Happy Weekend!

Today, as mentioned in the headline, is World Day Against the Death Penalty, though technically that is every day, as only about a third of countries still have the death penalty and only about 17 countries still use it regularly. According to Amnesty International only 10 countries — China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, USA, Viet Nam, and Yemen — have consistently carried out executions every year for the past five years. Great company we’re in, there.

You know, for all the shit Republicans talk about Somalians and how they haven’t done enough to assimilate (among other, more disgusting commentary), it seems like it’s somehow always us and Somalia on these kinds of lists.

As you may have heard (or read here yesterday), Department of WAR Secretary Pete Hegseth is about to help us join noted bastions of human rights Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia in being one of the only remaining countries to do public executions. Although even they don’t livestream them. Personally, I’m not surprised, because after Tennessee botched Christa Pike’s execution, there were a whole lot of MAGA creeps on X the Everything App whining that we should have televised executions but with guns instead of needles — they’d probably enjoy watching a botched execution, given their level of blood thirst. Many even said they wished they could volunteer to be in the firing squads. Though in some ways that might be almost preferable, as prison employees who have participated in executions report serious post-traumatic stress and many end up having “alcoholism, drug addiction, considered suicide.” Given their utter lack of humanity, it’s doubtful that they’d have any of those issues.

Enough with that, though, before my face burns off from rage.

Today is also the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi, and so your first present is the great Renee Fleming singing “Sempre Libera” from La Traviata, which I am very excited to see at the Lyric this season.

It is also the birthday of Thelonious Monk! I spent a weird amount of time staring at the cover of Underground as a kid, partly because my dad told me that the Nazi was a real dead Nazi who was taxidermied, and I believed him for a whole lot longer than I should have, because I was an idiot.

Here he is playing Ugly Beauty, my favorite song from that album.

And here he is, doing his signature dance, which was mostly spinning.

If you haven’t seen the 1988 documentary on Monk Straight, No Chaser, I highly recommend it. He was a very interesting guy!

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Friday began like any other day, with Tabs and another of this week’s microscopey gifs, with lots of skin.

Sen. Jon Ossoff debated his Republican challenger, Rep. Mike Collins, whose congressional and campaign staff is so full of Nazis it might as well be a late-night block on the History Channel.

JD Vance is mad at “socialism,” which he defines as, um, foreign workers and also transgender kids on sports teams. Well we happen to have Karl Marx right here, and he says Vance knows nothing of his work.

Meta is aggressively censoring LGBTQ+ content on Facebook and Instagram, but don’t you go saying it’s to curry favor with the Trump administration, because Facebook has a long history of enabling fascists around the world, not just here.

The Trump administration must have looked at its approval ratings and decided the only way to improve things would be to kill a guy and livestream it.

And as we do every week, we rounded out our Friday with a nice civilized cocktail!

Have a fine weekend; Wonkette will be posting stuff all weekend and your one-a-day newsletter will be back Monday, because we don’t do Columbus. Columbo Day, now that, we could support.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. It’s finally fall, and in Ohio that means apple season. I’ve struggled to find a good apple-flavored cocktail in the past, but this recipe, dating back to 1862, fits the bill nicely. My wife and I both prefer hard cider over beer as a fizzy canned alcoholic beverage. A recipe that celebrates this lovely drink is well worth your time. Let’s make a Jersey. Here’s the recipe.

“Professor” Jerry Thomas was the first great American bartender. A wanderer, a bon vivant, and an impeccable showman, Jerry worked at some of America’s finest hotels, wowing crowds with his diamond-studded bar tools and flaming cocktails. He also wrote the first American cocktail book, How to Mix Drinks: Or, The Bon Vivant’s Companion. (Wonkette affiliate link!) Jerry first recorded the Jersey recipe in this volume. Decades later, David Wondrich wrote a companion book to the “Professor’s” Bible called Imbibe! In that volume, Mr. Wondrich had little to say about the drink: “It’s an honest, straightforward drink. Let that be its recommendation.”

Mr. Wondrich’s book was the first cocktail book to win a James Beard award, and it takes a bit of chutzpah on my part to critique him. But Imbibe! was written in 2007, and hard cider quality in America has improved drastically since then. I can get Angry Orchard anywhere, and it’s pretty darn tasty. Your local craft brewery probably has a nice hard cider on the menu. I asked the bartender at Masthead Brewing Company to whip up this version of the Jersey using their house-made semi-dry cider, and it was absolutely delicious.

Apple brandy and apple cider are profoundly American, dating back to Colonial times. Turning your apple crop into a high-value product with a long shelf life was a smart move for any farmer; the Founding Fathers made plenty of cider. John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, was in the cider business as much as the apple-tree business. German beer makers eventually stole the fizzy-beverage market from American cider, but the modern craft beer movement has welcomed hard cider with open arms.

I’d view this cocktail as a template, not a final destination. It’s fundamentally an Old Fashioned made with cider instead of bourbon. There are a ton of classic drinks built using this core recipe. The Sherry Cobbler and Champagne cocktail are simply sherry or champagne, bitters, and soda. The recipe immediately following the Jersey in Jerry Thomas’s book is a “Soda Cocktail,” which is simply seltzer, bitters, and sugar. We can take the Jersey’s apple-forward recipe and play with it to our liking. If you want to lower the proof, there’s no reason not to omit the applejack and just pour cider, bitters, and sugar. It’d be a great way to take an average cider — like Angry Orchard — and make it even better. You can also use another spirit, like rye whiskey, bourbon, or dark rum, instead of applejack to enhance the drink. Or make this drink almost entirely non-alcoholic by using fresh cider instead of hard cider. The bitters add a small amount of alcohol, but it’s not enough to notice. As always, there are no rules. Drink what you like.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Tom Foolery Apple Jack: Real talk: This is the only applejack I’ve ever tasted that was worth pouring. Watershed here in Ohio makes an apple brandy. It’s awful — musty, dry, and zero apple flavor. If you are lucky enough to live in a state that has Clavados, please use it here and tell me how good it is. I’ll be jealous.

Angostura Bitters: The “Professor” didn’t specify what sort of bitters to use. Angostura is the default, but try spiced cherry bitters or dandelion bitters and see how it tastes.

Demerara syrup: 2:1 Sugar in the Raw/water, heated on the stovetop until the sugar has melted. Sugar is the tricky part of this cocktail. If the cider is sweet, don’t add much sugar. You might want to omit this entirely depending on the drink.

Cider: A semi-dry cider is the best choice by far. Use what you like, but adjust the bitters-to-sugar ratio to suit your taste.

OPEN THREAD!

Bro. Bro. Brobrobrobrobro. Brooooooooooooo! We’re killing a dude live on camera, bro!

Yeah, on purpose! It won’t be like the time I accidentally almost killed a member of the West Point marching band by chucking an ax in his direction. But how sick would it have been if I had killed him with that ax on camera? That’s some John Wick shit. Reacher would kill a dude by chucking an ax at him and then making some quip to Neagley like, “Hey, I tried to ax him a question first.”

Ha ha ha, Reacher, man. That show is so badass. I keep offering to do a cameo where I recruit Reacher back to the military because we’ve all realized what a mistake we made in discharging such a badass warfighter just for disobeying orders and shooting a whole bunch of people. No luck yet, but the president said he’d put a call in to Bezos, so I’m feeling good about it.

That band dude was such a pussy about the whole thing. You know he sued me later, for almost killing him through my own negligence? Even though the ax only, like, grazed him. I wonder where he is now. Biden probably made him a general I need to fire for wokeness. Whatever happened to training soldiers at West Point to be war fighters?

I mean, killing a soldier through my own negligence? Does that sound like the Pete Hegseth you know?

Where was I? Oh yeah, I get to kill a guy live on TV! Well, I don’t, a firing squad does. Unless I make them put me on the firing squad. Whoa! There’s an idea! I keep telling the generals I want to be the one to fire missiles at unarmed fishermen instead of just giving the order to do it, and they’re all, Mr. Secretary, the Caribbean is an active war zone unfit for VIPs such as yourself, or Mr. Secretary, wouldn’t you prefer to keep several layers of accountability between you and these war crimes you constantly order us to commit?

To which I say, hell no, brah! I’m tired of giving the order to fire missiles at unarmed fishermen and not getting to push the button myself. This time, I want to pull the trigger. And I want the attention. Which is why we must livestream the first public execution in the United States since 1936 and the first military execution since 1961. HOO-RAH!

Oh, just livestreaming for now. I haven’t pitched broadcast. Got someone researching possible ad rates before we go to the networks. If I had to guess, I’d say take the cost of airing your average Super Bowl ad and triple it.

President Trump will like that. Satiate our blood lust by shooting a man on television and make money doing it? That’s Trump catnip, bro.

Look at me announcing this execution on the deck of an aircraft carrier, how badass is it that I got to do this?

That’s the Abraham Lincoln, bro. I was out there this week welcoming the sailors home after I made them spend 10.5 months at sea running themselves ragged in a futile war that I told the president we’d finish in like a week. I figured the least I could do was announce this execution in front of them. It’s important that our men and women in uniform know America has their backs, and if that means shooting a helpless cripple and broadcasting it to the world like it’s an ISIS snuff film, then that’s what it means.

Yeah, bro, Nidal Hasan. Remember him? Shot and killed 13 warfighters at Fort Hood back in 2009. None of them were armed, because Barack Hussein Obama was president and he didn’t respect the warfighter mentality. Also because it was longstanding military policy that soldiers don’t get to walk around bases always armed in case they are summoned to invade Iran immediately or have to defend the base against a surprise attack by antifa sappers.

But that’s the past, when we were the Woke Department. Now we’re the War Department. HOO-RAH!

It’s funny, if Hasan had shot and killed 13 unarmed and defenseless Iraqi little girls walking down by the river, I’d have spent however long it took lobbying President Trump to pardon him because we want that sort of warfighter mentality in the United States military. And those Iraqis probably deserved it anyway, what with being Allah-worshipping heathens and all.

But shoot a bunch of unarmed American soldiers, and I will pursue your execution with the same single-minded devotion with which I pursue gallon jugs of fortified wine to keep next to my desk. And my bed. And the recliner in the living room that only I’m allowed to sit in. And the weight bench in my garage, where I use the full gallon jugs as weights. Check out my guns, bro. That’s not gym muscle, that’s “lifting gallon jugs of fortified wine to my mouth and holding them there while I guzzle all the contents” muscle.

Only problem is that I can only do one rep before the jugs are too empty to be useful in building muscle. Which is why I go through a fuckton of jugs. It’s not because of a drinking problem, shut up, bro.

The only question is whether we leave Hasan in his wheelchair when we shoot him or lift him out and put him in another chair or stand him upright and tie him to a pole. Can you imagine how crazy the fake news will go at the sight of American soldiers shooting an Arabic man in a wheelchair?

But people have to know there are consequences for what Hasan did, besides being paralyzed from the waist down and having to spend the last few decades of your life in prison. People have to know there are consequences for committing crimes in Donald Trump’s America! Unless you are someone Donald Trump likes. Then it’s throw him a taste and enter Pardon City, bro.

I know liberal cowards think I’m just doing murder porn here, and yeah, they’re right! I haven’t been releasing all those boat bombing videos and bragging about our warfighters’ kinetic lethality or whatever because I feel the solemn weight of taking human lives enough to not turn it into a spectacle right out of a dystopian airport thriller! I’m doing it because watching this shit is better than Viagra. No more whiskey dick for Whiskey Pete, I tell you what.

Whoa, bro! What if instead of shooting Hasan, the firing squad all throws axes at him instead? We do that, and Fox will make it a primetime special. I better get to the nearest axe-throwing bar and start practicing!

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A Texas queer bar says it’s still looking for answers after it got its account deleted by Meta.

That deletion comes after months of Meta (Facebook and Instagram) flagging Oilcan Harry’s and its sister bar Rain on 4th for photos that were “inappropriate for minors,” and warning them that the account would be censored for “inappropriate content” and that its spread would be reduced.

However, none of the flagged photos violated any of Facebook’s stated guidelines.

[Scott] Neal told Chron that, strangely, none of the posts that Meta had flagged as inappropriate for users under 18 contained nudity. Rain on 4th and Oilcan Harry’s both regularly post pictures of their dancers, who are usually scantily clad. Instead, posts with drag queens, especially iconic Austin drag performer Brigette Bandit, were flagged more than anything else.

Prefer to PayPal?

Was it “strangely” though? Was it really? Because it’s not exactly the only bar that’s been targeted, and it isn’t just happening in Texas, either. Check out this graphic from a downtown Los Angeles queer bar, Precinct:

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. I mean, it’s not like Meta loves to step bravely up whenever fascism appears on any of its sites to make sure that it gets viewed by as few people as possible … oh dear, someone’s handing me a note from 2025 …

Meta’s concerning policy changes over the past few months include blocking teens from searching for LGBTQ+ related materials, a move Meta described as an “error,” and, in January, suspension of their fact-checking program, justifying it as a choice favoring “free expression” against “censorship,” apparently falling in line with President Trump’s views about online speech. The company also removed nonbinary and trans themes from its Messenger app, and scrapped their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program.

In this new more permissive online environment, an investigation by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) has discovered neo-Nazi activity flourishing on Instagram, including degrading hate speech, antisemitic conspiracism, and even Nazi symbols being used to sell merchandise.

Hmmm. That seems bad! Let’s see what they were up to in other countries, like India, which has a lot of social media enthusiasts and the extremely right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party! From 2020:

Facebook declined to act after discovering that the BJP was circumventing its political ad transparency requirements, according to people familiar with the matter.

The rules require advertisers to verify their identities and disclose them to users. In addition to buying Facebook ads in its own name, the BJP was also found to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars through newly created organizations that didn’t disclose the party’s role, the people said.

Facebook neither took down the pages nor flagged the ads. Instead, it privately raised the matter with the BJP, according to former employees in both India and the U.S., where the decision was discussed.

Oh, well, I’m sure they’ve stopped doing that sort of thing, especially given the extraordinarily popular youth-led Cockroach movement in India pushing back against the BJP’s policies, right?

India’s student-led “Cockroach movement“ has gained attention for using satire and social media to challenge authority. Protester Sakhi says several of her Instagram reels, including one mocking police that drew 40 million views, were removed or restricted under India’s IT Act.

Similar takedown complaints have been reported by activists, journalists and opposition figures. Critics warn of growing pressure on platforms such as Meta, while India’s government denies censorship, saying only content covered by legal restrictions is targeted. Meta did not respond to DW’s request for comment.

Oh. Well, I’m sure they aren’t doing this in every country. Let’s take a look at Myanmar’s recent history!

Meta’s rapid market entry into Myanmar, combined with the enthusiastic embrace of the platform by a population which had long been starved of space to freely express themselves, led to Meta enjoying near-total market dominance in Myanmar by 2017. The Facebook platform was used not only as a means of communicating with friends, but for many people in Myanmar, it became their primary news source, business directory, online marketplace, and go-to search engine.

Sounds pretty okay so far, did anything else happen in 2017?

Oh.

In the months that followed, more than 702,000 people, including children – over 80 per cent of the Rohingya who lived in northern Rakhine State at the crisis’s outset – fled to neighbouring Bangladesh. In Myanmar and elsewhere, at the heart of what is often called “ethnic cleansing,” which is not a legal term, is an organized deportation operation – that is, coordinated action aimed at forcing people to leave their homes and country and at ensuring they do not return.

The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population was achieved by a relentless and systematic campaign in which the Myanmar security forces unlawfully killed thousands of Rohingya, including young children; raped and committed other sexual violence against hundreds of Rohingya women and girls; tortured Rohingya men and boys in detention sites; pushed Rohingya communities toward starvation by burning markets and blocking access to farmland; and burned hundreds of Rohingya villages in a targeted and deliberate manner.

All that’s from a 2022 Amnesty International report called “Myanmar: The social atrocity: Meta and the right to remedy for the Rohingya,” and you can read it here.

But maybe I’m not extending enough of the benefit of the doubt to Meta. After all, it’s not like they have a history of doing this! Except for when they were censoring stories about violence against Kurds in 2015 and violence in Kashmir in 2016 and … well, maybe it’s been different in the United States all this time.

Nope! They’ve been censoring the American Declaration of Independence as “hate speech” in 2018 and auto-creating white supremacist groups in 2021 — in the middle of the January 6 insurrection, no less — and throwing a little shit-fit tantrum and keeping entire swaths of the global population from having access to news just as the climate catastrophe really got going in 2023 and finally abandoning fact-checking entirely and, well, there’s much more, but you get the idea right?

Man, I’m old enough to remember when I, personally, got put through the wringer for suggesting that Facebook might be, actually, maybe working on behalf of shitty government agencies! How’re my statements on this looking now?

Binkowski, who previously reported on immigration and refugees, said Facebook largely ignored her: “I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model.”

Anyway, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that it takes enormous amounts of public pressure to get Facebook groups with names like SwastikaFans1488 taken down (after which we inevitably get gaslit by weird, stupid uggos like Matt Gaetz about “censorship,” which we are forced to endure because American news organizations are now owned by the same people who finance weird, stupid uggos like Matt Gaetz) but Meta just goes ahead and censors nice drag queens doing completely wholesome things all on their own!

You know what that means, right? They’re doing it because they want to. They will keep it going as long as the excuses continue to let them.

What’s that phrase? Oh yeah. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

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On Thursday, JD Vance slapped on his favorite Dollar Store Jeffree Star eyeliner (IYKYK) and stood up in front of what we can only assume was a very small group of reporters and right-wing influencers in order to talk about the administration’s plan to crack down on “fraud.” Kind of ironic given, well, practically anything this administration has done.

The “fraud” he is actually concerned about is H-1B and J-1 “visa fraud,” which he is trying to paint as the administration just really standing up for American workers.

After he and several others, including noted white nationalist and Dr. Evil cosplayer Stephen Miller, gave their respective speeches, one of the reporters asked him to provide his definition of socialism, just like Theo Von asked Zohran Mamdani to do recently.

“How do you define socialism personally, and why do you think socialist candidates are popping up everywhere across the country?” asked the reporter.

“Oh man, I, you know, I guess it's honestly it's a hard term to to define these days because very often socialism, you know, classically you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers. And yet in reality, I guarantee that most of the self-described socialists running across the United States of America are going to howl about this announcement today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers. So, I don't know what the term means anymore,” Vance responded.

Yes. They are. Hell, a lot of people who prioritize workers in general are going to “howl.” Why? Is it because they actually don’t care about workers? No, it’s because someone replaced Vance’s dog whistle with a fog horn and we can all tell that this is not about “protecting American workers” but about “appeasing racists.” Vance, not actually being quite as stupid as he pretends to be, is entirely aware of that. He knows what game he’s playing on both ends of this.

You see, there’s a lot of opposition to Vance from the Right at the moment, not just because he’s a charisma black hole but specifically because his wife is Indian and his children are biracial. They don’t like that. They really, really, really don’t like that. Vance knows this and is doing this shit to appease these folks, to assure them that he is on their side.

If you think I am perhaps projecting an intention that isn’t there, the co-chair of his special fraud task force Andrew Ferguson spoke at the presser as well, and he was pretty explicit about it. After claiming that unless we purge the nation of immigrants “our roads will be unsafe” and “crime will continue to rise,” he praised the work done by EEOC chair Andrea Lucas “protecting white American men from discrimination.”

“I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That's what unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today,” Vance, a person who knows what words mean, explained.

You gotta love how whenever these freaks have no case they start being shitty about trans kids.

Absolutely no one is saying that we should replace American workers with foreign workers. What we are saying is that we know this is not about protecting workers, because if it were, Vance and the Republican Party would not be so fiercely against literally every other thing that helps workers. The H-1B program is rife with serious issues and fraud, but the immigrants are not the ones perpetrating it — the corporations hiring them are.

“You know, it's it's funny, “ he continued. “Back in 2016, one of the most interesting things that happened is when Bernie Sanders, then of course the leading socialist in the United States of America, was asked about open borders. He gave an answer that sounded similar to Stephen Miller's where he said, ‘Of course we're not going to have open borders because that's going to displace American workers.’”

They do know that the whole “open borders” thing is a figment of their imagination, right? There were not open borders during the Biden administration. They made that up, I guess because if they actually had to address the things that all these scary socialists are actually proposing, they’d sound like assholes.

That being said, we do in fact need immigrant workers here, because we have labor shortages in many areas of the economy that are only going to get worse as Boomers age out of the workforce. For instance, we have about 330,000 to 400,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs and are projected to have a shortage of 1.9 to 2 million by 2033. Our current physician shortage is expected to increase to 124,000 by 2034. The construction industry has about 349,000 jobs to fill this year alone.

