Indepen-Dunce Week: A Supreme Promise Kept

In the final and most shocking Supreme Court decision of the 2019-2020 term, Justice Gorsuch sided with the court's four liberals to affirm that a healthy chunk of east-central Oklahoma along with most of Tulsa is in fact the Creek Indian Nation because Congress never got around to officially dissolving that promise, and now as many as 1.8 million or so non-Native people are now squatting on various reservations.

The Supreme Court said Thursday that a large swath of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision with potential implications for nearly 2 million residents and one of the most significant victories for tribal rights in years.

The land at issue contains much of Tulsa, the state’s second-largest city. The question for the court was whether Congress officially eliminated the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation when Oklahoma became a state in 1907.

In a 5-to-4 decision invoking the country’s long history of mistreating Native Americans, the court said “we hold the government to its word” and the land Congress promised to the Creek Nation is still Indian land.

“If Congress wishes to withdraw its promises, it must say so. Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law,” wrote Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who was joined by the court’s liberal justices.

“To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law,” Gorsuch said, “both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right.”

The dissent, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., warned of significant upheaval in the criminal justice system, and in other areas of government such as taxing and zoning. But state and tribal leaders downplayed those concerns and said they are negotiating an agreement to address jurisdictional issues.

Most directly, the ruling means that federal officers, not state authorities, have the power to prosecute tribal members for major crimes committed in the defined area. Less certain is how the decision affects the authority of state and city leaders when it comes to imposing taxes, zoning laws and other regulations.

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter and leaders of five tribal groups issued a joint statement after the ruling indicating they have made “substantial progress toward an agreement” to submit to Congress and the Justice Department that would put in place a “framework of shared jurisdiction.” 

“We have a shared commitment to maintaining public safety and long-term economic prosperity for the Nations and Oklahoma,” according to the statement from Hunter and the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations.

Lawmakers in Washington would have to pass legislation, for instance, for state officials to continue prosecuting crimes involving tribal members in the area affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Somehow I don't see Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats going out of their way to dissolve these five nations anytime soon, which means Oklahoma and Washington DC are going to have to work out an agreement and stick to it.

But this is a huge tribal victory, one that almost certainly means that all of Eastern Oklahoma is Indian Country, along with the existing Osage Reservation northwest of Tulsa.

We'll see what can be worked out.

Thanks, Neil!

Indepen-Dunce Week: Stone Cold Negative

Bill Barr may have dropped the charges against Michael Flynn (who is now completely down the "deep state" conspiracy theory black hole) in order to save Donald Trump, but Barr apparently isn't going to extend convicted dirty tricks artist Roger Stone the same courtesy. If Trump wants to save Stone from reporting to a Georgia prison on Tuesday, he's going to have to order the pardon himself.

The Justice Department supports longtime Trump friend Roger Stone going to prison on Tuesday, according to a new court filing. 

Stone has asked a federal appeals court for emergency help to delay his prison term until September, citing coronavirus. 

But the Justice Department, which has been criticized for going easy on Stone, said the report date of July 14 that was set by his trial judge is "a reasonable exercise of that court's discretion based on the totality of the factual and legal circumstances." 

The Justice Department argument on Thursday sets up how Stone may need to turn to President Donald Trump as his last hope to avoid prison. 

The department told the DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday that Stone, 67, hasn't given any legal reasons why he should be treated differently from other convicted felons or kept out of prison at this time. Stone had claimed he had an exceptional situation because his age put him at risk of death from coronavirus in prison. 

Stone has all but conceded he's unlikely to get another reprieve from a court before July 14, when he's set to turn himself in to a federal prison camp in Georgia. In recent weeks, he blanketed online forums with pleas for a presidential pardon. 

Despite Attorney General William Barr calling Stone's case a "righteous" prosecution, Trump has repeatedly said Stone is a victim of the Mueller investigation, which the President, without basis, has called corrupt and illegal. "He can sleep well at night!" Trump wrote on Twitter on June 4 after a Stone supporter tweeted about a pardon. 

Stone's prison term has already been delayed before. 

A federal judge delayed Stone's June 30 prison report date by two weeks, ordering him to spend that time at home essentially in quarantine. The prison in Jesup, Georgia, has reported 10 inmates and three staff testing positive with coronavirus as of Thursday afternoon, with one staff member recovered. It's unclear how many of those cases are in the medium-security prison versus the camp where Stone is to report. 

Stone was indicted in January 2019 on charges including attempting to cover up his efforts to reach WikiLeaks in 2016 to help the Trump campaign access documents stolen by the Russians. Prosecutors argued at the trial that Stone had lied to Congress in 2017 to protect the President. 

A jury found him guilty last November, and Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him to more than three years in prison in February.

So, absent a presidential commutation or full pardon, Roger's going to prison on Tuesday.  And if that happens, I bet he'll be willing to make a deal to rat out Trump to save himself.

Clock's ticking, Donald. You've talked a good game, but are you willing to risk Barr's wrath?

President Donald Trump implied in a pair of interviews Thursday that he was ready to grant clemency to Roger Stone, his friend and ally who was convicted of, among other things, lying to Congress and is set to go to prison this month.  

Trump is widely expected to pardon or commute Stone's sentence, according to at least half a dozen sources close to the President. 

Asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity whether he's considered a pardon or commutation for Stone, Trump said during a phone interview, "I am always thinking." 

"You'll be watching like everyone else in this case," he said. 

In another interview, with radio host Howie Carr, Trump decried Stone's treatment at the hands of law enforcement and said he may grant his clemency plea. 

"He was framed. He was treated horrible. He was treated so badly," Trump said. 

Told Stone was "praying" for a pardon ahead of the day he is due to report to prison on July 14, Trump said Thursday, those prayers may be worthwhile. 

