It’s weird. Horrifying. At the very least, eye-opening. But mostly it is weird and horrifying. Nicholas Joseph Fuentes. Several television commentators refuse to use his name or to give his website any exposure.
Of course the GOP is silent on this guy who is tightly aligned with the former president. He had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the former president, grifter Donald J. Trump. Fuentes is an extreme racist and anti-Semite and has publicly called for a white person to get elected president, then suspend elections and democracy to become a white Christian nationalist regime with a dictator.
Right now that proposed dictator is the grifter in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. This guy has a podcast and other ways of reaching his fellow racists and anti-Semites. The Anti-Defamation League has a very extensive dossier we can read online.
He says women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. That not only should abortion be banned, but contraceptives, same sex marriage, sodomy and homosexuality. He is a Holocaust denier and claims Jews are in charge of the media, which is why most Americans “like” abortion, contraceptives, same sex marriage, sodomy and a few other activities he considers immoral. He said the Jewish media magnates have brainwashed most of America into “liking” all of these things.
Fuentes wants good Catholics running the country according to his interpretation of the Bible. Fuentes wants a good Catholic to be the dictator.
Nick Fuentes is a little nut bar who joined the thousands of other nut bars who attempted to over throw the government on January 6, 2021. He has a following so Fuentes is a dangerous seditionist. Yep, Nick Fuentes is truly horrifying.
But then there was the little Pro-MAGA event put on by the New York Young Republican Club dinner. That Georgia nut bar Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had something to say about the January 6, 2021 failed coup. She told the adoring audience, “I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed.”
When the media and White House pushed back on her words, the soon-to-be former Mrs. Greene claimed she was just being sarcastic. After the White House condemned her comments Greene said, “The White House needs to learn how sarcasm works. My comments were making fun of Joe Biden and the Democrats, who have continuously made me a political target since January 6th.”
Greene said she would never back down from her support of the Second Amendment. She added, “I will never allow the White House, Democrats, or the media to continue to accuse me of something I had nothing to do with.”
The truth of course is that Greene was involved in the planning of the pro-Trump Rally taking place at the Ellipse right before the MAGA crowd stormed the capitol, plus she helped organize House Republicans in their effort to overturn the 2020 general election. Between the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate 147 Republicans — a majority of the GOP caucus — voted not to certify the 2020 election, i.e. voted to be seditionists. And that took place after the MAGA crowd stormed the capitol in an effort to stop the certification. Is anyone surprised MTG lied?
One of the great moments of the insurrection came when leaders from both parties got together to plan out how they would complete the certification of the 2020 general election on that day and to get help from the National Guard for the beleaguered Capitol and DC Metro Police.
Nancy Pelosi … the GOP fears Pelosi. That’s why they created so many attack ads and fear mongering fund raising messages with the Speaker’s name and (usually) grotesquely Photoshopped face.
We can ask the question, “Why does the GOP fear Nancy Pelosi?” It’s really a simple answer. She had been the most successful Speaker of the House in modern times. My good friends on the far left will disagree, labeling Pelosi a corporate Democrat, but reality claps back on the criticism while at the same time exposing why Republicans are so afraid of Nancy Pelosi.
The list of her accomplishments as Speaker of the House, starting with the glass ceilings she broke: Was first elected to Congress in 1987. She was the first minority whip in 2001, became the first woman to be the minority leader in 2002, and finally the first woman Speaker of the House in 2007 … then again in 2019. I bet Kevin McCarthy is sitting on the sidelines whimpering about Nancy being more popular with her caucus than he is with his.
So her biggest legislative accomplishment is ushering the Affordable Care Act in to be signed by President Barack Obama. It was Pelosi’s persistence and will power that got the bill passed in the House and helped get it passed in the Senate. She also worked hard to repeal the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that banned LGBTQ+ individuals from serving in the military. She also whipped up most of her caucus against an Iraq War resolution.
Pelosi angered the Chinese government — twice. Early in her legislative career she visited China and, with two of her colleagues, held up a banner honoring the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They were chased away by the Chinese security forces. More recently she visited Taiwan, giving a major speech in Taipei.
Since retaking the gavel in 2019 she pushed back on most of the former president’s grotesque and hate-filled policies. Then in 2021 when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and Joe Biden was in the White House, she pulled her caucus together to pass the sweeping infrastructure bill, ending our failed war against marijuana. Student debt relief. Pelosi helped pass the most aggressive climate and environmental justice agenda, the first meaningful gun violence reduction legislation in nearly 30 years.
