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Growing Fascism: Canceling Stephen Colbert

Update:  New reporting suggests the Felon's FCC chair demanded Colbert's termination.

Hitler came to power he and his Nazi goons sought to silence critics and either coerced news outlets into complicity through threats and dangling financial rewards or shut the down.   Then, as is seemingly the case now in 2025 America, many rich industrialist and media titans decided it was better to go along with the Nazi regime than to support resistance. Ultimately Germany and the millions of Germans who had their homes destroyed or lost their lives in WWII paid a horrific price.  This lesson from history is lost on the powers that be at CBS and it's parent, Paramount, who have capitulated the Felon by settling a lawsuit that could have been won and lining the Felon's pockets and have now decided to terminate Stephen Colbert's late night show. Why, because the Felon, like Hitler cannot tolerate criticism, and disliked Colbert's all too accurate criticism and mockery.  Of course, CBS and Paramount are not the only targets of the Felon's ire - the Wall Street Journal and its parent company have just been sued for libel by the Felon for reporting on the likely true story of a birthday card the Felon gave to Jeffrey Epstein.  Ironically, the Felon has boasted that he can't wait to depose Rupert Murdock, forgetting that he himself will now be subject to being deposed by Murdock and his companies.  I suspect that refusing to answer questions under oath will do little to end the ongoing focus on Epstein and his purported "client list" that many believe includes the felon.  A column in the New York Times looks at CBS and Paramount's self-prostitution to the felon and the dangers such behavior poses. Here are excerpts:

This week, Stephen Colbert announced that CBS is canceling his late-night show, days after he spoke out against the network’s owner for settling a lawsuit with President Trump for $16 million — a lawsuit it would probably have won. The Colbert news was yet another dark moment for an American media company seemingly bowing and scraping to Mr. Trump, obeying in advance, hoping to make a deal.

Barry Diller explained the willingness to settle to Maureen Dowd as needing to “bend the knee if there’s a guillotine at your head.” Of course, the “guillotine” was maybe not being able to do the corporate deal you wanted — Paramount, CBS’s parent company, is in the midst of closing a merger with Skydance that requires approval from the Trump administration — which is not the same as having your head cut off. But maybe to a billionaire, not getting your money is the same as being decapitated. This is not the first time Paramount and its chairwoman, Shari Redstone, have been accused of going along to get along.

Stephen Colbert went to CBS in a more innocent era, in 2015, before Donald Trump won the presidency the first time. He’d gotten the gig, to replace the not particularly political ironist David Letterman, after spending nine years doing “The Colbert Report,” a show in which he parodied a Fox News host — playing a character largely based on Bill O’Reilly, with all of his huffy bluster. In taking the bigger stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, Colbert toned his politics down at first, but it wasn’t until he became a full-throated critic of the new administration that he found his footing. People liked his mostly gentle truth-telling, night after night. They still do; his is the No. 1 show on an admittedly contracting late-night schedule.

Viewers still want political content, but they are not provided with it as they were in Mr. Trump’s first term. #Resistance was good business. . . . this time around, as he [the Felon] has done with everything else that once stood in his way, from Harvard to fancy law firms to the Federal Reserve, he is determined to crush any dissent using any tools he has available. So just the mere possibility of a holdup on a media deal, which could undermine the vast wealth of a media heiress, seems as if it could be enough to end an impertinent TV show.

This has happened before. . . . members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee declined to give records of their organization to the House Un-American Activities Committee and in 1947 were convicted of contempt of Congress. Like Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Trump is not a fan of antifascism.

In 1950, Grandpa ended up in Mill Point Federal Prison in West Virginia. Later, my brother and I would agree that the stint (and the year of media attention) was most likely a huge boon to his writing career. But at the time, in the years after he was imprisoned, the family existed in a state of terror, with Grandpa and his family deciding to live in Mexico for a while because they couldn’t get passports to go elsewhere.

But I never thought I would someday live in an America that looked quite so much like my grandfather’s Cold War nightmare. Maybe this is in some ways worse, since there isn’t even a Soviet Union we’re supposedly battling. It’s just to glorify this man who really doesn’t like to be made fun of.

CBS said that its decision was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” And maybe that’s true. But maybe it was the “guillotine at your head.” Many people in America didn’t need to actually get blacklisted to change their behavior, to turn their friends in, to go along to get along. That’s the point of authoritarian coercion: It’s a motivator.

