They don't remember.

 It blows my mind and breaks my heart to realize that there are grown adults of around 20 years young, who don't remember what America was before the last decade, wherein 45/47 and his 37% have ruined it.  They don't remember civil political discourse or civility, period.  They don't remember a time before xenophobia, hate, scapegoating and divisiveness ruled the day.  They don't remember a time when the rule of law carried the day.  They don't remember a time when we were widely respected in the world, and an inspiration to many.  And although we have had many shameful chapters in our history, they don't remember a time when we were so much more than our worst aspects and potentials.  They don't remember a time when there were things to be truly proud of and patriotic about protecting and nurturing.

They only know this crazy, hateful, cruel and lawless, corrupt and sociopathic POTUS and his xenophobic, racist, horrific followers.  They know a government that lies constantly, shoots peaceful protesters in the street, and kidnaps people with no due process and puts them in concentration camps.  They know a government that is Reaganomics on steroids, Robinhood in reverse, a fascist oligarchy.  We already had no social safety net, no investment in our people, when I was their age, and it changed the trajectory of my life from what it would have been and could have been, had we had (like most other westernized countries) federal, universal, single-payer health care, maternity and paternity leave, child care, etc.  And instead of trending in the right direction, no matter how long and how hard some of us fought to make it do so, it has only gotten worse and worse, until we had a crazed, racist, antisemitic South African wackadoo on a stage with a chainsaw, as the 37% cheered.  That was the exact moment when I, watching in abject horror, knew that America was gone.

20-year-olds do not remember the America I believed in, the ideals I passionately fought my entire life to try to make us live up to.  Instead, all the worst aspects and potentials of America have come to fruition.  And it is poisonous fruit.

It is heartbreaking enough to watch your country be swallowed whole by all of the above-outlined horrific potentials, but then to realize that there are not even just children (which is heartbreaking) but adults now--fully grown adults--who don't remember.  They don't remember when, though it has always faced strong headwinds, there was an alive and kicking America to be proud of and passionate about.

And all the No Kings marches, and all the No Kings men (and women), couldn't put America together again.

 Let me make clear what has taken place and is taking place, since many people are not seeing it:

1.  Trump has taken over Venezuela.

2.  It has nothing to do with caring about democracy, as he has simultaneously announced to the press that the exiled, duly elected, opposition leader and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will not be supported by the US as the rightful leader.  He further pontificated that she is "not respected".  What that translates to is:  "I know she won't give me all of Venezuela's oil."

3.  This whole this is about OIL, and power.  47 wants both.  A side benefit is that it distracts from all the talk about his health, the Epstein files, etc.  He would have gone for it without any side benefits, though, as HE WANTS THE OIL.

47 has just taken over a sovereign country because he wants to enrich himself and his oligarchic cronies of the oil tycoon variety.

Believe the man when he says stuff.  Colombia is not safe.  Greenland is not safe.  And, yes, wait for it:  Canada is NOT SAFE.  Canada has a lot of oil, people.

If he gets away with Venezuela, he will know that he has effectively, as one knowledgeable person phrased it yesterday on the news, "dissolved congress".  It has been obvious to me for this entire term that congress is TOTALLY (and treasonously, by the way) complicit.  Congress has the power of the purse, yet 47 ended PEPFAR and US AID and so much else.  Congress stayed SILENT, though 47 had NO power to do what he did unless THEY CEDED THEIR POWER TO HIM.  We no longer have checks and balances, as we no longer have congress.  Congress is nothing but a mirage now.  They are just there to look pretty, and they aren't even doing that, in my subjective opinion.  They are ugly, in their treasonous complicitness.

If 47 cared about liberating Venezuela, he would be supporting the opposition, but instead he has said that their leader is "not respected" (which is a statement based on nothing), and has also said "we will be running things".

"Running things" translates to TAKING OVER VENEZUELA.

Like I said, other countries are next.  There is no stopping this sociopathic, textbook malignant narcissist, who fancies himself Hitler 2.0.  Hitler without the stache.

