Another page out of the autocrat’s playbook

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” - Hermann Goring

Adolph Hitler’s success was derived from his control of the public narrative. (1)  Similarly, Trump imitates this by deploying the National Guard in Democratically-controlled cities, based on bogus claims that these cities are experiencing out-of-control crime rates.  He’s lambasted the media as an “enemy of the state” and threatened traditional public and private institutions  who do not line up with his authoritarian inclinations.

Like Hitler’s Brown Shirts, Trump uses the military to intimidate any who oppose his imperial motives.  He ignores the courts and is puppeteer to Republicans in Congress and Red State legislatures.  His cruelty towards immigrants is becoming legend. (2)

Renaming the Defense Department as the War Department, along with an unlawful bombing of a suspected drug boat in international waters, is intended to display a macho image.  He ludicrously illustrates this with an “AI re-imagining of the war movie ‘Apocalypse Now,’ which he rebranded as ‘Chipocalypse Now’.” (3)

Many of his dogmatic supporters see him in a paternalistic fashion who will bring discipline to their fear of a chaotic world. (4)  They could be easily characterized as having “daddy issues” by some. (45  Trump’s own upbringing under a domineering father did little to help him establish any positive self-esteem.

But his own actions may be his undoing.  His relationships with pedophiles Epstein and Maxwell destroys any positive fatherly image, even by some of his strongest MAGA-ites.  The fate of our democratic republic waits to see if Trump’s supporters will remain loyal to the dubious father figure he so desperately needs them to see.

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(1)- https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zgtyvcw/revision/5 

(2) - https://immigrantjustice.org/blog/leading-with-cruelty-eight-impacts-of-trumps-first-day-executive-orders/
(3) - https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/unhinged-and-anti-american-critics-erupt-over-trumps-ai-generated-threat/
(4) - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-a-new-home/202407/what-donald-trumps-most-loyal-followers-may-have-in-common
(5) - https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/11/americas-daddy-issues-trump/680566/

The culture of gun violence in America

 

 

 

My daughter was 38 when she passed away from Covid-related Pneumonia  in 2020 and as tough as that loss was I don’t think I could bare the loss of an 8-year old from a senseless, violent act like that which happened in Minneapolis recently.  That mass shooting was just one of some 90 mass shootings in August and one of nearly 300 this year alone.

Mass shooters are deemed mentally unstable which has some validity to that claim but the lax laws in most states make the purchase of these weapons fairly easy by those who have no record of mental instability. Even if there was, guns could still be purchased illegally but in most cases, more difficult than purchasing them openly from a licensed dealer.  Data shows that the highest rates of gun crimes, including suicides, tend to occur in the states with lax laws.

The old argument that claims car accidents cause more deaths than guns hasn’t been true since 2015.(3)  Efforts to legislate sane gun control measures is always met with opposition from the powerful gun lobbyists and their advocates in Congress and state legislatures.  They put profits over the gun epidemic in the U.S. that has one of the highest rate of gun deaths per capita and where they rate #1 in gun ownership.

We can make our schools and neighborhoods safer without denying sane, reasonable people their 2nd amendment rights.  We just lack the will and leadership to make it happen.

Ignore Climate Change at your own risk

 

 

The recent destructive flooding that happened in Central Texas this past week is one more warning about the ramifications of ignoring climate change.

Climate change skeptics are quick to dispute how flooding, like the recent Kerrville, Texas tragedy, has anything to do with man-made climate change.  What many are dismissively calling “acts of God” are more realistically abuses of God’s creation.  

We pump tons of God’s earth bound carbon and methane into the atmosphere every second of every day (1) through our extraction of those elements to meet our ever expanding energy needs.  Our attempts to mitigate this abuse is  constantly being hampered by those who profit from fossil fuel production.

The National Weather Service, that provides more accurate weather forecasts than they were able to in the past, warned citizens in Central Texas about the potential for such devastating floods, but way too late to prevent the deaths for many who got caught up in this severe storm, including many of the young girls who were camping at the popular Camp Mystic, that sat nearly 200 yards from the Guadalupe River’s edge. (2)   This river saw as much as a 36 feet incise in just 5 hours.

