Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

With Donald Trump facing indictment and arraignment on multiple fraud charges on Tuesday, the Trumpworld response is to flood the zone with House GOP Circus of the Damned sideshows.

 

SOME OF DONALD Trump’s close advisers are calling on top Republicans in Congress to accelerate criminal referrals against President Joe Biden, demanding revenge after Trump became the first former president in history to be indicted.

“Now the House GOP has to continue to investigate the Biden bribes and refer for indictments,” says John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster. “Just the beginning of the end for the Bidens.”

Michael Caputo, a former Trump official who remains close to the ex-president, says he agrees that the House GOP should accelerate its Biden-related probes — and added a 2025 twist: “In fact, I think President Trump should appoint an attorney general who will arrest Joe Biden for his China corruption on Inauguration Day 2025. There’s a far stronger case against Biden for his crimes and now the precedent is set.” (Trump’s team often speaks as if a 2024 victory is a foregone conclusion.)

Behind the scenes, Trump spent Thursday night on a barrage of phone calls to House Republican leaders and other MAGA lawmakers to confirm they had his back following the indictment, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. He also, the sources say, vented about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his other Democratic foes. CNN first reported on this blitz of evening calls, noting that some of these lawmakers “serve on committees that are trying to investigate the Manhattan DA.”

The demand for revenge against Biden stems from two ideas circulating in Trumpworld. The first is that Bragg is doing Biden’s bidding by pushing an indictment of Trump. The second is an effort to recreate a strategy he successfully used against Hillary Clinton in 2016, repeatedly calling her “crooked” and accusing her of corruption at a time when his own ethical lapses were under scrutiny.

“This is all about Biden through Bragg countering the GOP investigation of the millions in communist Chinese bank wires to the Bidens. Classic political diversion,” claims McLaughlin.

Trump has been baselessly accusing Bragg of doing the new president’s bidding, predicting Bragg’s work will “backfire massively on Joe Biden.” Even before the GOP won back control of the House in last year’s elections, Trump had been calling top allies on Capitol Hill, grilling them on different strategies for investigating Biden, his family, and his administration, people familiar with the matter recall. At times, Trump would ask “how many” times Republicans planned on impeaching Biden.

While Trump’s team publicly demands revenge on Biden, they’ve already drawn up efforts to punish Bragg for his prosecution of the former president. Rolling Stone reported earlier this month that Trump has been demanding his advisers draw up legal plans for how they could punish the DA if they were to retake the White House. And his advisers have already located specific areas of the legal code they could use to take their revenge — including via the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

 

So yes, expect the House GOP investigations into Biden to kick into high gear, resulting in House GOP Committee votes to refer Hunter and Joe Biden for criminal prosecution to the Department of Justice, and for Merrick Garland to hand these over to Special Counsel Jack Smith.

 

What will come of these cases is anyone's guess, but Republicans will be talking about these criminal referrals every time a Trump indictment is brought up.

 

Expect more Trump indictments, too. 

Of course, the more immediate problem is that Trumpworld is calling for supporters to take revenge as well.

Minutes after former President Donald Trump was indicted by a grand jury in New York, his supporters flooded social media and extremist message boards with violent and racist threats against the officials prosecuting Trump, as well as bloody civil war.

“This cannot go unpunished,” one member of the rabidly pro-Trump message board The Donald wrote on Thursday night. “The DA needs to pay dearly.”


“None of this will stop unless there is blood in the streets,” another poster wrote.

In Trump’s own statement, the former president called the indictment a “political persecution” and referred to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as “hand-picked and funded by George Soros,” and stated that Bragg is “doing Joe Biden’s dirty work.”

His far-right supporters mobilized quickly online to echo these comments. Through their vitriol, and calls for war, some supporters also promoted a narrative where Trump’s indictment was actually going to help him win victory in 2024. In some cases, supporters falsely said the indictment was simply a ruse to distract everyone from the shooter in Nashville earlier this week.

“The whole trans terrorist thing must have been polling badly so they decided to indict Trump based on the testimony of a lying jew and lying whore,” one influential neo-Nazi account on Telegram wrote, alongside an AI-generated image of a tattooed, topless Trump in a prison yard.

While Trump supporters did not publicly make specific plans for protests or violence, there were numerous examples of violent rhetoric in response to Trump’s indictment, including calling for violence against Bragg, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, and law enforcement.

