BREAKING NEWS: With Kristi Noem fired, Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) has been nominated to assume control of The Department Of Fucking Corey Lewandowski And Angrily Denying It, as of Monday morning.

Said Senator Mullin, "I mean, I don't normally swing that way, but as a patriot I pledge to waste your tax dollars by whatever means necessary, even if those duties entail laying the wood to any and all of President Donald J. Trump's male advisors, ambassadors, special envoys, or really anyone who wants a little piece of Oklahoma. And yeah, I'm speaking to you, Kushner."

The deeply unsettling image the 70% Human-Tupperware Miss Noem having taxpayer-funded Afternoon Delight with Corey "C-Lew" Lewandowski at a cruising altitude of 32,000 feet has already driven huge numbers of teenagers to declare themselves "Incels For Life". In response, Senator MerkMillions said, "Listen, my understanding is that the plane in question was purchased by DHS to rid our country of high-profile detainees, and while that never happened, since Former Director Noem simply appropriated it for use as a private booty-ride, much like Kash Patel's Emergency Olympics Shuttle, as the new director of DHS I intend to immediately put it to the use for which it was intended."

When asked by reporters what that intended use might be, Mullin grinned, gripped himself somewhere just south of Tulsa, and said, "Someone’s about to find out, and that ain't no joke," before leaving the podium in a wash of camera flashes and general gagging, "or my name isn't Waymul McMerkington".

An ebullient President Donald J. Trump (editor's note: "ebullient" is just a fancy Left Elite word for Mid Adderall Binge), tweeting 143 times between 1:43 and 2:15 am, addressed the issue on Truth Social with the following post:

"Senator Wirmway will TIRELESSLY work to Keep our Border Secure, Stop Migrant Crime, MurDERers, and other Criminals from illegally REPEATEDLY ENTERING our Country!!! And THEN ENTERING and slowly EXITING the BORDER. AGAIN AND AGAIN. RIGHT WHERE Texas and Oklahoma meet. ILLEGALLY! Senator M'BiffM'ark will END the Scourge of Drugs!!!! and, MAKE AMERICA ASSPLAY AGAIN. Wait, what? Anyhow, Senator FunkyBunch will make a spectacular Secretary of Homeland Security, and maybe ONE NIGHT The Wayner can swing by the part of the Lincoln Bedroom I haven't demolished yet and DEPORT Melania. While I watch. From behind The Millard Fillmore curtain. Thank YOU foR yoUr attention to this matter."

That TruthSocial post was later deleted.
​
Meanwhile, Byron "Cuck" Noem, husband of Ex-Director Kristi Noem, had no comment when contacted by reporters, except to say that he also was considering a new directorial position as the head of the Biden Crime Family.

Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue #42

1. I mean, yeah, I miss the shit out of her already, but for some reason I am not fully heartened by her dismissal, or her slow walk of shame back to the Painted Silicone Hills of South Dakota.

2. For one thing, this makes it easier to become distracted by, say, the closing of the Strait Of Hormuz, which, hilariously, Donald Trump seems to think ships can be escorted through by other ships, the buddy system magically making them both impervious to ship-exploding missiles (hello, $23 gas!), before putting Miss Noem in cuffs and arraigning her by 8am tomorrow.

3. Also, it gives us The Oklahoma Blockhead, Mr. Markwayne Mullin, as her replacement, a man so stupid that he once lost a game of Connect Four to the Roadrunner's anvil.

4. For instance, who could forget when Markwayne (I think he's sort of like "The Three Faces Of Eve" in that you never know if you're getting Mark, Wayne, or Markwayne) tried to fight Teamsters President Sean O'Brien on the Senate floor during a hearing, only to be stopped by Bernie Sanders repeatedly yelling "You're a United States Senator for god's sake, sit down!"

5. Hey, did you catch during yesterday's Noem Is An Embezzling Thief of YOUR Tax Dollars senate hearing, when it came out that Corey Lewandowski, who Noem has been banging on Your Tax Dollar Private Jet on the regular, sent her a text that Thom Tillis of North Carolina (suddenly has balls and a sense of ethics now that he's not running again) read aloud, asking about joining The Mile High Club in their private cabin, on a plane that was purchased with YOUR Tax Dollars for (really) high profile deportations!

6. Hey, you can't make this stuff up. Actually, you can, but I think the Skin Bracer slap we all require here is to realize we have entered into an America in which it is entirely unnecessary to make things up, because something already way more demented is already happening over the next non-fictional rise.

7. BTW, you can be forgiven for having forgotten who Corey "Punching Female Reporters Is Just Part Of The Job, Man" Lewandowski is, but yeah, he's the guy who Steve Bannon replaced to run Trump's 2016 campaign after Cor punched a female reporter.

8. When you've just been canned in favor by the booze-sweating and furiously sinister baggy-panted pork chop who is Steve Bannon, shouldn't you have the class to walk out naked into the Kalahari at dawn with a shovel and bury yourself for eternity?

9. Here's the problem: Republicans aren't even bothering to campaign for the Midterms anymore. Trump isn't out hitting the trail and selling endorsements as usual. Everyone knows they're going to get slaughtered and lose the house (I predict by 30 seats), and very possibly the senate. So they've moved to Plan B. Which is Bomb Iran, gerrymander more, pass more restrictive legislation, declare national emergencies, send ICE out on foraging raids, whip up the confusion and terror, have Comrade Tulsi appropriate Georgia ballots in the middle of the night, declare voting machines rigged, limit mail-in voting, and pour BILLIONS of Adelson Mercer Bezos Elon Altman money into attack ads, while Larry Ellison rigs the Tik Tok algorithm to portray JD Vance, through the latest most cutting-edge AI technology, as appearing slightly human. Or, hey, just cancel the elections entirely.

10. Peter Thiel assembled JD Vance of out a set of spit-coated Appalachian Legos, and now he's Vice President. That should frighten anyone not thrilled about the prospect of a gay, South African, Libertarian, Edgelord, Technocrat, Transhumanist billionaire being the string-puller behind the squat of stubble that wants to be our next president.

11. But back to Miss Nomenclature, who no doubt has a lucrative future as an auto-parts calendar model, or as the evil baby incubator on Amazon Prime's new "Handmaid's Tale II: Martial Law Boogaloo", but the question is, just how far is Pam Bondi's Justice Department prepared to go to investigate her obvious financial fraud and self-dealing, let alone double-homicide of certain Minneapolis citizens?

