I’ve always loved gangster movies.

And I know that as soon as I say that, many of you are already thinking The Godfather or Goodfellas. I’ve seen both of them at least a dozen times. Probably more.

But I also loved Boardwalk Empire, especially the scenes featuring the hotheaded young Al Capone. Loud. Charismatic. Vindictive. Impulsive. Obsessed with loyalty. Always keeping score. Always looking for revenge.

Sound familiar?

Because the more I watch trump lumber around America like a sleepy orange grievance machine, the more I realize he has always viewed himself less as a President and more as a mob boss.

Not a GOOD mob boss, mind you.

Not Michael Corleone.

Not even Tony Soprano.

More like a guy running a protection racket out of a failing Atlantic City steakhouse while screaming at the waiter because the ketchup bottle is empty.

trump is basically the Temu version of Al Capone.

Capone, at least, ran an organized criminal enterprise. trump runs his like a Roomba with felony convictions, smashing from scandal to scandal while knocking over democracy and screaming about witch hunts.

And the similarities are impossible to ignore.

Both men were obsessed with loyalty.

Both viewed vengeance as a governing philosophy.

Both demanded absolute devotion from the people around them.

Both loved humiliating enemies publicly.

Both treated rules as something only suckers followed.

And both eventually developed some very awkward relationships with taxes.

In fact, despite all the murders and violence tied to Al Capone, the feds could never pin a body on him.

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You know what finally got him?

Tax evasion.

Which feels strangely poetic considering trump’s own long-running history of suspicious accounting gymnastics, disappearing tax obligations, fraud settlements, shuttered foundations, and a “university” so scammy it sounded like something advertised at 3AM between testosterone pills and reverse mortgages.

This is a man whose foundation was dissolved for fraud.

A man whose company was convicted of tax fraud.

A man with 34 felony convictions.

A man who reportedly spent decades circling around mob-connected figures in New York construction and casino culture.

And somehow, despite ALL of that, millions of Americans still look at him and think:
“Yes. That seems presidential.”

That’s the part that still blows my mind.

But what truly fascinates me is how openly trump now governs like a cartoon mafia boss.

He doesn’t even hide it anymore.

Everything revolves around loyalty, retaliation, tribute, silence, and protecting “The Family.”

And this is where the story somehow gets even more ridiculous.

Every mob boss needs enforcers.

trump has Kash “Kross Eyes” Patel and Todd Blanche.

The consigliere and the street crew.

Their job isn’t defending law and order. Their job is protecting The Don and punishing his enemies.

Notice how quickly trumpworld starts targeting people the moment they fall out of favor.

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James Comey.

Jack Smith.

Former staffers.

Former lawyers.

Former allies.

Former Cabinet officials.

Everyone eventually becomes a rat. A snitch. A traitor.

trump talks exactly like mob bosses in old movies. The language is practically identical.

Weak.

Disloyal.

Low-life.

Scum.

Backstabber.

Rat.

The man sounds like he should be threatening somebody behind a butcher counter in Queens.

And the funniest part?

In mob movies, somebody usually flips after the third FBI raid.

In trumpworld, they flip after he refuses to pay their legal bills.

Even trump’s latest financial schemes feel ripped directly from organized crime fiction.

Take the absurd $1.8 billion “compensation” slush fund supposedly intended for people “wronged” by the Biden administration.

Who determines who gets paid?

A board selected by trump.

Of course.

Because nothing says “healthy democracy” quite like a president creating a giant revenge piggy bank controlled by his own loyalists.

And then, almost magically, trump and his family would receive broad protection from IRS-related legal exposure.

How convenient.

That’s not governance.

That’s a protection racket with letterhead.

And like any mob boss, trump understands tribute culture.

Everybody knows that if you want access to The Don, you’d better arrive bearing gifts.

Maybe it’s a massive inauguration donation.

Maybe it’s a favorable business deal.

Maybe it’s a public humiliation ritual on Fox News where you pretend he’s the greatest leader in human history despite the fact that he now falls asleep faster than my grandfather during Mets games.

Maybe it’s investing in whatever bizarre meme coin operation the family is pushing this week.

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In organized crime, tribute buys protection.

In trumpworld, tribute buys access.

The similarities never stop.

Even trump’s foreign policy sounds like a guy demanding a cut of sportsbook revenue from neighboring territories.

He wants Venezuela’s oil.

Iran’s oil.

Control over shipping lanes.

A “piece of the action.”

The man discusses international diplomacy like a guy leaning over a poker table saying:
“Nice Strait of Hormuz you got there. Shame if something happened to it.”

And honestly, if this were merely corruption, it would almost be funny.

But the terrifying part is this:

Al Capone never controlled the federal government.

Capone never had nuclear weapons.

Capone never had millions of people trained to dismiss every investigation as a conspiracy.

Capone never had a propaganda machine convincing supporters that every prosecutor, judge, journalist, whistleblower, and witness was part of “the deep state.”

trump is what happens when a mob movie collides with reality television and somehow acquires sovereign immunity.

He isn’t a mastermind.

That’s what makes him so dangerous.

A competent criminal at least understands limits.

trump doesn’t.

He lurches from scheme to scheme, outrage to outrage, crime to crime, using each new scandal to distract from the previous one like a man juggling chainsaws in a gasoline factory.

And somehow, against all odds, the Republican Party decided THIS was the guy they wanted running the country again.

Not despite the felony convictions.

Because of them.

Because in modern MAGA politics, criminality itself has become a performance of strength.

That’s the truly poisonous part of all this.

trump has trained millions of Americans to view corruption as authenticity.

Cruelty as leadership.

Retaliation as justice.

And blind loyalty as patriotism.

The difference between gangster movies and real life is that eventually the credits roll.

The hero survives.

The villain gets dragged away in handcuffs.

Justice wins.

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But America isn’t watching a movie.

We handed the federal government to a vain, sleepy, grievance-soaked Temu Capone who believes loyalty matters more than law, revenge matters more than democracy, and every institution in America exists to protect him personally.

And unlike the gangsters in the movies, this one has Air Force One.

So now I want to hear from you.

Which fictional mobster does trump remind you of most, and why?

And what do you honestly believe is the thing that finally catches up to him? Leave your answers in the COMMENTS section below.

Because what has always fascinated me about Al Capone is that after all the violence, corruption, intimidation, and alleged crimes, the government ultimately nailed him for something almost boring.

Taxes.

And honestly? It would be strangely fitting if history repeated itself.

If you enjoyed this piece and want to support independent writing like this, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

I know things are tight for a lot of folks right now, and I never take your support for granted. But paid subscriptions genuinely help keep the lights on and allow me to continue writing, researching, yelling into the void, and documenting this surreal moment in American history without corporate sponsors or billionaire funding.

Thank you, as always, for reading and being part of this community.

Majid

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The President is unfit.

I know it, you know it.
The world knows it.

Doesn’t matter how many bombs he drops.
He’s dropping more bombs in his pants.

MAGA may buy his bluster,
but smart grown ups don’t.

All he has are lies and hyperbole.
“Tremendous,” “the best,” “the biggest.”
Nothing connected to reality.

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He is distracted by aggrandizement.
“My face on a coin, my name on the dollar,
a ballroom for me, a library for me.
Big gold statue for me.”

All while you struggle to buy gas.
You choose between food and filling the tank.
And he says affordability is a hoax.

What he told a room full of people today
should alarm everybody, whether you’re
Republican, Independent, or Democrat:

“We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.”

That wasn’t just a bad answer.
That was the most dangerous thing he’s said yet.

Excuse us? You mean to say that dropping bombs
on Iran, or Venezuela, or Cuba is more important than
taking care of the American people at home?

He gave a speech at primetime last night,
one in which he was supposed to make a case
to the American people for why we’re in Iran,
why we have 13 dead service members, 300 wounded.

Why we’re amassing 50,000 members of our military,
seemingly gearing up for a ground invasion that will
put even more American lives at risk, for some mystery reason.

Regime change? No. They deny it, even though
trump is busy bragging that he eliminated all of the leadership.
He killed the 80 year old Ayatollah, now replaced by his
younger, more radical son.

Nukes? No. They’ve assured us repeatedly that
they obliterated it last year in July, and it’s buried deep
under rubble that nobody can get to. But we might need
to bomb it again, just in case.

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Oil? Nah, we good. In fact, trump assured us
tonight that we have more oil than anybody. So much oil
we don’t even need the Strait of Hormuz. The same Strait
we suddenly need help reopening.

But don’t worry, folks, we’re out in Iran for reasons
which may or may not be revealed to you two weeks from now.

His low energy speech was a farce. It was warmed over comments
that sounded familiar because they were the exact same lines
he’s been repeating everywhere.

Back in the day, when networks gave time
to the President of the United States,
he would deliver somber, unifying messages
about threats we faced together.

Not a partisan speech.
A call to all Americans.

But last night? Anything but.

Look how great I am. Look how dumb my predecessors were.

He looked into the camera and told everyone
what we all knew to be false.
“The strongest economy in history.”

That he could stand there and say that
shows the contempt he has for the American people.

We are paying inflated gas, grocery, and utility prices
because of his tariffs and his war.

He could have said something simple.
“I know many of you are feeling pain, and we are focused
on turning things around.”

I would not have believed him.
But at least that lie would have shown awareness.

Instead, we got arrogance.
Blatant, in your face nonsense.

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He is surrounded by sycophants.
Bad news is dismissed as fake.
Decisions are made inside a bubble.

That is not how you run a country.

Sometimes it feels like an unhinged man
is at the wheel, laughing one moment
and checked out the next.

And the people around him know it.

They see it.
They hear it.
And they do nothing.

He’s weak. He’s delusional.
He’s falling asleep in every meeting.
He’s obsessed with grift and vengeance.
He is easily manipulated.

Our enemies can see that.

And that makes us less safe.

We are not dealing with a strong man.
We are dealing with a weak one who pretends to be strong.

A man who lies because he has to.
A man who blusters because he is hollow.
A man who surrounds himself with loyalists because the truth terrifies him.

And the most dangerous part?

Everyone around him knows.

They see it.
They hear it.
They understand exactly how unfit he is.

And they choose power anyway.

That is how countries fall.
Not all at once, but piece by piece,
while people who know better stay silent.

We are past the warning stage.

This is the consequence stage.

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I just need to vent a little bit.

I usually get on here and try to put together some clever analogies and break down complex issues into easy-to-digest articles, and I haven’t given up on that.

I’m just... exhausted.

We are facing multiple threats to our democracy here in America, possibly abroad too, but it feels like so much more here it’s insane.

And much of the imminent danger is coming from our own President.

I can hear you MAGA fuckers howling about TDS, and I don’t give a shit. You are a big part of the problem, so I’m going to give it to you.

Your idiotic answers to any time we mention a stupid thing trump does is to accuse us of having TDS.

US: trump fell asleep in a major meeting in the Oval Office
MAGA: You have TDS

US: trump started a war in Iran, despite promising no new wars
MAGA: You have TDS

US: trump just insulted the Prime Minister of Japan
MAGA: You have TDS

US: trump just used dignified transfer photos for fundraising emails
MAGA: You have TDS

... and on and on it goes. You’ve replaced rational thinking with stupid catch phrases, like “the left can’t meme” or “go woke go broke.”

This tired reliance on the adolescent “own the libs” energy is exhausting, mainly because it’s coming from a lot of people whose adolescent kids are already grown, but you’re carrying on like THEY do.

You love trump because he is his absolute worst self: he disrespects people without apologizing, he’s greedy and selfish, he’s corrupt, he lies like there is no tomorrow, and you mainly love him because these things drive us crazy.

But put the shoe on your own fucking feet: What if Gavin Newsom is elected President?

What if Gavin Newsom is President, and he decides to go Blue MAGA? So, by going Blue MAGA, I mean he would immediately embark on an absurd retribution tour, looking for some payback from everyone who dissed him. Lawsuits and prosecutions galore. Petulant and spiteful, but only to Republicans.

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He would announce that he’s going to penalize a bunch of red states ONLY. He would also announce that he’s changing the Gulf of Mexico (we are NEVER calling it the Gulf of America, you dummies) to the Gulf of Newsom.

During every single speech, he would be sure to mention trump’s name at least 50 times, and always finding new and creative ways to remind everyone how horrible and racist he was, yeah, we know how much you HATE being called racist, it’s like the “n” word for you.

He would declare that he’s going to erect statues of himself instead of your Confederate heroes, he’s going to rename schools and hospitals after himself. He would have an executive order making every Tuesday “Transgender Tuesday.”

He would hold press conferences and talk about how trump started 9 wars as President, but he Newsom had just ended all of them with a phone call... nobody thought it could be done, he said.

He would have his likeness put on the 5 dollar bill, replacing Lincoln. And then he’d rip down trump’s colossal new ballroom, and replace it with an even BIGGER building called “The Obama Monument,” and pass a law that it can NEVER be changed or knocked down.

And then he’d have his billionaire friends do a hostile takeover of Fox News, and they would have Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and the rest teaching woke ideology.

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And you know, as ridiculous as those things sound (and they DO sound ridiculous), and as much as I know they are wrong, I kinda feel like I want some payback, to be perfectly honest.

I know it’s irrational. I know it will only succeed in driving the two sides further apart. I’m not defending how I feel, because I don’t need to. I just know that, after just now watching a replay of trump calling Democrats “sick people” and other divisive comments, I just want YOU to see how it feels.

And I would like you to experience it for 4 to 8 straight years, or for however long it would take your stubborn, self-centered asses to see “Ohhhh, THAT’S how it felt to THEM.” Yep.

I guarantee you, if Gavin Newsom did even ONE of those things, you MAGAs would lose your fucking minds and start screeching about how you need to take your country back.

But Donald trump is already doing most or all of those things, just opposite, and y’all are titillated because none of it makes any sense, it’s wrong, but it irritates US.

You guys imagine yourselves as the stereotypical cool, leather-jacket wearing hipsters, flipping the bird to us uptight boomers and blue-haired hippies, right?

But you’re not hip or cool. Many of you have lived with resentment your whole lives, resentment of the changing world just passing you by, while you’re stuck in your small, unchanging town with your small mind and intolerant attitude.

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You love trump deporting all “those” people, even though you know you don’t want to do THEIR jobs, but you hate how their super hard-working ethic makes YOU feel like a lazy slacker. How dare those “illegals” bust their asses and get ahead before you?

And they came here and started a business, while you’re on a couch in your underwear, picking Cheese Doodle crumbs off your chest, wondering where it all went wrong as you watch Fox News rant about the very same thing.

You hate how Liberals act all high-and-mighty, with their defense of the less fortunate, their use of good grammar and hygiene, with their insistence on treating people with respect the way THEY want to be treated, not the way YOU prefer to treat them.

Every progressive, liberal or Democrat to you has like 17 ear and nose piercings with blue hair and pronouns, and walks around with books on Karl Marx and loves to burn the flag or watch a trans kid get surgically changed from a boy to a girl during their lunch break at school, against their parents’ wishes, of course.

You think we hate America, just because we have a problem with trump trying to literally steal the midterm elections and every election after that with his SAVE America voter suppression act.

You think we are less patriotic because we believe that when a President promises to lower prices, and release the Epstein files and ensure that rich and powerful pedophiles are held accountable, that he should keep his promises.

You think we don’t love our country because we hate how trump would rather give trillions to the wealthiest people in America instead of a few billion in extended healthcare subsidies so millions of Americans don’t die.

But you would think wrong.

We LOVE America, but we hate what trump is doing to it, and we hate that you are fine with him burning it all down and stuffing his and his pals’ pockets to overflowing just because Hunter Biden sold a painting for a million dollars, and every other whataboutism you can muster.

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We love America so much that we care enough to criticize when we see shit that isn’t working properly, when we see injustice, like a masked goon wrongfully shooting someone in the face.

FUN FACT: When Obama was President, there were many, many protesters from the Tea Party yelling about taking their country back, but none of them were shot in the face.

We love America so much, we believe that cabinet members should actually be qualified for their position, not just have good TV hair and be able to project a pseudo macho, chest-beating persona for an audience of one.

I truly DO give a shit that our country is heading in the wrong direction, and the guy who’s supposed to be steering is literally only doing things to make himself wealthy.

And I’m pissed because SO many MAGA still support him, even as gas approaches $4 dollars per gallon because of his war of choice and that affects ALL of us.

I’m pissed because so many MAGA are impressed or amused by his antics, while there really is nothing to laugh about during these serious times.

I don’t expect anything to come of this.

No mass MAGA revelation. No sudden moment of clarity where you all wake up and say, “Oh man, Brooklyn Dad, I get it now. We were being juvenile assholes, laughing while the country burned because it made you mad.”

That’s not going to happen.

But here’s what I do know.

At some point, this all catches up.

Reality always does.

The prices you’re paying.
The rights being stripped away.
The chaos you keep cheering for because you think it only hurts us.

It doesn’t.

It hurts all of us.

That’s the part you still refuse to understand.

We’re in the same boat.

And you’re still drilling holes in the bottom of it.

Not because you don’t know better.

But because somewhere along the way, “owning the libs” became more important to you than staying afloat.

And yeah, I’m pissed.

But more than that?

I’m tired of watching people cheer for their own downfall just because they think it makes someone else miserable first.

If this piece hit you, if you’ve been feeling this same frustration building and needed someone to say it out loud, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I’m here every week, breaking this stuff down, calling it out, and saying the things a lot of people are thinking but don’t always put into words.

Your support keeps this going.

When did you first realize this wasn’t just politics anymore, but something deeper?

Do you think any of this actually gets through, or are people too far gone at this point?

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The Japanese Prime Minister rolled her eyes and was visibly shocked by this comment from Trump. Trump continued, alluding to using nuclear weapons and saying to a reporter, “This looks like one of your people right here. Is he good or bad?”

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It’s actions like these, including Trump’s vastly unpopular war in Iran (recent polling shows a negative 28 percent approval rating of the war), and skyrocketing gas prices, that are causing a MAGA mutiny within Trump’s base of supporters.

One former supporter, who says she voted for Trump three times, said to NBC News that Trump was a “worthless pile of sh*t,” and that her decision to vote for Trump three times was “My bad. Apparently I’m an idiot.”

We also cover the confirmation hearing of Trump’s newest hack-appointee, Senator Markwayne Mullin, and GOP Senator Rand Paul’s growing rift with MAGA, on Network.

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Rep. Gomez sits on the House Intelligence Committee, giving him a front row seat to Trump’s Iran War, and a plethora of expertise on the subject. Trump, who made the unilateral decision to wage a war without congressional authorization, has not only plunged the Middle East into a new era of chaos and danger, but has steadily worsened the already severe affordability crisis here at home.

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Oil and gas prices have soared since Trump began the war, something Rep. Gomez tells us his constituents are paying attention to. With affordability consistently ranking as the number one cause of concern for Americans in 2026, one would think that the Trump, who rode to power on creating the “golden age” of America, would care just a bit more about the negative impact this is having on American families and new parents.

Instead, Trump has dedicated his second term to enriching himself and his family to the tune of billions, selling presidential pardons, and passing massive tax cuts designed to benefit his billionaire donors and friends. When asked about affordability, Trump says it’s a “Democrat hoax.”

These factors combined, along with Rep. Gomez’s role as a new father, are what led him to announce the National Summit on the Caregiving Crisis, an event meant to shine a spotlight on the state of caregiving within the United States.

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Rep. Gomez, who founded and chairs the Congressional Dads Caucus, went viral in 2023 after bringing his son Hodge to the House floor during a record-breaking speaker vote. Rep. Gomez says it highlighted a double standard, in which fathers are oftentimes praised for bringing their children to work, while mothers are criticized.

The Dads Caucus strongly advocates for a national paid leave program, affordable and accessible child care, and expansion of the Child Tax Credit. The summit will take place tomorrow, March 17th.

Rep. Gomez joins me to discuss how Trump’s Iran War is affecting the affordability crisis here in the U.S., and much more.

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Yesterday, the President of the United States told the world that Iran fired American Tomahawk missiles at a girls’ school.

Sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Other times it feels like I’m a background character with no dialogue in a bizarre cold-open SNL skit. Except this time, I actually have something to say about how the present one may have just torpedoed his own presidency, and how his sickening sycophants helped him do it.

Imagine telling a room full of reporters, and by extension the entire country, that a foreign adversary fired not one but TWO of your own highly-guarded Tomahawk missiles at an Iranian girls’ school.

And yet, that is exactly what our “president” incredulously did today.

Start the countdown on his presidency now.

We all know what a presidency is supposed to look like. They are grand, official, often consequential. Serious and sometimes boring. Full of statecraft and legislation, proclamations and poll numbers.

Occasionally, they veer into terrifying drama, when the consequences of action or inaction could lead to war… or worse.

Presidencies can be wildly different. Democrat or Republican. Black or White. Man or… well, we’re still apparently a ways off from THAT one. Damn you, America.

But what they all tend to have in common is deliberation.

The biggest decisions are supposed to be weighed carefully. Advisors gather. Consequences are examined. Alternatives are debated.

No impulsive decisions made in anger or ignorance.

The office demands seriousness.

What we have in the Oval Office now is the exact opposite.

A complete clown show.

A presidency lurching from week to week with a new scandal or crisis, each one seemingly engineered to distract from the previous one.

Great leaders assemble teams of experts to eliminate blind spots and fill gaps in knowledge, ensuring that the president has the full benefit of experience and perspective at his fingertips.

But this jackass, trump?

He has assembled the WORST cabinet in modern American history.

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What should be a council of seasoned advisors often looks more like a junk drawer.

Where one would expect gravitas, experience, and steady leadership, there is instead a swirling collection of clapping seals, each one trying to outdo the next with grotesque displays of loyalty rather than offering sober guidance.

trump doesn’t want advice.

He wants fealty.

He wants bowing and scraping, the more humiliating the better.

There is an empty crater where trump’s self-esteem should be, and no amount of unearned praise or stolen Peace Prizes will ever fill it.