"If you say he's praying, his prayer may be answered," Trump said. "Let's see what happens." 

Stay tuned.  That pardon could come as soon as tonight.

What will Barr do in response?  Most likely nothing and he'll go around cleaning up the crap all over the floor like he always does, but wouldn't this be funny if it was the last straw?

We'll see.  Should be an interesting weekend to say the least.

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Indepen-Dunce Week: Losing To Win

Donald Trump lost both tax cases today in front of SCOTUS, but he won when it comes to delaying the now inevitable release of whatever criminal information in his returns until after the election.

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected President Trump’s assertion that he enjoys absolute immunity while in office, allowing a New York prosecutor to pursue a subpoena of the president’s private and business financial records.

In a separate case, the court sent a fight over congressional subpoenas for the material back to lower courts because of “significant separation of powers concerns.”

“In our judicial system, ‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence,’” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the New York case, citing an ancient maxim. “Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States.”

In both cases, the justices ruled 7 to 2, with Trump nominees Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the majorities. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented.
While the court said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. had the authority to subpoena the records from Trump’s private accounting firm, it also sent the case back to a district court for more work.

The information is part of a grand jury investigation, so the joint decisions dash the hopes of Trump opponents that the information will be available to the public before the election.

Vance is investigating whether the Trump Organization falsified business records to conceal hush payments to two women, including pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed they had sex with Trump before he took office. Trump has denied those claims.

Vance is seeking Trump’s tax returns, among other records. The president has refused to make them public, unlike previous modern presidents. Because the records are for a grand jury investigation, they would not likely be disclosed before the election.

So both cases will go back to lower courts for ruling based on the test criteria outlined by Chief Justice Roberts in both decisions, meaning that while the cases will go on, they will go on long after November's election.

Trump is probably in real trouble at the state level. He could be indicted, depending on how NY's state courts rule, but that won't happen until next year at the earliest.

As far as the House Democratic subpoenas go, those too go back to a lower court, will be made moot when Congress adjourns in January, and the process will have to start 100% all over again. If Trump's still President in 2021 with a new Congress, Trump will simply tie the ruling on the specific subpoena up in court for another two years and let the subpoena expire again. Roberts gave him (and all future presidents) the road map to do just that.

Either way though, Trump lost, but effectively won, at least as far as the 2020 election goes on his clearly politically fatal tax returns. Besides, what difference would the fact that Trump's a tax cheat and criminal make to voters now, at this point, after all the criminal acts he's already performed in office so openly and brazenly?

Effectively it doesn't matter at all.  But it will be used against Joe Biden next year if the GOP still controls the Senate. If not, expect Biden to be sued by red states for...something...in retaliation for the New York case against Trump.

And while politically Trump wins, legally, should he lose the election, he's now almost certainly heading for prison in New York. Keep in mind that Trump now has every reason to make sure that never happens, or he's spending the rest of his life in a prison hospital.

How far will he go to escape that fate?

Indepen-Dunce Week: Bluenami Tsunami

I said last month that I wouldn't be convinced Joe Biden had any shot of defeating Trump until he was favored to take the 270 electoral votes he needed to win. Up until now it's been tossup after tossup, and tossups right now have to favor the incumbent. But now, Cook Political Report finally has Biden getting 279 electoral votes regardless of tossups, and finally, it's time to start to believe Biden can win. Cook's Amy Walter:

This election is looking more like a Democratic tsunami than simply a Blue wave. President Trump, mired in some of the lowest job approval ratings of his presidency, is trailing Biden by significant margins in key battleground states like Pennsylvania (8 points), Michigan (9 points), and Wisconsin (9 points). He’s even running behind Biden in his firewall states of Florida and North Carolina.

We’ve made changes to our Electoral College ratings to reflect this reality.

• Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska’s 2nd district move from Toss Up to Lean Democrat.
• Maine, once in Lean Democrat, moves to the safer Likely Democratic category.
• Georgia has joined Arizona, North Carolina and Florida in the Toss Up column, although, at this point, Biden would be slightly favored to win at least Arizona and Florida.
• Maine’s 2nd district has moved from Likely Republican to a more competitive Lean Republican.

These moves alone push Biden over the 270 electoral vote threshold (to 279).

Caveats still abound even as down-ballot races are shifting towards the Dems.

Can things change between now and November? Of course. So, this comes with that important caveat. But, we also know that the president is not interested in changing his approach or focus. As one strategist who has been doing extensive focus group work with suburban voters tells us, “they are mostly done with Trump.”

One of the biggest unknowns, however, is voting itself. As we’ve seen this spring and early summer, most states are not prepared for an onslaught of absentee ballots. And confusion about how/where to vote could impact turnout. Moreover, if voters start to sense that the race for president is a blow-out, will they be more willing to split their tickets to ensure a ‘check and balance’ in Washington next fall? At least one Republican I spoke with, however, was wary of a check and balance working this year, telling me that “people are looking for a restart and a reset.” That includes down-ballot candidates as well as the president.

The reality is that we won't know who won for at least a week after Election Day, if not two or three weeks.  A 279-269 scenario where Trump runs the table on tossups would still be a Biden win, but Trump could all but force a Supreme Court decision to move things to go to the House if votes aren't counted and certified by December 14th, when electors are supposed to meet in state capitals. 

Bush v Gore went until December 12th, 2000 and was decided just days before the elector deadline that year, the 18th (First Monday after the second Wednesday in December).  If Florida can go that long, imagine the Trumpies jamming up a half-dozen or more states this way to prevent Biden from being able to claim 270.

The point is, take nothing for granted.

Even the ability to vote.

Indepen-Dunce Week: It's About The Kids, See

House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy takes to USA Today to sell the Republican priority of legal immunity to COVID-19 lawsuits for businesses by using America's schoolchildren as bargaining chips.

The economic shutdown has transformed many American households into makeshift day cares, middle school classrooms and summer camps. Parents have had to take on the roles of teachers and coaches while trying to manage full-time jobs. Now, as we look to reopen parts of the economy, those same parents are facing limited to zero options for child care.

Under COVID-19 orders, 50% of providers recently surveyed reported their center was completely closed, and most of the providers who did remain open were operating at less than 25% capacity. And 1 in 3 jobs in child day care centers went away, likely for good. Additionally, many schools will reopen this fall with staggered or part-time schedules and at least 60 private schools have permanently closed, displacing more than 8,000 students.

We now see a looming crisis for schools and child care. If it's left unaddressed, it will exacerbate the economic crisis caused by the pandemic by preventing parents across the country from returning to work, and continue to widen the socioeconomic gap.

There is an important role for Congress to play in alleviating the stress on our families. We should begin by addressing the shortage of child care options by working to keep existing providers in business and encouraging new child care providers, including home-based providers, to start up in as safe and healthy a way as possible. Any additional financial relief considered by Congress to businesses to aid in the economic recovery should prioritize child care providers and schools.

Small home-based providers should be treated like start-ups and given small business support, including access to regional networks, to help improve quality and access to group purchasing power. This will also help providers with recruitment and professional development of the workforce, for both new and returning employees. Many of these businesses are owner-operated, women and minority owned businesses. Helping them launch and setting them up for success could be a win-win in aiding the recovery.

Again, this is exactly what Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have been proposing for over two months now, and Senate Republicans have been blocking for over two months now.  So what's the catch?

Next paragraph, please.

A part of helping schools and child care centers confidently reopen will involve providing liability protections against frivolous lawsuits. COVID-19 related lawsuits against businesses (including child care providers as well as K-12 schools), when good-faith efforts to follow best health practices and recommendations are followed, are an existential threat to companies large and small.

K-12 schools across the country have asked Congress to provide meaningful, targeted protection from frivolous claims and lawsuits resulting from possible exposure to the coronavirus on school facilities and property. A wave of such lawsuits threatens to prevent child care providers and schools from reopening, which would undermine the economic and social recovery of our country.

And there it is.

Republicans are already making plans to force schools to reopen this fall regardless of safety. Florida is already forcing all schools to reopen next month and Texas is doing the same thing. Nationally, the Trump regime says it will not allow public schools to reopen on partial or staggered schedules, and that distance learning will not be accepted.

The CDC's guidance for schools recommends that students and teachers wear masks “as feasible,” spread out desks, stagger schedules, eat meals in classrooms instead of the cafeteria, and add physical barriers between bathroom sinks.

Some schools have announced plans to bring students back for only a few days a week, an option that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday said was unacceptable.

“It’s clear that our nations schools must fully reopen and fully operate this school year. Anything short of that robs students, not to mention taxpayers, of their future,” DeVos said.

During a call with governors, DeVos slammed plans by Virginia's Fairfax County Public Schools to have families decide between fully remote instruction or two days a week at school. “A choice of two days per week in the classroom is not a choice at all," DeVos said, according to audio of the call obtained by The Associated Press.

DeVos also criticized many schools' attempts at distance education after the pandemic prompted them to move classes online last spring. She said she was disappointed in schools that “didn’t figure out how to serve students or who just gave up and didn’t try.”

The same thing can’t happen again this fall, she said, urging governors to play a role in getting schools to reopen.

They gave up because of school funding cuts across the board by Republicans.  By the way, Cincinnati plans to open schools in the fall on a staggered schedule. Mayor Cranley says he disagrees with the plan and says schools have no choice but to open as normal.

Finally, Donald Trump made it clear today that he plans to cut all federal funding for any school district, college, or university that doesn't open this fall.

Trump on Wednesday morning tweeted, "In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!" 

On Tuesday night, DeVos said she is “very seriously” looking at withholding federal funds from schools that don't open their doors this fall.

“Kids have got to continue learning,” she told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson during an interview late Tuesday. “Schools have got to open up, there has got to be concerted effort to address the needs of all kids and adults who are fear mongering and making excuses simply have got to stop doing it and turn their attention on what is right for students and for their families.” 

Federal funding for K-12 schools includes billions for low-income schools and special education. But education leaders immediately questioned how the administration would propose to hold back those funds or others. 

"To be clear: there is no mechanism by which they can decide to magically withhold funding without Congressional authorization," tweeted Sasha Pudelski, advocacy director for AASA, The School Superintendents Association.

This is going to be the big fight over the next several weeks across the country, and it's going to play out against a backdrop of a massive spike in cases and very soon a massive spike in COVID-19 deaths.  Kids are going to be Republican pawns, put in the direct path of a pandemic that will kill thousands and cripple tens, maybe hundreds of thousands more. And teachers, educators, and school staff?  When they start dropping dead in classrooms?

What then?  "Find a way to open as normal or lose all funding, you have six weeks."

Keep an eye on this. The future of public education in America is now very much in doubt.

And that's exactly what Republicans want.

The end of public education.

Indepen-Dunce Week: A Pair Of Supreme Disappointments

America got a bit closer toward theocracy today with two SCOTUS decisions on your employer's religion trumping your own, with your employer now able to deny you health care coverage and oh yes, your job, based entirely on their "closely-held" religious beliefs.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to give the nation's employers more leeway in refusing to provide free birth control for their workers under the Affordable Care Act.

The ruling is a victory for the administration's plan to greatly expand the kinds of employers who can cite religious or moral objections in declining to include contraceptives in their health care plans.

Up to 126,000 women nationwide would lose birth control coverage under President Donald Trump's plan, the government estimated. Planned Parenthood said nearly nine in 10 women seek contraceptive care of some kind during their lifetimes.

The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, gives the government authority to create the religious and moral objections, said Justice Clarence Thomas for the court's 7-2 majority.

The Department of Health and Human Services "has virtually unbridled discretion to decide what counts as preventive care and screenings," and that same authority "leaves its discretion equally unchecked in other areas, including the ability to identify and create exemptions from its own guidelines," he said.

In dissent, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said the court in the past has struck a balance in religious freedom cases, so that the beliefs of some do not overwhelm the rights of others.

"Today for the first time, the court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree" and "leaves women workers to fend for themselves" in seeking contraceptive services, they said.

Women’s groups condemned the ruling. The National Women’s Law Center said more than 61 million women get birth control coverage through Obamacare.

It's going to be zero if the GOP gets its way, as the ACA won't exist, which is another issue, but Thomas's ruling basically states that the government should be making these moral and legal objections on behalf of employers.

Are employers going to have to opt-in to birth control coverage now because the Trump regime can now assume employers object unless they say otherwise?  Thomas's ruling certainly left that door wide open should the regime decide everyone "needs" that exception.

And as far as job discrimination goes, well, your employer's religious beliefs now mean they can fire anyone they like.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday strengthened legal protections that shield religious institutions from job discrimination lawsuits.

It was the court's second ruling this term intended to expand religious freedom. In a previous 5-4 ruling along traditional ideological lines, the justices said states cannot exclude religiously affiliated schools from state scholarship programs, a decision that further lowered the wall of separation between church and state.

"The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools, and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission," wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the 7-2 majority. "Judicial review of the way in which religious schools discharge those responsibilities would undermine the independence of religious institutions in a way that the First Amendment does not tolerate."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent for herself and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the ruling is based on a simplistic approach that "has no basis in law and strips thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protections."

A 2012 Supreme Court ruling protects churches, the schools they run, and other religious organizations from lawsuits brought by employees who perform a "ministerial" function. Allowing such suits, the court said then, would invite government interference in a religious institution's internal affairs.

Wednesday's ruling involved Roman Catholic schools in southern California that were sued after deciding not to renew contracts for two teachers. Agnes Morrissey-Berru sued Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach for age discrimination when her contract was terminated, and Kristen Biel sued St. James School in Torrance when her contract wasn't renewed after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She said the school violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In both cases, the churches said they were protected from discrimination lawsuits. But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused to throw the cases out, ruling that even though the teachers taught some religious subjects, their duties were not ministerial. Morrissey-Berru is not a practicing Catholic and was not required to attend any religious training for most of the time she taught at Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Got cancer?  Too bad, God says you're fired.  The Hobby Lobby decision is a Pandora's box that's going to destroy the Civil Rights era if left unchecked.  A second Trump term guarantees it.

Oh, can't help but notice here the losers in both of these rulings are almost exclusively women...

Just putting that out there.

Indepen-Dunce Week: Tales From The Trump Depression

As I've been warning for months now, COVID-19 eviction moratoriums have expired all over the country on July 1, and we're going to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions thrown out into the street over the next several months, into the jaws of an epidemic and an economic depression. And the majority of victims will be black and brown.

A backlog of eviction cases is beginning to move through the court system as millions of Americans who had counted on federal aid and eviction moratoriums to stay in their homes now fear being thrown out. 

A crisis among renters is expected to deepen this month as the enhanced unemployment benefits that have kept many afloat run out at the end of July and the $1,200-per-adult stimulus payment that had supported households earlier in the crisis becomes a distant memory. 

Meanwhile, enforcement of federal moratoriums on some types of evictions is uneven, with experts warning that judges’ efforts to limit access to courtrooms or hold hearings online because of covid-19 could increasingly leave elderly or poor renters at a disadvantage. 

Of the 110 million Americans living in rental households, 20 percent are at risk of eviction by Sept. 30, according to an analysis by the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project, a Colorado-based community group. African American and Hispanic renters are expected to be hardest hit.

More than twenty million new homeless in the next three months.

Twenty million. 

“If you look at the covid pandemic and the health outcomes, the economic outcomes, that is hitting black and brown people very hard,” said Peter Hepburn, a research fellow at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. “And that is likely to be seen in the housing market as well.”

In response to a survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, about 44 percent and 41 percent of adult Latino and black renters, respectively, said they had no or slight confidence they could pay their rent next month or were likely to defer payment, according to an Urban Institute analysis of the data, which was collected between May 28 and June 9. About 21 percent of white renters felt the same.

In Milwaukee, where a state eviction moratorium was lifted in late May, the number of eviction filings through June 27 was up 13 percent compared with previous years, according to data collected by the Eviction Lab research group. Nearly 1,300 cases have been filed so far in June. About two-thirds of those cases were filed in majority-black neighborhoods.

“Milwaukee is the future. A lot of these other cities are just beginning to ramp up their capacity to process cases again,” Hepburn said.

Evictions are also beginning to pick up in areas where coronavirus infections have recently spiked, said Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) recently ordered bars to close and restaurants to reduce occupancy after coronavirus cases surged in the state. But the courts remain open in Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, where more than 2,000 eviction complaints were filed in June, according to January Advisors, a data science consulting firm.

“That wave [of evictions] has already begun. We are trying to prevent it from becoming a tsunami,” Yentel said.

Thousands of  evictions will become tens of thousands very soon.  Nobody is talking about doing anything to stop it. As bad as things are now, they will be much worse in the months ahead, in every possible aspect, suffering untold.

Rent's due.

Nowhere to go for many.

Welcome to the Trump Depression.

Indepen-Dunce Week: Portrait Of The Con Artist As A Young Punk

Excerpts are starting to come out from the tell-all book due next week from Trump's niece Mary, and they are not flattering of the Orange Emperor at all.

Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, paints her uncle the president in a horrifying light and reveals explosive details about his character and disparaging comments made by his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry.

“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary bluntly declares in the book. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”

In one particularly disturbing scene from a trip to Mar-a-Lago, Mary recounts how when she was 29 and wearing a bathing suit and a pair of shorts to lunch at the resort, her uncle looked up at her and remarked, “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked.”
“Donald!” Marla Maples said to her then-husband, slapping him on the arm.

“I was twenty-nine and not easily embarrassed, but my face reddened, and I suddenly felt self-conscious,” Mary recounts. “I pulled my towel around my shoulders. It occurred to me that nobody in my family, outside of my parents and brother, had ever seen me in a bathing suit.”

The Daily Beast first reported that the book would see Mary revealing herself as playing a critical role in helping The New York Times print its Pulitzer Prize-winning bombshell investigation of the president’s taxes, including how he was involved in “fraudulent” tax schemes and received more than $400 million (adjusted for inflation) from his father’s real-estate empire. As she reveals in the book, Mary supplied the paper with Fred Trump Sr.’s tax returns and other confidential financial information.

The book, obtained by The Daily Beast, opens with a family dinner at the White House in April, 2017 to celebrate the birthdays for Mary’s aunts, Maryanne and Elizabeth.

As Mary was walking through the halls of The White House, she recalls passing life-sized paintings of former first ladies. “I stopped in front of Hillary Clinton’s portrait and stood silently for a minute. I wondered again how this could have happened.”

At the dinner, just a few months after her uncle had moved into the White House, Mary recounts how Donald gestured towards Eric Trump’s wife, his daughter-in-law. “Lara, there,” he said. “I barely even knew who the fuck she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me.” The couple had been together for eight years.

Don Jr. went on to give a toast to his father, at which point Mary got one of the waiters’ attention. “Can I have some more wine?” she asked. When the waiter returned with two bottles, and asked red or white, Mary responded “yes, please.”

The dinner wrapped in two hours and as Mary notes while it was twice as long as Thanksgiving or Christmas at her grandparents’ house, it was less time than Donald spent at a dinner with Kid Rock two weeks later.

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, goes on to describe her uncle as meeting all the criteria for malignant narcissism and how he is easily manipulated by others when it comes to his constant need for adoration.

The NY Times story on the book goes further, describing an incident where Trump got into college by arranging for someone to take his SATs for him and that he treated his older brother Freddy, Mary's father, like garbage.

As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school.

Mr. Trump has often boasted about attending Wharton, which he has referred to as “the best school in the world” and “super genius stuff.”

The Washington Post recounts Mary's story about Trump bullying his younger brother Robert.

Donald delighted in tormenting his younger brother, Robert, whom he perceived as weaker, Mary Trump writes. Donald repeatedly hid his brother’s favorite toys, a set of Tonka trucks he received for Christmas, and pretended he didn’t know where they had gone. When Robert threw a tantrum, “Donald threatened to dismantle the trucks in front of him if he didn’t stop crying.”

All of this stems from Donald Trump's father Fred Trump Sr. being a flat-out sociopath growing up.

It's the rest of the world who now suffers for it.

Indepen-Dunce Week: Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem

What if Antifa threw a flag-burning and nobody came except the white supremacist militias?

For weeks, a mysterious figure on social media talked up plans for antifa protesters to converge on this historical site on Independence Day to burn American flags, an event that seemed at times to border on the farcical.

“Let’s get together and burn flags in protest of thugs and animals in blue,” the anonymous person behind a Facebook page called Left Behind USA wrote in mid-June. There would be antifa face paint, the person wrote, and organizers would “be giving away free small flags to children to safely throw into the fire.”

As word spread, self-proclaimed militias, bikers, skinheads and far-right groups from outside the state issued a call to action, pledging in online videos and posts to come to Gettysburg to protect the Civil War monuments and the nation’s flag from desecration. Some said they would bring firearms and use force if necessary.

On Saturday afternoon, in the hours before the flag burning was to start, they flooded in by the hundreds — heavily armed and unaware, it seemed, that the mysterious Internet poster was not who the person claimed to be.

Biographical details — some from the person’s Facebook page and others provided to The Washington Post in a series of messages — did not match official records. An image the person once posted on a profile page was a picture of a man taken by a German photographer for a stock photo service.

The episode at Gettysburg is a stark illustration of how shadowy figures on social media have stoked fears about the protests against racial injustice and excessive police force that have swept across the nation since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25.

Armed vigilantes lined the streets of small Idaho towns last month after false claims circulated online about antifa, a loose collection of activists who oppose fascism and have sometimes embraced property damage and violent protest in recent years. Similar hoaxes have befallen towns in New Jersey, South Dakota and Michigan in recent weeks.

Yes, these guys are armed, dangerous, and absolutely ready to shoot people. Working-class white folks who believe race and ethnicity are coming to wipe them out. Less-than-knowledgeable, easily-led types.



You know, morons..

Thank goodness for that.

But even morons can kill.  And somebody is absolutely making sure that these goobers can find "antifa" to bear arms against. One of these times, it's going to get ugly.

Very ugly.

Indepen-Dunce Week: Follow The Money

The two-thirds of a trillion or so in Trump regime "small business loans" that I told you was going to turn into massive corporate graft, sleaze, and outright theft was even worse than anyone could have known and in tens of thousands of cases not a single job was saved as they took the money and ran.

Data released Monday by the Small Business Administration show that businesses owned by members of Congress and the law practice that represented President Trump were among the hundreds of thousands of firms that received aid from the agency.