12. Only time will tell, but I have faith in Pambi to do exactly what Bill Barr did with his "immediate and thorough" investigation into the many ways in which it was painfully and abundantly clear that Jeffrey "8 malfunctioning cameras" Epstein did not, in fact, kill himself. Which is to say, get right on that!
​
13. Meanwhile: Onward, friends!

Roman Soldiers would carve NFFNSNC into their shields. A rough translation from the high-school Latin class that I regularly skipped to smoke weed in the back parking lot in a 1971 Chevy Nova reveals that NFFNSNC is an acronym translating to: Non, Fui , Fui, Non Sum, Non Curo.
Which was the Roman way of letting soon-to-be-defeated (except Hannibal) uncivilized tribes in on the dudes with pointy spears marching in perfect formation's motto:
"I Was Not, I Was, I Am Not, I Do Not Care".

You gotta admit, that's about as baller a sentiment for a soldier as it gets.

Like, if you're a Saxon tribesman wearing a rotting bear-hide and waving a club with a rock strapped to the end using six feet of a previous enemy's achilles tendon, you're likely to start re-appraising the wisdom of berzerking across that river to get busy with NFFNSNC centurions.
Because not only is their motto saying, "I was not afraid before I was born, and I will remain unafraid after I die," it is also saying "I am a cog in a machine of violence, and a cog cares about itself even less than the violence of the machine that will exert itself without mercy regardless."
That's a turn around and walk away sentiment.

It is also one I am a big fan of, even as it applies to the mundane and non-violent actions of daily life.

I have no concrete political or spiritual identity, but I am a Stoic, which by definition means calling yourself a Stoic is ridiculous, but mainly means that the power and haircuts and leader-adulation and Italian suits and stacks of bitcoin are all as worthless now as they will be after you expire.

So, in the end, there is only the movement of the machine, and how we experience our individual Cog-dom, but, most importantly, the degree to which we, by our actions, improve or diminish the lives of all the cogs around us while we're still, very briefly, around.

The Problem with America is that there are far too many stupid Americans.

But even Voltaire, the Parisian OG of mocking stupid Americans all the way back to 1759, could not resolve the ultimate paradox of our fledgling country, and so, the morning after both the longest and least-consequential State of The Union address in history, we must ask ourselves once again: are Stupid Americans (STAM’s) more stupid now than they used to be?

My feeling is no, they’re exactly the same. We neither evolve nor devolve so quickly. But if the sea (social media) were made of whiskey (drunken currents of approval/aggrievement), we’d all be Jacques Cousteau.

The problem is that STAMS are both impervious to hangovers (due to their concrete neural pathways) and the terrifying degree to which social media allows them to herd together, like bison on the Great Plains of Negative Erudition, to re-affirm their collective ignorance.

Which means, in essence, that Stupid Americans are exactly the suspect protoplasm they have always been, all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion of 900 million B.C., when we were all still multicellular sponges. It’s just that now the sponges are dangerous.

Various inane and evidence-free tropes, biases, and confabulations (notions of a Flat Earth, insistence on Geocentrism, tales of The Resurrection, and/or Trickle-Down Economics), used to be randomized and isolated in small groups, revivals, militias, and rural evangelical pockets.

Now, through the miracle of Google, the same fact-averse cliques and incurious factions are unified.

At least in their inability to define Google, or spell UNIFIED.

But they are a more easily manipulated voting bloc.

You can run the numbers on the intellectual quotient and relative educational levels of MAGA all you like, and just in terms of sheer, inarguable math it’s not heartening, but I think what we miss as a society in dismissing MAGA as an inevitable extension of STAM, is that beyond a staggering degree of credulity, MAGA is really a collective expression of exhaustion.

It’s hard, sweaty labor to be angry all the time. A specific grievance can keep a man alive on death row for decades, but aggrievement as a general matter, always on the simmer, stripped away from ideas, policy, solutions, initiatives, and political concession, feels good. At least for a minute. But much like a popsicle-denied child taking a dump on the kitchen floor, when the Tea Party runs out of manufactured Kenyan Birtherism fuel, all that’s left is emptiness and bitter fumes.

Just like how it seemed okay to do cocaine four nights a week during the 1980s because all your friends and co-workers were doing cocaine four nights a week during the 1980s, it often doesn’t matter how absurd or illogical what you believe is, all that matters is the number of people who believe it right along with you. There is safety in even illusory numbers, but there is genuine relief in Total Acceptance.

Every civilization in human history that attempted a form of representative government with individual rights eventually became exhausted by the mental strain of having to handle the complexity and nuance that such non-animal behavior required, and so eventually turned to autocracy.

Autocracy is valium. Problems are branded phraseology. Solutions are improbably simple. One man can fix everything. One side is to blame for everything unfixed. If only that senator were less annoying. If we do it, it’s necessary. If they do it, it’s betrayal.

It is a weakness of mind, the craving for something solid to grab onto in a thoroughly unsolid world.

Noam Chomsky, everyone’s favorite totally mystifying Epstein Pal (Steve Hawking a close second) wrote Manufacturing Consent in 1988, which, as it turns out, was right when Jeff and Ghislaine and Donald J. Pedophile were launching their new business, but in any case was a brutal takedown of the unholy nexus of Democracy and Media. Essentially, Chomsky (between underwear-on massages), postulated that 80% of the electorate was irrelevant, since they were STAMS incapable of processing complicated political or philosophical nuances.

Therefore, every American election was an attempt to sway the remaining elite 20%, (professors, white collar types, political junkies, professionals, the highly educated, the wealthy) through dirty tricks, personality considerations, and oppressive waves of television advertisement, to split 11-9 for one candidate or another.

Well, at least that’s how I remember Consent while reading it in the early 90s, but I always thought Noam was onto something, at least prior to the Internet. Now I think it is the 20% that are irrelevant, mainly because the billionaire 1% can now purchase the allegiance of just enough STAMS through the social media companies that made them billionaires to begin with, to negate the other 19% with AI bullshit.

In other words, there is no reason to have intelligible policy, reasonable political goals, governmental representation, or hard-won consensus, except to the degree that your Language Learning Model requires it to sway STAMS on TikTok.

(It occurs to me to wonder, for the first time since typing this sentence, that perhaps Noam’s buddy Jeffrey suggested the title Manufacturing Consent as a sly inside joke while working the runway/dressing rooms of Donald’s Miss Teen USA contest?)

It turns out, in a connected world, that it is not enough to provide concrete evidence when facing manufactured identity. Political Identity, as opposed to political opinion, on both the Left and Right, is impervious to rationale.