Thus far, at the time I’m writing this, an ill-advised and illegal war against Iran has been raging without the approval of Congress, without any clear strategic objective, and without anything resembling an exit strategy.

Now, I’m not a foreign policy expert.

But I probably know as much as that bobble-headed buffoon trump.

I know that the United States has had an adversarial relationship with Iran for decades, ever since 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in the late 1970s.

I know that Iranian leaders have chanted “death to America” ever since.

I know that Iran has long pursued nuclear capability.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning that Iran is “weeks away” from a nuclear weapon for roughly forty years now.

Iran has also claimed to be developing nuclear energy, the stated justification for its uranium enrichment activities.

And I know that President Obama negotiated the JCPOA nuclear agreement, which placed strict international monitoring on Iran’s nuclear program to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons.

I also know that trump’s irrational hatred of Barack Hussein Obama compelled him to rip up that agreement and replace it with absolutely nothing.

Nothing but bombast.

Nothing but bluster.

And thus far, bombast and bluster remain the primary weapons with which he is prosecuting this war.

A war that began so suddenly that Americans inside Iran reportedly received little or no warning to evacuate.

The press briefings surrounding this conflict often resemble an Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First?” routine.

Officials contradict one another.

Nobody seems quite sure who said what… or who authorized what.

Pete Hegseth, the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” is a hilariously hollow caricature of chest-thumping male bravado whose apparent mission is to reassure the public that the Pentagon suffers from no shortage of testosterone.

But cartoonishly loud machismo does not inspire confidence.

It inspires concern.

Pentagon officials and staff have reportedly described Hegseth’s leadership environment as “chaotic” and “paranoid.”

And that should terrify anyone paying attention.

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The Voter ID Lie Is Not About ID

Let’s be clear about what is happening.

Republicans are not arguing about voter ID.

They are arguing about who gets to vote.

Kristi Noem just said the quiet part out loud when she said “we’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting…” HUH?

They keep pushing this idiotic, bad-faith talking point:

“It’s insulting to suggest Black voters and women can’t obtain ID.”
Suddenly they care what Black people and women think.

Then comes the barroom logic:

“I can’t even buy a Coors Light or board a plane without showing ID.”

That is not the argument.

No Democrat is saying people are incapable of getting identification.

What we are saying is this:

When you create unnecessary barriers to solve a problem that barely exists, you are not protecting democracy. You are manipulating it.

And Democrats need a full-throated clapback now, before these false equivalencies calcify through repetition. Because if you repeat a ridiculous lie enough times, people start to treat it like common sense. See trump.

There are multiple layers to the voter ID issue.

First: documented voter fraud is vanishingly rare, generally ranging between 0.0003% and 0.0025%.

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Second: even data compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023.

Seventy-seven.

Third: most people do not mind showing a driver’s license. But that is not what Republicans are pushing anymore. Under the SAVE Act, many voters would now be required to produce a birth certificate and or passport.

Fourth: married women who changed their last names may face additional hurdles, because their married name will not match the name on their birth certificate.

So the question becomes obvious.

Why?

Why are we erecting all these new obstacles to participate in democracy to guard against a statistical anomaly?

Passports are not free. They are not cheap. And they do not arrive in a few days.

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I don’t speak any Spanish.

Despite the fact that long before I moved to Brooklyn, I lived in the predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood of Inwood, the upper part of Washington Heights in Manhattan.

When my mom was growing up there, it was mostly a German, Irish, and Jewish neighborhood. Her neighbors were the Wagners, O’Malleys, and Rosenbergs. My neighbors were the Garcias, Hernandezes, and Padillas.

Now don’t get me wrong. I learned plenty of Spanish words. At first it was curse words like mierda and culo. Eventually I picked up real ones like agua, amigo, and hermano.

It felt cool learning words in another language, like my world had gotten a little bigger.

And I was lucky. My whole neighborhood was like that. Our public school classrooms reflected it. My classmates were Black, Filipino, Chinese, Dominican, White. It was an actual melting pot.

That’s where I learned what made America special. My fourth-grade teacher explained that our diversity is what makes this country beautiful.

I believed that then.

I still believe it now.

That’s ME in the bottom row, with my incredibly beautiful, diverse classmates.

But right now, there’s a generation of kids learning something very different. They’re watching intolerant, resentful adults teach them that diversity is something to fear.

I’m talking about the tantrum trump and MAGA threw over Bad Bunny being selected to perform the Super Bowl halftime show.

From the moment it was announced, prominent personalities stomped their feet over how “un-American” he supposedly was.

Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican.

Puerto Rico is America.

It didn’t matter how many people patiently explained this. Maps. History books. Charts. Videos. Nothing worked.

As long as he spoke Spanish and had the nerve to speak English with an accent, he was “other.”

Meanwhile, trump’s ICE goons are literally using appearance and accents to justify detentions, a clear violation of our Fourth Amendment rights.

Facts didn’t matter.

Bad Bunny hosting Saturday Night Live didn’t matter.

Being the second most-streamed artist of all time didn’t matter.

Winning six Grammys didn’t matter.

His acceptance speech didn’t matter, when he said “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans. Hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

MAGA had already decided they’d prove hate was stronger.

Turning Point USA even announced alternative programming for bigots who preferred Kid Rock over Bad Bunny.

Bad Bunny transported America to the Sugarcane fields of Puerto Rico.

And then the show happened.

It was stunning.

Sugarcane fields. Hundreds of dancers dressed as farmers. Barrio scenes with domino games and piragua vendors that took me right back to Washington Heights.

Cardi B. Pedro Pascal. Jessica Alba. Lady Gaga. Ricky Martin.

There was a moment where Bad Bunny handed his Grammy to a little kid who looked just like Liam Ramos, the five-year-old taken by ICE across state lines.

Then Bad Bunny marched through the fields, declared “God Bless America,” and shouted out countries across the Americas as a billboard behind him read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

I couldn’t understand every word.

But my body understood the beat.

The energy.

The joy.

I’ve watched halftime shows for decades. This was electric.

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

And right on cue, MAGA complained.

They always do.

They complained last year about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance too, calling it a “DEI halftime show” and “ghetto,” claiming the lyrics were “gibberish” or hard to understand, despite the performance drawing a record-breaking 133.5 million viewers and featuring Samuel Jackson, SZA, DJ Mustard, and Serena Williams.

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A year earlier, they went after Rihanna’s halftime show, with trump himself calling it the “worst halftime show in Super Bowl history,” bizarrely criticizing her language and even her pregnancy reveal, despite their obsessive fixation on forcing women to give birth.

Meanwhile, there is rarely any criticism of white artists unless they openly oppose trump, like Green Day changing their lyrics to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”

They don’t hate music. They hate being reminded that America doesn’t revolve around them anymore. They hate not being the default.

My Substack last week covered trump’s participation trophy culture, how they resent losing automatic preference.

Bad Bunny didn’t replace anyone.

He expanded the stage.

But MAGA doesn’t see ALSO/AND.

They only see either/or.

And that’s where they’re wrong.

You don’t lose anything when someone else is celebrated.

Bad Bunny doesn’t erase Bruce Springsteen.

Kendrick Lamar doesn’t erase country music.

Representation isn’t subtraction.

It’s expansion.

That’s what I learned growing up.

My world got bigger.

That’s what MAGA can’t stand.

They see culture as a zero-sum game. If someone else is centered, they think they’re being erased.

That’s not patriotism.

That’s insecurity.

And trump feeds it.

He tells them who to hate.

Who to fear.

Who doesn’t belong.

Meanwhile, real problems go untouched. Healthcare. Housing. Wages. Education.

They need distraction. They need division. They need you mad at your neighbor instead of the people picking your pockets.

But I know what America looks like.

America looks like Washington Heights.

It looks like Brooklyn classrooms.

It looks like kids growing up bilingual without thinking twice.

It looks like a Puerto Rican superstar telling the world love beats hate.

America is ALSO/AND.

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And MAGA can’t stand it because it exposes how small their worldview is.

They want a country that looks like a mayonnaise sandwich. Uniform. Bland. Safe from change.

But America was never meant to be small.

America is loud, complicated, messy, and beautiful.

It’s dominoes on sidewalks and football on Sundays.

It’s English and Spanish and everything in between.

It’s people coming together.

And no amount of racist tantrums from trump or his followers will ever change that.

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“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson understood something fundamental about power in America long before cable news or maga grievance culture existed. You do not have to make people richer, safer, or freer to control them. You just have to convince them that someone else deserves less.

That insight explains almost everything about the cultural rot trump and maga have normalized, especially their hysterical obsession with attacking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They painted DEI as some kind of freebie program that handed out high-paying jobs and elite opportunities to unqualified Black people, women, and people of color. In their telling, DEI stood for Didn’t Earn It.

That was always a lie.

DEI never existed to lower standards or reward mediocrity. It existed to open doors that had been deliberately kept shut. It was designed to ensure that when positions became available, they could no longer be quietly reserved for straight white men by default. Everyone still had to be qualified. In many cases, they had to be overqualified. The only real change was that the job market stopped being a whites-only club.

And that is what enraged them.

They were not angry because mediocrity was being rewarded. They were angry because their unearned advantages were no longer guaranteed. They were furious that the participation trophies they had quietly received for generations were suddenly up for competition.

This is the culture trump rose from and now presides over. Not a rebellion against unfairness, but a tantrum over lost entitlement. A movement that screams about merit while elevating failure, rewards loyalty over competence, and mistakes cruelty for strength.

Lyndon B. Johnson portrait, archival photo

What followed was not a rejection of mediocrity, but its coronation.

DEI, ENTITLEMENT, AND THE LIE THEY NEEDED

They told themselves a very specific story about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion because they needed it to be true.

They claimed DEI was a rigged system designed to hand out jobs and prestige to undeserving people. They said Black people, women, and other people of color were being elevated over more qualified white men simply to satisfy quotas. They insisted this was unfair. They insisted this was discrimination. They insisted they were the victims.

But DEI never guaranteed outcomes. It never handed anyone a job. It never lowered standards.

What it did was far more threatening.

It forced institutions to acknowledge how often qualified candidates had been quietly excluded. It required employers to widen the applicant pool. It made it harder to pretend that talent only came in one color, one gender, or one accent.

Everyone still had to compete. Everyone still had to earn it. In many cases, people from marginalized groups had to be better, sharper, and more credentialed just to be considered equal.

That was the real offense.

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For generations, white mediocrity had been cushioned by access. Jobs were passed along through networks. Promotions were justified by vague notions of “fit” or “culture.” Failure rarely carried consequences, because there was always another soft landing waiting.

DEI disrupted that comfort.

And instead of rising to the challenge, they lashed out.

They reframed equality as theft. They reframed opportunity as favoritism. They reframed accountability as persecution. And they screamed about participation trophies while quietly demanding one of their own.

What they resented was not unfairness.

What they resented was competition.

That resentment needed a champion. Someone loud. Someone aggrieved. Someone deeply mediocre but endlessly confident.

They found him.

CABINET MEETINGS AND THE ELEVATION OF FAILURE

Nothing illustrates the participation trophy culture better than trump’s cabinet.

