More what the fuck are they doing … and why?

Let’s start with the grifter in chief. I am old enough to remember when the office of president had a grave dignity that each resident of the office did their best to uphold. Now we have a carnival barker in the overall office using the presidency to hawk everything he can think of to separate his cult rubes from their money to make him profit. The presidency has become not a job to guide the nation but a profit seeking center of a crime family. But right wing media crowed non-stop about the Biden crime family over an alleged 20 thousand dollar payment. Meanwhile it was reported that tRump made almost 600 million in just the time he has been in office on a crypto scheme. And no one is stopping him. So much for the emolument clause of the constitution. Hugs

Trump Launches $249 “Victory 45-47” Cologne [VIDEO]

Speaking of trying to buy votes, here is another criminal trying to steal an office. Hugs

Adams Offers “10,000 Free Tickets” To Macy’s Fireworks

And speaking of hate for those no white …. what is the death of brown children worth these days compared to billionaires getting a tax cut to keep more money they will never need other than to claim to have it. Hugs.

Study: USAID Cuts Will Lead To 14M Deaths By 2030

It was all about not having a ship named after a gay navy hero because to these bigots somehow gay means weak. However some of the greatest military heroes are members of the LGBTQ+ community. They just needed the cover of claiming these other ships would be renamed also. There is no inclusion and diversity with these white supremacist haters. If someone thinks different from them, looks different from them, or has a different religious view from them that person must be destroyed by them. Such a person is a threat to them. Weird way to think. Hugs

Pentagon Halts Renaming Of Other Navy Ships

Let’s talk about the attempt to whiten the US. That is what the entire goal is. It is not about removing criminals as the government just gave two convicted traffickers felon gang members asylum for at least one year and removed from jail just so they could accuse an innocent man the government deported “by accident”. These concentration camps and ICE actions are because people like Stephen Miller hate anyone not white especially if they speak Spanish which Miller can not understand which makes him sure that they are insulting him. It is about older white people scared that the brown people will do to the whites what they did to the brown people while they were in charge. Hugs

Trump: I Want To Put “African Crocodiles” In Rio Grande

Trump: “The Concept Is” Alligators Will Eat Escapees

Trump: I Want To Put “African Crocodiles” In Rio Grande

Florida’s Concentration Camp Is Already Flooding

Trump: Work Is Underway To Reopen Original Alcatraz, “It’s Surrounded By Sharks, What A Symbol It Will Be”

Add in the capitalist all the profit must be for us people who hate for a democratic socialist that wants to make live better for the lower incomes, along with the Christian freak out the man is Muslim claiming he will install his religious laws instead of theirs on the public, and the weirdest right wing shit like he will authorize killing all Jewish people and go on a terrorist campaign on the city, but the worst thing is corporate democrats are terrified to support the elected Democratic Party nominee because their corporate over lords don’t like he is going to do stuff for the public, for the people instead of shifting all possible profit to the wealthy like the corporate Democratic Party leadership republican lite members. Hugs

Trump Threatens To Arrest “Communist” Mamdani If He Defies ICE: “People Are Saying That He’s Here Illegally”

Trump: “I’ll Save NYC From Communist Lunatic” Zohran Mamdani And Will Make The City “Great And Hot Again”

Mamdani Blasts Trump’s Threat To Have Him Deported: It’s An Attack On Democracy And On Every New Yorker

It’s rather telling that they’ve chosen to go after CNN, and NOT Apple nor the app creator. If they were serious, they’d attempt to stop it immediately by going after the app creator first and then Apple for allowing it to be available in their App Store and compatible with their iOS. (Apple could install a patch that would hinder the app.)

This is clearly about intimidating, censoring & controlling the media, and the fat fascist is just itching to destroy one of these entities.

