"Behold. The Festering Carcass Of American Rot"

In this blog, I am always happy to cite writers whose insights are worthy of note. My sources of those writers are many, and sometimes arise from the recommendations of others. My good friend John, also a man of deep insights (I'm truly blessed with such companions, including Steve and Dom), alerted me to Oliver Kornetzke. The writer offers a searing, withering portrait of the man the Amerikans have twice chosen to lead them to their doom:

“Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul - all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn't but always has been - arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshipped like gospel. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul - it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.”

Kornetzke gave additional analysis of Trump and his gang of barbarians in an essay he originally wrote in April. 

What’s happening in this country isn’t just cruel—it’s methodical, strategic, and deeply familiar to anyone who’s studied or survived under regimes built on repression and rot.

 We’re watching a script play out—one that was written in the blood and bureaucracy of Putin’s Russia, refined in the dungeons of Chechnya, perfected through decades of oligarchic decay, secret police intimidation, and mafia-state theatrics. And now it’s being re-staged here in America, rebranded with flags and lapel pins and the tired language of “law and order.”

The Trump regime—this carnival of third-rate strongmen, grifters, sycophants, and sadists—isn’t innovating anything. It’s copying. It’s importing the authoritarian model wholesale. They’ve read the Putin playbook, dog-eared the best parts, and now they’re running it in real time. And the cruelty? That’s not a flaw in the system. That is the system.

Because cruelty serves a dual purpose: it distracts and it paralyzes. It shocks the conscience just long enough to make you forget about the theft happening in broad daylight. It freezes resistance by making you wonder who’s next. It’s not just about dehumanizing the target—it’s about disarming the observer. You see a 52-year-old seamstress abducted by masked agents in broad daylight, and your mind stops. That’s the point. While you’re frozen, they’re looting the vault. 

Just as the Nazis had their terror squads, so does Trump.

That’s what ICE is now—a terror squad designed not just to punish the “other,” but to frighten the rest into submission. They don’t need to knock on your door. They just need you to see what happens when they knock on hers. They want you disoriented, enraged, heartbroken, and above all—silent.

Kornetzke has not abandoned all hope, however, and predicts the Trump regime will ultimately fail.

...you can only keep people paralyzed for so long. Fear calcifies. Shock fades. And eventually, rage focuses.

 Rage, yes—but don’t retreat. Pay attention. Speak out. If something feels wrong, say it’s wrong. Refuse to play along with their language, their framing, their euphemisms. They are not “removing undocumented immigrants.” They are disappearing people. They are not “restoring law and order.” They are weaponizing the state.

Remembering our collective humanity can also be a potent antidote to tyranny: 

...there will ... be courage. And solidarity. And moments that remind us exactly why we fight.

Because we don’t do it for the flag. We don’t do it for politicians. We do it for every seamstress dragged from her car. Every family torn apart. Every dissident silenced. Every protestor jailed. We do it to honor the civil rights marchers, the freedom riders, the Stonewall rebels, the water protectors, the labor organizers—the defiant, the bold, the brave. 

Fighting the good fight has never been easy. As a teacher, I always tried to instill, through literature, the power of integrity and demonstrate that courage, resistance and truth, while they often appear to exist in only small pockets against seemingly insurmountable power, ensure that we retain our humanity.

 

 

The Truth About Charlie Kirk

Unfortunately, the lionization of the late racist Charlie Kirk is not confined to the Benighted States of Amerika. To the Conservatives of Canada, Charlie Kirk is a martyr to free speech, a man who spoke fearlessly his 'truth'. Shamefully, after the disgraceful speech by Rachel Thomas, the Liberals joined in on the ovation:

Thankfully, Pastor Howard John Wesley fearlessly spoke the truth about the deceased. He said, "how you die does not redeem how you live."

Guess who will be labelled an enemy of the state and b the recipient of death threats? Hint: it won't be the white Conservative lass.

But I Thought Amerika Loves Free Speech.

Just a follow up on my previous post, which tried to take to task the arrant hypocrisy of Amerikans who trumpet free speech but become virulently opposed to it when their sensibilities are offended.

Apostles of the deceased right-wing emblem are warning Americans to get in line and mourn Charlie Kirk properly or be prepared for severe consequences.

At least 15 people have been fired or suspended from their jobs after discussing the killing online, according to a Reuters tally based on interviews, public statements and local press reports. The total includes journalists, academic workers and teachers. On Friday, a junior Nasdaq employee was fired over her posts related to Kirk.

Others have been subjected to torrents of online abuse or seen their offices flooded with calls demanding they be fired, part of a surge in right-wing rage that has followed the killing.

Some Republicans want to go further still and have proposed deporting Kirk's critics from the United States, suing them into penury or banning them from social media for life.

The hypocrisy of this right-wing pearl-clutching is rather breathtaking, but hardly surprising.

Republicans' anger at those disrespecting Kirk's legacy contrasts with the mockery some of the same figures – including Kirk – directed at past victims of political violence.

For example, when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul was clubbed over the head by a hammer-wielding conspiracy theorist during a break-in at their San Francisco home shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, Higgins posted a photo making fun of the attack. He later deleted the post.

Trump's whisperer Laura Loomer suggested that

Paul Pelosi and his assailant were lovers, calling the brutal assault on the octogenarian a “booty call gone wrong.” Speaking to a television audience a few days after the attack, a grinning Kirk called for the intruder to be sprung from jail.

And, of course, there was the deafening silence when Democrats were murdered. Herr Trump, who has been quite vocal about Kirk's killing, had nothing good or constructive to say when the other team was falling victim to violence last June. In fact, he politicized those deaths for his own advantage.

Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were killed along with their dog, and State Sen. John Hoffman, a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were shot and wounded.

 Following the Minnesota shooting, Trump called the incident "absolutely terrible," however, he slammed Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, and did not call him.

"I think he's a terrible governor. I think he's a grossly incompetent person. But I may, I may call him, I may call other people too," he told ABC News' Rachel Scott on June 15. 

"Why would I call him? I could call and say, 'Hi, how you doing?' Uh, the guy doesn't have a clue. He's a mess. I could be nice and call, but why waste time?" Trump told reporters on June 17.

Yet those disrespecting Kirk's memory and legacy are being ferreted out, a myriad of punishments awaiting them.

The campaign to fire Kirk’s critics has not slowed. Calls to run people out of jobs have flooded across X. A newly registered site, "Expose Charlie's Murderers," has 41 names of people it alleged were “supporting political violence online” and claims to be working on a backlog of more than 20,000 submissions. 

And Canadians, within Canada, are not exempt from this surge of outrage.

 A University of Toronto professor whose social-media post after the assassination of American political activist Charlie Kirk was criticized by Ontario’s Minister of Colleges and Universities is now on leave, according to the university.

Ruth Marshall, an associate professor in religious studies and politics, has been placed on administrative leave, the University of Toronto’s faculty association confirmed Friday.

An account on X, apparently connected to Prof. Marshall, posted Wednesday afternoon that “shooting is honestly too good for so many of you,” using a profanity and describing the subjects as “fascist.” 

While obviously her remarks were intemperate, it is disturbing to see a Canadian institution devoted to free speech overreacting thus. 

And one wonders what the consequences will be for the European Union, whose members refused to support a minute of silence for the fallen Kirk. 

... the refusal of Katarina Barley, a vice-president of the chamber, to let some MEPs hold a minute of silence for Charlie Kirk has sparked uproar among many conservative MEPs, including inside the European People’s party. 

Surely such disrespect will not go without consequences by the Amerikan arbiters of all that is holy and sacred.

The message is clear. Some lives matter more than others. In the fraught and roiling political landscape of Trump's Amerika, that means Republican lives will always trump Democratic ones. 

What Being A Patriot Now Means In Amerika

Well, in light of the murder of right-wing emblem Charlie Kirk, Trump's Amerika is enjoying a shot in the arm (no pun intended). That free-speech loving country is now being encouraged to report all free speech about Kirk's death if it doesn't accord with the official narrative of the slain right-wing leader as a secular saint.

America will take action against foreigners who “glorify violence” or otherwise “make light” of the shooting death of right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk, a Trump official said on X Thursday, as he encouraged people to report violators to the government in order to “protect the American people.”

U.S. deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau wrote that such people are not welcome in the United States, and that he has instructed consular officials to take “appropriate action” against those who “praise” or “rationalize” the shooter’s actions.