For instance, casually mentioning to your MAGA wife that 30 weeks ago Donald J. Trump said, after dropping bombs on Iran, that the Iranian nuclear program was obliterated and would take ten years to recover, and then as you sat together holding hands on the couch watching The State Of The Nation last night while Donald J. Trump, with zero shame or even explanation, said that Iran is a week away from a nuclear bomb in order to justify military intervention, even though he ran on an America-First platform that insisted there would be no new wars, and he already solved nine of them but not this one, earning him the much-coveted FIFA Peace Prize – she will still find a way to dispute it.

Even the part about condemning Iran for killing protestors, but not condemning ICE for killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Because, what you’re asking of a STAM in 2026, under the second endless occupation of this president/human locust, is not to “arrive at a conclusion after the consideration of certain facts”, you’re demanding, with every chink of fallacy that flies away from the chisel, “Hey, can you stop being you?”

Almost no one wants to stop being them.

A bullet-proof identity is more seductive than meth, and facts are the remaining teeth that stand between meth and comforting illogic.

“Being There” is a 1970 Jerzy Kosinski novel about an imbecile who speaks in such generalities that people assume his dimwitticisms are profound. In other words, “Being There” should be renamed “the Deepak Chopra Story,“ and Kosinski should be renamed Nostradamus.

“Forrest Gump” is a deeply stupid 1994 movie about a deeply stupid man whose behavior sways deeply stupid people to do deeply stupid things, delivered with the sort of cutting-edge Robert Zemeckis technology that beguiled half a generation of cinema goers, like zombies staring at fireworks, into believing that there was value in innocent stupidity. We are still paying the insanely steep price for Forrest Gump.

Also, Hanks will be dropped for the coming sequel, "Gump II: Dipshit Boogaloo", so that Forrest can be played by Kid Rock, a born method actor if there ever was one.

You know who is not a MAGA hero? My man Socrates. Which is strange, because Socrates hated democracy while living in the purest form of Athenian democracy that ever existed. In fact, Socrates committed suicide by drinking hemlock, when Athenian Democracy itself began to go the way of Project 2025. He did not hate the form of governance because of the freedom it offered the people, including himself, he feared it because he saw how leaving all decisions to “the people” would eventually mean the dumbest among us would lead the dumbest among them, as soon as they truly recognized one another.

Donald J. Trump and STAMS have been Tinder-Smashing and staring deep into one another’s blank, occluded eyes since 2015.

Here's a short list of the things that Donald J. Trump and Jesus have in common: 1. They spent a lot of time hanging with prostitutes, 2. Their best friends were lepers, and 3. They have multiple bestsellers that were ghostwritten.

America, as a union, occupies exactly the state that it is currently in because Stupid Americans, who are now close to a majority of Americans, refused, for a decade, to make this president pay any price at all for his endless, blatant stupidity. 

By excusing the worst of him in return for a few policy favors we all got to find out that we hadnt even begun to see the worst of him.

The banality of evil, as it turns out, is not a buffet. You are either ladling from no chafing dishes or you have your snout in all the chafing dishes at once. Stupidity may or may not be preordained, depending on your stance in the world of neuroscience, but convenience very definitely is. And America, for all its high-flown ideology and philosophy and noble origin-stories, is really built on pure convenience in the face of moral contradiction, and the feral unwillingness to relinquish a single inch the identity required to live with it.

1. If the tiny pile of rubble that was once known as Epstein Island had to be renamed, shouldn't it from now on be called Kid Rock?

2. Given his evident organic/cognitive shortcomings, complete disregard for key, pitch, and harmony, willingness to ride a mildly catchy hook from 1998 for thirty years of dimwitted ignominy, and a total misunderstanding of contemporary politics, isn't it strange that Turning Point USA and/or Republicans in general are cool with Kid Rock being an obvious DEI hire?

3. It you told me what Chuck Foreman, Otis Sistrunk, Jack Lambert, Duane Thomas, Earl Campbell, Fred Dean, Bronko Nagurski, Ronnie Lott, Lawrence Taylor, and Johnny Unitas thought about yesterday's halftime show, I'd gladly listen. Otherwise, it's like discussing variations in the color of cement.

4. The only Super Bowl I've ever attended featured Coldplay at intermission, and I would have paid 5x as much if they sang in Hungarian as some sort of arty protest. I care more about a contestant guessing the cost of a box of detergent on today's Price Is Right than I do the political value of a Super Bowl halftime show.

5. The "NFL" is thirty-two very conservative billionaires plus a mob lawyer whose only language is ruthless capitalism, and Bad Bunny had more streams worldwide on Spotify last year than any other artist. The World Cup, comprised as it is of many Spanish-speaking countries, including Spain, has ten times the number of viewers as the Super Bowl. The NFL would hire a hologram of John Wayne Gacy singing "The Candy Colored Clown" for next year's game if they thought it would make them an additional five dollars a piece. Bleating along the entire political spectrum misses the point that the point is greed incarnate, and has no politics at all.

6. For the mildly confused patriots out there, Puerto Rico is part of the United States, also known as America. The Bunny speaks what he speaks, and if he thinks you should struggle a bit finishing that second trough of nachos in order to expand some linguistic horizons, I'm with him. Besides, I understood more words during his Reggaeton Exegesis than I did the last time I ordered Lard Crisps with a side of Lard at a Waffle House in Alabama. The end.

7. If you discard the 1% chance that Donald J. Trump did not know he was re-posting a meme of the Obamas as apes, or if it was the next video queued that means a lot of the content Donald J. Trump views is of the same slant as that meme regardless of a particular intentionality, or the fact that immediately blaming a staffer is SO EFFING Donald J. Trump, you still have to explain to me being OK with any president of any party spending one minute of his tenure as President Of The United States retweeting puerile horseshit late into the night instead of working to make all our lives better.

8. Isn't it interesting that if, as a somewhat childish response to the Obama/Apes thing, I photoshopped Donald J. Trump’s head onto the body of an obese/convicted felon/child rapist, I wouldn't have to shift a pixel since that describes every single picture of Donald J. Trump ever taken?

9. It’s likewise interesting that Evangelical Christians have such a hysterical fear of Woke Identity, when so much of modern Christianity has nothing to do with religion at all, or even Christ, and is really all about tribalist politics.