The Trump administration’s war on immigrants has already led not only to significant labor shortages, but to other businesses suffering or even closing because they don’t have enough customers anymore.

“It is ironic,” Vance said, at least using that word correctly, “that so many of the self-described socialists running across this country, they love the idea of replacing American workers with foreign workers, which suggests to me it's really not about the working class. It's about their hatred of native-born citizens.”

Yes. That’s the ticket. We all hate native-born citizens. He’s got us there.

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If Vance and his “task force” actually cared about people getting laid off in favor of people who are willing to work for less money (or just laid off for bad reasons in general), they wouldn’t be focused on immigrants or “protecting white men” from the discrimination they pretend to face, they’d be focused on things like getting rid of at-will employment, raising the minimum wage, getting rid of “Right to Work” in the states that have it, and encouraging unionization and other things that protect all workers, whether they are immigrants or “native-born.”

They’d be instituting labor regulations on hospitals so that nurses and other health workers don’t get so burnt out that they quit.

Instead, they are far too busy cutting over 60 workplace safety and wage regulations, making it easier for employers to pay workers less, gutting OSHA, trying to replace immigrant labor with child labor and, the most important cause of all, affirmative action for white men.

This administration cannot end soon enough.

There are many terrible things in the news right now, but let’s start Friday with something that isn’t terrible. Namely, there were Senate debates last night, and your Democrats beat ass.

Here is Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff explaining at the outset of his debate with redneck head injury Mike Collins that the night’s proceedings woult be “the trial of Mike Collins.”

Ossoff repeatedly called Collins a bigot throughout the night, called him pathetic, just showed Georgians and all Americans what it’s supposed to look like when you fucking loathe somebody with every fiber of your being, and you’re fortunate enough to get to run against them, so you have an excuse to dwell on your hatred. It was just brutal, and you could tell how brutal it was by the dumbfuck look that was perma-plastered on Collins’s face throughout the entire event.

Collegial respectful fun time is over! These people are not your friends on the other side of the aisle, with whom you have respectful disagreements!

As Ossoff explained to Georgians last night, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” That’s the kind of people we’re dealing with here.

You see, by the end of a debate with one of these scumbags, not only should people not want to vote for your Republican fascist opponent, they should also want to keep driving if they see that person broken down on the side of the road. By the end of a debate with literally every Republican running for office today, the average American person should want to step over that person if they happen to see them underfoot.

This is how every one of our candidates needs to treat each and every one of these fascist, bloodthirsty bigots.

This next clip was so great because Ossoff was completely talking about something else, data centers to be specific. He just happened to find the perfect, most natural moment, in the middle of talking about Collins voting to take your money and give it to data center developers, to slip in a line about how Collins has “hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office.”

Ossoff really hammered Collins on all the bigots, white supremacists, and Nazis with whom he surrounds himself and shares DNA and legal familial ties. And Jon Ossoff did not let that go, because Mike Collins has not earned the respect of having Jon Ossoff letting that go.

This. This is how you treat white supremacist, Christian nationalist MAGA men.

You humiliate them.

Whew!

Here’s the whole damned thing!

Of course, as we mentioned, there was more than one debate last night. Simultaneously in Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed was beating the shit out of Mike Rogers, and one thing that really was clear flipping back and forth between clips of these two debates was how attractive and smart and, well, hot our candidates are. Meanwhile, to a man, the Republicans’ candidates all look like greasy pedophiles.

The El-Sayed debate wasn’t as flashy, but it had its moments, especially when it came to smacking the shit out of the bigot next to you and daring him to say what he really wants to say. Like in this clip, where El-Sayed repeatedly dared Rogers to talk racist shit about his mom.

Other than that, there were a lot of moments like the one below, where El-Sayed clowned on Rogers for suddenly being against his boss Donald Trump’s trade war now that his poll numbers are in the shitter, making ads drinking Labatt’s Canadian beer. “Be serious, my guy.” Indeed, El-Sayed dropped several “my guys” last night, and it was great.

Then there were moments like this one, which was just fun because of the way El-Sayed fucked the camera while he was going after Rogers for having how many yachts? Two yachts.

And here’s the whole thing on that.

To watch much more of both debates, go to Aaron Rupar’s page on Bluesky, because he somehow watched them both at the same time. There was also a Troy Jackson/Susan Collins debate, and she came off looking like an ass too, but that one wasn’t as exciting.

After the debates, both Ossoff and El-Sayed ended up on Jen Psaki’s MS NOW show. During Ossoff’s appearance, he reacted to the announcement from Defense Secretary Shtifaced McBarfight that he had achieved his first erection without medicinal intervention in a decade the Pentagon will be livestreaming the execution of the Fort Hood mass shooter, because we guess Trump’s America is a sick, perverted, pathetic little bitch loser hybrid of Saudi Arabia and Gilead now. He called Pete Hegseth a “deeply unwell person.”

In that same interview he “bless his heart”-ed Mike Collins, and it was great.

Christ, he loathes Mike Collins, and knows what filth he is, and he reads him for it every moment he can:

“Here in Georgia, where we are so proud of our legacy as the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let a man like Collins win this Senate race and represent Georgia for the next six years. We’ve got to defeat the bigot congressman.”

That’s the closing argument for every Democrat, just replace Mike Collins’s name with the name of whichever Republican in whichever race. They are all equally trash, equally vile, equally white supremacist Nazi bigots, equally worthy of being shunned until they take their last breaths.

Go forth and win shit, Democrats.

[New York Times / The New Republic]

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This night’s Wonkette Movie Night pick is The Girl With All The Gifts, available for free with ads on YouTube, Pluto TV, Plex, and Fandango; $3.99 in the usual places. Join ZiggyWiggy and all your friends Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern!

This paragraph is bad, you should skip it!

She wasn’t sure if Andrew Tate was going to kill her, or if he was just a rapist. Pages and pages and pages of horrendous details from the Tate Brothers’ UK extradition charges. Plus the minor who he knew very well was a minor, and the webcamming “extreme pornography” he forced her to do on herself because “true love.” (Court Listener) Say, why was Erick Erickson literally the only person on the Right pointing out that the rest of them became Tate Brothers Fanboys and Girls after all the sex trafficking charges came out? Truly, what kind of Oppositional Defiant And Also Child Rape Disorder do these people have? (The Bulwark)

Okay you can come back now!

Well maybe the FBI and DOJ will investigate this Epstein pal — “is she for me or are you keeping her for yourself?” — since he’s from Bard College? (Mid-Hudson News)

This is some good writing and some good attention paying at the Trump Accounts auto-enrollment (for some children) announcement:

Another strong contender was when both Trump and Cruz riffed on the idea that children can now walk into McDonald’s “saying ‘I want good service, I own this company’.”

Yes, who wouldn’t want the children to say that when they walk into McDonald’s. (The Independent)

Here’s some dumbfuck rant from Trump, this one about how Henry Cuellar was so ungrateful for his pardon that he didn’t even switch parties. Thank you to Joe My God for the paragraph breaks, there’s no way to read his walls of dumbfuck without them. (Joe. My. God.)

Kimberly Guilfoyle, girl you in trouble! Heart eyes emoji! (The Bulwark)

Nods wisely:

Everything about NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement on the anniversary of October 7th was correct, and the pro-Israel people AND the pro-Palestinian protesters reacted completely fucking awfully. What entire dicks. (Gift link New York Times)

The “always” in South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Annie Andrews’s “I will always support trans youth” didn’t last very long. This is a true shame. (Erin in the Morning)

How the Ellisons — PTUI — got Democratic leaders to isolate California state AG Rob Bonta so he would cave on the Ellisons’ shitty, junk-bond-status, pay-themselves-$150-million-bonuses-while-$80-billion-in-debt Warner Brothers takeover. Everything about this is terrible, and particularly fuck Barbara Boxer, because she has yelled at me, personally, TWICE. (The American Prospect)

Apollo software programming leader woman Margaret Hamilton has died. This is the best anecdote though!

There was the incident that became known as “the Lauren error”: One day, her daughter Lauren, then four years old, was playing with the command module simulator at the Instrumentation Lab when she somehow activated a pre-launch program, called P01, while the simulator was in midflight — which crashed the simulator altogether. Hamilton created a program add-on in the technical documentation warning users not to launch P01 during flight.

She also proposed a software fix to prevent the error happening during a real mission, but she was overruled on the grounds that the highly trained astronauts were never going to make that same mistake. Yet during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, that’s exactly what happened: Jim Lovell inadvertently launched P01 during the flight, causing the on-flight navigational data to vanish. Hamilton and her team were called in to solve the error, and after that her proposed changes were integrated into the program.

Margaret Hamilton was 90. (MIT)

Bitcoin ATMs? Not in Albuquerque, bitches! (KRQE)

Your friend Worriedman has some real pretty crops. (Worriedman)

Even Kimberly Guilfoyle dancing around like an asshole backstage at the January 6 Get Those Fuckers Rally And Guillotine Exhibition couldn’t make me hate this song, but it almost did.

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Feed The Kitty

Our morning began with the TABS, which I never type in all caps except now. Odd. Our micro-gif today is some cells dividing and stepping on mitosis.

Republicans are not freaking out about the midterms. Please do not put in the newspaper that they are freaking out.

Colorado’s GOP nominee for governor started out weird and offputting, and only keeps getting moreso and moreso.

Donald Trump sure is having fun joking about letting Iran nuke San Diego and Los Angeles, which must be doing wonderful things for Republicans trying to get reelected in California.

Trump’s “sir” stories and his Melania stories crossed the streams, and it was just as ugly as Ghostbusters led us to think.

Donald Trump is even fucking up his attempts to bribe voters.

Wonkette loves you! We’ll be back again tomorrow, and … oh gosh, Friday!

As you may have noticed, there’s an election coming up, and by complete coincidence, Donald Trump is sending out bribe checks in hopes that at least a few voters will thank him by voting for Republicans.

And some of you have already been sending yours to Wonkette!

You can also use the button below to donate an amount of your choice at Paypal, or we have a Patreon too.

Feed The Kitty

Now, these aren’t the imaginary $5,000 bribe checks he’s been lie-promising if voters keep Republicans in control of Congress. These are much smaller payments of $500 to some people enrolled in Obamacare (mostly in red states, huh!) and $90 to some people enrolled in Medicare. But in a crucial difference from the mythical $5,000 Trump dividend — and the prior equally mythical $2000 “tariff dividend” and $5000 “DOGE dividend” — these little healthcare bribes are actually being paid out.

