Should we laugh at things like this, should we cry, or should we scream? By Hal M. Brown

 

I had nothing to write about a few minutes ago, but then Ann’s sister, Nancy, sent her this and she showed it to me. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.

I had the same feeling when I saw online what, with my perverse sensibility, I thought was the best anti-Trump protest sign (click for footnote: 1

Look at the editorial cartoons by Ann Telnaes (here).2 They are definitely not amusing They are somewhere between cry or scream inducing. Don’t look to Ann Telnaes or any of these editorial cartoonists to get a good laugh. If you want to laugh look at these New York cartoons.

Editorial cartoons reflect where the country is. Consider these cartoons and Biden. Here’s a search for Obama cartoons.

While many are critical none suggest that Biden or Obama were hellbent to utterly destroy democracy.

Whether in cartoons (some with words and others without words) protest signs, in articles, or on TV, the messages about what Trump is doing to wreak havoc on both democracy and what used to be considered the underpinnings of social order and common sense must be sent out across the nation in a way that the people who need to hear it pay attention before it is too late. It has to come as if it is the thundering word of God from sky.

Our rights to tell in any way we choose to do so what we sincerely believe is true are embodied in the First Amendment. 

This is the relevant, the crucial part, related to my Substack today:

Freedom of Speech / Freedom of the Press

The most basic component of freedom of expression is the right to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech may be exercised in a direct (words) or a symbolic (actions) way. Freedom of speech is recognized as a human right under article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . The right to freedom of speech allows individuals to express themselves without government interference or regulation . The Supreme Court requires the government to provide substantial justification for interference with the right of free speech when it attempts to regulate the content of the speech. Generally, a person cannot be held liable , either criminally or civilly for anything written or spoken about a person or topic, so long as it is truthful or based on an honest opinion and such statements.

A less stringent test is applied for content-neutral legislation. The Supreme Court has also recognized that the government may prohibit some speech that may cause a breach of the peace or cause violence. For more unprotected and less protected categories of speech see advocacy of illegal action , fighting words , commercial speech , and obscenity . The right to free speech includes other mediums of expression that communicate a message. The level of protection speech receives also depends on the forum in which it takes place.

Despite the popular misunderstanding, the right to freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment is not very different from the right to freedom of speech. It allows an individual to express themselves through publication and dissemination. It is part of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression. It does not afford members of the media any special rights or privileges not afforded to individuals in general.

As long as we have a democracy this means we can get the message out that Trump is trying to undermine democracy. We can use whatever methods and means we have to educate, motivate, and inspire people to wake up from their “what me worry” sleepwalking through life and realize they must actually do sonething before the First Amendment, and in fact the entire Constitution, is rendered irrelevant.

Update:

My friend Sabrina Haake and I must have a cosmic connection since we wrote about similar topics today. Like I wrote yesterday (here), when it comes to a later stage of the round-up of Trump enemies the MAGA Gestapo will be knock at (or busting down) out doors. Read Sabrina’s Haake Take here.

She also references the First Amendment:

Social media vetting is viewpoint discrimination under the 1^st A

When the government engages in viewpoint discrimination, it singles out a particular opinion, perspective or “viewpoint” for treatment that differs from how other viewpoints are treated. Viewpoint discrimination, where the government persecutes or otherwise punishes someone for expressing views it dislikes or disagrees with, is illegal.

In 1995 the Supreme Court explained: “When the government targets not subject matter but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. Viewpoint discrimination is thus an egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”

She concudes:

Scared yet? Sabrina has a link to NPR story about Trump jailing and deporting US citizens abroad.

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1

You have to scroll down Stormy Daniels’ X page to find any posts about Trump. Mostly she promotes her shows there. I keep posting to her account hoping that she reposts something I write. This could get me many more followers. 

2

Telnaes made the news when she quit as the editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post when Jeff Bezos spiked this cartoon showing him to be a Trump tool. That backfired big time on Bezos since prior to that only subscribers could see the cartoon and then it was all over the news (Google search here).

This is one of the most depressing articles I've ever read. The only hope I see is if that enough of these voters didn't really want Trump to be a ruthless dictator. By Hal M. Brown

 

Since you're reading this you're one of the people Trump voters see as a smug privileged snob.

You don’t even have to read “How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape in today’s New York Times (subscription)” to get the gist of it. You can just look at the graphics. Here are four more of them:

There are graphics showing that even in primarily Black or Hispanic communities Trump has made more gains than Democrats.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.

The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.

Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.

Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.

Trump has managed to divided the country into as us against them, or as the “them” would put it, “them against us.”

Those reading this are members of the more highly educated and more affluent “us.” I think you more likely than not can read the NY Times article because you have a subscription. The other “us” would read the previous sentences and say “see, that’s what we mean, these people are a bunch of smug privileged snobs.” 

We have to admit that the so-called party of the working class is no longer the Democratic Party. It is now the Trump Republican Party. For decades since the decidely upper-upper class FDR was president for three terms, Democrats won elections because the working class believed that the candidates from the professional class and upper class, even upper-upper class, would make their lives better. They believed that they really cared about them. Jimmy Carter pulled off being seen as being just a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia even though his peanut farm was between 2000 and 3000 acres.

The cruel irony of this is that these candidates really did care about people less affluent than them. 

Then along came Donald J. Trump. While he was not only a member of the upper class, he was an in-your-face member of the upper-upper class. 

He took his cruel Apprentice “you’re fired” persona and turned it into his brand. Millions of people ate it up. None of the people who got the “you’re fired” treatment were villains. In fact they were even horrible potential job candidates like many of the performers on The Gong Show who got the gong.

By way of comparison, Gong Show star and creator Chuck Barris (who once lied about being a CIA assassin) actually was the creator of the show while 13 time Emmy Award winner Mark Burnett deserves credit for the successful casting of Trump as a business genius on “The Apprentice.” 

Trump isn’t an Einstein level genius like he thinks he is. He is a genius at some things like marketing and unabashed lying. In other areas he is as dumb as a post.

His most recent dumb as a post example is a demonstration of his segmented intelligence. This was in his comments about stealth aircraft. They were made at his weird trophy wife West Point commencement address (from below reference):

However, one avenue of free-associative speculation Trump meandered along while speaking about military investment seemed to confirm that one of his much-derided beliefs remains intact: the president seems to genuinely believe that so-called “stealth” fighter jets—military aircraft designed to be difficult to detect by radar—are actually invisible.

“We are buying you new airplanes, brand new beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand new planes, totally stealth planes,” Trump said, speaking to a proposed record increase in defense spending.

“I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sort of wondering.

“We shape a wing this way, they don’t see it. But the other way they see it? I’m not so sure, but that’s what they tell me!

Trump’s supporters don’t give a shit about any of this. While I doubt that if we could give them all IQ tests we would find that they aren’t what you could label “dumb” meaning having significantly below average scores. However if they answered honestly I think they would score fairly high on this gullibility test.

I took the test:

Trump sold himself as a man of the common man. He appealed not only to the gullibility of a large enough segment of the population to win, but hid his true intention to become a ruthlessly cruel dictator throughout the campaign. He made his bigotry clear, but he never said “vote for me and I will destroy democracy” for everyone including most of you in my adoring audience.

If enough people decide that this isn’t what they want their country to be there’s a chance there will be enough blowback to lead to an active resistance that will derail his blitzkrieg to Trumpify America. It took the Allies four years to undo what the Nazis did following their blitzkrieg to take over Europe. Alas, it may take this long for democracy loving Americans to undo what Trump is doing.

Addendum (nothing to do with the above):

Trump’s supporters don’t care that he is a grandiose narcissist who needs to hang pictures like this in the White House. 

I just wonder what foreign leaders think about him when they see it. They don’t even have to be there in person as many stories are being published about it including this one in The Irish Star.