Well, that was a helluva tangent and there’s probably more, but that’s about all I can remember. This should also note Nancy Pelosi is stepping down from her leadership role, along with several other Democrats. Hakeem Jeffries will be the minority leader once the new congress begins. My guess is the GOP will still be afraid of Pelosi if she is in Congress.
Best wishes to Pelosi’s husband Paul. He was attacked by a hammer-wielding nut who hit Paul Pelosi in the head hard enough to cause a skull fracture.
Republicans aren’t even trying to hide their anti-Semitic and bigoted views. The leader of the New York Young Republican Club invited the guy who promoted the PizzaGate conspiracy theory that drove one deranged follower to enter the Washington, D.C. pizzeria and shoot up the place.
Also on the bill was the guy who started the anti-immigration group VDare. I wasn’t going to mention his name, but Peter Brimelow has an interesting, i.e. ironic and possibly hypocritical history. He was born in Warrington, Lancashire, England and immigrated to the United States to spew his racist, white nationalist, anti-immigration views. So he started VDare, I wonder if the National Review and Marketwatch were glad to be rid of him. He was a reporter/editor for the former and a columnist for the latter.
VDare don’tcha know, was selected as a name because the first child born to English — white — colonists was named Virginia Dare. Well, isn’t that cute.
Brimelow has said America’s immigration policy is “Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America.” His website has become a welcome hub of white nationalist, racist and anti-Semitic agitators who want to change the immigration laws to not allow non-white people into the U.S. Just click on this Wikipedia page to read all about Peter Brimelow, his website and all the racist anti-Semites that post on it. The Southern Poverty Law Center consider them to be an anti-immigration hate site and the Anti-Defamation League said, “VDARE posts, promotes, and archives the work of racists, anti-immigrant figures, and anti-Semites.” No need to get bogged down by all the details.
They are obviously afraid of Nancy Pelosi too, and especially the original “Squad” that was four non-white women in Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and my personal favorite … well maybe I don’t have a favorite I don’t know, I’m conflicted. It’s like that time my two older sisters, Cheryl and Mary Lou, cornered me and asked which of my sisters was my favorite because they knew, unequivocally, it was my younger sister Elaine. I only did LSD once with my two older sisters … maybe more than once — anyway Lainey and I shared many a memorable night/day tripping and otherwise using, as Frank Zappa called, them, “trendy chemical amusement aid(s)” Check out the album, Studio Tan, and the song/story, “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary” and how Greggery outwits the “slowly aging, very hip young people.”
Anyway Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is the fourth member of The Squad. They might be the most reviled members of the House of Representatives … oh, I don’t know. The GOP uses AOC for fund raising, but they raise funds by using the entire Squad, which now, I understand, includes a man, Jamal Brown of New York and another woman, Cori Bush of Missouri, both of whom are, unequivocally, non-white. I point out that last detail to ask a rhetorical question: “Do the far-right people like Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor and Ann Coulter get apoplectic when the Squad gets on the groove tube and starts talking about equality for all?”
Is Ann Coulter still relevant?
So, avoiding any further tangents, this is what it all boils down to, this screed: The GOP — The Grand Old Party —, Republican Party is the party of racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Like I pointed out earlier they don’t even try to hide it anymore. The fact is, the GOP base is largely filled with the racist folk and it’s the GOP’s own damn fault. It goes back to 1968 when the Nixon Campaign started courting the Dixiecrats, the racist members of the Democratic Party who left the party instead of agreeing to support the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and otherwise treating black folk as equals.
“No siree, Billy Bob! We ain’t letting’ any colored people in my store!” And voila! As if on command The Civil Rights marchers would find those places and occupy them. I’m almost tempted to call it a thing of beauty, but for anyone who watched the nightly news, or was participating in the Civil Rights movement, the reaction to the civil rights marchers was brutal, inhumane and filled with hate. One need only examine the fates of Emmitt Till, Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman; Addie Mae Collins, age 14, Cynthia Wesley, also age 14, Carole Robertson, age 14 and Carol Denise McNair, age 11 — the Birmingham Four — young girls killed when a bomb went off in the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama.
