like 75% of dem messaging right now should be “the party led by epsteins best friend is breaking into pre-k childcare centers so they can record your toddlers and put the videos on internet”
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Thursday, January 01, 2026 at 12:36:07p EST
(Kenneth Fowler/CNN)
This article is going to explain what we’re actually facing, lay out its four preconditions, and show you that America meets every single one. It will then explain why knowing this is important, and what we can do once equipped with that knowledge.
There’s a name for what’s happening: electoral autocracy. Elections happen. Multiple parties compete. But the system is rigged to favor one faction through gerrymandered maps, voter suppression, captured courts, and media control. When the wrong side wins anyway, those captured courts block them from governing. Hungary operates this way. So do we.
Start with gerrymandered maps. The Brennan Center’s September 2024 analysis found Republicans hold approximately 16 extra House seats due to favorable district lines.¹ Republicans drew 191 congressional districts while Democrats drew 75.¹ Only 69 of 435 House seats are rated competitive.² The Senate is worse. California’s 39 million residents have the same representation as Wyoming’s 579,000, a ratio of 68 to 1.³ The 50 Republican senators who confirmed Trump’s Supreme Court justices represented 43.5 percent of the American population. Their 50 Democratic colleagues represented 56.5 percent.⁴ The last time Republican senators represented a majority of voters was 1996.⁵
Rigged maps only work if the right people show up to vote. That’s where voter suppression comes in. The evidence includes confessions. During floor debate on Montana’s HB 176 in 2021, a Republican state representative explained he wanted to end Election Day registration because young voters are “not on our side of the aisle.”⁶ The bill passed. In oral arguments before the Supreme Court that same year, Arizona Republican Party attorney Michael Carvin was asked what interest his party had in maintaining voting restrictions. His answer: eliminating them “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”⁷ When the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s HB 589, the court found the legislature had requested data on voting practices broken down by race, then restricted exactly those practices disproportionately used by Black voters. The law, the court wrote, “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”⁸ North Carolina enacted that law less than two months after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Between 2021 and 2024, states passed 79 restrictive voting laws, nearly three times the number passed between 2017 and 2020.⁹
Gerrymandering and voter suppression tilt the playing field. Media control ensures tens of millions of Americans never realize the game is rigged. Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates 178 television stations reaching approximately 40 percent of American households.¹⁰ The company requires stations to air “must run” segments including commentary from Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump White House official, nine times per week.¹⁰ In March 2018, Deadspin compiled footage of nearly 200 Sinclair anchors reading identical scripts warning about “fake news” at other outlets.¹¹ You can watch the video. Sinclair executive chairman David Smith reportedly told Trump in 2016: “We are here to deliver your message.”¹² When your local news is owned by a conservative media conglomerate pushing partisan content through trusted local faces, voters cannot punish leaders for policy failures they never learn about.
None of this would hold without the final piece: captured courts that enforce the rigged system and block any attempt to change it.
The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to decide whether federal district judges have the power to issue nationwide injunctions blocking presidential policies. The Court declined to hear the case.¹³ The Trump administration asked the same question. The Court took it, ruled in Trump’s favor, 6-3.¹⁴
Same legal question. Same Court. Different answer depending on who asked.
The judiciary abandoned neutrality decades ago. Bush v. Gore stopped votes from being counted. Shelby County gutted voting rights. Citizens United flooded elections with dark money. What we’re watching now is the endgame.
The Niskanen Center analyzed the Court’s treatment of lower court injunctions and found that within the first six months of Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court lifted approximately 77 percent of injunctions blocking administration actions. For the Biden administration over four years, the Court lifted 10 percent.¹⁵ Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck documented that in the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration sought emergency action from the Supreme Court 19 times. That equals the total number of requests the Biden administration made over four years.¹⁶ The Court sided with Trump nearly every time.