I have been warning of this since 2015.  I really wish a certain dear friend of mine's Facebook page was still up (the friend passed away and the page is now vaporized, along with many years of content), as I wrote a LOT on it, predicting everything 47 has done, right down to rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps (I was told I was being overly dramatic and ridiculous).  But I wrote about that/predicted all of it on my page, too, you just have to go back and look.  So I don't know why I seem to cling to the vain hope that, at some point, PEOPLE WILL START TO UNDERSTAND.

Yet, I have a next-door neighbor who is firmly in the MAGA cult, and it is a cult.  IT'S A CULT.  But I digress.  About 37% of the American population is in the cult.  They continue to believe that 47 is "making America great again".  Then you have another large chunk of Americans who proudly will tell you every chance they get that "I don't watch the news."  I had that happen yesterday at the health food store:

The cashier asked "How are you?"  I had to pause for a moment, and then I said that I am a mixed bag, because personally I'm well, but "the news is very upsetting."  Her retort was "That's why I don't watch the news."  Well, bully for you (and, might I add, DUMB BUTT), that DOESN'T MAKE IT GO AWAY, or make it not affect you.

So many Americans seem to me to be like little kids who stick their fingers in their ears and sing "La la la la la, I can't hear you!", and are insufferably proud of themselves for that.  Meanwhile, I'm screaming on the inside:  WAKE THE RHYMES-WITH-DUCK UP, PEOPLE:  our country is gone!

47 hasn't just taken over Venezuela.  He has, before doing that, taken over America.  And all the No Kings Marches, and all the No Kings men (and women), couldn't put America together again.

😢

#MyCountryIsGone 
#DoesAnyoneCare?
#OrAreYouAllTheCashierAtTheHealthFoodStore?

703

My country has fallen to fascism, and I'm also coping with things in my own life, ranging from ID theft, to staring down the barrel of a live possum in my bedroom and a forked-tongued snake rearing up, which was threatening to strike my kitten last week in my house.  The world just keeps on worlding.  Yet have I forgotten the hostages for one nanosecond, through all of that and more, since October 7, 2023?  Even when I'm posting about fascism here at home, and masked ICE agents kidnapping people off American streets and whisking them out of the country to a horrendous concentration camp, or 47 building a concentration camp here in my own state and putting people there with no due process?  No.  Not for one nanosecond.

Because there hasn't yet been one nanosecond since October 7, 2023.  October 7, 2023 has been one long moment.  One held breath.  One endless dark tunnel.  One terrible nightmare of abandonment, disillusionment, betrayal, gaslighting and the relentless, inescapable clarity of seeing the rabid monster of antisemitism ferociously foaming at the mouth all around me and my entire people.

Lost in all of it, as far as the world and the aforementioned rabid monster of antisemitism are concerned, are the hostages.  They are now emaciated and looking like Auschwitz concentration camp survivors.  Yet the world doesn't care, because the rabid monster of antisemitism infuses their every cell and the gaslighting is so complete.  Posters of babies taken hostage (and, we now know, later brutally slain along with their mother) defaced and ripped down, as if ripping down a poster can erase the truth.  As if defacing the photo of an innocent baby can erase the truth.  No, truth can't be erased, even when you draw swastikas on photos of babies, and rip them down.  Truth can never be murdered in dark tunnels, only the humanity of those who turn away from it can be.

#BringThemHomeNow

Link below is to:  Sarah Kendis' 9/5/2025 blog, "700 Days of Truth Held Hostage"

History tells us that monsters and monstrous regimes are not sustainable.

The treasonous traitor in chief willfully would NOT call in the national guard to DC on Jan. 6, 2021, when it was desperately needed and being desperately called for by elected officials to quell the violent insurrection he incited, thereby also becoming an active participant in it, as its treason played out.  Yet now, in 2025, he is calling in the national guard to DC, for no reason other than to continue and solidify his fascist takeover. 😠

I have one thing to say to the monster and all those mini-monsters who follow and treasonously, complicitly enable him:  FASCIST REGIMES ARE NOT SUSTAINABLE FOREVER.  You're having your cruel, xenophobic, lawless, oligarchic, treasonous, violent moment but, if history is any guide, pretty soon you'll be flying your Qatari jet to take asylum in Russia.  If you're lucky.  And all those who enable you now will say later that they were "just following orders".  And the people who most vociferously supported you will pretend they never did.  And you will permanently reside in the reviled trash heap of history.