Trump And Noem: We’re Asking Pam Bondi If We Can Prosecute CNN For Reporting Existence Of Anti-ICE App

Noem Is “Thrilled” That Bondi Will “Go After” CNN

Fox Host: Prosecute CNN For Reporting About ICE App

FL AG Threatens To Charge Key West Officials Over ICE

tRump and crew do not care how many people lose their coverage. They claim those “able-bodied people” should get a job so they have healthcare. That is how out of touch most wealthy republicans are if they honestly believe that companies routinely offer health care now. Most companies either don’t or have strict requirements to qualify. The thing is republicans have been trying to cancel health care of the public, for the people since forever. Look how many times they tried to repeal the ACA / Obama care. This bill they just passed will let them roll back the subsidies and throw millions off the ACA rolls. Why? Because they don’t care, they got their healthy care so you can fuck off as it costs profits. You’re not wealthy enough to pay for care yourself than you don’t need or deserve it. Just suffer and then slink away and die. Hugs

At Least 17 Million Will Lose Insurance Due To Megabill

This is the person who the cult felt was so much smarter and better than Joe Biden? I often ask how his cult could be taken in by him and the reply comes back “he speaks like we do, he hates who we hate”. WTF. Hugs

BOOK: Trump Thinks Brain Scans Can Measure IQ

With all that is happening it is hard to keep up but we are in the land of nonsense where people with the least understanding of a subject override the advice and judgment of experts. Real scientists make judgments based on medical data / studies while these people run on emotional high that conspiracies give them. Dunning-Kruger effect. Hugs

Top FDA Official Overrode Experts On COVID Vaccines

Major Bank Finds Tariffs Will Cost US Employers $82B

At what point can we start calling and admitting tRump is not acting as a president of the US but as an authoritarian dictator trying hard to cement his power / authority to crush any dissent. When will our eyes be opened wide enough to see that time is short to stop the erosion of our rights and due process. The Democratic Party is not doing enough to get the message out. Hugs

NYT: DOJ Is Mulling Criminal Charges For Non-MAGA State And Local Election Officials Over QAnon Idiocy

As was widely reported during the 2022 and 2024 elections, hundreds of seasoned local and state election officials fled their jobs due to threats of violence by the cult. The statement below is from the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State.

So this guy who never served in the military and has no background in law enforcement will lead the army and the ATF, but is convinced he alone is smart enough and needs no help? No I think what this is about is they don’t want the civilians to find out planes to illegally use the military and to either try to stop it or tell people about it. Think on it, tRump wants complete unfettered control to use the military / Army to enforce tRump’s decrees. Maybe his taking over local or state elections apparatus to declare republicans

won when they clearly did not, to enforce voter suppression acts, or simply to back him as he demands a third

US Army Secretary Fires All 115 Civilian Advisors

On Friday, Driscoll notified the 115 members of the Civilian Aides to the Secretary of the Army program, or CASA, an all-volunteer group that serves as the secretary’s eyes and ears in communities across the country, that their roles were being terminated.

Just last month, in a virtually unprecedented move, the service granted direct commissions at the rank of lieutenant colonel to a group of wealthy tech executives from firms including Palantir, Meta and OpenAI. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Army planners are quietly trimming down, or outright dismantling, programs seen as peripheral to the service’s high-tech future.

as the service doubles down on its push to modernize with a Silicon Valley-style lensI can imagine where that’s headed.

A couple of posts I want to share.

https://www.tumblr.com/reagan-was-a-horrible-president/788449530211418112

https://www.tumblr.com/reagan-was-a-horrible-president/788449156487380992

https://www.tumblr.com/reagan-was-a-horrible-president/788448145969446914

https://www.tumblr.com/reagan-was-a-horrible-president/788446255502262272

Reasons to Leave Christianity* in 2025

I have long liked this young YouTuber. I started following him when he was more into debunking stuff while also producing atheist content. I felt he understood what a lot of people were going through in that he was trying hard to hide being an atheist from his parents and family which gave him an idea what many in the LGBTQ+ community were going through with their families. He himself noted that similarity. One of the things I like about him is his calm quiet fact filled delivery. If others have not noticed I don’t like aggressive angry yelling videos, they are too close to what I grew up with and suffered in my childhood. Drew is not a fervent anti-Christian like so many atheists are. Instead he simply is against the bad stuff some people do in the name of religion / Christianity. I like that. At the end of this video he again says if you are getting something good from your faith, don’t leave it, just change it to make it better. I agree. He explains how Christianity was abused by corporations and wealthy people to get people to do things against their own interest they otherwise wouldn’t do. In the name of god work more at a lower cost to make money for your employer type stuff. Hugs

