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.

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*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.

It’s easy to join The Resistance

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In a brilliant protest, members of Greenpeace suspended a large banner reading “RESIST” near the White House early this morning. From The New York Times’ coverage of the banner, apparently the banner was up at least from around 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST.*

Not all of us can participate in the scale of protest that members of Greenpeace orchestrated early this morning when they apparently spent hours scaling a crane near the White House in order to hang a wonderful banner. But all of us who oppose fascism can do something.

I’m way too chicken and out of shape to climb a crane, but I can and probably will give a donation to Greenpeace. I believe in rewarding and encouraging things like Greenpeace did this morning.

I routinely give to organizations whose work I like and want to see continue. I’ve given to the American Civil Liberties Union and to Planned Parenthood, for instance, as well to environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club (and to Greenpeace in the past), and to humanitarian groups, such as Mercy Corps.

I blog.

I talk about politics to those within my sphere of influence. (As I’ve noted here many times over the past year-plus, I supported Bernie Sanders, and those within my close sphere of influence voted for him in the California primary.)

I do what I can, given my time, energy and funds.

I suspect that many of us do nothing because we think that if we can’t do something big and brilliant — along the lines of what some brave members of Greenpeace did this morning — then our contribution won’t matter.

But our contributions do matter. They add up.

Fascism thrives where complicity thrives. “President” Pussygrabber and his fascist, neo-Nazi supporters will thrive only if we allow them an environment in which to thrive. We can fairly shut them down right now if enough of us choose to do so. (The fascists, being anti-democratic by definition, are famously stubborn to public outcry, however, so yes, this is probably going to take some time, and hopefully not, but perhaps, some bloodshed. [As the right wing loves to say, freedom isn’t free.])

Impeachment and removal from office aren’t the only tool to cripple a presidency (and they are far from certain to work); ask the Repugnican Tea Party traitors who did everything in their power to cripple Barack Obama’s presidency.**

Payback is a bitch, and we who oppose Pussygrabber should encourage our elected officials to be just as obstructive as the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been obstructive over the past several years. (Most of what “President” Pussygrabber & Co. propose and do are and are going to be destructive, and so most of what they propose and do should be obstructed as much as possible.)

Even if one or more of your elected officials is a Repugnican, enough outcry from his or her constituents can make even a Repugnican elected official back away from the train wreck on crack that is “President” Pussygrabber. The vast majority of elected officials, after all, want to remain elected officials.

Yes, contacting your elected officials matters. Most people never contact their elected officials, thinking that it won’t matter, so your contact is magnified. I routinely e-mail my elected officials. (Sometimes I send them snail mails, especially on the issues that most concern me, but usually I e-mail them.) If you can visit your elected officials’ offices, including participating in protests at their offices, that’s even better. That does get their attention. (I’m not into calling my elected officials’ offices, as I prefer written communication, but if that is your thing, go for it.)

Organizations that are suing the Pussygrabber administration (such as the ACLU) — and there will be many federal lawsuits against the Pussygrabber administration — could probably use your donation, as lawsuits aren’t cheap.

I surmise that federal lawsuits are going to prove to be the No. 1 weapon against the unelected Pussygrabber administration’s fascist, unconstitutional and anti-American actions. Indeed, we have three branches of government in order to keep any one branch from getting out of control.

Pussygrabber is a modern-day Caligula, but unlike Caligula was, he is not an emperor. He will find that while it has been one thing to be the king of a business empire, the American empire is another thing entirely.

Pussygrabber is not a legitimate U.S. president, and so we should point out his illegitimacy at every opportunity.

The No. 1 thing in resisting the Pussygrabber administration, I think, is not to keep quiet. The Germans in Nazi Germany kept quiet and we know the consequences of their silence.

So speak up. Don’t be afraid; the unelected Pussygrabber regime can’t imprison or torture or kill all of us, and as soon as its treasonous members start to imprison or torture or kill any of us, it’s all over for them in short order anyway.

Be as effective as you can within your own sphere of influence. Most of us who oppose “President” Pussygrabber and all that he stands for effectively have our own cell, and millions of cells together make a difference.

Besides, think of the advantage that we of The Resistance already have: Despite his treasonous, anti-democratic lies to the contrary — and kudos to The New York Times for this week having flat-out called Pussygrabber’s lie a lie — about 3 million more of us voted for Billary Clinton than for Pussygrabber, and his approval ratings right now are historically low for a new “president.”

Pussygrabber is weak — and he knows it. He is scared — and he should be.

For more ideas of how to resist, you might consider reading the newly released book The Trump Survival Guide. Soon I’m going to buy the great political writer Matt Taibbi’s Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus.

Revisiting some classics can be useful, too. George Orwell’s anti-fascist 1984 (which is No. 1 on amazon.com as I type this sentence [and a different edition of the novel right now is at No. 6]) is a great read, and I’m planning to purchase Sinclair Lewis’ anti-fascist It Can’t Happen Here (which is No. 7 on amazon.com as I type this sentence).

You don’t even have to read a book. You simply can Google ideas. Hell, you don’t even have to type anything into Google’s search bar; I’ve done that for you, so just click here.

The main thing is to do something.

That’s always better than doing nothing.

Welcome to The Resistance, where every contribution matters.

The people, united, will never be defeated.

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*The Times reports:

… Travis Nichols, a spokesman for Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy organization for which the activists were volunteering, said the protesters were there “to resist the environmental, economic and racial injustice that Trump and his administration have already laid out and put into practice.”

In his first week in office, Mr. Trump’s administration instructed officials at the Environmental Protection Agency to freeze grants and contracts, and, according to Reuters, ordered the agency to remove the climate change page from its website.

Mr. Trump has also resurrected the Keystone and Dakota Access pipeline projects that have been the subject of virulent protests by environmental activists. …

**I have had my problems with the-not-nearly-progressive-or-aggressive-enough Obama, and have written about them here over the years, but I recognize that he was the twice-duly-elected president of the United States of America. In 2008 and in 2012 he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College — and, unlike George W. Bush and “President” Pussygrabber, not only did he win the popular vote, the only vote that really matters in an actual democracy, but he didn’t get an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court or from an enemy nation.

That wasn’t a debate — it was a debacle (or: Trump is toast — Part 2)

Donald Trump spent much of Sunday night’s debate shit show creepily stalking Billary Clinton. Oh, well; at least he didn’t try to grab her by the pussy…

In case you were wondering, I did watch the second presidential debate on Sunday night (I did not live-blog it). Afterward I wanted to take a scalding hot shower and scrub myself with a wire brush.

That, of course, was mostly the uber-slimy Der Fuhrer Donald Trump’s fault. Team Trump’s having Bill Clinton’s alleged sex victims present in the debate hall (as though Billy Boy were running for a third term, which he kind of is but isn’t actually) wasn’t at all clever or effective; it was mind-blowingly sleazy, even for El Trumpo. And from promising to imprison his political opponents should he become president to declaring that Muslim Americans must police each other in a paranoid, anti-Muslim police state, it’s crystal fucking clear what fascist demagogue Trump’s agenda is: unabashed fascism, turning the United States of America into Nazi Germany 2.0, with him in the Hitler role.

When cornered on his 2005 comments about grabbing women by the pussy (made when he was just a young lad of 59 years — you know, locker-room banter [even though he wasn’t inside of a locker room]), Trump essentially stated that Hey, the members of ISIS are worse than he is!

I want to see poor people of color try that “defense” in our courts of law when they have been charged even with misdemeanors. It’s interesting how power and privilege (in Trump’s case, brought about by his biological sex, his race, his generation and his wealth [assuming that he even really is all that wealthy]) rear their ugly heads.

Only Donald Trump is so fucking sleazy as to make the corrupt, pay-to-play, political human weather vane on crack Billary Clinton seem like an angel by comparison. The widely despised Billary is very lucky that her opponent is the worst candidate that the Repugnican Party has put forth in many, many years, if not in all of U.S. history.*

Anyway, it’s clear that Trump must never sit in the Oval Office.

Of course, he very most likely will not; fivethirtyeight.com right now gives him no more than a 16.7 percent chance of winning to Billary’s 83.3 percent chance.

I still plan to vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, since fivethirtyeight.com puts Billary’s chances of winning my home state of California (and thus all 55 of its electoral votes) at more than 99.9 percent.