Democrats and good-government groups point out that, like so many other Trump diktats, the payments may not exactly be legal. Back in the Before Times, we recall, Congress had to approve that sort of thing. But so far, no lawsuits have been filed in an effort to stop the expenditures.

So far, it’s too early to see whether the MediBribes will do Republicans any good, or if people will just (as is happening!) split their bribes between Wonkette and the Democratic candidates of their choice. Trump and his party are already facing an electoral paddlin’, and the bribes may not reach enough voters or create enough positive buzz to change more than a few minds. Plus, there’s the little problem where the checks won’t even begin to offset the higher medical costs created by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill.

But never underestimate the ability of Trump voters to get excited when Dear Leader hands them a little bandaid to help them out after he’s cut off a limb or two. It’s only a flesh wound.

$500 Obamacare Bribes From Uncle Orange

The White House announced back in September — to little media attention, as far as we can tell — that it would be issuing $500 “Working Families Obamacare Refunds” to nearly ONE MILLION Americans, claiming that the money was from ill-gotten “overcharges” imposed by the source of all evil, the Biden administration. That number should already set off stink detectors, since around 19 million Americans have health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act, even after Trump’s efforts to enshittify it. The bribe checks are coming shortly after the administration kicked 760,000 Americans off Obamacare, insisting they were all doing “fraud,” although it’s likely many of those who were unpersoned actually qualified.

As NPR explains, the $500 checks to some ACA users are coming out of fees that insurance companies pay the government to participate in the ACA healthcare marketplace; the fees cover the government’s operating costs for the healthcare exchanges. That’s been part of how the ACA works from the beginning, but the White House announcement just plain lies about it, implying that Joe Biden had cheated people with “user fees” that drove up premiums while doing no good at all. You know, beyond covering the costs of running the program. Revenue from the fees has never before been thrown directly at taxpayers, but Donald Trump has unlimited power to ignore piffling little obstacles like the Constitution.

The $500 “refunds” will only go to users who got their insurance through the federal marketplace instead of the state exchanges, and only to people whose individual incomes are above $64,000 annually, too much to qualify for any premium subsidies at all. Many of those folks benefited from Biden’s expansion of premium subsidies that congressional Republicans refused to extend. When the subsidies expired, millions of Americans saw their premiums skyrocket. That includes people with incomes below the $64K cap; the reduced premium subsidies they still qualify for don’t come close to covering the full cost of the increases, and they won’t even get $500 from Trump’s bribe scheme.

The “refund” checks are accompanied by a letter from Donald Trump that reads more like a campaign ad or a Truth Social rant than an official document:

Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University law school in St. Louis, Missouri, told NPR that the letter reeks of “electioneering” and almost certainly violates the Hatch Act, another silly relic Trump ignored long ago. She added that the letter “looks like a pretty desperate effort to, in essence, bribe the recipients of this letter to vote in gratitude to Trump in the upcoming midterm elections.”

But that’s not all the fuckery, heavens no! Remember, the “refunds” only go to ACA subscribers who buy insurance on the federal healthcare.gov exchange, not to folks in mostly blue states that set up their own exchanges. That means the bribe checks are mostly going out to people in red states that wanted nothing to do with Obamacare, although two blue states, Hawaii and Oregon, also use the federal exchange. And again, the vast majority of ACA subscribers in those red states won’t get a check at all.

Ellen Allen, a West Virginia woman profiled by NPR, is one of the Lucky Duckies who did get a MediBribe. She saw her monthly insurance premium go up by $1,967 every month when the Biden subsidies vanished. She wasn’t terribly impressed by the $500 check she received Monday, which she called a “political stunt.” She told NPR, “If they wanted to do something meaningful, they would work on affordable healthcare instead of just sending out checks every now and then.” Allen works for a small nonprofit, West Virginians for Affordable Health Care, and plans to put the check in her health savings account, but also to keep fighting to reform our mess of a healthcare ‘system.’

$90 Medicare Bribes Most Won’t Even Notice

Like the Obamacare bribes, the $90 Medicare bribes will only go to a small share of beneficiaries, although of course the administration insists it’s a wonderful way to make healthcare “more affordable.” It will be sent by direct deposit to about “21 million people enrolled in Part B under traditional Medicare who don’t pay income-related premiums or receive premium assistance from Medicaid,” as healthcare think tank KFF explains.

That leaves a lot of Medicare enrollees out, particularly the 35 million Americans enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans, even though many of them also pay premiums for Part B. The bribes will also bypass another 12 million Americans who get assistance with their premiums because they’re disabled or have low incomes, presumably because they have it too easy.

And what a wonderful benefit it will be for the third of Medicare beneficiaries who get it! $90 is enough to fill up your car with Iran-war inflated gasoline, unless you have a diesel vehicle of course. And if you keep it to cover healthcare costs, it’ll cover the projected $79 increase in Part B premiums that will kick in come the new year, with change left over to buy two pencils for Christmas, but not two dolls, unless you get an off brand from the dollar-fifty store.

The MidtermCare bribes will be pulled — again, illegally — from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which Congress established in 2008 to “make improvements under the original fee-for-service program,” meaning hospital and medical coverage under Medicare Parts A and B. As KFF notes, the $2 billion fund has never been tapped, but the $90 payments should largely wipe it out. Hope Medicare doesn’t need any improvements anytime soon.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s MediBribes, however illegal or corrupt they are, will make any difference in the midterms. Trump has ranted about the payments in some of his campaign appearances, and on his fake Twitter, but they don’t seem to be generating any buzz yet. For all the naked politicking in the ACA “refund” letters, Trump only brags about what he’s done, and he isn’t on the ballot. Voters may or may not get the idea that they should reward Great Leader by voting for Republican House and Senate candidates. And since the Medicare payments are primarily going out by direct deposit, the seniors who do get them may or may not realize it’s supposed to be a bribe.

That may explain why there have been no lawsuits to stop this latest grifting by Trump. Pushing back on it might actually make the stupid wasteful spending a campaign issue, with Fox News railing against the mean old Democrats who want to keep Americans from getting their richly-deserved “refunds,” How Dare You!

And OPEN THREAD.

[NPR / Scripps News / ABC News / KFF]

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Seven Bribes For Seven Brothels

And now, a followup to our earlier post about the general panic gripping Republicans right now nationwide. In this post, we’ll narrow the focus to Donald Trump, and how truly pathetic he is.

Because, well, bless his heart, but Trump is telling “sir” stories about Melania now. Or at least he’s telling “sir” stories about “my wife.” It’s always possible — and there’s precedent for this — that he is not sure who he’s talking about when he refers to “my wife.”

It could have been Natalie he was talking about. Maybe these days he really doesn’t know which lady is in the room with him, and has lost the power to discern between the cold Slovenian one who bats his fish hand away every time he attempts to touch her and the nice blonde one who would cross an ocean just to take one of his diapers to the dumpster, who calls him “Father Jesus Lord Captain My Captain World’s Best Dear Leader Daddy-O” and squeaks the squeaky toys that make him laugh.

But last night, at that pathetic rally Trump did for Ken Paxton in Texas — “for” — Trump told a sir story about “my wife.” Apparently she’s been correcting his pronuncation of “vegan.”

“You know, my wife told me ‘sir, you have to do me a favor — it’s not vay-gan, it’s vee-gan.’”

So, that didn’t happen. Donald Trump’s wife under no circumstances calls him “sir.” Maybe it was Todd Blanche wearing an assless French maid’s costume?

Trump continued telling the story he hallucinates about James Talarico once a day, between sunrise and sundown:

“Now he says he loves meat, but he’s a vegan — see, Melania? I got that right.”

Melania Trump did not call Trump “sir.” Perhaps it was Kash Patel wearing an assless French maid’s costume?

“He’s a vegan. He wants to eat a piece of lettuce, a little piece of lettuce, please. You know where he is? He’s sick because he’s been forced to eat meat for political reasons, and he’s throwing up all over the place. He’s sick.”

OK. James Talarico has the flu because he has been trading his normal meals of “a little piece of lettuce please” for “political meat” and now he’s throwing up.

Trump concluded with another lie: “How the hell would I know? I like steak!”

No. Donald Trump likes burned cow meat with ketchup. That is not steak. Calling what he eats steak would be like calling his ballroom “architecture” or calling his presidency “successful.”

But sure, whatever.

So that’s a little snapshot of how Trump’s sadness rally for Paxton went.

There were a number of protesters in the room who disrupted the event multiple times, and one of them was assaulted by one of Trump’s MAGA cows on camera.

Trump tried to pre-emptively brag about how many people were there, as the camera panned to reveal lots of empty seats.

Trump incited hatred with lies about migrants killing everybody.

He repeated his mangled, babbling lines about letting Iran nuke Los Angeles or San Diego, which, we hate to say it, but we’ve been covering this man’s butchering of the English language for over a decade now, and it is not actually correct to say he was inviting Iran to bomb those places. He’s trying to fearmonger over the possibility of Iran doing that if Hero Trump hadn’t stopped them from getting a bomb they definitely never would have gotten if he had just left Barack Obama’s goddamned fucking nuclear deal in place.

For a longer explanation of this, read Jonathan Bernstein at the Good Politics/Bad Politics Substack, on how Trump really didn’t say the thing he’s being accused of, but nobody should really give a damn that he’s being misinterpreted, because for one thing, he can go fuck himself.

Never let it be said that Wonkette is unfair to that pedophile-protecting Little Hitler stupid-ass senile pantshitting dictator wannabe loser.

As the New York Times notes, the thing Trump really didn’t talk about during his Ken Paxton rally was Ken Paxton, which is probably good, because this is Ken Paxton last night at the same rally:

Got that? No? OK, well what Ken Paxton said there was:

“Have y’all ever heard that this is the most important election of your lifetime. Anybody ever heard that? Well, you know what, I’ve been thinking about that — and, you know, why do we always say that? And you know what, I want you to think about this. The Continental Divide in the United States. If a drop of rain falls one inch or more on the right side, on the East side, it ends up in the Atlantic Ocean. If it falls one inch on the other side, or more, it ends up in the Pacific Ocean — unless we’ve renamed it. I think that’s possible. This election, we’re not talking about red versus blue. We’re not talking about a moderate Democrat. We’re talking about the Constitutional Republic. Freedom. The Bill of Rights. We’re talking about capitalism. On the other side, we’re talking about communism, socialism. The government controlling. That’s why these elections are really mattering. And they matter, unfortunately, right here in Texas.”

