IT'S WORSE, MUCH, MUCH WORSE, THAN WE THOUGHT IT WOULD BE.

That's not just any "cross". It's the symbol associated with "Deus Vult" (God wills it), which was the symbol of the First Crusade. In recent years it's been adopted by right-wing extremists, and was widely displayed by many insurrectionists on J6. 

In recent years, neo-Nazi nationalist groups have co-opted these same symbols to support their xenophobic, racist, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic agendas. “Deus Vult” is emblazoned on alt-right parade banners and chanted at rallies.

 

Peter Hegseth:

TRUMP CHOOSES A FAUX NOOZ HOST FOR SECRETARY OF DEFENSE 

Heather Cox Richardson, 11/12/24:

"Today the Trump transition team floated the idea that Trump could sign an executive order creating a board of retired senior military personnel that would review high-ranking officers and recommend removing any they deemed unfit for leadership. Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef, and Lara Seligman reported in the Wall Street Journal that such a board would enable Trump to purge the military of the generals whom he considers insufficiently loyal to him. Generals who refused to carry out what they considered unconstitutional orders—including using the military against U.S. civilians—infuriated Trump during his first term. 

(This is how fascist leaders take hold of the military. Read history to confirm this.)

The chairman of VoteVets, retired major general Paul Eaton, warned that such a plan would turn the U.S. military into Trump loyalists. Eaton also warned military personnel what that would mean for the troops, suggesting that folks should “take a look at Stalin’s officer purges in early WWII that resulted in the Soviet, now-Russian Army, enduring incompetence and the use of its rank-and-file troops as cannon meat. 

The American military is the envy of the world’s militaries, given its efficiency for military effect and stunningly low casualty count. Probably a good model to keep.” Transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “[T]he American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.” 

But Trump’s claims of a mandate are wrong. As vote counts continue to come in, it appears that Trump’s margin of victory was actually quite slim. 

 [skip] 

For secretary of defense, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth*, a combat veteran and host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, a show Trump reportedly enjoys. As national security expert Tom Nichols points out, the Secretary of Defense has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. The secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion. 

Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. He became popularly known after accidentally hitting a man with an ax on the Fox & Friends show in 2015. Then, in 2019, he regained notoriety when he volunteered that he had not washed his hands in ten years because he does not believe germs are real. 

Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.” 

 [skip] 

Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that the news that Trump has tapped the inexperienced Hegseth to run the world’s largest and most powerful military “stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world.” While some Republicans say they look forward to getting to know him better, others appear to share the Pentagon’s concerns. 

Marcy Wheeler:

"There’s something else that Hegseth is happy to do that the others are not. The possible choices are gutting the military of women, people of color, LGBTQ soldiers, launching nuclear first strikes, committing war crimes, and treating leftists as terrorists — all are things he has espoused before." 

*Not that this matters anymore, but regarding Hegseth's personal and moral integrity:

"Hegseth got wife #3 pregnant while still married to wife #2." 

This is the slow-walk to fascism Liz Cheney warned us about; and MAGA, too uninformed and bamboozled by a con man, ignored. 

But here we are.

REMEMBER WHEN REPUBLICANS KNEW WHAT A DANGER TRUMP WOULD BE TO AMERICA?

 

Trump is still Trump. 

What changed their minds about the danger to democracy that Trump is?

 

Marco Rubio: “I will make this promise to you today. I will do whatever it takes...Trump, a con artist, will never get control of this party...We cannot allow a con artist to get access to the nuclear codes of the United States of America.”pic.twitter.com/vFzS2bGRvR

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) November 12, 2024

FLOTUS vs. FLOTUS

 

Former FLOTUS, Melania, has refused an invitation from current FLOTUS, Dr. Jill Biden, to meet at the WH for the traditional transferring of families in the WH.

Spiteful, vindictive, and mean-spirited Melania has refused. She's as vengeful and classless as her convicted felon husband.

My only hope for the incoming FLOTUS is that she keeps her clothes on. There are plenty of soft-porn Melania images on the internet. America doesn't need any up-to-date racy photos of America's FLOTUS.

Also, this holiday season, we're grateful we won't hear Melania say: 

 

"Who gives a f**k about Christmas stuff"--Melania Trump

America! Are you excitedly looking forward to hearing what comes out of her pottymouth next Christmas?

TRUMPERS APPARENTLY HAVE NO SPECIAL NEEDS KIDS:

 

So if red state and blue state Americans have special needs children, you're on your own! 

The Trump administration won't care.

David Shuster: "Trump has now reaffirmed his plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. 

For the record that department funds, among other things, all the special education and special needs program in public schools and public colleges in all 50 states."

RUSSIA TELLS THE U.S. WHO THE REAL BOSS IS.

 

Julia Davis is the Russian Media Monitor for The Daily Beast:

Julia Davis

@JuliaDavisNews

·

51m

Meanwhile in Russia: Putin's presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said, "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them."

