling key agency positions with loyalists. Part of the goal is to screen tens of thousands of individuals to make sure that they would follow his orders as president.

Trump is also thinking of issuing many pardons to overturn the work completed by the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden prosecuting him, his advisors and his allies. He wants the authority to remove labor protections for the civil service so that he can hire and fire federal workers at will, while dramatically extending his power into the realm of education in particular. Federal prosecutors would be brought in to curb local crime, and the White House would tighten its grip over the Department of Justice, continuing to shatter the separation that emerged after Watergate.

Just in case anyone is missing the President Richard Nixon comparison, Trump would start impounding congressional funds again — refusing to spend money that the House and Senate appropriated — which is exactly what caused Congress to pass major reforms in 1974 centralizing the budget process and constraining the use of impoundments.

As The New York Times reports, Trump and his associates want to “alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign proposals and interviews with people close to him.”

To do so, the Times continued, “Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.”

To be sure, the growing authority of the presidency is nothing new. Nor is it a Republican story. Executive power has steadily expanded since the founding of the republic, accelerating greatly the 1930s and 1940s when President Franklin Roosevelt vastly expanded the executive branch.

Although liberals had once praised this power as a necessary source of centralization which would allow decisive leadership to address the nation’s needs, hope turned to fear when Nixon revealed how that authority could be used for dangerous ends to go after opponents, reward loyal supporters and to conduct illicit and even illegal operations. As the Watergate investigation was getting underway, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. acknowledged that he had previously not fully recognized the dangers of empowering presidents until he wrote his 1973 book, “Imperial Presidency.”

Although Congress passed a series of reforms in the 1970s — such as the 1973 War Powers Act — that curtailed the presidency, the institution continued to expand its reach in the decades to come. Some reforms, such as a 1978 law that created an independent prosecutor who could investigate certain allegations in the executive branch, were allowed to expire. Others were overturned, and others proved ineffectual.

Following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, President George W. Bush pushed for another vast expansion of executive power on the grounds that it was essential to protect national security.

Presidential power has been a bipartisan affair. Democrats have used the authority for their own ends. Frustrated with the Republican Congress, for instance, President Bill Clinton used executive action to expand the environmental programs of the federal government. Most recently, Biden leaned on executive power to advance a student loan forgiveness program that the courts ultimately overturned.

While presidents from both parties have deployed executive power, not all presidents have intentionally mapped out plans to go after their enemies without any legal justification. This is what Trump has in mind and it’s downright Nixonian. It’s also why he represents a threat to the Oval Office that goes beyond the typical issue of consolidating power.

Trump has shown quite clearly how he is willing to ignore any institutional or normative guardrails that have been in place — from leveraging foreign aid as a way to obtain campaign fodder on an opponent to rejecting the legitimate results of an election. He has continually used his bully pulpit, in rallies and on social media, to target opponents and inflame his army of supporters.

The ability to manipulate the power of his position has been made clear, though, as the findings about January 6 revealed. What many initially thought was yet another moment of Trumpian chaos was actually a systematic, carefully orchestrated and quite sweeping plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to multiple congressional and legal investigations.

If it had not been for the action of key individuals, from former Vice President Mike Pence to numerous federal judges, the plan could have been successful. The lesson should not be that the system worked, but how close we came to a total disaster and how our democracy depended on people doing the right thing at the right time.

Voters should be paying close attention right now. When presidents use presidential power in dangerous ways, not only does this present a dangerous stress test at the moment, but it also means that over time, the expansions of power are rarely cut back. When Trump breaks governing norms, he also establishes dangerous new ones.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/22/opinions/trump-second-term-presidential-power-zelizer/index.html

and let's not forget.... he will not leave the white House ever.... if he wins 2024 is the last presidential election until nature catches up to him.

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan on Monday hit back at conservative lawyer and activist Mike Davis after Davis vowed to deport the journalist if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election and Davis is named, as is being pitched by multiple Trump insiders, as attorney general.

Hasan on his show Sunday exposed “Davis’ threats to send journalists to the D.C. gulag” and “his repeated calls on social media for his followers to ‘arm up against the violent Black underclass’” during a segment on the extremist figures who may carry out Trump’s radical agenda in a potential second term.

British-American Hasan was now on Davis’ lists to be indicted, detained, denaturalized and deported, he wrote.

“I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag,” the possible cabinet member added. “But I’ll put him in the women’s cell block, with @Timodc [former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller]. So these whiny leftists don’t get beat up as often.”

Hasan sarcastically responded: “Nothing to see here, just the former Gorsuch law clerk touted as Trump’s next attorney-general, threatening to indict, detain, & deport me (for what?) & put Tim Miller, who is gay, in a women’s prison.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mehdi-hasan-mike-davis-deportation-threat_n_655c775de4b0c0333bed613e

In June, the city of Murfreesboro passed a decency ordinance, originally designed to ban drag performances on city property. The text of the law says it is intended to promote “public decency, [maintain] family-friendly environments in public places, and [protect] against harm to minors from public expressions appealing to prurient interests.”

The ordinance also contains a clause that cites another city law which classifies public homosexuality as indecent behavior. The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee has filed a lawsuit against the new ordinance, accusing it of violating the First and 14th amendments. The ordinance was temporarily blocked, but has since been allowed to go into effect.

The police chief and the city manager are charged with enforcing it by deciding which incidents violate the law, according to Murfreesboro Mayor Shane McFarland.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/murfreesboro-library-book-ban_n_65567d9ce4b0998d699f7e61

This was only part of the article..... You all should re-read the 2nd paragraph above.

This is what the MAGA trash/GOPQ wish to bring to the entire country.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A Colorado judge on Friday allowed Donald Trump to remain on the ballot in the state's election next year, but found that he "engaged in insurrection" by sparking the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

The ruling from Judge Sarah Wallace, which is almost certain to be appealed, rejects a bid by a group of Colorado voters to disqualify Trump under a rarely used amendment to the U.S. Constitution that bars officials who have engaged in "insurrection" from holding federal office.

The judge found that, as president, Trump was not "an officer of the United States" that could be disqualified under the amendment.

The decision is a victory for Trump, who is fighting a series of similar challenges to his candidacy. A Trump spokesperson on Friday said the ruling was "another nail in the coffin of the un-American ballot challenges."

"The American voter has a Constitutional right to vote for the candidate of their choosing, with President Donald J. Trump leading by massive numbers," the spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.

Still, the judge concluded Trump's "conduct and words were the factual cause of, and a substantial contributing factor" to the attack on the Capitol. She found that Trump "engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 through incitement."

The Colorado case, which was brought by a group of voters aided by the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was the first to go to trial and was viewed as a test case for the wider disqualification effort.

CREW President Noah Bookbinder said the group would appeal the ruling.

"The court's decision affirms what our clients alleged in this lawsuit: that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection based on his role in January 6th," Bookbinder said in a statement.

Lawyers for the voters argued that Trump engaged in an insurrection by spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, summoning supporters to a rally in Washington and then urging them to march to the U.S. Capitol, where Congress was meeting to certify the election results.

Thousands of Trump supporters then stormed the Capitol, assaulting police and sending lawmakers running for their lives, in an unsuccessful bid to stop the certification.

Trump's lawyers claimed the former president had no relationship with the far-right extremist groups who played a major role in the attack and that his remarks before the riot were protected by his right to free speech.

The ruling applies only to the Republican presidential primary and general election in Colorado. The state is rated as safely Democratic by nonpartisan political forecasters for the general election.

The decision is the latest setback for the effort to disqualify Trump. Courts in Minnesota and Michigan have rejected efforts to keep him off the Republican primary ballot, but have not ruled on his eligibility for the November 2024 general election.