Huh.

Well maybe the people in the room were fired up for Ken Paxton anyway?

“Look, we’re voting for him, let’s just put it that way,” said Julie Funk, a 66-year-old retired first-grade teacher from nearby Bulverde, Texas. She was there with a few of her girlfriends, all of whom winced at the mention of Mr. Paxton.

“I absolutely agree with all of” the president’s characterizations, Ms. Funk said.

Conversations with likely voters were a tad awkward, since all of them seemed to have heard the president describe their Senate candidate as a pain who looks bad, dresses bad and talks bad. Some tried looking on the bright side.

“He probably already has changed some of that,” a 73-year-old former agriculture worker named Jody Gatto said of Mr. Paxton. “The way he dresses, he definitely has sharpened it up a little bit. Yeah. But you know what? He is what he is.”

Whoa, those are some Texas-sized boners for Ken Paxton, don’t let the enthusiasm knock you over!

As we noted in our morning post, Trump got back to the White House and started yammering on Truth Social, accusing James TalaFREAKo of being missing in action (you know, because of that slice of lunchmeat he ate), and daring him to debate Paxton.

To which Talarico replied:

“This is what Trump panic looks like,” wrote The New Republic this morning, about Trump’s bonkers tour of high school gyms in red states that he can’t seem to sell out anymore.

“In actuality, my Events for very good Republican Politicians are probably more crowded than ever. There are no empty seats, there haven’t been for years, and there never will be. The Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever,” Trump writes on Truth Social, because of how hot his rallies are, actually.

And then the camera pans around and …

TNR:

Trump will keep jetting from rally to rally, and keep jerking his arms as “YMCA” blares in ever-smaller venues. He will keep reciting old grievances about Hillary Clinton and newer ones about trans people and Canadians. He will keep doing what he’s always done because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. But there was a kernel to what he said in Mobile about seeking the company of the people who loved him all along. As he becomes more unpopular and his party’s panic grows, these cozy rallies are his safe space—the last remaining place where he is still adored, still funny, and still winning.

Much more about how pathetic Trump has become at that link.

Quick, Donald! Make up another story about your wife calling you “sir”! Say “transgender for everybody” again!

The strong men with tears in their eyes are hanging on your every word!

[New York Times / The New Republic]

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In case you haven’t heard, on Monday United States President Donald Trump gave a “speech,” which is in quotation marks because his speeches are basically just the unconnected ramblings of an old sundowning crank on a cocktail of God only knows what, and said some very interesting things in Nebraska about major regions in Southern California, one of which happens to be the one in which I live!

“I want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”

This caused absolute glee among the trashy, unwashed racists attending Trump’s speech, of course, because they are this nation’s dumbfucks and suckers. If Trump was talking about high gas prices being a small price to pay to keep San Diego and Hell Lay from getting the nucleared, and sure he probably was, and so fucking what because fuck that guy? Then his idiots should probably not have hooted and hollered and fucked their mothers about what a great mitzvah Iran would be doing in wiping two awesome Californian cities off the map!

Unless you prefer PayPal?

But it caused a different sort of glee here in California, among local elected officials, who have been keeping the story going all week long as they release statements condemning what he said!

“We can disagree with each other, but at the end of the day, a President’s first duty is to bring Americans together and to protect every one of us,” said Terra Lawson-Remer, who chairs the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

“When the commander in chief talks about San Diego being ‘taken out’ by other countries with whom we’re at war, he is not fit to lead,” she said. “Trump is a traitor to our security, to our values and to our country.”

A bunch of other electeds took to social media to proffer similar sentiments:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said that Trump’s “statements against our city are dangerous and could potentially compromise our safety… The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives.”

And the state officials had something to say, too:

Even a Republican got in on the action! Jim Desmond, who is running in San Diego County for a seat most recently vacated by extremely nasty piece of work Darrell Issa, took to the socials to have some words for Trump!

“I vehemently disagree with President Trump’s comments,” he wrote on Twitter, or X, or whatever the fuck. “America must stand up to Iran and defend our interests, but the first responsibility of our Commander in Chief is to protect the American people and our homeland.

”As a Navy veteran, I served to protect Americans, not write off American cities as an acceptable price of war. Our job is to keep Americans safe, stand up to our enemies, and make sure a threat like that never becomes reality. No American city is expendable, and no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.”

Naturally, the White House is gaslighting with all their might, as though we are tiny babies who were all born yesterday and haven’t heard the dumbfucks farting out their conspiracy theories about “librul California” or whatever all this time, saying that the “media freakout” is “not rooted in reality.”

That’s right, the Trump White House, which shoehorned its way into power twice by triangulating racism and misogyny with all the conspiracy theories and weaponized disinformation narratives it could use, is very predictably blaming the media for accurately reporting what the president said.

Unfortunately for them, they have not had any credibility in a very long time, on account of all the bullshit they spread, so we don’t really need to listen to anything else they say on this matter.

Trump “revisited the controversy,” as the coverage would have it, on Wednesday. I love how they cover it that way, as though he isn’t just opening his mouth and vomiting out streams of sundowning consciousness instead of saying cogent thoughts that he thinks. Don’t worry guys, he cleared it right up!

“I said it the other day. ‘Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. Let them hit.’ You want to see a horror show? You want to see problems?” Trump told the Texas crowd on Wednesday.

“Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles if you want to see some bad things happen. You want to see a country that would be in free fall? We’re not going to let that happen,” he added. “We protect our cities. We protect our country. We’re not letting that happen.”

Oh okay, sure thing pal!

There was no update on whether the crowd cheered this one, too, but the story did note that he was heckled by protesters, who — despite what the Trump White House would have you think — were exercising their First Amendment rights.

Anyway, I’ve been getting emails and calls all week long, as the news filters back to friends and family out of state, asking if I am concerned about an Iranian attack on my house, specifically.

The answer is no! First of all, Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” days, much like the days of his having a normal human neck, are long over.

Second, I have never felt particularly threatened by Iran, nor do I have any issue with Iranians, and in fact it causes me great distress every single day that Iranians are getting killed by absolute fucking dipshit moron wingnuts, in my name, as an American! I never asked for that, and I do not want it, and in fact I stand against it in every possible way!

There is one particular government, however, that I do feel threatened by, which not only is hostile to me personally, and has caused me all sorts of problems for many years, and which has, in fact, actually fired fucking missiles at San Diego in the very recent past and fucked up one of our major freeways, causing an enormous amount of damage to our economy for no good reason.

That government is, of course, the Trump administration, which is much more dangerous to me, personally, than Iran.

I don’t see Iranian chucklefucks cheering on bombing my city, either. Just MAGA!

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It has been a hot minute since we checked in on Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for Colorado governor. In case you need a refresher, he’s just a regular guy who claims to have killed “someone” at the age of seven, at the behest of his stepfather who also forced him to kill a cat at the age of three and to then somehow wear said dead cat on his head. He also claims to have performed many exorcisms, both in person and over the phone, and to have personally rescued more than 45,000 women and children in 30 countries he can’t actually name. Among other things.

THESE OTHER THINGS.

He was also a spiritual mentor to Charlie Kirk, though that one checks out.

Right now, it doesn’t seem as though he’s doing very well. In fact, no one has even bothered to do any polling on the race since August … of 2025. That poll had him trailing the Democratic nominee, Colorado state Attorney General Phil Weiser, by 12 points.

Of course, at that point, the fact that he was a child murderer/exorcist had not yet been well-publicized. That could hurt or help him, depending on how batshit Colorado Republicans are. I really don’t know anymore.

The latest news with the American Mary Bell is that, for one, he’s recently been fined $58,000 for illegally taking individual donations over the legal limit, totaling around $83,000. The administrative hearing officer who determined the fine did note that he was apparently too stupid to know that this was illegal, but that it didn’t really matter because he should have at least hired someone less stupid to tell him it was illegal.

“The person charged with compliance did not know what he was doing, and no one above him made sure that he did,” administrative hearing officer Macon Cowles wrote in his decision. “Why an experienced professional was not hired when the Marx Campaign carried a balance of ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ in its bank account.”

He also held a rather fascinating Zoom call with his backers the other night, during which he recounted a lovely evening with his wife when he threw her against a wall out of nowhere in order to “teach her a lesson about self defense.”

Via The New Republic:

“Show the before and after; they don’t want the full truth—that my wife was fake-crying, suckered me in,” Marx told his donors. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh are you OK?’ and she does a spinning back kick into my [groin].

“I was like, ‘OK, you actually can protect yourself,’” Marx recalled.

Marx’s wife, Eileen, then appeared on camera, placing her arms around his neck while claiming that she did a “rear choke” defense. […]

Well, far be it for me to kink shame anyone, but that’s not the way he’s always described the incident. In another interview he did in 2021, it sounds much worse than that.

In 2021, the former Marine turned priest laughed while recalling “grabbing her and slamming” his wife after she suggested that he could protect her.

“It was a decent push,” he said at the time, beaming. “She hit that and started crying, bent over, facing the opposite way.”

In still another interview, Marx’s wife insisted that he was merely inspiring her to train more.

Eileen Marx said she did not believe the rough encounters with her husband constituted domestic abuse but that they had instead reminded her that she does “need to train.”

“What he did—eight years after that, I got my first-degree black belt,”

Ah yes, the old motivational slam into the door. Classic normal relationship move.

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It’s worth noting that one of his other heartwarming stories involved throwing his toddler son across the room. He says he did it because the boy was hurting his sister and that he only threw him onto the bed, but like … he was a toddler and Victor Marx was an adult man with a blackbelt in the “Cajun Karate” invented by his father, Karl Marx (not kidding), so he probably could have just picked him up? Unless the child inherited his cat-like reflexes and, like his wife, also kicked him in the groin?

Also, in 2014, Marx explained to his congregation that a primary cause of domestic violence was bitches not knowing their place.

“More girls and women would not be abused by men if they were content with who they are and where God has them,” he explained. Sadly, I cannot find the whole sermon online, so I can’t learn precisely who Victor Marx thinks women are and where God has them, but I think we can assume that it is in the kitchen making Victor Marx a sandwich. The right sandwich. Without mayo. And the crusts cut off. Otherwise, you know, she might just be asking for it.