I grew up soft on episodes of “Murphy Brown” and “The West Wing.” I believed that the arc of history bent toward Barack Obama, and technology solving the world’s problems, not causing them. I thought if we could laugh at MAGA hard enough, maybe Mr. Trump would go away, ashamed. But we should realize that under this administration, being funny and famous will not protect you. Even being rich won’t.

We’ll never be able to mock Mr. Trump into submission. Maybe that was our mistake. A quarter-century ago, there was once a very popular satirical TV show in Russia, too, called “Kukly” (“Puppets”). Vladimir Putin didn’t like being made fun of, either. It was off the air by the end of 2002, and the once-spunky Russian media industry was brought under control by his allies. Mr. Colbert ran a TV show, which is primarily a machine to attract viewers and sell advertising to play for that audience — neither of which it, or any TV show, does as well as it once did — not to change the world. We’ll have to do that ourselves, and we can’t count on the help of the timid billionaires, not when they have money at stake.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Trump Is Winning the Race to the Bottom

The Felon bloviates incessantly about "making America great again," yet his policies are doing great harm to America's future, particularly when it comes to global competition, particularly competition with China.   Federally funded research and development spending is being slashed, prominent universities(including my alma mater) are under attack, scientists are considering moving abroad, and public education is under relentless attack to please white "Christian" nationalists who have long seen an educated and thinking population across racial and socio-economic grounds as (i) a threat to archaic religious beliefs, and (ii) a threat to white male privilege.  If America is to remain the dominant nation in the world, the exact opposite of the Felon's and right wing GOP's agenda focused on Project 2025 is what is needed.  Sadly, self-enrichment and pandering to the anti-elite, anti-education MAGA base is seemingly all the Felon and his political whores care about.  Indeed, like too many of history's past empires, the focus is on preventing change and funneling money to the already privileged and wealthy,  A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at the great harm to the nation's future being done by the Felon and his anti-knowledge regime.    Here are column excerpts:

Confidence. Some people have more of it and some people have less. Confident people have what psychologists call a strong internal locus of control. They believe they have the resources to control their own destiny. They have a bias toward action. They venture into the future.

When it comes to confidence, some nations have it and some don’t. Some nations once had it but then lost it. Last week on his blog, “Marginal Revolution,” Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason economist, asked us to compare America’s behavior during Cold War I (against the Soviet Union) with America’s behavior during Cold War II (against China). I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast — between a nation back in the 1950s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation today that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away.

In the 1950s, American intelligence suggested that the Soviet Union was leapfrogging U.S. capabilities across a range of military technologies. Then on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

Americans were shocked but responded with confidence. Within a year the United States had created NASA and A.R.P.A. (later DARPA), the research agency that among other things helped create the internet. In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most important education reforms of the 20th century, which improved training, especially in math, science and foreign languages. The National Science Foundation budget tripled. . . . . Within a few years total research and development spending across many agencies zoomed up to nearly 12 percent of the entire federal budget. (It’s about 3 percent today.)

America’s leaders understood that a superpower rivalry is as much an intellectual contest as a military and economic one. It’s who can out-innovate whom. So they fought the Soviet threat with education, with the goal of maximizing talent on our side.  “One reason the U.S. economy had such a good Cold War was that the American university had an ever better one,” the historian Hal Brands writes in his book “The Twilight Struggle.”

Today we are in a second Cold War. For the first couple of decades it wasn’t clear whether China was a rival or a friend, but now it’s pretty clear that China is more a rival than a friend. . . . “Its primary goal is to damage America’s economy and pave the way for China to become the world’s pre-eminent power,” he wrote.

China is a country that, according a 2024 House committee inquiry, was directly subsidizing the manufacture and export of fentanyl materials, even though drug overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans 18 to 44.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has moved — confidently — to seize the future, especially in the realm of innovation and ideas. China’s total research and development funding has grown 16-fold since 2000. Now China is surging ahead of the United States in a range of academic spheres. In 2003, Chinese scholars produced very few broadly cited research papers. Now they produce more “high impact” research papers than Americans do, and according to The Economist, they absolutely dominate research in the following fields: materials science, chemistry, engineering, computer science, the environment and ecology, agricultural science, physics and math.

