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Tag: trump

  • Morning Message 1.16 – Trump & Insanity

    Good Monday to ya folks I am John Henry and you may not know this but I’m actually “a guy.” Like when someone says “I know a guy?” That’s me they’re talking about, I’m the guy they know and I’m the guy you know right here with another Morning Meeting.

    Today I want to talk a minute about two great tastes that go great together: insanity, and Donald J “The J Is For Jesus Jumping Christ Is There No Bottom To This Man’s Character” Trump.

    I’ve observed for a long time that I felt like Trump was ultimately setting himself up to be declared non compos mentis – that is, not mentally fit to stand trial. His fundamental defense for everything is that he genuinely believes he didn’t do anything wrong, a proposition so ludicrous it’d be laughed out of a sitcom writer’s room as being too unrealistic.

    I want to be clear that I think he does know, he just doesn’t care – and I think that’s the difference between criminal and crazy. The one thing he may be insane and or stupid enough to believe is that if he sticks with his story, the courts will fall for it. There’s even precedent – fans of true crime stories will be familiar with noted gangster Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, who spent three decades running a NYC mafia while wandering around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers.

    I suspect Mr. Trump will find the courts less susceptible to this ruse than they once were, but that’s his problem. I figure it’s an even shot that he’ll manage to stay outside of a cell until he dies of natural causes; what the ultimate decisions will be in the courts is anyone’s guess as always but the man’s 76 years old and visibly unhealthy. That said under the circumstances a posthumous conviction isn’t off the table either; certainly there’s a solid argument to be made that the historical record must be clear and unambiguous so we can stop arguing over whether he’s a fascist and start talking about why so many of us fell for it.

    Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I am mentally ill, and I use that phrase deliberately. There are times when it’s almost as though I’m a passive observer outside my own head, watching helplessly as the rest of me refuses to cooperate with what I want to do. It sucks. It makes my work inconsistent and the likelihood that I’ll stay on a schedule for anything pretty slim, among other real-world problems that, when they’re at their worst, make me think I’ve got a legitimate case for disability.

    I don’t think Trump is mentally ill in that sense at all. I think he’s mentally ill in the sense that he’s a psychopathic narcissist. I say “psychopathic” rather than “sociopathic” deliberately as well. As an old friend who’s also a psychologist once put it, a sociopath doesn’t understand that other people have feelings just like them; a psychopath just doesn’t care.

    In that sense, I think Trump is legitimately mentally ill. I think he knows what what he’s doing is “wrong” in the sense of being illegal or morally reprehensible to most reasonable people. I think he doesn’t care because to him all that matters is him, and he’ll do whatever benefits him first and worry about the legalities later. Every moment is spent finding ways to cut a corner here or refuse to pay a bill there or split a hair in this other place, all backed with the bluster and bravado of a half-literate rube who’s watched too many crime shows on television.

    When you view his actions through this lens you start to understand that this is the only play he has left. He has to go down swinging, even if he’s carried out of the courtroom in a canvas overcoat with extra-long sleeves, the most important thing to him is maintaining that “reasonable doubt” in the public eye, that little bit of fluff that can be spun into a mountain of high-quality bovine excrement about how he was really taking a principled stand and he deserves credit for that even though he was fundamentally wrong, he just didn’t get it because he’s mentally ill...oh, and also he’s not mentally ill at all, it’s just the corrupt state that’s persecuting him because he’s a dangerous truth-teller.

    That is quite precisely where the line is drawn for me, as someone who struggles daily with mental illness and who has loudly and proudly advocated against stigmatizing it.

    There are people in this world who can’t help themselves. There are times when you could light a fire under my ass and it wouldn’t get me out of bed.

    Then there are the people who say they can’t help themselves because fundamentally being insane is more socially acceptable than being just plain evil. Like the domestic abusers who “lose control” but never seem to have a problem keeping themselves in control when faced with someone bigger than them. That’s what Trump is.

    I understand the arguments about his ego making it impossible for him to accept a judgement suggesting he’s mentally unfit, but you need to understand that in his mind that gives him an out. It gives him – and the acolytes and sycophants who he believes will point to him as inspiration in future history – that back door to say “see, I wasn’t really insane, the evil government just made that up to persecute me.”

