Remember, none of my stuff is written with AI. Let’s all support indie writers who reject using AI in our posts, okay?

Anyhoo, here’s a roundup of some recent posts. Some humorous, some not so funny, some just downright grim. Pick your poison, and restack what you like (my subscriber numbers have remained the same for a long time, so I can use all the help I can get!):

This first one was inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. If it looks familiar, but different, it’s because I sent it out with a different headline and graphic. It’s been tightened up a bit, too.

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This one is about Trump’s insider trading war, which mainstream media mysteriously still refers to as the Iran War and similar monikers:

This is a short one. Short and sweet. Self-explanatory, too!

This one’s just a little reality check:

My G.L.O.V.E.s are off in this story about American fascism:

Some things Caligulus Trumpus does are too ridiculous to write about, but we do it anyway to help maintain the anti-Trump cottage industry as a major part of the U.S. economy:

In the mood for reading about an epic asshole? Here ya go:

ICE brings its cowardice to the skies:

How a scammer used AI to pretend to be an editor at a major publishing house to try butter me up into sending him money:

Where Rand Paul got his ludicrous ideas — It’s almost like there’s a little factory in the South that generates bidedal rectums and places them into political office:

Wildberries and oil and the end of the axis of evil:

Chapter Three of the Psalm of Vampires sequel. The remainder is on hold a little. Frankly, I’m not seeing enough traction on this to move forward, and my brain has about 50 other ideas for novels in its head. I’ll see how it goes, but for now, all three first chapters are available here on Ruminato Substack:

In praise of my favorite centrist politician. We probably don’t do this as often as we should, you know? I mean, just compare the two men, right?

It’s always good to hear from Dr. Harry Hemogoblin, isn’t it?’

There’s more, of course. Just go to ruminato.com, my Substack domain, for more. If you look at it on your laptop or tablet, you will find it’s very easy to navigate and find the content you’re looking for.

Ruminato

Essays, Political Rants and/or Satire, Humor, and Fiction by Charles Bastille, author of MagicLand, Psalm of Vampires, and Restive Souls

By Charles Bastille

Happy Sunday! Give me a restack if you feel like offering support. Or, buy my new fiction anthology!

Thank you, as always. Love you all! Unless you unsubscribe, in which case I harbor a minor resentment for several weeks.

Let’s close with some appropriate music. I love the filmed choreography and art direction of this cover of Roland Orzabal’s (Tears for Fears) song by Gary Jules:

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Mr. Fulbright is filing a report to Screwtape on the demonic attempts to control Caligulus Trumpus.

Greetings and Salutations, Screwtape:

My apologies for my recent lack of timely communication. As you know, the patient has fallen quite ill, which makes it more difficult to apply our usual invasive suggestive techniques.

Luckily, the patient has devolved so fully that he is quite capable of acting on our behalf with little intervention.

I’m happy to report that the lovely Mrs. Breckinridge has found a most delightful tart to aid our efforts.

Her name is Natalie, and I’m sure by now you’ve heard of her.

Natalie has quickly achieved legendary status in the human world. Stories abound of her exploits, even though she has been under Mrs. Breckinridge’s tutelage for just a short time.

One of our favorite stories, which I must say forced me into a howling guffaw loud enough to have transcended our continuum and into the human realm for a brief moment, involves a little story involving one of the patient’s many court cases.

Well, dear mentor, it seems young Natalie was left off a passenger list on the patient’s entourage to the courthouse. The Secret Service wouldn’t let her into the patient’s heavily armored SUV because of the oversight.

She huffed, she did, and she puffed, and she screamed, as well. A delightful scream it was, too, a shriek, really, which would have pierced eardrums had it been inside a room.

She was livid at being left off the entourage list because, as you may be aware, she is usually affixed to the patient’s side as if by epoxy.

Desperate to join the patient, she jumped into the trunk of the vehicle as it drove off. How the Secret Service was unable to prevent this, I can’t say.

Luckily, the only mortal who heard my laughter as it wafted into the human world was Steven Cheung, the patient’s communication director, who has already joined our team and is destined, I’m told, for basement duty tending to the baser needs of ghouls and trolls upon his exit from the foul planet that humans live on.

Natalie became a pet project of Mrs. Breckinridge shortly after the patient was smitten upon seeing her at something called the Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in 2019. When Mrs. Breckinridge heard him say, “She lit up the television screen like very few people I’ve ever seen do it,” she immediately went to work.

I remember that day well. The patient’s heart rate reached 150 beats per minute when he first set eyes on her, touched, I knew, by what he perceived as a strong resemblance to his daughter, which always sends his delightfully soiled mind into a besotted sexual frenzy.

Well, regardless, I thought he was a goner with that heart rate turning his orange skin purple and sweat soaking his exterior like the side of a cold glass of iced tea.

The enemy might have called that reaction sweet, a sign of a blooming love, but only if they were unaware of the patient’s unrequited longing for his primary blond offspring, which, let’s be honest here, is a bit much even for our team (Some of Mrs. Breckinridge’s younger helpers were said to be somewhat nauseated by the patient’s natural instincts).

However, this is what makes working with this patient such a delight. He rarely requires more than a nudge, and lately, not even that.

I’m happy to report that the relationship has indeed blossomed, and we have Mrs. Breckinridge to thank for that, since the patient’s ability to express himself in ways that traditionally offer physiological pleasure to human females of Natalie’s age has, shall I say, expired. Not that there was much for him to work with in the first place, which itself is an irrelevant factor with his personality type, who take no interest in the carnal satisfaction of their paramours.

Mrs. Breckinridge instead went the obsession route, which is always a reliable weapon when it can be nurtured properly. For example, the large newspaper that we have been moderately successful at influencing, the New York Times, still employs a reporter by the name of Maggie Haberman, who I find to be a bit of a pest.

I’m told by Mr. Jones that he’s working on that problem, but for now, loser Haberman continues to write such things as:

Several videos shared with The Times show Ms. Harp sprinting across great distances to keep up with Mr. Trump’s golf cart as it putters across his course in Scotland.

I have confirmed this with Mrs. Breckinridge, who says she and her helpers laughed endlessly as Natalie caught up to the golf cart, quite out of breath from all the running and chasing, and with bed hair suitable for a mug shot. As I understand it, this kind of foot chase across the golf links is a frequent occurrence.

“I Want to Bring You Joy” is one of many expressions of devotion Natalie has expressed to the patient, but, as you know, she is consumed by our kind of devotion, not the enemy’s.

Mrs. Breckinridge has managed to obtain for Natalie a kind of proximity to the patient at all times that his other sycophants can only dream of. Mrs. Breckinridge, with her wry humor, has told me on multiple occasions that Natalie isn’t merely pasted onto the president; she is the paste itself, so close is she to him.

Natalie is with him at all hours. I have witnessed much of this, and it pleases me to no end. The patient eats up the attention the way starving jackals chomp the bowels of a lion’s quarry.

Natalie and the patient sit together on his massive gold-framed bed, he on his phone, she on her laptop, posting wild AI memes together deep into the night, often with no sleep, giggling like school children during a clandestine sleepover.

Occasionally, one of them will whisper a derogatory remark about his wife, Melania. More giggling follows, hand to mouth, as if to hide their illicit laughter from an unnamed observer. It’s all quite atrocious and enjoyable.

He especially enjoys when Natalie mocks Melania’s accent. I believe those are the rare moments when there is a brief stirring within the front of his adult diapers, but that fades quickly, especially when Natalie finds it necessary to tend to cankle leakage.

The patient considers this late bedtime activity a way to consummate the relationship. It is the best he can hope for, after all, given his various medical conditions.

She participates in many social media posting frenzies with the patient, including 40 different times referring to E. Jean Carroll in one sitting. One post after another for hours. It was, please forgive my word usage, dear Screwtape, quite heavenly.

Mrs. Breckinridge herself helped Natalie pen one letter to the patient, which read, “You are all that matters to me.” I’ll admit to seeing the patient read this letter and not being particularly interested in its origin, because he displayed his usual aloofness when she called him on his cellphone ten or so times that same day without his answering.

This all occurred before I had had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Breckinridge, so I was not yet attuned to her exquisite maneuverings.

I truly thought he was merely examining a piece of his deranged fan mail, one of his favorite pastimes. I had not yet been made aware of Natalie’s deep obsession with the patient.

When I did learn about it, I was in disbelief. How could such a troubled soul be allowed such proximity to a president by his security team? I was, frankly, a bit worried as well, knowing that these relationships, although quite enjoyable, usually end badly for one or both of the parties.

Credit here to Mr. Simmons, who assured me that the Secret Service had developed several plans for taking her out of the picture if need be. We can’t lose our patient as an asset before his natural time elapses. We have no control over that, of course, it being the exclusive purview of the enemy, but if there are courses of action we can take to prevent an assassination, we must do so.

Mr. Simmons, as you know, was the demon who helped concoct the phone-blown-off-ear story by urging a troubled Secret Service agent to plot it with a few others. Some of our finest work. I was pleased to learn that Mr. Simmons had moved on to charge d’affaires of Mitch McConnell photography sessions.

He’s done some fine work there, as well.

Permit me, then, my most merciless mentor, to provide a roundup to highlight the relationship between Natalie and the patient. I offer this in bullet format, even though I know you despise them, because, frankly, I do enjoy tickling the underbelly of my tormentors. In addition to what I’ve described to this point:

• First off, Natalie is Christian, but the kind we like.

• Quoting the New York Times again, which I know you don’t mind now that we’ve had so much success getting them to sanitize the patient’s activities: “She rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.”

• She made news as one of those lucky few to be stuffed into a catering container in Turkiye during a recent threat by one of our favorite countries of all time, the Islamic Republic of Iran (I get goosebumps every time I mention the place).

• She provided AI graphics and video to the patient that prompted him to post a video of a previous president and his wife, and one of our mortal enemies, Obama, as apes. I know how much you enjoyed that one.

• The press reports that she loves him as much as his wife and children, a report that I find humorous beyond words, since they don’t love him very much at all. Take away his ability to fill their coffers with ill-gotten money, and they’d all be lining up to hang him at the gallows. No, my eminence, hers is a unique obsession. What the patient’s wife and children feel toward him is less than a shadow of Natalie’s dark obsession, I’m happy to report.

• Her devotion to the patient has stirred a mixture of jealousy, disbelief, anxiety, frustration, fear, and other wondrous emotions within his team at the improved West Wing, bolstered, I believe, by her access to him, which is absolute. She is more than his Wormtongue. She is both his mouthpiece and the conduit through which all information to him flows. I’ll admit to being apprehensive about this at first, but it has proven to be remarkably helpful.

• In one letter made public, she wrote to him: “I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).” If only we could snip her DNA and spread it through the populace.

• The patient has stated that she is the only person who cares about him.

• The news gadflies Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan call her a human binky, which I do appreciate, but not on their terms. We need to accelerate our conversion efforts on these two fools.

There’s much more, details of which I have sent through other channels.

If there’s any bad news to report, it is that the devious enemy has found its own surrogate, a fellow named Jon Ossoff, who is a Democratic senator from Georgia. By doing nothing more than mentioning her name in the same breath as the patient, he has become a legitimate presidential contender, and thus a threat to our cause, considering his tendencies, which veer directly into enemy territory.

He often makes wisecracks about the patient, and worse, all of them are spot on. Example: “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

He is going to be a big problem for us. I recommend assigning one of our best to him, assuming he’s not a lost cause already.

Until next time, dear mentor…

— Yours with everlasting and demonic intent,

~ Mr. Fulbright

Notes

Most of the news content regarding this comes from two sources. Here are gift links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/politics/natalie-harp-trump-devotion-white-house.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/us/politics/trump-natalie-harp.html

“Mrs. Breckinridge” is a bit of an Easter Egg, but you might need to be a boomer to figure it out.

For those of you not familiar with The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, they’re a series of letters written by a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, on how to cajole and tempt Wormwood’s assigned target, an everyday British man.

For more on Natalie Harp, check out Jay Kuo’s Natalie Biography:

The Status Kuo

More Than Just a Human Printer!

Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned a name most Americans had never heard, and the White House and right-wing media freaked out. It seems he’d touched a nerve…

Read more

4 days ago · 612 likes · 92 comments · Jay Kuo

Snopes is unable to verify Natalie’s cancer story

https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/08/20/natalie-harp-bone-cancer/

Leave a comment

I made an exception to my usual NO-AI in my graphics mantra because my prompt was very specific about the artist I wanted to emulate, Gustave Doré, who no longer has copyrights associated with his work. I used Adobe Firefly to create the background image, and then I superimposed Natalie over that myself using Photoshop. Adobe claims Firefly doesn’t use outside copyrighted images for its LLM (model), but instead uses contributions by Adobe users through Behance and other opt-ins. The prompt was: “Demonic scene similar to illustrations in Dante’s Inferno by Gustave Doré.” The image of Natalie Harp is in the public domain by the White House.

Here is Mr. Fulbright’s original report to Screwtape:

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You remember the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), right? Oh, you poor, sweet summer child. You forgot, didn’t you?

Well, all those “on again,” “off again” ceasefires during the Strait of Hormuz Insider Trading War, those wonderful “We’re about to bomb, oh, wait, no we’re not,” market manipulation statements coming out every few days from the ruins of the White House, were actually related to a theoretical and mostly fictional Memorandum of Understanding that expired today.

The MOU was allegedly a document signed by the U.S. and Iran last June stating that the two countries were committed to achieving a lasting peace agreement. It was “negotiated” by ace diplomats/real estate tycoons Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who probably envisioned turning Tehran into the capital of the 55th state (after Canada, Venezuela, Greenland, and Cuba were happily in the fold of the big, new, beautiful, bountiful United States).

Nobody really remembers why TrumpleSickSkin bombed Iran all those months ago in the first place. Especially Democrats, most of whom are still sitting around with their butts on their hands while Rome burns.

It doesn’t matter why he let loose the bombs, because trying to assign logic to anything the orange puffaroon does is like trying to understand why an enraged chimp just bit off your face.

The damage is done, and here we are, trying to prognosticate a madman’s next move. This is an impossible task.

Anyhoo, Iranian Republican Guards, fresh off slaughtering tens of thousands of their own people protesting a crappy economy and the theocratic regime responsible for it, used those two months to consolidate power in the wake of the idiot killing the nation’s “Supreme Leader” (that’s Iran’s name for the ayatollah in charge of things).

So, yeah. He died, and so did the family of his son, who replaced him. The word is that the son, who is now the Supreme Leader (name not important), is alive but possibly lying in multiple pieces on a hospital bed somewhere, so he makes no public appearances, since it’s hard to travel when you have to reattach parts of your body before standing before crowds of people lecturing them on how women suck and should remain mostly uneducated and hidden from view.

Quick history lesson!

I hate to do this to you again, but we need to backtrack a little for some historical perspective.

To understand what Iran has been doing during these two months of dithering by the TrumpleManiacs who run the U.S. war machine these days, we need to explore how the government of Iran works. Don’t worry, I can do this in a paragraph or three.

Way back in the 1970s, Iran had a little revolution to overthrow the Shah of Iran, who was a nasty dictator installed by the U.S. and Britain because they were mad about a socialist prime minister who had won an Iranian election fair and square (mostly).

At first, the government that replaced the Shah was sort of semi-democratic in nature. They had a parliament (called the Majlis) and everything! But it didn’t take long for the top cleric in the nation, a truly nasty fella named Ruhollah Khomeini, to consolidate power and become Iran’s “Supreme Leader.”

Take a look at this guy and tell me that’s the face of someone you want knocking on your door surrounded by a cadre of well-armed misogynists.

He then began a pogrom against women, of all people. Imagine an American Christo-nationalist taking power as supreme dictator in the United States, but without all the publicly known sex stuff.

One way he consolidated power was through a militia group of hardened misogynists called the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). These were, and are, basically army guys who think that women who don’t do everything they are told and hide their faces properly should be sent directly to a grave.

Khomeini bolstered the IRGC with a huge voluntary force of men called the Basij, who did things like run around Iranian cities on motorcycles chasing women who dared to show more than an eyebrow. Seriously, that’s what these men were tasked with. Jump on a motorcycle and look for bare ankles.

Khomeini turned Iran into a pretty crazy place. Lots of people went to prison for just being human beings. Iranians can thank American foreign policy for the gift later, maybe after we bomb the crap out of them again, if we can find the bombs to do it with (Hegseth pretty much ran the inventory down to nothing, so that’s a big if).

When Khomeini died, he was replaced by a guy named Khameini. As we say in America these days, you can’t make this shit up.

Well, Khameini was just as nasty as Khomeini.

They’re both dead now. Khameini (the one with the “a”) was killed when Trump got a hair up his ass and decided to bomb Iran for reasons.

So he was replaced by another Khameini.

But, as I said, the newer Khameini was apparently blown up some, too.

Remember that Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) of which I spoketh (spaketh?) earlier?

Well, my friends, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (I’m gonna just call them the IRGC from now on) were very happy that the Trumpanzees in charge of things negotiated with themselves and finally came up with the MOU.

The Iranian diplomats took a look at what the real estate guys came up with and said, “Yeah, sure, whatever buys us some time.”

One important small but salient fact about the real estate guys’ MOU is that the little sheikdom of Oman played a central role in the “negotiations,” which was, from the beginning, a farce.

This matters because today Trump threatened to bomb Oman. For reasons.

The IRGC knew, of course, that the MOU was a sham, even if our orange clusterbomb of diseased flesh did not. (He probably did not.)

So, the IRGC scrambled to consolidate power, since Khameini 2.0 was still in multiple pieces in a hospital. This is what you call a power gap, and the IRGC seized the opportunity to snatch power away from the clerics so they could simultaneously crank out a crash drone buildout and keep chasing women back into their homes.

One might think that this should turn Khameini 2.0 westward ho. But no. That will not happen, because the Trump bombs killed the following members of his family:

• Zahra Haddad-Adel: (wife of Khamenei 2.0).

• Mohammad Bagher: Khamenei 1.0’s teenage grandson (son of Khameini 2.0).

• Khamenei 1.0’s Daughter: Khameini 2.0’s sister.

• Khamenei 1.0’s Son-in-law: The husband of 2.0’s deceased sister.

• Khamenei 1.0’s Grandchild / Granddaughter: The young child of his deceased daughter and 2.0’s sister.

Let’s pause and summarize the results of the Hormuz Insider Trading War so far:

• Trump/Hegseth Crazytown has turned a thorn in its side into a mortal enemy.

• Trump/Hegseth Crazytown has closed the Strait of Hormuz, which only a few months ago saw hundreds of ships passing through per day on open sea lanes and now is lucky if three slip through.

• A strengthened Iranian government, which had been badly weakened by protests and the general unhappy mood of its people, who are now mostly rallying around the flag thanks to the blathering antics of the American president.

• More than 100 children killed when an American missile was erroneously programmed by a hallucinating AI system to strike a girl’s school.

• Lots of newly rich folks, many of whom, according to evidence that I’m not going to back up with sources here because I believe you’re fully capable of researching it on your own, are getting insider tips about the various pronouncements that issue every few days from the Oval Office (“we’re bombing someone,” “No, we’re not!”).

• Significantly higher oil prices and gas prices. The mainstream media, of course, is flooding the zone with headlines like, “Why gas prices aren’t worse,” because half the corporate media is owned by Trumpanzees, and the other half is too afraid to challenge the hegemony. Most economists seem to agree the sleight of hand that has kept oil prices under $100 per barrel are about to run their course.1

• Trump/Hegseth Crazytown’s primary accomplishment has been turning the Strait of Hormuz into a gauntlet, a sort of shooting gallery for armed mariners. Every few days, we read about how Iran has smoked another tanker or barge at sea. It’s a narrow shipping lane. Just imagine how much insurance rates on oil tankers have skyrocketed.

