Radley Balko (Rise of the Warrior Cop) hasn't been heard from much this year (unless I guess you subscribe on Substack?) but he's now coming out hard to debunk the Trump administration's mangling of crime statistics to justify his militarization of domestic law enforcement.  Although none of the broad strokes are radically different from what I've pointed out in previous posts (ie, violent crime in DC, and nationwide, is a fraction of its historical high 30 years ago, and DC's violent crime and auto theft rates have been precipitously falling every year since the post-pandemic peak and are on track, even before Trump's intervention, to continue falling this year), Balko brings the math and the context to make it fully irrefutable.  And he does bring in an additional surprising stat - red states have higher per capita violent crime than the blue states Trump has been targeting.





Balko's article for Mother Jones is worth checking out, and he's also featured on this week's Ezra Klein podcast.




 

The Trump administration has been quietly moving our US foreign policy position in the Levant away from a two-state solution outcome, and closer to, but not yet outright embracing, the annexation of Palestinain territory by Israel.

This week saw Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoking the travel visas for members of the Palestinain groups the PLO and Fatah just prior to their scheduled appearance in New York where Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was to give a speech at the UN General Assembly.  Rubio has effectively canceled this appearance.

Rubio's office cited two conditions for this ban:

1) "Before the PLO and PA can be considered partners for peace, they must consistently repudiate terrorism — including the October 7 massacre" - a not-unreasonable ask on the surface, but the extent to which Fatah has satisfied this repudiation appears to be a matter of unnecessary semantics, as Fatah has blamed Hamas and their Oct. 7th violence which has "brought disaster upon the Palestinian people".

2) "The PA must also end its attempts to bypass negotiations through international lawfare campaigns, including appeals to the ICC and ICJ, and efforts to secure the unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state." - this is a bit more insidious.  Basically what Rubio and the Trump administration is demanding here is for the Palestinian leadership (not Hamas) to cease their appeals to international bodies such as the UN itself, and those criminal justice institutions to which neither the US nor Israel have recognized.  The very fact that these Palestinian groups are maintaining their legitimate right to statehood is being cast as incompatible with a peace settlement.  And just at a time when other leading European allies are throwing support to officially recognizing the legitimacy of an autonomous Palestinian state.

If this was simply a matter of diplomatic sensitivity towards ongoing peace negotiations, maybe I could see some vestige of solace, but instead this seems to fly right in the face of any of the ongoing peace talks with Israel's Arab neighbors, and clearly against our own European ones to boot.  So what's the endgame? 

It isn't very reassuring when, very quietly a couple of weeks back, this Rubio State Department also fired a press officer over similar semantic language regarding our (American) policies towards these Israel/Palestinain negotiations.  Shahed Ghoreishi, a contractor in the Bureau of Near East Affairs, had upset his superiors by pointing out that the official US policy on Gaza does not support "mass relocations".  But more troubling was Ghoreishi's pushback against the State Department's, and Ambassador Mike Hukabee's, use of the terms "Judea and Samaria" in reference to the West Bank, which are the names that a future 'Greater Israel' map would denote this territory.

“Despite a close working relationship with many of my dedicated and hardworking colleagues, I was targeted following two events last week when I attracted the ire of the 7th floor and senior officials in Embassy Jerusalem: stating we are against forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza as President Trump and special envoy Witkoff have both previously claimed and cutting a reference to Judea and Samaria,” Ghoreishi said, referring to the floor where top leaders have offices at the State Department.

“Both of these had been consistently approved at the senior level in the past, so it begs the question why I was suddenly targeted without a direct explanation and whether our Israel-Palestine policy is about to get even worse - including an unwillingness to take any stand against ethnic cleansing. The future looks bleak,” he said.

Also, one other very interesting story this week, which is far more interesting in what it is not saying. 

Conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer continues to wield a jarring amount of power in the Trump administration. The latest example: She appears to have had a Democratic senator’s classified visit to a military spy agency canceled.

On Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that his visit to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)’s Virginia headquarters had been cancelled after Loomer launched what Warner called “a campaign of baseless attacks” on social media against him and the NGA’s director, Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth... The classified visit, planned for Friday, had not been publicized. It was intended to be an oversight visit to the agency, which works within the Department of Defense (DOD) to provide intelligence through maps and satellites.....

“Why are the Pentagon and [intelligence community] allowing for the Director of an Intel agency to host a rabid ANTI-TRUMP DEMOCRAT SENATOR at NGA under the Trump administration?” Loomer asked.

Obviously the fact that this....."internet personality" Laura Loomer has the ears of both Trump and JD Vance, as well as apparently many other MAGA folks within the White House, should be alarming enough.  But what we don't know from this story is also pretty alarming, which is.... what was the subject of this meeting which was cancelled?  And could it be because of what the meeting was focusing on that Loomer chose to sabotage it?  I mean, maybe Sen. Warner just decided to drop by the office of the NGA for an unpublicized classified visit.  Or maybe there was something specific of interest involving satellite intelligence for which Warner wanted or needed to be briefed.  Maybe he still will be.  But, let's say that Loomer, being connected enough to have even known about this unpublicized classified meeting in the first place, may have also known about what the meeting pertained to, and may have not wanted that information shared?  I'm just saying, it looks pretty weird. and scary.  As noted in the above article, Laura Loomer seems to have a very strange and outsized influence on the Trump administration's intelligence apparatus.  For what reason?  Could it have anything to do with her support for Putin?

We probably won't really understand the scope of this story for some time, but it's a good item to stick in your pocket for that later date.
 

I suppose I should make myself perfectly clear.

I do not and never have had so much as a grain of respect for the late Charles James Kirk.  I have always seen him for exactly what he is, for his function within the radicalizing right-wing grievance-sphere, as a shitheaded propagandist and as a blatantly bad faith pusher of distortion and disinformation.

Unfortunately, in our current times of hyperpartisan hysteria for which Kirk was a vociferous participant, it seems to have become necessary to specify some very basic principles about civil discourse, the kinds of principles which Kirk was content to render illegible during his "Prove Me Wrong" trolling or his "Jubilee" performative debates.  The fundamental principle here is that being a shitheaded propagandist and a campus debate-troll do not and should never warrant one's death sentence.  I'm happy if we can all be sensible enough to at least agree on this.  Kirk's brand of sophic dissembling was obnoxious, sure, but never so persuasive to anyone with half the size of his head to require such corporeal intervention in response.  In a perfect world, where those on the left still actually understand and uphold civil, humanist values, this is not in the least bit controversial.

If we can, in fact, all truly agree that simply being a puppet-throat, even for an authoritarian white/Christian nationalist movement, is not in itself a capital crime, and that it is actually insane for anyone to think so, then I surely hope that we can also so easily agree that it is at least as insane for anyone to believe or to infer that something like South Park's recent caricature of Kirk could have reasonably inspired his public assassination.  Yet, for what I assume are equally bad faith and cynical reasons, we are hearing just that, and worse.  My fear is that Kirk's murder will inspire a torrent of such self-righteous intimidation and censorship by claiming that any criticism of Kirk and the movement which he represented is essentially culpable in his death.  In fact, we've already seen a number of people - private citizens rather than political or media figures - who have been fired from their jobs for social media posts that they've made about Charlie Kirk's death.  I admit, I haven't actually seen any of these posts - they seem to have already been deleted, some voluntarily - but, again, I would hope that we can agree that speech alone should not be crimes requiring such punitive measures.