These achievements of course lead directly to China’s advantages across a range of high-tech industries. It’s not just high-tech manufacturing of things like electric vehicles, drones and solar panels. It’s high-tech everything. . . . . The Chinese gains in biotech are startling. In 2015 Chinese drugmakers accounted for just under 6 percent of the innovative drugs under development in the world. Ten years later, Chinese drugmakers are nearly at parity with American ones.

Then along came A.I. Americans overall are fearful about it. . . . The countries most excited by the prospect of that future? China, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand. The fact is that nobody knows what the A.I. future holds; people’s projections about it mostly reflect their emotional states. Americans used to be the youthful optimists of the globe. Not right now.

Still, America has its big tech companies filled with bright young things charging into the future, so you’d think our lead would be secure. But over the past year, Chinese firms like Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent have produced A.I. models whose quality is nearly equal to that of American models.

The A.I. race is perhaps the most crucial one, because it will presumably be the dominant technology of the next several decades. “The No. 1 factor that will define whether the U.S. or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, told a congressional hearing. “Whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant.”

So how is America responding to the greatest challenge of Cold War II? With huge increases in research? By infusing money into schools and universities that train young minds and produce new ideas? We’re doing the exact opposite. Today’s leaders don’t seem to understand what the Chinese clearly understand — that the future will be dominated by the country that makes the most of its talent.

Populists are anti-intellectual. President Trump isn’t pumping research money into the universities; he’s draining it out. The administration is not tripling the National Science Foundation’s budget; it’s trying to gut it. The administration is trying to cut all federal basic research funding by a third, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A survey by the journal Nature of 1,600 scientists in the United States found that three-quarters of them have considered leaving the country.

The response to the Sputnik threat was to go outward and compete. Trump’s response to the Chinese threat generally is to build walls, to erect trade barriers and to turn inward. A normal country would be strengthening friendships with all nations not named China, but the United States is burning bridges in all directions. A normal country would be trying to restore America’s shipbuilding industry by making it the best in the world. We’re trying to save it through protectionism. The thinking seems to be: We can protect our mediocre industries by walling ourselves off from the world. That’s a recipe for national decline.

In the progressive era, America built new institutions like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Reserve. During the New Deal, Americans created an alphabet soup of new agencies. By 1949, Americans had created NATO and the precursor to the World Bank. Where are the new institutions fit for today? Government itself is not great at innovation, but for a century, public sector money has been necessary to fuel the fires of creativity — in the United States, in Israel and in China. On that front, America is in retreat. . . . .Is China’s dominance inevitable? Of course not. Centrally controlled economies are prone to monumental blunders.

But the primary contest is psychological — almost spiritual. Do Americans have faith in the power of the human mind? Are they willing to invest to enlarge the national talent pool? Right now, no. Americans, on the left and the right, have become highly attentive to threat, risk-averse and self-doubting about the national project. What do you do with a country with astounding advantages but that no longer believes in itself?

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Spanberger Opens Early lead in Virginia Governor’s Race

Many in Virginia are feeling adverse effects from the Felon's and DOGE's large scale firings of federal workers and under the falsely name "big beautiful bill," many Virginians could end up losing health care coverage.  Add to that rising prices caused by the Felon's tariffs, and most Virginians will find themselves worse off with whatever small tax cuts they might receive overwhelmed by higher consumer prices.  What better way to show Virginia's displeasure with the Felon and his white supremacist, anti-diversity agenda than to have Virginia Democrats lead by Abigail Spanberger rout Republicans in November's statewide elections.  True, the GOP ticket deserves defeat - an expansion of Democrat's hold on the General Assembly would be welcomed too - given its agenda to take Virginia further backwards in time. As for Winsome Sears, one can only hope that her extremism - she has said the Felon was "sent by god," she wants a complete ban on abortion and is stridently anti-LGBT - gets underscored and that it proves to be a drag on the other GOP candidates.  Both Politico and The Hill are reporting that Spanberger and the other Democrat statewide candidates leading in polls.  The downside is that many are still undecided and there is always the fear that Democrat supporters will be complacent and fail to vote, assuming the Democrat ticket is destined to win.  Here is this from Politico:

Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, maintains a double-digit lead over her Republican opponent, according to a new poll from Virginia Commonwealth University.

