Blog

“I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.”

– ABRAHAM LINCOLN

This 4th of July was supposed to be special. Anyone old enough to remember the proud pomp and fanfare of our nation’s 200th birthday recalls a holiday of huge DC crowds and the unprecedented good feelings that coast-to-coast unity engendered. 

The other day an old high school friend of mine posted a great picture on Facebook of Independence Day on the National Mall circa 1976.  The crowd extended as far as the eye could see, with broad smiles on virtually every face you looked at. Nobody seemed to be thinking about anything other than the good time they were having on a day every American was happy to celebrate. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean things were hunky dory in the U.S. at the time. We were just two years removed from the trauma of Vietnam. Issues stemming from integration, like bussing to schools, were creating battlegrounds in a number of communities. The first wave of economic pain tied to the coming end of our dominance in global trade and manufacturing was beginning an oxidation process of what would become the Rust Belt. Inflation was high, exceeding wage growth. Finally, the POTUS at the time had replaced the first one ever to resign his office following the ugliest White House scandal in American history. 

But looking at the photo, none of that seemed to matter.  There appeared a collective feeling that whatever challenges we faced, whatever our nation’s failures, at the very least our country’s mission statement, the faithful adherence to the Constitution, would protect what we all agreed was most precious… the rule of law and our basic freedoms it codified, and an electoral process that was the envy of the world. The hundreds of thousands of smiles in that picture seemed to express mass confidence in such reassurance. 

It gets no more surreal than the Fox News coverage over the last several days of the Trump-centered Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Fox decided to go all in promoting and covering the event, declaring it a sparkling exhibition of American “heritage and military grit.”  Trouble is that in addition to the mass exodus of the performers originally scheduled on the entertainment list, along with the refusal of up to 11 states to participate, nobody has showed up. 

Fox News anchors on the ground have been sticking to a talk track that not only ignores that development, but actually pretends it isn’t true. Despite live camera footage of entirely empty Mall expanses, the Fox commentators are cheerfully reporting  how “thousands of Americans are here celebrating our heritage.”  It’s a good bet that even the North Korean state propaganda services would be loath to broadcast such Orwellian absurdity. 

As for national unity on America’s 250th birthday week, that’s never been a Trump priority. Hastily erecting a model of the golden arch Trump means to build in megalomanical homage to himself, as well as deploying packs of overheated national guard, park police and even ICE personnel to confirm his incessant proclamations that DC “has almost no crime anymore,” are foremost on the agenda. Concepts like community and national unity have “woke” written all over them. Keep the messaging where Trump always wants it… validating his grievances.

This week his Sheriff of Nottingham, United States Attorney for DC Janine Pirro, has been doing her share in that regard. She is prosecuting a 67-year old former US Olympian “to the fullest extent of the law” for the felony of reaching in and picking out a floating example of the sub-shoddy job the no-bid award of the Reflecting Pool reclamation project resulted in. 

JJ Cafaro, is the Mar A Lago buddy of Trump who received the government contract.  The Interior Department justified skirting procurement rules and pinpointing Cafaro’s company, Greenwater Solutions, by citing the “unusual and compelling urgency of the Reflecting Pool project.” 

Cafaro, who bears a striking resemblance to Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy fame, pleaded guilty back in 2000 to trying to bribe disgraced Ohio Congessman James Traficant and promptly turned federal stoolie in return for a reduced sentence. Ten years later he pleaded guilty again to campaign finance violations. He has offered little in the way of public comment concerning the debacle. 

The vandal Pirro wants to keep off the streets is David Hearn, once an Olympic Canoeist.  Pirro somehow got him indicted on Wednesday. Those who didn’t believe the old adage that a grand jury “can indict a ham sandwich” should now reconsider. Pirro contends the senior citizen “forcefully and violently” pulled up the blue liner installed just weeks before. There is “tremendous evidence,” assured Pirro, to convict the nefarious Hearn of his “deliberate act.” The former Olympian could receive up to 10 years in prison.

Meanwhile, perhaps the almighty has decided to express some dismay with our current trajectory. Record heat has permeated the entire mid-Atlantic region. Temperatures as high as 105 were reported in DC this week. It was so hot Friday, The Great American State Fair was forced to cancel activities for the afternoon. That offered small comfort to fully uniformed personnel, who appeared ready to engage in a firefight, and whose number just about equaled the attendees, as they baked mercilessly under the unforgiving sun. 

The high for our 250th Independence Day is forecasted at a health-threatening 104 degrees. Trump, who certainly will be wearing that ridiculous blue suit and wing tips when he enters the fires of his eternity, was unfazed by the forecast. “It’s going to be approximately 107 degrees out. And I’m going to go and make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything.” Maybe he’s practicing for this Christmas. When he’ll be shimmying down Whoville chimneys to steal the gifts the ungrateful brats don’t deserve. 

Whether just recently raising the flag of independence and national sovereignty, or marking a quarter millennium of existence, a nation is judged on its leadership and the process for selecting it. On our nation’s 250th birthday we are addled by a President who incited the storming of our Capital after he lost his bid for reelection in 2020, and now refuses to sign any legislation until Congress passes the Save America Act, MAGA-created sedition that everybody else agrees will wreak havoc on our electoral process. 

Trump has declared any other governing priority a “yawn.” That includes a recent bipartisan housing package that offers some dim hope of across-the-aisle cooperation. Indeed, nothing comes out of this White House that doesn’t seek to discredit the U.S. electoral system and continue laying the groundwork for refusing to turn over power if the GOP is repudiated this November. 