Christian extremists get librarian fired for displaying book about transgender child

No one forced these people to read the book. But just having the book there in open view enraged them. How dare this librarian admit that trans kids exist, that they are real. They wouldn’t have an issue with a book on child angels or mythical creatures, but humans that are different from the majority straight cis must be denied and destroyed. Forbidden knowledge seems big in the Christian extremest world. They seem to live for and delight in harming anyone or thing different from the way they want the world to be. They seem to think it fine for them to force their views on others but requiring factual teaching about science, biology, geology, race history is oppressing them. Imposing the idea that some people dress up in costumes to read books to children on them is a violation of their rights, but a kid’s desire to see themselves represented in media they feel they have a right to prevent. Hugs

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/06/christian-extremists-get-librarian-fired-for-displaying-book-about-transgender-child/

The librarian worked at the location for 15 years before she displayed a trans male author’s book.

Arin Waller (She/They)June 24, 2025, 4:00 pm EDT

The cover of the offending book, When Aidan Became a Brother by transgender male author Kyle Lukoff. | Lee & Low Books

Lavonnia Moore, a 45-year-old library manager, had worked at the Pierce County Library in Blackshear, Georgia, for 15 years. She was ultimately let go when a Christian extremist group filed a complaint to the library after Moore approved the display of a children’s book about a transgender boy.

According to Moore, the display (entitled “Color Our World”) included the book When Aidan Became a Brother (by trans male author Kyle Lukoff), a story about a family accepting a trans child named Aiden while also preparing for the birth of Aiden’s sibling. Library volunteers created the display as a part of a regional-wide summer theme featuring books that celebrate diversity.

Related

Man burns 100 LGBTQ+, Black, & Jewish library books on social media video

“I simply supported community involvement, just as I have for other volunteer-led displays. That’s what librarians do — we create space for everybody… I did not tell the parents and children what they could or could not add to the display, just as I do not tell them what they can or cannot read,” she wrote in a statement.

However, the book caught the attention of a group calling themselves the Alliance for Faith and Family (AFF), not to be confused with the anti-LGBTQ+ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. The AFF had previously been in the public eye for demanding the removal of a mural in the Waycross-Ware County Public Library, which included a Pride theme declaring, “Libraries Are For Everyone.”

The AFF campaigned on Facebook, urging their followers to pray and take a few moments out of their day to email the Three Rivers Library System and Pierce County Commissioners to “put a stop to this and show them the community supports them in taking a stand against promoting transgenderism at our local library,”

In an update post, the group wrote, “The display has been removed, and LaVonnia is no longer the Pierce County Library Manager. Please thank the Pierce County Commissioners and Three Rivers Regional Library System for quickly addressing our concerns.”

Moore and her sister Alicia confirmed that LaVonnia Moore had been fired. A statement to The Blackshear Times from the Three Rivers Library System Director Jeremy Snell explained that the library board leadership decided to move to new leadership for the Pierce County Library. He specifically cited the display of an “inappropriate” book as his reasoning.

“The library holds transparency and community trust in the highest regard,” Snell said.

“Instead of investigating, talking to me or my team, or exploring any kind of fair process, they used the ‘at-will’ clause in my contract to terminate me on the spot. No warning. No meeting. No due diligence. Just the words ‘poor decision making’ on a piece of paper after 15 years of service,” Moore claimed.

“I am just heartbroken,” she said of her dismissal.

According to Moore’s sister Alicia, “She messaged the family group and said ‘I was just fired.’”

“I don’t think she’s doing emotionally good, because imagine having to pack up 15 years in two days,” Alicia Moore told First Coast News.

“She’s heartbroken that a place she gave so much of herself to turned its back on her so quickly. And yes, she’s still in disbelief. She didn’t expect to be punished for doing her job with integrity and love for all patrons — especially children.” the sister explained.

The sisters are currently seeking legal counsel, and Alicia is urging people to reach out to the library board and county commissioners.

“I’m hoping the same method will be useful to get her justice,” Alicia said.