😠

The Coup has Couped

Putin's asset in the White House continues his relentless dismantling of the United States government.

I never thought I'd outlive my beloved country, but I have.  The name is the same but we've been taken over.  And the only "invasion" has not been from all those that 47 has relentlessly engaged in "othering", in dehumanizing, to his base for the last decade.  No, the invasion, as the cliche about horror movies goes, is "coming from inside the house!".  That is why so many Americans do not realize at all that we have undergone a fascist coup.  Congress, on the other hand, must realize it and just consistently turns a complicit and therefore treasonous blind eye, which is how we have gotten to this point.

This point of scooping people up of the street and disappearing them to concentration camps, vaporizing the already obscenely tiny social safety net in this country, all to cement the oligarchy, putting our constitution and rule of law in the shredder, and dismantling the federal government.

Everything may, for now, feel the same to you on a daily basis here in "America", but make no mistake:  you are now in a fascist country.  The coup has couped.  No one has stopped 47 at all the many points he could have been stopped at along this ten-year ride to get here.  And now here we are.  In MAGAmerica.

"State Department is firing more than 1,300 staff on Friday, internal memo says"

I've come up with a name for the new country we are now in, the xenophobia and othering capital of the world: MAGAmerica

MAGA people are sick.  The MAGAt in Chief is selling Alligator Alcatraz "merch".  How sick does one have to be to want to sport a beer koozie or tee shirt that says Alligator Alcatraz?  You are literally sporting your support for a concentration camp, for dehumanization and cruelty.  It is like the sick, antisemitic tee shirts that some of the Jan. 6th seditious insurrectionists sported, saying things regarding the Holocaust that I won't even repeat/give oxygen to on my page.  Sick, dehumanizing, othering.  That's MAGA and MAGAmerica, the name that came to me this weekend for this new, heartless, cruel, terrifying country we find ourselves citizens of.  MAGAmerica killed--murdered--my country, America.

There is nothing to be proud of about Alligator Alcatraz.  NOTHING.  It's a crime against humanity, and totally against American laws aplenty.  Have we learned nothing from slavery, Japanese American internment camps, McCarthyism, and the treatment of Native Americans?  That is all part of our own history here in this country.  Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust?  About othering?  About xenophobia and scapegoating?  About the banality of evil?  EVIDENTLY NOT, if we are kidnapping people, including 4-year-old American citizens with cancer, not affording people any due process, shipping hundreds to a concentration camp in El Salvador, and also creating our own concentration camp meets reality TV show, Alligator Alcatraz, in which to put kidnapped humans and intentionally torture them by surrounding them with the intense heat, fatal-disease-carrying mosquitoes, pythons, alligators and hurricanes of the Everglades, with nothing but a tent between all of the above and the people?

Oh, look honey, we are entering MAGAmerica, see the welcome sign?  Look, there it is:

"Welcome (only no one is, other than white, Evangelical Christians) to MAGAmerica!  We are the xenophobia and othering capital of the world!  Where your tee shirt can say "Alligator Alcatraz", to show your pride in one of our most sensational concentration camps!  Where you can carry a machine gun and not pay taxes, because society is for suckers!  It's every man, woman and child for themselves here, wu hu HUUUUUUUUUUUUU, the south is going to rise again!  47 was sent by God to make everything perfect for "us" by getting rid of any and all "thems", eliminating taxes, and allowing guns galore!  And if this welcome sign is too wordy for you, don't worry, you don't have to learn to read, that's for the "elites", and we have abolished the Department of Education, 'cause who needs it?  Alligator Alcatraz, wu hu HUUUUUUUU!"

Like I said, MAGAts are sick, sick, cruel people.  And they've remade this country in their terrible image.

Velshi piece on MSNBC: "American dystopia: The cruel spectacle of Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’"

No Kings in America

Let's roll.  Creative non-violent resistance has been proven historically to be a profoundly powerful, effective instrument of social change.  Here are my signs for today's No Kings Protest:

#NoKings