Stop using oil. Stop using natural gas, too. Stop. The sooner you can stop, the better. Do what it takes. I don’t know what that is for any individual – for you – but do it.
I know it’s work. I’m not saying, “here’s the easy no impact thing you can do to feel better about yourself,” I’m saying “this is what you need to do if you want to actually do something,” and those are very different statements. It’s a lift, and it’s a heavy lift, but it’s what to do now.
Being work – being difficult – doesn’t change that it needs to happen. Stopping the Nazis in World War II was a heavy lift too. It was work, it was difficult, and it was very literally very very deadly. Millions of people died. Millions more got fucked up for life. Still needed to happen, just like this still needs to happen now. And both the deaths and the fuckery were going to happen anyway.
So stop using oil.
I started saying this literally decades ago, talking about US adventurism in the Middle East. For the money people – the ones who matter – it was then and is now about oil. You want the US out of the Middle East, do everything you can to stop oil consumption. Starve the beast, and eventually the beast will weaken and die. It’s not fast and it’s not easy and it’s not glamorous, but it’s what will work.
Sure, you can talk about the lunatic fundamentalists who want to start Armageddon and end the world to bring back Jesus – fuck, I hate that typing that out is relevant and important – but without the money people using them as muscle, they’re a bunch of flea-picking determinedly-ignorant dipshits feeling up snakes in strip-mall storefronts. Fuck ’em. The reality is that fossil fuel companies are ass-deep in fascism, and always have been, so:
Stop. Using. Oil.
Internalise that. The problem is oil and the people who extract, refine, and sell it. It’s also natural gas and coal and any other fossil fuel, but mostly, it’s the oil.
Stop using oil.
Hit those goddamn breaks, slow down, and then just. Fucking. Stop. Using. Oil.
Some of that’s easy, some of it’s not, and it’s not fast. Lots of people can tell you ways how, including me, but don’t get me wrong – I’m not a saint on this; our furnace is still natural gas. I want to fix that, and we’re actively stockpiling money to do so, but it’s going to take time. It just is. But we’re actually actively working towards it, and we have been for a while.
Not just at home, either. If things go right at the work I don’t talk about online – ever – we’ll be cutting fossil fuel consumption there by another 91% by late this summer.
Thanks to me.
It’s taken ages. We’ve already cut use by about 77%, thanks again – I stress – to my efforts. This new 91% cut will be 91% of what’s left over after all that. It’ll be a 98% cut from where we started, years ago.
If things go right – and there are supplier questions so it might not go right – we’ll be throwing that switch mid-year. For good. It’ll have been years of effort but we’ll have gone from over two thousand gallons of oil a year to
FUCKING ZERO
…with the remaining 2% being natural gas. (We have a path out of that, as well. But the oil comes first.)
There’s nothing unique about my position in this. My accomplishment can be repeated by others, I am just saying.
The end result of not using oil will be much better than what we have now. Some of the intermediate steps will be improvements, too. Some won’t. Some, people just won’t like. Surveys show Americans want to stop climate change but they also want to keep using gas forever and I’m fucking sorry, but that’s just not how reality works.
Until people internalise that they have to stop using oil, I don’t know how much anything else matters.
What I’m hearing – and hopefully it’s wrong, but it’s what I’m hearing – is that Republicans in Congress know that this is all a hellish dictatorial evil nightmare, but that even now, they won’t cross Trump. One or two will, but not many and not enough. I don’t know that it’s true, but maybe it is.
If you have Republican Representatives or Senator(s), it is your job TODAY to make them fear YOU more than they fear HIM.
This is some serious business last chance shit right here, okay?
This is correct. The document is very clear on that point. But here’s more from Anders:
The United States sees it as a strategic priority… that MAGA movements come to power in Europe, and they intend to use the means that they have to support such movements in the fight against the current centrist governments.
These are some very dramatic statements that have raised deep questions about whether there is any foundation for NATO to function going forward if the United States sees it as a strategic priority to undermine the governments of other NATO countries. …
It’s really hard to see how there can be an alliance any more. The reality is that the views expressed in this [policy document] are in many ways identical to the Russian viewpoints on Europe and the Russian goals of regime change in European countries.
He further discusses the document’s demands for ‘free speech,’ in the sense of ending social media moderation and opposing the exclusion of hate speech, the lifeblood of MAGA fascism. There are several demands in the document around these topics, which he sees – correctly – as focused on helping Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg push MAGA/fascist propaganda into Europe through their algorithmically-driven propaganda machines.