The survey, conducted between June 19 and July 3, found that 49 percent of registered voters support Spanberger, with 37 percent saying they would vote for GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears if the election were held today. That’s an even bigger lead than Spanberger enjoyed in Commonwealth’s December poll, which had Earle-Sears trailing her by 10 percentage points.

The poll also found that the cost of living continues to dominate as voters’ top concern, with reproductive rights and immigration also ranking high among Virginians’ priorities. Spanberger, who represented Virginia’s 7th Congressional District from 2019 to 2025 after serving in the CIA, is leaning into the issue by touting an “Affordable Virginia Plan” that lays out her vision for lowering housing, energy and health care costs.

The centrist Democrat enjoys an even wider lead among young voters, with respondents aged 18-24 years old siding with the Democrat by a margin of 31 percentage points. Her campaign also outraised Earle-Sears’ by more than $4 million in the last three months, raking in over $10 million between April and June, according to a report filed Tuesday with the Virginia State Board of Elections.

As for the rest of the statewide tickets, The Hill has this:

The poll’s results out of the lieutenant gubernatorial race and the attorney general race mirrored the governor’s race results. In the lieutenant governor’s race, state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D) leads conservative talk show host John Reid 46 percent to 36 percent, while in the attorney general race, former state Del. Jay Jones (D) Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares 47 percent to 38 percent. 

However, roughly half of independents in all three matchups said they were undecided. 

Most polling out of the governor’s race so far shows Spanberger with an advantage over Earle-Sears. A Roanoke College survey released in May showed Spanberger with a wide 43 percent to 26 percent lead, with 28 percent of voters saying they were undecided. However, another May poll released by the business group Virginia FREE showed Spanberger leading by 4 percentage points.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as lean Democratic. 

Personally, I would love to see a Democrat landslide.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

FEMA Is a Disaster Under Trump

We are a month and a half into hurricane season and Texas, parts of North Carolina and the Northeast are reeling from flooding and FEMA is unprepared to deal with the disasters under the incompetent ICE Barbie who prefers to cosplay rounding up migrants (few of whom have criminal records) rather than aid states and localities with disaster recovery.  Worse yet, the Felon's regime is making accurate weather and hurricane forecasting more difficult and less precise.  Living on the water in coastal Virginia one is very aware of the potential for a hurricane disaster and the thought of being at the mercy of ICE Barbie and a degraded FEMA (and Trump acolyte, Glenn Youngkin) is unnerving. One has to wonder how many more major disasters need to occur before MAGA world - especially in Gulf coast red states- grasps that gutting federal agencies is a form of Russian roulette and not in the best interests of millions of Americans.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the dangerous disarray at FEMA and what it could mean for many as climate change worsens - the Felon continues to call it a "hoax" - and more  climate driven disasters occur.  Here are highlights:

One thing that’s helpful in a crisis is steady leadership. Unfortunately, disaster-stricken Americans are stuck with Kristi Noem instead.

Noem, the secretary of homeland security, was unequivocal at a March Cabinet meeting: “We are eliminating FEMA.” (She was echoing President Donald Trump, who’d suggested getting rid of the agency.) This weekend, when asked point-blank whether that was still the plan, she had a different claim. “No, I think the president recognizes that FEMA should not exist the way that it always has been,” she said. “It needs to be redeployed in a new way.”

Noem is right that FEMA’s current deployment seems to not be working all that well. But no matter how officials describe their plans, the Trump administration is dismantling the federal government’s ability to prepare for, warn about, and help Americans recover from disasters.

My colleague Zoë Schlanger writes today about some of the many ways FEMA was not prepared to respond to major flooding in Texas. The agency took days to get search-and-rescue teams to the state and did not immediately tap responders from adjacent states who were ready and waiting. FEMA’s delay in renewing contracts for a call center meant that thousands of flood victims’ calls went unanswered . . . the contracts have since been renewed. FEMA’s acting chief, David Richardson, finally showed up in Texas more than a week after the floods, sporting, for some reason, cowboy boots and a straw planter hat.

At least Texas is getting some federal help, however belatedly. By contrast, California Governor Gavin Newsom complained last week that his state has still not received the federal assistance it requested to help recover from major wildfires in January. . . . This is part of a pattern going back to the first Trump administration in which states with Republican leaders who flatter Trump get help, while Democrat-led states or those that voted against the president are shut out. Americans’ ability to recover from a disaster shouldn’t be conditioned on the officials they choose to represent them.