I don’t know, though. He’s a sick fuck and a pathological liar, but his could still be a just be an “every pot has its lid” situation involving two very weird people who lie a lot, think they are “The Real Mr. And Mrs. Smith,” and who like to randomly attack one another in order to practice their karate skills.

Like you do.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Those midterm elections are less than four weeks away, and the headlines just keep getting worse for Republicans.

Politico: “Republicans enter triage mode as their election hopes continue to dim.” And it’s illustrated with a picture of Donald Trump leading Lindsey Graham’s undead sister Darline by the hand like he’s trying to make sure she gets to the pudding line at the nursing home safely.

As the article explains, Republicans have pretty much given up on North Carolina, accepting that Thom Tillis’s Senate seat is going to end up belonging to Democrat Roy Cooper. Besides, they suddenly are freaked out about and pouring money into South Carolina, where Darline Graham is apparently basically AWOL, which is probably better for her campaign than showing her face, since she fuckin’ sucks so bad.

Republicans are indeed putting an additional $5 million into the race between Graham and Democrat Annie Andrews, who Trump is now attacking with anti-trans ads and calling her “Tr*nnie Andrews,” because base bigotry is the only thing pigfuck Republicans have left in their arsenal. Clearly they are scared, and the latest polls might be why.

And then there’s Kansas. They’re having to spend money in the Senate race in Kansas, which the Cook Political Report just reclassified as a “Toss-Up.” And Cook is generally pretty small-c conservative about these things. If you look at their current list of toss-ups, you’ll note that it still includes Iowa, Alaska, Maine, Michigan, Texas, and Ohio, all of which look varying degrees of “good” for Democrats. Iowa is starting to look great. Ohio has been looking great. Nate Silver has Texas in the “leans Democrat” category now. Maine is tight, but there are more polls with Troy Jackson up than there are with Susan Collins up. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball just moved the Alaska race between Democrat Mary Peltola and incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan to “leans Democrat.”

The Crystal Ball also has Michigan as “leans Democrat,” which is probably more true than any Republicans would like to admit. If it wasn’t, Mike Rogers wouldn’t be freaking out and releasing ads condemning the “tariff war” between the US and Canada, without mentioning Donald Trump’s name. And Trump wouldn’t be shitting his pants on Truth Social saying that Abdul El-Sayed “goes back to the days of the Jihad,” whatever the hell that means, and also calling him “Mohammed.” (It is entirely possible that Trump is just a senile white supremacist and thinks all Muslims are named “Mohammed.”)

If they weren’t shitting their pants about Michigan, Kash Patel’s FBI probably wouldn’t be making highly illegal campaign ads against El-Sayed.

So it definitely can’t be good for Mike Rogers that some audio just leaked of him making fun of Michigan voters worried about rising costs."Oh my gosh, coffee went up. You know, horror!" said Mike Rogers, in an ad we’re sure Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign is making as we speak.

Seriously, pick a state, and we can tell you how it sucks ass for Republicans right now. Texas? Their current hot attack against James Talarico is that he, himself, is missing in action, because of how he has the flu. He’s still fuckin’ winning, though!

But yeah, Trump is on Truth Social, demanding James TalaFREAKo come out, come out, wherever you are, and debate Ken Paxton. (We guess Natalie forgot to tell Trump that Talarico is selling “Talafreako” shirts on his website, that’s how much that nickname has backfired.)

Famously, Ken Paxton has been hiding from debates with Talarico this entire season, so it might be news to him that Trump is issuing such challenges. Oh yeah, and there’s more leaked Ken Paxton audio of him talking shit about why his impending loss isn’t his fault. “It’s the war, it’s gas prices, it’s diesel.” It’s also that Ken Paxton really sucks, but hey, Donald Trump was still willing to travel to Texas to talk about himself in a room full of empty seats last night, on “Paxton’s” behalf, so we guess they’re fine.

How bad is it for Republicans? Lord, if Democrats can find the money, they want to do a bigger push in Mississippi, which we who are from Memphis still contend is the top sleeper candidate for “Which Southern state would turn blue fastest if you just fucking invested there?” Could Scott Colom win in Mississippi? Could Dan Osborn in Nebraska? Yes and yes.

Quote from anonymous Republican in that Politico article we referenced at the top: “If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006.”

Your mouth to God’s ears, bud.

But speaking of that money, we’ll end this piece where we started, with another horrible headline for Republicans, this time from the Washington Post: “Half a billion dollars in GOP spending does little to move polls.”

The story is basically what the headline says. Republicans have so much goddamned money this cycle, but that’s all they have. Voters simply do not want to eat the fascist shit sundae of failure, lost wars, and high gas prices the Republicans are selling. An excerpt of that article:

Since Labor Day, when President Donald Trump opened up his war chest for the midterms, Republicans have pumped half a billion dollars into competitive House and Senate races.

A month later, the polls haven’t moved in their direction.

High-quality public surveys show Democratic Senate candidates tied or leading in Alaska, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — the same as before Labor Day. Democrats’ lead on the generic congressional ballot has slightly widened since, from about six points to roughly nine, according to analyst Nate Silver’s polling average.

Notably, the surge of attack ads has not sunk the Democrats at the center of some of the most expensive races. More voters hold a favorable than unfavorable view of Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, according to a late September New York Times-Siena poll — despite more than $115 million spent attacking him. Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s favorability actually increased by five points since August, to 47 percent, Fox News surveys show, despite $76.2 million in attacks.

Here’s a video from an MS NOW focus group with 10 Trump voters in Michigan. Five of them are voting for El-Sayed.

Four more weeks.

[Washington Post]

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The press doesn’t seem to think it’s a very big deal that Trump wants to “shove it up [our] ass” and led crowds to cheer when he hypothesized about Iran nuking LA and San Diego, which is different from how the press treats these things when other people say them. (No Democrat has ever mused genially about red states getting nuked.) (Status Kuo) More from Wonkpal Paul Slansky! (Slansky)

Speaking of shoving something up someone’s ass, seriously what’s Trump hiding in there? (Tiedrich)

Whatchu doing Kimberly Guilfoyle? Oh brazen corruption, understood! I’m sure Marco Rubio is in Greece right now “giving a speech” instead of fixing all your Greek shit :) (Gift link Wall Street Journal)

Blue Texas would really fuck their shit up! (Bad Faith Times)

Well of course they’re paying College Republicans to heckle Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan! (Michigan Daily) I hope Hasan Piker listens to him and shuts the fuck up! (Mediaite)

Oooof.

Naomi Klein’s new book starts on a mountaintop with two “faithful men gathering an audience to share their vision”. It’s a vision of a paradise city, gated at every entrance, no need for weapons there, everyone in it rich. One of the men has tears in his eyes as he describes its beauty. The opening scene of End Times Fascism, co-written with Astra Taylor, is not a metaphor, however. The men are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The year is 2026, the mountain is Davos. The paradise city will be called New Gaza.

(The Guardian)

You and I can both buy the Naomi Klein’s End Times Fascism at Bookshop! Bookshop.org is the anti-Amazon, a certified B-corp partnering with local bookstores. Here’s our Bookshop affiliate link, when you buy books, Wonkette gets 10 percent. You can search any old book from that page and it will count. Buy all the books!

Speaking of New Gaza, doesn’t seem like Netanyahu’s doing a very good job keeping Israel safe. His government is supposed to check incoming flight crews for anybody who might, say, try to crash-land a plane full of his citizens. (Haaretz)

Here’s an awful, AWFUL story. A woman running for Congress in Surprise, Arizona, was raped while she was out fixing campaign signs. The rapist’s friend was about to rape her too. And candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia is the one who felt embarrassed and ashamed. (Phoenix New Times)

Facebook and Instagram are banning ads and posts from gay bars, like “pictures of drag queens” — not sexxxy slutty drag queens with big nude boobies and such, just “smiling people dressed in clothes usually worn by the other gender, and also flamboyant makeup” are not allowed, what is even happening. (Chron)

The House Equality Caucus won’t support any Democrats who are shitting on trans friends. GOOD. (Erin in the Morning) New York City is spending millions on gender care for minors, since all the universities and hospitals noped out like a bunch of chickenshits. (Gothamist)

After we knock down all the Trump arches with a hammer, on Day Two we should really do something about revoking Elon Musk’s citizenship. After all, he did lie for his student visa. Boom: jail. Anyway, all his white supremacist shit in one place. (Religion Dispatches)

And a longread on the white supremacist’s DOGE and its literal invasion of the private US Institute of Peace. (Gift link Wall Street Journal)

We’re gonna need a sexy, sexy man, STAT! So: Hello, Mr. Gallant! (Gift link New York Times)

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Wonkette’s day began with not enough coffee and just enough tabs, and yet another microscopic gif, which seems to be a trend this week? What is this, a blog for ANTS?

What? The US military under Trump and Hegseth is lagging behind the forces of Ukraine because our idiots in charge are full of shit? Amazeballs.

Donald Trump had a rally near Baltimore and it was a goat rodeo. The Trump rally, not B’more.

Sean Duffy wants to reward highly fertile Americans with public transit funding, because this is hell and we live here now.

Donald Trump needs a Camp David near his real home, especially so he can charge rent on future presidents.

Everything about the Paramount-Skydance-Warner Bros merger sounds like a dystopian hellscape.

Jim Bakker is dead but his legacy lives on in how fucked up American politics has become.

Yr Wonkette loves you and if you’d like to be a tree, we’re good with that.

Disgraced televangelist, convicted fraudster, and accused rapist Jim Bakker died Monday, making America a slightly better place. Bakker was that most American of types, a flamboyant con man with a gimmick. He was the first American televangelist to make effective use of satellite technology to get his message — and his endless fundraising — to a far broader audience than could be reached by conventional broadcasting. When Bakker began beaming 24/7 religious programming to cable TV providers in 1978, only HBO and Ted Turner’s little UHF station in Atlanta were also up in low earth orbit; ESPN was a year behind Bakker.

Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye, who got her start telling children Bible stories with hand puppets, were very canny broadcasters who merged their Prosperity Gospel brand of fundamentalism with folksy, daytime-TV programming. Unlike a lot of their televangelist contemporaries, they were short on Bible-banging and condemning sinners. Instead, they marketed being born again as a neat lifestyle choice, and promised viewers that if they’d just help Jim and Tammy spread the Good News, God would reward them, just as He had rewarded the Bakkers with riches. (OK, sure, all that wealth actually came from the faithful, but obviously that was God’s will.)

And if viewers had to overextend themselves to have nice things (while also sending money to Jim and Tammy), God would see that risk-taking as a leap of faith, not profligacy. Bakker reassured viewers that “God wants you to be happy. God wants you to be rich. God wants you to prosper, even as your soul prospers.”

Bakker truly lived by his own bullshit principles, believing that he could endlessly milk the faithful for more and more money to build out his Heritage USA theme park and resort. He sold “lifetime memberships” for timeshare hotel rooms, and when funds ran short, he sold the memberships to far more people than could actually use the rooms in any given year. To bring in more cash, he launched still more building projects, trying to fund them through a series of Ponzi schemes that eventually landed him in federal prison for defrauding investors.

In so many ways, Bakker and the rest of the grifty televangelists of the ‘70s and ‘80s prepared America for the rise of Donald Trump, another con artist with a talent for attracting attention and parlaying financial scams into wealth and power. It’s almost no wonder that current-day fundagelicals are among Trump’s most loyal supporters, even as more and more Americans reject him. They’ve been conned by some of the slickest faith-slingers ever, and they like what he’s selling.

The MAGA faithful believe in a freaky End Times Judgment Day in which Trump will mete out Old Testament fury upon America’s enemies — most of whom are other Americans who aren’t like the MAGA faithful.

Then he’ll send everyone who’s left a check for $5,000. You just have to believe.

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Feed The Kitty

Trump may not know anything about the Bible or Christianity, but he knows about faith, and about how to whip up fervor among those who attend his tent revivals. It’s about the excitement, not the fiddly theological details. Trump’s fantastic lies and promises are entertaining, even if they’re completely divorced from reality. We have to do whatever policy Trump wants, and in fact, we have no choice. Only he can do it.

The Trump pitch isn’t all that different from how Oral Roberts told his TV flock in 1987 that a 900-foot-tall vision of Jesus commanded him to raise $8 million to send graduates of Oral Roberts University on medical missionary trips. If he didn’t meet the goal, Roberts said, God would “call him home.” Of course, in those less-enlightened times, Roberts was considered a loon, and his reputation never recovered, but he still had a core of followers who were happy to believe he could raise people from the dead (through the power of Jesus, of course).

Trump also has a televangelist’s knack for sermonizing about anything that’s getting attention in the news and attempting to put an ideological spin on it. Jerry Falwell blithely explained that 9/11 happened because God had lifted His “curtain” of protection from the USA because we had offended Him by allowing abortions and other horrors:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.’”

Similarly, Pat Robertson insisted that God sent Hurricane Katrina to hit New Orleans in 2005 to punish America for abortion, and Falwell agreed. Katrina was actually a matter of some theological disagreement; John Hagee, who went on to promote Trump, said a gay pride parade had provoked God’s wrath on New Orleans, while Franklin Graham said God had sent the hurricane to punish the city for sexual licentiousness during Mardi Gras and also for the practice of voodoo.

Trump, on the other tiny hand, is far more likely to say world events center on him. Wars happen because he’s not in power, good economic news during Joe Biden’s presidency was due only to businesses anticipating Trump would return to power, Trump made it possible for Americans to finally say “Merry Christmas” again after the phrase was banned for years, and even the Best Picture screwup at the 2017 Oscars was due to the award show’s production staff being too focused on attacking him.

American politics has also had many versions of such doomsday prophets, like Glenn Beck, who during Barack Obama’s presidency rode a wave of paranoia and racism to the top of the ratings, with all sorts of wacky predictions of coming Apocalypse, too. Remember that time Beck said he was going to go blind, and we all knew it was because his entire shtick was mental masturbation? Beck was a master of promising some big coming disaster — like Barack Obama committing mass murder any day now — that never came to pass. Very much like a certain president who has since 2017 been promising an amazing new healthcare plan, which he’ll reveal in two weeks.

Hey, speaking of fading memories, we had almost forgotten Beck’s 2010 big slob picnic “Restoring Honor” rally in DC, and how after that America’s honor was restored, or at least there were some hot gay hookups on Craigslist. That completely forgettable nonevent at least inspired the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert “Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear” where we first realized Stewart had fallen in with a bad both-sides crowd.

Trump’s political career is the apotheosis of politics as a kind of tent revival, where religion and politics are blended with weird spectacles like July’s big UFC Bouncy House Battle Brawl or the America 250 shitshow on the national mall, all aimed at glorifying Trump, God, and America, which are the same thing. See also all the weirdass AI iconography of Trump as Jesus (or a doctor, maybe), or the bizarre rhetoric about how God Himself demands we build a gilded ballroom (and drone base) unto the Lord.

We guess the only real difference between Trump and the TV evangelists who preceded him is that when those guys had sex or money scandals, they were sometimes shamed out of their jobs. Jim Bakker lost his ministry and money, then eventually came back from prison and resumed grifting, but never regained the audience or influence he once had. After news broke that he visited prostitutes, Jimmy Swaggart tearfully apologized and went away, leaving only a soiled condom on the chair.

Trump, on the other hand, simply can’t do anything that will bother his diehard supporters, as we’ve seen again and again. We can only conclude that he’s bigger than Jesus.

OPEN THREAD.

[Juicy Ecumenism / Mother Jones / WaPo (2018) / NYT (gift link)]

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What Would Jesus Read?

It’s all over: Paramount and Warner Bros. have been permitted to join forces in the worst fucking merger I have ever seen in my life, and I lived through the Clear Channel radio buyouts that destroyed traditional broadcast media!

That means that the $110 billion Skydance “media consolidation” continues to unfold like a horror film, with overly jolly reporting saying shit like this (emphasis mine):

Earlier in the week, tech was invoked nine times in Ellison and Kreiz’s press release about the new company’s leadership team, which includes veterans of Google, Facebook and Scale AI.

The executives signaled that they will employ artificial intelligence tools — which Ellison has called a “force multiplier” — throughout the business.

And they will move to improve the tech stack that powers streaming services like HBO Max, one of the many Warner assets that Ellison has sought to buy for the past year. (CNN is also a part of Skydance as of Tuesday.)

Great, because that’s exactly what Trump-loving tech billionaires needed, more propaganda power over already thoroughly cooked American brains.

Prefer Paypal?

The Trump-humping billionaire Ellison family now owns:

Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, HBO Max, Pluto TV, Warner Bros., CNN, CBS, CBS Sports, TNT, TNT Sports, Nickelodeon, Discovery, a whole multitude of intellectual properties along the lines of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Star Trek, Top Gun, SpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many more.

And of course, there’s also TikTok!

Not only are people going to get even dumber and crazier because of this, but it’s an absolute fucking nightmare for anybody who has ever worked in or loves Hollywood, or even simply respects the soft power that it has offered us for generations.

No longer! Big Tech (with a lot of help from a Saudi Arabia-led conglomerate, which now owns nearly half of Skydance, oh God) gets the propaganda power of our media now! From the Los Angeles Times, last month:

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery.

Foreign investors, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio. That will give them a hefty stake in CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, HBO and two historic Hollywood film studios. […]

As part of the Communications Act of 1934, Congress placed restrictions on foreign ownership of broadcast outlets because of concerns about national security. Current rules prevent foreign investors from owning more than 25% of a company that holds a U.S. broadcast license — unless the FCC determines that foreign ownership would serve a public interest.

Oh, we know whose interest that is!

But there’s a board, you say?

The board:

Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who stepped down from running the Call of Duty publisher after Microsoft completed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King, is joining David Ellison’s board of directors at the newly christened Skydance following Paramount’s now-completed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed Kotick’s spot on the new board, which was disclosed in a new SEC filing, along with philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair also joins as a board advisor.

Yeah, THIS BOBBY KOTICK. This was what the WSJ had to say about that fucking schlub back in the olden days of 2021:

Activision has been thrown into turmoil in recent months by multiple regulatory investigations into alleged sexual assaults and mistreatment of female employees dating back years. Mr. Kotick has told directors and other executives he wasn’t aware of many of the allegations of misconduct, and he has played down others, according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents.

And don’t get me started on fucking Tony Blair!

In July, California AG Rob Bonta joined other attorneys general to challenge the merger, arguing the deal was not only illegal, but also likely to lessen competition and cause a decline in entertainment quality. And they were right!

LESS THAN THREE MONTHS LATER, here we are, with the Ellison family adding fucking Warner Brothers to their portfolios. Per CalMatters:

It’s the latest episode of California officials confronting big corporate interests over some issue, loudly promising to make business executives change their ways and then caving in. The corporation often makes some minor concessions that allow the officials to save face.

When David Ellison, the Paramount boss, threatened to move his company out of California if the merger was blocked, Bonta accused him of blackmail and renewed his pledge to crack down.

However, the threat changed the dynamics. As very similar articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal described it, Bonta succumbed to political pressure — some from Gov. Gavin Newsom — to compromise.

Fuck you, Rob Bonta and other attorneys general, for pretending that this was something you cared about enough to actually fight for it, only to cave within three fucking months to some of the worst people on earth! Some of us have been fighting them for fucking years because we know they are shitbirds who should never be anywhere near any sort of power, soft or otherwise!

And a very hearty fuck you to David Zaslav, whose cynical statements about the creatives who made the film industry the force it was made me so fucking angry a few years back that I spent time and money I did not have to drive my ass hours to LA multiple times to march with the writers there, because it was the right thing to do!

I’m so fucking angry this was allowed to happen! Look at this shit! This is from Zaslav’s garbage goodbye video, during which he did not choke on a donut, somehow, despite my most fervent wishes.

Behind every one of those moments is the work, talent and commitment of everyone who does their part to bring it all to life. And that is what matters. Honoring the work that came before us, doing our part to carry it forward and knowing that the work continues.

For me, it’s been a great honor to be alongside all of you. I hope you take pride in what you’ve built, what you’ve created and the role you’ve played in shaping an extraordinary history.

What’s past is prologue. The future waits for each and every one of you. For your spirit, your ingenuity, your creativity and your courage.

Oh, fuck you.

And fuck you, too, California electeds and hopeful electeds. I would love to know why our current governor and probable future governor, along with LA Mayor Karen Bass, decided to come out in full-throated support of this mess!

Beyond media, here’s a partial list of shit the Ellison family owns or has investment stakes in, per Thomas Marketing Services:

Skydance, of course
Oracle
Tesla
Theranos (lol)
Sensei Ag
An entire fuckin’ Hawaiian island

You know what I own? A 2009 Toyota Yaris! God, to be a billionaire failson in 2026.

All this just shows me that elected officials and appointees, whose job is literally to protect us from big business getting out of control, didn’t think this through, and further that they aren’t thoughtful enough to grasp the true power and history of our entertainment industry, and they have stopped listening to those of us who do understand this.

During the Biden administration, we had Lina Khan pissing off every corporation that wanted to shit all over our antitrust laws. Now we’re handing our corporate mergers to Prince Bone Saw. At least Lina Khan’s working for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani now, instead of rotting in a gulag somewhere, which we assume is next on their agenda.

Hooray for Hollywood.

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At Zeteo this week, Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez reported that Donald Trump is “consumed” by fears that after he is gone, Democrats will tear down all the monuments he is building in his own honor, and he’s flailing around trying to make sure they can’t. They have five sources on this, all people either in the Trump administration or advisers.

Some […] Trump officials, two of the sources tell Zeteo, have studied examples of efforts to purge specific autocratic political cultures in other countries – such as “de-Ba’athification” in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the “de-Orbánising” taking place in Hungary following the electoral defeat of Trump’s political ally Viktor Orbán. […]

“He has told me and others, more than a few times, that the reversal of this work cannot happen,” [says one adviser]. “The president wants all of it to be there forever. We’re talking about the Kennedy Center, the ballroom, all of it and more. President Trump is looking at his legacy in centuries and this is a huge part.”

It’s funny that they’re studying the fall of other petty tyrants and losers. At least they understand who Trump is, and what kind of disgraced trash he deserves to be remembered as.

He’s reportedly demanding people come up with all kinds of jackass ways to preserve all this ugly stuff, to make it physically difficult to get his name off the Kennedy Center, for example. He wants Congress to pass a law to make his ballroom “permanent.” He wants it to be “illegal” to get rid of money that has his face on it.

For once, he is afraid of something that is real! They’re calling it “De-Trumpification,” and every single Democrat running in 2028 needs to run on it, to vow that just like Trump did with the East Wing, they will call in the bulldozers first and not say they’re sorry later.

Arch: Gone.

The Kennedy Center and whatever else he’s put his name on: Rip the fucking letters down.

Ballroom: Bye, bitch.

Everything he’s done to make the White House look like a gaudy strip club in an abandoned strip mall? Removed. Painted over. Rose Garden restored.

Everything.

It really should be in campaign slogans and commercials. There is no teardown too petty.

Make America Not Look Like Ugly Fucking Trash Again.

And the babbling loser should have to watch it on TV.

But the Washington Post has some new evidence for the “He’s Not Planning On Leaving Anyway” file, and it is that he wants to turn one of his tacky golf clubs into the new Camp David.

Is there something wrong with the current Camp David? Well, no, except for the fact that Dear Leader hates it and always has.

He thinks Camp David is booooooring. So he wants a new one, one that’s architecturally hideous like everything else he does, with fake Mar-a-Lago boobies bouncing around everywhere. Yay, that’s what Dear Leader likes!

The Post reports that Trump wants to take his West Palm Beach club and “give” part of it to the government, to turn it into an “official sanctuary for foreign leaders and future US presidents, designed to host international summits and house presidents when they take vacations in Florida.” Additionally, “Future presidents would also be offered comped memberships to the Trump club.”

Sure. “Future” presidents. Because in the future he’s imagining, any “future” president would just be Don Jr. or Stephen Miller or maybe Peter Thiel and Elon Musk can collect Hitler’s bones and DNA and create a new fancy-schmancy Robot Hitler to be president!

Or maybe he’ll just be president-for-life, like the world leaders he actually admires.

In this future it will of course be illegal for a Democrat to become president.

“Just as Camp David, Windsor Castle, or the Elysee Palace are known worldwide, so too will the Presidential Golf Course in Palm Beach County,” Harvey Oyer, a lawyer representing the Trump course, wrote to the Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners in a letter last month. Oyer asked the county, which owns the property the course is on, to provide a piece of the land to the federal government, and he promised Trump would pay for the construction of a presidential residence and facilities on that land.

Hahahahahahaha fuck that gross loser shit, nobody with class would ever so much as darken the door of the place for the purpose of taking a shit in the foyer.

Anyway, what Trump appears to be jerking his limp mushroom dick off to here is a fantasy — something Natalie printed out for him as a literal AI fantasy, maybe? — where anybody the King grants the right to act as president, they will still have to come kiss his ring. And of course, because he thinks he is a real builder, a real architect, and that people with taste admire him, he fantasizes about them coming to his luxurious palace and ooh-ing and aah-ing.

“The property is minutes away from the Donald J. Trump International Airport, does not have buildings looming, does not have houses along the course, has great security features, is close to law enforcement, and happens to be a highly rated golf course. These are features that are necessary for any presidential retreat,” said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview plans.

Yeah, sure, a presidential retreat tailored to the tastes of one specific tyrant. It probably also has Epstein rooms, for doing whatever Epstein Files stuff Trump likes to do, whatever Todd Blanche is still hiding from the public.

The Post explains that the letter from Oyer acknowledges that construction of this wouldn’t be finished before Trump leaves office (“leaves”) and that it would be a “gift” to future presidents. See what we said above about future presidents being mere figureheads who still want to come and kiss Dear Leader’s ring, because of how they are all Republicans.

“My understanding is that President Trump views this as a lasting contribution to the presidency and to those who will hold the office after him,” [Palm Beach County Administrator] Abruzzo said.

Uh huh.

Different suggestion: If Trump “gives” a piece of his West Palm Beach club to the government, the next president should bulldoze that motherfucker too or turn it into a gay club/abortion clinic/windmill shark sanctuary.

It’ll be fun, and full of sharks and windmills, and also stairs!

Trump loves sharks and windmills and stairs.

[Zeteo / Washington Post]

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Right now would really be a great time to go back in time and fire whatever Kamala Harris aide it was who told Tim Walz to stop calling Trump and his people “weird,” because honestly there is no other word for them at this point. Trump is ranting about “complicated lawnmowers” and “transgender for everyone” — which, who even knows what that’s supposed to be. Mandatory sex changes?

What else? Well, the Trump administration is getting close to realizing Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s dream, first announced all the way at the beginning of Trump’s current term but which he seems to think is a great idea to re-announce right before the midterm elections, of tying funding for public transit to birth and marriage rates. Now, it sounds crazy, mostly because it is crazy and also because those things do not have anything to do with one another, but it fits in with Duffy’s personal agenda of using his position as Transportation secretary to push his freaky pronatalist shit upon the rest of the country and turn us all into a bunch of Duggars.

THIS ONE!

Duffy, whose primary qualification for the role was his participation in MTV’s Road Rules/Real World Challenge, has nine children himself, with fellow reality TV wingnut Rachel “Absolutely Wanted To Fuck The Obnoxious, Smelly Homophobe Who Picked His Nose And Put It In The Peanut Butter Jar” Campos-Duffy.

Under the new proposal, areas that have higher birth rates than the national average will get up to 10 percent more funding than other areas, regardless of actual need.

“Moving forward, the federal government is focusing on smart, affordable projects with high ridership. If you want federal funding, your project needs to align with where communities and families are actually growing,” the Transportation Department said in a statement obtained by Politico.

Gosh, could it just be innocent? Could it be that he just wants to fund transit in the areas where it is most needed, due to population increases? Not even remotely! Because the five states with the highest birth rates are South Dakota, Nebraska, Alaska, North Dakota, and Kentucky.

Three of those states — South Dakota, Alaska, and North Dakota — are also in another top five: the top five states with the lowest population density. Which means that they probably don’t need a ton of buses or a high speed rail system.

Meanwhile, there are a ton of smaller cities with absolutely terrible public transit systems that actually do need that funding.

If you don’t pay enough attention to the bad parts of the internet, you may be wondering what the hell this is about. Well, the far Right has, in the last few years, gone absolutely bug-fucking-baby-crazy. They can’t stop talking about how OH MY GOD EVERYONE NEEDS TO HAVE TEN MILLION BABIES RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Even though, you know, we don’t have anywhere near enough obstetricians to deliver all of those babies or enough pediatricians to care for all of the children, especially in the sparsely populated rural areas where Duffy wants to put all of the buses.

There are a few reasons for this, all of which are very, very stupid.

First, the usual racism bullshit about propagating the white race and what have you. They don’t like it when they hear that, even just from a purely practical perspective, we need immigrants to work here, they’re upset about predictions that white people will eventually be a minority in this country, and their solution to this is “more white babies.”

Second, they believe it’s key to winning the culture war because studies show that people, women in particular, become more conservative when they have kids. They’re very, very mad at all of the lefty women going around ruining everything by voting and what-have-you and are trying desperately trying to convince the younger generation to aspire towards nothing but being stay-at-home mothers and sexmaids for their patriarchs.

Third, they want a redistribution of women. Thanks to the influence of crazy ass incel messageboards, red pill influencers, and professional misogynists, young men have become increasingly repulsive, which is probably why studies show that they are far more interested in getting married than are young women.

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All of this aside — doesn’t the Right actually hate public transportation? Like, hasn’t the whole crazy Republican thing for the last few years been that they think public transportation and 15-minute cities where you can walk to most of the things you need instead of driving are parts of an evil conspiracy to force them to stop having cars so that they have no way to get away when the we start doing tyranny to them and forcing them to become furries or something? Or aren’t they at least afraid that it might be better for the environment or that it could reduce our dependence on oil? Especially now that we even have electric/hybrid buses?

Even if they’re not crazy conspiracy theorists, I don’t know how many people are interested in dragging nine kids on a bus on the regular, unless they are using those kids to scam tourists into giving them money for their “soccer team.” At that point, I think you probably need to invest in your own sprinter van.

This is all about social engineering, which is not the usual kind of engineering we associate with trains. For all the Right cries that we’re trying to “control them,” they’re the ones obsessed with homogeneity, they’re the ones talking about how they need everyone to be just like them. They’re the ones trying to tell people what to do with their lives. Duffy wants to “reward” people for doing what he wants them to do with their lives.

But there is a chance it could backfire. Public transit is pretty fucking awesome, and providing that for people just might get them to start thinking differently about how we might use our taxes for things other than cops and war. For all Sean Duffy knows, this could turn them into full-on sewer socialists, expecting their tax dollars to be used for things that actually benefit them in their daily lives. The horror!

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