REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Saturday, May 23, 2026 14:51
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Sunday, May 3, 2026 6:08 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


1000 black children are aborted every single day in America. 473 black children are murdered for every 1,000 that are born. In states such as Mississippi and in Washington D.C., black women account for up to 79% of all baby murders. The baby murder rate among black women is FIVE TIMES HIGHER than that of white baby murderers.

All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.



And... SPOILER ALERT:

You idiots were freaking out about the made-up covid death statistics for years.

Yet, it is quite curious how none of you have spoken up and said anything about the fact that since the lockdowns have ended, there have been more black baby murders in abortion clinics in the US than the entire amount of OLD, FAT, DYING people who had allegedly died of covid.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 8:03 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:

FUCK YOU.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Judge tosses Laura Loomer’s defamation suit against Bill Maher

The conservative activist alleged that Maher defamed her with a joke suggesting she had an affair with President Donald Trump.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/22/judge-tosses-laura-loomer-bil
l-maher-defamation-suit-00887992

Loomer, an influential figure in the MAGA movement, has used her platform since Trump returned to the White House to weed out administration officials she accuses of being insufficiently loyal to the president. She has targeted dozens of staffers across the White House and executive departments, many of whom have been swiftly fired or seen their nominations pulled.

Breaking: Laura Loomer Loses Bill Maher Lawsuit After Her Dad Said She Always "Bragged" About Giving Trump Blow Jobs. A federal judge, a deposition for the ages, an honest father and a roast beef cameo nobody saw coming.

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/breaking-laura-loomer-loses-bill

This week, a federal judge in Florida — a Bill Clinton appointee, which is already a cinematic touch — granted summary judgment to Maher and HBO before the case could even reach a jury. Not “you might lose.” Not “this is shaky.” Summary judgment, which in lawyer-speak means “there is no universe where you win this, please stop.”

Then, of course, the bombshell: Her Dad said he might put her back into involuntary psych hold because the blow job stuff is probably true.

A tearful Jeff Loomer declined to say over the phone whether he was currently considering another involuntary psychiatric hold for his daughter, given her bizarre claim this week that she has been performing oral sex on President Trump, but did not rule it out.

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

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Monday, May 4, 2026 9:06 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S.

The Trump administration falsely claims that boat strikes target fentanyl and have halted 97 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S.

By Nick Turse | May 4, 2026

https://theintercept.com/2026/05/04/trump-boat-strikes-fentanyl-cocain
e-drug-supply/

The Pentagon claims that attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have severely curtailed the import of illegal drugs to the United States. And President Donald Trump says this has saved more than 1 million American lives. Experts call these assertions laughable and reporting by The Intercept shows that claims by the White House and War Department are baseless, phony, or both.

“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”

While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.

The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels attacked by the U.S. are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. “The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean, it’s like floating in bags, it’s all over the place,” he said in October of boats leaving from Venezuela.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and five other government officials briefed on boat strikes told The Intercept that top officials admitted in close-door briefings that the vessels are not transporting fentanyl. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” said Jacobs, who serves the San Diego area. “Representing a border community, I know that 99 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes through legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.”

Fentanyl is generally produced in the United States or Mexico, Baumgartner said. “I have not seen any evidence that fentanyl has ever been smuggled from South America to the United States,” he told The Intercept. “Cartels would not smuggle fentanyl down to South America just to smuggle it back by boat.”

While bales of cocaine float in water, Baumgartner said, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities and would not be seen floating in the aftermath of an airstrike.

Fentanyl or not, Trump has also touted astounding decreases in drug smuggling due to the boat strikes. “Drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent,” Trump said at a January 29 White House briefing. Experts said that Trump’s claim is ridiculous, invented, or involves disingenuous numbers meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Baumgartner noted that even the Pentagon figures put the lie to Trump’s claim. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” he said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

The word “deterrence” has become a popular Pentagon euphemism for the use of lethal strikes, in contrast to previous U.S. government efforts to marshal economic, diplomatic, and military means to convince adversaries to change their ways. “Deterrence has a signaling effect on narco-terrorists, and raises the risks with their movements,” Humire claimed. But last month, for example, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, including five in five days. “That shows that traffickers, even along that high seas route, are not being deterred,” said Isacson.

The amount of cocaine seized by U.S. authorities suggests the strikes have had little impact on the trade. “Really absurdly, there’s been no impact on flows of drugs toward the United States,” said Isacson. While data is limited, figures from Customs and Border Protection show that seizures at U.S. borders and along coasts have increased amid the Trump administration’s airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. “CBP’s cocaine seizures have actually gone slightly up since the boat strikes began. Cocaine seized at all U.S. borders in the seven months before the strikes began was 38,000 pounds. In the seven months since, it’s 44,000 pounds — 6,000 pounds more,” Isacson explained.

The Coast Guard recently announced “record-setting interdictions” of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific under Operation Pacific Viper, indicating that large quantities of the narcotic are still transiting through that maritime corridor. Since last August, that service has seized more than 215,000 pounds of cocaine as part of this operation, Coast Guard spokesperson Brandon Hillard told The Intercept. “Narco-terrorists continue to go to great lengths to traffic illicit narcotics within and out of the Western hemisphere,” he said, highlighting “the seizure of hundreds of tons of cocaine.”

The general stability of the drug’s wholesale price also suggests it remains widely available. “The Coast Guard recently seized 1.2 tons of cocaine and reported a wholesale value of $19.3 million. This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner explained of a seizure announced this month. “This report may be using old pricing information, but I would expect a significant spike in prices with even a 20 percent reduction in the cocaine flow.”

According to the drug-testing company Millennium Health, use of stimulants, including cocaine, is climbing sharply and was detected in urine samples at nearly twice the rate of fentanyl in 2025.

“A 97 percent reduction in cocaine flow would mean that cocaine was now extraordinarily rare in the United States,” said Baumgartner. “The price of cocaine would have skyrocketed. Addicts would be fighting each other over what little cocaine or crack they could find.”

Trump has also advanced absurd statistics about lives saved by attacks on boats. “When you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat,” Trump claimed. This echoed his previous assertion that “every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” Experts say that there is no way of knowing how many lives are saved due to drug interception efforts, but that Trump’s claims are nonetheless untethered from reality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths for the 12-month period ending in November 2025. By Trump’s math, the drugs on the 54 boats would have been responsible for 1,400,000 deaths — 20 times the number of overdose deaths in one year. “The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

While not as egregious as Trump’s claims, Humire also offered up overdose numbers that appeared calculated to deceive. “As early as September 2025, the Administration had also achieved a nearly 20% drop in deadly drug overdoses in the United States compared to the previous year,” said Humire, crediting Operation Southern Spear with a share of the success. Left unsaid is that the first boat strike occurred that September, meaning the strikes would have had little or no impact on the numbers. The Pentagon did not provide any details on the source of Humire’s figures.

“ There is no military solution.”

Experts say Humire’s statistics appear to be rhetorical sleight of hand, since Operation Southern Spear is not actually preventing the flow of fentanyl — the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. Baumgartner called it “misleading” to link Operation Southern Spear to decreases in overall drug overdoses and drug flow because it “only impacts cocaine smuggling, not fentanyl or other drugs.”

Humire claimed Southern Spear and National Defense Areas on the U.S. Southern border “diminished the flow of fentanyl,” telling Congress it is “down 56% since the same period last year.” In actuality, CBP’s seizures of fentanyl at the U.S.–Mexico border have been declining since 2023. Halfway into fiscal year 2026, fentanyl seizures are almost exactly half of the total for 2025.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth also claims that the boat strikes have significantly impacted the drug trade. “Some top cartel drug-traffickers in the @SOUTHCOM AOR have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean,” he wrote in a February post on X. The Pentagon won’t name these “top” traffickers, failing to respond to repeated requests for information from The Intercept.

Lawmakers and other experts say that the Trump administration completely misconstrues the nature of the drug trade. “They have a fundamental misunderstanding that drug trafficking is a business. And that means there is no military solution,” Jacobs told The Intercept.

Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies, echoed this. “They’ve applied a war paradigm to an economic problem, as if there is a command structure of the global drug economy where the person at the top finally says, ‘We’ve had enough. Everyone, stop what you’re doing now. We surrender’ — as if a cartel boss could command users, growers, smugglers, money launderers, and dealers, to all give up. It doesn’t work that way,” he explained. “Even if you did find a case or two of someone deciding to get out of the business, there are an infinite number of replacements willing to step up because that’s where the money is. Smuggling is the business. There’s always going to be a Han Solo.”

“They’ve applied a war paradigm to an economic problem.”

The Trump administration’s killing of civilians on alleged drug boats contrasts with the administration’s ongoing embrace of drug traffickers, drug dealers, and certain cartels, as well as its cuts to drug enforcement efforts. Justice Department records show, for example, that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has dropped by about 6 percent since 2024. And more than 5,000 FBI and DEA agents have been reassigned from combating drug cartels to immigration enforcement, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Trump’s then-Attorney General Pam Bondi also scuttled the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces which allowed the department to coordinate investigations of cartels and transnational criminal networks. And last year, federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades.

To justify January’s U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump administration prosecutors charged him with numerous crimes, including “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy” and “Cocaine Importation Conspiracy.” The Trump administration is now running the country via a puppet regime that includes Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who was indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking, having “partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world, and relied on corrupt officials throughout the region, to distribute tons of cocaine to the United States,” according to the Justice Department.

Trump has also granted clemency to around 100 people accused of drug-related crimes, including kingpins. He gave, for example, a “full and unconditional” pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted in 2024 for using his office to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked: “Why would we pardon this guy then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?”

On Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., questioned Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the boat attacks. “What legal justification could there possibly be that would allow the U.S. military to strike boats in international waters and kill the occupants of those boats without a showing of evidence that there’s narcotics on those boats?” he asked, before being met by a stream of doubletalk about the legality of the attacks. Unable to elicit a straight answer, Kaine responded: “I think there’s a profound mismatch between what is occurring and the underlying assumptions in the legal opinion.”

Military briefers have admitted to members of Congress that they cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute survivors of the boat strikes, leading the U.S. to repatriate, hand off, or leave injured victims to drown. Similarly, those killed — if they are involved in the drug trade — are hardly drug kingpins. An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those killed in U.S. strikes found that while they had been smuggling drugs, they were not “narco-terrorists” or gang leaders but laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, two were low-level criminals, and one was a local crime boss. All were from a desperately poor area, and most were crewing such boats for the first or second time. “These individuals don’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” said one government official of those killed.

“We don’t use missiles to address a public health problem.”

Asked about the disconnect between the Trump administration pardoning drug kingpins and killing low-level persons who may be associated with the trade, Tree said it was par for the course. “The punitive aspect of the drug war has never been about logical consistency,” he said, noting that tobacco will kill close to 500,000 Americans this year, six times the number of overdoses. “Does that mean Trump is going to drone strike the homes of tobacco executives in the U.S.? Can other countries target them since Trump lacks the political will? That would be absurd because we don’t use missiles to address a public health problem.”

“These are visceral knee-jerk responses designed to make politicians appear tough,” Tree said, “but being tough is not the same as being effective.”

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

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 7:00 AM

SECOND

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


The End of America’s Soft Power

The United States has given up on one of its core international strengths.

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

May 4, 2026

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/04/trump-soft-power-usa/?tpcc=recirc
_latest062921

One of the more striking features of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy—not the chosen ends, but its preferred means—is its absolute confidence in America’s hard power and its near-total disdain for what my late colleague Joseph Nye called “soft power.” Nye defined the latter as “the power of attraction,” as a nation’s ability to get others to do what it wanted because it possessed qualities that made others want to emulate it, associate with it, and follow its lead. States with a lot of hard power could compel others through force and intimidation or by offering aid or protection; states with an abundance of soft power enjoyed greater influence because others wanted to be like them, agreed with the principles they stood for, or viewed them as fashionable, successful, and even “hip.”

A good realist like me is hardly going to denigrate the importance of hard power; on the contrary, it’s hard to have lots of soft power without substantial hard power to back it up. But you can have plenty of hard power and little or no soft power, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia has shown. Ideally, a state would like to have a lot of both, because having a lot of soft power means others will be naturally inclined to do what you want and you won’t have to use your hard power very often. Nye believed America’s combination of hard and soft power gave it enormous advantages when dealing with the outside world, which is one of the reasons he was optimistic about America’s future and skeptical of those predicting its decline. Yet by the end of his long career, even he had begun to worry about what was happening to America’s global appeal.

Under Trump 2.0, the belief that hard power is all you need is abundantly apparent. The administration used the threat of tariffs to force trading partners into one-sided economic agreements, and it vows to continue the effort despite the Supreme Court decision that strikes them down. The administration has used military force in more than half a dozen countries and continues to kill alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, even when it doesn’t know who they are, cannot prove all of them are in fact engaged in narcotics trafficking, and admits that these actions will have little or no effect on the availability of illegal drugs. President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused other world leaders of being weak, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he didn’t “have the cards” and should therefore cut a deal with Russia, and imposed a blockade on Cuba intended to further immiserate ordinary Cubans and eventually force its regime to surrender. Last but by no means least, it abandoned diplomacy and launched an unnecessary and unprovoked war against Iran, on the mistaken assumption that the Iranian regime would quickly collapse and yield a government more to our liking.

What is most striking about this fixation with hard power is how little effort is being made to disguise, legitimize, or justify its use. Most countries do nasty things on occasion, and great powers do so more than most, but they usually try to find ways to hide the mailed fist in a velvet glove of normative justification. Not so the Trump administration, which seems positively gleeful whenever it is able to violate some established norm and inflict some pain. When the president threatens to eradicate Iranian civilization, or when the secretary of defense dismisses international law and boasts that U.S. troops will show opponents “no quarter” (which would constitute a war crime), it is clear their goal is to intimidate rather than persuade, to compel rather than attract. Their motto, it seems, is: “Being the strongest means never having to say you’re sorry.”

This veneration of hard power has been accompanied by systematic efforts to undermine the institutions and policies that once made the United States more attractive to others. The U.S. Agency for International Development was abruptly dismantled by Elon Musk and the DOGE effort, endangering the lives of millions of people around the world and making the United States look arbitrary and indifferent. The administration tried to shut down the Voice of America broadcast network, an effort that was blocked in court and by a rare moment of congressional opposition. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has withdrawn the United States from more than 60 international organizations, allowed dozens of diplomatic posts to sit empty, and left the U.S. unrepresented at key international summit meetings. Violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the killing of innocent protesters have exposed an ugly side of America to the rest of the world, and a sustained assault on higher education—previously one of the most visible symbols of American prestige and soft power—has made U.S. colleges and universities less attractive destinations for foreign students. Not only do these actions hit academia’s bottom line (which may be the point), it also means fewer foreign students will be educated in the United States, an experience that usually makes them even more “pro-America” than when they arrived. Put these things together, and you can understand why China’s image around the world is rising while America’s is falling.

I’m hardly the first person to notice the administration’s systemic assault on America’s soft-power advantage; what’s puzzling is why administration officials don’t recognize what’s happening. Do they not understand that overreliance on hard power—and treating the use of military force to hurt other countries not as a rare and regrettable necessity but as an act to be celebrated—is going to make other countries less willing to work with an erratic, vengeful, and potentially threatening America? Haven’t they ever heard the old adage that “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”?

Here’s what I think is going on.

First, from the president on down, the administration’s weltanschauung divides the world into the strong (“winners”) and the weak (“losers”) and views any sort of compromise with weaker parties as a failure. Hence the tendency to preen and posture and adopt a take-no-prisoners attitude toward even the mildest criticism or opposition, not to mention the mindless attacks on staunchly pro-American countries such as Canada or Denmark. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s macho muscle-flexing about the “warrior ethos” and the joys of “lethality,” and White House advisor Stephen Miller’s declaration that the “iron laws” of history justified dominance by the strong, are perhaps the most obvious examples of this perspective, but they are hardly alone in believing that powerful actors can just tell others what to do and expect them to comply. Remember: They were appointed by a president who bragged that being a star made it OK to molest women. In this (im)moral universe, rules are for other people.

Second, although Trump and his followers claim to be intensely patriotic, they don’t seem to like the country they are trying to lead. Consider the MAGA slogan: If you believe it’s necessary to make America great again, you must not think it’s great today. For all their symbolic flag waving, it’s remarkable how few things Trump and his minions like or admire about this country. They don’t like most of the media; they despise most popular entertainers; they loathe Democrats (who are a larger share of the population than Republicans); they don’t like checks and balances or the rule of law; they are suspicious of citizens who weren’t born here (along with some who were); they have little respect for science and think universities are the enemy; and they remain convinced that a shadowy “deep state” still infects the military, the diplomatic corps, and a lot of government agencies. Trump doesn’t even like the White House and wants to remake it into a gaudy imperial monument. Because they believe America is in terrible shape, they may find it hard to imagine that the country’s enduring features might be attractive to others.

Third, Trump and his followers like quick fixes that they can portray as real achievements (e.g., the administration’s bogus peace agreements, interim trade deals, etc.) while eschewing patient, long-term efforts to win support overseas. Trump and company are more interested in cutting deals with other leaders than in nurturing positive ties between peoples, where the benefits accrue gradually and may not be fully realized until after they’ve left office. Who cares about winning over the next generation of foreign students when you will be out of office after 2028?

If this was your world view, then you would also discount the importance of soft power and lean on hard power instead. But Americans should know better. Some of the greatest successes in U.S. foreign-policy history came from working constructively and generously with others—including some former adversaries—and by working to correct some of the less savory aspects of our own society in order to burnish our global image. Examples include the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Civil Rights Movement, the measured promotion of trade liberalization, and the hard-nosed but ultimately peaceful negotiations that ended the Cold War and reunified Germany. By contrast, some of America’s biggest foreign-policy failures (e.g., Vietnam, the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ouster of Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, or the current debacle in Iran) came from thinking that sufficient hard power would guarantee success.

The United States still has many appealing qualities, and foreign governments and citizens have been able to distinguish between America as a country and an ideal and the actions of its worst leaders. But if American political life continues to become coarser and more corrupt, and its hard power is repeatedly misused while its soft power atrophies, keeping those two things separate is going to be a lot more difficult.

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

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 8:07 AM

SECOND

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


If you took all the undocumented people who have illegally voted since 1988, and multiplied it by all of the transgender athletes that played in any college sport in the year 2025, your total would still be 37,720 less than the number of times Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files.

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

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 9:02 AM

SECOND

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


Republicans Make Jaw-Dropping $1 Billion Demand for Trump’s Ballroom

The president has insisted his vanity project would be funded by wealthy donors.

By Ewan Palmer | May 5 2026

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-make-jaw-dropping-1b-demand-
for-donald-trumps-ballroom/

Senate Republicans are seeking $1 billion of taxpayer money to help fund “security adjustments and upgrades” linked to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project.

The proposal was outlined in a reconciliation package focusing on federal law enforcement and border security spending, which was released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday.

The legislation also allows for part of the $1 billion package to be used for security upgrades for the East Wing Modernization Project—also known as Trump’s ballroom project—including “above-ground and below-ground security features.”

The push arrives as Trump and MAGA figures have desperately demanded that the ballroom be allowed to go ahead in the wake of the assassination attempt against the president at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25.

The package does include the caveat that none of the requested funds may be used for “non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project.”

The proposal outlining how to allocate funds to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) through 2029 includes more than $30.7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and nearly $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection, including funding for training and hiring staff.

Trump has suggested that the 90,000-square-foot room—which the East Wing of the White House was demolished to make way for—is necessary, as it would provide greater security.

The 79-year-old has insisted that the project, previously estimated to cost $400 million, will be funded by private donors. The White House also indicated in a July 2025 statement that the Secret Service would provide any “necessary security enhancements and modifications” needed for the ballroom to be used by the president for state dinners, galas, and other glitzy events.

A federal judge had ordered that construction of the ballroom be halted unless it receives approval from Congress, as requested in a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Last month, a U.S. appeals court allowed construction to resume on the ballroom pending the conclusion of the legal challenge.

Trump has bemoaned that the lawsuit forced him to reveal his plans to build a large military base underneath his White House ballroom.

“The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in late March while holding up large placards detailing how the completed ballroom might look.

“The ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under the military, including from drones, and including from any other thing.”

In a statement while releasing the reconciliation bill, Grassley said, “Republicans won’t allow our country to be dragged backward by Democrats’ radical, anti-law enforcement agenda.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families. We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”

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

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Wednesday, May 6, 2026 6:55 AM

SECOND

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


MAGA Will Kill Many Americans
Greed, willful ignorance and mortality
Paul Krugman
May 06, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-will-kill-many-americans

Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration broke with previous policy and approved the sale of blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, dismissing long-standing concerns that making sweet-flavored vapes available will lead to increased smoking, especially among young people. A White House spokesman claimed that this policy U-turn reflected “Gold Standard Science,” but the decision came after Donald Trump — who suddenly became pro-vaping in 2024 after meeting with a “leading vaping lobbyist” — personally put pressure on the FDA commissioner. Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men.

In other news, the New York Times reports that the Trump FDA has been suppressing research that refutes disinformation from anti-vaccine activists:

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes.

Let’s back up for a minute. Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier:

What changed in the 1980s? The obvious answer is politics: The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a sharp U.S. turn to the right. And there is a strong correlation between right-wing politics and increased mortality — stronger than many of the statistical associations that guide public health policy.

You can see this correlation at the state level. Here’s life expectancy by state plotted against Trump’s share of the 2024 vote:

I’ve labeled the 10 most populous states. I’ve also labeled the outliers — red states with relatively high life expectancy, blue states with low life expectancy — to emphasize that these are small states. Taking population sizes into account, the trend line through the data points shows that there is there’s a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level. Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.

What drives this correlation? Part of the answer is that red states have weak social safety nets and are especially unwilling to provide healthcare to vulnerable populations. As I noted in my most recent primer, many red states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would have borne the bulk of the cost. Texas, which likes to boast about its economic success, leads the nation in the share of its children who lack health insurance.

Beyond this, right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic. The chart at the top of this post comes from the redoubtable Charles Gaba, who carefully tracked the association at the county level between political orientation and vaccination, and — because the vaccines worked when people were willing to get them — between politics and death rates. Deaths per capita in America’s reddest counties were almost three times as high as in our bluest counties. Also notice, in the chart comparing America with France, the big drop in US life expectancy during Covid, which had a lot to do with vaccine rejection.

Why is right-wing politics so deadly? Greed and willful ignorance.

The right’s opposition to providing healthcare obviously has a lot to do with greed, with wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.

Greed is also an important factor in the attack on medical science. The best-known example of scientific disinformation promoted by corporate interests is the fossil-fuel-financed attack on climate science, but the template for this attack was the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry’s “merchants of doubt” to discredit evidence that smoking is harmful to your health. The straight line from this campaign to the relaxation of rules on flavored vapes is obvious.

The role of greed in the anti-vaccine movement may be less obvious, but the fact is that quack medicine is big business. Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated.

Which is not to discount the role of willful ignorance driven by ideology. The modern U.S. right is, to a large extent, an alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalists — and the latter are deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.

Now that this alliance is in power, we’re seeing the forces that keep U.S. life expectancy far below that in other rich countries, that cause Texans to die younger than residents of Massachusetts, go into overdrive at a national level.

The consequences will be grim.

We’re already seeing a resurgence of measles as a result of lower vaccination rates. Other infectious diseases will follow. And when — not if — we face another pandemic, there’s every reason to fear the worst.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are set to lose health insurance this year, and millions more as drastic Medicaid cuts kick in. Reproducing a chart from my last primer:

America, then, is on track to experience a large rise in unnecessary deaths. But at least we’ll have mango-flavored vapes.

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

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Thursday, May 7, 2026 8:37 AM

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


Trumptards singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" - Cabaret



Grand Theft Oil Futures
Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
Paul Krugman
May 07, 2026

Under Trump II, corruption runs rampant. Success in business depends not on what you know but on who you know, and there are no rules beyond having — and, obviously, buying — the right connections.

This is bad for everyone who doesn’t have those connections. It’s bad for economic growth. And it undermines the moral basis of the economy and society as a whole. It’s the path of how a country slides into third-world status.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/grand-theft-oil-futures

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

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Saturday, May 9, 2026 7:04 AM

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


ARE YOU SOCIALLY LIBERAL BUT FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE?

Then, with the U.S. deficit projected to hit $2 trillion and Republicans controlling all three branches of government, I would argue that you must be a Democrat.

It was Reagan, Bush 43, and Trump who’ve done the most to get us into this National Debt quicksand.

Mostly, they did it by overdoing tax cuts for those who needed them least.*

It was Bill Clinton who famously left his successor a surplus . . . Barack Obama who left his successor, Trump 1.0, a National Debt shrinking relative to the economy as a whole . . . and Biden who averted a Covid-induced financial collapse / global depression — averting even the widely predicted recession — and handing his successor a growing economy and inflation of just 2.7%.**

Two no-brainers for shrinking the deficit:

(1) Adequately fund the IRS to collect the taxes due.

(2) Close loopholes and raise rates modestly on billionaires and billionheirs — while making it clear every time the subject arises that, in the main, we celebrate their achievements and admire their success, wish them well, appreciate their numerous good works (truly) . . . and don’t blame them a bit for not paying more tax than the tax code requires. It’s just that the tax code has gotten out of whack, and it’s tearing our country apart.

Join the Patriotic Millionaires if you are one (annual income $1M+ or new worth $5M+) . . . or support their proposals if you believe the playing field has been tilted a little too far in their favor.

* The Debt was 30% of GDP at the beginning of the Depression, 41% at the beginning of World War II, 122% in 1946, at the end of the war . . . and then fell gradually back to 30% by 1981 when Reagan began cutting taxes for the rich. Sensibly, at first, but then by too much. Made worse by Bush 43 and now Trump.

** In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Biden overdid the Covid stimulus; but underdoing it, I believe, would have been far worse.

https://andrewtobias.com/126904-2

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

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Saturday, May 9, 2026 7:39 AM

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


This article is 4 months old, but still true:

Big Oil Knows That Trump’s Venezuela Plans Are Delusional

The president’s thinking is stuck in the 1980s.

By Rogé Karma | January 10, 2026, 9:55 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-plan-venezuela-oil-eco
nomic-mistake/685572/

So, about all that Venezuelan oil. Although President Trump has declared that America’s oil companies will soon “go in” to Venezuela and “spend billions of dollars” to rebuild that country’s petroleum industry, the administration is making two huge assumptions. First, that unleashing Venezuelan oil would yield lower energy prices for American consumers and giant profits for American companies. Second, unlike previous administrations, which got bogged down for decades in failed nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump can simply let great American companies do what they do best—drill, baby, drill.

But my conversations with several oil-industry veterans and energy analysts indicate that the administration has the situation precisely backwards: Restoring Venezuela’s oil industry is completely unrealistic in the short term, and might not be in America’s economic and geopolitical interests at all. “Trump seems locked in the world of the 1980s and ’90s, when the U.S. imported most of its oil from a handful of foreign sources,” Arnab Datta, a lawyer who specializes in energy markets, told me. “But today, America is the world’s biggest oil producer. The play for Venezuelan oil doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the new world we’re in.”

Although some oil executives who met with Trump at the White House yesterday expressed a vague interest in doing business in Venezuela, Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods offered a blunt warning about the country. “Today,” he said, “it’s uninvestable.”

The Trump administration is right about one thing: Venezuela has a lot of oil. As recently as the ’90s, it was one of the world’s top producers, pumping out more than 3 million barrels a day. But in the early 2000s, the populist leader Hugo Chávez forced out most Western oil companies, seized their assets, and turned their operations over to the country’s dysfunctional state-owned company. Production has since plunged by more than two-thirds. In this history, the Trump administration sees a golden opportunity. With Maduro, Chávez’s hand-picked successor, out of power, U.S. companies can return and bring hundreds of millions of barrels of new supply to the global market.

Yet expert after expert told me that rebooting the country’s oil industry would require a herculean effort. It would involve training an army of workers with no experience in the industry, rebuilding decrepit processing facilities and miles of crumbling pipelines, and amassing a private security force to protect these investments from cartels and private militias. “I really can’t overstate just how hard this would be to actually pull off,” Ben Nussdorf, who served as a senior adviser for the Department of Energy’s Office of Oil and Natural Gas from 2014 to 2021, told me. “Don’t even think about making a dollar for at least a decade.” According to the most optimistic projections, simply restoring Venezuela’s production to its previous peak would require a decade and $100 billion of investment; more conservative estimates put the numbers closer to 15 years and $200 billion.

In a Truth Social post before the White House meeting yesterday, Trump announced, “At least 100 Billion Dollars will be invested by BIG OIL.” That prediction would be more believable if oil companies could expect a lucrative return on these gargantuan investments. But in inflation-adjusted terms, current oil prices—about $60 a barrel—are historically low. And they are well below the roughly $80-a-barrel cost of extracting and refining Venezuelan oil—much of which is the kind of thick, low-quality petroleum (known within the industry as “heavy sour crude”) that requires extensive processing.

This basic dynamic is unlikely to change anytime soon. The price of oil is widely expected to remain near its current level, and perhaps fall even further, between now and 2030 as demand growth for fossil fuels slows in developed countries and several new oil projects elsewhere come online. “It’s hard to imagine that companies are going to be willing to take such big, risky bets in the current price environment,” Rory Johnston, a veteran oil-market analyst, told me. “It just doesn’t make financial sense.”

The single biggest obstacle to restoring Venezuela’s oil industry is the country’s fragile political situation. Every industry veteran I spoke with emphasized that a stable government is the most fundamental requirement for attracting expensive, multi-decade oil investments. Executives need to feel confident that a country won’t suddenly descend into civil unrest, military conflict, or armed revolution. But at the moment, nobody knows what the political situation will be in Venezuela a week from today, let alone in a year or a decade.

Trump has declared that the United States will “run the country,” which so far has meant issuing commands to Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, backed by the threat of military force. So far, Rodríguez has mostly complied with the Trump administration’s demands, which include turning over up to 50 million existing barrels of oil to the U.S. But how long will the Venezuelan government, military, and population tolerate their country being held hostage by a foreign power? Even though she has complied with most of Trump’s demands, Rodríguez has declared that her country is “ready to defend our natural resources” and “shall never be a colony ever again.” “Venezuela has 120,000 troops and a 300,000-person militia,” an oil-industry lobbyist who requested anonymity to avoid alienating the administration, told me. “Want to run that country forever? It will make Iraq look like a cakewalk.”

A 2024 report by S&P Global ranked Venezuela’s attractiveness for oil investment last out of 111 countries, citing, among other factors, its weak legal protections for companies, confiscatory levels of corporate taxes, and “high levels of corruption.” (Other reports have come to similar conclusions.) Addressing all of these problems sufficiently to unlock Venezuelan oil may require the exact kind of nation-building that Trump and his allies now decry. Even then, companies may not trust the Venezuelan government to protect their interests. “These companies have already been burned investing in Venezuela before,” Johnston told me, referring to Chávez’s 2007 decision to nationalize the country’s oil resources and confiscate the assets of corporations such as Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. “I think they are going to be very hesitant to go back in and do it again.”

Woods told Trump as much. The Exxon Mobil chief said that if an invitation from the Venezuelan government and “appropriate security guarantees” were forthcoming, he was prepared to send a technical team to assess the state of the country’s oil industry. But he also cited his company’s bitter past experience. “We have had our assets seized there twice,” Woods said, “and so you can imagine to reenter a third time would require some pretty significant changes.”

Half a century ago, Trump’s obsession with Venezuelan oil would have made more sense. For much of the late 20th century, the U.S. depended heavily on foreign petroleum, much of which came from the Middle East. The infamous Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s caused oil prices to quadruple, led to long lines at gas stations, and helped trigger a recession. In that environment, the U.S. was desperate for any form of oil production that could ease global prices, and going into Venezuela was a way for American companies to diversify their sourcing.

But since then, the industry has undergone several major changes. Total global oil production has nearly doubled since the 1980s. Given the size of the market, Johnston estimates that restoring Venezuelan oil production back to its 1990s levels would lower global prices by only about $2 to $4 per barrel over a decade, about 5 to 10 cents per gallon of gas at the pump.

Even more important, the composition of global oil production has shifted dramatically. Today, the United States is the single largest oil producer and exports its petroleum all over the globe; Texas alone currently produces nearly 6 million barrels a day, almost twice as much as Venezuela at its peak. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest producer and exports most of its oil to America. Both countries currently sit on untapped reserves, and even larger new reserves have been discovered in U.S.-allied countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Guyana. In this environment, the singular obsession with securing Venezuela’s oil—despite the economic, political, and legal risks—makes little sense. “This isn’t the 1970s anymore,” Jason Bordoff, the director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me. “If the U.S. wants more oil, there is a whole menu of potential places where it can invest, starting right here at home.”

In fact, now that the U.S. is a major oil producer, unlocking a trove of foreign oil could backfire. The current price of oil approximately matches the cost for most American companies to produce a barrel of oil. If the price were to drop significantly, then suddenly many of those companies’ assets would no longer be profitable. Major oil corporations would be forced to scale back investment and shut down their least profitable domestic wells, and many smaller companies would find themselves unable to pay back their loans, prompting a wave of bankruptcies across the sector. “We’re talking about this administration screwing us over again,” a top executive at one of the country’s leading shale groups recently told the Financial Times. “If the US government starts providing guarantees to oil companies to produce or grow oil production in Venezuela I’m going to be?… pissed.”

Although consumers may initially benefit from such a drop in global oil prices, the resulting collapse in American oil production would make future price spikes more likely. “We see this cycle again and again,” Datta, the energy-market lawyer, said. “When oil prices get too low, you get bankruptcies. You get investment drying up. And every time, the sector is less able to respond to higher prices in the future.”

In one sense, the Trump administration is correct to distinguish its intervention from the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. As recently as 2003, you could have at least made a coherent argument that securing the invaded country’s oil reserves would serve the U.S.’s economic interests. That isn’t remotely true today.

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

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Sunday, May 10, 2026 6:22 AM

SECOND

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


What attracts Trumptards to Trump?

Why Do People Embrace Hate? Sartre Has an Answer

A classic essay examines the hidden dynamics behind modern prejudice.

By Livia Gershon | May 8, 2026

https://daily.jstor.org/why-do-people-embrace-hate-sartre-has-an-answe
r/

What makes a person hate a particular group of people and support policies that harm them? Writing in 2020**, comparative literature scholar Judith Greenberg looked at French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” in light of twenty-first-century American politics.

Sartre wrote the essay in 1944, as people around the world were learning the extent of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. He was also grappling with the continuing power of anti-Jewish sentiment in France at the time.

Greenberg takes issue with the way that Sartre understood Jews themselves. Ignoring Jewish religious belief, history, and culture, Sartre equated Jewish identity with legitimate fear of antisemitic violence. He claimed that “it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.”