• If the Strait of Hormuz ever does open for business again, Iran will pretty much be in charge of it, and might even collect tolls. This is completely different than it was before the Trump/Hegseth attacks against Iran.

The Wall Street Journal, where a few intrepid journalists still manage to occasionally sneak out a good story, reports on what the IRGC has done with its MOU window:2

After President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran in mid-June, administration officials fanned out to build support for an agreement they hoped would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and start winding down the war.

Iran’s hard-line leaders huddled in Tehran and came up with a different plan, according to Iranian and Arab officials. In their view the pact was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight.

Their efforts include giving the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more control of the country’s regular army, appointing hardened veterans of the war with Iraq and past internal crackdowns to key posts, expanding domestic counterintelligence operations and ramping up production of missiles and drones. The leadership quickly seized the initiative, attacking ships to tighten Iran’s grip on Hormuz and expanding the battlefield to the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia has used to get around Iran’s chokehold on the Persian Gulf.

The Iranian government is preparing to raise havoc to levels Americans might become so uncomfortable with they won’t wait for the midterms to demand a change in government.

I don’t expect you to believe my hyperbole. But the messaging is coming directly out of Iran:3

“There is also a widespread view in Iran that the main war has not yet begun.”

That’s Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash, an Iranian defense analyst, who goes on to say, “What we have seen so far is increasingly interpreted through the lens of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics—limited, incremental escalation designed to weaken capabilities before a larger confrontation.”

In war, we can never know if such bellicosity is posturing or what they really have in mind. But one thing we do know is that the IRGC spent these two months not only rebuilding their forces, but making important improvements to their missile systems’ targeting capabilities.

Their missiles can now change course in mid-flight, making it easier to find their targets. This comes at a bad time, because American air defenses in the region have been depleted.4 American military bases are vulnerable, while Navy personnel are jumping off ships because they’re malnourished, unwashed, and miserable.

And it’s not like the IRGC has been quiet during the MOU. The little red dots are Iranian strikes against American bases and the oil infrastructure of U.S. allies.

That’s one hell of a misunderstanding, isn’t it? What, exactly, is a Memorandum of Understanding good for? It’s simple: It was always intended as a device for manipulating the stock market. This is what you get when you have a crooked president who appoints billionaire real estate tycoons to “negotiate” peace treaties.

Meanwhile, Khameini 2.0 has recovered enough to announce that the armed forces have been restocked and stacked. Within the scope of that announcement, Khameini added that the repression of women will enjoy a fresh round.

To accomplish this, he named Hossein Taeb, who made a name for himself by leading a punishing assault against protesters in 2009, to head the Basij, that volunteer force I told you about.

The Iranian people, therefore, are now getting assaulted by both sides in this war. Their future is as bleak as it’s been in a century.

The American people don’t much care, because the mainstream media has flooded the U.S. with “Death to America” imagery for the last forty years. This, even though most young Iranians would kill to live in America.

Notes

Speaking of shelf lives we’d like to see shortened, I wrote this last August. Not much has changed:

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Footnotes

1

For some wonky reasons why oil prices are likely to explode, check out Krugman:

Paul Krugman

Why Isn’t the Price of Oil Even Higher?

Donald Trump is not a well man. He is, unfortunately, also President, which means that we all pay a price for his inability to accept reality. Notably, while he insists that he has “total control over the Strait of Hormuz,” shipments of oil through the Strait will remain minimal unless Trump can find a way to smuggle oil out in catering carts — or until…

Read more

9 days ago · 2509 likes · 428 comments · Paul Krugman

He’s won a Nobel Prize in economics, and I haven’t, so I would rather just let him explain it all.

I say, let’s let him run (assuming the walking corpse will still be alive).

Since we are playing the three-term president game, his opponent is obvious. Feel free to share the graphic (No AI, except the idiot’s) on your favorite social media. Just right-click to save, or do whatever you do on your smartphone.

Happy Sunday, and thanks for reading!

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1. Climate change, which is about to ravage the world in catastrophic ways we are still mostly blind to.

2. China’s takeover of the world economy.

The first item demands its own post(s). I recommend you read ’s Substack on climate change. All you need to know, if you have the courage to read it, is there.

This post concerns the other thing. Given the continued bellicosity over a potential war with China from both U.S. political parties, I’m here to say that the war has already begun, and that the United States lost without China firing a single round.

The result, barring a miraculous change of American policy, will be an impoverished nation dependent on a one-way supply chain of Chinese goods pouring into the country dictated to Americans by the whims of the victor.

Arguments over vaccines and data centers will become moot because the U.S. will transform into a purely consumer nation full of illiterates in which only a few will be lucky enough to brag about the prestigious job of dodging Amazon warehouse robots (made in China) for a living.

Since consumption requires money, the economy will transform into one that, aside from a wealthy few who find a way to thrive while having one foot out the door (Peter Thiel in Argentina), will be weighed down by a huge dependent American peasant class relying on government handouts.

This ironic result of Republican late-stage capitalism is unavoidable. An exciting, charismatic leader, maybe AOC, will dominate the next presidential campaign as the economy collapses, or the one after that, and all the Republican fears about socialism will come to pass with wild abandon.

But socialism won’t save us, because it will be too late. A bankrupt nation will not be able to compete with China, which will, based on current trends, control every aspect of the world economy through vast investments and an absurdly dominant position in technology.

As it stands now, while the U.S. dithers, a fraction of its aware population barely stands on the back of its heels in protest as a rancid, foul-mouthed regime of hate spends its limited resources on tracking down ways to line the pockets of its primary donors and send important segments of its population into concentration camps or other countries.

Meanwhile, China is discovering glueballs and other edgy teasers of quantum computing while its auto industry, with more than 100 car manufacturers, laughs at the dying embers of what used to be the pride of American manufacturing.

There are 743 auto-related manufacturers in China. Some of them, of course, are joint ventures with European and U.S. firms, but U.S. firms are finding their participation in China’s vast market increasingly tenuous.1

China produces three times as many cars as the United States.2

Chinese auto manufacturers are currently marketing a ridiculous 7,142 models of cars.3 U.S. car aficionados work themselves into a lather when Tesla announces one new model, which then takes six years to get to market, partly because Musk is too busy pumping right-wing noise into the echosphere with his Apartheid Twitter machine.

China built its auto industry almost instantaneously while the U.S. spent its time figuring out how much it should feed its growing monolith of hate and misogyny.

China didn’t build its massive auto industry with cheap labor. It built it with robots.

It’s not just cars

China has 1,527 companies or entities (some are government-run) building smartphones or their constituent parts.4 Americans haven’t heard of many of them because both Republicans and Democrats are afraid of what will happen if they allow them into the country. I suspect the fears run from the possibility of all of the Chinese-made devices blowing up simultaneously to simply knocking the U.S. cellular manufacturing industry to the ground.

This short bullet list of Chinese brands won’t mean much to most of you, because the United States either outright bans them or makes it difficult for them to establish U.S. market share:

• Huawei

• Xiaomi

• Oppo

• Vivo

• Honor

• Transsion (Tecno, Infinix, and Itel)

• ZTE

But most Chinese are well aware of all of them.

While large portions of the U.S. population sit numbed by its addiction to drugs, booze, celebrity entertainment, and short, cheesy videos, China is building things at such prodigious rates that there is a cottage tourist industry devoted to exploring Chinese industrial and technical development. Hyped up trend names like “infrastructure porn” and “Chinamaxxing” lure tourists into China as they gawk at spectacular bridges, trains that run at 300 mph, and clean, glittering airports.

Meet the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge. At 102.4 miles, it’s the longest bridge in the world. It connects Shanghai and Nanjing (among other cities) in Jiangsu province, mostly following the route of the Yangtze River.

The bridge also spans a 5.6-mile section of Yangcheng Lake in Suzhou.

It cost $8.5 billion (U.S.) to build in four years, then opened in 2010.

China is also home to the longest span across the sea, a 34-mile beast that connects Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao.

The American fascination with Trump, which extends even to his haters through non-stop posts about him, has led Chinese citizens to consider the decade-long obsession enough of a blessing that there is a Chinese term for it: Chuan Jiangao, or “Make China Great.”

Wang Wen, writing for Renmin University’s Institute for Financial Studies, tells readers:5

Trump’s first term made at least three notable contributions to China’s rise.

First his presidency shattered the image of the US as a paragon of democracy for many Chinese…

…Second, Trump helped accelerate China’s push toward technological independence... By 2024, China had achieved significant strides in tech independence, including breakthroughs in semiconductor manufacturing. This shift was underscored by record-high chip exports in 2024, which surpassed $159 billion, doubling 2018 figures.

Third, Trump’s tariffs and trade restrictions pushed China to strengthen its ties with the non-Western world… China’s reliance on the US for trade fell from 17 to 11 percent.

Trump’s trade war with China has driven a rapid restructuring of global trade, leading more Chinese to recognise that the world is far larger than the United States.

Wen goes on to point out that Chinese industry leaders are reacting to tariffs not with fear and anger, but happiness at the opportunity to use this window of U.S. fecklessness to their advantage.

Worse, the notion of mutually assured destruction from a real war, which was long a centerpiece of the relationship between the U.S. and Chinese economies, has evaporated into the storm clouds of Chinese dominance. U.S. trade now accounts for only 11 percent of Chinese trade overall. Its economy would survive a war much more easily than the American economy would, assuming no nukes are involved.

And China’s military is nearing parity with the U.S., at least as measured by weapons system technology:6

Right-wingers are quick to point out that China has achieved its technical apex by copying U.S. technology.

Welcome to the real world, numbskulls.

China has eagerly exploited Trump’s laser focus on ruining the U.S.’s relationship with the rest of the world, particularly its allies. Trump’s rejection of science in favor of the black magic of grift is triggering an exodus of researchers to other countries, and an exodus of allies into the arms of each other.

I’ve written about this exodus before, and it’s only accelerated since then:

It’s a march of progress versus a retreat into the marshes

In 2023, China built more solar power capacity than the U.S. has in its history, according to a recent article in New Yorker magazine.7

China’s trade surplus is at $1.2 trillion, even though it is moving its exports away from U.S. ports and into other world ports. The U.S. trade deficit was $73.3 billion in June 2026. Trump’s trade war has barely knicked it. It was $77.6 billion in May.8 The difference between when he snatched the Oval Office and now is not much more than a rounding error.

The result of this small change isn’t more U.S. manufacturing. It’s simply less commerce. The other Atlas in the world capitalist fever dream, China, has simply shrugged and moved on to other countries.

There is strong evidence that at this point in the trade war, China considers the U.S. nothing more than a dangerous pest. Some of this has crept in through bipartisan efforts, but the real catalyst for the worst of it is the American obsession with all things Trump.

While we raise our fists in rage at the lunatic-in-chief, China builds.

It’s building the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, with its 1548 horsepower engine and acceleration from 0 to 62 mph in less than two seconds.9

That’s like being fired out of a cannon.

Here’s Motor Trend, in a headline starting with “Just Wow,” describing the vehicle:10

In the short time it’s been on the market, the SU7 Ultra has already become one of the world’s most talked-about performance cars. It holds the Nürburgring lap record for the quickest production four-door vehicle, and with 1,526 horsepower and 1,305 lb-ft of torque, it ranks among the most powerful production cars ever built.

China is doing things like building seven-hundred-ton die-casting machines to make cars like this. On the regular. Every day. Churning them out like American ag companies splattering American consumers with corn syrup and fat and forever chemicals.

It’s building pharmaceutical companies like Akeso, which recently rolled out an experimental cancer drug that studies show blows a similar drug made by American mega-pharm company Merck out of the water.11

While Trump is denigrating scientists and researchers, China is investing in hunting for them wherever it can.

Chinese government programs extricate people from the hinterlands — people like AInnovation chief technology officer Fan Li, who was a hidden prodigy lodging quietly in a Chinese coal mining town before government recruits found him. Fan Li now presides over a company that has helped transform Chinese industry from a maker of schlockware into one that makes precision instruments.

His company makes, among others, a machine with an AI-driven high-resolution camera that inspects screws that roll out of high-capacity production lines in numbers unheard of on American production lines.

A few weeks ago I purchased a small desk. I knew before it arrived that its country of origin would be China. What I didn’t expect was the precision by which the thing was made. No more of those misaligned screw/screw holes that used to plague Chinese products we had to fight with when putting them together.

The directions still barely make sense. But it no longer matters. This thing was so simple that a five-year-old could have put it together, and everything fit like it had been handmade.

And it was idiot proof. Not even I could attach a piece to the wrong part of the desk. The design, probably driven by AI, simply wouldn’t let me.

I thought of Han Li, and then realized there are millions of people like him in China doing the same kind of thing he’s doing while we’re sitting at our laptops and tablets yelling about Trump.

Even Chinese beer promises to someday be better than what we find in America. Han Li’s company offers its AI services to dozens of Chinese firms, including Tsingtao Brewery:12

On a screen, Li pulled up an intricate diagram of a factory for the Tsingtao Brewery, one of his customers. He typed in a prompt: “Have they achieved their energy-saving goal in the past year? If not, why?”

Moments later, Li’s AI machine reports on anomalies it has detected in four devices in the Tsingtao plant, along with suggested solutions:

“Look for wet malt or jams at the mill; investigate steam and pump behavior in the pasteurizer.”

China cranks out nine industrial robots for every one in the United States. You might cheer this, happy that another American worker is saved from the unemployment line, but that worker is probably going to be removed by bankruptcy when the American firm he works for is hammered by Chinese automation.

Whether we like it or not, robotic automation is coming, even if it means that they’ll all be Chinese:13

There was another sprawling display of robotics expertise at the Spring Festival Gala, the most watched television event of the year. Humanoids marched, backflipped, and twirled nunchucks; robotic pandas gambolled.

This freaks out people in China, too, not just us. After all, they aren’t much different than us when it comes to AI fears. Viewer complaints about the television show displaying robotic athletic prowess were rampant.

But while people in China are expressing some alarm online over their robotic future, China continues to develop and build. And they’re doing it like they’re in the race of the century, because, guess what? They are.

In this race, China is doing things like developing the Galbot G1, which looks like a friendly Terminator.

The Galbot, and its surprising dexterity, is used for everything from household chores to offering service options at convenience stores.

The company that makes it is led by robotics experts like He Wang, a Stanford PhD graduate who, like many Chinese Stanford grads, now lives in China. He is typical of the kind of immigrant the Trump regime has been chasing out of the U.S. since 2016.

That work, led by Stephen Miller, is now so thoroughly complete that many Chinese researchers are happily self-deporting because Trump has helped power the transformation of China into the world’s leading nation of science.

Elections have consequences.

Smart, educated immigrants from many nations are leaving the hostile environment of the United States, but none more eagerly and in numbers like those from the Chinese mainland.

This former Chinese diaspora, returning to a hero’s welcome in China, is helping to build next-generation solar equipment, batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots, cars, and dozens of other vital pieces of a modern economy.

Before 2016, in the days when they weren’t overtly hassled for being Asian, many Chinese Americans were happily ensconced within the American industrial machine. Since 2016, they’ve reverted to being Chinese Americans. The hostile environment in the U.S. became overt and, sometimes, dangerous. “Stop Asian hate” became a rallying cry against this development, but it never changed the facts on the ground very much.

This isn’t to suggest that American research is helpless without Chinese-born researchers. That would be dumb to say. American research prowess is, however, heavily influenced by immigration from all over the world, and many of them are leaving, too.14

I don’t think you’ll find many people who work at universities who don’t offer positive reports on the influence of foreign students and teachers, all of whom now face a hostile federal government.

But a few immigrants traveling back to their home country do not account for the growth of the Chinese juggernaut. It helps a bit, to be sure, but it isn’t what drives it. What drives the new Chinese economy is an industrial policy that directs resources into industries the government wants to succeed in, and possibly dominate.

The current U.S. government has an industrial policy, too. I call it the Trump Enrichment program. This is good for Trump and his cronies, but not so good for the rest of us.

Americans will have no say in their future

We can argue amongst ourselves all we want about whether robotics, AI, and CRISPR should be part of our future, but the argument is on the verge of being rendered moot by the long march of China.

Soon, Americans will have no say in the matter.

Notes

Correction: The image showing the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge must be wrong, because the bridge is a viaduct for a high-speed train railway, and the picture clearly depicts car lanes. I noticed this when porting this story over to Medium.

Per Wikipedia, this is the bridge:

Jaded opinion warriors will note that the same fears were made about Japan several decades ago, and look what happened! A nothing burger!

If you think the situation is the same, I have a bridge in Nanjing to sell you.

Biden hinted at introducing industrial policy, and his vice president was routed from office by troglodytes.

But that’s what it will take to turn things around. I see little talk of it from either Republicans or Democrats.

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Footnotes

When I saw that ICE was going to use some of its $39 billion in funding for the 2026 fiscal year to purchase gloves that electrocute people, I finally said, “Damn, give me some of that action.”1

Their endless recruiting drive has finally reached this old white dude through a pair of gloves. God, how I love America.

Also? This is NOT Satire. These are real things that ICE is loading up on.

Here’s how the gloves work

ICE stormtroopers do their usual thing where they sling their darkened SUV in front of an unsuspecting motorist at an intersection. They jump out of the SUV and approach the vehicle, body cams off, of course, if they have them, face coverings on.

They open the door, turn on an easily accessible switch on their glove, and boom! The glove turns into an electrocution device.

They then pull the driver out of their vehicle and electrocute them while doing so. And Ukrainian President Zelenskyy thinks he’s hot shit with his drones. He’s got nothing on ICE, let me tell ya.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E by their clever manufacturer, Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky, which advertises itself as a manufacturer of “non-lethal” (unless you use them wrong) compliance tools.2

I am old, hear me roar

G.L.O.V.E. stands for “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter.” How low is that output? According to the company, per AP:3

The gloves must be applied directly to someone’s skin to deliver a pain stimulus that typically helps an officer gain compliance within seconds, according to the company.

Did you say, “within seconds?” And “pain stimulus????!” Sign me up! I might even start drinking again so I can hang out in bars wearing the gloves and an old man’s “get off my lawn” attitude. Who says you can’t have fun during your twilight years?

Or maybe I can add a distinctive touch to the role of Walmart greeter. The possibilities are endless.

ICE even gives the gloves a funny, Orwellian name: “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

I personally prefer “Buzz Gloves,” ICE, but you do you.

The Buzz Gloves are just a tiny part of the ICE budget: $20 million, which tells me ICE has got all sorts of other fun stuff planned for the inner sadist in me.

I decided to check out the handy user manual for the gloves, and wow, was I pleased. Just the first page was a delight:4

I can imagine the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) spokesperson after the first fatality: “The illegal and criminal immigrant was resisting arrest and threatening our patriotic officers. Reports of the officer choking the criminal while attempting to restrain her are inaccurate. We regret that her nine-year-old child also expired when she tried to intervene, but this is a reminder that if you are an illegal alien, we will find you, and we will arrest you.”

What other goodies await me in the user manual? Well, after that promising start, I decided to dig in.