Elon Musk’s “X” is the bigger threat, of course. As Nielsen puts it: “If you’re European, then it is a national security priority to stop using X.” Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into a fascist propaganda fountain, as opposed to Zuckerberg’s primary intention of making as much money as possible, working with fascists if that’s what gets the job done.
I have, of course, been saying that it’s time to stop using X since a few months into Elon Musk’s takeover of the site because of this exact reason, but, well – who the fuck listens to me?
Anders’s final key takeaway here is that this document doesn’t show a MAGA-led US deciding not to care at all about Europe, but instead shows a US deciding to care very much about Europe – mostly western Europe – with the specific and stated intention of installing MAGA governments, telling Europe that they must be MAGA – fascist – to be allied with the US.
This move would be an extension of what MAGA see as “their” western hemisphere, which other than western Europe means North and South America, including Greenland.
Naturally, this process would include granting Russia and Trump’s second-best pal Putin their own sphere of influence in the east. This portends the US’s impending betrayal of Ukraine, and later, a betrayal of the Baltic states, Poland, probably a couple of others (Moldova? Romania? Bulgaria?) as well.
But why? Does Trump love Putin and Orban that much?
I believe It’s more than that, and more than Trump’s ego, believe it or not. It’s more than his desperate longing to be a dictator and it’s more than his sheer will to steal every dollar in sight. Trump and MAGA, well… they are definitively fools, morons, white nationalists, imperialists, longing for a white imperial past. But I still think that Putin has more choate strategic plans than Trump, and I still think Ukraine is a climate war, so…
…shall I post this line again? Sure, I’ll post this line again. Here’s what I think Putin really wants – not what he’ll get, what he wants. It’s a minimum goal, to “secure” the nation:
That’s oversimplified, of course, but this is a small map and a big thick line. The reality would be far different, and most likely more like existing national boundaries, but still: it gets the idea across.
Meanwhile, when Russian maximalists and propaganda shills talk about how “we should march all the way to Paris” – which they do, repeatedly – here’s what I think they want:
And what do these lines have in common?
Mountains.
Tall, easier to defend, mountainous, migration-blocking borders.
It’s simple-minded in a lot of ways, I suppose, but so is keeping the border at the Rhine and that kept French foreign policy busy for a few centuries, so border politics don’t have to be all that complex.
Putin et al – they know climate change is real. Trump’s a decaying fool and might not know now if he ever did, but Putin? He knows. But heading a petrostate dictatorship with lots of far-northern land? He doesn’t want to stop it, because it’s the outsourced expense of allllllll Russia’s money, and if billions die, well, that’s the cost of doing business.
I call map one Putin’s Wall. Map two? Let’s call it Solovyov’s Wall, since as far as I can tell he’s the most famous proponent of “marching all the way to Paris.” Soloyvov’s Wall isn’t attainable – it won’t happen, it’s (ugh) aspirational – but I do think Trump wants to give Putin his wall, and that Putin has enough trust in Russia’s ability to handle MAGA that he’s willing to let Trump and his replacements handle the west.
Personally, I think MAGA has enough interest in a semi-mythical White Europe that they’re willing to do it. As long as they’re lead by the right – white, fascist – governments.
Hence, this hideous betrayal of a document.
That said, let me be real clear about something: On their own, Russia cannot attain Putin’s Wall. It’d take a complete American betrayal and European capitulation for them to have any chance. They cannot do it alone.
But thanks to MAGA and Trump, they’re on the edge of getting that American betrayal. They want to push that betrayal to completion. If they get it, then they’ll help the US make MAGA happen in Europe, in order to get the second necessary condition of European collapse and capitulation.
Russia’s no match for the EU as a whole. But torn apart? Picking off one little country at a time is… it’s not easy, it’s absolutely not, but they’re willing to kill as many of their own as is necessary for as long as is necessary to do it. Particularly if they’re ethnic minorities. And since nobody wants to flee a climate disaster to a war zone anyway, so he wins either way. Whether deterred by mountains or by war, refugees would go elsewhere, or not at all.
And that’s why I think this is a climate war. Not a war triggered by climate changes in Russia, but by Russia wanting to keep oil and gas going forever and keep out the people that will starve and kill.
You noticed Iran saying that Tehran will have to be abandoned as a capital, didn’t you? It’s more corruption and incompetence than climate change – but it’s a bit of all three. Climate change has moved the timetable. Made things worse. And yet, we’re just getting started.
So, then. Where are we? Ah, yes. How this all plays out.