However, Greenberg notes that Sartre’s real interest wasn’t in Jewish perspectives but in what makes a bigot. In fact, Sartre explicitly wrote that in other contexts the same scapegoating purpose could be served by Black or Asian people. Today, Greenberg writes, we might also substitute immigrants, Muslims, or members of the LGBTQ community.

Sartre viewed antisemitism as a solution for the fundamental human problems of anxiety and alienation. In particular, he focused on how “being-for-others”—existing with the awareness of others’ perceptions—creates tension through the risks of exposing one’s inadequacies. Because of this, anyone may become overwhelmed by a social world with many different perspectives and demands, and by the possibility of getting things wrong.

To Sartre, antisemites are people who suffer from this insecurity and fear and are unwilling to do the work of adapting to cultural change and learning new things. This leaves them vulnerable to propaganda offering simple answers. The antisemite also revels in the release of constraints imposed by living peacefully in society with others and finds comfort in joining crowds of people like themselves.

“When gathered among other like-minded people, they celebrate their resistance to difference and difficulty,” Greenberg writes. “In creating fear for the scapegoat, they displace their existential anxiety and bolster themselves with a false sense of superiority.”

** A Situation of Fear: Revisiting Sartre in Trump’s America
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/studamerjewilite.39.1.0073?mag=wh
y-do-people-embrace-hate-sartre-has-an-answer
“Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear,” says candidate for president Trump during an interview with eminent journalist Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (2018, i).

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

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Sunday, May 10, 2026 7:21 AM

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


Typical for Trump: promise big, take the money, don't deliver on the promise, make excuses, spread confusion and uncertainty

MAGAs Are Fuming After Email Confirms They Will Never Get Their $500 Trump Phones or Deposits Back

By Chelsie Napiza | 10 May 2026, 7:28 AM BST

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-mobile-t1-phone-scandal-1795914

An estimated 590,000 buyers paid a £74 ($100) deposit to secure a Trump phone, collectively handing the venture roughly £43.7 million ($59 million). As of May 2026, not a single confirmed customer has received the device.

. . . Trump Mobile launched on 16 June 2025 at an announcement at Trump Tower, headlined by the president's two eldest sons and timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign launch. The T1 was marketed as a gold-coloured Android handset bearing an American flag on its back and bundled with a monthly service plan at £37.50 ($47.45) per month. Initial delivery was promised for late summer 2025.

That deadline slipped to November 2025, then December, then the first quarter of 2026. A mid-March 2026 T-Mobile carrier certification deadline also passed without resolution. By April 2026, Trump Mobile quietly redesigned its website, removing the release date entirely rather than replacing it with a new one.

NBC News, which placed its own £74 ($100) deposit in August 2025 to track the story, called Trump Mobile's support line five times between September and November 2025 and received inconsistent answers each time. A representative said in October that the phone would ship on 13 November, but it did not.

In January 2026, a call centre operator said the T1 was 'in the final stages of certification and field testing,' with a ship date 'sometime in Q1 2026.' That quarter has now passed. At one point, customer service representatives blamed a 43-day federal government shutdown for the delay, an explanation analysts quickly dismissed as irrelevant to a private-sector hardware company.

Updated Terms Strip Buyers of Guarantees

The clearest signal yet that buyers may never see either a phone or their money came with a revised terms of service published on 6 April 2026. The updated document states explicitly that paying a deposit 'does not constitute a completed purchase and does not create a binding legal contract.' The payment is described as 'a conditional opportunity to buy the device if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it,' with the company retaining all control over whether a phone is produced at all.

The terms confirm that deposits will not accrue interest, are non-transferable and carry no independent cash value. Buyers who wish to cancel must submit a request through customer support before any final sale is completed. If Trump Mobile cancels the project outright, it says it will issue refunds of the original deposit amount. The fine print adds, however, that the company bears no liability for delays caused by 'parts shortages or hold-ups with regulators,' and that buyers waive any right to pursue claims beyond the original deposit figure.

Investigative journalist Joseph Cox of 404 Media, who attempted to place a deposit when pre-orders opened, found the process immediately chaotic. His card was charged the wrong amount, no shipping address was ever collected, and a confirmation email arrived promising delivery notifications that never came. Cox called it 'the worst experience I've ever faced buying a consumer electronic product.' He subsequently reported unauthorised recurring charges being levied against customers' cards.

Android Authority, which placed its own deposit in 2025 and has tracked the story since, wrote in January 2026 that it fully expected to 'never get a phone' and 'never see the $100 deposit again.'
The 'Made in the USA' Claim That Quietly Disappeared

The T1 was sold from day one on the strength of a single, politically loaded promise: it would be built in America. Within days of the June 2025 launch, that language vanished from the Trump Mobile website. 'MADE IN THE USA' became 'American-proud design,' then 'Brought to life right here in the USA,' language that supply chain experts noted was legally and commercially meaningless.
Trump Phone

People are questioning whether the Trump T1 phone is worth the wait.

By February 2026, company executives confirmed to reporters that the T1 would not be manufactured in the United States. Final assembly of roughly the last ten components would take place in Miami, while bulk production would happen overseas. In the meantime, Trump Mobile began selling refurbished iPhones, made in China, and Samsung devices, made by a South Korean company, under the same 'American' branding umbrella.

In January 2026, Senator Elizabeth Warren and ten other Democratic lawmakers wrote formally to the Federal Trade Commission, asking the agency to investigate 'bait-and-switch tactics involving deposits for products never delivered' and to determine whether Trump Mobile's 'Made in the USA' advertising constituted false claims. The letter, co-led by Representative Robert Garcia of California, also asked the FTC to confirm whether the White House had communicated with the agency about the venture. 'The American people deserve to know that consumer protection laws apply equally to all businesses, regardless of political connections,' the lawmakers wrote.

As of May 2026, the FTC has not publicly confirmed whether a formal investigation has been opened. Trump Mobile has not responded to multiple press inquiries. California Governor Gavin Newsom's office weighed in publicly, describing the T1 project as appearing to be 'FRAUD.'

For nearly 600,000 Americans who trusted a brand built on the Trump name, the gold phone has become the latest entry in a long record of ventures that took their money and delivered nothing.

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

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Sunday, May 10, 2026 2:22 PM

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


36 neurologists, forensic psychiatrists and physicians from Harvard, Columbia, Tufts and George Washington just entered a formal statement into the Congressional Record declaring Trump mentally unfit for office. Not a political statement. A medical one. Signed by Nobel laureates. In the official record.

They cited worsening cognition, grandiose delusions, and severely impaired judgment. Then noted he has sole unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons. Let that sentence exist in your brain for a moment. SOLE. UNCHECKED. NUCLEAR. AUTHORITY. 36 doctors said this is the problem.

Here is the Congressional Record: https://www.congress.gov/119/crec/2026/04/30/172/76/CREC-2026-04-30-pt
1-PgS2162.pdf

Trump does not take criticism well. Rather than quote Trump's aggressive gibberish, satirists wrote Trump’s reply because he is easy to imitate and completely off his rocker:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
36 so called DOCTORS who probably went to very BAD medical schools, possibly the worst in history, are saying I am mentally unfit which is TOTALLY FALSE and also VERY UNFAIR!! My brain is PERFECT, possibly the greatest brain ever examined, Doctor Ronny Jackson said my cognitive test results were INCREDIBLE, he was WEEPING, big strong doctor, tears everywhere, never seen numbers like mine!! I know more about nuclear weapons than any of these fake psychiatrists, my uncle taught me NUCLEAR THEORY at MIT, tremendous theory, the best, and I have never once accidentally launched anything EXCEPT tremendous economic growth!! Grandiose DELUSIONS?? I AM ACTUALLY THIS GREAT, not delusional AT ALL, there's a DIFFERENCE, very important distinction that these so called Harvard doctors don't understand!! 59% of Americans think I'm mentally unfit but 59% of Americ also thought Hillary would win and we all know how THAT turned, TREMENDOUSLY!! The 25th Amendment is a DEEP STATE EEP STATE DOCUMENT planted by Soros and also Obama whose birth certificate is STILL missing!! MY BRAIN IS TREMENDOUS AND FULLY FIT!!

https://imgur.com/gallery/59-of-americans-think-hes-mentally-unfit-36-
doctors-just-made-official-congressional-record-codes-havent-fucking-moved-x5OEEo2

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

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Monday, May 11, 2026 10:09 AM

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


Will our Hyper-Gilded Age Usher in Genuine Populism?

The tech bros are worse than the robber barons ever were — and voters are catching on

Paul Krugman | May 11, 2026

Elon Musk is no Andrew Carnegie

America used to be a middle-class society. But income and wealth disparities began rising rapidly during the Reagan years, and by the late 80s many observers began drawing parallels between the new era of inequality and the Gilded Age.

At this point, however, it’s clear that we are not experiencing a mere replay of the reign of the robber barons. We are living through something much worse. The tech bros make the “malefactors of great wealth” called out by Theodore Roosevelt look benign by comparison.

Some widely used measures of inequality suggest that income disparities, which soared in the 1980s and 1990s, have plateaued since then. But the concentration of wealth at the top is continuing to soar. Today’s oligarchs control a huge share of America’s wealth — much larger than their share even at the end of the 1980s:


The growth in wealth concentration is even more extreme if we look at the very, very top. Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on wealth and income inequality, argues that the concentration of wealth is now much higher than it was at the peak of the Gilded Age: https://gzucman.substack.com/p/standing-up-to-trumps-imperial-blackmai
l

Tellingly, unlike the robber barons of yore, many modern plutocrats show little sense of gratitude for their good fortune, little inclination to give back to society by devoting a significant part of their wealth to good works. Forbes reports that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have devoted almost none of their wealth to philanthropy, while Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are only slightly better.

More important than the stinginess of the superrich, however, is the fact that their wealth has brought great political power, arguably more than the robber barons ever possessed — power that they abuse on an epic scale.

Thanks to the Roberts Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling, plutocrats are able to pump vast amounts of money into elections. Here’s a recent headline from the New York Times:
BILLIONAIRE BOOM
The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics
Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections. Wealthy donors are reaping the rewards.

One example of many: Peter Thiel bankrolled J.D. Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign, burying his Democratic populist rival under a flood of PAC money. Without Thiel’s big bucks, J.D. Vance would not now be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

And Elon Musk actually controlled a significant part of U.S. government operations in 2025 — control that he used, among other things, to eviscerate foreign aid. Those aid cuts have already led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, mostly children, with millions more deaths likely to come. https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=interval_m
inutes&order=asc

The big political question going forward is whether there will be a significant backlash against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of mean-spirited men.

I believe that there will be such a backlash, indeed that it is already starting, and that there is a political opening for some genuine populism if politicians have the courage to take a stand.

Polling suggests that an overwhelming majority of Americans — roughly speaking, almost everyone except MAGA Republicans — now consider the gap between rich and poor a major problem:


https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53821-majorities-americans-say-wealt
h-inequality-is-problem-want-government-intervention-january-2-5-2026-economist-yougov-poll

And anger over the Trump administration’s corruption — which isn’t the same as anger over the power of the superrich but overlaps with it — is clearly on the rise, becoming a major issue for the midterms.

What we need to push back against 21st century oligarchy are political figures who won’t let themselves be intimidated by the hysteria the wealthy always exhibit at any hint of an effort to limit their privileges. That hysteria is on full display right now in New York City, where some of the wealthy are crying persecution over a planned tax on expensive pieds-a-terre — apartments owned by nonresidents. It’s even more extreme in California, where a proposal for a one-time wealth tax has led Google’s Sergey Brin to compare the state to Soviet Russia.

What politicians and pundits need to understand is that while the ultrawealthy would like us to believe that concern about their excessive power and privileges is a radical, left-wing, anti-centrist position, it isn’t. It is, in fact, a view shared by a large majority of Americans. And in any case, as G. Elliott Morris has shown, few voters, even those who describe themselves as moderate, really support what pundits call “centrism.”
https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-04-07-only-8-percent-moderates-a
ctually-want-moderation

It’s true that any politician who proposes a pushback against modern American oligarchy will face a tidal wave of lavishly funded venom. But given the realities of who today’s plutocrats are and what they do, there are big opportunities for leaders willing to pull an FDR and declare, “I welcome their hatred.”
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-madison-square-garde
n-new-york-city-1

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

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 8:36 AM

SECOND

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


The Assassin’s Delusion

Violence serves an authoritarian agenda.

By Adam Serwer | May 12, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/assassins-delusion-backfirin
g-violence/687135/

People keep trying to kill the president. The closest call came in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, when Donald Trump (then a candidate) had his head grazed by a bullet. Other apparent attempts include an incident at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, and possibly another that resulted in a Secret Service shooting at Mar-a-Lago in 2026. The latest would-be executioner, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was stopped long before he got anywhere near Trump. Nevertheless, these repeated incidents are disturbing symptoms of an obsession with vigilante violence that has infected the country.

No figure on the left in a position of power comparable to that of the president has called for violence the way that Trump has—but the sentiment that he deserves to be killed is easy to find online. Imagining that assassinating a president would solve any kind of problem is delusional. Presidents are chosen by the electorate; their supporters and their politics do not disappear when they die.

Thinking that you live in an action movie is also delusional. The wannabe assassin at the dinner showed up, allegedly, to kill the most protected man in the world with, The New York Times reported, “a shotgun, a handgun and knives.” In real life, violence is not like in a video game. You do not have a health bar you can refill with pixelated roast turkeys. The man is lucky to be alive, and his chances of success were always near nonexistent.

Thinking that an assassination would advance a political cause is likewise delusional. The only cause these attempted assaults have benefited is Trump’s. His main preoccupation since the dinner has been justifying the illegal construction of his lavish ballroom. But on Thursday, he tried to leverage the horror with which Americans react to political violence to criminalize a political opponent—demanding that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries be prosecuted for “inciting violence.” Trump posted on Truth Social a photo of Jeffries with a sign reading maximum warfare that was meant to promote Democrats’ redistricting success in Virginia. The phrase—certainly extreme—had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, Jeffries said; he chose it because it had originally been used by an anonymous Trump associate who told The New York Times that the White House political strategy was “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” The charge was absurd, but Trump wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

The greatest delusion of all—one shared by both the would-be shooter and the president he targeted—is that violence is an expression of strength, and nonviolence a symptom of weakness. Now, I am not a pacifist. I do not believe that violence is always wrong. And I am not arguing that it is always ineffective. But the Trump administration’s greatest failures have been connected to its obsession with violence, and its opponents’ most dramatic victories have resulted from the organized and courageous use of nonviolence.

The Trump administration scrapped an already existing diplomatic accord with Iran in favor of war, and now finds itself desperately trying to reach an inferior agreement to end that war before the conflict crashes the global economy. Its immigration crackdown, which has killed at least four Americans and produced scenes of brutality associated with dictatorships, has contributed to the president’s plummeting approval ratings and Republicans’ diminishing chances in the midterms. The entire world watched as Trump tried to crush the Twin Cities with an army of masked officers, only to be defeated by ordinary people who loved their neighbors enough to risk their own lives to defend them.

The success of that kind of nonviolent civic resistance is not an anomaly. Around the world and across history, nonviolent campaigns have triumphed against even the most brutal regimes. As the researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan write in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, nonviolent campaigns are more successful than violent ones, and, “once they have succeeded, more likely to establish democratic regimes with a lower probability of a relapse into civil war.” This has proved true in starkly different settings: the Philippines, Ukraine, Brazil.

Even setting aside the obvious moral considerations, sustained political violence requires people with a relatively rare set of traits—the willingness and ability to kill among them—that limit participation. Nonviolent campaigns, by contrast, can draw from all sectors of society: Think of the protesters in Minneapolis, the moms and dads ferrying food to immigrant families in hiding, the observers and “commuters” who tracked ICE officers and tried to draw attention to their actions. Nonviolent methods are also more likely to build broad coalitions and foster high-level defections, because officials do not fear being killed by the opposition. Perhaps more important, the skills and social bonds built through nonviolent struggle are more conducive to the kind of society Trump opponents want to build—a multiracial democracy where people of all backgrounds can thrive.

The Trump administration would have loved to validate its misadventure in Minnesota with scenes of violent protesters. It knew that a violent response would alienate the broader public and consolidate its own power. Trump had already justified deployments of federal agents to cities such as Portland by falsely portraying them as postapocalyptic war zones. Both Trump administration officials and their allies in the right-wing media attempted again and again, against all evidence, to portray Minnesotans as violent. Fox News insisted that Minnesota was home to “revolutionaries” filled with “bloodlust,” while the administration smeared Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two observers killed by immigration agents, as “terrorists.”

Instead, the nonviolent resistance of the Twin Cities forced the Trump administration to back down from an operation that advertised only its own barbarism. Although advocates for nonviolence are often caricatured online (by people on both the left and the right) as cowardly, Good and Pretti were braver than their killers; and resorting to violence is often an expression of the purest cowardice. The resistance imposed political costs that the administration was unwilling to sustain, and two prominent figures associated with the crackdown, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, were forced to step down.

Seeking to provoke violent confrontations to justify greater crackdowns and seizures of power is a long-standing tactic of authoritarian regimes. During the Cold War, supposed Communist plots were used as pretext for the establishment of military dictatorships (which were backed by the United States) all over Latin America. During the Years of Lead in Italy, fascist groups pursued a “strategy of tension” by executing terrorist attacks that they then blamed on the left. The theory was that chaos and the fear of chaos would increase support for an authoritarian government led by the former fascists. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has written, far-left groups engaged in their own campaign of terrorism in the name of ushering in a communist utopia—including the Red Brigades’ assassination of the center-left former Prime Minister Aldo Moro—that shocked Italian society into cracking down on extremists.