This was never a group assembled for competence, experience, or independent judgment. It was assembled for loyalty, obedience, and a willingness to clap on command. Watching one of trump’s cabinet meetings feels less like governance and more like a hostage video, except everyone is competing to sound the most grateful.

They take turns praising him. They trip over themselves to thank him. They stretch reality to absurd lengths just to flatter his ego. And they know the rules. The loudest praise wins. The most shameless devotion gets rewarded.

This is not leadership. It is a court.

Pam Bondi is not an attorney general in any meaningful sense of the word. She is a cheerleader with prosecutorial powers, deployed to protect trump and punish his enemies. The job is not to uphold the law. The job is to serve the man.

Pete Hegseth is a walking talking point with a microphone and a temper, promoted not because of discipline or judgment, but because he performs grievance well on television. Volume replaced expertise. Swagger replaced substance.

RFK Jr is what happens when conspiracy theories are treated as qualifications. He is not there to improve public health. He is there to validate suspicion, confusion, and distrust. In a culture that values spectacle over seriousness, that makes him perfect.

None of these people are exceptional. None of them are qualified for the gravity of their roles. But they are useful. They are loyal. And they know how to applaud.

This is how mediocrity gets rewarded. Not quietly, but lavishly. With titles, power, and proximity to the throne.

And it sends a very clear message.

You do not have to be good.
You just have to be grateful.

FAKE AWARDS, ENGINEERED PRAISE, AND THE NOBEL OBSESSION

If trump’s cabinet is the participation trophy culture in motion, his obsession with awards is the psychology behind it.

No one has ever wanted to be praised more loudly or more constantly than trump. Not respected. Not admired. Praised. He does not want recognition earned through achievement. He wants applause detached from reality.

That is why he has spent years openly begging for the Nobel Peace Prize. Not subtly. Not coyly. Publicly. Repeatedly. Like a child staring at a shelf and insisting the prize belongs to him simply because he wants it.

Why would he deserve it?

He has deployed National Guard troops against American cities. He has used Border Patrol to terrorize communities. He has overseen operations in which U.S. citizens were abused and even killed. He has bombed multiple countries and territories while bragging about it.

None of this resembles peace.

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And yet the entitlement remains. Because in the participation trophy culture, wanting something is treated as qualification enough.

When the Nobel Committee did not comply, trump did what he always does. He found a substitute. A fake award. Something invented purely to give him a shiny object and stop the tantrum. He accepted it proudly, because the point was never legitimacy. The point was validation.

The humiliation deepened when an actual Nobel laureate offered him her own prize in what can only be described as a desperate peace offering. Even then, the irony went unnoticed. He did not see how absurd it was. He only saw what he believed he was owed.

This is how participation trophies function in this culture. Not as consolation prizes, but as proof that merit no longer matters. That power can manufacture applause when the real world refuses to provide it.

And once you accept that premise, everything else follows.

LOSING, LYING, AND THE REFUSAL TO ACCEPT REALITY

Nothing exposes the participation trophy culture more clearly than trump’s relationship with losing.

He lost the 2020 election decisively. By millions of votes. In the popular vote. In the Electoral College. In courtrooms across the country. He lost, and he lost badly.

And it broke him.

For a man who had spent his life failing upward, losing publicly and unmistakably was intolerable. It was proof of mediocrity he could not spin away. It was confirmation that he was not popular, not admired, and not chosen.

So he did what participation trophy culture demands. He denied reality.

He told his followers the election was stolen. He encouraged fantasies. He rewarded loyalty to the lie and punished anyone who acknowledged the truth. Facts were replaced with feelings. Evidence was replaced with grievance.

When that was not enough, he escalated.

He sent allies to raid offices in Georgia, chasing election data from 2020 like a child trying to erase a bad grade. He pressured officials in Minnesota, a state he lost three times, demanding data as leverage while federal agencies remained embedded there as a threat.

The message was unmistakable. If you cannot win, change the story. If the story resists, use power. If power fails, scream louder.

This is not strength. It is entitlement refusing to confront reality.

Participation trophy culture does not teach people how to lose with dignity. It teaches them that losing is illegitimate. That outcomes are optional. That authority exists to soothe wounded egos rather than serve the public.

And when that belief reaches the presidency, the consequences are catastrophic.

MONUMENTS, BUILDINGS, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF EGO

When policy fails and legitimacy collapses, spectacle takes over.

In the middle of economic strain for millions of Americans, trump has fixated on monuments to himself. Not metaphorical ones. Literal structures. Bigger buildings. Taller arches. Grander halls. Proof, in concrete and steel, that he matters.

He has pursued plans for a massive ballroom larger than the White House itself. He has floated the idea of constructing an arch meant to dwarf both the Arc de Triomphe and the Lincoln Memorial. He has even announced plans to remake the Kennedy Center, attaching his name to it and then acting shocked when artists and performers cancel in protest.

These projects are not about civic pride or national unity. They are about scale. About size. About compensating for something fundamentally lacking (my friend JoJo likes to call him “small in the pants,” LOL).

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Participation trophy culture does not measure success by outcomes or impact. It measures success by visibility. By whether something looks impressive enough to distract from failure.

The irony is painful.

A man who cannot accept an election loss wants monuments. A man who rejects accountability wants legacy. A movement that screams about “real America” cheers as public resources are bent toward ego projects while real problems go unanswered.

This is what happens when vanity replaces service. When applause becomes the goal instead of results. When the illusion of greatness is valued more than the work of governing.

And it is not confined to buildings.

It infects culture too.

CULTURAL GRIEVANCE, BAD BUNNY, AND MANUFACTURED OUTRAGE

The participation trophy culture does not stop at politics. It spills into everything.

Take the recent maga meltdown over Bad Bunny being selected to perform at the Super Bowl. The reaction was immediate, loud, and utterly predictable. Influencers announced, with great drama, that they would not watch the halftime show. They vowed to boycott. They promised alternative programming, which somehow always turns out to be the same tired lineup of Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood.

It would be funny if it were not so revealing.

This was not about music. It was about resentment. Bad Bunny is one of the biggest artists on the planet. His success is undeniable. His audience is massive. His talent is not in question. What bothered them was that he does not fit their idea of who deserves that stage.

This was not even the first time. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez headlined the Super Bowl years ago. Bad Bunny himself performed then, alongside J Balvin, and there was no grievance counter programming. The difference now is not novelty. It is grievance that has been nurtured and weaponized; ICE is the hammer that has been summoned to punish their perceived enemies, enemies who do not take resources, jobs, or votes away from them.

Participation trophy culture teaches people that recognition they do not receive must be illegitimate. That applause given to someone else is an insult. That success without their approval is an attack.

So they pout. They stomp. They declare themselves victims of a culture that no longer centers them.

And instead of confronting why that feels threatening, they reach for familiar targets. Accents. Skin color. Culture. Anything that allows them to look down on someone else and feel momentarily superior.

Which brings us back to Lyndon B. Johnson.

SCAPEGOATING, BIRTHERISM, AND THE MACHINERY OF RESENTMENT

This culture did not appear out of nowhere. It was cultivated deliberately.

Before trump descended the escalator, he tested the waters with birtherism. He looked at the first Black president of the United States and decided the most useful lie was to question whether he belonged here at all. It was crude. It was racist. And it worked.

Birtherism gave resentful white Americans exactly what Lyndon B. Johnson described. Someone to look down on. Someone to blame. Someone whose legitimacy could be endlessly questioned without ever addressing their own frustrations or failures.

That tactic became the blueprint.

During the escalator speech, trump did not offer hope or policy. He offered grievance. He waved away “political correctness” as though basic respect were oppression. He described Mexicans as criminals and predators. He promised a wall. He promised dominance. He promised that cruelty would once again be acceptable.

And people cheered.

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From there, the targets kept changing, but the formula stayed the same. Muslims became threats. Latinos became invaders. Haitians became grotesque caricatures. Trans people became political props, despite representing a tiny fraction of the population.

None of these attacks fixed wages. None of them improved healthcare. None of them strengthened communities.

But they did something else.

They reassured people that if they were unhappy, it was not their fault. If they were struggling, it was because someone else was cheating. And if someone else was being punished, then perhaps the system was working after all.

This is how participation trophy culture sustains itself. By converting resentment into identity. By turning grievance into virtue. By making victimhood feel like moral superiority.

And once people accept that, mediocrity no longer feels shameful.

It feels justified.

WHAT THE TROPHY REALLY IS

Participation trophy culture is not about kindness. It is not about inclusion. And it is certainly not about fairness.

It is about soothing wounded egos at any cost.

It is about telling people they are special without asking them to be better. It is about rewarding loyalty over competence, grievance over growth, and resentment over responsibility. It is about constructing a world where failure is never examined, only explained away.

trump did not invent this culture, but he perfected it. He understood that if you convince people they are owed greatness, you can redirect their anger anywhere you want. You can tell them the problem is immigrants. Or Black people. Or women. Or artists. Or anyone who reminds them that talent exists beyond their narrow sense of entitlement.

And while they are busy raging, you can pick their pockets.

You can enrich yourself. You can shield the powerful. You can fail spectacularly and still demand applause. You can lose elections and insist you won. You can hand out fake awards, build vanity monuments, and staff the government with loyal mediocrities who know how to clap.

That is the trophy.

Not a medal. Not a plaque. Not a ceremony.

The trophy is the permission to never be accountable.

Lyndon B. Johnson warned us what happens when resentment is weaponized. We are now living inside the result. A culture that mistakes cruelty for strength, noise for leadership, and grievance for merit.

Participation trophy culture does not lift people up. It drags the country down.

And the longer we pretend otherwise, the more damage it will do.

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A few weeks ago, just before Christmas, I wrote a Substack article called TDS Isn’t a Diagnosis. It’s a Cop Out, which featured a bratty little kid running around a diner, wreaking havoc and tormenting everyone inside.

In that piece, the real horror was not the child. It was the parents. They were unable, or unwilling, to provide even the most basic checks and balances on his destructive behavior. You could see exactly where the analogy was headed.

I wrote that piece nearly two weeks before trump invaded the sovereign nation of Venezuela. A nighttime raid. Bombs dropped. More than 100 citizens killed. Dictator Nicolás Maduro captured. All of it happening just two days after the world staggered into the chaos of 2026.

I’m not Nostradamus, but I saw it coming. My tweets are the receipts.

Venezuelan oil facilities, night time

On November 30, 2025, I wrote: If trump is so concerned about drug trafficking that he’ll start a war with Venezuela, why is he pardoning the former Honduran president who was convicted of drug trafficking? The math ain’t mathing. This is all about oil.

That tweet was in response to reports that trump’s military had allegedly bombed boats in international waters.

I say allegedly because there is no independent proof these incidents happened as described. What we do have are videos that could just as easily be AI, paired with a conveniently manufactured narrative that Venezuela was waging a drug war on America. A perfect pretext for a so-called drug crusader president to launch a military strike.

I call bullshit.

No drug operation continues dumping millions of dollars into the ocean once the entire world knows the U.S. military is targeting shipments. And AI is now so advanced it can convincingly depict trump flying a jet and dropping bombs on his own citizens.