Fifty years after our Bicentennial, when so many came together as one to celebrate the foundations that allowed our country to weather its mistakes while pursuing its better angels, we face the specter of national jubilation hijacked by those actively moving against the very freedoms worth recognizing. What’s left is totalitarian grift, enjoyed only by those not included on an enemies list that grows by the hour. Enjoy the fireworks. BC

There is a wonderful scene early in the classic Western television miniseries Lonesome Dove. The two principal heroes of the story, legendary Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, along with several others of their outfit, butcher American history over dinner. 

Bolivar, the Mexican cook takes issue with Gus griping about his ringing of the dinner bell. “Robert E. Lee freed the slaves, complains Bolivar, “I can whack that bell if I want to.” “It was Abe Lincoln who freed the slaves,” corrects Gus, followed by Pea Eye Parker, a loyal but not particularly razor sharp cow hand, who adds … “he didn’t free Mexicans anyway, Bol… it was Americans he freed.” 

At this point Gus decides to set the record straight while grabbing yet another opportunity to rib his buddy Woodrow. “You’re in over your head, Pea,” Gus explains, “…it was a bunch of Africans Lincoln freed, no more American than Call over there.” Woodrow immediately swallows the bait and pronounces “l’m American, by God.” But Gus continues to needle him. “You were born in Scotland as I recall,” he jibes, “still dragging on the teat when they brought you over here.” To which a now exasperated Woodrow declares before leaving the table “I reckon I’m as American as anyone from Tennessee!”

A compelling argument can be made that the 14th Amendment is foundational to post-Civil War America and its national identity. After all, it’s core clauses: citizenship, immunities, due process and and equal protection form the nexus of not only the freedoms our society enjoys, but the very composition of our citizenry. As bad as Reconstruction and Jim Crow were for black society, without the codification of their citizenship, no alternate scenario is too bleak to envision. 

With regard to judicial precedents, one simply can’t find anything more rock solid and enduring than what was ratified in 1868. The very concept of stare decisis (“to stand by things decided”) seems illegitimate if the 14th Amendment’s guidance is open to be challenged. To take issue with it would be like being the sport’s writer who voted against Willie Mays’ induction into the Hall of Fame. There is no reasonable explanation for doing so. 

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This is about as clear as the English language gets. Equally straightforward is the section that declares it unlawful to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Taken together these passages are far more determinative than, say, the stipulations of the 2nd Amendment, which the entire MAGA ecosystem demands leave no room for interpretation. 

Of course, our President couldn’t care less what’s in the Constitution; he’s been clear on that since he became politically relevant and began to torment us. But Supreme Court Justices are obligated to demure to the nation’s most sacred document.  At least that’s what we have been led to believe and what each one swears an oath to assiduously abide.

Regrettably, after this week’s SCOTUS ruling reaffirming birthright citizenship, we can be certain that, like Trump, three highest-court justices have other priorities that subordinate even the most no-brainer allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law it informs. That so many of us feared the worst and, more than breathing a sigh of relief, rejoiced and thanked the good Lord after the 6-3 decision was made public, clarifies the crisis we currently experience. 

Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett may have been pleasant surprises by not meeting our worst expectations, but the fact Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch did so means we can be certain one-third of this court have no problem supporting a position that can only be justified with Fox/Am fiction. What each had to say in dissent only reinforces that, when it comes to applying the freedoms our constitution conveys, immigrants are outside looking in, which is exactly where this trio wants to keep them. Even tenuous legal ground be damned. 

Most credible researchers contend that birth tourism is not a statistically relevant issue. The most alarmist numbers cited don’t exceed 25,000 per year. Two to three thousand or less is what most reliable data supports. However, Clarence Thomas sees a crisis worth overturning more than a century of precedent to address. Declaring dead certainty that the citizenship clause was meant to enfranchise only freed slaves, Thomas bemoaned that “foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens” will continue to benefit from protections only real U.S. citizens should enjoy. 

Alito sounded like he was going to cry about the “terrible mistake” the court has made. That’s probably not too surprising from someone who actually flew his American flag upside down during Biden’s presidency. Many don’t remember that Alito was not W’s first choice for the slot he ended up in. Harriet Miers was initially chosen, but was forced to withdraw her name when Democrats piled on her lack of judicial acumen and declared victory in the fight against cronyism when she was replaced. Put that one squarely in the “careful what you wish for” category. 

Alito is not aging well. The overt bias of his dissenting comments here portends that, like Trump, he will become meaner and less reasonable during his twilight days. Time will not be friendly to his judicial temperament. 

Perhaps no SCOTUS nominee ever spent more time at their confirmation hearing promising to respect stare decisis than Neal Gorsuch. Over and over he swore that precedent would always have its say when he decided cases. Overturning birthright citizenship has never even been seriously considered by the Supreme Court. After all, as Ronald Reagan himself proclaimed, America “is that city on the hill.” Until very recently our entire national brand was tied in with the immigrant experience and the freedom our nation offered. More than precedent, birthright citizenship has been an American guarantee. 

Yet and still, Gorsuch wasn’t having it. While not plunging down the Thomas-Alito rabbit hole, he seized on “reside,” the one word in the birthright clause open to any degree of interpretation. Gorsuch was not as hysterical as Thomas, but his reasoning was clear: there are enough transient immigrant babies born to justify wiping out the citizenship status of the vast majority who have set down roots that firmly establish them as residents of whatever state they are in, and the country as a whole. 

That specious logic has been the hub of the GOP immigrant narrative for decades. Condemning a crime committed by one undocumented immigrant to slime them all has become the wheelhouse of virtually all of the GOP rank and file. Gorsuch was simply more “nuanced” than Thomas and Alito in his expression of that fear and loathing. Stealing basic constitutional freedoms from millions is a price he’s willing to pay if it stops even one enemy prego from slipping into our borders and dumping a  future MS-13er on us. 

Many Texans will tell you that no literary character ever captured the essence of America’s spirit more than Captain Woodrow F. Call.  Ask each how Call’s immigrant experience differs from the millions they currently are hell bent to disenfranchise and it’s likely very little of their reasoning will make much sense.  As if that hypocrisy isn’t depressing enough, we can now be certain that one-third of the Supreme Court shares it. But take heart, we can still go ring the dinner bell if we want to, even in Tennessee… at least for now. BC

On  Wednesday, Trump staggered on stage, not far from the Reflecting Pool he abased and now claims without evidence was vandalized for no other purpose but to embarrass him, and officially kicked off the Great American State Fair, a MAGA-sanctioned celebration of America’s 250th Birthday. Entertainment was sparse since virtually the entire list of B-rated acts originally scheduled withdrew after concluding that even their struggling careers could only be made bumpier by appearing at what was really for all intents and purposes just another Trump rally. 

But fear not, art is in the eye of the beholder. If Trump and his MAGA vanguard declare that the Marine Corps Band, one half of Milli Vanilli, and super patriot Lee Greenwood are spectacular showstoppers…who’s to argue? 

And that’s exactly what Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy did. Duffy, who served four terms in the House but was most likely picked to head the 55,000-employee department because of his short stint as the host of Fox Business’s The Bottom Line, brought his large brood on stage to sing the praises of the event’s lineup. 

Duffy and his wife, Fox personality Rachael Campos, have nine children, including his youngest, Valentina, who was born with Down syndrome as well as a heart condition. Duffy cited her health struggles in 2019 as the reason for giving up his House seat. 

Once on stage an ebullient Duffy grabbed the microphone and addressed the crowd. He was determined to lend his voice to Trump’s grievances against the entertainers who deserted him:

“…we have to give a big round of applause to our military band and singers…way better than those libtards who cancelled on us. So much better… President Trump will make you famous.”

The moment came and went. The crowd roared its approval, and Duffy continued without any speck of self-awareness. The notion he had just insulted his own daughter with a vile slur as she stood behind him in front of thousands of people did not appear to register. 

Before Trump, even partisan politicking at a function to celebrate the country’s birthday would have brought focused media scrutiny as a clear violation of the Hatch Act; uttering such an affront to common decency while doing it would have meant submitting one’s resignation before the week was out. Certainly anyone in the Biden Administration who said something comparable would have been shown the door with haste. 

However, the outrages this regime constantly produces have by now been near fully normalized over an ever more obedient media landscape. If Duffy didn’t happen to have a daughter with Down syndrome, chances are most all platforms would have ingested his ugliness as just par for the MAGA course, part of Trump’s “reshaping of government.”  

But Duffy has not been stoic about letting  the public know of the hardships Valentina’s condition has created for him as a parent, while also preaching that her “extra chromosome” “has been a blessing,” teaching his other children “tolerance and empathy.” All of which made the hypocrisy too stunning to fully escape notice.  While the national networks ignored the story, it had legs on the Internet. His response to requests for explanation provided a clinic on the circular reasoning Fox/AM has spent more than three decades providing its reactionary ecosystem. 

Asked by the HuffPost for comment on the backlash to his perceived hypocrisy, Duffy lashed out:

“I will not be lectured by the same people who want to abort babies with special needs… Rather than policing language, maybe liberals should spend time with these beautiful children, acknowledge their humanity, and while they’re at it, try loving their country more than they hate President Trump.”

Parsing Duffy’s response provides a roadmap through the bowels of MAGA despicability, its validation of and  celebrating, not just abiding, the most vile behavior from its government officials. Worse than not holding them accountable; it actually demands they say and act at odds with accepted norms for decency. Otherwise, they are caving to woke political correctness. Since Duffy has a special needs child he is inoculated to say whatever he wants on the matter… like Jackie Mason jokes about Jews. 

MAGA and its GOP rely heavily on anti-abortion extremism. It provides a get-out-of-jail card for any transgression. “You are for killing babies! How dare you question me about hypocrisy! Anything I do or say is beside the point; I will not answer to a baby killer. Moreover, liberals couldn’t possibly have special needs children, so they have no credibility to judge on such matters. This is simply more Trump Derangement Syndrome, more hatred for the U.S.!”

Fox News conspicuously ignored the story, but you can bet had it appeared on their website the comment thread would have constantly repeated this warped rationale in support of Duffy’s response. This regime is filled to the brim with lifelong Fox News consumers. The Murdoch  nihilist narrative of open season on previously accepted norms for civic and personal decency permeates their worldview and fully informs their actions. Sean Duffy is exhibit A. 

As the father of an autistic adult, I long ago exhausted all patience for any iteration of the R-Word. During the first Trump term I lost one particular friend who was a fan of his after making clear I would no longer let slide his frequent use of such slurs. Apparently, that was asking too much and a 25-year friendship ended. 

Validating our worst traits as courageous expressions of principle is the Rosetta Stone  of the MAGA mob Fox/AM created. Abasing your own disabled child to do it is merely the price one pays for sticking to their guns and owning the libs. Ask Sean Duffy. BC

American media is now wedded to both the creation and normalization of the rabid chaos Donald Trump’s full descent into sociopathic madness assures. The collective reaction to Saturday night’s futile attack by a desperate lone gunman, which never made it past the security checkpoint designed to halt such plots, clarifies that American journalism no longer concerns itself with whether or not governance addresses even the most basic interests of its citizenry. 

