NF, One L
Issue #5

1. Complicity in all things is merely an accumulation of rationalizations.

2. Complicity in politics has the added (dis)advantage of requiring those rationalizations be fed on a daily basis, and the only fuel they will accept is raw chunks of soul. Is there anything left inside of Mike Johnson? Is there anything more than an imperious evangelistic smirk behind those eyes? Can he continue to smile while passing legislation that is the opposite of everything it proposes to be, while standing next to The Grifter, a man who is all the things any conservative Southern Christian would rightly flee from? Mike Johnson, worth noting, was a constitutional lawyer for two decades, working as senior legal counsel for “The Alliance To Defend Freedom”. On the ATDF website, it says their mission statement is “The protection of constitutionalism”, which is as meaningless and nebulous a bunch of bullshit as the notion of Mike Johnson retaining a scrap of soul once this is all over, if only because this will never be all over.

3. Staunch constitutionalist Mike Johnson’s law career mostly revolved around taking on Free Speech cases involving the defense of religious freedoms. Not all religious freedoms, just a form of Baptist Evangelism. Other religions requiring freedom? They can find their own Mike Johnson as wingman.

4. Mike Johnson’s Free Speech comes a-la-carte. For instance, he proclaimed during his political rise that homosexuality was “inherently unnatural” and called same-sex marriage “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy” that could “doom even the strongest Republic”. Sure, maybe Mike Johnson and his God of Choice are correct about both. I mean, it’s more than clear (Diddy, 700 dildos) that sexual anarchy is a huge problem in America. That’s why we had the Virgin Birth, friends, no Dark Harbinger to emerge between the legs of for us! So, Mike Johnson stands for Free Speech for everyone, as long as everyone concurs with what Deep South Louisiana Baptists find to be Acceptable Speech. Otherwise, that shit costs. And what it costs is the enforced silence of anyone not wise enough to invest in (tithes, parish bake sales) Correct Speech.

5. In terms of homosexuality and various republics doomed by it, was it Charles Nelson Reilly who jammed his ascot into the gears of Ancient Grecian political philosophy? Did the Goths sacking Rome end the thirteen-century reign of that Imperial Republic, or was it Tiberius who failed to man the gate while sniffing young men’s togas?

6. Maybe both empires were eventually destroyed by the gilded ideals they claimed to stand for politically and religiously eventually rendered fraudulent by wealth disparity and the behavior of the debauched upper classes. Or wait, is that 2025 America?

7. Maybe worth nothing that Louisiana, represented by Representative Mike Johnson, noted defender of small government and state’s rights, ranks 3rd in terms of money taken from the Federal Government. In fact, HALF of Louisiana’s budget comes via federal funding. You know, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, FEMA, education, nutritional assistance programs, infrastructure, Mardi Gras floats, etc. Plus, free abortion! Actually no, but they do mysteriously have one of the lowest rates of available contraception and school sex education while are also proudly THIRD in teen pregnancy and SECOND in sexually transmitted disease!

8. As the brilliant Supreme Court decision Citizens United made clear, gonorrhea is free speech. Also, antibiotics will not cure that "Big Beautiful Bill".

9. Before moving into the glories of public office, Mike Johnson was Dean of The Judge Paul Pressler School of Law. The vaunted JPPSOL (killer division one hoops team) was supposed to be a capstone educational achievement for the state of Louisiana, which administrators boasted would “unashamedly embrace” a “biblical worldview.” Or at least Mike Johnson's worldview. Instead, it collapsed without ever enrolling a single student or opening its doors, ultimately failing to be accredited, although remains as a proud entry on the lengthy and accomplished resume of Mike Johnson. So, kind of like Trump University, which Donald Trump, on the 2016 campaign trail said he would “NEVER settle the lawsuit over” and then three weeks after being elected settled the lawsuit for twenty-five million dollars + admitting fraud.

10. There is no ten.
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11. To be honest, it's possible there is no Mike Johnson.