Or a more reasonable example, the media figure who was also fired for his speech, Matthew Dowd, an otherwise centrist beltway pundit.  The meat of his statement, responding to a question about "the environment" which has enabled such murderous action, illustrates Kirk's role as a poisoner of discourse: "Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions."  We might say that this seems insensitive in the aftermath of the shooting (and actually Dowd made these comments live before Kirk's death had been announced, just minutes after the event, so he couldn't have prepared his words more thoughtfully), and this brand of "chickens come hime to roost" is especially gauche in the aftermath of an event like this, but, to a certain extent involving the crux of what he's saying here, I happen to agree with Dowd in the abstract, and I don't believe he deserved to be fired for these comments.  He should have, at least, been given the opportunity to go back on the air to clarify himself.  Again, in normal circumstances, where civil discourse has not been eroded into hot-take outrage, it would not be controversial to simultaneously acknowledge that Kirk did not deserve a death sentence for spewing hateful words, but also to recognize Kirk's direct responsibility in this corrosion of civil discourse over the past 10-15 years.  In this "environment", this media ecosystem driven by algorithms which discourage nuance and temperance, while incentivizing irrational outrage and fear and which has consistently exploited our sense of helplessness, maybe it starts to become more understanble how some people, espacially those without intellect or imagination, would turn to more desperate resorts as acceptable or even reasonable paths of action.  Kirk's death should be seen as an indictment on this entire media ecosystem, regardless of his own participation and perpetuation within it.  Such irrational, immoral consequences emerge when weak minds are aroused.to action, especially when plied with an abundance of falsehoods willfully and deceptively presented as dire truths.

Such exploitative demagoguery exists within the left-wing media ecosystems as well.  There are plenty of Young Turk-types who see FOX News as a envious model of indoctrinal efficacy, and promote its emulation.  Many of these hosts have a similar distrust of their audience's critical thinking abilities, or even discourage it.  "Free-thinkers" are poor team-players.  Again, they may stop short of openly advocating violence, but they'll still exploit a sense of hopelessness and helplessness, and in the audience's existential desperation, they'll implore them to "do something".  But despite this being true, the real fact of the matter is that, as a matter of sheer scale, there is very little appropriate comparison to be made, and this is evident from even the couple of days we've had since Kirk's death.

We have Nancy Mace claiming that "Democrats", writ-large, "own" this murder, even as I haven't seen a single public Democrat who has tried to defend this crime.  Maybe some anonymous posts online?  From people who have been trained to regard such "TV people" as indifferently than "NPCs"?  Mace says "If you have a different opinion from the left, they want to kill you. That is a fact."  No, Nancy.  That is not how "facts" work.  I'm hard-pressed to find a whole lot of factual evidence to back up the claim that the Democrat party, or the "left" in general, has as their operative agenda the extermination of every person with a differing opinion.  What is a fact, however, is that this statement you just gave provides a perfect example of the kind of radicalizing hyperbole which would surely result in much more violence if your audience were to take it seriously (and many might).  And that scares me a hell of a lot more than any of the drooling foolishness that ever came out of Charlie Kirk's mouth.  In fact (as in "backed up with tangible evidence"), we're already seeing elements of the right-wing media and their audience who are hell-bent on using Kirk's death to ramp up further violence on a scale which the Dems or the left-wing could barely even begin to imagine.  Matthew Dowd may have been pre-emptively fired for his insensitive comments, but you can damn well be sure that FOX's Jesse Watters will not be fired for openly calling for Civil War.  Which one is really worse?  This is the nature of our so-called centrist media hypocrisy.

Another fact happens to be that Charlie Kirk was an avowed racist, with plentiful and repeated examples.  Again, not really deserving of a death sentence in and of itself.  In fact, I kind of appreciate his candor on the subject.  But maybe you can't so easily isolate the racist politics he broadcast from the actions of some of his mourners when they call in threats to shut down historically black colleges and university campuses in retaliation of Kirk's death, even though the assassin, seen in video footage, clearly is not a black man.  But if you've followed Kirk's own race grievances, and his concept of who "the enemy" is, then such a response starts to make sense.  And just as we saw with last year's Butler shooter involved in the attempt on Trump's life, these supporters like to conspiratorially throw around the vague "they" when there is zero evidence to suggest that a single other person was involved.  Well, unsurprisingly, we're seeing a similar "they" behind Kirk's murder as well.  Will corporate news media be as vigilant in quickly tamping down such rhetoric as they were in firing Matthew Dowd?  Not likely.  Even Bill Maher, recently promoted onto CNN, has without consequence referred to "their" attempt to kill Trump last year, conflating it as part of the same witchhunt as the other Trump prosecutions.

Clearly one side has been more privileged, even before last year's election, to engage in this kind of incendiary provocation, and they seem content to expand it, all while gaslighting Dems and the left that it's all our fault somehow.  Because somebody somewhere once said something mean about Nancy Mace's boob job.  Let us just try not to take the bait.  Mockery is infinitely preferable to manslaughter.
 

It seems that the hot conspiracy take catching on is that Charlie Kirk's murder was orchestrated by the Israeli government.  If anyone wants my advice, I'd suggest maybe avoiding anything being pushed by the Neville Roy Singham-funded Grayzone website or anything Max Blumenthal has to say. 

Some suckers on the Left appear to be allowing their anti-Zionism get in the way of their better senses.  As for the Right, well, let MAGA eat their own.

Rampop II wrote:

Yet it appears MAGA is going ahead and blaming the Left anyway.

Meh, "the Left", "the Jews".  Evs.

Rampop II wrote:

We all knew they’d come up with a way, despite the killer coming from a classic MAGA family.

I wouldn't put too much stock in his upbringing.  From what we've seen so far, he seems like another terminally-online young gamer desperate to do something "meaningful" with himself.  Then Charlie Kirk came to town.

Rampop II wrote:

Yesterday would have been more risible were it not equally ominous for its multiple declarations of MAGA jihad against the Left:

"The evil-doers for my husband's assassination have no idea what they have done."
"The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry."

The evil–doers, plural.
Who, exactly?

It's the "demons" they've been talking about for years now.  It's amazing how much the mainstream media is chalking Kirk up as someone "open-minded", just trying to find a connection through conversation, when he was actually out there railing against the "demonic forces" trying to replace Christians and rape their daughters.  You know, "honest discourse".

Colbert had a good bit about Vance and Miller last night, talking about Vance coming up with his version of how rabidly violent the Left is by saying he pulled these numbers out of his "stat-crack".

Jinnistan wrote:

My fear is that Kirk's murder will inspire a torrent of such self-righteous intimidation and censorship by claiming that any criticism of Kirk and the movement which he represented is essentially culpable in his death.

And this is precisely what Vance is intent on doing, and it's quite disconcerting to think of all of the busy-body bitches who will be calling up random people's employers trying to get anyone fired who ever talked shit about Kirk or maybe even MAGA, framing it as a "celebration" of his death.  We know that many employers will not bother with context, but just fire anyone with even a slight possibility of bringing their business some bad press.  A lot of people are going to get fucked, just because they "think differently" about Kirk's blessed Christendom.  But more importantly will be the chilling effect of persuading people to not speak out at all - basically exactly the very thing these MAGA-holes are claiming has been happening to them.  Everything about "cancel culture", social media "censorship", even so-called "debanking".  Stephen Miller said elsewhere about Kirk's critics, "we will find you, we will take away your money, we will take away your power".  Rubio is promising to revoke visas based on this.  And if it isn't enough that your posts about Kirk's death don't exactly amount to "celebration", Trump goons have added "rationalizations" for Kirk's death as sufficient cause to castigate people.

It's easy to find examples already.  Washington Post's Karen Attiah, with posts which may not have been kind to Kirk but are explicitly anti-violence, certainly not a celebration of it against anyone.  The same Nancy Mace I mentioned earlier is trying to strip Ilhan Omar of her congressional committee assignments for criticizing Kirk and MAGA, even after Omar called his death "mortifying", expressed empathy for his family and saying "we cannot just go out and terminate people".  (Ah, I see now Mace is calling for Omar's deportation as well, 'cause why not?)  And Vance, on Kirk's show, called out this article from The Nation, claiming it "justifies" Kirk's murder, when in fact it says "I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views".  In a true spirit of honoring Kirk's name, there's going to be a whole lot of similarly bad faith efforts to intimidate and silence critics.  And worse, because of Kirk's Christian nationalism, it'll be done with some vague taint of episcopal destiny.

It's so much more relaxing in the face of an encroaching authoritarian state to focus on sheer ineptitude, and thankfully we still have Kash Patel and RFK Jr around as handy reminders that maybe these folks aren't quite capable of keeping their story straight enough to fool "most of the people most of the time".  The problem is that, when you have a political party that's too petrified of Dear Leader that only some of their people are willing to call out obvious deceptions, the larger complicity still enables the mission.  So there have been a lot of these beltway stories with various Republican congresspeople, speaking anonymously on background (to avoid Trump's wrath), all basically admitting that there are precious few among their collegues who take either Patel or Kennedy, and any other handful of administration officials, seriously at all.  But whether or not there will be any momentum to shut down the bullshit mostly depends on some kind of larger debacle which could prove to be a "blood in the water" moment.  So far, at the very least, Patel and Kennedy are providing the closest to such momentum, because it seems from a lot of this background talk that nobody really likes either of these men any more than they trust their competence.

Patel as a case in point has serious morale issues within the FBI which is coming close to a boiling point.  No one seems to sincerely believe that Patel represented anything resembling substantive leadership during his pair of recent congressional hearings.  But all that matters is that Patel was combative enough to impress Trump, who loves cheap drama, which may be the only person who matters.  

Outside of television histrionics, the most substantial piece of Patel's testimony was his claim regarding Epstein that "There is no credible information....that he trafficked to other individuals", before adding cautiously "the information we have, again, is limited."  This is quite an astounding claim.  A reasonable follow-up should have been, "Then why did Epstein have secret cameras installed in every room of his properties where he hosted parties involving the trafficked victims and certain powerful men?"  The cameras which allegedly recorded the "tens of thousands" of videos which the FBI seized showing these girls being victimized?  Seems pretty elaborate just to capture video of his own private activities.  But more importantly, by qualifying as "credible", Patel is essentially saying here that the mountain of testimony from Epstein's victims regarding all of the powerful men they were trafficked to by Jeffery were all not credible?  Another obvious follow-up, "How did you make that determination of credibility against the victims?"  This is why I am also so unimpressed with the grandstanding by so many Democrats at these hearings who failed to raise these obvious points, instead preferring for their own antagonistic viral clips and soundbites.

And while I'm not exactly a fan of Rep. Thomas Massie for a host of unrelated reasons, he deserves credit here for bypassing theatrics and instead focused on the substance of the evidence, pointing out that the FBI is in possession of certain '302' interview transcripts with Epstein victims which identify up to 20 names of powerful men who were recipients of Epstein's trafficked girls, which is information that Patel is publicly denying the existence of.  Massie: "We know these people exist in the FBI files, the files that you control."  Patel then tries to slither out of this by blaming the "original sin" of the 06-07 investigation, only for Massie to correct him that these 302 documents were filed during Epstein's 2019 arrest instead, for which Patel noticeably avoided responding directly to, with only a feeble "There have been no new materials brought to me".  Kash, Massie just brought these materials to you, you might want to look into them.  (No doubt that this "original sin" involving the very shady negotiations between Epstein's lawyers and those who prosecuted his 2008 case definitely deserves plenty of scrutiny as well.)  Since Massie's speaking time was limited, he also entered a number of other articles into the congressional record involving Epstein's intelligence ties, including information concerning an exchange with Epstein's bodyguard, Igor Zinoviev, with a not-too cryptic warning:

Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Epstein’s victims wrote:

(Zinoviev said) "You don't know who you're messing with and you need to be really careful. You are on Jeffrey's radar and somebody that Jeffrey pays a lot of attention to, which is not good, you don't want to be on Jeffrey's radar."

And I said, "Well, give me some examples. I mean, who am I messing with?"  And that's when he looked across the table and whispered three letters, "C-I-A.".

Of course all of this revolves around Alexander Acosta, the initial prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida case, who had made such a "sweetheart" deal with Epstein in 2008, including an unprecedented non-prosecution agreement against any and all co-conspirators, which a federal judge would later invalidate as illegal to allow for the prosecution of co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.  Acosta allegedly said in 2019 that Epstein was "above my pay grade" and "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone."  Acosta is scheduled to testify in front of Congress tomorrow, so we'll see if anyone has the cojones to ask him who exactly told him this instruction.

Anyway, it's damning enough that Kash Patel doesn't seem the least bit interested in finding out.

........




Maybe less of a "fucked-up hot dog" and more of a microwaved Norman Mailer.

With the fired CDC director Susan Monarez testifying this week, there's even less reason to take RFK very seriously, and even the Republicans on the committees are having a hard time finding anything credible to defend him.  So naturally, they're going for some other rather incredible angles, like attacking her lawyers for being "anti-Trump".  But most bizarrely, Okie dokey Markwayne Mullin made an especially lame-ass accusation that he was in possession of an audio tape recording of the final meeting between Monarez and RFK Jr - the one in which she was told to resign - which Mullin claimed would prove that Monarez was lying in her testimony.  Monarez, no doubt confused, reiterated her testimony as given.  And when pressed by the committee to release the recording, a spokesman for HHS clarified, "there is no recording".  Mullin afterward meekly apologized, claiming that he "was mistaken".  Sure thing.  Nice try.  Absolute amateur hour.  (Aren't congressmen under oath at these hearings?  'Cause that sure seems more like perjury than a mistake.)

Going back a couple of weeks..... Rand Paul, who was also a sniviling little shit to Monarez over vaccine mandates during her hearing, had some interesting takes on Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, one of the top CDC officials who resigned in protest after Susan Monarez was fired by RFK Jr.  Dr. Daskalakis is an open and proud gay man, once known as NYC's "gay health warrior" when he worked to combat monkeypox.  Rand Paul is so jealous, saying that Daskalakis' gay lifestyle should have disqualified him from working in the government to begin with: "He does not represent the mainstream of anything in America.  He should have never had a position in government. And he brags about his lifestyle, you know, this whole idea of bondage and, you know, multiple partners and all that stuff. He brags about that stuff."  Rand knows how to keep it to himself.  It must be the libertarian in him which makes him so concerned about other people's lifestyle choices.  Another Southern Republican, Georgia's Buddy Carter, went even further by accusing Daskalakis of being a "BDSM Satan worshipper".  Gosh.

Anyway, transparently, Daskalakis' very open "lifestyle" was never previously a problem for his "qualifications" as a CDC expert, until of course Republicans needed an excuse to distract from all of the very credible criticisms that were being made against RFK Jr. by these resigned professionals.

And just how out and about was Dr. Daskdatass?  This is apparently the source of his "leather-bondage" fetish.



(note the pentagram)

What a goddamn country.
 

Rampop II wrote:

Turns out the source of that “Israel did it” rumor is…the Iranian government. Figures.

It tracks.

The fellow I mentioned above, Neville Roy Singham, is worth noting, as a somewhat oxymoronic "Maoist billionaire" based in Shanghai, he is nevertheless an American who finances quite a bit of the reflexively defensive disinformation around Russia-China-Iran (ie, "Ukraine provoked their own invasion", "the Uyghur genocide is a Western hoax", "the Mahsa Amini protests were a CIA psy-op", etc), and the website The Grayzone is a prominent example of peddling in this garbage.  Unlike people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who have been pushing this narrative of Israel assassins taking out Kirk for mostly right-wing media spheres, Singham's efforts are more focused on infiltrating left-wing media, trying to peel off those anti-Zionists who would be instinctively attracted to such a scenario.  Singham still has many ties to some legacy leftist media and organizations forged during the RT-America days, and generally the mission is to demoralize progressives from democratic participation, painting Western values in the most pejorative terms (imperialism, colonialism, capitalism) all while obscuring the autocratic constrictions from what their audience presumably sees as the alternative hemispheric values.  (Basically it's just the other side of the current autocratic vise.)

Much like how some MAGA folks jumped immediately to blaming transsexuals for this murder, there are any number of people who will gravitate to whatever their prefered boogyman before bothering, much less waiting, to see any substantial evidence one way or the other.  The Grayzone's main editor, Max Blumenthal (another disinformation shill) has been trying to make the rounds on podcasts, but it remains to be seen just how eagerly or not the left-wing media will buy into it.

........

This is slightly relevant, in that it further illustrates this stultified conception of binary values usually pushed by propogandists.  Simplicity is one of the more insidious tools of deception.  It's either this or that.  Easy.  Left/Right, Black/White, West/East, look over here now over here, look at him while I'm looking at you, and then finally which hand am I holding the coin?  Is that a good thing or a bad thing?  I thought this was an interesting quote from Rabbi Ben Shapiro on Bill Maher's show last week, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder which posits an extremely broken notion of morality which does, in fact, provide an accurate representation of Kirk's binary bigotry:

Ben Shapiro wrote:

If the, sort of, reasonable morality that you espouse is universal, then why is it not even remotely universal on planet Earth?  OK?  It is only found in Christian-based societies.  You will not find it...unless it was grafted on later by, you know, us conquering some place.

Shapiro appears to be taking credit for Christianity as his Jewish child.

This is absolute nonsense to anyone who hasn't been intellectually suffocated in parochial schools and communities.  "Reasonable morality" has emerged in most all civilized societies, and it is not to be taken for granted that specifically biblical morality was ever the highest quality example of such.  The very basic texts outlining these things like "ethics" and "morals" were explicitly done by the Greeks, quite outside and independent of biblical literature.  Anyone from Confucius to Buddha to motherfucking Hammurabi were quite capable of establishing codes of reasonable morality outside of Judeo-Christian influence.

I think we all need to come to an understanding that there is no proprietary copyright claim for reasonable morality.  That might be a wise step in the right direction.  It ain't the west, it ain't the east.  It might be right where you're standing.

Rampop II wrote:

Jinnistan wrote:

It seems that the hot conspiracy take catching on is that Charlie Kirk's murder was orchestrated by the Israeli government. 

Turns out the source of that “Israel did it” rumor is…the Iranian government. Figures.

In addition, it's worth pointing out that the State Department has also decided to shut down all of their remaining programs to counter foreign disinformation campaigns.  As if it weren't a problem at all.  Free speech restrictions are only worth enforcing against late night comedy hosts and bored Americans shitposting at work.

And then there's Tucker Carlson, who has been pushing the theory about Charlie Kirk possibly having been assassinated by the Israeli government, at Kirk's memorial service describing the theoretical plotting of Kirk's murder as being similar to Jesus: 

Tucker Carlson wrote:

And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about "What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking". And there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, "I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him? That’ll shut him up, that’ll fix the problem".

And then he cackles like a goddamn lunatic.

This hasn't exactly gone unnoticed, but there hasn't been any real pushback from the MAGA-factions who were there witnessing this in real time.

Does Trump get to retain his title as the anti-war Nobel Peace Prize President if he only starts a war with America?  Like maybe those people who don't think masturbation qualifies as sex?

Even before they changed the Defense Department to "WAR", I noticed that Trump and Hegseth stopped saying words like "soldier" or "troops", and instead were using "warfighters" and "warriors".  It definitely begs some questions that maybe someone should have started asking.  Hegseth stressing a shift to "maximum lethality" and "violent effect" sure sounds like he wants to start a war.  "We're going to go on offense."  So we're not going to wait for someone else to start a war.  And also Hegseth fired all of the top Pentagon lawyers, to push a "warrior ethos", almost like he wasn't expecting his new war to abide by any legal standards or rationale.  And let's say that Trump was serious about actually ending these forever wars, then wouldn't he want to overturn the very outdated 23-year-old Authorization for Use of Military Force which Congress granted to W. Bush to start these forever wars?  Yeah, Trump ain't doing that, because that would revert war powers back to Congress.  And it did occur to a few Republican congressmen that maybe, given the trends, they should revoke the AUMF sooner than later.  But they did not do.

So an interesting question is obviously, "For whom do these war bells toll?"  Many might say China, but that would actually be really messy.  Canada and Greenland seemed more likely.  Maybe even Mexico, maybe Nicaragua, hell, maybe even Cuban, for old times' sake.  But maybe we should have taken Trump a bit more seriously with that Apocalypse Now meme, because these past couple of experiments of federalizing our urban law enforcement seem to have been rehearsals for a full on engagement in America's "war ravaged" cities.  And now, I guess earlier today, Trump has made it semi-official that he plans to launch a 'War on Enemies Domestic'.  Suddenly, firing all of the lawyers starts to make sense.  Oh, it's not about Nuremberg exactly.  It's more about not letting our own Constitution stand in the way.  Or our own generals for that matter, as they were fairly explicitly instructed this afternoon.  You can retire, but you can't dissent.  Much like Americans, as we're soon to be.  We may not be entirely content about this turn of events, as long as we remember to shut the fuck up.  And shave, or something.

At this point, we should be able to see how this is going to play out in the courts, much like what's already happened with the federal court ruling in California which declared Trump's deployment of military troops to LA as an illegal breach of 'Posse Comitatus'.  The Supreme Court will then dutifully suspend the lower court rulings while they take a year and a half to bother ruling on it, giving Trump in the meantime all of the leash he needs to implement, and normalize, an atrocious amount of civil rights violations.  "No harm, no foul", writes John Roberts on his nondecision emergency ruling.  It does start to feel as if these conservative justices are aware that maybe if they delay their responsibilities long enough that whatever really horrible event - which not only these Republicans but all of these billionaires building bunkers and locking down their excess wealth are clearly waiting for and expecting to happen any day between now and the midterms - will render the need for jurisprudence moot.  Almost as if this war on American citizens might be a pretty central aspect in the next phase of such an escalation?

That's one branch down.  And Congress is no help.  Pubs are keeping their heads down as much as possible.  "Well, we're all going to die", reassures Sen. Joni Ernst.  "We can do this the easy way or the hard way".  But just look at these ratcunts Schumer and Jeffries.  These assholes actually thought that "if only we can get a sit-down with Trump!"  Schumer today was bragging about possibly swaying Trump into caring about rural hospitals.  Schumer's trying to play poker with a hand full of coupons.  Maybe these Dems are just more worried about their pwn donors getting in on the best missile silo deals.

Trump's War on Enemies Domestic needs to be taken in context of Trump's executive orders last week against Antifa.  Don't worry, these orders have nothing to do with Antifa, and having nothing to do with an organization which no one has mentioned in five years will not be enough to spare you from being targeted under this order.  So let's look at what Trump is establishing as the standards for the kinds of left-wing dissent which will soon be criminalized.  Keep in mind, this order concerns pre-emptive force against 1st Amendment protected activity: "The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts."  So this is not about specific actions, but ideas and words which, under their purview, could potentially precipitate violence.  Kind of like "criticizing Charlie Kirk" becoming equivalent to "being complicit in Charlie Kirk's death", or "protesting ICE raids" becoming an incitement to mass shooting ICE agents.  The executive order lists the kinds of 1st Amendment speech and activity which will fall under the label of this left-wing "foment" which is responsible for "animating this violent conduct":

1) anti-Americanism
2) anti-capitalism
3) anti-Christianity
4) support for the overthrow of the US government (weird how this isn't #1, right?)
5) extremism on migration
6) extremism on race
7) extremism on gender
8) hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family
9) hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion
10) hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality

"This guidance shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity."

There's an awful lot of ambiguity in the language here (what constitutes "extremism", "traditional views", "traditional morality"?) which could ensnare a whole lot of diverse sentiments.  At what point does rights of speech and assembly become a "conspiracy" or "solicitation to a crime" if we consider the above subject matters as criteria?

And add to this that the Trump administration is pulling out all the stops on making sure that their next plan to steal elections will be far more successful than 2020, and the 'Reichstag' analogy starts to look a lot less silly.  The ultimate prize of achieving an authoritarian state is that they get to stay in power regardless of what the people think.  Maybe that's precisely the urgency behind this particular rush to War.