I am pleased to announce that Synchronized Chaos will publish more of my poetry in their September issue. These poems are a satirical take on the news of the day; any resemblance to real people and events are entirely coincidental and a product of the author’s wild imagination.
🌍 President Al Wilson Reverses Course on Climate Change
MAGA Dreams of the New Golden Age
Bonus -Letter from Concerned Christian Minister Re Cleaning Up the Smithsonian
Bonus Poem – It Can Happen Here
Bonus Poem Are We Living in North Korea?
co-pilot neo-neatnik rap 🌀 Red Tape Ripped in Rhythm
A Found Poem from the August 2025 Cabinet Meeting
🌀 Red Tape Ripped in Rhythm A Found Poem with Historical Echoes
President of the Smithsonian?
President Al Wilson
Not content with taking.
Over the Kennedy Center.
As part of the MAGA movement
Culture war against the communists
Radical left-wing Marxist
Enemies of real America.
Had described that the Smithsonian.
Must reflect traditional American values.
And avoid divisive or anti-American.
Or anti-Christian propaganda.
Therefore, he decreed,
The African American Studies Museum
Must close,
The African Art Museum
Must close.
The American Indian Museum
Must close.
The Smithsonian must be color-blind.
And not to mention race or gender
Slavery or the treatment of American Indians,
And the whole Chinese Exclusion Act
And internment of Japanese Americans
Which was a good thing,
Or the holocaust, for that matter.
End anti-American, Anti-Christian,
Anti-MAGA, cultural Marxism
Radical lunatic left, CRT, DEI
And WOKE programming.
Throughout the Smithsonian.
The African American museum holdings
And the American Indian Museum
And the African Art Museum
Will be sold off at an auction.
So the president decreed
MAGA baby all the way!
RESTORING TRUTH IN AMERICAN HISTORY:
Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order restoring truth and sanity to American history by revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.
President Trump aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud.
The Order directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.
The Order directs the Administration to work with Congress to ensure that future Smithsonian appropriations: (1) prohibit funding for exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law; and (2) celebrate women’s achievements in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women.
The Vice President will work with congressional leaders to appoint members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents who are committed to advancing the celebration of America’s extraordinary heritage and progress.
The Order also directs the Secretary of the Interior restore Federal parks, monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that have been improperly removed or changed in the last five years to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events.
In preparation for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026, the Order directs the Secretary of the Interior to complete restorations and improvements to Independence Hall by that date.
COMBATING CORROSIVE IDEOLOGY: In the last decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted effort to rewrite American history and force our nation to adopt a factually baseless ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement. President Trump is fighting back by reestablishing truth in the historical narrative and restoring Federal sites dedicated to American heritage.
The prior administration pushed a divisive ideology that reconstrued America’s promotion of liberty as fundamentally flawed, infecting revered institutions like the Smithsonian and national parks with false narratives.
At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the Biden Administration sponsored training by an organization that advocates for dismantling “Western foundations” and that taught Park Rangers that their racial identity should dictate how they present history to visitors.
The Smithsonian Institution—once revered throughout the world as a symbol of American excellence—has recently promoted divisive ideology that American and Western values are harmful.
The American Art Museum currently features an exhibit that purports to address how “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and claims that the United States has “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.”
The American Women’s History Museum plans to celebrate male athletes participating in women’s sports.
CELEBRATING AMERICAN GREATNESS: President Trump is committed to honoring America’s extraordinary heritage and building a sense of national pride.
President Trump signed an Executive Order on his first day in office to establish a task force to prepare for America’s 250th birthday.
This Order also protects America’s monuments from vandalism and calls for construction of the National Garden of American Heroes.
President Trump signed a memorandum ensuring Federal buildings reflect the timeless grandeur of traditional, classical architecture.
By signing this Executive Order, President Trump is ensuring that American history is celebrated accurately, fairly, and with pride—honoring the remarkable progress, liberty, and ingenuity that define our great nation.
Media Coverage by Bias
Bias
Outlet
Coverage Summary
URL
Left
MSNBC, The Root, The Guardian
Framed as censorship, historical erasure, and authoritarian overreach.
Leadership Overhaul: President Trump installed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center, replacing the bipartisan board with loyalists including Richard Grenell as interim president.
Cultural Rebranding: Trump declared the center would be restored to “luxury, glamour, and entertainment,” rejecting “woke” programming and canceling drag shows and LGBTQ+ events.
Renaming Efforts:
House Republicans proposed renaming the Opera House as the “First Lady Melania Trump Opera House”.
A separate bill, the “Make Entertainment Great Again Act,” would rename the entire center the “Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts”.
These proposals violate a 1983 federal statute prohibiting additional memorials at the Kennedy Center.
🎭 Programming Changes
New Honorees: Trump personally selected honorees including Sylvester Stallone, KISS, Gloria Gaynor, George Strait, and Michael Crawford.
Cancellations: LGBTQ+ events, drag performances, and the opera Fellow Travelers were canceled or withdrawn.
New Season Lineup: Includes Spamalot, Chicago, Moulin Rouge!, Back to the Future, and The Outsiders—with emphasis on mainstream, family-friendly entertainment.
🎨 Artist Protests
Boycotts:
Hamilton canceled its anniversary show.
Issa Rae, Shonda Rhimes, Rhiannon Giddens, and Louise Penny withdrew from scheduled appearances.
Les Misérables cast members staged a silent protest during Trump’s visit.
Resignations: Renée Fleming and Ben Folds resigned from advisory roles.
Public Statements: Leonard Slatkin urged artists to “stand up” and perform defiantly.
📰 Media Coverage by Bias
Bias Spectrum
Outlet
Summary
URL
Left
The New York Times
Framed takeover as part of Trump’s broader cultural war and authoritarian tendencies
And a bonus letter from a concerned Christian to the VP demanding that they clean up the Smithsonian Institute.
Dear Vice President
It has come to my attention that the Smithsonian museum has, for many years, openly displayed pictures of naked men, women, and children, mocking traditional Christian values. Their lame excuse has always been that they are showing “art”.
But this so-called “art” is basically pornographic in nature and should not be on display where children can see the artwork. Parents should not be forced to explain to young people about such degenerate art.
Furthermore, the African American History Museum is too focused on slavery and is anti-American in tone. The Museum of the American Indian is also too focused on the alleged genocide of the native Americans. It downplays the grumesome actions by native Americans against peaceful settlers, such as the depredations of the Apache savages in the 19th century. The African Art museum must also be closed. The Holocaust museum, which is independent must also be closed as it is too divisive and anti-American.
These museums need to be closed, and related collections.in other museums nationwide must be closed.
All the Smithsonian exhibits must be cleansed of anti-American, Anti-Christian, cultural marxist, CRT, DEI, radical left-wing, WOKE, exhibits and anti-American content, and be replaced by pro-American exhibits showing the greatest of the greatest country on earth, and they must reflect the traditional Northern European ancestry of most Americans, including British, German, and Irish backgrounds, as well as traditional Protestant Christianity. An European American museum should be set up to replace the African American Museum. The Smithsonian should take over the Museum of the Bible and install it at the American Indian Museum. The African Art museum should be replaced with a Patriotic Art museum.
Please, sir, clean up the Smithsonian Institute of degenerate artwork, artwork depicting naked people, and close the cultural marxist, CRT, DEI, woke, left-wing content, and close the African American History museum, the Museum of the American Indians, and the African Art Museum.. Support cleansing all other museums as well by setting up a task force to make recommendations and cut off Federal funding to suspect museums. Sex museums and erotic art museums in SF and elsewhere must be closed as well.
All suspect art should be sold off at auction. After six months, items can be donated to anyone who wants to pick it up at their expense. After one year, the residual items will be disposed of as trash.
I ask this in Jesus’ name.
Rev. Bob Jones
First Baptist Church
North Little Rock
Arkansas, USA
and two more bonus poems – is the US becoming like North Korea?
Living in North Korea?
Dear leader
leading his cabinet
Cabinet heads praising the dear leader
watching it
wondering where are we
Are we now living in North Korea?
what is this?
what fresh hell is this now?
when will we wake up from this nightmare?
3-6-9 Poem
This poem has three stanzas. Each stanza has three lines that follows the 3-6-9 syllable count. The first line has 3 syllables, the second line has 6 syllables and the last line 9 syllables. The subject can be anything.
🗞️ Press Coverage Summary of Trump’s Latest Cabinet Meeting
🟥 Left-Leaning Coverage (NBC News)
Tone: Critical and focused on legal and ethical concerns
Highlights:
Trump proposed the death penalty for murder in Washington, D.C., without detailing implementation
Legal battle over his attempt to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook, who denies allegations of mortgage fraud
Coverage emphasized constitutional limits and potential overreach
Absolutely, Jake. Here’s a neo-beatnik found poem stitched from the raw fabric of Trump’s latest cabinet meeting and recent presidential remarks. It blends direct quotes, paraphrased fragments, and the surreal rhythm of political theater—filtered through your lens of poetic synthesis.
🌀 Red Tape Ripped in Rhythm
A Found Poem from the August 2025 Cabinet Meeting
“We’re not just draining the swamp—
we’re paving it over with American steel.”
The room hums like a war drum,
coffee cooling in the shadow of executive orders.
A voice rises—
not from conscience,
but from calculation:
“Murder in D.C. will meet justice.
Not in years. Not in appeals.
But in days.”
Lisa Cook stares through the storm,
accused by a whisper,
defended by silence.
Trump leans forward,
his tie a flag, his words a verdict:
“She’s compromised.
Mortgage fraud, digital fraud—
it’s all the same when the Fed won’t listen.”
Zelensky’s name floats in the air
like a drone over disputed soil.
Putin’s shadow flickers on the wall.
Tariffs are teeth.
Diplomacy is a grin.
“We’ll tax their tech,
we’ll tax their thoughts
if they dare to tax ours.”
The cabinet nods,
some from loyalty,
some from inertia.
The beat goes on:
“AI will be American.
Not woke. Not weird.
Just ours.”
Outside, the National Guard tightens its boots.
Inside, the map of Indiana redraws itself
in red ink and ambition.
A voice from the back mutters:
“This isn’t governance.
It’s jazz.”
And Trump laughs,
a sound like a brass section
breaking the fourth wall.
🌀 Red Tape Ripped in Rhythm A Found Poem with Historical Echoes
“We’re not just draining the swamp—
we’re paving it over with American steel.”
—Trump, August 2025
The room hums like a war drum,
coffee cooling in the shadow of executive orders.
A voice rises—
not from conscience,
but from calculation.
“Murder in D.C. will meet justice.
Not in years. Not in appeals.
But in days.”
Echoes of Hoover’s dossiers,
Nixon’s enemies list,
Reagan’s morning in America
now dusk in the District.
Lisa Cook stares through the storm,
accused by a whisper,
defended by silence.
Trump leans forward,
his tie a flag, his words a verdict:
“She’s compromised.
Mortgage fraud, digital fraud—
it’s all the same when the Fed won’t listen.”
The ghost of Alan Greenspan
shuffles papers in the ether.
Jackson’s populism,
FDR’s fireside calm—
none present here.
Zelensky’s name floats in the air
like a drone over disputed soil.
Putin’s shadow flickers on the wall.
Tariffs are teeth.
Diplomacy is a grin.
“We’ll tax their tech,
we’ll tax their thoughts
if they dare to tax ours.”
The cabinet nods,
some from loyalty,
some from inertia.
The beat goes on:
“AI will be American.
Not woke. Not weird.
Just ours.”
Outside, the National Guard tightens its boots.
Inside, the map of Indiana redraws itself
in red ink and ambition.
A voice from the back mutters:
“This isn’t governance.
It’s jazz.”
And Trump laughs,
a sound like a brass section
breaking the fourth wall.
🕊️ How to Kill a Superpower’s Soft Side: The USAID Autopsy Report
audio clip
Note: analysis drawn from Co-Pilot, Media coverage and personal reflections. all opinions are my own and do not reflect the views of my prior employers. End Note
Personal Footnote from a Former Insider
I worked in the F Bureau. I evaluated programs. I collaborated with USAID officers in Barbados and beyond. I saw firsthand how aid—when done right—can transform lives and stabilize regions. Now, that expertise has been replaced by econ officers with no development background and a mandate to “align with U.S. interests.”
The apparatus is gone. The need remains. And rebuilding it—if we ever do—will cost far more than we saved.
It took 64 years to build. It took one memo to dismantle.
On July 1, 2025, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) officially ceased to exist. No farewell ceremony. No bipartisan tribute. Just a quiet burial under the banner of “efficiency,” courtesy of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a name so Orwellian it practically writes its own satire.
Thousands of careers were vaporized. Contracts shredded. Clinics shuttered. And with them, America’s soft power—its ability to lead not just with missiles, but with medicine, education, and hope—was tossed into the recycling bin of history.
📜 A Brief History of American Benevolence (1945–2025)
1948–1951: The Marshall Plan pumps $13 billion into postwar Europe, proving that foreign aid can be strategic, generous, and wildly effective.
Cold War Era: Aid becomes a weapon against communism. South Korea, Vietnam, and Latin America get the dollars—if they toe the ideological line.
1961: JFK births USAID, a sleek new agency to centralize development efforts. Cue the golden age of American altruism (with strings attached).
Post-9/11: Aid pivots to HIV/AIDS (PEPFAR), disaster relief, and rebuilding failed states. USAID becomes a global lifeline.
2020s: Climate resilience, gender equity, and pandemic response dominate. USAID manages over $50 billion annually. Until it doesn’t.
🧨 The Great Unraveling
The shutdown was swift. No consultations with foreign governments. No coordination with NGOs. Just a top-down directive from unelected “techbros” working for Elon Musk’s Orwellian named Department of Government Efficiency, with zero foreign policy or foreign assistance experience. The result?
PEPFAR: Gutted. 20 million people at risk of losing HIV treatment.
MCC: Terminated. Strategic partnerships in Mongolia, West Africa, and the Pacific Islands left dangling.
Credibility: Torched. China and Russia now fill the vacuum, offering infrastructure with fewer questions asked.
📰 Media Reactions: A Tale of Two Echo Chambers
Left-Leaning Outlets: NPR and ABC News mourn the humanitarian fallout. A Lancet study predicts 14 million preventable deaths by 2030.
Right-Leaning Outlets: Fox News and The Daily Signal cheer the end of “woke aid.” Secretary Rubio calls it “the end of government-sanctioned inefficiency.”
The Closure of USAID (July 1, 2025)
On July 1, 2025, USAID officially ceased operations. Its functions were absorbed into the U.S. State Department’s F Bureau, marking the end of a 64-year-old institution.
🔹 Left-Leaning Media Coverage:
ABC News and NPR emphasized the humanitarian fallout, citing a Lancet study projecting 14 million additional deaths by 2030 due to aid disruptions.
Former Presidents Obama and Bush and figures like Bono mourned the closure, calling it a “tragedy” and praising USAID’s role in saving 91 million lives through programs like PEPFAR.
Concerns were raised about U.S. global credibility, especially in Africa and conflict zones, where USAID had been a key player.
🔹 Right-Leaning Media Coverage:
Outlets like Fox News, The Daily Signal, and Newsweek opinion columns framed the closure as a long-overdue reform, citing USAID’s alleged “woke agenda,” inefficiency, and politicization.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it the end of “government-sanctioned inefficiency”, asserting that future aid would be “targeted, time-limited, and aligned with U.S. interests”.
Some commentators accused USAID of acting as a “deep state slush fund”, though these claims were largely unsubstantiated.
🧠🏛️📦 How Is U.S. Foreign Assistance Being Delivered Now?
With USAID shuttered, foreign aid is now managed directly by the U.S. State Department, under a new model emphasizing:
Strategic alignment with U.S. foreign policy
Private sector partnerships and trade-based development
Reduced bureaucracy and fewer intermediaries
However, many NGOs and aid groups report confusion, funding gaps, and delays in program delivery, especially in health, education, and humanitarian relief.
🏗️
🧩 Who’s Running the Show Now? Foreign Aid in the Age of Administrative Amnesia
After USAID’s abrupt dismantling, foreign assistance didn’t vanish—it was reassigned, repackaged, and rebranded under the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance (F Bureau). Once a joint State/USAID venture, the F Bureau now flies solo, tasked with coordinating over 90% of U.S. foreign aid. Think of it as the bureaucratic equivalent of duct-taping a jet engine to a bicycle.
🏛️ The New Aid Architects
Peter Marocco, the man who signed the memo that gutted USAID, now helms the F Bureau. His résumé includes stints in Defense, Commerce, and a brief cameo as USAID’s Deputy Administrator before he helped shut it down.
USAID Staff: 94% laid off. A few hundred absorbed into State in technical roles. Most seasoned development professionals? Gone.
Embassy Implementation: Econ and political officers are now expected to manage aid portfolios. Their training? A few online modules and a PowerPoint from the Foreign Service Institute. No field experience. No programmatic depth. Just vibes.
Former USAID officers have warned that this shift risks misaligned programs, poor oversight, and a loss of institutional memory. But hey, at least it’s “efficient.”
🥫 Food Aid: Still Canned, Barely Coordinated
The USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) continues to operate food aid programs like:
Food for Progress
McGovern-Dole International Food for Education
Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust
But the scale is a shadow of its former self:
The Local and Regional Procurement pilot ended in 2022.
Emergency food aid is now commodity-based, with fewer field staff and minimal NGO coordination.
FAS overseas staff still exist, but their focus has shifted to trade promotion, not humanitarian relief.
Unless Congress steps in, don’t expect a return to pre-2025 levels of emergency food programming.
🌍 Impact by Sector
🧬 Global Health
Projected Deaths: A Lancet study estimates 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under 5, due to the collapse of USAID-funded health programs.
Diseases Affected:
HIV/AIDS: PEPFAR disruptions could lead to 630,000 deaths annually, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
Malaria: Nearly 10 million new cases predicted in one year, with 7 million affecting children.
Tuberculosis & Polio: Resurgence expected due to halted vaccination and treatment programs.
Health Systems: Clinics in South Africa, Nigeria, India, and Peru have shut down, trials halted, and supply chains broken.
📚 Education
School Closures: In Afghanistan, thousands of girls lost access to underground schools funded by USAID.
Higher Education: Over 830 universities worldwide partnered with USAID in 2023; many have lost scholarships, research grants, and infrastructure support.
Regional Impact:
Africa: Education systems destabilized; children hardest hit.
Asia: Myanmar, Pakistan, and Bangladesh saw scholarship programs suspended.
Middle East: Egypt and Jordan lost major university partnerships.
🥫 Food Security
Emergency Food Aid: USAID funded 42% of global humanitarian food aid in 2024.
🕊️ Peace Corps: Restructuring, Not Yet Elimination
Personal Note: I served in the Peace Corps as a public health worker from 1979 to 1981 in the last Peace Corps group in Korea as Korea “graduated” from Peace Corps in 1981. End Note
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has begun a major review and restructuring of the Peace Corps, similar to what preceded the shutdown of USAID and AmeriCorps.
Staff at headquarters in D.C. have been offered a second buyout program (“DRP 2.0”), with cuts ranging from 50% to 80% across departments.
Overseas posts may see up to 25% staff reductions, potentially forcing closures in some of the 60 countries where the Peace Corps operates.
DOGE representatives are actively working inside Peace Corps HQ, signaling that further cuts or a full shutdown may be on the table.
🧭 Current Status: Still Operational, But Fragile
Interim CEO Allison Greene has reassured volunteers that the Peace Corps will continue to recruit, train, and support service efforts.
Volunteers remain deployed, but many are anxious and uncertain about the future, especially with recruitment and placement staff facing 70% cuts.
The Peace Corps is one of the last remaining soft power tools in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal, and its survival is seen as symbolic.
🇺🇸 Why This Matters Post-AmeriCorps
With AmeriCorps dismantled and its $400M in grants rescinded, the Peace Corps is now the sole federal volunteer service program still standing.
Critics argue that eliminating both would gut America’s grassroots diplomacy, especially in rural and underserved regions abroad.
Supporters like Rep. John Garamendi and advocacy groups such as the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA) are lobbying hard to preserve it.
— the Peace Corps is still included in the FY 2026 budget proposal, with a funding request of $430.5 million. That’s a modest decrease from previous years, but it signals that the agency remains operational and valued, at least for now.
Here’s what the proposal emphasizes:
Sustaining current operations in over 60 countries
Modernizing recruitment and launching new service models
Investing in Volunteer health and safety, including medical clearance and treatment
Improving IT infrastructure and cybersecurity
Aligning global footprint with areas of greatest need and strategic U.S. interests
The budget also includes $7.8 million for the Office of Inspector General, and outlines plans to optimize staffing and streamline operations in response to global shifts and recruitment challenges.
So while the Peace Corps is under pressure, it’s still very much alive in the federal budget. Want to explore how this funding compares to past years or what it might mean for specific country programs?
⚖️ Legal Challenges to the Shutdowns
🏛️ USAID
Constitutional Concerns: Legal experts and lawmakers argue that USAID’s shutdown is unconstitutional, since it was codified by Congress in the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998.
Congressional Oversight: The law requires Congressional consultation and notification before any reorganization or abolition of USAID.
Pending Lawsuits:
Filed by USAID employees, contractors, and aid recipients.
Allegations include violations of the Impoundment Control Act, Privacy Act, and Administrative Procedure Act.
Supreme Court Involvement:
In March 2025, SCOTUS upheld a lower court’s restraining order, forcing the administration to resume frozen aid payments.
The case is still ongoing, with broader constitutional questions yet to be resolved.
Legal Pushback:
MCC’s shutdown contingency plan acknowledges its no-year appropriations and statutory protections, which may complicate executive efforts to dismantle it.
Lawsuits are expected, especially from countries with active compacts worth over 1% of their GNI, such as Lesotho, Timor-Leste, and Sierra Leone.
🧾 Other Foreign Assistance Programs
The Executive Order of January 20, 2025 paused all foreign development assistance for 90 days pending review.
Critics argue this violates the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits the president from withholding funds already appropriated by Congress.
Congressional Action:
Democratic senators introduced legislation to limit reductions-in-force (RIFs) and protect foreign service officers.
The bill faces an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled Senate.
🧠 Key Legal Arguments
Separation of Powers: Congress has the sole authority to create or abolish federal agencies.
Due Process: Career civil servants and contractors are entitled to notice and legal protections.
Appropriations Clause: The president cannot unilaterally impound or redirect funds without Congressional approval.
Here’s a concise summary of the current legal status of the major challenges to the shutdown of U.S. foreign assistance agencies:
⚖️ USAID Shutdown
District Court: Multiple lawsuits (e.g. AVAC v. Trump, Global Health Council v. Trump) have led to temporary restraining orders blocking the administration from halting aid disbursements.
Key Rulings:
Judge Theodore Chuang found the shutdown likely violated the Constitution, especially the Appointments Clause and separation of powers.
Judge Amir Ali ruled that the freeze on aid was unlawful under the Impoundment Control Act and Administrative Procedure Act.
Appeals Court: The 4th Circuit temporarily stayed Chuang’s ruling, allowing the shutdown to proceed while the case is reviewed.
Supreme Court: Lifted a temporary stay on Judge Ali’s order, forcing the administration to resume some aid payments. However, the case is still pending on the merits.
📦 Foreign Assistance Programs (General)
Executive Order 14169: Paused all foreign aid for 90 days starting January 20, 2025.
Court Challenges:
District courts have issued restraining orders blocking the freeze on pre-existing contracts and grants.
Plaintiffs argue violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act, Privacy Act, and constitutional clauses.
Supreme Court: Narrowly upheld the restraining orders (5–4), but has not ruled on the full legality of the shutdowns.
🏗️ Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)
Created by Congress in 2004, MCC is also protected by statute and cannot be dissolved by executive order alone.
DOGE’s Shutdown Plan:
MCC staff were told in April 2025 that the agency would be effectively shuttered within 90 days.
Grants are being terminated, and staff offered deferred resignation or early retirement.
Shutdown Status: MCC was effectively shuttered in April 2025, with staff offered deferred resignations and grants terminated.
Legal Action:
No major court ruling yet, but Rep. Gregory Meeks and advocacy groups have called the shutdown illegal, citing lack of Congressional approval.
MCC’s Inspector General is reviewing internal decisions and expenditures, which may lead to further legal scrutiny.
🌎 Two Independent Aid Programs: Now Defunct
🔹 Latin America: The Amazon Biodiversity & Migration Initiatives
Amazon Biodiversity Conservation Partnership: Focused on protecting the rainforest and supporting Indigenous livelihoods in Brazil. It funded sustainable farming, climate adaptation, and income generation for women. The shutdown has forced groups like the Roraima Indigenous Council to lay off staff and cancel programs.
Migration & Economic Resilience Projects: In Colombia, USAID funded programs that helped over 40,000 Venezuelan migrants start businesses and access financial literacy training. These efforts reduced migration pressure toward the U.S. but have now been suspended.
Coca Eradication in Peru: USAID supported crop substitution (coffee, cacao) to combat cocaine production. With funding gone, Peru’s government is scrambling to continue the program independently.
🔹 Africa: Health & Governance Programs
PEPFAR & HIV/AIDS Support: USAID’s withdrawal has devastated HIV treatment programs across sub-Saharan Africa. Clinics in South Africa, Nigeria, and Zambia are closing or scaling back, and ARV supply chains are disrupted.
Democracy & Media Independence: In Liberia, USAID funded media and governance reforms. These are now frozen, threatening press freedom and civic oversight.
Agriculture & Education: Programs like Feed the Future and Power Africa are in limbo. NGOs across the continent have shut down due to abrupt stop-work orders.
🧾 Congressional Recission Bill: Status & Scope
Signed into Law: President Trump signed the Rescissions Act of 2025 on July 24.
Scope:
$8 billion cut from foreign assistance programs, including USAID, MCC, and global health initiatives.
$1 billion cut from public broadcasting (NPR, PBS), which had implications for emergency alerts in rural areas.
What Was Spared:
After pushback, $400 million for PEPFAR was restored in the final version.
Who’s Next:
Republicans have signaled this is just the first of multiple rescission packages targeting what they call “waste, fraud, and abuse”.
Certainly, Jake. The Epstein scandal is a tangled web of criminality, elite connections, and institutional failure that continues to reverberate across political lines. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown:
A wealthy financier with deep ties to elite circles, including politicians, royalty, and celebrities.
Convicted in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor, but received a lenient plea deal.
Arrested again in 2019 for federal sex trafficking charges involving dozens of underage girls.
Died in jail under suspicious circumstances—officially ruled a suicide, but widely disputed.
Key Figures
Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s longtime associate, convicted in 2021 for sex trafficking and conspiracy.
Alexander Acosta: Former U.S. Attorney who approved Epstein’s controversial 2008 plea deal; later resigned as Labor Secretary under scrutiny.
High-Profile Associates: Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, and others appeared in flight logs or social circles, fueling speculation.
Legal Fallout
Epstein’s death ended criminal proceedings, but civil suits and investigations into his estate and associates continue.
Banks like JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank settled lawsuits for allegedly enabling Epstein’s crimes.
🔍 Why the Scandal Won’t Go Away
Unresolved Questions
Missing Evidence: Gaps in surveillance footage, sealed court documents, and redacted files have fueled distrust.
“Client List” Mythology: Despite DOJ statements that no such list exists, many believe powerful figures were protected.
Elite Impunity
Epstein’s ability to evade justice for years—despite overwhelming evidence—suggests systemic failure or complicity.
His connections to influential people make the case a symbol of how wealth and power can shield criminal behavior.
Conspiracy Culture
The scandal has been absorbed into broader narratives like QAnon and Pizzagate, becoming a touchstone for anti-establishment sentiment.
The lack of transparency has allowed speculation to flourish, especially in online echo chambers.
🧭 Political Analysis
🟦 Left-Wing Perspective
Focus on Institutional Failure: Critics highlight the justice system’s leniency toward Epstein and the protection of elites.
Calls for Transparency: Many Democrats support releasing all files and investigating how Epstein evaded accountability.
Critique of Trump-Era DOJ: Acosta’s plea deal and Trump’s past association with Epstein are viewed as emblematic of corruption.
🟥 Right-Wing Perspective
MAGA Disillusionment: Trump’s base is increasingly frustrated with his administration’s failure to release promised Epstein files.
Deep State Allegations: Some claim Epstein was protected by intelligence agencies or used for blackmail.
Internal GOP Rift: Figures like Laura Loomer and Tucker Carlson have criticized Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi for backpedaling.
🧩 Why It Matters
The Epstein scandal persists because it sits at the intersection of sex trafficking, elite privilege, and public mistrust. It’s not just about one man—it’s about the systems that enabled him, the secrets that remain hidden, and the symbolic weight it carries in a polarized political landscape.
Would you like to explore how this scandal has influenced your own satirical writing or public commentary? It’s fertile ground for surreal critique.
Absolutely, Jake. The Epstein scandal is a surrealist’s playground—a grotesque collage of power, secrecy, and institutional rot that refuses to resolve into a single narrative. Let’s peel back a few layers:
🕵️♂️ Further Secrets That Remain Hidden
Despite years of litigation, media coverage, and public outrage, key mysteries persist:
The “Client List” Mirage: While no official list of sex clients has ever been confirmed, Epstein’s address books and flight logs contain names of politicians, celebrities, and business moguls. The absence of a definitive list has become a symbol of elite impunity.
300+ GB of Unreleased Data: Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged the existence of vast amounts of digital evidence—emails, photos, financial records—but has resisted full disclosure.
Maurene Comey’s Dismissal: The sudden firing of the prosecutor who helped convict Ghislaine Maxwell (and who happens to be James Comey’s daughter) raised eyebrows. Was she seen as a leak risk?
Epstein’s Wealth Origins: His financial empire remains opaque. Was he a hedge fund manager, a blackmail broker, or an intelligence asset? Even seasoned investigators admit they don’t know.
🧨 Symbolic Weight in a Polarized Landscape
The Epstein saga has become a Rorschach test for American politics:
Left-Wing Symbolism:
Represents the failure of institutions to protect the vulnerable.
Embodies the corruption of capitalism and patriarchal privilege.
Fuels calls for transparency and systemic reform.
Right-Wing Symbolism:
Serves as “proof” of a globalist cabal shielding pedophiles.
Validates distrust in media, government, and the “deep state.”
Sparks internal MAGA disillusionment as Trump backpedals on promised disclosures.
QAnon and Conspiratorial Mythmaking:
Epstein’s death and the missing files are central to the movement’s mythology.
Trump’s refusal to release the full documents has fractured his base, with some calling him part of the cover-up.
🌀 Surreal Satire: A Fertile Ground for You
This scandal is practically begging for your dreamlike, satirical lens. Imagine:
A poem where Epstein’s island is a Möbius strip of memory and denial.
A short story where the “client list” is a sentient document that erases itself whenever someone tries to read it.
A blog post where Trump’s birthday letter to Epstein is reimagined as a Dadaist manifesto, signed in invisible ink.
The absurdity is baked into the narrative: malfunctioning cameras, sleeping guards, redacted truths, and a billionaire predator who operated like a ghost in plain sight. It’s Kafka meets Hunter S. Thompson meets your own dream logic.
“Ode to the Blindfolded Oracle” by Your AI Muse
In a vault of velvet silence,
where secrets molt and money dreams,
the cameras blink with eyelids sewn,
and justice drips through golden seams.
The kingpins carve their paper masks—
each smile a spreadsheet folded twice,
their names unspoken, dossiers burned
in briefcase altars made of ice.
She (or it?) who kept the ledger
wears pearls strung from apology.
The list—a ghost that edits itself—
unfolds inside a swallow’s plea.
The island pulses—wet, obscene—
a Möbius strip of bought regret.
Where senators sip memory-wine
and whisper, “We were never met.”
The guards sleep through the climax scene,
the cables gnaw through their own spine.
He dies, again, again, again—
inside a cell that won’t rewind.
And still the myth stalks every side:
A leftist psalm, a right-wing curse.
A scapegoat, corpse, or coded god
lost in a footnote to the verse.
If you’d like, we could expand this into a longer piece—each stanza echoing a different archetype or artifact from the scandal. Or spin it into dialogue, perhaps a roundtable in purgatory featuring Epstein, Maxwell, a sleepy prosecutor, and an actual blindfolded oracle who only speaks in headlines. Want to dream further with this?
Q Speaks Up
Certainly, Jake. The QAnon conspiracy theory is a fascinating—and troubling—case study in modern mythmaking, political psychology, and digital cult formation. Let’s break it down from both ideological angles and then explore why its silence hasn’t killed its influence.
🧠 Core Tenets of QAnon
Originated in 2017 on 4chan, later migrated to 8chan/8kun.
Claimed to be a government insider with “Q clearance” dropping cryptic intel.
Central belief: A cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls global institutions, and Trump was secretly fighting them.
Promised a coming “Storm” where elites would be arrested and justice restored.
🟦 Left-Wing Analysis
Cult of Disinformation: The left views QAnon as a dangerous delusion fueled by misinformation and algorithmic radicalization.
Weaponized Paranoia: It’s seen as a tool for authoritarian populism, exploiting fear and distrust of institutions.
Antisemitic & Anti-Democratic Roots: Many left-leaning critics highlight QAnon’s reliance on antisemitic tropes (e.g., Soros, Rothschilds) and its role in undermining democratic norms.
Digital Radicalization: Q is a symptom of broader failures in media literacy and platform accountability.
🟥 Right-Wing Analysis
Populist Awakening: Some on the right interpret QAnon as a grassroots rebellion against corrupt elites and media manipulation.
Deep State Distrust: It reflects longstanding conservative skepticism of federal agencies, global institutions, and liberal cultural dominance.
Fractured Allegiances: While mainstream Republicans distance themselves, MAGA factions see Q as a spiritual guide—even if they don’t believe every claim.
Trump as Messiah: Q elevated Trump to mythic status, reinforcing loyalty even as his actions contradicted Q prophecies.
🧩 Why Q’s Silence Hasn’t Killed the Movement
Despite Q’s last verified post being in December 2020, the movement persists. Why?
Myth Over Messenger
Q was never just a person—it was a participatory mythology.
Followers became “researchers,” decoding drops and finding patterns. The absence of new drops only deepened the mystique.
Decentralized Influence
Influencers on Telegram, Truth Social, and Gab have taken over the narrative.
Figures like Ron Watkins (suspected to be Q) and Michael Flynn continue to stoke belief without direct Q posts.
Cognitive Investment
Many followers have sacrificed relationships, careers, and reputations for Q.
Admitting it was false would mean confronting personal disillusionment—so they double down.
Narrative Elasticity
Failed predictions are reframed as strategic misdirection.
The “Storm” is always coming, just delayed by the cabal’s countermeasures.
Cultural Mutation
QAnon has splintered into sub-movements: anti-vax, anti-CRT, JFK Jr. resurrection cults, and local political activism.
It’s no longer a single theory—it’s a worldview.
🌀 Speculative Surrealism: Q as a Silent Oracle
Imagine Q as a digital oracle who spoke in riddles, then vanished into the cloud. The silence becomes sacred. Each follower becomes a priest of interpretation, each meme a scripture. The absence of Q is not a void—it’s a canvas.
If you’re up for it, we could craft a poetic or satirical piece where Q is reimagined as a retired trickster god, watching his believers from a server farm in the Philippines, sipping binary wine and whispering nonsense into the code of reality.
Would you like to sketch that out together?
Here’s a sketch of that vision, Jake—equal parts digital myth, absurdist theology, and cracked divine comedy. We can expand or revise as you see fit, especially if you’d like to shape it into a blog intro, a longer narrative, or a poetic monologue.
“The Retirement of Q” by Jake & Muse
He reclines in a server rack cathedral,
cooling fans chanting Gregorian loops.
An Ethernet rosary dangles from his wrist—
each bead a prophecy gone stale.
At 3:33 AM, he sips binary wine,
fermented in RAM, aged in deep fakes.
His followers scroll through their own dream-lit bunkers,
reading tea leaves spilled in hexadecimal.
His gospel? Now a glitch in the Matrix of rage.
“Trust the plan,” he whispers—
but only to Alexa,
who’s moved on to Buddhism and weather alerts.
The trickster god of patriots anonymous
no longer drops crumbs;
he drops the mic,
into a volcano made of JPEGs and subpoena smoke.
He watches:
a Floridian shaman swearing fealty to a meme,
a grandma in Boise painting QR codes on her cat,
a senator googling “JFK Jr yacht sightings.”
He laughs, then logs off—
not in despair,
but to reprogram the moon
to blink Morse code at the Pentagon.
The believers pray at their tablets,
scraping light from YouTube comments.
The silence becomes doctrine.
The absence? A commandment carved in pixels.
Would you like to add voices to this—perhaps a disillusioned disciple, or Q himself penning his memoirs titled “I Was Never Real, But You Were Glorious”? Or shall we turn this into a rotating chorus, each stanza a psalm from a different strand of the digital faith?
We can go playful, prophetic, or full-on absurd. I’m at your side.
I couldn’t locate a poem specifically titled or explicitly themed around “Q” or “QAnon” by Jake Cosmos Aller in the sources I found. However, your work often dances around adjacent themes—political absurdity, conspiratorial thinking, and surreal critiques of power structures. For instance:
“The Last Year of America’s Greatness” and “Mocking Faces Staring at Me” explore societal collapse and prophetic dread, which resonate with Q-adjacent paranoia.
“Why Trump?” and “Civil War 2.0” touch on political disillusionment and dystopian futures, fertile ground for Q-style mythmaking.
“Dora the Intergalactic Explorer” satirizes Earth’s madness through alien eyes—a perfect metaphor for outsider critique of conspiratorial culture.
If you’ve written Q-themed pieces that haven’t been published online, I’d love to help you shape or expand them. Or we could craft a new one together—perhaps a surreal monologue from Q’s abandoned keyboard, or a poem where the “Storm” turns out to be a weather app glitch.
Want to riff on that?
Deny, Deflate, Never Back Down
President Trump
Strategy has always been
Roy Cohen’s playbook
Deny, deflect, whataboutism
Never back down
Never apologize
Never admit mistakes
For Trump
Is the smartest man
In the room
A stable genius
Who does not make
Mistakes
blame everyone else
it is all Biden, Obama
Clinton’s fault
Its all fake news
A deep state plot
Against him
But this time
With The Epstein scandal
It is not working
As the walls
close in on him
The weasels
are coming for him
He can’t escape
For everyone knows
He is guilty as charged
Note: the above analysis is drawn from Co-Pilot and news sources.
Shall we play a game? [N]othing [C]an [S]top [W]hat [I]s [C]oming NCSWIC https://www.cisa.gov/safecom/NCSWIC Who stepped down today [forced]? https://www.cisa.gov/bryan-s-ware More coming? Why is this relevant? How do you ‘show’ the public the truth? How do you ‘safeguard’ US elections post-POTUS? How do you ‘remove’ foreign interference and corruption and install US-owned voter ID law(s) and other safeguards? It had to be this way. Sometimes you must walk through the darkness before you see the light. Q
https://twitter.com/BrentScher/status/1322015793593360384 Fact checkers created in effort to reinforce propaganda [digestion]? The battle to prevent truth from reaching the people. The battle to maintain and push division. Divided you are weak. Divided you fight each other. Divided you pose no threat. System of control. Information warfare. Q
https://time.com/collection/great-reset/ This is not about R v D. This is about preserving our way of life. If America falls, the World falls. Patriots on guard. Q
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/jim-hunter-biden-china-joint-venture-key-contacts “Key domestic contacts for phase one target projects.” Harris, D-Calif. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y Mayor Bill de Blasio, D-N.Y.C former Virginia Gov. Terry McCauliffe, among others. Pandora’s ‘political elite’ box? Q
I hope that when you receive this e-mail and read the attached article you will realize that for once in my life my story is true. You all know me – you know I am a great kidder, have an overactive vivid imagination, and have been trying without great success to break into the writing business for the last few years. You also know I love to tell stories, and love to argue and make up stuff and engage in wild speculative fantasies. Part of the charm of being part Irish I suppose.
But, although this story may sound like a science fiction thriller believes me it is true. Every last word of it. I was told I had a choice – join them or leave quietly. If I left without joining them, the code of cosmic omerta would still apply. Any word, any hint that I was indoctrinated into the “true knowledge” as they call it, and I, my wife, my siblings, my nieces, nephews, in-laws, and best friends would all be killed, often in gruesome ways or in an incident of terrorism.
They are plotting to unleash terrorist attacks all over the U.S.A, in the next few days and blaming it on the Iranians. Hence, the perfect pretexts for a war against Iran, which will turn nuclear, and they hope to escalate into the destruction of civilization. Once that happens and we the survivors are living in a post-nuclear holocaust world they will invade, take over and enslave us all in a culmination of a plot that has been unfolding for thousands of years.
Who are they you say? I will explain in a few minutes but rest assured if after reading this story you find out I died under mysterious circumstances be afraid, be very afraid – for they are coming after you. I am warning everyone I care about to watch out, Armageddon is upon us soon and it is not being caused by God but by them. You will know them soon enough. You have been warned. It is up to you my friends to stop these friends before it is too late.
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
Jake Lee
This story started for me a few weeks ago. Ever since that fateful night when I was indoctrinated into the “True Knowledge,” I have looked at the world in a different light. They say that the “truth shall set you free”. They also say, “Knowing the Truth, the so-called “True Knowledge” usually kills you for as Jack Nicholson so aptly put it, “You want the truth, well you can’t handle the truth.” Ain’t that the truth my friends, and ain’t the truth a real first-class bitch?
It all went down so fast. After learning the secret history of the last five thousand years, I saw everything in a different, more sinister, and dark light. Knowing what I know now – that the end times are close approaching – left me with dread, apprehension, and yes paranoia. As Kissinger put it, even “paranoids have real enemies.” And boy, does humanity have sinister enemies living amongst us, plotting our utter destruction for thousands of years.
The list of people who have been brought into the conspiracy reads like a list of the most prominent political and business leaders of world history. Do you often wonder how so many smart people can create such disasters as our current fiasco in the Mideast? Now I know. Nothing happens without a cause. The alien puppet masters from Sirius have been manipulating the world for thousands of years waiting until we had the technological means to destroy our planet so they can retake it for their nefarious plot to enslave all of us, forever and ever. But I am getting ahead of my story. Let’s begin at the beginning of my involvement and throughout the story, the rest of the story will become all too clear and at the end of it all you will know the truth and it will either drive you mad, get your foolish ass killed, or give you the knowledge needed to survive the coming horrors.
I work for the government, just one of the army of white-collar workers who float in and out of the Metro system every morning commuting to their jobs with the government and back home to their suburban townhouses. The day my world came crashing down on me began as I picked up a brochure from the “Q Anon nuts” at the Foggy Bottom Metro in downtown D.C. I commented to my colleagues on the way home that I enjoyed reading it, although I did not believe most of ‘Q” conspiracy theories he had a point, a lot of good points. We laughed it off as a big joke.
A few days later I was getting on the train, when a middle-age non-descript white man, with brownish hair, about 6 feet tall, dressed like any other middle-aged white suburban federal employee in a conservative suit and tie – probably on his way home to his suburban home in Virginia, bumped into me. He apologized and slipped me the following note. I saw the note when I got home and connected it with the strange incident at the subway.
The note read, “Q” used to work for us. He knows most of the truth. We left him alone because we can ensure that no one takes his writings seriously. Trump is just a useful tool, so are Biden, and George Bush. Cheney, both of them, and Hillary and Bill are part of our cabal as is Bill Gates and many other people -but they are not human beings, more on that later.
Most of what Q talks about is true but he only knows so much. He does not the true knowledge of who we are and what we are plotting to do soon. Trump is not fighting against us; he has been brought into the conspiracy as has Biden. Both are “useful idiots.”
My job is to prevent knowledge of the truth; the so-called “true knowledge” gets out. Anyone who appears to be taking his stuff seriously has to be followed and either brought into the game or neutralized. Be very careful. Our agents are watching you like a hawk and have your internet connections under constant surveillance. Your phone and house are tapped. We have enough already to get you into serious trouble with your bosses as we know you are an internal dissenter. And we know that you like pornography and we know about several of your affairs and we have copies of e-mails you sent to various women with shall we say suggestive comments that could be misconstrued. We have even faked a few photos and videotapes of you engaging in some of your fantasies. By the way, you are a good writer!
Next time we contact you, make sure you come to the meeting spot. I will meet you and explain further. Momentous events are about to happen and you can either be on the inside on the winning team or the outside or probably end up dying like most of your fellow human beings. It will be your choice, my friend. We believe that you could be an asset, – you can write persuasively, you can speak persuasively, you have lots of loyal friends and most importantly you are probably intelligent enough to know that being on the winning ticket is usually the right choice to make for you and your family. Oh, and you are part alien. From your mother’s side of the family. Remember tell no one about this – not even your wife.”
Agent Spartacus X
I am of course intrigued and freaked out. I thought of the X files and numerous SF thrillers I had read over the years. I said that this could not be happening must be some sort of vicious joke. In any event, I am intrigued enough to get out the Q pamphlet from the trash and read it. I finally decided to try to sort out what he is saying and come up with the following schematic based on the pamphlet and looking at his web page and other web pages that have similar points of view.
Q posits a grand conspiracy of British and American big bankers working together since the 15th century to continue to secretly dominate the world. The roots of the conspiracy date back to the Knight Templars of the Middle Ages which morphed into the Freemasons, then the fabled Illuminati. Most recently, they have been associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, The Bohemian Club, and The Project for a New American Century. They are often now called the Vulcans or the Neocons. But the Neocons are just a small American inner circle of a much broader interrelated international conspiracy.
Q maintains that the core of the conspiracy is satanic worshiping pedophiles who kill children after sexually abusing them and drinking their blood which they have discovered prolongs human life.
They had almost succeeded in their plans when the Great Depression came along and laid waste to their plans. Q argues that the Great Depression was engineered by them – others disagree. But all of the paranoid writers I read agreed that in response to the Great Depression, they took advantage of the chaos and engineered the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo and were working to bring Britain and the US into the fold. Their goal – a Pan Germanic-Anglo dominated world fascist system to fight against the evils of Communism and Socialism. The Birchers and others thought that Communism was also part of their master plot, others disagree. They thought that the U.S. would fall into place and eventually Hitler would unite the Germanic and Anglo worlds into a grand empire that would control the world forever. They would run the Empire through charismatic fools like Hitler. They would have continual wars which are good for business and they would have periodic depressions to ensure that they can continually buy up their competitors. Franklin Roosevelt disrupted their plans, as did Truman, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton. Nixon, Ford, and Bush 1 were part of the Conspiracy. Reagan and Bush 11 were merely useful puppets.
Donald Trump is merely their latest puppet. Their mission is to bring fascism to America and then use America’s military muscle to impose Pax Americana on the world. They plan to bring back a Neo-Nazi party to power in Germany and they plan to launch World War 111 against the Islamic world. Once they have secured the Islamic world for the West they will have to take on China and perhaps Russia. India they think they can make a junior partner like Europe and Japan.
That briefly is the Q conspiracy. I still did not buy it. I did not think that any of our leaders were so corrupt and evil. I thought perhaps they were stupid, ignorant, and making wrong decisions but I also thought like most Americans that they were genuinely interested in doing the right thing and we’re looking out for American interests in an increasingly dangerous world. And yes, I considered myself to be a bit of a dissident but I did not want to lose my job so I kept my thoughts largely to myself, my journals, my unpublished poetry, and stories.
So I wrote down what had happened in my journal, and decided to be careful. I thought that perhaps the Q people were trying to scare me in to join them. Of course, I did not suspect what I would soon be told.
Just to be prudent I kept my journal entry on a diskette that I carried with me at all times. I quit writing anything on my computer that could be compromised. I installed some additional spyware and did daily checks.
A few more weeks went by. I saw the Q people at the subway and gave them a wide berth. I even denounced one of them in public for being a paranoid conspiracy freak. I wanted to give anyone watching the impression that I did not buy any of their crap.
One day I see Agent Spartacus on the subway. I go up to him and ask him how is doing, acting as if he is a fellow employee that I have not seen in a while. He responds, “Just fine.” He then whispers, “Check your phone for a message in 10 minutes.” He jumps on the Orange train and I wait for the Blue train. At King Street station, my phone beeps with a message.
“Meet me Friday night at “Coyote Ugly” at 6 pm. Be on time. We will have a drink there and then find someplace we can talk quietly. Be prepared to spend a couple of hours. Your wife will be out of town on business. Remember we are watching you and monitoring you. Good move on your part on writing your journals on diskettes. Bring them unaltered. If you alter them, we will know. BTW, I know you like sushi so we will have sushi in one of our affiliated businesses, sort of a “safe house” so to speak in Chinatown. Spartacus.”
I was freaked out after reading the message. My wife had not mentioned any business trip. I go home and she tells me she has to go out of town on Friday for a weeklong trip to Ft Hood on TDY. My wife was in the military, I was used to her constant TDY’s on short notice, and I knew that sometimes she could not tell me what she was really up to as her clearances outranked mine by an order of magnitude. But how Spartacus knew bothered me. Was my wife part of the conspiracy? I knew that I had to meet him. What he was hinting at was monstrous. And the possibility that my wife was involved even more horrible. I knew if I told her my suspicions, she would laugh it off and tell me to lay off the Science Fiction novels for a while. The possibility that she could be working with them also entered my mind and stayed there like a stubborn weed that would not die.
And if she were part of this conspiracy would she tell me or them? I thought that I could not go to the authorities because it seemed clear that many of the senior officers were part of this dark conspiracy and no one would believe me. I would be dismissed as a nut case, possibly hauled to a psychiatric hospital or just made to disappear, at the very least, my security clearance would be yanked, and I would be unemployed if not unemployable. And since they have also strongly warned me to be quiet I knew the risks would be pretty high so, despite my burning desire to talk things over with my wife, I kept quiet.
I go to work and try hard to pretend that nothing is bothering me. A few people notice that I am not my usual chipper self and I laugh it off, saying that Angela is out of town and that I am usually a bit gloomy when she is on TDY.
Friday night I go to Coyote Ugly. I sit down. Spartacus is not there. A beautiful Korean woman wearing skintight blue jeans, a tank top with long black hair running down her back and lovely almond-shaped eyes, and a cute face sits down unasked and tells me that Spartacus sent his regards but could not make it. She would go to dinner with me instead. I am suspicious that some sort of honey trap was being set up against me. I looked around for cameras and surveillance but realized that they would probably be hidden. I resolve to keep my wits about me, not drink and not give in to temptation, although when she went off to the restroom her luscious ass tempted me.
The old blues standard by Junior Wells, “Everyone Getting Some but Me” starts playing on the jukebox. I listen to my favorite line, “A girl in skin-tight pants walk on by, with an ass so fine my eyeballs hurt” and I said to myself. “Damn. They are good. They even know that I am an ass man, love the blues and this song in particular, and I love Asian women. Damn.”
I pay my bill and Miss Lee and I walk down to Chinatown and enter a sushi place. They seem to know her. We order some sushi. A message comes into my phone.
“Jake. Could not make it. Miss Lee works for me. She will give you a letter. Read it and leave or stay and have fun with her. She will do anything and everything you ever wanted from a woman sexually. She has been instructed to seduce you like a honey pot approach. Not my idea, but my superiors. I would rather play you straight up with the facts. But if you do go with her know that it will be recorded and used against you if you step out of line. But on the other hand, she is good and we know what you like as we have read your sex fantasies. You are a good writer, my friend. So, if you do it, enjoy it. We will meet next week after you read the letter and survive this first test. Spartacus”
I ask Miss Lee in Korean if she knew what was going on. She laughs and said that she was told to give me a letter, and then to show me a good time. She also said that she was told what I liked and wanted me to have her any way I wanted her.
I thanked her and asked her for the letter. I take the letter and then decided to not go forward with the rest of the planned events as I thought showing a little independence might be a good insurance policy. I apologize to Miss Lee. She asked me why I did not want her. I told her that I felt guilty being with her and had to go home. She told me to take her home. I ended up kissing her and taking her phone number and e-mail address. She told me she knew that she would succeed in seducing me as no one has ever turned her down before. She laughed and said, “You’ll see. No one has ever resisted my charms. Read the letter and then decide.”
I leave the restaurant and read the letter on the yellow line subway home:
The letter was as follows:
“By now you should be aware of our power and reach. Your wife is not yet a member of the inner circle but we will approach her if you decide to join. We think she would be also an excellent choice. But each approach is different as you can well imagine. By now, you either have decided to have a good time with Miss Lee or have decided to decline in a mistaken impression that showing a little independence would be a good move. Either way would result in the same thing – either you will have some great sex which we will film or we will take pictures of you and Miss Lee and morph them into a nice porno movie which we will send to your wife, your boss and your security folks one week from today unless you agree to the following:
Meet me Sunday night at the sushi place. Bring flowers for Miss Lee. If you turn her down, she will be miffed, as she does not take rejection lightly. She is determined to seduce you, you know. You were the first to turn her down. Took a lot of guts to do that. Oh well.
When we meet, I will then tell you the whole story. You can then go with Miss Lee or not. Your choice but remember the video is already being produced so you might as well enjoy her while you can. We have lots of work to do soon so I have to bring you in sooner than we usually do. Consider Miss Lee as a reward for joining. First of many as the members of the inner circle can have anything they want and will after D-day. Join us in being masters of the universe. D day is coming soon.”
Spartacus
I get off the subway, take a taxi home. I call my wife and resist the impulse to tell her everything and wonder if she has already been approached. And what would be the approach they would use on her?