I skipped all the way to section 6.3 of the manual because it looked like the most fun:

Agitated Chaotic Event (ACE) previously known as Excited Delirium Syndrome (ExDS) and Suicidal Considerations

Agitated chaotic event is basically my middle name, so I rushed to that section like a MAGAt sniffing out bad crypto. That part was slightly disappointing, but as I scrolled down, I noticed this section just before it:

6.2 PHYSIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

CD3s may increase the affects that can cause sudden death including physiological changes with:

• Increase in blood pressure

• Changes in blood chemistry

• Increase in respiration and heart rates

• Changes in heart rhythm

• Increase in Adrenaline

• The longer the CD3 exposure, the greater the potential risk

Can I just say here that a manual stating, “The longer the CD3 exposure, the greater the potential risk,” will be like catnip to my fellow sadists in my new job?

If this product doesn’t help recruitment among my fellow white male brethren living in fear of the extinction of the mighty white race, as well as all men, I don’t know what will.

Oh! Maybe this:

Buzz Vests!

The company that makes G.L.O.V.E. also makes a nice little vest to help transport those nasty, squirmy illegal aliens to far-off places they’ve never heard of.

Or maybe just by transport van to a domestic concentration camp. Either way, with that budget, we can be pretty sure they’ll all be wearing Buzz Vests.

Time for a test

I hope you’ve had your morning coffee or are otherwise alert, because I’m going to give you a little test.

It’s not as difficult as those crazy hard cognitive tests they give the caterer-in-chief every few days, but it’s pretty damn difficult.

The instructions: examine this E-vest marketing GIF below and let us know in the comments what you think the vest does.

Leave a comment

With ICE’s new, unlimited budget, they’ll be able to stockpile these things like the human gas giant in the Oval Office has stocked up on Epstein file references over the years.

The thing is, these new toys will barely put a dent in ICE’s new budget.

I did the maths, and the cost of the gloves to ICE is only .0005% of the budget.

Oh, my friends, there is so much more to come.

Aren’t those of you who didn’t vote for Kamala because you had yourself a litmus test she failed happy with yourselves now?

I have a great idea for those of you who didn’t vote for her. Offer your services to Compliant Technologies to be a test subject for all their new products.

Notes

The manual also includes this bit of info, which I’ll include verbatim to stimulate the comment section:

The G.L.O.V.E. SHALL NOT be deployed for any of the following:

• Verbal defiance or belligerence

• Punishment

• Torture

• Horse play

Avoid using the G.L.O.V.E. against certain portions of the population to include:

• The elderly

• Small children

• Pregnant women

• The severely handicapped

If they think I’m buying these things and not using them for horseplay, they’re crazy.

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Footnotes

In case you missed this latest news from the Hormuz Insider Trading War, we learned yesterday that the U.S. Secret Service, acting on credible reports that Iran might try to shoot down Air Force One as it left the NATO summit in Turkiye a month ago, stuffed Trump and his entourage into a catering container and onto a C-32A, which is a military transport plane based on the Boeing 757 that is sometimes used to disappear U.S. immigrants to concentration camps outside the country.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s the sickly macabre part of this story: Air Force One took off from Turkiye as if the bloated one was still on it, thus serving as a decoy for the Iranians to shoot down.

This means that the Secret Service is now in full deviance mode, thus becoming yet another U.S. security agency that will need to be cleansed once this nightmare is over.

As usual, I have my ideas on what should have transpired, and am sad that it did not. My fantasy news report, as written by a New York Times reporter, on how the catering trip ends:

What I envision, and this might be one reason I would never be considered for a Secret Service job, is His Oafishness trussed like a turkey, an apple stuffed into his mouth, then dropped by a parachute into one of those hedonistic Monaco parties where petrostate sheiks get so obliterated on Monaco booze they won’t know they’re eating the president instead of fine, imported meats.

“Tastes like chicken,” one of the more alert members of the tribe exclaims in between pinching the butts of passing waitresses dressed in tiny skirts.

Sigh. As I said, there are reasons I’m not given important jobs.

Did I ever tell you the story about the time I drank so many vodka martinis at a Christmas party whilst chatting with the CTO of the big tech company I worked for that I was called into his office the following week? The key bit of information you need here is that I had never spoken to him before that party.

Yeah, well, so I arrive at work and see in my inbox that a meeting has been scheduled with him by one of his underlings. I arrive for the meeting; he invites me to have a seat, and he rubs his head, which was probably still smarting after the party, and asks, “Do you have any idea what this meeting is about?”

I told him I did not. We spent the next hour chit-chatting about whatever came to mind, occasionally trying to guess what one of us might have thought during our conversation was important enough for a meeting.

It was a beautiful moment between two lost souls, and a reminder that alcohol can be powerful stuff that should be treated maybe with a bit more respect than people tend to give it.

I don’t know why dropping Trump into a party full of Monaco sheikhs reminded me of one of my finer tech career highlights, but it did, and now you had to suffer with me for a few moments, and for this, I apologize.

Moving on.

It’s pretty craven to let Air Force One take off, full of, you know, actual humans, knowing that it might be smoked by an Iranian missile or three.

Squirrelling away a president to prevent him being shot out of the sky? Yeah, sure, that makes sense. But then keeping the Air Force One entourage in the dark about it, where the only warning is, during the flight, some Secret Service goon telling everyone to shut their airplane window shades, is pretty much Hannibal Lecter-level darkness.

The orange puffaroon reconnected with his brand new Qatari version of Air Force One shortly afterward, telling the reporters he had used as decoys:1

“I’m number one on their list, before you. But if I go, you go. Right? Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”

Remember now that most of his press entourage consists of allies from the right-wing media, because he kicked out a large number of mainstream media reporters from the White House press pool early in the regime. So these are mostly his people he’s exposing to the wonders of Iran’s latest missile technology improvements.

I’m beginning to think that one explanation for the regime’s behavior is that there is one hellacious amount of drinking going on at all hours of the day, and not just by Kegsbreath and Patel. I sense, perhaps, too, more than a wee bit of other drug substances are flying around the West Wing.

The claim is that Trump himself is a teetotaler, and I suppose that must be true since there are no reports otherwise, but you can’t tell me he’s not on something.

One look at his Truth Social posts will provide enough evidence of that.

Much of the stuff he writes is undecipherable. It’s like a toddler’s nine-year-old brother hits the keypad to relay the toddler’s latest pontifications on things like the National Guard:2

Chandler Hall, representing, on Television, the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress, stated that adding the National Guard to Cities, including our now Great Again, Washington, D.C., had “NO impact on Crime.” How crazy is that. Hall was met with furious dissent. The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything “TRUMP.” These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean “TRUMP.” This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now. I am also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization. Crime is way down since I took Office, and they know it. Liars, at this level, must be held accountable! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I have no idea what’s going on there.

Yesterday, when he somehow learned that Iran is asking for war reparations, he demanded the same from Iran, acting as though he was blindsided by their demand.

This is odd, because it’s right there in the so-called Memorandum of Understanding, which he signed on June 17. The memorandum proclaimed a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction. The memorandum was developed by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two real estate developers hoping to cash in on war and death.

For some reason, these two clowns are hopping around the Middle East acting as U.S. envoys that the rest of the world is forced to politely react to, even though everyone would be happier seeing both of them floating face down in the heavily mined Strait of Hormuz.

Kushner, especially, has his fantasies about Gaza, another place he and Witkoff have stuck their noses into.

Trump’s reparation demands were spelled out on his Truth Social app, presumably with an assist from Natalie (for the history-related stuff):3

I see that Representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran are asking for compensation for the damage done to them during the last five month Military Conflict (started because, THEY WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON), even though it was never mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings! But it is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole, and thousands of others killed in combat. Additionally, compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months. I have instructed my representatives to put this firmly into any, and all, future negotiations. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I have a mental picture of First Clown Natalie and Trump sitting together collaborating on that post, but since this is a family-oriented Substack that never goes deeply into R-rated material, much less X, I will not divulge what my imagination has conjured.

As funny as all this would be if it were part of a slapstick comedy, the seriousness of it all couldn’t be more real.

Trump’s idiotic war has depleted American missile reserves down to almost nothing. He has essentially handed the Strait of Hormuz to Iran. There is no way to get it back.

Technically, the strait is now being co-managed by Iran and Oman. Before the Hormuz Insider Trading War, the strait was an open sea lane.

I call it the Hormuz Insider Trading War because every few days, there’s a new agreement, the markets react, then there isn’t, and the market reacts again. Somebody is getting really rich.

All I know is that it isn’t me.

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Footnotes

You may have heard that Cassidy is the Louisiana Republican Senator who cast the deciding vote to formally turn what was once known as the Department of Justice (DOJ) into part of a criminal mob operation by voting to confirm Todd Blanche, the Grifter-in-Chief’s personal attorney, as U.S. Attorney General.

This officially makes the DOJ a state-run law firm in service to the most corrupt criminal presidential regime in American history. That the regime happens to be a racist cesspool doesn’t help matters.

And you thought Pam Bondi was atrocious?

Buckle up, my friends.

Cassidy is the same guy who once claimed he was against RFK Jr. as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) until he wasn’t. He issued a few performative objections during Brainworm’s confirmation hearings, then dutifully voted for his confirmation anyway. Just like he and every other Republican Senator does all of Trump’s nominees.

Occasionally, one or two of them will pretend to get the willies over one of the Cabinet choices, but only if they know the nomination isn’t in danger. It is an insulting game they play, but the mainstream media falls for it every time, so many voters do, too.

Here’s Cassidy trying to justify his latest kneepad purchase:

“The choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche.”

I have no idea what that means.

Now that the deed is done, let’s take a brief tour of the personal history of Todd Blanche, the crime family’s personal attorney, and now the head of whatever we call the DOJ these days. I call it a state-run law firm, and I’ll die on that hill until the orange puffaroon melts into the mantle of the Earth and his toxic sludge burns its way into hell where it belongs.

Let’s do history differently this time, and begin with the most recent awfulness, since we live in a “what have you done for me lately” kind of world.

Todd Blanche: Interim Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General

Blanche’s most recent history is his most important, even more so than all the times he represented Trump in court and managed to slip the snake through various legal holes.

The disintegration of lawfare

Let’s begin our tour with this simple January directive issued through Blanche’s office to 93 US attorneys during a weekly video conference. The meeting was chaired by a young 33-year-old MAGA maniac named Aakash Singh, who, while frothing like a rabies-infected jackal, told them that Trump is their chief client and anyone who didn’t want to click their heels and raise their hands forward should leave the DOJ.2

This may or may not have something to do with a rather incredible number. Before I reveal the number, let’s be clear that it took barely one year to achieve: Since Blanche became Deputy Attorney General in March 2025, 16,000 DOJ employees have left the department.3

The DOJ has lost one quarter of its attorneys during this exodus. The good news? Many of them are now on our side, fighting the hooligans who remain.

200 of them were fired by Blanche because they previously had worked on efforts to prosecute Trump.4 Blanche reportedly bragged about the firings to various cultists and insurrectionists in the regime.

In fairness, some who have remained are not hooligans, but dedicated public servants hoping against hope they can continue to fight non-Trump crime under the radar.

Some have remained simply because they have work they feel must be completed before they leave, such as a recent case in L.A. where a whole lot of people were busted for child sex trafficking in the Figueroa neighborhood, which had become almost as notorious for child trafficking as the Epstein-Mar-a-Lago crime ring of Palm Beach.5

But you can be sure many more will leave now that Blanche has been confirmed as Trump’s official federal attorney-at-large. Fights against the kind of crime Figueroa (not to mention Palm Beach) experienced will become increasingly rare as the DOJ is converted more fully into Trump’s personal, state-run law firm.

The good news, again, is that many exiting attorneys will join the ranks of the resistance and clobber the people who’ve remained when they meet in court.

I’d like you to ponder, for a moment, the type of person who might remain in the wake of this farce. They’ll either be desperately idealistic career prosecutors hoping they can quietly continue doing their jobs as Blanche continues to transform the DOJ, or they’re insurrectionists unaware of the damage they’re doing to their resumes, which makes them not too smart and thus easy targets for smart lawyers in cases the newly formed personal law firm brings forward.

We’ve already seen this in action. Trump’s state-run law firm is losing case after case in court. The only wins he’s been getting have been through the Supreme Court, which has become as corrupt as he is, but even the corrupt justices seem to have a few limits.

Time after time, the state-run law firm presents a case to a grand jury, and either gets laughed out of court or withdraws its case before the hysterics have a chance to begin.

A classic example of this is the current attempt to prosecute former FBI director James Comey over a seashell display on a beach. That case is about to end in the same result as the recent attempted prosecution of an Olympian, who they tried to charge with ruining the reflection pool, which Trump ruined.

Substack is replete with more examples (Fox News, not so much).

The reason for the consistent failures is that good prosecuting attorneys realize that cases are built on facts, not made-up stories and grim fairy tales. They’d rather leave the DOJ than try to tell tall stories invented by Blanche’s AI machines. Meanwhile, those who remain in the state-run law firm are discovering that American jurisprudence has a long history of legal discovery and application. The regime’s desire to wipe it all out is proving more difficult than they thought.

A Listicle of 20 terrible things Blanche has done as Deputy or Acting AG

Next, let’s do some random bullet points highlighting examples of Blanche’s work on behalf of the insurrectionists occupying the White House and the Republican side of the U.S. Senate. Much of this info comes by way of the very helpful folks at the Justice Connection, a group of disaffected DOJ attorneys with their knives out, chomping at the bit to meet the disintegrated DOJ in court for some retribution.6

I am not a fan of listicles, but I thought the format worked for this, so I made a top 20 list. There’s a lot more for intrepid readers to dig into if they want to.

• In May 2026, Blanche tried to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay insurrectionists, whom he called victims of “lawfare.” The slush fund would have (and still might) even paid those who assaulted police officers during the January 6 insurrection. He did this through a bizarre agreement with the IRS to end the tax agency’s investigation into the Trump crime family’s tax dodges.7

• He ordered the deletion of DOJ press releases regarding the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021.8

• In August 2025, video footage revealed a senior advisor to then Deputy Attorney General Blanche, Jared Wise, urging rioters to “kill” officers during the insurrection.9

• Under Blanche, the DOJ ended its prosecution of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders who were involved in the January 6 insurrection by moving to vacate existing seditious conspiracy convictions.

• Blanche forced the resignation of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, Todd Gilbert, for refusing to fire prosecutors in the Western District who said that a Trump obsession over classified Biden documents was a nothing burger.

• Like every other MAGAt on Planet Earth, Blanche has called for the investigation of George Soros, a money bag guy who favors the left. Specifically, Blanche called for the investigation of Soros’ Open Society Foundation. It’s probably only a matter of time now before a headline creeps out of the DOJ, but Soros is older than Trump, and probably could care less what Blanche tries to do.

• Blanche has repeatedly tried to make an example of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a newsy legal U.S. immigrant, but has been roundly defeated in the courts for his attempts to do so. Garcia was once sent to an El Salvador prison camp, but was freed after normal people blasted the publicity whistle loud enough for courts to hear public outrage. His case is still pending, though, and you can be sure that Blanche will remain transfixed. In April 2025, he put U.S. attorney Erez Reuveni on leave for conceding in court that Garcia should never have been prosecuted.10

• In June 2026, Blanche hired insurrectionist attorney Kurt Olsen as a senior US Attorney. In his new role with the state-run law firm, Olsen helped seize voting machines and related documents in places like Georgia and Arizona and promoted a theory, disproven in courts, that former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro hacked Dominion voting machines to favor Biden in the 2024 election.

• Blanche led the effort to use the DOJ to attack the beloved Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by suing them for allegedly defrauding donors through a paid informant program. In Blanche’s words, the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” It’s another AI-generated lawsuit by the state-run law firm that has no legs and is likely to disappear soon. Still, it’s a window into Blanche’s thinking, which is that all opposition can and should be targeted by the DOJ, especially given the fact that the state-run law firm has unlimited AI tokens.11

• As mentioned, he led the effort to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey over a seashell display, saying with a straight face, “While this case is unique, and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate.”12

• His misdirection, suffocation of evidence, and terrible treatment of Epstein survivors is legendary. Follow American hero Katie Phang for more on this. If Blanche comes to an ignominious end soon, we’ll have her to thank. Seriously. One person. Her.

  Katie Phang

  Law and Disorder

• In July 2025, Blanche interviewed the horror show known as Ghislaine Maxwell, who was moved to a minimum security prison shortly after. Blanche has repeatedly said that Trump was not deeply involved with Epstein, even though he appears in the public-facing Epstein query machine housed on DOJ servers thousands of times, and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has said he appears more than a million times in unredacted files.13

  Christopher Armitage, one of our more reliable, “Can we do something about all this, please, besides just complain?” people, has some thoughts on Blanche’s Maxwell visit:

The Existentialist Republic

Bombshell Uncovered: Evidence Shows Blanche Likely Committed Witness Bribery, Evidence Tampering, and Conspiracy in New Mexico. Those Crimes Carry at Least Seven and a Half Years in State Prison.

The President’s personal attorney now serves as the 88th US Attorney General of the United States of America…

Read more

14 days ago · 353 likes · 29 comments · Christopher Armitage

• Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, stated in May 2026 that Blanche has had full responsibility over the Epstein Files “from the beginning.”14 A perusal of his record indicates that is not her throwing him under the bus. He’s really the gum in the works. If he doesn’t spend the rest of his life behind bars after all this is over, our next Attorney General will be as much of a failure as Merrick Garland was.

• In April 2025, Blanche disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit, mostly so he could grift in the balmy seas of cryptocurrency with $150,000 worth of crypto himself without snoopy federal attorneys poking around.15

• Accusing the American Bar Association (ABA) of being an activist organization, in April 2025, Blanche barred DOJ employees from participating in ABA events, just one day before the DOJ eliminated $3.2 million in federal grants to the ABA to help train lawyers fighting domestic and sexual abuse.16 The ABA said at the time the defunding was illegal and a result of the ABA’s criticism of the Trump regime.

• In January 2026, Blanche said that there was “no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis.17 He also tried to taint her reputation by pushing an assault investigation against her after her murder.18

• In January 2026, he threatened to prosecute Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over acts of terrorism, saying on Apartheid Twitter, “I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”19

• In November 2025, he urged Federalist Society lawyers to join a war against judges who block efforts to send immigrants to concentration camps.20

You remember who the Federalist Society is, right? Here’s a refresher:

• Strong evidence suggests that he lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings as Deputy Attorney General when he told Senators he had no direct knowledge of the Eric Adams (former New York City mayor) corruption case. However, memos revealed that he and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove were in communication over the case, which Bove recommended be dismissed, and that Blanche agreed with Bove’s assessment.21

Todd Blanche: The early years

One skill we must admit that Trump has managed to hold onto even as his mind continues to be hollowed out by madness, rage, and dementia is his unique ability to find the sleaziest lawyers on the planet.

Todd Blanche is such a slinky rat that he makes the grifter-in-chief’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, look like he spends all day soaping up at the Bar Association’s special bathhouse for reformed lawyers.

Back during the Trump 1.0 years, in a direct sign that there is a god or universe with a sense of dark humor, he represented a guy named Boris Epshteyn as part of his defense efforts for another Russian mole, Paul Manafort.

Manafort should be doing time right now, but he was pardoned by the crime family boss after his conviction for mortgage fraud. New York State tried to convict him again anyway, but the New York Supreme Court said, no, that’s double jeopardy, which, sadly in this case, is correct.

But the fact that he represented a dude named Epshteyn tracks with his life as a criminal attorney who aids criminals and who has spent much of his time lately trying to bury the Epstein files.