The debate over the efficacy of violent and nonviolent tactics is an old one, as alive during the past century as it is today. The story is not quite as neat as we’re often told. Lawmakers who feared that the civil-rights movement might abandon nonviolence, particularly after the “long hot summers” of the 1960s, were willing to deal with Martin Luther King Jr. because they believed that if they didn’t, more radical leaders such as Malcolm X would take his place. King, to be clear, was largely sympathetic to the Black Power movement’s motives, if not its theories. He was also not opposed to using violence in self-defense—his entourage carried firearms—even as he argued for disciplined nonviolence during protests and other public events.

Those arguments ring as true now as they did then. “The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensify the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their prejudices toward Negroes. In the guilt and confusion confronting our society, violence only adds to the chaos. It deepens the brutality of the oppressor and increases the bitterness of the oppressed. Violence is the antithesis of creativity and wholeness. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible,” King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here. “To succeed in a pluralistic society, and an often hostile one at that,” he wrote, Black people would need to form “constructive alliances with the majority group.”

One might object that demanding that activists and protesters remain peaceful in the face of violence wielded by state officials and right-wing groups is a double standard. Well, that’s true. But it’s always been true. That double standard is written into both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents whose references to “insurrections” included slave revolts. Americans have always been more tolerant of state and right-wing-vigilante violence—lynchings, soldiers firing at striking workers, the New York City police riot of 1992, the January 6 insurrection—than of violence from the left. That double standard is part of America’s political topography and cannot be wished or argued away. It can only be outmaneuvered.

Writing of the Black Power movement, King asked: What kind of nation “applauds nonviolence whenever Negroes face white people in the streets of the United States but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same Negroes are sent to the fields of Vietnam”?

Yet that hypocrisy does not change the political landscape. As King noted, “The Negro’s struggle in America is quite different from and more difficult than the struggle for independence. The American Negro will be living tomorrow with the very people against whom he is struggling today. The American Negro is not in a Congo where the Belgians will go back to Belgium after the battle is over, or in an India where the British will go back to England after independence is won.”

Americans are going to have to figure out a way to live with one another. Nonviolence is the only way to create political change without the kind of generational wounds that make tolerance impossible. The alternative offers little more than a lonely and ridiculous death.

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

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 11:01 AM

SECOND

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


The Chinese view Trump as an ‘accelerator of American political decay.’

For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. President Trump’s volatile second term shattered that image.

By Li Yuan | May 12, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/china-trump-xi-decline.htm
l?unlocked_article_code=1.h1A.BSLV.DtxZZRKqANF8&smid=url-share

When President Trump visited China in late 2017, Xi Jinping welcomed him with a grand display of Chinese history and culture: a four-hour private tour of the Forbidden City culminating in a performance by the Peking Opera.

Eight years, a pandemic and two trade wars later, Mr. Trump is returning to Beijing, where the theme of future dominance, not ancient majesty, has filled domestic and international headlines with articles about dancing robots, drone swarms and the quiet hum of electric vehicles.

China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it. Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr. Xi’s worldview centered on “the rise of the East and decline of the West.”

For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who reviled the American system often assumed that it worked. Mr. Trump’s ascent and his volatile second term shattered that image.

In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”

The report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility toward China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that unified the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.

“At this turning point in history,” the authors wrote, “what we hear is the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”

Such language, once confined largely to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political discourse.

Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025, according to a study by two Brookings Institution researchers.

The narrative of American decline did not begin with Mr. Trump. For years, Chinese state media and nationalist pundits have highlighted mass shootings, homelessness, political polarization and economic inequality in the United States as evidence of the failures of Western democracy. More recently, official outlets embraced the viral phrase “kill line,” borrowed from video game culture, to describe what they portrayed as the irreversible downward spiral facing America’s working poor. It’s a familiar tactic of the Communist Party to distract the Chinese public from the country’s own issues.

But Mr. Trump’s return to office and his administration’s erratic decision-making in both domestic and foreign policy have supplied the propaganda machine with plentiful fresh material. Images of immigration raids, the Minneapolis shootings and bitter political infighting circulate widely on Chinese social media alongside triumphant commentary about American dysfunction. What once sounded to many educated Chinese like exaggerated propaganda increasingly feels, to some, observational.

A 31-year-old education consultant in northern China who advises families on overseas study told me that parents who had once aspired to Ivy League degrees for their children now saw America as “too chaotic.” A decade ago, more than 80 percent of his students considered the United States for study abroad, said the consultant, who asked me to use only his family name, Wang, for fear of government retribution. Now, he estimated, the figure has fallen to 45 percent.

Mr. Wang described watching footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and finding himself thinking of the Red Guards that Mao Zedong dispatched to tear apart China’s institutions during the Cultural Revolution. That feeling returned more insistently with the immigration raids and the targeting of perceived enemies during Mr. Trump’s second term.

“The America that represented wealth, freedom and institutional confidence feels like it belonged to a different era,” Mr. Wang said.

Among China’s foreign policy analysts, the conversation has turned to what Beijing can gain from the bilateral relationship, which has become more transactional under Mr. Trump than under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Only China can save Trump,” said Huang Jing, a professor at Shanghai International Studies University, during a media event that was livestreamed in late 2025. With the U.S. midterm elections approaching, he argued, Mr. Trump needed visible wins such as Chinese purchases of American soybeans, corn and natural gas that could play well in swing states.

“Since Trump,” Mr. Huang said at the event, “the United States has become increasingly prone to compromise.”

Wu Xinbo, a leading American studies scholar at Fudan University, offered a similar assessment. If Republicans lose control of the House this fall, he said at the same event, Mr. Trump is likely to pivot toward his foreign policy legacy, creating space for a larger accommodation with Beijing.

China, he said, “should make good use of this opportunity.”

The war in Iran has reinforced the view that China has the upper hand with Mr. Trump. At a conference in late April, Mr. Wu argued that the war reduced Washington’s leverage against China while increasing Beijing’s by consuming American military and diplomatic attention in the Middle East.

The logic helps explain why China’s official language regarding Mr. Trump has often been less hostile than it was regarding Mr. Biden. According to a project by the Tracking People’s Daily newsletter, which used artificial intelligence to analyze nearly 7,000 Chinese official statements since 2021, Mr. Biden was presented as a more systemic threat — so serious that Mr. Xi accused Washington of “encirclement and suppression,” unusually confrontational language for a Chinese leader.

By contrast, the study noted, “Trump’s transactionalism is something Beijing understands and can work with.”

Yet belief in U.S. decline has not translated into aggressive Chinese foreign policy, at least not the kind of overt geopolitical gamble that Russia made before invading Ukraine.

China has become more assertive, pressuring U.S. allies, expanding military activity around Taiwan and restricting rare-earth exports in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs. But even as Beijing advances the idea of the decline of American power, it appears wary of directly confronting what many Chinese analysts describe as a still dangerous superpower.

Two factors play into this circumspection. First, many Chinese strategists believe Beijing can do better by sitting back while the Trump administration fumbles. Second, an unstable and distracted United States may also be a more unpredictable one.

Beijing’s export-dependent economy needs a stable international order to function. An erratic United States threatens that stability in ways a confident, predictable America never did, Zongyuan Zoe Liu, an economist at the Council for Foreign Relations, told me.

Mr. Xi “is getting the United States he always wanted,” she said, “and the America he most feared at the same time.”

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

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Thursday, May 14, 2026 6:48 AM

SECOND

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


[Trump had much to learn in 1991, but he didn't]

Warren Buffett Exposed the Top Reason for Donald Trump’s Business Failures

The contrast between these two men’s approaches to money is not merely a matter of temperament. It reflects fundamentally opposed theories of how wealth is built and sustained.

By Jade Small | May 13, 2026

https://theheartysoul.com/warren-buffett-donald-trump/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/warren-buffett-exposed-the-top
-reason-for-donald-trump-s-business-failures/ar-AA235ja9

Few moments in modern business history are as prescient as a single Q&A session at a Midwestern university in the spring of 1991. A student stood up and posed a deceptively simple question to one of the world’s most respected investors. The answer that came back was brief, calm, and, as history would eventually confirm, almost prophetically accurate. It didn’t make the front pages that day. There were no breaking-news alerts. But the diagnosis delivered in that university lecture hall would prove to be one of the most precise autopsies of a business career ever recorded, delivered while the patient was still operating.

The investor was Warren Buffett. The subject of his analysis was Donald Trump. And the single word at the center of Buffett’s explanation, leverage, would go on to define not just Trump’s early business failures in the 1990s, but a pattern of financial behavior that would later be scrutinized in a New York courtroom three decades later, producing one of the largest civil fraud penalties in American history.

What Buffett said that day was simple enough for a college student to understand. What it revealed about the mechanics of financial failure was something business schools have been teaching ever since.
The 1991 Lecture That Became a Masterclass

Buffett cautioned students to avoid borrowed money during a question-and-answer session at Notre Dame in 1991, using Donald Trump’s troubled casino investments to explain the life lesson.

The question, as posed by the Notre Dame student, was direct: where did Donald Trump go wrong?

Buffett’s answer cut straight to the core. “The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right,” Buffett said. “He basically overpaid for properties, but he got people to lend him the money. He was terrific at borrowing money. If you look at his assets, and what he paid for them, and what he borrowed to get them, there was never any real equity there.”

That final sentence is worth pausing on. Equity, in financial terms, is the difference between what an asset is worth and what is owed on it. It is the genuine ownership stake, the real value that belongs to you after the debts are stripped away. Buffett recounted how Trump made his assets appear to be worth much more than they really were. Trump’s approach was to lock in property loans at prices far higher than their true value, which meant he also incurred significant debt to acquire them in the first place. The assets looked impressive on the surface. The numbers underneath told a different story.

At that 1991 lecture, Buffett estimated Trump owed “perhaps, $3.5 billion now, and, if you had to pick a figure as to the value of the assets, it might be more like $2.5 billion.” Trump was “a billion in the hole,” which, Buffett noted, was actually better than being $100 in the hole. “If you’re $100 in the hole, they come and take the TV set. If you’re a billion in the hole, they say ‘hang in there, Donald.'”
The Warning Buffett Had for Every Investor

What made the lecture memorable was not only Buffett’s dissection of Trump’s finances. It was the broader principle he drew from it. “I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. Donald Trump failed because of leverage. He simply got infatuated with how much money he could borrow, and he did not give enough thought to how much money he could pay back,” Buffett said.

His advice to the students was unambiguous. “You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing. I’ve never borrowed a significant amount of money in my life. Never. Never will. I’ve got no interest in it.”

This wasn’t simply a personal preference. It was a principle embedded deep in Buffett’s entire investment philosophy. In Berkshire Hathaway’s own owner-related business principles, the company states plainly that it uses debt sparingly and will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage its balance sheet. That conservatism has sometimes limited returns. It has also kept Berkshire solvent through every market crisis of the past six decades.

In his 2017 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders, Buffett wrote that the strongest argument he could muster against ever using borrowed money to own stocks was that there is simply no telling how far stocks can fall in a short period. He added that even modest borrowings could be dangerous: “Even if your borrowings are small and your positions aren’t immediately threatened by the plunging market, your mind may well become rattled by scary headlines and breathless commentary. And an unsettled mind will not make good decisions.”

The Taj Mahal: The Clearest Case Study

Of all Trump’s real estate ventures, none illustrated Buffett’s warning more starkly than the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. In 1988, Trump purchased the unfinished Taj Mahal property from Resorts International for $230 million. The casino would eventually cost almost $1 billion by the time it opened in 1990. Trump completed the project using junk bonds, a decision that hurt the company afterward as the gambling industry struggled in a recession and interest rates became unmanageable.

The financing structure was precarious from the start. The Trump Taj Mahal was heavily financed with $675 million in high-interest junk bonds to complete the unfinished casino, and the Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy by 1991. Paying off those high-interest rates swamped the whole project. Junk bonds, formally known as high-yield bonds, are debt instruments issued by borrowers with lower credit ratings, and they carry higher interest rates precisely because the risk of default is elevated. Locking in $675 million at those rates left almost no margin for error.

The casino recorded a $14 million loss in its first three months, and there were days when its bank balance reportedly approached zero. Securities analysts at the time warned that the combination of extravagant opening costs and insufficient operating margins would doom the project. One analyst, Marvin Roffman, publicly predicted failure. Trump was not happy. He faxed a letter to Roffman’s boss demanding the firm dismiss Roffman immediately or issue a public apology. If not, Trump threatened “a major lawsuit against your firm.” Roffman was fired. His prediction, however, proved correct.

The project’s financing included high-yield bond instruments that carried interest costs about 50% higher than Trump had told regulators he would incur. This reliance on expensive junk-bond capital converted what might have been a manageable short-term operating loss into an immediate solvency issue. Within 15 months of opening, the debt structure was untenable, forcing a Chapter 11 filing.

The 1991 Chapter 11 reorganized roughly $675 million of high-yield bond financing, converting creditor claims into a mix of reduced cash obligations, lower interest rates, and equity in the property. In the prepackaged bankruptcy, Trump gave a 50% stake in the business to its bondholders in exchange for lowered interest rates and a longer payoff schedule.

The Taj Mahal was not an isolated incident. Trump Entertainment Resorts and its predecessors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection multiple times, with the Trump Plaza Hotel also filing for bankruptcy around the same time as the Taj Mahal, indicating a recurring theme of financial overextension. By 2004, the parent company Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts had accrued approximately $1.8 billion in debt, prompting another Chapter 11 that restructured corporate borrowing and ownership stakes.

What the Casino Control Commission Found

The problems were well-documented in real time, not just in hindsight. Trump already had other Atlantic City casinos before the Taj Mahal opened, and a report issued by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in August 1990 found they were “generating an insufficient level of cash flow” that was pushing the Trump Organization toward “financial collapse.” By that point, the Trump Organization was approximately $3.4 billion in debt, $832.5 million of which was personally guaranteed by Trump, according to the 1990 Casino Control Commission report.

When the economy and real estate market plummeted in 1990, real estate attorney Alan Pomerantz said Trump owed $4 billion to his debtors, including almost a billion for which he was personally responsible. “I think he borrowed more than most other prudent real estate people,” Pomerantz told CNN.

The banks chose not to push Trump into personal bankruptcy for a specific reason. They decided that Trump should not be allowed to go bust because he was the best salesman to sell off his own properties, and hammered out a five-year plan to allow him to repay his personal debts. His name, even in crisis, had commercial value. That reality kept him afloat when the math alone would not have.
The Fraud Trial: Buffett’s Diagnosis Confirmed in Court

Buffett’s lecture identified a pattern of behavior in 1991. Thirty-three years later, a New York courtroom would attach legal consequences to that same pattern.

Following a three-year investigation, in September 2022 New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump, a number of Trump Organization companies, and senior executives for engaging in years of financial fraud. In September 2023, before the trial began, Justice Engoron issued a ruling granting Attorney General James’ motion for partial summary judgment, finding that Donald Trump and the defendants committed fraud by falsely inflating the value of his assets.

A New York judge ordered the defendants to pay more than $450 million in total, representing $363.8 million in disgorgement and pre-judgment interest. Judge Arthur Engoron delivered the verdict after the trial in New York. Attorney General James’ lawsuit punished Trump, his company and executives, and his two eldest sons, for scheming to dupe banks, insurance providers, and others by inflating the former president’s wealth on financial statements. Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron also barred Trump for three years from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation, or applying for loans from any New York chartered or registered financial institution.

Engoron found that Trump’s inflated wealth claims were critical to his success, affording him lower loan interest rates and allowing him to build projects he wouldn’t have otherwise been able to finish. In effect, the court found that Trump had been borrowing against a fiction, securing cheap credit on the basis of assets that were, by the judge’s determination, systematically overstated.

In February 2024, Engoron concluded that the defendants failed to accept responsibility or to implement internal controls to prevent future submissions of blatantly false financial data to borrow more and at lower rates.

In the decision, Judge Engoron excoriated Trump, saying the president’s credibility was “severely compromised,” that the frauds “shock the conscience,” and that Trump and his co-defendants showed a “complete lack of contrition and remorse” that he said “borders on pathological.”

A significant legal development followed: after the trial that ran from October 2023 to January 2024, an appeals court in August 2025 voided the financial penalty while upholding Trump’s liability. The appeals court confirmed the underlying finding of fraud but ruled the penalty itself was excessive. The legal debate over the amount does not undo the court’s central finding on the facts.

Buffett’s Philosophy vs. Trump’s Strategy: A Structural Contrast

The contrast between these two men’s approaches to money is not merely a matter of temperament. It reflects fundamentally opposed theories of how wealth is built and sustained.

Warren Buffett compounded Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder returns at a compound annual growth rate of 19.8% from 1965 to 2023, compared to a 10.2% rate for the S&P 500 over the same period. That track record was not built on market timing or complex derivatives. It was built on principles rooted in business analysis, patience, and discipline. Central to that discipline is a deep suspicion of debt as a tool for growth.

Buffett is well known for his conservative views on finance. He dislikes leverage and opaque financial structures, and his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, has rarely used excessive leverage or derivatives. His core lesson: leverage magnifies losses as much as gains. When an investment financed with borrowed money goes wrong, the losses are amplified. The lender still gets paid. The borrower absorbs the difference.

Trump’s approach worked in the opposite direction. As Buffett summarized it: “The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right. He basically overpaid for properties, but he got people to lend him the money. He was terrific at borrowing money. If you look at his assets, and what he paid for them, and what he borrowed to get them, there was never any real equity there.”