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She is correct, they don’t want to admit the LGBTQ+ exist and are doing their best to make it so we don’t to their kids. If they can convince their kids early that those people are bad before the kids learn their friends are LGBTQ+ they might turn out to be bigots as the parents want

BREAKING: The three liberal Supreme Court justices release a scathing dissent after the Republican-controlled judges issue an anti-LGBTQ ruling that “ushers in a new reality” that will deny children the “opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society.”

This is only the third time that Sonia Sotomayor has read her dissent from the bench, indicating strong disapproval…

“Exposing students to the ‘message’ that LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, supported by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The ruling was made in favor of a group of parents who want to opt their children out of elementary school lessons that include LGBTQ storybooks. The case will now go back to a lower court for final decision on whether schools must provide such an opt-out option.

Thanks to the Republican justices, school districts must now inform parents in advance of the books being read in class and allow them to pull their children if they choose. For underfunded schools, this additional burden will be too much to bear. It adds administrative costs and distracts teachers who are already struggling to teach overcrowded classrooms. Taken in tandem with the Trump administration’s efforts to completely eliminate the Department of Education, it’s a grim omen of things to come.

Crucially, the decision is a blatant handout to the religious radicals who helped put Donald Trump in power, which in turn tilted the court even more conservative. Such people want to pretend that LGBTQ people don’t even exist.

“Given the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country, countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parent’s religious beliefs. If that is sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny, then little is not,” Sotomayor continued.

She predicted that the decision will cause “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.”

“Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” she continued. “The harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too. Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students’ learning and development.”

“Worse yet, the majority closes its eyes to the inevitable chilling effects of its ruling,” she went on. “Many school districts, and particularly the most resource strapped, cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences. Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections.”

“The Court’s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards,” she added. “Because I cannot countenance the Court’s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.”

Who’da thunk it …

The US Brain Drain Begins

Ohio’s GOP-backed budget keeps anti-LGBTQ provisions, Governor’s Merit Scholarship changes

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/06/26/ohios-gop-backed-budget-keeps-anti-lgbtq-provisions-governors-merit-scholarship-changes/

By: Megan Henry – June 26, 2025 4:25 am

The final version of Ohio’s two-year state operating budget retains anti-LGBTQ provisions, requires Governor’s Merit Scholarship recipients pledge to remain in Ohio after graduation, and ties state funding to compliance with a new higher education law.

The budget now heads to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk for his signature, which he must sign by June 30. He can line-item veto provisions in the budget.

Anti-LGBTQ provisions

A handful of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions are sprinkled throughout the budget, including a provision that would only recognize two sexes — male and female.

“Do we really have to make a law that says that men are men and women are women?” state Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, asked. “Do we really have to define that? We shouldn’t have to, but apparently we do.”

The budget would require public libraries to put books related to sexual orientation or gender identity in an area of the library that is out of sight for minors.

“If moms and dads want their kids to be indoctrinated within that, that’s up to the moms and dads, but we’re not going to put it in children’s faces in the children’s sections of the libraries,” Click said.

Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, called out the library provision.

“If you are one of the 20% of young people who identify as LGBTQ, you’re not going to be a hero in that story,” he said. “We have to have more books that show you as a leader, as a champion, as a hero.”

The budget would also ban Pride flags from being flown at public buildings and prohibit giving funds to youth homeless shelters that house transgender youth, even if they also serve youth who are not transgender.

“We are not hanging out the welcome mat for people from the LGBTQ community,” said Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood. “We should be a place where folks can just be who they are authentically and live and let live.”

Higher education provisions

The Governor’s Merit Scholarship awards the top 5% of each high school graduating class a $5,000 scholarship each year to attend an Ohio college or university.

Under the final version of the budget, scholarship recipients must sign a statement of commitment to live in Ohio for three years immediately after graduation starting in fiscal year 2027.

“If we want our young people to stay in Ohio, to start their careers in Ohio, to start a family in Ohio, we need to put our money where our mouth is, and we are doing that in this budget,” said Ohio House Finance Chair Brian Stewart, R-Ashville.

The Senate’s version of the budget would have required scholarship recipients sign a promissory note, but the final version of the budget instead requires students to sign a statement of commitment to live in Ohio for the first three years after graduating college.

“It was deemed (the promissory note) was a little bit heavy-handed and so we tried to roll that back,” Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon said.

The budget allocates $47 million for fiscal year 2026 and $70 million in fiscal year 2027 for the Governor’s Merit Scholarship.