As part of its $660 billion small business relief program, the SBA also handed out loans to private schools catering to elite clientele, firms owned by foreign companies and large chains backed by well-heeled Wall Street firms. Nearly 90,000 companies in the program took the aid without promising on their applications they would rehire workers or create jobs.
The data, which was released after weeks of pressure from media outlets and lawmakers, paints a picture of a haphazard first-come, first-serve program that was not designed to evaluate the relative need of the recipients. While it buttressed a swath of industries and entities, including restaurants, medical offices, car dealerships, law firms and nonprofits, the agency did not filter out companies that have potential conflicts of interest among influential Washington figures.

Several major chains owned by big investment firms, including PF Changs, Legal Sea Foods, and Silver Diner, received millions of dollars, which may rekindle questions about whether large companies with Wall Street connections should accept the money or not. Over the past weeks, dozens of publicly traded companies returned money after they were told by the Treasury Department that the program was not meant for large, well-capitalized companies.
Companies applying for the money were required to certify that the money was “necessary to support the ongoing operations,” while taking into account “their ability to access other sources of liquidity," the SBA’s website states.

Treasury and SBA spokespersons declined to comment. Other administration officials declined to speak on the record about the data.

“We think we’ve done a reasonably good job of suggesting that those who were not going to be able to meet the certification should have returned money,” said one senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to follow the administration’s rules for releasing the information.

And of course, members of Congress outright looted the Treasury, nearly all of them Republicans.

Among some of those receiving relief were Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s family’s shipping business. In addition, at least seven members of Congress or their spouses received loans, including lawmakers who were directly involved in shaping regulations and also benefited from a blanket waiver of ethics concerns.

Among the loan recipients disclosed is KTAK Corporation, a Tulsa-based operator of fast food franchises owned by Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.). Hern had advocated to increase the size of loans available to franchises, including in a March letter to Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and Charles E. Schumer.
KTAK reported receiving between $1 million and $2 million to support 220 jobs. Hern spokeswoman Miranda Dabney said the letter was “a bipartisan idea meant to simplify the way loans were calculated,” and said the franchise rule that Hern advocated for did not benefit KTAK because it employs fewer than 500 people.

“These PPP loans are all about paying employees so any expansion or increased funding measures were aimed at helping employees of franchisees stay employed,” Dabney said. “The whole program was designed to keep people off of unemployment.”

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) benefited when three of his car dealerships, located outside of Pittsburgh, received a combined total of between $450,000 and $1.05 million to retain 97 jobs, according to the data.
Kelly is not involved in the day-to-day operations of his auto dealerships, said spokesman Andrew Eisenberger, and did not participate in discussions between the dealerships and the PPP lender. 

“Kelly’s small family business employs more than 200 western Pennsylvanians whose jobs were at risk because of [Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s] business shut down order,” Eisenberger said.

Several plumbing businesses affiliated with Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), all based in Broken Arrow, Okla., each received between $350,000 and $1 million. A spokeswoman said Rep. Mullin is not involved in the day-to-day operation of his businesses.

The rich took the cash, fired employees anyway, and pocketed hundreds of billions.

"But Zandar, they have to pay it back, right?"


Sure, they pull accounting tricks and write off losses.


Meanwhile, tens of millions of us lost jobs and the rent's due.

Indepen-Dunce Week: Retribution Execution

The Trump regime's future fascism can ill afford another incident where the Pentagon talks him out of US troops putting a few thousand rounds into protesters, so the loyalty checks and purges are on in the Defense Department.

A pair of 20-something White House staffers will begin conducting interviews with political appointees at the Defense Department starting next week, three current and former U.S. officials told Foreign Policy, a move that some fear could lead to more dismissals of Pentagon officials considered disloyal to President Donald Trump.

The White House liaison office sent an email to political appointees at the Pentagon on Wednesday, inviting officials to schedule a meeting with representatives from the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). The message, described in detail to Foreign Policy, touts the meetings as a platform for noncareer officials to show off their credentials for a position in a possible second Trump term.

Advertised as “office calls,” the meetings over the course of several weeks will include each political appointee in the Pentagon, from presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed appointees to their subordinates, according to the email. “This is an opportunity for each appointee to discuss their career and interests for 2021 and beyond,” the email said.

The interviews will be conducted by two subordinates of John McEntee, Trump’s former body man who now runs the personnel office: John Troup Hemenway, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia, and Jordan Hayley, who graduated from Liberty University in June and heads up PPO’s external relations. Politico first reported in April that Hayley had joined PPO, after Hemenway was brought on in March.

“These meetings were set up by DoD so that our political appointees could discuss second-term opportunities at the Department and throughout the administration,” Chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Rath Hoffman told Foreign Policy.

Though the email described to Foreign Policy appears to include all appointed Pentagon officials, a defense official said senior officials such as Defense Secretary Mark Esper are not intended to participate and described the meetings as nonmandatory. Following interviews at the Pentagon, White House personnel are also expected to interview appointees at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security in the coming weeks, officials familiar with the matter said.

But current and former officials who spoke to Foreign Policy worry that the 30-minute interviews will be used to root out officials who aren’t seen as sufficiently loyal to Trump, as the Pentagon has been rocked by the recent departures of several top appointees who broke with the White House on the hold of military aid to Ukraine or had ties to Trump’s political foes.

“I think the assumption is correct—aligned with Trump or you’re out,” a former senior Trump administration official told Foreign Policy.

“Suffice it to say that in my 30 years in government I am unaware of anything quite like this,” Eric Edelman, a former Pentagon policy chief during the George W. Bush administration, told Foreign Policy in an email.

Foreign Policy reported this week that the McEntee-led PPO has been pushing for Rich Higgins, a former National Security Council staffer under Trump fired for a memo that alleged “deep state” political actors were conspiring to overthrow the president, to be hired for a top job in the Pentagon over objections from inside the department. Moving loyalists into political appointments at the Pentagon could position them to move into higher-level jobs if Trump is reelected in November.