    Pretending to believe his own BS is the only way he goes down as anything but a petty, faithless, crook and traitor, and that’s what he’s thinking about right now. He only cares about what’s being said right now to the extent that it undermines his viable long-term legacy as a strong, shrewd leader who refused to bow to the almighty government.

    To imagine that his ego would stand in the way of allowing himself to be deemed unfit for trial or incapable of being held responsible for his actions is to radically underestimate the depths of his ego. He’s thinking more about what people will be saying about him long after we’re all gone, than what they’re saying now. That’s why he’s so angry about going to court is that it’s not a malleable record; it’s much harder to claim that something did or didn’t happen when there’s clear, objectively verifiable evidence that the opposite is true.

    Sometimes you’ve got to be a little nuts to really understand how crazy people think. Lucky for you, you know a guy…

    That’s it for today’s morning message folks, thanks as always for your ongoing support and engagement! Please don’t forget that I am 100% crowdfunded so I can remain 100% independent, if you can help via PayPal, CashApp, Patreon, you can find links to all of those and lots of other options for both one-time and ongoing contributions at johnhenry.us/money, and of course as always the best support is engagement so keep on liking and sharing and commenting and helping spread the word, and I’ll see you tomorrow with another Morning Message!

  • Morning Message 1.13

    Hey there everyone, welcome to Wednesday and the morning message I’m your unflappably consistent and predictable host John Henry, let’s get right to it.

    I want to talk a minute about this thing in Florida with Ron DeSantis ordering migrant refugees to be shipped around the country as political tokens to be used.

    Look, it’s real simple: this is f**king disgusting. It is absolutely beyond the pale for anyone to use human beings like this, or even for us to allow it to happen.

    I said back in September of last year when DeSantis sent Florida officials to San Antonio, Texas to round up immigrants to be then flown to Massachusetts, all in service of somehow “owning the libs,” that it sounded like kidnapping to me. Apparently the sheriff of Bexar County, Texas agrees as he filed a criminal complaint of “several” counts including both misdemeanor and felony charges of unlawful restraint. (The five felony charges related to the minors who were kidnapped and relocated by Ron DeSantis’ private schutzstaffel.)

    The thinking – and I use that word very loosely – here is that since it’s the “libs” who are “inviting” “these people” to Our Great Nation, then the “libs” can take care of them, we’ll just drop ’em off where all the rich “libs” are! That’ll larn ’em hyuk hyuk. And it’s such a problem in Florida that they had to go to San Antonio, Texas to find some brown people to abuse.

    Meanwhile they’ve done it again, this time shipping a bunch of people to Sacramento where California governor Gavin Newsom continues making empty, performative threats about it. Fascist lapdog and odious caricature of humanity Alecia Collins (communication director for the Florida Department of Emergency Management) was quoted as sneering, “From left-leaning mayors in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, the relocation of those illegally crossing the United States border is not new but suddenly when Florida sends illegal aliens to a sanctuary city it’s false imprisonment and kidnapping.” I could spend another twenty minutes deconstructing all the racist, fascist, classist, bigoted, stupid, malicious dogwhistles in just that sentence, but neither it nor the festering pustule who spewed it merits that level of validation.

    We are being governed by five year olds. Ron DeSantis is fascist garbage, and the only two things stopping me from kicking him square in the ass are the law and the fact that I can’t afford to burn a perfectly good pair of shoes afterwards, bury them, then salt the earth to ensure his odious infection of stupidity and malice doesn’t spread.

    It’s not just him, either. Trump, McConnell, Christie, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley. The entire Republican Party has gone 100% fascist. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. They don’t care if you know, because we’ve spent the last half-century shrugging our shoulders and pretending we don’t see it because we don’t want the holidays to be uncomfortable. Even my state rep is a galumphing, gelatinous assembly of empty hostilities and vague handwaving accusations with no substance and no attempt at it.

    Meanwhile, humans are being used as political props for sick, malicious pigs like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. All they do is lie through their teeth, say a bunch of angry words and point their marks in a direction, and ride it straight to the bank.

    We must stop being afraid to call a fascist a fascist. We have to stop allowing ourselves to be conned into cutting corners and making compromises and “reaching across the aisle” just to shove our hands in a meat grinder.

    Enough. The entire Republican presidential field is a sick joke and it can’t possibly be anything but. I don’t see trying to beat Biden from the left as a winning strategy in ’24 – people like stability too much and he’s bringing that – but certainly we can beat fascism from the left, right now.

    We start doing that by admitting out loud that’s what we have to do.

  • Post Hoc, Ergo Cluster Hoc

    Everybody wants the rewards of hard work and due diligence, but most people only want the rewards, without doing the hard work and due diligence.

    This is reflected in non-solutions to political problems like term limits (it’s called VOTING; term limits only serve to ensure that if you do get a decent person in office they can’t stay there long enough to get much done), and specious “solutions” to avoidable problems, like expanding the Supreme Court to counter-act the impact of a bad appointment. The proper way to have dealt with that was years ago, by not electing someone who’s going to make bad appointments. The proper way to have dealt with THAT was to not put up with the so-called Democratic party shoving a status quo token candidate down our throats in the face of overwhelming support for a progressive reformist platform. That means you stop jumping on the bandwagon you’re told and worrying about whose “turn” it is, and start taking issue with your “democracy” being dictated from the top down.

    America has a bad habit of not bothering to try to do things right and then complaining and trying to find shortcut solutions when things go wrong, and that never has worked and never will. We have proven once that “just do what you’re told or else the eviler will win” ends up with the eviler winning anyway, and I have a bad feeling we’re about to do it again. I hope not, but I suspect this race is going to be close enough for Trump to try to throw it to the Supremes, counting on the result being in his favor because he’s effectively turned the Supreme Court into a partisan weapon. And still, you hear “but Hillary won by three million votes.” Horse hockey. She lost. She and her team know how the electoral college works just like Trump and his team did, and she got cocky and arrogant and so did a whole lot of her voters, who were expecting a coronation and got a coup. Ralph Malph could have beat Trump by three million votes; the spread should have been five times that at least, and you should have had an energized, progressive ticket all the way down to your county commissioners and mayoralities.

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    I’m sorry that’s not an easy pill to swallow, but this nonsense of waiting to get angry and do something until the damage has already happened is just that, nonsense. Hillary Clinton was a lazy, arrogant candidate who assumed right up until the returns started coming in on election night that she had everything in the bag, and that’s what cost her the election. Many of us KNEW that’s how it would play out, but the majority just did what they were told, didn’t ask questions when the primary was obviously rigged and public opinion manipulated to gain post-hoc validation for the DNC-sponsored pillory of Sanders, the more popular candidate *by far*. They deliberately disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of people, telegraphed far ahead of time that they were going to do what they wanted so there was no point in voting anyway, and then blamed the very people whose voices they silenced for their own incompetence, ineptitude, and hubris.

    We let them do the same in 2020, and it’ll be nothing but a miracle if things don’t play out more or less the same way, handing the country over to Trump for another four years, and thereby effectively ending American Democracy.

    We have got to learn to stand up when it matters. Why do black people have to die before the masses listen to what many of us have been saying for decades about the militarization and authoritarian over-reach of local police? Why do we have to wait until millions are facing eviction before we start railing against the whole stupid system that’s created six times as many empty houses as homeless people but we still find a way to convince ourselves the homeless deserve it? Why do we have to wait until millions are infected with a deadly and crippling virus before we get serious about reforming our broken, cruel, and ineffective for-profit health care system?

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    We humans love our comfort, and our addiction to it – to the point that we’ve damn near sacrificed our very existence just for the illusion of comfort – is killing us.  That is how we got to the point that a single 87 year old woman is nearly all that stands between us and totalitarianism.

    That is why I’m not always polite and smooth-talking about these things. My readers are unquestionably of a higher intellectual and ethical caliber than the majority, but it’s still up to you guys to keep the word spreading, to take the chance on hurting your nazi grandma’s feelings or telling your drunk Uncle Bob who thinks OAN is a news source to shut the hell up, and to make the realities unavoidably clear to those who continue trying to avoid them.

  • The United States Is Under Fascist Occupation

    Donald Trump w German Chancellor Angela Merkel
    Click image for original

    There is a fascist occupation happening in our country.

    The United States of America is currently occupied by fascists, up to and including the President.

    That’s not hyperbole.  I wish it were.  Frankly, I’ve been saying that we’re in a state of coup for years now, but it’s finally to the point where no reasonable person can deny it.

