Democrats Troll as Genocide Horrifies; American Families Gouged

Cartoon America - Democrats' incapacity
to speak to weighty matters hearkens
Reginald Marsh. See above
'This is her first lynching,' 1934
             Image Source Credit: GRANGER 

Democrats No Longer a Serious Party

Commentary

Nine Americans were beaten to death in the West Bank by settler terrorists, or kidnapped and tortured the last two years in death camp Palestine.

Genocide continues, as terror-state Israel maintains its perverse hatred of journalists and medical personnel, slaughtering them wantonly.

Trump threatens more militarization of the National Guard and occupation of more American cities.

American families face skyrocketing costs for college, child care, healthcare, groceries, gas, electricity, taxes, among other costs.

The Democrat response? 

Troll Trump; mock Trump; and pronounce trolling effective; drawing Democrat raves in what passes for victories for this decrepit party, led by California Gov Gavin Newsom.

Trolling is working, Democrats assure the people.

Obvious problem is trolling is not solving problems; not addressing moral catastrophes; not even pretending to bring relief to American families, or stopping wars or genocide.

What matters is major Democrats are drawing views on X, and seeing more Google searches, or crowing that Gaven Newsom has a merch section of his website, just like Trump.

The disconnect between what Americans face on the ground here, and what we and Israel inflict onto the world, especially children is a widening gulf, created by indecency here, and careerism, convenience and compliance.

But, hey, Democrat officeholders mock Trump on social media, even emulate Trump's use of capitalized words, and hyperbole.

So, that's a win for all of us, right? 

I mean, please tell me people see the disconnect between what matters and this shit.

Matt Taibbi and a few others are warning Democrats their moral failings will exact political costs. 

But Democrats won't listen, count on it.

Trying to out-Trump Trump via the derivative ironic trolling of an infinity-faced douchewad like @GavinNewsom is the most DNC thing ever. They’d do better with another dead person… https://t.co/JpwGhieCfL

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) August 25, 2025

Wisconsin, Race and Election Time

Sauk County Wisconsin is pictured above. I love Sauk County,
and it's only real sin is not voting for neo-lib, corporatist
Democrats enough to assuage corporate media.

Madison, Wisconsin — Reporting from Baraboo, (Sauk County), Dionne Searcey has a fine piece on racism, rural Wisconsin and the 2024 elections in the New York Times this morning.

"No Politics and No Religion," read prominent notes in the Square Tavern in Baraboo (Facebook), reports Searcey.

Topics leave too many bad feelings; like hitting on a man's girlfriend, or drinking someone's beer.

The problem with Ms. Searcey's reporting, like every corporate-liberal politicos', is a fundamentalist embrace of identity politics and the Standard Social Scientific Model of human nature that is almost Skinnerean-Behaviorist in its hidebound smugness.

Identity politics are what the progressive heretic, Matt Taibbi, derides as dogma that human beings are the walking "embodiment" of every contrived aspect of their identity, as imposed by the liberal priests of academia, corporate media and the Democratic Party.

You think you know who you are, readers? No. You are what the liberal elites say you are. Forget your character, it's your skin color.

Identity politics, as nonsensical as it is, serves a purpose. It's a cover for the Democratic Party's embrace of war (and Genocide), and long-term abandonment of the working class. And this does cause resentment.

Searcey touches on this:

Jerry Helmer, the Sauk County Republican Party chairman, said what voters in Sauk County are worried about is the economy, and they think Democratic elites such as Ms. Harris do not care about the middle class. 'I hear more and more that nobody knows what her policies are,' said Mr. Helmer, who lives outside Baraboo in Prairie du Sac and is a candidate for the state legislature. 'She comes off like a ditz.'

Mr. Helmer is right on all counts. But his brand of heresy is heard as imprecation by today's Democratic Party elites.

And when Helmer and Wisconsin, deliver Wisconsin to Donald Trump, identity politics will be a big factor; along with that whole Genocide thing that elected Democrats pretend is not happening.