I’ve heard the argument that those of us in the deep-blue states should vote for Billary even if we don’t like her, since Trump and his treasonous, fascist followers will have a talking point should he actually win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College, like Al Gore did in 2000. (Well, Gore probably won Florida and thus the Electoral College also, but whatevs.)

Um, (1) that very most likely won’t happen** (Trump will lose both the popular vote and the Electoral College by a decisive margin, I am confident), and (2) even though Al Gore won more than 500,000 more popular votes than Gee Dubya Bush did in 2000, we weren’t to question Dubya’s presidential legitimacy, so fuck the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ predictable pissing and moaning should Billary actually win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote.

It wasn’t at all a national issue when that happened for Gee Dubya, so the treasonous hypocrites could go fuck themselves until they bleed to death.

P.S. Every time that Trump mentions Bernie Sanders’ name, as he did at least three times in Sunday’s “debate,” he should get a new malignant tumor. Trump isn’t fit or worthy enough to feast on Bernie’s feces.

It’s wonderful when Trump thinks that he’s exciting Millennials by mentioning Bernie, thinks that he’s going to inherit anything like a sizable chunk of Bernie’s supporters, and when he pretends to give a shit that democratic socialist Bernie was fucked over by the Democratic National Committee.

Yes, Bernie was fucked over by the DNC, which is one of many reasons why I won’t vote for Billary and why I switched my voter registration from the Democratic Party back to the Green Party, but anyone who remotely grasps what Bernie stands for never could vote for a fascist flaming piece of dog shit like Donald Trump.

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*No U.S. president in my lifetime of almost five decades had not first been vice president, a U.S. senator or the governor of a state before ascending to the White House. A shitbag like Donald Trump, who proves amply that no amount of money can buy class, always was very unlikely to break that pattern.

**Fivethirtyeight.com gives the scenario in which Billary loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College only a 0.6 percent chance of happening.

Donald Trump must never be president

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In a shamelessly grotesque display of white nationalism and fear mongering, at the end of his “speech” on immigration in Phoenix on Wednesday, Der Fuhrer Donald Trump paraded white people whose relatives had been killed by “illegals.” This ignores the fact that the vast majority of American citizens who are killed by others are killed by fellow citizens, not by non-citizens. Trump, having no qualifications whatsoever for the highest public office of the land, sociopathically happily will use racial division and scapegoating for his own political gain, no matter how much it harms real people — which makes him quite dangerous.

Yesterday I found the stomach to watch Der Fuhrer Donald Trump’s “speech” on immigration in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday.

It was one of those unpleasant things that you don’t want to do but that you should; fascist demagogue Trump’s public utterances now are as important as fascist demagogue Adolf Hitler’s early public utterances were. (Indeed, just substitute “Jew” for “illegal” in Trump’s public proclamations and you pretty much have Hitler’s political rhetoric: This nation would be great again if only it weren’t for the Jews! illegals!)

Phoenix, of course, was fertile nationalist, fascist, white supremacist ground for El Trumpo, which is why he held his little KKK rally there on Wednesday.

Let’s talk about the backasswards red state of Arizona, which surely would have been a slave state had it not been made a state decades after the Civil War.

While 6.3 percent of those in my home state of California in 2012 were deemed to be undocumented immigrants — the second-highest percentage for any state in the nation (behind No. 1 Nevada at 7.6 percent and tied with Texas also at 6.3 percent) — by comparison 4.6 percent of Arizonans in 2012 were deemed to be undocumented immigrants (the national average 2012 was deemed to be 3.5 percent). Yet to hear the backasswards, Trump-lovin’ Arizonans tell it, illegal immigration is their (and the nation’s) No. 1 problem!

This is not at all the common public sentiment here in California, where we have more “illegals” than does Arizona, both percentage-wise and in actual numbers.

No, the problem isn’t the “illegals.” The problem is right-wing hatred and white supremacism and a fear of diversity rather than an embrace of diversity and an understanding that diversity makes us stronger, not weaker — it’s homogeneity that threatens a nation, not heterogeneity, because homogeneity is just inbreeding writ large.

You see an embrace of diversity and heterogeneity here in California, which is why California is a blue state instead of a backasswards, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging red state like Arizona.

I feel as safe here in California’s capital as I would almost anywhere else in the nation, but to hear Der Fuhrer Trump tell it, to simply leave your home is to be at grave risk for being murdered by an “illegal.” If Trump’s fear-mongering rhetoric were true, then why am I not a lot more terrified than I am? After all, I live in the state with more “illegals” than any other state!

At the end of his “speech” on immigration on Wednesday, Trump fittingly had a bunch of all or mostly white people come on stage and talk about their loved ones who were killed by “illegals.”

Which is, of course, statistically bullshit.

Given that there are millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States, yes, of course, a tiny percentage of them are going to commit serious crimes, including murder. But far more American citizens are killed by (and otherwise violently victimized by) fellow citizens than they are by non-citizens; should we deport all American citizens? If you are an American citizen residing in the United States, you are, after all, much more likely to be murdered or otherwise killed by a fellow citizen than by a non-citizen.

Trump’s “speech” on immigration in Phoenix on Wednesday was a hate fest; it was an orgy of white supremacism.

Donald Fucking Trump has had more than a fucking year to come up with something other than fascistically blaming all of the nation’s problems on the “illegals” (most of them from Mexico) and advocating that we build a “Game of Thrones”-like Great Wall on the southern border to keep out the brown-skinned wildlings who supposedly threaten our very (white) way of life.

Trump has had plenty of time to develop some semblance of an actual presidential campaign, but he still has nothing other than rank white supremacism.

Trump on Wednesday night in Phoenix shamelessly and disingenuously yet again brought up the unfortunate shooting death of 32-year-old American citizen Kathryn Steinle by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico in early July 2015 in San Francisco, because the shooting conveniently happened so soon after he opened his presidential campaign by demonizing “illegals.”

Steinle’s death was to be retroactive “proof” that El Trumpo was right about those “dangerous” “illegals,” you see*; she didn’t die in vain! She died for the Trump campaign!

Thing is, the authorities suspect that the “illegal,” a homeless man, shot Steinle (with a loaded handgun that he had found) by accident, not on purpose (the man’s case has not been adjudicated yet), and at least one member of Steinle’s family, Steinle’s brother, has had a real problem with Trump using Steinle’s death for his own personal and political gain. (“If you’re going to use somebody’s name and you’re going to sensationalize the death of a beautiful young lady, maybe you should call and talk to the family first and see what their views are,” Steinle’s brother said.)

Trump’s hate- and lie-filled anti-immigrant rhetoric, of course, is only meant as a diversion from the fact that he is utterly unqualified to be president of the United States of America. He never has been elected to any public office yet seeks the nation’s highest elected office. No ego there! Donald Trump only ever has been a flim-flam man, a walking, talking fraud and fraudster.

Trump doesn’t want the masses to focus on him and on his stunning lack of qualifications; he wants to distract and terrify the ignorant, racist masses with the bogeymen that he has created.

And Trump wildly overstates the bogeymen’s numbers, of course.

From 2009 to 2012, the numbers of undocumented immigrants (about 11.2 million of them) in the United States didn’t grow at all — in fact, the number of them peaked at 12.2 million in 2007, before the George W. Bush-induced recession, and their numbers have fallen because of the second George Bush recession — and ironically, their numbers in the border states of California, New Mexico and yes, Arizona, dropped from 2009 to 2012. (That fact didn’t stop Arizona’s racist, hateful SB 1070 in 2010. Facts, you see, never stop the fascists. [SB 1070 was an incredibly mean-spirited anti-brown-skinned-undocumented-immigrant law that for the most part has been stricken down as unconstitutional by the federal courts.])

Blaming a certain group of people for the nation’s problems isn’t going to solve the nation’s problems any more than Nazi Germany’s blaming the Jews for its problems solved Germany’s problems.

And, of course, the fascists, the nationalists, the white supremacists are bullies, so they’re not going to pick on someone with power — someone with numbers and with political power. No, they’re going to go after a relatively much weaker minority. That’s how Nazis and neo-Nazis operate, because they’re weak, stupid fucking cowards.