Instead our news industry now much prefers to incite and proliferate the endless shock news cycle its interactive doting on a clinically narcissistic President creates. There exists no better definition of interdependence to the maintenance of totalitarianism.

The headlines this week celebrate a brand new national distraction to both the Epstein files, which fully convict Trump as an enthusiastic participant in a child sex ring, as well as the devastation Trump/MAGA impulse nihilism is doing to America at home and abroad. It’s also yet another opportunity to gaslight reporting of the regime’s constant efforts to dismantle democratic processes and cover up a mountainous list of crimes. 

Trump is never actually happy, but his ridiculous presser Saturday night provided the all-about-me attention he spends most waking moments seeking out. That he called on first and actually praised CBS reporter Weijia Jiang, current President of the White House Correspondent’s Association, indicated he believed the organization now serves him rather than its mission statement to shepherd the 1st Amendment. 

“I just want to say you did a fantastic job,” the POTUS gushed in the way he does when addressing lackeys whose servility he can count on. “What a beautiful evening.” Jiang didn’t disappoint, teeing up fluff for Trump to drive down the fairway. “Can you describe what was going through your mind,” Jiang, still resplendent in her evening gown wondered with the most inane gaze possible. 

Trump proceeded to crow about how the attack spared the gathering one of his rambling monologues about the press as public enemy #1, which confirmed his reason for coming was only to pour gasoline and demand all bend the knee. His aim was to declare full vindication since he had last attended the function back in 2011, when then POTUS Barack Obama made a fool of him… back before we understood how Fox/AM could get its legions to adore even the most imbecilic among us.

Trump hoped to declare full victory when he agreed to sit down with Norah O’Donnell for an interview with 60 Minutes. No doubt he figured his sweet talking of her colleague Jiang would carry over and O’Donnell would provide more blank canvass for him to finger paint his narcissism on. 

Perhaps O’Donnell didn’t get the memo from her new Trumpist bosses, or maybe she summoned up some courage and integrity. Whatever the reason she decided to lead with Epstein, quoting directly from the manifesto left by the WHCD assailant, which condemned Trump’s involvement in the child-sex atrocities. Trump’s evil malevolence immediately returned as he squinted at O’Donnell and unleashed his worst: 

“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people…you should be ashamed of yourself for reading that… You’re a disgrace.”

Roughly 12 hours later, Dana Bash of CNN served notice to the network’s new ownership that, when it comes to Trump, she’s willing to be a team player. Interviewing one of Trumpism’s most dogged opponents, Congressman Jaime Raskin, Bash demanded to know whether Saturday’s incident made Democrats “think twice” about employing “heated rhetoric” toward the Trump regime. Raskin asked for an example, to which Bash stammered about messaging that called Trump “terrible for the country.” The normally unflappable Raskin appeared stunned by the question, but unlike our POTUS remained polite and professional, mutely pointing out that Trumpist policies are in fact terrible for the U.S.

Of course, Fox/AM will run with such false equivalence and use a crime it welcomes to add propane to its 24/7 messaging that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is an existential threat that should consume any and all  “woke” trivialities like basic human rights and civil liberties. We can count on Waters, Faulkner, Gutfeld, Hannity, Levin et al to ensconce Saturday’s freak show into Trump-as-courageous victim lore. Clearly, the “legacy media” Fox/AM villainizes at every opportunity will help that narrative along as much as possible. A ruinously Orwellian juncture for the nation. BC

There is no better day of the year to consider the primary tenets of What Would Jesus Do (WWJD) than Easter Sunday. Those of us who believe that the Lord is our salvation are obligated to model behavior he only once strayed from during his time among us. Anything else is heretical to the faith that is supposed to guide our lives as Christians. Simple, straightforward, commonsensical… a no brainer. 

So what  are the basics for conducting oneself in line with WWJD? Again, nothing complicated here. Love your neighbor. Welcome the stranger. Offer love instead of loathing, understanding instead of fear, giving instead of taking, helping the poor at the expense of the rich, peace instead of conflict, unity instead of division. The list is fairly effortless to conjure up. 

Yet and still, millions in America who swear they are devoted to God’s only son have created a political identity that betrays near every virtue he stood for. Indeed, their champion, who far too many actually compare to Jesus himself, is an idolatrous maniac who spends most of his time trying to convince anyone who will listen/read that he is far more in league with the beast than our savior. 

Make no mistake, this bloc is the activist component of a criminal Republican Party, an organization that is enabling a sinisterly immoral, spiritually destitute villain to destroy godly virtues, not just in the U.S., but throughout the world. Donald Trump despises humanity, and possesses no inclination to do anything but obsessively renounce WWJD as a paradigm for “Radical Left Scum.”  

How at odds Trump is with our Lord’s chosen path requires little research; it is constantly on display. In fact, on Easter Sunday, he provided all a rational person would require to confirm his malevolence. Addressing the leadership of Iran, who on national television a couple of nights before he had quipped should be bombed “into the Stone Age,” the President of the United States railed that: 

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

It’s hard to imagine anything more profane, violent and hateful, and on Easter Sunday no less! What Would Jesus Do? Denounce all of it… condemn its author. Evangelist Franklin Graham’s reaction? Not so much…

“Today the Iranians, the wicked regime of this government, wants to kill every Jew and destroy them with an atomic fire. But you have raised up President Trump. You’ve raised him up for such a time as this. And Father, we pray that you’ll give him victory,”

Graham cited the book of Esther as the basis for his vitriol, assuming Iran’s current leadership harbors the same agenda as Persia’s King Haman back in 400 BC. Like Trump, Graham constantly lies that, when it comes to Muslims anywhere, the Bible issues a blank check regarding ends justifying means. 

