And it’s even less fun than it sounds
THIS SUMMER OF THE YEAR TWENTY TWENTY-FOUR of the Common Era, a summer of ominous extremes of climate and conflict, finds me living through history, at least so the news anchors tell me.
The implication is that I should be awe-struck and grateful for waking up in fear of what I’ll see on MSN, the quiet cappuccino-and-catastrophe moment that sets the tone for my day. Will it be monkey pox? New horrors in Palestine? A sniper on the roof? Canadian terrorists arrested mere hours before their planned atrocity?
Will the day end with cars floating down flooded Toronto highways, murder and mayhem in Britain, the hottest day on record, the slow death rattle of American democracy?
Now that I’ve experienced history, normal life, that smelling daisies — having mediocre sex — no matching socks boondoggle, seems so desperately lo-fi, I can barely drag myself from my encampment to the food bank for a single-serve plain yogurt and an expired muesli bar.
I want history that’s like a half-decade-long panic attack, or chronically-acute adult-onset asthma. I never want to stop gasping. Turning blue from stress is how I know I’m still alive, damn it.
Not-So-Great Debate
Donald Trump, a serial sexual predator and compulsive liar of deep convictions, thirty-four so far, if you’re counting, is the Republican choice for world’s most powerful man. He cinched the nomination in advance via a “debate” with Joe Biden, his responses consisting of an atmospheric river of incoherent disinformation delivered in the aggrieved tone of a nine-year-old caught smoking a spliff behind the woodshed.
Biden, Americans’ beloved decent guy, the man who restored a semblance of normality to the US against impossible odds, a man who survived personal tragedy and faced his nation with kindness and class; who carried the day with canny bipartisanship and diplomacy informed by decades of service, the most progressive and productive president in living memory — and a frail senior with deteriorating cognition who’s no longer able to walk down stairs without thinking first — was the basket case with all our eggs in it.
We’d fooled ourselves that he hadn’t gradually turned into a sock puppet and no one was working the sock. He took a game swipe at countering Trump’s tumult of lies and defending his record, but by the time he remembered where his mouth was he was so exhausted he needed an ice-cream cone and a nap.
Watching this cringey public elder abuse invoked pity and terror, pity for him and terror for the rest of us. Is staying on your feet and yelling the loudest all it takes to win? Then Trump won. And though I cluck my tongue at using “literally” as an adverb, and it beggars belief: literally everything Trump said was untrue.
We spent the next few days avoiding social media, sending our calls to voicemail, and sporting black balaclavas whenever we left the house, lest we pass anyone to whom we’d insisted, “Are you kidding? Of course Biden’s up to it!”
How Many Judges Can You Fit in a Clown Car?
Trump’s lawyers convinced Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed, or maybe anointed, I get them mixed up, to toss out the pending stolen-documents case. Turns out the special prosecutor, Jack Smith — a wild-eyed, bearded ascetic given to convicting war criminals in The Hague, a regular St John The Baptist type — never had the right to be a special prosecutor; nor had any special prosecutors in the entire history of the US had the right to be special prosecutors, now that she had a chance to think about it.
We can thank our lucky stars that Aileen, who before her appointment by Trump had presided over four trials of three days’ duration, took time out of her busy schedule making shit up, then getting stuck on how to deal with the shit she made up, to plunge herself elbow deep into some steamy-hot jurisprudence.
She examined Title 28 of the United States Code (1948), which governs the federal judicial system, including providing for the appointment of special prosecutors, and she determined that — now, no fair peeking! — that’s right: despite seventy years of special prosecutors being duly appointed, the whole process is — unconstitutional!
You or I, we’d already be sleeping on boiled sheets and enjoying our status as bitch to some tattooed lifer, had we but taken even one of those top-secret documents. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden were treated with uncompromising severity for their breaches of security and trust. But Trump? No consequences. He is tacitly understood to be above the law, and every time he’s let off the hook reinforces that perception.
With Jack safely back in the wilderness in his loincloth eating locusts and honey, the other Trump judges, the dead-eyed conservative justices of the Supreme Court, could truly shine. For example, Clarence Thomas, a mega grifter who failed to disclose literally — there I go again — billions of dollars of gifts from a donor with an interest in cases before the court; whose wife, carving out some spare time between making paté and becoming “one flesh” with her husband — that gag-inducing bit of TMI is his actual description, by the way — helped spread The Big Lie (Trump lies so frequently, they’ve had to give them names, like plants, with genus, “big” and species, “lie”).
That’s ONE of the ultra-conservative SCOTUS justices.
Another, Samuel Alito, has mastered the art of tongue-in-cheek denial, a handy skill considering he has the American flag flying upside down outside his home (his wife made him do it, nudge, wink) signaling his bond with the crazed insurrectionists who tried to stop the certification of the 2020 election — these plus four other conservative justices ruled, to the gobsmacked surprise-not-surprise of literally everyone not on the Supreme Court, that the president has absolute, total immunity for criminal acts committed in the course of his official duties. Gee, can you narrow it down a little?
The Plan Hits the Fan
Project 2025 hit the fan, with its droid-like lead, Kevin Roberts, threatening bloodshed should “the left” not comply, and with Trump, panicked that Americans were waking up to the reality of actual impending dictatorship, laughably denying any knowledge of the nine-hundred page blueprint, a kind of “Christian Theocracy for Dummies.”
This includes total erasure from public life of “trans ideology” (translation: all queer people), which handily solves the problem of filling up those internment camps once the millions of undocumented immigrants have passed through and been deported.
I can see it now: American queers will be rounded up — just forget about any new Broadway musicals or re-runs of RuPaul — and placed in those camps. They will be rubbing sequinned shoulders with the women caught running red lights while racing to the nearest state where they can abort the fetuses which are their sisters and their daughters; Muslims, terrorists to a man; the Bidens, Liz Cheney (Trump has suggested that she’ll be getting a military tribunal for her efforts at truth-telling and integrity), Nancy Pelosi, Adam Kinzinger… it’s like South Park’s version of Hell as the place where all the interesting, cool people end up.
What happened to non-insane conservatism, the kind that balked at radical change and usually focused on economic policy, not social engineering? The current Republican party represents the opposite of conservatism.
Who are these hateful, hate-filled men? How did this preposterous loser, Trump, end up sucking the life out of us? A man who told a rally in Pennsylvania last April:
“Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways- it represented such a big portion of the success of this country.”
and on November 11th, in Claremont, New Hampshire:
“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”
Is he an idiot? Suffering from dementia? Or a dangerous thug bent on revenge? Let’s say that three things can be true.
He’s Marilyn Monroe, loopy on Seconal and white wine, saying, “It’s Sugar me,” on the set of Some Like it Hot. The words no longer matter, just the legend.
Who are these men who dare to tell Americans what they may or may not think? Who get to decide who’s on the A-list and who’s disappeared? What happened to their small government, when it’s obvious that their plan is for government to slip its oily tentacles into every intimate moment of private life, rob women of their bodily autonomy, impose their perversion of Christianity, decide what constitutes a family?
Who do they think they are, these smug frat boys with their scary clown of a mascot?
Project 2025’s massive playbook, a grim autocratic manifesto seething with violent rhetoric, sets out the structure of the right’s vision for America. This document accuses the left of “totalitarianism”, yet in one particularly chilling paragraph imagines a surveillance program that will monitor women for abortion-related travel and openly share their medical records; scorns “transgender ideology” as imposing restrictions on their religious beliefs, and threatens vulnerable trans Americans with genocide; takes aim at the Civil Rights Act as anti-white racism, that unicorn; and seeks to end equal marriage, diversity, equity and inclusion because in their mind DEI is exclusion and LGBTQ+ people filth.
It’s classic Orwell, a missive of hate from the Ministry of Love, a morbid revenge fantasy which could only have been written by the world’s most aggrieved, grandiose whiners: rich, white heterosexual men.
Decommissioning the administrative state is touted as “returning government to the people”, when, in fact, what’s returning is freedom for corporations to pollute and defraud in the name of profit while Republicans line their pockets and their war chests. If this is not pure cynicism in the description, then it is madness.
A Very Straight Agenda
If you had any doubt that these Christian Nationalists were misogynists, real haters of women, read about the “problem with the American family”: a crisis of fatherlessness (mainly Black fathers, of course). Not a crisis of poverty in a country where the poor are deemed undeserving losers who squandered their opportunity (because everyone starts with exactly the same circumstances and advantages). What the world needs now is white men in charge, lots of them, and when they say in charge they’re not messing around.