This was a tragedy that could have been avoided had the Kerr County officials not decided a few years earlier to forego “their … ability to warn people, including a delayed flood risk alert from Kerr County and stalled development of a flood monitoring system.” (3)  And how ironic too that Kerr County state Rep. Wes Virdell, voted three weeks earlier to prevent the passage of HB 13 that would "have established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure." (4)

Then there’s the Trump administration’s plan to diminish the effectiveness of the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (5)  Along with their plans “to eliminate [FEMA] ‘as it exists today’ and to dole out less money to states that are hit by disasters”, (6) communities become much more vulnerable to these disastrous events.

Trump’s Big Ugly Bill (BUB), that was recently signed into law, is ending all clean energy efforts so they can regenerate the coal and oil production which has brought us to the threshold of catastrophic weather changes.  Changes that will kill innocent and vulnerable men, women and children who sit along coastal waters or near designated flood plains.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) gave solar development a more certain timeline (10 years) of which they could depend on federal tax credits that incentivized solar developers and consumers.  This assurance created demand which in turn created jobs and lower prices for solar engineered products.  Trump’s BUB would completely eliminate developer tax credits by 2028 (7)

The climate science is now showing us that these destructive events will happen far more quickly than they have been.(8)  

The leaders of countries like ours, who ignore the threatening consequences of climate change, are in affect deciding the deadly fate of this unstoppable force, by failing to mitigate the human contribution of green house gases. In so doing, we are coming ever closer through our non-action of even being able to preserve life on this planet as we know it. (9)


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(1) https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/climate-science/how-much-carbon-dioxide-are-we-emitting/
(2) https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/07/06/texas-flood-risks-warnings-alerts-preparation/?location=alert
(3)https://www.axios.com/2025/04/11/trump-eyes-huge-climate-research-cuts-at-noaa
(4) https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5343144-trump-noem-fema-dhs-hurricane-season/
(5) https://www.douglewin.com/p/the-end-of-solar-and-battery-manufacturing?publication_id=1180283&post_id=166762725&isFreemail=true&r=8pb8r&triedRedirect=true
(6)  https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/Climate-change-QA/how-fast-is-climate-changing
(7  https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case-scenarios-sea-level-rise 

(8) https://www.csiro.au/.../Cli.../how-fast-is-climate-changing

(9)  https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case-scenarios-sea-level-rise 

Sustain No Kings Day

"The bedrock of autocracy is laid with the abdication of vigilance" - Sarah Kendzior 

On a day when the nation could have united to salute the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, it was over-shadowed by a man-child, craving attention, who in the past has exhibited “flagrant animosity and disrespect toward the military,” says author and activist Camillo Mac Bica.  Likely the crowd size to honor the men and women who serve in today’s Army would not only have been larger,  but perhaps more exuberant out of respect for their service.

Like everything else Trump inserts himself into, reality gets obstructed by his hyperbole and the fantasy world he creates for those too willing to bend the knee.

His mere presence at that parade diminished what this nation is capable of expressing towards our soldiers.  He cast a pall over this salutary event, just like he sucks the air out of every room he walks into.  He and only he is all that matters in the self-absorbed mind of a monarchical autocrat.

To a day that should have been focused on the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, which we will have for years to come, the nation instead  participated in something far more patriotic that we could easily lose in this generation.  June 14th, 2025 will be written down in the history books as the day this country started to take back their constitutional moorings and stood up to the cowards who hide behind their wealth and power grabs.

May “No Kings Day” be sustained by us all in the days and weeks to come.

"The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes."   - Abraham Lincoln

 

Freedom for who?

"The will of the people is the source and the happiness of the people 

the end of all legitimate government upon earth" - John Quincy Adams

 

Some thoughts on Denton City Council’s repeal of the low-level marijuana decriminalization ordinance.