1. As a longtime resident of San Francisco, I think I can say with complete confidence bolstered by indisputable first-hand factual observation that reopening Alcatraz may be the single stupidest idea I've heard since the last hyperbolic sentence I typed about an idea floated by the untethered mind of The Grifter. Is it dumber than the military occupation of Greenland, making Canada the 51st-58th states, paying Pete Hegseth minimum wage to sort through the Ziploc bag of old screws and nails in your junk drawer, or even, at this late date, still not grasping the meaning, purpose, or repercussions of enacting unilateral tariffs? Actually, yes.

2. Gunrunner Frank C. Weatherman was the final prisoner released, way back in March of 1962, five months before The Cuban Missile Crisis. Hey, you know what happens to a big pile of cheap cement, iron, and steel exposed to Pacific fog, salt air, and freezing temperatures for six decades? It slowly degrades into a monument to folly and rust. So, as they say over at Redfin, a Handyman's Special.

3. There is no electricity on Alcatraz, which, by the way is Spanish for Pelican. What there is, is up to 1 million tourists per year, graffiti, and massive piles of gull, cormorant, and egret shit. Most experts of either party will agree that a brand new shiny Supermax Prison will probably require electricity for full effectiveness. Running a prison entirely on diesel generators, or, at Pete Hegseth's suggestion, running the generators on vodka, seems unwise.

4. There is also no fresh water, fuel, or sewage. There is also no Nick Cage or Sean Connery. It would, on a dollar-to-dollar basis, be more cost effective to build a new prison in the middle of Lake Huron (pay up, Canada) made out of Elon's rejected chin implants, Jeff Bezos' duplicity, Zuckerbook's promises, and the thousands of meters of internal wiring that allow Melania, when unplugged from her charging station for public appearances, seem 12% less androidal.

5. The last president to brainstorm up some really top ideas with his coterie of sycophants and fingertip-sniffers about what to do with Alcatraz was Millard Fillmore, everyone's favorite 13th president, who decreed a lighthouse be erected there. When it was pointed out to Millard that, actually, Mexico owned Alcatraz, The Mill Man pouted for a while, consulted some of the sharper minds on Truth Social, and the next morning announced that since James K. Polk, who everyone knew was a pussy, annexed Texas in 1848, which along with California was 55% of Mexico's overall territory (emphasis on WAS), why couldn't we snatch a little island full of egret guano?

6. More arrests, more prisons, more deportations, more denunciations, more holding cells, more punishment, more anger, more us, less them.

7. Although bulldozing the island, erecting some tents, calling it PARDON TOWN, and then shipping every single Jan 6. rioter plus Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Elliott Broidy, Randall "Duke" Cunningham, Kwame Kilpatrick, Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Charles Kushner, Anthony Levandowski, Lil Wayne, Ken Kurson, Joe Arpaio, and Alex van der Zwaan to live there while being guarded by The Central Park Five, just might be a notion that has legs.

8. Only the weakest, softest, most deeply pampered, least masculine of men, let alone politicians, let alone presidents, attempt to use a former symbol of ruthless authoritarianism and incarcerative state punishment to bolster their tiny-fingered, dodged draft, porn payoff, wanna-Pope insecurity.
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9. Wait, if we placed 300% tariffs on Chinese-printed "Alcatraz Swim Team" shirts that, in per-unit sales to German tourists are more profitable than farming soybeans in Iowa, we just might rake in billions of Tariff dollars, which, when you read the fine print actually goes to the Chinese but sounds good on Fox & Friends, we just might save this Feel The Pain economy after all.

1. Hey, did you know that during the Triassic period, which was more or less 300 million years ago, the Carnian Pluvial Event went down? The CPE more or less ushered in the Jurassic of mediocre movie franchising, and thus the dinosaurs, mainly because massive Alaskan volcano eruptions completely changed the Earth’s ecosystem by causing it to rain for ONE MILLION YEARS STRAIGHT. So stop bitching.