Then of course there was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The names mentioned here are just a very small percentage, maybe one half of 1% of the men, women and children killed by white Europeans and their offspring, over 400 years of horror.
There was a guy In Milwaukee I met, James Cameron (not the filmmaker), who started the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee a few decades after he survived an attempted lynching. He could see his two friends severely beaten and hanged from a tree in the courthouse yard. The bodies stayed there for hours so the white folks could ogle and cheer for what happened.
So James Cameron survived and created the Black Holocaust Museum.
The white woman who the three young black men were accused of raping, recanted her story several years later. Bear in mind, this lynching wasn’t in the Deep South where racism and Jim Crow were the orders of the land. Nope, Cameron’s experience happened in Marion, Indiana, August 7, 1930.
Cameron died in 2007. If you’re interested, he wrote a book about the experience and so much more, called A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story. Those are his two friends hanging from the tree in Marion, Indiana.
As of now Kevin McCarthy hasn’t secured enough votes to elect him as Speaker of the House. He just isn’t racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-wok-ish and anti-democracy enough to gain the support of his entire House caucus. He has very little support among the Freedom Caucus.
We know for a fact who will be in the Democratic Leadership once the next congress convenes, but we have no idea who the GOP leadership will be because they can’t get their act together. Democrats are ushering in a new generation of leadership, starting with the next House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The Republicans: Nada.
Today the long-awaited 1/6 Committee report is set to be delivered. The committee, led by Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and ranking member Liz Cheney (R-WY) has been working for about 18 months and now there is a hard deadline of January 1, 2023 because the Republican Party is set to take over control of the House of Representatives when the next congress begins in early January. That is the end of this select committee.
Just this week the committee referred to the Department of Justice four charges against the former president and several of his associates: 1) allegedly obstructing an official proceeding, 2) conspiracy to defraud the government, 3) inciting an insurrection and 4) conspiracy to make a false statement.
Trump’s attorney and buddy, John Eastman, also had charges referred to the DoJ: allegedly obstructing an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the government.
Also referred to the DoJ for possible prosecution: Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark (Don’t know what his job was) and Kenneth Chesebro.
The committee also referred to the House Ethics Committee several members of the House of Representatives who did not honor the subpoenas they were served. With the GOP set to take over the leadership all we can say is, “Good luck with that.”
We say “allegedly” for the legal niceties, but with all the evidence and testimony we have seen and heard there’s very little doubt all of them are guilty. Them and many more. Now it’s up to Jack Smith, the special councel over seeing all charges related to Donald J. Trump, the former president and the world’s biggest grifter. I was about to say the world’s greatest grifter. But I’ve seen all the Ocean’s 11 movies — including the eight. You remember that one, Ocean’s 8, with Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awekwafina, Rihanna and Helena Bonham Carter.
The fictional characters in those movies are far greater grifters that any of the Trumps may fancy themselves and as often as Trump has declared bankruptcy, he isn’t the world’s greatest grifter in reality either … well, maybe he is. He got over 74 million people to vote him — in a re-election bid after we had the better part of the four years to see him for what he is: an unindicted criminal.
But I digress.
So much has transpired since I first began adding words to this post it’s hard to remember it all. It seems so long ago when I first heard about Nick Fuentes — November 29.
New transcripts have been dropped while we waited for the full report to get published. Many of them are recitations on the phrase, “I plead the fifth.” You know what is funny, in the “I’m not laughing” sort of way? Retired lieutenant general Mike Flynn pleaded the fifth when asked, “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?”
You’d think that would be easy to answer, “Yes.” But not for Lieutenant General Flynn.
That is what makes up a lot of those transcripts, witnesses pleading the fifth. This is what the Fifth Amendment says: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
I doubt a majority of Americans have actually spent time reading the Constitution of the United States, in particular the Fifth Amendment. Sad to say, ignorance and mediocrity are the leading traits found in a large percentage of Americans. Maybe it’s a large majority of Americans. That’s why crooks like Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump were elected president.
Nixon was re-elected. And why? The Nixon campaign was able to portray the Democratic candidate George McGovern as weak — despite McGovern being a bomber pilot in World War II who flew 35 missions out of Italy — and his first V.P. running mate Thomas Eagleton — who was on the ticket a whopping 18 days — too sketchy to be so close to that nuclear war button.