In July 2024, the Court ruled 6-3 that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts within their core constitutional authority, and presumptive immunity for all other official acts.¹⁷ The Court held that Trump’s discussions with the Acting Attorney General about overturning the 2020 election fell within his exclusive constitutional authority and were therefore absolutely immune.¹⁷ Courts cannot inquire into a president’s motives. An action does not become unofficial merely because it violates the law.¹⁷ Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision makes the president “a king above the law.”¹⁷
A president can now direct the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies. He can order federal law enforcement to investigate, harass, and charge anyone he designates as a threat. He can pardon co-conspirators before, during, or after any scheme. He can fire any official who refuses to comply. If these actions fall within his official duties, he faces no criminal liability. The Court manufactured this immunity from whole cloth. No statute authorized it. No constitutional text required it. No precedent compelled it. Six justices simply declared that presidents need this protection to act “boldly.”
The Court is simultaneously dismantling the independence of federal agencies. In Trump v. Slaughter, currently before the Court, the administration argues that the president can fire Federal Trade Commission commissioners at will, eliminating the for-cause removal protections that have governed independent agencies since 1935.¹⁸ The D.C. Circuit has already ruled that Trump’s firings of Merit Systems Protection Board and National Labor Relations Board members were lawful.¹⁸ If Humphrey’s Executor falls, the Federal Reserve, the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, and every other independent agency comes under direct presidential control. A president could fire the Fed chair for refusing to cut interest rates before an election. He could purge every agency of anyone who might resist.
Criminal immunity for official acts. Direct control of every federal agency. And now, with the nationwide injunction ruling, illegal orders take effect everywhere except in the specific jurisdictions where individual plaintiffs have standing to sue. The Court has built a legal architecture in which a Republican president operates with essentially no constraint.
Now consider what the same Court does when a Democrat holds office. In June 2023, the Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, a $430 billion initiative affecting over 40 million borrowers.¹⁹ Chief Justice Roberts invoked the “major questions doctrine,” holding that agencies cannot make decisions of vast economic significance without explicit congressional authorization.¹⁹ The previous year, the Court used the same doctrine to strike down the Clean Power Plan.²⁰ In June 2024, the Court overturned Chevron deference entirely, eliminating the 40-year principle that courts should defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.²¹ The six-justice majority handed every conservative federal judge in the country a veto over Democratic governance.
The student loan program and the Clean Power Plan were not radical initiatives. They were exercises of delegated authority that prior courts would have upheld without controversy. This Court invented new doctrines to stop them. As Justice Kagan wrote in dissent, the Court’s approach “overrules Congress’s decisions about when and how to delegate” and makes the Supreme Court itself “the arbiter, indeed, the maker, of national policy.”²²
SCOTUSblog’s analysis calls this the “who-what duality” of the Roberts Court: expanding presidential power over personnel while restricting presidential power over policy.²³ But that framing is too neutral. The personnel expansions let a Republican president fire anyone who might resist. The policy restrictions prevent a Democratic president from using the administrative state to do anything at all. One president gets to destroy. The other gets blocked from building. This is not judicial philosophy. It is collaboration.
None of these tools will transfer. A Democratic president attempting to invoke the immunity ruling, the removal power, or the elimination of nationwide injunctions would discover new limits, new doctrines, new procedural barriers. We know this because we already have the data. Seventy-seven percent versus ten percent. Nineteen emergency requests in twenty weeks versus nineteen in four years. Same questions, different answers, depending entirely on who is asking.
Here is what all of this means in plain terms. One faction wins elections while losing the popular vote, governs without constraint, and installs lifetime judges who validate the structures that enabled minority rule. The other faction needs supermajorities to win, cannot govern when it does, and watches every policy achievement get struck down by courts it cannot reform. The gears turn freely toward authoritarian consolidation. Try to turn them back and the teeth catch.
This is why nothing ever gets better. Two-thirds of Americans support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.²⁴ Seventy-three percent believe the healthcare system needs major change or a complete rebuild, including 67 percent of Republicans.²⁵ Exposed to policies without party labels, supermajorities support them. Yet the federal minimum wage has not moved since 2009. Healthcare remains broken. Housing stays unaffordable. Climate action stalls. Not because these policies are unpopular. Because the system is designed to prevent the popular will from becoming law. Gerrymandered legislatures will not pass them. If they pass, captured courts strike them down. If courts uphold them, the next minority-elected president dismantles them.
Every precondition is met. This is not a warning about where we are headed. We are already here.
The federal government will not save us. It has been captured. Any strategy for preserving democratic governance must begin by acknowledging what we are actually facing. What remains is the ground we still hold at the city and state level, and the willingness to use it.
The Introduction to Soft Secession booklet explains exactly what that looks like: public banking, interstate compacts, criminal prosecutions of federal officials under state law, and revenue strategies that reduce dependency on a captured federal government. It’s free at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER, along with the Educate Activate Recruit Repeat Method for actually getting these policies passed, Being Dangerous: How to Go from Activist to Operative, a printable trifold you can hand out, and Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, the full book explaining how we got here. Physical copies and merch at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.
Look at the differences between the “hellscapes” right and left imagine if the other is in charge. They tremble at the thought of seeing taco trucks and hijabs, men raising children together, people wearing masks so they don’t get sick. We tremble at concentration camps, bombings, abductions.
I want to thank https://personnelente.wordpress.com/2025/12/31/attacking-ukraine/ for the link to this news article. I think it is seriously important we realize Ukraine is suffering to keep the rest of the world safe. If Putin has his way he will recreate the world of the USSR in the 1980s again, taking territory of other countries by force and stealing their resources, just as tRump thinks the US should be able to do the countries the US deals with or are in our hemisphere. None of this will come to any good for the world. Right from the start Ukraine should have been given the weapons it needed with no restraint on how to use them. Biden did as much to damage Ukraine as Putin’s military did. Biden forced Ukraine to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. Thankfully Europe is realizing that mistake and removing the no attacks on Russian soil restrictions. Hugs
In 2025, Russian troops carried out a record number of air attacks on the territory of Ukraine. According to the United24 platform, the enemy used more than 60 thousand guided bombs, about 2.4 thousand missiles and more than 100 thousand drones of various types.
Number of air alerts in Ukraine in 2025 / United 24
During the year, at least 19,033 air alerts were announced throughout the country. The sirens sounded most often in the Kharkiv region (2,020 times), Zaporizhia (1,807 times) and Sumy region (1,793 times). The fewest alerts were recorded in Transcarpathia (126 times), Ivano-Frankivsk region (133 times) and Lviv region (140 times).
If in the winter and spring months there were one or two major attacks per month, then since June-July their number has increased significantly. During individual strikes, the enemy used up to 60 missiles and hundreds of drones, sometimes up to 700–800 drones in a single attack.
The most massive attacks of 2025:
January 15: 177 targets (of which 43 missiles and 74 drones, air defense destroyed 30 missiles and all drones)
February 1: 165 targets (of which 42 missiles and 123 drones)
March 7: 261 (of which 67 missiles and 194 drones)
April 24: 215 (of which 70 missiles and 145 drones)
May 25: 367 (of which 69 missiles and 298 drones)
Starting in June, the shelling has intensified significantly:
June 29: 537 targets (of which 60 missiles and 477 drones)
July 9: 728 drones.
In August, the number of attacks remained at a high level:
August 21: 614 targets (including 40 missiles and 574 drones)
August 28: 629 targets (including 31 missiles and 598 drones)
August 30: 582 targets (including 45 missiles and 537 UAVs).
Consequences of the shelling of Donetsk : National Police of Ukraineregion
A record number of drones was recorded on September 7 – 823 targets (including 810 drones and 13 missiles), and on October 30 the enemy launched 705 targets (including 52 missiles and 653 drones). During November and December, massive attacks continued: the number of missiles reached 51, drones – up to 653 in one shelling.
United24 emphasizes that human suffering cannot be fully measured in numbers, but statistics clearly demonstrate the scale of the threat and confirm that Ukraine needs enhanced air defense and support from international partners.