Then, on December 6, 2025, I tweeted: Just to be clear: we all know trump’s hostility toward Venezuela has everything to do with oil and almost nothing to do with drugs, right?

Venezuela’s oil reserves

Sure enough, while the dust from the raid was still settling, trump announced the United States would take Venezuela’s oil. He said he would personally oversee how the revenue was spent, not Congress, despite Congress being constitutionally responsible for such matters. He also bragged that he had informed oil executives before and after the attack.

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I’m not spiking the football here. Anyone who has spent time paying attention to trump can recognize the pattern. It is as predictable as a feral kid in a diner eventually knocking over a waitress’s tray when no one intervenes.

Next on the kids’ menu? Greenland.

Plenty of people, across the political spectrum, insist trump’s fixation on Greenland is just bluster. They assume his threat to keep military force on the table is an empty gambit.

Those assumptions are based on familiarity with a version of trump who once had guardrails.

Greenland forces are ready

During his first term, there were people in his administration who carried real gravitas. The kind of experience and authority that fills a room. trump systematically purged those people. What remains are enablers like Stephen Miller, Scott Bessent, and Pete Hegseth.

There are no heavyweights left to check his worst impulses. That matters when he toys with decisions that could fracture NATO itself.

Would attacking Greenland make sense? No. Neither do his tariffs. Neither does deploying the National Guard into American cities. Neither did extracting Maduro for alleged drug crimes while pardoning a former Honduran president responsible for 400 tons of cocaine.

Sense has never been the point.

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He has also announced a blatant pay-to-play international club called the Board of Peace, complete with a one-billion-dollar membership fee. Imagine Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy starting a group called Men Against Serial Killers. Despite claiming he fears Russia as a neighbor, trump invited Putin anyway.

Presumably, this cabal of dictators and ethics-free strongmen will decide who gets what slice of Gaza, and who gets first dibs on beachfront property.

trump and Putin at Alaska Summit

Nothing trump does makes sense if you compare him to presidents who at least attempted to govern within the bounds of law and consequence. What kept most presidents in check was respect for the Constitution and the understanding that no one is above it.

trump has been granted something close to immunity by the Supreme Court. So he does whatever he wants.

When CBS reporter Tony Dokoupil asked if there were limits to his power, trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

trump has no morality.

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What he has is greed and a bottomless need for validation. New York’s real billionaire class never accepted him. They saw him for what he was, a con artist playing rich. Nothing enraged him more than being exposed as someone who wasn’t truly wealthy.

That is why his stories always include imaginary burly men with tears in their eyes calling him sir. It is why he fumes when people say Mr. trump instead of President trump. It is why he coated the White House in gaudy gold like a Vegas casino.

trump’s ridiculous, gold-trimmed White House decor

Oil wealth would change everything for him. Venezuela’s reserves could elevate his personal fortune. Greenland’s oil and rare minerals could push him into a financial stratosphere he has chased his entire life.

But there is one thing that threatens all of it.

The Epstein files.

They are the only existential danger to his legacy. trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein run deep, and that is why millions of unreleased documents remain buried. If even a fraction becomes public, he is finished.

Think about it. He has already been found liable for fraud, sexual assault, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. He cheated on every wife he ever had. None of that truly rattled him.

The only time we have seen genuine panic in his eyes is when Epstein’s name comes up.

That is why Venezuela matters. That is why Greenland matters. That is why the chaos is intentional.

The spectacle is the shield.

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If we want to break his grip on MAGA and power itself, the focus must remain where he does not want it. On the files. On the truth. On the depravity he has spent years trying to bury.

The man who joked about his daughter’s sexuality.
The man who watched teenage girls undress at beauty pageants.
The man who bragged about entitlement to women’s bodies.

Those are not the worst skeletons in his closet.

They should start calling them the trumpstein files.

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Do you believe the Epstein files are the one scandal he truly fears, or is there something else? What would real accountability even look like at this point?

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The Blue and Black Dress

You all remember the blue and black dress, don’t you?

About 11 years ago, it was a phenomenon that swept across social media like the plague, ending friendships in its wake, as a picture circulated on Tumblr in 2015 of a dress belonging to Scottish musician Caitlin McNeill.

She asked what seemed like an innocent question at the time, but one that caused a massive debate.

Why? Because some people thought it was white and gold.

There were camps of people dug in like ticks, insisting that no, YOU are the idiot for thinking that dress is blue and black, when anyone can clearly see it’s white and gold.

This was one of those rare apolitical fights, where Democrats and Republicans could find each other on the same team for a change. The differences spanned every socio political demographic imaginable.

For the record, I was in the other camp. The right one, of course.

I said, “You know what? I’ve been in graphic design since 1988. I’ve been an Art Director for about 12 years now. I think I know color.” And yes, if you read smugness there, you read correctly. I know my shit.

And sure enough, after much prolonged debate, the manufacturer of the dress, Roman Originals, confirmed that the color of the dress was indeed blue and black. I realize they were trying to capitalize on the virality of the controversy in order to pump sales, but damn… they let that debate drag on way too long.

It turned out that people’s eyes were interpreting the lighting of the dress differently, which is what caused the big brouhaha.

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At the time, this felt like a quirky lesson in human perception. A harmless reminder that context, lighting, and expectation shape what we think we see.

What felt playful in 2015 feels dangerous in 2026.

When Perception Stops Being Harmless

What made the dress so fascinating was not just that people disagreed. It was that they disagreed passionately, confidently, and irreconcilably, even after the facts were settled.

Once Roman Originals confirmed the dress was blue and black, many people still could not quite let go of what they believed they had seen. The brain had already decided.

Today, we are watching the same phenomenon play out in Minnesota, except now the stakes are not aesthetic. They are mortal.

This is the blue and black dress of our political era.

Everyone is watching the same video. Everyone is hearing the same statements. And yet, depending almost entirely on where you fall on the political spectrum, people are arriving at radically different conclusions about what happened, why it happened, and whether it was justified.

That divergence is not accidental.

Minneapolis showed America what unity means.

What the Video Actually Shows

Let’s start with what the video evidence actually shows, because facts still matter, even when some people pretend they don’t.

The ICE agent who fired the shots was not standing directly in front of Renee Good’s vehicle. He was positioned off to the side. At no point is he objectively in mortal danger from being run over.

This matters because the entire justification offered by the Trump regime hinges on the claim that Good “turned her car into a deadly weapon” and attempted to mow him down.

The geometry does not support that claim.

The agent had been circling her vehicle, filming her at close range in an apparent attempt to intimidate her. Her demeanor throughout the encounter was calm. Her only audible words to him were, “I’m not mad at you.”

That detail alone should give any honest observer pause.

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There’s a strange phenomenon in American politics right now: the people who warn early are treated like conspiracy theorists, while the people who warn late are treated like prophets.

We saw it with trump’s fixation on boats and his sudden invocation of “narco terrorism.” The moment he started targeting them, some of us said immediately, “This isn’t about drugs. This is about pretext.” We were told to calm down. To stop being dramatic. To stop seeing shadows where there were none.

Then the language escalated. The targets expanded. The justifications hardened. And suddenly the thing we were assured was nothing became something everyone pretended was obvious all along.

Being early in America has become indistinguishable from being wrong.

Five years ago today, on January 6, our elected officials did not anticipate the President of the United States doing anything as brazenly desperate as riling up an angry crowd and pointing them at the Capitol, despite his ominous invitation promising it “will be wild.” The unimaginable happened anyway, in plain sight, because too few people were willing to imagine it.

But personally, me? I don’t care if I’m seen as wrong, or even labeled a conspiracy theorist. I’m just a normal citizen who occasionally sits down and asks himself a simple question: if I were a truly bad person, with genuinely bad intentions, what would I do in this situation?

So far, we have been lucky that the worst actors in the world cannot peer directly into my fear-factory of a mind. But at an increasingly alarming rate, trump and the people around him are matching my worst thoughts, step for step.

Many of us read Project 2025 and thought, “That would be awful if they ever enacted this agenda. How dreadful.” And then, little by little, it started unfolding.

Power consolidated. Loyalists installed. Guardrails weakened.

He is surrounding himself with spineless toadies who will never temper his most extreme impulses, and he has effectively neutered the Republican half of Congress as he marches toward fulfilling his agenda.

trump Does Not Act in Good Faith. He Never Has.

One of the most persistent failures of our institutions is the assumption that trump behaves like a normal political actor. He does not. He never has. He does not stumble into abuses of power, and he does not accidentally overreach.

He manufactures justification.

Fraud, crime, disorder, terrorism, invasion… these are not discoveries for trump. They are tools. He invokes them when he wants permission to break rules, shatter norms, or seize authority with minimal resistance.

Fraud is his skeleton key; it opens every locked door.

He used it to attack elections.
He used it to undermine aid programs.
He used it to demonize immigrants.
And now he is using it to prepare the public for force.

This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.

The pieces move before the public notices the board.

The Most Dangerous Pretext Is the One at Home

The moment that should have jolted every serious person awake came when trump casually acknowledged during an Air Force One interview after the Venezuela invasion, that he was pulling the National Guard out of several cities, while explicitly reserving the right to bring them back “when the time is right,” because, as he put it, “the crimes will start again.”

Read that again.

Crimes will start again.

Not if. Not maybe. When.

That is not a warning. It is narrative conditioning.

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You do not deploy force because crime exists. You talk about crime until people accept force. You withdraw authority so instability can be cited later. You normalize emergency language before the emergency is declared.

Then you return as the only solution.

When trump reminds the public that he can invoke the Insurrection Act, and when he invokes George H.W. Bush as precedent, he is not providing historical context. He is building legal cover in advance. He is training people to hear those words without alarm.

This is not restraint. It is staging.

Normalization starts with language, not deployments.

If You Wanted to Abuse Power, This Is How You Would Do It

You do not need to predict trump’s exact next move to understand the threat. You only need to understand how he operates.

If you wanted to interfere with elections without openly canceling them, you would claim fraud.
If you wanted to suppress protest, you would claim crime.
If you wanted to deploy federal force domestically, you would claim disorder.
If you wanted to justify extraordinary authority, you would claim necessity.

Every step requires a pretext. trump always supplies one.

That is why early warnings are dismissed. By the time the action happens, the justification has already been normalized. The debate shifts from “should this be allowed?” to “isn’t it unfortunate that it’s necessary?”

That is how democracies erode. Slowly. Legally. With applause from people who were told it was unavoidable.

Venezuela Is the Blueprint We Are Ignoring

If you want to see what this logic looks like when it graduates into raw force, look at Venezuela.

According to reporting by Reuters and the BBC, Nicolás Maduro was captured in a U.S. operation and transferred to the United States, where he is now in federal custody. trump then spoke openly about the United States running Venezuela temporarily, about “getting the oil flowing,” and about not being afraid to put “boots on the ground.”

That is not ambiguity. That is regime change language, spoken plainly.

And the most important detail is not just what was done, but how casually it was described. trump did not frame this as a reluctant last resort. He spoke about it like a transaction. A takeover. A business opportunity.