In his 2017 shareholder letter, Buffett warned that even small leverage and debt can rattle your mind during a market downturn, and an unsettled mind will not make good decisions. He and Charlie Munger built Berkshire with minimal leverage because they refused to risk what they had for what they didn’t need. Most investors only learn this after a downturn amplifies their loss, turning a temporary setback into a permanent one.

As Buffett wrote in that same letter: “When major declines occur, they offer extraordinary opportunities to those who are not handicapped by debt.” Debt, in other words, doesn’t just hurt you when things go wrong. It prevents you from capitalizing when things go right for others.

Why Smart People Go Astray

Buffett raised a question at the end of his 1991 remarks that is still relevant today. “It’s interesting why smart people go astray. That’s one of the most interesting things in business.”

The answer, in Trump’s case, appears rooted in what Buffett identified as an infatuation with the act of borrowing itself. Trump failed because of leverage. He simply got infatuated with how much money he could borrow, and he did not give enough thought to how much money he could pay back. The ability to borrow enormous sums became, for Trump, a goal in its own right, a demonstration of market confidence, a proxy for prestige. The question of what happened after the borrowed money arrived seems to have received less rigorous attention.

Buffett’s first rule of investing is “don’t lose money,” and his second is to “never forget the first rule.” That isn’t a cliché. It is a structural commitment to protecting capital that shapes every decision downstream. Trump’s model, by contrast, required near-perfect outcomes to avoid collapse. When the real estate market turned, when interest rates refused to cooperate, when gambling revenues fell short of forecast levels, there was no buffer. Only debt.

What This Means for You

The Warren Buffett and Trump story is, at its core, a case study in the difference between the appearance of wealth and its substance. Buffett saw the distinction clearly in 1991. The court record, completed across multiple trials and restructurings over three decades, has since filled in the details.

First, borrowed money amplifies both gains and losses in equal measure. The investor who borrows to buy an asset that rises looks like a genius. The same investor who borrows to buy an asset that falls may not survive long enough to try again. The aggregate evidence portrays the Trump Taj Mahal as a heavily leveraged venture whose debt service obligations outstripped early operating cash flow, producing acute liquidity distress and a negotiated Chapter 11 reorganization in 1991. The financing structure created a leverage trap that turned revenue shortfalls into insolvency.

Second, overvaluing assets to secure financing is not just financially dangerous. It carries legal risk. For years, Donald Trump engaged in massive fraud to falsely inflate his net worth and unjustly enrich himself, his family, and his organization, according to the New York Attorney General’s findings. The court’s conclusion was that the fraudulent inflation of asset values was not incidental to Trump’s business model. It was integral to it.

Third, Buffett’s long-term record offers the clearest counterargument available. Greg Abel succeeded Buffett as CEO at the beginning of 2026, inheriting a company built without the shortcuts that leverage promises and rarely delivers. Buffett’s investment success is not built on secret formulas or high-frequency trading. Sustainable wealth is achieved by owning great businesses, not chasing quick gains. Compounding works best when left undisturbed over decades.

For any investor, whether managing a personal portfolio, a real estate purchase, or a business acquisition, the practical implication is the same. Ask not only whether you can borrow the money, but what happens if the investment underperforms. Ask whether there is genuine equity in the deal or merely the appearance of it. Ask whether the debt service is manageable when conditions are bad, not just when they are favorable. These are not abstract questions. They are precisely the ones Buffett was raising in a university lecture hall in 1991, and they are the ones the New York courts were still trying to answer more than three decades later.

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

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Thursday, May 14, 2026 8:20 AM

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


Late-Night Truth Social Bursts Offer a Peek Into Trump’s Mind

WSJ analysis shows president using the platform to spread conspiracies, attacks

By Anthony DeBarros and Annie Linskey

WASHINGTON-Monday was a typical day for President Trump. He took questions in the Oval Office. He met with members of Indiana University’s championship football team. And he had dinner with law-enforcement officers in the White House Rose Garden.

After the sun went down, another familiar ritual began: late-night social-media posting. The president’s Truth Social account posted 55 messages between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m.

The messages, mostly reposts from other accounts, falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, aired frustrations from anonymous social-media users that Democrats hadn’t been indicted by the Justice Department and called for the arrest of Barack Obama for, among other things, a claim that the former president “fabricated” the U.S. finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House.

The activity is emblematic of Trump’s account, which operates as a nearly round-the-clock, high-volume amplification system that blends his own voice with a network of partisan and fringe content.

Since the start of his second term, Trump’s Truth Social account has ballooned to 12.6 million followers, up from about 8.6 million. The president himself—with the help of staffers—has posted at least 8,800 times, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Monday was one of 44 similar spates of a dozen or more Truth Social posts published from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. since Trump returned to the White House. Last Dec. 1, from 8:17 p.m. until just before midnight, the president’s account posted nearly 160 times—more posts than on any other day in his second term.

Trump’s messages that night included reposting an item calling for the deportation of all Somali Americans and reposting a message saying Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Ca.) should be jailed for allegedly having planned the Jan. 6, 2021, attack of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

The bursts of social-media activity feature content from other accounts—including images, videos and text—that appeal to the president and his team. The nighttime missives often include some of the president’s sharpest and most divisive messaging, amplifying conspiracy theories, describing migrants as a threat to the country, threatening to punish his adversaries and mocking his opponents—all while giving a platform to obscure, anonymous accounts.

The account’s most active nights have been driven by posts featuring videos and screengrabs from users on X and other social-media platforms. For example, in the early-morning hours of Jan. 5, days after a successful military operation in Venezuela, Trump’s account posted nearly 90 times in the span of an hour.

The posts included a video clip of Trump saying that Somalia isn’t a nation, “it’s just people walking around killing each other.” Since January 2025, the account has published more than 120 posts critical of that country or its people, including posts disparaging Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat and prominent member of Minnesota’s Somali community.

The posts leave the public with a stew of presidential musings and reposts, many of which are published while people in the U.S. are asleep. Most of the messages get little scrutiny, disappearing into the cascade of posts on his account.

Much more at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-late-night-truth-social-st
orms-that-offer-a-window-into-the-president-s-mind/ar-AA233xYf

https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-truth-social-late-night-posts-167cb
47a

Download today’s Wall Street Journal from https://tinyurl.com/2mpdd47p

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

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Friday, May 15, 2026 11:33 AM

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


The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote

By Helen Lewis | May 14, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-
misogyny/686939/

Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.

When I asked him about this position, Wilson said it wasn’t his top priority—“We have bigger fish to fry”—but something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years’ time. I found this intellectual footsie maddening. “If I said to you, ‘I think all white men should be put in cages—but not now; it’s not my aspiration for now,’?” I suggested, “then you wouldn’t be interested in a single other thing that I had to say at that point.”

Wilson chuckled. “Oh, I know you’d probably have all my attention.”

This is twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.

Wilson believes that women should “not ordinarily” hold political office, and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs. His uncompromising vision for America was once considered marginal, the conservative writer Karen Swallow Prior told me. Since his elevation by Hegseth, however, “no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is fringe anymore.”

Wilson is a prominent voice in what is sometimes called “masculinism”: a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men. His version is religious, influenced by the notion of male “headship” of the family and Saint Paul’s belief that godly women should “be quiet.” There are also plenty of secular masculinists, as well as nominally Muslim ones, such as the streamer Sneako, the self-proclaimed pimp Andrew Tate, and the podcaster Myron Gaines. Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.

But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Wilson’s approach to public life clearly has an element of what professional wrestlers call kayfabe—the winking, performative trollishness that now characterizes the online right. He wants feminists like me to get angry with his most outlandish proposals, making ourselves look like scolds or Chicken Littles in the process. But Wilson and a growing number of powerful allies are sincere in these beliefs, and would want to enact them if given the chance.

One of masculinism’s central claims is that no one is talking about men. So true! Men’s issues are not being discussed in Senator Josh Hawley’s 2023 book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. They aren’t being discussed in Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men. They aren’t being discussed in the panoply of Christian books available on Amazon with titles such as Man for the Job, Masculine Christianity, and It’s Good to Be a Man, or in their secular counterparts, such as Why Women Deserve Less. They aren’t being talked about on social-media feeds (which can be highly segregated by sex) or on some of America’s most popular independent podcasts, such as Modern Wisdom, Huberman Lab, and The Diary of a CEO.

For decades, each feminist advance in American public life has prompted an equally strong backlash. The first wave of women’s-rights activists won suffrage for women, against ferocious and sometimes violent opposition. After the second wave secured Title IX and other legal victories against sex discrimination, Phyllis Schlafly successfully fought back against the full ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. By the identity-obsessed 2010s, the full weight of corporate America had swung behind glib slogans such as “The future is female.” This commercial blitzkrieg inevitably convinced some people that women’s advancement had come at men’s expense. A refrain I kept hearing over the past few years was that boys were being made to feel ashamed of themselves, as if they were stained by some kind of original sin. These years have seen a counterreaction, with the total abandonment of the #MeToo movement, conservative gloating over the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the return of straightforwardly sexist put-downs—“Quiet, piggy”—to public life.

Like most popular movements, masculinism has many entry points, and both defensible and alarming forms. At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn. At the other end of masculinism are a misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs and the longhouse (terms that we’ll come back to) and a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own bodies.

On the internet, masculinism is presented as a rebellion—a transgressive middle finger to the liberal establishment, expressed in all the words a corporate HR department would order you not to say. In the past few years, leaked group chats have shown Young Republicans and college conservatives using sexism, infused with racism, as a bonding mechanism. “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,” read a message in a Telegram thread used by the leaders of Young Republican chapters in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. (Several members of the chat were women.) Richard Hanania, who describes himself as a former white nationalist, calls this kind of in-group signaling “the Based Ritual,” a way for younger MAGA enthusiasts to prove their bona fides to one another.

Among Gen Zers, Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir is Nick Fuentes, who leads a loose collection of trolls known as Groypers. A self-professed Christian nationalist, anti-Semite, and virgin, Fuentes has built a fan base in part by deploying vividly misogynistic language. “Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything,” Fuentes said on a livestream earlier this year. He added: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”

Fuentes’s rhetoric shows how this gendered view of the world can easily be interlaced with other prejudices. Gay men? Effeminate, uninterested in sports, therefore unmanly. Jews? Clever rather than athletic; also unmanly. University lecturers? Pencil-necked postmodernists; also unmanly. Trans people? Inevitably degenerate. Muslims? An invasion force of rapists. Black men? Thugs from whom white women should be protected (if only they would submit to patriarchy). Almost every facet of contemporary online rightism can be refracted through the prism of gender. Multiple people affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the most influential MAGA policy organization, cut ties with the group after its president refused to condemn Fuentes’s anti-Semitism last year. But his view that women belong in forced-breeding camps has produced no such fuss.

Wilson told me he considers this sort of rhetoric unforgivably gauche. “The Bible says that a godly woman is a husband’s crown,” he said. “I’ve never seen a king talk about his crown the way Fuentes talks about women. It’s absurd.” I wanted to ask whether “small-breasted biddies” came from the Gospel of Mark or Luke, but Wilson was on a roll. He thought Fuentes was so extreme that he might even be an undercover federal agent sent to discredit the movement. “He is, as far as I’m concerned, on the other team.”

In theological terms, that might be true. But both men benefit from a shock-and-awe rhetorical strategy. In 2014, it was a minor scandal when the megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll was revealed to be “William Wallace II,” the author of dozens of pages of message-board rants about how America was a “pussified nation” where men are “raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Now such language would barely raise an eyebrow.

Writers who used to hide their masculinist impulses behind a pen name now write and say outrageous things under their real name. Take the manosphere provocateur known as Raw Egg Nationalist, whose handle on X, where he has more than 300,000 followers, is @Babygravy9. He combines lifestyle and nutritional advice—“slonking” raw egg yolks—with hard-right, anti-immigration politics. He writes for Infowars, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s media outlet. He posts about antiwhiteness and has his own line of microplastic-free herbal-tea bags, Kindred Harvest.

In 2024, a left-wing activist group outed him as Charles Cornish-Dale, a religious historian who has studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, and whose Ph.D. thesis was titled Migrations of the Holy: The Devotional Culture of Wimborne Minster, c.1400–1640. When his name became public, Cornish-Dale, now 38, concluded that being doxxed has “only made me stronger and more committed to what I’m doing.”

He did not use a pseudonym for his new book, The Last Men, in which he questions whether it is “possible to be men fully in a liberal democracy.” His political prescriptions, like Wilson’s, might be described as uncompromising. “Someone asked me the other day—I think it was a girl, actually—she was like: ‘So would you take away the vote from women?’” he told me. “I was like, ‘I would take away the vote from the vast majority of men as well.’?”

His book, published by the venerable conservative imprint Regnery, suggests that men with high testosterone levels voted for Trump because high T is correlated with an acceptance of hierarchy, status, and inequality. Liberalism, by contrast, suppresses men’s life force: “Leftists have now openly embraced emasculation and having low testosterone as part of their identity.” He also revisits an argument he first made in an article titled “Ecce Homos,” that the left had robbed straight men of their heroes by recasting them as gay. He wants to reclaim the male bonding of “Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, the Spartan last stand at Thermopylae, cowboys, pirates, gang members.”

The Last Men is a confounding book because it seems equally perturbed by falling birth rates and Brokeback Mountain winning three Oscars. Cornish-Dale identifies potentially worrisome phenomena, such as a reported decline in sperm counts around the world, and gestures toward genuine feelings of ennui experienced by many young American men, who are stuck in unrewarding jobs, searching for greater meaning in their lives. He lays the blame at the feet of the elites: They are keeping you fat; they are unhappy with risk taking and hierarchy; they are calling masculinity toxic.

In conversation, Cornish-Dale is cocky but likable, with a languorous way of speaking that reminded me of Simon Cowell. Our Zoom took place at 6 a.m. his time, and he appeared to be talking to me from his bed, wearing striped pajamas. His current aesthetic is shaved head and swole, though back in 2012, he gave up doing fieldwork in a Buddhist monastery when he was asked to cut off his man bun. “I was going through a hipster phase,” he told me. “They wanted me to wear a robe instead of skinny jeans, and I just wouldn’t do it.”

Cornish-Dale is essentially an influencer—albeit one who knows a lot of $10 words. But masculinism is not merely an outgrowth of the attention economy. Other figures with similar ideas have strong connections to conservative policy circles.

One of these is Scott Yenor, who has declared that modern women are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” Since 2000, Yenor has taught political philosophy at Boise State University, in Idaho, 300 miles south of Douglas Wilson’s stronghold in Moscow. He has also worked with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on rolling back DEI programs, which conservatives see as a de facto racial and gender quota system that is harmful to white men. “The core of what we oppose is ‘anti-discrimination,’?” Yenor wrote in a 2021 email, released to The New York Times under a public-records request.

Yenor now fancies doing a little discrimination of his own. As he wrote in an essay for the Claremont Institute last fall, he believes that the law should change to allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, compensating men more so that their wives do not need to work. (Currently, this would be straightforwardly unconstitutional sex-based discrimination.) In 2021, he argued that colleges should not try to recruit more women to become engineers, but instead should “recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade.”

Like J. D. Vance, he reserves particular scorn for women who do not have children. Heaven help the “childless media scold” or “barren bureaucratic apparatchik”—Yenor’s terms—who decides she would prefer having a career to having babies. His rhetoric is unpleasant and extreme enough that he could not get confirmed to a university board in Florida. As for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment, Yenor told me via email that “when America had household voting or some rough equivalent, it was not a tyranny, the country was well governed, and the family was supported. The country is different today, and the same voting system would be uncongenial to our conditions.” (Although he responded to my question about the Nineteenth Amendment, Yenor did not make time for an interview with me.)

Yenor recently became the chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. A January report from the foundation called for a “culture-wide Manhattan Project” to promote family building through generous tax giveaways to married couples in which one parent is employed. At the same time, abortion, birth control, single-parent benefits, day care, dating apps, and no-fault divorce would be discouraged. The report contains one of the least romantic sentences I have ever read: “Marriage also opens unique retirement planning opportunities.”

All of this is a continuation of themes found in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term. The document, in the words of my colleague David Graham, offers a vision of America where “men are breadwinners and women are mothers.”

Yenor’s suggestion that feminism—with its attendant horrors of work outside the home, birth control, and financial independence—has made women neurotic and dependent on pharmaceuticals is now an article of faith on the right. Anonymous online posters frequently bring up data suggesting that liberal women are most likely to report suffering from anxiety. But to attribute female unhappiness to feminism seems wildly ahistorical. Have these people never read, say, The Feminine Mystique, which exhaustively cataloged the despair of mid-century stay-at-home mothers? (“Many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops,” the author, Betty Friedan, wrote.) Across the manosphere, however, young people are told that before feminism ruined everything, women used to be cherished and pampered by their husbands. Now women are supposedly subsidized by government handouts or earning six figures in pointless “email jobs.” In the masculinist paradigm, every woman does HR for cats and every man is a plumber or merchant seaman.

I asked Wilson about his allies’ nostalgic distortion of history. “Just a simple question,” he responded. “If you went back to 1850 and said: Out of all these women who had to get husbands’ permission to travel, to visit a sick cousin or whatever, how many—take 10,000 of those women—how many of them were on antidepressants? And how many of them today are on antidepressants?”

That wasn’t a fair comparison, I said, because today everyone is on antidepressants. Also, in the 1850s, SSRIs hadn’t been invented. You just got told to take some laudanum and go to the baths.

How popular are masculinist ideas? Last year, research by King’s College London and Ipsos found that Gen Z men in 30 nations were far more likely than male Baby Boomers to say that the fight for women’s equality had gone so far that men were now disadvantaged. They were also more than twice as likely to say that a father who stayed home with his children was “less of a man.” Meanwhile, 83 percent of Republican men younger than 50 think society is too feminized, according to a survey by the conservative Manhattan Institute. Intriguingly, this survey did not replicate the usual trope of working-class men revolting against snooty female elites: It found that “college-educated Republicans are more likely than their non-college counterparts to endorse the view that society has become too feminine.”

The most recent presidential election, pitting Trump against Kamala Harris, was a gift to masculinists. After all, the movement’s villains include female bosses, feminists, and women who don’t bear children—and Harris was the embodiment of all three. The male podcasters who got behind Trump in 2024 now host outright misogynists: Consider the career of the Christian debater Andrew Wilson, who in January appeared on arguably the most popular podcast in America, The Joe Rogan Experience—the manosphere-influencer equivalent of singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

Rogan’s choice of guests is a useful bellwether of the American political mood; he himself drifted from 2020 Bernie bro to 2024 Trump endorser via anti-wokeness, annoyance at COVID lockdowns, and a deep investment in conspiracy theories. He has lately begun to take an interest in Christianity, and has attended a nondenominational church.

Wilson, who appeared on Rogan’s show to promote his online debating courses, originally became famous for appearing repeatedly on Whatever, a dating podcast with 4.6 million YouTube subscribers. The show’s specialty is goading models and OnlyFans girls into delivering ragebait, such as one recent guest’s suggestion that she deserves a millionaire husband. Women are never supposed to win in the Whatever bear pit, but sometimes they do, just by remaining calm while the men try to trip them up.

In one episode, Wilson told a female fellow guest that she was too stupid to understand him, so she raised the fact that Wilson’s wife, Rachel, has children with three different men. He went thermonuclear. “You lick snizz,” he barked. “You’re a fucking dyke. Don’t talk shit about my wife, you stupid bitch.” He added, “I’m better than you.” It was an extraordinary display of uncontrolled aggression. In another clip, he mocked a female guest for being unable to open a pickle jar. She handed it to him, and he failed too. “Your hand greased the whole top of it,” he complained. Wilson has one of the most unpleasant internet personas I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve been on Bluesky. (He did not reply to my request for an interview, which was a relief.)

Unsurprisingly, Wilson treated Rogan, a high-status man, with far more respect than he showed the models of Whatever. In full bro-ing-out mode, he told Rogan that “feminists would immediately stop being feminist if they just had a taste of, like, well, you know, people actually did have to shut themselves up at night from wolves.” (How a chain-smoking middle-aged man who podcasts for a living would fare against a wolf is an open question.) The difference between this Andrew Wilson and the one from Whatever was remarkable—as was the fact that Rogan was prepared to host the benevolent version without any apparent concern for the malevolent one.

Wilson also took the opportunity to plug his wife’s book, Occult Feminism, which argues that feminism is “born of occult belief, because at its core, feminism seeks to make women gods over men, or at the very least to deify women.” I’ve read it (spoiler alert: The suffragists loved séances; Miley Cyrus’s tongue is pagan) and can say that the experience is eerily reminiscent of a friend recounting half a dozen Wikipedia pages that they read while drunk.

Wilson, however, promoted his wife so successfully that a few weeks later, Rachel Wilson made her own appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “I didn’t really have much of an opinion on feminism,” Rogan told her—except that he’d noticed that some feminists hated men. But listening to her book had made him realize that its origins were “bonkers.”

What followed was a greatest hits of anti-feminism, which, as Phyllis Schlafly learned, is the one subject where women’s contributions are always welcome. “Nobody wants to talk about this,” Rachel Wilson told Rogan. “This is the conversation no one’s ready for. Women’s access to higher education is the No. 1 correlate around the world—regardless of economics, race, culture, status, anything—to falling birth rates.”

In fact, observing a link between education and birth rates would be considered utterly banal in policy circles: The United Nations was publishing research on the phenomenon back in the 1990s. But everything in the manosphere has to be presented as allegedly forbidden knowledge. A few weeks later, the podcaster Katie Miller—wife of the Trump White House adviser Stephen—was making the exact same point to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, also with the air of someone breaking a taboo. Feminism was destroying the family, she told Ingraham, because it “pushed women into the workplace.” As the writer Jill Filipovic noted, “These two women are having this conversation at their jobs.”

In fact, the challenge of falling birth rates is so well-known that many countries have implemented pronatalist policies in response: Singapore offers $11,000 “baby bonuses,” while Hungary exempts mothers of three or more children from income taxes. So far, though, none of the carrots has worked. The actually unspeakable bit is whether women’s access to education and the job market should be restricted, in the name of producing more babies and saving civilization. I wish people like Rachel Wilson would just come out and say that they favor this, so we can have a proper argument about it.

Instead they deploy a classic masculinist tactic: Tiptoe up to the edge of a policy that would poll as well as mandatory Ebola, then pirouette away at the last minute. Joel Webbon, a hard-right pastor based in Austin who has built a large social-media following by opposing feminism and the “LGBT Mafia,” is one of those prepared to say openly that he would like to restrict women’s participation in public life. “I know a lot of people, and I’m obviously not going to name them, but a lot of people and names that you would recognize are much further to the right than they are willing to publicly say,” he told me. However, he did not mind their bait-and-switch style, because the left has used it for decades. A small group of people argued that “love is love” to pass gay marriage, “and then, you know, it’s like: Oh, actually, Drag Queen Story Hour.” Masculinists were only turning lefties’ own strategy against them.

Like Douglas Wilson, Webbon is regularly described as a hate preacher; he told me that his services in Austin attract protesters who photograph his congregation. And as with Wilson, and Cornish-Dale, there is an enormous gulf between Webbon’s combative online persona and the person I interviewed. On his podcast, he talks trollishly about “the fake sin of raaaycism,” but one-on-one, he was scrupulously polite, calling me “ma’am” and listening without interruption as I told him that the system he advocates for is closer to Saudi Arabian guardianship than anything from the Christian tradition. He sees his internet presence, he told me, “like the Apostle Paul arguing and lecturing in the hall of Tyrannus,” an important period of evangelism for the early Church. When I checked his X feed later, he was talking about “Jewish sodomites” and reposting an account called @IfindRetards.

The Phyllis Schlafly of today is the writer Helen Andrews, with whom I am sometimes confused by liberals with Helen blindness. In a viral 2025 essay for Compact magazine called “The Great Feminization,” Andrews asked whether greater female participation in the workforce was “a threat to civilization.” (Honestly, women can be so overwrought.)

She was building on an influential thesis on the right known as “the longhouse,” which argues that modern, feminized society resembles the communal living halls of the past, which were dominated by “den mothers” who ruled by passive aggression, offense-taking, and ostracizing their enemies—all classically feminine modes of behavior. The most famous outlining of the longhouse thesis came from a writer calling himself L0m3z in the religious magazine First Things. He declined to cite any specific historical examples and added that one could not really define the longhouse, anyway, because “its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles.” How convenient! Instead, the longhouse was “a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.” Let me shock you: L0m3z was eventually outed as a humanities academic.

Andrews took this thesis further, arguing that “everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” To translate that into English, the claim is that women don’t settle arguments like characters in a Guy Ritchie film, with fisticuffs outside the smoking shed and no hard feelings two hours later. Instead, Andrews writes, they “covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.” Therefore, “all cancellations are feminine.” Again, a quick glance at the history books presents a few challenges: The backstabbing in the Roman Senate was both literal and figurative, and the Vatican has always been a nest of scheming cardinals. And who pressured ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air after Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Brendan Carr, who is Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, and the possessor of a Y chromosome.

Later in the essay, Andrews offered a testable proposition: “If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?” As it happens, the labor economist Revana Sharfuddin has crunched the data on factories in the Second World War—one of the greatest periods of “demographic feminization” in American history—and found no evidence that they became paralyzed by cancel culture and petty HR disputes. When I asked Andrews about this, she noted that wartime automobile and electrical factories were still essentially segregated by sex, and that even so, some managers hired counselors to help them deal with their new workforce. “For what it’s worth, the counterargument that most landed with me was the example of communism,” she wrote in an email. “Women were well represented in medicine and science in the Soviet Bloc, and their society didn’t collapse—well, it did, but probably not because of the women.”

Andrews’s essay comes to the defense of former Harvard President Larry Summers, who resigned under pressure in 2006 after arguing that women might be underrepresented in the hard sciences because of their innate lack of interest in those fields and their inability to perform at the highest levels. It later emerged in the Epstein files that this was a sanitized version of his private view, which was that women have lower IQs than men. (Out of curiosity, I hunted down the diversity stats for 2006, the year Summers resigned. At the time, four-fifths of Harvard’s tenured professors were men.) In retrospect, Summers’s ouster doesn’t look like the product of feminist hysteria; rather, his colleagues may have seen him as an embarrassing liability and seized on the opportunity to offload him.

To my surprise, when I put this to Andrews, she partially agreed. “Saying Larry Summers was fired because of the controversy is like saying America entered World War II because of Pearl Harbor,” she said. “It’s a simplification: good enough for the one-sentence version, but definitely omitting important factors.” In our communication, she was wry and self-deprecating, apologizing for any inconvenience I’d experienced by being mistaken for her—“the bad Helen.” I reflected that this version of Andrews wouldn’t have gone viral in the way that the one warning that working women are a “threat to civilization” did.

On the right, creeping feminization has become an all-purpose explanation for many recent events: Women pity the underdog, pander to self-proclaimed victims, and care about hurt feelings more than the truth—all of which are exploited by undocumented immigrants and violent criminals. In this analysis, Renee Good—the woman shot by an immigration-enforcement officer in Minneapolis—was killed because she’d adopted left-wing values. “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” the right-wing pundit Erick Erickson posted immediately after her death. Women are childlike, naive, immature; they simply do not understand the real world.

Helen Andrews wrote a viral 2025 essay that questioned whether greater female participation in the workforce was a “threat to civilization.”

Many MAGA figures have identified the surfeit of feminine empathy as a political issue. The first episode of Douglas Wilson’s Man Rampant podcast was called “The Sin of Empathy.” The Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad issues regular condemnations of “suicidal empathy” between posts complaining that women “no longer wear any real clothes and instead are always in athleisure.”

This disdain for empathy often leads to the conclusion that women’s political participation is a problem, because the little ladies will insist on voting for the wrong candidates and policies. “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” Peter Thiel, an early advocate for Trump in Silicon Valley, wrote in a 2009 essay for a Cato Institute journal. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In this view, the gender split in American politics—55 percent of men but only 46 percent of women voted for Trump in 2024—is not merely a reflection of differing priorities but a problem to be solved.

At the same time that people like Wilson are saying out loud that they want to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, the suggestion that anyone seriously wants to end female suffrage is often dismissed by mainstream conservatives as lib hysteria. After all, changing the Constitution would require the assent of three-quarters of the 50 states. “I’ll be concerned about the 19th thing the day a single state—just one out of 38—passes a repeal,” Inez Stepman, a former fellow at the Claremont Institute, posted in March. Liberals were “humorlessly chasing fumes of jokes and bar chatter, and dishonestly using it to silence real policy and cultural debate.” Personally, I would feel better about this line of argument had I not sat opposite the conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson in 2018 while he sneered at my suggestion that Trump-appointed justices would overturn Roe v. Wade. Or if the Trump administration had not taken the issue of birthright citizenship all the way to the Supreme Court. Or if Pete Hegseth had not already blocked the promotion of female (and Black) military officers, and frequently expressed his opposition to women serving in combat.

Masculinism is now approaching its imperial-overreach phase, like the Roman empire that many of its leaders so admire. For some of its most ardent adherents, if someone on the left is doing anything, regardless of their sex, it’s feminized and bad. Meanwhile, when Trump sends out a bitchy Truth Social post about a petty grievance, that is a display of manly vigor. Tucker Carlson’s perfectly buoyant coiffure? Rugged—butch, even. Ben Shapiro’s heartwarming enjoyment of musical theater? In the best tradition of the Vikings or Spartans, probably. This reductive view of the world—women things bad, men things good—is the mirror image of the worst excesses of 2010s Tumblr feminism, when introverted teenage girls posted hashtags like #KillAllMen and drank from mugs that read MALE TEARS.

In March, the anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo had to fend off a horde of anonymous right-wing posters claiming, apparently seriously, that white men “are very easily the most oppressed group in history.” When he described this view as “brain damaged” and invoked a little-known American phenomenon called slavery, he was besieged with complaints.

For me, this episode gets to the core of MAGA masculinism. Which of its faces is the real one—the conservative think-tankers seeking to undo antidiscrimination laws, or the soap opera of influencers railing against “small-breasted biddies” and AWFULs, wallowing in self-pity, and labeling everything they dislike as feminine?

But of course, the sober thinkers and the shock troops feed off each other. Sometimes, as with Wilson, they coexist in a single person. This is a movement with real policy goals: the rollback of no-fault divorce. Tax breaks to reward male breadwinners and female homemakers. An end to anything with a whiff of DEI, even leadership programs for women in the military, like one cut by Hegseth. A return to the workplace culture of the 1970s, where sexual harassment was normalized. An open preference for male employees in hiring, promotion, and pay awards—in other words, affirmative action for men.

Yet masculinism also functions as a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo—whatever that currently is. Masculinism is both serious and silly, sometimes camp and sometimes chilling, an attention-grabbing performance and a genuine proposition. No wonder it has become the cornerstone of Trumpism.

This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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

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Friday, May 15, 2026 1:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Women voting ruined America, so there is that.

If women didn't vote, there wouldn't even be a Democratic Party.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, May 16, 2026 2:18 PM

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Women voting ruined America, so there is that.

If women didn't vote, there wouldn't even be a Democratic Party.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
You Trumptards are silly. At least half of the total brain power and intelligence in America is in women. Male Trumptards contribute little, except abundant stupidity, arrogance, and problems. I have seen that for decades about the kind of people who vote for Republicans. Trump voters are just greedy, grasping, dishonest, and plagued with mental problems.

By the way, the best talent is moving back to China, thanks to Trumptards. If the Trumptards had been in ascendance before WWII, all the talented scientists would still have been living in Europe and the US would not have been able to build the A-bomb, for one high-tech example. The burst of scientific enquiry after the War ended would have never occurred. The Apollo Moon landing? It would have failed. Couldn't have designed the rockets with Trumptards as the engineers.

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

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Saturday, May 16, 2026 2:19 PM

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


China’s Top Tech Talent Is Heading Back Home

The Wall Street Journal | May 16, 2026

Those who return after working here, called 'sea turtles’ are fueling efforts to take on Silicon Valley

- Hannah Miao and Jon Emont

https://www.magzter.com/stories/newspaper/The-Wall-Street-Journal/CHIN
AS-TOP-TECH-TALENT-IS-HEADING-BACK-HOME

By Hannah Miao and Jon Emont

When Meta Platforms said in April that it would lay off 10% of its staff, Allen Sun quickly booked a trip to Menlo Park, Calif.

It was a prime opportunity. Sun, a Beijing-based headhunter for some of the biggest Chinese tech companies, works to lure China-born talent back home, targeting people at U.S.-based companies such as Meta, Google, Anthropic and Amazon. Some clients are authorizing him to promise salaries that match or exceed the workers’ Silicon Valley pay—a windfall given China’s lower cost of living.
“The compensation is very competitive,” said Sun.

For decades, making it in the U.S. was the ultimate sign of success for China’s best and brightest. Now, many of them are coming home—and the reverse brain drain is fueling Beijing’s efforts to edge out the U.S. in artificial intelligence, robotics and medical research.

There is an unprecedented jostling for AI talent among the richest companies and global superpowers that has skyrocketed tech researchers to NBA and Hollywood levels of wealth and spurred a cutthroat recruitment blitz across the industry. It’s not just American CEOs attempting to entice researchers with lavish job offers. (Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was dangling $100 million pay packages last year.)

Recent examples of high-profile Al talent poached by top Chinese tech companies include Wu Yon-ghui, a former vice president of research at Google who helped develop Gemini and now heads research for TikTok-parent Byte-Dance’s AI arm, and Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher who was named Tencent Holdings’ chief AI scientist.

From ‘Seattle Freeze’ to Beijing

There’s a longstanding name within China for those going back home—“sea turtles,” a pun on the Mandarin term for overseas returnees, haigui, that also evokes female sea turtles’ instinct to return to their natal beach after years of migrating around the world’s oceans.

But the trend as it relates to top tech talent today has implications for American economic competitiveness, both now and in the future. The number of recent Chinese graduates returning home to seek jobs grew 12% in 2025 from the previous year, and the figure has more than doubled since 2018, according to a report by Chinese recruiting platform Zhaopin.

Once known more as a technology copycat than as an innovator, China now offers returnees a chance to work in cutting-edge industries. National and local governments dangle perks such as housing subsidies and startup funding. The shift also comes as some Chinese feel less welcome in the U.S. owing to worsening U.S.-China relations and tightening immigration policy. Returnees said they felt it was harder to advance to leadership roles in the workplace being Chinese in the U.S. In some cases, returnees were motivated by the promise of more professional freedom.

Zhang Kai is a star researcher who works to visualize the inside of cells down to the near-atomic level, an area of high interest for pharmaceutical companies. Earlier this year, he left a professorship at Yale for the state-run University of Science and Technology of China.