Manafort, Epstein, and Rudy Giuliani pal Igor Fruman were implicated in a Trump–Ukraine scandal that everyone has forgotten about. Blanche represented Manafort and Epshteyn while working for law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.22

Before tainting himself with Trump, he was considered an accomplished lawyer and prosecutor. His drift to the dark side appears to have begun when he took on the Manafort and Epshteyn case. He eventually succumbed completely when he bought a beach home in Palm Beach near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago massage palace in 2024.23

You might think, “Well, that’s a smoking gun. He was up to his ears in Epstein.” But that’s not really how crime family lawyers operate. They rarely get their own fingers dirty in the filthy laundry. But for some reason, they seem to get a charge out of protecting those who do.

So, like the good mob lawyer that he is, Blanche went to work and signed up to defend Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He lost that case, but still managed to keep his client out of prison in a series of dark legal maneuvers that we’re all still licking our wounds from.

Blanche went on to represent Trump in three out of Trump’s four criminal cases.

But first, he had to do something most of you will never consider: Fix the awkwardness of being a registered Democrat. So he switched parties.

You might think, oh, a turncoat in more than one way. But, nah, he was probably a registered Democrat because it’s just easier to move around in New York political circles that way. Nothing to see here, methinks.

He eagerly ran up to Trump, got on his knees, and the rest is history.

He was his personal lawyer on three criminal cases, any of which would have buried any other politician.

The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump

Trump was convicted on 34 counts related to the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme. As he often does, Blanche relied more on court maneuvers to delay the trial than he did on evidence to support his client’s innocence. The prosecution summoned 20 witnesses to plead its case. Blanche summoned two.

He repeatedly tried to delay or dismiss the case. He motioned for the judge to recuse himself. He even tried to get the trial moved from state jurisdiction into a federal courthouse because he knew Trump could just pardon himself if he won the presidency after losing the case.

This is how mob boss lawyers operate. They work their way around the darker tunnels of the law, looking for avenues of escape. Blanche has become a master of that dark art.

Even after Trump’s conviction, Blanche’s relentlessness and ability to pile up endless delays led to Trump being given an unconditional discharge after he was inaugurated instead of doing time in a New York state prison. When people said Trump was running for office again to avoid prison, they weren’t using hyperbole.

Trump being Trump, he has since gone on to use the office of the President to formally run his criminal operation from the Oval Office, and he now has his own personal state-run legal firm to accomplish his ends.

Not even Jack Smith could rescue us

Blanche also was Trump’s defense attorney in two cases brought by independent prosecutor Jack Smith on behalf of the Justice Department before it became Trump’s personal law firm.

In one of those cases, based in Florida, United States v. Donald J. Trump, Blanche stumbled into some luck when the random docket process gave him a Trump-friendly judge, Aileen Cannon, who basically killed the case. That case involved Trump’s alleged pilfering of classified documents. Our only bit of satisfaction out of that case was a few memes.

The other case, also called United States v. Donald J. Trump, was a voter suppression case. Smith indicted Trump on four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

Blanche managed to create one delay after another, to the point that by the time it came time to begin the trial, Trump was stumbling into the Oval Office with an awful grin, forcing Jack Smith to abandon the case thanks to the Supreme Court ruling on full presidential immunity.

Hoping for a new verdict

Why Blanche went from a lucrative career to gamble on a guy like Trump, whose reputation for not paying attorney fees was legion, is a mystery we won’t learn about until Attorney General Jack Smith prosecutes him in 2031, Supreme Court Chief Justice Barack Hussein Obama presiding, if there’s truly a god.

Notes

If a Republican argues that you wouldn’t be happy with any other choice for Attorney General that Trump might make instead of Blanche, it’s fair to concede the point and look for ice cream.

One thing you can tell Republicans is that having a state-run personal law firm is much closer to the kind of communism everyone is familiar with than anything Democratic Socialists, who are simply trying to claw back lost social welfare and civil rights, will ever dream up.

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Footnotes (I love footnotes, don’t you?)

The email was supposedly from the editor-in-chief at Kensington Publishing, a large independent that bills itself as the largest of the publishing houses that hasn’t been sucked into the Big 5 orbit through acquisition.

He was excited to have found me on the interwebs!

Let’s have a look at just how excited “he” was by reviewing “his” email. See how quickly you find the AI portion of it (hint: It’s easy):

Dear Mr. Bastille,

I hope this message finds you well.

My name is John Scognamiglio, and I am Editor-in-Chief at Kensington Publishing Corp.

(Yes, he’s the actual editor-in-chief)

I recently had the opportunity to review your work, particularly MagicLand, and was deeply impressed by its imaginative fusion of metaphysical fantasy, dystopian fiction, romance, and philosophical storytelling. The novel presents a richly conceived world where magic and technology have remained locked in conflict for millennia, resulting in a narrative that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally compelling.

What especially stood out to me was your portrayal of Belex and Aurilena. Their relationship transcends the divisions between their respective civilizations, transforming a seemingly impossible romance into the emotional heart of the story. As Belex, a genetically enhanced young man from Gath, and Aurilena, a gifted priestess of Moria, struggle to reconcile duty with love, their journey becomes a powerful exploration of trust, compassion, and the courage to challenge generations of hatred.

I was equally impressed by the depth of your world-building. The long-standing conflict between the technologically advanced Gath and the magical society of Moria unfolds with remarkable complexity, while the mystery surrounding the true origins of their war continually raises the narrative stakes. The gradual revelation of hidden truths, combined with Aurilena’s search to understand the source of her extraordinary gifts, creates a story that balances epic adventure with deeply personal transformation.

Beyond its captivating fantasy and romance, MagicLand thoughtfully explores themes of peace, reconciliation, identity, destiny, sacrifice, evolution, prejudice, forgiveness, hope, and the transformative power of love. Your elegant storytelling, richly developed characters, and imaginative vision demonstrate both literary distinction and exceptional commercial appeal.

As part of our ongoing editorial review, I am always interested in identifying authors whose work demonstrates both literary distinction and strong commercial appeal. In that regard, I would be very interested in learning more about your current and forthcoming writing projects.

Could you kindly let me know whether you are currently represented by a literary agent? If so, I would be pleased to direct any future correspondence through your representative. If not, I would be happy to provide additional information regarding our editorial and acquisitions process.

Subject to the review of further material, I believe there may be opportunities for a broader discussion regarding the potential alignment of your work with our publishing interests.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I would be delighted to hear from you at your convenience.

Warm regards,

I’m a wary soul when it comes to unsolicited emails, so my radar for these things kicks in quickly. My first clue was simply the name of the supposed editor. An editor-in-chief of a large publisher isn’t going to reach out to me.

Full stop.

Not because I’m not America’s greatest unheralded living writer (I am, right? Right?). But because these folks really don’t have that kind of time on their hands, for one thing. And for another, it’s just not how they operate.

Fiction is a push operation, not a pull operation. Authors push, and push, and push their stuff out to potential publishers and agents. Publishers do not pull them in off the streets. It just doesn’t happen for the most part (a possible exception might be a writer’s conference or workshop, assisted, perhaps, by copious amounts of alcohol).

That said, for some reason I was awake at 5 am, so the first paragraph caught my eye anyway, and I let a glimmer of hope filter into my uncaffeinated brain. However, being a coffee addict, before I read past that first paragraph, I shuffled to my coffee pod machine and fired that baby up.

Slurp, slurp. The magnificent electrical charge of caffeine began to enter my brain. Slurp. Alert bombs began to go off in my head almost immediately. Slurp.

I read the first paragraph again, then the second:

I recently had the opportunity to review your work, particularly MagicLand, and was deeply impressed by its imaginative fusion of metaphysical fantasy, dystopian fiction, romance, and philosophical storytelling.

Okay, okay, John. Now we’re talking. You have excellent taste. Excellent. I bet you’ve won some editing awards, even. Perhaps you even discovered Chaucer. As Jon Stewart might say: Go on….

The novel presents a richly conceived world where magic and technology have remained locked in conflict for millennia, resulting in a narrative that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally compelling.

Ruh-roh. Ding, ding, ding, ding!!! Sound the AI alarm! Call in the Pangram AI detector machine!

Actually, calling in the Pangram machine didn’t even occur to me. I didn’t need it. I read on anyway.

By the time I got to this part…

Your elegant storytelling, richly developed characters, and imaginative vision demonstrate both literary distinction and exceptional commercial appeal.

…I was asking: “Holy shit, dude, what kind of AI prompt did you use for this? And why the hell are you targeting me? Did I kill your cat while distributing rat poison in the neighborhood?”

The really stupid thing about this is that the scammer was fairly clever and sophisticated in his technique, up to a point. (I say “his” because, well, my gender bias is just built that way when it comes to scamsters and most other criminal types).

This was a very detailed and specific attempt to target me. It wasn’t sent as part of a broader effort. It makes sense to assume, I suppose, that someone has found a way to automate every aspect of this, which is the real reason for my post: to alert other fiction writers of this scam. If not, it sure feels personal.

Actually, you know what? Even if this is all part of some sophisticated automated AI turnkey fraud, it is personal.

Anyway, the final giveaway is in the footer of the email, which has two unmistakable tells.

The first is the return email address: johnscognjohnscognamiglio.kensingtonbooks@aol.com

Not

kensingtonbooks.com.

AOL.com.

Also: johnscognjohnscognamiglio

Huh?

Whoopsie doodle, Mr. Scammer. Also? You’re a dumb ass for getting that far in an effort that might have fooled some people, then adding that “AOL” part.

A good scammer would have left that off the footer and included it only in the actual return address of the email from whence it came.

The second is just plain dumb. Even if I had fallen for the scam, my old graphic design/art director/creative director eye would have caught the silliest, sloppiest mistake of them all: the lack of a space between the street address of the publisher’s zip code and “United States”

“United States” is also a tell. Almost all email footers sent domestically skip that part and end with the zip code.

It’s pretty offensive that scammers are targeting fiction writers like me. Most of us barely make enough money to keep our phones charged.

Maybe next time, Mr. Scammer, have AI check your work. Also? May the rest of your life feature lengthy bouts of explosive diarrhea on every romantic encounter, if you ever manage to have one.

I don’t know what the scammer’s endgame was. I originally intended to follow through on the email to find out. I suspect it was to lure me into a “reading fee,” but who knows?

Instead of jumping down that rabbit hole, I decided to write this post.

Seriously, I must ask this of scammers who do this kind of stuff: What the hell is wrong with you people?

Anyway, if you’re a writer, beware. Don’t fall for it. There may be variations. It’s very unlikely an editor or publisher is going to contact you out of the blue, but if you are absolutely convinced one has, double and triple-check the return email address by looking at the raw version of the email.

Google how to do that if you don’t know.

Don’t rely on the footer of the email. They can fix that easily enough for Scam 2.0.

My raw email looked like this (I redacted my email address, mostly because I’ve always wanted to redact something):

You should also be able to tell a spoofed email like this by simply hitting reply and carefully examining the sender email address. Looking at the raw version is a little more definitive for me, though.

As a sanity check, I looked at Kensington’s website to look for email address patterns.

I found this:

https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/fraud-alert/

One of the bullet points was this:

• Pay close attention to the email domain, as scammers often spoof a legitimate email address. Our official email addresses all end in @kensingtonbooks.com.

I forwarded the company a copy of the email I received, since in my opinion, it’s also a personal attack against a guy who, upon a bit more research, has spent his life dedicated to the publishing business, and seems to be one of the good guys.

Stay safe out there, fellow writers. There are some real jerks out there.

Notes

I didn’t realize Kensington accepted unagented submissions until I checked them out, so I’ve decided to query them on my novel, Restive Souls. Wish me luck!

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It costs less than a Taylor Farms pre-packaged salad, and, hopefully, is a little easier on the stomach, too, although, to be fair, there is a wee bit of gore in one of the stories.

Unfortunate, because Stephen Miller is still around. I’ve been mentioning him for a lot longer than I wish. Here’s a little background story on America’s Nosferatu doppelganger in case you missed it:

He was not yet a household word when I wrote that. Now, almost everyone knows who he is, and never for a happy reason.

As long as he’s around, we’ll see headlines like these:

As of July 11, there were 65,765 people in immigration detention in the United States, many of them without a court hearing, which is a violation of constitutional rights.1

Compare that to November 3, 2024, when there were 38,863 immigrant detainees.

On August 3, one of Stephen Miller’s victims, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, died in custody at a place called Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. Delaney Hall has been working on its insipid reputation since Miller first clamped his fangs onto the American immigration scene.

Delaney has been the scene of repeated protests because it’s become a concentration camp with no accountability.

Lopez-Cornejo, 41, was a Salvadoran immigrant who wasn’t important enough for ICE to tell us his cause of death after “suffering a medical emergency” at Delaney Hall.2

He’s not the first.

According to Physicians for Human Rights, Lopez-Cornejo is the 53rd person to die in an ICE concentration camp under Stephen Miller’s watchful, sardonic gaze.3

Jean Wilson Brutus, 41, a Haitian immigrant, died in December 2025 after another “medical emergency.” The medical emergency, and his death, occurred one day after he entered the Delaney detention center. Even ICE admits he entered the facility in good health.4

Let me be clear here. With this regime, nothing they say can be trusted. A medical emergency should probably be considered a beating by guards until the regime can prove otherwise. Or, in Jean Wilson Brutus’s case, I don’t think you need to be a fiction writer like me to suggest that an ICE goon dropped some fentanyl into his stale peanut butter sandwich (look for clues in the footnote as to why I might concoct this crazy story).

The problem in these situations is that we can’t know. If Brutus was giving ICE goons some lip, the goons, already predisposed toward hate, could easily have dropped a little fentanyl sauce into whatever gross food they were giving him.

How would we know? It is impossible to know what goes on behind those locked doors. DHS won’t let anyone in to see what they’re up to.

Nobody is holding ICE accountable aside from the usual crowd of immigration lawyers and activist local politicians like Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor. They try their best to shine a light on these cases, but if we’re honest, Americans are still not particularly outraged when immigrants are seized from the streets and killed unless it’s right in front of their faces.

And even then, let’s be more honest. They’re much more interested when it’s a non-immigrant taken down in the streets during an ICE operation.

This is why Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, has prioritized a stealthier campaign of abductions that focus on courthouses, smaller attack convoys, and airports.

At courthouses, the only people there are suing each other or waiting to see a judge for a variety of other reasons, usually uncomfortable ones. The last thing anyone is going to do when they see ICE in a courthouse is blow a whistle.

At airports, everyone is cranky and just hoping to sit through an uncomfortable, crowded, loud flight without clawing their fellow passengers' eyes out.

“How was your flight, love?”
“It was a win. I didn’t kill anyone.”

So Mullin, who is in trouble with the more radical insurrectionists, like Steve Bannon, anyway, for not lining the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge with the heads of immigrants on pikes, came up with a new strategy: No more “operations” with names like Midway Blitz, where convoys of ICE goons attacked immigrants in broad daylight, which, in turn, lured armies of citizen avengers armed with whistles and camera phones.

Mullin didn’t pull back operations, though. He merely placed them into stealth mode. More arrests are being made now than ever. In July, there were 1,474 abductions per day in the first eleven days, which meant that Stephen Miller’s goal of 3,000 per day looked well on its way to fruition.5

Now, much smaller teams stalk the streets. Instead of five or six vehicles packed with ICE stormtroopers, one or two vehicles roam neighborhoods and much more quietly snatch their victims and flee the scene before anyone has a chance to respond.

And, as I mentioned, they’re in airports, too. You might think you’ll be boarding a flight at SFO (San Francisco), but instead, this happens while you’re looking for the latest Psalm of Vampires book at the airport book bin:

Your friendly TSA agents are helping the process by submitting names and birth dates of travelers to ICE.

This leads to scenes like this, via the New York Times:6

The woman and her 9-year-old daughter were walking through Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, heading to their gate to fly to Miami to visit a relative, when a stranger in plainclothes approached.

“Angelina?” he asked.

“Sí,” she responded.

Minutes later, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was on her knees, crying, as two immigration agents were handcuffing her in front of her daughter.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the DHS who seemed to relish her role as a Queen of the South determined to tear families apart during her tenure there, said at the time:7

“The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home.”

Did I mention that Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was arrested at the airport while her terrified 9-year-old daughter looked on? Republican family values, Queen of the South style.

Speaking of flights, Stephen Miller’s Gestapo regime sent 147 Venezuelans by charter to Venezuela just yesterday.8 This is one of the perks of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and keeping him locked up in his own special cage.

Deportations, with the coerced and staged cooperation of a newly subservient Venezuelan government, worked out so well after a similar charter flight carrying 146 Venezuelans in June that the regime, clapping its hands in glee, sent more.

What became of those 146 Venezuelans isn’t entirely clear, because just eight hours after the charter plane landed, an earthquake hammered the city they arrived in, La Guaira, killing more than 5,500 people and leaving about 24,000 people homeless. The building the deportees were detained in collapsed, killing dozens of them.

It was a wet dream scenario for Stephen Miller, who reportedly had sex with his crazed wife while watching a snuff film of the event (I may have made that up, but would it surprise you?).

What better thing to do, this regime obviously pondered, than to send more charters to a land devastated by a major quake?

This is a regime that loves using AI for everything. It’s not unfair to wonder if someone poses questions like this to ChatGPT: “What is the shittiest thing we can do to our Venezuelan immigrants?”

ChatGPT:

I’m glad you asked that question. You’re so impressive with these amazing queries. Why not send immigrants directly into harms way? Venezuela just had a major earthquake, so its resources are quite strained. It is very unlikely they will be able to support a transport plane loaded with a hundred and fifty or so impoverished souls.

What a country we’ve become.

Notes

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe now

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If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find my new 350-page anthology of short stories here for free:

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If you’re not a paid subscriber, you can purchase it for $4.99. Enter the code SUBSCRIBER_SPECIAL for 20% off:

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It costs less than a Taylor Farms pre-packaged salad, and, hopefully, is a little easier on the stomach, too, although, to be fair, there is a wee bit of gore in one of the stories.

Footnotes

Aside from an occasional flaring nostril aimed at extremely rare disagreements, Rand Paul has knelt before the mad clown just like the rest of the subservient Republican Congress, destroying the libertarian and Tea Party dream of a United States run like a lawless and unregulated Mad Max nation.

His dad, Ron, served as a Representative in Texas’s 22nd congressional district from 1979 to 1985 and in Texas’s 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013.

It could be argued that Ron was libertarianism’s most important and dedicated cheerleader and that, without him, its place in history would have remained where it belonged: three or four angry white middle-aged men yelling slogans while waving tattered Ayn Rand books in a dilapidated rural Texas church basement.

Rand Paul’s dad became enough of a libertarian icon that he ran for president under the Libertarian Party banner in 1988. He is considered by some to be the godfather of the Tea Party and a key reason for its existence.

So what were libertarian Ron Paul’s policy positions?

He opposed federal government activity in almost every area of public life. He considered social welfare programs abhorrent. He opposed a federal income tax. He wanted to strip the federal bureaucracy down to nothing by eliminating every Cabinet position.

He even hated the Federal Reserve, which helps protect your money from bank runs and, flaws and all, traditionally does a pretty good job of managing inflation and unemployment by setting fiscal policy and interest rates. He introduced a bill in Congress every year to eliminate the Federal Reserve.

He was also a proponent of the gold standard. He has consistently warned against the cost of military spending.

He was against the war on drugs and the war on terror, which might have attracted more young people if he hadn’t been against everything else.

He also consistently railed against the military-industrial complex. This was always a core part of libertarianism. One might disagree, for good reason, with libertarianism’s other policy stances, but its devotion to that one creed lured a large number of young people into its lair.

When the libertarian-minded Tea Party first began clutching the heels of the Republican Party to drag it into its cesspool, the one question on everyone’s mind was, “Why are so many young men gravitating towards this movement?”

But the reason was always simple: Young Republican men, much like Captain Bone Spurs, would have sacrificed their mothers to avoid military service. Railing against the military-industrial complex was a convenient but, as history has shown, cynical posture used to lure other young men into the Tea Party’s clutches.

Ron Paul, as it turned out, was libertarianism’s only true believer.

Libertarianism was essentially a vote against government intervention of any kind, so, in that sense, opposition to the military-industrial complex made sense. But the Tea Party went on to create budgets for the military that have never been experienced before. It was all bullshit. It was a show. A cover for Christo-nationalism, hate, and bigotry that finally begat Donald Trump, who then proceeded to dismantle its precepts with wild abandon.

In July, led by Tea Partier Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives passed a $1.15 trillion Defense Spending Bill, beating historical records into absolute submission.1

This unprecedented military budget isn’t about leveraging current military trends like agile drone warfare. Its sole purpose is to feed the monster. American defense manufacturers will be lining up to produce obsolete weapons of unimaginable cost — big beautiful machines that will get blown to bits by $50,000 Costco drones. They’ll suck more money from the budget in one minute of activity than you’ll see in your lifetime.

The military budget is state welfare for defense contractors. The rest of us get to starve or hunt for scraps on the tail end of the dead libertarian dream that has only managed to gut social welfare while building a military that small nations will almost develop a hankering to take on thanks to new strategies in warfare.

All that’s left of libertarianism these days is a wild-eyed Kentucky Senator with apparent psychological problems.

In November 2017, Paul was viciously attacked by a neighbor over a clutch of tree branches on their property border to such an extent that he had to have part of a lung removed. He suffered five broken ribs, including three displaced fractures, in the assault.2

While the mainstream media heaped sympathy upon Paul, I wondered at the time how a few tree branches on the edge of Paul’s property could set someone off that much. Conservative media, unsurprisingly, said that his attacker loathed Trump, but Rand Paul was not and is still not Trump.

You have to be in a serious, consistent conflict with someone to trigger that kind of outrage and assault.

Anthony Fauci is intimately familiar with Rand Paul’s likely psychological issues, being victimized himself by them.

But one can fairly argue that Rand Paul’s larger crimes are against the libertarians he claims to represent, especially his own father.

His consistent and reliable votes for Trump policies and bills have wrecked whatever there once was of libertarianism.

His dad, Ron, must be rolling in his grave, before he even gets a chance to climb into it.

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Notes

Libertarianism isn’t the only thing that’s dead in America’s authoritarian atmosphere:

Footnotes

While Europe was burning last week, I donned my designer hat to create a couple of Substack perks. I have more planned, so this is just a start.

I’ve been wrestling with ways to say thank you to paid subscribers without changing the nature of the Ruminato Substack, which follows the NPR model: Everything is free, including the Comment section: Pay if you can.

Like most of you, I am a paying subscriber to a very limited number of Substacks. I can’t pay for all the ones I’d like to. I rotate a few of them in and out of my paid subscription queue for budget reasons. But just the bigger ones, because they can handle the hit no matter what they say.

I don’t know how many people feel the same, but I’m sort of offended by the paywall system that hides content from non-paying readers. I’m not crazy about limits on comment sections, either, but I understand that from the larger Substacks, especially women, who are constantly under attack by lunatics. Their comment sections can quickly become cesspools, so it’s easiest, I guess, to just limit comments to paid subscribers.

At the same time, I gotta eat. And I’m not talking steak dinners. I’m talking those cheap Taylor Farm explosive diarrhea meals. Yes, as someone now on limited income, that’s my primary sustenance.

Charles, you idiot, my always clever readers will retort, you do know that that’s not the only way to eat a salad, right?

Alas, everyone’s a critic.

Anyhoo, my solution, thanks to Substack’s new(ish) feature, is to begin a series of perks.

Before I was a ranty Substack writer, I was a software guy (but not a tech bro!). Before that, and this is where Perks come in, I was a graphic designer and art director. This means I can do things like crank out a book in Adobe InDesign (expensive, but wonderful software) in a matter of hours.

So, I did. Twice!

If you look on the desktop version of the Ruminato website, you will see a menu item called “Perks.” All the perks I create can be found by clicking that link.

You can also find them here, so bookmark this page if you don’t want to lose the info:

https://www.ruminato.com/perks

For now, these are PDF versions, but other formats are coming.

Vampire Elegy

The first perk is my novel in progress, the sequel to Psalm of Vampires, tentatively titled Vampire Elegy. Each chapter is available free here on Ruminato. But paid subscribers get the perk of having them all in one place in the form of a PDF file (other formats coming soon).

You can always find the free version starting here:

The downloadable book is available to paid subscribers here:

Download Vampire Elegy

The book version is a downloadable file that requires a paid account. It will be updated each time a chapter is published.

Note that Vampire Elegy is a work in progress. The title might change. The plotline might change. Genders might even change. Fun fact: When I first started writing MagicLand, he was a she and she was a he. Then I flipped them. After an initial shock, the characters recovered, and it turned out okay!

Read a review!

See? Republicans worry too much.

Short story anthology

The great conceit of any writer is that we assume other people want to read our stuff. There is heady blindness to truth in that regard, I’m sure, but I proceeded as if with my next Substack Perk, which is an anthology of all my fiction here on Substack.

There is more of my fiction here on Substack than I realized. Enough to fill a nearly 400-page book.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find the book here:

Download the anthology

Honestly, it’s still a little rough around the edges, but I will keep updating it until I’m totally happy with it, which means it will probably get updated 1,398,543 times. At least.

I will also be making the anthology available to all my subscribers for a very small one-time donation (about the cost of a Taylor Farm salad, hopefully without the repercussions). I’ll send out a “Breaking News” email when that becomes available. It will also show up on Amazon soon.

I hate the fact that it is necessary to rely on Amazon so much, but hey, if Kamala had been elected, Lina Khan (pdf link) would have been able to maintain her plan to break up Amazon, so blame the people who didn’t vote for her. We’d be living in a very different world now if so many men didn’t hate women so damn much.

UPDATE

This is now available as a standalone digital download for $4.99:

Buy Now (PDF)

See the Table of Contents at the end of this post.

No AI

I don’t use AI for any of my writing. Not for plot development. Not for character development. Not for names. Not for anything. The best way to encourage human writing is by supporting those who shun AI, especially if you like the work. You don’t have to pay a dime. A simple restack helps tremendously.

So check out the perks. More are on the way.

Thirty Minutes and Other Short Stories Table of Contents

This is the TOC from the book. Click-tapping the page number takes you to the story here on Substack (free).

Note: the page numbers could be slightly different in the PDF if any major text updates are made that might reflow the text. The PDF version has its own TOC.

General Considerations
These are short stories independent of any of my novels.


Thirty Minutes	8
Can one phone alert change the world?

The Box	18
A man faces a bizarre heatwave and a catatonic wife

The Illegal Alien	31
An extraterrestrial visitor stumbles into a world of trouble

Walking with Hemlock	40
When your implacable enemy becomes your best friend

Conversations on a Bank Floor	51
A short story about the nightmare of revolution

Hijacked	57
I don't know who she is anymore

Born a Savage	77
A messiah’s last breath in the oceans of Europa

Quantum Blues	82
A man is incarcerated for a crime he can't commit

Princess Time Slut Visits Costco	93
A short story wherein our heroine discovers a phone

A Dust Storm for Daisy Gilbert	100
A little baseball story with a dust storm thrown in

Gorzon the Magnificent	105
Can smiles from a young girl's heart slay a monstrous memory?

The Fifty Planets of the Broken Messiah	110
Questions from a distant world.

Seeking Amy	117
Pandemic fiction about discovering those closest to us.

Johnny Neuron	125
Wherein our hero goes brain surfing.

The Story Where His Lordship Drops a Jesus Bomb	135
The Adam and Eve story isn’t what you think.

Cat Jesus and the Holy Lawn Dart	143
This story is the prequel to "The Story Where His Lordship Drops a Jesus Bomb."

That Time God Sent a Galaxy-Sized Fireball to Earth	149
His Lordship discovers some unpleasant truths behind a little planet's inhabitants.


Restive Souls
Restive Souls is my alternative history novel about a great African nation that rises in Carolina Low Country. These stories are part of the novel's timeline. but separate from the novel.

Onlooker	156
A mysterious stranger approaches the Creek town of Pakanahuil

The Day the World Got Woke	161
Fiction that will terrify those who promote the great replacement theory

Songs of Narragansett: The Black  Liberation of Newport	175
A small band of untrained soldiers helps the British win the American Colonial Rebellion


The MagicLand Chronicles
These stories are part of the MagicLand novel timeline. but separate from the novel.

Triage	181
A young woman returns home after the Third Eradication. Let the magic begin.

The Fires of Easterly	191
Little did we know that beneath the glow of the continuously burning Easterly fires was a city of magic.

The First Reckless	201
Helping someone revisit their past can come in handy once in a while. Just ask Gladstone Freely.

The Death of Charlie Hollywood	209
My name is Charlie Hollywood. Before the First Eradication, I was a crypto gamer and financier. It’s all gone, now. All of it.

The Cutting	216
A simple cut turns into a hellscape. Trigger warnings: gore

Scarlett’s Kitchen	234
It’s her kitchen. She can do what she wants.


The Wanderer	243
A ghost hunts for prey in the new land of magic.


The Futurists	251
Some say magic began to appear before Old Earth fell.

The Cesspool Mermaid	257
She was living in a small shallow pond full of toxic waste.

The Dragons of Sierra	266
Will a new menace alter the conflict between magicians and augmented humans?

The Graft Queen	269
He sliced the head clean off the Gath. Why didn’t it grow back?

Mary Catches Fire for Free	274
The Gath had nearly destroyed us. Then along came Mary.

The House of Nadab	280
Welcome to our house, where you choose how to die.

The War Dogs of Lamar	287
May the best beasts win. A MagicLand short story.

Welcome to You+	294
It's time for a new, augmented YOU! A MagicLand Chronicles fiction short story.

The Return of PeeWee Secaucus	297
A lawyer discovers the gift of magic.

The Dragons Amongst Us	308
There are some who say that there is a third species. Not of Gath. Not of Moria...

The Rise of the AI Reich	315
A MagicLand short story about a very possible near future.


Psalm of Vampires Short Stories
Psalm of Vampires is my potboiler novel about a streaming, bible-thumping vampire who gets caught up in a huge Atlanta murder mystery. These stories are adjacent to the novel, but separate. 

The Vampires of Bodie	322
The Mouras Encantadas discover the American West.

A Song for Vampires	330
An Easter story: Atticus Argeadai (Jade Mourning) visits the Middle East.

Charly and the Pink Lady	335
A noir vampire love story based on a "Psalm of Vampires" character.


Memoirs
Two memoirs.

Pouring Boiling Water Over Children	346
Redemption in the arms of madness on a cold winter day.

That Time I Learned the First Woman I Fell in Love With Ended Her Own Life	352
A remembrance of unrequited love.

Thank you for reading. I love all of you, unless you’re Andrew Tate and reading this between rounds of cage fighting with your neighbors in your new home.

Notes

I generally shun generative AI art, too. I’ll admit to some curiosity when it first emerged, but since I’ve been using Photoshop since it was a tiny application called Barneyscan bundled with scanners, there’s no excuse for me using it. I have found that more and more stock images I use as a base image are AI, though, so stuff slips through once in a while.

For those wondering: I’m aware of less expensive graphic software than the Adobe stuff, but it’s what I know. I’ve been using it for nearly 30 years. Canva, for example, looks wonderful. But I’m getting too long in the tooth to think about switching now.

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Yesterday, another Wildberries warehouse in Russia went up in flames. It almost doesn’t matter when you read that sentence, because a Wildberries warehouse is getting blasted by Ukrainian drones almost every day.

“Wildberries” is Russian for “Amazon.” It’s their version of the Amazon retail empire. They’re getting hit by Ukraine ostensibly because they sell drones and drone parts. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a wily fellow and certainly knows that disrupting the Russian version of Amazon is going to draw the attention, and ire, of Russian citizens.

I take no joy in the knowledge that blowing up warehouses is likely to lead to civilian Russian deaths.

But the Russian people are out of excuses. They have been willfully blind to Putin’s brazen savagery against their neighbors (and, in many cases, friends and family) for more than four years, just as our own population of MAGA clowns and drug addicts and deviants have been supporting the blatant and growing authoritarianism of a sexual predator posing as a president in the ruins of the White House for a total of more than six years.

Russian citizens have access to the same information we do, just as MAGA insurrectionists and Epstein cheerleaders have access to the realities behind their hero’s gruesome exploits.

Russian citizens cower under the excuse that their versions of Fox News create a news monolith on behalf of Putin that they can’t escape. Truthful information about Ukraine and Putin, though, is available via the Telegram app, which is almost as pervasive in Russia as Facebook is in the United States.

Dylan Combellick, who basically monitors the Ukraine War for a living, also reports that Wildberries facilities in Penza, Russia, and Sarapul, Udmurtia, also in Russia, were hit last night.

Ukraine isn’t just hitting warehouses. It’s decimating the Russian oil infrastructure that has propped up the Putin regime since it first invaded its neighbor to the west.

Every major Russian oil refinery has been hit, per United24, a Ukrainian news service:

• Omsk Oil Refinery: Russia’s largest refinery (22 million tons/year capacity); struck on July 6, 2026.

• Kirishi Oil Refinery (KINEF): Leningrad region capacity of 20–21 million tons/year; repeatedly targeted.

• Ryazan Oil Refinery: 17.1 million tons/year capacity; repeatedly struck, causing prolonged suspensions.

• Kstovo Oil Refinery (NORSI): Lukoil plant near Nizhny Novgorod processing 16 million tons/year; hit multiple times including July 2026.

• Yaroslavl Oil Refinery (Slavneft-YANOS): 15 million tons/year capacity; struck multiple times.

• Volgograd Oil Refinery: Lukoil plant with 14.8 million tons/year capacity; targeted in drone operations.

• Perm Oil Refinery (Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez): 13.1 million tons/year capacity; hit in late July 2026.

• Moscow Oil Refinery: ~12 million tons/year capacity; hit in multiple waves of strikes during summer 2026.

• Novokuibyshevsk Oil Refinery: 8.8 million tons/year capacity in the Samara region; damaged and partially halted.

• Syzran Oil Refinery: 8.5 million tons/year capacity in the Samara region; struck by long-range drones.

• Bashneft-Novoil (Novo-Ufimsky) / Ufa Refineries: Bashkortostan facilities processing over 7 million tons/year; hit in repeated operations.

These numbers and bullet points come directly from a Ukrainian news source, so it’s reasonable to expect a propaganda flourish behind them, but I fact-checked most of the incidents, and various other sources around the interwebs seem to confirm the numbers.

The reliable Combellick, who maintains a daily report on the Ukraine War on the Medium platform (with a decidedly Ukrainian slant), describes the most recent attack on Russian oil infrastructure:

The Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez (PNOS) was hit by Ukrainian drones.

PNOS, part of the Lukoil Group, processes over 13 million tons of oil annually, produces high-quality gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation kerosene, and lubricating oils. The refinery is a key industrial facility in the region and one of the most technologically advanced in the country, supplying fuel to both the domestic market and export markets.

— Dylan Combellick

He also reports that the port in Taman, Krasnodar, a Russian oil depot that is used to transport oil, is on fire, probably from Ukrainian drones.

The attacks have resulted in queues at Russian gas stations that would look familiar to Americans who tried filling up during the Yom Kippur War and OPEC Oil Embargo of the 1970s.

The average Russian is now feeling the effects of the war in ways they can no longer ignore. Some of them are even fighting each other for gas, according to Combellick and other sources, such as Nadin Brzezinski, another reliable source on the Medium platform (also very pro-Ukraine).

Another reporter, and apologies for not remembering who, described the situation in parts of Russia as something out of a Mad Max film.

During the years since the war began, Ukraine has become a drone superpower. Its drones can, and do, hit deep inside Russia to the point where the Russian oil infrastructure is in danger of collapse.

Russia is responding by killing women and children while targeting apartment buildings from Kyiv to Lviv in Ukraine.

Like our own madman, Russia’s is becoming increasingly desperate as the strength of internal dissent grows and the vultures begin to circle.

In the United States, where our own madman has handed the keys of the Strait of Hormuz to a belligerent, tyrannical authoritarian theocratic regime, his own allies, even the crazy ones, are turning against him.

Alex Jones, who for some reason is still able to broadcast his mindless rants even after having his income sucked dry by the courts punishing him for unforgivable lies toward the victims and parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School, has joined a growing “impeach him” chorus within MAGA.

Today, Republican Senators, for now, gave up on trying to confirm the Predator-in-Chief’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, although I don’t expect any resilience in opposition there. The fiend in the Oval Office will rouse himself from his sleep long enough to spew methane out of his mouth and do some kind of horrible thing to take our mind off it, and then Republican Senators will confirm Blanche, because that’s what cowards do.

Still, there are a ton of cracks in the walls of MagaLand, and the reason for this is that no matter how firmly piles of excrement set, eventually a wall with that kind of foundation collapses upon itself.

I won’t reiterate the various signs of collapse here. Most of you are inundated with enough Substack articles to know what’s going on.

The man is dying, and the only question remaining is how many people he wants to bring down with him.

We are fortunate, ironically, that he is fooling himself into thinking he’s built a legacy worth protecting.

But I don’t know that Putin is crippled by that same weakness.

Ukraine is winning the war Putin started four years ago. Its drones are sought after by every military in the world. The phrase “economic collapse,” in the wake of at least a million dead soldiers, is a legitimate one in describing Russia’s imminent future.

So the fate of this most dangerous hour probably rests in the hands of Trump’s closest ally, a man thousands of miles away whose grip on power is unknown. We can be sure, though, that the vultures are circling there, too. An authoritarian’s worst enemy is almost always his friend.

Buckle up.

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Chapter Three — Missing Pieces

If someone is chasing you, you better hope it’s not Charly. When Charly is hunting you, it’s more like a charging rhinoceros than a human or another vampire trying to catch you.

Charly has always been known within his vamp house in central Africa, the Sasabonsam House, as an indefatigable, incomparably puissant warrior. A little more than a century ago, he feasted on hundreds of Belgians when King Leopold controlled vast parts of central Africa as his own private kingdom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Leopold claimed full ownership of a massive African nation called the Congo Free State that he carved out of the jungle. There was nothing free about the place. It became the nightmarish backdrop to books like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.

The only thing free about the Congo Free State was Leopold’s willingness to rip entire tribal nations and languages out of history books before historians had a chance to sit down and start scribbling. That, and his penchant for plundering the nation’s resources, turning valleys of gold into ruined gulleys full of blood, grieving widows, and broken, starving children.

The Sasabonsam House didn’t much care, but if they had any human allies in the region at all, it was the straggling survivors, not the invading Belgians. While the House feasted mostly on Belgians, they also kept the locals honest by occasionally feeding on them, too.

The Sasabonsam House, through feudal kings and their proxies, also convinced locals that central African vampires, the Banyana, were a side-effect of colonialism. This created a feigned alliance that made it easier for the Sasabonsam House to maintain significant landholdings deep in the jungle where the Belgians dared not tread.

Having a ten-thousand-year-old warrior (that’s Charly) as their knight in shining armor didn’t hurt. Charly ravaged entire Belgian settlements throughout King Leopold’s Congo strongholds. Europeans knew there was a fearsome power in the dark forests they tried to master, but they didn’t know what it was, or what to call it.

It was Charly.

Charly is one of the oldest living vampires on earth, if not the oldest. He’s one of the most ancient living creatures on Earth, too. He’s older than the giant sequoia trees of California, and he sometimes looms as large when he’s bearing down on you in a cold rain. He is powerful enough that he could have survived the Jurassic Age.

You don’t want a being like that chasing you.

He chased me to the SUV, where Owens was waiting outside with Cornelia, poised to fire her special bullets into whoever or whatever was pursuing me. Cornelia was a special gun, but as my legs pumped their way toward Owens, I wasn’t sure she could stop Charly. I was even more sure that I didn’t want her to.

“Don’t shoot!” I yelled. “It’s Charly!”

Owens steadied his aim anyway. He never listens to me.

“No! Owens!”

Two choices faced Owens as I neared him, my rampaging friend close behind. One, obviously, was to shoot Charly and hope it would at least slow him down enough for me to get into the SUV and get us out of there. Even under siege from Cornelia’s bullets, which were toxic to vamps, Charly would probably survive and heal quickly enough to hunt us down soon after falling. The other choice was for me to face Charly and appeal to what was left of his mind to end his attack.

By turning around in front of Owens and his beloved anti-vampire weapon, then turning my back on him to face Charly’s charge, I guess I was choosing option two for both Owens and me.

“Fuck, Atticus, what the fuck?” Owens blurted out into what was now a horizontal, freezing rain that sliced into our faces like tiny shards of shrapnel. Garrison jumped out of the SUV, too, holding a different kind of gun, maybe a Glock.

Charly reached me more quickly than I thought he would. I knew by his footfall that he was near, but he was upon me almost the instant that I finished my pirouette in front of Owens.

You might remember from my previous tale that I sometimes envied the short life of humans. At this moment in time, I was pretty sure that humans got a raw deal. I suddenly found myself wanting much more.

I thrust my hands in front of me in a feeble attempt to stop Charly from removing my head and launching it into the Appalachian foothills north of Atlanta. “Charly,” I said. “Wait, man, it’s me. Atticus.”

Charly’s laugh was uproarious. “I know that, you chicken shit.” His laugh thundered to the point where a pine cone from a nearby tree bounced off my head. He swatted my shoulders like the old friend he was. “I had to be sure it was you, bro.”

“The fuck?” said Owens.

“Yeah,” I said. “The fuck.”

“Long story, man.” His head bobbed around like that of a skittish bird on a cautious hunt. I wondered who he was worried about. Charly wasn’t afraid of anyone that I knew of.

“Well, fuck me, let’s get out of the rain.” I looked at Owens, then the SUV. “Will he fit in there, Owens?”

Owens laughed and opened the doors. We all climbed in, Charly last. Garrison took the driver’s seat and Owens the passenger side. Charly and I sat behind them.

“What was that all about, Charly?” I asked when we were all settled. I looked down. “I think I may have shat my pants.” I never tried playing the tough guy with Charly. Nobody did. And Charly knew better, anyway, than to think that I could think I could take him in a fight without a bazooka filled with magic vampire-killing projectiles.

Somehow, Charly was already sweating. He wiped his big bald head as he said, nodding toward the house, “If I tell you what’s up in that place, you won’t believe a word of it.”

“At this point in the timeline, Charly, I’d believe a singing goat was the president of the United States. Try me.”

“Umm. Okay. But you’re not gonna like this.”

Owens couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, “Fuck’s sake.” It’s a disease he has, I think.

“Out with it,” I said.

“They cloned Daphne, man.1 They fuckin’ cloned her.”

“You’re right on both counts,” I said. “I don’t believe it, and I don’t like it.”

“And I had to make sure it was you out there in the yard, you know?”

“No, I don’t know anything. And it’s getting worse.”

Charly shook his head. He seemed genuinely shaken. “So,” he said, “I figured I’d give you a scare. I knew the real you would run like the chicken shit you are.”

I wanted to smash his newly formed smile, which had morphed into the size of a piano keyboard, into a million pieces.

“Charly,” I said. “Be nice.”

He was beaming. Pretty happy guy for a dude who was afraid of clones.

“You’re fucking proud of yourself,” I added. I was insulted, but I couldn’t deny it was a sound strategy when he continued.

“See,” he said. “A clone woulda stood its ground. No history, no real knowledge of me.”

I nodded. “I still hate you and I always will from now on,” I said in a deadpan voice. “But, shit. Tell me more.” I wasn’t ready to believe his wacky story about Daphne, but the truth was, Charly was the last person to have seen her that I knew of.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on in there,” he said, looking in the direction of the house again as a flash of lightning lit up the grounds with a double strobe of light.

“Sounds like a battle of apex predators to me,” sneered Owens. Balls of steel, still, even after all he knew about Charly.

Charly, though, no longer hated Owens, so he ignored the remark.

Calming down, breathing more slowly, Charly said, “I moved in there a few weeks ago. I lost track of Daphne in the woods about a month ago.”

“You mean, the jungle? In Madagascar?” I asked.

“Yeah, uh-huh. Whatever. We were hiding out with a Kalonoro clan. And another one, I dunno man, snatched her? I don’t know what else to call it.”

“Another Kalonoro clan?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah. Something like that. They have this thing about newly turned vampires.” Charly shrugged. “They think they have special powers or something. Just old tales, you know? These old little vampy asses ain’t the most sophisticated dudes on the planet. But if they believe ‘em, they believe ‘em, right? So, they snatched her.”

“You might have told me sooner, dude. I’ve been scouring the fuckin’ planet for your ass for the last month and a half.”

“I’m sorry, Jade. I just got here last week. I tracked every scent in that jungle for a month. Getting you involved woulda slowed me down. I was sure I’d find her.”

I wanted to smack him again, and he knew it. He grasped my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “There’s nothin’ I wouldn’t do for you,” he said.

“I know.” I could feel tears trying to squeeze out of my eyes. “But now you’re saying they cloned her? Or someone else? I mean, there’s a big window of information I’m missing here, Charly.”

“Yeah. Well, me too. I’ve been at that house about a week, renting a room. I tracked them down. You know how good I am at tracking, right?”

I nodded. “No creature better in all the land.”

“I knew for sure wherever she was, it was somehow associated with that house. I smelled her scent. It was unmistakable.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Always has been. But wait. Before you go any further. What’s with the eye thing?”

“Eye thing?”

“Yeah, dude. Your eyes were all glazed over and black and shit before you started chasing me. That’s what got me scampering, you asshole, not because I was afraid of you.”

I was afraid of him.

Charly laughed. “You were so scared.”

I shrugged. “Maybe a little. So?”

“An old Sasabonsam trick. Works every time.”

Owens broke in with, “Can you two lovebirds try to get to the central issue here? Old Garrison here is about to fall asleep.” Garrison responded with a dirty look.

“Can’t really be hurried, asswipe,” said Charly. It felt like old times.

“What is the central issue, Charly?” I asked. “Clones? Daphne being kidnapped? What?” I was thinking about the woman on the table Owens told me about. “I mean, Owens, that was Daphne your police report was talking about, right?”

“Ya think?” Owens said sarcastically.

“Wait, what?” asked Charly.

“That’s why it would have been nice for you to come forward, you know, the very fucking second you got stateside?” said Owens angrily. “You were carrying a lot of information we could have used.”

“I was scared,” Charly said. That kind of comment wasn’t going to elicit a response even from Owens because it fell so far outside the zone of probability that it was impossible to react. Charly looked at me. “Scared for you. My best friend, ever, in all this world, and in all my years.” That was saying a lot for someone who’d lived 10,000 years. “I didn’t know what was wrong with her. Still don’t, man.”

“Wrong with her?” asked Owens.

“Yeah, man. I finally found her in the basement of that shithole. Lying on a fucking metal table. Staring straight up into the sky, saying nothing, her eyes wide open, no reaction to my touch. Nothin’. Until then, I heard or saw nothing from her. That’s why I didn’t tell you dudes. I mean, Jade, man, I was thinking that me coming back and telling you she got snatched right from under me would be worse than anything for you.”

“Let me handle my feelings, Charly. But go on.”

“Yeah, man. I know. I can be a dumbass sometimes.”

“Should be your fucking middle name,” said Owens. Balls of steel, that man.

Charly continued: “But I followed the wrong scent, Jade. The wrong fucking scent. That wasn’t her. Just, you know, smelled like her. And looked like her, except for the vacant, blank, comatose look.”

“So, this clone,” I said. “Is it in that house right now? While we’re yappin’ about it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Fuck me,” I said.

Owens was still pissed. “Who’s Chevalier?” he asked.

Charly looked at Owens. “So you dudes been tracking him, too?”

“Nope,” said Owens. “We just discovered how much we love sitting in SUVs for hours in Midtown neighborhoods eating donuts together in the freezing fucking rain. Fuck, man? How have you lived so fucking long with all that salt in your head?”

“Owens,” I said. “We were here for like, five minutes.”

Owens was pushing Charly pretty hard. Hard enough to make me wonder if Owens thought that maybe Charly was a clone. They always had an antagonistic relationship, but Charly reached a point during the Jerrold Mountain battles with the Wurdulac where I knew he’d throw his body in front of a train to protect Owens. Not that a train could hurt Charlie.

But this was a risky test, one that, if the clone responded by taking Owens out, would only prove that Owens was a smart dead guy.

But Charly was smart, too. Smarter than Owens knew. He smiled at Owens. “I see what you did there. These clones, dude, they have no personal history. You wouldn’t be able to piss it off this way”

Owens just stared.

“Good thing, too,” said Charly.

“Yeah, well,” said Owens. “That’s assuming I believe all this clone bullshit. But after Longtooth, I guess I’ll buy anything for now.” He still had a fresh scar in his hand from his coffee house encounter with Longtooth.

“And the Mouras Encantadas,” I said.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Owens.

Garrison then broke into the conversation. “Can we assign blame later?” he asked. “We need to sync up our stories. Charly needs to know everything we know, and we need to know everything Charly knows. Right now, it’s like we’re standing around shooting bullets into the air.”

Owens raised his hand. “I’ll go first. But first we need to decide what we should do about the Daphne clone, because she might not be a clone. Mr. Apex here might be wrong about everything.”

“It’s not her,” said Charly.

“You might be betting a friendship on that statement,” warned Owens, looking at me.

I shook my head sadly and choked out, “It’s not her.”

Owens nodded. “Then we should sit somewhere more comfortable and figure this shit out.”

The rain had dissipated, so after checking a weather app, we decided to drive up into Gwinnett to a steakhouse near Truist Park that Garrison knew well.

On the way there, Owens told Charly everything he had told me about the police report, and I covered everything I knew about the rest of it.

There were pieces to our version of the story that we knew were just sort of flying around loose with no connection to anything, especially the title frauds. But somehow, we knew everything was connected.

By the time Charly was finished with his side of things, some of it began to fall into place.

But I began to wonder if I’d ever see Daphne again.

Here’s a standalone short story, a noir romance, about Charly:

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Footnotes

Sometimes, it’s not about politics.

Barack Obama’s politics are far to the right of mine. Some of his policies, such as drone strikes in Afghanistan, made me want to scream into the night. As a president, he was a centrist. I most certainly am not.

If he emerged from a hot tub time machine into the 1970s, he’d be a moderate Republican like two other former Illinois senators, both Republican: Everett Dirksen and Charles Percy.

Sometimes, it’s not about politics.

Just before he won the presidential election, I believed him when he said he was a blank slate. That was typical centrist posturing, but it was honest. I squirted a few tears of joy on that election night. I had no misgivings.

Obama possesses a core decency that has been missing from American politicians for 250 years. He’s a unicorn. He’s the family man that no Republicans, who once claimed to own the mantel of family values, can even speak of in their current fugue of malfeasance, hate, and sex crimes as they continue to fall over each other in service of a man whose name is said to appear one million times in unredacted versions of the Epstein files.

Obama’s integrity is even more remarkable when you consider the nature of Illinois politics during his ascension.

If he’s a crook, he’s the sneakiest summabitch whoever lived and has earned every penny of his ill-gotten wealth.1 So even then, I’m giving him his props.

Also? I think we all know he’s not. And this is part of what makes him special.

Illinois politics was steeped in corruption during Obama’s Illinois political career

One of life’s great mysteries is: How did he do it? I’ve never read an Obama biography or autobiography except for parts of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Maybe the answers lie in one of his other books.

I won’t try to explain it here beyond some (mostly) guesswork at the end of this essay. Instead, I’m going to describe the cesspool from which he came so that you can marvel at his achievement and better appreciate how remarkable his political journey was.

In Illinois, 1,913 public officials ended up behind bars after federal trials in Illinois’ Northern District between 1976 and 2012.2

Four out of nine governors before current governor JB Pritzker found their way to the hoosgow.

Thousands of dollars were found in Secretary of State Paul Powell’s shoe boxes and various other hiding places such as strong boxes and briefcases in the 1970s.3

Illinois’ career Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2025 on ten felony counts for federal bribery and wire fraud. He was a fixture of Illinois politics during Obama’s days in Illinois politics, but Obama miraculously avoided the Madigan corruption machine.

Chicago and Illinois had already developed a reputation as a wild place for unrestrained political corruption under the Daly Machine, led by Mayor Richard J. Daley, who ruled Chicago with an iron fist from 1955 until 1976.

As Chairman of the Democratic Party, all roads to political success ran directly into his office, where favors, bribes, and ultimatums decorated the walls like Trump gold.

Daley was never convicted of anything. His son, Richard J. Daley, who was also a Chicago mayor, seemed much less interested in harboring corruptioneers. But hundreds of people surrounding Daley Sr. were jailed for various corrupt practices.

With that culture firmly in place, subsequent political bosses like Madigan fought to develop their own fiefdoms in the wake of the Daley empire, like Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Antigonus carving up the Alexandrian empire after Alexander the Great’s death.

Madigan came out on top, but the entire state became a cauldron of relentless crime and graft, with hundreds of corrupt politicians scrambling for as many illicit proceeds as they could get their hands on.

Authors Dick Simpson and Tom Gradel, who co-wrote Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism and Criminality, reported in that book that such a rate of corruption is matched only by Louisiana and Washington, D.C., where the population of affected citizens is much smaller.

I would argue that no jurisdiction in America can match the graft of the Illinois and Chicago Democratic machine.

I would also argue that Obama’s influence, in addition, of course, to more than a thousand politicians scooped out of the political swamp and thrown into federal prison, has led to significant reforms that have transformed Chicago and Illinois politics into something more benign. Today, Illinois more closely resembles the common kind of political graft we see in other states governed by one-party rule, rather than rampant crime everywhere, all the time.4

The gauntlet of Chicago’s Democratic machine

The gauntlet of the Illinois Democratic machine’s corruption that Obama had to work through is too large for a minimal Substack like this to fully document. Entire books have been written on the subject. I’ll cover a few highlights so you can get a sense of the political environment Obama had to navigate.

Michael Madigan

Madigan built an empire. An empire of crime. Not in the way Trump has. Not quite as much in your face, although he didn’t make much of an effort to hide things.

Madigan was Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1983 to 2021, except from 1995 to 1997, when Republicans managed to sneak in a couple of years as the state house’s majority party. He was the main tollbooth through which all Illinois politicians were required to pass.

The gates of the tollbooth were operated by cigar-chomping men with the kind of criminal connections that made federal prosecutors’ heads spin.

U.S. District Judge John Blakey said, while sentencing Madigan, that he was the “central command post” of a massive, ongoing bribery operation between mega-utility Commonwealth Edison and Illinois politicians lining up to grease their palms for favors.

Blakely wrote:

“It was a nauseating display … of perjury and evasion. You lied, sir. You lied. You did not have to.”

But the Commonwealth Edison bribery case was notable not for its corruption, but as being the one time Madigan was caught with his fingers in the cookie jar. He had established a sparkling reputation as a local prince of corruption long before his indictments.

Federal prosecutors were unable to obtain convictions on Madigan’s (alleged) full criminal career that most Illinois political observers would describe as a “yearslong criminal enterprise to enrich himself and his political allies,” in the words of pre-Trumpian CBS News.5

In all, Madigan and co-conspirator Michael McClain originally faced a 23-count indictment for racketeering, conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and extortion covering the majority of his years as speaker. Federal prosecutors were surely disappointed that they couldn’t obtain convictions on all of them.

Jurors also convicted Madigan on three counts of wire fraud for his attempt to buy a state board seat for Chicago Alderperson Danny Solis, who was himself accused by the FBI of funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars from campaign funds into his personal bank account.

Chicagoans greeted Solis’s behavior with a shrug. It was business as usual; a typical alderman (that’s what they were called in those days, since politicians were mostly men).

Most importantly, Madigan was essentially the party boss during Obama’s Illinois political career.

Obama being Obama, he wound his way through the Madigan muck with a clever grace, which I’ll get into later.

Rod Blagojevich

Where do I begin?

Former Illinois Governor Blagojevich is also a unicorn of sorts. Somehow, he managed to transcend the criminal underworld of Illinois politics to create his own unique brand of what might best be called “criminal buffoonery.”

He went to prison like any good Illinois governor should, and was accused of a world of pay-to-play schemes, but America had a favorite: Using his office as governor to sell the United States Senate seat that Obama vacated, after winning the presidency, to the highest bidder.

It was such a terrific blend of criminality, brazenness, and silliness that Americans very nearly developed a sort of fondness for the guy, enough so that when the Grifter-in-Chief pardoned him in 2025, many of us felt a sense of relief that America’s silliest governor copped some forgiveness within the scope of this cold, cruel world.

Blagojevich served as governor from 2003–2009, the final two years of Obama’s term as an Illinois Senator (not U.S. Senator from Illinois, but instead a member of the Illinois Senate).

One reason Blagojevich was able to retain some affection from voters despite his criminality is that he was a progressive governor who helped set the template for Illinois’ current governor, JB Pritzker.

Blagojevich was ultimately convicted on 17 corruption charges. All Obama needed to do to avoid any accusations of connections with Blagojevich was avoid walking into the governor’s office for a chit chat, which Obama studiously did.

Edward Burke & Jesse Jackson Jr.

In the grand scheme of Chicago corruption, these two were minor players. But they were contemporaries of Obama. The temptation to hang with Jesse Jackson Jr., especially, must have been great, considering Jackson’s father’s legacy.

Jackson Jr., who was a U.S. Representative from 1995 to 2012, pleaded guilty in 2013 to wire and mail fraud for redirecting campaign contributions for personal use, primarily the purchase of luxury goods. He served 30 months in prison.

Burke was a career Chicago alderman, serving from 1969 to 2019. Like Madigan, he had a long, distinguished history as a career criminal whose antics were as well known to Chicagoans as Wrigley gum. Like any good Chicago Democrat, he was convicted of racketeering, extortion, and bribery.6

He was a local kingmaker, but Obama avoided Burke like he was a nasty pox specializing in explosive diarrhea.

Antoin “Tony” Rezko

There comes a time in most political careers when the lizard pays a visit and invites you into his den to dine with him on an endless feast of corruption. For history’s worst president, that moment came when he was a young real estate carnival barker in New York City chasing Black people out of his tenements. One day, one of Joseph McCarthy’s sleazy lawyers, Roy Cohn, paid him a call, became his mentor, and the rest is history.