Trump’s attacks on FEMA have never been particularly coherent: He attacked the agency last year for doing too little after Hurricane Helene, and then said he wanted it to do less. But the basic premise that FEMA needs rethinking is not unreasonable, nor is it partisan.

But moving to a more state-reliant paradigm would take real investment in federal policy beyond just FEMA—both financial and administrative, neither of which Trump is interested in making.

Such a shift would require research that readies the country for changes in climate and increases in extreme weather. Instead, the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate research into climate change, which the president has described as a “hoax.”

It would require rebuilding and upgrading local infrastructure so that communities can weather storms, floods, and fires better, and thus don’t have to spend so much money rebuilding . . . . Instead, in April, FEMA canceled a grant program established during the first Trump administration that was designed to help fund projects that do just that, saying it was not part of the agency’s mission.

It would require ensuring that people have timely and accurate forecasts that can allow them to get to safety before disasters strike. Instead, the Trump administration is gutting the organizations that perform those duties. Some National Weather Service offices no longer have 24-hour staffing. The Defense Department is cutting off the National Hurricane Center’s access to satellite images that are crucial for good hurricane forecasting . . .

[T]he One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to health care and food assistance have pushed funding burdens onto state governments, meaning they will be less able to cover unexpected costs.

Scholars like to say that there are no natural disasters. Fires, floods, hurricanes, and other phenomena are natural, “but what makes them a disaster is how they intersect with individual and community vulnerability, which is socially constructed,” the historian Jacob Remes told Pacific Standard in 2017. “Once we understand this fundamental paradigm, we can understand how disasters are political events with political causes and solutions.” This may sound theoretical and academic, but the Trump administration’s decision to destroy the federal capacity for disaster relief will create far too many chances to see exactly what it means in practice.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

It's Time to Politicize the Texas Flood Tragedy

Whenever there is school shooting or other mass shooting or yet some other tragedy that stems from Republican and right wing policies, one hears a constant refrain from the political right that it's not an appropriate time to talk about the blunders and failed policies/mindsets that played a role in causing the tragedy. We hear endless bloviating about "thoughts and prayers" or that the focus must be on "healing" - pretty much anything rather than lay responsibility at the feet of those who were responsible for the policies and incompetence that lead to the loss of life and ruined lives.  Sadly, we are seeing the phenomenon once again in the wake of the Texas Hill Country flood disaster with disingenuous blather coming from everyone from Texas governor Greg Abbott  (Texas deserves a better governor, in my view, as a former Texas resident) to Kerr County officials who rejected federal funding for a flood warning system to building officials who seemingly issued building permits for additional camp cabins in a know flood plain.  A piece at The Atlantic lays out why this is precisely the time to politicize the tragedy in the hope that future tragedies can either be avoided or lessened.  Here are article excerpts:

When a reporter asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott who is to blame for the deaths of more than 100 people in this month’s catastrophic Guadalupe River flooding, Abbott scoffed. “Who’s to blame?” he said. “Know this: That’s the word choice of losers.”

The impulse to avoid blame—both placing and accepting it—is common after a disaster. Following school shootings, many political leaders suggest a variation on the idea that “now is the time to come together,” while asserting that anything other than unity might “politicize this tragedy.” After four people were killed last year at Apalachee High School in Georgia, for example, Governor Brian Kemp said, “Today is not the day for politics or policy.”

Perhaps this stems from a desire to protect the friends and families of the victims. I noticed this in my own interviews last week with camping experts. When I asked what they thought had gone wrong at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors died, they dodged the question. “The loss of life is very tragic,” one camp insurer said, but “you got to think about all the kids that also made it as well.” A camp-health expert told me, “We don’t make any determinations or ideas around what happened, what didn’t happen.” To be fair, the details of what, exactly, happened are still unclear. Camp Mystic’s director, Dick Eastland . . . . died in the floods. After that kind of a loss, asking if the camp should have been better prepared might feel distasteful.

The camp did, however, make some decisions that in retrospect appear reckless. In 2019, it began a project to build new cabins, including some in a flood-risk area. The camp also failed to move several older cabins even though they were in a floodway, which, according to Kerr County officials, is “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of floodwaters.”. . . . . The state and local governments, too, deserve scrutiny for the ways they did and did not act to protect Mystic campers and others in the flood zone.