I made the argument years ago as a member of the Frack Free movement in Denton that sought to ban fracking in our city, that the Texas Legislature was becoming the nanny state they so much protested against when federal legislation was trying to curb the corporate excesses that put profit over people.  An effort to make our air cleaner and by default reduce medical costs for Denton citizens that suffered respiratory ailments was being blocked then by a mindset that still puts self-serving interest over the legitimate will of the people .  The state then, as it’s doing now with the effort to decriminalize the use of marijuana, is guilty of over riding the judgement of a local municipality, based on some ideal that a smaller but more powerful group have the abusive power to force on others.

It not just citizens in Denton who favor legislation that decriminalizes the use of marijuana in small amounts.  A recent poll found that significant majorities in the state of Texas want such legislation.  But the governor and his coterie of like-minded legislators think they know what’s best for Texans.  This behavior demonstrates the hypocrisy that emanates from those who use the “nanny state” label when it serves them best.

About ten years ago, former Texas state senator Don Huffines bemoaned the efforts of federal, state and municipal legislation that dictated what could and couldn’t be in various areas of our daily lives.  But it wasn’t the fact that citizens of this country and state sought legislative changes that essentially wanted the government our of their lives in all things.  It was, as Don Huffines fashioned it in a March 29th, 2015 Op-ed piece, the legislation that came from “insidious … liberal local political subdivisions.”

Breathing cleaner air and indulging in the use of the “devil weed” as it’s adversaries see it,     were things that Huffines saw as an affront to his Tea Party conservative values then, those “rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model”, Huffines claimed.  Liberal local political subdivisions that were forming in the urban areas of the state like Denton as part of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex served as counter-forces to oft restrictive legislation that was either out of date for the times or represented pseudo-religious, capitalist views that didn’t want to see a future that was slowly changing by newer generations of Texans.

At 76 years old, I’m watching our world changing as a result of modern technology that has the unexpected result of isolating us rather than opening up the general narrative that includes a diverse cultural population.  It pains me to see people ignore evidence-based reality and justify their actions as supporting traditional norms but whose sole purpose is to keep their socio-political views as the prominent, and yes, the only, voice that needs to be considered.

We got to where we are today by gradually allowing those cultural changes that were more  inclusive.  “Freedom” may have been the catch word for Tea Party zealots a little over a decade ago, much as it is for the Trump-driven MAGA crowd today, but only if you are a 2nd generation or better, white, laisse- faire Christian and predominantly male.  All others need not apply.

Don Huffines lost his state senate seat 4 years later to Nathan Johnson, the first Democrat to represent his district 16 in over three decades.  Huffiness failed to read the signs that said people in his district at least were tired of the status quo, which too often excluded anyone who didn’t look and sound like him.

The four Denton City Council members, including Mayor Hudspeth, who failed to support the choice their constituents made 2 years ago does not represent a true sense of freedom but a fear that the future is too uncertain for them and that opposing the powers that be is not a risk they are willing to take.  

Any voter remorse yet?

Will our national motto become "In the Generalissimo Trump we trust"?

 

“America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

How satisfied are Trump voters with his chaotic performance thus far?  His destabilizing tariffs enable inflation rates to remain as high or higher than when he took office.  His budget bill, approved by Republican sycophants in Congress, increases the deficit by billions.  Our cost of living is becoming unbearable for millions.

How about Trump’s cavalier attitude towards the rule of law?  Legal immigrants have been deported without any due process, disregarding SCOTUS’ affirmation that these constitutional violations must stop.  

Private institutions like Harvard and any law office that represents Trump’s perceived enemies are now being threatened with financial loss by his White House

Freedom of the press is being threatened as Trump goes after TV and newspaper sources that addressed the facts which exposed Trump’s ongoing lie about the 2020 election, stolen government secrets and his relationship with dictators, especially Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Trump protégé,Elon Musk, has wreaked havoc with our federal system, threatening funding cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid.  Critical agencies like the DOJ, HHS and Homeland Security, are now headed by unqualified flunkies who’ll focus more on his revenge efforts over policies that benefit Main street Americans

And lastly!  If you think you’re safe from Trump’s authoritarian behavior because you’re a conservative white christian, you might want to read what Robert P. Jones,  the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, said about Trump’s vision for extremist Christian Nationalist groups.   