Graham can be confident that his flock embraces his Islamophobia and whatever Trumpist war crimes it legitimates. More than 60 percent of U.S. Evangelicals are loyal Fox News viewers. Clearly, when push comes to shove, Jesus doesn’t stand a chance against Jesse Waters or Greg Gutfeld. 

Conversely, Pope Leo XIV can’t be certain just how many Catholics he speaks for when he condemns “the violence of war.” After all, a majority supported Trump as recently as December of 2025. Like Evangelicals, rank and file Catholics possess far more tolerance for bombing a girls school in Iran than for a woman’s right to choose, gays or the dreaded transexual community. Turns out more than 50 percent of white Catholics are regular Fox News viewers. 

Like every other part of our national demise, the life of Jesus and its impact on American Christianity has been overwhelmed and disfigured by the 24/7 propaganda of Fox/AM. Rather than a blueprint for humanity, the teachings of Christ are now just more grist for the MAGA white grievance and resentment mill, fuel for division, a basis for exclusion rather than welcoming. 

What Would Jesus Do? What would he say? Perhaps the same thing he said on this very day more than 2000 years ago… “Forgive them father; for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) BC

Our full shame as a nation can be found at the South Texas Family Residential Center, better known as “Dilly” for the Texas border town near Loredo that hosts it. There, the worst of America is suffered by people who were deceived enough to believe we offered a city on a hill instead of hell in a border town. Dilly is where families rounded up to meet Stephen Miller’s quotas are processed and treated as poorly as any of the countries they came here to escape could dream up. 

When Dilly was first opened under the Obama Administration it was meant to process people apprehended at the southern border, who never actually made it to the U.S. Its standards were those meant to address migrants who were fully transient, many having just suffered nature’s worst. The guidelines were set to offer shelter and food, possibly basic medical care to those with nothing, whose baseline for treatment was that of a refugee, one who has been through an ordeal and could benefit from any services at all. Stays at Dilly grew longer as the processing caseload increased. 

The Biden Administration stopped using Dilly in 2021 amid widespread reports of substandard conditions and a policy consensus that there were better ways to go than long-term detention of children. Alternative approaches such as more intensive case management and electronic monitoring were immediately equated by Republicans as simply “catch and release.” 

That Dilly was inadequate to hold families for long periods didn’t bother Trump, and he had barely lied with his hand on a bible when Dilly was slated to reopen. Trump’s ICE didn’t care that it originated as a processing center for migrants who had yet to spend any time in America. The facility immediately transitioned to long-term holding for any family caught in ICE’s mass deportation web. 

The facility holds mostly families, with hundreds of children. But unlike its original mandate, a large percentage of its occupants had fully integrated into U.S. society, some for decades, before ICE grabbed them from as far away as Minnesota. Home one day, a concentration camp the next. We elected a sadist who has spent more than a decade dehumanizing immigrants, and Dilly now fully delivers on that rhetoric. Excellent AP reporting recently exposed just how horrendous conditions are at Dilly, and who is suffering through them. 

It is fully “open campus housing,” in other words there are no walls, or privacy. Accommodations  resemble a hurricane shelter, or some other emergency site, except nobody gets to leave when the storm has passed. Lights are on 24/7, a policy most reputable human rights organizations now equate with torture. 

Worms in the food, wholly inadequate medical services, guards who treat the occupants as prisoners who deserve no quarter, constant lockdowns, and worst of all an epidemic of debilitating boredom and depression throughout the children’s population.  Were one not informed on who Dilly houses, after hearing one horror story after another, anyone with a modicum of decency would conclude it dispenses cruel and unusual punishment for criminals. There are none of those here; ICE is holding families with children in conditions that even violent felons should not have to endure. 

Clearly… and tragically, the U.S. citizenry possesses perhaps a majority of people who simply shrug when made aware of Dilly. “What about the word illegal don’t you understand?!” Or, “see what happens when you have open borders?!” Or “if they had followed the law, they wouldn’t have had any problems!” Apparently, millions of Americans can live with what mass deportation, directed by a fascist, whose entire family emigrated to America just three generations ago, encompasses. 

Personally, Dilly debilitates me. Since 2015 some of us have understood clearly what fully unleashed MAGA governance was capable of. Dilly fulfills such prophecies. It is a wave of torment to the soul, as much for how bad it is now as how much worse we are sure things will become.

Dilly confirms beyond doubt that this country has blown past a tipping point decades of Fox/AM bigotry guaranteed would arrive sooner or later. That virtually the entire rest of our news and information universe now normalizes inevitable results like Dilly only compounds the despair. 

Always when studying the Holocaust students share one common and unanswerable question: how could so many lose all of their empathy at once, all of their humanity? How could they watch abject cruelty and remain nonplussed? Who fully recognized the madness and cried for its victims in real time? Now we know those answers… and just like then, there are far too few of us. BC

Everything we now see and hear services one monstrous lie… that the Trump Regime is somehow a legitimate American Presidency. Any media reference to DOJ or the FBI, the State Department, and of course ICE, even ancillary organizations like the Kennedy Center, relies on the patently false premise that these institutions actually function in line with their mission statements in service to the public good. That’s a preposterous fiction. 