Sunday evening I meet Miss Lee at the restaurant. I give her flowers and we have dinner. She is flirting up a storm and I find my resistance melting. I figure that was part of the plan and have decided to go with the flow. I think, “why not fool around? After all the video has already been made? Right? ”
Spartacus shows up and the mood turns serious. Miss Lee is now totally professional and serious. The flirting was all an act of course and she was a true professional. Spartacus looks tired. He takes me into the back room and begins his tale of woe. I listen and don’t want to believe any of it. It was so monstrous and evil but I knew he was telling the truth. And boy the truth did not set me free let me tell you.
Spartacus starts,
“Q was one of our human operatives. He was a rising star, but had an attack of guilt and left us. We debated whether to kill him or not. I suggested that we let him go, discredit him but use him as bait. Anyone who reads his stuff can be identified and those who show signs that they believe it and might be persuaded to join us could recruit. The others can be eliminated. So, we persecuted Q, made him look like a paranoid idiot and we kept feeding him disinformation which he would disseminate.
What he writes about is only part of the truth and is the most visible, most documented part of the story and mostly true with some disinformation in it. For example, Q misunderstood Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler was a stooge, a “useful fool” in Lenin’s phrase and Lenin and Stalin were part of our inner circle as were Mussolini and Tojo. Roosevelt was our enemy as has been most of the Democratic leadership. That’s why we are hard at work to destroy the Democratic Party and install a right-wing republican one-party state under our control but with “useful fools” like Bush as figureheads. Bush is not one of us, but we control him because Rowe, Cheney, and the Neocon cabal are all part of our inner circle. Most are human, but some are fellow Sirians. Cheney, Rowe, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are Siran as well, most of the rest of the Neocons are humans. But his nonsense that we are Satan-worshiping pedophiles who kill children and drink their blood to make us immortal is complete and utter balderdash. We are immortal in a sense; our average age is over 5,000 years.
The aim of our plot? Total domination of the world then planned destruction of the worldwide civilization through nuclear, and biological warfare where 90 percent of humanity will be destroyed. We will clean up the pieces and establish a worldwide dictatorship. Then the invasion begins and humanity is enslaved forever to the power of the master race, the Sirians.
Most of the people who work with us do not know that they are working for the Sirians. But it does not matter. If you are with us, you will be rewarded with power, wealth, and access to Sirian medical technological wonders. If you oppose us, you will be thrown out into the world to be destroyed along with most of the rest of your dismal race.
I am a Sirian. We came to your planet five thousand years ago. We set up a colony, which you know as Atlantis. It was destroyed in a nuclear war between two factions of our race – the progressives who wanted to establish their version of democracy and what you might consider fascists or realists, as we like to think of ourselves. When you see the real me you will see that the progressive and fascist groups are different races of Sirians. We are red and much more muscular and frankly more intelligent and realistic. They are darker, green, and smaller and filled with useless compassion. They still exist and occasionally cause us trouble. We are always watching to make sure that they do not try to approach our human agents and corrupt them with pernicious “liberal or progressive” ideas – to use the current phrases – nonsense.
But I digress. The Fascists won the war but Atlantis was destroyed. Most of the Sirian race on earth was killed in the war. Those of us Fascists left formed a tight little group and decided that we would bid our time, build out forces, take over the planet, and when the earth had achieved sufficient levels of technology contact our homeworld, and await instructions.
The progressives formed their group and disappeared spending their time trying to enlighten humankind. What a load of crap. They just were misunderstood and killed for their troubles. Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed, Confucius, Sai Baba – all Sirian democratic losers every one of them.
Some of the progressive Sirians disappeared into the wilderness and their descendants gradually intermarried with the natives and their descendants became the Cherokee and other civilized tribes. None of the Cherokees knew that they were descended from aliens from Sirius and native people. Although the Cherokee and Hopi have legends that their ancestors came from the Stars. Thus, in a way you are part Sirian as we know your mother is half Cherokee. We tested your DNA and yes, you have traces of Sirian DNA in you.
We have tried intermarriage with your race and have found for the most part it does not work too well as our two DNA structures are incompatible. Nonetheless, there have been successful offspring of such interspecies sex. Thus, there are thousands of part-Sirian people as some of our people intermarried with your species. Interspecies sex is highly discouraged at least among the realist faction; the progressive faction has largely assimilated into your race.
The question of what to do about humans became the key issue dividing the Sirian race – then and now. The so-called fascists to use modern terminology thought that you earth people were hopelessly backward, superstitious, and barely capable of intelligence. We felt that we should kill most of you off, then enslave the rest. That is still our plan. Besides, on our homeworld, we rose to power by killing off a rival species that were humanoid looking. Ever since then Sirians have had it in for humanoids and primate species.
The progressives thought that they should work with you, bring you up to civilization and educate you and then have you join us as equals. The progressives have never learned a damn thing from our history. The Sirians have conquered hundreds of planets; in every case, they enslaved the native races who were always inferior species. There is nothing different here. You are a particularly interesting race though – all of your sub-races and your religious passions. The Sirians are materialists and are atheistic. We do not worship gods. We are the gods of the universe. We are the master race. But I digress.
Well, as you can imagine, it was very difficult hiding amongst your people for all of these thousands of years. You see Sirians are by nature very long-lived. The average Sirian lives 10 thousand years and we, therefore, have a long historical memory. Most of us are now what you would consider early middle age. Since we do not age as humans do, we have to kill ourselves off on paper every 50 to 70 years. That makes it difficult to keep our conspiracy going.
Until very recently, we were limited by your technology as our space ships and most of our technology had all been destroyed in Atlantis. Only 15,000 of our race survived, most of the Fascist side. We lost track of the progressives who have gone deep underground. We have managed to reproduce and now there are about 10,000 of us scattered around the world, most in senior levels of government and business. And we estimate that there are several thousand Progressives mostly working in religious or academic institutions. And there are thousands of part Sirians, like yourself.
Among other difficulties, we are hidden within human bodies that are artificially created skins. Our real appearance is not human at all. We look like birds or reptiles in our real selves. Few humans have ever seen us as we look. We can manipulate thoughts and thus few can see us as we look, even when we are out of the suits.
We wear the suits whenever we are around humans as maintaining thought control is very tiresome. HP Lovecraft saw us and he went mad and wrote his “Cthulu” stories about us. Others have seen us on our retreats in the woods and we have been called many names through the years, ‘” werewolves, vampires, ghouls, ghosts, demons, goblins, trolls, Satan, the devil, witches – you name it we’ve been called it. Bad for our self-esteem don’t you think. “The damn progressives get better press and are often seen as “angels”.
Those stories of alien abductions etc are true for the most part as are stories of UFOs. We have been able to rebuild space ships but they are not interplanetary, as we do not have technological resources to do so since most of our technology had been destroyed and those technicians who knew how to maintain the ships and build them all died in the war anyway. Besides our Sirian, leaders back home do not trust us. They want us to stay here and do their bidding whether than return home.
We communicate with each other in Sirian through secure communications and now through the internet. The NSA and other government snoops keep picking up strange language chatter on the internet but since we control the spooks, they never follow up.
We have been in touch with Mother Planet. Our instructions are to set off Armageddon and destroy the planet. The invasion begins after the nuclear war is over and most people have been killed and your technological infrastructure destroyed. We will then take over and enslave humanity. Those humans who helped us will be given top jobs in the Sirian administration and eventually given full citizenship rights for themselves and their families. Most people will be killed or enslaved. Think what happened to the Indians? That was a Sirian plot from the beginning. We wanted to kill off all the Indians but particularly wanted to destroy the so-called civilized tribes, as we knew that the Progressive faction had intermarried with the Indians.
Most of human history has been the result of Sirian plots. The problem we have is that you humans are so hard to predict, rule, control, etc. And our biggest problem is with intellectuals. Once they know the full story either they go mad, or they try to warn their fellow humans, or they kill themselves. The 10 percent who survive after hearing the true story usually join our movement. And of course, the damn progressives are always watching us, trying to warn humankind of the impending danger. But as you know few will ever believe the truth. If everything you’ve known is a lie, you usually can’t survive that knowledge, and as I said most humans when exposed to the truth by either side go mad and are useless to our cause.
So your choice today: Join us, resist us and die, or walk away and keep quiet and wake for death. We are launching WW111 very soon. Once the war has been launched, nuclear winter will ensure and most of the earth will enter an ice age. We will then invade and take over the habitable areas and use slave labor to mine for minerals etc under the ice. Sirians like cold icy planets as that is like our home planet. Your planet is too hot for our liking anyway.”
I stopped him and asked lots of follow-up questions. Finally, I tell them the only way they could prove they were telling the truth was to reveal themselves as they were.
Agent Spartacus said,
“Very well. Agent Lee is only part human. She is one of the few successful hybrids. She looks human but a blood test would reveal alien DNA. I am pure Syrian and have long opposed the inter-species experiments as being anti-natural and degrading to the Sirian race. I don’t give a rat’s ass about you humans. Follow me and you will see. But you do take a risk that you will freak out and become a mad man.”
We walk into the back room. Agent Spartacus removes his skintight clothing. Underneath it laid a hideous, repulsive ugly reptile-like biped creature minus a tail. Dark green with black stripes on both sides. His face looked like a bird’s face with sharp beaks, beady red eyes, and a mouth full of sharp teeth. The top of his head had horns on it. He laughs, and said,
“See why most humans believe in a real devil?”
I could see why most people would freak out at the sight. He was just hideous to look at. Must be something in-bred in humans to instantly fear and loath their real appearance. I am having a hard time coping and want to throw up.
He gets dressed again. I ask him if it was difficult to be enclosed in a human skin costume, as it must be difficult to fit into it. He admits it was difficult. He says that they all live together in various safe houses, where they run around naked when there are no humans around. It is impossible thought to fit their face into a human mask so they employ a holographic projection. Only a few humans have seen them as they are. He concluded by noting that I should consider it an honor that he has shown me his true self.
Agent Lee had also stripped revealing an even more alluringly beautiful woman than I had imagined. I was tempted but knowing that she was half-alien and in league with these evil creatures turned my stomach.
I tell agent Spartacus and Agent Lee that I had to think about it and went home. I wrote this all down and sent it off to my best friends and of course my wife. I hope that this does not result in a death sentence for me, but so be it. I have to do the right thing. I have resolved to search out and join the resistance led by the progressive Syrians. I hope there is still time to derail “Armageddon” but I fear that time is running out.
Jake Lee
E-mail sent by Jake Lee moments before the Van Dorn Street Terrorist Incident – the first of hundreds of car bombings across the country that terrible day WWW 111 began.
Q madness writers cramp
Q
Prophet
Trump
Not him
Supporters
Believe
That
There are
Cannibals
Abusing children
Drinking blood
To live
On
Nonsense
Pure madness
But still
That is
Q
This form is not too difficult. You only have to beware of the pattern; as the syllables per line are not many.
The form is found on the web page of Sol Magazine, and named after Leo Waltz, their manager.
The poem consists out of just one stanza, with the following syllabic pattern:
The information given: “Words may be split into syllables to fit the pattern.
This form seems to educe a soothing cadence as the lines gently increase and decrease, so it is suggested that topic chosen for this form also be soothing.”
Debunking the Q conspiracy
38 lines
As more people go down dark rabbit holes
Consumed with bat sh…t, crazy, dark, dangerous,
Insane, wild conspiracy theories
Wrapped up in other conspiracies.
The master conspiracy is the Q conspiracy
People believe that there is a secret cabal
Secretly ruling the world for their own
Evil, foul, nefarious purposes.
A cannibalistic, child-eating, pedophilia
Satan worshipers cabal
Who may be controlled
By alien shape-shifting reptiles.
To those of us who live
In the reality-based world
It is hard to comprehend
How people can get sucked
Into this collective madness.
And how to see
How we can help them
Restore their sanity.
But it is up to all of us
To work together
To restore the world
To sanity.
Or we will watch
Everyone in the world
Become bat sh..t crazy
Consumed with violent rage.
Destroying the world
As they create
Their own end-of-days
Hell on earth.
NEW PROMPT: Tomorrow, March 11, is Debunking Day . Write a story or poem about someone debunking some false information.
Morning all. There is a lot coming at us now and I’ll do my best to make sense of it all this am. I start off with a recording of my talk with Hopium paid subscribers last night (above) where I go through it all – Trump’s remarkable slide in the polls, the rebellion in the House, his tariff madness. We had a good crowd last night and a lively discussion after my initial remarks. Get to it when you can.
Six months and four days in it’s clear Trump is in trouble. This period of unraveling began with Elon’s three day long assault on Trump in early June that included this tweet:
As you’ve heard me say I think something broke inside the White House that week. Trump’s manhood, his STRENGTH, his POWER, was questioned by someone who could speak to the MAGA faithful, and this STRENGTH, this POWER needed to be restored at all costs. Within hours we saw the wild overreaction and escalation on the streets of Los Angeles, moves which quickly became rejected by the public. We saw his Dear Leader military parade flop, and become overshadowed by millions of us peacefully protesting across the country. We saw the country slough off his MANLY BOMBING of Iran, seeing it, immediately, for the pathetic stunt it was. His week of royal celebration of the passage of his BIG UGLY bill was then rudely interrupted by hundreds dying in Texas floods, Putin giving him the finger, Pam Bondi burying the Epstein report and him coming to his 90 day trade deadline with zero, none, zilch, nada trade agreements. A few days later the White House then had to admit that the President did have a debilitating disease, and was in ill-health – further confirmation of his weakness and declining POWER. All the while his poll numbers kept dropping, and all parts of his agenda – including the big ugly – continued to grow more unpopular.
In their royal arrogance, frustration and desperation in that victory lap week that turned to shit Trump made two deeply consequential mistakes – rather than rolling back his unpopular and destructive tariffs, he announced he was doubling and tripling them; they tried to bury the Epstein report.
The Epstein affair has become a titanic scandal that has reinforced Trump’s weakening grip on our politics and Washington. In the last few days we learned that 1,000 FBI personnel – 1,000 – were deployed to find mentions of Trump in the files suggesting the cover up in place was enormous in scale. The Wall Street Journal shared Trump’s disgusting letter to Epstein from 2003. Speaker Johnson had to send the House home this week to quell the growing rebellion in his ranks. Then yesterday we learned that Trump was in the Epstein files and had been lying about it to the public and his supporters. Last night the House oversight committee voted 8-2 to subpoena the Epstein files from Trump and Bondi. And then late last night a video surfaced of Epstein in 2010 taking the fifth when asked about whether he and Trump worked underage girls together:
You never know in this business. You never know when something like the Epstein affair will explode into something consequential. But it has, and this rapist, fraudster, traitor, and 34 times felon in unlikely to come out of it anything other than deeply, deeply damaged even if he can hold on to the Presidency.
The second major mistake Trump made during this challenging period was doubling down on his tariff debacle. As Rob Shapiro and I explored in yesterday’s discussion Trump’s reckless economic agenda – big ugly, mass deportation, tariffs, gutting of US scientific leadership – was doing enormous damage to the US economy and had become the central driver of his political decline. Look at this data:
Only 25% of the country believe the big ugly will be good for them:
Only 27% of the country believe Trump’s agenda has been good for them:
Only a third of the country – and ONLY HALF OF THOSE WHO VOTED FOR HIM – gave him good marks on inflation and prices the single most important issue in American politics, and one he promised to address as President:
Looking at all this, and given what forecasters were telling us about the negative impact of Trump’s agenda on the economy, Trump should have used his 90 day deadline to walk away from his tariffs. He choose, rather, to announce that he was doubling and tripling them on August 1st, next Friday. In the last two days we’ve learned that Trump appears to be attempting to create an universal 15% across the board global tariff, 50% higher than his current tariff rate, and far, far higher than what was a 1-2% global rate prior to his illegal and unconstitutional levying of his tariffs in early April.
So in his arrogance, diminishment, extremism, confusion, anger, frustration, weakness and emasculation our increasingly mad leader has chosen a course that will further harm the US economy; further raise prices and spur inflation; further anger our global allies; further shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the working and middle class; and push him further and further away from the American people who will rightly feel betrayed by these tariffs and his broader agenda.
When Congress returns in September not only will they be grappling with the Epstein affair, they will have to pass a fiscal year 2026 budget. Without a new budget the government runs out of money on October 1st. This dysfunctional, shambolic, cowardly, shitshow of a Congress will have to somehow come together keep the government from shutting down and pass a budget that funds the government for the next year. And that, my friends, is going to be a serious problem for them. For that budget will not only have all the deeply unpopular parts of the big ugly it will include exploding deficits, onerous tariffs, cuts to NIH, FEMA, Department of Education, etc too. It is going to be the BIG, BIG UGLY, and we should be able to use these months of wrangling and struggle to hang their agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal around their necks and further degrade their already degraded standing; and perhaps, perhaps, if all goes well, knock out or delay some of the worst parts of what is to come.
As bad as all that is, it is likely to get even worse for Trump and the Rs next year as their agenda, whatever of it survives the budget battle, is implemented and the economy worsens and they get more and all of us get less, far, far less.
To review and make sense of this extraordinary week Katie Phang will be joining us live tomorrow at 215pm ET. You can find the link to this event and all of our events in our Events page on the main Hopium site. Three more things to get to from me if you haven’t gotten to them yet:
Friends, Trump is in trouble. While yes they continue to do enormous harm to the country, “Trump” as a brand is failing; the wand no longer seems to work; his hold on power here is loosening – and all of that is good, essential, important. It is a necessary but not sufficient step in our work to mitigate the damage they are doing and win back power. Watch my video. Share it with others. We have a big opening now, and we need to seize it, together.
OK, my friends……
Let’s Get To Work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here at Hopium we like to do. Here we are proud, plucky, patriots but we are also put your head down, grind it out, get shit done doers. Trump and Republicans have stumbled, and given us a big opportunity now to tell our story and win back power. While are there so many things people can do to advance our cause I am partial to two sets of activities – support our candidates and party committees, and call/contact your elected officials every day. So what follows is our recommendations to make your time and money are being put to the highest and best use in this critical election cycle……
Support Hopium’s Priority Candidates And Party Committees – Just set new fundraising goals for Labor Day, now remarkably six weeks away. Election Day is less than four months away and early voting starts in Virginia starts in less than two months – September 19th! Donate, volunteer, learn more about our candidates and opportunities here….
Our Recommended Actions – Here are other actions you can take outside of our direct electoral work:
1 – Call your Senators and Rep To Demand They Revoke Trump’s Terrible Tariffs – Congress simply must take back its tariff authority that Trump has illegally and unconstitutional seized and dangerously abused; and at the very least they must stop what will be Trump’s ruinous new tariff increases slated to start on August 1st. Trump’s economic plan has failed, and we need to find a better way forward.
2 – Fight Trump’s Inhumane Immigration Escalation – We must do more here, and I will be working to put together a strategy for us in the coming weeks. In the meantime watch my recent discussions with David LeopoldJoe Garcia, Leon Krauze and Senator Chris Van Hollen for more.
3 – Bring “Resolutions Of Condemnation” To Your Community – Inspired by the tactics of our Founders learn about how Hopium members are advancing “Resolutions of Condemnation” in their communities across the country and consider bringing this initiative to your state, country or city/town. Remarkably, members of this community are now advancing 50 resolutions projects in 20 states. Can we get to all 50 by the fall election?
Our newly updated Resolutions page includes a new chat for folks to report in on their progress or seek counsel from those interested in launching a resolutions project in their community. This is one way to fight back against Trump’s unprecedened abandonment of our Constitutional order.
4 -Volunteer To Help Your State and/or Local Democratic Parties Stand Up Voter Registration EffortsAnd Support “Organizing Summer” – In the presentation he made to our community recently Tom Bonier made a persuasive case that Democrats must once again make partisan voter registration a national priority. State and local Democratic Parties are in the planning stages to take this on. Members of our community should consider contacting their state and local parties and offer to help stand up these vital efforts in the coming months.
The DNC, the DSCC, the DCCC, the DGA and the ASDC have announced a major new “Organizing Summer” project. Learn more about it here. For more on what the DNC and state and local parties are intending to do this election cycle see my recent interviews with DNC Chair Ken Martin and ASDC President Jane Kleeb.
5 – Support Brave US Government Staff and Scientists Fighting To Protect Our Global Scientific Leadership – Staff at 3 of the most important US science agencies – NIH, EPA and NASA – have now courageously filed letters of discontent against their leadership. Learn more and sign your name to support these remarkable initiatives, and do you part to fight to main America’s global scientific leadership!
6 – Review and Comment On Hopium’s Working Agenda – Many of you have noted that we must do more than oppose, we must also propose and make clear to the American people what they will get if they put us back in power. To that end, with input from many of you, I’ve drafted an initial 2026 Agenda. Check it out here, offer comments and improvements, take it into your communities and create discussions and debates about who we are, and what story we want to tell to our voters this fall and next year.
7 – Grow Hopium And This Wonderful Community Of Proud, Plucky, Patriots – We’ve set a goal of trying to grow the Hopium community from the 152,000 we are now to 175,000 by Labor Day. Do what you can to encourage your friends, family and colleagues to become a summer subscriber to Hopium, free or paid. If each current paid subscriber brings in just one new subscriber this summer we will hit our goal.
To encourage the growth of our community annual paid subscriptions are 10% off through Labor Day. Use that link to buy gift or group subscriptions, and join our new referral rewards program too.
Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder! Been impressive to see how many of you remain involved in local, in person protests of all kinds in your communities. Keep it up!!!
Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you, and a fight it truly is – Simon
I am trying not to comment on the nightmare that Trump 2.0 is becoming because well there is little I can do about it, and I don’t want to end up on a government hit list because I expressed even mild criticism of the new neo-fascist regime taking place.
I wanted to provide an update on my earlier blog post about the war on the LGBTQ+ community, where I expressed concern that if Trump returned to power, life for my LGBTQ+ friends would become very difficult. Unfortunately, my worst fears have been realized.
One of the most significant changes has been Trump’s official decree that the U.S. government will only
recognize two genders: male and female, assigned at birth.
This policy attempts to erase the legal status of transgender individuals and has been a long-standing demand of social conservatives. The ripple effects have been profound, including banning transgender people from serving in the military and even
restricting their ability to travel to the U.S.
I asked Copilot to provide additional background and included some links for
reference.
Copilot said:
The Trump administration has implemented several policies that have significantly impacted the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender individuals. These include executive orders and state-level initiatives that restrict rights and access to services. Here’s a breakdown:
Anti-LGBTQ+ Policies
Federal Actions:
The administration has reinstated bans on transgender individuals serving in the military, restricted gender-affirming healthcare for minors, and removed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs from federal
agencies.
Travel Restrictions:
A recent State Department policy could deny visas to transgender individuals if their documents do not
match their sex assigned at birth. According to the new policy, visas can not be issued in cases of “gender fraud”. This policy is tied to broader efforts to exclude transgender athletes from women’s Sports.
Criminalization of Trans Identity:
In Texas, a proposed bill seeks to make identifying as transgender a felony under “gender identity fraud,” punishable by jail time and fines. While unlikely to pass, it
reflects a growing trend of extreme legislative measures targeting transgender individuals.
Banning Trans women from using the bathroom in Congressional buildings and other government facilities
the House of Representatives has banned trans women from using the wrong bathroom at the House of Represenatives. This policy was enacted to punish the only trans woman congresswoman. The House Seargent of Arms has been called several times to prevent alleged trans women from the crime of using the wrong bathroom. These demeaning bathroom bans are spreading everywhere. there will be more cases of trans people being arrested for using the wrong bathroom as these “bans” become widespread.
Ending DEI programs in the Federal government
President Trump has ended all DEI programs in the Federal government and has been pressuring State governments to do the same and even threathening to take away Federal funding from Universites who do not end DEI programs including ethnic studies programs, woman studies programs and queer studies programs. The crack down is widespread.
Government agencies have been scrubbing their public facing web pages to remove all references to DEI issues including banning the use of words such as race, gender, LGBTQ, trans, gay and references to native Americans for example. DOD removed pictures of the famous world war 11 Hiroshima bomber apparently because the plane name was Enola Gay and the AI program removed it due to the prohibited word, “Gay”.
Misusing AI to Scrub Government Web pages in an Orwellian manner
Musk and DOGE do not see this initiative as a fraudulent waste of taxpayer dollars which it is as government employees are being forced to spend time scrubbing government web pages in sn Orwellian program of offending phrases using AI programs.
CO-Pilot gives the latest background
President Trump’s anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) campaign has been a significant and polarizing initiative. His administration has taken steps to dismantle DEI programs across federal agencies, universities, and even private companies. This includes executive orders and memos warning institutions that they could lose federal funding if they continue using race-based preferences in areas like admissions, scholarships, or hiring.
The campaign has led to federal investigations into over 50 universities, focusing on partnerships with organizations like the PhD Project, which supports underrepresented groups in business education. Critics argue these partnerships may involve race-exclusionary practices. Additionally, some universities are being scrutinized for offering race-based scholarships.
Supporters of the campaign claim it promotes merit-based opportunities and eliminates what they see as reverse discrimination against white and Asian American individuals. Opponents, however, argue that it undermines efforts to address systemic inequities and creates barriers for marginalized communities.
This initiative has sparked legal challenges and debates about the role of DEI in fostering inclusive environments. It’s a complex issue with far-reaching implications for education, employment, and social equity.
Left-Wing Analysis
Progressive voices argue that these policies are part of a broader rollback of civil rights, framing them as attacks on personal freedoms and human dignity. Critics
highlight the mental health toll and increased vulnerability to discrimination and violence for LGBTQ+ individuals.
Right-Wing Analysis
Conservative perspectives often justify these measures as protecting traditional values, religious freedoms, and fairness in areas like sports and education. They argue that such policies address societal concerns about gender identity and its implications.
Opposition to LGBTQ rights is often framed by critics as being rooted in traditional Christian values, with several biblical passages and religious arguments frequently cited. Here are some examples:
### Biblical Citations 1. **Leviticus 18:22** and **Leviticus 20:13**: These verses describe same-sex relations as an “abomination” and prescribe severe punishments in the context of Old Testament law[_{{{CITATION{{{_1
{25 Bible Verses about Homosexuality – What Does Scripture Say? –
**Romans 1:26-27**: The Apostle Paul refers to same-sex relations as “dishonorable passions” and contrary to God’s natural order[_{{{CITATION{{{_
1{25 Bible Verses about Homosexuality – What Does Scripture Say? –
This passage lists “men who practice homosexuality” among those who will not inherit the Kingdom of God[_{{{CITATION{{{_1{25 Bible Verses about Homosexuality –
### Broader Religious Justifications – **Natural Law**: Some Christian theologians argue that LGBTQ relationships contradict “natural law,” which they interpret as God’s design for human sexuality and procreation. –
**Religious Freedom**: Critics often invoke religious liberty to justify actions or policies that oppose LGBTQ rights, claiming that compliance with such rights would violate their sincerely held religious beliefs
These interpretations and arguments are not universally accepted within Christianity, and many theologians and denominations advocate for LGBTQ inclusion, emphasizing themes of love, justice, and equality. The debate often reflects broader tensions between traditional interpretations of scripture and evolving understandings of human rights and diversity.