Far from being inappropriate, now is the right time to ask questions, such as: Did camp officials follow the emergency plans with which the camp passed a state inspection two days before the flood? Why was there “little or no help” from authorities as the campers fended for themselves, wading through rising waters to higher ground? Why was an emergency alert called a CodeRED delayed for an hour after a firefighter in the area first asked for it to be sent? Why did Kerr County, which is in an area known as “Flash Flood Alley” and dotted with summer camps, including Mystic, struggle to install a flood-warning system after having considered such a project for years? Why did the state rebuff local officials when they tried? Why were so many people, at so many levels, seemingly unwilling to address the danger these children were in?

In a confusing, anguished time, gentle pabulum such as “come together” and “focus on the mourning” can feel safe and reassuring. And blame can be depressing; accepting responsibility for something that went terribly wrong is often painful and embarrassing. But the alternative is much worse: a world where the loss of innocent life is treated as inescapable, where no calamity can be prevented or bad situation reformed. Admitting that we can improve the world might be initially more uncomfortable, but it is also more hopeful.

Finding out who is responsible for a major failure matters, because identifying that failure can help prevent a next one. As Tom Moser, a former Kerr County commissioner, put it to reporters, “I think things should come out of this. It should be a lesson learned.”

Another word for blame is accountability, and accountability can motivate change. After 9/11, Richard Clarke, who had been national coordinator for counterterrorism leading up to and during the attacks, told families of the victims: “Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you”—an attitude that helped bring about efforts to improve national security. After a man opened fire on two mosques in New Zealand in 2019, killing 51 people, then–Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she felt almost “complicit” because the nation’s laws had allowed the gunman to acquire his weapons legally. To her, it was the time for politics and policy: “I went to a press conference immediately after and said that our gun laws needed to change,” she told NPR recently.

Accountability was, I would bet, the goal of the reporter who questioned Abbott. Countless studies have shown that outcomes for citizens improve when members of the media ask probing questions of politicians.

Of course, even if officials take responsibility, misfortune will continue to happen. Even with timelier warnings and cabins on higher ground, children still might have died in the Guadalupe flood. Yet as we come together, pray for the victims, and console their families, we should also try to understand what happened. Tragedy is part of life. But we should not invite more tragedies than are necessary by pretending we are powerless to stop them.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

MAGA Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Jeffrey Epstein

It must be said that watching one's moral and political opponents infight and tear each other apart can be most satisfying.  That's what Democrats and those on the political left are experiencing as MAGA world is going berserk over the Felon's Department of Justice saying no client list exists for the late Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking operation that focused on very young women and girls after hearing for years that the list was real and would be extremely harmful to Democrats. The irony, of course, is that if there is a list, MAGA world's "dear leader", Der Trumpenfuhrer, is thought by many to a prime candidate for inclusion on the Epstein "client" list given his past friendship with Epstein (which he is now downplaying) and the photos of him with Epstein all over the Internet. The lesson, naturally, is that when you constantly inflame grievance, peddle non-stop conspiracy theories and seek to demonize others, especially political opponents, it creates a wild situation where a sudden change in the long preached storyline will not be well received.  A column in the New York Times looks at the current MAGA world frenzy which I for one hope the Felon is unable to extinguish.   Here are column highlights:

Last week President Trump’s Department of Justice delivered a blow to one of the foundational beliefs of the MAGA movement, one that helped carry him back to the White House.

In an unsigned memorandum, the department declared that there was no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced deceased convicted sexual predator, maintained a client list or that he blackmailed prominent individuals for various misdeeds. The memorandum also declared that Epstein committed suicide.

Most Americans saw this news (if they saw it at all) and barely raised an eyebrow. The Epstein story was part of the past; he died in 2019. But it detonated like a bomb in the MAGA universe. Pro-Trump influencers with vast audiences couldn’t believe what they were reading.

After all, they’d been told for years that there was an Epstein client list. . . . In October 2024, JD Vance, then a candidate for vice president, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.”