The Colorado decision can be appealed to the state's supreme court and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three Trump appointees.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone, Daniel Wallis and Rosalba O'Brien)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/colorado-judge-allows-trump-primary-002823400.html

By Kerry Eleveld — November 17, 2023
President Joe Biden connected the dots for voters Tuesday with an unassailable truth about the Republican abortion bans sweeping the country: "The only reason there is an abortion ban in America is because of Donald Trump."

Appearing at a campaign reception in San Francisco, Biden sought to push back on the growing narrative that Trump has been "vague" on abortion when he has repeatedly bragged about how "proud" he was to "terminate" Roe v. Wade. The Trump campaign is also currently running an Iowa ad crediting his judicial appointments for overturning the '70s-era Supreme Court ruling that made access to abortion a federal right.

To Biden's point, whatever pro-choice conservatives might tell themselves about Trump's abortion position, Trump is solely responsible for enabling Republican state lawmakers to ram through these six-week, 12-week, and 15-week abortion bans at the expense of their constituents.

"Let’s be absolutely clear what Trump’s bragging about," Biden told event attendees, "The only reason there is an abortion ban in America is because of Donald Trump. The only reason teenagers in Ohio are being forced to travel out of state to get their healthcare is because of Donald Trump. The only reason a fundamental right has been stripped away from the American people for the first time in American history is because of Donald Trump."

All of this may seem obvious to pro-choice Democrats, but some recent focus groups suggest pro-choice Republicans are deluding themselves about the threat a Trump presidency would pose to abortion access nationwide.

Biden will never cut into Trump's MAGA margins. But conservatives and soft Republicans who fervently believe in abortion rights (and democracy more broadly) represent a small but critical slice of voters, some of whom could be persuaded to vote against Trump.

Team Biden needs to make a case for the stark choice voters will likely face next year between abortion rights believer Biden and abortion ban pusher Trump. It's a case that simultaneously motivates Democratic base voters while confronting pro-choice conservatives with the very real prospect that Trump could eradicate abortion rights nationwide if he is able to regain control of the White House.

https://crooksandliars.com/2023/11/why-did-roe-v-wade-get-overturned-one-word

A former senior official in Donald Trump’s White House slammed his ex-boss as a “traitor” and “a clear and present danger to our democracy,” according to a new book by ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

Karl told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Monday evening that the unnamed official served Trump “loyally” for more than a year “at a very high level inside the West Wing, very close to Donald Trump” and hasn’t been publicly critical of him.

Psaki read the full quote from the official:

“He lacks any shred of human decency, humility or caring. He is morally bankrupt, breathtakingly dishonest, lethally incompetent, and stunningly ignorant of virtually anything related to governing, history, geography, human events or world affairs. He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and the rule of law.”

“It gets to a fundamental truth about Donald Trump, and that is the most piercing and searing criticism of him,” Karl said. “The people that are sounding the alarm loudest about what a second Trump term would mean are those who are closest to him.”

Karl told Psaki that the former official hasn’t gone public because he fears “retribution” from Trump against himself and his family.

Karl’s book, “Tired of Winning,” hits shelves on Tuesday.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-senior-trump-official-traitor-093409419.html

mmmm some of the description of the Orange Jesus are words I have used.

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said the body would absolutely support former President Donald Trump if voters choose him as the GOP nominee, even if he’s been convicted of a crime.

“I know this is newsworthy but as party chair I’m gonna support who the voters choose,” McDaniel told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. “And yes, if they choose Donald Trump.”


The voters are looking at this and they think there’s a two-tiered system of justice,” McDaniel went on. “They don’t believe a lot of the things that are coming out of this and they’re making these decisions and that’s reflected in the polls.”

Trump has been indicted four times and will likely spend much of next year, peak campaign season for the 2024 presidential race, in a courtroom. But despite those charges, he remains the far-and-away frontrunner for the Republican nomination despite never appearing on a debate stage with his fellow candidates.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll also found Trump ahead of President Joe Biden in five key swing states in a hypothetical matchup. The polls were conducted more than a year before the next election, when such surveys are often unreliable.

McDaniel’s comments came after Trump sparked yet more controversy, using a Veterans Day speech to attack his political opponents and pledge to “root out” the “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” the former president told supporters in New Hampshire.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-nominee-rnc-ronna-mcdaniel_n_65518dc0e4b09c9500aac50a

lol...once upon a time the GOP billed themselves as the law and order party. lol Now the GOPQ/MAGA Trash party is all out for insurrection, detention camps, and a dictstorship. And ANYONE who votes for Mango or plans to vote for him falls into this category.

If he wins a second term, former President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to wage war on immigration, implementing a vast array of policies dreamed up with Stephen Miller, the adviser behind his most controversial first-term immigration policies.

A New York Times story published Saturday provided details: Trump would round up millions of undocumented people and put them in detention camps while they await deportation, using reassigned federal law enforcement and National Guard members to help with the sweeps.


Other reported proposals would deny automatic citizenship to babies born to undocumented people and deny visas to people with ideological views Trump does not like.

President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign called it “the horrifying reality that awaits the American people” if Trump is “allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again.”

“These extreme, racist, cruel policies dreamed up by him and his henchman Stephen Miller are meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared and divided nation is how he wins this election,” read a statement from the campaign.

It continued: “Trump talks openly about his plans at rallies, and voters should take him at his word. He’s making the wrong bet. The American people chose unity over division and hope over fear in 2020 when they elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and sent Donald Trump packing, and they’ll do it again next year.”

Miller told The New York Times that the proposals would rely on existing statutes, allowing Trump to act without needing help from Congress to overhaul immigration laws — which would be a tough task.

“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the Times. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Trump would reportedly seek to reinstate his first-term ban on people from Muslim-majority nations entering the country and refuse asylum to people at the southern U.S. border. According to the Times, he would use the same authority that allowed him to bar asylum-seekers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic but say migrants carried other diseases like tuberculosis.

People with temporary protected status — a legal designation for people from certain countries where there was a natural disaster or armed conflict — would also reportedly lose it.


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-campaign-denounces-racist-cruel-alleged-trump-immigration-proposals_n_654fef0ee4b09c9500aa6153

ok... something needs to be done about the border. What??? How about invading some of these Central and South American Countries and replacing their governments so their citizens would want to stay home??? Far fetched... yep. On the other hand I'm not going to support detaining millions in CAMPS....

We’ve all often wondered whether Donald Trump understands the historical import of what comes out of his mouth. He’s so ill-informed, so proudly ignorant, that it’s easy to think that when he hurls a historical insult, he just doesn’t know.

I feel pretty safe in saying that we can now stop giving him the benefit of that particular doubt. His use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only.

Before we get to that, let’s just record what he wrote and said. On Saturday at 10:25 a.m., he posted on Truth Social: “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.” Then, at a rally in New Hampshire later that day, he repeated those words essentially verbatim—promising to “root out ... the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”—and then doubled down on it: “The real threat is not from the radical right, the real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

This is straight-up Nazi talk, in a way he’s never done quite before. To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word.

Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Maus and Maus II, the graphic novels in which he drew Jews as mice and their Nazi captors as menacing cats, explained some years ago to The New York Review of Books how he hit upon the idea:

I began to read what I could about the Nazi genocide, which really was very easy because there was actually rather little available in English. The most shockingly relevant anti-Semitic work I found was The Eternal Jew, a 1940 German “documentary” that portrayed Jews in a ghetto swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftaned creatures, and then a cut to Jews as mice—or rather rats—swarming in a sewer, with a title card that said “Jews are the rats” or the “vermin of mankind.” This made it clear to me that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project. In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin—like fleas and roaches.