Men’s contribution to procreation lasts about thirty seconds, and there’s no guarantee he’ll stick around once he’s done. Single moms have raised children with success since forever. But Project 2025 cannot allow that to be true. Men are the all-important factor in the success of a family as they define it, not the mother, who is still the default caregiver, whether or not she has a job; who may or may not be thrilled to be pregnant, or, for that matter, may not have consented to sex in the first place.
What happened to conservative politicians who aren’t psychotic? These men institute total abortion bans with no exceptions for incest or rape and want women’s health records to be shared between states, just to close any loopholes. Is that cruel and unusual punishment? I mean, are they actually punishing women, subjecting them to torture? Do they think somehow that the woman was culpable, complicit in the incest or rape? That they led the men astray? That is, after all, biblical subtext. (Shades of “Carrie”, with Piper Laurie slapping Sissy Spacek in the face with a bible, “Eve was weak!”)
Nonetheless, there must be a man, even if he’s an abuser, because you made your bed and in it you must lie. Forgiveness, grace, redemption: the primary message of true Christianity, has been expunged; forgiveness just ain’t butch enough. The man must stay to do the manly (important) things (but leaving all of the mental load and emotional labor to the woman): to go to the real job; talk baseball, and finance; smoke cigars and tinker with cars; administer harsh discipline, and, above all, be the moral compass.
For example, he might, like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, one day make a pledge with his son, and I wish I was joking, not to watch porn, and to hold each other accountable using an app that tracks their transgressions online. It’s father-son bonding at its most weirdly inappropriate.
The men of Project 2025 say they are returning society’s focus to the family. What they are actually doing is returning society’s focus to themselves.
The men of Project 2025 insist the man “must be there” to complete the family because white heterosexual men won the lottery, and wokesters — the women, the queers, the transexuals, the people of color — have been taking away their prize. They have been so coddled and so privileged for so long, they cannot tolerate any situation, event, or worldview in which they are not one hundred percent the focus of attention, and their word, law.
r/TodayILearned: You don’t stop being an incel just because you got laid.
Assassination Lite
But, awesome as that is, it’s not everything. For light relief we had the merest hint of an assassination attempt, Trump’s auricular cartilage grazed by a strangely elusive bullet, lobbed at him by a pimply misfit with surprisingly poor aim.
This was all enabled by a Secret Service who conveniently collectively ignored the shocked rally attendees shouting, “There’s a gunman on that roof! With a gun! On the roof! Over there, look!” as they pointed frantically to the gunman with a gun, over there, on the roof. “Well whaddaya know! A gunman on the roof! Too bad, that’s the responsibility of the local police! We don’t do roofs! Or kids’ rooms! Or wash dishes!” I’m not making this up, except for the rooms and dishes bits.
Ah, well, just another weekend! Forgotten in a matter of hours, the failed attempt at least yielded a photo for the ages, King Don with triumphantly raised fists, a little streak of blood running down his face, no more than a scratch, like he might get when he tries to hold Melania’s hand. A moment almost of grandeur if you were visiting from Alpha Centauri and hadn’t done your research.
Some questions about the low-cal mini-assassination, dressing on the side:
- The bullet that grazed his ear: why didn’t it strike anyone in the bleachers directly, like, directly behind him?
- How did the bullet graze his ear after he turned his head?
- When he turned his head to the right, how did the bullet graze his right ear?
- Why was there so little blood?
- “Hey look there’s a gunman on the roof”?
- How come that any assassination attempt always has the Secret Service disabling the President by completely covering him and bringing him down to the ground to protect him with their bodies-except this one, where Trump was able to stand up and shake his fist in a gesture for the ages?
- I’ve never for one second been a conspiracy theorist, but — what the fuck?
Juicy Secret Bits
Trump says his secret bits out loud — like, “vote for me, my beautiful Christians, and you’ll never have to vote again” — but his VP choice, J D Vance, posts his secret bits online, so they can be hunted down and turned into memorable quotes that resonate with voters, the way a dentist’s drill resonates in your oral cavity.
Like Trump, he’s a classic woman hater with no filter, and like all real he-men he seeks to control and oppress.
He’s a bona fide creep who turns every public statement into a sneer. His cruel scorn for “childless cat-ladies” backfired, alienating top-ranking Republicans like Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins; and heaped indignity on women who want to conceive, but can’t; that a woman would choose to remain childless is a concept that breaks conservative brains. (What happened to all that libertarian hooey about “freedom”?) Naturally, step-children or gay couples adopting don’t count. It’s penis in vagina land, and let’s be clear, only one of each for the duration of your rotten sinner’s life.