    You need to understand that this did not happen overnight, nor by accident. For forty years, fascists – calling themselves “constitutional republicans,” “christian fundamentalists,” and other dishonest labels – have been deliberately occupying every level of government in this country. It’s part of their strategy, and it’s been widely reported since at least the late 1980’s, and we all just ignored it because “it can’t happen here” and “we’re better than that.”

    In 2016, they took the White House…or so you’d think, but the reality is that happened in 1980 and we didn’t notice.

    None of this is an accident. It’s planned, it’s been planned, and it’s been a long time coming, and we didn’t just let it happen, we helped it happen. We helped it happen by getting gung-ho and enlisting after 9-11, we helped it happen by allowing the military-industrial complex to not just eat up a sizeable portion of our GDP but to entangle itself in the profit margins of the elite, so as to ensure they too would help advance the coup.

    We helped it by deifying Ronald Reagan, who was a really terrible human being, a white supremacist, anti-environmentalist, homophobe, bigot, and misogynist…but he was so darned polite and well-spoken and affable while he did it, and it made us feel all warm and fuzzy about hating the mythic “welfare queens” and ignoring the AIDS crisis because it was a “gay disease.”

    This is starting to make you angry, reading this article.  You’re thinking to yourself “hey wait a minute now, I’m not part of this, and attacking that nice old man Reagan is just a step too far!”

    But I could literally hyperlink every word in this article to a different story about how this has been happening for decades, and some of the articles are decades old.  We didn’t listen.

    Military contractors, police contractors, and yes even the people who produce cop shows, wittingly or unwittingly, have all been footsoldiers and communication directors for the slow rolling conversion of this nation into a fascist state.

    They’ve done it through propaganda, they’ve done it through appealing to venal material greed, they’ve done it through appealing to our egos, they’ve done it through programming the very same young men and women who sign up to defend this nation to feel their fealty to a flag, a political party, icons, and symbols while slowly fading out even the most basic notions of common decency and social contract from education under the rubric of “fighting socialism.”

    We haven’t just been had, we’ve been taken. I’ve got my own responsibility to bear in that – I should have been screaming this much more loudly from the rooftops decades ago, but like a fascist occupant of a group that thinks it’s a manners and common ground organization is so good at arguing, you’ve got to make the message palatable, right? Because politics done right is politics that destroys a democracy without the democracy realizing who’s firing on it. Because the only thing Occupy Democrats is occupying is their own material greed. Because people of no ethics and fewer morals can push people like me right out of a potentially good organization with manipulative claptrap like being “cognizant of my agenda,” an agenda that didn’t exist and an accusation that I should have punched in the mouth when it was made.

    We’re all guilty on this one, or at least most of us, even if only by virtue of having bought in to any number of tropes and propaganda narratives designed to make us doubt the strength of our SYSTEMS when it’s not the systems but the PEOPLE who are the problem.

    If we’re lucky, it’s gonna be a long ride.

    If we’re not, pretty soon they’re just gonna stop even trying to pretend, and we’re going to be crushed. Including Mr. Cognizant Of Your Agenda and Mr. Occupy Democrats and Matthew “Addicting Info” Desmond and all the other accidental and deliberate double agents who have all contributed to the coup in their own way.  Usually their own way is by trying to gain money and ego boosts by destroying political discourse with pandering and shallow sloganeering and refusal to stand up and speak truth without shame under the stupid, self-serving rubric of popular appeal and “growing the page” and “getting more likes.”

    I have watched organizations not just abandon their principles but allow them to be turned into weapons – and some of those I *have* warned about in plain text, repeatedly, but still pulled my punches because I have friends whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt and whose friendship I didn’t want to lose who are major players in those organizations.

    I don’t think most of those folks are wittingly working for the enemy, mind you. I think they’re well-intended and mostly just like me, trying to find the best way to avoid hurting people’s feelings.

    We’ve allowed calls for civility and decorum to be weaponized, and our own best intentions turned into tools of treason against our country.

    I should have stood up taller, spoken more loudly, but until now, nobody would have listened anyway.

    I think some people – and some of you are reading this, or at least there’s no reason you shouldn’t be – are much more ready to listen now than they were six months ago, or five years ago, or ten, or twenty.

    There’s still time to turn this around and be the nation we’ve been pretending to be…but it’s going to take work, and it’s going to cost some people some friendships, and maybe worse.

    Suit up, kids. This really is the “moment” I’ve been telling you was coming for a long time, and it’s gonna get uglier before it gets better.