Before he was Trump’s director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel told Glenn Beck, a right-wing radio host, that the F.B.I. had Epstein’s “black book” and that it was “under direct control of the director of the F.B.I.” In 2023, Patel told Benny Johnson, a MAGA podcaster, that members of Congress should “put on your big-boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

In September 2024, Dan Bongino, now the deputy director of the F.B.I., told his listeners, “Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal” that would “rock the Democrat Party.”

These quotations are a small fraction of the right-wing discourse about Epstein. During the Trump era, references to Epstein have been ubiquitous in MAGA circles. And the statement “Epstein didn’t kill himself” was so popular that it leaked out into the wider American culture.

The Epstein story mattered so much in MAGA circles because it was a key element in their indictment of America’s so-called ruling class. Trump’s appeal to the Republican base isn’t just rooted in his supporters’ extraordinary affection for the man; it’s also rooted in their almost indescribably dark view of the American government.

Why are they so keen to burn it all down? Well, if you believe your government is populated by people so depraved that they’d participate in and cover up the systematic sexual abuse of children, then you wouldn’t just want them out of office; you’d want them prosecuted, imprisoned and maybe even executed. And you’d want all the power you’d need to make that happen.

And if you believe that the ruling elites would abuse children, then they’d certainly be the kind of people who’d gin up a Russia hoax or try to steal an election in 2020. People who are that terrible are capable of anything. . . . . MAGA America also believed the F.B.I. was protecting pedophiles to preserve the status quo.

On the right, the Epstein story became the thinking man’s version of the QAnon conspiracy theory — the idea that American society was led by a gang of cannibalistic pedophiles.

Epstein was a monstrous and grotesque sexual predator. Along with his convicted confederate, Ghislaine Maxwell, he systematically groomed and sexually abused (and enabled the sexual abuse of) hundreds and hundreds of young women and girls.

He was also one of the most well-connected people in the world. A host of powerful people attended his parties and rode on his jet.

Oddly enough — considering MAGA’s obsession with Epstein — one of his most powerful friends was Trump. They flew together, they partied together, and in 2002, Trump told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.” But Trump also made this ominous observation, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” . . . . This was the man that MAGA trusted to fully expose Epstein and all his misdeeds? . . . . Alex Jones said the Trump administration was now “part of the cover-up.”  

Make no mistake: MAGA is very angry. After the Department of Justice released its memo, MAGA influencers exploded. Tucker Carlson was furious. “The whole thing that this tape shows that he didn’t kill himself is, like, a joke, but worse than that, it’s a joke that we all get,” he said. “I feel like we’re at a dangerous point now.”

This moment is significant for another reason: It allows us to peer into the future of MAGA and see its potential crackup. After Trump is gone, this movement could tear itself apart. Its very existence is premised on a series of fantastical assertions about America and American government.

This means that MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right-wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance, and MAGA supporters are so convinced that the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump who dares to tell them the truth — or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves.

Once Trump leaves office, there will be no one left to end the internal arguments and direct everyone to fall in line. If the Democrats have a problem of too many purity tests, Republicans will soon experience the consequences of putting together a coalition that may have too few. In red America, you can believe anything so long as you support Trump.

Remove that man, and only the grievances remain, and many of MAGA’s grievances are against other Republicans. The G.O.P. coalition contains pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine factions, internationalists and isolationists, normie Republicans and wild conspiracy theorists.

Republican ideological diversity is its temporary strength. It could build a tent big enough to win very close to a majority of the popular vote. But by pulling a critical mass of disgruntled Americans into one party, Republicans have created a culture of constant conflict, and those conflicts are often rooted in completely false beliefs about American life. 

Trump himself isn’t immune from attack. As part of his divorce from the MAGA movement, Elon Musk has claimed that Trump and his longtime ally Steve Bannon are in the Epstein files. “How,” Musk posted on Tuesday, “can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

By Saturday evening, Trump had enough. . . . . bizarrely claimed that the Epstein files were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration.”

Judging from the early response online, MAGA is not satisfied. The usually faithful Benny Johnson was shaken. “By admitting that the Epstein Files are real,” he said, “and that you’ve read them, and you don’t like their contents, and they were written by your enemies, it doesn’t make the most compelling case as far as I’m concerned. Holy moly.”

This much we do know: Some of MAGA’s most trusted voices — including Patel, Bondi, Bongino and Trump himself — are suddenly telling their movement: Move along, there’s nothing to see here. But MAGA does not want to hear what they have to say.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty