In defense of Scott Adams’ right to practice free speech

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“Dilbert” must die! Scott Adams’ long-running comic strip “Dilbert” has been dropped by many media outlets that caved in to the “woke” mob over Adams’ audacious exercise of his free-speech rights (while being a white man). Rejecting the central tenets of “woke”ism — the No. 1 tenet of which is black good, white evil — does not make you “racist”; it makes you only a “heretic” in the ongoing “Woke” Inquisition.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been big on Scott Adams for some years now. In years past I have enjoyed his long-running comic strip, “Dilbert,” which has, at least in the past, made some excellent, often funny points about workplace culture, which often is insane (and thus ultimately abusive).

But over the years, it seems to me, the comic strip has grown more bitter and less funny, with a bit of a mean streak having crept in over time — probably as a result of Adams’ personal unfoldment over the years.

Indeed, the character of Dilbert seems to be a stand-in for Adams — the white guy who’s obsessed with his version of reason and logic who is surrounded by abject morons. It’s hell to be a mental god among the masses of idiots.

Even a cursory look at Adams’ YouTube channel — which I never visited until after the latest brouhaha — indicates that he’s one of those older white men (at age 65, he’s a baby boomer) who, under the guise of utilizing and defending logic and reason, will try to eviscerate you with logic and reason, you illogical, irrational fucktard!

Is Adams on the autistic spectrum? And/or is he a bit of a toxic mansplainer? And/or is it a manifestation of baby-boomerian assholery (redundant)?

In any event, I don’t see that the (rather selectively quoted) words that Adam used on YouTube that have gotten him into trouble are straight-out, irrefutably racist.

To me, you’re racist if you believe that a race (usually your own, of course) is inherently better than another race (or even all other races), or that your race is righteous, innocent and good, and that the members of another race are, because of their race, guilty and evil (or, at least, inferior to your race). And these judgments aren’t based upon the individual’s character, behavior, words, actions, etc.; they’re based on the individual’s race.

And in the cult of “woke”ism, that’s pretty much what white people are: guilty and evil because of their (our) race. We were born this way, and we can’t make it go away. We were born with the original stain (or is it a bleaching?) that is whiteness.

Under “woke”ism, there are only two types of white people: (1) white people who are horribly racist who actually will admit it and (2) white people who are horribly racist who refuse to admit it. In the end, either way, if you’re white, you’re guilty as charged (and you’re charged with being an irredeemable, racist piece of shit, of course) in the kangaroo court of “woke”ism.

This is a sick dynamic. It’s anti-white racism — and yes, when practiced by black people it is black supremacism — posing as “anti-racist” “social justice.”

And this is the sick dynamic that has been with us for several years now that, I surmise, prompted Adams’ YouTube rant. (I am not defending every word of Adams’, by the way, but I don’t see that the words that especially got him into trouble with the poobahs of “woke”ism necessarily came from a solid place of “racism,” but that they apparently primarily came from his opposition to “woke”ism, which is toxic as fuck.)

I didn’t hear Adams in his rant call black people inherently inferior and/or call white people inherently superior.

I heard him say that too many blacks don’t take advantage of the opportunities that are available to them, which is, in his view, their chief problem or one of their chief problems, anyway, and that their supposed refusal to lift themselves up has left him in the space that he is through with them.

(While I think that Adams overestimates how easy it is to get ahead or even to keep one’s head above water in our so-called “meritocracy” — belief in the myth of the “meritocracy” seems to be rampant among the baby boomers, who love to tell those of us who have had to follow them to just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps — it’s also probably true that most of us do not, in fact, take anything like full advantage of the opportunities that are available to us.)

Adams’ take on all of this might rub you the wrong way, but is it “racist” because it’s not flattering to “woke” black (and other other “woke”) people?

That someone won’t toe the “woke” line — that one dares to say something that a “woke” black person (or other “woke”ster) might not find flattering (or, worse, to be heretical in the hysterical church of “woke”ness) — doesn’t automatically make him or her, or his or her words, “racist.”

Perhaps the most controversial comment that Adams made is that he thinks that relations between black Americans and white Americans are so broken that whites should just move/stay away from blacks, because relations between the two racial groups never are going to improve.

Read and/or watch the news, the “woke” “news,” and the “woke” commentary regularly, and this opinion doesn’t seem to be too far out there.

Well, if indeed you are hated for your race, moving to another location where you won’t be hated for your race (at least as much, anyway) would be understandable.

Indeed, black Americans, in the Great Migration, fled the race-based hatred of them that they experienced at the hands and mouths of anti-black, racist white Americans. No one can blame them for that; you don’t have to remain somewhere to take abuse, especially over something as immutable as your race.

I can say that as a white male (albeit a gay white male), in public I routinely experienced hostility, mostly from black people, toward me because of my race in the “woke” Sacramento, California, which is about 13 percent black and 31 percent non-Latino white. My “crime” in all of these unpleasant episodes was that of being a white man.

About a year ago I moved, for early retirement, from California to a small community in Nevada that is about 2.5 percent black and 70 percent non-Latino white.

For the past year, I haven’t felt hated because of my race. (If you’re going to hate me, fine — but it really needs to be about something intentionally evil that I have done or said — not about my race.) The racial composition of where you live does greatly affect your day-to-day experience of your community (not that we really have “community” anymore, but still…).

No, I didn’t move to Nevada primarily to flee “woke” (that is, anti-white, racist) black people; my partner wanted to retire here and I decided to retire with him here, as we both had had more than enough of California’s overpopulation, which is the cause of many of its other problems, including (in no certain order) the ridiculous cost of living, inter-racial strife, poverty and homelessness, crime, and, of course, just overcrowding in general, that is, never being able to have some space to yourself for fucking once.

But that I’m obviously not hated just for being white in a white-majority community is great, I can report after what I experienced in “woke” California at the hands (and mouths) of the “social justice warriors” for more than two decades.

Speaking of “white flight,” indeed, as John McWhorter notes in his excellent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, among the many insanely contradictory central tenets of “woke”ism are that white people who move away from blacks are practicing “white flight,” yet whites who move into a black neighborhood are just there to “gentrify” it.

So, you see, the “crime” there isn’t actually about moving away or about moving in — it’s the original “crime” of being white that’s the problem, and to the “woke”sters, if you are white, you cannot win, because you were born evil.