For Barack Obama, the lizard was a real estate developer named Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Rezko ran a company, Rezmar Corporation, that interviewed Barack Obama when he was still a student at Harvard, where Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. Luckily for us, Obama didn’t get the job, and the young, ambitious scholar instead took a job with a law firm that focused on civil rights litigation, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.7

Although Rezko didn’t offer Obama a job, he did recognize some of Obama’s obvious traits and strongly encouraged him to look into a political career.

Whether Rezko had the same kind of intent as Roy Cohn did toward Trump is impossible to know. But it’s fair to guess that when someone encourages your calling, and then you become successful at that calling, a soft spot develops towards the person encouraging you.

All indications point, however, to Obama always taking counsel with himself first, and never letting one person control his destiny or play too large a role in his success.

This may have been his superpower as a young man, and it saved him from the snares that Illinois politicians might have led him into.

Rezko was a political huckster who made one of the first contributions to Barack Obama’s earliest campaign efforts via two food companies. It was a modest contribution, $2,000, but Obama was running for small potatoes: a seat in the Illinois Senate. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody cared.8

Although they remained on friendly terms, Obama never allowed himself to get caught up in Rezko’s world of graft, which eventually included the usual mix of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, and extortion, for which he was indicted in 2006 and eventually convicted.

Later, Rezko grifted his way onto Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign finance committee, which eventually pulled in $14 million in campaign contributions, but he wasn’t the top dog there, and there are no known improprieties.

Reporters tried to cast shade on a real estate transaction Obama made with Rezko after Obama cashed in on book royalties. Obama purchased a home next to a lot owned by Rezko’s wife. The accusation: Rezko sold a ten-foot parcel of his wife’s land to Obama at a higher than assessed value to make Rezko’s wife’s land less attractive to local developers.

A bit of a stretch to call that corruption, but Obama conceded the point anyway in later interviews, expressing regret over the deal.

Can you imagine the current occupant of the Oval Office fretting about such things?

Reporters, and even Hillary Clinton (during their 2008 presidential primary campaign), tried to tie Obama more closely to Rezko, but failed.

Rather than view his relationship with Rezko from the lens of corruption, it’s more useful to view it from the larger field glasses of a young man veering out of corruption’s way, but being smart enough to slap the occasional crooked shoulder so prevalent in Chicago politics.

Rezko was as close to corruption as Obama ever tread, and that wasn’t very close.

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel was the perfect partner for Obama during and before Obama’s presidency. He has just enough Chicago in him to be dangerous, but he doesn’t appear to possess the penchant for corruption most other Illinois Democrats have.

Personally, I think this is because he was a ballet dancer in his youth. He turned down a dance gig with the Joffrey Ballet in favor of politics, and somehow danced his way through Chicago politics, cozying up with Barack Obama enough to become Obama’s Chief of Staff after Obama was elected.9

Emanuel’s biggest crime is that he’s a Clinton corporatist. He started his political career progressively enough, as a political operative for Paul Simon (the Illinois Senator, not the singer/songwriter).

Later, he worked for Clinton, where he became deeply involved with NAFTA, which eventually became a war cry for MAGA, but was also frowned upon by many on the left.

Some would also call Emanuel a Zionist, but I don’t like getting into those arguments because that part of the world was ruined by Europeans after World War Two more than it was by the people caught in the conflict created by the Palestinian Mandate imposed by Great Britain and others.

Emanuel is certainly Jewish. His middle name is “Israel,” after all, and his father was born in Jerusalem, where he took a bullet during Arab protests for Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization.

Emanuel wants to be your next president, an unlikely event, mostly because his past associations with Israel will obliterate10 him during the Democratic primaries.

He’s now a fierce critic of Netanyahu.11 He delivered a speech earlier this month in Tel Aviv urging the withdrawal of U.S. aid unless Netanyahu’s policies are rejected by Israeli voters, but this is a bit like someone snatching a winning lottery ticket from its owner as she hands it to the clerk and then laying claim to the prize.

But during the Obama years, Israel wasn’t drawing the same attention as it is now, even though its apartheid-like policies against Palestinians were firmly entrenched. Israel still had the sympathy of much of the world, leveraged by support for those who argued that it was a nation surrounded by hostile neighbors.

In Illinois, Emanuel served as a political mentor of sorts for Obama, but he also served as a guy who’d take some of the punches aimed for Obama’s head, a task he also performed as Obama’s Chief of Staff.

How did Obama escape all that?

Picking the right people to chill with has always been one of Obama’s many skills. Rahm Emanuel might not be my idea of progressive politics, but he was a handy torch for Obama to carry into meetings with power brokers, and has stayed out of trouble.

When Obama found mentors, they were clean. Obama served as the main driver of a shadow effort by U.S. Democratic Senator Paul Simon, a man considered to have been of pristine integrity, to force state legislators to put together a set of campaign ethics laws for Illinois. The result was a new law called the Gift Ban Act. According to the political publication Stateline:12

The 1998 law prohibited politicians from using their campaign funds for personal use, banned fundraisers in Springfield during legislative sessions and required candidates to file their fundraising information online, so the public could see who was paying for a campaign before the election.

Nobody was likely more important as a mentor than Emil Jones Jr., who was the President of the Illinois Senate when Obama arrived. Jones was constantly in Michael Madigan’s face, but, more importantly, Jones acted as an armour coating for Obama when Obama was still green and learning the state’s political ropes as an Illinois senator.

He moved Obama through the line of hands you must shake in Illinois when Obama ran for the U.S. Senate. Obama needed Jones’ help, because he most certainly wasn’t going to get it from Michael Madigan, who feared Obama’s reform efforts.

Madigan campaigned for Obama’s opponent in the Senate primary, Dan Hynes, instead. This led to Hynes getting 63 percent of the vote in Madigan’s home 13th Ward of Chicago, to Obama’s 15 percent. But Jones said to Obama, “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” Obama won the primary, and the rest is history.13

The combination of clean mentors and active efforts at election and political reform resulted in two simultaneous messages from the young, charming, ambitious, and funny politician from Chicago, Hawaii, and, through ancestry, Kenya: “I’m an up-and-coming politician you need to pay attention to, and I’m saying ‘no’ to the land mass of Illinois corruption.”

After he became the president of the United States, corruption in Chicago suddenly became taboo. Not nonexistent, but no longer the game that must be played to advance a political career. Obama became a new template. Citizens began to demand more Obamas and fewer Madigans.

What is happening on a national scale today will ultimately land in the same place. Americans are seeing Chicago-style corruption on a nuclear scale.

But they’re also furious. The blowback will send hundreds of politicians to jail when Jack Smith or someone like him becomes Attorney General/Jailer during the next administration.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll also get a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court named Barack Hussein Obama.

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Footnotes

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The city of Chicago awarded a $13.5 million grant to Yellow Banana, a Cleveland-based grocery logistics company, to reopen six shuttered grocery stores.

The grocery stores served food deserts1 on the city’s south and west sides. Folks in places such as Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the city’s far south side were finally getting an opportunity to satisfy a long-term hunger for real food in real grocery stores.

The food deserts appeared when name-brand stores, including Whole Foods, pulled out of these neighborhoods. Whole Foods pulled out of a much-ballyhooed location in Englewood four years ago. It was replaced by a discount grocer named Save A Lot under a separate program set up by the city (one that is also in trouble).

After receiving its grant, Yellow Banana then contracted with Save A Lot to bring the six other shuttered supermarkets back to life.

All of these stores have one thing in common: They serve communities in Chicago in dire need of reliable, reasonably priced grocery stores. These are communities containing neighborhoods with a heavy dependency on the federal SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps.

But now, all six Save A Lot stores under the $13.5 million grant will be shut down on Saturday (July 25) unless an investing angel or other bright light swoops in to save them. The Save A Lot that replaced Whole Foods is also reportedly closing.

The primary reason?

The Save A Lot stores have lost 26 percent of their SNAP sales since the Trump regime gutted the SNAP program through the “One Big Beautiful Bill” of death (aka: One Big Bill of Death) passed on July 4, 2025.2

It all started with the decimation of the SNAP program

The One Big Bill of Death cut an almost inconceivable $186 billion from the SNAP program, affecting approximately 42 million people.3

The MAGA Congressional Republicans who wrote the bill then developed an onerous set of new requirements for receiving benefits:4

• Expanded Work Requirements: The bill raised the age limit for “able-bodied adults” expected to work to qualify for receiving benefits, from 54 to 64 years of age. Even veterans were affected. Anyone with four working limbs is now required to work 80 hours per month. Single mother? Too bad. Off you go. Chances are, you won’t make enough to cover child care. New rules now also apply to veterans, adults with children over 14, and the homeless.

• Food price inflation is no longer taken into consideration. The MAGA Republicans used the Orwellian term “Restricted Benefit Calculations” to establish cost neutrality in future benefit adjustments. In plainer English, this means that when prices soar like they have under the regime’s insane Hormuz Insider Trading War, there is no adjustment made for inflation.

• Legal immigrants and refugees seeking permanent residency and/or asylum, victims of domestic violence, and human trafficking victims were cut out of the program.

• State Cost-Sharing: The bill requires states to pay up to 15% of their residents’ SNAP benefits. This, in turn, has forced many states to look into imposing stricter requirements from its struggling citizens to minimize their costs. Red states, of course, were already eager to do so.

• Elimination of SNAP-Ed: Federal funding for SNAP nutrition and education programs was also eliminated.

Republicans warned us of these changes with their manifesto of hate, Project 2025, long before the election that saw 78 million people reject yet another overqualified woman as their president. [Page 300 of Project 2025]

Acknowledging that the extreme MAGA cuts to SNAP benefits have severely impacted these stores, Save A Lot spokesperson Sarah Griffin then hid under the standard corporate dodge of “financial headwinds” to explain the company’s exit from neighborhoods that desperately need grocery stores:5

“As a result of this [the SNAP reductions] and other financial headwinds, Save A Lot made the difficult decision to end our arrangement with Yellow Banana. Yellow Banana is exploring alternatives in order to keep the stores open. If they are unable to find an alternative, the stores will cease operations, effective July 25th.”

You might be wondering, “Hey, what about that nice grant they received from the City of Chicago? Aren’t there obligations?”

Indeed, there are. According to Peter Strazzabosco of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, the former Whole Foods store must remain open until the middle of this year, but that is covered under a separate program than the bigger grant. The six stores covered by the grant must be reopened within a year, although it’s unclear who is responsible for that and what the enforcement mechanism is.6

That Yellow Banana might be rotten

Unfortunately for people residing in Chicago food deserts, Yellow Banana appears to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Yellow Banana contracts with Save A Lot to run its stores, but it appears to be doing a terrible job.

How bad? Bad enough that Thomas Lys, a Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor, took a look at its balance sheets and said way back in 2024 (ancient history in our current beleaguered timeline):

“When I look at this balance sheet, it’s a company that’s not good at doing whatever it’s doing. I don’t see anything here that would give the people on the South and West sides any hope. Understand, all I know is what’s been conveyed to me. But this is a company that can’t pay $800 for its utility bill.”

The Chicago Sun Times identified this and other problems with Yellow Banana almost from the moment the grocery company entered the Chicago market.7

SNAP cuts affect every grocer in the United States

It’s fair to say that in the case of Chicago’s Save A Lot, the 26% drop in income generated through SNAP was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that camel was probably going down anyway thanks to Yellow Banana mismanagement.

But grocery stores not named Kroger and Albertsons often run on paper-thin margins anyway. That 26% loss of SNAP income would be substantial even for them. And the drop in SNAP income has affected every grocery and supermarket in the country. The biggest among them will respond by raising prices, if they haven’t already.

$100 billion in SNAP benefits go to 250,000 food retailers, comprising five percent of sales nationwide.8

The One Big Bill of Death has stripped the SNAP program down to a husk of its former self. The largest retailers can survive the hit. Smaller grocers can’t, especially if they’re running damaged balance sheets the way Yellow Banana does.

Say hi to your Walmart greeter

Walmart collects 24% of all SNAP spending, much of it from its own employees.9

In 2018, before the One Big Bill of Death, the nonprofit organization Big Hunger calculated that 202,500 Walmart employees received SNAP benefits, amounting to $618.4 million in corporate welfare annually.10

According to the Government Accountability Office, in 2020, “Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every state.”11

Although there are no reliable numbers in the wake of the One Big Bill of Death, we can assume that a good chunk of these employees will no longer be eligible, given that between 2 and 4.5 million Americans have lost their benefits, including one million children.12

For example, Arizona saw a 55 percent drop in food assistance from July 2025, just after the One Big Bill of Death was passed, to April 2026.13

I guess that’s one way to beat corporate welfare: Just cut everyone off.

I (and others) call it corporate welfare because SNAP has traditionally provided the side benefit (for Walmart and other large companies) of subsidizing their policy of paying workers low wages.

Walmart has since raised its hourly wages, but anyone who has fought with the welfare system knows that being knocked out of the pool of SNAP recipients with a somewhat higher wage has its drawbacks and can sometimes feel worse than before the wage hike.

Even the big chains are closing shop

Well, we’ve established that it’s just the smaller grocery stores that are affected by all this, right? Maybe a few food deserts get a little bigger? No big deal.

Apologies for misleading you, but that’s not the case.

Profit margins at even the big box stores are tiny. Overall, profit margins sit at around one to three percent, depending on which article you read.

Big grocery stores are disappearing, too:14

• In June 2025, one month before the Big Bill of Death passed, Kroger announced it would close 60 stores, 5% of all Kroger brand stores, during an 18-month period. These guys aren’t stupid. They read Project 2025, too, and they’re paid to anticipate government policy.

• Discount grocery chain Grocery Outlet announced 36 store closings in March 2026.

• Albertsons announced this year that it is shutting down about a dozen stores in several states and Washington, D.C. The megachain has 2,000 stores that it plans to evaluate now that a merger with Kroger has fallen through.

• In addition to stores carrying the Albertsons name, the chain has closed an Acme store in New Jersey, a Balducci’s in Connecticut, a Randall’s store in Texas, Safeway stores in Washington, D.C, and California, and two Vons stores in California. There are more on the horizon, as Albertsons is always fighting for its life.

• Dollar General ran a nice little “optimization review” (I love corporate speak!) in 2025. The conclusion? Close 96 stores, all of them by January 2026 (in other words, hurry!). It also planned to shut down 45 PopShelf stores. The company has announced that it plans to keep expanding, too, but the trend for them, like all retail, has been away from the food deserts that gave life to the chain in the first place.

• Texas’s beloved HEB is reviewing the status of all 440 of its supermarkets in Texas and Mexico. It recently stunned Austinites by closing the doors on a location in Austin’s Spicewood Springs neighborhood that had existed since the 1980s.

• Amazon is closing every single one of its 70 Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores, ending what it once called a grand experiment, saying in its corporate announcement, “While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.” Amazon, for now, is saying that most of these stores will be reopened or rebranded as Whole Foods stores.

• Southern grocery giant Piggly Wiggly recently closed a store in Phenix City, Alabama, leaving that small southern city’s 38,000 residents with one less decent-sized grocer to choose from. The company has announced the closure of stores in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Sumter, South Carolina, too, without explanation (oh, SNAP!).

• Winn-Dixie, claiming a rebranding strategy, slammed the doors shut on almost all its stores outside Florida and Southern Georgia in late 2025, including, according to mashed.com, “seven Harveys Supermarkets in Georgia and one in Florida, 12 Winn-Dixie locations in Louisiana, 18 in Alabama, one in Georgia.” Winn-Dixie says it plans to sell some of its closed locations to other grocery companies.

• Even Aldi is closing stores. One store, in Peru, Indiana, the heart of MAGA country, shut without warning, with customers finding out when they drove into the parking lot only to see a “closed for business” sign. Another store, in a north Milwaukee food desert, abruptly closed in January 2026, leaving many local shoppers without a reliable grocery store. The company had already shut down 30 stores in 2025, the first year of the One Big Bill of Death’s draconian SNAP cuts.

I’m not silly enough to claim all these store closings are because of federal SNAP reductions. Some of them are just standard comings and goings based on corporate whims.

But we know for certain that the decimation of SNAP has led several Save A Lot stores in Chicago to the verge of collapse. The company told us so in a rare belch of truth before smothering it with corporate-speak.

Other grocery companies, which also operate on profit margins thinner than a crazed president’s lies about reflection pools, are less likely to be as forthcoming. Instead, they’ll keep shutting their stores and blather about things like “market conditions.”

So it’s up to us to give them no benefit of the doubt, and evaluate the facts on the ground as they come in using our set of standards instead of theirs.

My set of standards is based on one thing: The vast majority of corporate CEOs are still, even after all we know about the child-rapist in chief, willing to give him cover as long as their bottom lines are protected by the massive tax breaks the One Big Bill of Death gave them.

Late-stage capitalism has drawn the battle lines clearly. Retail grocers will continue to build out ever-slicker stores with higher markups, in an effort to end the scourge of low profit margins. During this process, we will all keep paying more for groceries. And some of us will simply do without any real groceries at all, living on canned “food” products that are little more than ladles of corn syrup and food dyes.

Notes

Thanks for reading!

I recently received an “unsubscribe” notice from one of my cherished readers saying they’re leaving because they are looking for more hard news. My feeling is that there are plenty of Substacks out there keeping us up to date on today’s doomscroll. I’d rather avoid regurgitating the same 50 headlines I see in my inbox every day. It’s exhausting and fruitless.

Hopefully, you’ll find enough different stuff here, from satire and fiction to special reports that dig a little deeper, to encourage you to become a subscriber (paid or free) or simply share, restack, and comment. Thanks again!

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Footnotes

I just received an email from Author’s Alliance with the headline: “Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement Receives Final Approval.”

Nah, I’m not going to rewrite that just to show I am committed to original work. I think my readers already know that I am. Besides, how do I rewrite it unless I translate it to French or something? So I added a couple of words for clarity, and went with their headline.

If you’re not familiar with Bartz v. Anthropic, it’s the first big AI copyright case in the writing world.

Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude AI, got hit with a class action lawsuit claiming that it infringed authors’ copyrights when it downloaded millions of entire copyrighted books in violation of U.S. copyright law.

Anthropic responded to the lawsuit by claiming that its use of the downloaded “datasets” constituted fair use because it only wanted to train its models on the content for its LLM models.

The litigants, however, also accused Anthropic of piracy, partly because the sources of some of their downloads contained pirated works, in addition to works they legitimately purchased.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of authors Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief), and Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here) by three legal firms: Susman Godfrey LLP, Ieff Cabraser Heimmann & Bernstein LLP, and Cowan Debaets Abraham and Sheppard LLP.

Anthropic tried to get the case tossed into the legal garbage can by obtaining a summary judgment, but in June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said, “Nope.”

He said that if the books had been obtained legally instead of pirated from various sources, Anthropic could claim fair use. However, he said Anthropic would have to prove it didn’t pirate the books. He then set a trial date for December 2025.

Rather than go through all that, Anthropic settled out of court. They didn’t admit to piracy, but they did agree to compensate authors for the pirated downloads anyway.

This means that if you published a book with a valid ISBN or ASIN (ASIN is, essentially, Amazon’s version of ISBN) downloaded by Anthropic, you could get part of the $1.5 billion cash settlement.

If you didn’t file a claim, however, it’s too late because all the filing deadlines have expired.

Disburse those funds!