VLAD SHOWING TRUMP WHO'S THE BOSS:

Russia's most watched state tv program humiliates Trump's wife by airing photos of her former profession as a soft porn model:

 

YOUR SUNDAY MOMENT OF ZEN

 

Max Burns

Max Burns is a Democratic strategist and the founder of Third Degree Strategies, a progressive communications firm. His writing has appeared in outlets including the New York Daily News, Business Insider, NBC News and Buzzfeed. 

"The Trump who will walk into the White House on Jan. 20 is a man steeped in unsettled vendettas, who came within a hair’s breadth of a string of federal felony convictions that he is now empowered to wipe away with a self-pardon — as if those offenses and so many others had never even happened. Trump will see his priorities as he has always seen them: party over country and self over all.

A man with 34 felony convictions can’t win the presidency in a nation where trust in institutions is high. It’s only in a culture where the justice system has long since lost its legitimacy that a man with such a thick criminal record as Trump glides by relatively unremarked. 

That one man can so effortlessly game American institutions to his own benefit says as much about the decrepit state of America’s institutions as it does about the moral decrepitude of the crook. The nine years of the Trump era have taken a bat to our democracy, and Trump’s MAGA movement has exploited the nation’s systemic weakness at every turn. 

Political misinformation flooded social media networks owned by Trump’s key allies, or by Trump personally. Meanwhile, Trump and compliant Republican lawmakers torched public trust in the courts — first by appointing an ethically vacant Supreme Court, and later by urging his followers to hate and distrust not only the judges who tried him but the entire “rigged” justice system. 

Trump is now set to return to the White House, and he’s made no secret of his lofty goals for a second term: gutting the civil service, destroying the independence of the Justice Department and seeking political and legal revenge on his lengthy list of personal enemies. 

Judging by yesterday’s election returns, a majority of Americans are eager to see Trump do exactly that. The former and future president now inherits a nation deeply weakened by his own toxic brand of politics. Our divided and exhausted nation will now need to fend off the constant extralegal whims of a president who is also, thanks to the Supreme Court, functionally immune from prosecution for any act he undertakes. 

If Trump’s first term was any indication, we won’t need to wait long for our next constitutional crisis. It matters that Trump won his office in a free and fair election. It matters that free people voluntarily chose to cloak Trump in power he will almost certainly abuse in far-reaching and destructive ways. 

Our country made the choice to walk down the dark path of Trump’s resentments and conspiracies. 

We will come to regret it."

TRUMP'S VICTORY BROUGHT TO US BY ELITIST BILLIONAIRES

 

"American voters...are becoming more like Trump."

 

TOM NICHOLS: 

 

"Uncharacteristically, I'll say that Democratss should stop beating up on themselves and firing volleys back and forth. (They can get back to that later.) American voters - as I've been warning for years - are changing, and becoming more like Trump. That's hard to counteract. 

Maybe the mistake we all made was thinking America would elect a Black woman. I had a gut feeling they would not. But in any case, when elections are about feelings, fantasies, boredom, and resentment, the candidate who services those delusions has a natural advantage. 

Democrats are understandably focused on voters who flipped because they're suffering economically. But a far larger number of voters were un-flippable and not poor! They're the comfortable Trumpers who think, like, 'Canada conspired with Michelle O to hijack voting machines.' 

 When millions of people think that way, you can't agonize *too* much over losing another three points during a global backlash against inflation (that no government could have stopped and that the US handled well). Especially when you've won important House/Senate races in all those states. 

 The Democrats should definitely have a reckoning about their inability to recognize that becoming the party of the college-educated (which is what the GOP used to be) has affected their ability to message. And you're seeing some rumbles already. 

But no Democrat can change the fact that millions of ungettable GOP votes are set in stone not because of economic conditions - which were the best any candidate could have hoped for - but because even relatively affluent voters have spent years marinating in complete craziness. 

 And I'll add, again, that this is not some post-hoc rationalization based on this week. I've written about this for years, and warned about it at length in a book I wrote more than four years ago. That's really why I just couldn't be optimistic about this election."

LISTEN TO THIS:

 

Here's convicted felon and recently released from prison, Steve Bannon, and Kash Patel (who, I've read, is on the short list to head the CIA in Trump's regime).

This is EXACTLY the way fascists speak and threaten when they take power. Kash Patel, the next possible Director of Central Intelligence under Trump: 

 “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.” 

Kash Patel, the next possible Director of Central Intelligence under Trump:

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.” pic.twitter.com/fZa1Iyw5ap

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) November 8, 2024

 PS. The 60+ court cases all found that there was no fraud, no rigging in the 2020 election and that Trump was lying about it and has recently admitted he "lost by a whisker!" 

By law, CIA is specifically prohibited from collecting foreign intelligence concerning the domestic activities of US citizens. Its mission is to collect information related to foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence.

Patel and Bannon are talking like fascists when they say they're going to go after people who committed no crimes, and who didn't repeat Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

This is how authoritarian strongmen govern.

This isn't American.

AMERICA'S FOE, RUSSIA, IS HAPPY WITH TRUMP'S WIN

 

CONGRATS TO ALL WHO VOTED FOR TRUMP, YOU'VE MADE THE EX-COMMUNIST LEADER OF THE KGB  AND BUTCHER OF UKRAINIANS VERY HAPPY.

WASHINGTON POST:

washingtonpost

President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning political comeback has created an opening for Russia to shatter Western unity on Ukraine and redraw the global power map, according to several influential members of the Russian elite.

Across the corridors of power in Moscow, the win for Trump’s populist campaign arguing that America should focus on its domestic woes over aiding countries like Ukraine was being hailed as a potential victory for Russia’s efforts to carve out its own sphere of influence in the world.

In even broader terms, it was seen as a victory for conservative, isolationist forces supported by Russia against a liberal, Western-dominated global order setting the rules for the entire world that the Kremlin (and its allies) have been seeking to undermine.

“We have won,” said Alexander Dugin, the Russian ideologue who has long pushed an imperialist agenda for Russia and supported disinformation efforts against Kamala Harris’s campaign. “ … The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat,” he wrote on X.

 

Trumpers excited to make human beings' lives a living Hell. (PS. Anchor babies are American citizens.) This is Trump's "glorious" plan for our country:

How sick are they? This sick. https://t.co/vqX76ggjs9

— Jack Hopkins (@thejackhopkins) November 8, 2024

JUST A REMINDER:

 

Remember when Trump adamantly insisted that he knew NOTHING about Project 2025? Never even read it?

He lied, of course. 

The MAGA brigade handed the country over to a master liar:

"AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS NOT DEAD; IT'S ON LIFE SUPPORT."

 

JOHN ADAMS:

"Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts & murders itself.  There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It's in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact & no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Govt. & when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty."

Matthew D. Taylor:

"We're living in the moment the American founders feared most: A populist authoritarian (they used the term "demagogue" -- same difference) has gained power through a legitimate election.

Worse. Trump has the most concentrated, anti-democratic coalition since the Confederacy.

Indeed, for those searching for comparison points from American history, I believe there is no simple parallel for what a threat this poses to our democracy."

"Moving forward, there'll be two narratives of American history: the Trump regime's narrative, bolstered by powerful media on the right: E. Musk vs. reality.

The regime's narrative will be: Trump as American savior, January 6 was righteous (if misguided), and restoration of a Christian America. Trump will almost certainly pardon most or all January 6 rioters, whose 'bravery' will be celebrated by the regime's propaganda.

The other narrative -- the complicated story of America's yet-to-be perfected union, of growing pluralism since the 1960s, of the derailment of that trajectory through a white majority and Christian majority backlash -- will be forced to live in the shadows of disfavor and censorship.

I expect -- and I'd be thrilled to be wrong -- we'll see a surge in Christian nationalist and Christian supremacist rhetoric and identities around Trump in the coming weeks and months.

Trump's seemingly 'miraculous' re-election on the heels of his 'miraculous' survival of the assassination attempts will pour jet fuel on the already popular idea that Trump is ordained and anointed by God for office.

Trump gestured toward this in his victory speech.

Over the past 10 years, charismatic Christian prophets have issued hundreds of positive prophecies about Trump, his divinely appointed destiny, endurance of persecution, etc. This means that Trump has taken on a quasi-messianic aura for many American Christians.

What makes this so dangerous is that, to his followers -- the only segment of the American populace that he cares about -- Trump can make the case that he has not only a democratic mandate, but that he also has a divine mandate to enact his agenda. 'Promises made; promises kept.'

I am especially concerned about this 'Trump as Jehu' prophecy narrative that has set in in recent months, because it is preparing the ground for Christians to accept and even endorse Trump's threatened violence against his opponents as a necessary purge.

It is well past time that we lay aside any lingering forms of American exceptionalism to recognize that autocracy, kleptocracy, and theocracy absolutely 'can happen here.'

Like most populist authoritarians, Trump uses the language of democracy to dismantle liberal democracy.

We need to learn from resistance movements around the world how to stand in the face of MAGA hegemony.

Our dream of a pluralistic, liberal, multi-religious, multi-racial American democracy is not dead; it is on life support."

 

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

America chose the felon and rapist to lead her!

 

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” —H. L. Mencken

I have nothing more to say.

VOTE!

 

Donald Trump, the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who's been accused of sexual assault by 20+ women, and who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, closed his campaign last night by calling Nancy Pelosi "an evil, sick, crazy b..." (Trump mouthed the last word. "It starts with a "B" but I won't say it. I wanna say it.")

JD Vance closed by calling VP Harris "trash."

If you voted for Trump and Vance, that's what you voted for.

Your wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, aunts know what you think of them, because you voted for men who denigrate, demean, and abuse women.

VOTE!

 

Heather Cox Richardson 

sSoetrnpod2g9mm00g687u9m7051t9u9011cc34mt55flum9ha9th2flc1i1  · 

November 3, 2024 (Sunday)

I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.

I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.

If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives.

Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national.

America would become a slaveholding nation.

Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal.

South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them.

But that’s not how it played out.

As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.

The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans.

But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.

The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.

In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.

By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence.

In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.

Now it is our turn.