Our constitutional republic will die through our complacency and silence, not a bloody revolution.

 

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 link to the comments above in blue

higher than when he took office   -   https://theconversation.com/us-inflation-has-increased-since-trump-took-office-why-prices-are-unlikely-to-come-down-soon-249956

cavalier attitude towards the rule of law  -    https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-04-16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-donald-trump-el-salvador-nayib-bukele

any law office that represents Trump’s perceived enemies   -    https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/trumps-executive-orders-against-law-firms/

financial loss by his White House   -  https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5364829/trump-administration-freezes-funds-after-harvard-rejects-dei-demands

Freedom of the press is being threatened   -    https://freedom.press/issues/three-press-freedom-threats-during-trump-20/


threatening funding cuts to Social Security,    -  https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2025/03/05/four-trump-threats-to-social-security/

Medicare & Medicaid. -  https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5000935-medicaid-cuts-potential-next-congress/

focus more on his revenge efforts   -   https://www.axios.com/2025/03/21/trump-retaliation-revenge-biden-security-clearance
 

extremist Christian Nationalist groups.  -  https://baptistnews.com/article/trumps-dangerous-closing-message-to-his-white-christian-followers/

In search of our lost humanity

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire


Illegal immigration in America exists primarily because millions are forced to seek relief from physical and economic abuses in their homelands.  Climate change is now interactive also with these abuses as a warming earth deprives people of basic comforts and a means to provide for the essentials of life.

It’s absurd to think then of these people as criminals in the same vein as rapists and murderers.  They’ve risked everything to protect their families from those abuses and now find themselves treated by insensitive and sometimes brutal people here the U.S.; behavior not totally dissimilar to those who drove them from their native countries initially.  This is a notion however, that is apparently too complex for some people to grasp.

In an essay  entitled “On Hostile Coexistence with China” in May of 2019, during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.), noted a view of immigrants that Trump held then remains unchanged today.

“Trump’s presidency has been built on lower middle-class fears of displacement by immigrants and outsourcing of jobs to foreigners.  His campaign found a footing in the anger of ordinary Americans – especially religious Americans – at the apparent contempt for them and indifference to their welfare of the country’s managerial and political elites.”

This strained narrative seems to have altered the thinking of many “ordinary Americans” to see freedom as something not meant for those who don’t look and think like them. They’ve become, it seems, what Isaac Asimov referred to as “a cult of ignorance”  who’ve been “nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that [their] ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”

In a conversation with C.J. Polychroniou, a political scientist/political economist, author and journalist, culture critic Henry A. Giroux noted that “Life is now a war zone and as such the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.”   

Trump has ignored the rule of law and the due process that it guaranties all who stand before it.  He has found willing accomplices in Congress and right wing organizations to diminish the American character we have come to believe in - honorable, hard-working and champions of justice.  We have innocent people here legally, on student visas and green cards, who believed in our 1st amendment right to speak freely, without recourse from government.  They have now become victims of the merging authoritarianism prevalent in most every word and deed Trump falls back  on to appease those who seem to have “put no importance to the way they are governed” and have gambled, as Albert Camus noted, “with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests’. ”

America’s destiny has once again come face to face with the grim reality that power and greed are attempting to delude the virtues we have embodied in leaders like Washington, Lincoln and FDR who put public service before personal gain.  Without it, we become unwary  victims of “free market" capitalists, influencing how we think and behave through captivating ads that project happiness and economic success in material ownership of mostly nonessential products.  Thus, an image that affects personal gains for them and their investors.

“Freedom belongs only to people, Timothy Snyder asserts in his WaPo op-ed. “It does not belong to institutions or abstractions -- and least of all to non-existent institutions or abstractions. The moment that we yield the word "free" to something besides a person, we are yielding our freedom.”    

Trump attempts to run this country much like he did as an evocative entertainer on his TV show, The Apprentice.  Acting tough in a vulgar way and demeaning people openly may get you higher TV ratings, but it becomes a divisive force when applied in our multi-cultural society.  And nothing generates hate more in the MAGAsphere than believing you’re being displaced by “those people who aren’t real Americans”.