10. For instance, I would like for Erika Kirk, the world‘s most upbeat and opportunistic recent widow, to explain how the music of Kid Rock in any way relates to theology, family values, or Christian ideals, when it's obvious that simply because K-Rock plays golf with Donald J. Trump his behavior gets a pass, or is at least morally fluid.

11. In the end, Kid Rock is just a guy named Robert James Ritchie from Detroit who likes drugs, booze, and underage girls, and who has inexplicably managed to hammer out a career from that sort of weird pride that comes from being a dirty white boy and refusing to apologize for it.

12. So fair enough, but his music is also rudimentary trash rock-rap, therefore he’s stealing from two genres with primarily black roots and translating them for white truckstop crowds. In other words, the dude is pure irony, since that means he's the actually the Bad Bunny of the mayonnaise that comes on cineplex french fries, but just speaking in a less mellifluent tongue that most people also don't understand.

13. But, as a very publicly-forward Satanist myself, at least as it involves vinyl and OG Black Sabbath, I played Kid Rock‘s “Devil Without A Cause” backwards, and while it had little of the tang of sulfur or cloven-footed evil to it, when I played it forwards it just sounded like Kid Rock. Which was a bit disappointing. Although it did make my bust of Leonard of Limoges, the Patron Saint of Aging Dudes from Detroit who look like mustached lesbian ferrets in wallet chains and Jorts, explode.

14. Oh yeah.

Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum. Despite her stance as a noted Libertarian and uncompromising individualist, she chose not to use her real name professionally or to own its Jewishness interpersonally. Objectively speaking. 
                 
Many years later, one of Rand’s acolytes, Barbara Weidman, legally changed her name to Barbara Branden, partly to likewise jettison the baggage of Moses, but also because bRANDen has Rand cleverly wedged within itself, like an intestinal fluke.

American Statesman, oddly-bewigged pseudo-ophthalmologist, and famously Libertarian senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is the son of former presidential candidate and famously Libertarian Representative Ron Paul (R-TX). Ron Paul obsessively quoted Ayn Rand in his early work, which is ugly reading even for 1960’s Texas. 

Among Ron Paul’s most pressing concerns were:
 -The need for Good Texans to properly arm for Imminent Race War.
-All the ways in which Jews run everything, but mainly banks.
-Welfare scams and the lazy blacks who buy candy with your taxes.
-Regularly calling the White House “the Pink House” as a hilarious gay cocktail pun. 
 
While fans of nuance may choose to view Ron Paul’s obsession with sodomy as an admission of closeted self-hatred, Senator Rand Paul insists he not named after Ayn Rand, let alone Paul Auster, Jake Paul, or Paul Giamatti. No one believes Senator Rand Paul, mainly because he is lying, but also because his son is named John Galt Paul. 

 “The Rand” is the unit of currency in South Africa. Noted Libertarian Elon Musk is from South Africa, but only because his grandfather got tossed out of Canada for being an Out-Loud Nazi, complete with uniforms and parades. The Musks moved/fled to Johannesburg, which is a gorgeous city known for its many artistic, musical, and cultural qualities, plus a generous Nazi Resettlement Program, complete with separation of human beings along strict racial lines.

Alyssa Zinovievna Rosenbaum-Rand came from a bourgeoisie St. Petersburg family. Her father had a successful business, and as a child Alyssa was waited upon by cooks and nannies, although such perks were soon snatched away by commissars of the Bolshevik Revolution. As the Red Army swept down upon them, Alyssa witnessed firsthand that, in practice, enforced Collectivism was not the Utopian economic model it purported to be. 

Karl Marx, turns out, was a liar. Lenin, word is, was a douche. So the Rosenbaum family moved/fled to New York, which is a gorgeous city known for its many artistic, musical, and cultural qualities, plus a generous Immigrant Resettlement Program, complete with separation of human beings along strict economic lines.

As a result of this traumatic experience, Ayn Rand spent her life advancing dubious pseudo-Libertarian political and economic theories under the name “Objectivism.”  Although not unlike giggling cousins in the top bunk at grandma’s exploring under each other’s jammies, Libertarianism and Objectivism are not the same thing.

Libertarianism is to Objectivism as pleasureless masturbation is to the enjoyment of Kid Rock’s vocal abilities. 

Mainly, though, Rand focused on the degree to which individual genius (for instance, embodied in the form of Ayn Rand) was superior to mass stupidity (embodied in the form of all those who were not Ayn Rand). 

Such masses included New Jersey serfs, Westchester peasants, unwelcoming Manhattan high society, Bolsheviks in name or behavior, tax assessors, business regulators, Trotskyites, building inspectors, art critics, literary critics, leftist poets, unconvinced potential acolytes, those who preferred David Hume and H.L. Mencken’s brand of Enlightenment Liberalism to Self-Service Libertarianism, politicians larding gifts upon the conniving poor, and generally anyone whose existence tended to slow The Cogs of American Industry.

Which, when translated from Cyrillic to Capitalism meant Negroes, Latinos, Chinese, immigrants of all varieties (except misunderstood St. Petersburg merchant families), takers, moochers, beggars, General Parasites, individuals already dismissed by F.A. Hayek, and pretty much any laborer with the collectivist need to seek fair compensation for their labor. 

Rand, in a Soviet fashion predating the collapse of irony, then made a career of literarily denouncing such traitors to the cause of the Free Market, if not the Revolution, relegating them to long sentences in the frozen Siberia of her imagination, if not a Riker’s Island cell. 
 
                                         A Brief Introduction to Libertarianism
 
A political stance in which the individual is paramount above all else, while advocating for limited government in both the markets and the personal lives of citizens. It calls for privatization of most federal programs and departments (police, firemen, postal service, Social Security) with the idea that constant market innovation sheds lazy and unneeded bureaucracy, while a pretense of individual responsibility supersedes group actuality.
 
                                            A Brief Dismissal of Libertarianism
 
The theory that select individuals will create wealth for all, via unregulated personal wealth creation that eventually trickles down to the lower classes, has been repeatedly disproven throughout human history. Libertarians speak eloquently of personal rights, but tend to choose a-la-carte such things that best serve their personal interests, while not having the courage to carry the philosophy to its logical conclusions. A genuine Libertarian, as opposed to one who employs a fraction of the philosophy when convenient, would therefore enthusiastically support the legalization of all drugs, plus abortion, suicide, and prostitution. Individual choice is either sacrosanct, or it is not. But idealistic, less-wealthy Libertarians are often muted by pragmatic, more-wealthy Libertarians who hold onto scraps of incompatible Christian morality, mainly because they want to get elected. 
 
