Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog): Sabrina Haake

Showing posts with label Sabrina Haake. Show all posts

October 15, 2025

Feds again show us who the real fascists are. "I am Anti-fascist" should be our rallying cry.

This is what residents of Chicago are reading today. The headline ought to be “Fascist Feds…”

Sabrina Haake, who writes the Haake Take Substack, and works in Chicago, has been posting links to stories about ICE brutality on her Facebook page.

She hadn’t posted this one so I did. Here’s what I wrote:

Here’s the latest from YOUR city. Consider that they want to call people in MY city of Portland wearing chicken and frog suits terrorists and people playing the theme from Ghostbusters dangerous. Fact is that they will become dangerous if and hopefully when peaceful and even mocking resistence work to turn enough people against this Hitlerian regime. Our D-Day can’t come soon enough.

In referencing this Chicago story I wanted to put a link to Sabrina’s Substack here and saw she’d just posted this new one:

The word “eejits”didn’t register with me as a way to pronounce idiots at first… hey it’s 6:00 AM here and I am still on my first cup of coffee. This pronunciation comes from Ireland where it is usually meant as a friendly retort but no doubt Sabrina uses it much more harshly with the third defintion below:

This is a crucial point Sabrina makes in her subtitle, “Has MAGA really forgotten what WWII was about? and here:

She concludes:

‘Antifa’ is Trump’s rallying cry. When he calls Democrat-run cities a “war zone” before he invades them with occupying forces, understand that he is planning to turn them into one.

I have a suggestion. It isn’t enough to try to educate the eejits about what Antifa means. We have to stop using the abbreviation. We should always spell it out and proudly call ourselves

Addendum 1:

You can buy Aunt Tifa t-shirts.

They are good but, like Sabrina and I have said, we are dealing with eejits. Perhaps we should forgo trying to be clever since this doesn’t register with imbeciles and we should spell it out. We are Anti-fascists.

You can order “I AM ANTI-FASCIST” t-shirts by desgining them yourself on lots of “make you own” company websites like this.

Of course you can get the simple statement on signs too. Perhaps the next Indivisible protest will be called “Anti-fascist” instead of the more benign sounding “No Kings.” I’d suggested called it “No Hitler in America” (here), and even ordered signs for the Oct. 16 protest, but I think “Anti-fascist” is better.

Addendum 2:

RawStory summarized this story (here) where it led (at this writing) to 139 comments, some with illustrations like this:

October 1, 2025

Leave it to my friend Sabrina Haake to write the best article about what Trump is doing to my city of Portland. This also led me to register on the local Sinclair station so I could post a link to her Substack there.

I won’t even try to write about what Trump is doing to my city of Portland since Sabrina Haake, who I count as one of my “met online but yet to meet in person” friends, did it (here) instead. She did it far better than I could.

She begins to address the Portland “problem” as follows:

Oregon, home of the imaginary ‘Antifa,’ mocks Trump’s false narrative
Pursuing these directives, Trump threatened to invade Portland, Oregon, where green hair and Kombucha kiosks scream “Antifa” to the MAGA faithful. Incensed by the spectacle of nose rings and flannel, Trump posted that he had authorized federal troops to protect “War ravaged Portland” with “Full Force, if necessary,” because Oregon’s ICE Facilities are “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

What I do want to share is my comment to her, fleshed out with the images I couldn’t post because Substack won’t allow this in comments.

Hal Brown commented to Sabrina:

Thanks for highlighting Portland, Sabrina. As you know I live just outside downtown in a suburb. For your readers who want to follow our local news here are the three local Portland news websites I look at every day:

https://www.koin.com

https://www.kgw.com

and

https://www.opb.org

... I don’t look at

https://katu.com

because it is the Sinclair station and unlike the other three it’s main story is “At least 4 arrested by federal officers outside Portland’s ICE facility as tensions flare” obviously meant to support Trump’s false narrative. As featured article the other stations have “‘Oregon has no choice’: New SNAP requirements will impact over 313K residents”, “Oregon braces for government shutdown after deadline passes without a deal: ‘Many people will be harmed’ as top stories,” and on OPB “Portland troop deployment expected to cost at least $3.8 million.”

You can read the KATU story about the ICE headquarters arrests here: https://katu.com/news/local/arrests-by-federal-officers-outside-portlands-ice-facility-president-donald-trump-authorization-oregon-national-guard

You can watch the six minute broadcast video here:

Most of the comments are supportive of Trump which is no surprise since this is a Sinclair station but I suggest you check out the comment by HMStressline (which is me). I took the time to open an account there just so I could post a comment suggesting people read this Substack with an active link. You can see what I posted without going to KATU by clicking my BlueSky post here (it looks cool):

This is how my comment looks:

Here are some of the other comments:

I will give KATU credit for at least having a comment section. This fact alone may lead me to checking it out. I may want to add my liberal two cents to their articles. I may even come out of hiding behind PDXStressline and reveal who I really am by posting links to some of my own Substacks from an enemy camp.

