Not only that but in the last 160 years, black Americans became middle class, overcoming obstacle after obstacle. It’s the dumbest thing I can think of to make our black coworkers and managers feel like they didn’t work hard and achieve their titles through merit.

What is the point of that? Seriously? The rest of us moved forward but the MAGA guys and the Opus Dei contingent in the federalist society felt it was their moral obligation to give the South to little white men who thought they were too good for the modern world?

I’m sitting here thinking about my dad explaining slave markets and plantations to me with I was a little girl living in Charleston, South Carolina. Showing me where segregated schools still existed. Explaining to me why we fought the Civil War when he pointed at Fort Sumter across from Charleston harbor as we kids climbed all over the cannons.

Those experiences made a difference to me. As a military brat, most of my schools were desegregated. I didn’t grow up feeling like black, brown, Asian, Hawaiian students were different. We grew up with lessons about not judging people because of how they looked.

So, I just don’t get it. The Southern states grew up with the remnants of slavery all around them. You’d have to be deprived of all your senses to not stumble across all that evidence. They had to know that forcing people to live in a tiny slave shacks after endless days of planting rice or picking cotton and having their children sold from them were terrible things to do to human beings. That was followed by decades of terror and poverty.

There are a lot of MAGA voters who are younger than me who should know better and should have just gotten used to the new normal that was already about 50 years old when Trump came down that elevator.

“He says what everybody’s thinking”. Really? Is that what everybody is thinking? Is it all really about not learning anything in school or from your parents or from lived experience? People just wander through the world oblivious to the living culture around them? Is it really the case that underneath the tender skin of so many Americans there is an itch that can’t be scratched when it comes to black, brown, or female Americans? It’s just there in case of an emergency like when wealthy selfish people need to get away with theft of our national treasure?

Honestly, we’ve come so far in the last 60 years that it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. We rely on each other to keep the economic engine going. You can’t cut out that many people from future prosperity and enfranchisement without the entire country suffering as a consequence.

If that was the goal of the moneyed overlords who used MAGA and Catholicism and evangelicalism to overturn the rule of law and the pursuit of happiness of the majority, well, they certainly got their money’s worth.

It won’t last. You’ve got a madman in the Oval Office, gas is at $4.69/gallon in Pittsburgh, and the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency so he could screw all of the voters in his state in order to deprive the US Congress of two black congressmen.

Even two is too much. Two.

How miserably petty and small can the white guys get?

Nobody’s perfect and we don’t want student body presidents or lifeguards.

But in our form of democracy it is crucial to elect people who have gone through some kind of adversity without selling their souls. The three presidents who consistently rank as the top three greatest presidents in our history are exemplars.

Washington, Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt, all three struggled and endured either war, poverty, or crippling illness. They weren’t perfect people but they could be counted on to reach down deep in their souls and find the right way foreword to lead, unify and direct.

They weren’t in it for personal gain or fame. They weren’t in it for golden parachutes. They didn’t harbor any overt antipathy towards other human beings who weren’t like them but treated them with respect and dignity.

When it comes right down to it, in a crisis, party affiliation doesn’t matter as much as dedication to the country and character. And after they do their terms, they leave it all on the table and the country is better for them being the leader. Americans were united and gaining in prosperity.

There have been many presidents who knew that the norms were full of loopholes but refrained from taking advantage of them. Maybe they never met a national emergency to bring out the best in them. And there have been presidents who violated the norms and the country paid a price for that. We recovered because our challenges weren’t dire.

It’s just that when the country is falling apart, you do not want an amoral, selfish, greedy, power hungry, shameless, con man in charge of a country that runs on the honor system.

A line from a Chinese drama about the Qing dynasty goes, “If swearing were truly useful, why would we need iron rules?”. You might think that is the standard operating procedure of the current Chinese government. Too much constriction could be a problem as well. Our commonly understood norms give our presidents flexibility in emergencies.

But it might be time to crack down on the unitary executive theory and tighten the restraints on the president. At least take them back to the time when we learned from the Nixon Experience.

As we have seen, swearing an oath is not sufficient restraint for presidents of low character. And for some peculiar reason, a lot of Americans can’t discern good character from bad.

I was talking to a guy who swore I got my information about the Dept of Ag cutting back on paying farmers who grew crops for food banks and local school systems from social media. It took seconds to find this article from 2025.

They are sticking their fingers in their ears going “la-la-la I can’t HEAR you.”