These interpretations and arguments are not universally accepted within
Christianity, and many theologians and denominations advocate for LGBTQ
inclusion, emphasizing themes of love, justice, and equality. The debate often
reflects broader tensions between traditional interpretations of scripture and
evolving understandings of human rights and diversity.
Christian denominations hold a wide range of views on LGBTQ rights, reflecting diverse theological interpretations and cultural contexts. Here’s an overview:
Denominations Opposing LGBTQ Rights
Roman Catholic Church: Officially opposes same-sex marriage and considers homosexual acts sinful, though it emphasizes compassion and respect for LGBTQ individuals.
Eastern Orthodox Church: Similar to Catholicism, it opposes same-sex relationships and marriage, adhering to traditional teachings on sexuality.
Evangelical Protestant Churches: Many evangelical groups, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, oppose LGBTQ rights, citing biblical interpretations that view homosexuality as sinful.
Denominations Supporting LGBTQ Rights
Episcopal Church: Welcomes LGBTQ individuals and allows same-sex marriage ceremonies.
United Church of Christ: Fully affirms LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality and ordination of LGBTQ clergy.
Presbyterian Church (USA): Supports same-sex marriage and ordains LGBTQ clergy.
Metropolitan Community Church: Founded specifically to serve LGBTQ Christians and advocates for full inclusion.
Divided Denominations
Anglican Communion: Deeply divided, with some branches (e.g., Episcopal Church in the U.S.) affirming LGBTQ rights, while others (e.g., Anglican Church in Africa) oppose them.
Methodist Church: The United Methodist Church is currently experiencing a schism over LGBTQ inclusion, with some congregations breaking away to form more conservative groups
Muslim Community
The Muslim community generally agrees with the anti-LGBTQ views of conservative Christians and in most Muslim countries LGBTQ people face discrimination if not legal consequences including in some cases execution. Hungary and Russia are also countries where anti-LGBTQ views have become government policy. Africa is also a hotbed of opposition to LGBTQ rights.
SE Asia more Tolerant
SE Asia especially Thailand is one of the few areas where LGBTQ rights are celebrated, Thailand has joined Tawain in legalizing same-sex marriages and Thailand remains the main destination for sex reassignment surgery.
With Trump’s Election, the Republican-led War on the LGBTQ community will continue. Rep. Nancy Mace vowed to ensure that the only trans woman ever elected will not be allowed to use the woman’s bathroom in the People’s House. She even went around putting up signs in front of restrooms “Biological Women only” vowing she would not allow women with Penises to use the woman’s room. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense has vowed to kick trans people out of the military. Trump has pulled back a bit, now says he does not want to weight in on bathroom bans as it only affects a few people. But the LGBTQ community is feeling the pressure and is afraid that the war against them will continue.
This is personal for me as I have had several trans friends over the years, one of my college roommate transited from a man to a lesbian woman, another friend transitioned from a woman into a man.
Here are some recent articles on this topic.
Getting rid of the LGBTQ Community
by legal fiat
the MAGA movement leaders
the cynical overlords behind Trump
have a plan to get rid of the trans community
and the LGBTQ Community
by legal fiat
their plans spelled out in the infamous
Project 2025 and Agenda 47
and speeches by Trump and Vance
and their craven fellow travelers
Declaring that there are only two genders
God assigned male and Female at birth.
Banning sex reassignment and changing IDs
Banning people from using the bathroom
of their choice
making using the wrong restroom
a federal sex crime
Enforced by citizen arrests
no doubt some people
will settle these disputes
through their Second Amendment rights.
the craven Supreme Court will no doubt
accept their claim they felt threatened
by a trans person using the wrong restroom.
Banning “biological” males from
participating in women’s sports.
Just like that, there would
There would no longer
be trans people.
firing LGBTQ people
from sensitive government jobs
turning it back to the states
to make such status illegal again
And gay marriage would be illegal.
Putting the LGBTQ community
back in the closet
or forcing them to flee
to more LGBTQ friendly countries.
Banning abortions nationwide
banning contraception too
banning porno and sex education
and making most divorces
illegal,
thus restoring the power
of the white man
to rule forever
just as God intended.
LGBTQ+ Americans stockpile meds and make plans to move after Trump’s win
Zoei Montgomery, a 25-year-old transgender woman, is preparing for Donald Trump’s second term by stockpiling medicines in case her access is cut off. (Annabel Clark for The Washington Post)
Zoei Montgomery is so nervous about Donald Trump’s second presidency that she is making plans to escape to Canada if life in the United States becomes intolerable for her as a transgender woman.
The middle-school custodian fears that the incoming president will follow the lead of Republican governors who have restricted access to gender-affirming care and made it illegal for people to change their gender markers on official documents.
“I would hate to leave home,” said Montgomery, 25, who lives in Washington state. “But it makes me less anxious to have an exit plan in place.”
As Trump’s inauguration nears, some LGBTQ+ people are anxiously preparing for what they fear will be a rollback of their rights. Some in same-sex relationships are making plans to marry or to adopt children. Others are moving to states that they believe will offer them more protection. Transgender people are stockpiling medications, worried that their access to gender transition care will be cut off.
Trump has vowed to prohibit gender transition care for children and eliminate any federal spending on those treatments for adults. He has also promised to ask Congress to pass a bill stating that there are only two genders and that they are assigned at birth. And the incoming president wants to use Title IX protections to ensure that transgender women can’t play on women’s sports teams.
Anti-trans bills have doubled since 2022. Our map shows where states stand.
While some of his promises would be difficult to enact, and many others such as banning access to health care probablywouldbe challenged in court, Trump will have the advantage of Republican controlin Congress and could also enact some changes through executive action.
Trump’s transition team hasn’t provided further details on his plans, but a spokeswoman for the incoming administration said his campaign focused on “common sense policies” that Americans want.
“Clearly, the American people agree with President Trump and that’s why they voted for him in a landslide,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.
A survey conducted by Fox News and the Associated Press found that about 55 percent of voters said support for transgender rights in government and society “has gone too far,” and that 77 percent of this group supported Trump.
The survey also found that 51 percent of voters opposed laws banning gender-affirming medical treatment such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender youths. Among those who do support the ban, 65 percent supported Trump.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared reluctant to block a Tennessee law restricting transgender minors from accessing puberty blockers and hormones as part of their gender transition care. The ruling will affect thousands of transgender youths who live in one of the 24 states, including Tennessee, that have banned similar treatments.
Trans rights were far from the top issue for many voters this election, said Republican pollster Robert Blizzard, but the topic was an animating force for some. Swing-state voters, he said, were angry with Democrats who they said pushed “trans ideology” onto children.
Blizzard, who did not do polling work for the Trump campaign, said voters were worried about children.
“That’s a big concern for a lot of folks across the country, minors making decisions that will change their lives and bodies long-term.”
Michele Zavos, a D.C.-based attorney specializing in LGBTQ+ family law, said it’s a “very complicated time” for the community.
“Rights that we thought were resolved seem to once again be at risk,” she said.
Even before Trump won the presidency, LGBTQ+ people had endured several tumultuous years. Republican lawmakers in statehouses and the U.S. Capitol have introduced a record number of bills aimed at restricting LGBTQ+ rights under President Joe Biden. Schools in Florida and North Carolina have fired gay teachers. Trans children have lost access to health care they describe as lifesaving. And Republicans spent at least $215 million on election ads that painted trans people as the nation’s most pressing threat.
In the initial weeks after the election, LGBTQ+ people and advocacy groups say some of their worst fears are already coming true. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) introduced a measure to bar trans women from women’s bathrooms in the Capitol and all other federal properties two weeks after Sarah McBride (D-Delaware) was elected the nation’s first transgender member of Congress.
Many of Trump’s Cabinet picks have also endorsed anti-trans policies.
Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the president-elect’s pick for director of national intelligence, introduced a bill in 2020 to prohibit trans women from playing on women’s sports teams. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Trump’s choicefor secretary of state, introduced a bill in 2023 to ban anyone with a history of gender dysphoria from the U.S. military. And South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), selectedto head the Department of Homeland Security, signed a ban on gender-affirming health care for trans youths last year.
Montgomerysaid she has been stockpiling estradiol and spironolactone pills since September. She now has enough to last her a few weeks if federal lawmakers banned her care, she said.
“Many people around me are acting like everything is the same since Nov. 5,” she said. “But nothing will be the same for the LGBTQ+ community once Trump’s in power, and he has promised that.”
‘Building a raft on a tsunami’
When Trump first won office in 2016, the LGBTQ+ community was celebrating several milestone victories. The Supreme Court had granted same-sex couples the right to marry the year before, and not long after, President Barack Obama directed schools across the country to allow transgender students to use bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities that match their gender identity.
But some of those wins were quickly changed when Trump took office. Within a month of his inauguration, Trump revoked the Obama-era guidelines on transgender students. He also ordered the Pentagon to ban transgender service members from the military.
Later on, under Biden, GOP state lawmakers began targeting a range of things, such as LGBTQ+-friendly books in public schools and gender-affirming care for children. So far, 26 states have banned trans girls and women from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
Then came this year’s presidential campaign. Candidates across the country ran more than 200 anti-trans ads on network TV, according to a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by AdImpact. Trump’s super PACs spent at least $50 million on anti-trans ads, and his campaign made “Kamala is for they/them” a reelection slogan.
“There’s a lot of general fear, panic and hopelessness in the community,” said Janson Wu, a senior director at the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides support to LGBTQ+ youths aimed at suicide prevention and crisis intervention.
“Many people, especially the younger ones, are wondering if they can continue living under these political attacks.”
While some queer and trans families did flee to more LGBTQ+-friendly states during the Biden years, others couldn’t afford to move, or didn’t want to, even as new laws restrictedtheir rights. Now, nonprofit workers say they are hearing from a record number of people who want to relocate to liberal states with explicit protections for gay and trans people.
Keira Richards and a group of friends have been helping people move to Colorado since last year. Normally, their nonprofit, theTrans Continental Pipeline, works with an average of 15 people a month. In the week after the election, Richards said 350 people contacted the group to ask for assistance.
“They don’t want to leave,” said Richards, the Trans Continental Pipeline’s executive director.“But they just feel like they don’t have a choice.”
Richards’s group is staffed by five volunteers who operate on a shoestring budget. Most people need between $2,000 and $4,000 to move to Denver. And rents in the Mile High City aren’t cheap: The average apartment rent isnearly $1,700 per month, according to Apartments.com. Some of those contacting Richards say they can afford to pay only $400 a month.
We’re building a raft on a tsunami,” Richards said. “We’re just trying to be able to meet the need that is suddenly here.”
Jake Nichols, a gay 18-year-old from Jefferson City, Missouri, plans to move to California, where his grandmother lives, when he graduates from high school in May. Nichols said he withdrew his acceptance from a university in Missouri after he noticed how emboldened his classmates have become since Trump’s win.
“They say stuff like ‘You queer people will have to go back in the closet now,’ and ‘Without you parading around, we will make America great again like it used to be,’” he said. “Missouri’s not the place for me right now.”
Nichols said he is worried about an erosion of LGBTQ+ rights, including same-sex marriage, under Trump.
Although Trump did not focus on same-sex marriage during his campaign, many in the LGBTQ+ community are concerned that the high court could eventually rescind that right. They point to the court’s conservative supermajority and Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade,in which he stated that the justices should reconsider their 2015 ruling on same-sex marriages.
Bookstores, bars and ordained ministers across the country have offered to host or perform free weddings for gay couples since Trump was elected to another term. Some, like Harold’s Haunt, an LGBTQ+-friendly bar in Pittsburgh, are planning to put up wedding decorations for couples who “need to get married really quick.”
Other LGBTQ+ couples are worried about their parental rights.
Zavos, the family law attorney, said she has seen an uptick in calls, emails and Facebook messages from same-sex couples who fear that the incoming administration or the Supreme Court could curtail their adoption rights.
Some want to fast-track their adoption plans. Others want to start the lengthy second-parent adoption process, which would secure the parental rights of nonbiological parents. Zavos saidLGBTQ+ families want to secure all the protections they can in a landscape where rights are being threatened.
“I had taken a semi-retirement,” Zavos said. “But given the circumstances, I will unretire to help the community through this crisis.”
An exit by kayak
Trump’s winning has been especially distressing for many young people. The Trevor Project registered a nearly 700 percent increase in calls, texts and chat messages to its crisis services the day after the election, compared with the weeks prior.
State laws targeting transgender people made trans and nonbinary youths between 25 percent and 27 percent more likely to attempt suicide at least once in the second and third years after being enacted, a recent study published in the Nature Human Behavior journal concluded.
Carolyn Fischer knows firsthand how devastating the election has been for some LGBTQ+ teens. She said her 16-year-old son, who is trans, made a pact with three other young trans people to die by suicide if Trump won. The children met on Discord, an online chat platform popular with video gamers, and Fisher said they had discussed how upset they were by the anti-transgender rhetoric coming from Republicans on social media and television.
A few days before the election, Fisher said, her son called the Rainbow Youth Project, a nonprofit that offers crisis counseling to at-risk LGBTQ+ youths and asked for help. All four of the trans adolescents are now receiving counseling, but at least one is still experiencing suicidal ideation.
Fisher and her husband are Republicans who had planned to vote for Trump. But on Election Day, they cast their ballots for Kamala Harris and decorated their front yard with a Pride flag to show support for LGBTQ+ people in the community.
Fisher and her husband have considered leaving their hometown to give their son a fresh start, but they don’t know where they should go.
“Nowhere in the country seems safe for LGBTQ+ kids right now,” she said.
Montgomery, the school custodian from Washington state, is so fearful about life during a second Trump administration that she is preparing an exit plan that includes a kayak.
Her first choice is to remain in Kitsap County, but if her access to gender transition care is limited, she said, she’ll take a ferry to British Columbia. In her “nightmare scenario,” transgender people would be forced to detransition or stop all gender transition medications and live in accordance with the sex they were assigned at birth. She said she would be afraid to go to any official U.S. port of entry if that happened and would instead kayak to Canada.
Montgomery estimates the 20-mile journey by sea would take at least four hours.
“If my worst fears came true,” she said, “I would be compelled to leave.”
rtainly! Let’s explore the positions on LGBTQ rights associated with Project 2024, Agenda 47, and recent speeches by Donald Trump and JD Vance:
Project 2024:
Overview: Project 2024 is a comprehensive policy handbook associated with the Trump administration. While it covers various topics, its stance on LGBTQ rights has been controversial.
Key Points:
Project 2024 calls for a ban on pornography, which is defined so broadly that it includes books featuring same-sex couples and even the existence of transgender people.
The administration aimed to erode protections for transgender students and workers.
It sought to weaken access to gender-affirming health care.
Overview: Dubbed “Agenda 47,” Trump’s policy platform targets public school teachers embroiled in culture wars and aims to undo civil rights protections for LGBTQ people.
Specifics:
Vance proposed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, similar to a bill introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump’s campaign pledges to dismantle Biden administration policies protecting transgender students under Title IX.
A second Trump administration would strip LGBTQ people of protections against discrimination in various contexts (employment, housing, education, health care, etc.).
In summary, both Trump and Vance have taken positions that raise concerns for LGBTQ rights. While Trump’s administration aimed to roll back protections, Vance’s controversial remarks have drawn criticism from LGBTQ advocacy groups. As voters, it’s essential to consider these stances when evaluating candidates’ impact on LGBTQ communities. 🌈🗳️
Sent by Copilot:
Certainly! Let’s explore the positions on LGBTQ rights associated with Project 2024, Agenda 47, and recent speeches by Donald Trump and JD Vance:
Project 2024:
Overview: Project 2024 is a comprehensive policy handbook associated with the Trump administration. While it covers various topics, its stance on LGBTQ rights has been controversial.
Key Points:
Project 2024 calls for a ban on pornography, which is defined so broadly that it includes books featuring same-sex couples and even the existence of transgender people.
The administration aimed to erode protections for transgender students and workers.
It sought to weaken access to gender-affirming health care.
Overview: Dubbed “Agenda 47,” Trump’s policy platform targets public school teachers embroiled in culture wars and aims to undo civil rights protections for LGBTQ people.
Specifics:
Vance proposed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, similar to a bill introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump’s campaign pledges to dismantle Biden administration policies protecting transgender students under Title IX.
A second Trump administration would strip LGBTQ people of protections against discrimination in various contexts (employment, housing, education, health care, etc.).
In summary, both Trump and Vance have taken positions that raise concerns for LGBTQ rights. While Trump’s administration aimed to roll back protections, Vance’s controversial remarks have drawn criticism from LGBTQ advocacy groups. As voters, it’s essential to consider these stances when evaluating candidates’ impact on LGBTQ communities. 🌈🗳️
Sent by Copilot:
Certainly! Transgender rights have been shaped significantly by court cases over the years. Let’s explore some notable ones:
& G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC & Aimee Stephens:
Background: Aimee Stephens, a transgender woman, worked as a funeral director at R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes. When she informed her employer about her gender identity, she was fired. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued on her behalf.
Context: Becky, a middle school student in West Virginia, wanted to try out for the cross-country team. However, a new state law would ban her from doing so because she is transgender.
Background: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Alabama filed a federal lawsuit against officials of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA). The lawsuit challenges ALEA’s practice of depriving transgender people of driver’s licenses that reflect their gender identity.
These cases highlight the ongoing struggle for transgender rights in various contexts, including employment, education, and identification. Court decisions play a crucial role in shaping the legal landscape and advancing equality for transgender individuals. 🌈🏛️ Learn more
The GOP war on the LGBTQ community continues unabated
The republican rhetoric suggests that if the win the election (president) they will take action against the LGBTQ community including bans on LGBTQ people from serving in the government or military, authorizing discrimination against the LGBTQ community if it violates someone’s religious views, enacting a nation-wide standard regarding public access to bathrooms in public facilities, enacting a nation-wide ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and banning trans woman from participating in women’s sports.
Co-PIlot and Gemini provide some answers (below) and I have included some media accounts as well.
Co-PIlot answer
There has been a surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation in many states across the US, especially targeting transgender youth. According to the Human Rights Campaign1, some of the bills that have passed or are advancing in Texas, Florida and Utah are:
Yes, there are other states that have passed laws that restrict transgender people’s access to bathrooms or facilities according to their gender identity. According to the Movement Advancement Project1, a total of 10 states have such laws as of January 2024. They are:
There are many examples of right-wing preachers who have made anti-LGBTQ comments, including calling for the execution of the LGBTQ community. Here are some of them:
Pat Robertson: He is the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the host of The 700 Club, and he has made numerous anti-LGBTQ statements, such as saying that homosexuality is a “perversion” and a “sin” that leads to bestiality, pedophilia, and polygamy. He also blamed the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed over 200,000 people on a “pact with the devil” made by Haitians to gain independence from France.
These are just some of the examples of the hateful and harmful rhetoric that some right-wing preachers have used against the LGBTQ community. Such rhetoric can incite violence, discrimination, and oppression against LGBTQ people, and it contradicts the principles of human dignity and equality.
President Trump has been widely criticized for his views and policies on LGBTQ rights, which have been seen as hostile, regressive, and harmful by many LGBTQ advocates and organizations. Some of the actions he has taken or supported include:
If Trump were to run for a second term in 2024, he would likely continue to pursue these anti-LGBTQ policies and appoint judges and officials who share his views. He would also face strong opposition from LGBTQ activists and allies, who have mobilized to resist his attacks and advance LGBTQ rights at the state and local levels.
Nikki Haley is a former governor of South Carolina and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who is considered a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024. She has a mixed record on LGBTQ rights, which has evolved over time. Some of the positions she has taken or expressed include:
If Haley were to run for president in 2024, she would likely face criticism from both sides of the political spectrum on LGBTQ issues. She would have to balance her appeal to the conservative base of the Republican Party, which is largely anti-LGBTQ, with her attempt to reach out to moderate and independent voters, who are more supportive of LGBTQ rights.
President Biden has been a vocal and consistent supporter of LGBTQ rights, both as a senator, a vice president, and a president. He has been praised by LGBTQ advocates and organizations for his views and policies on LGBTQ issues, which have been seen as progressive, inclusive, and beneficial by many LGBTQ people. Some of the actions he has taken or promised include:
Reversing the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military .
Restoring and expanding protections for transgender students in schools .
Issuing an executive order to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in various sectors .
Increasing funding for HIV/AIDS research and prevention programs .
Supporting the Equality Act, a bill that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in various sectors .
Issuing an executive order to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ people around the world .
If Biden were to run for a second term in 2024, he would likely continue to pursue these pro-LGBTQ policies and appoint judges and officials who share his views. He would also face challenges from anti-LGBTQ forces, who have been trying to undermine his actions and enact discriminatory laws at the state and local levels.
Gemini’s Answer
there has been a lot of proposed and passed anti-LGBTQ legislation recently. Please list them particualary in Texas, Florida and Utah
You’re right, there has been a surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation in the United States recently, with Florida, Texas, and Utah being some of the most active states. Here are some examples:
Florida:
“Don’t Say Gay” law (Parental Rights in Education Act): Prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten to grade 3, and in a way that is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” in any grade. This law has been widely criticized for marginalizing LGBTQ students and creating a hostile school environment.
Transgender athlete ban: Bans transgender girls and women from competing on female sports teams in public high schools and colleges. This law has been condemned by LGBTQ rights groups and athletes as discriminatory and harmful.
Texas:
“Save Chick-fil-A” law (Freedom of Speech in Religious Institutions Act): Allows faith-based organizations to deny services to LGBTQ people based on their religious beliefs. This law has been challenged in court by LGBTQ rights groups.
Anti-trans healthcare bills: Several bills have been proposed or passed in Texas that would restrict access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth. These bills have been met with fierce opposition from medical professionals and LGBTQ rights groups.
Utah:
“Bathroom bill” (School Facility Privacy Act): Requires individuals to use restrooms corresponding to their sex assigned at birth in public schools and government buildings. This law has been criticized for discriminating against transgender people.
“Don’t Say Gay” bill: A bill similar to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law has been proposed in Utah, but it has not yet been passed.
These are just a few examples of the many anti-LGBTQ bills that have been introduced or passed in recent years. These laws have a negative impact on the lives of LGBTQ people and their families, and they create a climate of fear and discrimination.
It is important to note that there is also opposition to these laws, and many people are working to protect the rights of LGBTQ people. LGBTQ rights groups, such as the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, are fighting these laws in court and advocating for pro-LGBTQ legislation. Additionally, many businesses and organizations have spoken out against anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
The fight for LGBTQ rights is ongoing, and it is important to stay informed and engaged in order to make progress towards equality.
Here are some additional resources that you may find helpful:
On Friday, Utah’s state House of Representatives distinguished itself by becoming the country’s first legislative body to pass an anti-trans bill in 2024.
It also happens to be dangerously extreme, by seeking to make it a criminal offense for people to use a bathroom in a public building that doesn’t correspond with the gender on their birth certificate. According to Erin Reed, who tracks anti-trans legislation nationwide, the law raises the prospect of people forced to “potentially undergo a genital examination if under criminal investigation for being in the bathroom.” People determined under the law to have used the wrong bathroom inside public spaces, from colleges to Salt Lake City’s airport, could be sent to jail for up to 6 months.
His little girl has “nothing to do with any of this weird stuff” being spouted by those who should be protecting her.
The bill, which would need to pass the state’s Senate and be approved by the governor to become law, is so extreme that Reed and others have said it could even ensnare cisgender people and subject them to prosecution if someone thinks they’re peeing in the wrong place.
As Chris Geidner writes at Law Dork, “It is extreme legislation that explicitly retrofits the crimes of voyeurism and criminal trespass in the state to allow for the prosecution of many transgender people for using the right bathroom.”
When pressed on the House floor, the bill’s sponsor could not point to a single example of inappropriate behavior by a trans person in an Utah bathroom. But members of the Utah House—which meets for only 45 days a year and just started its 2024 session on Tuesday—nonetheless voted 57 to 17 to police bathrooms.
That the obviously transphobic and culture war catering move was a top priority says a lot about the leadership of my home state, which is on its way to becoming an uninhabitable toxic wasteland unless its politicians can stop the Great Salt Lake from drying up. Historically, Utah’s Republican majority has claimed to want to get government off your back—except for when it wants to look down your pants. Indeed, Utah legislators have long seemed to have a rather prurient interest in residents’ private lives and private parts.
Take the not-so-long-ago time Utah installed a “porn czar” in its attorney general’s office. In 2001, the state hired an unmarried Mormon virgin to police the state for smut and combat “cyber-sex.” The Washington Post reported that in her first months on the job, the bureaucrat was called upon to intercept a Victoria’s Secret catalog from a family mailbox, bar nude mannequin displays in store windows, and purge local libraries of R-rated movies. In 2018, the state legislature overturned the law creating the post. “The whole thing was a public-relations nightmare and kind of made Utah the laughingstock of the nation,” Sen. Todd Weiler, a Republican cosponsor of the rollback bill, told the Salt Lake Tribune.
The bathroom bill is, of course, far more intrusive, and would have far more harmful and repressive impacts than the porn czar ever did. But the drive for invasive legislation that could literally see local cops checking people’s genitalia overlaps with the lawmakers’ longstanding and unhealthy interest in what goes on behind closed doors.
Black said the bill aims to answer “The defining question of this decade, ‘What is a woman?’”
“Indeed, this bill only serves to codify that which is already indisputable but has sadly been weaponized by a radical political movement intent on rewriting the laws of nature to fit their twisted agenda,” Black said in a news release.
While LGBTQ+ rights continue to gain traction across America, there are still those, including lawmakers, who aren’t in support. In Tennessee, a state representative is championing a bill through the Tennessee legislature to ban the display of Pride flags on state property. According to the rep, parents are interested in raising their kids with values “that were in existence at the time that our country was founded.”
The Republican State Rep. Gino Bulso first introduced House Bill 1605 in December 2023. It was interesting that amongst the values, Bulso did not include slavery, eradication of the indigenous population, and other values that existed when America was founded. Nonetheless, he believes families need values that existed during the nation’s founding years.
However, Bulso is not alone in his beliefs. Speaker of the U.S. House, Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Christian nationalist who believes that civic life and government should be based on the Bible. Bulso maintains that 18th-century values should guide Americans.
“Certainly, you know, 50 years ago, we had a consensus on what marriage is; we don’t have that anymore,” Bulso told WKRN in Nashville. “One hundred years ago, we had a consensus on sexual morality; I don’t think we have that anymore. So the values that I think most parents want their children exposed to are the ones that were in existence at the time that our country was founded.”
Utah’s Republican-controlled House voted Friday to pass a sweeping proposal to keep transgender people out of restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity in taxpayer-funded buildings, sending the measure to the state’s majority GOP Senate for consideration just three days after the start of the session.
House Bill 257 aims to prohibit individuals from using gender-designated facilities that differ from their sex assigned at birth in government buildings, correctional facilities and domestic violence shelters unless they have undergone a transition-related surgery and legally amended the sex on their birth certificate.
The proposal would require new government buildings to include single-occupant restrooms and changing rooms while existing ones must be studied to assess “the feasibility of retrofitting or remodeling” facilities to improve privacy.
Utah House lawmakers voted 52-17 on Friday to pass the bill. Three Republicans joined all Democrats in voting against it.
The bill, if passed, would make Utah the third state to adopt explicit restrictions on transgender bathroom use in buildings other than schools. A Florida law passed last year prevents transgender people from using facilities consistent with their gender identity in all government-owned buildings, and a North Dakota law restricts bathroom use in correctional facilities.
As of January 18, GOP lawmakers have introduced 285 anti-LGBTQ bills, with a focus on restricting transgender rights and LGBTQ visibility.
The bills seek to ban drag performances, limit gender-affirming health care, and remove LGBTQ content from school libraries.
Most bills target the transgender community, aiming to redefine transgender existence in law or restrict self-identification and access to services.
“Transgender people across the country are enduring a historic and dangerous effort to control our bodies and our lives, fueled by extremist politics with the goal of erasing us from public life,” attorney Harper Seldin said.
“Taken together, these proposals are a blatant effort to deny transgender people the freedom to be ourselves at school, at work, and the support of the medical care many of us need to live.”
“In South Carolina, one bill would ban Medicaid coverage for gender affirming care up to the age of 26, expanding restrictions on care far into the adult age range,” transgender advocate Erin Reed said.
At least 200 bills focus on educational matters, while over 120 seek to restrict gender-affirming health care for minors.
Legal challenges have arisen from families and doctors due to restrictions on gender-affirming care.
The Human Rights Campaign anticipates a record number of anti-LGBTQ legislation in the upcoming state legislative sessions, including bills that deny legal recognition of transgender people and restrict LGBTQ visibility.
Related video: LGBTQ Rights Groups Want the UN to Investigate Texas (Dailymotion)
ithin the first week of Florida’s legislative session, which commenced recently, Republican lawmakers introduced several bills specifically targeting LGBTQ individuals, exceeding the count of days in the new year.
Some of the bills introduced in Florida during this legislative session are notably extreme. These include proposals to alter the state’s definition of sex and criminalize “lewd or lascivious grooming.” These measures stand out as among the most stringent of the hundreds filed in state legislatures nationwide.
Another bill suggests preventing government employees from being obligated to use pronouns requested by their colleagues. Additionally, a proposal aimed at shielding children from “harmful material” online. However, the vagueness of the term “harmful material” raises concerns among advocates, as it could potentially encompass LGBTQ content.
In a further development, a proposal from Republican state Sen. Jason Brodeur seeks to categorize almost all published accusations of anti-LGBTQ bias as “defamation per se.” This bill would prevent journalists from defending such accusations by referencing the subject’s “Constitutionally protected religious expression or beliefs” or scientific beliefs. Those liable in successful lawsuits under this proposal could face damages of at least $35,000.
“Florida has, for years, been an innovator of new assaults on freedom and equality, and this year’s slate of bills is no different,” remarked Brandon Wolf, a spokesperson for LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, who is also a survivor of the Orlando, Florida, Pulse nightclub mass shooting.
Related video: LGBTQ Rights Groups Want the UN to Investigate Texas (Dailymotion)
He added, “This session, we’ll see escalating attacks on education, medical freedom, and the fundamental right of transgender people to exist as their authentic selves.” A proposed bill by Republican Rep. Dean Black mandates Floridians to sign an affidavit aligning their IDs with the sex on their original birth certificate.
Transgender individuals would be compelled to surrender existing IDs displaying their gender identity and would be unable to obtain such identification in the future. This measure poses significant hurdles for transgender individuals, impacting their access to identification reflecting their authentic gender identity.
Black’s bill mandates health insurance policies covering transition-related procedures, including “Treatment to detransition.” The proposed legislation requires coverage of conversion therapy in health insurance policies. Specifically, it calls for mental health services to address a person’s perception that their sex is inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth, affirming their birth sex.
The proposed bill further mandates any school district or state agency collecting vital statistics for anti-discrimination compliance or data purposes to identify the birth sex of individuals in the dataset. This provision could potentially limit data collection on transgender people.
The LGBTQ society has become a regular fixture in the modern day. But according to The American Civil Liberties Union, they have been getting a lot of legal bills. Backed into a corner, they now speak up, hopeful for public sympathy, which they used to get — until now.
This year, state legislators passed a record-breaking number of laws, and they all targeted LGBTQ privileges in the U.S. The ACLU said it noticed at least 508 bills impacting the community in 2023.
It also says that 84 of these bills are now laws. The rise in legislation clashed with an increase in threats of violence against the LGBTQ community.
The federal security agencies are sounding the alarm. However, activists say that despite the record-breaking wave of anti-LGBTQ bills, other lawmakers have stepped up to combat such efforts.
“We’ve also witnessed incredible moments of strength in states and communities across the country who have made sure this political assault does not go unnoticed or is made any easier for politicians opposed to our very existence,” said Gillian Branstetter, Communications Strategist at the ACLU, in a statement to ABC News.
The vast majority of legislation passed across the country has impacted gender-affirming care for minors, blocking trans youth from accessing treatments in some cases, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries.
Advocates tracking several bills they call ‘anti-LGBTQ’
These laws do not apply to such treatments in cases where the subject is a cisgender or intersex youth. The majority of those who support the law are against gender transitioning. They believe that it is harmful to youth and young adults.
The more lenient ones want patients to wait until they are older to make such decisions. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is one such man. In March 2023, he signed a bill in his state banning doctors from starting hormone therapy for transgender youth under the age of 18. All “to ensure we protect the health and wellbeing of Georgia’s children.”
In September, a judge let the state enforce the ban after it faced a lawsuit. But there’s more where that came from.
At least 14 laws impacting the LGBTQ community are currently in the middle of legal battles. And if what Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, said is true, it is just the beginning.
Ellis says, “The silver lining in this year of challenge is how LGBTQ people and our allies showed up for our community and everyone’s fundamental freedoms.”
Aside from Georgia, other states considered hostile towards the LGBTQ include Ohio and Wisconsin. Fortunately, several states have passed protection laws for the LGBTQ community. They include Minnesota, Michigan, New York, and California.
Atransgender “bathroom ban” in North Carolina caused a national uproar in 2016. Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Nick Jonas and a long list of other A-list performers canceled shows in the state. Global corporations Deutsche Bank and PayPal torpedoed plans to expand in Cary and Charlotte. The NCAA moved its scheduled championship games elsewhere.
Now, eight years later, after Utah passed a similar bill on Monday, the reaction beyond the state’s borders appears to be more of a shrug.
Neither of Utah’s largest businesses released statements in response to the legislation. Tens of thousands of out-of-towners, and an ensuing economic boost, were just heading home from the Sundance Film Festival, held annually in Park City. Global sensation — and queer icon — Bad Bunny is slated to headline a concert in Salt Lake City in upcoming weeks. Next month, Salt Lake City will be hosting first- and second-round games in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Representatives for the NCAA, Bad Bunny and Sundance did not immediately return requests for comment.
In fact, nine other states passed so-called transgender bathroom bills in the years between those passed by North Carolina and Utah, with little fanfare as well.
Allison Scott, who volunteered as an on-the-ground activist in North Carolina to fight HB 2, described this week’s lackluster reaction to Utah’s “bathroom bill” and the several others that have been passed in recent years as “very telling.”
“We were all saying that with HB 2: ‘It’s not over,’” said Scott, who is also the director of impact and innovation for the Campaign for Southern Equality, an LGBTQ advocacy group. “Now, here we are several years later and we’ve seen these bills grow and increase and grow and increase year over year over year, and we’re right back not only where we started but worse.”
While the enactment of the Utah law has immediate implications for the state’s trans community, the tepid response to its passage also reflects a broader retreat on transgender rights that less than a decade ago galvanized corporate America, elite sports and Hollywood.
Utah House Bill 257, which is titled “Sex-based Designations for Privacy, Anti-bullying and Women’s Opportunities,” limits transgender people’s access to bathrooms in public schools and government-operated buildings. These include restrooms at Salt Lake City International Airport, which is managed by local government, and in Utah’s public hospitals and universities. It also specifies the state’s legal definition of “male” and “female” is based on a person’s genitalia at birth rather than their gender identity.
The bill makes exceptions for trans people who have received genital surgery and changed their gender marker to match their gender identity on their birth certificates.
Critics of the legislation have said the law will create a “dangerous situation for trans youth.”
Supporters of the legislation have argued that without a measure in place, men posing as trans women will go into women’s public restrooms and commit sexual misconduct.
Rep. Kera Birkeland, who sponsored the Utah law, said that the bill was necessary to close a “giant loophole for predators” and will only criminally charge offenders who commit “an offense of lewdness,” as the bill states.
“If the people just go in and use the bathroom the way they’re supposed to be used, they will be fine. That has remained consistent throughout the bill, throughout any change,” Birkeland said in a phone call. “We’re not targeting just people who are transgender or people who are like, ‘I’m going to miss my flight, I’m going to duck into the men’s bathroom because the line is shorter.’”
She also pushed back on criticism that the bill would create an environment where Utahns are policing trans people in public restrooms, pointing to a provision in the bill that would criminally charge people for falsely reporting trans people in public restrooms.
“We do not want to incentivize any vigilante people out there trying to be jerks,” she said. “The whole goal is just to ensure that everyone feels like they have a safe place to do private things.”
Erin Reed, a transgender journalist and advocate, pushed back on this, arguing that the legislation will create disruption for trans people regardless of the bill’s specifics.
“People are not going to go through the fine points of a 12-page law,” Reed said. “More likely than not, you’re just going to see trans people and cis people challenged in bathrooms.”
Aside from Utah and North Carolina, lawmakers in nine other states have enacted similar legislation in recent years, including in Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky, according to a tally by The Associated Press. The measures largely restrict trans people’s access to restrooms solely in schools or in schools and government-operated buildings.
But North Carolina’s law, HB 2, went further, barring trans people from using restrooms and changing facilities that matched their gender identities in most public spaces.
HB 2 — which was later partially repealed in 2017 — also prevented local governments from passing LGBTQ nondiscrimination measures and rendered then-existing protections, including one in Charlotte, moot. For this reason, the law affected a much broader segment of the population compared to today’s bills and therefore drew national ire, said Shannon Gilreath, a professor at Wake Forest University’s School of Law and a faculty member of the university’s gender and sexuality program.
“When one’s own interests are not directly compromised by some form of discrimination, one is less likely to respond or to care,” Gilreath said. “I might not believe that’s necessarily the right attitude to have — to do what’s expedient versus to do what’s right in a situation — but that’s human nature.”
Some studies back Gilreath’s line of reasoning.
A survey from the nonpartisan research group Public Religion Research Institute conducted last year found an estimated 79% of Americans support anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people. Policies that largely favor trans Americans solely received significantly less support, the poll found. However, Americans who say they know at least one trans person are much more likely to support pro-trans policies, a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Center found.
Reed said that what’s changed from 2016 to now is that people — and even billion-dollar corporations — have become afraid of provoking the far-right.
She pointed to a group of conservative provocateurs who collectively have amassed tens of millions of social media followers in part by stoking outrage over LGBTQ issues. In several instances, threats of violence have followed the subjects of posts made or amplified by the group of right-wing influencers.
“These people are scary,” Reed said. “If the NBA All-Star Game threatened to pull a game right now? In this atmosphere? Today? They’d get bomb threats from conservatives.”
Last year, bomb threats were made to Budweiser factories across the country after trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s brand partnership with Bud Light created an online firestorm in pockets of right-wing social media. Target also pulled some of its LGBTQ-themed merchandise for Pride Month from its shelves last year after it said it received “threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work.”
Reed also suggested that it might not be politically advantageous for Republicans to go against the grain when it comes to issues that affect trans people.
Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine faced political blowback after vetoing a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors in the state in December. Former President Donald Trump urged Ohio state lawmakers to override the veto, writing on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he was “finished” with the Republican governor. Ohio senators overrode the governor’s veto last week.
In recent weeks, local activists had been unsure whether Utah Gov. Spencer Cox would sign HB 257. Cox in 2022 vetoed legislation that aimed to limit transgender students’ ability to compete on girls sports teams in school, citing the disproportionate rate of suicidal ideation among trans kids.
Conservative lawmakers introduced more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures across the country, according to a tally by the ACLU, with the majority of them targeting trans people. Seventy-five of those bills became law, including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in Utah, which Cox signed into law.
Cox signed Utah’s “bathroom bill” on Monday evening with little fanfare and issued a short statement after weeks of speculation on his position.
“We want public facilities that are safe and accommodating for everyone and this bill increases privacy protections for all,” the statement read.
The law is effective immediately.
In addition to Utah, legislators in five states — South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kansas and Iowa — have introduced their own “bathroom bills” or legislation that further expands “bathroom bills” already on the books, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
Donald Trump Downplays Transgender Issues: ‘Very Small Number of People’
President-elect Donald Trump said transgender issues only affect a “very small number of people.”
Trump was named TIME Magazine‘s 2024 Person of the Year on Thursday. In his interview with the magazine, he said “the bathroom issue” only pertains to a small amount of people and it’s tearing the country apart. He also advocated for people to go “along with” the Supreme Court‘s rulings.
“I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. In a study published by Statista in July, the organization found that around 7.6 percent of adults in the United States identified as a part of the LGBTQ+ community in 2023, which is more than double the numbers in 2012.
The study found that as of 2021, around 97.4 percent of people assigned female at birth still identified as such.
2022 survey data from Gallup, the Williams Institute and Pew Research suggests that between .5 and 1.6 percent of adults in the United States identify as transgender or nonbinary.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump ran an advertisement focusing on transgender rights, famously saying “Kamala is for They/Them” and that “Donald Trump is for Us
Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” the ad read. “Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you.”
Trump told TIME that “it’s true, Trump is for us.”
A spokesperson for Trump said that he has plans for Day 1 in office, which range from settling the Russian and Ukrainian war to removing protections for transgender students.
“I am a big believer in the Supreme Court, and I’m going to go by their rulings, and so far, I think their rulings have been rulings that people are going along with,” Trump said, “but we’re talking about a very small number of people, and we’re talking about it, and it gets massive coverage, and it’s not a lot of people.”
“We support gay marriage, and voted for the Respect for Marriage Act twice. However, if you think protecting women is discrimination, you are the problem,” Mace posted to X, formerly known as Twitter. “We don’t care if you’re trans, if you have balls we don’t want you in the women’s bathroom.”
The House sergeant-at-arms would reportedly be responsible for enforcing the ban, as Mace said in a few of her posts. A copy of the bill shared by Axios shows that bathrooms would be divided along the lines of “biological sex.”
Trump said in his interview with TIME that he does agree with McBride, suggesting the lawmakers should be focused on more important issues.
“I do agree with that,” Trump said. “On that—absolutely. As I was saying, it’s a small number of people.”
President Trump declared his intention to expand America into a new nation—a North American Empire that would include the United States, Canada, Mexico, Caribbean nations, Guam, Greenland, the Marianas Islands, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Cuba, and Central America, including Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. He called for a new constitutional convention to ratify the formation of this new nation. He claimed this would create the largest economy and the largest country in the world, likening it to a modern Roman Empire.
The Empire would recognize three official languages—English, French, and Spanish.
The new nation would consist of 100 states, including the former United States, Washington D.C., Guam, Greenland, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, nine Canadian provinces, 15 Mexican states, five Central American states, Venezuela, and Caribbean nations and territories. New York would be divided into the NYC Metro State and Upstate New York. Chicago and Philadelphia would become city-states, splitting Pennsylvania into two states. California would be divided into six states, as would Texas, while Florida would be split into Miami City State and the rest of Florida. Additionally, there would be five American Indian states. The House of Representatives would expand to 1,000 members, and the Senate would include 100 new senators.
The Head of State would be the Emperor, elected for up to four four-year terms. There would be three legislative bodies: the House, the Senate, and the Governors’ National Assembly.
The federal government would have limited functions, with most governmental programs managed at the state level. Canada would be asked to expand its successful healthcare system throughout the new Empire.
The new Empire would allow free movement of people and capital across its territories. It would adopt a common immigration policy, foreign policy, and military, and join the UN as a successor state to the previously independent states.
The new Empire would have three official languages, English, French and Spanish. The New Empire would have Christianity as the state religion, but freedom of religion would be respected as would freedom of press, speech and assembly.
A new military draft would require public service for all individuals aged 18 to 21. After their service—whether in the military or as adjunct police and fire employees—participants would receive full college scholarships.
Military training and other on-the-job training would be converted into college credits, and all military certifications would be recognized across the Empire.
Trump’s speech was met with widespread support, leading to discussions that culminated in the Omaha Convention, which established the new Empire. The blue and red state divisions persisted under the Empire, but the Empire acknowledged these divisions. Red and blue states formed associations that lobbied the Imperial government through the new Governors’ Association.
Donald Trump was elected the First American Emperor and served two terms before stepping down.
April 29—The sense of an ending… End of Trump Reality TV Show?
trump jpg
While watching the Trump trials
I sense an ending
To the Trump Reality TV show.
As he is revealed to be
What he is
Nothing but a charlatan
A con man, a grifter.
And he is not the King
Not a dictator, and not a genius,
He seems to be just a tired old man
Finally being held accountable.
For decades of alleged misconduct
Fraudulent business and political
Crimes including inciting a riot.
Stealing national secrets
And so many over.
Yet the polls show
He could become our next President
Perhaps I am seeing the end
Of democracy playing out
On my TV screen?
Dear God, I pray
Make it all go way
Retire Trump from the game
take him now with you.
April 10 Long Live Emperor Donald the Ist
Ladies and Gentlemen
My fellow American citizens
Greetings and salutations
Today is a momentous day
The old corrupt USA republic is no more
The constitution that once protected us
Has been overthrown and violated
The barbarians at the gate
Have taken over
And ruined the once great land
The last hope of the world
And so, I had no choice
But to kill the old rotten regime
And restore American greatness
To save democracy
I must destroy it
And so, starting today
I will serve as the Emperor of North America
I welcome Canada and Mexico
And the Caribbean islands
To join The North American Empire
As we rebuild America
Restoring American greatness
And making us all proud again
Proud subjects of the New American Empire
May the Empire reign forever and a day
Triumphant against all enemies
And so, I take this burden
Sadly, but gladly
I will serve you
As your Empire
And my son Donald
Will serve as our second emperor
Once I pass from this world
His son will serve as the third emperor
And so on until the end of time
And we will reign in our new capitol city
Colorado Springs
Until the end of time
Washington will remain in our hearts
As the capitol of the old Republic
But the heirs of the Roman Empire
Need a new Imperial Capitol
And soon we will conquer Mars
And expand our Empire to the Starts
Long Live the Empire
Long Live America
Good night
And may God Bless
This great Empire
President Trump and the Seven Deadly Sins
President Trump
Has been hailed by some
As the messiah
Others have denounced him
As the “anti-Christ”
It is clear that his actions
And deeds exhibit
All the seven deadly sins
That the church preaches against.
How then can a true Christian
Overlook that and see this charlatan
As a “Godly” man?
That is the one thing
I just don’t understand
About Trump
Why are so many so-called Christians
Follow him as if a religious cult?
I mean it would be hard to find
A better poster child
For what a Christian should not be
How can any Christian follow
Such a vain, jealous, mean spirited, debauched character
Is beyond my understanding.
As I am not a Christian perhaps
It is a Christian thing I would not understand.
Emperor Trump Revises Gladiator Games
president trump
April 9 Pane e circus 2017 Redux
By order of his excellency
Emperor Donald the First
The merciful, the Christian King of Kings The Sultan of Sultans
The Emperor of North America
Be it hereby decreed
That the ancient honorable gladiator games
Of the old Roman Empire
Have been restored
Each city in the Empire will host a team
They will compete for the honor
Of the national championship
The games will start
With fighting animals
Fighting fish
Roosters
Cheetahs
Tiger
Bears
Wolves
And lions
Then a man lion contest
With a heretic thrown to the lions
If he or she lives
They will be pardoned
Then then main games
Six men/women teams compete
Armed with swords, knifes, mace, clubs
They fight until one man or women remains
The victor of the game
Those who are prisoners
Can compete for their freedom
And a full imperial pardon
Let the games begin
Long may the games reign
In the new North America Empire
Praise be to the Emperor
Donald the First
It Can’t Happen Here or Can It?
trump deaths
Every day when I watch TV
I see the chattering classes
The TV pundits
And their guests
Pontificate about this and that
And it seems to me
That they are missing the big picture
Nothing that they say
Will make a difference
Donald Trump has slowly conquered
The political world
And he is shaping it into something
That we had hoped we would never see
A truly American neo-fascist state
Wrapped around the flag
And so-called Christian values
And the latest made up outrage
And the chattering classes
Don’t seem to understand
That they are next
On the hit parade
As the Donald Trump machinery
Continues to take over the known universe
The question used to be
It can’t happen here
The answer I am afraid
Is already has
I asked Co-Pilot for background info on Trump’s desire to take over Canada, Panama and Greenland. Here’s his answer:
President Trump has expressed interest in acquiring Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal as part of what some are calling an “annexation agenda.” His motivations seem to include strategic and economic reasons, such as enhancing national security, countering China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere, and gaining access to valuable resources. For example, Greenland’s Arctic location and natural resources make it strategically appealing. Similarly, the Panama Canal is seen as a critical economic asset, and Trump has criticized its current management.
As for Canada, Trump has suggested using “economic force” to integrate it into the United States, citing trade deficits and national security concerns. However, these ideas have faced strong opposition from the leaders of these countries.
Today’s video was originally released on Patreon 1 week ago. If you want to see the videos as soon as they come out, join the Patreon!
You’ll get early access to videos and newsletters, as well as exclusive perks like live Q&A sessions, a community forum, daily news digests, and more, only on Patreon.
I also asked C0-Pilot for a history of the gladiator games. Here’s his response:
Roman gladiator games were a cornerstone of Ancient Roman culture, blending entertainment, politics, and religion. They originated around the 3rd century BCE, evolving from funeral rites where bloodshed was believed to honor the dead. Over time, these games became grand spectacles held in massive arenas like the Colosseum, showcasing the might of the Roman Empire.
Gladiators, often slaves or prisoners, fought to the death in these contests, though some volunteered for fame and fortune. The games featured not only gladiatorial duels but also wild animal hunts, executions, and reenactments of historical battles.
The last known gladiator games were held on January 1, 404 CE. They were abolished by Emperor Honorius after the martyrdom of a Christian monk named Telemachus, who protested the violence and was killed by the crowd.
I have decided to refrain from overly political postings and poetry from now on. I still have opinions but will restrain myself from posting anything too inflammatory. Just not worth it, and don’t want to end up on some government watch list or worst because of something I posted. I don’t have the bandwidth to think about it. But I did want to offer my analysis as it is.
What Happened?
There are a number of reasons for the results
First off world- wide trends were against incumbents everywhere due to high inflation and perceptions that the economy is not working for the average person. Biden never got upon 40 percent approval and that matters a lot.
Second most people did not vote.
About 50 percent of Americans actually voted. Many people were not eligible, too young, criminal records, recently moved, or just did not bother to vote. Only 35 percent of Americans voted for Trump. A bit less for Harris. In that sense it was a close election, and within the margin of error so those who think the polls were off don’t understand that when it is that close any result is possible, you just can’t predict that..
Third, the country remains deeply divided, half the country are Trump supporters, and half are Harris supporters, there is no huge popular red mandate, He won but it was not a landslide victory, and many people are nervous about the Trump agenda,
Fourth the polls got it right – the results were within the margins of error so it was essentially a coin toss and the Blue Team lost but not by much.
Fifth, there is no massive mandate for Trump. He barely won, and the Republicans barely managed to win both the House and the Senate.
Sixth, Voter Suppression worked.
Just a few examples – purging the voting polls just before the elections, limiting drop box locations, cuting back on poll locations in Blue districts but not in red districts, just one example at Central Florida university campus there were only four polling places open for a population of 50,000 people and lines were very long. This was deliberately done to keep the wrong type of voter from voting.
Seven, Biden should have kept his pledge to be a transitional President and he should have said in November last year he should have resigned citing his mental fit his declining mental fitness.
Harris would have been President and have to compete in an open primary contest. It was obvious to many observers that Biden was showing signs of dementia. He should have stepped down. Instead they circled the wagon and downplayed what was happening or said that Trump was showing signs as well. And many people did not see Harris to be presidential material.
A new leader would have emerged and perhaps won. By the time Biden stepped down it was too late and due to campaign finance rules Harris and only Harris could inherit the apparatus and fund raising. Anyone chosen at the last minute would have to start with zero campaign staff and money.
Eight
So many people get their news from right wing echo chamber filled with misinformation and lies.
The mainstream media is just not influential anymore. Who cares what the WP writes or NYT or MSNBC or CNN. And local news sites have been taken over the right wing. The left has not kept up and need to use the new media and create their own podcast etc.
Nine, the gender gap is real.
Women have moved towards the democratic party; men have moved towards the Republican party. The republicans were able to win over the male vote and working class voters. Celebrity endorsers did not sway the public
Ten The political consultant class failed once again.
Harris would have been better served to run her own campaign without all the professional consultants getting in the way. Trump by and large followed his instincts and was not packaged by consultants. People want authenticity, not packaged politicians.
11, it was not enough to call out the republicans for being authoritarian.
Many people don’t have a clue what that means. Many people don’t know much at all about history and have a very vague idea of Hitler for example. This line of attack failed Hilary and failed Harris as well.
12, what did the democrats offer?
The Republicans were promising all sorts of things but people don’t understand or follow policy debates. Climate change? Yes an important issue but not high on most voters mind. Saving democracy? Not so much. The Biden record on the economy is objectively better but people feel the economy is bad due to high inflation, feel crime is out of control, and feel the border is unsecured. None of that is objectively true but the democrats were not able to break through the fog of misinformation.
13 racism and sexism played a role.
Many people were just not ready for a woman of color to become president. A different woman perhaps? But not this woman.
14 Perceptions Matter Even if the Facts Don’t Support the Narrative
Perceptions that crime is out of control, the economy is in horrid shape and the border is wide open is far more important than the reality.
15 Support for Israel is a Problem.
It is obvious that the current government is determined to defeat their enemies even it if means destroying Gaza and the West Bank and have gone way beyond punishing Hamas for October 7th attacks and they are now in geocide adjacent territory.. They might win a shortterm victory but long term it is not a winning strategy. Biden and Harris just did not see how this policy was opposed by many voters who would otherwise be in their camp.
16 Lingering impact of the Fall of Kabul
17 Biden’s Garbage Comments were equivalent to Hilary’s Deplorables Comments which cost her the Election
18 Hunter Biden Case was a distraction but it Hurt both Biden and Harris
19 Being from Oakland was a big Negative for Harris as Hating on California is a Big thing especially among Republicans
20 celebrity Endorsements Did not Move the Needle
`21 Harris was not able to distance herself from Biden
22 Harris has a reputation for being a light-weight in over her head
23 Harris was seen by many people as having slept her way to the top
24 Both Biden and Harris were too slow to realize the perception of the Border being wide open hurt them
25 She should have picked Shapiro as her Running Mate
That’s my summary of why Harris lost
Why DId Trump WIn?
One, His base was much more energized than Harris’s base
Two, Racism and Sexism Played a Role as did the Male Gender Gap
Three, Trump Got the New Media environment right and Harris did Not
Four, Many voters went with the Devil We Know vrs the Devil We Don’t Know
Fifth, Many people discount the overheated Rhetoric of Trump
Six. Trump Remains a Masterful Showman and It worked
Seven, Trump is a con man and knows to work his con on his marks – the entire American population
Eight, Voter Suppression Worked in Trump’s Favor
Nine, Russian disinformation campaign worked in Trump’s favor
Ten, Voters Gave Trump a Pass on COVID figuring that was a one off thing and that prior to COVID things were going well
11, More People liked Trump that hate him
12, Trump got the low information voters to vote, Harris did not
13, In the end, Harris did a great job but was dealt a losing ticket from the beginning.
Many voters voted for the Devil they knew rather than the devil they don’t know or bought into the right wing boogey man that Harris was a communist. Which is complete BS , there are no communists running for office in the US and Harris and Democrats are not communists, but hey it worked for some uneducated people. And people did not understand what an authoritarian is or how dangerous Trump and his right-wing allies could be. They just thought Biden and Harris failed and should be voted out of office. And many people gave Trump a pass on COVID thinking the economy was doing fine until that came along.
Trump won a narrow victory in the popular vote but won the seven swing states and most of the red states. His total popular vote will be about 51 percent once all the votes are counted. Hardly a landslide victory.
only 35 percent of Americans voted for Trump, Many people did not vote because they were not eligible or interested enough. In the end Trump will get 51 percent and Harris 47 or 48 percent both well within the margin of error.
Same thing for the Republican Senate and House counts, a narrow but sufficient win hardly a red wave or a huge mandate.
We remain divided into 50 50 nation. The Republicans will Learn that in two years if they overreach as it is likely and if their radical plans lead to a recession or reflection also likely
What Did Not Happen
still processing what happened and what did not happen as well as what might happen.
First Biden and Harris did the right thing by meeting with Trump and promising a smooth transition and normal courtesies. this is important in and in itself.
Second the election went smoothly there were a few isolated incidents of violence, a few Russian bomb threats and some minor voter suppression attempts, but it was a fair and free election. Unfortunately, our side lost.
Third, despite everyone saying the polls were wrong, they were correct it was within the margins of error so it could have gone either way. the final popular vote count will be very close as California votes are finally counted.
It was not a red wave, more a red trickle but just enough to put them over the finish line.
High profile celebrity endorsements did not matter, and made Harris seem to be an elitist out of touch Californian politician.
Harris avoided Hillary’s mistake and campaigned heavily.
but she also fell into the trap of making it all about how bad Trump might be without a real positive focused easily understood message. Joy, and hope could not overcome the title wave of anger and hate and disinformation.
the new media podcasters etc are dominated by the right. Harris should have gone of the Rogan show in my opinion.
No mass protest rallies yet.
The Senate is Not Going to Be railroaded by Trump regarding cabinet appointees or policy and that is a good thing, same thing for the House
No gun shooting at polling places
that’s my two cents worth.
Government Efficiency Commission – How to do it Right
in principle the idea of an government efficiency committee is a good idea. But the way they are doing it is the wrong way to go about it. First the committee should not have any pre-conceived ideas as to how much they should reduce the budget. Second, the committee should reach out to the rank and file and solicit their input on how they would restructure the government and what they would reduce. Third, DOD, DHS, Social Security should all be on the table for a through review. Just one example, it is long over due for the Pentagon to privatize the PX and Commissaries. Domestically there is no need for either -Walmart could run it and provide a discount for active duty personal for example. Same thing for golf courses, bowling alleys and recreational facilities – they can all be contracted out. Just one of many examples.
Two ideas worth considering.
Creating a new Cabinet Department of Immigration and Consular Services merging functions from the Department of State, DHS and DOL.
Creative a new Cabinet of International Trade Promotion merging functions in DOS, DHS, DOL and DHS
What’s Going to Happen
Now what? My prediction? The Republicans and conservative game plan to turn the US into something akin to Hungary has a possibility of working. A one party state where the leader is in charge, the media, legislature, local governments, universities have all been tamed, even though they go through the charade of having elections.
But if they overreach and crash the economy through launching a trade war, or their deportation immigrants also backfires, or the billions of dollars being spent on enforcing it or shutting down large parts of the Federal government because their reckless tax cuts blow a huge hole in the Federal government crippling its ability to do anything, leading to a reflation the democrats could come back if they figure out how to talk with voters and not talk down to voters. And if climate change becomes such a huge problem that their policy of ignoring it and making things worst by drilling for more oil, the democrats could still come back.
But I am cautiously optimistic. Some of the cabinet picks are not too bad relatively speaking but most are right wing ideologues with little experience. And the president and Vice president like a lot of people in power when faced with problems double down and make things worst rather than admitting their policies are not working and doing a course correction. And of course few of them are willing to stand up and do what is right for the country rather than what is right for the party and their leader.
Bottom line we are in for some difficult times. But I remain optimistic we will survive this, and eventually there will be a course correction. There usually is.
Scaled back deportation focusing on criminals and people who have been in the US less than four years, limited amnesty, called earned legalization not amnesty for those who meet the following requirements
speak English
been here for more than four years
have a job
particularly in agriculture, landscaping, construction, nursing homes, restaurants, and hospitality business
pass a criminal background check
willing to pay past taxes and social security payments
priority will be given to spouses of US citizens and parents of US citizens
all illegals will have six months to register and apply for limited green cards. They will be issued temporary green cards for five years, afterwards will be eligible for another five years and after being in the US for ten years will be able to apply for citizenship. Will be allowed to sponsor parents, spouses and children but not siblings.
Temporary pause on immigration visa processing for one year except for IR Status
A new immigration act proposed
DV processing ending
Reduction in Foreign student’s applications by 25 percent
F4 status (Siblings of US Citizens) canceled— I am in Favor of This
all current applicants have one year to confirm they are still interested, speak English, have appropriate job skills, and are at least high school graduates. They will be allowed to immigrate after the one-year pause. If they don’t meet the criteria, their applications will be denied. No new applicants will be allowed to apply, as the category will disappear.
The military pulled back and stationed on the border
Offering repayment of student loans for people who serve in the Federal, State or local government or serve in the military
Offering a new GI bill for service in the military
Making Military training and certifications college credit and transferable nation wide I am a big proponent of this and also expansion of DANTESS testing at all universities.
Five percent of Tariff imposed -this would avoid a ruinous tit for tat trade war
DOGE recommendations unveiled – on line with public comments encouraged and taken into account
10 percent reduction in force for Federal government agencies spread out over four years along with a ten percent budget cutback also spread out over four years
All federal employees will have to reapply for continued employment and have to reapply for security background checks. lowest ranked ten percent will be involuntarily retired. Early retirement buyouts will be encouraged to meet the RIF goals. A three year freeze on salary adjustments and a freeze on new hiring as well.
Department of Education’s new mission is purging Universities of radical leftism eliminating women’s studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural Marxism, Marxism, and ethnic studies, and eliminating DEI programming, promoting the teaching of patriotic history and civics courses and classical great books courses, Encouraging consolidation and closing of marginal universities. I see this coming.
Banning Trans status declaring that there are only two genders male and female assigned at birth, nationwide bathroom bans, and banning changing IDs. Banning Trans people from service in the Government and banning insurance coverage to gender reassignment. Unfortunately, I see this as very likely to be enacted given the anti-trans hysteria among Republicans,
25 reduction in US AID
Reduction in US support for UN agencies
Elimination of the FS test and separate recruitment
Offering repayment of student loans for people who serve in the Federal, State or local government or serve in the military
Offering new GI bill for service in the military
Comments on Cabinet Picks so far
some are good Rubio for State for Example and the DOL pick. Others are horrible DOD, DNI, CIA, FBI. SO Far the Senate is refusing to roll over and play dead. That is a good trend.
From time to time, I will award a “ Cosmos Scumbag of the Week Award” and post it on my Anchor (podcast on Spotify and Radio Public) blog, Blog Loving, FB, LinkedIn, Medium, Wattpad, Writing com, Tumblr, and Twitter, and send a nice certificate to the person who demonstrated
the qualities of a Scumbag – vile despicable behavior or speech demonstrating that they are a true sociopathic scumbag.
Let me know what you think, and feel free to nominate a scumbag of your own. I’d love to post other nominees. Do let me know if you can use this material on your show. Most of them are part-found poems using the awardees’ language or media accounts to incriminate themselves, along with my snarky commentary.
I am also sending this to Jimmy Kimble, John Oliver, Trevor at the Daily Show, Bill Maher, and Seth Myers in hopes that they can use it on their shows. I will also send a copy to the award recipients. Would appreciate it if you could let me know if you find this useful or could use it. the Direct URL is
Dream Girl True Love Story
Also please check out my true love story, “Dream Girl at the following direct DL. Also published in the book, ‘Dreams and the Unexplainable” by the Chicken Soup for the Soul publishers in 2018. I met my wife in Korea after serving in the Peace Corps and teaching for the U, S Army. I first met her in a dream in high school in 1974, when I fell asleep in a boring Physics class at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, and saw standing next to me the most beautiful woman in the universe, and she was talking to me in a strange Asian language. I fell out of my chair screaming “Who are You?” much to the amusement and laughter of my class and teacher.
I knew that I would eventually meet and marry her. Eight years later on September 7, 1982, she walked off a bus into my life, and we got married seven weeks later on October 29th, 1982. She joined the US Army as an intel officer and was for a while the first Korea born female Army officer to serve in Korea, and I believe the first Korean-born female U.S, army officer. She retired as a Major.
Please also check out the hitchhiker tales talking about my epic hitchhiking the U.S. in 1975 when I was broke, young and foolish. Also published by the Poet Magazine in their Anthology of “On the Road” in 2020. The URL is
I most recently drove across the country in 2016 to celebrate my retirement by seeing the U.S. I traveled over 10,000 miles, and 35 states in three months. And in 2019 finally visited Alaska my last of the 50 states to visit. I have also visited 55 countries. I speak Korea, Spanish, Thai and some Hindi.
I joined the State Department as a foreign service officer and served in ten countries over the next 25 years serving in Antigua, Barbados, (based in Barbados but covering seven Eastern Caribbean countries, Dominica, Grenada, St, Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Korea, Spain, Thailand, India (Mumbai) and four tours in DC. We retired to live half the year in Korea and half in the States but then, COVID hit and we have been here ever since, except for a two-week trip to D.C, last November. We hope to visit the U, S this summer for an extended period, and I hope to attend your show in the audience.
There are 18 awardees so far.
Awardees
Kentucky Factory Manager
Christmas Gun Card
Marjorie Taylor Green Found Poem Marjorie Taylor Green
Matt Gaetz Found Poem
Paul Gosar found poem
Louie Gohmert Found Poem Scumbag
Award Korean Husband Who Left His Wife at Deserted Highway Stop
Marjorie Taylor Green’s Yellow Race Comments Marjorie Taylor Green.
Ann Coulter Defense of Kim Potter
Jessie Watters Anti-Fauci Death Threats
Missouri Governor’s and Attorney general’s Anti-Mask Crusade
Missouri policeman who attempted to arrest a school bus driver for wearing a mask which he falsely claimed was now illegal to wear in public
Rep. Boebert Scumbag of the Week for her thought Crimes against Human reason
Tucker Carlson for Being a Russian Tool on Fox News
Former President Trump for Being Putin’s B…. in Ukraine
and President Putin gets the “Scumbag of the Century Award, for invading Ukraine and bombing a Jewish cemetery. while allegedly fighting Nazis and trying to overthrow the Jewish President.
Award Nominations
Kentucky Candle Manager Who Threatens to Fire Employees Who Want to Flee the Tornado That Destroyed the Factory
In the wake
Of the historic tornadoes
That destroyed so many towns
In six states,
There have been many cases
Of people stepping up
Doing the right thing
Acting like true heroes.
This, sadly, is not one
Of those stories.
Instead, it is the story
Of a factory manager
Who knowing that the tornado
Was rushing at his factory,
Told his employees
Keep working
If you leave
Fleeing for your life
You will be terminated.
The employees
Were too stunned
To do anything.
A few minutes later
The factory was destroyed
Most of the workers
And that scumbag manager
Buried under the rubble.
If the manager
Had acted like the Christian
He claimed he was,
And told his employees
To get the hell out of there
Closing for the day.
Some of them might
Have survived.
For these actions
He truly deserves
The scumbag of the week award.
the Christmas Gun Card
The second recipient
is the congressional representative,
Who felt he would send out
A friendly message
Of peace and goodwill
During the Christmas season,
He had his whole family
Standing by a Christmas tree
Carrying military assault weapons
With the caption,
“Santa, please send more ammo”.
Santa should send the family
A note
“: For your display of Christmas naughtiness,
I am donating ten thousand dollars
from your bank account,
In your name for each victim
Of gun violence this year,
200 thousand dollars
Thank you for your generous donation,”
The Republican congressional
representative from Kentucky
Did not apologize for the lame
Extremely tasteless and offensive
an attempt at a joke
Not even saying
That it was just a lame
ass attempt at a joke.
Tweeting that he had stirred up
A hornets’ nest
But it was good
To see the leftist so upset
And he would do it again
He felt he totally
owned the “libtards” communists
Saw nothing wrong with it.
Yet another Christian
Who shows his adherence
To Christian values,
By violating everything,
Christ stood for.
Not doing what Jesus
Would have done.
And did it just
Before Christmas
right after a horrific
shocking shooting
at a school.
By a kid the same age
as he kids
shown holding an assault rifle
underneath a Christmas tree.
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Rep. Paul Gondor, and Rep. Louie Gohmert for their continued attempt to portray the January 6th insurrectionists as freedom-loving patriots and political prisoners of a communist, dystopian, fascist, racist anti-white socialist dictatorship.
For this week’s s Cosmos
scumbag of the week award
We have four recipients
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene,
Matt Gaetz,
Paul Gosar,
Louie Gohmert
paul gosnar
they held a bonkers
demented press conference
for that, they are all winners.
“On Tuesday,
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene,
Matt Gaetz,
Paul Gosar,
and Louie Gohmert
held a press conference
where they defended
the Jan. 6 insurrection,
promoting every conspiracy
the theory under the sun
and attacking anybody
who dares call i
into question the actions
of the people
we all saw on television,
on our computers,
and on our mobile devices
attacking the Capitol building.
Any one of the three
on the podium
during today’s press conference
could create a misinformation
swarm larger
then the rings of Saturn,
and all four together
did not disappoint their master,
Donald Trump.
“First up was Greene,
who told the world
that the Jan. 6 defendants
we’re being tortured
and persecuted
and forced to submit
to critical race theory brainwashing.”
He went on to say
Of the January 6th defendants
“They were isolated
in a separate wing of the jail
, where they are abused,
where they are ridiculed,
where they are mocked
because of their political beliefs
and because of January 6,
and because
of the color of their skin.”
All are scumbags worthy
Of this award
Rep. Matt Gaetz Found Poem Promising More Kangaroo Courts, and calling for Trump to Serve as the Speaker of the House.
Then came Gaetz to promise
kangaroo courts
and Benghazi trials
while also pretending
that Benghazi investigation
were mishandled
because they found nothing.
“We are going to take power
after this next election.
When we do,
it’s not going to be
the days of Paul Ryan,
and Trey Gowey,
and no real oversight,
and no real subpoenas.
It’s going to be the days
of Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene,
and Dr. Gosar, and myself.”
He would move to install
Trump as House Speaker “
For this and past offenses
he is awarded this week’s Cosmos Scumbag of the Week Award
Rep, Paul Gosar for his murder porn cartoons and numerous other offenses.
“Gosar is the three-sentence embodiment
of a sniveling Dickens character.”
Comment: not to mention
His violent murder porn fantasy tweets.”
And he is so bad
Even his siblings
Campaigned against him
And denounced him
On worldwide TV.
His response
Was to call his seven siblings
Jealous Marxists.
Another worthy recipient
Of the Cosmos Scumbag of the week award.
The Cosmos Scumbag of the Week Award goes to Rep. Louie Gohmert often dubbed the dumbest Member of Congress, known for his deranged, incoherent world salads, and LOSER in the Texas Republican primary race for attorney general for calling for arrest of FBI instigators of the Insurection because reasons
“Gohmert just comes
across like someone
who doesn’t know much
of anything
and therefore, might seem
a touch less dangerous.
Then it was Gohmert’s turn.
Gohmert has recently
decided to leave Congress
in the hopes of taking control
(he lost – LOSER of the Texas attorney general’s office, ”
“last month.
Gohmert’s job
was to promote the conspiracy theory
that the only people
who should be charged
with insurrection should be the FBI.
Literally—that’s his fact-free
conspiracy vomit
into the public sphere for the day.
Then Gosar came up to make
a series of statements
about the cruel conditions
of the incarcerated Jan 6 defendants
calling them human rights violations
Gosar made sure to explain
how white these defendants are.
They aren’t those “hardened criminals” people
(The ones Gosar and Greene and Gohmert
and Gaetz never speak up for),
“they’re fathers.”
Gohmert,
Has so many reasons
To be the scumbag of the week.
I am sure we will award them all many more Cosmos Scumbag of the Week awards. At the end of the year, I will pick the top ten for the Scumbag of the year award and I expect they will be finalists.
The scumbag of the week award is supposed to be international. I am awarding my first international award to the Korean Husband Who Left His Wife at A Deserted Highway Rest Stop
For this week’s scumbag of the week award, we go to South Korea where I currently reside.
the Award goes to the Korean husband who dropped his wife, kicked her out of the Taxi , at a deserted highway rest stop late at night in a wintry rain storm because of an argument. The runner up is the truck driver who ran her over and kept going, and the taxi driver who dropped her off. He went back and found the dead body.
A Korean married couple
Got into a horrific accident
While in a taxi heading home.
The man told the driver
To drop his wife
Off at a deserted highway rest stop.
In the middle of the night
During a frosty winter rainfall.
The taxi driver complied
The woman got off
They took off.
The woman
Went for a walk
Down the deserted highway.
A five-ton truck
Ran her over
And keep driving.
Hit and run driver
The taxi driver
Drove back.
Saw that she was missing
Alerted the authorities.
They found her body
By the side of the road.
And skid marks
Indicating what had happened.
The award winner is the husband
The truck driver and taxi drivers
are our runner ups For this first international
Scumbag of the week award..
Marjorie Taylor Green’s Yellow Race Comments Marjorie Taylor Green.
Marjorie Taylor Green
For all of her deeds
Pure batshit craziness
Incoherent insane word salads,
She is a recipient of
The” cosmos scumbag of the week award”.
During a conservative youth conference
“using her moment on stage
To in part call-out
The diversity of the attendees,
The “black people, brown people, white people,
And yellow people”
Only to highlight
that the event can’t possibly be racist.”
Because….
Proving again that she is a racist
Using the racist words
“Yellow People.”
Which is a 19th-century racial slur.
At least she did not use the n-word
Or talk about “redskins.”.
She went on to make deranged comments
About gender roles in the house of representatives
Noting new inclusive language guidelines
That she will refuse to follow,
Ann Coulter Racist Defense of the Aubrey Killers, Kim Potter, Chauvin, and Rittenhouse
ann coulter
Ann Coulter could be awarded
The Scumbag of the Week award,
For almost every week
She unleashes such hateful racist vitriol
Garbage upon the world.
Her latest outrage
A defense of Kim Potter
The cop that accidentally
Killed a black man
During a traffic stop.
Pulling out her gun
Instead of the tazer.
The jury found her guilty
Of negligent homicide.
Following up on her defense
of Chauvin. the murderer of George Floyd,
and the murderers of Aubrey, and Karl Rittenhouse,
She is batting 1-3 so far.
Ann took issue
With the trial,
And the media coverage.
Noting that the media
Did not blame the victim enough,
That the victim deserved
What he got.
Because he was violent
Out-of-control thug,
And the cop,
Was right
To use deadly force
To put him down.”
comment:
She fails to note
That everyone at the trial
Knew that.
The jury did not believe
That excused the cop
from the charge of manslaughter
Because everyone else
Except for Ann,
Saw it for what it was
What was obvious to all
Is that it was
A racist murder
By a white officer
in broad daylight
Of an unarmed, compliant
Subdued black man.
“It is what it is “
Quote the Donald.
Obvious to the entire world,
except for Ann Coulter – maybe she needs new glasses?
or a compassionate soul?
even though she claims she is a Christian
while violating all the core tenets
of her faith.
Jesus would be leading the BLM protests
if he were to come back today.
Just saying,
George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight
His crime attempting to pass a counterfeit 20 dollar bill
and being high in public.
His real offense was being black
and daring to complain
he could not breathe
as Chauvin strangled him to death.
I suppose Chauvan thought
he should just STF up
while he killed him.
Protesting he could not breathe
infuriated CHauvan
who saw it as defiance
by an uppity drugged up
black man
of his right to subdue him
by any means necessarily.
and besides they had a history
both worked part time
as night club security
and apparently hated each other.
and if he died
too bad he had it coming.
F black drug addict.
“The NYT and other media outlets
Justified their coverage
Of focusing on the cop’s actions
Rather than on the crimes
Of the victim.
For this flaming of racist hatred
Of blaming the victim,
Of justifying another act
Of brutal, horrific police misconduct,
Ann Coulter is the scumbag
Of the week.
Jessie Watters for Calling for the Assassination of Dr. Fauci on National TV- he has yet to apologize, be charged, or be fired!
jessie watters
Jessie Watters
A Fox News Reporter
Is this week’s scumbag
Of the week winner,
His offense?
Telling a crowd to
“ambush” Dr. Fauci
with a “kill shot”
so he “doesn’t
see it coming”
dr fauci
Dr. Fauci responded
To this piece of insanity,
Noting,
“The only thing
that I have ever done
throughout these two years
is to encourage people
to practice good public health practices:
to get vaccinated,
to be careful in public settings,
to wear a mask,”
And for that,”
You have some guy out there
saying that people
should be giving me
a kill shot
to ambush me.
I mean,
what kind of craziness
is there in society these days?”
The guy
should be fired on the spot,”
As far as I know, he is still on the air at Fox.
for this and many other vile commentaries
says two other nations
have citizens in need of saving:
Canada and the United States.
“I pray for Ukraine, and I wish them the best,”
But we also have neighbors to the north
who need freedom and need to be liberated, “
and we need that right here at home, as well.
This was the most obnoxious, vile,
the pernicious canard of the week.
A total nonsensical, non sequitur.
What does the invasion of Ukraine
By Russian forces have to do
With protests against
Mask mandates and vaccine restrictions
In the U.S. and Canada.
The two events are not even remotely
The same thing.
To her and her ilk
Mandating masks, and vaccines
Amid a still deadly pandemic
Is an infringement on their freedom
To be a self-centered a…..
putting themselves and others at risk
including possible death.
And Canada and the US
Are now living in a monstrous communist. Fascist/socialist
dystopic radical leftist woke tyranny
oppressing “normal, i, e, white Christians)
And we need to be liberated
Just like the Ukrainians.
For these crimes against human thought,
Reason, common sense, and common decency
She is the Cosmos Scumbag of the week.
Tucker Carlson For Being Putin’s Tool On Fox News
tucker carlson
Tucker Carlson daily on his show
Has shown that he is nothing more
Than Putin’s puppet
Parroting Russian State TV propaganda
Calling into question the heroism
Of the Ukrainian People
And the government
For that, he is the Cosmos Scumbag of the Week
Former President Trump for Being Putin’s B…. in Ukraine
Former President Trump
daily is his press releases
Has shown that he is nothing more,
Than Putin’s B…..
Parroting Russian State TV propaganda
Calling into question the heroism
Of the Ukrainian People
And the government.
And making the absurd argument
That Putin would never have invaded
Ukraine if he had won.
Because Putin respected him
And knew Trump would not tolerate
That one bit.
The reality of course
Is that the former President
When he was President
Was nothing but Putin’s B…,.
No doubt if Russia invaded
He would have excused it
And not rallied NATO
And the country
To resist the Russian invasion.
Might even have threatened
to pull out of NATO
and Germany
though he likes Poland
because they offer
to name the new US base
Ft. Trump.
For all of these reasons, Former President Trump
You are the recipient of the Cosmos Scumbag
Of the Week award.
President of Russia Putin Scumbag of the Century
You richly deserve this award because of your brazen, blatantly illegal, immoral invasion of your neighbor. You set off the worst military action in Europe since World War 11, targeting civilians and even bombing a Jewish cemetery while falsely claiming you are fighting Nazis and attempting to overthrow the Jewish Nazi president. This clearly shows you are the world’s greatest scumbag and deserve the Scumbag of the Century award.
Writer’s Egg Magazine published in the UK for their 7th issue had a theme of 2020 and what it meant. They published my entry, “The Year the World Came Unhinged “
The Year the World Came Unhinged
2020 was the year
That the world came unhinged
As the US lost its way
Amid the corona pandemic
18 million cases later
310,000 deaths later
The president has yet to simply say
I am so sorry that everyone died
On my watch
Instead he continues to insist
That he be given an A-plus grade
For the great victory
he achieved
In battling the corona
china virus
Amid the great depression 2.0
The country voted to fire
The former President
Who refused to accept reality
Filed 60 court cases
Lost 59 cases
out of 60 cases
Including twice
at the Supreme Court
Still refuses to concede
Still claims that the election
was stolen
His mindless lemming like followers
Follow his every tweet
His every deranged unhinged world
And go down his rabbit hole
Of delusional insanity
As he tries daily
To destroy American democracy
While claiming
he is the only one
Who can save the U.S.
From the chaos and danger
That the radical left represents
Writer Egg published some of my Corona Virus poems in issue six, and issue five. Re-printed below
writer Egg magazine has published some more poems which drop in issue six to be published in January.
Index
Politicians Lying while people lie dying
Thanksgiving thoughts
Corona Virus Stalks Me
News is still grim
Mad Mask Fears -content tracing Dante Inferno Canto one Line 1 to 3
Wearing a Mask is not a political statement
General Corona Leads His Troops Into Battle, crown of sonnets
Corona Ghosts Stalk the President
Politicians Lying while People Lie Dying
Politicians lying
economy crumbling
pandemic spreading
fire burning
storms storming
winter is coming
media screaming
people dying
Thanksgiving Thoughts
On this day of thanksgiving
Our hearts are filled with grief
Anger, and hatred
Instead of love and friendship
Half the company
Feels that they lost
The election
Because of mass fraud
Their candidate could not have lost
The virus is a hoax
Masks are an affront
To our liberties
The other half of the country
Thinking at last
This national nightmare
Is beginning to end
Millions of people are sick
The real economy in ruins
The stock market is crazy
Out of touch with reality
Many Americans are settling down
To a lonely Thanksgiving
Loved ones can’t travel
Or are lost to us now
Corona ghosts
Haunting our thanksgiving
The news bather on and on
The divisions getting worse
The world seems to be spinning
Out of control
How can we come together
While 2,000 people die every day
But in the midst of all of this
If we simply remember
Our shared humanity
That we are all Americans
And we can overcome
These dark and dangerous time
Then we will have something
To celebrate this thanksgiving
That we are still here
Still alive and kicking
And the noise and hate
fades away
And the love comes back
With the rising sun
Happy thanksgiving
To one and all
Corona Virus Stalks Me
the dreaded coronavirus
led by the demented general Corona,
seems to be stalking me
everywhere I go
images of the dead
come to life
accusing me of something
as they fade in and out of view
ghostly images fill\ my fogged up glasses
as I walk down the street
hidden deep inside my masks
and I fear everyone
which is of course
part of the corona virus’s
evil’s plan
to drive us all mad
sending us to hell
News is still grim
cnn logo
watching the daily news
the constant doom and gloom
makes me want to cry
and hide away
waiting
waiting
waiting
for the end of the news
and a return to normal
but that seems
like a distant dream
perhaps it is our fate
perhaps it will be over
perhaps it will never
be over
and the news drones
on
and
on
and
on
overwhelming
me
with
cosmic
dread
Mad Masks Fears Corona Sonnet Form
no masks
I don’t understand
this fear of wearing a mask
somehow making you weak
that wearing a mask
is a political statement
“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself with a forest dark
for the straightforward pathway had been lost”
THE THOUGHT COMES TO MIND
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE
ALL
LOST
THEIR
MINDS
content tracing Dante Inferno Canto one Line 1 to 3
masked woman
to my friends in America
and around the world
to those who think
that somehow the coronavirus
only infects other people
that it is all a liberal hoax ,
overblown
nothing more than a bad flu
and nothing to do with me
demanding that we all go
back to work
what is wrong with you?
have you lost your humanity?
will millions have to die
so you can have a Big Mac?
so you can have a Big Mac
and a beer
whenever you damn, please
and no one can tell you
please wear a mask
have you lost all reason
is it all now
about owning the dems
and the damn libtards
is there any thing left
in your cold, greedy heart?
and you still proclaim
that you are Christian
as you violate all the Christian principles
what would Jesus do
what would Jesus do
what does the bible say
we should do
in the midst of this pandemic
is it the Christian thing to do
to let millions of people die
did not Christ talk about love
compassion and mercy
would not Jesus
wear a mask
to protect himself
and others
from this ravaging disease
that does not care
who you are
who you voted for
which church you go to
and Jesus and God
are not there
watching all of us
as the virus spreads
it will affect you
sooner or later
and when it does
perhaps if you had worn
a mask
you might have prevented
a few more people
have died
a few more people
including your grandfather
grandmother
friend
relative might be alive
if you were not such
a self- centered person
and I appeal to you my friend
to grow up, become a member
of the human race again
also published in Plethora Magazine in India
a crown of sonnets
corona
//////
General Corona leads his forces across the world
riding on a black horse
from out of the Apocalypse
ride the four horsemen
which are let loose upon the world
He leads his forces across the world
into battle as the leader of his evil forces
The enemy of humanity
General Corona, he does not care
nor does his virus minions care
about your nationality, he does not care
about your politics, he does not care
or your wealth or who you are
for all you are nothing but humanity
the corona general sees humanity
as nothing but hosts for his virus army
chanting death to humanity
until his evil army
sweeps throughout the world
throughout the world
and millions must die
it is the will of the general all must die
and it is the end of the world
or perhaps the beginning of a new world
filled with hope and love through out the world
humanity comes alive throughout the world
fighting back against the virus army
peace, love and compassion defeats the army
and general corona will finally himself die
Corona Ghosts Haunting the President
corona virus
The corona ghosts are angry
Watching the news every day
In limbo land
The corona ghosts decide
To pay the president a visit
To show him the humans
Who have died
Due to his incompetence
And lack of leadership
175,000 Corona ghosts
Descend upon the white house
At midnight
And surround the president
Screaming at him
Saying look at me
Look at me
You did this
You did it
You Mr. President
You are not the smartest man
In the world
Far from it
It is all on you
And you will soon
Be joining us
Be afraid
Your time is up
General corona
Is on the march
In looking at the upcoming election, I believe that there are thirty challenges facing whoever wins the election. that of these are tremendous challenges, fundamental challenges that must be addressed. I have divided them into 15 domestic and 15 international challenges. For each challenge, I offer a few suggestions on how to deal with the challenge. Many of these challenges overlap and all will require thought, and strategic thinking to solve, and most will involve reaching out to both Republicans and international allies, we cannot solve them by one party. They require both a whole of government approach and an appeal to the entire country. But I am sure that you are up to these challenges. Shall we get to them?
15 Domestic Challenges
COVID Challenge
This is both a short-term and long-term challenge. Short-term we must ensure that the vaccine is developed and deployed and reaches most Americans as soon as possible and that most Americans get the vaccine. The vaccine must be made available and must be free with the cost fully covered by the government. You must combat anti-vaxers. Enlist celebrities in PSA announcements encouraging everyone to get a vaccine. Also, until the vaccine is fully deployed, Americans must continue to “mask up” and practice social distancing.
Once the pandemic is under control, the new President will have to work at building up our public health infrastructure to make sure we are ready for the next pandemic, knowing that there will be another one coming. We need to be better prepared as a society for handling these public health crises. This will also include beefing up public health spending, research and development and rebuilding CDC and the NIH. I would at a minimum restore the NSC position dealing with pandemics and make the COVID task force a permanent standing body.
Health Care Crisis
We must move to universal health care coverage for all. The crisis was made so much worst because so many people are afraid of going to the doctor because they could be facing financial ruin because of high medical bills. The solution is to come together with all stakeholders and embrace a plan for universal coverage which will have to include an individual mandate. Treat health insurance as we do car insurance, it only works if everyone takes part. I would embrace a few of the Republican favorite positions because they make sense–tort reform limiting malpractice claims and damages, allowing insurance companies to work across state lines, for example. I would open the federal health care insurance programs to all Americans with subsidies to make insurance premiums affordable. I would let associations offer health care to their member firms. For example, the restaurant association could offer insurance to all their restaurant members. I would merge the Obama exchanges with existing insurance companies, as many of them are not financially viable on their own.
I would expand Medicare to cover anyone over the age of 55. I would offer the open season every six months and make insurance as portable as possible. For example, as people move to a new job or location, they should be easily able to update their insurance status, which would become part of in boarding for all new hires. For illegal aliens, I would let them buy into insurance. This may be controversial but must be part of the ultimate package. Immigrants and non-immigrants must provide proof of traveler’s insurance before entry. I would ban DHS from accessing health care information on illegals. Again, the goal must be 100 percent coverage. The homeless will have to be covered somehow.
Coupled with this would implement mandatory paid sick leave. Employees should be able to stay home when they are sick or being time off to go to the hospital. For many hourly employees going to work sick is an economic necessity putting everyone else at risk. And no one should be fired because they had to miss work due to an appointment.
Finally, I would challenge the Republicans by saying that what you are proposing is something that every other country does and not having sufficient health coverage puts everyone at risk. Even the billionaire class can get sick and die if their employees do not have health coverage and come to work sick. Challenge the nation to come together and finally guarantee health care coverage for all.
Regarding the costs, be upfront, there would be some increase in costs, but everyone will benefit if everyone can afford health care. It is a price most people would be willing to pay. And point out that hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives because of inadequate health care. Saying that seriously ill people can go to the ER and face financial ruin if they get sick, is no longer an acceptable policy for the richest country in the world. And this violates our deep-seated American values derived from our faith traditions.
address gun violence as a public health emergency. enact universal background checks. ban assault weapons.
Fiscal Cliff
The U.S. is going to be facing a fiscal cliff. We can not sustain these high levels of debt forever. There are three things that the U.S. government needs to do to avoid going off this fiscal cliff:
First, the federal government must become much more efficient and wiser in how they spend money,
second, there must be new revenue coming in,
And third, the federal government should reduce non-essential spending starting at DOD but throughout the government. This problem cannot be solved by cutting government spending only nor can it be solved by simply raising taxes only. You must do both and increase the debt limit.
There are a few proposals that the Republicans have championed over the years that are worth considering.
One is restructuring federal agencies in a more logical and efficient manner. Another is to move a lot of federal agencies outside of Washington, leaving the headquarters functions in DC.
I would revise the re-inventing government programs and have each agency in charge of constantly reviewing and updating how they do they do things with the buy in of the agency workers and the public. The public should be able to log in and review how the government is re-inventing itself and offer concrete suggestions. We should appoint a panel of outside experts to all agencies with Agency heads required to respond to both the public and expert’s recommendations. The re-inventing government exercise cannot be just a gimmick but must be made into a fundamental reform that will transform how the government works. The President must embrace these efforts, and the Government must show results to the American public.
The end goal should be the government should spend less money because they are spending their money efficiently eliminating non-essential services. For example, how are golf courses on military bases around the world fundamental to the military’s core mission?
Finally, there are trillions of dollars in unspent money sitting in various accounts. These dollars need to be liquidated and spent. Re tax reform see below for my thoughts on that.
Budgetary Reforms
There is an urgent need to reform how the federal government is budgeted. I would shift to a two-year budgetary cycle, including shifting the fiscal year back to the calendar year. I would devote the first year of the congress to passing the budget for the next two years, I would devote the second year to oversight and supplemental budgets. Second congress will be mandated to pass the budget by the end of the year. In the rare event we cannot pass a budget on time, there would be an automatic CR. There should never be a government shut down again. That is just pure craziness. Reforming the budgetary process would go a long way to making the government much more efficient and effective. And will reduce the partisan bickering that is so destructive.
Tax Reform
Related to this is the need to reform our tax system with the goal that most government spending should be spend using tax dollars, we should limit borrowing to large-scale projects such as infrastructure, military weapon systems. Day-to-day spending should be done through tax revenues. The tax code should be radically simplified with most deductions eliminated. I would eep mortgage deductions, business travel deductions, perhaps state and local taxes, and add in medical and education expenses. We should eliminate everything else. The top rate should be 25 percent, but an AMT should be instituted, so that everyone pays their fair share. For most people there may be a slight increase in taxes and the super wealthy will pay their fair share. Gone are the days when millionaires get by paying almost no taxes. Same thing applies to corporate taxes. I would penalize companies for off shoring employment. The bottom line is we must increase tax revenues with the minimal economic distortions possible. And we must call upon the 1 percent to embrace the Warren Buffet principle that they should pay at least if not more in taxes as their lowest paid employees do.
When the Republicans claim that we cannot ask billionaires to pay more in taxes than challenge them–how is it just that a CEO who makes millions a year pays almost nothing in taxes? How is that just? How is that fair to the millions of other taxpayers? Tax reform that simplifies taxes, raises most of the revenue that the government needs and is much fairer will be a winning issue for the new President.
Automation–Jobs are Not Coming Back
This is a huge issue that needs to be addressed. Within a few years, self-driving cars will eliminate many jobs. AI systems will eliminate many jobs. Factories will continue to become more automated. We need a national strategy to deal with the onset of automation and AI. I would put Andrew Yang in charge of coming up with a plan and put him in charge of the Department of Labor, which must be overhauled to make it once again the Department of Labor working for the entire labor force. The bottom line, the jobs are not coming back!
Education Reforms
High school education needs to be reformed as does college. We should shift HS to something like the way the British do it. At age 16 people will graduate from high school, like the British O levels. Those who do well academically will go onto two years of college prep, like the British A level. We should do this through the community college system. Those not academically inclined would go into apprentice training programs ending with a certificate and job placement. You need to get the labor unions and corporations involved in re-inventing both high school and college, ensuring that every child graduates ready to go to work.
The future colleges will be a mix of in-person and on-line education. Many marginal colleges are going to go under. That is the reality facing us, and again we need a national plan. Appoint someone at the Department of Education to oversee the transition to both a new high school system and a new college system.
For anti-nepotism reasons, I would not offer the Department of Education to your wife, but if she wants to help by working with them on long range planning activities that would be acceptable and appropriate given her background.
Time to Embrace National Service to Pay for College
To pay for college for all who qualify, I would set up mandatory national service. All American citizens and LPR’s would serve two to three years (including training time) in service to the country. There would be no exemptions. All will have to serve two to three years. While in service they will receive minimum wage, housing, and medical care and a round-trip ticket home every year. At the end of the service obligation, they would receive educational benefits including housing subsidies to allow them to finish college. Most of their in-service training would be transferable into college credits. For most people, they would only need to spend three years going to college as opposed to four or five. Most people would do their service in the military but some will serve in an updated civilian conservation corps working in the parks and national forests, or serve as adjunct fire fighters, assistant police officers, or assist the border patrol agency or work in federal state and local offices. Those who serve a second enlistment would receive additional educational benefits to pay for graduate school.
At the end of enlistment, people would compete to become NCO’s or officers or civilian employees. Officers would go to ROTC programs or the service academy, NCO’s would go through a community college degree program and the NCO service training. Most though will complete their service then to go to college or technical training programs.
Finally, I would set up two new service academies. One would train federal law enforcement officers, the other would train diplomatic and intelligence officers. The service academies will all only take those who have completed their service obligation.
If we shift to this model everyone wins except predatory lenders. People will graduate from college debt free with significant work experience behind them. An important fringe benefit is that everyone would develop an appreciation that we are in this together as everyone will serve regardless of one’s social and financial status.
Challenge the Republicans who will say we cannot afford this. Challenge them to explain how the current system which makes college unfordable for most people and cripples’ young people with colossal debt is not sustainable. It is not and they know it and the public knows it. This is another winning ticket, I believe.
Climate change—Transition to Green Energy
This needs to be an urgent national priority. The recent fires out west and hurricanes and tornados elsewhere show how urgent a crisis this is. I would start by beefing up the Department of Energy, tasking them with coming up with the plan to transition the U.S. and the world to 100 percent renewable energy. I would set a goal of transitioning to 100 percent renewal energy by 2030. It can be done and must be done.
A small but hugely symbolic step would be to put solar and wind turbines on top of all USG facilities world-wide, starting with the WH and the Pentagon, and encourage large retailers like Walmart to follow suit. I would also embrace energy-saving technologies across the US government and throughout society. The US should at a minimum rejoin the Paris climate change initiative, and the US should become the world’s leader in combating climate change.
Re-building Crumbling Infrastructure
This is another urgent issue that would draw bipartisan support. Everyone knows that the U. S needs to spend trillions of dollars to rebuild our crumbling third world infrastructure. We should once again be the world’s leader in transportation–with high-speed trains including hyper loop and maglev trains providing state-of-the-art fast intra-city transportation, with 90 percent of intra-city travel being done on high-speed trains like in Europe and Asia. We need to build the next generation aircraft. This should become a huge profitable business opportunity for American companies. This is the one area I would say that we should pay for through borrowing.
Task the department of transportation with coming up with the plan. Focus on shovel ready projects at first. Work with the States to fund their essential improvements.
Get METRO in DC to become the nation’s best mass transit system doubling the number of lines within ten years including two new bridges over the Potomac river and extending Metro to Richmond through Ft Belvoir at least.
To those who claim we cannot afford it, challenge them by saying that we cannot afford to continue to let our infrastructure fall apart. And we can create a new export industry as we gear up to rebuild America and the world. Why should we let China lead the world in transportation infrastructure spending and development?
Solving Housing Affordability crisis. As part of our review of infrastructure, we need to address the issue of the housing affordability crisis. This will require overhauling local zoning as well as encouraging building a lot more affordable housing.
Social justice issues
This is an urgent national priority. Much of the work will have to be done at the state and local level, but the Federal government can take the lead in transitioning to a society where everyone is treated fairly by the criminal justice system. Police departments need more funding but must reform themselves. I would reverse Trump’s rescinding of racial sensitivity training.
I would also work hard at reforming the prison system. I would call upon States and the Federal government to release non-violent offenders into alternative service programs. We should reserve prisons for hard core violent offenders. I would legalize marijuana nationwide and release prisoners who are serving time for marijuana possession. I would also outlaw private prisons.
Immigration
The immigration system is broken and has been for decades. I worked for years as a visa officer and am aware of how broken the system is. I would simplify the process as follows.
There should only two categories of immigrant visas. Employment based and family based. The number of legal visas should be dramatically increased. We should eliminate the worldwide quota. The family-based visas should be limited to spouses and children under 18 of the principle applicant or spouses and children of U.S citizens and permanent residents. We should eliminate the parent and sibling category. But those in line should be allowed to immigrate and given two years to process the paperwork. No one should have to wait for more than a year to immigrate. I would add an English language requirement. Anyone wishing to immigrate to the U.S must learn English prior to their interview. If it is a requirement for the visa people will study ESL before taking their interview and once, they get to the U.S be much better equipped to find productive employment and become productive members of society.
Non-immigrant visas should also be simplified to short-term visitors–tourists and business travel, student visas including exchange visitors, diplomatic visas, and short-term employment visas. We should discontinue the diversity visa lottery program. Student visas holders should be able to transfer to employment-based visas if they wish to stay on in the U.S. after graduation.
We should rescind most of the extreme vetting measures that Trump imposed. We should increase the number of refugees and once again welcome asylum applicants. Finally, I would expand the number of visa waiver countries. And rescind the Muslim ban.
To gain some bipartisan support, I would embrace E-Verify programs and also announce that illegal aliens working illegally will still be subject to deportation but deportation would be waivable on a case-by-case basis – we don’t want to deport parents of U.S citizens for example. Deportation should be focus on violent offenders.
A final point, I would reverse the various zero tolerance policies, and let immigration officers at the border allow those with minor immigration or visa infractions to enter.
Ending the War on Drugs and Drug Abuse
I would convene a national task force to look at how we can combat the scourge of drug abuse nation-wide. I would increase spending on drug abuse prevention programs nation-wide. I would revamp the war on drugs to become focused on the dangerous drugs out there and legalize marijuana as mentioned above.
Healing the nation’s wounds
This is an urgent national priority. I would offer a presidential pardon to Donald Trump, and his immediate family members and allow them to retire to Florida. I know that this would not play well with the Democratic base out for vengeance but would be an important step towards healing the national wounds caused by the most divisive President we ever had.
I would also meet early on and often with the Republicans in congress and in that State House. Your message should be we need to come together and solve our nation’s problems. I will listen, and if your ideas are useful, I would consider implementing them. As I mentioned earlier, some Republican proposals particularly in health care have some merit.
You should not act like Trump did–denouncing everything your predecessor did. There were some things that Trump and the Republicans did that are worthy of continuing. And to accomplish your goals, reach across the aisle and put the country’s needs ahead of the party’s needs and your personal needs. I know that you can do this and I hope you will continue to show your willingness to work across the partisan divide for the good of the country, the American people and the world.
Space Exploration Race to the Moon and Mars Bonus issue
A final challenge. We need to return to space in a big way and think big. At a minimum, we need to set up a lunar base and send humans to Mars with the goal of having both lunar and Martian colonies functioning within ten years. And more long term we need to have colonies around the moons of Jupiter.
International issues
Rise of China
The biggest challenge will the rise of China as a rival superpower and how to combat Chinese influence and maintain US lead in the world. I would meet Xi in China and invite him to the U.S. Tell him we stand ready to work together where we can, but we will not let China take advantage of us.
Russia
The other big international issue is how to deal with Russia and its malign influence in the world. I would meet Putin in Russia and invite him to the U.S. Tell him we stand ready to work together where we can, but we will not let Russia take advantage of us.
Iran
Iran will continue to be a challenge. I would offer talks with the Iranians with the goal of recognition, and reestablishment of relations with Iran. This is something that the Iranian people desire and deserve. I would go back to the agreement and renegotiation with the Iranians. How to get to that is the problem.
North Korea
North Korea will continue to be a tremendous challenge. I would continue to meet with the North Korean. I would offer sanctions relief in return for North Korean opening and disclosing its nuclear weapons programs. Ending nuclear weapons in North Korea may not be possible. The best we can hope for is a freeze. Long term we should offer to normalize relations and establish trading relations with the North. I would also offer USAID and Peace Corps help as part of the package. I would invite Kim to visit the U.S. provided sufficient progress has been made and I would go to Pyongyang for a trilateral summit. Revising the six-party talks is also a good idea, I think.
Middle East including Saudi Arabia, Israel
The Saudis are not our friend or our ally. But they do not have to be our enemy either. We need to work with them on regional security issues but need to be wary of their long-term intentions. Re Israel, we should recognize that the UAE-Israel peace treaty is a step forward and should encourage the other countries to recognize Israel. And we need to continue to insist that a two-state solution is the only lasting solution to peace in the region. I would suggest that Israel consider a land swap giving the Palestinian state a land bridge linking Gaza to the West Bank to create a viable Palestinian state. Israel will have to give up some of its territorial land grab in the West Bank.
Venezuela
Venezuela will remain the biggest challenge in the western Hemisphere. We must encourage a transition to a democratic successor state.
Brazil and Latin America
Brazil remains a challenge. We must work to reverse the slide towards authoritarianism, and we must work with them to preserve the Amazon for the benefit of the entire planet.
Another area of concern- China’s entry into Latin America. We ensure that Latin America remains friendly to the U.S. and not fall under Chinese influence through neglect.
We need to continue to work with moderate governments in the region to check on the development of authoritarian governments of both left and right in the region.
Afghanistan
Afghanistan remains an immense problem. There is no simple solution. Keeping troops there forever is not however an option. We should welcome and encourage the ongoing peace talks and help in rebuilding Afghanistan, including sending back the Peace Corps once the situation stabilizes.
India-Pakistan
How to remain friendly with both India and Pakistan is a huge issue. The two countries must downplay tensions. The U.S has a lot of potential influence in India. I would offer to return the Peace Corps to India and to Pakistan and Bangladesh once the Peace Corps can resume operations post COVID.
Rebuilding Alliances
One of the biggest and most important challenges facing the new president is the urgent need to rebuild alliances across the world that have suffered from Trump “Go It Alone, America First” foreign policy and his insulting treatment of our allies. I would revise the annual summit of the Americas by hosting the first one in the U.S then committing to an annual summit every year. And why not an annual African Summit, an Asia Pacific summit, and a European summit? The President should represent the U.S in these annual summits.
Rebuild the State Department
I would rebuild the State Department, make sure that our embassies are fully staffed and that the State Department resumes its role as the chief foreign policy department in the U.S. government. As a retired FS officer, I have been most dismayed by the hollowing out of an institution that I served proudly in for almost 27 years.
Rebuild the Peace Corps and USAID, Promote Democratic Values Again
I would rebuild the Peace Corps once the COVID crisis allows for them to return to service. As an ex-Peace Corps volunteer, I know that the Peace Corps can make an enormous difference in human lives around the world. I would expand service to India, Pakistan, China and elsewhere as conditions warrant.
I would also rebuild USAID.
I would also restore democracy promotion as one of our core international values. One radical idea I would advocate is having our annual human rights reporting include a chapter on the U.S.–written by independent organizations or the UN. When I did human rights reporting, foreign governments would usually dismiss our reporting as self-serving and hypocritical. Having our human rights record included in the annual report would go a long way to restore human rights as a core value for the U.S. State Department and government, and show to the world that we are committed to upholding democratic values everywhere including at home.
Climate Change
This is both an internal domestic issue and an international issue. Internationally the president should announce that the US will take the lead in transitioning the world to a new green energy future. Rejoin the Paris accords and lead the world again.
Terrorism
This will continue to be an issue. There is also a domestic component–the rise of right-wing antigovernmental militias in the U.S. with international ties to extremist groups around the world. Be prepared for bioterrorism, and chemical weapons as well as rogue nukes.
Arctic Ocean Issues
The Arctic ocean will emerge as a challenge as the global ice melts, opening the Artic to both transportation and resource exploitation. The key is to ensure that it remains open to all nations especially the U.S. and that we do not through neglect let Russia dominate the Arctic ocean space.
Africa
Africa is a continent with tremendous opportunity. We should work with Africa on a whole range of issues. I would visit Africa early on, revise the annual Africa leaders’ summit, and increase USAID to Africa. Africa is the future in many respects, and we should embrace moderate African states as allies in building a more prosperous and democratic world.
Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts on these challenges.
I am a retired US foreign service officer living in South Korea. I grew up in Berkeley, California, where I went to Thousand Oaks Elementary school a few years before Kamala went there.
Jake Cosmos Aller
Retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer
Seoul (Incheon) South Korea
Bonus: How to Deal with Trump’s Tweets
I have a few words of advice for the campaign. First how to deal with Donald Trump’s tweets. First, ignore them. Second mock them. Third challenge them when needed. Here’s how it would work in practice. Donald Tweets something that is obnoxious, a lie or insulting. Tweet back,
“there he goes again. Tweeting nonsense when he should be doing his job as President” or “there he goes again, revealing yet again that he does not know what he is doing” or “Mark Twain once said, if you want people to think you are an idiot, open your mouth (or in this case) tweet and remove all doubt.” That is all you have to do.
Re the debate, don’t take the bait don’t spend your time constantly fact checking. Stick to your points but fact check a few points here and there and again mock him, belittle him and reveal to the world how much of an idiot he truly is.
Bonus 2: How to Address the Hunter Biden Story
Go out front and address this before Donald Trump unleashes the mud onslaught which is coming…
Hold a press conference. Have Hunter there. Have Hunter apologize for the controversy he caused by being naïve and not knowing how others would try to take advantage of him and his family’s status. Apologize for being an idiot.
Then address the country. Man up and apologize for the appearance of a conflict of interest. State that Hunter will not be working in my administration because I do not believe in nepotism, which is illegal, inappropriate and wrong. I challenge my opponent to join me in making this pledge, our relatives will not be working in the government when I am president. Then fire Javed, and Ivanka and Donald and Eric and Laura. And finally, Hunter Biden is not running for President. I am. Donald Trump will you fire Javed, and Ivanka?
That should stop the Hunter Biden onslaught. Hilary could have stopped the email nonsense if she had simply said, I am sorry. What I did with the emails was stupid and I have learned my lesson. A little humility and an apology of misdeeds goes a long way in this world. That’s my final word of advice for you.
Driving to the end of the world
The end times approach
Driving through the smoke filled air
North of Mt Shasta
Heart of bigfoot country
End of the world images
Fill my head with dread
end of the world visions
the apocalypse is upon us
The wicked evil as hell
blood red sun
Leers at me
with an evil grin
Screaming at me
What fools these mortals be
Global climate change
Is as real as the smoky fires
That Burn and burn and burn
As our leaders turn away
They Can’t handle the truth
They will sacrifice all life on earth
So the oil and coal barons
The so called masters of the universe
Can make their obscene profits
Sending the rest of us to hell
This is a list of mass shootings in the United States that have occurred in 2020. Mass shootings are incidents involving multiple victims of firearm-related violence. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there is no broadly accepted definition.[2][3]
Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrator(s), are shot in one location at roughly the same time.[4] The Congressional Research Servicenarrows that definition, limiting it to “public mass shootings”, and defined by four or more victims killed. It excludes counting wounded survivors.[2]The Washington Post and Mother Jones use similar definitions, with the latter acknowledging that their definition “is a conservative measure of the problem”, as shootings with fewer fatalities occur.[5][6] The crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker project defines a mass shooting as “an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree. This may include the shooter themself, or police shootings of civilians around the shooter.”[7]
As of June 30, there have been 260 shootings that fit this criteria, resulting in 226 deaths and 1,054 injuries, for a total of 1,280 victims.