The news of the interviews also comes after high-profile departures of officials perceived as disloyal to Trump. The resignation of Kathryn Wheelbarger, who performed the duties of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs for nearly two years, will become effective on Saturday, after the White House dropped her intended nomination for a top Pentagon intelligence post.

Other recent Pentagon exits appear to be casualties of the House’s impeachment of Trump. Elaine McCusker resigned her role as acting comptroller in June. She was removed from consideration for the permanent post after raising questions about Trump’s aid freeze to Ukraine at the center of the impeachment trial. Former Pentagon policy chief John Rood was also fired in February after finding himself at odds with the president on Ukraine and other behind-the-scenes clashes with the White House.

So yeah, just remember, a second Trump term means a rubber stamp military that will obey not the Constitution, not the rule of law, but Trump.

And only Trump.

Last Call For Indepen-Dunce Week

Taking the week off to recharge, as it's been necessary to do so.  I'll post at least one thing daily, but right now it's time to decompress a bit.

The fireworks in DC got hot last night.

As the official fireworks show began over the National Mall, some people gathered at Black Lives Matter Plaza offered up a counter narrative in the form of Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black national anthem. Others opted instead to chant “fuck your fireworks.”

The plaza played host to protesters throughout the day, a largely tension-free scene as demonstrators continued to demand racial justice. But as Independence Day shifted to night, a series of small confrontations played out, a microcosm of ongoing debate about the right tactics to confront white supremacy.

Around 10:40, a group of Trump supporters walked through, only for protesters to escort them out. Another person walked through, and a protester through his red hat over a fence.

Some protesters wanted to get more physical with the president’s supporters, while others just wanted to help facilitate their exit. Police eventually formed a line to prevent the Trump supporters from reentering the plaza on Vermont Ave.

Earlier in the night—just before the official Fourth of July military flyovers began—a small group of protesters gathered for a “Flag-Burning Challenge,” where they set small U.S. flags alight before eventually torching a larger flag that was laying on the ground. The event sparked a brief scuffle, as other protesters tried to stop the flag-burning from happening.

“This is what they want, don’t give it to them,” said one person, alluding to how the act could generate negative coverage of the movement. (Stories about the flag-burning quickly started circulating in right-wing media.)

But for Jamel Mims of the New York City Revolution Club, burning the U.S. flag was justifiable.

“[Trump has] fucking called us terrorists, and called those people, that lynch mob that he’s enabled, ‘fine people.’ And so those fireworks represent a fucking disgrace, and that flag represents the ugly history of that country and its ugly present,” he said. “And there’s only one way to properly display it: fucking on fire.”

The country is burning in more ways than one.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Another Black Lives Matter protester was killed in Seattle by a car, run over by an angry driver who deliberately drove onto a closed highway and hit two protesters.

A 24-year-old woman died Saturday of her injuries after she and another woman were hit by a car on a closed highway in Seattle while protesting against police brutality, authorities said.
Summer Taylor of Seattle died in the evening at Harborview Medical Center, spokeswoman Susan Gregg said.

Taylor and Diaz Love, 32, of Portland, Oregon, were hit by the car that barreled through a panicked crowd of protesters on Interstate 5 early Saturday morning, officials said.

Dawit Kelete of Seattle drove the car around vehicles that were blocking I-5 and sped into the crowd about 1:40 a.m., according to a police report released by the Washington State Patrol. Video taken at the scene by protesters showed people shouting “Car! Car!” before fleeing the roadway.

Love is in serious condition in the intensive care unit, Harborview, Gregg said.

Love was filming the protest in a nearly two-hour-long Facebook livestream captioned “Black Femme March takes I-5” when the video ended abruptly; with about 15 seconds left, shouts of “Car!” can be heard as the camera starts to shake before screeching tires and the sound of impact are heard.

A graphic video posted on social media showed the white Jaguar racing toward a group of protesters who are standing behind several parked cars, set up for protection. The car swerves around the other vehicles and slams into the two women, sending them flying into the air.

The driver, who was alone, fled the scene after hitting the protesters, Trooper Chase Van Cleave told The Associated Press. One of the protesters got in a car and chased the driver for about a mile. He was able to stop him by pulling his car in front of the Jaguar, Van Cleave said.

Troopers arrived, and the driver was put in custody, Washington State Patrol Capt. Ron Mead said.

Kelete was described by offices as reserved and sullen when he was arrested, according to court documents. He also asked if the pedestrians were OK, the documents say.

Kelete was booked into the King County Correctional Facility on Saturday morning on two counts of vehicular assault. Bail was denied.

A judge found probable cause to hold Kelete on an investigation of vehicular assault. He faces a second court hearing on Monday at which the judge will determine if he can be released on bail, according to court documents.

It was not immediately clear if Kelete had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

Officials were trying to determine the motive as well as where he got onto the interstate, which had been closed by the state patrol for more than an hour before the women were hit. Mead said they suspect Kelete drove the wrong way on a ramp. Trooper Rick Johnson said the driver went through a barrier that closed the freeway before striking the women.

Troopers did not know whether it was a targeted attack, but impairment was not considered a factor, Mead said.

The cops are shrugging and saying that protesters shouldn't be on the road, and that state police in Washington can't -- and won't -- guarantee safety.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Sunday Long Read: Why It Was Never Mueller Time

Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin goes over the autopsy report of the Mueller Report's death on arrival in this week's Sunday Long Read , and how the Justice Department was able to defuse it from his first day on the job. In hindsight it was clear how Mueller's careful, by-the-book actions were doomed from the start, and all of them, save Michael Cohen's conviction, will be undone by the time Trump leaves office.