There’s a bit of a feeling out there that Trump is weakened and even some who think that this nightmare is… more or less over. That Trump is a “lame duck,” that there is no MAGA without him.
That’s partially true. Trump is weakened. MAGA is, too, and they’ve been dependant upon his stardom – and fandom – to reach critical mass. They will be badly wounded – but not out – once he goes.
But none of that means this is over. The more trouble MAGA and Trump think they’re in, the more Trump and MAGA will lash out, trying to push their fascist power fantasies into existence. We will all see more betrayals, more sabotage, more oppression – the ICE army of white supremacists they’re working to summon into existence, funded by the so-called “big beautiful bill,” will actively work to dwarf the violence and abuses we’ve seen this year.
It’s their vision of the future, and they’re going to fight for it. It’s what they want, it’s what they’re all in to get, and it’s what they will do anything to achieve.
And they will not go down quietly. Take heart in the recent massive election shifts. Take heart in Trump’s decay and weakness and failing… opinion polls. Take heart in the America First/MAGA civil war. Take heart in all of it.
But do not, for a moment, think this is actually over.
We saw what happened last night. If you didn’t: eight fuckheads went over (7 Democrats, 1 Republican) to end the shutdown. They got absolutely fucking nothing for it. NOTHING.
The Democrats and one independant siding with Republicans on the vote Sunday night were Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., John Fetterman, D-Pa., Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., Tim Kaine, D-Va., Angus King, I-Maine, Jackie Rosen, D-Nev., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.
However. There’s one last long shot, but you have to go from zero to 100 on this right the fuck now. You may not have until the afternoon, you almost certainly don’t have until tomorrow. You’ve got to go RIGHT NOW.
There’s going to be a series of steps before this is over. As I understand it, IT IS NOT YET OVER, THERE IS ONE MORE 60-PERSON VOTE. We have to get at least one of these fuckheads to go “oh shit, what was I doing?” and change their mind.
They need to see an absolute eruption of fury.
I don’t want to link to Threads, so I’m posting text from a post there, telling you to WRITE, CALL, BOMBARD ON SOCIAL MEDIA, SCREAM, most particularly at these four:
“Is the shutdown over? Not yet. Tonight’s vote was only step 1 of 5. There’s still another 60-vote hurdle, amendments, and then the House. Nothing has reopened. Pressure matters right now—especially on (Tim Kaine, VA), (Maggie Hassan, NH), (Jeanne Shaheen, NH), and (Jacky Rosen, NV).”
Here’s what I wrote variations of tonight, just after the betrayal vote:
How DARE you cave?
HOW. DARE. YOU. CAVE.
The Republicans are toxic, the election gave Democrats their first hope in a year, Trump is the most unpopular he’s ever been and you’re SURRENDERING?! You’re giving up the ONLY piece of leverage we have in exchange for… a fucking SHOW VOTE? A show vote that means NOTHING?! From a party who LIES like they BREATHE?
I am repulsed. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!
Frankly it’d serve you right if they didn’t even have the show vote. I hope they don’t. I hope they rub your face in it.
I want my goddamn contributions back. I need to send them to whoever primaries you, and the rest of your little pack of coward turncoats. Seriously, if there was a way after all this time to yank back every dollar I gave you, I would.
Yeah, I know, I’m not a constituent but this fascist MAGA Republican Party budget affects me just as much as everyone else and you’re the one yanking them from the jaws of defeat to hand them a victory.
Clear the goddamn seat and make room for someone who might actually vote like a Democrat.
Frankly – you should just resign.
Get loud. Right now.
And primary every single one of these motherfuckers. They’ve all got to go.
This is why some of us are still out there, week after week, protesting at Tesla dealerships:
Here’s the story. It’s old, but it’s still pretty much true. Driving the stake through the heart of Tesla is how to take down the rest.
That’s why those of us who understand that this is a marathon are still getting out there, week in, week out. Not every protest, but over and over again, we’re there.
We’re not there yet. But sales keep falling. The more they’re reminded about who he is, the more sales go down.
As we head into the SNAP shutdown – however long it may last, and while I’d love be surprised and see it end tomorrow with the Republicans giving in on their whole refusal-to-negotiate shutdown bullshit, I’m leaning towards it lasting a while – I want to hand out a couple of critically important items, one short and easy, one long and difficult.
First, the easy one: food banks need your money right now. If you have spare money, now’s a great time to give them some. They’re going to bear the immediate brunt of the hunger, and will need every dime they can manage. Some states are stepping in – Washington State just advanced a couple million a week to local food banks – but not all. Particularly not red states.