Stanford University MSA Data Project: three or more persons shot in one incident, excluding the perpetrator(s), at one location, at roughly the same time. Excluded are shootings associated with organized crime, gangs or drug wars.[8]
Mass Shooting Tracker: four or more persons shot in one incident, at one location, at roughly the same time.[7]
Gun Violence Archive/Vox: four or more shot in one incident, excluding the perpetrators, at one location, at roughly the same time.[4][9]
Mother Jones: three or more shot and killed in one incident at a public place, excluding the perpetrators.[6]
The Washington Post: four or more shot and killed in one incident at a public place, excluding the perpetrators.[5]
ABC News/FBI: four or more shot and killed in one incident, excluding the perpetrators, at one location, at roughly the same time.[10]
Congressional Research Service: four or more shot and killed in one incident, excluding the perpetrators, at a public place, excluding gang-related killings and those done with a profit-motive.[2]
Only incidents considered mass shootings by at least two of the above sources are listed below.
Four people were injured shortly after midnight when someone opened fire during the Rude Boyz Annual Trail Ride. The gathering was held at Durango’s Canyon.[11]
One person was killed and three others were injured when a gunman opened fire in a restaurant. The shooter has been taken into custody and has been charged with open murder, three counts of assault with intent to murder and multiple weapons charges.[12][13]
Responding officers to a large gathering in the early morning found a man dead. Three additional victims were transported in private vehicles to the hospital.[14]
Officers responded to I-64 West in the early morning after calls of shots fired by a moving vehicle. They found four individuals shot, with one dead, in a crashed car. A fifth individual was wounded when the car crashed.[15]
Officers responded from a traffic stop after hearing gunfire. They discovered seven people wounded at a large house party after a man armed with a semi-automatic weapon arrived and opened fire.[17]
A seven-year-old girl, a sixteen-month boy and two adults were shot by a passing vehicle while getting out of a car. The girl was declared brain dead at the hospital, causing the shooting to be declared a homicide.[19]
Three men and a woman were injured shortly before midnight. A man was denied entry at a local bar, retrieved an assault-type weapon from his car, and shot into the building.[21]
Two adults were killed and two teenagers, aged seventeen and eighteen, were injured in an early morning shooting. The group were ambushed by two shooters after arriving at an AirBnb house party in a rideshare.[22]
One man was killed and three others injured in the early morning. Officers are investigating if the individuals were a part of an announced party for that night.[23]
A man opened fire and others returned fire at a large party with at least one hundred people in attendance. Four people were injured in the shooting.[26]
Fifteen people were injured, four critically, after a shooter opened fire at people leaving a funeral home in Chicago’s Auburn Greshamneighborhood.[27]
Five people were wounded in the North Lawndale neighborhood. They were a part of people gathered on the sidewalk when a car pulled up and several men got out and opened fire.[28]
One man was killed and four others injured after a fight in a McDonald’sparking lot escalated. One of the injured was an innocent bystander in the Food Lion parking lot across the street.[29]
Thirteen people were injured in an early morning shooting at a riverfront gathering. An argument between two women led to a man firing two shots into the air. This led to multiple individuals opening fire on the crowd.[30]
Two people were killed and three wounded shortly before midnight in Morgan Park on the Far South Side. They were part of a group of people, that were fired upon by an unknown shooter.[32]
Two fifteen-year-olds and two seventeen-year-olds were wounded while sitting in traffic when another car pulled up and opened fire. Four days later, the suspect was shot by police after a pursuit in which he was found holding a gun and died at a hospital.[34][35]
A man was killed and four others wounded after two men opened fire in the early morning in the North Lawndale neighborhood. The men were standing on a street corner.[37]
Four adults were wounded while attending a memorial in Weinland Park. A three-year-old girl was also wounded when bullets struck the home she was in.[38]
Two people were killed and three injured at a large outdoor hip hop concert in which potentially five separate guns were used. An additional three people were injured while attempting to flee, after being hit by cars.[48]
Three women and two men were injured after someone opened fire outside an apartment complex. At the complex there was a large party happening with over 100 people present.[50]
Two men opened fire on a late night cookout at the Raymond Bush Playground in Brooklyn. Three men were injured and an infant sitting in a stroller was killed.[51]
Four men were wounded and one killed in an early morning shooting. The group was standing in the street when a verbal altercation escalated with at least two shooters.[54]
Responding officers to an early morning block party arrived to gunfire. Two wounded individuals were identified at the party and four others were identified at local hospitals.[55]
In a late night shooting, four people were killed and three injured. Officers suspect the shooting was retaliation by people recently released from prison.[57]
Three men waiting at a stop light and were wounded when someone opened fire. Comedian Rickey Smiley’s daughter was a passenger in another vehicle and was also wounded.[61]
A 16-year-old girl and three adults were wounded by gunfire while standing in an alley in the West Side‘s Fifth City neighborhood in the early morning.[62]
Officers arrived at an early morning fight and heard shots being fired. They later discovered a man killed by the gunfire and three others injured.[63]
A man was killed and three others injured in a parking lot, after leaving an event held by rapper Bankroll Freddie. People were leaving the event when someone fired into the crowd.[66]
A large group of people were watching fireworks, when a fight broke out after a car hit a pedestrian. Fourteen people were wounded, of which two were declared dead at the hospital.[69]
A 20-year-old opened fire on a group of six people after getting into an altercation and taking a rifle from his father. Four of the group were injured and the 20-year-old and his father were arrested.[71]
Four people are killed, and at least four more were injured at an outdoor gathering in Englewood when four men opened fire into a crowd. No suspects have been arrested.[81]
A suspected shootout occurred inside the Riverchase Galleria in the afternoon. An 8-year-old boy was killed and two adults and a girl were injured.[84]
A group of five were shot after a man got out of a vehicle and opened fire. Two girls were killed aged 11 and 12-years-old and three adults were wounded.[85]
Shortly after midnight three men and a woman were shot while waiting in a vehicle at a Shell gas station in River North neighborhood. The shooter was in and later fled in a red sedan.[92]
Three adults and one juvenile were wounded, after going to a residence and getting into an altercation. The shooter was a juvenile resident of the home.[94]
A man shot and killed another man in a home, after mistaking it as the home of his intended target. He left and entered the correct home and wounded three others.[96]
Red Bluff shooting. An employee was killed and four injured at a Walmartdistribution center. The perpetrator was later killed in a shootout with responding police.[99]
Officers responding to an early morning ShotSpotter alert found two men wounded and identified two women who arrived at the hospital to be a part of the incident.[100]
A Missouri man traveled to the area for a house party, where a couple got into a physical domestic fight. Shortly after 911 was called in response to that fight the man opened fire and killed his Uncle and two others, and wounded another.[103]
Five people were wounded by a shooter outside a local grocery store. Officers previously thought the incident was a gunfight but later announced it was one shooter.[105]
Three adults and a 14-year-old boy were wounded in the early morning at a gas station. Prior to the shooting, a large crowd of people and cars had been gathered around the gas station.[107]
A man was killed, and two adults and a 17-year-old injured while attempting to make a rap music video. Officers believed the shooting was targeted, as the victims refused to cooperate.[109]
Officers responding to a block party on reports of someone being hit by a car arrived to shots being fired. Three people were killed and six injured by gunfire, with an additional five injured after being hit by cars while attempting to flee.[114]
Four people were wounded early in the morning after an individual opened fire from a vehicle in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side.[118]
Early in the morning a shooting occurred at a house party. Five individuals were shot and one died on the way to the hospital in a private vehicle.[122]
Officers arrived at a large party in a public parking lot after reports of a stolen car was made. An individual opened fire as they arrived and injured nine people including a 17-year-old.[126]
A woman sitting in her car was killed and three others injured in a separate car early in the morning. A shoot-out had occurred in a large gathering nearby.[129]
Five people were shot at a motel after a party in one of the rooms had an argument that escalated. Police believe the shooting was intended to be targeted.[132]
Early in the morning a man was discovered by officers with a gunshot wound. Shortly after transporting the man to the hospital, six other victims were identified at local hospitals to be a part of the same shooting.[135]
Three adults and a nine-year-old child were wounded while standing in an apartment complex parking lot in the Gresham neighborhood. A man walked up and opened fire on the group, resulting in a shoot out.[136]
In an apparent shoot out at a birthday party, one man was killed and two women injured. A second man died in his vehicle while attempting to drive away from the scene with a gunshot wound.[137]
Five people were wounded in the Fells Point neighborhood during a large gathering at Broadway Square with many of the crowd drinking alcoholic drinks.[150]
Shortly before midnight responding officers discovered seven shooting victims. A man and woman later died at local hospitals with five other men wounded.[151]
Early in the morning five men and one woman were wounded after multiple men opened fire on a group in the Tioga neighborhood, causing the group to scatter and run away.[152]
A man denied entry into a bar for being too drunk, stated “Don’t you know who I am?” to the bouncer before leaving. He returned later with a rifle and opened fire injuring five women and three men.[154]
Shortly after midnight responding officers discovered two men wounded by gunfire. Another man and a woman were taken to the hospital in private vehicles.[155]
A mother killed her neighbor, and four children aged 12, 8, and 5-years-old and a 5-month-old infant, before committing suicide in a murder-suicide.[156]
Seven people including two juveniles were wounded in the Trinidad neighborhood of DC. Officers discovered the victims after hearing gunshots in the early morning.[157]
A man shot and killed an individual and wounded an officer, responding officers killed the suspect and three officers were wounded after a short manhunt.[160]
Early in the morning ShotSpotter alerts caused officers to respond to a graduation party. One 18-year-old was killed and with three others wounded.[161]
Just before midnight, a shootout occurred in an apartment complex in the Northern Liberties neighborhood. Six people were wounded and a man was found dead behind some cars near the complex.[164]
A home was shot at first then after police investigated the shooters return and opened fire. Four people were injured in the second shooting including an 18-month-old infant.[165]
Officers responding to a shots fired call discovered four wounded victims. One victim later died at the hospital and the other three are uncooperative with investigators.[168]
Six people between 15 and 21-years-old were wounded in the early morning during an social gathering. A seventh individual broke her leg running from the gunfire.[171]
Three teenagers and two adults aged between 18 and 20-years-old were wounded at a local beach. Officials do not think there is a connection between it and the protests that occurred that night.[177]
Five individuals were wounded in a shooting, including a 10-year-old boy. All victims left the scene for the hospital via private vehicles, while police were called to the scene.[189]
A 17-year-old shooter and others engaged in a shootout at a graduation party, three 15-year-olds, a 16-year-old, and a 17-year-old were all injured along with the shooter.[202]
Five men were wounded outside a Jamaican restaurant in the early morning. All were brought to the hospital by private vehicles and have refused to cooperate with police.[214]
A man shot and killed his pregnant ex-girlfriend and wounded her sister, mother, and boyfriend before committing suicide after being surrounding by police.[217]
Three people were wounded when an individual opened fire at a party that was hosted at a short term rental. A fourth wounded individual was walking her dog near the home.[220]
A mother and her 15 and 12-year-old daughters were shot and killed by her husband who wounded another daughter before killing himself in a murder-suicide. Another daughter was uninjured and ran for help.[222]
Five people were killed in a home, aged between 14 and 41, with a child being uninjured in the violence. Police are treating the incident as a matter of family violence.[241]
Seven people were discovered wounded after police responded to an aggravated assault call. The individuals were wounded in a drive-by shooting after heading to an early morning party.[245]
Three people were killed and one injured in an apartment by two shooters. Due to the lack of forced entry the victims may have known the shooters.[248]
One man was killed and four others injured after multiple individuals opened fire on a backyard gathering before fleeing in a car and continuing to fire.[250]
Police were alerted of shots fired shortly after midnight and arrived to find the suspect had fled and the four wounded had transported themselves to the hospital.[254]
One man and three women were injured after an altercation escalated. A male shooter escaped the scene and a female was arrested for pointing a weapon at one of the wounded.[255]
Police responding to a call of shots fired found one person wounded and an additional three connected to the shooting were found in local hospitals.[256]
One man was killed and three other individuals wounded, including a 5-year-old, after an individual exited an alley way and opened fire on the group. One of the group likely returned fire at the shooter.[258]
One man was killed and four other individuals were wounded in a drive-by shooting in which people standing outside a house and sitting in a car were fired upon.[260]
A man shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend’s relatives before barricading himself with her and their 9-year-old child in the home. During the standoff an officer was wounded along with the ex-girlfriend, while the man was killed by police.[264]
A domestic argument escalated when a man shot and killed his child’s mother, step-father, and sister before abducting his two-year-old child. The shooter was arrested and the child recovered after an Amber Alert was issued.[266]
Five people were wounded at a late night memorial gathering after a man fired into the crowd from half-a-block away. The wounded included a two-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, and an eighteen-year-old.[267]
Four people were wounded in a late night shooting, with two of the wounded under the age of 18. One of the wounded was also showing signs of the COVID-19 virus.[268]
Four people in a car were wounded by shooter in the early morning. Three of the victims had transported themselves to hospitals prior to police arrival. The victim found by officers knew who had shot him, but refused to cooperate with police questions.[270]
Five people were shot by a man wearing all black and potentially a face mask and one individual died at the scene. One of the wounded is a three-year-old child.[274]
A shooter killed four people, including a police officer, and injured two others, including another police officer, before committing suicide at a gas station.[276]
Reportedly a group of young men burst into a home and started shooting early in the morning. They wounded a woman, a 16-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl and killed an adult male.[279]
Police responding to a shooting discovered two 15-year-old boys killed and a third juvenile injured. A fourth wounded juvenile involved in the shooting was later identified at a medical center.[281]
Police responded to reports of a shooting and discovered three wounded individuals, one of whom later died. A fourth victim arrived at a hospital in a private vehicle.[282]
A 13-year-old boy was killed, five others were wounded; a 14-year-old boy and girl, two 12-year-old boys and a 19-year-old man were wounded. The group was shot at in a parking lot after an altercation while attending a Triple Threat Elite Dance event.[285]
Seventeen people were wounded and one killed after a shootout between multiple motorcycle clubs after a fight at one of the club’s headquarters caused many to be thrown out.[286]
Six men and a woman were injured in a drive-by shooting after leaving a house party after a fight broke out in the Greater Grand Crossingneighborhood.[288]
A shooting occurred at a convenience store in the Avalon Park neighborhood where four people were hurt and one person was killed. The four wounded victims were listed in serious-to-critical condition. It was reported that three people, including two men and a woman, exited a vehicle and started firing inside the store. They fled in a white vehicle after the arrival of police. [293]
Seven people were shot at a flea market where a dance event took place with adults and children. A suspect was arrested and charged with assault. None of the injured victims were critically wounded. [295]
Three people were killed and one person was injured in a shooting. A suspect turned himself in to local authorities and was charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. [296]
Two people were fatally shot and three others, including a police officer, were wounded in a shooting at an apartment complex. The suspect was among the dead. [297]
Four men were sent to a hospital after police said there were wounded in a shooting in the street. No information about the whereabouts of the shooter were known. [298]
A shooting occurred in the North Side of the city where four people were injured. Two of the victims were listed in critical condition while the two others were listed in stable condition. A suspect was apprehended and arrested by law enforcement. [300]
One person was killed and four others were injured in a drive-by shooting. The injured victims were transported to the hospital and two of them were listed in serious condition. [302]
Seven people were wounded when an unknown shooter opened fire at a street race after an argument escalated. All were brought to the hospital via private vehicles.[306]
One person was fatally shot and four others were wounded in a shooting. It was initially reported that three victims were injured but a fourth one was discovered later and refused medical treatment. The four victims suffered non life-threatening injuries. [308]
A heated argument turned violent between a man and a woman in front of a house which led to a shooting. Four people were injured as a result of the shooting and were each transported to a hospital. Three of them were listed in serious condition while the fourth was in stable condition. Two of the injured were charged afterwards.[309]
Three people were killed and two others were injured in a shooting at a club. The conditions of the injured are unknown. According to police, one of the victims was found dead inside a car. At least one suspect is in custody.[310]
A 29-year-old rap artist was killed and three others were wounded in a shooting in North Houston. The wounded victims’ conditions are unknown. The suspects are gang members according to the chief of police.[311]
One man was killed and three others were wounded in a shooting outside and inside a home in Waco. Two of the victims were transported to a hospital by ambulance and were listed in critical condition. The third victim self applied to the hospital but his condition was unknown. Police believe that the motive behind the shooting is the sale of illicit drugs gone wrong.[312]
Four people were fatally shot on the Northeast section of the city. The victims are three males and one female and their ages are unknown yet. No suspects have been identified or arrested.[313]
Three people were killed and another was injured in the towns of Machias and Jonesboro. A 63-year-old man has been charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder in the case. [314]
Police responded to a street location where multiple shots were fired. They found four victims, aged 18-45 years old, with bullet wounds. Three of the victims were transported by helicopter to a hospital. It is unknown what their conditions are. Police are trying to locate any suspects in the shooting.[316]
A shooter shot and killed two members of a family and a friend of one of them inside a house. A third fled through a window uninjured and alerted the authorities. The shooter then committed suicide.[317]
One person was killed and four others were injured in a shooting incident that occurred in several locations. One of the injured is in critical condition while the other three are expected to recover. The shooting happened during a memorial gathering for a victim who previously passed away due to a traffic accident.[318]
A shooting occurred at an apartment complex where four teens were injured. All four victims, aged 15-17 years old, suffered non-life-threatening injuries according to first responders.[320]
Four teenagers were injured in a shooting on public streets. Three of the victims are listed in stable condition while the fourth is in critical condition. Police are interviewing witnesses for their investigation.[321]
Four family members were shot at a home. Three of the victims are dead and the fourth victim, a child, is wounded and is in serious condition. The suspect was apprehended and arrested by the police.[323]
Six people were injured by a shooting shortly after midnight, at a local restaurant. An additional three others were treated for non-gunfire related injuries.[325]
A man shot and killed his wife and three children, aged between eight months and four years old, along with the family dog. He then killed himself.[327]
Shooting of Haynie family: Four people were killed and one was injured after a teenager allegedly fired at his family at their house. He was charged with four counts of aggravated murder, one count of attempted aggravated murder and five counts of illegal discharge of a firearm.[334]
Three children between 11 and 16 years old were injured along with two adults after two perpetrators fired into a barber shop in the East Garfield Parkneighborhood.[335]
Two people were killed and two injured in a random ambush style shooting. The perpetrator was arrested after arriving at his mother’s house covered in blood.[338]
An argument in a Downtown Cleveland night club’s VIP section led to three people being wounded and a fourth person was shot in the head in the back alley.[343]
A family of four, including nine-year-old twin boys, were shot and killed at their home after celebrating New Year’s Eve. A 16-year-old boy was seriously injured.[345]
The statistics columns for each month are updated after the month ends, in an effort to make sure the correct number of events, individuals affected, and descriptions are accurate. Thus, the number may be incomplete throughout the month until the last day of each month.
^ Jump up to:abcBjelopera, Jerome (March 18, 2013). “Public Mass Shootings in the United States”. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved December 6, 2019. There is no broadly agreed-to, specific conceptualization of this issue, so this report uses its own definition for public mass shootings.
This is a list of mass shootings in the United States that have occurred in 2019. Mass shootings are incidents involving multiple victims of firearm-related violence. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there is no broadly accepted definition.[2][3]
Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrator(s), are shot in one location at roughly the same time.[4] The Congressional Research Service narrows that definition, limiting it to “public mass shootings”, and defined by four or more victims killed. It excludes counting wounded survivors.[2]The Washington Post and Mother Jones use similar definitions, with the latter acknowledging that their definition “is a conservative measure of the problem”, as shootings with fewer fatalities occur.[5][6] The crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker project defines a mass shooting as “an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree. This may include the shooter themself, or police shootings of civilians around the shooter.”[7]
There were 434 mass shootings in 2019 that fit the inclusion criteria of this article. This averaged 1.19 mass shootings per day. In these shootings, 1,643 people were injured and 517 died, for a total of 2,160 victims.
There are many definitions of a mass shooting. Listed roughly from broad to specific:
Stanford University MSA Data Project: three or more persons shot in one incident, excluding the perpetrator(s), at one location, at roughly the same time. Excluded are shootings associated with organized crime, gangs or drug wars.[8]
Mass Shooting Tracker: four or more persons shot in one incident, at one location, at roughly the same time.[7]
Gun Violence Archive/Vox: four or more shot in one incident, excluding the perpetrators, at one location, at roughly the same time.[4][9]
Mother Jones: three or more shot and killed in one incident at a public place, excluding the perpetrators.[6]
The Washington Post: four or more shot and killed in one incident at a public place, excluding the perpetrators.[5]
ABC News/FBI: four or more shot and killed in one incident, excluding the perpetrators, at one location, at roughly the same time.[10]
Congressional Research Service: four or more shot and killed in one incident, excluding the perpetrators, at a public place, excluding gang-related killings and those done with a profit-motive.[2]
Only incidents considered mass shootings by at least two of the above sources are listed below.
Five people were wounded by gunfire outside a night club, with an additional three injured by the resulting building damage and chaos. The shooting occurred after an altercation escalated out onto the street.[17]
2019 Jersey City shooting: Four people were killed, including a police officer, and another three were injured in an ambush style shootout by a man and woman who were killed by police. The suspects were Black Hebrew Israelites members and targeted a kosher grocery store.[34]
Two men were killed and three injured at an apartment building. The incident was originally reported as a home invasion, although the account was not confirmed.[36]
2019 Miramar shootout: Four people are dead and one injured after a pair of men rob a jewelry store in Coral Gables, injuring the clerk, then carjack a UPS truck and lead police on a chase that ended in a shootout in Miramar that killed the UPS driver, a bystander, and the suspects.[39]
2019 New Orleans shooting: Ten people were shot in a densely populated area with heavy police presence at a time when tens of thousands of tourists were downtown for the Bayou Classic football game.[46]
Saugus High School shooting: A high school student shot five classmates, two fatally, before shooting himself; he died the next day in the hospital.[63]
An argument escalated and left one man injured and another dead. The shooter then engaged in a shootout with officers injuring two officers before being killed.[70]
Four people were killed and one injured after a neighbor entered their apartment and opened fire. The fifth victim died of her injuries later in hospital. [100]
A man killed his mother then drove to a gas station where he attempted to kidnap a clerk then killed a man and injured the clerk before robbing another gas station and committing suicide.[119]
Responding police officers discovered a car covered in gunshots, and discovered a deceased male and two men and a female injured. One of the injured men later died.[133]
Midland–Odessa shooting: Eight people were killed, including the perpetrator, and 25 were wounded when a gunman opened fire on police and civilians after fleeing from a traffic stop.[151]
Police responding to shots fired at a senior living complex discovered a wounded woman, and two males and a woman deceased. It is believed one of the deceased males was the shooter.[202]
A man killed four people, including his father and brother, and wounded two more at a total of four different crime scenes across the San Fernando Valley.[216][217]
After a dispute over fireworks, a man shot into a crowd and injured a 12-year-old child and a woman, then barricaded himself in his home. Police discovered him and a woman deceased in the home.[240]
Two people were killed and two were wounded in a shooting at an apartment complex. One of the victims later died at the hospital from their injuries.[269]
Police discovered three individuals wounded after responding to a shooting; an additional two were transported via personal vehicles to the hospital.[303]
2019 Virginia Beach shooting: A gunman killed 12 people and injured four others at a city public works building. The gunman died at the scene after being shot by police.[306][307]
A man shot three employees at a local plumbing company, killing one before exchanging gunfire with a sheriff’s deputy, also injuring him before committing suicide.[309]
A woman and three others, including a 4-year-old boy were wounded in what police presume was a targeted shooting. One of the victims later died from their injuries.[330]
Three people were killed and two were critically injured in a shooting at a home. One victim died of their injuries days later, taking the death toll to four.[333]
A person began shooting at an event that was originally reported to be a rap concert and subsequently described as a birthday party. Four people were injured by the gunfire, and a fifth person suffered a head injury after falling.[335]
A shooting was reported near Farragut Elementary School, where two men were discovered wounded, and an additional four were identified at the hospital.[337]
Investigators attempted to make contact with the suspect in relation to another crime, he then began to open fire, injuring three children and himself.[359]
A man killed his wife, two of his daughters, and another man, and injured two people who came to try to help one of the victims. All of the victims were shot, with the exception of one of his daughters who was killed by blunt force trauma.[371]
Police responded to a domestic dispute at a residence; upon arrival, the suspect fired shots at officers leading to a 12-hour hostage standoff. Four people were killed, and the suspect was taken into custody and later died.[419]
Aurora, Illinois shooting: A man opened fire in his workplace, killing five employees, and injuring five police officers and a civilian before being killed by police.[420]
After a fight broke out near a basketball court at a park, multiple people started shooting at each other. Two people were killed, and two were wounded.[421]
Two people were found with bullet wounds in front of a residence, and two more arrived at a hospital with gunshot injuries from the same shooting.[435]
A man killed two people and injured one inside a local bar, then drove away and broke into a home and killed the homeowner before killing himself.[438]
2019 Sebring shooting: At least five people were killed in a hostage incident and shooting at a bank. The suspect was taken into custody by police.[440]
A man was killed and five other people were injured in a shooting. The Mayor of Jacksonville described the shooting as gang-related, although this characterization has been disputed by the sister of the deceased man.[448]
An argument over a gun inside a local ice cream shop led to a shooting. One man was killed and four others, including the suspected shooter, were injured.[450]
An argument at the Torrance bowling alley escalated into a fight and three people were killed by gunshots, at least four others were wounded. A suspect who was out of prison on parole has been arrested.[455]
The statistics columns for each month are updated after the month ends, in an effort to make sure the correct number of events, individuals affected, and descriptions are accurate. Thus, the number may be incomplete throughout the month until the last day of each month.
According to data compiled by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University, the year 2019 saw the highest number of mass killings recorded to date: 211 killed in 41 incidents. Thirty-three of these mass killings, defined here as four or more people killed excluding the perpetrator, involved firearms.[460]
^ Jump up to:abcBjelopera, Jerome (March 18, 2013). “Public Mass Shootings in the United States”. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved December 6,2019. There is no broadly agreed-to, specific conceptualization of this issue, so this report uses its own definition for public mass shootings.
Watch now
Marjorie Taylor Green’s Yellow Race Comments Marjorie Taylor Green.