Do you get the agenda? (And it’s not coming from gay men, big surprise, because it turns out that all that talk of a “gay agenda” was just classic projection.) If you’re an American woman, there are men seeking public office who have a straight agenda; who are determined to fill your uterus and keep it that way, for nine months, right up until the kid pops out, at which time they can starve it, refuse to educate it, and force it to be the gender they prefer.
They want to protect parents’ rights, except for parents who want to give their trans kids affirming care, or parents who don’t want their kids brainwashed with religion. Louisiana’s governor, faced with a lawsuit by parents who object to the posting of the biblical Ten Commandments in the classroom, advises them: “Tell your kids not to look at them.”
Very good advice, albeit dripping with contempt, but whatever, which might also apply to Republicans, about books Republicans disapprove of. Like all censors, they’ve read the raunchy bits, to which they’re immune, then banned the books. And who knows: Maybe the history of slavery in America is pornography.
But J D Vance. This little pot-bellied tyrant really wants to punish the infertile and the non-compliant. He thinks children should count as extra votes, controlled by the parents, so that a family of father, mother and four kids, for example, would equal six votes, effectively disenfranchising the childless. He calls childless couples sociopathic. How far are we from compulsory Trump Youth membership?
And he’s a reeks-to-high-heaven hypocrite, on record as a never-Trumper just a couple of years ago, suggesting Trump was “America’s Hitler”; a hypocrite, with a wife who’s a lawyer, a career woman who works out of a posh San Francisco legal firm, and Indian: which, and I would say “ironically” if it wasn’t so vile, is eliciting death threats, and comments that Vance doesn’t appreciate women of his own white race, from the white supremacists who infest their base of voters.
Did this privileged couple have childcare? Of course they did: Vance’s Indian mother-in-law, a biology professor who took a sabbatical. After all, looking after grandkids is the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female, a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.”
Well, that’s perfect, because making our toes curl with embarrassment is a weird, unadvertised feature of everything that comes out of J D Vance’s mouth, which I think is a size 10 and a half.
Weird
The epithet stuck because it fits. The only program Republicans have to offer Americans consists entirely of make-believe and personal attacks — AI-generated audiences, Biden staging a coup, Kamala the shape-shifter morphing from Indian to Black (did she twitch her nose, like Samantha in Bewitched?) — because it’s no longer a political party representing people. It’s just guys lookin’ out for guys, elites scratching elite backs; they are — last time, promise — literally inane: empty in their heads and their hearts. They hate freedom; they hate anyone who’s not rich or Christian or male or straight or white. So, in fact, statistically it’s more likely than not that they hate you.
Raped? Pregnancy threatening your life? Sorry, you gotta endure the horror that God visited on you.
Want to retire? Surprise! No social security for you, you old hippie, and you’ll be working for five more years so the one percent of Americans who already have everything anyone could possibly want can buy more, like yachts and politicians.
Can’t feed your kids? Maybe you shoulda thought of that before you opened your legs, little missy, before you kicked out that man just because he slapped you around occasionally. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, just not in the school cafeteria.
If you think I’m unfair, that no human being could be so reprehensible, take a look at a short video, seen originally on TikTok, in which John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, and a senior adviser to Project 2025, brags about giving fake five dollar bills to his unhoused fellow citizens.
Win-win: the unsuspecting street dwellers are happy and grateful that they can buy food or smokes—until they’re arrested for offering counterfeit bills; McEntee is happy and proud that he’s “cleaning up the streets”—because unhoused Americans are just more garbage, I guess. Go ahead, watch it on X.
Where do they find people like John McEntee? In sewers?
In my world, the one I insist on living in, childless cat ladies are badass: free-thinking angels with furry-tailed companions. I’ll take a stadium’s worth of them any day, instead of this Republican cabal of demented, gleeful sadists planning a white, right-wing Christo-Fascist purge of all the vermin, with concentration camps, medical experiments of forced birth, the establishment of a state religion and military tribunals for those who challenge the party line or The Leader.
History! Enjoy your front-row seat. Why, it’s enough to make me wanna fire up xHamster, drop my knickers and watch some porn with Mike Johnson, his son, and maybe— that beautiful Christian, Hannibal Lecter.
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