The cage bars that trap any hope for democracy

I read through the transcript of another episode of the podcast Gaslit Nation by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Corporate Manslaughter and discusses (among other things) the “Council to Reopen America.” This council includes key members of the Trump Crime Cult – the pandemic prince, Ivanka (nasty princess for now, I’ll come up with something), Steve Mnuchen of Treasury, Wilbur Ross of Commerce, Larry Kudlow, Mark Meadows, and Robert Lighthizer. All of these people have a long history with various criminal characters, such as corporate raider Carl Icahn, or are GOP strategists dating back to Ronald Reagan, or were associated with primary GOP donor Sheldon Adelson who was behind the move to get the US embassy moved to Jerusalem, which put Palestinians off any possible peace deal.

Meadows, like Mike Pompeo and the vice nasty guy, believes the Biblical end times are here and they are basing policy on trying to make all those end of the Bible prophesies come true. Those prophesies are about disasters, so their policies are designed to make disasters happen.

Back in 2016 the nasty guy asked Russia for Hillary Clinton’s emails and was sued for child rape by a woman who said she was a victim of a global trafficking network. He checked every box of classic tabloid fodder – mafia ties, sex crimes, spies, secret meeting with global elites. Stories that would be ratings gold. So why did most of the press work against its own financial interests and not bite?

Roy Cohn was a political operative who died of AIDS in 1986. The nasty guy was his protégé who dumped Cohn when he became ill. But in that time the nasty guy learned key skills: how to swindle money, how to marry for maximum benefit, and how to cozy up to America’s enemies – the Soviets at the time. And “how to construct a new American reality out of the wreckage of the American Dream.”

Chalupa said:

So on recent call with business leaders, just to give an example of how dictatorship works, Dictatorship 101, on a recent call with business leaders, Trump claimed Ivanka created 10% of all jobs in the United States. This is known as the Big Lie, a lie so colossal and brazen that how dare you even challenge it? It's just so absurd. But repeated often enough, it becomes part of the mythology of a dictatorship, and this is all according to a famous psychological profile of Adolf Hitler from a 1943 book, and I'm quoting this book now: "Never admit a fault or wrong, never to accept blame. Concentrate on one enemy at a time. Blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong. Take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind." That is what Trump does. That is what he's known for doing.

According to his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, Trump studied the speeches of Hitler, Trump studied Hitler. That is why we're seeing, right in front of us before our eyes, Trump in his Hitler cosplay.

For those who haven’t been a teenager in a long time or don’t follow comic book superheroes, “cosplay” is costume play. A person dresses up in the costume of the hero and acts out scenes or scenarios of being that hero. An example of that is the nasty guy’s daily press conferences to talk about what he’s done about the virus, which are really propaganda rallies.

One of the nasty guy enemies is the press, shown through his constant attacks. When asked about it he said he does it to demean and discredit them so no one will believe their negative stories. That’s in the dictator handbook.

The GOP has been united around corruption, around making sure people can’t thrive, around destroying the environment, and around blood money. In a sense we’re still fighting the Confederacy (155 years after its first defeat it is winning), though slavery has transformed into the prison industrial complex, including border detention centers, where these people make money off denying rights and freedoms.

FEMA normally would distribute aid, in this case protective gear for hospital workers in harm’s way. But under the Trump Crime Cult FEMA is distributing only 50% of those supplies to the states. The rest they’re turning over to private companies, who allow states to bid for them. And where one of the bidders is FEMA with the financial pockets of the federal government.

And those private companies? One is owned by Mike Gula, who was a big GOP fundraiser until this opportunity to profit off medical supplies came along. Ivanka claimed to create 10% of jobs, a Big Lie. She is creating jobs – blood money jobs.

As for the rest of us, Kendzior said the goal of the GOP …

is strip this country down and sell it for parts. And a broken down country is a lot easier to manage. A country of terrified people, 30% of whom are now unemployed, are easier to manage, and eventually, the fear that we're all facing turns to scapegoating, turns to panic, turns to blame, and it leads to a lot of simplifications about what kind of state has what kind of governance and so forth.

So go ahead and let the blue states secede? There’s a problem, the blue areas in red states, such as St. Louis are heavily black areas. And black people in a country controlled by the nasty guy would have terrible lives, even worse than now.

The nasty guy has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, even though it is unproven to help the disease and has deadly side effects. I had earlier written that the nasty guy has a small stake in the company that makes it. So do many of his cronies. One, who runs an investment portfolio says they have only a 0.7% stake in the company. Of no consequence. But a 0.7% stake is worth about $775 million.

But this is a small crime to get the media focused on it so the nasty guy can commit big crimes in secret. Well, actually, out in the open with very few people paying attention.

One of the things he’s doing, while not criminal in the legal sense, is pack the courts with the most reliably conservative people. They will push American law to the right even if we defeat the nasty guy in November. Because the Supreme Court hears so few cases the Courts of Appeal are the final word in most cases. And already one quarter of Appeals judges are nasty guy appointees, all of them selected by the highly conservative lawyers of the Federalist Society. These judges will be able to sabotage a Democratic president’s agenda. The nasty guy has built a monument to himself in the judicial system. In an authoritarian regime the judicial system is the cage bars that trap any hope for democracy.

Defeating such a judicial system – one as corrupt as the guy who implemented it – would require a popular uprising with deadly results. These popular uprisings rarely succeed. See: Hong Kong.

Want to keep our youth from needing to protest? Vote Blue, no matter who. Though that doesn’t mean you don’t critique the candidates hoping to make them better. Are you able to do something for someone you don’t know? Vote Blue, even if your own candidate is no longer in the race. Have you been saying Bernie or Bust? We’re already at bust, have been for a long time, and are on our way to hell.