2. Neurochemically, love is the precise delivery of an ideal mixture of the chemicals Serotonin and Norepinephrine, plus the same amount of Dopamine that by itself causes schizophrenia.

3. Every time Donald Trump shits himself playing golf, an angel gets its wings. Word from P. Gates Inc. is that heaven is now so overcrowded with the Newly Winged they’re sending less desirable angels to Supermax in El Salvador.

4. For 99.9% of humanity’s existence, not a single person on earth could read or write. Sure, eventually we came up with the Aqueducts and Penicillin and Democracy and The Wheel and WiFi and A Grudging Acknowledgement Of The Female Orgasm, but really, reading, which is to say the ability to create and inhabit alternate worlds and spend untold voyeuristic hours experiencing the thoughts and emotions of others via prose is the main reason that we are no longer merely apes. I mean, we are still just apes, and not that far divorced for Simian v Sapien, but as slick as Koko is with the hand gestures and snack-pleading, she will never read a single line of Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh” and therefore cannot ascend the literary creationist ladder, our greatest achievement.

5. Speaking of which, remember when the longest-serving pope in the history of popedom, Pius IX, held temporal powers over the Papal States on top of his duties as human conduit to God(s) as we understand them? Therefore, IX was more or less what Lindsey Graham suggested the other day, that Donald Trump should be considered a candidate for pope on top of his duties as Great Helmsman of America, which only Lindsey Graham could think is a fine idea, mainly because Lady G is a sycophant of such immeasurable purity that he now spends alternate weekends occupying a quaint villa on the shores of Donald Trump’s colon. By the way, Pius IX was also the one who codified the idea that animals have no soul and are therefore entirely under the dominion of man, and so it was not a sin to treat them any way a given man wished, either as protein, labor, random sociopathic cruelty, or target practice. Not to mention Haitian Kitty Burgers. Sure, you could say that was a long time ago and a lot of things have changed culturally and societally in the interim, but Pius IX served 100 years AFTER Tommy Jeff and Ben Franklin signed the constitution that our Constructionist Supreme Court still insists be followed to the letter, even though bacteria, the atom, the multiverse, and the Female Orgasm had yet to be invented, so what’s Pius IX’s excuse?

6. The French (me, ancestrally) call orgasms Le Petite Mort, which translates to “The Little Death”, which may be the greatest metaphor in the history of metaphors, going all the way back to the Carnian Pluvial Event.

7. Pete Hegseth, still Secretary of Defense.

8. I tried to read JD Vance’s fake hillbilly book when it came out in 2017 but, despite my OCD, couldn’t finish it. I guess because, although I’d never heard of and knew nothing about him, it felt very James Frey, which is to say, unconvincing in voice and attitude. I learned not long after that JD in reality grew up in a middle-class suburb outside Cincinnati, went to Yale, and had spent a few summers in Appalachia with his grandparents. Even then, the notion of casting yourself as The Voice of The Mountain Poor when you’d “summered” in Kentucky as a teenager made me laugh out loud. It’s sort of the same way that, although he did nothing but lose a lot of other people’s money as a Silicon Valley huckster bankrolled by Peter Theil, Vance still refers to himself as a Venture Capitalist. Hey, if I lose money betting the under on Knicks games every night, does that mean I’m a bookie?
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9. The title is a joke, all of the above is true.

1. Although "lots of people are saying" that every single American still self-identified as MAGA at this late date is as dumb as a rock, I generally dispute that, as I do believe there is a great difference between intellect and factual deficit. Also, rocks are simply a more dense compression of atoms than flesh, often in pretty colors and without the bad attitude or need for weekly therapy. So, while we are more neurally complex than our rock friends, on the whole are less useful as shelter construction or tossing pointy versions of ourselves at enemies.

2. All matter is identical, all matter is interconnected, matter is differentiated by the perception or action of other matter in relation to itself. So, everything's everything. Also, the universe is simultaneous. There is no forward or backward narrative. It is all happening just as it has always happened just as it always will happen.

3. In case you're wondering, the only thing I microdose is John Coltrane.

4. Still, in terms of MAGA policy, you have to be as delusional as a bag of hammers to support (let alone define the meaning of) tariffs as good for anyone except Chinese manufacturers who American manufacturers (offshore labor) and American politicians (any donation is a good donation) have allowed American consumers to become dependent upon, mainly for cheap, instantly obsolete, landfill-ready crap. As a culture we haven't really grasped that a demand for inexpensiveness in all things is in itself an expense, and manufacturing jobs will never return to America by blaming their loss on particular politicians we dislike, they will return when we embrace the idea that paying more for something of local quality is not only patriotic, but economically astute.

5. I like things that are extremely well-made, from cars to audio equipment to guitars to garbage disposals. I am fascinated by design and construction techniques. I marvel at genius innovation and production. It is one of the things that we, as Americans, really are great at. "Paying more" is a self-defeating concept. You should pay exactly "what it costs" to acquire something that reliably and cleverly does exactly "what it purports to." Anything else is garbage, which is to say currently on sale at Target.

6. Hey, Remember when The Grifter anointed dumb-as-a-rock Betsy DeVos (Everyone's Favorite Amway Heiress) as Secretary Of Education, despite having zero experience either as a min-wage secretary or working in education in any capacity? Not a coincidence.

7. Paying a reasonable effective tax rate is necessary, regardless of income. Running a country is expensive, yo. Bitching about where your taxes go is a beloved American pastime, but in actuality absurd. The government will spend what it spends regardless of your distaste for Welfare Queens (coined by Ronald Reagan, btw, way back when he ran for president in 1976 and was trounced by the mighty conservative juggernaut of Gerald Ford and Bob Dole. Hey, opportunistic race-baiting didn't start with Haitians in Ohio eating JD Vance's pet ferret!) Your tax money mostly goes to servicing the many trillions of dollars of our debt held by China and Japan. If you're worried that your personal payroll taxes are funding libtard NPR, they're not, so relax and put the game back on. You know where else your taxes mostly go? The huge empty hole into which the ultra wealthy (The Grifter, proudly) shovels little or no coin, hiding their incomes in offshore accounts next to the offshore labor they pay peanuts to, and then complain about the dwindling American manufacturing base.

8. You do not get to support Donald Trump à la carte for all the things you may like about him and ignore everything else. It’s cowardly, weak-minded, selfish, and exhaustively ignorant. If you are a member of MAGA, you're exactly the same enabling sucker who denounced Russians under Stalin, Italians under Mussolini, Chileans under Pinochet, or Ugandans under Amin, having waved the perfumed hanky of Democracy under their noses in a superior fashion all your life, king of the "Why did they let it happen?" crowd. Donald Trump is president of the United States because he sells Papal Indulgences (at the price of his supporter's morality) to embrace easy, simplistic, often incoherent and regularly false answers to nuanced and difficult questions.
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9. Nuance and complexity are almost always the only required tools to refute any given theology, especially the ones that pretend not to be political in origin.
Next Week: What We Talk About When We Talk About Marco Rubio.

1. Hey, so let's talk about Nazis and the people who continue to love them. So, really, let's talk about Elon. But first, did you know Fred Trump (formerly Drumpf, sort of like changing your name from Cherilyn Sarkisian to Cher) was arrested in Queens in 1926, one of 7 men busted for "brawling" with anti-fascist protestors at a KKK rally? Of course that's all fake news/hoax/lamestream bleating, except when you take 12 seconds to Goog the NY Times article published the following day, in which Fred features prominently.

2. When first running in 2016, Donald was asked about the incident by a Daily Mail reporter. Here is his verbatim response:

"He was never arrested. He has nothing to do with this. This never happened. This is nonsense and it never happened. Never took place. He was never arrested, never convicted. It’s a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there. It never happened. Never took place.”

Got it.

3. Aside from the multi-podium Hitlerian salutes Elon Musk has wowed supporters with, and subsequent denials/interpretations of what such salutes actually mean to Elon, let alone what they serve to communicate, it's hard to deny that the familiar chest pump, flat hand, palm downward, straight thumb components are identical in both gestures, and EXACTLY what's required for entrance into Club Goebbels while waiting behind the velvet rope at midnight. On March 14th, Elon did tweet "Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did." Which, even if you LOVE the turn radius of your Cybertruck, let alone all the great work DOGE is doing, is a tough sentiment to delete away.

4. Elon's grandparents are actually Canadian. His grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was head of the Canadian branch of Technocracies Incorporated, a proto-Fascist movement to replace democracies around the world with technocratic rule. Really! Yeah, you can't write this stuff. Apparently you can't report it, either. Anyway, in the 30's Tech Inc developed an all-gray uniform based on early Nazi costumery, and in 1939, when Canada declared war on Germany, the group was banned and Haldeman arrested for Nazi sympathies. After not nearly enough time in jail and upon release, he moved the family to downtown Detroit. Actually, that's not true, they fled to South Africa, home of the peanut butter and jelly mix of ex-pat Nazis + Apartheid! Likely just a coincidence.

5. And much like spending 200 million of his own cash to get Donald Trump elected, Elon swung his Odd Arm Gestures and plenty of Bitcoin behind the ultra fascist Alternative für Deutschland, everyone's (Hess, Goering, Gabbard's) favorite party in the recent German election. Addressing them via Zoom from Baron Trump's race car bunkbeds, Elon said "It's good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything. Frankly there's too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents."
The AFD's broke out in wild applause, even though it was manifestly unclear what his coded language referred too. What guilt? Who again? Wait, wasn't Operation Barbarossa the opening act at the last Fyre Festival?

6. Look out for coming issues of NF, One L, where we will dive deep into Apartheid Emeralds and chin implant surgery + just the kind of hairline reconstruction only a billion dollars can buy.

7. Finally, as long as we're talking about the transitions of Popes old and new, worth remembering the impenetrable, glacial silence of Pius XII during one of the least-Christian eras of human history, who had regular secret back-channel negotiations with Hitler (sort of like when Trump met Putin in the White House, no notes taken), who was otherwise busy re-assuring the world he was not on the verge of invading Poland. Then he invaded Poland. These Vatican/Reich negotiations no doubt covered a myriad of topics, possibly one being the price of muteness on the world stage due to grounds of "neutrality", sort of like what Jesus worked out with Pontius Pilate. Yeah, Pope Pius XXII even said nothing while thousands of Jews were rounded up in ROME, from right beneath the papal skirts, and sent to Auschwitz. Sure, it's a bad look now, and tough to explain in 2025, but just as children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, neither should popes.

8. Pete Hegseth is covered with Nazi chest tattoos. You can view their symbology online. Stephen Miller tried to join Aryan Nation but was rejected, even tier bosses saying he was "too creepy", and so signed up for a "I Look Like Nosferatu, Too!" cosplay club instead.

9. Parasites in flag pins, this government, this ship of irredeemable fools.

1. Hey, did you know the term comes from 1980's Turkey, as many other great things do? It was used in reference to the shadow military sway in what otherwise purported to be representative government in the halls of Ankara. Apparently 39% of Americans now believe there is an organized movement actively working against their particular interests, an agenda that is gauzy and provides no real information as to how or why, but certain political figures, in cynically alluding to pulling back the Oz curtain, have made what would otherwise be a straight-to-video movie starring Bruce Willis, Tara Reid, and a sentient monkey named "Mr. Filibuster" into something that otherwise fairly rational people have come to fully embrace.
It's rhetorical genius to prop up a bogeyman (Trump's one true skill) who can be faulted for all things too complex to simply Executive Action away, without the thing itself being named or known so that half a nation can project their fears onto it, and in doing so use the Zoloft of Vague Blame to soften the edges of their own lives.

2. But let's take a second to think about this more clearly. It is certainly true that there are many entrenched Federal workers in cushy jobs that are not essential to the functioning of government, but the same could be said of employees at Amazon, Walmart, FIFA, any law firm, any job anywhere. It is, after all, one of the functions of Capitalism that workers, instead of controlling the means of production and distribution, can instead control how much time they spend playing FarmVille on their $1000 phone while also drawing an hourly wage, or what tonnage of office supplies they choose to smuggle home over the course of a year.

3. This is, of course, very different than the lunatic obsession with the idea that the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, IRS, and most of federal bureaucracy have a mutual master plan to make it harder for blue collar workers in swing states to live the lives of their choosing. And also how this State Of Deepness is forever on the verge of insisting innocent citizens host drag shows in their living rooms on alternate Fridays, are not allowed to fully enjoy fried foods without shame, and have to swallow the Nazi Diktat that they take it easy on willfully spreading Covid to friends and neighbors. Which is interesting, because "The Deep State" is not helmed by actors and henchmen, but are our actual friends and neighbors. What, faceless mid-level Justice drones don't have kids and debts and likewise mundane concerns? They aren't one-dimensional snippets of script dialog, but actual people who are unlikely to take secret directives from George Soros? Do they all meet in some candle-lit basement and wear funny hats and decide weekly who to wield their secret powers against, but most likely conservative personal trainers in Michigan and Ohio? Why, after all, would these people want to Make America Decidedly Worse Again, when they are Americans living in America and subject to all things American all weekend long?

4. Here's a question: Did the Deep State not exist under Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Both Bushes, and Trump 1, only to emerge from hibernation like Outback Locusts each time a Democrat is elected, proceeding to swarm, buzz, and ultimately strip the land of leafy greens and the last golden bucket of Freedom Fries?

5. The dictionary definition of The Deep State:
-A country where a few wealthy citizens funnel money into an election to determine the outcome (Elon)
-Secret military forces that kidnap citizens who aren’t breaking any laws (check any headline today).
-A hidden government group with a backchannel of communication to hostile nations (Vlad The Poisoner).
-A government in which a leader appears to be in control, but is actually beholden to an unknown group of interested individuals who work outside the law to pass laws or enable political crimes (any toe-licker caught in the non-light-escaping black hole of Trump's ego).
-A government that illegally surveils its citizens to gain information to use against them (we're all screwed with this one).

6. I mean, does any of that sound like the Black the Kettle keeps calling it?

7. In the end, the Deep State is really the modern extension of the Kafka-branded sense of any system of power making inexplicable and contradictory pronouncements over which Regular Folks have no control. Like, for instance, Marco Rubio arguing yesterday that while it's true the US Government mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego García to a notorious prison in El Salvador, at which the US Government is paying 6 million a year to house deportees, even though Garcia has the legal right to be in the United States and no criminal record, the US Government cannot demand Garcia's return because he is no longer in the custody of the US Government.
Now THAT'S some serious Gordian Knot/Deep State action. I'm presuming though, that since a Republican administration did it, and also the dude is brown (dirty), it's fine. No howling about the random cruelty or twisted logic of that action required from those who are convinced they're being screwed by activist lib judges on the regular just for laughs.
I personally feel a Deep State Of Melancholy and Terror At The Deep Shit State Of Our Nation, but I suspect that is not what they're referring to.

8. America loathes a wealthy puppet master, what with our history of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and patriotic fervor, except when the wealthy puppet master is OUR wealthy puppet master, in which case it's fairly awesome.

9. I have to say that I do Deeply Miss (like a now-highly-successful collegiate lover) the relative political sanity of the 1980's, in which everyone knew Russia was evil, both parties had an obligation to work together on legislation, and an unapologetically Manichean view of all aspects of life was not something to be proud of, let alone slap as a bumper sticker onto the Cybertruck of your nihilistic certainty.

Next week: What We Talk About When We Talk About Ghislaine Maxwell.