On platforms like The Donald, where all five of the top pinned posts on the homepage on Thursday night related to Trump’s indictment, commenters openly called for violence that was largely racist in nature.


Under a post with a photo of Bragg captioned “FAT PIECE OF SHIT!” another user commented: “There once was a time when he would have been lynched for much less.”

“Can’t we put a bounty on Bragg’s head? Time to fight lawlessness with lawlessness,” one user wrote. In response, someone said: “Hey man a lot of us are thinking the same thing, but if I said what should really happen I'd be charged with ‘terroristic threats.’” Another added: “The unjustified prosecution of President Trump is state terrorism. Respond to terrorism with terrorism.”

 

 99.999% chance this is all empty bluster.

But it only takes that .001% for someone to get hurt or worse, and the Feds to win 100% of the time.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Florida Man Is Probably Packing Heat, Just Saying.

 

Florida's Republican-supermajority Legislature advanced a bill Thursday that would allow people to carry concealed weapons without licenses, additional training or background checks.

Where it stands: The bill will go to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has indicated that he'll sign it."A constitutional right should not require a permission slip from the government," the governor said during an address to the state Legislature earlier this month. "It is time we joined 25 other states to enact constitutional carry in the state of Florida."

Details: The measure would allow Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a permit or training.Under current law, residents must undergo firearms training, clear a background check and pay fees when applying for a concealed-carry license.

With the new bill, a person will be allowed to carry a concealed weapon without a license if they meet the current requirements needed to obtain a license, including not having been convicted of a felony or found guilty of a crime relating to controlled substances within a three-year period, Axios' Martin Vassolo reports.

The big picture: About half of the U.S. states already have some form of a permitless carry law.Florida would become the 26th if DeSantis signs the bill. Per the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, other states where permitless concealed carry is legal include:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota (for residents only), Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming.

 

So yeah, Randy Rife Range here goes to Shooter's Sports 'n' Shootin' in Jacksonville and buys a gun and sticks it in his pocket and totally won't blast his own dick off.

 

Gunmerica!

 

And yes, the entire tri-state area here around Cincy is now license free concealed carry, along with 22 other states and now Florida, which means of course the next time you cut somebody off in traffic, remember to swerve a bit to avoid incoming fire. 

Cops of course are going to love this.

The Biggest Of Book Bans

Missouri Republicans are eliminating all state funding for public libraries in retaliation for the ACLU suing the state over the state's recent book ban law in school libraries, and the results are going to be dozens of libraries shutting their doors for good.

 

Late Tuesday night, the Missouri House of Representatives voted for a state operating budget with a $0 line for public libraries. While the budget still needs to work its way through the Senate and the governor’s office, state funding for public libraries is very much on the chopping block in Missouri.

This comes after Republican House Budget Chairman Cody Smith proposed a $4.5 million cut to public libraries’ state aid last week in the initial House Budget Committee hearing, where Smith cited a lawsuit filed against Missouri by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) as the reason for the cut.


ACLU-MO filed the suit on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association (MLA) in an effort to overturn a state law passed in 2022 that bans sexually explicit material from schools. Since it was first enacted in August, librarians and other educators have faced misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for giving students access to books the state has deemed sexually explicit. The Missouri law defined explicit sexual material as images “showing human masturbation, deviate sexual intercourse,” “sexual intercourse, direct physical stimulation of genitals, sadomasochistic abuse,” or showing human genitals. The lawsuit claims that school districts have been pulling books from their shelves.

“The house budget committee’s choice to retaliate against two private, volunteer-led organizations by punishing the patrons of Missouri’s public libraries is abhorrent,” Tom Bastian, deputy director for communications for ACLU-MO said in a statement to Motherboard.

Like in all ACLU cases, the organization is not charging the two Missouri library groups for services. Both library organizations are also run by volunteers – every state has an equivalent of these two organizations that serve public and school libraries. In other words, a politician either lied or didn’t have his facts straight, and now 160 library districts risk losing state aid in June.

“State Aid helps libraries provide relevant collections, literacy based programming, and technology resources to their communities,” Otter Bowman, president of the MLA told Motherboard in a statement. “Our rural libraries rely the most heavily on this funding to serve their communities, and they will be crippled by this drastic budget cut.”

This is just cruelty and retaliation, but that's who Republicans are. The purpose of government is to punish your political enemies for daring to oppose you at all. And the fact that if this becomes law and the state's public library budget is zeroed out meaning libraries in the reddest, rural counties in Missouri will close, well, that's the point.