What makes the whole thing full Orwellian is that  the regime makes no effort to mask its sedition. Trump, Leavitt, Patel, Bondi, Musk, Noem, Rubio, Grenell – the list is endless – have been transparent in their declarations about pursuing agendas fully at odds with the oaths to the Constitution all swore to. It’s simply that the GOP, Democrats and nearly the full media landscape, don’t just ignore their overt criminality, but actually remold it to fit in as legitimate policy created in good faith by the Administration.

Kash Patel isn’t pretending to do anything other than obstruct justice in Minnesota. His direction to deny state investigators access to details about both ICE murders has been unequivocal. “Do something about it” is the attitude Trump demands from his yes people; all of them relish providing it. 

Marco Rubio sat through several Senate hearings where one former colleague after another denounced his craven destruction of USAID and his outright betrayal of Ukraine as anathema to virtually everything he was about as a Senator. Only pathological shamelessness could explain his indifference to the dishonor committee members vividly described. Yet and still, Rubio did nothing to conceal or revise the treachery he carried out from day one. He owned his obedience.

When Senator Chris Van Hollen outlined in detail Rubio’s slavish implementation of DOGE’s gutting of virtually the entire array of resources for Post-War US Diplomacy, mindless destruction that promptly created starvation conditions in a number of dependent areas, Trump’s lackey merely quipped “… your regret for voting for me merely confirms I am doing a good job.” No attempts to deny the gist of Van Hollen’s condemnation, just the full Pam Bondi approach of disdain for oversight.

Like the entire Trump Cabinet – which regularly displays how servile each member is during sickening roundtable spectacles that make North Korean photo ops seem contentious – Rubio has no problem accepting as his primary duty grotesque sycophancy. It’s everyone else’s problem to make it fit as the actual pursuit of US national interests. Tragically for all of us, few seem to mind making that effort. 

Nihilism is all about destroying what was previously created. For 30 plus years Fox/AM has indoctrinated its walking dead to believe the generational continuity of US governance has been a conspiratorial erosion of their once paramount societal status. The first Murdoch Presidency was contained by parameters it wasn’t yet prepared to destroy. The 2.0 version suffers no such limitations. 

Treason as an American Presidency is an era we very well might not survive in tact. When historians survey our epitaph years hence, they will surely scratch their heads about how the continual siege a totalitarian imposed on America could be fecklessly reduced to “affordability” and “overreach” issues. Perhaps ICE atrocities are snapping us out of our stupor and clarifying the menace we face. Pray it’s not too late. BC

History will determine that there was perhaps no more disastrous event than when Ronald Reagan dismantled The Fairness Doctrine in 1987. The prohibition on one-sided, advocacy-driven broadcasting formats served America well for almost 40 years. Its end presaged the poisoning of our national discussion… with ruinous results.  The most disgusting irony that now insults us every day is how Fox News hijacked the doctrines’ principle requirement… that broadcasters present news and information in a “fair and balanced” manner.

Fox charlatan Roger Ailes, along with a failed disc jockey named Rush Limbaugh, were visionary in understanding the market share that could be mined from White grievance and resentment with The Fairness Doctrine gone. The rest will be remembered as one of American history’s greatest tragedies, a stake plunged into democracy’s heart.

Fox and its AM talk radio accompanists ARE the original and primary tumor responsible for the civic cancer that is destroying us. Future scholars will be as flummoxed as to why this critical cause-and-effect connection was so discounted in real-time as post-war students were about how Hitler was able to beguile his minions. 

The record is clear on the culpability of both of America’s major political parties in the warping of our civic discourse. They allowed Rupert Murdoch, a foreign tycoon with a well-deserved reputation for Machiavellian pursuit of profits, to transform informing the American public from a revered duty to strictly an opportunity for profits. He and Ailes introduced and relentlessly enhanced a national news network founded on the premise that America’s entire news and information ecosystem was evil and corrupt, fully servile to the political well being of the Democratic Party and its sinister “elite” masters.

If Democrats were cluelessly neglectful of the danger Ailes and company posed, establishment Republicans were seditiously complicit in their efforts to harness Fox/AM’s hate to their electoral advantage. The bottom was reached when, after Trump insulted and slandered the entire 2016 Republican Presidential primary field, the GOP’s establishment leadership congealed to promote the full plethora of his first term outrages and twice direct rank and file to acquit patently impeachable conduct. Such craven opportunism turned out to be suicide as the McConnells, Cheneys and Bushes were devoured by Fox/AM’s rabble. 

Now the Republican Party is dead, in its place is the monster Fox/AM’s evolution was certain to end up with. The Democrats lay mortally wounded, still unable to summon the political will required to call MAGA what it is. And every minute of every day Fox/AM rejuvenates the fanatical ardor of its totalitarian mob. 

The beasts that now fully control American power are racing to implement one sick Trump imagining after another, destroying any constructive governance while creating everything required for a determinitive clampdown on opponents. Meanwhile, Democrats cling to the hope that the electoral system MAGA gratuitously assaults on the hour will deliver them the “Blue Tsunami” required to “put the brakes on Trump’s extreme agenda.” This despite the regime promising again and again to ignore the legitimacy of such a majority if not arrest its membership. 

This is the state of affairs we currently endure  What can be done? More than 30 years of 24/7 fixation on White bitterness and the lie of Lost Cause nobility created a unifying political narrative that has brought us to the abyss. And while we may have less than one year to figure out how to save ourselves, certainly the rage felt while witnessing this regime commit crimes against humanity and plunder our national treasure at will, not to mention trample our precious liberty, provides the high-test fuel required to power a movement.