Democrats Jettison Free Speech, Free Press and Free Inquiry

Matt Taibbi has committed cardinal sins in the eyes of the Democrat Party and contemporary corporate liberalism: Journalism.

Taibbi penned a report entitled The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine: Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories.”

Taibbi reported Twitter emails detailing efforts of the American intelligence and public health communities plotting how to censor and marginalize speech and other information deemed too dangerous for Americans to read.

Some speech even, such as the release of liberal-favorite Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Spring 2020 emails was "used to exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci."

In liberal circles, this distrust of Fauci is considered heresy, so must be stopped.

Read Taibbi's work to see how far our country's Democrat Party has drifted from cherished notions such as free speech and free press.

“The Vitality Project however is just part of a broader cultural shift that reverses long standing liberal/left commitments to free expression and allows censorship in the name of protection and safety.” ⁦@NAffects⁩ https://t.co/CWJGENs3pi

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 19, 2023

Google, YouTube, Facebook Censoring Former NYT Reporter, Chris Hedges

Democratic Party-supported Big Tech has discovered an enemy of the state that must be censored: Former New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges.

Reports Hedges this week in ScheerPost:

"The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gone are the interviews with the combat veterans and West Point graduates Danny Sjursen and Eric Edstrom about our wars in the Middle East. Gone are the discussions with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube. Gone are the shows with the cartoonists Joe Sacco and Dwayne Booth. Melted into thin air, leaving not a rack behind."

The increasing censorship by Big Tech shows the extent to which Democratic Party-supporting Big Tech has become an adjunct the authoritarian Democrat Party.

Writes Glenn Greenwald: "I really believe history will record that the people who destroyed the full potential of the internet to free us of centralized state and corporate control are the liberal journalists, Dem politicians and activists who spent years demanding a new censorship regime from Big Tech."

Matt Taibbi wrote about Big Tech's censorship of Hedges. 

So, I quoted Greenwald in a Facebook post, and added a link to Taibbi's piece.

This morning, Facebook alerted me it was censoring my Chris Hedges piece as a "violation of community standards," effectively demonstrating again what Hedges, Greenwald and Taibbi have been warning about for years.

Diversity Idiocy Is Rearing Its Head, Looking for Big Money Following Chauvin Verdict

Vicki McKenna is a heretic and radio
personality in Madison, Wisconsin.

Update: Madison West High School principal apologizes for email scheduling racially segregated meetings

Madison, Wisconsin — Diversity consultants look to ramp up their snake oil sales in the wake of important legal victories against racism, especially George Floyd.

Race consultants are making out like bandits sermonizing their fallacious drivel to corporations, police departments, universities, and all manner of education.

Here in Madison, Wisconsin local radio personality Vicki McKenna has had enough.

Vicki McKenna blew the whistle on the Madison Metropolitan School District's politically correct-identity politics tripe in the wake of the verdict against the killer cop Derek Chauvin.

The School District featured Zoom links for "white parents" and for "parents of color," in strict accordance to the ridiculous way liberal dogma describes race and racism.

This idiocy was too much. Writes McKenna:

Jim Crow 2.0, courtesy of the Madison School District. pic.twitter.com/qMKwHu4mMp

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) April 23, 2021

McKenna is right. Her tweet was picked up by Glenn Greenwald who added his own experience with the separate-by-color, identity politics practice.

For the last (and actually only) diversity session I attended before leaving The Intercept, the highly-paid outside consultant emailed everyone before saying employees would be divided by race into different rooms (white room & POC room) and it was shocking. Now it's standard: https://t.co/0c6YmFMCX0

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Near the start of the session, before we were segregated by race, one employee of mixed race -- one white parent, the other parent Indian-American -- nervously and earnestly asked which room she should go into. This dividing people up this way is going to have long-term impact.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Most of us have had our own experience with diversity consultants.

At one well-meaning company, (though the diversity consultants were cynical), a week-long diversity training seminar feature consultants explaining that we all have biases, a comment on human nature that we are just empty vessels to be filled somehow with prejudices, with no mention how critical reasoning and independent thinking played into who we are.