Good Amerikans, never ones to be asleep at the switch, are readily heeding the call:

In the hours after Landau’s post asking for reports about foreigners making light of Kirk’s death, he received almost 4,000 responses, including from users who posted screenshots from the personal social media accounts, including photos, of people that users claimed had “sided with America’s enemies,” as one widely-shared response put it. 

Trump whisperer Laura Loomer is also getting in on the 'patriotic' action, claiming

 on X that she’d gotten a government employee fired after publicly posting screenshots of his social media accounts, one of which included a post of him calling Kirk a “literal racist.” The “Libs of TikTok” X account has posted photos of several dozen people, including teachers, government employees and even a reality TV show contestant, it claims have celebrated Kirk’s death. Self-described political strategist Joey Mannarino posted on X that he’d been “reporting people to their jobs all day.” 

As I predicted in yesterday's post, a new era of repression and terror is beginning, and the Benighted States is becoming an even more dangerous place than it has already been under the second Trump regime.

Calling for action against those who express controversial opinions is “striking and dangerous,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, an associate professor who studies conspiracy theories and online communities at Queen’s University, in an email.  

Landau “is basically crowdsourcing surveillance and turning social media users into informants for state power,” he wrote. “This opens the door for abuse, with people mass-reporting foreigners whose politics they dislike, knowing it might jeopardize their visas.”

One needn't be an ardent student of history to understand that the current Amerikan trajectory mimics that of Nazi Germany.  This small snippet serves as a potent reminder, however:

To make up for a lack of staff, the Gestapo decided the vast majority of the population were loyal to the regime. It ruthlessly targeted its resources against groups within German society defined as political opponents, most notably, communists and socialists, religious dissidents, Jews, and a much broader group of ‘racial’ enemies, including long-term criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, Gypsies, juvenile gangs and the long-term unemployed. 

'Loyal' Amerikans would likely dismiss such parallels as the hysterical rantings of "the radical left." In their hubris and profound ignorance of the world and history beyond their borders, they would undoubtedly claim that their persecution of unpopular views is entirely different and in defence of God and country. 

Hmm, I do believe that is exactly what the Nazis claimed to be doing as well.

 

They Are Contemptible

As I have written before, there seems to be no bottom to the depths to which Republicans in general, and one in particular, will descend. In the aftermath of the killing of right-wing star Charlie Kirk, this is what Trump, fulminating with righteous hypocrisy, had to say:

You don't need me to discuss the implication of his speech, but it certainly sounds like, in politicizing Kirk's killing (something Republicans always accuse Dems of during after school shootings), Trump intends to bring a new reign of terror and repression upon Amerika, especially with regard to free speech, political and media opposition to his agenda, etc. 

And his fury seems quite partisan. As the NYT observes, 

Mr. Trump made no mention of attacks on Democrats, including Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, who was killed in June.

The question in my mind is how the Democrats will respond to this. My suspicion, given their spinelessness, is that they will condemn the violence but be very wary of criticizing Trump's speech, their shrinking political fortunes uppermost in their mind. 

In other words, there will likely be no one to oppose what is to come.

No More 'Good Guys'?

When we look at the world today, it is undeniable that the most powerful countries are led by evil men. Russia's Putin, Amerika's Trump and China's Xi  JinPing readily come to mind, as does Benjamin Netanyahu leading the nuclear State of Israel. And I think it would be to declare the obvious that none of the aforementioned care about their people, except as means to certain ends.

While we expect authoritarian rulers to see their people as fodder, I have never really had a sense until now of a specific war being waged against the people of the U.S. by its government. To be sure, almost all American governments have cruelly abused their poor, their disenfranchised, their minorities. And of course that demographic has always provided the bulk of fodder in all of Amerika's post-WW11 military misadventures. However, one could almost have believed the abuse was rooted in the American disdain for the downtrodden (see the American Dream) as well as its historically racist nature.

However, to me it now appears that a wider battle is being waged by Amerika against its general population,  a kind of social eugenics, in which a wide swath of a credulous population will be gradually eliminated, While it might seem a conspiratorial thought, there is evidence to support my odd thesis.

Consider, for example the changes at the National Institutes of Health, led by the unhinged Bobby Kennedy Jr. Unqualified ethically, morally, intellectually or temperamentally, Kennedy, with the tacit permission of Trump, is doing his damndest to undermine the health of Americans. Claiming he wants to make America healthy again, he has systematically cut all manner of research grants.