No judgement if you can’t, obviously. Everything is terrible. But if you can, now’s a great time.
Secondly, the difficult one: I want to talk about the context in which this is happening, and why the money matters so much, and why it’s really quite important to give now if you can.
Topline inflation numbers – which we don’t even have right now, I remind you, thanks to the Republican MAGA shutdown – are not representative of a fixed basket of goods. They representing a shifting basket of goods, a price basket that is intended to meet the same needs, but does not always have the same contents.
Remember that term: price basket, both fixed and shifting. It’s important.
That’s because the topline inflation numbers are less about mechanical cost and more about how much are people spending within a category. While those two numbers may look similar at first glance, they are in fact very different.
Let me show you how different, simplifying by only using… beef.
If beef prices go up – as they have, through the roof, under Trump – then the bureau assumes that people will move to cheaper cuts of beef.
(Really, they assume that they’ll likely move to cheaper types of meat outright – that people will forego beef sometimes, and instead eat more chicken or fish, just for example. But again, we’re sticking with beef for this example.)
Let’s say people had been buying a lot of porterhouse cut beef last year. That’s not the most expensive cut of beef, but it’s on the higher end.
Let’s say porterhouse has gone from $10/pound to $15/pound over the last year. That’s a lot, obviously; I’m picking that big a jump because I want clearer maths, not just because that’s about the kind of price change we’ve seen in beef since Trump took over. Even though we have.
Let’s say that as a result, people who were buying porterhouse last year have shifted this year to buying T-bone stakes. Still a very good cut, nutritionally equal, but cheaper. This is the sort of rational decision the Federal government assumes people will make, and which they look for in sales.
Now we’re talking T-bone steaks. Let’s say that over the same period of time, T-bone cuts went from $9 a pound to $13 a pound. Still a big jump! Less of one, but still big, and still a cheaper cut.
Still with me? Let’s recap:
Porterhouse went from $10/pound to $15/pound over a year.
T-bone went from $9 to $13 a pound over the same year.
People bought less porterhouse and more T-bone as a result, shifting their purchase pattern to save money in the face of higher prices.
We’re about to calculate the inflation rate.
How do you think this year-over-year inflation rate would be calculated?
$15/$10, producing a 50% annual inflation rate? No.
$13/$9, producing a 44% inflation rate? Also no.
Remember above, I said “price basket” would be important? This is why. They’d use the current price basket against the year ago price basket, even though the basket no longer contains the same item.
Which means that they’d calculate the price increase as such:
$13/$10, producing a 30% inflation rate.
Now something I want to make clear is that if you are talking about cost of living, this is reasonable. It does reflect real-life behaviour. They aren’t “cheating” by doing this if the goal is to measure cost of living, which it mostly is. (If prices go down, which happens regularly in food, they do adjust back the other way too. Just to get that on the record.)
So where a fixed goods price basket would show a 50% or 44% inflation rate, depending upon which kind of stake was in it, the shifting price basket – the cost of living adjusted basket – would show a 30% inflation rate, because that’s how much people are actually spending.
How happy you are about that change in your basket doesn’t really factor in so much.
Now that we’ve made it through all that noise – why is this relevant?
Because people already buying on the very low end don’t have as much manoeuvring room to change their purchase choices. And in that context, the fixed price basket becomes more important than the shifting price basket, not less.
Anna and I have extremely good budgeting. And even during all we’ve been through over the last couple of years, we’ve remained fairly price-insensitive over what foods we choose to eat.
As a result, I know a few important things:
I know what we spent on a monthly basis a year ago, what that averaged out to over five months as of each month.
I know what we’re spending now, and how that’s averaged out over the last five months.
I know that where groceries are concerned, what we buy really hasn’t changed much, due to that price insensitivity. It’s changed some, but it hasn’t changed a lot.
And knowing all that, I know that our average grocery spending per month has gone up 61% from September 2024 to September 2025. Sixty. One. Percent. I have every number and calculation to prove it.
Does that mean all fixed-price baskets would show that kind of spike? Absolutely not. I’m sure I eat more imported and/or speciality foods than typical – Bonne Maison preserves from France, instead of Smucker’s. Maple syrup from Canada on Sunday pancakes, not Mrs. Butterworth’s table syrup, a mix of HFCS and flavourings. Stuff like that. Having been “food insecure” more than once in my life, if there’s one place I am spectacularly resistant to cutting back on quality, it’s food. As a result, we’ve been hit harder by food tariffs than most, and my fixed-basket inflation number is not going to be typical.
But while I’m confident that grocery costs at the lowest-income levels haven’t gone up 61% – they may have less opportunity for cost reduction via purchase changes than people higher up the income scale, but they do have some, and they’re also not getting hit as hard directly by the tariffs – I am just as confident of this:
Food costs for low income Americans have gone up a lot more than the official inflation rate will ever say. 3%? 4%? That’s fart noises. I don’t know what it is, but I’m confident it’s a lot more than that.
It is, after all, always a lot more expensive to be poor.
And that’s where we are as Trump and MAGA decide to cut off SNAP. There’s $6 billion in contingency funds that are supposed to be used in situations like this, and Trump is refusing to use it, just like he unconstitutionally refused to spend other Congressionally-ordered spending. His puppets in the FDA are saying that American hunger isn’t an emergency, so it won’t be spent.
And why that, in turn? Well, maybe it’s for just political pressure. Using hunger to force Democrats to let through insane doubling to tripling of health insurance costs is entirely his kind of shitheel manoeuvrer.
Maybe that’s all it is.
Or maybe it’s because he and Miller and Vance and all those goddamn ghouls want his fucking street riots so he can invoke the Insurrection Act, and if starving American citizens is what it takes to get his riots, starving American citizens is exactly what he’ll do to get his street riots.
You know I’m right about that.
So.
Let’s not give the fascist any goddamn food riots. No matter how much he might want them.
I really, really, really gotta point something out here.
This “ballroom” Trump Shitstain the First says he’s building is 90,000 square feet, and is going to cost THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.
Apparently. That’s what he says.
This is bullshit. He’s pocketing AT LEAST half of that money. Probably two-thirds, maybe 70%. I daresay probably 70%. Or who knows, all of it – but let’s say he’s actually going to build something and some part of the extorted “donations” will actually be spent doing so. It’s still bullshit, and he’s still pocketing most of the money.
How do I know this?
Because $300 million for 90,000 square feet is over $3330/square foot in construction cost. That’s absolutely batshit insane by any standard. The highest-end commercial construction in the US is under $1000/square foot. You’re telling me he’s going to spend over three times that?
I don’t fucking think so. It’s bullshit, and he’s keeping most of the money.
But if that’s not enough for you, consider this:
The most expensive commercial building EVER BUILT IN THE WORLD (according to Wikipedia’s list of most expensive buildings) is One Financial Centre in Hong Kong, which is, slightly ironically, two massive skyscrapers. It’s a combined two million square feet of floor space, mostly vertical, which adds assloads of cost. It is opulent as fuck and serves extremely high-end customers in an extremely wealthy city.
Excluding land costs (because shitstain has the land already), 1FC cost right around $3315/square foot to build.
Which is to say, slightly LESS than his fucking “ballroom.”
His ballroom will cost MORE per square foot than the most expensive luxury commercial construction project ever built.
Which is, again, bullshit.
He’s pocketing that money, and nobody should think for a moment otherwise.
Post your reality; use the hashtag to help other people see it, if you’re okay with the one in a million shot that they ask you to let them use it on Kimmel.
In reality, of course, they’ll mostly be checking YouTube and maybe other corporate social media, not cooperative spaces like the Federation. But he’s famous enough that if he calls for a hashtag, a lot of people will use it, and in this case, that’s no bad thing.
So – Portland. Chicago. Los Angeles. Memphis. DC. You in particular, but not just you…
Pamela Bondi went before Senate Oversight on Tuesday determined not to testify to Democrats, and to help Republicans deflect and defend the Trump regime’s fascism. That’s obvious; it happens fairly regularly.
But usually, people doing this routine at least pretend to answer the questions. They don’t provide answers, no, of course not. But they pretend and follow forms.
Bondi wasn’t even pretending. Her responses were unrelated, spurious – and as Senator Schiff put it, “pre-canned” – attacks on and insults of Democratic questioners, over and over again. We couldn’t be entirely sure of it at the moment, but Reuters managed to photograph her notes during her “testimony”, and now we absolutely know for sure they were prewritten.
Later, she started launching these prewritten lie clusters during questions, while Democratic senators were speaking. Here’s an example of her interrupting Senator Schiff over and over again with literal unrelated whatabouts and insults.
Eventually, I guess she ran out of pre-installed lie clusters, because she ran out during a response to a question from Senator Whitehouse and froze up. She literally couldn’t seem to talk.
(I swear to you – I swear to you – I did not add that caption over the video. It was a player issue. But I couldn’t not keep it, now could I?)
But I do think there was a point here, and it wasn’t just not answering questions while giving Republican Senators time to lie and deflect on behalf of the regime. That’s all too normal.
No, I think the intent was to show their utter contempt for the legislature. I think this a stupid version of Caligula’s expression of contempt for the Senate, when he said he was going to appoint his favourite horse as a member.
(He didn’t actually do it, legend aside. The record is reasonably clear on that. He just mocked them with the idea.)
At least Caligula’s version was funny. This, by contrast, is just sad. But sad or not, I do think there was a point, and that point was to display contempt for representative government and to metaphorically blow a horse’s fart in the faces of elected representatives.
And I think that’s something people should understand.
If anyone’s wondering whether US farmers exporting to China just need a little “temporary help” to get over Trump’s trade war, read this thread from farmer Sarah Taber on Mastodon. She’s a farmer from North Carolina and deeply involved in farming issues. Read all of the thread.
If you won’t, though – if know your US Civil War history, you might know about how the Confederacy self-embargoed cotton exports, withholding “King Cotton” from the market.
They thought it would grind textiles production in the UK to a halt and force the UK to come in on their side of the war.
What happened instead was Egyptian cotton.
Trump pulled his bullshit thinking China would bow to him over soybeans; what happened instead was Brazil and Argentina. They haven’t bought a single goddamn US soybean since last spring, as South America ramped production right the fuck up.
Soybeans were the US’s largest agricultural export.
Emphasis on were.
And arguably, it gets worse from there.
So seriously, go read the thread. It’s good, knowledgable shit.
Fascist Trump’s allies are out today repeating the “cities are war zones” lie, so anybody in Chicago needs to get out there and starting posting pictures of their “war zone” just like Portland.
“Chicago’s a nightmare, it is literally a war zone” — Rand Paul
People you expect to know better will not, in fact know better. I’ve run into this too damn many times. People who you’d think wouldn’t bite on this bullshit absolutely will bite on this bullshit. So you need to reveal the lie through a massive flood of photographic evidence you vouch for personally, yourself.
Post your reality, Chicago. Everywhere. Starting right now.
Before things get a lot worse, which it looks like they’re about to do given Trump’s “full force” order and his “anti-fascism is terrorism” executive memo, I need to reiterate:
It’s lies. This shit about Portland? It’s all lies.
The lies about Seattle were lies too. Particularly reviving the old lie that “they” “took over a significant percentage of the city” back in 2020. Remember when I posted a map showing the three blocks and a park that were the entire protest zone? And how it was 0.0something percent of the city? How it was basically the equivalent of a guy and a yappy dog on the corner of a Walmart parking lot, and how on a full map of the city the red rectangle was literally too small to see?
Remember that?
It’s lies about Portland now. I know people in Portland. I know people who are in Portland RIGHT NOW, for the weekend.
It. Is. All. Lies.
If you don’t believe me, believe Tess Vigeland, a Wall Street Journal senior producer who lives in Portland. The Wall Street Journal is not exactly a “left” publication and doesn’t exactly employ “radical leftists.” I quote her here in entirety:
“He is lying. They are lying. They are literally making this shit up. I live four blocks from the ICE facility they say is a “war zone.” I pass it every single day on my way home. There are, on average, maybe 30 protesters who’ve camped out (they have a small grill) and set up tents. Sometimes more show up on the weekend. They use bullhorns to shout invective at the building and it’s been awful for the residents who live across the street and noise laws should be enforced. But the notion that this city of 600,000 people is a war zone is completely laughable. CNN has a photo from September 1st on its story about this that makes it seem like the city is, indeed, under siege (and that’s part of the problem, images that don’t tell a complete story). But the idea that they needed that kind of show of force is insane. Would I like the protesters to go away? As a neighbor, yup. Do they have the right to set up a tent city outside the facility? Probably — but again, it’s annoying. Does Portland have myriad problems that a maddeningly ineffective local government seems unable to solve no matter how much tax money we throw at it? Yup. But does any of it call for federal troops fanning out across the city? Absolutely not. It’s stupid. This is all for show by an authoritarian administration that knows its base will applaud because oooooh lookie a liberal city getting its due. (I have relatives who will applaud this, by the way.) But they’re lying. They’re all LYING.”
Tonight, I’m writing a letter – a physical, paper letter, with an envelope and a stamp – to the local Sinclair propaganda outlet, KOMO-4, over their continued blockade against Kimmel.
I’m not telling them I’m going to boycott them, no. They’re a free/over-the-air station. I don’t pay them. I don’t pay them a dime, why would they care if I boycott them?
