EVIL ON BOARD

The following words were not spoken on some podcast or at some partisan rally.  No, they were spoken at the State Department’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism. This was Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathering of representatives from more than 60 countries to address international far-left terrorism.

The speaker here is none other than White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. A transcript of his words was published in full on the State Department’s own website. 

To begin with, what he told the world’s governments: that “the leftist” is driven by envy of “a perfect family [that] goes to church every Sunday.” Then he proceeded to instruct the world’s governments how to identify “the leftist.” He told them that “Not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a “normal’ person.” 

He continued, “It is not a coincidence that when you look at these violent ANTIFA demonstrators, they are all deformed in some way….in their mannerisms, in their appearance, in their dress…..Look at photographs of ANTIFA demonstrators who are violently demonstrating. 

“Why is it that there is not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them is deformed…in their bodies and their appearance to the point that their outer appearance is a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

He told them that “You should trust your instincts about who is ‘normal,’ who is ‘beautiful,’ and who is a threat to normal, healthy living.” Miller specified that his targets were “enemies of civilization,” and urged “completely unflinching pursuit.”

To students of history, this sounds all too familiar. For in truth, it echoes Nazi propaganda’s signature strategy in the 1930s, There is even a word for it: entartet, which is German for “degenerate” or “deviant.” It was designed to teach people to recognize degenerates by appearance – deformity of body as proof of deformity of spirit. Miller does exactly the same thing. 

In Nazi propaganda, it was used as a slur to label art, music, and people the regime considered racially, culturally, or politically “inferior.” The term was used especially to identify entartete kunst (degenerate art)  and entartet musik (degenerate music). The Nazis used it to justify exclusion, censorship, and persecution.

And most insidious of all, it became associated with Jewish identity. For here, entartet was a way to say “those people do not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft,” the Nazi ideal of a racially defined national community. And we know how that ended. 

MIller is using the essence of entertet in precisely the same way the Nazis did for precisely the same reason: identifying those whom he selects for summary prosecution. In fact, his speech reproduces the pattern of this propaganda almost to a T. 

To compare Miller’s speech to Hitler’s propaganda machine is not hysterical name-calling. It identifies a clear parallel to how Nazi propaganda taught people to identify things, and especially people, that would no longer be allowed to exist in their “new order.”

And today those words, those Nazi-style instructions on how to identify people to be singled out for persecution, are posted on the State Department’s website. 

It has come to this. From the obscene depths Donald T****’s depraved madness, the Administration has adopted the hateful essence of the most murderous propaganda machine in history, as official American policy. 

Watch your backs, people. We’re on shaky ground, here. 

FREEDOM ON THE ROPES

Donald T****’ and his MAGA movement’s determination to control the outcome of the midterms elections will lead to their defining moment. For them it is all or nothing, and their playbook is out there in plain sight. Among other things, this is where his placement of three Supreme Court justices has already begun to pay off. 

For example. Louisiana has the second-highest percent of Black residents of any state in the union, second only to Mississippi. New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport are three of the Blackest cities in the USA.

But the Supreme Court has ruled that Louisiana, which has six seats in the House, doesn’t need to have a single Black representative. It ruled that MAGA’s gerrymandering Black districts out of existence and diluting the power of the Black vote is just politics, not racism. Still, a state defined by Black history and culture having all white representatives is just OK with them  

In point of fact, it is both; it is crass, racial politics covered by a thin, transparent judicial veneer. It is white Supremacy, plain and simple. And it’s no accident that virtually all of the eleven states of the confederacy are all actively gerrymandering away their Black districts as well. Welcome to MAGA America, y’all.

But that’s just where it starts. 

They’re not only making it harder for Black and brown people to vote. Let me say for anyone who still does not get it: Women should not have to jump through more hoops, clear more barriers or take more steps to cast a vote than men do. 

And that’s important because if T***’s SAVE Act passes, it will be harder for women to vote, especially older married women. It will also be harder for trans people to vote. 

The fact is that it was never really about voter fraud. Never. Their own Heritage Foundation’s research proved that. Truth is, their goal is to suppress the rights of people whose demographics show that they tend to vote liberal. It’s that simple. Republicans know that a substantial majority of American voters— especially women and people of color—don’t like their policies and will vote against them. 

