World Gone Mad in 2025 Overdrive: Spring Equinox Edition
There must be something more than what the fascist Trump/Musk/Vance/Thiel regime has to offer, which is nothing but a class war on the 99%.
It’s been too long since I’ve posted here and it’s time to change that. Another great journalist named Alleen Brown has a blog called Eco Files, where she does a monthly roundup of her thoughts on what’s going on when she doesn’t have a new investigation to publish. This seems like a solid engagement strategy, so here we go.
Ms. Brown has been covering the insane Energy Transfer lawsuit against Greenpeace, which everyone should follow closely since the fate of the environmental justice movement is at stake. The news has just come down with the rigged jury in the rigged kangaroo court siding with the fossil fuel oligarchs over Greenpeace. It’s a devious plot to criminalize dissent against the rape of the Earth and arson of the climate, which is a travesty of justice to say the least. All power to Greenpeace as they vow to appeal and fight on in this battle of good vs evil, the Rebel Alliance vs the Empire, the Fellowship of the Ring vs Mordor…
I myself made it to a third interview stage with Greenpeace this past autumn for a communications specialist position. I was told I’d made it to the final three candidates from more than 500 (!) applications received, which was somewhat encouraging. Alas, close doesn’t win the day in this brutal job market that’s only gotten worse under Musk’s fascist DOGE regime with all the layoffs of federal employees.
I was blessed however to receive Rose Bowl tickets as a Chanukah/Christmas gift from my folks, so I traveled down to Los Angeles to see our Ohio State Buckeyes roast the Oregon Ducks on a beautiful New Year’s Day in Pasadena (on their way to winning the National Championship!) I’d been wanting to see the Buckeyes in a Rose Bowl playoff game ever since college football went to the BCS system in 1998 and this was the first such occasion. What a game it was with generational freshman wide receiver Jeremiah Smith scoring two long touchdowns in the first half, as OSU jumped out to a stunning 31-0 lead on the way to a 41-21 victory.
But 2025 quickly went off the rails with the apocalyptic LA wildfires that started just a week after my visit to the City of Angels. This seemed to foreshadow the chaos ahead. As a native Buckeye whose parents met as students at The Ohio State University, it’s incredibly embarrassing to have to count a disingenuous traitor like JD Vance as an alum. I’ll be targeting him —with words as my weapon — in a future post.
It seems that World War III is underway, but it’s not a war of nation states per se — it’s the next phase of the class war that the 1% have been waging on the rest of us. There’s also plenty of disturbing evidence to suggest that the Trump regime is in league with Russia and transnational mafia state oligarchs to destroy what’s left of American Democracy and sell off our nation for parts, piece by piece. All that “Make America Great Again” crap is pure propaganda.
Each day seems to brings one insane headline after another. The foul ruling against Greenpeace was preceded by this story at Inside Climate News:
Former Top EPA Official Warns of Dire Consequences of Planned Purge at the Agency’s Science Office
Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who spent 40 years at EPA, said the proposed move will debilitate environmental protections, prevent the agency from getting ahead of future threats and leave the public exposed.
It’s hard to fathom how MAGA supporters rationalize the Trump regime’s slash and burn approach to the EPA, except to say that they just don’t understand what’s really at stake due to the propaganda kool aid they’ve been swilling for decades.
But back to the December holidays for a moment, when a mind-blowing moment occurred on Christmas Night as I found myself re-watching John Carpenter’s classic 1988 flick They Live yet again. This film moved back onto my radar in 2014 when leading man Roddy Piper was quoted saying that it was actually a documentary. The zeitgeist only grew in 2016 when memes popped up depicting both Trump and Hillary Clinton as undercover aliens from the movie. More recently just Trump:
Speaking of right wing grifters, I’m still trying to figure out whether Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard sold out, lost her mind, or was a disingenuous agent provocateur all along. Like many progressives, I adored her when she renounced the corrupt DNC in 2016 to support Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign for the political revolution that this country so desperately needs. But she clearly jumped the shark in 2021-22 and now it’s downright appalling to see her as part of the Trump regime’s fascist war on America and the world.
Equally appalling is the complicity of Joe Biden and Merrick Garland in everything that’s now happening. I can’t stand when people describe Garland as merely feckless or too timid or too cowardly. No, he’s a corrupt bag man for elites on both sides of the aisle, as are all too many key figures in the DOJ and FBI. See “Servants of the Mafia State” from investigative journalist Sarah Kendzior, which I’ve shared countless times. The fact that Garland was involved in the Oklahoma City cover-up in 1995 tripped my conspiracy detector in a big way, since it was my research into that topic in the ‘90s that enabled me to instantly recognize 9/11/2001 as an obvious inside job (as there were so many similar holes in the official story.) I loathe the taboo on this topic, which is partly due to Alex Jones giving conspiracy theory a bad name.
Biden and Garland allowed Trump to slow walk potential punishment for the sedition of January 6, 2021, to run the clock out on justice so that he could run for President again. That never should have been allowed to happen and it was troubling as early as mid-2021, as Kendzior has been warning over the past four years.
Here she is from her newsletter in November of 2023 (yes, 2023):
That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition.
Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history. Even Hitler had a prison interlude between his putsch and his presidency. The only thing approaching an equivalent lies in the American past: the refusal to punish confederates and instead let them regroup under new names, leading to the decimation of Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow.
But that effort took decades. The backtrack of the Biden administration – and its accomplices, the Vichy Democrats in Congress -- took months. Policies that voters feared the Trump administration would enact were often enacted by Biden.