Zhang said it was becoming harder for Chinese researchers to lead ambitious projects in the U.S., and that the political environment was getting tougher, citing the example of a Chinese Ph.D. student working with him who was restricted from entering the country during the first Trump administration.

“Invisible restrictions exist,” he said in an email. “While I don’t intend to frame this as a lofty nationalist gesture, Trump’s actions over the years actually made me ‘more patriotic.’ ”

Jeff Li felt pigeonholed in his job in the U.S. After graduating from New York University with a master’s degree in computer science, he had to work in the field in order to stay in the States. He felt like U.S. companies tended to hire Chinese workers for engineering jobs, but he was interested in
exploring a role in product management.

He landed a job at Microsoft and moved to the Seattle area in 2018. It was his first time living in the suburbs, where it was pitch-black at night and he needed to drive 15 minutes to buy anything. He felt the “Seattle freeze”—what West Coasters refer to as the city’s reputation for being a difficult place to make friends. As an H-1B visa holder, he felt nervous leaving the U.S., fearing he would not be able to get back in.

He decided to move back to Beijing at the end of 2021 to work at a leading Chinese tech company. Going home had its own downsides. The country is notorious for its “996” work culture: working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. He had to get used to living in a big city again, where strangers pressed up against him on a crowded subway.

But his quality of life felt better. He could order food delivery from an app anytime, anywhere. He didn’t have to worry about renewing his visa.

Now, Li is building AI agent products for a startup. His friends back in the U.S. have gotten green cards and bought houses, but don’t have much flexibility in their career paths. Li said he felt more unrestrained.

“Even though the U.S. has many broader advantages, as a Chinese person, China is my home turf,” he said.

Tax Breaks and Free Office Space

Many Chinese professionals continue to build careers in the U.S. Four out of five among 6,700 Chinese nationals receiving a research doctorate from a U.S. academic institution from July 2023 to June 2024 indicated an intention to stay in the U.S. rather than return home, according to the latest annual census of the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

And U.S. companies still generally offer much higher pay and better work-life balance than Chinese competitors. America remains the world leader in AI models and other cutting-edge technologies. Many Chinese professionals have settled down in the U.S. and are raising families, making it hard to uproot their lives.

But the Chinese government is working to ease homecoming pains.

Shenzhen, a tech hub in southern China, is advertising tax breaks and the equivalent of more than $700,000 in subsidies for qualified overseas returnees. Shanghai’s Pudong District is offering up to roughly $14.7 million in project funding for top young talent in science and technology.

Another district in Shanghai has a program targeting Ph.D. holders who have held senior positions in companies abroad, as well as people under 40 with experience overseas. Those who make the cut are eligible for a living allowance of up to nearly $300,000 and startups can receive free or low-cost office space.

Some recruits help Chinese companies expand to other countries, using their knowledge of languages and local work cultures, said Zak Dychtwald. who runs Bridgeworks Global, a Shanghai-based consulting firm that works with multinational companies. “Chinese companies need people who understand global markets and understand global management,” Dychtwald said.

Recruiting efforts extend to students who have not yet embarked on a career path. China’s Education Ministry in 2022 established a recruitment platform for students returning from abroad, and leading tech companies such as Huawei and Tencent have early-career programs for overseas students. Last year, 535,600 students returned to China from overseas, up from 415,600 in 2023, according to China’s Education Ministry. A LinkedIn survey of more than 1,000 overseas Chinese Ph.D. students last year found that 59% planned to return to China after graduating, up from 38% in 2024.

The number of people from China living in the U.S. on visas for purposes such as education and work, including H-lBs, has fallen each year from fiscal year 2022 to 2024, according to Homeland Security Department data.

In part, that is because H-1B visas, the main pathway for highly skilled foreign professionals to work in the U.S., have become a political flashpoint in the U.S., especially within the MAGA movement, with critics saying the program allows tech companies to hire foreign workers for cheap instead of Americans. The Trump administration has added a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas and is proposing higher wage requirements.

For those Chinese who go back home, the reason isn’t always politics or money. One bioengineering Ph.D. graduate worried about gun violence. An AI scholar felt he was discriminated against due to his race, while he was shut out of programs for underrepresented minorities. A pharmaceutical researcher said he wanted to be closer to his aging parents.

Lu Wuyuan, a scientist, moved to Shanghai in 2020 after three decades in the U.S. When he first arrived in 1990 to study at Purdue University, he felt like he was in a movie. Driving along 1-65 from Indianapolis to West Lafayette, he passed by idyllic farmland and gentle rolling hills.

He became an American citizen and raised two sons in the U.S. As a tenured professor at the University of Maryland, he studied cancer, HIV and other infectious diseases.

Then, under the first Trump administration, the U.S. government began scrutinizing academics’ ties with China, concerned about national security. In 2018, Lu became one of hundreds of scientists investigated by the National Institutes of Health over alleged undisclosed ties with China. Lu said Maryland knew about and encouraged his collaborations with Chinese universities, so he thought the NIH inquiry would pass quickly.

The investigation dragged on. By 2020, Lu had enough. He quit and moved to Shanghai to join the faculty of Fudan University, a prestigious school that had been trying to recruit him for years. At Fudan, Lu has continued to research infectious diseases, recently patenting technology for an improved Covid-19 antiviral, which was licensed by an American company.

“When China is ascending to become a global power, that makes your choice much easier,” he said.

—Chuqin Jiang contributed to this article.

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

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Sunday, May 17, 2026 5:42 AM

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


Trump’s brazen plan for a $1.7 billion slush fund

Trump will reportedly drop his IRS lawsuit — for a price.

By Cameron Peters
May 15, 2026, 5:05 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/488910/trump-irs-lawsu
it-tax-returns-weaponization-compensation-fund

Earlier this year, Trump, along with two of his children and his family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns to media outlets. Now, he reportedly plans to drop the case — in exchange for a $1.7 billion fund he can dole out to his allies through a commission under his control, according to ABC News. https://abcnews.com/US/trump-poised-drop-irs-suit-launch-17b-weaponiza
tion/story?id=132962661

How is that supposed to work? The $1.7 billion would take the form of a so-called “weaponization” fund, ABC reports, that could be paid out to address the grievances of Trump allies who believe they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration — including those prosecuted in connection with the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Trump himself reportedly would not be eligible to make a claim against the fund, but “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims,” per ABC.

What’s the context? The settlement, which could be finalized “in the coming days,” looks like an end-run around judicial skepticism over Trump’s suit, which pits a sitting president against the government he leads.

As the New York Times reported earlier this month, the judge overseeing the case has suggested that the case may be moot because the parties — Trump and the other plaintiffs vs. the IRS and the Justice Department — are not really in opposition (Trump is, again, the DOJ’s boss). Both sides are supposed to defend their position in briefs due this coming Wednesday, which a settlement could allow them to avoid. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/trump-suit-irs.html

What’s the big picture? Two major focuses of Trump II have been getting even for perceived wrongs against him and his movement, and finding ways to enrich himself and his allies. The reported settlement, if it goes through, would accomplish both in one fell swoop.

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

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Sunday, May 17, 2026 5:54 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Maybe your party shouldn't have done a bunch of evil shit.

And nobody is going to notice whatever it is you're bitching about today because by this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about.

Just shut the fuck up already dude.

You lost the war.

Everyone is exhausted and bored and nobody cares anymore.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, May 18, 2026 8:25 AM

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And nobody is going to notice whatever it is you're bitching about today because by this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about.

Just shut the fuck up already dude.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, maybe you should read your own words? "By this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about" means 50 more Trump goofs.

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

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Monday, May 18, 2026 8:26 AM

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


When the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations met in Beijing, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping spoke about the lessons of history:
Quote:
Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?
The Thucydides trap refers to the theory, originally propounded by the Greek historian for the war between Athens and Sparta, that conflicts erupt when a declining power is confronted by a rising rival.

So Xi was implicitly insulting the United States, portraying it as a nation in decline. Someone presumably explained this to Trump, who went on Truth Social to declare that Xi was talking about U.S. decline under “Sleepy Joe Biden,” not now that he has made us “the hottest Nation anywhere in the world.”

In reality, the widespread Chinese view that America is in decline has only grown stronger under Trump II. In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”

And that was before the debacle in Iran.

The fact sheet released by the White House after his trip to Beijing proclaimed that President Trump negotiated a sweeping package of commitments that will drive high-paying American jobs and open new markets for U.S. goods.

The main component of this package was a Chinese commitment to buy $17 billion a year of U.S. agricultural products, on top of an earlier commitment to buy more soybeans. Actually, I should put “commitment” in scare quotes: China made similar promises during Trump I, and completely failed to deliver. But suppose that the Chinese actually come through this time. How big is this “sweeping package”?

It is an extra $17 billion for beans compared to the US exporting goods worth $2,197.5 billion in 2025. It is a small hill of beans.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-thucydides

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

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Monday, May 18, 2026 9:14 AM

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


China calls Beijing summit deals with Trump "preliminary," undercutting White House claims of concrete wins on tariffs, agriculture, and 200 Boeing aircraft. (The Arizona Star)

https://tucson.com/news/nation-world/business/article_489ec934-2cfb-58
49-a511-0e63be1af7ad.html

Trump said China agreed to buy 200 Boeing aircraft, but analysts questioned the lack of a timeline.

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

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Tuesday, May 19, 2026 1:14 PM

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


Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Is Worse Than Stealing

Recasting the January 6 insurrection as the work of heroic patriots remains the president’s highest priority.

By Jonathan Chait | May 19, 2026, 9:13 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/trump-anti-weaponization-fun
d-january-6/687215/

Among the very first things Donald Trump did upon assuming the powers of the presidency for the second time was commute the sentences of, and grant pardons to, everybody involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Republican allies expressed moderate disappointment but vowed to move past this ugly blemish. Senator Susan Collins called it a “terrible day for our Justice Department.” Senator Tommy Tuberville admitted, “It’s a hard one, because we work with them up here,” referring to Capitol Police who were viciously beaten by Trump’s allies. Tuberville concluded, “At the end of the day, we’ve got to get Jan. 6 behind us.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that Republicans were “not looking backwards; we’re looking forward.”

It was not, however, just one terrible day. Trump’s loyalty to his most violent and criminal supporters was a signal of his highest priority and has been a reliable guide to his decisions ever since. The impulse to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021, appears to be the inspiration even for the establishment of a $1.8 billion Treasury Department slush fund for victims of so-called weaponization of government.

Last week, when the administration floated the notion of disbursing payments to alleged victims of government weaponization, cynics assumed that Trump meant to divert the money to himself. But this assessment may have turned out to be too naive. Trump already has ample ways to profit from office, including from stock trading with the benefit of inside knowledge and by accepting gifts from client states. The Justice Department told reporters yesterday that Trump, his sons, and his family business would not receive payments from the fund. The recipients will almost surely be insurrectionists and other allies.

How, exactly, can Trump hand out taxpayer dollars at his whim? The putative mechanism is a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. In 2020, an IRS contractor leaked a few years of Trump’s tax records. (Before Trump, major presidential candidates had for decades voluntarily released their returns, an essential step in demonstrating that they had no conflicts of interest.)

The contractor was caught and sent to prison. Trump nevertheless sued for the offense of being subjected to a portion of the scrutiny his fellow candidates have voluntarily undergone. Because Trump runs the IRS, it is no longer in a position to place any limits on his demands. He has already exploited the loophole of suing his own government to pay a series of allies investigated for or convicted of committing crimes out of loyalty to him. The recipients include the family of Ashli Babbitt, an insurrectionist who was shot and killed on January 6 while smashing her way into a corridor behind which members of Congress had taken shelter from the mob.

Trump’s Justice Department describes the forthcoming payouts as a “systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The process is, in fact, the opposite of systemic. It is designed to be controlled personally by Trump and sheltered from any judicial scrutiny.

If the government were actually compensating victims of lawfare, it would direct payments to James Comey, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, and other targets of Trump’s vindictive prosecutions. Trump has described his actions as turnabout—“I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”—which, given that he has called his own prosecutions political targeting, is tantamount to confessing that he is targeting his enemies.

But, of course, nobody entertains for a moment the thought that the fund could conceivably reward an actual victim of weaponization. To ensure that it will never be used for a deserving victim, the fund is scheduled for termination on December 15, 2028.

Asked by a reporter yesterday whether people who committed violence against police officers should receive payments, Trump replied, “It’ll all be dependent on a committee. A committee’s being set up of very talented people, very highly respected people.” The committee is being selected entirely by Trump, who retains the power to replace any member who displeases him, and who in any case has argued in multiple contexts that he is entitled to exert full control over any decision by the executive branch.

The most dystopian explanation for this scheme comes from sources who sketched it out to ABC News last week. As ABC’s reporters characterized it, the sources described the fund as “a hybrid between a victim compensation fund—similar to the civil claims process that followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill—and a truth-and-reconciliation-style commission.”

Trump’s commission is deviously inverting the original and most famous truth-and-reconciliation commission. South Africa established its commission to document the crimes committed under its apartheid regime. Rather than uncovering the truth to facilitate the state’s transformation from authoritarianism into democracy, Trump is doing the reverse, inscribing his lies into the historical record in an effort to undermine democracy.

It is common to describe Trump’s steps as vengeance, but he has more in mind than merely settling old scores. This obsession drove Trump to support a successful primary challenge to Senator Bill Cassidy, whose offense was casting a symbolic vote to impeach him after January 6. Cassidy had long since surrendered any independent impulses, to the point of violating his own pro-vaccine convictions to cast a humiliating, decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. Yet Cassidy’s penitence did not satisfy Trump.

Trump considers it essential both to intimidate anybody who would stop him from carrying out illegal orders—hence his attempts to imprison Democrats who truthfully advised military members that they should not obey illegal orders—and to reward anybody who does follow them. He has reportedly promised mass pardons before he leaves office. Trump could have waited until after the 2028 elections to set up his slush fund, but he is doing it now in a high-profile way, presumably to communicate directly that loyal allies can expect lavish rewards.

The government’s operating ethos during Trump’s second term has followed the dictum that the president and his allies are immune from the law, while his enemies can expect to be hounded. As his party watches silently and cowers, his intentions grow only more naked.

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

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Tuesday, May 19, 2026 1:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

And nobody is going to notice whatever it is you're bitching about today because by this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about.

Just shut the fuck up already dude.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, maybe you should read your own words? "By this time next week there will have been 50 other major things to bitch about" means 50 more Trump goofs.

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



I forgot to put "major" in quotes.

You're just a whiny little bitch.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 6:15 AM

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 forgot to put "major" in quotes.

You're just a whiny little bitch.



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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
My favorite word for today is Nihilist. 6ix, Trump, and his Trumptards are Nihilists, those for whom important things are meaningless. (Oh Well: On Nihilism, Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 5:00AM by Marie Snyder, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/oh-well-on-nihilism.html )

The Looting of America

MAGA corruption reaches the point of no return

Paul Krugman
May 19, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-looting-of-america

So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.

Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.

Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies.

But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors.

Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption.

Don’t say that this taxpayer-financed slush fund won’t have political consequences.

On the contrary, the polling and focus-group analyses I’ve seen say that voters are very angry about corruption. Trump’s theft of taxpayer money, while people are losing healthcare coverage and food aid while suffering from Trump-induced higher prices, is perfect fodder for the Democrats in the upcoming elections.

So we should ask ourselves why the Trumpists have abandoned all restraint. There have been many corrupt politicians in U.S. history – although they were pikers in comparison to Trump. Yet they at least attempted to hide their corruption, or at least keep it discreet and deniable, in order to avoid a voter backlash.

I would argue that the blatant nature of the new looting is a signpost of where America under Trumpism is heading in the months and years ahead.

It’s true that Trump has a base that will support him no matter what, in many cases literally believing that he has been chosen by God. This puts a floor under this support. But his disastrous recent polling, as Nate Cohn writes in the Times, suggest that this floor may be lower than many thought.

Now, we already know that Trump and his allies have no intention of facing free and fair elections. With the unstinting help of the Roberts Supreme Court, they have already rigged the midterms through redistricting. Trump minions are actively trying to depress Democratic-leaning voter turnout, by demanding from states the right to challenge their voting rolls. And it would be naïve to think that redistricting will be the end of the MAGA effort to undermine democracy.

Still, Trump is aware that, even with Republican gerrymandering, November may deliver a blue wave big enough to hand Democrats the House and, quite possibly the Senate. G. Elliott Morris estimates that Democrats will need a 4-point popular vote advantage to win the House, but the latest Times poll gives them an 11-point lead. Why, then, isn’t he trying to be at least slightly discreet in his corruption?

One answer is that even if MAGA loses big in November, Democrats can’t count on wave elections every cycle, and the field is now strongly tilted against them. As Morris writes.

“While the situation for Democrats is not necessarily dire for 2026, the situation for democracy in 2028 and beyond certainly is.”

So you can think of the $1.8 billion slush fund as a promise to MAGA-world that there is a payoff to be had if they just stick with him for the next two and a half years.

Beyond that, we are, in effect, watching what happens when a quasi-authoritarian regime’s corruption and criminality pass the point of no return.

At this point Trump and his MAGA minions have stolen so much, committed so many crimes — not just theft but taking America to war illegally, abusing ICE detainees, and much more — that if and when they lose power many of them will face personal ruin at best, years of jail time at worst. This would happen even if they stopped committing more crimes.

So there’s no incentive for them to end their criminality, or to end the attempts to bribe others to go along. Either they succeed in destroying America as we know it, or they won’t. And until that’s resolved, they may as well engage in even more corruption and criminal acts.