September 18, 2025

Kimmel may have gotten fired for a telling a joke about Trump, ABC should now stand for Always Bow and Cower.

Most people have heard of the stages of grief even if they aren’t familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (article). Jimmy Kimmel certainly knows about it because he referenced it in his monologue. Playing psychologist, he altered the fourth stage just for Trump and showed how quickly he moved to the final stage of acceptance.

If you haven’t seen or read the portions of the Jimmy Kimmel monologue that led to him being fired click 1 here 1

Sabrina Haake has a great first sentence in her Substack “Jimmy Kimmel has a First Amendment claim against Trump's FCC. (here)” It is “If Trump’s skin gets any thinner the US will have its first translucent president.”

She goes on to say:

Trump, who relishes belittling people with unpresidential insults, like calling democrats ‘scum’ and ‘the enemy within,’ can’t take it when his slurs boomerang back at him.
Instead of accepting that jokes, jabs and insults come with the territory—satirizing presidents is an American tradition— Trump reacts like an enraged teenager when anyone insults him. Whenever the media fail to fawn, or worse, accurately report Trump’s unprecedented corruption or ineptitude, his first instinct is to use federal resources to seek retribution against them.

She then goes on to focus both on legal issues (she’s an attorney) and Trump’s psychology which covers much of what I planned to write about this morning.

My premise is that the real “crime” that led to Kimmel’s dismissal wasn’t what he said about Charlie Kirk. It is what he said about Trump. I am not alone in this. Others commenting on the firing have been expressing this opinion.

We’ll never know whether Trump himself pushed hard to have him fired. It may not matter since ABC knew how he felt about Kimmel and what would make him happy.

When it comes to Trump unless they keep Kimmel’s show the letters ABC forever will mean Always Bow and Cower.

Unless he’s really thick Trump had to know he waded into the shit when he saw the monologue. If he realized this he’d have been triggered when Kimmel talked about the fourth stage of grief after he played the clip of his bragging about his glorious ballroom. This is where he plans to have Trumpian Big Balls which he can show off to prove how great he is - make of that what you will.

He may have thought “enough is enough” and picked up the phone and called Bob Iger and told him to get rid of that Kimmel guy.

Trump set himself up. Not being the most self-aware person in the room he may not have realized that he made himself the butt of the joke with his own words. We know he boycotts that White House Correspondents Dinner because he had to sit through being mocked there by Barack Obama (see article which has a video).

Trump made himself the butt of Obama’s jokes by promoting the Obama birth certificate conspiracy (see Wikipedia).

That took some thought and planning. He spontaneously made himself the butt of Kimmel’s joke just by being himself.

In fact, in some ways Trump is the most unfunny joke in American history but if he wasn’t about to destroy democracy we would find his antics hilarious. Now when we hear well crafted jokes about him the saying “that’s so funny it hurts to laugh” applies.

Still, whenever possible those with a platform must keep mocking him.

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What Jimmy Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was, uh, grieving on Friday − the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.

Then he showed the clip of what the president said after a reporter asked him how he was holding up after the death of his friend Charlie Kirk and Trump said “I think very good” before going on to brag about the new White House ballroom he was having built:

“And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”

The this is what Kimmel said:

Yes, he's at the fourth stage of grief: construction. Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend; this is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK? And it didn't just happen once. And then we installed the most beautiful chandelier. Responses you wouldn't believe. Who thinks like that, and why are we building a $200 million chandlier in the White House? Is it possible that he's doing it intentionally so he can be bad about that instead of the (Jeffrey) Epstein list? …

There was more:

“And it didn’t just happen once,” Kimmel continued, throwing to a clip from Fox and Friends, where the President again responded to a question about Kirk’s death by talking about his ballroom.
“Oh, when I heard it? I was in the midst of building a great… for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right?” Trump said before going on to reveal that the architects informed him of Kirk’s shooting.
“There’s something wrong with him, there really is,” Kimmel stated. “I mean, who thinks like that?”
More importantly, the late-night host questioned, “Why are we building a $200 million ballroom in the White House? Is it possible that he’s doing it intentionally so we can be mad about that instead of the Epstein list?”

TV Insider has an article about this which incudes his entire 16 minute monologue.

Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog)