Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Monday, December 29, 2025 17:52
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 105831
PAGE 84 of 84

Tuesday, December 23, 2025 3:18 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

So shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Believe me, says 6ixStringJoker, the Nazi who claims he is not a Nazi.

JD Vance pretends almost no Americans are antisemitic

The Times of Israel reports:

US Vice President JD Vance claimed in an interview on Sunday that almost no Americans are antisemitic and that concerns about antisemitic voices are raised as a way to avoid discussing “a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy” on Israel.

In the interview with the publication Unherd, Vance also downplayed concerns about Nick Fuentes, the popular far-right antisemitic podcaster, and said that Christianity is “very much at the heart” of America’s common culture.

The interview was the latest in a series of comments Vance has made dismissing or declining to condemn an increasing embrace of antisemitism among parts of the US right.

In a speech on Sunday to the conservative Turning Point USA’s annual convention, whose opening days were roiled by a debate over excluding antisemites, Vance said the movement should be open to everyone as long as they “love America,” coming down firmly against “purity tests” and adding that he “didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform.”

More, including videos, at
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/22/jd-vance-pretends-almost-n
o-americans-are-antisemitic/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 23, 2025 3:45 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

MAGA Is Breaking Up Over an “Are Nazis Cool?” Debate. It’s a Sign of Things to Come.

Trump’s GOP is held together by a cult of personality. But what happens when that personality flickers?

By Jill Filipovic | Dec 23, 2025 1:09 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/maga-heritage-foundation-m
ike-pence-donald-trump.html

In something of a Christmas miracle, the MAGA coalition may finally be starting to break down.

The Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 blueprint for this Trump term, just saw more than a dozen staff members defect for former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom think tank; turncoats include the former leaders of Heritage’s data, economics, and legal teams. Among prominent MAGA leaders—mostly elected officials, people who want to be elected officials, and podcasters—there is a growing divide over what one might assume should be an easily answered question: Should they welcome Nazis, avowed white supremacists, and unrepentant racists hurling slurs into the movement?

This is apparently quite the conundrum. It’s also telling that the cleavage is coming now. After all, the movement Donald Trump built has long welcomed bigots and racists; Trump himself dined with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and enthusiastic antisemite Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, although he later claimed to not know who Fuentes was. The people who have gotten into bed with the president, whether they’re D.C. think tank staffers or Jan. 6 hooligans, realized who they were cozying up with.

That some are starting to object and defect suggests that two things are happening at once. The first is that MAGA bigotry has gotten significantly broader, expanding beyond the groups the broader right believes are acceptable to malign (women, Black people, immigrants, Muslims) and coming for groups of which prominent MAGA leaders are a part (Jews, Indians, anyone whose ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower). The second is that Trump himself is fading: He’s elderly and showing the typical signs of fatigue and cognitive decline. This is creating something of a vacuum in leadership. Vice President J.D. Vance is the clear MAGA heir apparent (or at least believes himself to be). But he won’t take the throne unchallenged. Some of these contenders want to sit in the Oval Office, and there can be only one butt in the chair behind the Resolute Desk. Others want a different kind of Republican Party: Some strive to turn away from Trumpian populism and toward a tax-cutting pro-business agenda; others aim for a return to the politics of conservative Christianity, with a refocus on restricting abortion and LGBTQ+ rights; a few really may object to MAGA’s blood-and-soil nationalist turn. But the coalition is currently fracturing for one reason: The leader is weak, and a successor is being chosen.

The growing objections to MAGA racism can feel pretty rich coming from people who seemed just fine with many kinds of racism up until now. But it’s also true that MAGA racism has, like the famous “First they came for” poem, proved itself insatiable. Vance has been among the leading voices for the idea that there is a category of “heritage Americans,” a very-online term for people whose family ancestry supposedly gives them more of a claim to legitimate Americanness than anyone else: naturalized citizens, children of immigrants, someone whose grandparents immigrated after World War II. If your ancestors came over anytime after 1789, you are not a “Grade A” American, as one chart puts it. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” Vance has said—marking those who chose to become American as having a less legitimate right to Americanness than those who fought to break up the country.

This turn has alarmed many conservatives who, like most Americans, are not purely descended from Pilgrims. The elevation of unapologetically antisemitic rhetoric and the growing hatred of Jews among Gen Z conservatives seem to have also spooked some MAGA loyalists. A recent Manhattan Institute focus group of Gen Z conservatives found them praising Adolf Hitler as a “great leader” and understanding “where he was coming from as far as wanting to improve the national state of Germany.” One young man who also said that Jews are a “force for evil” explained: “I’m very pro–strong executive, –strong leader, –strongman. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, ‘We have to take Germany back for Germans.’ And I feel like we should do that in America.” A leaked chat among Young Republican leaders showed them joking about the Holocaust, calling Black people monkeys, and saying, “I love Hitler.” Young voters generally hold more antisemitic views than older ones, and young conservatives are, on average, the most antisemitic of all. This may be because young people are getting much of their political news from outrage-amplifying social media, as well as from “influencers” with popular podcasts, TikTok accounts, and YouTube and Discord channels, and many right-wing influencers have seen that racism, sexism, and antisemitism drive traffic—which in turn drives fans to be even more bigoted and reactionary. Candace Owens recently went on an extended antisemitic tirade, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Fuentes have also entertained antisemitic conspiracy theories or flat-out blamed the Jews for various problems. And the Trump administration is putting people with long records of antisemitism into top positions.

This seems to be an inflection point even for some notorious bigots and people who didn’t mind when the president called Somalis “garbage” and compared immigrants with insects. Laura Loomer is one of the country’s most notorious Muslim-haters (she has called Islam a “cancer” and argued that Muslims should not be allowed to hold political office) and acted as if getting banned from Twitter for hate speech was as bad as being sent to the gulags. But now she is suddenly in favor of gatekeeping, enforcing basic standards, and “moral clarity.” Former presidential contender and current candidate for governor of Ohio Vivek Ramaswamy, who during his 2024 campaign claimed that “our diversity is not our strength,” compared prominent Black progressives with the Ku Klux Klan and asserted that he had never seen or met “the boogeyman white supremacist” in America—“Maybe I’ll meet a unicorn sooner,” he added, “and maybe those exist too”—also seems to have changed his tune. “If you believe that Hitler was pretty fucking cool, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” Ramaswamy recently said. “If you call Usha Vance, the second lady of the United States of America, a ‘j—t,’ you have no place in the future of the conservative movement.”