The Governor’s Merit Scholarship was enacted through the last state budget two years ago and 76% of the state’s 6,250 eligible students from the class of 2024 accepted the scholarship. Eighty-seven percent of Ohio students accepted the scholarship in its second year and 11 rural counties had a 100% acceptance rate.

The budget ties a portion of the State Share of Instruction to compliance with Senate Bill 1, a new higher education law banning diversity efforts, creates post-tenure reviews and an American civic literacy course, among other things.

The law affects Ohio’s public universities and community colleges and each university must submit a report showing compliance to the House and Senate higher education committees by March 1, according to the budget.

Housing provisions

The budget kept housing provisions the Senate added to the budget — $90 for the Residential Development Revolving Loan Program and $10 million for the Residential Economic Development District.

The Residential Development Revolving Loan Program supports new, single-family residential homes in rural areas of the state.

“If we want to grow our population, we have to have places for folks to live,” Stewart said. “This is going to be directed to small counties. We can’t be growing housing just in the three C’s, we need to be growing housing all across Ohio.”

Follow Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on Bluesky

The good, bad, ugly and of course the stupid. 6-25-2025

5000+ Mexicans Form Record “Human Pride Flag”

Cops: Atlanta Teens Filmed Themselves Destroying Gay Bar’s Pride Flags, Hate Crime Charges Possible [VIDEO]

Riley Gaines: Defund States That Back Trans Athletes

Riley Gaines, who has turned a fifth place finish against non-trans swimmers into career with MAGA media.

Now let me see if I have this right. Riley Gaines finished 5th in a race with a trans athlete. And, if that trans athlete had NOT been in the race, Riley Gaines would still have finished in 5th place because the two swimmers were TIED for 5th. So, a trans athlete being in the race did not have any effect on Riley Gaines at all

Grenell Rages At “Hamilton” Creators Over Pride Event

Murkowski Floats Leaving Republican Party [VIDEO]

Cassidy Realizes Vax Advisory Panelists Are Crackpots

Fox Host: Israel Must Carry Out More Assassinations

US Intel: Bombing Only Set Back Iran For Months

Fox Host Furious About Ceasefire Announcement: “Adolf Hitler Wasn’t Thrown A Lifeline” At War’s End [AUDIO]

Sen. Katie Britt: “Trump Will Win The Nobel, No Doubt”

Trump Hints US May Leave NATO Mutual Defense Pact

Trump Admin Seeks To Deforest 59M Public Acres

Parliamentarian Nixes GOP Plot To Sell Public Lands

ICE Used National Guard Troops To Raid CA Weed Farm

Noem: Alligator Alcatraz Will Open “At Turbo Speed”

McConnell: Worried About Medicaid? “Get Over It”

Trump Challenges “Stupid AOC” To Cognitive Test

WH Claims DOGE Worker “Big Balls” Has Resigned

First of all, I would like proof of this man’s “big balls.”

Second, he is a national security disaster. From his Wikipedia page:

His maternal grandfather Valery Martynov was a KGB Lieutenant Colonel executed by the Soviet Union as a double agent. After his execution his widow moved with her children, including Coristine’s mother, to the United States.

Also from Wikipedia:

Bloomberg News reported that Coristine had been fired from his internship at cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for allegedly leaking internal company information to a competitor. Following his dismissal, a large collection of internal Path documents and conversations was leaked online.

The apple may not fall too far from the tree in this instance.

Reuters published a story alleging that Coristine’s online content delivery network DiamondCDN had facilitated the work of the cybercriminal group EGodly. In 2023 Egodly thanked Coristine saying “We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” Egodly has claimed involvement in a number of crimes including email hacking, theft of cryptocurrency, and the harassment of a former FBI agent.

This guy would never have passed any sort of normal security clearance. That this story isn’t a massive front page scandal is an indictment of the times we live in.

Bill White: In Trump’s world facts are inconvenient, irrelevant

Bill White: In Trump’s world facts are inconvenient, irrelevant

My wife and I recently returned from a Danube River cruise — no, it’s not blue, the waltz notwithstanding — and we had a wonderful time.