Here’s another great passage from Kendzior in October of 2024 that really sums it up, from a post where she was quoted and interviewed by journalist Brendan Toller of WPKN in Connecticut:
BT: …To read your substack to me is to enter a new reality. You have the media binary of right versus left which has gone on for years, but you see things at a deeper level. If you don’t mind, I’m going to just read some of your passages and then have you respond because they’re just so to the point. Here's one: [“Cheap Signals”]:
“Right-wing pundits claim that the DOJ does not have evidence of Trump’s guilt, instead of admitting the truth: the DOJ has had evidence on Trump crime for half a century. But they don’t want to use it, for they are in a mutually beneficial corrupt relationship. Over decades, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and corporate corruption merged, solidifying their anti-American agenda in the 21st century. 2016 was not a rupture, but an acceleration of the plans of a dark transnational alliance and the institutions that protect it.
“Trump, protected by the FBI and DOJ for a half century, is the deep state he pretends to fight. And Biden, who entered Congress in 1973, the same year the DOJ started investigating Trump, is a career silent witness.
“Contrary to popular belief, bipartisanship is alive and well. You need a both-sides approach if you’re not only going to kill us all but make us root for our own demise. In short, the Trump administration was a crime syndicate masquerading as a government, and the Biden admin is a government masking the crime syndicate.”
SK: That's unfortunately still the case. Sometimes I get flack for paragraphs like that. What people don’t understand is that when I criticize the abuser/enabler dynamic in our political system and criticize both parties, it doesn't mean I’m saying the parties are identical. In fact, by their nature, they need to not be identical, or even similar at points, if they’re going to work toward a broader corrupt goal and achieve it.
The throwaway line that I hear, especially from Democrats, is, “How dare you say they're the same? Trump is so much worse.” And I'm like, look, I wrote two bestsellers about The Crimes of Donald Trump. His decades of mafia ties, all the horrific things he did before he got to office and then in office. You don’t need to tell me!
But there’s a reason he was able to even get to that point and it has to do with institutions that in many cases don't have a partisan affiliation. One of the most frightening aspects is that they don’t even have a particular national affiliation. There are individuals and groups that are not working in the interests of the US or any particular country. They’re non-state actors tied to organized crime.
They are people that have multiple passports, offshore accounts, digital currency — all these things that cross state borders and challenge our idea of what autocracy or kleptocracy really is. This was never covered well in the media, but I felt like there was a fighting chance to get at it during the Trump admin years because his bombastic nature attracted interest in the backstory. But that interest has gone away with the media itself, which is severely gutted.
We’re not seeing a lot of investigative work. There are a lot of folks who I think truly don’t know what’s going on, even though it has in fact been reported. But it’s hard to find that knowledge with broken search engines, suppressive algorithms, media companies that fired so many of their workers, etc.
It’s a tough time for the truth.
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Kendzior is about to go on a book tour in April for her new book and I highly recommend reading all of her stuff and checking her out…
Biden showed his true colors yet again on his way out the door of the White House when he failed to pardon NSA whistleblower Reality Winner. I reported on this for Counterpunch in January (and should have blogged about it then), but here it is:
January 20, 2025
Biden’s Refusal to Pardon Reality Winner Underscores Taboo on Questioning Electoral Integrity
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I also recently had a new story published with EnviroNews — it’s not an investigation per se, but some reporting on the environmental legal beat. The Center for Biological Diversity filed notice of intent to sue the Trump regime for his preposterous Executive Order that declared an “energy emergency”, with related directive for the US Army Corp of Engineers to expedite permits for fossil fuel projects that will threaten wetlands and endangered species:
Trump Executive Order Threatens 700 U.S. Wetlands; Leading Enviro Org Gears up for Battle - March 14, 2025
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I’d like to conclude this spring roundup by citing the words of one of my favorite musicians from last fall, on the night before the election.
"Fuck fascists, eh? Fuck fascists," guitarist Stu Mackenzie said as Australian psyche-rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard left the stage at Stanford's Frost Amphitheater on Monday November 4, 2024. It was no secret that the band had been encouraging fans to vote against Trump, as they’re socially conscious eco-rebels who have been ripping on Trump and “Leon Musk” for years.
I had pitched the band’s publicist on covering their five show California run as one big feature story for PopMatters and to my delight, they liked they idea. I had previously sung their praises covering their incendiary shows at the Hollywood Bowl in 2023 and Berkeley Greek Theater in 2022. It was a great road trip adventure to catch the first five shows of their fall tour in Los Angeles, San Diego, Paso Robles, Palo Alto, and a bonus “rave” show in San Francisco the day after the election.
I tied the story into the uneasy mood of the nation, since there was a sense of inevitable dread in the air due to the less than thrilling campaign run by Kamala Harris and the DNC minions. These people obviously still fear Bernie Sanders’ political revolution more than Donald Trump’s fascism, which is a sad commentary that may spell the end of the American Experiment if we the people cannot rise up against this class war. Hence the title of what was my most popular story of 2024:
On Tour with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard at the End of Days - 11/26/24
But it was incredibly inspiring to see the widely broadcast rally held by Bernie Sanders and AOC in Tempe, Arizona on their Fighting Oligarchy tour tonight! As Bernie tweeted afterward:
“Thank you the 15,000 people who came out in Tempe, Arizona tonight for our Fighting Oligarchy tour. In fact, not only was the arena filled, but the overflow crowd was also at capacity.
Americans will not hand their democracy over to authoritarianism.”
If you missed it, check it out on the YouTube and viva resistance!