Now, it would be unfair to claim Congress has already “moved on.” These events unfolded over the weekend. But the deeper failure is already visible.

Republicans in Congress have spent years acting as a rubber stamp for trump’s worst impulses, training him to believe there will be no meaningful consequences. Democrats, meanwhile, too often respond to each escalation as if it were an isolated scandal rather than part of a single accelerating pattern.

What is missing is imagination.

These are not disconnected events. They are iterations. Pretext followed by escalation, followed by normalization, followed by the next, larger pretext.

Venezuela is not an outlier. It is proof of concept.

The pretext goes global fast.

Escalation Is the Point

Once a leader learns that audacity is rewarded and restraint is optional, escalation becomes inevitable.

Why not rip down part of the White House and build a grotesque ballroom?
Why not slap your name on the Kennedy Center?
Why not talk about taking Greenland?
Why not confiscate ballot boxes in cities you do not control and call it “election security?”

He has already tried to overturn birthright citizenship. That fight is not over. And if he is willing to reach for that, what exactly do we think is off limits?

People say, “That would never happen here.”

That is not realism. It is a failure of imagination.

I can imagine entire cities flooded with federal ICE agents and National Guard troops, no crime emergency required. When trump says crime is happening, millions simply accept it.

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I can imagine AI-generated videos depicting boats exploding in the middle of the ocean, convincing enough to fool experts. Why fake a drug operation at sea? Because it creates a pretext. And pretexts are how invasions are sold.

And why invade? I can imagine a man who has been mocked his entire adult life by “real” billionaires for being crude, tacky, and fraudulent, desperately seeking obscene wealth and validation.

Like Putin, rumored to possess tens or even hundreds of billions, trump does not care how or where wealth is acquired. Through a shady crypto coin bearing his name, or by plundering a sovereign nation’s oil and mineral resources, the method is irrelevant. Only the accumulation matters.

I can even imagine him inventing a pretext to remain in office, declaring himself a “wartime president,” and announcing some fabricated rule that a president cannot be removed during a national emergency.

Ridiculous? Maybe.

Unimaginable? Not anymore.

Once audacity is rewarded, it becomes policy.

The Real Failure Is Imagination

What is most alarming is not that trump thinks this way. It is that our leaders do not.

They prepare for good faith disagreement.
He prepares for bad faith domination.

They wait for proof of harm.
He operates on proof of intent.

They cling to the rulebook.
He studies how to tear it up and justify the mess afterward.

They keep assuming there will be a clear red line before action is required. But trump does not cross lines. He erases them, then claims the crossing was necessary.

By the time institutions respond, the chessboard is already set.

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This Is Not Hysteria. It Is Foresight.

Five years ago, January 6 taught us that the unimaginable is not impossible. A sitting president incited an insurrection against his own government, and we were caught flat-footed because too many people believed it could never happen here.

Now we know better.

Now that we have a firm grasp on the kinds of depravity trump is capable of, whether it is a January 6 insurrection or a January 2 or 3 invasion of Venezuela, if he catches us off guard again, it will not be because the signs were unclear.

It will be because of a failure of audacity and imagination.

The question is not whether he would abuse power. He already has.

The question is whether anyone is willing to imagine the worst in time to stop it.

Because once permission is granted, the rest is just paperwork.

Pretext is the permission structure.

I make pieces like this free because early warnings only matter if they spread. But the follow-ups, the legal breakdowns, and the next-step analysis are for subscribers. If you want to stay ahead of where this is going, not react after the damage is done, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

What, in your opinion, is the most outlandish possibility for the next three years that our elected leaders are not considering seriously enough?
What should be done now to prevent it?

Comments are open to paid subscribers. I’ll be reading and engaging.

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Something is happening in Minnesota. Not quietly. Not slowly. It is loud, viral, and being held up like the Rosetta Stone of corruption by every major right-wing influencer with a pulse.

A young content creator named Nick Shirley released a video that alleges massive fraud in Minnesota childcare funding programs, pointing cameras at buildings that look empty and declaring it proof of theft. The clip spread like wildfire through their ecosystem. Within hours you saw the blue-check brigade lining up to crown him the new Woodward and Bernstein of the Midwest.

Ted Cruz. Tomi Lahren. Kari Lake. Alex Jones. Mike Flynn. Robby Starbuck. And every second-tier conservative personality desperate for engagement. They were all there, applauding him like he just uncovered Watergate.

Before we sharpen the pitchforks or hand out Pulitzers, we need to take a breath. A deep one. Because hysteria travels faster than truth.

Yes, Minnesota has a fraud problem. Nobody is denying that. Massive fraud involving Feeding Our Future already resulted in over seventy indictments, federal prosecutions, and guilty pleas. That investigation began long before anyone named Nick Shirley ever pressed record.

This story did not materialize last week. What is new is the packaging.

The fraud story isn’t new. The frenzy is.

The Right Is Salivating Over This

And we need to understand why.

There are certain stories conservative media cannot resist. Stories that combine government spending, immigrants, welfare, and the chance to dunk on Democrats in power. Minnesota hits that jackpot.

And then you add the repeated targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents a district with a large Somali population, and suddenly people are not talking about fraud in Minnesota. They are talking about Somali fraud in Minnesota. That distinction is not accidental. It is strategic.

If the outrage were about government waste, they would be screaming about fraudulent PPP loans that enriched millionaires. They would be furious about Covid relief scams that dwarf daycare funds. They would bring receipts for fraud everywhere.

But they are not. Only Minnesota matters today. Only Somali suspects are circulating. Only one narrative is being hand-fed to the public, like popcorn at a carnival.

That is when my eyebrow went up.

Viral does not mean verified. Outrage is not evidence.

The Shirley Video: New Hype, Not New Evidence

The viral video shows Shirley walking into quiet daycare centers that appear inactive. He claims those locations are receiving government money. Maybe some are. Maybe some closed temporarily or operate differently than expected. Maybe some are genuine fraud. That is why we have auditors, subpoenas, prosecutors, and judges.

A camera and a narrator are not proof. They are presentation.

And presentation is powerful. Right-wing influencers know this. That is why they rushed to bless the footage as gospel, even though Minnesota officials have been investigating for years and federal authorities have already handed down indictments in related cases. The timing of the outrage is not about discovery. It is about sensational amplification.

Think of football: when an offense completes a questionable play, they sprint to the line hoping to snap the ball before anyone calls for review. The right is trying to snap the ball quickly.

There’s a difference between journalism and performance.

This Was Never Journalism… It Was a Viral Ambush Wrapped in a Detective Costume

Let’s be clear about what Nick Shirley’s video actually is. It is not investigative journalism, it is not a balanced inquiry, it is not a methodical fraud audit. It is a xenophobic YouTuber pile-on; a street-corner sting operation framed as hero-journalism, designed for outrage clicks more than truth.

Everything about his approach reveals intent. Real reporters don’t need shouting, hallway-pressing chest puffery, or hostile ambushes at businesses that open an hour later than when you decide to show up. If you’re doing honest reporting, evidence speaks. You don’t have to.

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Instead we get theatrics. We get confrontation. We get the energy of a bounty hunter with a GoPro, not a journalist with receipts. He arrives at one facility at 1pm even though the sign clearly states they open at 2pm… yet the audience is never told. The absence of children is treated as incriminating, not operational.

Observers have pointed out that video timestamps seem conspicuously absent, and signage showing posted hours may have been blurred. That is not transparency. That is framing.

And let’s talk about permission. Filming young children without signed parental consent is not investigative rigor: it’s amateur hour. The same people who declare themselves defenders of children suddenly forget consent forms, privacy laws, and safety protocols when the narrative is too juicy to slow down long enough to follow the rules. So which is it? Are children sacred, or are they props?

Because a pattern becomes obvious quickly: the video works not because it proves anything, but because it looks like it proves something. It was shot and edited to imply guilt, to manufacture suspicion, to let viewers fill in the blanks with fear and prejudice. A staged interrogation isn’t evidence. It’s content.

If journalism needs ambush tactics and blurred signage to function, it’s not journalism. It’s theater.

Not open ≠ suspicious… unless edited to look that way.

The Convenient Silence

While right-wing celebs praise Shirley as a hero, a few voices have stepped up to ask the reasonable question: Why now? Why this clip? Why this suddenly coordinated outrage?

Some local Minnesota users pointed out that regulators have been pursuing fraud long before the video. Others noted that if we truly care about protecting tax dollars, maybe start with Republican-backed corporate theft instead of daycare centers run by brown immigrants. Maybe ask why the same people cheering Shirley had nothing to say when trump pardoned drug traffickers, fraudsters, and grifters who stole real money from real Americans.

Fraud is either a problem everywhere or it is a tool used selectively for narrative. And selective outrage always reveals intent.

Fraud Isn’t New: They Just Only Care When Black and Immigrant Communities Are Accused

If this feeding frenzy was truly about fraud, then Rick Scott would be Exhibit A. His company committed $1.8 billion in Medicare fraud. That’s billion with a B. David Gentile pulled $1.6 billion. Philip Esformes defrauded Medicare for $1.2 billion in unnecessary bills. Three men. Three Republicans. All vastly more money than what’s alleged in Minnesota, and you won’t find MAGA anywhere near those stories with pitchforks. Why? Because those fraudsters look like them.

Meanwhile, Somalis are less than 2 percent of Minnesota’s population and less than a tenth of one percent of the United States. Yet suddenly this is the fraud emergency? Suddenly Minnesota is the epicenter of American decay? Spare me. The people who pardoned felons, commuted the sentences of grifters, and cheered while white-collar crime flourished are now pretending fraud is a moral line too sacred to cross.

trump himself is a convicted felon on 34 business fraud charges, and has pardoned or commuted dozens of criminals, but Minnesota daycare centers are the crisis? Please. This is not about crime. It is about a narrative. It is about using Somali immigrants as political kindling. It is about creating folk villains so white-collar criminals in suits remain invisible.

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And we cannot separate this from trump calling Somalians “garbage,” telling them to “go back where they came from,” or the racist fever dream of “they’re eating the cats and dogs.” Minnesota is not an isolated scandal. It fits squarely into a historical pattern of scapegoating the same groups again and again.

If real fraud is found through legitimate DOJ investigation… good. Prosecute. But a YouTube ambush is not accountability. It is propaganda. And fraud committed by white businessmen in boardrooms is no less criminal than fraud committed in childcare programs. In fact, by scale, it’s worse.

Until outrage is universal, outrage is political.

Caption: Fraud isn’t racial. The narrative is.

This Story Conveniently Reinforces Elon Musk’s “Waste, Fraud, Abuse” Playbook

Here is where the timing should make everyone sit up straighter.

When Musk took over Twitter, he slashed departments, fired critical safety teams, gutted Trust & Safety, and justified it all as eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The cuts weren’t surgical, they were scorched-earth. And in hindsight, stories like Minnesota help retroactively justify his brutality to the public:

“See? Fraud is everywhere. Cuts were necessary. Government and institutions are bloated. We need stronger, harsher oversight.”