Conclusion: Libertarianism is a vehicle of contempt for anyone who bothers to educate themselves about, and then question, the fatal contradictions inherent to Libertarianism.
 
                                            An Objective Look at Objectivism
 
All the great things about Libertarianism, but even less plausible, intellectually grounded, or bound by basic moral precepts. The Objectivist Man (it’s always a man with Rand) is a cartoon super-individualist with incredible talent, looks, perseverance, confidence and architectural skills, who also happens to be dynamite in the sack. Those unlucky enough to be born slightly dumber, uglier, more needy, emotionally or physically damaged, and/or unproductive in conveniently measurable ways are consigned to The Masses -- so less yapping and more laboring, Objectivists have Upper West Side cocktail salons to prepare for.
 
                                        A Subjective Takedown of Objectivism
 
If Marxism as a philosophy can be reduced to the relationship (Dialectic) between subject and object with knowledge (Material) being the currency exchanged as part of the social contract, Communism in practice is a loathing for the individual, as well as for Labor not yet collectivized for the benefit of individuals who are also Communist Leaders. Therefore, Objectivism is the celebration/justification of Pure Greed (Rational Self-Interest) which dares to explore the relationship between ME and ME, wherein the lives of THEM are sometimes useful to ME, but mostly not. Which is why Ayn Rand is particularly popular with young men and their as-yet neurologically formed brains, plus rock drummers and Bitcoin enthusiasts. It’s always those who secretly long to be surrounded by others, while simultaneously despising others for inspiring that longing, who most deeply respond to the tenets of Objectivism.

Primae Noctis, which means “First Night”, and is sometimes also called Droit du seigneur, was the practice in which Feudal lords retained the option of sleeping with any vassal’s bride on their wedding night, mainly to get a quick one in before the woman was permanently soiled. While the Russian Feudal System might more accurately be termed “Serfs With Benefits”, it was really a forced-labor death sentence for millions of expendable people.

In America, we find it hard to understand why anyone would want to be Communist. On the other hand, in America, Martin Van Buren did not retain the option of banging your new bride before the cash bar closed at the reception. Today in the Land of the Free, “Communist” is generally a propagandistic epithet for anyone mildly Leftist who disagrees with anyone unthinkingly Conservative, but also for Radical Socialist Lunatics who continue to assert that health care and education are basic human rights.

In light of centuries of the misery and enslavement of Russian peasants--with the full cooperation of the Russian Orthodox Church--Karl Marx’s musings on the redistribution of wealth and fair compensation for labor make a great deal of sense. At least on paper. In practice, centralized economic planning, state monopolies, worker control of the means of production and distribution, and an abolition of private property are absolute disasters. 

Which is to say, Ayn Rand was 100% correct about one thing: apes are not built for Communism. We do not share on a large scale. Or really at all. Apes take. And if any random banana has a beef with it, apes get violent. We are also inherently hierarchical. Equality does not exist in nature, because ideologically mandated balance is unnatural. Deep-seated survivalist chaos is natural, and balance is for beams and speaker systems. 

Which is to say, Ayn Rand was 100% wrong about almost everything else, since almost everything else she wrote either directly or indirectly asserted that while All Primates Are Equal, Some Primates Are More Equal Than Others.
 
                                        FOUR Plots of FOUR Books by Ayn Rand
 
We The Living (1936) – Protagonist Kira Argounova, a stand-in for Rand, is gifted with an independent spirit and razor intellect with which she rejects any attempt by her family or the nascent Soviet state to tell her what to do. She takes on several rugged, individualist lovers, Andre and Kiril and possibly Bob, but in the end is murdered by Lenin for refusing to be individually collectivized.

Non-Ironic Money Line: "What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”
 
Anthem (1938) – Dystopia turns out to be a place where geniuses and serfs get the same raw deal. A man named (really) Equality 7-2521 flees into the wilderness with Liberty 5-3000, a hot Tsarist Jennifer Lawrence who is a stand-in for Rand. Together they establish a new society based on individualism and sexy campfire speeches, although much like Adam and Eve, no one can figure out why their children’s children aren’t all inbred dolts. The End.
 
Ironically Non-Ironic Money Line: “What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and impotent, are my masters?”
 
The Fountainhead (1943) – Rugged individualist architect Howard Roark (Frank Lloyd Wright) designs a low-income housing unit for takers and parasites, then wires it with dynamite rather than let sycophants and toadies alter its genius design aesthetic. Roark may be ruthless, and even sort of a prick, but at least he’s true to himself since empathy is unwelcome in both building design and rugged sex with engineering fangirl Dominique Françon, a stand-in for Rand. At the end, Roark drones on for twenty pages in defense of Self-Interest as a governing philosophy, Ego as the source of all creation, and the evils of Collectivism, Altruism, and Negritude.
 
Maddeningly Incoherent Money Line: “Why is it so important - what others have done? Why is anyone and everyone right - so long as it's not yourself? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic - and only of addition at that?”
 
Atlas Shrugged (1957) – Rugged business wheel Hank Rearden (Andrew Carnegie) battles the forces of altruism by being an even more ruthless and uncompromising Industrialist/prick than he already was. Like, in one chapter he ups steel production way past what’s generally considered safe by OSHA, but in the end even selfless manufacturing cannot defeat the takers, looters, and parasitical negroes who insist on ruining all that is good about America. Sexy doormat Dagney Taggart, a stand-in for Rand, joins Rearden and his Industrialist pals as they jet off to a Colorado mountain lair to start a Utopian society based on unregulated, high-altitude Capitalism. 
 
(In the unpublished sequel, Atlas Sharted, after three days in a frozen cabin together, Rearden hoodwinks the other Industrialists by cornering the market on matches and kindling, and then they all stab each other to death with a deer antler.)
 
Libertarian Erection Money Line: “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil, it’s the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.”

Ayn Rand’s two most famous (debatably) novels (not that they’re famous, but that they’re novels) have sold a combined twelve million copies in America alone. In 2026, they still sell around 200,000 copies per year, which is more than every living American author combined. The ideas they contain, forty-four years after Rand succumbed to the Unregulated Tobacco Industry and ascended to Deregulated Heaven, implausibly continues to poison current politics. Not to mention modern economic theory, much of the tech industry, the MAGA New Right, Project 2025, the notion of Unitary Leadership, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Claremont Institute, Heritage Americanism, Elon, Peter Theil, Larry Ellison, Zuckerberg, a generation of 4Chan gamer fanboys, Russell Vought, Palantir wingnut Alex Karp, Sam Altman, Curtis Yarvin, and Stephen Miller. 