Robert Mueller submitted his final report as the special counsel more than a year ago. But even now—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Administration’s tragically bungled response to it, and the mass demonstrations following the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others—President Trump remains obsessed with what he recently called, on Twitter, the “Greatest Political Crime in the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt.” In the past several months, the President has mobilized his Administration and its supporters to prove that, from its inception, the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government was flawed, or worse. Attorney General William Barr has directed John Durham, the United States Attorney in Connecticut, to conduct a criminal investigation into whether F.B.I. officials, or anyone else, engaged in misconduct at the outset. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also convened hearings on the investigation’s origins.

The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.” Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.” According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true. Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report. In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller—he should be thanking him.

The events that led to Mueller’s appointment began shortly after Trump took office, when he met several times with James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. Over dinner at the White House, on January 27, 2017, Trump said that he expected “loyalty” from Comey—specifically, as he would later make clear, he wanted an announcement from the F.B.I. that he was not under suspicion for misconduct with Russia during the campaign. At the time, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, was being investigated for lying to the F.B.I. As Comey later testified, on February 14th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President told everyone else to leave, then asked Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said. “He is a good guy.”

Comey declined either to publicly clear Trump of wrongdoing or to close the investigation of Flynn, and the President resolved to fire him. On May 8, 2017, Trump told Rod Rosenstein, who had recently been confirmed as the Deputy Attorney General, to write a memo describing Comey’s performance as the F.B.I. director, in particular his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail. The following day, Rosenstein submitted the memo and Trump fired Comey. Sean Spicer, the President’s press secretary, told reporters that the President had done so for the reasons stated in Rosenstein’s memo, but, as Trump soon confirmed in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and in a conversation with visiting Russian officials, the real reason was related to the Russia investigation.

Rosenstein was distraught over how the White House had used his memo. Concerned about Trump’s firing of Comey, he named an independent prosecutor, now known as a special counsel, to look into a possible connection between the Trump campaign and Russia. (Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, had recused himself from matters relating to Russia.) Rosenstein didn’t consider anyone except Mueller for the post. Mueller had both the skills and the bipartisan credibility that the job required. Having worked in the Justice Department during the Cold War, he hardly needed lessons on the malign intentions of the government in Moscow. Mueller had been a federal prosecutor in the nineteen-eighties, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division during the George H. W. Bush Administration, and then, starting in 2001, the F.B.I. director for twelve years. Until May 17th, when Rosenstein named him as the special counsel, Mueller knew very little about the state of the Russia investigation. Andrew McCabe, who, as Comey’s former deputy, was the acting director of the F.B.I., invited Mueller to the J. Edgar Hoover Building for a briefing.

At the first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Russia investigation, on June 3, 2020, Graham opened the proceedings by saying, “It’s important to find out what the hell happened.” He wanted to know whether, when Mueller was appointed, there was any evidence that Trump’s campaign had been colluding with the Russians. McCabe’s briefing of Mueller, along with a subsequent meeting between Mueller and Rosenstein—neither of which has been previously reported—begin to address Graham’s question. These meetings demonstrate that, from the beginning, Mueller was instructed to conduct a narrow, fact-based criminal investigation.

The new information here is the mettings between Mueller and Andrew McCabe, and Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, with the express intent of limiting the scope of Mueller's investigation in order to make sure there was no indication of impropriety.  Mueller of course had no defense against being constantly accused of it, and the investigation found nothing on Trump himself that he could reveal. Toobin goes on to reveal that as most of us suspected, the Mueller team was handcuffed from day one because they didn't know how to deal with cheaters like Trump and especially Barr.

In other words, Mueller was told not to exceed his mandate.  He didn't.  And it cost the country everything, as the regime has been able to hide all the evidence since then, including the grand jury testimony, from House Democrats.  It's entirely possible that we'll never know the full story of what Trump did with Russia for years, if ever.

In all honestly think Joe Biden's first act as President should be to declassify the entire Mueller report and make it public. It won't happen, but it needs to.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

The political, social, economic and electoral story of the last decade in America is the vast demographics change in the country's non-Hispanic white population, or rather, the non-change. The number of white Americans has essentially remained unchanged since 2010 according to preliminary census data analysis by the Brookings Institution.

U.S. racial and ethnic minorities accounted for all of the nation’s population growth during the last decade, according to new Census Bureau estimates.

The data underscore the nation’s growing diversity and suggest that the trend will continue as the White population ages and low birth rates translate to a declining share. Non-Hispanic Whites declined to 60.1% of the populace in 2019 and their number shrank by about 9,000 from the 2010 Census to slightly more than 197 million.
Over the same period, the U.S. added 10.1 million people identified as Hispanic. The median age for White non-Hispanics rose to 43.7 years — more than a decade older than the median Hispanic of any race — with Black and Asian American residents in between.

“The declining White population share is pervasive across the nation,” according to a report by William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The decline was “accentuated in the past few years by a reduction of births among young adult White women and an uptick in deaths, perhaps associated with drug-related ‘deaths of despair.’”

If the data are confirmed by the 2020 census that’s underway, the decade after 2010 would be the first one since the first population count was taken in 1790 that the White population didn’t grow, according to Frey.

White people’s share of the population declined in all 50 states, increasing only in the District of Columbia, according to the Brookings analysis. It fell in 358 of the 364 U.S. metropolitan areas and in 3,012 of its 3,141 counties.

Everything the GOP is doing, the Trump regime is doing, the white supremacists are doing, is driven by this.  All the racism, all the voter suppression, all the redlining, all the immigration stuff, all the deportations and kids in cages and school funding devastation and abortion TRAP laws and and all of it, all of it in service of raising that percentage of white Americans that has fallen now to sixty percent, trying to save the dying system of white supremacy in America.

I repeat.

Everything. 

Everything they have done has been in service to white supremacy, yes.  But now for the first time it is in real danger because white people are simply being outpopulated by the rest of us.

That's it.  That's the entire deal, folks.

Thanks for coming out.