Ironically, I rather doubt that Der Fuhrer Trump actually personally hates Latinos. (Of course “illegals” overwhelmingly refers to brown-skinned individuals from south of the border.) Latinos (“illegal” and “legal”) are just an awfully politically convenient punching bag (or should I say piñata?). Demonizing undocumented immigrants from Latin America (and, I believe, by extension, all immigrants from Latin America) is Trump’s way to try to get into the White House. (Hey, it’s just politics! It’s nothing personal! We’re good — right?)

The thing is, Der Fuhrer Donald Trump’s hate-filled, racist rhetoric harms actual human beings. Not only “illegals” are targeted, but all Latinos (and even those who aren’t even actually Latino but who might to some appear to be Latino) are to be targeted by Trump’s white-supremacist and white-nationalist flying monkeys, and that’s unfuckingacceptable.

It’s as acceptable as was Hitler’s and his henchmen’s targeting of Jews (and other relatively powerless minority groups).

History has demonstrated amply that the demonization of an entire group of people by a nation’s political leaders easily can lead not just to persecution, but even to genocide against that group of people.

Donald Trump must never be president of the United States of America.

If he does make it that far and his political rhetoric turns into the Nazi-like actual persecution of a certain group or certain groups of people (he has demonized Muslims, too, but primarily has targeted Latinos), then it would be time for something like, as the right wing likes to put it, a Second-Amendment remedy.

It’s a remedy — an extreme one, yes, of course, but an extremely necessary one — that should have been employed with Hitler; it would have saved millions of innocent lives.

We true Americans patriots must never allow the United States of America to become Nazi Germany 2.0.

We can allow that to happen only over our dead bodies.

I far prefer ballots to bullets, but as the right wing never rules out the use of bullets, neither can we on the left afford to do so.

P.S. As a white American-born U.S. citizen who has lived in California and, unfortunately, also in Arizona my entire life, I can testify that a solid majority of the Latinos whom I’ve known and with whom I have interacted have been decent, hard-working people.

I’m not at all a fan of Catholicism (or any other organized religion), that’s true, but overall Latinos have brought the United States far more benefit than harm. Their presence and their injection of their culture, which includes their strong work ethic, into the national culture of the United States of America makes the U.S.A. stronger, not weaker.

I, for one, won’t sit idly by while a President Trump fascistically persecutes Latinos because I’m not Latino.

P.P.S. I don’t feel like regurgitating all of the details of Trump’s despicable “speech” in Phoenix on Wednesday; it was bad enough to watch it all the way through once. You should watch it yourself. If you’re sane, you’ll note many incredibly pathetic moments. It’s great insight into the “man’s” “character.”

You’ll note, I think, that the vast majority of his fascist shtick very apparently isn’t even anything that he strongly believes himself, but that he knows works well with his audience of white nationalists and fascists.

I will note that among Trump’s many wonderful ideas regarding immigration is requiring an ideological test of prospective immigrants to be let into the nation, as though (1) such a test weren’t a violation of human rights (your political ideology must match that of a typical Repugnican Tea Party fascist to be able to come into the United States!) and (2) as though such a test, if actually implemented, couldn’t be defeated.

—

*As a writer for even the right-wing Wall Street Journal commented:

High-profile incidents, like the [July 2015] arrest of a Mexican national in the horrific shooting death of a young woman in San Francisco, can give the impression that immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes [than are natives]. But the alleged killer [of Kathryn Steinle] is no more representative of Mexican immigrants than Dylann [Storm] Roof [the winner who gunned down nine black Americans in their church in cold blood in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015] is representative of white people.

When violence is OK (even necessary)

San Jose Mercury News image

Anti-fascist protesters make their views on Donald Trump clear at his appearance in San Jose, California, on Thursday. I can’t blame Latinos for reacting to Trump and his supporters in the way that they have; indeed, Trump came right out of the gate a year ago this month publicly voicing his hateful, right-wing intent to make Latinos into the scapegoat for the nation’s problems in typical fascist, neo-Nazi-Germany fashion. If you are Latino (you know, the new Jew), you easily could fear for the safety and security of yourself and your loved ones under a President Trump — and act accordingly.

Such a domesticated, docile lot are we Americans, tamed at birth by our corporate (and “Christian”) overlords, that one of the many things that we claim to be true but yet very rarely to never ever actually examine — such as that there is God (and a Jesus and a heaven and a hell, etc.), that capitalism is the best socioeconomic model and that this is so self-evident that we are not to discuss otherwise, and that the United States of America militarily can do no wrong (hell no should President Hopey-Changey have apologized for the nuking of Japan! [And, of course, he didn’t]) — is that violence is always wrong.

Of course, that’s not always true; when the rich and powerful use violence, such as we saw with the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War — which was to regain Big Oil’s access to Iraq’s oil and was for the war profiteers’ war profiteering — then violence, even on, or perhaps even especially on, a grand fucking scale is A-OK.

It’s we commoners who never are to use violence for our political aims, you see; no, only the elite may do that.

So the question arises as to whether or not it’s OK for anti-Donald-Trump protesters to use violence against Trump’s supporters, such as happened in San Jose, California, on Thursday.

The Associated Press reported:

A group of protesters attacked Donald Trump supporters who were leaving the candidate’s rally in San Jose on Thursday night. A dozen or more people were punched, at least one person was pelted with an egg, and Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire.

Police stood their ground at first but after about 90 minutes moved into the remaining crowd to break it up and make arrests. At least four people were taken into custody, though police didn’t release total arrest figures Thursday night. One officer was assaulted, police Sgt. Enrique Garcia said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries and no major property damage, police said.

The crowd, which had numbered over 300 just after the rally, had thinned significantly. Still, those that remained, filling about a city block near the San Jose Convention Center, were rowdy and angry.

Some banged on the cars of Trump supporters as they left the rally and chased after those on foot to frighten them.

Police were keeping their distance from the crowd as the scuffles played out but kept them from getting any closer to the convention center.

“Our police officers have done an extremely courageous and professional job so far,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told the Associated Press by phone. “We’re all still holding our breath to see the outcome of this dangerous and explosive situation.”

The mayor, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, criticized Trump for coming to cities and igniting problems that local police departments have to deal with.

“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Liccardo said. …

I’ll dive right in: Knowing that Adolf Hitler & Co. rose to power in Germany in no small part because not enough Germans stood up to them, even when the signs of the Nazis’ rising fascism were plain to see early on, I cannot find it within myself to condemn what the anti-fascist protesters did in San Jose last week when the fascist demagogue Donald Trump came to their city.

In light of what the protesters actually did — comparing that to the evil that quite foreseeably could come to pass under a President Trump, I mean — I’d say that the anti-fascist protesters went awfully easy.

This isn’t to say that I condone every single, individual act of violence that anyone might commit anywhere. There is a viral video on YouTube, for instance, that reportedly and apparently shows a young, fascist man who is walking away from the San Jose KKK rally after its conclusion being attacked from behind apparently without provocation (other than his political leanings, apparently) by some asshole who hits him in the side of the head with some object (a pair of shoes, from what I can tell) and then runs away.

The Trumpbot doesn’t appear to have been hurt badly (even small cuts to the head can bleed a lot), and his (literal) bloody shirt has been a wonderful political prop for his fellow right-wingers.*

But I’m much, much more concerned about the United States of America being taken over by white supremacist, jingoist fascists like Germany was in the 1930s than I am about how it might look to the fascist Trumpbots that some poor fellow Trumpbot was hit in the head with a pair of shoes in San Jose.

I never have hit anyone upside the head with a pair of shoes, and don’t foresee myself ever doing so, but I’m fine with the neo-Brownshirts getting the strong and clear message now that their brand of politics — fascism — is unfuckingacceptable to the majority of us Americans.

It’s not OK, as the Nazis did and as Donald Trump and his supporters do today, to single out certain groups of people — be they Jewish, Muslim, Hispanic (or otherwise non-white), be they non-heterosexual and/or non-gender-conforming, mentally and/or physically disabled, be they socialist or communist, be they whomever or whatever — for special mistreatment and persecution (even mass execution) as scapegoats for all of the nation’s socioeconomic problems.

A few pairs of shoes upside the heads of the neo-Nazis right now just might save millions of lives in the future.

I call that well fucking worth it.

P.S. It has been just assumed that those who have attacked Trump’s jackbooted fans are supporters of Bernie Sanders.