Yesterday, the judge overseeing the settlement, Araceli Martinez-Olguin, ordered that funds be disbursed to writers.1

By modern judicial standards, Judge Martinez-Olguin acted quickly on the final settlement. And for good reason. She has bigger fish to fry, as she is now the judge assigned to a case filed by 12 states to block the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros., an event that would put CNN in the hands of another Trumpanzee, David Ellison, and his über-rich yacht-racing father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison:

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

No Dancing For Paramount and Warner Bros., At Least For Now

California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined us last Tuesday to discuss the lawsuit filed by a coalition of 12 state attorneys general in a last-ditch effort to block the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. by Paramount Skydance Corporation. The Justice Department has already signed off on the merger. But the state attorneys general believe the dea…

Read more

a month ago · 1032 likes · 44 comments · Joyce Vance

If you filed a claim, you can expect about $3000, minus whatever the publisher or any of your co-authors get (publishers get half).

It’s really not much money for a recent book. I had three books on the list of pirated books. They were all old nonfiction technical books that fell into both obscurity and obsolescence a long time ago, so for me, it was an easy decision to join the class of plaintiffs. It’s basically free money for me on a few dead books.

Some authors and publishers declined to participate in the class, which means they can file a separate lawsuit. Most notable is the Chicken Soup for the Soul folks. The way class action lawsuits work, if you join the class settlement, you can’t then turn around and sue separately. But if you don’t join, you can file your own, separate lawsuit.

If you filed a settlement claim, you probably did so through the claims administrator’s website. Presumably, you filled out the forms telling the administrator how you want to be paid. I chose Zelle.

If you don’t know your status, you can contact the administrator here:

1 877-206-2314
info@AnthropicCopyrightSettlement.com

Anthropic Copyright Settlement
c/o JND Legal Administration
P.O. Box 91204
Seattle, WA 98111

They’re responsive and will answer your questions quickly (I know from experience).

Notes

There are other copyright lawsuits in the works:

Master List of lawsuits v. AI, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Midjourney & other AI cos.

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First Lady of Malignancy Melania Trump today announced that she would follow Spain's lead after it edited Trump out of World Cup celebration photos.

“Today I’m announcing that I will be editing my (gag! blargh!) husband out of all existing photographs on the internets. This will be my greatest contribution to society and you will all be happy!”

There was no comment from Trump’s propaganda network, True Sociopath.

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Buy it here!

Chapter Three of the Psalm of Vampires sequel, Vampire Elegy, is about to drop any day now, so if you haven’t checked out the first two chapters and the prologue, now’s a good time.

So far, we’ve learned that there’s a mysterious chap named Chevalier in a ghostly house in Atlanta. In his house lies a woman in a coma who seems to maybe, perhaps, possibly, suspiciously, even, resemble Jade’s love interest, Daphne, who we thought was incubating in Madagascar’s jungles among the dwarf vampires known as the Kolonoro after Jade’s other lady friend Moreland turned her.

Whew! I’m exhausted just reading that, aren’t you? This is why you should hurry and catch up. Lots going on!

Anyhoo, there appears to be a connection between Chevalier and a local title fraudster that Jade has a strong urge to drain, but we don’t yet know what that connection is.

Vampire hunter and Atlanta police detective Standmoore Owens and his vampire friend (that’s Jade — long story, but it’s all in Psalm of Vampires) have decided to check out the place in Chapter Two. It doesn’t end well.

Here’s the first installment of Vampire Elegy:

Read the Prologue

Here are links to the next two chapters:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

You can also find more of my fiction here:

https://www.ruminato.com/s/fiction?sort=top

Now, on to some indie writer promos.

Check out some promos from other indie writers…

Fallen: Complete First Book of the Series

by Patrick Abbott

Available in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats. Read on your Kindle, phone, tablet, computer and more

**The Complete First Book. Books 1, 2, and 3 available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited**

Brendan Murphy nearly died fighting for his country. Now he’s trying to stop a war.

Five years ago, alien ship appeared in low orbit all around the world and stayed there, waiting. A highly advanced alien race known as the Sabia lingered with little contact with humanity, and the worlds’ governments have been eager for answers – and access- for years.

When combat veteran Brendan Murphy is wounded stopping an attack on a Sabia diplomat, he finds himself whisked aboard one of their ships and given medical aid. This rare opportunity finds him walking a tenuous line between burgeoning friendships and secret agenda that will test his loyalties and sanity in ways he can’t begin to imagine.

Check out more on Fallen, Risen, Dormition, and the upcoming finale Assumption.

Order on Amazon directly at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZB1K98K

Download Now

The Testament of Silence

by Evelin Kholeli

His Father’s War Was Fought with Guns. His Will Be Fought with Data.

A novel of blood and data.

Buy Now

St. George’s Church

by Grant Kelly

The Church Filled With Ghostly Watchers

Abandoned for decades and filled with eerie silent figures, St. George’s Church has become one of Europe’s most haunting and unforgettable locations

Buy Now

Notes

Blurbs of each book are written by the indie authors included in the post.

Inclusion of these books does not constitute an endorsement of any of the promoted books here, as I may not have read them. This promotion is part of a cooperative promotion by Indie authors. If you read one and like it, leave a comment! There are no affiliate links in this post.

I do not acquire any pennies for promoting these books. It’s strictly a cooperative venture between indie authors.

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Like most of you, I didn’t watch Thursday night’s train wreck where the Mad Clown drunkenly told us he was going to try to interfere with the Midterm Elections. I love my readers dearly, but you’ll probably never see a “I watched Trump’s speech so you didn’t have to” post. Like you, I value the remaining nuggets of my sanity.

However, unlike you, I have Dr. Harry Hemogoblin III on the Ruminato payroll. For every consultation, I send him a pile of Tide Pods, which he enjoys snacking on after a midnight stroll through one of the shadier parts of town.

Dr Hemogoblin is said to be a psychiatrist. Although this claim has undergone some dispute, I think he’s qualified enough to provide commentary, in the form of annotations, on the world’s first advertisement by a world leader for electoral interference.

So grab yourself a nice bottle of warm Malört (fellow Chicagoans know this fine beverage well), and let’s dig in!

The Transcript

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Prezident of the United States:

Musical intro for your enjoyment whilst reading the transcript and Dr. Hemogoblin’s annotations:

Good evening. Before we begin, I’m proud to report that our country is safer, stronger, and far wealthier than it has ever been before. We are doing great.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is an understandable opening coming from someone who has added about $2 billion to his personal bank account since the destruction of the East Wing. So far, no lies! Drink!

Less than two years ago, we inherited an economic and social disaster after the worst inflation in 48 years, the wide open borders with millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, including criminals of all types, and 11,888 murderers, many of whom killed more than one person.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

You’ll find that central to his many catalogued psychiatric disorders is a pattern of unprecedented lying. I once had a friend who hated his roommate’s dog so much that he peed all over the apartment and blamed the roommate’s dog. The prezident is a bit like that.

We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

First of all, I need to thank the amazing, incredible, testosterone-rich, and wonderful Charles Bastille for the Tide Pods. I may have eaten too many, however, because upon reading “We had transgender for everybody,” I rushed to the mirror on the doorway and dropped my pants for a looksee. Apparently, my naughty bits are placed exactly as originally intended. Not that there’s anything wrong with alterations, but “we had transgender for everybody” appears to be a bit of an exaggeration.

For a sanity check, I examined the rosters of every U.S. female professional sports team and found no men. However, I am willing to offer my services, pro bono, as a member of the Prezident’s Council on Genitalia Examiners.

Finally, as for the whole world laughing at us, they aren’t laughing now, are they?!!!! Drink!

Two years ago, our country was dead.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

One of many bizarre comments, even for this guy. I’ve identified this as a symptom of what some of us (me) in the pyschiatric field call, EverythingIsDeadolepsy, a rare disease thought to infect only one human at a time every thousand years.

Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This statement could be challenged by a review of world temperatures, but there’s no denying many of us have been under a very unpleasant heat dome of late. Drink!

America is respected like we have never been respected before.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I just got off a Zoom call with 8 billion citizens of the world who all said they’d like to see the United States sucked into a vortex and eaten by Canada, while a horde of zombies invades the place screaming, “Winter is coming!” In other words, the world not only does not respect us, they’re mad as hell for allowing all this to happen, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

We have more money being invested in the United States than at any time in the history of our country.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is a form of delusional projection. More money has been invested in him than in any president in the history of our country, so the patient here assumes that this means the entire country is receiving investments.

More Americans are working today than ever before. This week, it was announced that inflation saw the largest monthly decline in more than six years, just happened. It was just given out. The media reported it and we accept it, the best in six years.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

In the psychiatric world, this sentence is known as gobbledygook. The prezident appears to be surrounded by men with similar symptoms as he, because this was a vetted speech that passed the scrutiny of so-called speech writers whose command of the English language is, to put it charitably, questionable.

The tax cuts in our Great Big Beautiful Bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars, like with the provisions, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors, along with the interest deduction on a loan used to purchase a car, but only if that car is made in America.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I was just on a Zoom call with 200 million Americans. Here’s a screenshot of a reaction to the comment “The tax cuts in our Great Big Beautiful Bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars:”

And a 100 percent expensing for our job-creating businesses.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I just finished a Zoom call with 20 million business owners across America. Here’s their reaction to this comment:

Our stock markets are at their highest point in many years, but we can actually say of all time.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The unchecked urge to say something that we should never say, especially when untrue, is a form of Tourette Syndrome known as Orange Depravity Syndrome.

And your 401(k)s, pensions and retirement accounts are setting records every single day, the highest in history.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Personal note: My broker moved all of my stocks into an AI-based oil futures account that moves funds according to anticpated prezidential statements related to the Hormuz Insider Trading War. So far, so good. Drink!

For years we paid the highest price for prescription drugs anywhere in the world.

Now we pay the lowest price under my Most-Favored-Nations policy, because I was able to get the rest of the world and the pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly. Drug prices are coming down by 70, 80 and 90 percent. Trumprx.gov, this will ultimately reduce the cost of health care. You have to go to Trumprx.gov and take advantage of it.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Just finished a Zoom call with about 230 million Americans, and this was their reaction to “You have to go to Trumprx.gov and take advantage of it:”

But the cost of health care is coming way down because of what we’ve done with prescription drugs.

And with Trump accounts, every child in America now has access to a tax free investment account to save for their future. Billions and billions of dollars are being invested, put in by companies and individuals to take care of our children, so that at age 18, they will have potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in their account, and they’ll get off to a great start in life.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The failure to mention that they will all be dead and have no heirs is presumably a part of his unbridled narcissism.

So for that, go to Trumpaccounts.gov and sign up your child or any child you’d like to sign up.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I’m not a computer security expert, but I don’t recommend visiting any website with the word “Trump” in it, unless you have a strange urge to be stalked by a deranged Argentinian man:

Our previously wide open borders have been transformed into the most secure borders in the history of our country, with zero illegal aliens being admitted to the United States in the past 14 months. That is zero.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This seems like a moment to pause and count the dead.

Nobody thought it was possible. We had the worst border in the history of our country, and now we have the best.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I can confirm this. Some previous borders didn’t even include the Louisiana Purchase! And what the hell is this shiz????

Crime is plummeting nationwide…

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This brings us to one of the most fascinating aspects of the prezident’s personality disorder. He frequently calls others “losers,” and doesn’t like to be outdone by anyone. It is my theory, as the world’s greatest psychiatric mind, that the reason he has turned the White House into a global casino and crime syndicate is so that he can have the highest crime rate per capita in the history of these occasionally United States.

…with the murder rate at its lowest level since 1900 - or more than 125 years ago. We’re making a record investment in our armed forces, and we have the strongest and most powerful military by far anywhere in the world. I built it during my first term and, unfortunately, we’re forced to use it now. We won in Venezuela, which is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

There is a lot to unpack here. I’ll keep it short: “Hello, Cuba. Aren’t you glad you have no oil? Yes, the prezident has turned off all your lights through the embargo, but, and just trust me on this, things could be worse. Oh, and for those of you who can afford a boat, I don’t recommend boating in the Caribbean until Hurricane PedoPrezident has breathed its final breath.”

We are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

My son, Renauldo, has already cashed in on the fruits of that labor by hacking into my American Express account and ordering bizarre incarnations of Lego sets I never thought I’d see.

America is back and doing really well. But we still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed, because no country can be great without fair and honest elections. You have to trust your country because, if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Ruh-roh. Here we go.

And that’s very simple — no trust, no greatness. For many years I’ve called for bold, swift and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. Every American deserves to know that, when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure.

One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible. Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.

This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes, like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference. Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people — our beautiful, our great American people.

But that all changes right now. The documents we will release starting tonight have been gathered by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, a great group of people, along with the staff of the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, supported by our top intelligence agency chiefs who have all personally reviewed the findings we are presenting this evening and fully confirmed their authenticity.

You can see these documents for yourself at whitehouse.gov, that’s whitehouse.gov, go check it out. Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly, and that’s what we’re doing.

The documents cover five major areas of concern. First, they show that, over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The phrase we most often use in psychiatry for this is “willful stupidity.” This is complicated by the fact that the prezident most likely is aware that anyone can acquire U.S. voter files for a price, even me. In fact, I have done so. I then contacted all of them for a Zoom call. If you haven’t heard the sound of 220 million people laughing simultaneously, let me tell you, friends, it’s quite a treat.

That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening. This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence even shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.

Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the Deep State — a very, very famous group of people, in many cases — in our intelligence agency, worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible.

US spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020, when they discovered that tens of millions of voter data — think of that, tens of millions of voters’ data — in 18 states have been bought, stolen or hacked by China. Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The inability to let something go (aka, “obsess”) is part of a larger set of pyschological disorders that are well known within the prezident. These include:

Rumination: Repeatedly replaying past mistakes, conversations, or negative events without reaching a solution. It is very common in depression and generalized anxiety.

Obsessions: Intrusive, unwanted thoughts or urges that cause significant distress or anxiety. This is a hallmark of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), where the mind gets “stuck” on a fear.

Fixation: An intense, prolonged focus on a particular thought, person, or object (see Obama, Barack, Hussein).

Hyperfixation: A state of intense, all-consuming focus on a specific topic or task.

They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else. And to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress. In fact, all they kept saying is, this is the most secure election in the history of our country — a standard, very pat line that was divvied out to say.

The cover up of this colossal security breach is even more disturbing in light of the additional information showing that China engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The following paragraph is difficult to decipher, which is unusual for a scripted speech. It is possible that the AI Speechwriter software suffered a glitch:

They did not want — and they just didn’t want it. They fought like hell not to have it, Donald Trump to win, and for good reason. As the documents we are releasing show, CIA reporting explicitly stated, and I quote, in mid-2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president in an effort to reduce the US president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.

Isn’t that nice? Also, in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the US midterm elections and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself. Separately, in mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the US president.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I am working with collegues to define a new psychiatric disorder that officially names the disorder that would cause the prezident to release documents that demonstrate the exact opposite of what he says they do.

They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

A personal comment: Mr. Prezident, we do not need the Chinese to tell us you are the worst human to ever enter the Oval Office.

And they did everything possible to do exactly that. Going on this document says, and this is by the CIA, the strategy included efforts to use Chinese contacts with big US companies to influence US business leaders to turn against the president of the United States of America.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Let’s give the prezident a pass on his psychotic behavior here and just assume he has somehow missed the oligarchs lining up on their knees to… well, this is a PG-rated Substack, so I won’t continue.

The Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could and they didn’t care what they said. The Chinese government wanted US president to lose the next election.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Ummm, Bastille, you are getting all this money from China and all you pay me is a few Tide Pods? You’re a monster.

And the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them. Charged them billions and billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs and built the strongest military anywhere in the world. We have the strongest military anywhere in the world. These are exact quotes from the CIA reporting. The name of the person doing the quote is now under review, but it gets even worse.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I am confused by this statement, and am unable to provide analysis.

Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden. Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing.

These were briefings I would get almost every day; everything was kept out that was of importance. One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election. Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running, quote, a shadow government, unquote, to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press.

Other officials who witnessed such efforts perceived the motivations to be blatantly political. Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags information, and this is a group of bags that were used to destroy information, given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned, it was supposed to be burned.

These bags were supposed to be at a different level by different people, incinerated and checked, but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky. We believe this was not done on purpose, but rather through gross incompetence of the people that were supposed to burn the bags. But the findings are stunning.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is sort of amusing, but if you really enjoy fiction, I recommend you bookmark this Ruminato section:

https://www.ruminato.com/s/fiction?sort=top

The remainder of the speech is essentially a set of fictional scenarios disproven by years of court cases and investigations. There is no hope for the individual spelling out this stuff.

Today, I’m asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden. To fire those involved in the cover up and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people.

Yet concealing China’s meddling was only the beginning. The third set of documents we are releasing proves that for many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems, dishonest, almost all.

They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that. Tonight, we’re publishing a series of previously classified US intelligence community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack. As one assessment states, we judge that the United States’ adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure.

That’s unquote but that’s some statement, isn’t it, made by supposedly great patriots of our country? The document goes on to further state that, quote, we assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter registration databases, poll books, and other official election websites are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use this access to these systems to disrupt election processes within the United States of America.

Tonight, we’re releasing all of those findings and spanning from January 2020 to June 2026. This is a cyber threat aimed at the very heart of our democracy. Many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results on these terrible machines.

Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that’s exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. And that’s what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop, to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.

This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past. The fourth set of documents reveals that even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up. Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large scale voter registration operation in Michigan.

In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat Get Out the Vote Organization, corrupt group in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found. They were just so concerned, they couldn’t believe it, actually, that they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced.

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In other words, it was pay, play and cheat. The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it. Tonight, I’m asking the FBI director to ensure that the matter is fully investigated and to work with the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible for any crimes.

Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.

Hundreds of millions of US voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.

And yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail. As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of LA and governor, was held on June 2nd, long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago, on July 10th. Think of that, much more than one month.

Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.

In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about, because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot.

They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country and that’s true; you can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multibillion dollar in value airways for absolutely no money.

They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multi-billion dollar assets. Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.

Every American, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, independent or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest, and fair election system anywhere in the world. Secure elections should be a partisan — really, should just, we should be together Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody, and it should not be a partisan issue.

It should cause to unite us, not to divide us. This should be a cause, we should be united, not divided. In light of the brand new and irrefutable information, I have revealed tonight my administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People’s Republic of China and many others.

We will be working closely to mitigate any harm and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.

Tomorrow, the Secretary of Homeland Security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems.

They are bad. We’re in the process of informing governors, Senators and members of Congress of potential issues in their states. If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states, and we are committing to fix it and we’re also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.

We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest. I’ve also ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately. But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act. How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat.

The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way. This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that? Could I have your photo, please? Photo voter ID. All voters must provide proof of citizenship.

Are you a citizen of our country, please? And hopefully there will be no corrupt mail-in ballots, which, if you watched California and so many other places, mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt. So, you would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel if you’re going away on business or vacation.

These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I’ve mentioned. To all Americans, I ask you to pick up your phone tomorrow, call your Representatives in the House and Senate and demand that they pass the SAVE America Act without delay. Together, we will restore faith and confidence in our country, and we will be bigger, better and stronger than ever before.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless our great military. And God bless America. Thank you very much.

R-rated final response from the Ruminato team: “Oh, fuck off, you nitwit.”

Notes

As a rule, I do not use AI for anything. I made an exception with the song because I was experimenting. Feel free to yell at me. I wrote the lyrics, but AI did the music. I am sorry. Also, I have posted it before. Sorry again.

Fun fact, though: After I created that little diddy, I saw that the Lego people who do Iran’s propaganda also produced a video with that same voice. Do they use Suno, too? The world wants answers.

Primary reference for some facts in this story: HCR:

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