If you feel that you need additional backup, just go to Google Images and type in “Jewish vermin.” You’ll get the picture in a hurry. Here’s one cartoon from an Austrian newspaper in 1939 depicting Jewish refugees as scurrying rats. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of such images.

Trump, let us clarify, does not mean Jews. He means some Jews—the ones who aren’t for him, which come to think of it is most Jews. And by the way, to drop that rhetorical bomb at this time, when antisemitism is raging across the country because of what’s happening in the Middle East, is especially outrageous. But Trump’s vermin are not a racial category. No, Trump’s rats are a much broader category, and in that sense an even more dangerous one—he means whoever manages to offend him while exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to register dissent and to criticize him.

And no, he’s not going to be throwing anybody in a gas chamber. But that’s a pretty low bar for un-American behavior; that is, fascism was not so bad until it started exterminating people? The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service… If you doubt that President Trump and the Republican Party are capable of all these things and several more, you need to read some history pronto.

Apparently many Americans need to. I woke up Sunday to a Latino man telling CNN that well, under Trump, we didn’t have all this inflation. Which is true as far as it goes. The inflation wasn’t Joe Biden’s fault, but of course Biden and the Democrats can’t say that true thing because it sounds like excuse-making. And one can’t blame this man, who I assume is working hard to feed his children, for thinking this way.

But dear God. Can’t we get people to think about fascism, and what Trump would do to this country? Trump invoked “vermin” on the very day that The New York Times broke yet another harrowing story about his second term plans, this time having to do with immigration. “He plans,” the Times reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” And he wants to build huge—yes—detention camps. There’s much more. And all of this, by the way, appears to have been fed to the paper by his own people, who are obviously proud of it. They want America to know. And just before this, remember, Trump told Univision that he would use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies.

They are telling us in broad daylight that they want to rape the Constitution. And now Trump has told us explicitly that he will use Nazi rhetoric to stoke the hatred and fear that will make this rape seem, to some, a necessary cleansing. We may not get every voter to care about this. But for those of us who do care, this is what the election is about, and nothing else, and history is screaming at us to convince as many people as we can.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/official-vermin-trump-now-using-151028725.html

Ok.. I will say it again.... Mango is a thug... a fascist..... a white nationalist....... a thief..... a traitor...... And I would point out and remind all that he does not respect Our Military. He believes that anyone who serves is a sucker. His former Chief of Staff, Jojn Kelly, a Retired General, has confirmed the foregoing. He called for the execution of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, who did his duty to protect the people of this Country from the traitor, Mango.

One more thing... he is of German descent. His grandfather left Germany to avoid compulsory military service back in the late 1800s. His father Fred never served as he to thought it was for suckers. The two Fredos did not serve.

You get the picture with Mango? It is not hard to see.

Former President Donald Trump has vowed to unleash federal prosecutors on critics if he wins reelection next year in what he frames as retaliation for his own criminal woes.

The once-and-maybe-future president openly admitted that he would order authorities to prosecute his rivals, a move that would amount to a dramatic break with a bedrock principle of the American legal system.

“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say: ‘Go down and indict them,'” Trump told the Spanish-language Univision network in an interview aired Thursday night. “They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”

Trump asserted that unleashing federal prosecutors and the FBI on his political opponents would be only fair because he has been indicted in four separate cases and is facing 91 felony counts.

“They’ve released the genie out of the box,” the former president said. “You know, when you’re president and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them so you can win an election.”

Trump did not name those rivals whom he would put in the legal crosshairs if he finds a way back to the White House in the 2024 vote, but he has previously floated charges against Gen. Mark Milley, Hillary Clinton and President Biden, among others.

Trump has long told allies that he plans to dispense with legal and political niceties in a potential second term and proceed with a campaign of “retribution” for what he sees as his own persecution by liberal prosecutors.

To facilitate Trump’s plans, pro-Trump legal figures have drafted plans that would jettison Justice Deparment policies intended to prevent political consideration from driving criminal prosecutions.

“If they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse,” Trump said.

Independent legal analysts say Trump’s claims that prosecutors have unfairly targeted him are false. They note that special counsel Jack Smith acts independently of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden has no role in his prosecutions.

They warn that Trump’s plan to use the justice system to exact revenge against political opponents is extremely dangerous and potentially unconstitutional.

Trump has said Milley should face potential execution for treason, in part because the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff suggested he would not allow Trump to use nuclear weapons after the Jan. 6 attack in the final days of Trump’s presidency.

Even though he had four years to probe Hillary Clinton, Trump now says the former Democratic presidential candidate should be jailed for supposedly using a private email server during her time as secretary of state.

Trump has also said he would name a special counsel to investigate the “Biden family,” although Special Counsel David Weiss already has the authority to investigate any alleged crimes related to presidential son Hunter Biden.

Special Counsel Robert Hur was appointed by Garland to probe separate allegations that Biden mishandled classified documents. Trump admits intentionally keeping hundreds of secret documents and refusing to return them to the feds, while Biden notified authorities as soon as a handful of documents were uncovered by staffers and cooperated.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-vows-unleash-feds-critics-193500718.html

Investigating and actually charging are two different things..... I would also point out the obvious...... in the case of Hillary Clinton over 8 years will have elapsed and all crimes, but a few, have a statute of limitations.

I also believe that most Federal Judges, even Mango appointees, would take a dim view, of the wholesale arrests, of Mango enemies. Oh, I'm not saying they will not be arrested, because I think they will be. I'm saying in the end the Judiciary will hold firm again with the exception of Clarence "The Corrupt" Thomas.

12 months to go... Support Dems..... Vote Dems. Because what is the alternative but the GOPQ/MAGA trash crowd.

Ohio Republicans are claiming a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, which was approved by voters in Tuesday’s election, doesn’t actually do that — and they’re promising to take steps to prevent the legal protection of reproductive freedom in the state.

“To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative,” Ohio House Republicans wrote in a statement released Thursday. “The Ohio legislature alone will consider what, if any, modifications to make to existing laws based on public hearings and input from legal experts on both sides.”

Ohio banned abortion in the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, but legal challenges to state’s abortion laws left residents’ reproductive rights in limbo until Tuesday’s ballot measure. The strategy Republicans are now proposing would essentially strip Ohio’s courts of the authority to repeal existing abortion restrictions before the new amendment goes into effect on December 7.

“No amendment can overturn the God-given rights with which we were born,” state Rep. Beth Lear (R-Galena) added in the Republican’s statement. Another representative, Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester), claimed the referendum had only passed due to “foreign election interference.”

Rep. Bill Dean (R-Xenia) said the amendment “doesn’t repeal a single Ohio law,” and that its language is “dangerously vague and unconstrained, and can be weaponized to attack parental rights or defend rapists, pedophiles, and human traffickers.”

Ohio is not the only state where Republicans are attempting to undermine pro-choice ballot initiatives endorsed by constituents. In Michigan, two anti-choice activist groups are working with Republican lawmakers to sue the state and block the implementation of that state’s voter-approved constitutional amendment.

Stacey LaRouche, press secretary to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, told The Detroit News that “it shouldn’t be lost on people that these right-wing organizations and radical Republicans in the Michigan Legislature are cherry-picking courts to try to once again overturn a constitutionally guaranteed right because they can’t win with voters.”

Ballot measures supporting reproductive freedom have been approved in all seven states where they have been put to voters. Despite Republicans claiming that the end of Roe signified the return of the abortion issue to the will of individual states, they clearly remain determined to undermine reproductive rights no matter what any state’s voters have to say about them.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ohio-republicans-god-given-restrict-213951995.html

You see they really do not like people voting..they really don't

By David Nir — November 8, 2023
Democrat Dan McCaffery defeated Republican Carolyn Carluccio in a race for a key seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday night, ensuring Democrats will maintain a comfortable majority on the bench heading into the 2024 elections. McCaffery's margin stood at 53-47 with approximately 92% of the vote counted when the Associated Press called the race.

The two candidates, both judges, were vying to fill a seat that had been vacant since last year, when the previous chief Justice, Democrat Max Baer, died. As a result of McCaffery's victory, Democrats will once again enjoy a 5-2 majority on the court, which has often found itself at the center of election disputes and will likely do so again next year.

The court played a key role in rejecting Donald Trump's baseless claims of a stolen election following the presidential election in 2020. Carluccio, however, had indicated some sympathy for Trump's views, recently telling the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I have no idea" whether Joe Biden won the race. Had she won, future Republican attempts to subvert election results would have become more likely to succeed, especially in the event of any potential absences or new vacancies.

The soonest that Republicans could retake a majority on the court would be 2025, when three Democratic justices will go before voters. However, those elections will be retention elections, where voters are asked simply whether an incumbent should remain in office. Only one sitting Supreme Court justice has lost a retention election in state history. The next partisan election for a seat on the court is not set to take place until 2029.

https://crooksandliars.com/2023/11/dem-win-pa-supreme-court-stops-trumps-2024

ok Judges are supposed to be fair and neutral.... but who the hell wants a GOPQ Judge sitting on any State Supreme Court with an election coming up in 2024 and KNOWING Mango and company are plotting to try to steal it anyway? Especially in a key state like PA.

In an interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega, Dr. Lance Dodes, former clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, suggested the pressures of Donald Trump's multitude of legal woes, combined with the possibility his financial fortune could be wiped out, are aggravating his existing mental problems which could lead him to incite a new wave of violence that the country witnessed on Jan. 6.

Asked by DeVega about Trump's "state of mind and resulting behavior these last few weeks," Dodes began by observing, "Donald Trump’s severe narcissistic, antisocial (sociopathic) character disorder means he cannot tolerate or even acknowledge losses or defeats."

Although I’d like to hope Trump would just curl up in the fetal position and become unable to leave his bedroom, that does not seem likely, according to Dodes:

“Ultimately, he may decompensate to the point of gross paranoid psychosis with even more obvious incitement to riots and civil war rather than accept the reality that he has been finally held accountable,” he warned.

Although not all the other psychiatrists DeVega spoke with predicted violence, all but one predicted Trump's self-destruction in some way.

Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Goulston, a former FBI hostage negotiation trainer, said Trump could become “completely unhinged” and “like a mortally wounded animal, which can be the most vicious and dangerous animal of all.”

https://crooksandliars.com/2023/11/trump-may-be-verge-gross-paranoid

Note, the reference to Mango's EXISTING Mental issues..... wackadoo,wackadoo.... and he is coming for you and me.

After a particularly disappointing night of election results for Republicans, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) lamented “pure democracies,” where major decisions are left up to voters rather than their elected officials.

“Thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot, because pure democracies are not the way to run a country,” Santorum said Tuesday night on Newsmax.

Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved separate ballot measures protecting abortion rights in the state constitution and legalizing recreational marijuana.

“You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote,” Santorum said.

Nearly 57 percent of voters backed the abortion access measure, and about 56 percent approved of the marijuana measure. Both are set to take effect in 30 days.

The Buckeye State will be the 24th state to legalize recreational marijuana for people 21 and older.

In August, Ohio voters shot down an attempt led by Republicans that would have made it harder to amend the state constitution — an effort that was seen as directly aimed at preventing the abortion amendment’s passage.

Several states have been taking up abortion laws — both providing protections and implementing new restrictions — since the Supreme Court upended Roe v. Wade last year, pushing the issue of abortion access back to the states.

Seven of them — including Ohio, where the issue has been put directly to voters — have approved protections for abortion rights.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bemoaning-ohio-results-santorum-says-150236507.html

Virginia Democrats are projected to win control of both of the state’s Legislature bodies, according to Decision Desk HQ, dealing a major blow to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s agenda for the remainder of his term.

Democrats won control of the House of Delegates and maintained their grip on the state Senate. Tuesday’s election results mark a reversal from two years ago, when Youngkin was elected governor and Republicans won control of the House of Delegates.

Various Democratic figures jumped into the campaign. President Biden issued endorsements last week, and former President Obama recorded robocalls in various districts. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) also made the trip to Virginia to campaign alongside a number of candidates.

Democrats in competitive races repeatedly hammered their GOP counterparts as “MAGA extremists” and warned that Republicans would move to pass an abortion ban in the state. The Democratic victory makes it highly unlikely that Youngkin’s endorsed ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation — with exceptions — will pass through.

But Tuesday’s wins do not mean smooth sailing for the Democrats’ policy agenda. Democrats in the state Legislature will likely clash with Youngkin, who could block a number of initiatives from being passed.

Significantly, however, national Democrats will see their victory in the commonwealth as an affirmation that their messaging on abortion is a winning strategy heading into 2024, where Biden appears on shaky ground as he looks set for a rematch against former President Trump.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4298211-virginia-democrats-glenn-youngkin-abortion-joe-biden-obama-2024/

Youngkin, the GOPQ Governor of VA has one year left. He can't succeed himself. And as far as he is concerned he is NOT to be trusted regarding abortion rights.

In a win for pro-abortion-rights advocates, Ohioans voted to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution on Tuesday.

Voters in the Buckeye State approved a ballot measure known as Issue 1, which asked voters whether the state’s constitution should be amended to establish “an individual right to one’s own reproductive medical treatment, included but not limited to abortion.” The amendment, which goes into effect 30 days from now, protects abortion access up to the point of fetal viability. Abortions would only be allowed after that point to protect the life of the mother.

The Associated Press called the election, declaring that Ohioans approved the measure, exceeding the required 50% simple majority of support needed to pass.

Republicans in the state legislature had attempted to raise the simple majority threshold to 60% with a special election back in August, but abortion rights groups cleared that hurdle, in yet another win, after Ohioans voted to keep the simple majority requirement in tact.

Ohio, a Republican-leaning state which Donald Trump won in 2020, joins several other red states where voters have consistently turned up at the polls to support expanding abortion access after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that recognized a constitutional right to an abortion, was overturned in June 2022.

Ohio was the only state to directly vote on abortion this year where Republican leaders in the state had previously passed a law banning abortions after about six weeks, but that law is currently blocked by court bans amid ongoing litigation. It briefly took effect last year following the overturn of Roe v. Wade, before the case of a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim, who was forced her travel to Indiana for an abortion, made headlines and created national outrage.

Currently in Ohio, abortion is allowed up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. The results of today’s election mean that the new amendment to the state’s constitution will blocks the six-week abortion ban.

Republicans and Democrats were using this election to test the waters to see how important the abortion issue remains with voters heading into the 2024 election. Ohioans have spoken – indicating their support, meaning Republicans have their work cut out for them ahead of 2024 in the Buckeye State.

Abortion rights groups are hoping to continue the momentum as they work to put more ballot initiatives before voters in 2024 in states like Arizona and Florida, two key presidential battleground states.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ohio-issue-1-passes-enshrining-abortion-rights-in-state-constitution-020317813.html

As I predicted.

Do you see why the A.G. Of Fla doesn't want the issue on their ballot?

The judge in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial despairingly pressed the ex-president’s lawyer: “I beseech you to control him if you can.”

Judge Arthur Engoron’s plea reflected his frustration at an incorrigible witness who boasted Monday about his piles of cash, aimed scathing political attacks and spouted uniquely illogical logic.

But Engoron, who is presiding over the New York trial, also put his finger on a deeper question that will define a singular political figure’s place in history.

And the answer, as always, was no, Trump cannot be controlled.

No mere lawyer could impose the kind of discipline that two-and-a-half centuries of constitutional checks and balances could not provide during Trump’s time in office or since. And after threatening to dismiss the ex-president from the witness stand, Engoron opted to let the Trump storm rage in the apparent hope that it would blow itself out — though history has shown it never does.

Trump’s combative defense against claims he inflated his wealth to rip off banks, insurance firms and New York state, served as a troubling preview of a 2024 election season that is likely to become ensnared with his massive legal peril. But it also revealed insights into Trump’s relentless refusal to give an inch to his enemies and showed why voters who despise East Coast authority figures and liberal societal codes adore him.

His testimony offered warnings to lawyers who will seek to puncture his self-created bubble of alternative realities with facts and evidence — and showed how he might try to charm and confuse jurors in his coming criminal trials.

As he climbed into the witness box and lifted his hand and swore to tell the truth — an almost ironic act given his record of falsehoods — Trump obliterated yet another convention. Ex-presidents in America don’t typically get called to explain their actions in court. And Monday’s four-hour dive into the Trump Organization’s financial records was just a warm up for subsequent criminal courtroom dramas that could mean the Republican Party will nominate a convicted felon for president. Trump denies wrongdoing in each and every case against him.

Trump shows what he will do to save himself
Trump in a blue suit, tie and shirt instead of his campaign livery of dark suit, white shirt and improbably long red tie, left no doubt that if tearing down legal and political systems is what it will take to save him, he won’t hesitate.

“It is election interference because you want to keep me in this courthouse all day long,” Trump told prosecutors working for New York Attorney General Letitia James, accusing her of trying to base a run for governor on an attempt to destroy his business. As he often does, the ex-president was turning facts upside down — it is he who is politicizing the justice system in his own bid for a return to power.

And before he faces judgment, Trump is seeking to discredit the organs of accountability that will seal his fate. “It is an extremely hostile judge,” Trump added, raising his hand to point at Engoron, who sat beside and just above the witness box on the bench.

The ex-president’s day was a microcosm of a riotous life as a real estate magnate, New York City icon, showbiz reality star and demagogic political candidate and US president. He obstructed, exaggerated, spouted insults, brassily trampled courtroom protocol and substituted partisan narratives for the yes and no answers that the judge demanded. Yet Trump also expertly used the outraged stream of consciousness and linguistic dexterity that turns his interrogators in the law, or the media, in knots.

There were even flashes of humor, hinting at one of the key ingredients of the political method that has seduced millions of Americans. Asked, for instance, whether he had built houses on a golf course in Scotland, Trump conceded that he had not but added waspishly: “I have a castle.” And there were oodles of quintessential Trump self-promotion. He boasted that his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort was “a very successful club,” said he’d built the “best building on the West Coast” and claimed dubiously that his 18 holes in Aberdeen was the “greatest golf course ever built.”

At one point, Trump mused: “I’ve had a lot of cash for a long time.”

Trump’s supporters could not watch him since the trial was not televised but they would have recognized the bulldozer on the witness stand and the blow-it-all-up persona that made a twice-impeached, four times indicted ex-president who left Washington in disgrace nearly three years ago again the Republican front-runner.

It became clear long before Trump left court complaining of a “scam” that his legal strategy was indistinguishable from his familiar political one: admit nothing and brand any criticism as proof of a vast, unfair plot against him. The goal was transparent: leverage the latest bid to call him to account into a campaign fueled by a martyr complex that can win back presidential powers to drive away his legal woes.

“People are sick and tired of what’s happening. I think it’s a very sad day for America,” Trump said at the end, before noting The New York Times polls showing him leading President Joe Biden in key swing states — a tactic his lawyer Chris Kise also used to imply the “soon to be” next president wasn’t being shown sufficient respect.

Trump’s dignity is ruffled
Yet Monday was also a rude awakening for Trump.

Retired commanders-in-chief are usually surrounded by a force field of deference, with their secret service detachments and forever title of “Mr. President.” Trump has long posed as the alpha male and his entire business and political creed — in person and on social media – is based on intimidation. But it must have been a long time since anyone had shushed Trump like Engoron, cutting him off ahead of another meander by saying, “No, no, you answered the question.”

There was no “Mr. President” from the attorney general’s lawyers or the judge. The witness was simply “Mr. Trump.” He sat on a leather chair, alone in the wood paneled witness box, his hands clasped in his lap.

But the trial quickly became a test of wills between Trump and Engoron over who controlled the court. After one trip by Trump down a rabbit hole, the judge asked the lawyers if they had asked for an “essay” on brand value. Frustrated with partisan asides, Engoron warned that “this is not a political rally, this is a courtroom.” And the judge bristled at the ex-president’s complaint that he always ruled against him. Adopting a tone typical of Trump subordinates, Kise argued with the judge’s admonitions against speeches and lauded the ex-president’s “brilliant” replies.

Later, the judge, perhaps trying to avoid offering grist for a potential appeal said he’d let the ex-president ramble. But by the end of the day, Engoron’s resolve frayed: “It feels like a broken record,” he said of Trump’s answers. The ex-president snapped back: “He keeps asking me the same question over and over.” Engoron will however get the last word. He has already ruled that Trump, his two adult sons and the Trump Organization are liable for fraud in inflating his wealth in return for advantageous deals with banks and insurance firms. The trial will resolve related claims and decide how much restitution is due and whether he will be barred from doing business in New York.

How Trump defended himself
It was hard to tell whether Trump had helped or hurt himself. He did appear to disrupt the smooth running of the trial. But – as he complained at one point – there is no jury, and Engoron will be left to adjudicate the trial.

Trump’s defense broadly rested on three planks. He denied accusations that he’d inflated his properties, insisting conversely that he’d undervalued most of them by not including ill-defined millions of dollars implied by his “brand” and its potential. He claimed that he was protected by a disclaimer clause in financial documents, which meant that banks and insurance firms had to do their own due diligence. And he repeatedly insisted that “there were no victims,” so there can have been no crime.

This blanket deniability and belief in his own imperviousness echoed Trump’s false proclamations in office that the Constitution granted him almost absolute powers. Or that the phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that earned him his first impeachment or his January 6, 2021 speech before the Capitol insurrection were “perfect.”

Trump also offered an intriguing glimpse into his mindset as a businessman that makes it easier to understand his false insistence that he actually won the 2020 election when he clearly lost it.

“I can look at a building and tell you what they are worth,” he said, creating the impression that the true valuation of a property was something he could just pluck out of the air, with little regard for all the complex financial instruments that normally add up to an investment’s true value. This desire to make a reality just what he wants it to be has long defined Trump’s political approach. And he seems to adopt a similar tactic in looking at an election and deciding who won regardless of the actual evidence about who got the most votes.

This question of whether Trump actually believes what he says will be key to two election interference trials — one in federal court in Washington and one in Georgia where prosecutors must show he intended to break the law. Trump insists that he was convinced he won in 2020, despite all evidence to the contrary. And in his virtual reality world, he may believe it or may at least be able to convince a jury he did.

But the most sobering takeaway of Trump’s day in court on Monday was that while the law might succeed in enforcing accountability where constitutional and political constraints failed, there is no sign yet that anyone or anything can bring the potential 47th president of the United States under control.


https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/07/politics/trump-court-appearance-2024-election-season


Apparently this buffoon admitted to inflating his assets.... So there you go... it's just a question of how much he and the Fredo's will pay.

But as the article pointed out this guy lives in an alternative fact filled bubble. His insistence that he won the 2020 election despite the fact that he did not. Better pay attention. Better talk up friends and neighbors, if you can, about how delusional and dangerous this piece of crap really is. We are 12 months from November 2024.

And if there is an election in your state today, you better vote DEM. Forget this third party crap because the barbarians are indeed at the gate.

Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.

More than crazy bluster
This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it. But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of illiberal and outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.

First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.

Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.

Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.

Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.

But in the real world, people are too intermixed for this to occur naturally. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust,genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.

Violence as noble and intoxicating
Fascists, then, see violence as noble and intoxicating. For example, Julius Evola, a far-right intellectual active in Italy from 1920 to 1970 and the author, among other things, of “Fascism Viewed from the Right” and “A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth,” writes that violence “offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero that sleeps within him.”

Today, Evola is a favorite of the alt-right, and he suggests that a hero’s death is preferable to a life built on liberal compromise. “The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero,” Evola writes, “even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.”

The ultraconservative Catholic authoritarian and opponent of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre, who is recognized as one of the intellectual forefathers of fascism, goes even further.

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death,” Maistre writes. Indeed, without an executioner, the man who kills other men, Maistre claims society could not exist. For violence is necessary to satisfy “men’s natural desire to be destructive,” he writes; it leaves them feeling “exalted and fulfilled.”

Social disruption and destruction
These comments make clear that fascists see violence as something to be used for more than just personal retribution and intimidation. It is to be used to create wider social disruption and destruction. Not only are individuals to be subject to attack, but institutions and norms as well.

Consider “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” a work by two amateur historians popular on the far right.

The book is actually a restatement of Evola’s theory of historical regression, set forth in his “Revolt against the Modern World.”

The idea is that history moves in cycles, the first one being the best and each one thereafter representing a further decline. The fourth cycle is the worst, and it ends only when all existing social institutions are destroyed. This, in turn, is an application of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that “one can build only in a space which has been previously razed to the ground.”

Then history will reset and cycle once again.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon admires these ideas so much he made a movie about them.

Trump appears to embrace these ideas too. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great,” he says.

Viewed in this context, not taking Trump’s violent rhetoric more seriously seems dangerous indeed.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts. Try our free newsletters.

It was written by: Mark R. Reiff, University of California, Davis.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-violent-rhetoric-echoes-fascist-123455636.html

So go to the article and see some of the pics... especially the one of the pussy's known as the Patriot Front... a couple of years ago in Philadelphia tthese clowns thought they could march in the street they ended up being chased down the street by local residents, a mix of black,white and Latino. Wearing a mask in public should be illegal . All of them need to be unmasked.

Already looking ahead to the public unrest his hypothetical re-election could cause, Donald Trump and his allies are reportedly circling an idea to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, deploying the military to act as domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post reported Sunday that the drafting of such plans has largely been “unofficially outsourced” to a coalition of right-wing think tanks working under the title “Project 2025,” according to one insider and internal communications obtained by the newspaper. In response to questions, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said, “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden. President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.” The Post also reported, citing people who’ve spoken to him, that Trump has remarked in recent private conversations that he’d like to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies, including former members of his administration like Bill Barr and Gen. Mark Milley.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-mulling-deploying-military-streets-000421422.html


As I have said if he is re-elected he is never leaving office

In 1989, arguably the most powerful man in one of the most powerful city’s in the world wanted 15-year-old Yusef Salaam dead. “Bring Back The Death Penalty” read the advertisement taken out by then-real estate mogul Donald Trump in big, bold, black lettering.

There was nothing abstract about that statment. Trump wanted Salaam and the four other boys accused of the Central Park rape dead. And he was willing to use his considerable wealth to do it.

The rush to judgement in Salaam’s case was jarring. He and the four other members of the Exonerated 5, formerly known as The Central Park 5—Yusef Salaam, 16; Antron McCray, 16; Korey Wise, 18; Kevin Richardson, 16; and Raymond Santana, 15—weren’t even convicted when the calls for their death began.

“That ad...was published two weeks after we were accused,” he says. “It wasn’t created two weeks after we were accused. It was in the works massaged and green-lit two weeks after we were accused. ‘Bring back the death penalty’ was the first words that were read.”

Trump was trying to get the same evil forces “to do to us what was done to Emmett Till,” says Salaam.

The criminal justice system failed in Salaam’s case. “I wanted the system to work for me,” he says. “I wanted them to say hold on, we don’t have any DNA evidence. We don’t have any blood. We don’t have nothing. We have four false statements that don’t match anything. And we’re going to play one of the statements at Yusef’s trial because he didn’t say anything that was captured on tape or on paper. And they damned us all for it.”

But in Trump’s case he hopes the system manages to hold the right person accountable. “Karma is real,” says Salaam.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/yusef-salaam-trump-calling-death-191500376.html

ok go to the article..check out Mango trying to look bad... Hey, MAGA Trash your cult leader is an empty suit, a coward, a piece of shit, a limp dick..... I'm I clear... oh, and any of you who follow him are the same

A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump slapped a fellow Trump-appointee with a hefty prison sentence Friday, deciding former marine and State Department official Federico Klein deserved 70 months in the clink for storming the Capitol and striking officers with a riot shield. Klein, 44, was convicted of eight felonies in July. His charges stemmed from the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, where prosecutors said Klein was in the first wave of rioters who attacked and pushed past police to break into the U.S. Capitol. Later in the attack, Klein wedged a stolen police riot shield between two doors to keep them open for other insurrectionists to pile inside. He was also heard yelling, “We need fresh people” as rioters attacked police, prosecutors said. At Friday’s sentencing, Judge Trevor McFadden told Klein his actions “prolonged the mayhem” and that he was “front and center in that chaos.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-appointee-stormed-capitol-gets-173241064.html


And another Jan 6 insurrectionist goes down.... But nothing happened on Jan 6, right?

NEXT

Trump’s legal defense has become indistinguishable from his presidential campaign as he struggles to cope with accountability imposed by courtroom procedures but portrays himself as a victim of political hounding. Just as he tarnished the reputation of the US electoral system among millions of his supporters with false claims of election fraud, the ex-president is now seeking to trash the image of another pillar of American democracy: the courts. And characteristically, he is accusing President Joe Biden, his Justice Department and various prosecutors of being guilty of the very transgression that he himself perpetrated as he portrays the cases against him as “Election Interference.”

Trump put his two adult sons in charge of his real estate firm when he became president, but despite their positions of authority, both insisted they had very little to do with dealing with their father’s financial statements, which were used in securing loans on the firm’s behalf.

“That’s not the focus of my day. I focus on construction. I don’t focus on appraisals,” Eric Trump said at one point, after a long exchange in which Assistant New York Attorney General Andrew Amer tried to show his deep involvement in the affairs of a development at a Trump golf course in New York.

The case rests on claims that Trump, his sons and their firm inflated statements of the ex-president’s personal wealth to get financial benefits in loan and insurance policies worth tens of millions of dollars. The case is a civil one and does not allege criminal behavior but could result in heavy financial restitution and end the company’s capacity to do business in New York. It’s therefore critical to Trump’s own financial health, his legacy and the future prospects of his family.

Things grew heated when Amer apparently succeeded in undermining Eric Trump’s claims that he had little to do with his father’s financial statements. “I understand we had financials as a company,” Eric Trump said. But he added: “I was not personally aware of the statement of financial condition.” Amer, however, showed him an email he was sent in 2013 from the firm’s former financial controller Jeff McConney who asked him to value a property that included a supporting data spreadsheet.

“So you did know about your father’s annual financial statement, as of August 20, 2013, didn’t you?” Amer asked. Eric Trump replied: “It appears that way, yes.”

In essence, both Trump sons are arguing that despite running the company, they knew nothing about its financial statements.

Earlier, Donald Trump Jr. had insisted that he was similarly unaware about details of his father’s finances – despite signing off on them – and that he relied on accountants to worry about the details. After his own testimony concluded he strolled out of court, saying it went “really well.” Blatantly and brazenly disregarding evidence that clearly contradicts such assertions is another time-worn Trump tactic. After the ex-president was impeached over an account of a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that showed him trying to leverage US military aid for a political benefit, the former president repeatedly insisted that he had conducted “a perfect call.”

Outside the courtroom Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. also dipped into his father’s bag of political tricks by portraying himself as the innocent target of a witch-hunt.

“I think it went really well, if we were actually dealing with logic and reason the way business is conducted,” he said, adding that “unfortunately the AG has brought forth a case that is purely a political persecution.”

Engoron has already ruled against the Trumps on one of the claims at issue — persistent and repeated fraud — so the trial is about various other claims of conspiracy and falsifying business records. It will also decide how much the Republican front-runner and his companies could be forced to pay in restitution.

Before court ended for the day on Thursday, Trump’s legal team also resorted to another familiar tactic — targeting court staff and the judge in order to build a conceit that the entire trial is unfair and the legal system that appears likely to deliver a damning judgment against him is corrupt.

Two Trump lawyers raised questions about the conduct of the judge’s clerk — who Trump has also attacked online, earning fines for infringing a gag order. Engoron commented that there could be “a bit of misogyny” in criticism of the female clerk. In a bizarre passage of the trial, Trump attorney Chris Kise insisted: “I’m not a misogynist. I’m very happily married, and I have a 17-year-old daughter.” Then his colleague Alina Habba rose to defend her colleague and insisted he wasn’t a misogynist. The Trump team has accused the clerk of co-judging the case, much to Trump’s anger.

CNN legal analyst Shan Wu said that neither the testimony of Eric Trump nor the strategy of attacking court personnel seemed like a smart approach.

“This tactic of … trying to totally distance themselves, saying that they know nothing about the financial statements, plus the admission that came out from Eric – I think it really hurts their credibility,” Wu said on “The Situation Room.”

Referring to the objections to Engoron’s clerk, Wu added: “It is unfathomable to me why his defense counsel are using that kind of tactic here.”

Another Trump – Ivanka, the ex-president’s eldest daughter – has been trying to avoid testifying next week in the case after she was dismissed as a defendant. In a late Thursday filing, her lawyer argued that she would suffer an “undue hardship” if made to travel from her home in Florida, where she lives with three minor children, to appear in the middle of a school week.

A higher court, however, swiftly denied the bid to block the order for her testimony and pause the trial until an appeal could be heard by the New York appellate court.

In other cases, Trump plays for delays
Another quintessential Trump legal strategy is again in operation in Washington, DC, as his lawyers seek to delay his trial in the federal election interference case — possibly until after an election that could hand Trump the power to end or disrupt many legal threats against him if he becomes the 47th President.

Trump’s legal team on Wednesday asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to delay a trial scheduled to take place in March — during the heat of the GOP primary race — as the legal system works through his bid to get the case dismissed on the grounds that he’s immune from prosecution on any actions he took while president. His attorneys also this week asked a judge in Florida to delay the trial in a case over the ex-president’s handling of classified documents until after November’s election.

Trump’s team is entitled to exhaust all possible legal avenues as they prepare for his trials since the integrity of the legal system rests on defendants getting a fair hearing and wielding every potential remedy. Even so, during his long business and political career, Trump’s legal maneuverings often seem designed to tie courts in knots and to delay accountability while mocking the spirit of those protections.

And the idea that a president is free from legal accountability for anything he does in office would have grave implications to the bedrock principles of constrained presidential power and the idea that everyone is equal under the law.

It would pave the way for a second potential Trump term that tests the constitutional limits on executive power even more than the first one. Trump, who is showing increasingly autocratic instincts on the campaign trail, has already promised his supporters a new term would be devoted to political “retribution.”

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/03/politics/trump-legal-system-attack-sons-trial/index.html

FYI Mango Offspring... Don Jr. a/k/a/ Fredo, 44 or so years of age,Ivanka is 40 or so, Eric a/k/a the Other Fredo is 38 or so All grown... All approaching middle age..... The Fredos testified that they don't know nothin....... Do you really think the judge ,who is the trier of fact, bought into that? The company, Mango, the Fredos have already been found liable for fraud. The issue is how much in damages they will pay.

The biggest name in sky-tech, the James Webb Space Telescope, has captured some of the world's most intricate images of distant celestial bodies — from new sights of swirling solar systems, to advanced analysis of exoplanetary atmospheres — since its famous launch on Christmas 2021. On Monday, nearly two years later, Fox News host Laura Ingraham finally heard the news. During his remarks on a new executive order aimed at regulating artificial intelligence, President Joe Biden mentioned AI's application in astronomy, noting it has enabled the Webb telescope to chart distant galaxies (and a coterie of bizarre, distant gas giants). But the mention of the Webb telescope seemed to puzzle Ingraham, who did not understand that the Webb telescope was indeed real, and then mocked Biden.

"Did he call it the ‘Webb telescope’? Isn’t it the Hubble? Is he thinking of Webb-Hubble? I don’t understand,” Ingraham said, laughing. That laughter withered, though, after the existence of the telescope was apparently confirmed for the Fox host. “There is a Webb telescope that I didn’t know about. ... I stand corrected by Joe Biden.”

For more interstellar wonder from the indeed-quite-real James Webb Space Telescope, check out the 7 most spectacular images from the telescope's first year, and a hand-picked batch of one astronomer's personal favorite Webb photos.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fox-news-host-laura-ingraham-032301888.html


ok..... well..... the Right, the MAGA crowd, the GOPQ are pretty much anti- science...... so perhaps they learned something too since they hang on her program and FOX Non News, in general.

A hedge fund billionaire and GOP megadonor has a message for voters: Stay clear of Trump.

Leon Cooperman, chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, blasted the former president in a call with CNN last week, insisting that Trump cannot return to the Oval Office.

“It would be terrible for the country if Donald Trump were reelected,” Cooperman told CNN in a phone interview late last week. “He’s a divisive human being who belongs in jail.”

Trump is currently staring down 91 felony charges across four criminal cases, including 44 federal charges and 47 state charges. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of them.

It’s not the first time that Cooperman has gone on the attack with Trump. Last year, the CEO told the PBD Podcast that he would rather take a chance with progressives than put a “would-be dictator into a second term where he has no allegiance to anybody but himself.”

Cooperman admitted he “reluctantly” voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, but he has a long history of supporting the political ambitions of right-wing candidates, including the late Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, former President George W. Bush, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to OpenSecrets.

Cooperman also said that both Biden and Trump are “bad choices,” making a long-shot prediction that neither of them will be their party’s nominee this time next year. If they reach the ballot, however, he told CNN he won’t vote.

Instead, the executive is hunting for a more centrist option. According to Federal Election Commission records, in August Cooperman donated $1,000 to the 2024 presidential campaign of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who himself has come out in full force against Trump’s candidacy.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/belongs-jail-billionaire-republican-donor-195959163.html

Florida's Republican attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to keep a proposed abortion rights amendment off the ballot, saying proponents are waging “a war” to protect the procedure and ultimately will seek to expand those rights in future years.

But proponents of the proposed amendment said Attorney General Ashley Moody is playing politics and that her arguments fall legally short given what the call the clear and precise language of the proposed measure.

A group called Floridians Protecting Freedom has gathered nearly 500,000 of the 891,523 voter signatures needed ahead of a Feb. 1 deadline for signatures to put the proposal on the 2024 ballot. The state Supreme Court would be tasked with ensuring the ballot language isn’t misleading and applies to a single subject if it goes before voters.

The proposed amendment would allow abortions to remain legal until the fetus is viable. But Moody argued that abortion rights proponents and opponents have differing interpretations as to what viability means. Those differences along with the failure to define “health” and “health-care provider,” she said, are enough to deceive voters and potentially open a box of legal questions in the future.

“The ballot summary here is part of a ... design to lay ticking time bombs that will enable abortion proponents later to argue that the amendment has a much broader meaning than voters would ever have thought,” she argued in a 50-page brief.

She said while prior court decisions have used viability as a term meaning whether the fetus can survive outside the womb, “others will understand ‘viability’ in the more traditional clinical sense — as referring to a pregnancy that, but for an abortion or other misfortune, will result in the child’s live birth.”

Proponents disputed those statements.

“The proposed amendment is very clear and precise,” Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani said in a news release. “The term viability is a medical one, and in the context of abortion has always meant the stage of fetal development when the life of a fetus is sustainable outside the womb through standard medical measures.”

Moody also argued that language that allows abortions after the point of viability to protect the health of the mother do not distinguish between physical and mental health. She also said voters might assume a health-care provider is a doctor, but the amendment doesn't explicitly say so.

Republicans have dominated state politics and controlled the governor’s office and both branches of the Legislature since 1999. In that time, the state has consistently chipped away at abortion rights, including creating a waiting period before the procedure can be performed, parental notification if minors seek abortion and forcing women to have an ultrasound before having an abortion.

A law Gov. DeSantis approved last year banning abortion after 15 weeks is being challenged in court.

If the courts uphold the law — DeSantis appointed five of the Supreme Court’s seven justices — a bill DeSantis signed this year will ban abortion after six weeks, which is before many women know they are pregnant. DeSantis, who is running for president, has said he would support a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks.

If the amendment makes the ballot it will need at least 60% voter approval to take effect.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-attorney-general-against-criticism-214631896.html

Consider the folowing for years the then Fla Sup. Court said that the Privacy Provision in the Fla. Constitution gave women the right to an abortion...... Yes, Fla. has a Privacy Provision that was approved by the voters.

The elevation of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) to House speaker was a shocker. Not since John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate has a heretofore little-known politician been lifted so quickly to a position of prominence and importance. Though Johnson now is second in the line of presidential succession, we’re still finding out basic and important facts about him and how he sees the world. This includes his alarming record as a hardcore conservative cultural warrior, motivated by a Christian fundamentalist belief, who has fiercely opposed gay rights (comparing homosexuality to pedophilia), called for a total nationwide ban on abortion, proposed the end of no-fault divorce, and urged a return to “18th century values.” One more significant thing I’ve discovered is that Johnson appears to believe in a religious litmus test for politicians.

This weekend I broke the news that Johnson and his wife, Kelly Johnson, a self-described Christian counselor, a few years ago created a seminar that promoted the premise that the United States has been a “Christian nation.” I found a video of one of these sessions they held in 2019 at the Baptist church they belong to in Bossier City, Louisiana. At that event, from the pulpit, Kelly declared that “biblical Christianity”—that is, a literal reading of the Bible as fundamentalists interpret it—is the only “valid worldview,” and nothing else makes sense. (This worldview includes creationism—believing that the Earth was created by God in six days 6,000 years ago—and the denial of evolution.) Mike Johnson called for “biblically sanctioned government.” In this venue and many others, including a podcast they have hosted together, the pair have contended that there is only one truth: “Jesus’ truth.”

The Johnsons are diehard fundamentalists who believe every religion other than their brand of Christianity is false and that whatever is written in the Bible should dictate all conduct, rules, policies, and laws. As I reported earlier, Mike Johnson in 2016 exclaimed, “We’re living in a completely amoral society.” The only way out, according to him and Kelly, is to abide by the Bible.

This is a lot to absorb. We’re often uncomfortable discussing a politician’s faith. But in this case, Johnson acknowledges that his fundamentalism determines his politics and policy positions. As he said during a Fox interview, “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, 'It's curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?' I said, 'Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That's my worldview.'"

After reporting the story on the seminars he and his wife conducted, I went back and watched the video again and found another important nugget that I’m sharing here for the first time. Toward the end of that three-hour-long presentation, Johnson instructed the assembled on how they ought to apply their religious beliefs to politics:

You better sit down any candidate who says they’re going to run for legislature and say, “I want to know what your worldview is. I want to know what, to know what you think about the Christian heritage of this country. I want to know what you think about God’s design for society. Have you even thought about that?” If they hadn’t thought about it, you need to move on and find somebody who has...We have too many people in government who don’t know any of this stuff. They haven’t even thought about it.

This remark came after Kelly and Mike had repeatedly asserted that the Christian fundamentalist worldview—based entirely on what appears in the Old and New Testaments—is the only legitimate worldview.

Johnson was telling the folks in the pews that the only political candidates deserving support are those who share this worldview and who embrace the notion that the United States has been a Christian nation. This smacks of Christian nationalism and appears to be a religious test for politics.

Johnson, of course, is free to follow his values, back politicians who are fundamentalist Christians, and press others to do the same, believing that only people who follow his take on Christianity are worthy of holding elected office. But doing so demonstrates a narrow and rigid view of life and suggests that he yearns for a theocracy—a government run only by Christian fundamentalists who base all their decisions on what they consider to be the “absolute truth” of the Bible.

A good example of how Johnson’s faith affects his approach to public policy occurred earlier in this seminar, when he discussed climate change. He asserted that the demand for action to address the climate crisis “defies the created order of how this is all supposed to work.” He explained that the Bible presents an order to life: There’s God, beneath God is “man,” and below that all the animals. Humans are to follow God’s command to “take dominion of the Earth. You subdue it...We’re supposed to eat those animals.”

Johnson noted that environmentalists ignore God’s word, and he compared them to the devil:

When you take God out of the equation, and you remove absolute truths...you got to make all this stuff up. So what they’ve done is, as the devil always does, they take the truth and they turn it upside down. So the radical environmentalists—they actually believe that the environment is God.

Johnson adheres to a harsh perspective. The only truth is what he preaches. The only true religion is what he practices. The only guide to the problems of modern society is the Bible. Environmentalists are akin to Satan.

Johnson does come across as a mild-mannered fellow. Indeed, during this seminar, he told his co-religionists that they need to promote their truth in a Christ-like fashion, with loving and kindness, and that they must avoid bitterness or anger. Do not be quarrelsome, he advised. Don’t try to silence or censor others. Let the critics and foes have their say, for, ultimately, nothing can defeat the one and only truth that Johnson and his comrades in Christ hold.

Johnson’s amenable persona is a cover for his extremism. He sees himself as part of a small band of righteous Christian soldiers combatting an “amoral” society. (His wife’s business was called Onward Christian Counseling Services. After he became speaker, she took down its website.) For Johnson, this is truly a war for the soul of the nation. With a Bible in his hand, he and a small slice of Americans are up against dark and Satanic forces. Still, Johnson is a happy warrior—albeit an intolerant one who believes that only he and his fellow faith-keepers possess the truth and deserve access to power. He cannot accept the religious and cultural diversity of this nation and the world. He is much better suited to be a preacher than a leader just two heartbeats away from the presidency.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

https://link.motherjones.com/public/33196514

ok folks, the crazies have managed to temporarily (let's hope) gain control of the U.S. Congress..... this guy is reason enough to open the purse strings and donate from time to Dem candidates. But as I have said over the past few years you better wake the fuck up.