But reality is getting harder to ignore. And who wants to admit to being responsible for putting the least qualified person on the planet in charge of the richest country with the biggest military to play with and steal anything that he can?

He is literally ruining lives all around the world and destroying economies with abandon.

Do you want to know why, you maga lurker?

It’s because Trump has no skin in the game. He was born rich and has had people fall all over themselves all his life to shield him from legalities and make him happy. Nothing he does on the world stage is going to affect him personally. It only affects the little people.

He doesn’t care about your gas prices. Never did. All he cares about is being the top of the global heap in terms of power. Does he want to do anything constructive with that power? No. He wants to be the next Genghis Khan.

That’s what you voted for. You got us into this mess. Now get the fingers out of your ears.

Or are we now to expect that these events will be held at the ballroom and Trump will become the new Ticketmaster?

Wow, look how close he got to a guy who could punch his nose through his brains.

Let me see, rich white guys owning their own black gladiators… what does that remind me of?

Tarantino anyone?

I want an IM PEI kind of architectural statement next to the White House. Hire an American architect who’s got a nice portfolio of modern, elegant buildings.

The building must stay within the original footprint.

The building must pay for its own energy. The energy sources shall be solar or wind with supplemental grid electrification.

There shall be a visitors’ center and First Lady’s/Gentleman’s office complex. Public restrooms will be unisex or ladies rooms will be triple the size of the men’s room.

The building shall house an on-site daycare center.

There will be a multipurpose room that can be used for various functions. (Eg ecumenical Religious services and sacrifices, stage for entertainment, dance floor when needed, barre and mirrors for adult ballet, tables for crafts and bingo night, AV equipment for training seminars, lectures, etc).

There will be catering facilities, kitchens with state of the art equipment.

Members of the public shall be able to book the space for weddings and other events (Beltane celebrations, quinciñeras, baby showers, retirement parties etc) at no additional charge. (WE’RE PAYING FOR IT. )

Furnishings, window coverings, flooring shall be made from sustainable or renewable materials.

All components of the building and interiors must be American made. All food at this venue must be American regional cuisine or fusion. All wines must be Californian or New York State. Wood must be from American sources. American craftsmen and artists shall be invited to submit proposals for furnishings, textiles, art and other installations.

Gilding shall not be used on any permanent building surfaces or reliefs. All references to former presidents and First Ladies (portraits, busts etc) must be respectful and tasteful.

Write your own specifications in the comments.

No problem, he says, I’m going to get my friends to help me build a new one. Anyway, the old one did not look good, know what I’m sayin’? The new one will be tye most magnificent garage you have ever seen. I’m going to build a fallout shelter under it too. You won’t be able to use it but the garage on top of it will be stunning. It’s going to be all bullet proof glass and three stories tall. That’s where I’ll store my Land Rovers, Lambos and Tesla trucks. You’ll love it!

What about my car? What about my lawn mower, shovels and rakes? Why do YOU get to decide what goes on MY property? I’m not going to be able to use it? Plus this thing is going to be the biggest glass building on the street! Ir will be out of place and will completely ruin the beauty of this quiet mid-century street lined with tall, mature, graceful maple trees. We’re all going to be looking at your 24 cars.

Yeah, I know. But it’s going to have to be built to keep the riff raff from stealing my cars. The trees have to go, he says, as a contractor drives up with chain saws and 30 guys start taking down the trees.

What are you doing?? You can’t just do that. Where are the permits? What about the historic preservation committee??

Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll make a deal with you. How about you pay for the design and construction of my garage?

But you said your friends were going to pay for it.

Yeah I did. But you’re making such a fuss about my 24 car glass garage that YOU can pay for it. I’ll send you the bill. Sure, there’s a 109 foot deep hole right next to your house but think of it this way, it will be the biggest glass sunroom garage you’ll ever see and from your second floor bedroom window you’ll be able to see right through lt to look at all those vehicles and Tesla trucks that look like prototypes for some car show. Whaddaya say? It will give you complete control to rebuild the garage. If you don’t pay for it, it will just stay a massive hole in the ground. Here are the plans. The cost is $400 million.

$400 MILLION??

Yeah, to start. Contractors. It always takes longer and costs more when they’re done, amirite?

But it’s my land. It’s my garage. I want the old one back.

You’re never getting that piece of crap back, he says. Besides, the ground needed to be regraded and you needed a French drain.

That was only going to cost $5000. I don’t want to pay for your stupid garage.

Well, what’s done is done.

He glances around the rest of the property.

Your front flower bed has some beat roses. Let me pave over that. It’ll save you some time in the summer.

The ballroom was packed in spite of the ethical reservations of some who attended. Others protested too much because of course they were all going to go. Trump waved a shiny object and they all flocked to it like magpies.

What about security? LBC Washington Correspondent Simon Marks describes security at the Hilton Hotel where the dinner took place as “lax”. What does that mean? He says there was a magnetometer at the entrance to the ballroom but none anywhere else in the building. In other words, anyone could have brought in guns, knives or even bombs into the hotel at any point. The only point where they would have been stopped is in the hall outside the venue.

You might argue that the corporation that owns the Hilton hotel may have been wary of screening every bloody soul that passed through every entrance, or through the lobby, and surveilling every room on every floor for several days in advance. If you want to be super secure, that’s what it would have taken, right? Because otherwise, how could you be absolutely sure that explosive or incendiary devices weren’t placed around the building in strategic locations that would have triggered a collapse or something equally serious? But nope. No one saw any extra security at the entrance to the hotel or in the lobby. Who knows maybe they’re just really good at hiding security apparatus these days. I could believe that.

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. My theories are more speculative. I’m more in the My Cousin Vinny mindset. We know the outcome. There is evidence that leads to the outcome. We just have to find the evidence. It’s the way I used to think about my research projects. The thing happened. That was real. It’s not magick because that’s not the way the universe works. There are laws of nature and evidence for everything. What is the most plausible explanation for an event? You don’t need to tie yourself or your audience in knots to explain something. The evidence is already there before our eyes or with a little investigation.

So, I’m inclined to believe that this was the case of a very motivated man acting on his own to take out his target(s). The early reports are that he was aiming for Trump or his administration cabinet members. Many cabinet members were there. Hmmm… did everyone know that? Is that well known feature of previous WHCD events? It’s easy to go back to previous dinners to find out.

But who did we know was definitely going to be there? That means who was expected to be there at the very least? I would say the members of the White House correspondents association. Any member of cable, network, radio, print, podcasts, and independent domestic and international journalists who cover the White House might reasonably be expected to be there.

The president’s presence was somewhat less definitive. He’d never gone to a WHCD before and his petty vengefulness locks on to different people and ideas from one minute to the next. Thoughts of the Iranians actually defying him, a thought so improbable to him that it would occupy his limited brain cells, might have overcome his vicious hatred of the press. Or he might fantasize about refacing some American symbol with concrete or pinky beige marble. Plus, there is always the remote possibility that the press might have been the ones who humiliated HIM. Or he’d get carried away and go full Adolph on them. Either spectacle could have been wildly entertaining.

What was the mentalist hired for entertainment doing? Did he pick up on anything before the mayhem? Did he get paid anyway?

By the way, did anyone notice how Trump could barely keep his eyes open when he was standing in front of the attendees before they all sat down to salad? He looked like he had trouble breathing and was about to pass out. Given his physical appearance, I’m surprised he didn’t TACO going to the dinner at all.

From what we know now, it looks like a lone, desperate man, who was a fantastic sprinter, was able to get around the sparse barriers and almost to the ballroom where a large number of significant members of the media and the Trump administration were collected. It is assumed that Trump or one of his greasy minions were the targets.

That’s all I had until I remembered this one tiny little thing from the Congressional January 6 hearings. It was from Cassidy Hutchinson:

There was one magnetometer. It was to screen members of the press who went into that ballroom. They had no weapons. Anyone else in that hotel could have been armed to the teeth.

Just throwing that out there. Make of it what you will.

Snyder is brutal in his description of our national suicide. He also says that MAGA is an international movement. It just goes by different names in different countries. Victor Orban was the conduit from Putin to America. Some of us knew this. Ruth Ben Ghiat, Anne Applebaum, Paul Krugman and Kim Lane Scheppele have been reporting this truth from different perspectives for years.

It’s just that the American press corps seemed to have no interest in the connections while they chased the latest Trump outrage like magpies. When did we hear about the corruption and impoverishment in Hungary? After Brexit (yet another MAGA manifestation) when did we hear about what happened in the UK? Did any major news org report that British children were shorter than their international peers after years of austerity and Brexit?

That’s where we are headed, except we won’t have the NHS. In our case, people will die from lack of medical care starting next year. Cancer patients won’t get infusions, children will die of preventable diseases and people in nursing homes will be put out on the street if no one comes to pick them up.

And Republicans will let Trump do absolutely anything he wants. None of them have any plans to stop him. They will hold open the bank safe doors as he robs us and then they’ll drive the getaway car. Like a bad abusive boyfriend, Trump will isolate us from all our friends and family and tell us we’d be nothing without him. Then he’ll spend all the money in our bank accounts.

The bad times are coming. There’s no way to avoid at least some significant amount of pain. Everyone is going to feel it, MAGA working class voters most of all. THEY brought this on themselves. Some of the Democrats sold themselves to Wall Street, health insurance companies and aipac. The rest of us have been watching this disaster bear down on us from miles away, knowing that in spite of our warnings and campaigning and protesting, there was nothing we could do.

Maybe we have to hit bottom before we save ourselves. Just don’t blame it on all of us, Tim.

I’ve been following Krugman and Scheppele on the topic of Orban probably since the Occupy Wall Street days back in 2011. That’s when I started hearing about Orban’s takeover in Hungary and how he was ratcheting its governmental mechanism to work for him and Fidesz and no one else.

Check out this podcast from Paul Krugman talking to Kim Lane Scheppele about the rise of Pèter Magyar and the defeat of Orban. Spoiler alert: it’s going to be a long process to de-Orbanize Hungary but the EU is ready to help! And hinder. It’s complicated. But riveting. It needs to be a book.

Shout out to YouTube. Yes, people complain about the algorithm, Yes, it can seem to be too strict about certain sensitive topics. But it turns out to have had a significant part to play in Hungary. Probably the EU protects that. The US? We’ll see.

How does that work?

Let’s take the John F Kennedy’s famous quote:

“Ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

That’s a snazzy piece of rhetoric that I never really thought about too much. What was going on in 1960? The civil rights movement and the Cold War immediately come to mind. But we were transitioning from Eisenhower who was a moderately liberal Republican to JFK who was all about modernization, youth and mid-century American power. It comes off like a scolding in a way.

But it definitely applies now. I have had trouble articulating why the woke thing bothers me too. It’s not that I disagree with the definition or rightness of woke. It’s difficult to argue that empathy, treating people with dignity and respect, and enlightenment is a bad thing. It’s that the assertion that there’s only one way to be woke and that is subjective and mutable depending on the group is exhausting and can come off as selfish and out of touch. It only seems to go one way. Let’s face it. If you’ve ever had to go up against a self-appointed enforcer in a social media thread, you know nothing you say is going to satisfy them. Regardless of your background or the socio-economic class you’ve been brought up in, to them you are privileged and need to apologize for that. You need to submit and forget about your own needs.

I’m sorry, but that’s insane and offensive. If you can’t understand why that attitude can turn off even the most sympathetic ally, then you are the problem here.

But if you apply Kennedy’s quote, you can turn woke on its head. For example, instead of putting the emphasis on rights for every out group there is and then requiring everyone to walk on eggshells to not hurt anyone’s feelings, why not ask those same groups to endorse enthusiastically something the whole country can benefit from?

When is the last time you saw the pride parade feature the theme of universal healthcare for everyone? Sounds crazy, right? Take intersectionality to its logical conclusion. Are you a part of the community that needs your diversity, expertise and drive or do you want to separate yourself from the rest of America because you feel your rights are endangered?

This administration has proven that everybody’s rights are endangered even the white women who everyone has decided to make the scapegoats for the current disaster. I’m sorry, but did Michigan’s Arab community think about what would happen if Trump won their swing state? I can’t think of a dumber move than supporting the guy who almost certainly supported Bibi Netanyahu’s drive to wipe out the Palestinians. How did that help anyone? Now you can’t even protest what Israel is doing on college campuses,

Why set yourselves apart? You aren’t melting into the pot. If you had, the maga contingent would have just been the unsavory bits instead of the dominant flavor.

Pick a problem that needs to be solved and get behind solving it. Direct all your alphabets and ethnicities and cultures and disabilities to call attention to corruption, workplace issues, housing, healthcare. You know, stuff that affects everybody. Maybe the crazies who voted for Trump would stop seeing you as a threat (which we all know you are not. ).

Ask what you can do for your country. Advocate for universal things and ask others to vote for them too.

Come to the dark side.