Some of them probably are, but some of them aren’t. Anarchists, for instance, to my knowledge routinely attack white supremacists (which I fully support) but aren’t big on supporting any political candidates, not even the uncommon likes of Bernie Sanders.

And most of those who attacked Trump supporters, at least in San Jose on Thursday, appear to be Latino (see the video at the link). Because they hate Trump doesn’t necessarily mean that they are backing Bernie. But I can’t blame them for their actions; stunningly utterly lacking the qualifications of the presidency, Trump has used stoking racist, anti-Latino sentiment as his No. 1 distraction with which to fuel his campaign; he has attacked Latinos more than any other group.

You know, though, even Adolf Hitler had the brains to attack a tiny minority group; even before the Nazis started to exterminate them, Jews comprised not even 1 percent of the population of Germany.

As of July 1, 2014, however, Latinos comprised 17 percent of the population of the United States, making them, per the U.S. Census Bureau, “the nation’s largest ethnic or racial minority.” Latinos are on course to comprise 28.6 percent of the U.S. population by 2060, per the Census Bureau.

I’d say that Der Fuhrer Trump picked the wrong minority group to shit and piss upon.

At any rate, Bernie Sanders reportedly said today on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “We have millions and millions of people who are supporting us, and I want to make it clear that any person who is a Bernie Sanders supporter, please, do not in any way, shape or form engage in violence. That is absolutely not what this campaign is about.”

With all due respect to Bernie, this isn’t about Bernie. This is about an entire group of Americans who have been under attack by a fascist presidential campaign for about a year now — mostly because of their race. Trump started attacking them long before we knew that Bernie would come as far as he has. Again: This isn’t about Bernie. This is about stopping a budding fascism, which is more important than is any one individual’s political campaign, even for the presidency.**

Bernie is entitled to his beliefs on violence; I’m not sure whether he truly believes that violence never works or whether he is saying publicly what he and/or his advisers feel he must say publicly for political reasons.

But, as the son of a Jewish Polish immigrant whose relatives were slaughtered by the Nazis in Poland during the Holocaust, I’m thinking that Bernie would agree that it’s much better to nip fascism in the bud, before it goes full bloom.

He and I might not agree on whether or not violence should be taken off of the table — I say that of course it cannot, not when the right wing never takes it off of the table; you never unilaterally disarm — but I’m sure that he and I agree that preventing the rise of Nazi Germany 2.0 here in the United States of America is of paramount importance.

—

*I’m assuming that he supports Trump and Trump’s policies. He doesn’t claim otherwise in the video; in fact, he claims in the video that he had been chanting Trump’s name, so he very apparently is a Trump supporter.

**That said, do you really see the Billarybots, whose candidate is Fascist Lite, being very effective in countering Nazi-Germany-level fascists here at home? I mean, that would require them to actually put down their lattes, and given their love of all things French, we can extrapolate how hard they would fight the neo-Nazis here at home; no, worthless, cheese-eating surrender monkeys all.

KKK/Neo-Nazi/Trump rally in Chicago shut down by true American patriots

Associated Press photos

In the top news photo, police remove a protester (the black guy in what appears to be a dark-green hoodie, I’m guessing) from the audience gathered yesterday for a rally for Der Fuehrer Donald Trump on the campus of the University of Illinois-Chicago, where the KKK rally was called off by the Trump campaign because of the anti-fascist protesters who had thronged to it. In the bottom news photo, an anti-fascist protester holds up a sign reading “Derail Trump!” (I quite concur) on the university campus while police officers keep the peace after the KKK rally was canceled.

The fascists who support Donald Trump, and Der Fuehrer Donald himself, claim that their First Amendment rights were violated when anti-fascist protesters shut down one of their KKK rallies in Chicago yesterday.

Oh, boo fucking hoo!

The First Amendment is indeed important — especially when it’s the stronger who are trying to oppress the weaker by suppressing their freedom of expression — but had the good people in Germany manned (and womaned!) up and shut down Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party early on, then millions of innocent people wouldn’t have been persecuted, tortured and mass-murdered as a result of the Germans’ inaction.

American fascists don’t get to hide behind the First Amendment while they try to reinstate Nazi Germany here in the United States of America.

The prevention of the quite predictable grave harm that these far-right, nationalistic, jingoistic, xenophobic, white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, theocratic, ironically treasonous pieces of shit who support Donald Trump (and other fascists within the Repugnican Tea Party) would cause to millions of people, should they successfully grab power, is far, far more important than are the First Amendment rights of these evil pieces of shit.

The welfare of the many outweighs the welfare of the few, especially the few who are trying to jeopardize the welfare of the many.

Of course, Der Fuehrer Donald himself, never one to take any responsibility for anything himself, being a fucking sociopath and one of the most evil “human beings” walking the planet — a billionaire, perhaps, but a human-sized walking, blathering piece of shit nonetheless — has blamed yesterday’s fracas in Chicago on — wait for it — Bernie Sanders.

Reuters reports:

… Trump, who has rallies in Ohio and Missouri [today] canceled [his] Chicago event [yesterday] after it turned chaotic, with scuffles breaking out between protesters and backers of the real estate magnate.

The clashes follow a slew of recent incidents of violence at Trump rallies, in which protesters and journalists have been punched, tackled and hustled out of venues, raising concerns about degrading security leading into the November 8 election.

“All of a sudden a planned attack just came out of nowhere,” Trump said at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, [this] morning, calling the protest leaders “professional people.”

He said his own fans “were taunted, they were harassed by these other people, these other people by the way, some represented Bernie, our communist friend.”

“Now really Bernie should tell his people … he should really get up and say to his people, ‘Stop, stop,'” he said.

A spokesman for Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. …

Let’s see. How about the stupid, old, racist, fascist white man — a Trump supporter, of course — who quite offensively rather than anything like self-defensively punched a young black man (a protester) in the face at a Trump/KKK rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, this past week?

None of Trump’s Brownshirts was punched in the face in Chicago yesterday, to my knowledge; to my knowledge there weren’t even any arrests.

The stupid old pro-Trump white man who punched the young black man in the face this past week, however, has been arrested (probably only because his crime was captured on video).

When is Der Fuehrer Trump going to get up and say to his (goose-stepping) people, “Stop, stop”?

And of course the probably-too-pacifistic Bernie Sanders did not organize any sort of anti-Trump protest in Chicago yesterday (although I would be fine with it if he had). Bernie Sanders is just one of millions and millions of Americans who share his values and beliefs, and non-fascist Americans are free to act as they — we — will. We don’t have to wait and we won’t wait until we get the pretty-please permission of Bernie Sanders or anyone else to fight the real and present danger of domestic fascism, and yesterday we proved that.

Trump knows all of this, of course; it was just an opportunity for the neo-Nazi leader to blame Bernie Sanders — to blame someone, anyone else — for the fact that his fascist, neo-Nazi campaign for the White House stirs up violence, and it was an opportunity for grand propagandist (as well as Grand Wizard) Trump to brand Bernie Sanders a “communist.”

(Nothing like reaching back to the 1950s and before for some scare tactics! It’s as woefully outdated as it is wholly inaccurate, but our audience is comprised of nothing but abject, retrograde morons who are easily lied to and who are moved easily by fear and scare tactics, so no matter!)

Actually, now we Bernie Sanders supporters are, I believe, more likely than we were before yesterday to disrupt Trump’s KKK rallies, now that he has taken to attacking Bernie Sanders in trying to blame Sanders for the violence for which he is solely responsible, and now that he is employing Red-Scare-era slurs against Sanders.

For the record, I don’t see Billary Clinton’s supporters as being anything remotely resembling effective in fighting the likes of Der Fuehrer Trump and his jackbooted lemmings, since the Billarybots accept an awful lot of evil in a leader, as long as he or she just says nice things, as evidenced by their support of Billary, whose entire political career has been comprised of panderingly saying one nice thing but doing another, evil thing.

Not that we supporters of Bernie Sanders need the worthless, brainless, spineless, ineffectual followers of Billary Clinton in the fight against fascism here at home; indeed, we Berners have outnumbered Trump’s Brownshirts for a long time now.

In any event, preventing the rise of a new Nazi Germany here in the United States of America under Der Fuehrer Donald is something to be proud of. (If you are heterosexual, it would be something to proudly tell your grandchildren.)

The shame would be in just allowing yet another fascist demagogue to rise again and to, with his henchfascists, persecute and murder millions of people. Let the eternal shame of the German people in their colossal dereliction of duty to derail Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, their eternal shame for their unconscionable failure to nip that one in the bud, be our guide now.

Preventing that level of evil is worth dying for, and we, the good Americans, the real Americans, must stand up to Der Fuehrer Trump and his Brownshirts and say, loudly: Over our dead bodies!

And if we need to employ violence against the neo-Nazis, then so be it. They need to know that we, the true patriotic Americans, will not take that off of the table, that we can speak their language too, only even better than they can, and that if they want a rematch of the Civil War, we are ready to hand their own sorry asses to them again.

P.S. You’ve probably seen this already, but in case not:

P.P.S. Apparently many counter-Trump protesters were shouting “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” in the university arena in Chicago yesterday, and at least one protester had a Bernie campaign sign:

Associated Press photo

Two things on this:

One, it’s nothing to disavow; to the contrary, it’s something to be proud of. (Unsurprisingly and tellingly, I’ve yet to see any report that any of the anti-fascist protesters were shouting, “Hillary! Hillary!” or displayed one of her campaign signs.)

Two, even if it were something to disavow, which it is not, neither Bernie Sanders nor his campaign has control over its supporters, who number in the millions.

And nor should a candidate or his or her campaign have any such control. Campaigns for elected office exist for the people; the people do not exist for campaigns for elected office. (This is, of course, the opposite philosophy of the jackbooted, goose-stepping Trumpians, who obediently give Der Fuehrer Trump their familiar one-armed pledge of allegiance.)

Finally, I just stumbled across this news photo from the fracas in Chicago yesterday and I love it. It’s one of the most iconic news photos that I’ve seen in ages:

Associated Press photo

Seriously. Kudos to this young man for standing up like he did (and kudos to all of the many others, too, of course), and the photographer deserves a photojournalism award.

Der Führer Trump hits new low with attack on physically disabled man

Updated below

A screen grab shows Repugnican Tea Party “presidential” candidate Donald Trump on Tuesday publicly mocking a New York Times reporter who has a congenital physical disability. The reporter’s “crime”? Telling the truth instead of supporting the dangerously fascistic Trump’s bold-faced lies against yet another already oppressed minority group. Reports USA Today: “Referring to Serge Kovaleski while on the campaign trail in South Carolina, Trump told a rally: ‘You’ve got to see this guy.’ He then ridiculed Kovaleski’s appearance by bending his wrists and jerking his arms around. Kovaleski has a chronic condition that affects his joints called arthrogryposis.” Kovaleski is pictured below, on the left.

Getty images

It should come as no shock to see Donald Trump make fun of a man with a congenital physical disability during a “presidential” speech. (Video of this wonderful event is here.)

The Nazis, after all — and Trump, unshockingly,  is of German descent — murdered tens of thousands of human beings with disabilities in a program that later was dubbed “Action T4.” As Wikipedia explains:

The program ran officially from September 1939 to August 1941, during which the recorded 70,273 people were killed at various extermination centers located at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria. Several rationales for the program have been offered, including eugenics, natural selection, racial hygiene, cost effectiveness and pressure on the welfare budget. After the formal end date of the program, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices that had been instituted under Action T4, until the defeat of Germany in 1945. The unofficial continuation of the policy led to additional deaths by medicine and similar means, resulting in 93,521 beds “emptied” by the end of 1941. Historians estimate that twice the official number of T4 victims might have perished before the end of the war, exceeding 200,000.

So as not to be a hypocrite, and to provide full disclosure, I myself have used the term “fucktard” (and other iterations of “retard”). Many times. But my first job out of college was working with mentally and physically disabled individuals, and while I probably shouldn’t use the term “fucktard” to denote a person of low intelligence (who has not actually been diagnosed clinically with mental retardation, let me add, importantly), I don’t make fun of people with actual physical or intellectual disabilities, because to do so is to show a stunning lack of empathy for another human being who has challenges that oneself does not.

And, of course, I am not running to be president of the United States of America.

There long has been no way in hell that I would or could support fascist Führer wannabe Donald Trump in any way, and to some degree I suppose that I’ve become immune to the venom and bile that has been spewing freely from Trump’s pie hole for months now, but this latest Trumpism should be the one that finally takes him down.

The Amazon.com series “The Man in the High Castle,” based upon a Philip K. Dick dystopian novel that envisions a scenario in which Germany and Japan actually won World War II and divvied up the United States between them, is timely. (Just last night I watched the first episode. It even makes rather chilling reference to eugenics, which the Nazi Germans occupying the United States are still practicing routinely.)

Here in Donald Trump is a patently fascist presidential candidate (of German blood, appropriately) openly mocking, in a “presidential” speech, a man who has a congenital physical disability.

How will the masses respond to this?

How will the masses respond to such utterly shameless bullying? I mean, other groups of people Trump has attacked — “illegals” from south of the border, Muslims, women, et. al. — can, for the most part, defend themselves against Trump’s bigotry to at least some degree.

But attacking those with disabilities?

Really?

How low, exactly, can Donald Trump go?

Should the masses actually allow Donald Trump to sit in the Oval Office, I can guarantee you this: In the future, if we even still have anything remotely resembling a democracy left, presidential candidates might be asked: If you could go back in time, would you kill Baby Donald in order to prevent the crimes against humanity that he perpetrated?

The Germans claimed that they didn’t know what Adolf Hitler was all about until it was too late. Bullshit. The signs were all there all along.

With Donald Trump, similarly, the signs are all there.

If we actually allow this “man” to be president — whether we actually elect him or whether we just allow him to steal the White House, like we just allowed George W. Bush & Co. to do in 2000* — we won’t be able to claim, with any shred of truth at all, that we didn’t know.*

P.S. If you think that noting Trump’s German ancestry is out of bounds, well, apparently Trump possibly has had a problem with it himself, or at least his father apparently had a problem with it. Notes Wikipedia:

Trump’s paternal grandparents were German immigrants; Trump’s grandfather, Frederick Trump (né Friedrich Trump), was a successful Klondike Gold Rush restaurateur. In his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump incorrectly claimed that Frederick Trump was originally called Friedrich Drumpf and of Swedish origin, an assertion previously made by Fred Trump for many years. Trump later acknowledged his German ancestry and served as grand marshal of the 1999 German-American Steuben Parade in New York City.

More disclosure: A while ago I participated in the Genographic Project, and my genes (if I interpret my results correctly) are a match for the dominant genetic populations first of the United Kingdom and second of Germany, so it seems quite possible if not probable that I have at least some German blood in me, as do many if not even most white Americans. That said, the Germans always have rubbed me the wrong way, even Nazism aside.

Update: Donald Trump has issued a lying, cowardly statement denying that he said/did what he said/did.

In the video I linked to above, Trump clearly says to his audience, “You gotta see this guy” (Serge Kovaleski, whom he has just called a “poor guy”) — this certainly indicates that he has met or at least seen Kovaleski, at least in a picture — and then Trump immediately mimics the distorted voice and gestures of someone with a physical and/or intellectual disability.

Yet now Trump alternately claims that he’s never laid eyes on Kovaleski and that “Despite having one of the all-time great memories, I certainly do not remember him” and “Serge Kovaleski must think a lot of himself if he thinks I remember him from decades ago – if I ever met him at all, which I doubt I did.”

The Washington Post has noted that “Kovaleski covered Trump while reporting for the New York Daily News between 1987 and 1993, a tumultuous period for Trump in which he struggled through several financial setbacks,” casting further doubt on Trump’s claim that he has no idea what Kovaleski even looks like. (Trump strikes me as the kind of individual who certainly would do opposition research; not only does he have the paranoia and the egomaniacal grandiosity, but he has the mean$ to have his henchpeople do this for him.)

Trump also took the page right out of the fascist/right-wing playbook in which he blames his victim; he proclaimed that Kovaleski “should stop using his disability to grandstand.”

Yes, it’s Kovaleski’s fault that Trump very, very apparently made fun of him and his congenital condition. Not only has Trump now attacked Kovaleski twice — Kovaleski, to my knowledge, has made no public statement, by the way (the New York Times has) — but Trump bizarrely has attacked the New York Times at length, criticizing its fiscal management and questioning its ethics, its quality and its relevance, which has absofuckinglutely nothing to do with the fact that Donald Trump very, very apparently recently publicly mocked a man for his congenital physical disability during a “presidential” appearance.

What started this whole fracas, of course, is Trump’s colossal falsehood that on television he saw “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center even as the twin towers burned and fell. This is a right-wing über-fabrication meant to further the wingnuts’ anti-Muslim agenda, of course.

But Donald Trump is too much of a fucking liar and a fucking coward to admit that he lied or, at the very minimum, very carelessly misspoke about “thousands” of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey on September 11, 2001. If he didn’t outright lie, which I think he most likely did, then he certainly didn’t care about the facts, the truth, because his overriding objective was to bash Muslims for personal political gain, not to tell the truth. Very presidential!

As I wrote above, we are seeing ample signs about what kind of “man” Donald Trump is. We ignore these flashing lights and sirens at our own peril.

And when I call Donald Trump a fascist, I mean it in the dictionary-definition sense of the term, not as a slam, although it’s perfectly fine with me if it’s also taken as a slam. (See Slate.com’s Jamelle Bouie on the topic of Donald Trump being a textbook fascist.)

Fuck the fascist Trump and the neo-Nazis who support him. They won’t turn the United States of America into another Nazi Germany without a fight.

P.S. I stand corrected; Business Insider reports:

… [Serge] Kovaleski told The [Washington] Post that he is confident that Trump remembers him and his condition. Kovaleski met with Trump several times when the reporter was covering Trump while working at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 1993.

“The sad part about it is, it didn’t in the slightest bit jar or surprise me that Donald Trump would do something this low-rent, given his track record,” Kovaleski told the Post.

The New York Times, where Kovaleski is currently a reporter, also had a response to the incident: “We think it’s outrageous that he would ridicule the appearance of one of our reporters,” a Times spokeswoman told Politico and confirmed to Business Insider. …

—

*Of course, after George W. Bush brazenly blatantly stole the 2000 presidential election, it couldn’t have come as a surprise that he would not protect Americans on September 11, 2001, or in late August 2005 (when Hurricane Katrina struck), and nor could it have come as a surprise that the “man” who had refused to accept that his opponent Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election would go on to start the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War, in which thousands of our troops died for nothing more than the treasonous war profiteering of the treasonous BushCheneyCorp and in which many, many more innocent Iraqi civilians, tens of thousands of them, have died — and which, of course, contributed to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has caused even more death and destruction.

There are terms for these high crimes: treason, war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.

That enough Americans not nearly long ago just enough allowed the fascist George W. Bush to rise to power anti-democratically should give pause to those who claim that Donald Trump couldn’t become president.

He probably won’t, but to ignore the possibility entirely is dangerous — and, dare I say, probably even treasonous.

To plutocratic traitor Trump and his racist ilk, Latinos are the new Jews

Reuters photo

A pinata of racist scumbag and Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Donald Trump hangs in front of a pinata shop in Reynosa, Mexico, last month, in response to Trump’s recent derogatory statements about Mexicans who come to the United States. Can’t we string up and beat the holy living shit out of the real thing?

Repugnican Tea Party presidential aspirant Donald Trump infamously said this in his big presidential campaign announcement speech last month:

… The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. [Applause from his audience, which apparently included individuals who were paid $50 a piece to hoot and holler and cheer. There’s nothing that money can’t buy, including “grass-roots” “supporters.”] Thank you. It’s true… When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. … [“You,” I presume, would be (mostly if not entirely) white people who are “good” because they support Trump (or are willing to be paid to “support” Trump).] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems [with them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. …

You know, asserting that “some … are good people” doesn’t make up for the fact that you essentially just called an entire class of people drug dealers, criminals and rapists. (And of course Mexico isn’t “send[ing] its people” to the United States; they are coming here on their own.)

Of course Donald Trump speaks for the majority of the white-supremacist Repugnican Tea Party set, who view Mexicans and others from Latin America (whom they usually just lump all together as “Mexicans”) as The Brown Menace from South of the Border.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Here in California, one of four states that share the border with Mexico, not only are there more Latinos (citizens and non-citizens) than there are in any other state in the nation (Texas comes in at a distant second place and Florida at an even more distant third place), but recently the number of Latinos has surpassed the number of whites in California, by about 14.99 million Latinos to about 14.92 million whites.

Yet here in California, we — the majority of us of all races — don’t believe that we have a “Latino problem.” If any state could claim to have such a “problem,” it would be California, but again, to us it’s not a “problem.”

Of course with the sheer number of Latinos in California, some, a minority of them, are going to commit some crimes — just as all members of all races in California commit crimes. So it is unfortunate that so soon after Trump’s racist, anti-Mexican comments, a 45-year-old man from Mexico who had been deported from the United States five times, reportedly, on Wednesday bizarrely shot and killed a 32-year-old white woman at a popular tourist spot in San Francisco in broad daylight for no apparent reason other than that he wanted to kill someone.

As was predictable, Trump yesterday shamelessly used this rare, bizarre incident to retroactively justify his anti-Mexican comments of last month. He added that “The American people deserve a wall” along the U.S. border with Mexico, so that, presumably, the United States would be like One Huge Gated Community, which the white supremacists among us would love.

However, having lived in northern California since 1998, I can tell you that we do not have an epidemic of undocumented (or documented) Mexicans (or other Latinos) shooting to death our precious young white women (in broad daylight or under the cover of darkness). Or raping them, either.

Quite presumably the 45-year-old Mexican man is mentally ill, and a sufficiently mentally ill person of any demographic can kill someone. You don’t point to one incident as “proof” that an entire race of people are guilty as you have charged.

I mean, certainly, because white-supremacist punk-ass Dylann Storm Roof premeditatedly gunned down nine black Americans in their own church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month, that doesn’t mean that all white men are cold-blooded mass murderers — does it?

No, to racists and white supremacists like Donald Trump and his ilk and those who love and support them, it’s always members of other races who are the “criminals” and the “rapists” and the “drug dealers.”

But I get it: The treasonous plutocrats’ and corporatocrats’ worst nightmare is that the American masses finally wake up, realize that our true enemies are the plutocrats and corporatocrats among us — the mostly-hidden-from-view 1 percent (which includes, of course, billionaire Trump) who treasonously have been decimating the American middle class and the working class for decades now — and that we will come for them.

So these plutocratic traitors like Trump must demonize relatively powerless minority groups as the “true” “enemy,” the “truly” “evil” “other.” We saw this dynamic in Nazi Germany. (More recently, we saw it with the unelected George W. Bush regime’s demonization of Middle Easterners [as well as of non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, who also were a target of the Nazis, of course].)

And that’s why I stand up for my Latino brothers and sisters when they are bashed: I won’t let them become the neo-Nazis’ next Jews.

The vast majority of Latinos in the United States of America are law-abiding, hard-working, productive individuals (citizens or not) without whom the United States would be in deep shit.

The United States of America’s biggest problems — including climate change; gross income inequality that further shrinks what’s left of the middle class day by day; plutocracy (including, of course, elections that are bought and paid for by the billionaires [like Trump]); unaffordable, for-profit health care; unaffordable, for-profit higher education; and a crumbling infrastructure (due in no small part because the plutocrats treasonouly refuse to pay their fair share of taxes) — aren’t caused by the impoverished peoples who come from south of the border seeking better lives for themselves and their loved ones.

No, the lion’s share of our nation’s problems are caused by the greedy, treasonous, mostly white, filthy-rich fucks from within — like Donald Trump — who have been bleeding us dry for decades. If we’re going to build protective walls, let’s build such walls entirely around them to protect ourselves from them.

A better idea, of course, comes from Mexico: stringing the treasonous plutocrats up like pinatas and beating them until their brains spill out on the ground like pieces of candy.

Pink triangle proposition won’t become law in California, but it’s the thought that counts

History repeats itself. Above are shown victims of fascist Nazi Germany’s persecution of accused gay men, tens of thousands of whom were required to wear an inverted pink triangle marking them as non-heterosexual. A theofascist California lawyer has submitted to the state’s attorney general’s office a ballot proposition to “put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method” “any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification.”

An Orange County, California, lawyer has paid the $200 filing fee to start the process for his “Sodomite Suppression Act,” which would, at its most merciful, prevent any non-heterosexual from being a public school teacher, a police officer, an elected public official or any other public employee, and which would, at worst, “put [non-heterosexuals] to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

My reading of the fairly short “act” gives me the impression that the sentiment is not entirely unlike the Catholick Church’s or the Mormon cult’s: Merely having same-sex attraction is bad, but actually acting upon it is the worst, because the fuller phrasing of the “act” is: “the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

In a shout-out to Vladimir Putin, the “act” also mandates that:

No person shall distribute, perform, or transmit sodomistic propaganda directly or indirectly by any means to any person under the age of majority. Sodomistic propaganda is defined as anything aimed at creating an interest in or an acceptance of human sexual relations other than between a man and a woman. Every offender shall be fined $1 million per occurrence, and/or imprisoned up to 10 years, and/or expelled from the boundaries of the state of California for up to life.

Although this modest proposal first emerged weeks ago, this past week it has hit the media as “news.”

The legal consensus is that California Attorney General Kamala Harris, whose office is the first stop for any ballot initiative in the state, does not have the legal authority to shut down the “Sodomite Suppression Act,” even though it patently violates the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution. The legal consensus also is that the office of the California secretary of state, the second and final stop for a state ballot initiative, does not have the legal authority to stop the “Sodomite Suppression Act.”

Of course, the right-wing lawyer who has proposed the “act,” a Matt McLaughlin, has cleared the easiest, lowest bar in the California ballot initiative process: he paid his $200 to the state’s attorney general’s office to obtain his ballot title and ballot summary, which he first must obtain from the attorney general’s office before he may begin to collect the 365,880 valid signatures of registered voters in order to qualify his ballot initiative for its placement on the November 2016 statewide ballot.

Collecting that many signatures would require some resources; McLaughlin would have to print his own petitions in a strict format dictated by state law and would have to get the bodies to go out and gather all of those signatures, be they paid or be they volunteers or some mixture of both.

Vox.com posits that the “[California state] Supreme Court is likely to step in and stop the [ballot] measure, particularly if the proposal gets enough signatures to qualify for the ballot,” but doesn’t cite its source of this assertion.

Oddly, though, neither Vox.com nor Slate.com, in their explainers on the “Sodomite Suppression Act,” notes that even though the majority of California’s voters might adopt a ballot initiative (for which only a simple majority is required), a federal court always can rule that the ballot initiative violates the U.S. Constitution (and, to my knowledge, the state’s Supreme Court can rule that a ballot initiative violates the state’s Constitution).

There is precedent for this: The hateful, anti-immigrant California Proposition 187, passed by the state’s voters by a disturbing 59 percent to 41 percent in November 1994, was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in 1997 (indeed, most of the law never even went into effect, because the same federal judge had imposed a permanent injunction on most portions of the law in December 1994).

And in November 2008, California’s voters narrowly passed (52 percent to 48 percent) the hateful, anti-non-heterosexual Proposition 8, which then was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2010. (The federal judge’s ruling was challenged legally but ultimately was left intact by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2013, and same-sex marriages in California have been legal since then.)

The California Supreme Court declined to prevent the unconstitutional Proposition H8 from appearing on the ballot, so it would be interesting to see what the court would do if it were asked to prevent the “Sodomite Suppression Act” from appearing on the ballot. Indeed, while Prop H8 “only” sought to outlaw same-sex marriages, the “Sodomite Suppression Act” calls for the Nazi-style wholesale slaughter of non-heterosexuals who ever have acted upon their same-sex attraction.

But, Wikipedia notes, citing a 2006 California Supreme Court case, “As a general rule, it is improper for courts to adjudicate pre-election challenges to a measure’s substantive validity.” In other words, the state Supreme Court apparently believes that voters get to weigh in on a ballot measure first, and the constitutionality of the measure, if it is passed, is to be hashed out in the courts only after the measure’s passage.

Thank Goddess for the federal court system and its ability (indeed, its duty) to weigh in on whether laws passed by the states’ legislatures or by the states’ voters violate the U.S. Constitution, as history has shown that even the states’ highest courts are fairly toothless, by choice or by design (to my knowledge, the states’ highest courts have jurisdiction only over their states’ constitutions, and state judges don’t have the legal authority to determine whether a state law violates the U.S. Constitution*).

True, it took years for the odious and unconstitutional California Prop H8 finally to be undone by the federal court system (that said, while today same-sex marriage is legal in California and in 35 other states, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage once and for all), but, even if the “Sodomite Suppression Act” were to make it to the November 2016 California ballot (unlikely, given the amount of money that is required to get anything on the statewide ballot in the nation’s most populous state) and pass (which is highly unlikely in this blue state), a federal court (if not also the California Supreme Court) immediately would halt its implementation, of course. Not a single bullet would be fired into the head of an accused non-heterosexual (not by the state government of California, anyway).

But, you know, it’s certainly the thought that counts, isn’t it?

Apparently wingnutty lawyer Matt McLaughlin is unlikely to be disbarred by the state for his ballot proposition. While proposing a law that blatantly violates the U.S. Constitution by proposing the wholesale murder of an entire class of human beings amply demonstrates McLaughlin’s blatant moral turpitude (if not also his blatant incompetence) as a lawyer, whose duty is to uphold the state and federal constitutions, not propose to violate them, McLaughlin should, in my book, be disbarred, but apparently he will be able to hide behind his First-Amendment “right” to propose, Nazi-style, that a whole class of people be executed.

Still, if you believe, like I do, that McLaughlin should be disbarred, you can sign, as I have, an online petition calling for his disbarment by clicking here.

Even if McLaughlin were just pulling an attention-grabbing stunt, his “Sodomite Suppression Act,” whether he means it seriously or not — to be safe, I assume that he is quite serious** — is hate speech, and lawyers who practice hate speech (which does not warrant First-Amendment protection, since it so obviously so easily can result in violence, even death, or other injury against its intended targets) should be disbarred.

I might thank McLaughlin, however, for demonstrating quite publicly that his Nazi-like mentality, although a minority mentality, still exists. And shudderingly, I surmise that while many if not most homophobes wouldn’t go so far as to execute an accused non-heterosexual individual with their own hands, the worst of the homophobes, if such execution were routine even here in the United States of America, wouldn’t much care and would do little to nothing to stop it.

—

*Alabama state Supreme Court Chief “Justice” Roy Moore, for instance, has claimed, quite incorrectly, that he has the legal authority and ability to override and ignore a federal judge’s ruling on the federal constitutionality of same-sex marriage in the state. Moore was removed from the post of Alabama Supreme Court chief “justice” in 2003 for having ignored another federal judge’s ruling on another federal constitution issue, but he was not disbarred, as he should have been, and thus he legally was allowed to run for the post again, which, insanely, is filled by popular election in the backasswards state of Alabama.

**Not much is known of McLaughlin, but the San Francisco Chronicle notes that “McLaughlin, a lawyer since 1998, tried to qualify an initiative in 2004 that would have added the King James Bible as a literature textbook in California public schools. He was quoted at the time as saying he was promoting classroom use of the Bible for its ‘rich use of the English language’ and was not trying to indoctrinate students.”

So McLaughlin apparently has a history of toxic, theofascist fundamentalism and apparently wishes for a theocratic state, much like the members of ISIS, whose mentality is the same but whose bible is different.

Affirmative action: Two wrongs don’t make a right (and yes, Paul Ryan is racist)

Updated below (on Monday, March 17, 2014)

The Sneetches are out in force with the warming weather.

Ah, springtime approaches, which means that it’s time for all of us to emerge from hibernation — and engage in more race wars!

The topic of affirmative action is rearing its ugly head again here in California, and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan is in some trouble (rightfully so) for a blatantly racist remark that he recently made.

In 1996, California’s voters approved Proposition 209, which made affirmative action by the state government, including at the state’s universities, illegal, by writing this prohibition into the state’s Constitution. Of course legal challenges followed, but the courts have upheld the constitutionality of Prop 209, whose language remains in the California Constitution today (if often ignored by those who still practice affirmative action, illegally, in California anyway).

Affirmative action is, I think, for the most part well-intended: to right the wrongs of the past, especially where adverse racial discrimination is concerned.

But, like Communism, affirmative action has looked much better on paper than it has in practicality. Did it ever achieve the equality that it promised it would? Um, yeah, no.

Practicing affirmative action now doesn’t help those who were harmed by racial discrimination in the past. It only creates even more racial discrimination in the present. Only it’s “nice,” “good” or “beneficial” racial discrimination, you see.

Bullshit, in my book. In my book, racial discrimination, whether intended to harm or to benefit someone, is wrong.

And of course the plutocratic powers that be love it when we commoners are fighting each other based upon our race, just like Dr. Seuss’ star-bellied (and plain-bellied) Sneetches. Because when we commoners are fighting each other (perhaps especially over something as superficial as our race), we’re divided, we’re not united in fighting the plutocratic powers that be.

The problem in California is that there are more who want to go to a state college or to a university than there are resources for those individuals. When scarcity arises, people want to start making cuts, but cuts based upon race is not the way to go.

If we truly want to be a post-racial society, then race has to stop mattering. (It will stop mattering — at some vague point in the distant future, the proponents of affirmative action argue. Um, yeah, no. The only time is right now.)

Asian students, for instance, are significantly over-represented in California’s state universities based on the Asian population in the state as a whole. And many if not most Californian Asians oppose the re-legalization of affirmative action in California because a return to a race-based quota system — and that’s what affirmative action creates, no matter what its short-sighted proponents may claim otherwise — would cut their admission numbers drastically. And, of course, many if not most (mostly non-Asian, of course) Californians view these Asian Californians as assholes for appearing to wish to perpetuate their “unfair” advantage.

What, exactly, is their “unfair” advantage? That they are Asian or that they are academically gifted — or that they are academically gifted while Asian? If they are academically gifted, why must they be penalized for that fact if they happen to be Asian?

I don’t see that it’s any more fair to shut out Asians than it is to shut out any other racial group. Racial discrimination is racial discrimination.

True fairness and justice have to come on a one-on-one, case-by-case basis, not based upon one’s racial group.

And like Communism was (let me emphasize that I’m talking about big-“C” communism and not about democratic socialism, which I support), affirmative action has been another failed attempt at social engineering. Human beings aren’t lab rats; they, we, are human beings, not some fucking lab experiment.

All Californians who have demonstrated the aptitude for college-level work should have the opportunity to go to college or to a university, regardless of their race. If the problem is that there aren’t enough resources for all of those individuals who wish to do so — and that is the problem here in California — then the solution is to expand that opportunity for everyone of all races by demanding that it be expanded, demanding that our tax dollars stop going towards things like the bloated-beyond-belief military-corporate complex and start going toward actual human needs, not to obscene human greed.

(And, of course, if part of the problem is that our public elementary and high schools are failing too many of our students, and I understand that they are, then we need to tackle that problem, too. [No, for-profit/charter schools are not the answer. Whenever profiteering is the No. 1 goal of any enterprise, that enterprise always will suffer, since profiteering is its main reason for existing at all.] And let’s not blame it all on our public schools; we lazy, selfish Americans are failing our young people as a whole, and it’s not fair for us to blame that on our public schools and their underpaid employees to the degree that we do!)

The solution to the scarcity of spots in California’s state universities is not the Procrustean bed of insisting that the racial composition of state university enrollment strictly matches the racial composition of the state at large.

This “solution” superficially seems fair, but it’s deeply unfair to many, many individuals, unfair to too many individuals for us to be able to deem it “fair” overall.

Two-thirds of the California Senate not long ago voted to put the repeal of Prop 209 on the statewide ballot. The state Assembly also would have to vote by a two-thirds margin to put the repeal of Prop 209 on the ballot for the state’s voters to decide whether to reinstate legalized affirmative action, but the state Assembly has yet to take the matter up. (Hopefully, it never will.)

Should the repeal of Prop 209 it make it to the ballot, I will vote against it and otherwise fight it. Affirmative action is a poorly thought-out practice that takes us further from, not closer to, a truly post-racial society (an ideal that, quite admittedly, we human beings might never meet before we annihilate ourselves).

And then there is former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, Repugnican Tea Party U.S. representative from Wisconsin, who recently remarked that here in the United States we have a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value of work.”

Reuters reports that

[U.S. Rep.] Barbara Lee of California, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, called Ryan’s remarks a “thinly veiled racial attack.”

“Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black’,” Lee said in a statement.

I agree with Lee — not just because Ryan is a Repugnican Tea Partier and I abhor the Repugnican Tea Party and its adherents, but because Ryan’s remark was meant to convey two false ideas:

(1) That certain individuals, based upon their race, inherently, even genetically, are lazy, do not want to work (while others, of course [like Ryan, of course], inherently, even genetically, are industrious); and

(2) That if someone does not want to slave in a minimum-wage job on which he or she cannot even live — and this is the only kind of job that the vast majority of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want the vast majority of us Americans to be able to have (the Repugnicans and their allies always have opposed even modest increases in the minimum wage, and they vehemently oppose a living wage) — then this means that he or she is “lazy.”

No, this means that he or she simply wishes to be paid the fair value of his or her work, and not be a fucking wage slave in perpetuity.

That’s what this means.

This is how the plutocrats long have defended their theft of our wealth: by calling us, the victims of their theft, “lazy.” Should we commoners point out the simple fact that the plutocrats have been robbing us blind forfuckingever now, the plutocratic traitors among us then accuse us commoners of waging a “class war,” when, in fact, they have been waging a class war forfuckingever in order to maintain their unfair lofty, gilded status. In fact, there is no other way for them to maintain their 1-percent status other than by waging their class war against the rest of us. And they wage this class war against us in a thousand fucking ways every fucking day.

So Paul Ryan told a dual lie: he insinuated that the members of certain races (and while Barbara Lee apparently was looking out for her own racial group, I don’t believe that Ryan was referring only to black Americans) inherently are lazy (a blatantly racist belief, a textbook, dictionary-definition example of a racist belief), when, in fact, because of institutionalized racism and white supremacy since the nation’s inception, some if not many members of the historically-socioeconomically-oppressed-by-the-white-majority groups have to a large degree just given up on chasing the so-called “American dream,” which, should they pursue it, they institutionally are set up by our plutocratic overlords to fail to catch. (And, to be fair, this trap catches most white Americans, too. Too much discussion of race presumes that most white Americans are wealthy when that is not the case, and the national discussion of class has long suffered at least in part because it has been so overshadowed by the national discussion of race.)

Yes, besides his racist lie about one’s level of industriousness being inherent (that is, race-based), Ryan retold the long-running lie that the United States of America is a meritocracy (and not a plutocracy), a system where your hard work actually will get you somewhere.

We commoners are acutely aware of the value of our hard work — our hard work indeed is so valuable that the plutocrats like Ryan and his ilk institutionally/systematically steal the value of our work from us, leaving us only crumbs. (This blatant thievery is called “capitalism,” which is deemed to be “good” — so “good,” and so inherently and intrinsically and self-evidently “good,” in fact, that we commoners may not even discuss the goodness or the lack of goodness of capitalism.) The plutocrats’ historical, blatant theft of the value of our commoners’ hard work demonstrates that they value hard work, too — our hard work, of course.

And, of course, when the far-right likes of Paul Ryan talk about “the value of work,” I cannot help but remember the signs that the Nazis erected above the entrances to their concentration camps: “Arbeit macht frei” — German for “Work makes you free.”

In Nazi Germany, it was the members of the Nazi Party telling their concentration-camp victims that work would set them free.

Today in the U.S., it’s the members of the Repugnican Tea Party assuring their victims that work will set us free.

Of course, it’s never the Nazis or the Repugnican Tea Partiers who are doing the hard work, is it?

And under their thumbs, no matter how hard we should work, we’ll never be free.

Update (Monday, March 17, 2014): California Assembly Speaker John Perez has announced that he will not allow the repeal of Prop 209 to come up for a vote in the state Assembly now, so that the repeal of Prop 209 will not appear on the November statewide ballot.

Three state senators who previously had been among the two-thirds of the state Senate to vote for putting the repeal of Prop 209 on the ballot reversed their positions and asked Perez not to proceed with issue in the Assembly, where Perez apparently wouldn’t have been able to muster the necessary two-thirds vote anyway.