A viral scandal like this becomes the emotional fuel for austerity. It reinforces the idea that oversight is a luxury and cruelty is efficiency.

If you want to shrink government, privatize institutions, cut social programs, or justify layoffs, nothing lubricates that faster than a dramatic story of “corruption.” And the right knows that.

Minnesota is not just a fraud case. It’s narrative terrain.

And Here’s the Darker, More Sinister Layer

Stories like this create the perfect pretext for suspicion and hostility toward immigrant communities. Especially when every post, every article, every tweet makes sure to mention that the alleged perpetrators are Somali. No subtlety. No nuance. No hesitation.

It signals to a very specific audience:

“Look who is stealing from you.”
“Look who is living off your taxes.”
“Look who you should be angry at.”

It is not about fraud. It is about permission.

Permission to judge.
Permission to stereotype.
Permission to fear.
And for some, permission to hate.

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We’ve seen what happens when suspicion becomes policy. When immigrant groups become headlines, talking points, and scapegoats. Haitians, Mexicans, Muslims, Afghans, Syrians… trump once described entire nations as “shithole countries” where “they speak languages nobody even knows.” He was not joking. He was indoctrinating.

Stories like Minnesota are narrative scaffolding. A moral staging ground. They let bigots say publicly what they already believed privately.

Fraud becomes the delivery system. The payload is xenophobia.

Fraud becomes the delivery system. Xenophobia is the payload.

What This Moment Actually Feels Like

A narrative test balloon. A story being shaped into a weapon. A coordinated push to tie criminality to Somali immigrants, to Democrats, to Ilhan Omar by proximity. Not with proven legal findings, but with vibes, rhetoric, and repetition. A soft launch for the next talking point in an election cycle that needs enemies, villains, and scapegoats.

If real fraud is happening, prosecute it. I will stand with anyone who demands accountability and transparency. But accountability is not a YouTube video. It is evidence. It is prosecution. It is process. And the truth does not need a viral army to make it real.

So I am not saying there is no fraud. I am saying we should not let influencers replace investigators. We should value facts more than clicks. And we should never let political opportunists decide who the public should fear.

Because I’ve seen this movie before. First they frame the story. Then they frame the people.

And this time, the target is clear.

Minnesota is not just a fraud story. It is a narrative battlefield.

The least we can do is refuse to be foot soldiers for someone else’s war.

If you want to join the conversation and be part of a community that pushes back against disinformation instead of drowning in it, become a paid subscriber. Paid members unlock comments and future deep-dive chapters in this series.

If you’re here from Twitter/X, welcome.

I’d love to hear your perspective… even if you disagree.

Comments are paid-only, so feel free to subscribe if you want in.

Why do you think the outrage only erupted AFTER the YouTube video, not during years of DOJ investigation? Is the right testing messaging for a broader anti-immigrant 2025 playbook?

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I went to a diner the other day.

If you’ve been to one, you’ve been to them all. The pie case near the register, the glass slightly fogged, displaying slices that look better at 2 a.m. than they ever would in daylight. A long counter lined with thick white coffee cups and spinning stools. The familiar mix of bacon grease, burnt toast, and coffee.

But this diner was different because of one particular customer. A toddler tyrant. We’ll call him Todd.

This little shit-stirrer was cute at first, the way many precocious kids are at first. They say the darndest things.

He was gently asked to take his seat by weary parents who seemed resigned to picking and choosing battles that did not involve actually stopping his behavior in this fine eatery. So Todd escalated. He graduated from braggadocious peacocking and prancing to sprinting around the diner at full tilt.

Waiters and waitresses did their best to avoid colliding with him, which became increasingly difficult because he was actively aiming for them. Several trays and plates were dropped.

Unbelievably, other customers were not alarmed. They were amused. They laughed loudly at his antics, encouraging him further.

When the staff finally tried to guide him back to his table, Todd yelled at them not to touch him. He puffed out his chest and announced that he was great, and that nobody behaved better than he did.

His parents offered no rebuke. They shrank into themselves, hoping stillness might hide their shame.

Finally, the manager had enough. He stormed over and told the parents to control their child or leave. Their son was disturbing everyone.

“Fake news!” Todd shouted, grinning.

“They love me. Look at them laughing,” he said. And to my disgust, he was right.

I stood up.

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If you’re like me, you’re still processing the sudden, tragic death of Rob Reiner.

If you’re like me, then you’ve already heard about trump’s demented, disgusting diatribe in which he claimed Reiner was killed not by the tragic, real‑life circumstances that led Reiner’s son Nick to allegedly plunge a knife into his parents, but because of TDS, trump Derangement Syndrome.

In yet another bizarre Truth Social post Monday morning, mere hours after learning Reiner’s son was arrested for the murder of his parents, trump said Reiner was killed “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

TDS is an idiotic right‑wing invention that insists anyone who has anything negative to say about the deranged, inappropriate behavior of Donald trump must have a medical condition. According to this logic, the problem is not trump’s behavior, but the fact that some of us fail to find it cute, adorable, or appropriate.

But I digress.

If you’re like me, you are truly disgusted by this unhinged post‑mortem attack on Rob Reiner because you feel a closeness to him. A kinship. A familiarity born not of personal interaction, but of decades of shared cultural presence.

I practically grew up with him.
We all did.

Not in the literal sense of attending the same school or hanging out together, but in the way his work lived in our homes, week after week, year after year.

The first time I saw Rob Reiner, he was “Meathead,” Michael Stivic on the groundbreaking television sitcom All in the Family. If you are unfamiliar with the show, it is worth watching a few episodes, even now.

The premise was deceptively simple. A family of four living in Queens, anchored by Archie Bunker, a bigoted patriarch with a narrow view of the world. His wife Edith was doting, frequently browbeaten, but quietly strong. Their daughter Gloria was compassionate and progressive. And her husband Michael, played by Reiner, was the outspoken, liberal “commie pinko” college student who challenged Archie at every turn.

My sister and I watched the show every week with our mother, howling with laughter at Archie’s upside‑down logic. His worldview felt outdated and absurd to us, even though we were too young to fully grasp the political subtext.

We understood something important though. Archie was the buffoon. He was the bad guy. And yet, almost every episode managed to redeem him just enough to remind viewers that flawed people are still human.

Michael and Gloria were the liberals. The “woke” characters of their era. They were right about most issues, but they could also be exhausting. Even as a kid, I remember thinking that constant moral vigilance looked tiring. Edith, meanwhile, held everything together, gently but firmly correcting Archie when it mattered most.

And somehow, despite the arguments, despite the clashing beliefs, this family stayed together.

One of the more surprising facts about the show is that Carroll O’Connor, who portrayed Archie Bunker, was not conservative in real life. He was staunchly liberal. Rob Reiner even noted in interviews that O’Connor was more liberal than he was.

All in the Family existed in a moment half a century ago when very little was off limits. Language was raw. Topics were incendiary. The show tackled racism, sexism, war, religion, and class head‑on.

If it were made today, it would almost certainly lose much of its edge. Hyper‑careful producers would sand down its sharpest moments, fearful of backlash from one side or the other. The heart and soul of the show would be diminished.

Rob Reiner went on to become a towering success as a director, helming films that have become cultural touchstones. The Princess Bride. Stand By Me. When Harry Met Sally. This Is Spinal Tap. Entire generations can quote these movies by heart.

What is remarkable is that his personal politics never interfered with the public’s love for his work. To this day, liberals and MAGA alike can trade favorite lines from his films without friction.

In fact, on the night of his death, while dealing with acute grief, I noticed something unusual.

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HOW WE GOT HERE

I watch a lot of TV, and I often draw parallels between what I see on screen and what I see playing out in this country. In the most recent episode of IT, there is a scene where a masked lynch mob of angry white men storms a military base, hunting a Black soldier they falsely believe killed local children. When the Black soldiers aim their rifles back in self-defense, the mob retreats but locks dozens of Black and white townspeople inside a barn and sets it on fire.

The only thing that gave those men the courage to commit such evil was the anonymity of their masks. They knew their faces were covered, their identities protected, and their violence would come without consequences.

It is not that different from today’s anonymous Twitter accounts that hide behind cartoon avatars, flaming skulls, and American flags. And in a more nefarious twist, many of these accounts have been traced back to users in Nigeria, Russia, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Their goal is simple: stir racial resentment in the United States.

And when you combine that with Elon Musk, who now owns one of the most powerful communication platforms on Earth, you get a megaphone for a very old American poison.

THE ELON MUSK FACTOR: FEAR AS A BUSINESS MODEL

I spend a lot of time online. Too much, probably. And because politics has become so toxic, I often have to step back and ask a simple question whenever a narrative begins to take hold:

Why is this story being pushed?

Elon Musk is the richest man on Earth. He could be using his enormous wealth to uplift communities or tackle long-term problems. Instead he has chosen to stoke racial resentment, not just in America but globally.

He reposts twenty-year-old videos of violent crimes with captions that echo ancient racist tropes.

“it’s always white women they terrorize...”
“non Whites have been calling for our extermination for years”
“Civil war.”

Almost every post is crafted to make his 230 million followers believe that violent Black people are lurking everywhere, waiting to steal their property, their dignity, their women, or even their lives.

The formula is not complicated. In a country where thousands of crimes occur daily, Elon only needs one or two examples framed strategically to manufacture a sense of racial panic.

And when you ask who benefits from that panic, the answer is as old as American racism: Those who need a distraction from their own failures.

Of course, none of this discussion is possible without trump’s permission structure. Without his infamous golden escalator speech ten years ago, many white Americans would still feel shame for their racism. Trump removed the shame. He turned it into a badge of honor.

Since then, we have seen the rise of “Karens Karening,” and certain names now live forever in internet history: Central Park Karen. BBQ Becky. Permit Patty.

Each incident revealed the same panic: the fear of being caught on camera acting on racist impulse. The fear of consequences.

In the Cinnabon case, the white woman clearly realized she was being filmed. And instead of backing down, she seemed to lean in, as if performing for her fellow racists.

Nobody who is not racist uses the hard R with that much ease.

But here is where it gets darker. Trump had just spent two weeks targeting Somalians in his speeches. The pattern is unmistakable. The moment he calls a group “garbage,” a viral racist incident emerges involving that same group.

And when the Cinnabon Racist was fired, racist donors immediately showered her with over one hundred thousand dollars. Many of them wrote a version of the same comment:

“They must have done something to provoke her.”

No evidence. No facts. No interest in the truth. Her whiteness alone earned her their sympathy. The Somali victims were dismissed instantly.

This is the America Elon and trump are building together.

THE FUENTES PIPELINE: MANUFACTURING EXTREMISM

Nick Fuentes has been back on Twitter for a long time now. This was not a one-time reinstatement. This was Elon intentionally bringing a holocaust denier into the mainstream and letting the algorithm push him into prominence.

Fuentes now has over one point one million followers. That is almost as many as I have, and I worked years for my platform. He was handed his through Musk’s manipulation of visibility.

Fuentes is not merely offensive. He is strategic. He tailors his rhetoric for insecure young men looking for identity. Many of the same boys who consume Rogan clips and Andrew Tate lectures find in Fuentes a kind of rebellious “middle finger to the establishment.”

