#RFK Jr.

[deadpresidents]

"Somehow disruption doesn't begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald J. Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming President has in his lifetime.

He has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation's capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Suffice it to say, so far there have been more of the former than the latter. Mr. Trump has said that 'real power' is the ability to engender fear, and he seems to have achieved that.

Mr. Trump's early transition moves amount to a generational stress test for the system. If Republicans bow to his demand to recess the Senate so that he can install appointees without confirmation, it would rewrite the balance of power established by the Founders more than two centuries ago. And if he gets his way on selections for some of the most important posts in government, he would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.

He has chosen a bomb-throwing backbench congressman who has spent his career attacking fellow Republicans and fending off sex-and-drugs allegations to run the same Justice Department that investigated him, though it did not charge him, on suspicion of trafficking underage girls. He has chosen a conspiracy theorist with no medical training who disparages the foundations of conventional health care to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

He has chosen a weekend morning television host with a history of defending convicted war criminals while sporting a Christian Crusader tattoo that has been adopted as a symbol by the far right to run the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world. He has chosen a former congresswoman who has defended Middle East dictators and echoed positions favored by Russia to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies.

Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is. In the past, none of those selections would have passed muster in Washington, where a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny used to be enough to disqualify a cabinet nominee. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has bulled past the old red lines, opting for nominees who are so provocative that even fellow Republicans wondered whether he is trolling them.

The message to Washington is simple, according to Roger Stone, the longtime Trump friend who relishes his own reputation as a political dirty trickster. 'Things are going to be different,' he said by text."

-- Peter Baker, "Trump Signals a 'Seismic Shift,' Shocking the Washington Establishment,' The New York Times, November 17, 2024.

Here's another incisive article about President-elect Donald Trump's transition and his frightening Cabinet nominees, who are abnormal even for Trump and the personality cult that has been built around him since 2015. For the past quarter-century, Peter Baker has been one of the very best, most level-headed analysts of the contemporary American Presidency, and he seems be stunned by the direction the incoming Trump Administration is already heading. Once again, all of these links are gift links to bypass the New York Times paywall so that you may read and share these important pieces and remain alert to the very real consequences of the 2024 election which are already taking shape.

[mudwerks]

(via RFK Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain - The New York Times)

The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain.

no words

[idvoteforthatdaddy]

RFK Jr. and Ted Cruz

I can work with RFK, looks wises, but that voice… I don't know.

Throw in Ted and could tolerate it.

[tomorrowusa]

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written and spoken extensively about democracy over the past nine years. He tells MSNBC's Ali Velshi that Trump's nominees for cabinet positions represent a concerted attempt to disrupt the US government which would benefit America's enemies.

Dr. Snyder says that the likes of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, etc. are not just unqualified but they are "anti-qualified".

He has some excellent advice for all of us. Watch the above video twice and then share it with somebody.

BONUS LINK!: He used his Substack to detail just what Trump and his minders are up to.

Decapitation Strike Preserving America from Trump's Appointments

It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed.  It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts.  It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country. However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror.  Elected officials should see this for what it is. 

The United States is under direct institutional attack.

Imagine 9/11 when the four hijacked planes had taken off — but before three of the four hit their targets. We need four GOP senators who are willing to put loyalty to American democracy ahead of servility to Donald Trump. Getting four Senate Republicans to block Trump's appointments is the equivalent of taking out all four of the hijacked planes on 9/11.

If your state is represented in the Senate by one or two Republicans, the burden is on you to persuade them not to go along with Trump's anti-qualified nominees.

It's true that about half of Republican senators are zombified Trump cult members. Those like Cotton, Tuberville, Scott, and Johnson are a waste of time. But almost a third of the GOP Senate caucus may be persuadable – under the right circumstances. Two GOP senators, Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska, have already expressed displeasure over the appointments. So we may need as few as two more.

This is your job right now. Get your GOP senator(s) to go on record on Trump's nominees. If they express even the slightest reservations about the nominees, get to work. Flattery and encouragement have a better success rate than threats and name calling. Appeal to patriotism. Even promise to make a small donation to their primary campaigns if they are challenged by MAGA hotheads in 2026.

The real struggle in the US now is between pro-democracy and anti-democracy forces. All other contentions must take a back seat to this.

[pissingonmonarchy]

Third Parties work for Trump.

Don't get conned.

[may-odaigahara]

third party voters in America are some of the stupidest people alive

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Theo Moudakis :: @TheoMoudakis :: @TorontoStar

* * * *

MAGAt GROTESQUERIE

TCinLA

Sep 29, 2024

Roseanne Barr: They eat babies. It’s true.

Tucker Carlson: So it’s not just the dogs and cats?

Roseanne Barr: Everybody thinks I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. They love the taste of human flesh and they drink human blood.

Tucker Carlson: I think you have some authority on this.

And also:

Fresh off an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s extremist election tour (above), Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is set to sit for a Pennsylvania town hall hosted by far-right Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau. Wallnau has pushed a litany of extreme views, including that Vice President Kamala Harris embodies “the spirit of Jezebel,” saying earlier this mont:

“What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel. When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation and domination — especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth — you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit. So, with Kamala, you have a Jezebel spirit, a characteristic in the Bible that is the personification of intimidation, seduction, domination and manipulation.”

You cannot make this shit up. Former Republican Peter Wehner wrote about this in The Atlantic this week. All these points need repeated emphasis:

The Republican Freak Show :: By: Peter Wehner

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.

Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, has described himself as a “devout Christian.” But a recent CNN story reported that several years ago, he was a porn-site user who enjoyed watching transgender pornography (despite a history of an anti-transgender rhetoric), referred to himself as a “Black Nazi,” and supported the return of slavery. According to CNN, commenters on the website discussed whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. Robinson wrote in response, “And the moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!” Politico reports that Robinson’s email address was also registered on Ashley Madison, a website for married people seeking affairs. (Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, has denied all of the claims.)

These allegations aren’t entirely shocking, because Robinson—a self-described “MAGA Republican”—has shown signs in the past of being a deeply troubled person.

Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, in 2011, Robinson wrote, “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall!” Robinson also has referred to the slain civil-rights champion as “worse than a maggot,” a “ho fucking, phony,” and a “huckster.” During the Obama presidency, Robinson wrote, “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!” He promoted the conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He referred to Michelle Obama as a man and Hillary Clinton as a “heifer.” He compared Nancy Pelosi to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Castro and mocked the near-fatal assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi. He is also an election denier, claiming that Joe Biden “stole the election.”

In 2017, Robinson wrote, “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” He has used demeaning language against Jews and gay people. He has cruelly mocked school-shooting survivors (“media prosti-tots”). And he supported a total ban on abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest, even though he admitted that he’d paid for an abortion in the past.

Much of this was known before he ran for governor. No matter. Republicans in North Carolina nominated him anyway, and Donald Trump has lavished praise on the man he calls his “friend,” offering Robinson his “full and total endorsement” and dubbing him “one of the hottest politicians” in the country.

SOME REPUBLICANS ARE distancing themselves from Robinson partly because they are worried he’ll be defeated, but also because they’re even more concerned that he will drag down other Republicans, including Trump. But the truth is that Robinson is a perfect addition to the Republican ensemble.

The GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has been relentlessly promoting the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets. In 2021, he said that the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser, promoted a conspiracy alleging that some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, and agreed with commenters who suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida, was a “massive false flag.” Another House Republican, Paul Gosar, has promoted fluoride conspiracy theories and posted an animated video depicting him slashing the throat of a Democratic congresswoman and attacking President Biden. Yet another Republican member of Congress, Lauren Boebert, was ejected from a family-friendly musical for vaping, being disruptive, and groping her date (and vice versa). She also falsely claimed that school authorities “are putting litter boxes in schools for people who identify as cats.”

The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reported that Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, who is under House investigation for having sex with an underage girl, “used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” according to a source Godfrey spoke with.

This is not normal.

The GOP is home to a Republican governor, Kristi Noem, who describes in her book shooting her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit, as well as killing an unnamed goat. A Republican senator, Ron Johnson, claimed that COVID was “pre-planned” by a secret group of “elites” even while he promoted disinformation claiming that Ivermectin, which is commonly used to deworm livestock, was an effective treatment for COVID. (Because people were hospitalized for taking the drug, the FDA tweeted, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow.”)

Earlier this month, Trump attended a 9/11 memorial event in New York City. He took as his guest a right-wing conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer, who has claimed that 9/11 was an inside job, referred to Kamala Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” and said that Democrats should be tried for treason and executed. (Trump has called Loomer a “woman with courage” and a “free spirit.”)

Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, floated the idea of having Trump declare martial law so that he could “rerun” the 2020 election. He suggested that the president should seize voting machines. He predicted that a governor will soon declare war. He has also warned about the dangers of a “new world order” in which people such as Bill Gates, George Soros, and World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab “have an intent to track every single one of us, and they use it under the skin. They use a means by which it’s under the skin.”

Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention and an unofficial Trump adviser, recently hosted a Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. He praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as having been “vindicated on everything” and described Jones as “the most extraordinary person” he has ever met. (Two years ago, Sandy Hook families won nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional-distress lawsuits against Jones for his repeatedly calling the 2012 school shooting, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed, a hoax staged by “crisis actors” to get more gun-control legislation passed. As The New York Times reports, “The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.”) (TC Note: all of Jones’ InfoWars property is being disposed of by court order to satisfy the judgement against him)

Carlson, one of the most influential figures on the American right, has also peddled the claim that the violence on January 6, 2021, was a “false flag” operation involving the FBI and used to discredit Trump supporters; alleged that former Attorney General Bill Barr covered up the murder of Jeffrey Epstein; and promoted testicle tanning.

Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democrat who recently endorsed Trump. The former president has asked Kennedy to be on his transition team should Trump win the election and “help pick the people who will be running the government and I am looking forward to that.” Trump told CNN’s Kristen Holmes, “I like him, and I respect him. He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy.”

Sara Dorn of Forbes listed some of the conspiracy theories that Kennedy has promoted—vaccines can cause autism; COVID was genetically engineered and is targeted to attack Caucasian and Black people (and Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are mostly immune); mass shootings are linked to Prozac; the 2004 presidential election was stolen from John Kerry; the CIA was involved in the death of his uncle John F. Kennedy; and Sirhan Sirhan was wrongly convicted of murdering his father.

In addition, Kennedy, who has revealed that he had a parasitic brain worm, told the podcaster Joe Rogan that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain.” He believes that chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender. He claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance. He’s said that Katherine Maher, the president and CEO of NPR, is a CIA agent. “Even journals like Smithsonian and National Geographic … appear to be compromised by the CIA,” according to Kennedy.

According to Kennedy’s daughter Kick Kennedy, her father chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, bungee-corded it to the roof of their car, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, New York. (The severed head streamed “whale juice” down the side of the family minivan on the trip home. “It was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told Town & Country magazine in 2012. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”) Kennedy has also recently admitted to leaving the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, as a joke.

Donald Trump Jr. has said that he could see Kennedy being given some sort of oversight role in any number of government agencies if his father is reelected, including the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services. “I can see a dozen roles I’d love to see him in.”

Like Mark Robinson, RFK Jr. fits right in.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.

None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.

They know.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in an essay titled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” warned that no one who “voluntarily runs with the hounds of falsehood” will be able to justify himself to the living, or to posterity, or to his friends, or to his children. Don’t surrender to corruption, the great Russian writer and dissident said; strive for the liberation of our souls by not participating in the lie. Don’t consent to the lies. The challenges facing Solzhenitsyn were quite different, and certainly far more difficult, than anything we face, but his fundamental point still holds.

The Trump movement is built on layers of lies. It’s late, but it’s never too late to liberate yourself from them. One word of truth outweighs the world.

[TCinLA]

[queenoftheimps]

The thing that I can't get over with the RFK Jr. bear story is there are no bears in Central Park

because it is located in central Manhattan, an incredibly dense urban environment

that also happens to be an island, so there are no adjacent forests for a bear to wander in from

Large predators simply do not live in Manhattan! They can't! There is a reason why NYC is mostly associated with pigeons and rats, because there are not that many kinds of wild animals around!

He's just casually like "Yeah I can just dump this dead bear on the side of the road and people will assume it's normal roadkill", as if there is an abundant bear population in a green space that looks like this

And he lives here! I understand why someone from out of town might not realize this, but he lives here!!!

[sweaterkittensahoy]

RFK Jr. endorsing Trump is officially the funniest fucking news I've seen all week. Like, we all knew you didn't have a backbone and only believed in bullshit, but dude. Doubling down like this is a CHOICE.

Fucking chode.

[happilyshadowyfest-blog]

[gwydionmisha]

Supreme Court Refuses to Remove RFK Jr. From Swing-State Ballots

[deadpresidents]

Thoughts on RFK Jr.'s claim about a worm found in his brain?

A worm that ate part of his brain and then died in his head sure would explain a lot of the goofy shit he believes. Even in a campaign featuring Donald Trump, RFK Jr. was at the top of my list of "Dudes Who Literally Had a Worm That Ate Their Brain".

Between RFK Jr. talking about having a brain-eating parasite and Kristi Noem weirdly sharing that she killed her dog, we've had some unique campaign strategies in the past couple of weeks.

(By the way, some headline editor for the New York Times had the opportunity to earnestly write "RFK Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain" and press *publish* today. Incredible.)

[westeroswisdom]

I don't think Qyburn told anybody to drink unpasteurized milk or made racist statements related to COVID-19 infections.

Though Qyburn might be somewhat curious about that whale's head which RFK Jr. sawed off at a beach.

[mudwerks]

(via Woody Harrelson appears to have jumped on the RFK, Jr. train | Boing Boing)

a picture is worth 1000 words

for real

[tomorrowusa]

If you liked Trump's disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, you'll absolutely revere the way he and "Worm Brain" RFK Jr. totally botch the next public health crisis.