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Democracy's fate will be decided by what happens with all the Trump gates. By Hal M. Brown

 

Yesterday I wrote “Crashgate, Donald Trump drives the economy into Herbert Hoover Hell” I began my “gate” series the day before with “What's next, Tarriffgate? Will Trump's presidency be known for its gates?”

These are the articles from RawStory shown in my illustration: 'Obama better get off the golf course!' CNN tees off with supercut as Trump works on swing and Trump buried by Dem vet for skipping event for fallen soldiers so he can play golf.

Loomer was the breaking story yesterday (White House fires multiple administration officials after president meets with far-right activist Laura Loomer) but RFK Jr. was also in the news with clips of his anti-vaccine statements when a vaccine expert working for the FDA resigned rather than be fired. He had a team working on vaccines that in addition to known diseases would be used for new diseases including those that had been weaponized. Futhermore, he had a team working on treatments and vaccines for cancer. (See Top vaccine official resigns from FDA, criticizes RFK Jr. for promoting 'misinformation and lies')

We’ve all heard RFK Jr. speak in his not-ready-for-radio (let alone TV) voice. I’d never heard Laura Loomer so I found this YouTube profile of her with her speaking:

You may recall she sued Bill Maher for suggesting she’d had sex with Donald Trump (reference).

Trump takes advice from two kinds of people with two, not mutually exclusive, psychiatric disorders. He has his group of sadistic psychopaths who wouldn’t know an empathetic feeling if it slapped them in the face. Stephen “Goebbels” Millerand Kash “Casket” Patel are the worst of these. Then he has Laura Loomer and RFJ Jr. who are conspiracy believers and may come close to being clinically delusional.

There are so many potential gates looming (sorry, that’s the appropriate word) down the road.

One comes to mind because my partner and I and some friends are attending one the many Hands Off! rallies this afternoon. (See website)

Threre are lots of suggestions offered for protesters who want to make signs. We thought we’d make “HandsOff! our Constitution” and “HandsOff! our Democracy.”

Because we are in a Portland suburb we worry that this may attract counter-protesters from the Proud Boys. Portland, because it is so progressive, has seen protests where the Proud Boys and Antifa squared off against each other. (See: “Who Are Antifa and the Proud Boys? Portland Protests Explained.”)

We have new friends we met yesterday (shoutout - they know who they are) who are going to a rally in Vancouver, Washington. An old friend is going to one on the waterfront near Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, MA. with her 14 year old daughter. Of course this is where a group of immigrants were met by the only real native Americans.

I don’t know what “gate” we could call it if one or more of this or another protest ends up in violence.

On MSNBC this morning Michael Steele said that there here are bad actors out there who want to cause trouble. He cautioned us to be smart and not “mess up” because Trump wants nothing more than an excuse to use the Insurrection Act to declare martial law. 

InsurrectionGate? Martial Lawgate? Police Stategate? On the later, I wish we had a federal police state where the police were really there to protect and serve rather than act as enforcers for a ruthless dictator.

I expect to see a large law enforcement presence at the Hands Off! protest and the more of our police I see the more reassured I will be. Oregon law enforcement does not cooperate with ICE, but I will be keeping an eye out for ICE thugs roaming the crowd demanding brown-skinned people prove they are citizens. (See: Portland police chief says bureau ‘does not engage’ in immigration enforcement amid federal crackdow.)

On the subject of ICE, another fascist police state travesty of the Trump administration is his deportations to the Salvadorian prison of both real gang members here illegally (who don’t deserve to be treated the way they are in that prison hellhole) and people, some here legally, who had never commited a crime beyond getting a traffic ticket. How Gestapo-like does something ICE does have to be for us to have an ICEgate? Already we have Joe Rogan and Ann Coulter breaking with Trump over ‘horrific’ deportation enforcement. (Article)

Trump, on his chaotic and rage fueled revenge juggernaut, seems intent on burning our democracy down as if he relishes creating one gate after another.

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