Atlas Shrugged is basically the Neo-Right Of Mice and Men, except set in a Salvadorean prison where George and Lenny are guards whose narcissism and intellectual laziness make them rich. Of course, Rand’s version is called Of Men and Clearly Better Men, and instead of shooting Lenny behind the ear at the end as an act of mercy, George engineers a hostile takeover of Lenny’s share of the Pruno concession, repossesses his car, and then revokes his visa.

Donald J. Trump is not intelligent enough to know that he is deeply Randian, and so comes by his Inner Objectivism naturally, like an infant real estate heir to a wet nurse’s gold filigree nipple: with unthinking, ravenous greed. 

Ayn Rand had many young, bright-eyed Objectivist acolytes who flocked to her Manhattan apartment over the years, where boozy intellectual salons often devolved into sex. Alan Greenspan, who was head of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, or from the nomination of George H.W. Bush to the curb-kicking of George W. Bush, was one of them. Ayn Rand’s nickname for Greenspan was “The Undertaker”. She personally attended his swearing-in to Gerald Ford’s economic advisory board. Word is that all of Rand’s acolytes were fucking all of Rand’s other acolytes plus Alan Greenspan, the man who more or less controlled the size and direction of the entire American economy for twenty years, and was uniquely responsible for the worldwide economic collapse of 2008. 

If the clear-eyed among us are beginning to suspect that, in actuality, there has been a forty-year Republican/Conservative plan secretly enacted that includes packing the Supreme Court, outlawing abortion, codifying White Nationalism, monopolizing information streams, promoting regressive Christian/Opus Dei Ideals, redistributing wealth to a tiny fraction of the populace, encouraging technocratic/plutocratic control systems, removing constitutional protections for The Masses and/or introducing them to the Prison Industrial System, and a rise of Immigration Fascism, Wealth Fascism, and Actual Fascism to replace American Democracy, which has culminated in the recruitment/blackmail of useful idiot/child rapist Donald J. Trump as figurehead, we can, in many ways, all thank Ayn Rand.

In the excellent Norse/Pagan religious tradition, Odin went to sleep at night with a bracelet and woke up every day with six. Which was good, because bracelets often broke or became tarnished, but more importantly, it reminded Odin that if he did not have the initial bracelet, it could never multiply, and so he would have none. 

There are two types of people in the world: those who take Odin’s parable as a call to be thankful for what they do have, and those who see it as a reason to embrace the unfairly maligned governance systems of Stalin, Mussolini, Pinochet, Franco, Mao, Jeff Bezos, and Oswald Mosely.

Machiavelli is a lot like Dave Chappelle. Which is a sentence few people have ever typed before, although does not make it one degree less accurate. Chappelle walked away from fifty-million Comedy Central dollars when he realized that dipshit Lacrosse Bros were mistaking his pointed racial satire for quotable locker-room humor. If Machiavelli were alive today, he would patiently explain that “The Prince” is not, in fact, a user’s manual for Donald J. Trump and the billionaires/Russian blackmailers who control him to turn the wealthiest country in the history of the world into a personal plaything. Instead, it is a dire, point-by-point warning about the deception and treachery of those who would use Machiavellian means dressed up as Aristotelian ends to achieve full Soviet Control. 

 “Atlas Shrugged” is not at all like Dave Chappelle, but remains widely if fatally misunderstood. Which is interesting given how rudimentary it is both as literature, and as ideology dressed up as literature. As a prose stylist, Rand is a master of droning repetition and self-cannibalization, but her work is really an unintended cautionary tale that prophesizes the rise of those who would use simplistic moralism to stoke The People’s Anger, but do it in such an aggressively dimwitted way that it can neither be argued against, or even described, making it impenetrably effective.

It's the last ruse prior to the End of Empire: quibbling over equivocation, using tautology to promote totalitarianism, attacking speciousness with a deliberate lack of specificity. The title Atlas Shrugged itself is an act of deliberate confusion, since Atlas was a Titan tasked by Zeus with holding up the celestial heavens (represented as Earth balanced upon his shoulders, which makes no sense) because Atlas (Trotsky) and his boys (Lenin, Stalin) took over Olympus for a while and instituted the Titanomachy, but Zeus (Churchill) and the other Olympians (FDR, Patton) won the war, whereupon The Gods (Judges Of Nuremburg) declared that lifting the sky for eternity was the ultimate price for folly.

Get the sledgehammer metaphor? It's like, what if Atlas shrugged the Earth from his shoulders just like Industrialist Titans shrugged away the parasitical masses? What would Atlas and Jeff Bezos do then, freed of their encumbrances and prepared to dive even further into Rational Self-Interest?

No word yet on Atlas taking a mid-level management position with Blackwater, but the idea falls apart a bit as Jeff realizes that when The Masses stop Prime-ing flexible hoses and dozens of cans of Vienna Sausage right to their front door, he has nothing. As it turns out, Atlas, like Odin, like Jeff, need those they despise, or they would have only themselves and their surgically reconstructed wives to look down upon.

In the end, Ayn Rand was a sociopath with a neurological disorder that compelled her to search for a literary justification to unapologetically be Ayn Rand. And in the process left us a steaming heap of unreadable paperbacks. But, like many of us, she was also a walking contradiction. Rand was for abortion but against feminism. She insisted there was no God but founded an Objectivist religion. She wrote caricatured hagiography about men who refused to bend the knee to a society of users and moochers, but allowed no dissent from her personal coterie of users and moochers. She was a heavy smoker who insisted that cancer warnings on packs of cigarettes were fraudulent Nanny State tyranny, at least until contracting lung cancer, when she quit, began accepting tyrannical welfare checks to cover her medical bills, and then died. 

Desperation transcends political philosophy, which is only apparent when you finally reach the moment, as everyone eventually does, of staring Objectively at their own human nakedness.

It is likely that the example of Donald J. Trump will last longer than the ideas of Ayn Rand, because while Objectivism is a simplistic, immoral, and easily dismissible philosophy, the genius of Donald J. Trump is that he has no ideas at all. It’s not possible to fight against pure, reactive selfishness. It has no coordinates. It has nothing to lose. It exists simply to burn its own fuel. A thousand-page novel can always be used to start a dystopian campfire, but an empire allowing a man like Donald J. Trump to rise to power is already as vacant as its leader aspires it to be. 

1. I mean, sure, this is all anecdotal. But it's also all true.

2. I have worked in many restaurants. It may be different now, but back in the day almost everyone white who worked in the kitchen was a lunatic. Almost everyone else tended to be Hispanic, and often illegal. Every single one of those restaurants would have collapsed into a pile of cocaine and ennui while the angry white waitresses who were really dancers, and the angry white cooks who were really documentary filmmakers, and the angry sous chefs who were really illustrators, and the angry bartenders who were really actors were busy letting the world know through the language of poor service exactly how unfairly it was treating them. The Hispanics just pulled their shifts, and mostly kept the place afloat.

3. I worked for a construction company for a year, nominally as a carpenter's apprentice, but really as a tall dude who carried things. Most of my fellow laborers were Hispanic, and often illegal. While I was learning almost everything on the fly, many of the other laborers were as skilled as the carpenters, but they did the shit work for shit pay anyhow. When you have no choice, what's your choice? Also, I was salaried and they were not, which likely was just a coincidence.

4. I worked in a hotel for many years, first as a clerk and eventually as general manager. During that time, I probably hired (and sometimes fired) between 100-200 people. You learn a lot about life from trying to staff and run a business that never closes. At first I mostly hired cute girls for front desk jobs. Most of those girls were young and white, because most of the young girls who applied were white. That policy got tossed out the window pretty quickly.

5. In the end, I needed people I could depend on. If you've ever been woken at 3am because the sewage pipe burst in the basement of a six-story building with 80 rooms in downtown San Francisco, you know, as you run half-dressed to your 1978 Celica GT to punch it through traffic, that you have to have someone who can handle chaos in the interim.

6. Culturally embedded entitlement, unearned self-regard, and a general parental pampering are not resume attributes that inspire confidence. Fair or not, generalization or not, brown people in America need it more. Require less. Are not obsessed with recognition. Believe in the concept of actual pay for actual labor. Many of those brown people are immigrants. Some are illegal. I’ll take them on my team all day, any day.

7. Fair point, at this juncture, to mention that I was a self-involved asshole in my twenties as well, racial classification notwithstanding. But I was, and still am, a hard worker. Give me a hard worker over a hip guy I can break down noir cinema with, or a girl who looks like arty Winona Ryder all day long.

8. Also worth pointing out that this is not about how all Hispanics/immigrants/illegals are saints, or even cool. Lazy Mexicans do exist, which I know because I've both hired and fired them. But they are unusual. Actually, I disliked a healthy number of brown people I worked with over the years, but I disliked them because of their personalities.

9. It's interesting that in this current discussion of the border/immigration/deportation, almost no one makes the distinction between Mexico and South America. Further, they ignore the profound differences between the people/countries of Central America. A Honduran and a Guatemalan, are, unsurprisingly, as different as a Manhattanite and a rural Texan. But we lump them all together because it’s easy, and because we’re generally lazy and stupid.

10. In terms of my personal hiring experience, give me a Salvadoran anytime. Amazing people, incredibly hard workers, hilarious and fun and awesome. I mean, yeah, not all of them. But, like, 88%. It got to the point that if a Salvadoran applied, I'd just hire them on the spot. Never once regretted it.

11. Probably because the statute of limitations has elapsed, I will admit that I hired illegals regularly and willfully. At least if their ID was fake enough that I could plausibly claim I'd been duped. I rarely regretted that either. What could be harder than trying to find work, and make way for your family, and to wake up with desperation instead of Jimmy Dean link sausages in your stomach, in a new country with a second language? It mystifies me why America is not knocking itself out to help these people. Big ups to Haitians and Somalis! How is it possible to live in a society led by a man who calls them "garbage" while the toothless gleefully cheer?

12. We’re the wealthiest, most fortunate, most powerful country in the history of humanity, and it’s not even close. A country of that description, I would think, would also be the exemplar of justice, humanity, hope, and service to the rest of the world. Can someone explain to me why we’re not again?

13. Hey, did you know that remaining in the US without status while applying for a visa/citizenship is a civil violation, not a federal crime? So what’s with all the guns and tear gas and federal troops tackling people in the streets?

14. Hey gun fetishist prepper! Remember when you had to have an open-carry auto-kit machine gun with bump stock and silencer and military scope and Eagle Talon ammo to help protect against encroaching government tyranny? Well, it's HERE! So why aren't you in Minneapolis right now pointing your gun/penis at people?

15. Oh, wait, because "tyranny" is a euphemism for "not white", and what you're actually protecting against is "empathy."

16. Race is an entirely cultural construction with no scientific basis, purpose, or meaning. There are certainly geographical groupings that share common evolutionary phenotypes related to DNA pools drawn upon, as well as environmental considerations such as proximity to the sun, or the need for more or less facial hair. There is no "White". There is no "Black." There are only variations of DNA combinations. The truth is that every single individual who has ever lived was so mathematically and chemically specific that they were always their own race of one.

17. There isn't a single white person in the bible. There isn't a single Christian in the bible. Really! Origin-wise, we're all South African. Back when Pangea was Pangea, there weren't continents, let alone countries. Back when the Bible was still an amalgam of mis-translated scrolls and oral histories, Jesus and his posse and his stigmata-dealers were brown Romans or brown Jews. Even the Romans were only partly Italian! They were Moors and Picts and Vandals and Visigoths and Ostrogoths and Goths and Franks and Egyptians and Greeks and Turks and Persians!

18. I am huge fan of South African music, primarily the genre known as Cape Jazz. For that reason alone, I'd be perfectly fine to have a South African passport and identify as such, which, down to the molecule, would not alter who I am, what I believe, what I stand for, or what my relative value is in relation to anyone else on Earth.

19. The Himalayas are the youngest mountain range on the planet. Nineteen major rivers/delta systems originate from them. The Valeriepieris Circle is an imaginary circle drawn on a map centered on the Himalayas that comprises 15% of the world's land mass and more than 50% of its population.

20. Which means, Stephen Miller, A MAJORITY of the world's population is neither Christian, American, exceptionalist, imbued with Judeo-Christian values, Miller-esque, Proud Boys, or white.

21. Not to get all Marx here, but the only true differences between any grouping of homo sapiens anywhere on the planet is economic status.

22. Hey, so time is static. Or at least it's non-linear. Which is to say, the past and the future are as real as this sentence. All three of them are happening, right now, as you read it. Gravity is the one force that connects all things in the universe. Because of this, time is influenced by movement. That’s not a clever bumper sticker, if you sent a windup alarm clock on a bedside table into space to orbit the earth, because of the increased distance from our gravitational center, the clock in space would record time faster than the one by your bed. It's true.