Obviously, they wouldn’t.
So instead, I’m telling them I’m going to boycott their local sponsors, and I’m going to write those local sponsors a physical, paper letter, one with an ENVELOPE and a STAMP, and make sure those local sponsors know why.
For every obvious reason, I (and 50501 Seattle) encourage you to do the same. If you’re not in KOMO’s range, that’s fine, find your local Sinclair station and write them, instead.
(But write your own letter, don’t copy mine. They check for that.)
KOMO received enough protest calls today – Tuesday, September 23rd, as I write this – that they shut down their phone system. They went dark.
They can turn off their phones. They can delete their voicemail. And they have, and they did.
Not email, don’t @ them on social media – or do that, that’s fine, but it’s not a substitute. It’s not as good. Do that too, but mostly…
WRITE DISNEY A LETTER. On PAPER. Put it in an ENVELOPE and MAIL IT.
Yeah, they’ll think you’re old. They’ll also think you have 1) money and 2) probably have children, more likely grandkids.
Now, grandparents love to spend money on grandkids, and if you say Disney’s not getting one goddamn dime until and unless they walk this back, they will care.
Particularly if enough of us do it.
See, paper letters are scary. They mean you aren’t momentarily angry, you’re determinedly angry. Paper letters mean you care enough to write this shit down by hand or get a printer working and print something. You’re so mad you got ahold of printer paper or stationery. You even care enough to get an envelope and a stamp and take something to a post office, or at least a post box.
You’re mad, and it’s not just a momentary twitch of reactive anger. You mean it.
And all that above means that paper letters are effective. So.
WRITE DISNEY A LETTER. ON PAPER. And send it HERE:
Disney-ABC Home Entertainment and Television Distribution 500 S. Buena Vista St. Burbank, CA 91521-3515
That’s what I did today.
Your turn.
Oh, and, use your own words, not mine. Duplicates are bad. And at least one upon a time, they would watch for that. You can hit the same beats, just … write your own. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, it just has to make sense.
I would like to wish all the people who fought with me and sneered at me about how Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were no better than Donald Trump and sat out the election and encouraged others to do the same a very happy DRINK SOME FUCKING BLEACH:
The Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.
…
Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs).
This is, yes, OBVIOUSLY, a duplication of Putin’s moves to designate target groups as “extremist organisations,” whether there’s an organisation or not, as “LGBT” was designated a couple of years ago, leading to the de facto re-illegialisation of LGBT people and large scale prosecutions.
Every other kind of queer is probably gonna be next.
I do not believe it’s a minor thing that Greg “let’s reclaim the word Nazi” Gutfield is repurposing Hitler’s “Jewish hypnotism” libel against trans people to transfer guilt from a cis white boy from a conservative family:
“[The shooter] was a patsy. He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct to consumer nihilism – the trans cult.”
There are plenty of other full-on-fascist declarations in this rant, too, not the least of which being the open declaration that they “don’t care” about “what-abouts,” which is to say, the overwhelming share of violence being from the right, or, in this case, the literal assassination of two Democratic state officials earlier this summer by a MAGA supporter with an extended list of targets. Those don’t count, because Democrats. Only MAGA are people, only MAGA have rights, only Trump can be king.
But it’s still important, and the one I think people may miss. This is, again, literally Hitler libel from a many who proposed “reclaiming” the word “Nazi” this summer.
If he wants the word so much, let’s apply it to him.
Laura Loomer, an important Trump confidante and aide, calls for a Trump dictatorship and mass arrests and prosecution of “leftists” (which for her absolutely includes liberals):
Trump and MAGA are following Putin’s playbook on the media, pushing it either into the hands of ideological compatriots or into silence:
Kimmel is about as controversial as a goldfish here. They aren’t serious about it being a problem; the whole •point• is that it’s obviously •not• a problem.
They are using something extremely benign to test the waters of government repression of speech, to see just how much they can get away with — and ABC caved like 3rd-grade toothpick bridge.
Nexstar Media Group, which is seeking FCC approval for a multi-billion-dollar merger with Tegna, said its ABC affiliates would not air Kimmel’s show before ABC announced its own decision.
Earlier this week, responding to a conservative reporter who said that anti-war protesters near the White House “still have their First Amendment right,” Trump replied, “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure.”
It’s against this backdrop that Politico reported [that] the Justice Department’s No. 2 official said Tuesday that people noisily protesting President Donald Trump could face investigation if they’re part of broader networks organizing such activities.
In the current environment I think it’s fair to say there’s really no reason to believe anything we’re hearing from federal law enforcement, either formally or on background to reporters.
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry.
Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.
Charlie Kirk was a vicious racist, misogynist, and anti-queer activist working to recruit anyone he could into his beliefs, someone who wanted LGBT people killed, who considered empathy a “new age” weakness and believed – and said outright – that any Black woman holding any position was too intellectually inferior to have it and so “stole” it from a white man.
And making all that into a durable political career became his life’s work.
Fuck Charlie Kirk. I’m glad he’s dead.
That he said and did all this vileness while dressed in a nice suit and in calm tones changes not one single goddamn thing, a fact which fucking nearly nobody has learned in over decades of the christofascist right performing the same. goddamn. routine. Say the most vicious, nasty, filthy, false accusations, slander and defame like a motherfucker, slime everything you can reach with contemptable evil, but do it all as a “gadfly” white heterosexual Christian man in a suit in careful tones and suddenly you’re “doing politics right.”
Fuck that, and for good measure, fuck Charlie Kirk.
He also openly desired bringing back public executions and said that children should watch them, and guess what?
He got his wish.
Somehow, though, pointing that out makes me the bad guy. Hilarious.
As always, his fellow-travellers were all-in on blaming trans people until it turned out his assassin was a groyper, a fan of human shitstain Nick Fuentes who hated Charlie Kirk for not being racist enough and misogynist enough. Kirk moving even further towards the fash in immigrant hate and anti-Black racism kept the peace between the two groups for a few years, but, well, Kirk saw the handwriting on the wall about the Epstein files and pushed for their release, and that was that.
“Oh noes, what are we to do about fascist on fascist violence?!” How about nothing. Yeah. Nothing sounds good. Or, I dunno, honour his last wish and release the Epstein files? That’d be nice.
But of course, I kid. Ha.
What is it, what is it, what’s the golden rule? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Well, an asshole did unto him exactly what he wanted done unto others, and I think that’s close enough.
So one last time: fuck you, Charlie Kirk. And you too, Fuentes, for good measure. And fuck you too, Gavin Newsom and anyone else who follows your example for eulogising and whitewashing this evil vicious fucker’s repugnant malignancy of a legacy.
He only got exactly what he wanted for people like me.
No, he fucking won’t. He literally shut down actual studies working on such things, because as with all fundamentalist-approach cardboard science, anything he does is driven by producing the answer he wants, not any answer that’s actually real.
So given all that, here’re a few key lies about “causes” I think we can expect:
“Overvaccination,” which isn’t a thing; it’s just a wedge to start rolling back vaccination in favour of “wellness” horseshit and pseudoscience that doesn’t fucking work;
High-fructose corn syrup, which in its most common formulation – for those who don’t remember – is chemically identical to honey. There’s literally not a way to tell filtered honey apart from 55/45 HFCS. This is also why filtered honey is fucking awful; once you filter out the water and the pollen remnants you don’t have any flavour other than sweetness.
(This may be substituted out for artificial colours and/or flavours, he’s got bugaboos about those too.)
And finally:
Hormone-based contraception.
Yeah. I think there’s a pretty good chance they’ll go there. I can’t be sure – this is all speculation, I assure you – but it’s been floated around in christofascism on and off for a while. Not as strongly as other lies about “the pill” (christ they’re so old) causing breast cancer (again: a lie), and being an abortifacient (again: a lie). So why not here? Why not go for it?
It has the added bonus of blaming the woman, which is another thing they always want to do.
Maybe I’ll be wrong. Maybe they won’t. But he used one word in particular that makes me think I’m right. That word is “interventions,” as in “interventions” that cause autism. That’s a word I’ve heard plenty of times before when fundamentalists talk about birth control, and also by the new age crowd that merged in with them, calling hormonal birth control an “unnatural intervention.” In other words, both upstream forks of his anti-vax “wellness” following have a history of using that word to describe hormonal birth control.
And here it is again. That word. “Intervention.”
Really could be a coincidence; really, genuinely could. That word is used by a lot of actual medical people for good and real medical treatments; it’s not one of their own made-up words.
But … they really do have a history of using it that way. And the orange fuckfash muttered on about “a drug or something” as the intervention at work, so… yeah.
I’m smelling an attack on birth control.
They’ve really been wanting to go at it, and given the increased… severity in tone… that we’re seeing out of the fascists, it feels like they’re slamming the metaphorical pedal to the metaphorical metal, and they might just go ahead and go for it.
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