It’s all tied together, the culture wars, their racial bigotry and their war on women, and it always has been. Because the people who are saying today that gutting the Voting Right Act has nothing to do with racism are the same people who said four years ago that overturning Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with controlling women.

With the midterms just five months away, T**** and his MAGAs are on a tight timeline if they are to achieve their goal. T**** articulated that goal recently when he said that if the Republicans win the midterms they will be able to “rule” for a hundred years. 

In truth, it’s really about Donald T****’s fear that whatever is left of his legislative agenda will vanish in the wind if the party loses control of the House this fall. He also knows that, with the Democrats in control of the House, his corruption, his crimes and his depredations will all be exposed.

T**** needs to remain president to stay out of jail. He knows that once he’s out of office he will be criminally at risk for all manner of crimes and corruption. He tried to stay in office once before after his term was up, and there is no reason to believe he won’t try it again.

But there’s another, more sinister reason why the Republicans need to keep the House in 2026. This time, it is about commandeering the presidential election in 2028 and taking down the democracy. Because if they do keep the House, the 2028 presidential election is in the bag, and no matter who wins, they cannot lose. 

It all has to do with the Vice President. Acting in his Constitutional role, JD Vance will be responsible for validating the electoral votes when Congress convenes in January, 2029. But unlike Mike Pence, Vance has no soul, no honesty and no honor. He will do what the party and Donald T****tell him to do, his sworn oath to the contrary not withstanding.  

It works like this. If no candidate receives a simple majority of electoral votes there can be no declared winner. The 12th Amendment to the Constitution says that in that case, the issue goes to the floor of the House, where each state delegation gets one vote. 

All Vance has to do is what Mike Pence, as a matter of duty and honor, wouldn’t. He can refuse to certify just enough electoral votes from a few pivotal states to assure that neither candidate receives a majority. The election goes into the House, and democracy turns over in its grave.

If there are 26 states with Republican majorities, the Republicans will be able to claim the presidency even if they outright lost the election. It will all be legal, above board and by the book. At that point, all bets on the future of America’s 252-year experiment with democracy will be off. 

In furtherance of his autocratic and dynastic fantasies, Donald T**** has promulgated the myth that neither he, nor by extension any Republican, can lose an election unless the Democrats cheat. Most appropriately here we should remember the words of Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, “Always accuse the enemy of that which you are guilty.” 

T**** is already on record saying he should have seized the voting machines in 2020. There’s no good reason to presume he won’t hesitate to do it in 2026. So there’s no question as to who will be doing the cheating.  

That’s why the midterms are everything for T**** and his MAGAs. All  T****’s blathering about voter fraud and foreign intervention and all the rest is just a diversion. His purpose is to cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral process.

If he can convince enough people that the process is corrupt, and even if he can’t, it will provide him a dubious mandate to declare a national emergency up to and including martial law, seize voting machines, invalidate the election and do whatever else he will. He can cheat all he wants .

His little toady, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has already told the American military brass to be prepared to operate on the streets of our cities. And T**** has his private army of Brownshirt ICA agents at his command. 22nd Amendment be damned, he has teased the idea of his serving a third term many times. Ultra-conservative Republicans have a plan for doing just that and have raised tens of millions of dollars towards that end. 

Do not believe for a moment that Donald T**** is not serious about any of this, from subverting the electoral process to seizing dictatorial power. He is.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

TRUTH BE TOLD

The other day I posted an article about New York Times reporters getting subpoenas from the DOJ to testify about T****’s new luxury AF1 and why he flew it out to Turkey but had to fly the old one back.

It seems that Israel intelligence picked up chatter about an assassination attempt on his Orangeness. But because he was in a hurry to use his new toy, it was no secret that the plane wasn’t equipped with all the security stuff that is required for an AF1. So the Secret Service said no. 

Now, I just assumed that T**** was sore because word got out about an apparent intelligence leak which blew blew his cover story about sending the new one off to England so that American GI’s could adore it clear out of the water.

Well, my assumption was wrong. Insiders are saying he was enraged because the story got out that his fancy jet wasn’t up to speed on its defensive retrofits. There was a full story about this on the front page of the Sunday Times but I missed it, my copy didn’t get here until yesterday evening. 

Rachael Maddow had the story on her show last night. And strangely enough, the Times reporters didn’t need leaks from anywhere to know that T****’s fancy Boeing 747-8 was lacking its state-of-the-art missile defense system. That fact was out there for anyone who knew to look for it. 

It seems that the company that builds the weapon has it’s design and operation fully illustrated on its public website. It’s not classified or anything. And the part of the device that actually shoots down approaching missiles, is mounted on the outside of the airplane’s hull. It’s there for all to see. 

All you have to do is know to look for it. You can see it clearly on pictures of the old AF1 planes. You cannot see it on the new one. The truth is out there; the missile system isn’t there. Case closed. 

All of which makes T**** and his lawyers look pretty stupid. You can’t throw reporters in jail just because they report something you don’t like. And you can’t make them talk. It’s against the law. That old 1st Amendment, again. 

Sometimes, I swear, as much as he wants to look tough and all that, T**** just can’t cut it. It is times like these that our country doesn’t look like it is being by an autocratic, a tyrant, or even a promising wannabe. 

More like Daffy Duck.

Contemporary Moslem historical accounts of Moslem-Jewish struggles commonly proceed forward from the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1947. However, any examination of the current strife in the Middle East must first be put in its broader historical context. 

For several millennium BCE the land known as Palestine was home to many peoples over different eras, including among others Canaanites, Philistines, Samaritans and Phoenicians. Jews lived there continuously from between 1,000 to 1,500 years before the Diaspora, which occurred under the Babylonians in 586 BCE and later the Romans in 70 CE.

Modern Arabs were late-comers in the region, arriving during and after the 7th century bloody Muslim conquests, when Arab armies from the Arabian Peninsula conquered much of the Middle East

The roots of the modern Arab-Jewish conflict can be traced back to the rise of Zionism—a movement for the re-establishment and development of a Jewish nation in the Levant—in 1897. At that time, the region known as Palestine, or the Levant, was part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire,and was inhabited by a majority Moslem Arab population with small Christian and smaller Jewish minorities. The culture was predominantly agrarian, the total population was less than a million.

Towards the end of WWI, the Levant came under British mandate. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration expressed support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. 

Jewish immigration accelerated during the 1920s and 1930s, and eventually tensions between Jewish settlers and Arabs escalated into armed violence. The Arab Revolt erupted in 1939 and began a period of intense armed Arab resistance against both British rule and Jewish settlers. 

In 1947, the U.N. partitioned Britain’s Levantine mandate into the state of Israel and, commensurately, statehood for the Palestinians. However, not anxious to accept an independent Palestinian state on their borders, that offer was rejected by the surrounding Arab states.

Palestinian Moslems had the choice of accepting full Israeli citizenship or, at the frenzied urging of the Arab states, becoming refugees. Several generations later, the descendants of those who became refugees remain stateless to this day. 

All of this is history. 

Against these historical realities, there are several truths about the contemporary violence in Gaza and Lebanon that must be made clear. 

First and foremost, Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic attempt to wipe out a given population, usually based on some ethnic, racial, national or religious criterion.  However, massive civilian casualties have been a fixture of modern warfare since the turn of the last century, and the war in Gaza was the Arab’s choice. 

The response of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli citizens was predictable. Cold-blooded as it seems, what Hamas apparently wanted was the horrific optics of the Jewish military killing Moslem civilians. These casualties are not victims of Israeli genocide, they are the victims of Hamas’ undeclared war against the State of Israel.   

Also, genocide is not subtle. If Israel was intent on committing genocide in Gaza, it would have not dropped thousands of leaflets advising its residents when and where it was planning to drop its bombs. Its IDF forces would have indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds of thousands or even millions Gaza’s hapless population; this has simply not happened. 

Conversely, genocide is exactly what Hamas and Hezbollah have in mind for the Jews. A quote commonly attributed to Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, aptly applies here:  “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” 

That is what the Arabs do. 

There is absolutely no moral equivalence between a Nazi regime which sought to exterminate a race of people, and a nation and a people that seeks to avert its own extermination.

Second, Israel is not an apartheid state. Apartheid, from the Dutch/Afrikaans language meaning “apart,” refers to the old South African government’s policy of forced racial separation. Israel has no such policy. In fact, some 2.5 million of its 10 million citizens are Arab Moslems.

The claim is made that Israeli Moslems are often treated as second class citizens, and to an extent this may be true. But then, so were African-Americans in the Jim Crow South, and no-one has ever suggested that America was an apartheid state. 

And then there’s this. Arab support of Palestinians in the West Bank is cynical at best. The reason they are stateless to begin with is that the Arabs refused to allow Palestinian statehood in 1947. For decades, now, Arab states have opportunistically used the plight of stateless Palestinians in the West bank, a humanitarian tragedy which they created, as a political and military tool to wield against their common enemy, the Jewish state of Israel.

And finally, it is imperative to recognize that the stated goal of all the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel organizations and terrorist groups over the last eighty years, and at one time or another all the Arab states surrounding Israel, has less to do with the efficient administration of Palestinian territory or care for its people than it does with the elimination of the State of Israel. That includes the annihilation of the some 7.2 million Jews who live there. Not even the Nazis could match that total. 

The Islamic world’s open hostility against an indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland has been the root cause of the violent history of  Palestine. The tragic, internecine warfare which has destroyed much of Gaza and the West Bank is an ongoing expression of that hatred. 

These are truths which Moslem scholars and historians would prefer the world to not remember. 

They must never be forgotten. 

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

Here is a quick historical retrospective:

When slavery was legal, helping slaves to freedom was criminalized. When the Holocaust was legal, hiding Jews was criminalized. When Jim Crow was legal, protesting racism was criminalized.

The point? Legality doesn’t necessarily equal morality.

The contemporary application: The criminalization of how people live their private lives may be legal, but it isn’t moral.

The imperative: Oppose MAGA’s agenda surrounding women’s rights, racial and LBGTQ+ issues. They’re trying to force everyone to live with their petty, hateful prejudices. No-one has that right.

I’ll take moral over legal any day.

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

 

This is not a photograph of a bombed-out French village in 1945. It is a picture of the neighborhood called “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma on this day in 1921 after it was attacked and burned to the ground by an angry white mob. Estimates range up to 500 Black Americans were slaughtered in the rampage. It is as dark and shameful chapter of our nation’s history. 

Today, racist whites in many of the former Confederate states are, with the shameful blessing of the Supreme Court, moving to gerrymander Congressional districts on the basis of race. This is also dark and shameful, although today’s Southern bigots smirk proudly of their efforts. 

Although not the raging violence of 1921, the intent by these hateful bigots today is the same as the Tulsa mob then: to dilute the visibility and influence of the Black population. Both of these actions are vile and depraved. What happened in Tulsa must always be acknowledged, taught and remembered as racial hatred and indifference to the lives of Black people. 

What is happening today in the Old South is no less so. 

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

Reports indicate that at least twelve Republican-led states turned over their voter rolls to the Federal Government. It is estimated that up to 62 million voters have been checked through the DHS/SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) project and four hundred thousand have been flagged for purging.

These would be mostly older people with a majority being women. Roughly half would be MAGA voters, dead or alive. This is all in furtherance of T****’s election-denying hallucination; if we can only get out hands on those voter rolls, we can prove that fraud once and for all. Massive voter fraud.Yeah you betcha.

However, one of the biggest promoters of T****’s Big Lie, the ultra-Conservative Heritage Foundation has soiled itself by debunking the whole concept of vote fraud once and for all. They did it by trying to prove it was true, but all they did really was their homework.

The truth is that the Foundation’s own voter fraud database—often cited in political debates—has failed to show large-scale fraud. Their own dataset has documented on the order of roughly 1,000–1,100 proven cases of voter fraud across the entire United States over multiple decades. This spans a period in which hundreds of millions to over a billion ballots, with a substantial portion being older incidents with some dating back to the mid-20th century, meaning the rate of confirmed fraud cases is extremely small relative to total votes.

One breakdown found that only about 105 of 749 cases occurred within a recent five-year window, and that across billions of votes, there were just about 10 documented cases of in-person voter impersonation, the type of fraud most often cited in public debate.

Put in proportional terms, even using Heritage’s own data, the incidence rate is calculated as 0.000007%, an almost negligent number on the order of seven millionths of total votes cast. One summary based on the database estimated a mere hundreds of cases out of more than a roughly one billion ballots, underscoring how infrequent such incidents are at a national scale.

Independent analyses, such as those from the Brennan Center for Justice, conclude that the database itself “adds up to a molecular fraction” of total votes and therefore inadvertently demonstrates that voter fraud is “vanishingly rare.”

In short, the substantive figures from Heritage’s own dataset show that while instances of voter fraud do exist, they are numerically insignificant, widely dispersed over time, and their effects are statistically negligible compared to the total volume of voting in U.S. elections.

So there it is. The Heritage Foundation, the outfit that created Project 2025 and hammered home T****’s insistace about winning the 2020 election finally did it’s own research and came a cropper. In one self-defeating moment, it called its own bluff, was forced to acknowledge the truth, and had to take it all back.

The election was fair. There was no voter fraud. Donald T**** lost.

All the rest is fantasy.

THE BERN HARD PERSPECTIVE

DONALD T**** IS WATCHING YOU

If this kind of deep, covert government surveillance doesn’t scare you, nothing will:

(AP, May 5) –  “The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious.

“The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an AI algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.

“Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.

“The Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections instead of simply targeting wanted suspects.” 

This is T****’s secret police in action: They know where you come and where you go, how you get there, presume to know what you are doing, and can arrange to have your ass stopped, harassed and even hauled away. And it’s all done by computers.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. 

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MAKING AMERICA WHITE AGAIN

This past December, U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), the federal agency that handles immigration benefits and applications, issued a mew policy memo that halted asylum requests broadly and put a “hold” on any type of immigration process for people from over a dozen countries bringing the total number of effectively banned countries to 39.

The reason was concern for national security. “This order aims to safeguard U.S. citizens from aliens who may seek to commit terrorist acts, pose threats to national security, promote hateful ideologies, or exploit immigration laws for malicious purposes,” the December 2025 memo said. A breakdown of the list of 39 is instructive. 

Seven of these countries, Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), Iran, Laos, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Yemen are Asian. Six countries, Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Haiti, and Venezuela are from the Western Hemisphere. Tonga is an island in Oceania. The rest of the countries on the list are African; there are twenty-five of them. 

It takes only a cursory look at this list to see that all these nations have one obvious thing in common: The people who live there are either Black or Brown, or non-Christian. Or both. The countries listed include Somalia and Haiti — nations that T**** has referred to as “garbage” and a “shithole,” respectively. 

The total population of these nations is just over a billion people. With a few well-aimed strokes of a pen, T**** has almost casually eliminated over 12%, some one in 8, of the world’s population, all people of color, from being among the tired, the poor, the homeless, huddled masses yearning to breathe free for whom we no longer lift our lamp beside his gold-plated door. 

It is clear that T****’s brand of racial bigotry knows no bounds.

Yet for Donald T****, Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as the world’s “shining light on the hill” still holds true.

As long as you’re white. 

                                        FUBAR SUMMIT

T**** just flew to China to meet with President Xi. He did not bring diplomats. He did not bring Politicians. He did not bring policy wonks. Instead, he brought Elon Musk. Tim Cook. Goldman Sachs. BlackRock. Boing. Visa. Mastercard. Yes, he brought his billionaire CEO buddies. .

These are top-of-the-heap financial players. They do not represent us; they were not elected by nor are they accountable to the people. Instead, ostensibly on behalf of the United States of America, they can easily be presumed to have negotiated in their own best interests. And we footed the bill for all of it; our tax dollars put them on Air Force One and paid for who knows what else?

For in truth, this was not a government mission at all. It was a corporate business meeting with a foreign government held under the cover of the American flag with the American President as front-man. With the whole world watching, it was Donald T**** selling out the American people to China and his oligarch buddies. 

His own accomplishments? Laughable at best. 

What he did do politically is throw Taiwan under the bus. He has already refused to commit to signing the Consolidated Appropriations Act which included $1 billion for security assistance to Taiwan. And he refused to authorize $150 million to replace defense articles already sent to the island. And when asked about the U.S. government’s relationship to the Republic of Taiwan, he equivocated. Just can’t tell the truth, probably doesn’t even know it.  

For his part, Xi calmly asserted this to the clueless America president: If you can mess with Venezuela and Cuba in your hemisphere, don’t preach to us about what we can or cannot do with Taiwan in ours.

And, of course, T**** got nothing on Iran, either. Iran still insists on controlling access to the Strait of Hormuz, they are not going to simply give up their nuclear ambitions, and no matter what Xi says, it’s an open secret that China has been funneling military hardware to Iran through North Korea for years. 

So T**** comes home with virtually nothing to show for it after his rich biddies make their deals in total secrecy and he goes on telling us his usual lies. And for all of this, he probably thinks he’s the world’s greatest diplomat even though he didn’t get to make his  “deal.” And he certainly doesn’t get that Beijing’s pomp and ceremony was nothing special just for him, only China’s standard showcase layout for foreign dignitaries. Our president, simpleton that he is, believes his own hype.

And is such an idiot.

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

NO CAKEThis is MAGA moral depravity in full view:

(Huffington Post, May 9) “Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has ‘good news’ to share with you: As a result of her oversight at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 4.5 million people have been kicked off food stamps in the past year. Rollins bragged about the move in an appearance on Newsmax Thursday night.

‘The good news: In just one year alone, we’ve already moved 4.5 million people off of SNAP,’ Rollins said, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as she predicted more hunger to follow.
‘We’re going to be pulling more and more people off,’ she added.

Rollins then struck a religious tone, ignoring how many people on public assistance do work, but still have trouble making ends meet.
‘Frankly part of this is the dignity of work, right?’ she said. ‘This is a great, American, biblical, foundational principle that people should work unless they’re very old or disabled or a child.’

Rollins is no stranger to dubious assertions, having once claimed that food prices have fallen when they were actually rising, and that a meal consisting of ‘a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and one other thing costs only $3.00.’

And that’s it. SNAP benefits go to low-income households. USDA sources report that roughly 40 percent, or 1.8 million SNAP participants are children. And for MAGA, it is a biblical imperative that they go hungry if they are poor.

And although she claims that even the poor can eat well, you just know that this sorry excuse for a human would consider a meal consisting of a drumstick, a broccoli floret, a tortilla and some beans as beneath her dignity and station, even as she pounds down her ribeye with potatoes au gratin, sautéd wild mushrooms and asparagus with hollandaise.

But then, don’t forget, MAGA shut down USAID for tens of millions of children worldwide. Heartless SOBs just left them to starve. And that’s MAGA for you.

They all have to go, every last one of them.

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

In our primary system, only the top two vote-getters move on to the November finals. With eight Democrats running and only two Reeps, if we don’t play or cards right we could get shut out and both of those could be Republicans. So please, let’s all get on the same bandwagon. Here’s the plan:

Do NOT Vote Early. Wait until after the last debate on May 5. Watch the polls and wait for a clear frontrunner among the Democratic candidates to emerge. Then, no matter whom you prefer, we suck it up and all consolidate behind that candidate. We must absolutely NOT split our votes across multiple Democratic candidates.

Imagine the embarrassment and humiliation of having our beautiful California, the most progressive state in the Union (with the possible exception of New York), being fronted by some mealy-mouthed, lying, MAGA Republican POS.

We simply cannot let that happen.

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

The 2026 G20 Leaders’ Summit will be held in Miami, Florida, USA, at the T**** National Doral Miami resort, on December 14–15, 2026.

Wait, what? A major international summit is going to be held at T****’s own resort? Just exactly what’s up with that? That’s not even close to diplomacy. It’s shameless self-serving on a global scale.

Because It will funnel tens of millions of taxpayer dollars straight into his pocket and turning it into little more than a money-making bonanza for Donald T****, hosting the world’s most powerful leaders at his private property diminishes the event almost to the point of absurdity.

The G20 is supposed to be about global cooperation, not personal aggrandizement and greed. Holding it at the host’s private resort makes America look less like a gracious host and more like a personal business venture and branding operation of the president.

And most glaringly, it exposes significant questions of conflict of interest, corruption and graft.

The leaders of the world’s most powerful nations have no delusions about Donald T****. They know him for what he is. It is hard to imagine how they must feel about being made part of this shabby operation fronted by a shameless grifter. But the G20 is an important international event. So they’ll come.

Even if it makes them look debased and a little soiled.

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

This is the United States of America,. And in this country, it is the people who are sovereign. And only the People. That is the basis of the covenant between the people of this country and their government as secured by the Constitution of the United States. 

First and foremost, we are a nation governed by the rule of law. No-one, not even the highest official in the land, is above the law. That is part of the covenant. 

One of the historic rallying cries of the American Revolution was “No taxation without representation.” The essence of this bedrock assertion is that the government cannot do anything to its citizens, without their approval. That approval, those laws, come from the voice of the people through their elected representatives. No civic leader up to and including the president, can declare that anything is law simply because they say so. 

Equally important as our political sovereignty are the personal freedoms guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights. From the First Amendment we are free to think, believe and with certain restrictions say as we wish. Period. In the words of Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1943, “If there is any fixed star in our Constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”  

Having just thrown off the “yoke of tyranny,”  and with a profound suspicion of a strong central authority, our Founding Fathers created a government consisting of three equal branches, each with checks and balances on the others.

That, too, is part of the covenant between the People and their government. 

With the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government they had created. His famous reply: “A Republic. If you can keep it.” Our founding Fathers presumed this would be possible as long as the government was run by honest and honorable men. And indeed, for almost two-and-a-half centuries, this has been the case. 

Our democratic institutions rely on the compliance of its citizens and leaders with and within the law. They are not capable of dealing with the existential threat of tyrannical defiance. Our nations founders presumed and relied on the intentions of good men to hold the reins of power and authority. Alas, this is no longer true.

Donald T**** is not good man. 

He is a 34-count felon convicted of business fraud. Several of his businesses and charities have been terminated as little more than scams. He is a deadbeat, thief, grifter, compulsive liar, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic narcissist. Ignorant of culture and history, unschooled in letters or the arts, he is crude and totally lacking in any of the social graces. Such a creature has no business anywhere near the reins of power. 

A comprehensive assessment of T****’s presidency does not suit the purpose of this missive; a brief compendium will suffice. Donald Trump has among other things used a secret police organization to kidnap people off the streets and drag them from their homes, incarcerate them in foul concentration camps and deport them without any pretext of due process. He has made war on a country which posed no threat to us, bombed and destroyed its elementary schools, hospitals and universities and killed thousands of innocent civilians.

He has blown up fishing boats for sport, torpedoed and captured ships in international waters, killed survivors and left others to drown. He has withheld food and medication from tens of millions of the world’s most vulnerable, blockaded fuel to a country with the intent of precipitating mass starvation and dedicated the Department of Justice to protect himself and his rich friends and purveyors of an international sex trafficking ring from prosecution.  

In all these things Donald T**** is unabashedly guilty. And since he holds in his hands what he believes is the power to corrupt or even cancel upcoming national elections, there are no assurances that the cancer of Donald T**** presence in government can be removed by Constitutional means.

But that does not mean the people are without options. It does not mean we must submit. We are sovereign in this country, Donald T**** is not. In spite of what he may believe, this is our country. Not his.

If he will not relinquish his grip on the nation according to the Constitution’s mandates, we can take back from Donald T*** what is ours and ours alone. That path forward was described eloquently over 60 years ago by a young graduate student in Berkeley, California. His name was Mario Savio: 

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who own it, to the people who run it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all

There will be risk involved. There will be violence and most likely even death. To quote Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Dictators do not go quietly, and there is truth in the words of Sun Tzu when he said “An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.”

No matter. If we love our country and our freedom, we must accept that risk. It is on us, the People, to redeem the promise of our Founding Fathers and sanctify the sacrifices of those patriots who, in the cause of freedom, pledged in the Declaration of Independence their ”lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.” Can we do any less? 

Freedom isn’t free.