Elon has effectively given him a recruitment center.

And then there is Tucker Carlson, who spent over two hours interviewing Fuentes and framing him as a legitimate political thinker. Tucker helped mainstream “Great Replacement Theory,” a bedtime horror story conservatives tell each other about immigrants stealing jobs, houses, and status.

I still have no idea how they think people who barely speak English and often work far below minimum wage are buying up homes and stealing wealth. But the truth never mattered. The narrative did.

THE BIGGER GAME: WHY THEY ARE DOING THIS

Elon, Tucker, Fuentes, and trump all operate from the same core grievance: that any effort to level the playing field for people of color is “anti-white racism.” They have rebranded DEI and CRT into existential threats rather than modest attempts to correct long-standing inequities.

This would be laughable if it were not so effective.

These men are not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing. They are tapping into something primal:

Fear.

Fear of losing status.
Fear of losing privilege.
Fear of losing imagined entitlements.
Fear of becoming the “other.”

And when you are desperate politically, you push the oldest American story there is:

The lie that white Americans are under attack.

And the moment they believe that lie, they are ready to fight imaginary enemies while ignoring the real dangers at the top.

THE CINNABON INCIDENT IS NOT RANDOM

So how does this all connect? Let’s zoom out.

Trump recently began attacking Somalians again. He does this whenever he needs a new scapegoat. Two weeks ago it was Venezuelans. Last week it was Somalians. Next week it will be someone else. The pattern is always the same.

And almost immediately after those remarks, a Somali couple walked into a Cinnabon and were violently berated with racial slurs. The video went viral. The employee lost her job. Then she raised over a hundred thousand dollars on GiveSendGo.

Republicans have mastered the art of turning white wrongdoing into white martyrdom.

Elon amplifies it.
Tucker intellectualizes it.
Fuentes weaponizes it.
Trump justifies it.

Each one plays a part in the same machine.

This is how you manufacture a race war without firing a shot. You flood the zone with grievance, paranoia, and fantasy. You convince ordinary white people that they are victims. You give them villains with dark skin and foreign accents.

And while they are busy hating the people below them, billionaires are stealing everything above them.

THE REAL QUESTION

Are Elon Musk and right-wing influencers trying to start a race war?
Or are they trying something even more cynical:

A distraction.

A distraction from trump’s economic failures.
A distraction from rising prices.
A distraction from promises he continues to break.
A distraction from the Epstein files he still has not released.
A distraction from the fact that his approval is sinking.

Fear is the oldest political trick in the book.

And America keeps falling for it.

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FINAL TAKEAWAY

The Cinnabon incident is not just a racist meltdown in a mall. It is a symptom of something much bigger and more intentional.

A billionaire amplifies white fear.
An extremist mobilizes white rage.
A cable host legitimizes white grievance.
A president targets communities for political gain.

This ecosystem is not organic. It is engineered.

And unless we name it and expose it, it will grow.

If pieces like this help you connect the dots no one else is talking about, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the best ways to support this work.

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This didn’t start after 9/11.

When I was a teenager, I remember watching the news with dread every time a horrific attack happened somewhere in the world. And before the anchor revealed any details, I would silently beg: “Please don’t let it be an Ahmed. Please don’t let it be a Mohammed. Please don’t let it be us.”

Because I knew exactly what would come next.

Then 9/11 happened, and the fear became sharper. More personal. More dangerous.

Suddenly the thing I feared as a possibility became a daily expectation. I had a very Muslim-sounding name. I had a beard. And millions of Americans were out for blood.

And I’ll never forget one moment that shocked me.

George W. Bush, a president I had incredibly low expectations for, stood on a national stage and said:

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. Islam is peace.”
“America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and they need to be treated with respect.”

I never thought I’d hear that from him.

And the reason it stands out is because we now live under a man who uses fear like gasoline.

A man who thrives on division.
A man who would never protect us.

Dearborn is living the nightmare so many of us grew up fearing.

This is what happens when a protest vote becomes a self-inflicted wound.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN DEARBORN

Here’s what we know:

• Dearborn officials and community leaders are warning that ICE raids are imminent.

• Muslim families have been told to prepare for enforcement operations.

• Schools, mosques, and civic centers are on alert.

• Legal support networks are mobilizing.

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As of now, there is no confirmed reporting of raids already taking place.

No families dragged out.
No doors kicked in.
Not yet.

But all signs point to what is coming next.

And that alone is terrifying.

When a known arsonist publicly waves a match, you don’t wait for flames to take him seriously.

This community voted, in part, to “send a message.” Dearborn Muslims, and Michigan Muslims as a whole, voted overwhelmingly not to help Trump win the presidency but to punish and defeat Kamala Harris over Gaza.

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Raise your hand if you were legitimately STUNNED when you saw pictures or video of trump grinning from ear to ear in the Oval Office with NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

I was laughing my ass off. It was one of the funniest things I’d seen in a while.

Unlike many in the media, I have a pretty good recollection of all the ways trump had attacked Mamdani in the weeks and months leading up to the self-described Democratic Socialist’s historic win.

This was such an insane, Bizarro-world display that I actually became a little bit obsessed with it, determined to dissect exactly how and why trump flipped his Mamdani hate into a love fest with his new “Communist” Muslim bro.

He’s called him “a radical left lunatic”, “a 100 percent Communist Lunatic” and a “self professed JEW HATER” one day before the election. And, to add insult to injury, he even told 60 Minutes the objectively blatant lie that he was “much better looking person” than the handsome 34 year old.

I have watched trump launch countless personal attacks against people young and old, Black or White, Democrat or Republican, and while most of his insults are childish, he does not hold back. He even recently told a journalist who asked about the Epstein files “Quiet, Piggy” right to her face.

In a high-stakes Oval Office meeting earlier this year between trump and President Zelensky, a sickening ambush awaited the Ukrainian leader, where he was belittled by none other than couch-f***ing phony JD Vance, who demanded to know “Did you even say thank you?”

Rarely have I seen trump do as thorough an about-face on anyone as he did with Zohran Mamdani, even as his favorite cable news channel Fox News had the Islamophobia and Socialist fear mongering cranked up to 11. A TV graphic that day billed the Oval Office meeting as “Showdown with Socialism.”

That ambush of Zelensky by trump and Vance was done in full view of cameras, with trump physically slapping Zelensky’s arm while shouting at him, “You don’t have the cards!”

Many admirers of the Muslim Mayor-elect were concerned that a similar sneak attack awaited Mamdani. They lamented the fact that the first 30 to 45 minutes were off limits to the press, no cameras allowed.

So what happened while the cameras were off?

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When we were kids, we were raised on stories that promised something simple and comforting: liars get exposed, bullies get humbled, greedy men lose everything, and villains eventually meet their fate. Those “moral of the story” lessons were supposed to guide us and teach us how the world really works.

Yet here we stand in 2025, watching trump glide through scandal after scandal. Now, with Congress voting overwhelmingly to release the Epstein files, the possibility of real accountability is finally in sight. For some, this may signal a turning point. For others, it feels like a reminder that justice can be partial, delayed, or manipulated to serve appearances rather than truth.

We’ve seen THIS story one time too many: impeachment hearings, court battles, the moral of the story seems to elude Teflon Don.

The bad guy isn’t supposed to win. And yet, every time it feels like the story is finally catching up to him, he finds a way to rewrite it.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf: Except the Villager Keeps Getting Rewarded

In that fable, the boy lies over and over until no one believes him and disaster arrives. The moral is clear: lie too much, and you lose everyone’s trust.

In real life, trump lies about everything: elections, crowd sizes, classified documents, Epstein, crimes, acquittals. Instead of losing credibility, he gains supporters. His base cheers. They don’t walk away. They lean in.

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Dear MAGA,

You complained about high prices under Biden.
trump said he would lower them on day one.
They’re way higher now.

You complained about foreign wars.
trump is now escalating conflicts in Venezuela and Nigeria.

You complained about corruption.
trump used the Oval Office to make himself $3 billion richer since January.

You wanted America First.
trump sent $40 billion to Argentina while American farms are failing — and he’s asking the courts to block funding for SNAP benefits.

trump promised a new “Golden Age,”
but the only gold is being plastered on the Oval Office and his new ballroom, while record numbers of Americans stand in line for food assistance.

He said he would target the “worst of the worst.”
Instead, his untrained ICE agents are grabbing U.S. citizens off the street — grandmothers, grandfathers, long-term legal residents — racially profiling your friends and neighbors.

Jobs?
The numbers are so bad he stopped releasing Jobs Reports.

Tariffs?
They are just an extra tax you pay, through higher prices on everything you buy.

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Respect abroad?
Other nations are laughing at the aging man who needs constant praise and smells like spray tan and cologne over mildew.

He has made things worse, everywhere, and assumes that if he repeats the lies — about solving eight wars, about $2 gas, about inflation disappearing — that you won’t notice.

The shutdown?
He said it himself:

“If there’s a shutdown, the President will be blamed… he’s the one who has to get people together.”

There were no shutdowns under President Biden.
The two longest shutdowns in U.S. history?
Both under trump.

He demanded Republicans reject a deal that would have kept healthcare premiums lower for one more year, simply to avoid swearing in Rep. Adelita Grijalva — whose signature would trigger the release of the Epstein files.

He knows what’s in those files.
He is betting you forget he promised to release them.
He is praying you forget he said he would hold the guilty accountable.

Are pedophiles acceptable now, as long as they’re trump’s allies?
That’s the question.

And don’t bother with:
“Why didn’t Biden release them?”

The documents were sealed by court order.
The Supreme Court delayed release twice.
The clock ran out because the system protected him, not because someone else wouldn’t.

We do not believe you voted for dysfunction.
We do not believe you voted to send $40 billion out of the country while cutting food assistance at home.
We do not believe you voted to strip help from working families struggling to survive.

The truth is:
many MAGA voters live in the red states hit hardest by premium spikes and SNAP cuts.

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Working people.
Not freeloaders.
Not caricatures.
Not the propaganda stereotypes you were fed.

You were told to punch sideways at your neighbors.
Meanwhile, the billionaires robbed your wallet.

Some say you voted to “own the libs.”
Maybe some did.
But most of you were looking for relief, for answers, for a better way — and you were given a mirage.

They told you we wanted to ruin your families and corrupt your children.
We didn’t.
We want the 99% to have a fair chance, and for the .01% to stop rigging the system.

We love America, too.
Our families fought for it.
They would be horrified to see a President deploying military assets against our own cities to shift headlines.

You won the argument about who gets to drive the car.
Fine.
Not the point anymore.

The point is:
The greedy, vengeful driver you chose is steering the car off a cliff.

Everything you thought you voted for — lower prices, better jobs, security — never mattered to him.
The only goal was enriching himself and his billionaire donors.

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At the end of the day:

We have more in common with each other than either of us have with the billionaires who benefit from this chaos.

We are all being robbed.
We are all being pitted against each other on purpose.

You can “own the libs” later.
But right now?
If we don’t stop fighting each other, the people pulling the strings will own all of us.

We either wake up, or we fall together.

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