Between late February and early April 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) executed an unprecedented wave of grant terminations, impacting a total of 694 active grants. 

The broad distribution of terminated grants demonstrates a systemic reshaping of NIH’s research portfolio. Nearly every institute experienced cutbacks, but the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) bore a disproportionate share of the reductions, accounting for 30% of the total funding loss. This notable concentration of cuts suggests targeted policy shifts or budgetary realignments that may adversely affect ongoing efforts to address persistent health disparities among minority populations.

Then, of course, there is Kennedy's broad undermining of confidence in vaccinations, recently claiming, for example, that healthy people have no need of vaccines. It is a position that led to him being excoriated this past week during a senate hearing over his tenure thus far:

The Senate’s second-highest ranking Republican, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY)—a physician—delivered a blistering rebuke of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing him of advancing vaccine policies that undermine public health. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy—also a physician—also harshly questioned the HHS chief.

“Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” Senator  Barrasso began. “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.”

"The public has seen measles outbreaks, leadership with the National Institutes of Health questioning the use of mRNA vaccines, the recently confirmed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fired. Americans don’t know who to rely on,” Barrasso exclaimed.

How many more will die or become permanently disabled because the NIHS is led by a lunatic?

And that lunacy is filtering down to the state level. Florida, under the banner of freedom for all, has made a decision.

Florida will move to end all vaccine mandates in the state, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced Wednesday.

The move would make Florida the first state to end a longstanding – and constitutionally upheld – practice of requiring certain vaccines for school students.

The state health department will immediately move to end all non-statutory mandates in the state, Ladapo said at a news conference. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was also at the event, said state lawmakers would then look into developing a legislative package to end any remaining mandates.

Ladapo [a Black man] said that every vaccine mandate “is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”

Now, there is much more evidence I could adduce to support my contention, but let's cut to the chase. Who benefits if there is a substantial die-off of Americans? It is the real movers and shakers of society, the powerful elite, who neither respect nor need "the masses" and really don't care for the 'burden' of taxation to take care of them. With large numbers ultimately eliminated, that burden will be much reduced.

You might quite legitimately ask, "But what if substantial numbers of MAGATS perish? Who will vote for Trump or his successor if not the credulous? To that I can only say such a question is predicated on the belief that meaningful elections will continue in Amerika. That is an assumption I am not, at this point, prepared to grant you.

The Return Of Gunboat 'Diplomacy'

I haven't had a lot of spare time of late to write, and today will see but a brief post to observe the following: as the U.S. continues its transition to domestic fascism, it is not forgetting the rest of the world in the process.

News comes daily about the sight of soldiers in the streets, with the national guard this past summer in Los Angeles and currently occupying D.C. Herr Trump promises, despite the legal obstacles, to dispatch them to Democratic cities like Chicago and Baltimore, despite plummeting crime rates. Of course red states are currently being ignored, many of which have higher murder rates.

But not satisfied to subjugate the domestic populace, the mad king is bent on imposing his rule on the world. Tariffs are assuaging part of that imperialistic impulse, but he certainly plainly intends to use his mighty military toys where he deems fit.

Having already labelled Venezuela a narco state and repository of terrible gangs such as Tren de Argua  (Orwell's Goldstein of the current era), it seems that all force is now being legitimized to stop this scourge, as evidenced by by the American ships positioned off of that South American country's shores. 

But what fun is having such military might if you don't use it? The Yanks answered that one quickly enough, firing upon a boat purportedly carrying drugs bound for America.

The president said in a Truth Social social media post that 11 people were killed in the U.S. military operation, and he posted a video of a small vessel appearing to explode in flames.

"The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States," Trump said in the posting. "No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America."

Now, I have no sympathy for drug cartels and their trafficking, but several questions need to be raised here: 

• how did the Americans know the boat was carrying drugs?
• how did they identify the Tren de Aragua gang as the occupants of the boat?
• why did they not simply stop the boat and arrest the alleged culprits?

Ultimately, the most important question is the one involving due process. While many Americans may mindlessly cheer the obliteration of drug smugglers, they also need to recognize that the elimination of due process is happening in their own country, as we see in the mass deportations currently underway. 

But then again, perhaps the mindless, aka the MAGATS, are okay with that too.