J.D. Vance, whose Indian American wife Usha has been called racial slurs by right-wing racists, said that people who target her specifically can “eat shit” but that otherwise the GOP should be a big tent. “When I say that I’m going to fight alongside of you, I mean all of you—each and every one,” the vice president said at Turning Point USA’s recent AmericaFest. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”

As the Nazis vs. Say-No-to-Nazis fissures broke open at the Turning Point event, conservatives on all sides of the debate laid claim to the legacy of their martyred leader Charlie Kirk. Some argued that he was a free-speech fanatic who would have welcomed everyone to TPUSA events even if they were wearing a T-shirt bearing a pro-Holocaust meme (“Let ’Em Cook”). Others agreed with Loomer’s take, that “people want to pretend like [Kirk’s] events were a free for all so they have an excuse to not call out the GOP’s Nazi problem.” Vance positioned himself on Team “Let ’Em Cook.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, seems to be with him: He caused major outcry after he defended Carlson having a very friendly interview with Holocaust denier Fuentes, in which Fuentes complained about the domination of “organized Jewry” and Carlson noted his belief that “Christian Zionists” have been “seized by this brain virus.”

The former Heritage staffers who have decamped for the new organization seem to be on Team Moral Clarity—or perhaps a team for which they don’t have to play ball with Nazis or the kinds of people who would attend a Turning Point USA convention. (That the organization they flocked to belongs to Pence—remember him? The guy the Jan. 6 rioters wanted to lynch on the White House lawn?—only adds to the sense that this cleavage runs deep.) In a not-so-long-ago iteration of the Republican Party, those who spoke and acted like Loomer, Owens, and even Kirk were the riffraff—part of the base, sure, but inconvenient and merely dog-whistled at to encourage loyalty. Now, though, they’re leading the pack, and not only when it comes to MAGA’s young pups.

It’s worth noting that in all of this, Trump is largely absent. Perhaps those closest to him see what average Americans do not: that his abilities, and with them his power, is waning. He turned the party into a cult of personality, in which the only ideology was to line up behind Donald Trump. The GOP rule “Whatever Trump wants, Trump gets” was so clear that the party stopped writing out policy platforms, instead issuing a one-page fealty pledge to its unquestioned leader. No one has the audacity to try to unseat him, or even to say that he won’t be in charge forever. MAGA stalwarts still wear their Trump 2028 hats, make Trump-as-Jesus fan art, share the triumphant photo of him raising his fist after surviving an assassin’s bullet, and believe that his 2024 win was a political resurrection divinely ordained to save America. Maybe Trumpism will never die. But clearly those around him can smell decay.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Winds of Change have changed direction. Hey, remember April?

When President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office at the end of that month, he was on a seemingly unstoppable roll. After taking four years out of office to prepare, he and his team returned to power with a blitz of more than 140 executive orders. He bent the Republican-controlled Congress to his will and dismantled much of the federal bureaucracy. He brought powerful institutions, including prestigious universities and law firms, to heel, demanding that his ring be kissed and his wallet fattened. He upended the nation’s economic and diplomatic relations with the world. He hijacked Americans’ attention—he was everywhere!—while openly musing about tearing up the Constitution and serving a third term. Moreover, Democrats were in disarray—truly—and their party’s future seemed in doubt. Trump stared out from the cover of this very magazine with the accompanying quote “I run the country and the world.” Honestly, it was hard to argue with him.

But as 2025 draws to a close, Trump seems a whole lot smaller. His party has been battered in recent elections. His poll numbers on even his signature issues—the economy, immigration—have tumbled. He’s seemingly lost touch with what got him elected, instead focusing on projects both petty and self-aggrandizing. As Americans worry about affordability, Trump and his family have profited wildly from his time in office. Republicans have begun to openly and repeatedly defy him. Democrats have started to outmaneuver him. Today, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal once more erupted with embarrassing revelations and unanswered questions. And every now and then, Trump seems to have a hard time even staying awake.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-is-suddenly-looking-a-lot
-smaller/ar-AA1SViia

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There’s a 92 Percent Chance Trump Is Making It Up

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | December 20, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2025/12/trump-strikes-ca
ribbean-military-number-venezuela/685348/

President Donald Trump likes to use a big number to anchor his point, especially when he wanders off on a tangent. Often it seems that a specific figure is on the tip of his tongue.

At this year’s ceremonial turkey pardon, Trump praised a farmer from Wayne County, North Carolina, for raising two “record-setting” birds, but then pivoted to his own electoral margin of victory: “I won that county by 92 percent.” (In fact, he won it by 16 percentage points.) At a McDonald’s corporate event last month, Trump claimed that the United States controls 92 percent of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf of America, as he calls it). It’s really about 46 percent. Trump won the veterans’ vote, he said on Veterans Day, with “about 92 percent or something,” and in July, he said he won farmers—well, “by 92 percent.” (More accurate estimates of the portion of the electorate he won would be 65 percent of veterans and 78 percent of voters in farming counties, according to exit polls and election data.)

His fixation on the number between 91 and 93 has been a feature for a while. In April, Trump claimed that egg prices had fallen by 92 percent. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics said 12.7 percent.) And at a rally shortly before last November’s election, while railing against journalists and the media, he allowed that “not all of them” are “sick people.” Just “about 92 percent.” That one, admittedly, is difficult to fact-check.

I came upon this curious pattern in the course of tracking down the basis for a far more serious claim the president has made repeatedly as part of his justification for the U.S. military buildup near Venezuela. More than two dozen strikes on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 100 people since September. The strikes have formed the core of the administration’s ongoing campaign to treat President Nicolás Maduro as a “narco-terrorist,” which many view as a veneer for wanting to see the Venezuelan strongman ousted from power and work with a new government to secure access to the country’s oil and rare earth minerals.

“The drugs coming in through the sea are down to—they’re down by 92 percent,” Trump told Politico on December 8. At a roundtable later the same day, he went with “92 or 94 percent.” Three days later: “Drug traffic by sea is down 92 percent,” Trump said in the Oval Office. A day after that brought a new estimate: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters.

More often than not, the president links the 92 (or more) percent claim to another: “Every one of those boats you see get shot down, you just saved 25,000 American lives.” In December alone, he has cited that figure—25,000 American lives saved per boat strike—on at least six different occasions.

I asked the Coast Guard—the lead federal agency for maritime drug interdiction—for any underlying data or information to support both of those figures. The Coast Guard referred me to the Pentagon. The Pentagon referred me to the White House. The Department of Homeland Security referred me to the Pentagon and the White House, which repeated Trump’s remarks without elaboration.

“President Trump is right. It is widely known that one small dose of these drugs is deadly, fentanyl is the number one killer of adults between the ages of 18 and 45, and any boat bringing this poison to our shores has the potential to kill 25,000 Americans or more,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement. “Rather than try to poke holes in these facts, The Atlantic should join President Trump in elevating the voices of families who have lost loved ones to the scourge of narcoterrorism.”

The president’s claims, however, are so porous that I hardly found anywhere to poke. Although Trump and other officials have repeatedly said that the goal of the strikes is to combat the trafficking of illicit fentanyl—the synthetic opioid chiefly responsible for an epidemic of fatal overdoses over the past decade—the drug does not come from South America. It enters America primarily across the border with Mexico and is produced using precursor chemicals from China. Venezuela, however, is primarily a transit country for cocaine bound for Europe.

In a briefing with lawmakers early last month, top officials acknowledged that they believed it was cocaine, not fentanyl, on the boats. A former senior Coast Guard official told me that in his more than three decades in the service, he has not been aware of a single instance of an intercepted load in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific containing fentanyl. In sum, the boats being struck aren’t carrying the drug that is the leading cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.—and what drugs they may be carrying aren’t coming to America. So it is hard to see how each strike saves 25,000 American lives.

Bill Baumgartner, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral who directed the agency’s operations in the Caribbean, told me that number “is just complete and pure fantasy.” The only way to arrive at that total of saved lives is if you would have rounded up 25,000 people and forced them to consume lethal doses of cocaine—a claim “just as stupid as saying that there’s a box of ammunition; if you confiscate a box of ammunition, you have saved 100 lives because there were 100 bullets there,” Baumgartner said.

It is even unclear how many of the destroyed vessels were actually carrying narcotics. The administration has not specified or released evidence of the types or quantities of drugs on them. When identifying boats ferrying drugs, “the intelligence isn’t foolproof,” and destroying a vessel with a strike—unlike boarding it during an interdiction—leaves no room to correct faulty intelligence, Baumgartner said. In the 13 months leading up to early October, 21 percent of the boats interdicted off the coast of Venezuela turned out not to be carrying any contraband, according to data shared by Coast Guard Acting Commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday in a letter to Senator Rand Paul, a Republican.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in the 12-month period ending in April, there were about 73,690 total drug overdose deaths in the United States (although that number is likely to increase when final data are tallied). If it were the case that each strike since September has saved 25,000 American lives, and given that 28 boats have been destroyed to date, the operation would have saved 700,000 lives—more than nine times the total U.S. drug overdose deaths in a year. “That makes no sense,” Adam Isacson, an expert on drug trafficking in Latin America at WOLA, an NGO based in Washington, D.C., told me.

The majority of overdose fatalities stem from opioids, not stimulants such as cocaine. In 2023, the most recent year for which such data are available, the CDC tracked 29,449 cocaine-linked deaths. (About 1.2 grams of cocaine can constitute a fatal dose. That amount is 600 times greater than the 2 milligrams of fentanyl that can cause a deadly overdose.) But notably, nearly 70 percent of cocaine- and other stimulant-related deaths that year also involved fentanyl.

As for the basis for the president’s claim of a 92 percent decline in maritime drug traffic: “We’ve only seen that in Trump’s remarks. No sourcing, no other data,” according to Isacson. (The White House did not specifically respond to my inquiry about it.) But the numbers the government does release give ample reason to doubt the statistic. Last month, the Coast Guard touted a record-setting year of drug interdiction; the agency seized more than 510,000 pounds of cocaine, primarily in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, compared with the 167,000 pounds it seized on average in prior years. This month, as part of its ongoing maritime-law-enforcement operations separate from the strikes, the Coast Guard seized 20,000 pounds of cocaine in a single interdiction. But global cocaine supply and demand continue to reach new heights, according to a June report from the United Nations. And counternarcotics-enforcement veterans told me that even if drug traffic by sea has seen a sharp drop, that does not signal an overall decline in cocaine traffic, because traffickers adapt and reroute shipments.

Perhaps the president has divined these numbers through a mathematically rigorous process beyond the reaches of my imagination. After all, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told Vanity Fair that her boss is a “statistical savant.” More likely, his affinity for 92 percent and extravagantly large round numbers is what in a game of poker might be called a tell. In 2019, Bloomberg noticed 10,000 cropping up whenever Trump made big claims, in topics such as the stock market and ISIS fighters. It was the number Trump cited for known or suspected gang members whom ICE removed in 2018 (though the agency put that number at 5,872). And it’s the number of points he said the Dow Jones would have been up in 2019 had the Federal Reserve not raised interest rates the previous year.

Not every time the president cites a 92 percent is off base. His August boast of a “92 percent” approval rating for the Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, was actually slightly less than the 92.8 percent of veterans who reported trusting the VA for their health care in the agency’s survey that month. That was up from—wait for it—92 percent under the Biden administration the previous year. But more often than not, the number seems to serve as a clue that the commander in chief might be reaching for a number he can easily remember, caring little whether it is accurate.

At three different rallies in the fall of 2024 leading up to Election Day, Trump bragged about his nearly decade-long campaign to denigrate the press. “The fake news back there—they were at 92 percent approval rating when we started this journey in 2015. And now they’re less than Congress,” he said on November 2. “I’m very proud of that.” In fact, the year the president descended his golden escalator and upended the country’s political life, Americans’ trust in the media was not at 92 percent. It stood at a then-historic low of 40 percent. In the years since, it has dropped to a new historic low of 28 percent. Congress’s approval, for the record, stands at 15 percent.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump is doing all he can to prove he is crazy:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation. Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! Thank you for you attention to this matter. PRESIDENT DJT
12/23/25, 12:32 AM

Trump, 79, Declares Absurd National Security Threat in Late-Night Meltdown

It is unclear what prompted the president’s latest deranged rant.

By Ewan Palmer | Updated Dec. 23 2025 3:02PM EST

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-79-declares-absurd-national-securi
ty-threat-in-late-night-meltdown/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 10:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Judges who ruled against Trump say that subsequent threats have changed their lives

NBC reports:

In his almost 45 years as a federal judge, John Coughenour has seen it all, including high-profile criminal trials that put his own safety at risk.

But this year, the 84-year-old senior district judge did something he hadn’t considered for a long time: He retrieved a gun he had stored at the federal courthouse in Seattle years ago and brought it back to his home in case he needed it to defend himself.

Coughenour is one of dozens of federal judges who have found themselves at the center of a political maelstrom as they have ruled against President Donald Trump or spoken up in defense of the judiciary. With Trump administration officials vilifying judges who rule against the government, a wave of violent threats and harassment has often followed.

More at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judges-ruled-trump-say-
harassment-threats-changed-lives-rcna248445

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 1:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

So shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Believe me, says 6ixStringJoker, the Nazi who claims he is not a Nazi.

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

Last time everybody checked, it's YOUR fucking party that is out there shitting all over Jews literally every day.

You're the bad guys. You're fucking toast.

It's hilarious to watch, actually.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 3:54 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

Last time everybody checked, it's YOUR fucking party that is out there shitting all over Jews literally every day.

You're the bad guys. You're fucking toast.

It's hilarious to watch, actually.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

So This Is Why Trump Didn’t Want to Release the Epstein Files

The latest batch includes many new references to Trump—and enough ammunition for Congress to keep pressing.

By Sarah Fitzpatrick | December 24, 2025, 2:49 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-epstein-files-justi
ce-department-redactions/685455/

Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump kicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.”

But this week, the documents released by Trump’s own Justice Department—including flight logs and emails—told a different story. Federal prosecutors determined in January 2020 that Trump had been a passenger on the notorious private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein—who would later be charged with sex trafficking—far more often than they had realized.

Many of the flights on what came to be known as the Lolita Express took place “during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” a federal prosecutor in New York told colleagues. Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was subsequently convicted and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex-trafficking operation, including using the plane for “transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts.”

There are many other mentions of Trump. The president’s name appears more than 100 times in files released yesterday as part of the DOJ’s compliance with legislation requiring it to disclose everything it has on the Epstein case. Trump fought Congress’s demand for transparency for months before abruptly pivoting and endorsing the bill once he realized he had lost. Although many references to Trump are clearly from news reports or from seemingly unverified tips to the FBI, one conclusion from the files is that Trump’s relationship with Epstein, a former friend, was of interest to federal law enforcement for years.

A White House official told me that Trump was never contacted by law enforcement regarding his interactions with Epstein during the time period for which Epstein and Maxwell were charged. The president has denied wrongdoing, though his characterizations of his relationship with Epstein—including about his presence on the plane—have shifted over time. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, declined to answer questions about the discrepancy between the president’s prior statements and the material released by the DOJ but said in a statement, “The truth remains: Donald Trump did nothing wrong.”

Read: The Epstein files only get worse

Trump has also insisted that he knew nothing of Epstein’s criminal activity—though his critics have questioned how that could be true given their close relationship and history of chasing women together. Members of Congress from both parties have said they will continue to probe the issue in the upcoming year. Representatives I spoke with told me their takeaway from reading the files is that top officials in the Trump administration have not been honest about what was in them, and that they intend to press Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for more information.

“Although the files are overly redacted, they’ve already demonstrated that the narrative painted by Patel in hearings, Bondi in press statements, and Trump himself on social media wasn’t accurate,” Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who co-authored the Epstein legislation, told me. “A complete disclosure consistent with the law will show there are more men implicated in the files in possession of the government.”

Representatives and staff on the House Oversight Committee told me they were drafting subpoenas in response to the documents released yesterday, seeking more information related to law enforcement’s identification of 10 alleged “co-conspirators” shortly after Epstein’s arrest in July 2019. The case that prosecutors were building related to those unnamed co-conspirators appears to have been substantial. One document released yesterday is a November 2020 overview presented to the deputy attorney general from an acting U.S. attorney titled “Anticipated Charges and Investigative Steps.” But what, if any, next steps were taken remains a mystery: The rest of the page is redacted.

Oversight Committee members are also drafting a contempt resolution to penalize Bondi for not ensuring that the DOJ fully complied with the law. The resolution, spearheaded by Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, will give Bondi 30 days to fully release all of the remaining Epstein materials, then fine her $10,000 each day that she doesn’t release them after that. They told me they expected to introduce the resolution when Congress returns in January. They are also moving ahead on articles of impeachment for Bondi, and said they were optimistic that they could get them passed in the House.

Khanna told me that there was an emerging “coalition of the right and left to fight for justice.” That alliance, he added, “has proven to be the kryptonite that marks the beginning of the end of the Trump era.”

Read: ‘They’re delusional if they think this is going to go away’

The files released yesterday—and Trump’s prominence in them—appear to have changed the calculation for senior Democratic Party leaders as they prepare for the midterm elections. Party leadership had previously sought to convince junior members not to focus on Epstein. But this week Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will push for the Senate to hold the DOJ accountable for not fully complying with the legislation, citing a missed 30-day deadline for all files to be released and excessive redactions in those that have been.

“The Department of Justice needs to shed more light on who was on the list, how they were involved, and why they chose not to prosecute. Protecting possible co-conspirators is not the transparency the American people and Congress are demanding,” Schumer said in a statement.

The Justice Department has acknowledged there are still many more files to be released—and the known backlog grew longer today when the DOJ announced that the FBI and New York prosecutors had uncovered “over a million more documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case” and that the process of reviewing them could take “a few more weeks.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had earlier said on Meet the Press that the delay was due to the need for additional redactions in order “to protect victims.” Behind the scenes, his office has requested additional “emergency” help from U.S. attorneys’ offices to continue reviewing and redacting Epstein-related material over the Christmas and New Year holidays, CNN reported.

The DOJ did not respond to my questions, but on X, the department’s public-affairs office has sought to downplay mentions of Trump in the files, saying that yesterday’s documents “contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”

When asked if the president still has confidence in his attorney general’s handling of the release of the Epstein files, Jackson said, “The president’s entire Cabinet, including AG Bondi, has done a great job implementing the president’s agenda.”

Survivors of Epstein’s abuses reacted with both excitement and anger as they reviewed the new files, lighting up group chats. Some were working retail jobs on one of the busiest days of the year; others were caring for children home from school. Lisa Phillips told me that there were still too many unanswered questions, but that the months of work she and other Epstein survivors had put into lobbying Congress were finally delivering results. “This is the first news that has made me feel like we are making headway,” she told me.

Sigrid McCawley, an attorney who represents several of Epstein’s victims, said it would take time to know the true impact of the “avalanche” of new documents released yesterday. But she told me that one thing is clear: “These brave survivors were absolutely correct that the government was withholding critical information from the public.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 26, 2025 1:54 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Real Reason Trump Runs America Like a TV Show

By Catherine Bouris | Dec. 26 2025

“It’s really more helpful to think of him in terms of being an actor than in terms of being a politician,” author Michael Wolff explained to the Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles. “In his courtship of the audience, in his own egomania, in his desire for attention.”

Referring to the first interview he conducted with Trump in 2016 for what would eventually become the book Fire & Fury, Wolff recalled asking the then-presidential candidate why he was running for office.

“He said, without missing a beat, and as though this was a perfectly normal goal, ‘To become the most famous man in the world,’” Wolff said.

Roger Ailes, the Fox News founder who was a close friend of Trump, once described Trump as “that kid whose parents never pulled him away from the television.”

“So he grew up just glued to the television at all times, not doing anything else, not paying attention to his schoolwork, not doing his homework, not really having friends, just glued to the television.”

Citing the New York trial where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, Wolff explained that the president’s entire frame of reference for how he wanted his legal team to defend him was television.

“He wants Perry Mason. He wants the guy who goes in and wins every case. He wants Roy Cohn, who he elevated to the guy who has won every case. He sees this just in terms of performance,” Wolff said.

“He wanted television lawyers. It was his entire reference. Everything is about television.”

Wolff also said that Trump almost always has the television on, adding, “There are very few moments in the car or when he’s doing a rally and a public appearance, but those are pretty much the only times that the television is not on.”

Above everything else, Trump responds to ratings. Wolff notes in one of his four books about the president that he is obsessed with the Nielsen ratings.

“His measure is always a popular audience measure. He’s kind of like a comedian working. He just throws out stuff, throws it out, throws it out,“ Wolff said, “and you can see him measuring the response. And when he really gets the response he likes, he just repeats it and repeats it and repeats it.”

“To judge him as a politician… you’re not going to get it. You’re not going to understand what’s going on here.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reason-trump-runs-america-like-
a-tv-show-wolff/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 26, 2025 5:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I love at the end of 2025 all Democrats have left in their empty quiver is the Epstein files that they hid from the public for 4 years and wanted hidden so badly they murdered Epstein to cover it up.

Good luck. You'll need it.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 26, 2025 5:56 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love at the end of 2025 all Democrats have left in their empty quiver is the Epstein files that they hid from the public for 4 years and wanted hidden so badly they murdered Epstein to cover it up.

Good luck. You'll need it.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

So, Democrats write a story about Trump's mental illness expressed by his excessive TV viewing and 6ixStringJoker, the biggest fucking idiot Trumptard on his block, doesn't understand that Trump is crazy. It figures that the overarticulate Trumptards, such as Trump and 6ix, have no clue what they did wrong in life since adolescence or why they are in trouble now. Is Trump still your only hope, 6ix, you shithead?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, December 27, 2025 6:52 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack

Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.

By Cory Doctorow | Dec 26, 2025 6:30 AM

https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/

In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause.

Luckily for the political fortunes of the world’s leaders, there is a better way to respond to tariffs. Tit-for-tat tariffs are a 19th-century tactic, and we live in a 21st-century world—a world where the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable US companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, all over the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural dais.

In 2026, countries that want to win the trade war have a unique historical possibility: They could repeal their “anticircumvention” laws, which make it illegal—a felony, in many cases—to modify devices and services without permission from their manufacturers. Over the past two decades, the office of the US Trade Representative–which is responsible for developing and coordinating US international trade, commodity, and direct investment policy—has pressured most of the world into adopting these laws, hamstringing foreign startups that might compete with Apple (by providing a jailbreaking kit that installs a third-party app store), or Google (by blocking tracking on Android devices), or Amazon (by converting Kindle and Audible files to formats that work on rival apps), or John Deere (by disabling the systems that block third-party repairs), or the Big Three automakers (by decoding the encrypted error messages mechanics need to service our cars). The rents that these digital locks help American companies extract run to hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. The world’s governments agreed to protect this racket in exchange for tariff-free access to American markets. Now that the US has reneged on its side of the bargain, these laws serve no useful purpose.

US tech giants (and giant US companies that use tech) have used digital locks to amass a vast hoard of ill-gotten wealth. In 2026, the first country bold enough to raid that hoard gets to transform hundreds of billions in US rents into hundreds of millions in domestic profits that launch its domestic tech sector into a stable orbit—and the remaining hundreds of billions will be reaped by all of us, everyone in the world (including Americans who buy gray-market jailbreaking tools from abroad), as a consumer surplus.

In 2026, many countries will respond to tariffs like they were still in the 19th century. But a few countries will have the vision, the boldness, and the political smarts to kick Donald Trump right in the dongle. The country that gets there first will enjoy the same relationship to, say, third-party app stores for games consoles, that Finland enjoyed in relation to mobile phones during the Nokia decade.

There are many countries with the technical nous to pull this off. Obviously, Canada and Mexico have pride of place, since Trump has torn up the USMCA agreement he arm-twisted them into in 2020, and heaped racist rhetoric on Mexico even as he threatened to annex Canada. Speaking of annexation targets with sizable communities of technical experts, the Danes could lead the EU out of the wilderness the bloc bargained its way into when they enacted Article 6 of the Copyright Directive in 2001. Then there's the global south: African tech powerhouses like Nigeria, South American giants like Brazil, and the small, developed Central American states who've seen Trump renege on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), like Costa Rica.

Retaliatory tariffs make consumer goods in your own country more expensive, and to the extent that they punish Americans, they do so indiscriminately, inflicting far more pain on soybean farmers than they do on the CEOs of the tech companies that back Trump.

Repealing anticircumvention law is a targeted strike on America’s most profitable companies, and it will have an especially severe impact on Tesla, whose hyperinflated price-to-earnings ratio reflects investors’ pleasure at the Tesla business model, which involves charging drivers every month for subscription features and software upgrades that expire when a car changes hands. Musk owes his power to the digital locks that keep this business model intact. If it were legal for mechanics all over the world to jailbreak Teslas and unlock all those features for one price, Tesla’s share price would collapse—taking with it the overvalued shares Musk uses to collateralize the loans he took out to buy Twitter and the US presidency.

In 2026, world leaders have a choice—to make things cheaper and better for all of us, or to fight Donald Trump with weapons that were developed in the Age of Sail.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 28, 2025 12:14 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Santa Presidency

Trump is trying to fix the economy by handing out cash.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-cash-tariffs-divide
nds-economy/685336/

President Donald Trump can hardly conceal his disgust for the word affordability, referring to its ascendance in America’s political lexicon as a “hoax,” a “con job,” and a “fake narrative” perpetuated by Democrats. But there’s one sign that he’s treating it like a very real political vulnerability: The former reality-television host is trying to give people cash.

In recent weeks, Trump has been pitching half a dozen schemes to, in the words of White House officials, put money “straight into the pockets of the American people.” After a year in which Americans’ pocketbooks have been walloped by Trump’s tariffs, cuts to the social safety net, and apparent nonchalance in the face of spiking health-care costs, the president is turning to the allure of sweepstakes-style checks from the government to help coax voters out of their financial malaise ahead of next year’s midterm elections. It likely won’t work, economists from across the political spectrum told me; one likened the payments to a bandage over a bullet wound.

Trump has floated a payment of $2,000 to most Americans in the form of a so-called tariff dividend, to be paid out from fees levied on foreign goods. He has offered $12 billion in relief to farmers reeling from the trade war he started. He has suggested paying subsidies “directly to the people” to pay for health insurance. And as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Nancy Youssef reported, Trump used a prime-time national address on December 17 to announce onetime bonus checks for troops in the amount of $1,776. “The checks are already on the way,” Trump said of the payments to 1.4 million service members. (The Pentagon says the money, which is being taken from a fund to improve housing for troops, landed in bank accounts before Christmas.)

Although the proposals each have different designs and purposes, taken together, they represent a concerted effort to neutralize the cost-of-living concerns dominating voters’ minds. Those worries are likely to only increase as Americans contend with rising health-care costs and growing signs of unease in the labor market, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Trump’s proposed payments are ill-suited to deal with those macroeconomic trend lines, he said. “It’s not a solution to anybody’s problem,” he said. “It doesn’t address inflation; it doesn’t address the weak labor market. It doesn’t address the fact that many Americans don’t have any assets and owe a lot on their credit cards.”

As the president’s first year in office comes to a close, the economy is showing signs of significant strain. A delayed jobs report earlier this month showed that the country’s unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6 percent in November, the highest since 2021. Young people and Black Americans are facing especially high rates of unemployment, which some economists see as a warning sign for the broader economy. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned recently of “a labor market that seems to have significant downside risks.” Consumer sentiment has neared record lows in recent months, a somberness that Trump appeared determined to counteract during his rambling speech on December 17, in which he blamed high prices and low wages on former President Joe Biden and shouted a series of misleading statistics about how the economy is great.

Michael Strain, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that the president’s attempts to convince Americans that their financial circumstances are better than they think sound “eerily similar” to the strategy that Biden embraced amid widespread concerns over the cost of living. Trump’s desire to entice voters with onetime payments is unlikely to improve his standing, Strain said. “People don’t like higher prices, and they don’t like higher prices even if their incomes are going up faster than prices,” he said. “And my guess is that people’s dislike of higher prices will not be mitigated by a onetime gift from Uncle Sam.”

The White House did not respond to questions about the president’s plans for any further cash handouts, but a spokesperson disputed the idea that the payouts Trump has proposed so far were part of a broader political strategy to address affordability.

Although Trump has repeatedly described America as “the hottest country anywhere in the world” and declared that a “golden era” of prosperity has dawned, his rosy view is not widely shared by the public. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released earlier this month found that only 36 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest number the president has received on that question during his two terms (57 percent of Americans disapprove). With the midterms less than a year away, voters appear to give Democrats a slight edge over Republicans on the question of whom they trust more to handle the economy. Seventy percent of respondents said the cost of living where they reside is not very affordable or not affordable at all.

It’s little wonder, then, that Trump is repeatedly talking about brighter days ahead and promising Americans cash infusions that he says will allow them to benefit from what he has described as a deluge of dollars flowing into the country from abroad. “We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariff money,” Trump told reporters last month, promising that the $2,000 in “dividends” would be delivered to voters in mid-2026. There are some potential issues. The proposal would probably cost more than the roughly $200 billion that America has collected in tariffs over the past year, and Trump would presumably need congressional approval for the preelection payouts. The president has already made a habit of using the tariff money—much of it paid by American companies and consumers—as a personal reserve fund he can direct as he sees fit. Trump has said the $12 billion his administration is offering to struggling farmers is being sourced from the tariff funds. During the government shutdown in October, the president covered a lapse in funding for a nutrition program supporting women and children by unilaterally tapping tariff revenue. In announcing the $1,776 payment to troops—which he referred to as “a warrior dividend”—Trump said twice that the $2.5 billion program was made possible, in part, “because of tariffs,” though the Pentagon has clarified that the money actually comes from the military-housing stipend, which Congress has already approved.

Several Republicans oppose Trump’s tariffs—and some are privately hoping the Supreme Court will rule them unconstitutional next year. Trump proposed the $2,000 payments shortly after Supreme Court justices expressed skepticism of his power to levy broad tariffs unilaterally.

The White House has not yet provided details on Trump’s plan for the tariff dividend, though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent previously said that such a plan would indeed require legislation from Congress. The proposal has faced a cool reception on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have said that any revenue from tariffs should go toward paying down the nation’s $38 trillion in debt. Trump-administration officials have sought to draw more attention to the tax bill Congress passed over the summer, reminding voters that some of its financial benefits are expected to kick in next year. Speaking at the Treasury Department earlier this month, Bessent touted a program that will offer babies born from 2025 to 2028 an investment fund seeded with a $1,000 grant from the government. Although the money in the accounts cannot be withdrawn until the year a child turns 18, the president’s allies have tried to brand the program as another instance of Trump putting money directly into Americans’ pockets.

The IRS recently revealed the process for establishing the “Trump Accounts,” launching a new website and tax form for parents to claim the money and contribute their own funds beginning in July. “Trump accounts are the president’s gift to the American people,” Bessent said at the Treasury, calling IRS Form 4547, which is named after Trump’s two presidential terms, “the most aptly named tax document of all time.” Administration officials are also trying to pitch the tax law as a more immediate boon to voters struggling with the rising price of groceries, housing, child care, and other expenses. “Next spring is projected to be the largest tax-refund season of all time,” Trump said during his prime-time address.

Provisions of the tax law signed in July were made retroactive to 2025, meaning the sliver of Americans who will benefit from reduced taxes on tipped wages, overtime, and Social Security payments will likely see larger tax refunds when they file in the new year. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on December 11 that Americans could expect an average of about $1,000 in additional tax refunds next year. But unlike Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which included a broad reduction of existing rates across income brackets, the 2025 bill was primarily designed to keep those tax cuts from expiring—meaning that many Americans will not notice as big of a difference in their take-home pay as they did eight years ago. And the wave of company-sponsored employee bonuses that Trump celebrated in 2017, after his original law significantly reduced the corporate tax rate, have not recurred.

Other provisions of the 2025 bill, including a larger deduction for state and local taxes and a new write-off for people who buy American-made vehicles, affect only a relatively small portion of the public, including wealthy people in high-tax states and those financially secure enough to purchase a brand-new car (at an average price now upwards of $50,000). The legislation’s curbs on spending for social programs, by contrast, could be felt broadly among the poorest Americans. Medicaid recipients and food-stamp beneficiaries will face some of the steepest cuts. The bill also did not address the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, which is set to increase premiums for some 22 million Americans next month.

Facing angst from voters and some members of Congress over the fact that the new year will cause health-care costs to double for millions of voters, Trump is again offering cash as a salve. “I want the money to go directly to the people so you can buy your own health care; you’ll get much better health care at a much lower price,” he said in his prime-time address, resurfacing a loose proposal to turn the expiring subsidies into new government-funded health-savings accounts. But the president has not provided much detail about how the proposal would work and has not done much to push Congress to pass a new law before premiums spike. Earlier this month, four moderate Republicans vented their frustration by joining Democrats to back a discharge petition extending the current subsidies for three years. The legislation has a strong chance of passing the House in January, but faces long odds in the Senate, where Republicans have already voted down a similar proposal.

The situation has frustrated voters like Stacy Rye, a 56-year-old real-estate agent in Missoula, Montana, who is staring at a massive increase in premiums next year. Rye told me that on top of the spiking costs for coffee, beef, and other groceries she already deals with, she will have to pay an extra $6,700 next year for health-care premiums. The plan by some Republican lawmakers to offer Americans up to $1,500 for health-savings accounts did not seem like it would help much, she said.

“What am I supposed to do with $1,500 when my premium is $1,300 a month?” she said, adding that Trump’s plan to have consumers haggle with insurance companies and hospitals seemed unworkable. “These are unserious people. I can’t negotiate against a giant company about what my health premiums are going to be.”

The president’s penchant for direct government payments goes back to 2020, when Congress responded to the coronavirus pandemic by passing several pieces of legislation that offered cash to struggling Americans. Trump put his name on the checks—the first of which offered $1,200 per adult—and sent letters to voters reminding them of his role in approving the “Economic Impact Payments.”

But economists later concluded that the flood of money injected into the economy during the pandemic—an approach Biden continued after taking office in 2021—helped worsen the soaring inflation that ultimately eased Trump’s return to the White House.

Now the president is facing the reality that many of his promises to quickly turn the economy around have fallen flat with a growing number of voters. And his well-worn tactic of pitching cash payments to voters at a time of deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of the economy may not be enough to reverse their disillusionment.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 29, 2025 9:40 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why does Trump want war with Venezuela?

Americans deserve to know if move is gambit for something else

Opinion by The Houston Chronicle Editorial Board

Dec 29, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/you-deserve-to-know-why-trump-w
ants-war-with-venezuela-editorial/ar-AA1Tdh5b

https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=542d4792-ce7e-42e2-88e7-11aa17b2a829&share=true

What does “America First” mean? It’s a question that President Donald Trump may have to finally answer in his escalating campaign against Venezuela. The stakes for Americans couldn’t be higher.

Across Trump’s runs for the presidency, he appealed directly to Americans who were tired of high-minded talk of defending the “international order,” nation building, regime change and spreading American values abroad. He tapped into popular discontent about the long, difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He vowed to put America first. But that simple phrase could mean very different things to his supporters.

One group imagined that Trump, who called his 2024 campaign the “peace ticket,” would pull back from conflicts elsewhere — in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea — and focus on problems at home. This group included Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has long warned against what George Washington, in his farewell address, described as the dangers of “foreign entanglements.”

Another group wanted roughly the opposite. They wanted America to use its power more aggressively — without all the talk of our values and principles. This group includes Stephen Miller, the president’s most important advisor, who recently wrote on X that “for years the United States operated as a ‘reverse empire,’” whose military too often “enrich[ed] foreign nations” instead of our own. “All we got in return were migrants,” he claimed.

Never mind the global order we shaped in our own image, placing the United States firmly at the center. The values of liberty and freedom that we helped spread and support. The vast wealth created and accumulated through America’s global dominance.

“No more,” Miller vowed.

Here in Houston, we know that neither camp has it right. From its founding, our city has been bound up in international conflicts. Our political leaders, like President George H.W. Bush and Secretary James Baker, never shied away from our nation’s global aspirations and commitments. Our varied immigrant communities reflect the United States’ long history of foreign intervention. During the Cold War and in the decades since, hundreds of thousands of people fled the resulting violence and repression, often settling in Houston. They ultimately made us stronger and more vibrant.

Yet Miller takes the wrong lesson from this chapter in our history. The Washington Post reports that the deputy White House chief of staff even hopes to use conflict with Caracas as an excuse to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.

Whatever the motivation, one of the biggest military buildups in the western hemisphere since the Cuban Missile Crisis is taking place in the waters around Venezuela. Last week, the U.S. military instituted what Trump is calling a “blockade” of the country’s sanctioned oil tankers. The Port of Galveston may become home to oil tankers seized off the coast of Venezuela. In international law, this is widely understood as an act of war. The administration has repeatedly hinted that something more serious is coming.

The Venezuelan government under Nicolás Maduro is deplorable in many ways. But the American people deserve to hear directly from the president why it is in our interest to meddle so aggressively — and what the goal is. Is there some actual just cause driving the sabre rattling, or is Miller simply so eager for mass deportation that he convinced the rest of the White House to put service members’ lives on the line as part of some grand legal gambit?

If you voted for Trump, you should want to hear that explanation even more. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, misguided though it may have been, came after President George W. Bush made a lengthy, concerted effort to rally public support for the war. It was based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction — claims this editorial board saw as insufficient — but he succeeded.

Trump has barely even tried.

Today, polls show that just about 30% of Americans approve of a campaign against Venezuela, and that number has been dropping. That may be because recently, Americans have too often had to try to find out what their country is doing through contradictory social media posts from members of the administration. Earlier this month, following the imposition of the blockade, Trump gave a primetime address on major broadcast networks in which he was widely expected to address the situation in the Caribbean. He didn’t mention it once.

On Truth Social, however, his preferred social media network, he wrote that Venezuela had stolen our “land” and “oil” — a shift from previous claims about drugs. He seemed to be referring to previous rounds of nationalization in the Venezuelan oil industry, which took place in 1976 and 2007, and wants our military to conduct the equivalent of a smash-and-grab robbery to get it back. Luckily for Trump, those expropriated private companies are in the process of being compensated. No war required.

And anyway, America is hardly in need of more oil, as the collapsing price of West Texas Intermediate shows.

At the moment, it’s hard to say how serious the administration is about beginning a military conflict. The unfortunate fact is that the more ships and more threats we use, the greater the likelihood that a conflict starts. Once American sailors or soldiers die, the thing may take on a life of its own.

America’s war in Vietnam, we should remember, only really took off with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when American ships became frightened of hostile torpedoes that didn’t actually exist, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson the perfect pretext to escalate the conflict. And the blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis almost resulted in a hot war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

There’s also the fact that the Constitution mandates that Congress debate and approve a decision to begin a military conflict. This is a responsibility that Congress has too often tried to duck. Last week, the House failed to pass a narrow measure which would have barred military strikes in Venezuela by a vote of 211 to 213.

Congress should affirmatively debate what is happening in the Caribbean more broadly and make clear its preferences, putting itself on the record. And Texans should ask their candidates for Congress — especially Rep. Wesley Hunt, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary for Senate — what they would support in office.

Perhaps the crisis around Venezuela will pass, as other foreign policy crises have passed in the first and second Trump administration. But we may be muddling through an inflection point. Houston has long been shaped by the geopolitics of oil as well as our deep ties with Latin America. We understand that the foreign entanglements Washington warned against are inevitable in the 21st century, but war should be a last resort.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 29, 2025 9:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love at the end of 2025 all Democrats have left in their empty quiver is the Epstein files that they hid from the public for 4 years and wanted hidden so badly they murdered Epstein to cover it up.

Good luck. You'll need it.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
So, Democrats write a story about Trump's mental illness expressed by his excessive TV viewing and 6ixStringJoker, the biggest fucking idiot Trumptard on his block, doesn't understand that Trump is crazy. It figures that the overarticulate Trumptards, such as Trump and 6ix, have no clue what they did wrong in life since adolescence or why they are in trouble now. Is Trump still your only hope, 6ix, you shithead?

Trump isn't crazy.

You're crazy for continuing to underestimate him after he destroyed your entire party, globalism, the entire Liberal Agenda in the media, illegal immigration and everything else your stupid ass cheerleads everyday.

You're fuckin' done dude.

Nobody will ever listen to you or anybody you read, ever again.

The world you thought you were living in 14 months ago is dead and will never come back.

Pat your stupid ass on the back, retard.

You did that.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 29, 2025 5:52 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Trump isn't crazy.

You're crazy for continuing to underestimate him after he destroyed your entire party, globalism, the entire Liberal Agenda in the media, illegal immigration and everything else your stupid ass cheerleads everyday.

You're fuckin' done dude.

Nobody will ever listen to you or anybody you read, ever again.

The world you thought you were living in 14 months ago is dead and will never come back.

Pat your stupid ass on the back, retard.

You did that.

Incandescent Anger

Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged. What explains the perpetual need for political enemies?

23 December 2025 | By Paul Katsafanas, professor of philosophy at Boston University

https://aeon.co/essays/what-explains-the-perpetual-need-for-political-
enemies

Imagine someone who grows up in a declining rural town. She dreams of escape, fantasising about the vibrant lives she sees portrayed in cities, lives full of culture, opportunity, wealth and success. As the years go on, the dream seems unattainable. Jobs are scarce, advancement elusive, and nothing in her life resembles what she once imagined. Frustrated and unhappy, she feels like a failure in life. But then she encounters grievance-filled populist rhetoric. The people she once admired and envied – the people she now identifies as the urban elite – are cast as the cause of her suffering. They are selfish, out of touch, morally corrupt, and hostile to her way of life. What once seemed like an image of the good life now appears as injustice. And, rather than focusing on specific policy proposals for correcting structural economic injustices, she becomes energised by condemnation and hostility.

Or picture another person, a lonely man who watches others form friendships, build relationships, and move easily through social spaces, while he remains on the margins. He feels isolated, sad, alone. One day he stumbles into a corner of the internet that offers an explanation: the problem isn’t him, it’s the world. Reading incel websites, he comes to believe that feminism, social norms and cultural hypocrisy have made genuine connection impossible for someone like him. In time, he internalises this story. His disappointment becomes a source of pride, a mark of insight. His sadness transforms into anger. He has enemies to rail against and grievances to voice.

These cases differ in an interesting way: the economic case involves a real form of structural injustice, whereas the incel case involves an ideology that invents a grievance. But notice that beyond this difference, there’s a similar emotional arc. A person starts out with a positive vision of the good. But their life is full of hardship, disappointment and despair. Initially, they might blame themselves. And that’s painful. It’s hard to sit in one’s own pain, feeling responsible for it, feeling like a failure. It’s especially hard when you see other people enjoying the life that you wish you had.

In time, these people encounter a narrative that redirects the blame. Their unhappiness isn’t their own fault, it’s the fault of someone else. They are being treated unfairly, unjustly; they are being attacked, oppressed or undermined. This kind of story is seductive. It offers release from feelings of diminished self-worth. It offers a way to deflect pain, assign blame and recast oneself as a victim. It also offers a community of like-minded peers who reinforce this story. What emerges is a kind of negative solidarity: bound together through animosity, they attack or disparage an outgroup. The individual now belongs to a group of people who share outrage and recognise the same enemies. The chaos and turmoil of life is organised into a clear narrative of righteousness: in opposing the enemy, we become good.

The Vietnam War protests and the anti-apartheid movements both involved forms of opposition and grievance, but their antagonism was in the service of positive goals. The movements led by Tucker Carlson, Trump, Orbán and so on – are very different. Their energy, coherence and sense of identity depend on opposition itself. Grievance animates their followers; hostility to enemies becomes central to how they think, feel and see themselves. Without enemies, the movement would unravel.

Much more at https://aeon.co/essays/what-explains-the-perpetual-need-for-political-
enemies

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

YOUR OPTIONS

SHARE THREAD

NEW POSTS SINCE LAST READ

USER	POST DATE
second	12.29 17:52