One of the many pleasures of these relatively small river cruises is all the interesting people you get to meet from around the world. This time around, we spent most of our time with Canadians and Australians, who seemed to enjoy our company once they determined we shared their low opinion of our president.

When one of the Canadians we dined with several times learned that we had signed on for a “Sound of Music” tour of Salzburg, Austria — featuring fountains, mountains, cityscapes, trees, a church and other locations from the movie — he told a nice story about an Austrian who emotionally described to him his love for their traditional folk song, “Edelweiss.”

I had read that the song actually was written just for the movie and had no significance for Austrians, which our guide confirmed the next day. So when our new friend repeated his story at dinner that evening, I politely corrected him, explaining that although some Austrians may have embraced the song — the Edelweiss is their national flower — it was a Rodgers and Hammerstein creation.

I won’t say our friend was crestfallen, but he did seem disappointed. I should add that I have a long tradition of spoiling people’s favorite stories, in part through the urban legend columns I used to write semiregularly.

So here’s the question. Is the truth really that important, if it spoils a good narrative?

After all, we’re in what some people have characterized as the Post-Truth Era, ushered in most recently by Donald Trump, his congressional lapdogs and Fox News but immortalized much earlier by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. Falsehoods abound, not just in the White House but all over social media.

Here’s how the European Center for Populism Studies explained the Big Lie technique.

The big lie is the name of a propaganda technique, originally coined by Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf,” who says “The great masses of the people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one,” and denotes where a known falsehood is stated and repeated and treated as if it is self-evidently true, in hopes of swaying the course of an argument in a direction that takes the big lie for granted rather than critically questioning it or ignoring it.

Pssst. If that doesn’t sound familiar, wake up.

Hitler used it to blame his country’s problems on his best available scapegoat, Jewish people. Trump and company have broadened this approach to encompass multiple scapegoats — immigrants, foreigners, transgender people, people who are “woke” because they encourage social justice and care about the future health of our planet — and to big lies involving the 2020 election and so many other subjects that we’re numb to it. He lies about everything, and his supporters don’t seem to know or care.

I remember when the idea of act checking first emerged in political coverage. Instead of just quoting politicians who were fudging the truth, the fact-checkers would point out when they were lying or exaggerating, in the case of The Washington Post by assigning up to four Pinocchios for the most egregious falsehoods.

Some politicians would correct themselves in future pronouncements. Others wouldn’t bother.

Trump, the ultimate Pinocchio, is oblivious to Fact Checking. He just plows ahead — “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” — repeating the same misinformation over and over at rallies, news conferences, debates. Facts are irrelevant.

Perhaps most amazingly, his long-since-debunked fraud allegations regarding the 2020 election are being incorporated into Oklahoma’s public-school curriculum. Elsewhere, facts about racial injustice, climate change and our nation’s history have been altered or eliminated from public school curricula to suit the MAGA agenda. Kinglike, Trump even is punishing colleges, states and others who won’t go along with his determination to impose “1984”-style Newspeak.

I think at least some Trump followers — particularly Republican elected leaders — know he is lying. But because it suits their preferred narrative, they go along. That’s frightening enough. Even scarier, though, are the people who are too dim, lazy or Foxcentric to figure out that we’re not being overrun by bloodthirsty killer immigrants or that non-straight men and women aren’t a threat to our military, our children or anything else, not to mention that Trump really lost the 2020 election, that the rioters storming the Capitol weren’t the true victims of Jan. 6, that indiscriminate ICE goon squads aren’t the best solution to illegal immigration and that vaccinating our children continues to be a very good idea.

They don’t just accept the lies. They spread them. That’s why we must be advocates for the truth, correcting and even confronting falsehoods, at rallies, on social media, in conversations. Ignorance is not bliss. It’s fueling our country’s descent into unrecognizable autocratic chaos.

“Eidelweiss” may be trivial. But innocent people being demonized? Trust in our elections destroyed? Our constitutional guarantees shredded? Our planet’s climate threatened? Long-dead diseases given new life?History rewritten?

Speak up. The truth is worth defending.

This is a contributed opinion column. Bill White can be reached at whitebil1974@gmail.com. His Threads handle is whitebil2000. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. For more details on commentaries, read our guide to guest opinions at themorningcall.com/opinions.