All of this, from what I can tell, is what Adams was protesting, and it’s not “racist” to protest anti-white racism, which does exist in the United States — in abundance, and again, grotesquely ironically, it usually is practiced under the guise of “social justice.”

Thing is, while Martin Luther King Jr., from what I can tell, sincerely wanted the races to get along together, “woke”ism makes it impossible for the races to get along together. When you have permanent race-based “victims” (black) and permanent race-based “oppressors” (white) — black good, white bad — you cannot join together for the common good.

“Woke”ism only perpetuates inter-racial strife, but that’s a feature, not a bug; “woke”sters, far from sincerely and genuinely being interested in advancing “social justice” and inter-racial harmony, are fucking hypocrites who only want to gain, either egoistically or even financially, by stoking inter-racial divisions. It’s their game, their gig, and they have no incentive to give it up, since they find it to be so rewarding (again, sometimes even financially so, and they don’t have to be black to do that — hi, Robin DiAngelo!).

Under the stifling, censorious “woke”ism, we can’t even state these obvious simple truths, because if we piss off one “woke” person — and, like the Borg, creepily, the “woke”sters all are of one mind (and you will be assimilated into “woke”ism; resistance is futile!) — we’re “racist” and we must therefore be “canceled” (that’s as close to publicly executing us as the “woke”sters can get, legally).

In terms of the psychosocial dynamics involved, this is no different from the hysteria about the “heretical” “witches” of yore. No one wants to be labeled a “witch,” so we must frenetically accuse others of being “witches.” And we get at least social rewards, if not also monetary rewards, for burning “witches” at the stake, a la Scott Adams’ “cancellation.” (Also, the more “witches” we “expose,” the safer we are from being burned at the stake ourselves, are we not? Goddess forbid the frenzied “woke” mob might turn on oneself someday!)

We Americans are backfuckingasswards on race — the “woke”sters have become the evil that we at one time said we wanted to eradicate (that is, racism) — and Adams’ treatment indicates that the fever may not break any time soon.

In the meantime, I’m deeply disappointed in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the other craven money-making entities that have caved in to the “woke” mob and decided to stop running “Dilbert” because of some “woke”sters who oppose free speech.

There is much that Adams has said over the years that I disagree with, such as his apparent admiration to at least some degree for former “President” Pussygrabber, and I’m no fan of his apparent libertarian bent, either, but I support his right to say what he believes as long as he’s not calling for physical harm to be done to others (as the Repugnican-fascists routinely do). That’s called freedom of speech, and it’s very much under threat by the “woke”sters who were supposed to “liberate” us with all of this fucking “social justice.”

Far from ushering in the multi-racial utopia that MLK dreamed about, the “woke”sters are careening us all toward an ironically racist hell, if we’re not there already.

Chillingly, though, that seems to be what they want: hell for certain “evil” others — and self-righteous elevation for their “woke” selves.

P.S. Oops; I failed to mention one of the more “incendiary” things that Adams claimed in his recent YouTube rant.

He referred to a recent Rasmussen poll that showed that, he said, almost half of black Americans don’t think that it’s OK to be white. He asserted that those black Americans who think that form a “hate group.”

If you are a group of people who hate another group of people, then you are, um, a “hate group.” That “hate groups” historically have been comprised mostly of white people doesn’t mean that only white people can form a “hate group.” Nor do you have to be formally organized as a hate group in order to act like one.

However, I don’t trust Rasmussen’s polling, and I don’t think that Adams represented the polling entirely accurately.

Fivethirtyeight.com says that Rasmussen has a decided pro-Repugnican bias, which I noticed many years ago, so I take the right-leaning Rasmussen polls with a grain of salt.

But that aside, Rasmussen reported that 53 percent of the black Americans it polled agreed with the lamely worded statement that “It’s OK to be white” — but didn’t report that a full 47 percent believe that it’s not “OK to be white”; Rasmussen reported that 26 percent of its black respondents said they disagree with the statement that “It’s OK to be white,” and that 21 percent said they’re “not sure” whether they agree or disagree with the statement.

Maybe those in the “not-sure” camp just don’t like painting a whole group of people with a broad brush; maybe they take it individual by individual, which is how it should be. (And ditto for the 26 percent who disagree with the statement; maybe they just have some whites, not all whites, in mind when they ponder whether or not “It’s OK to be white.”)

Equally revealing, if Rasmussen can be trusted, is its finding that 79 percent of all of its poll respondents agree with the statement that “Black people can be racist, too” (a central tenet of “woke”ism is that black people, by definition, can only be the victims of racism, never the perpetrators of it) — and that 76 percent of its black respondents agree with this statement, while 27 percent disagree, and 8 percent are “not sure.”

What I at least tentatively extrapolate from these two poll questions, if the poll is trustworthy, is that a bit more than one in four black Americans — not half of them — apparently have some degree of anti-white sentiment (but apparently believe that they can’t be racist themselves because they’re black). That’s still too many black Americans, but that’s not half of them.

Again, if you’re a member of a group (including a group that is a subset of a larger group) that hates the members of another group, especially primarily to even solely on the basis of something like race, biological sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender expression, then I’d call your group a hate group, even if your group has not traditionally been labeled a hate group.

If we can’t call things what they clearly are, we might as well just nuke ourselves into oblivion right now, because that’s the road we’re on anyway.

P.P.S. So after I posted all of the above, I read that “It’s OK to be white” is a “racist” statement/slogan — supposedly it is trolling, at least — pushed by white supremacists.

Just: Wow.

So it’s not OK to be white? To assert that I’m OK — and not, by definition, defective, evil, guilty, “racist,” etc. — for being white is “racist”? This is where we are with the toxic cult of “woke”ism; it’s all about your race, and it’s OK — indeed, it’s preferable — to be a member of a certain race or others, but it’s not OK to be a member of another certain race (white, usually). But this isn’t “racist”; indeed, this Orwellianly is deemed to be “anti-racist.”

This upside-down bullshit is some sick fucking shit.

But thankfully, “woke”ism is eating itself like a snake eating its own tail; it is collapsing under the crushing weight of its own absurdities and self-contradictions and over a growing realization among the U.S. populace that far from being anti-racist, it’s very racist.

Take the fascist buffoons seriously

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That arm movement comes to her so easily and instinctively…

By now, you probably already have heard that on Presidents’ Day, no less, Repugnican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, as many right-wing nut jobs and fascists have suggested over the past many years, that the red states and the blue states should have a “national divorce” — that they should split into two different nations.

Clearly, Greene and her treasonous, fascist ilk dearly miss the Confederacy, where the stupid white people in charge of the show could do whatever the fuck they wanted to those within their domain. Clearly, this is what they want: A white-supremacist, “Christian”-nationalist, fascist dictatorship.

Indeed, Greene actually has fleshed out her right-wing whack-job wish list for her “national divorce,” and of course she doesn’t suggest that any of the elements of it should be achieved democratically, so presumably, the red-state wonderland is to be an authoritarian/autocratic regime (conveniently, with “patriots” just like Greene in charge of everything, no doubt).

Among the many items on Greene’s sick-and-twisted, fascist wish list:

• Any individual moving from the blue-state nation to the red-state nation may not vote for five years, because as a former blue-stater, “You can live there [in Red-State Wonderlandia], you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values [there].” Again: Greene wants a fascist dictatorship a la the Confederacy — not a democracy.
• “We would immediately alleviate the need for departments like the Department of Education. States would have full control of their public education. Education would look different all over the country.” In other words, essentially, local fascist warlords would control what information your child could and could not receive in school. The Repugnican-fascists claim that they oppose, say, the madrasa, but what they want is to set up “Christo”fascist, madrasa-like “schools” of their own.
• “Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times [“drag queen” isn’t capitalized, but if Greene wants to show them such respect, I suppose that’s OK], and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government controlled gender transition schools.” I’m not sure how China gets wrapped up with the treasonous fascists’ fake “threat” of the LGBTQ community, but, again, Greene is calling for dictatorship, not freedom, here; the only way that you are allowed to exist in Red-State Wonderlandia is to present at all times as strictly stereotypically masculine or feminine, based upon your genitalia, and the police of Red-State Wonderlandia will police your sexual practices, obviously. Because freedom! And yes, it’s the left’s dream to have “government controlled gender transition schools” in which all boys are forced to become girls and vice-versa. Because Marjorie Taylor Greene would not lie to you about these “very important” matters!
• “Red state schools would bring back prayer in school and require every student to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance while blue states would likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies like the Trans flag and BLM.” Again, “trans” isn’t capitalized, but it’s sweet that the English-challenged Greene gives transgender individuals such respect. But you gotta love Greene’s hyperbole. Yes, in the blue-state schools, the transgender flag, which is a pretty light blue, pink and white, would replace the U.S. flag, I’m sure. And yes, in the name of religious freedom, let’s force our schoolchildren to recite one “Christo”fascist denomination’s fucking little prayer. And it’s not like Nazi Germany required such public displays of “patriotism” as pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler. (Oh, on that note, if the blue-state flag would be the transgender flag, then surely, Red-State Wonderlandia’s flag would be the Confederate flag or perhaps even the Nazi flag.)
• Continuing in her straw-man “arguments,” Greene opines: “Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools. I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not. Red states would ban biological males from all girls/women’s sports and all girls/women’s places of privacy.” I don’t know — it wasn’t Antifa that treasonously attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, although the fascist fucktards tried to pin that on Antifa — and Antifa, being anti-government, as I understand it, certainly isn’t a wing of the Democratic Party, as Greene lies that it is. (Antifa’s main enemy is fascism — thus its name — which is why fascists like Greene go apeshit over Antifa.) And why Greene smashes together “Antifa communists training schools” — again, Greene needs to learn English (actually, German would be a much better fit for her) — with transgender females in girls’ and women’s sports I have no idea, but I do know that transgender females who want to participate in girls’ and women’s sports is not at fucking all the pressing issue that the Repugnican-fascists want all of us to believe that it is. (For today’s Nazis like Greene, however, clearly, trans is the new Jew. Fascists must always have their scapegoats.)
• “Red states would maintain the truth that there are only two genders and would require the biological identity of each person’s gender on their identification, not how the person identifies. If you choose to identify differently you can, but if you want it on legal record you’ll need to move to a blue state in order to be legally free to lie to yourself and others about your identity.” Again, there is that freedom, that individual liberty, that Greene loves so fucking much: If she disagrees with how you want to live your life, you forcibly have to live somewhere else. This is not at all like how the Nazis treated groups of people whom they didn’t like in their midst. Not at all!
• “Red states would not have to abide by climate cult lies. Red states would be completely free to build and use fossil fuel energy for their citizens. Oil, natural gas, clean coal, and nuclear power would very likely be growing strong energy sources for red states.” I’m glad that Madge brought this up, because this is exactly what the red states would devolve into in Red-State Wonderlandia: They’d look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland/hellscape, replete with no standing trees and choking air pollution, as well as water that you cannot drink, because the unbound profiteering of a relatively few sociopathic individuals trumped all else. Except that Red-State Wonderlandia’s pollution would harm those of us in neighboring Blue-State Wonderlandia, so yeah, those of us who are sane cannot allow Greene’s Red-State Wonderlandia come into existence. (Also, of course, we actually patriotic, pro-democratic, pro-human-rights Americans cannot allow Red-State Wonderlandia to come into existence so that it can persecute minorities with impunity, as did the Confederacy and Nazi Germany.)
• “In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children’s toothbrushes.” Greene thinks about sex toys even more than I do, and I’m a gay man. Next time in Walmart I’ll be sure to look for the supposed sex toys next to the children’s toothbrushes.
• “Law enforcement would likely look different in red and blue states. Red states would likely have highly supported law enforcement officers and well funded agencies. Police officers would be well trained, paid, equipped, and seen as heroes once again, not portrayed as racists [sic] thugs.” Again with the English thing. Why is almost no one on the right proficient in English? They are proponents of “English only” but they couldn’t speak or write their mother tongue correctly if their worthless lives depended on it. That said, yes, I’m sure that policing would look very different in Red-State Wonderlandia; the fire hoses and the attack dogs would be back, I’m sure. (It moves to a blue state or it gets the hose again!) No, not all cops are “racists thugs,” but those who are need to be called out and fired (and, when appropriate, prosecuted), and in Blue-State Wonderlandia, they would be, while in Red-State Wonderlandia, they would be worshipped.
• “Crime rates would be very low. Red state citizens would be safe. Criminals would be locked away swiftly when they broke the law. Justice would be served.” I’m not sure how that would work, since for more than two decades now, the murder rate has been higher in those states that former “President” Pussygrabber won in 2020 than it has been in the states that President Joe Biden won in 2020. This is a long-running Repugnican-fascist lie: that the blue states are rife with crime while the Mayberry-like red states are crime-fucking-free. Indeed, in Red-State Wonderlandia, a bunch of chromosomally challenged mouth-breathers with full access to guns in a Wild-West atmosphere very predictably would mean that the morgues couldn’t even begin to keep up.

So there you have it, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “vision” for the United States of America. Again, in a word, the Confederacy 2.0 that she is pushing would be a hellscape.

And don’t get me wrong; I’d be fine with all of the mouth-breathing knuckle draggers forming a nation of their own, but, again, their unbridled pollution and incredibly short-sighted environmental degradation would adversely affect the rest of us, and we absolutely could not allow them to freely persecute those within their borders; their human-rights abuses would be astrofuckingnomical, and right now it’s only the existing federal United States government that is preventing them from carrying out the Nazi-like pogroms that they’d love to carry out, such as against non-white Americans and immigrants who want a better life for themselves, LGBTQ Americans, non-“Christo”fascist Americans, Americans who don’t bow down to all of the obvious evils of capitalism just like bowing down to the golden calf* that is capitalism, et. al., et. al.

Similarly, this is why the American Civil War had to be fought — and won — by the actual patriots: Because the treasonous, evil Confederacy could not be allowed to continue to exist and to continue to persecute certain human beings (black Americans mostly, of course, but others as well) it deemed deserving of persecution.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is, of course, a stunningly fucktarded buffoon. She embarrasses herself daily but is too fucking moronic to even begin to realize it.

But it is at our own peril that we dismiss the likes of Greene as too stupid and too crazy to pose any real threat to the nation. Many thought that Hitler was too buffoonish to ever pose any real threat.

When someone — perhaps especially someone in the United States Congress, no less — presents you with a fucking wish list that paints a fucking fascist horror show, perk the fuck up and fucking pay attention; don’t blithely, lazily tell yourself that it couldn’t possibly happen here.

It could — if we allow it to.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong. Dividing the red states and blue states into two separate nations would be, of course, at least next to impossible, not only logistically, with Red-State Wonderlandia necessarily having to reconstitute its own federal-government functions and offices and its own military, but even just defining red states and blue states can be nearly impossible.

Take Greene’s state of Georgia, for example: Presumably, she’d expect Georgia to be part of the Red-State Wonderlandia that she dreams about almost as she does about sex toys, just as Georgia was part of the Confederacy (indeed, Georgia was among the first seven backasswards, treasonous Southern states to secede from the Union).

Yet Joe Biden won the presidential election in Georgia in 2020 (albeit narrowly), and both of Georgia’s U.S. senators are Democrats.

In a solidly red state, the Democratic candidate for president doesn’t win, even narrowly, and no solidly red state is going to have two Democratic U.S. senators.

So, ironically, Greene very well might have to move to another state, it seems to me, if she wanted to live in Red-State Wonderlandia.

—

*It’s funny that the “Christo”fascists equate capitalism with Christianity when Jesus Christ said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. You cannot worship wealth and credibly call yourself a Christian at the same time. Jesus Christ was a socialist, as the New Testament makes clear. Those who argue otherwise are lying and/or are incredibly fucking stupid and/or are brainwashed, probably hopelessly so.

Sit back and enjoy the shit show as the Repugnicans continue to self-destruct

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An ass is going to bray; that’s what asses do.

I wrote this a little more than a month ago, when the House Repugnicans were electing spineless sap Kevin McCarthy as their leader in a series of 15 votes over several days:

…Even if McCarthy manages to temporarily satisfy these savages with some deal to ultimately become speaker, the next two years in the House are going to be nothing but chaos and gridlock — as was entirely predictable even before the circus of the last few days.

In a nutshell: The Repugnicans cannot govern. Or won’t. Can’t and/or won’t, though, the result is the same.

I expect the Repugnicans to continue to implode over the next two years, and although I’ve never been excited over Joe Biden — I’m still a Berniecrat — if Biden runs for a second term, it’s all his, and the Democrats will take back the House come January 2025, too.

In the meantime, the Repugnicans’ meltdown, if it is protracted, as it easily could be, might spill over into other elements and functions of our nation’s governance, but first and foremost, this is a Repugnican Party problem. This is not our problem. The extinction of the Repugnican Party would be best for the nation anyway, so there is no good reason to try to prevent it.

The Repugnicans invited in the cray-cray, and now they have to deal with the cray-cray. The crazy chickens have come home to roost, and they only want to burn the henhouse down. …

So last night’s Repugnican meltdown during President Biden’s State of Union address only further exposed the House Repugnicans — and the Repugnican Party overall — as unwilling, unfit and unable to actually govern.

First there was the pre-address spat in which Sen. Mittens Romney apparently told Rep. Today My Name Is George Santos that he didn’t belong there, mixing and mingling with prominent Repugnicans who hadn’t fabricated every fucking element of their biographies, but that “given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and saying quiet, instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room.”

Santos, being the classy professional that he is, later tweeted at Mittens: “Just a reminder that you will NEVER be PRESIDENT!”

That’s fucking rich coming from a pathologically lying, thieving piece of shit — Mittens also called Santos “a sick puppy” (quite an understatement) — who will be fucking lucky if he’s still in Congress by the end of this year. (Gee, maybe we can set up a GoFundMe for sick puppy Santos — and keep all of the money for ourselves…)

Then, of course, during the address, you knew that at least one of the pieces of white trash, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert, was going to yell out something like, “Liar!” — a la stinking piece of shit Repugnican Rep. Joe Wilson in 2009, who broke that ground.

White-trash performance artist Greene delivered for her fans (see the photo above) — and probably has fundraised on her junior-high-school-level antics already.

Speaking of which, I’ve heard that Greene has come from some money, even though she complains that her annual salary of about $175K isn’t enough (I’d say that she’s way, way overpaid) — but money cannot buy class, and Greene forever will be white trash in my book.

On that note, I get it that the MAGA-cap-wearing, gun-toting trailer dwellers across the U. S. of A. love Greene — when she tells them that she’s one of them, that’s undeniably the truth, perhaps the only truth that she’s ever told — but the Repugnican Party needs to appeal to more than just the mouth-breathing knuckle draggers if it wants to win national elections.

Indeed, the 2022 midterm elections — in which the mean-spirited MAGA cray-cray was rejected all over the nation, apparently most pivotally by the independent voters, who are turned off by the mean-spirited cray-cray — were not long ago at all, but the Pussygrabberian Republicans act as though they did just great in the elections that were held just three months ago today.

So where are we today, three months later after the American voters said enough of this shit?

We have Marjorie Taylor Greene making herself the ugly face of the Repugnican Party because Kevin McCarthy — who is no Nancy Pelosi where it comes to herding cats — is too pussy to do his fucking job and rein the embarrassing horse-faced cunt in.

We even have she-Nazi Scary Lake, the Pussygrabberian nut job on crack who lost the Arizona gubernatorial race but who still claims that she’s the only legitimate governor of the state, now threatening to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024 (she’s “on the warpath,” she says).

I wholeheartedly encourage Lake to continue on her little “warpath”; she’ll only lose the next war again (if she even makes it out of the 2024 Repugnican primary — she barely made it out of the August 2022 Repugnican primary, with not even 50 percent of the vote in what essentially was a two-way race, she against the Repugnican-Classic candidate).

I expect Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego to win DINO Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat next year (of course it’s not her seat, but the people’s, and the people are going to take it away from her if she runs for re-election).

And, unless former “President”/mob boss Pussygrabber is barred from continuing his third quest for the White House over one or more of his many felonious crimes (again: I’m not holding my breath on that), I expect him to emerge as the 2024 Repugnican presidential nominee, because, as I’ve written, I don’t expect the several deluded narcissists who want the 2024 Repugnican presidential nomination to step aside for Ron DeSantis in order to make it a two-way race, Pussygrabber vs. DeSantis.

In such a two-way race I think that DeSantis would win, as he’s even meaner — and is, dangerously, much more focused on oppressing others (usually those who don’t have much power to fight back, of course; that’s how fascist-bullies roll) — than is Pussygrabber, but DeSantis is a newer model. (Pussygrabber being replaced by a newer model instead of replacing a woman with a newer model would be pretty fucking funny, were the fascist demagogue DeSantis not so dangerous.)

I expect loser Pussygrabber to go “on the warpath” in 2024 — like his protégé Scary Lake — and I expect him to lose again — like his protégé Scary Lake.

And, of course, when they lose in 2024, both Scary and Pussygrabber will claim that no, they actually won. (And that tactic will work just as well for them then as it already has worked for them now.)

This is the future of the Repugnican Party: self-absorbed demagogues (like Pussygrabber, Scary Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et. al.) and the George Santos grifter types (some, of course, like Pussygrabber, are both demagogues and grifters) continuing to hijack the party, continuing to turn off more and more voters whose votes the Repugnican Party needs to win elections, and only weakening the party as a national party and in many regions of the nation as well.

We on the left — hell, those of us who just aren’t fucking insane — don’t need to do much but sit back and watch this shit show unfold while enjoying our popcorn.

As the saying goes, never interrupt your enemy when he (or she) is making a mistake.

P.S. Here’s a pic of Greene and Boebert heckling Biden during last year’s State of the Union address:

Reuters news photo

Real class fucking acts.

As someone put it, these pieces of white trash seem to think that they’re at a showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” instead of at the State of the Union address.

Of course, should a Democrat heckle a Repugnican president (or “president”) like this, the Repugnicans would whine that the presidency is sacrosanct and must be respected by everyone.

‘Red Dawn’ averted — for now!

We got the stealthy China balloon, so you can go back to worrying about the threat posed by transgender people and drag queens now…

I have no love for China — China’s culture of uber-conformity and absolute obedience to unelected authority repulses me — but the “China balloon” controversy, as former “President” Pussygrabber might put it (the adjective “Chinese” is not in his vocabulary), has struck me as funny, and not in a good way.

Of course it’s a little creepy for an apparent spy balloon, like something out of “Austin Powers” (the Chinese can be a bit nerdy), to be hovering over the United States, but this isn’t the “Red Dawn” moment that the wingnuts both fear and deeply desire.

It initially was reported that the balloon couldn’t get much more intel than the spy satellites that have been circling the globe for a long time now already can’t, and that it was too dangerous for anyone below to shoot it down, but then comes the report that the U.S. military shot it down today, albeit above the Atlantic Ocean, so maybe they were telling the truth about their concern about falling debris harming anyone on the ground below.

I’m fine with the China balloon having been popped, but I have to wonder how much of the decision to pop it was from the true national-security need to do so and how much of it was from hysterical criticism from the fanatics on the right that we hadn’t popped it yet! Joe Biden is not protecting us from this threat (even though we don’t know for sure if there really even is a threat)! Their knee-jerk reaction to just about everything that they aren’t certain about (and that’s a lot) is: Shoot it!

Anyway, The Washington Post reports:

… U.S. officials say there is likely a third such balloon conducting surveillance in another part of the world.

The balloons are part of an extensive Chinese military surveillance program that has been running for years, involving a Chinese company supplying the technology to the People’s Liberation Army, said two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The airship contains “some sophisticated communications gear” and had been lingering over strategic sites, said one official. Earlier this week it was spotted loitering over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, home to several nuclear missile silos. “But what it actually does we don’t know.”

U.S. officials believe that the balloon both drifts with air currents and has the ability to be directed. The bottom of the balloon is outfitted with propellers, an official said.

“This is a substantial program,” said the official. It involves a commercial Chinese company providing the technology to the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military. “This capacity has been used to fly over sensitive sites, and to collect information.”

U.S. officials have said the payload of the balloon is the size of three large buses. …

Yeah, you wouldn’t want that raining down on you from the sky above, I suppose.

Anyway, of course the United States spies on China, but it is ballsy for the Chinese to float spy balloons around the world, invading other sovereign nations’ airspace, and I can’t oppose shooting the balloons down when it’s safe to do so.

I see no mention in the aforementioned Post story about the balloon’s payload having been recovered by the U.S. military for analysis. I’d think that that would be something that we’d want to do. But perhaps that would be top secret (which would be contained in yet another classified document found some years from now in some politico’s closet or garage)…

But in any event, the China balloon event has been an interesting test of the American psyche.

We’re a bit hair-trigger, which is unsettling in this nuclear age.

That said, China does strike me as an ever-looming threat that we must keep an eye on, but the Chinese’s smug sense of superiority (if you haven’t seen “American Factory” yet, you should watch it) probably would be their downfall.

If the whole fucking planet weren’t nuked to oblivion first, of course…

P.S. The Post story, which has been updated since I first read it, now reports that “efforts to recover and examine the downed [Chinese] craft [are] now under way” and:

… An array of U.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels were descending on the debris field to recover as much of the balloon as possible, officials said. It’s located in an area where the water is about 47 feet deep, a relatively shallow depth that will assist in the recovery. A Navy salvage vessel — with FBI officials aboard to assist in the counterintelligence analysis — will arrive within a couple of days. …

I don’t know if I missed that reportage in the initial Post report (I don’t think that I did, though) or if the Post added that piece of information in its update (I think that’s probably what happened).

Ashli Babbitt got what she deserved

She-Nazi Ashli Babbitt was shot while part of a violent mob trying to get to members of Congress in the U.S. Capitol, which they’d broken into, on January 6, 2021, because they wanted to reverse the results of the November 2020 presidential election via domestic terrorism, yes the likes of former “President” Pussygrabber and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene maintain that Babbitt, whose removal from the gene pool was a great thing, was “murdered.”

I shouldn’t even have to fucking write these words, as it’s so glaringly fucking obvious, but in the dystopia that the treasonous Repugnican-fascists have hurtled us into since the advent of Der Führer Pussygrabber, I have to:

Ashli Babbitt was no fucking martyr. She was part of a treasonous mob of would-be overthrowers of the United States government — pissed off that their favored candidate had lost the presidential election — that had to be stopped, and her shooting death was her own fucking fault.

My thoughts on this have not changed since January 2021, when, on January 8, 2021, I wrote:

… The Karen-like supporter of “President” Pussygrabber very apparently was shot by a Capitol cop while committing federal felonies (treason/sedition and criminal trespass upon federal property, that I can think of right off of the top of my head). Far from being a “peaceful” “protester,” this woman very apparently was one of a violent mob trying to get into the House chamber — but was stopped by a cop whose job it is to protect our elected representatives (and others who are in the building legitimately and legally) against this type of terrorist threat.

See video of Karen’s justified (and rather satisfying…) shooting here.

Before you piss and moan, reflect upon the fucking fact that Karen would have been fine, A-OK, had the cops shot a black person during the commission of a federal felony, but she very apparently believed that her whiteness, her right-wingedness and indeed, her Karen-ness, made her bulletproof. She was, um, dead wrong…

At the time I wrote that, Babbitt’s name had not been announced, apparently, but she was, indeed, a Karen.

And since I wrote that, I found out that the cop who shot Babbitt is black — not that the race of the heroic cop matters, because it doesn’t, except that I’m sure that it has further incensed the Repugnican-fascists that one of their little would-be stormtroopers was felled by a black man; after all, it’s only supposed to be white cops killing black people.

The cop who rightfully killed Babbitt — who, again, in the end, killed herself via her incredibly stupid, seriously criminal actions — rightfully was cleared of wrongdoing; the United States Capitol Police released a statement in August 2021 declaring that:

After interviewing multiple witnesses and reviewing all the available evidence, including video and radio calls, the United States Capitol Police has completed the internal investigation into the fatal shooting of Ms. Ashli Babbitt, which occurred in the Speaker’s Lobby on January 6.

USCP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) determined the officer’s conduct was lawful and within Department policy, which says an officer may use deadly force only when the officer reasonably believes that action is in the defense of human life, including the officer’s own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury.

The officer in this case, who is not being identified for the officer’s safety, will not be facing internal discipline.

This officer and the officer’s family have been the subject of numerous credible and specific threats for actions that were taken as part of the job of all our officers: defending the Congress, Members, staff and the democratic process.

The actions of the officer in this case potentially saved Members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol and to the House Chamber where Members and staff were steps away. USCP Officers had barricaded the Speaker’s Lobby with furniture before a rioter shattered the glass door. If the doors were breached, the rioters would have immediate access to the House Chambers. The officer’s actions were consistent with the officer’s training and USCP policies and procedures.

On April 14, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced it would not pursue criminal charges based on insufficient evidence. The case was investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Metropolitan Police Department. The administrative investigation was launched after the criminal investigation was closed.

It indeed is case closed — except for the pro-insurrectionist traitors who still claim that Babbitt was killed unjustly.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has no redeeming qualities — she’s stupid, she’s fascist, she’s power-hungry and she’s dog-faced (that she-Nazi-like bleach-bottle blonde hair cannot save her) — for a while now has been waving the bloody shirt of Ashli Babbitt like the piece of white trash that she is, most recently in a House hearing, where the incredibly, painfully dumb cunt actually compared the death of Ashli Babbitt to that of Tyre Nichols.

Tyre Nichols, to our knowledge, never came at any cop with a weapon, or posed any serious threat to any cop, and therefore, yes, he was murdered, beaten to death, by cop — yet Greene compares Nichols’ death to the death of a white-trash woman who was part of a treasonous, felonious mob that was trying to get at members of Congress and that was perilously close to succeeding.

The cop who shot Ashli Babbitt could not have known how armed the mob was or was not, nor could he have known how hell-bent the mob was or was not on causing harm or death to its targets — members of the United States Congress, no less.

The cop was put in a difficult — indeed, in an unprecedented — position; January 6, 2021, was the first time in history that the U.S. Capitol was attacked by domestic terrorists instead of by an enemy nation, and he made the best decision that he could make in that awful moment that a mob of treasonous domestic terrorists were trying to reverse the results of a presidential election via terrorism for the first time in U.S. history.

Indeed, Greene, who clearly supports the fascist insurrectionists because she can’t suck Pussygrabber’s stubby orange dick hard enough, doesn’t belong in the U.S. House of Representatives or in any other federal office, because clearly, her fealty is not to the U.S. Constitution or to the rule of law, but only to the traitor Pussygrabber.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently was asked if he agrees with Greene that Ashli Babbitt was “murdered.”

McCarthy, even as dull as he is, responded, “I think the police officer did his job.”

Of course Pussygrabber had to chime in on his fascist Twitter wannabe “Truth Social”: “I totally disagree with the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy… ASHLI BABBITT WAS MURDERED!!!”

Because putting that in all caps and following it with three exclamation points MAKES IT TRUE!!! (How does Pussygrabber get to act like a teenaged girl every fucking day yet still get to be considered to be “masculine,” even “manly”?)

Of course Pussygrabber wants to paint Babbitt as a “hero,” a “martyr.” Otherwise, he’d have to admit that he caused her death more than did anyone else (outside of herself, of course).

And sociopaths on crack like Pussygrabber never admit wrongdoing, no matter how obvious is their guilt.

And further, clearly, just as Greene doesn’t belong in the House because of her treasonous support for the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, Pussygrabber should not be allowed to run for president again. It’s clear to me that the U.S. Constitution prohibits this; the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Section 3) reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

As an editorialist for The New York Times pointed out recently, it is true that “A few legal scholars have argued that Section 3 does not apply to the presidency because it does not explicitly list that position.” However, he writes, “It is hard to square that claim with the provision’s fundamental purpose, which is to prevent insurrectionists from participating in American government,” and:

… Nor is it antidemocratic to impose conditions of eligibility for public office. For instance, Article II of the Constitution puts the presidency off limits to anyone younger than 35. If we have decided that a 34-year-old is, by definition, not mature or reliable enough to hold such immense power, then surely we can decide the same about a 76-year-old who incited an insurrection in an attempt to keep that power.

So could Section 3 really be used to prevent Mr. Trump from running for or becoming president again? As a legal matter, it seems beyond doubt. The Capitol attack was an insurrection by any meaningful definition — a concerted, violent attempt to block Congress from performing its constitutionally mandated job of counting electoral votes. He engaged in that insurrection, even if he did not physically join the crowd as he promised he would. …

I surmise that the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly lists members of Congress and not the U.S. president as being barred from holding further federal office because of their support of insurrection at least in part because when the amendment was ratified way back in 1868, no one really thought that a U.S. president would or could be Public Enemy No. 1. (And, of course, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the amendment was ratified, the main concern was about allowing former members of the Confederacy to return to the U.S. Congress.)

Former “President” Pussygrabber should be behind bars already — his acts of treason resulted in multiple deaths on and shortly after January 6, 2021 (yes, even including Ashli Babbitt’s), and no one should be above the law. If you needlessly cause multiple deaths — while committing the felony of treason, no less — you should, at the minimum, be put behind bars.

(Pussygrabber’s level of treason — he is a traitor to the entire nation — in my book merits execution. Absolutely; I mean that. While I generally oppose the death penalty, Pussygrabber should be put to death for his crimes against the nation. He does not deserve to be able to continue to draw breath when he has killed people — while committing treason against the entire nation, no less.)

Alas, given the state of actual criminal justice in the United States, Pussygrabber most likely will die from a McDonald’s-induced heart attack (perhaps after he has thrown some ketchup against the wall in anger) than by lethal injection, but minimally, Marjorie Taylor Greene should be removed from the U.S. House of Representatives for her aiding and abetting of the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists that continues to this day.

At the bare minimum, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to protect our democracy from such traitors from the South.

Florida Man’s anti-freedom mind-control agenda must be quashed

Associated Press news photo

“Freedom from indoctrination”? No, it’s that we’re to practice the Repugnican-fascists’ blatant indoctrination. Their backasswards, far-right-wing indoctrination is so good and true that it’s not indoctrination, you see, and every other viewpoint is “indoctrination.” (Repugnican-fascist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a serious threat to our freedom despite claiming to be all about freedom, is pictured with his human props pushing his anti-freedom agenda in April 2022.)

Growing up in the Arizona public school system in the 1970s and 1980s, I was, indeed, indoctrinated.

Among much other bullshit, I was taught, at least indirectly if not also directly, that homosexuality is bad — sick, criminal, sinful, etc. (Mostly, it just wasn’t brought up at all — the erasure of an entire group of people is fun!)

Today, of course, we have same-sex marriage as the law of the land — and he-man Nick Offerman just very effectively played a gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship (with Murray Bartlett of the first season of “The White Lotus”) in the zombie-apocalypse TV series “The Last of Us,” a turn that no television show ever would have taken when I was growing up* — and in many if not most parts of the United States, many if not most of the homophobes who still remain among us keep their ignorant, hateful, bigoted, homophobic thoughts to themselves in polite company.

I was taught in the public school system that capitalism is perfect — Godly, even (in high school I had to take a pro-capitalist course propagandistically titled “free enterprise”) — and essentially I was taught that there is no viable alternative socioeconomic model, and that you’re crazy and/or evil for even suggesting (or even thinking) that there could be or should be (Love it or leave it, Commie!).

Seriously, though — how nice it is for the sociopathic profiteers among us to ensure that our public schools teach that our socioeconomic exploitation, in which millions of us are just wage slaves who in a nation whose beyond-ludicrous degree of income inequality grows larger and larger with each passing year are barely surviving, is the only option available to us.

This degree of mass mind control is nothing if not fucking Orwellian.

American history was taught to me in public school as an ever-progressive** march forward by overwhelmingly white people with a few minor oopsies and boo-boos along the way, but overall, God bless (white [that part always was understood if not always spoken aloud]) America, land of the free!

Conservatism, being all about keeping the stupid white man firmly entrenched in power and dominating the rest of us in perpetuity, still believes that today’s public school students should have the same experience that I did in the 1970s and 1980s. (Well, actually, I’m sure that even the public education that I received in the backasswards state of Arizona in the 1970s and 1980s is too “liberal” for them.)

It’s funny, because despite the right-wing attempt to indoctrinate me with the “right” sexual orientation, I’m nonetheless an out gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship. The years-long attempts to indoctrinate me didn’t succeed; apparently I am immune to such toxic indoctrination. (I’m an atheist, too, so “Christo”fascism, of which homophobia is part and parcel, didn’t get to me either; “God” and “Jesus” to me are on par with other mythical figures, such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny…)

And for decades I have had deep issues with capitalism — which for the most part is just systemic, legalized thievery that so often results in injury, destruction and even death — and I would much prefer to see a hybrid socioeconomic model in which the essentials of life are not for-profit and in which OK, sure, the non-essentials, including the luxury items, can be capitalized. (And I’m a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, of course.)

And yes, American history, as it is taught in our public school system, is, of course, whitewashed, to say the least; I seem to remember one U.S. history textbook with the maudlin title of The Pageant of American History or the like. I’m sure that Nazi Germany taught the history of Germany something like this: The nation was forged by strong, manly, God-supported white men! Get in line behind God’s soldiers or die, unGodly bitches!

So of course I oppose Repugnican-fascist Ron DeSantis’ fascist attempts to control what is and what is not taught in the public schools of Florida — in the name of “freedom from indoctrination.” (Indeed, you’re free to believe and to teach whatever you want — as long as stupid, evil white man Ron DeSantis agrees with it. Freedom! Yay!)

If our public schools don’t give our students the tools they need to be well-adjusted and successful in modern life, then our schools are failing them (which, of course, they are, but that’s another blog piece…).

And teaching like it’s still the fucking 1950s is not setting up our students for success. It’s setting them up for failure as future wage slaves to our corporate overlords, believing that the socioeconomic exploitation of them is what God wants and is the only kind of life that they ever can have.

On a related note, Advanced Placement courses are high school courses for the college-bound and are voluntary, and so their curricula should be hands fucking off to opportunistic political swine like the First Amendment-hating and freedom-hating Ron DeFuckingSantis, whose attack on the Advanced Placement black American studies course induced the College Board, which created the course, to water it down.

Of course, what DeSantis would prefer is that black Americans (as well as other non-white and LGBT Americans) just be erased entirely, so I doubt that the AP’s watering down of its black American studies course will please Gov. Florida Man.

As the Advanced Placement cave-in demonstrates, DeSantis already is winning his war to control all American minds.

Obviously I agree with age-appropriate teaching; of course your average kindergartener won’t understand the nuances of human sexuality, socioeconomic systems, the good and the ugly of U.S. history (including, of course, racism and the struggle for women’s rights and for LGBT rights as well as for non-whites’ rights), debates around religion, etc.

But an Advanced Placement student should be mature enough to handle the more adult topics, and further, DeSantis is trying to limit not just what Florida’s public elementary and high schools may teach, but what Florida’s colleges and universities — which are supposed to be bastions of independent thought and free speech — may or may not teach.

Former “President” Pussygrabber, at least, is so juvenile and self-absorbed (he’s the fucking poster child for the baby boomers) that he doesn’t bother to attack our public schools and universities; he’s too busy pettily attacking his legions of enemies (and as it is with every dictator and would-be dictator, it’s very easy to get on his shit list: just refuse to ardently lick his ass) like a petulant, perpetually miffed teenaged girl, apparently unaware that the majority of the nation is way, way beyond his endless grievance bullshit and knows fully well that he lost the 2020 presidential election.

That Ron DeSantis wants to institute mind control not only in the nation’s third-most-populous state, but in the entire nation as president, makes him much more dangerous than is Pussygrabber, in my book.

DeSantis’ goal is to indoctrinate all Americans into believing that any kind of life outside of the fascist hellscape that he has in mind for all of us — with him as our Dear Leader, of course — is our only fucking option.

Thankfully, barring one of the many criminal probes into his many crimes actually taking mob boss Pussygrabber down within the next two years or so (I’m not holding my breath), I expect Pussygrabber to win the 2024 Repugnican presidential nomination.

Why?

Because too many other deluded narcissists within the Repugnican Party apparently also are going to run for the Repugnican presidential nomination for 2024 — including people who have a snowball’s chance in hell, such as Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence — and, because the Repugnicans anti-democratically award all of a state’s delegates to the Repugnican National Convention to whichever Repugnican presidential candidate garners the most votes in that state, in 2024 Pussygrabber would benefit from a crowded Repugnican presidential field, just as he did in 2016.

Could Pussygrabber win in November 2024, though?

Um, he lost the national popular vote by millions of votes not only 2020, but in 2016 as well. History, methinks, is a guide on whether or not Pussygrabber could win back the White House in 2024.

Further, Pussygrabber eked out a “win” in 2016 only because of the anti-democratic Electoral College — and he did even that well only because at that time he was largely unknown, as least as a U.S. president.

Two impeachments, the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection that he treasonously led, and innumerable investigations into his mob-boss-level criminal activity later, the kind of “president” that Pussygrabber was and would be again no longer is an unknown; we know the treasonous asshole abundantly well.

Therefore, no, I can’t see Pussygrabber winning the presidency in 2024. (Well, maybe he could if he were running against Kamala Harris, who we’re still waiting upon to finally find her political legs, but that’s another blog piece…)

Pussygrabber and 2024 aside, Ron DeSantis must never be president of the United States of America — and so I hope that Pussygrabber beats DeSantis for the Repugnican presidential nomination, because I can’t see Pussygrabber winning (well, “winning”) the White House ever again.

I can, however, see a fascist demagogue like DeSantis, who offers cut-and-dry, “common-sense” “solutions” to our problems and who freely and giddily scapegoats others for his own political gain, winning the presidency, especially when as a president he is unknown, as Pussygrabber was in 2016.

Our freedom of thought, on which all of our other freedoms depend, depends on those of us who truly value freedom — including, ironically, freedom from (fascist) indoctrination — stopping the fascist, anti-democratic, freedom-hating DeSantis in his fucking tracks.

DeSantis is a cancer that must not be allowed to spread outside of the backasswards state of Florida. He must be contained within that fucking swamp.

—

*Seriously, though, the only reason I started to watch HBO’s “The Last of Us” is that it received good reviews, and I find the angle of zombification via fungal infection to be an interesting twist on a worn-out genre. (I tried to get into “The Walking Dead” several years ago but just couldn’t; I found the zombie genre to be tiresome already.)

So after two episodes of the establishment of the fungus zombies in “The Last of Us” (an aside: Can you kill them by spraying them with an anti-fungal, such as for athlete’s foot or jock itch?), I was surprised to see this “Brokeback Mountain”-like storyline plopped into the middle of the zombie action, and it actually works.

And while I had known that Nick Offerman would be in the third episode, I’d had no idea of the direction in which they took his character.

I mean, I imagine that plenty of homophobes have stopped watching the show after that third episode replete with man-on-man action, but to me, if you can drop in a gay love story in the middle of a zombie-apocalypse story and do it in a way that’s not too cheesy and actually works, then you’ve reached peak TV, in my book…

**”Progress,” you see, was white people taking over more and more of the nation under “manifest destiny.” The land’s natives had to be dispensed with and their territory taken from them, slaves from Africa had to be instrumental to profiteering, environmental destruction for the purpose of profiteering had to be done in the name of “progress,” etc., etc.