But the spark will never ignite without clear-eyed leadership that recognizes our circumstance and is willing to message accordingly. If we can’t unify around a righteous narrative of saving America from the evils Trumpism now pursues without accountability… well, as Lincoln, the leadership standard a now deceased GOP abandoned made clear from within the wreckage of our last conflagration, we will perish.

Fox/AM packaged lies and manipulations to successfully sell ruin as salvation. This is a moment to demand leadership determined to sell the truth… that time is short for saving a democracy the world depends on as much as we do. What could be more important? BC

The quest for civil rights in America took a decisive turn in the mid-60s when national news operations showed the brutality of Jim Crow on the ground in real time. Most all of us not fully poisoned with the savage hatred racism from the crib incubates were shocked at dogs tearing into the legs of peaceful protesters. The frenzied sadism of Bull Conners and company created a tipping point, a referendum on decency. 

A collective understanding was reached that tolerating such barbarism was simply too much hypocrisy. No nation claiming to be “Land of the Free” could withstand such a blatant contradiction. But even more importantly, if you could countenance such abuse you weren’t much of a Christian; in fact, you were a pretty rotten person. And so the U.S. seemed to finally move on from the Civil War and genuinely changed for the much better. 

Now it appears we are right back where we started. Only this time it isn’t states defying the federal government; it’s the government defiling the states. This time it isn’t the dying breath of a lost cause; it’s a White House guided by the most grotesque lies southern mythology created. And this time the group being set upon came here of their own accord, lured by what now turns out to be fraudulent promises of humanity. They were not kidnapped from where they were born… they are instead now being abducted and forcibly exiled without due process to places many thanked God they had escaped from. 

To be clear, every one of us has been taught from grade school that the immigrant experience couldn’t be more American… after all, we are a “nation of immigrants.” Unlike slavery, which always stood as a violent insult to our founding principles, welcoming the “tired and hungry masses” has from the start been a primary national aspiration. None other than Ronald Reagan himself declared “anyone from anywhere can come and become an American.”  

The nightmare is showing up in Internet videos. They started as a trickle, but now flood most news platforms not consciously trying to suppress them. One vivid video account after another of masked gangs of mostly white and conspicuously overweight tormentors, armed to the teeth, descending on terrified Latino targets. Nothing seems beyond them in terms of gratuitous cruelty as they confront and seek to detain their prey. Most are clearly untrained, even absurdly unskilled, at the job of taking “suspects” into custody. So Federal agents often punch and flail as their victims scream for help, often as a crowd of bystanders yells helplessly at the thugs. 

Each episode is as shocking as the next. Yet and still, some are especially despicable, such as when ICE agents held a woman’s child hostage in her front yard to coerce her out of her home, a sanctuary they know they can’t legally enter. The child is surrounded by villains as his mother pleads with them to let him come to her. They respond by taunting her to come out to them. 

That this is actually happening here speaks to more than total civic failure; it clarifies the amorality 30 years of Fox/AM programming has produced in millions of Americans. If Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld can make light of it, how bad can it really be? Don’t believe your eyes, or your heart, trust them instead… Bill O’Reilly’s former personal assistant and a failed comic. 

Every day, 24/7, it is the same mantra. These illegals deserve what’s now coming to them. Promises made, promises kept. Don’t overthink things. Tough love is never easy. It takes fortitude.  At Auschwitz the Nazis proclaimed “work will set you free.” On Fox, and at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the message is “dehumanization and abject cruelty make you brave.”

While DHS refuses to respond to any press inquiries about its now constant violation of basic human rights, Director Kristi Noem “couldn’t be more proud of our ICE agents.” This, even as it’s now public knowledge the recruitment and training of new ICE personnel is so haphazard and chaotic that virtually no standards are being enforced and a majority of recruits are wholly unqualified for the job. So like most every other facet of this Keystone Cop regime, there is the certainty things will always get worse. MAGA knows no bottom. 

All of which circles back to the issue of what America is or isn’t able to stomach regarding clear and constant crimes against humanity. A shameful development of Trump’s 2nd term has been the lack of outrage from within the Democratic Congressional and Senate caucuses toward what is unfolding, even as the regime promises much more is on the way.

Of course, MAGA has flooded the zone with one outrage after another, a generalized assault on the rule of law and constructive governance. One can sympathize to a point about the difficulties triaging a list of priorities under such unprecedented circumstances. But from the start the silence has been deafening among most Democrats toward this stream of ICE atrocities. Regardless of whatever else is going on, how can stopping this madness not be priority one for any lawmaker with eyes, ears and a basic sense of decency?! 

The depressing explanation may be that in blue states thus far spared the full-scale ICE assaults that Oregon, Illinois and California have suffered, constituents still can’t get too worked up about a group they don’t fully empathize with. After all, an overwhelming majority of voters wanted undocumented immigrants deported coming into Decision 2024. Even after witnessing every day the ugliness of MAGA fascists fulfilling that campaign pledge, it’s not them and theirs being targeted. So the needle still hasn’t moved like it should to provide the sense of urgency the crisis deserves. 

That tragic disconnect assures that things will get worse before they get better. Far too few still can’t understand that if these criminals are not held to account for outrages against immigrants they define as scum, they surely won’t answer for transgressions against Black Lives Matter demonstrators they label as terrorists, or trans people they deem to be sexual deviants, or Jews they accuse of disloyalty, or liberals they just hate. It’s not a slippery slope; it is the edge of a cliff. 

Sixty years ago shocking footage from the Deep South forced Whites in the US  to realize the trials Black America was enduring mattered to the nation’s story and was worth confronting. Those of us not poisoned by MAGA hemlock better come to similar conclusions about the immigrant community and their essential connection to our country’s basic anatomy pretty damn quickly or their despair will surely soon be ours as well. BC

In late February of 1933, not more than a month after Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, an arsonist set the German Reichstag building ablaze. Located in the heart of Berlin, the venerable Reichstag was where the German Parliament met, so the crime attracted the nation’s focus. 

It is important to note that the police services in charge of investigating the fire were now fully under Nazi control. A few hours after the incident they confidently declared Communists were responsible.  Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, was arrested at the site, and the Nazis promptly accused the Communist Party of seeking to overthrow the government. 

Within a day The Reichstag Fire Decree was enacted and  civil rights in Germany were abolished. A little more than a year later came The Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler and his inner circle murdered most everyone seen as an obstacle to his total dominance of German rule. The totalitarian control of Nazi edicts pervaded German life from that moment forward. 

When a nation gives way to fascism it quite literally falls apart, the logical result of accepting daily routines clouded by lies and deceit from the institutions meant to solve the governing challenges truth reflects. When facts are systematically repressed personal relationships, community ties, and  national unity become hostage to who can accept the emerging upside down status quo and who can’t. 

Many, maybe most, will sacrifice the civic duty and personal esteem democracy left unmolested to adjust in favor of continuing to pursue routines without interruption. Fewer won’t.  The tension between those unwilling to challenge a new fabrication based on the divisive intrigue despotism requires and those who refuse to accept it and feel disappointment, even betrayal, in friends and family who do will simmer and eventually boil over. The degree to which authoritarian control succeeds is easy to quantify; the first group steadily increases as the latter group is purged, or its members flee the country, or they just surrender and keep their mouths shut. 

Ironically, while a system falls to political extremism, those who move most ardently to confront its collapse are very often branded as at least equal part of the problem. Those desperately seeking to avoid conflict and hold on to normalcy lose interest in distinguishing who they resent for making waves. Many of those who give up the fight do so because of the toll taken on their close relationships.

Becoming a pariah is not pleasant, even if you believe in the lines you are drawing, the reasonable demands you are making. And the battle between criminals willing to lie and hurt for power and those who just want to put bread on the table, perhaps enjoy their famous chicken wings and the NFL every Sunday, is never any contest at all. Democracy dies in the shadows of avoiding drama. 

This last week has been particularly disheartening. One can detest a man’s murder and still be sickened by the MAGA crusade to make Charlie Kirk, not just a martyr, but a towering intellect and courageous communicator. The elevation of Kirk is the deification of Fox/AM, the enshrinement of its long crusade against liberal democracy. 

It’s not essential to go over Charlie Kirk’s well established record as a rightist provocateur. A two-minute Google session will provide all the education one needs as to whether or not his worldview reflected the values and traditions the American brand has stood for. It would be gratuitous to recite it here… and perhaps, now, dangerous. But it is clear that by the time of his shocking murder Kirk had become a ubiquitous symbol of the immense power Fox/AM’s platform provided those with the willingness and energy to both target the various audience blocs  it coveted and recite the relentless talk track it demanded. 

He deployed his youth and vigor, along with a willingness to confront critics directly, to beguile a younger generation of reactionaries the same way Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck had entranced their elders. Like his predecessors, who learned at the feet of OGs Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh, Kirk understood that the name of the game is validation, rendering otherwise bygone tropes of racial bias and societal intolerance we thought had been vanquished as destructive elements of our national conversation, not just acceptable but valuable, not merely understandable, but actually commendable. More importantly, critics of such thinking weren’t only wrong, they were sinister and dangerous. That perilous illogic is his legacy. 

But whatever Charlie Kirk may have wanted to achieve, whatever he hoped his legacy would be, at the end of the day in this sick nation he did more than his fair share to addle, his killing is being processed as nothing more than a pretext, no different from Berlin arson almost a century ago. Charlie Kirk’s abominable slaying has been ingested as a watershed justification for the MAGA menace to eliminate the remaining strictures on its ability to hurt who it pleases, destroy who it wants. 

Whatever “thoughts and prayers” were being offered to Kirk’s widow and children, they were surely drowned out by a line of the MAGA-Fox/AM political and media class that stretched around the block, each inciting violent retribution against “the radical left for Charlie”. Of course, the rot starts at the top, and these days our diseased POTUS is incapable of anything other than rank sedition and authoritarian tropes. His promise is to go after “each and every one of those responsible… for radical left political violence.” 

The MAGA (formerly Republican) Party leadership is seizing on the notion that Kirk’s slaying cleanses it pure, and calling attention to the fascism  it now actively embraces is a hate crime because “leftist hatred” is primarily responsible for US disunity. Meanwhile, in Huntington Beach, California a frightening crowd of unabashed Caucasian testosterone screamed in unison “White Men Fight Back!”  Few doubted their affiliation. 

What we are left with is fascism on the move, ready to get busy on a societal clampdown MAGA totalitarianism was always going to clammer for at some point. How we resist it requires what has always been demanded… courage, unity, but most of all a collective recognition of the crisis and what is at stake, which is everything. It is disheartening to see friends one loves and needs shrink from this basic set of responsibilities. It is more painful still to be ostracized for sounding the clarion call of what one knows is right. Yet and still, there are no other options now. The White Walkers are at the gate! BC