In Eagleton’s defense, he didn’t go through the heavy vetting process V.P. candidates usually go though now before the presidential candidate announces his — or hers now — name to thousands of cheering fans at the national convention, in the case of McGovern and Eagleton, in Miami, Florida. Plus, Eagleton wasn’t even McGovern’s first choice … or his second choice, nor his third. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy passed, then Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut before giving the senator from Missouri the call.
When the media kept asking McGovern and Eagleton the same questions, campaign stop after campaign stop, about Eagleton’s mental health, Eagleton announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I will not divide the Democratic Party. Therefore, tomorrow morning I will write to the chairman of the Democratic Party withdrawing my candidacy.”
That was the end of Tom Eagleton’s future aspirations.
We should also note, Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” had already been arrested for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee (June 17, 1972) where they were trying to install listening devices
Did the Nixon campaign have anything to do with exposing Eagleton’s supposedly private medical records? Considering Nixon committed treason in 1968, when he caused the 1968 peace negotiations to stop by promising the South Vietnamese government a better deal if they pulled out of the peace negotiations with North Vietnam. In January 1973 , just over four years after Nixon pulled that treasonous act, the peace accords were signed in Paris, France without any delegation from South Vietnam. In other words, the Nixon Administration screwed South Vietnam royally. And the Vietnam War would drag on until April 30, 1975 — which cost the lives of more than 130 Americans.
Sorry (not sorry) about the lengthy tangent. The point is if “we” are willing to elect crooks like Nixon and Trump, then, at best, we are a nation defined by ignorance and mediocrity. As Kellyanne Conway said in 2017 during a “Meet the Press,” interview, they would be using “alternate facts,” Which, Chuck Todd pointed out were nothing more than falsehoods.
Obviously there are so many Americans for whom truth and facts don’t matter — and losing our democracy doesn’t matter — those of us who do care about facts, truth and democracy cannot give the alternate facts crowd any credibility. We are all allowed to have are personal opinions, but not “alternative facts.” The facts are the facts, whether we like them or not.
It makes the Nick Fuentes saga seem long ago, quaint even. Just recently a congressman-elect from New York, George Santos lied extensively on his resume. There are calls for him to resign, but so far Santos has pashed against it. He says he will address his lies on Monday, December 26. It gives him time to think up more lies to make all the previous lies seem plausible to the voters of New York’s Third District.
Some would like to pin the blame on Democrats, for not doing enough opposition research and the New York Times (the news organization that broke the story) who, Santos claims, are his enemies. It fits the MAGA Cult playbook.
Some Republicans who went along with the Trump MAGA Cult just to keep the base happy are beginning to push away from Trump. Not because they find his views, actions, associations and words abhorrent, but because Trump is beginning to drive away voters. As long as the GOP primaries keep nominating MAGA Cult darlings like former Arizona Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the GOP will continue to lose med-term and general elections and very soon now the Democrats will start winning back state houses and governors’ mansions.
That is the party the Republicans have always wanted. Only now, they are finding out the majority of Americans do not want to vote for or support a political party that accepts anti-Semites, racists, xenophobes, anti-gay liars into their party.
How did this get started? Oh yeah. That xenophobe, racist, anti-Semitic, gay-hating, anti-immigration nut bar … I can’t remember his name now. It doesn’t matter. Republicans all look alike to me now.
Happy Holidays.
Tim Forkes started as a writer on a small alternative college newspaper in Milwaukee called the Crazy Shepherd. Writing about entertainment issues, he had the opportunity to speak with many people in show business, from the very famous to the people struggling to find an audience. In 1992 Tim moved to San Diego, CA and pursued other interests, but remained a freelance writer. Upon arrival in Southern California he was struck by how the business of government and business was so intertwined, far more so than he had witnessed in Wisconsin. His interest in entertainment began to wane and the business of politics took its place. He had always been interested in politics, his mother had been a Democratic Party official in Milwaukee, WI, so he sat down to dinner with many of Wisconsin’s greatest political names of the 20th Century: William Proxmire and Clem Zablocki chief among them. As a Marine Corps veteran, Tim has a great interest in veteran affairs, primarily as they relate to the men and women serving and their families. As far as Tim is concerned, the military-industrial complex has enough support. How the men and women who serve are treated is reprehensible, while in the military and especially once they become veterans. Tim would like to help change that reality.
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