Why I do these posts. This is three days of Joe My God that got away way from me. So why do I do these long news posts? Because I comb the Joe My God comment section for the best memes and snarkiest comments. It dawned on me I could post his news articles for those that want to read them. But three days is a lot to go throw and it is much easier just to quickly scan and snatch the comments rather than post them. So I need some inputs from everyone. Are these posts worth it? Or would you rather go to Joe My God yourselves. Or I can keep doing these. Up to you. Hugs
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tRumps Grifts / Scams / Ripping off the rubes / tRump’s ego / tRump’s Crimes / tRump’s health / Republican grifts & payouts for supporting tRump / other trump scammers
The Trump Golf Tracker estimates that the president’s golf trips have cost taxpayers some $110,600,000 so far in 2025. But that estimate, which was based on a 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on four golf trips during his first term, doesn’t even take into account the month of December.
The right wing media / the media arms of the GOP & Republican Party / The over the top thuggery and complete disrespect for common decency / Ask if you would like your child to act this way …. because maga does want their kids to be this crass as it makes them feel good / Kennedy Center debacle
The video was shared by Vice President JD Vance. FBI director Kash Patel said he is aware of the video and the FBI is investigating. The YouTuber says he is uncovering new fraud in Minnesota, but media outlets like KSTP reported more than a year ago about more than 62 investigations into Minnesota child care centers.
What this is really about is they are afraid Walz will run for office and win as he is so well liked. They are trying to gin up a fake scandal to Benghazi him like they did with Hillary Clinton. I posted yesterday how fake and full of lies / misinformation the “report” the YouTuber did was. In the article above this one you can see how the Republican Party had a hand in helping the right wing influencer to push a fake story. The state has been investigating these things for several years. Hugs
$175 billion for a “golden dome” that experts doubt would actually work, but only $2 billion in humanitarian aid for the United Nations. It’s what Jesus would want.
Space based weapons are forbidden by treaties that the US signed. That said do we have space based weapons … well I was sending commands somewhere for something when I was in the Army Sat coms / intel unit. You decide. Hugs
Maga hate fail / tRump lost in court / tRump supporters doing what they do not want you to know about / ICE lies / tRump’s DOJ / Misinformation / Trying to change history by spewing & omitting facts or what really happened
The emails, which were made public as part of a newly unsealed judicial order, largely reflected communications about the case that Robert E. McGuire, the acting U.S. attorney in Nashville, had with members of his staff and with Aakash Singh, a top official in Mr. Blanche’s office. They raised serious questions about whether the Justice Department had misled Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., who is overseeing the case, by telling him that local prosecutors had acted alone in charging Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Hate / Bigotry / DEI / White Supremacy / Christian Nationalism / US aid to only white countries or white dominated areas / US Healthcare / For Profit drug prices rip off the US public /
The civil probes are proceeding under the umbrella of the False Claims Act, which has traditionally been used to go after contractors who bill the government for work that was never performed or inflate the cost of services rendered.
The U.S. slashed its aid spending this year, and leading Western donors such as Germany also pared back assistance as they pivoted to increased defense spending, triggering a severe funding crunch for the United Nations.
U.N. data shows total U.S. humanitarian contributions to the U.N. fell to about $3.38 billion in 2025, equating to about 14.8% of the global sum. This was down sharply from $14.1 billion the prior year, and a peak of $17.2 billion in 2022.
The idea behind the legislation originated with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that has gained prominence for its work to incorporate religion in public spaces.
West last appeared here for his bill that would create a database of abortion patients.
In 2024, we heard from West for his bill to ban Pride flags at public schools and government buildings.
He appeared here in 2023 for his bill that would make it a felony to perform drag in the view of minors. His bill called for a $20,000 fine and up to two years in prison.
West first appeared here in 2021 when Gov. Kevin Stitt signed his bill making it legal to run over protesters.
The tweet below refers to West’s attempt to pass this same bill earlier this year.
tRump’s attack on Colorado because they won’t bow to the whim of the tyrant. His withholding money is illegal but no republican will stand up to the demented king.
Hey Tumblr, I forgot to tell you… but look at that!! First Assigned Male book in COLOR! 32 pages of AWESOME! It even features comics that aren’t online!
(Kenneth Fowler/CNN)
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