On the last day, each of the seminar participants confessed to her bias. Some mentioned Italian people, some mentioned black people, and so on.

When it my turn, I announced I had no biases and I was disappointed that everyone had jettisoned rational thinking to adopt bigotries. It's idiocy.

A friend at the company asked how the seminar went and I told her. She said, her admission of people against whom she had a bias was, 'Germans of a certain age."

Diversity consultants are good for a laugh, but this swindle is taking our country by storm.

Matt Taibbi too had a good laugh, but these corporate-consultant hucksters rake in a lot of money from credulous liberals.

Writes Taibbi in his scathing review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility last year:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. ...

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy ('Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness'), which naturally means 'a positive white identity is an impossible goal.'

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except 'strive to be less white.' To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as 'leaving the stress-inducing situation' – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the 'ordeal by water' (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

Greenwald too has been bashing this hokum for years:

The diversity and inclusion consultancy industry is creepy, authoritarian, cultish and toxic, with a painfully cramped and stilted understanding of how people interact with each other and the rules they must obey. There's a reason - several reasons - the corporate world loves it.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 29, 2020

Radical, independent thinkers lead the most recent movement against American racism. 

Let's foster young intellectuals, and not suppress their minds with dogma.

Peace and Justice author wins fight to obtain FBI record

What's next?

Fourth Amendment rights for all?

Not likely. 

Matt Taibbi writes on Seth Rosenfeld's story and ordeal in attaining the state's documentation of what would be judged illegal FBI surveillance and harassment were the Fourth Amendment actually a working barrier against the lawless and often idiotic infringements against liberty our citizens have endured over the past several decades, continuing today.

Rosenfeld began his quest to get the University of California F.B.I. files in 1981, a full 30 years before the Occupy movement. He had no way of knowing that his epic fight to use the Freedom of Information law to release these documents — which succeeded only after four lengthy, exasperating lawsuits — would conclude just as America seemed to be entering another period of ’60s-style street tumult and divisiveness. ...

Rosenfeld’s decades of hard-fought research into the romanticized, rapidly receding past of the ’60s era produce a relevant warning. Domestic intelligence forces will tend to use all the powers they’re given (and even some that they’re not) to spy on people who are politically defenseless, irrelevant from a security standpoint and targeted for all the wrong reasons. And policemen who abuse their powers don’t just ruin innocent lives and undermine our faith in the law. They miss the real threats

Obama’s Presidency on the Brink

How President Obama reacts to three catastrophes will define his presidency.

And none is the health care crisis, as critical as that is, and as annoying as are the Republican lies about public health care.

The catastrophes are Afghanistan, Goldman Sachs, and Veterans Affairs, none of which show a clear path to an acceptable humanitarian and political resolution.

Afghanistan

“Fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia!’” said Vizzini in The Princess Bride, a brilliant film my girlfriend talked me into watching.

Or as Gregory Feifer puts it in The Great Gamble, The Soviet War in Afghanistan (HarperCollins, 2009), “The Soviet war in Afghanistan again confirmed that no power ever successfully conquered that land … [From] Cyrus the Great [to] Alexander the Great … [to] the British … foreign forces have often moved into Afghanistan with relative ease, they’ve never been able to maintain control.”

Feifer and Vizzini might have added that the difficulties of the invaders paled in comparison to the devastation wreaked upon the invaders’ Afghan victims who after all were slaughtered and maimed on a level surpassing the American imagination.

But as the American death tolls mount, the Obama presidency is in political peril.

Goldman Sachs

As for Goldman Sachs, one need look no further than these two pieces describing the appalling situation that under the political circumstances could make Enron look like nothing more than a mere celebrity scandal by comparison.

Robert Scheer's Government Sachs' Strikes Gold ... Again - Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation's history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and ...

Matt Taibbi's The Great American Bubble Machine - The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) is a disaster made much worse by George W. Bush and the American Enterprise Institute who waved the American flag, lied us into war, and specifically ignored federal administrative law made to protect our veterans, while playing Joe McCarthy to political opponents.