23. The earth is moving through space at 67,000 mph. So if an alien ship at the edge of our galaxy were moving at the same speed on a parallel line, January 17th, 2026, or our current conception of NOW, would be the same as theirs. But our brains aren’t really equipped to process or visualize in more than three dimensions. Which is to say, everything we see in the night sky that we presume is either static, or at least moving in concert, is not.

24. So if the alien ship were moving at exactly our speed but directionally closer or further away, that dimensional movement would change the NOW that they observe us experiencing, while our NOW would remain the same. In other words, if the ship moved toward us at 65,000 mph, the Earth they observed would be different than the one we think we're in. Say for argument 100 years in the future. If they went away from us, they’d see 16th century France.

25. Which is to say that everything in the universe is always happening all the time, the only factor that gives us the perception of a linear unfolding is observation relative to speed x distance.

26. Which is to say, Trump was a monster, is a monster, and always will be a monster. ICE is the gestapo, was the gestapo, will always be the gestapo.

27. Since a future already simultaneously exists and will soon unfold in which America comes to its senses and realizes what a FUCKING TRAVESTY this authoritarian swing into madness is, what exactly are you rooting for? IT’S ALREADY WRONG IN THE FUTURE!

28. Fuck ICE. Fuck simplistic thinking and the cowards who perpetuate it. Fuck tribalism. Fuck deliberate stupidity. Fuck white pride. Fuck greed. Fuck the current incarnation of America harder than Glen Rice fucked Sarah Palin.

29. ICE spending is currently at the level of the 13th largest military in the world — more than Canada, Italy, Poland, and Australia. Their new funding push includes 14 billion a year on detention alone. Ice is not about immigration, or fairness, or the law, or the border. It’s where the Police State meets the Industrial Prison System. It’s where people too fat for law enforcement and too dumb for the military hit the streets for a very specific brand of fascist cosplay. ICE is a private army whose real job is to trigger a justification for the invocation of the Insurrection Act, just in time for the midterms.

30. The great thing about life is that we mostly get to choose who we want to be.

Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue #35
​
1. The woman's name is Renee Nicole Good. The woman is dead. And that is where factuality ends and religion begins.

2. Sounds like she'd been following ICE around all day, filming, yelling things with her partner as a sort of Citizen's Protest against both the actions and overall legitimacy of ICE. There are many reasons to question the legitimacy of ICE, and many ways to protest their actions, none of which are particularly effective, and most of which involve social media.

3. The wisdom inherent in both ICE as a political tool, and verbally confronting ICE as a political response, is equally dubious. Since deportation numbers under Obama and Biden are about the same as those under Donald J. Trump, ICE is really a performative tool of control pretending to be a legal method of enforcement.

4. As a species, we respond to images, not math. It SEEMS like something has changed through the deployment of ICE, but it's more that giddily depicted brutalism has entered, and been widely embraced, by a percentage of culture that gets high on fear experienced by people in a position they will almost certainly never themselves be.

5. Hey, you can open-field tackle an endless row of laborers in endless Home Depot parking lots, but we will still have the same understaffed courts, non-existent immigration policies, broken and feckless congress, transpiration of political courage, and a convenient racial toolbox with which to ignore the same set of problems and the same lack of solutions.

6. The Brutal Truth: America will never deport its way back to a perceived National Whiteness that will make poorly educated and perpetually angry whites more comfortable.

7. Although pretending to do so will make them vote.

8. But at some point the emotional and fiscal costs will overwhelm the fake benefits, and even those votes will shift to a better quality brand of hamburger.

9. Which is to say, Mr. JD Vance in 2028.

10. By the way, is there a more disingenuous, calculating, insufferable prick on the face of the planet than JD Vance? If so, please forward this mythical person's specs.

11. ICE just is, and almost certainly will be, until Donald J. Trump just isn't. But barring an emergency McNugget angioplasty, ICE will continue to behave as such, or worse, unless something happens that is so awful/embarrassing to the administration that it is forced to quietly back away.

12. Turns out in 2026 that incorrectly sending people to supermax in El Salvador and Uganda to be raped and tortured for crossing the border, branding them all Tren de Aragua cornerboys, and denying them Due Process, the ONE THING that we ALL have to be patriotic about, has yet to have that effect.

13. Spend five minutes online, and it's clear that shooting an obviously harmless woman in the face as payback for making your crap job a little crappier, and then calling her a "domestic terrorist" is totally cool with a percentage of Americans who are prepared to concede absolutely nothing, ever.

14. ICE is not moral or judicial or effectual. They are not police or military. They are a private army, and probably illegal themselves, but we won't know for sure until another decade of endless lawsuits scrape to an end. "FAFO" and "Why was she there in the first place?" and "If you obeyed the lawful commands of an officer, this wouldn't have happened" are party-line arguments that contrive to engage in rational discussion and event impartiality, but are really expressions of a transcendent personal anger to which facts, or even crisp video footage, does not apply.

15. Yes, Renee Nicole Good was probably being annoying as fuck, and other more subdued protesters, who watched her earlier behavior and even though sided with her politically wished she'd just shut up and go home already, did not think it a wise idea to plant their SUV between tired and illegally armed ICE goons on a freezing Minneapolis afternoon confident that shit would remain in control simply because they happen to live in White America.

16. All of that can be true, and all things can be stripped of politics, and Kristy Noem can be head of Homeland Security while also the most surgically altered aging stripper to ever be forcibly removed from the golden pole, and Donald J. Trump can be a sociopath and Baron Trump could have sold 150 million dollars worth of World Liberty Financial memecoins in the last year alone, even though his father is both President of the United States and owns World Liberty Financial, not to mention pardoned the guy from Binance who in exchange agreed to feature WLF tokens on his exchange, which, even for a world glutted with useless tech, is about as slick as method of gorging on bribes ever devised, and NONE of that changes the one elemental truth:

17. Renee Nicole Good was murdered. Your particular politics, religion, or political religion does not factor into that sentence.

18. America, in the end, is just another burgundy SUV half up on a bank of dirty snow, surrounded by police tape, inside of which evidence will be collected and bagged and stored and juries marshaled to be RIttenhoused, and names will be forgotten and lawyers paid extravagantly, but citizens of both parties will still know that their ride needs to be topped off, eventually, with fresh Venezuelan gas.