Gordon Duff's To Veterans Affairs Secretary Shensiki: Time to Take the Gloves off - Veterans around the country are waiting for Secretary Eric Shensiki to come to grips with the fact, obvious to all of us in the "real world" that we are in a war. I don't mean Iraq and Afghanistan, I mean here at home. We have many times more veterans than we have serving military and many more people in harms way at the hands of rogue elements of the Department of Veterans Affairs than from any foreign enemy.

For every national veterans care scandal, whether 'Shreddergate' or 'Snoopgate' there is now one every day popping up at one medical center after another. The stories are treated as hundreds of 'isolated incidents.' The big ones, thousands risk death from infection or incompetent treatment get a day of news, hidden behind the endless circus of petty political bickering that has replaced government in America.

Lessons learned in achieving acceptable policy metrics thus far: Listen to the peace movement, the left, and Vietnam War-era veterans!

Matt Taibbi on the Global Economic Crisis

Trying to comprehend the Global Economic Crisis, a diligent lay reader can construct some broad narrative of the scale and motives of the financial sectors' machinations and the political and regulatory duplicity by reading Paul Craig Roberts, Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor, Paul Krugman, CounterPunch, among several other sources late at night.

But the undertaking is still like trying to understand the mathematics of SuperString Theory. We are not equipped.

Matt Taibbi's 8,700-word piece in Rolling Stone puts together the most coherent piece that I have read yet.

Check Taibbi's piece out, and bear it in mind as you read of the next attempt by the Obama administration (and the GOP pushback and its alleged concern for the everyday American) to try to contain this seeming black hole that appears to have come from nowhere and is somehow aligned with strange forces in our society, equipped with properties that transform our government into some vaguely malevolent entity. Sounds like science fiction.

Most Americans harbor vague notions that our country is run by a few powerful interests looking out for themselves. Most Americans appear to have been correct.

An excerpt from Taibbi:

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: 'The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now,' he said. 'When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too.' In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being 'consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down.'

Matt Taibbi on John McCain's Problem with the Religious Right

Update: Prominent evangelical leaders to McCain: Don't pick Mitt. We don't trust him.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone discusses the failure of John McCain to consolidate his position as GOP nominee with the religious right, asking: Is this the end of the GOP's unholy alliance?

As written here before, though I happen to disagree with their descriptive facts of the world, those of the religious right whom I have met personally (here in Wisconsin) are earnest and well-intentioned, disdainful of cynicism and involved in the concept of community. And they do not respect liars.

And that's why McCain is not playing well.

(H)is basic stump speech doesn't contain a single line about God or religion. McCain is probably the first Republican in modern history to talk more about 'green technology' than about his personal relationship with Jesus Christ. ...

... Here's the thing about John McCain, and it's never easy to tell whether this is a good quality or a bad one. He's a shitty liar. He may be willing to change his position on anything from immigration to torture to campaign finance at the drop of a hat to win votes, and he may have no problem aiming below the belt — below the knees even — to impugn an opponent's patriotism. But this is not a guy who can get up in front of a churchgoing crowd in Asscrack, Arkansas, and start weeping to Jesus. In fact, he appears to deeply resent the implication that he needs to genuflect to the baby savior at all. As in, 'Hell, I already lived through five years of torture! You want me to do more?'

For more information:

- McCain Extends His Outreach, but Evangelicals Are Still Wary
- McCain's Evangelical Problem
- Religious Right to Kill 2008 Republican Nominee
- Evangelicals deserting ahead of 2008 election

Matt Taibbi on the American Political Culture

Great stuff from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.

(T)he very first response of the entire national media apparatus was to denounce (Rev.) Wright as a kind of living disease and shriekingly demand that Obama do the same.

These controversial occasions, it should be said, are favorites of the national punditry. They offer an opportunity for slothlike, couchbound columnists everywhere to dress themselves up in white-hot outrage and to pen long accusatory columns in a tone suggesting that all contentment and happiness in their lives will henceforth be impossible until the offending agent is fully and completely shunned by society.

Taibbi's right; the next thing we know Obama will be accused of ... never mind.