Think of it this way: The gravity of what the Trumpists have already done has created a sort of black hole at the center of American political life — and the Trumpists have already crossed the event horizon, the boundary beyond which there is no escape. So they will do ever more terrible things, because they have nothing more to lose.

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

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 7:38 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by second:

My favorite word for today is Nihilist. 6ix, Trump, and his Trumptards are Nihilists, those for whom important things are meaningless. (Oh Well: On Nihilism, Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 5:00AM by Marie Snyder, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/oh-well-on-nihilism.html )

The Looting of America

MAGA corruption reaches the point of no return
United States President Donald Trump, his family and his businesses have been granted immunity from any ongoing audits into their tax affairs, according to a directive by the Department of Justice. In a one-page document, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Justice Department said authorities would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from “prosecuting or pursuing” tax claims against Trump, members of his family and his businesses.

Nathan Goldman, a professor of accounting and tax expert at North Carolina State University, called the move “unprecedented”.

“The clause within the settlement that Trump and his family will no longer be subject to the audit process breaks from the current tax policies and puts Trump in a situation where he can pay what he believes is the correct amount without any fear of prosecution.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/20/us-president-trump-and-family
-given-immunity-from-pending-tax-audits

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

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 12:17 PM

SECOND

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


Where Are the Republicans Who Put America First?

By Thomas L. Friedman | May 19, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/opinion/trump-republican-party-gerr
ymandering.html

As President Trump and his administration head toward the midterm elections, it’s now clear that the Republican Party has split into three factions: the “Never Trump” Republicans, who refuse to ever vote for this unethical man; the “America First” Republicans, who favor Trump’s policies but won’t countenance his destroying American norms and laws; and “Trump First” Republicans — those who think Trump’s dictates come first and the Constitution and traditional norms come second.

The most alarming thing happening in America today is that the Trump First Republicans, on Trump’s orders, are purging the few America First Republicans. So should the G.O.P. hold the House and the Senate in the midterms, there will be no brakes whatsoever on this party and this president. I would not at all rule out their pushing for a third Trump term. We are going to a very bad place.

Just look at the trend-line: The Never Trump Republicans, who included traditional conservatives like Liz Cheney, John McCain and Mitt Romney, did not believe in Trump the man or many of his ideas. They thought that he both dishonored the Constitution and true conservative principles. Alas, though, McCain died, Cheney was forced out of the party and Romney quit politics altogether. On Tuesday, another Trump antagonist in the Republican Party, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, lost a primary to an opponent handpicked by the president.

The America First Republicans were ready to sign on to many Trump ideas — lowering taxes or limiting immigration or deflating the woke left — but when it came down to a choice between advancing those ideas and undermining democracy, this faction drew a red line. They put America first, not Trump first.

I am talking about people like former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and the Indiana and South Carolina state legislators who refused to go along with Trump’s shameful out-of-cycle gerrymandering of electoral districts just to increase the G.O.P.’s odds of holding the House. But now they too are being driven from the party.

Cassidy, the two-term Republican who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, was just defeated by a Trump First Republican in his primary. The back and forth between Cassidy and Trump was revealing. While he did not mention Trump by name in his concession speech, there was no doubt about whom Cassidy was talking about.

“Let me just set the record straight,” Cassidy said. “Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

Trump’s response was more direct — and incredibly revealing. He wrote on social media of Cassidy: “His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!”

Read those words carefully: “His disloyalty to the man” — not to the Constitution — is what got him defeated. Trump first.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who seems willing to abandon any principle he ever held to stay on Trump’s good side and remain his golfing buddy, expressed the essence of the Trump First Republicans after Cassidy lost:

“You can disagree with President Trump,” Graham said, “but if you try to destroy him, you’re going to lose, because this is the party of Donald Trump.”

Read those words carefully, too: It is not the party of Republicans, it is “the party of Donald Trump," which means it is whatever Trump says it is. But the most revealing part of Graham’s quote was: “If you try to destroy him, you’re going to lose.”

Translation: If you vote, as Cassidy did, to convict Trump after he was impeached for inciting an insurrection in our nation’s capital in a shameful effort to overturn the free and fair 2020 election, it means you are trying to “destroy” Trump — not protect America.

For Graham, upholding the Constitution apparently equals trying to “destroy” a man, even when that man was attempting to destroy the most sacred principle of our Constitution: the peaceful transfer of power by elections.

Don’t worry, Lindsey, your place in Trump’s golf rotation is secure.

At least Cassidy is not alone in the America First G.O.P. wing. My colleague David French wrote eloquently about the Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate, Shane Massey, who last week gave a speech explaining why he would not go along with Trump’s personal request that he support a midterm gerrymander to eliminate the state’s only Democratic-held congressional district.

A reminder: The Constitution requires a census every 10 years and reapportionment of House seats among states based on the population changes. But it is silent on when states can redistrict. Some states explicitly limit redistricting to once per decade in line with the census and some have independent commissions that restrict when and how lines can be redrawn. But once-in-a-decade has been the norm in most states, because new census data was the natural trigger.

For Trump to order Republican-dominated states to redistrict on his whim — purely to manipulate the election outcome so the G.O.P. won’t lose the House in November under a president whose popularity is at record lows — may be technically legal under the Constitution, but it is pure cheating in my book. It is also pure Trump: Life is only about what you can do, never about what you should do.

Massey wasn’t buying it. He refused to be a party to that travesty in his state — and specifically he refused to wipe out Representative James Clyburn’s district. Clyburn is the only Black member of the House from South Carolina, a state that is roughly 30 percent Black. The other six are Republicans.

Like a true America First Republican, Massey described himself as a “rabid partisan” and Washington Democrats as “crazy,” but he drew the line at cheating. Massey said he rued the day when “maybe we become convinced that the only way to preserve the Republic is to implement policies that are contrary to the founding ideas of the Republic.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by the America First Republican state legislators in Indiana who refused to obey Trump’s demand to wipe out Democratic-leaning districts. In the recent Republican primary there, five of those legislators lost to candidates who openly ran on their willingness to put Trump first.

Spencer Deery, one of two anti-redistricting Republicans to survive the pro-Trump cash tsunami to oust them, told NBC News, “I will never regret listening to constituents and doing the right thing.”

This is not one of those “both sides are doing it” things. Everything California did and Virginia tried to do in terms of out-of-cycle redistricting was based on statewide votes — not legislative shenanigans. They were only temporary and were initiated in self-defense against Trump’s effort to wipe out Democratic congressional seats in every state possible, starting in Texas.

So let me end where I began: Trump’s midcycle “redistricting” is not politics as usual, but cheating. And the $1.776 billion slush fund Trump just established to pay “victims” of the Biden administration’s supposed lawfare — which, as The Washington Post editorial board noted, “will pay out for two years before conveniently ceasing to exist right after the 2028 election, ensuring Democrats never get control over the money” — is not business as usual. It is stealing our tax dollars.

Democrats may still turn out enough votes in the midterms to overcome this in-your-face cheating and stealing. But if that doesn’t happen — if it is precisely this dirty dealing that keeps the Democrats from taking the House even if they overwhelmingly win the popular vote nationally — people are not going to take it sitting down. And they shouldn’t.

I worry for the future of the Republic if that happens. You push, you push, you push — and you never know when you’ve crossed the last red line and wiped out the last norm and our whole governing system just starts to fall apart.

That is exactly where Trump and the Trump First Republicans are driving us.

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

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 5:15 PM

SECOND

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


Tax world gawks at Trump audit agreement: 'Never seen anything like this'

A DOJ agreement ending any current IRS audits of the president, his family or his businesses stuns tax practitioners and could reignite Democratic lawmakers' pursuit of Trump's tax returns.

By Brian Faler | May 20, 2026 04:04 PM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/tax-world-gawks-at-trump-audi
t-agreement-never-seen-anything-like-this-00929576

President Donald Trump is flipping what had been a doomed lawsuit against the IRS into a free pass from the agency.

Astonishment is rippling through tax world at a settlement that goes far beyond the specifics of Trump’s suit — he sought billions of dollars as compensation for some of his tax records being leaked to the news media — to instead provide him, his family and his businesses sweeping protections against government scrutiny of his taxes.

Under the plan signed off on by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the IRS would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from all audits of “any matters currently pending.” What’s more, some worry it may mean Trump will never again be audited by the agency, pointing to vague language in the settlement barring examinations that stem from “lawfare.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Steve Rosenthal, a former longtime senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

The one-page document the Justice Department released Tuesday represents the most audacious step yet in Trump’s ongoing efforts to shield his taxes from scrutiny. https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1441216/dl

Trump has long bucked a decades-old tradition of presidents voluntarily releasing their filings, but this would prevent the IRS from examining them as well — special treatment that the IRS does not provide any other American. It would also flout the agency’s longstanding policy of automatically auditing every president.

It also promises a massive fight with Democrats if they vault back into power in this year’s midterm elections, with the agreement rocketing up lawmakers’ oversight to-do list.

“Democrats are going to fight every element of this,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Finance committee.

It’s also likely to become an ongoing headache for Republicans who have had little to say publicly about the plan.

And it’s the result of a lawsuit that was unlikely to be successful in the first place.

Result of ‘phony’ litigation

Trump had sued the IRS in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax information by an agency contractor, Charles Littlejohn, to the New York Times. Littlejohn, who pleaded guilty to the leak in 2023, told a court he released the information because he was incensed by Trump’s refusal to release his returns.

The administration has cast the settlement, which would also set up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate those allegedly harassed by the Biden administration, as a response to the “weaponization” of law enforcement by the previous president.

But the leak actually happened in 2019, during Trump’s first term in office, and Littlejohn was prosecuted by Biden’s Justice Department. The Times used the information to produce a blockbuster report in September 2020 showing Trump frequently paid little or nothing in taxes. Littlejohn also leaked tax records of numerous other prominent wealthy people, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, to ProPublica.

Experts noted Trump’s suit over the leak was never likely to succeed, in part because he missed the two-year statute of limitations to file a civil suit over the unauthorized disclosure of tax information. And there were major questions about whether there was a legitimate dispute for a court to referee since Trump was effectively both plaintiff and defendant. Trump pulled the suit in favor of the settlement shortly before a judge could weigh in.

“This all arises out of a phony piece of litigation,” said Rosenthal.

When Ken Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire whose tax data was also leaked, sued the IRS, he settled for an apology — something Trump will also receive under the settlement.

“[Griffin] should have asked for more,” joked one former longtime IRS lawyer, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “He needs a better attorney.”

In that case, the IRS argued it wasn’t liable for the leak because Littlejohn was a contractor, and not a direct employee.

The Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, quit Monday after the settlement fund was announced.

Tax pros described the agreement as breathtaking in scope. It nixes any audits, even of returns filed years before Trump became president. And it extends those protections to Trump’s sister, parent, “family or others filing jointly” as well as trusts, related companies, affiliates or subsidiaries.

It rules out examinations of any currently pending matters including returns filed before the agreement’s May 19 date. Democrats worry that an additional clause banning examinations arising from “lawfare and/or weaponization” could be interpreted to preclude any future audits as well and allow Trump to simply ignore the IRS from now on.

“It’s hard to see how he ever meaningfully participates in our taxation system again,” said Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means committee.

Back to the tax-return fight

The IRS is not required by law to audit the presidents but, to avoid any hint of favoritism, it has a long-standing internal policy dating to 1977, and enshrined in its employee manual, of automatically vetting every president’s and vice president’s returns. Trump has complained for years that he has been under audit.

During Trump’s first term, Democrats went to the Supreme Court to force the release of his filings, tapping a special power given to the heads of Congress’s tax committees allowing them to examine anyone’s returns. Neal argued they needed to know how well the IRS was vetting his filings. How the agency goes about auditing the president is highly secretive.

Now lawmakers are likely to experience déjà vu.

Trump’s taxes are likely to once again be a major focus for Democrats, though it’s not clear what, if anything, they can do about the agreement.

There were immediate, and unanswered, questions about whether the administration has the power to make such an agreement, and who might have the power to challenge it in court. Some wonder if the settlement could be legally vulnerable because one of its signatories, IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano, is serving in a role created by the administration that bypassed Senate confirmation.

Another question: Did the administration break a 1998 law barring the White House from interfering in tax audits?

Neal and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, fired off a letter to the administration Wednesday demanding it preserve internal documents related to the agreement and Trump’s suit against the IRS.

Some tax law experts wonder too if Democrats, should they regain power, will face pressure to once again force the public release of Trump’s returns.

“I think there would be a lot of pressure to find out what Trump is hiding here, and at least audit him in the court of public opinion,” said Rosenthal.

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

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Thursday, May 21, 2026 11:23 PM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump’s Ritualistic Humiliation of His Children Reaches a Charming New Crescendo

By Heather Schwedel

May 21, 2026 5:58 PM

https://slate.com/life/2026/05/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bettina-anderso
n-iran-news.html

I would call what President Donald Trump just did to his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a slap in the face if it weren’t for the existence of a widely circulated anecdote about a time Trump once allegedly literally slapped Jr. in the face, in front of a bunch of his college classmates. Still, as figurative slaps in the face go, this one had to hurt: The president just told the world that he’s not sure if he’s going to make it to Don Jr.’s wedding this weekend.

Don Jr. is set to marry socialite Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas in the coming days, and while taking questions in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump was asked if he plans to attend. “Uhhhh. He’d like me to go,” Trump said. Already with that loaded uhhhh, he wasn’t off to a great start. “I’m gonna try and make it. But it’s going to be a just a small, little private affair. … I said, ‘This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called “Iran” and other things.’ ”

Sigh. Even when he’s being dismissive of his own flesh and blood and flippant about war, in addition to being just kind of out of it, the man still has a way with words. “A Thing Called Iran” sounds like a lost Tennessee Williams play. Does anyone actually buy that he’s too busy to attend? While it’s true that we’re at war, it’s also true that Trump started the war, and now we can’t rule out the possibility that he did so in order to get out of going to this wedding. Not to mention, Trump finds time to golf one out of every five days—he can probably find a few hours to zip down to his son’s wedding.

Trump went on, “That’s one I can’t win on. If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed.” By the media, he meant, of course. While it’s entertaining to think Trump might sincerely believe that skipping his own son’s wedding would be counteractively good for his image, because it would show not that he is a cruel man who doesn’t love his son but a hardworking one, the far likelier explanation is that Trump just doesn’t feel like going. He doesn’t take the same sort of pride and joy in his children that others do, his relationship with Don Jr. has always been fraught, and he thinks weddings are boring because they’re not about him, so yeah, he’s not going to pretend to be excited.

My guess is that he will end up going in the end anyway—wars are clearly boring to him, too—rendering this fuss he’s making about how he might not completely pointless. It’s mean and messy for no reason, which is classic Trump. What’s the fun of just being a dutiful father? This way he still gets to withhold something and ensure that Don Jr. never for even a minute feels secure in his father’s love for him, which is sick, but such is the Trump family way. It’s the kind of thing that might make you feel bad for Trump Jr., if he weren’t who he is.

Later in the video that’s circulating online, Trump says one more thing of note, but sadly I have to debunk what people online think he said. He did not say, in reference to his son, “He’s a person I’ve known for a long time,” as funny as that would have been. What he actually said was, “No, but he’s got a very—a person I’ve known for a long time.” While he definitely got a little lost in that sentence, it seems pretty clear to me that he was talking about the woman Don Jr. is marrying, Anderson. I did wonder, though, if Trump has actually known her a long time, because even though he may have encountered her in Palm Beach, Florida, where she’s from and he has a home, she and Don Jr. are a relatively recent development. They got together in 2024, when the younger Trump was actually still engaged to his previous fiancé, Kimberly Guilfoyle. I don’t think Trump was trying to make a dig at his ne’er-do-well son’s awkward dating history per se, but Trump has seen Jr.’s romantic partners come and go. He himself has been married three times. So another reason for his lack of enthusiasm for his son’s wedding could be that he figures if he misses this one, no biggie, he can go to the next.

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

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Friday, May 22, 2026 7:33 AM

SECOND

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


Last year, Jeff Bezos and other tech billionaires evidently believed that they could insulate themselves from criticism — and secure their wealth against both taxation and regulation — by allying themselves tightly with Donald Trump. Notably, Amazon is one of the companies paying for Trump’s grotesque ballroom, along with Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

But Trump is now exploring new frontiers in presidential unpopularity, and Republicans are facing a wave of public revulsion so strong that it will probably overwhelm even their strenuous efforts to rig the midterm elections.

So paying court to the mad king isn’t looking like the smart political move Bezos and his ilk thought it was. How, then, can they defend themselves against the threat of taxes and regulations that might make them slightly less rich?

Well, Bezos evidently thought that the threat to his billions was sufficiently important to justify going on CNBC to lecture the rest of us about the evils of taxation — but not sufficiently important for him to learn a few facts first.

Somehow, I don’t think this new political strategy will work.

More about Jeff Bezos lying on TV about his taxes at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bezos-backlash-and-zombies

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

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Friday, May 22, 2026 3:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




You faggots loved Bezos.

Look at you little bitches whining today.

You're all a fucking joke. Paul Krugman is the least funny joke ever written.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, May 22, 2026 3:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump’s Ritualistic Humiliation of His Children Reaches a Charming New Crescendo

By Heather Schwedel


Maybe he hates his fucking son, Heather.

Maybe it's NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS, Heather.


And look at faggot second throwing around this OK! Magazine ladies bullshit.

You're a fucking joke, dude.

Get a life.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, May 22, 2026 3:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I forgot to put "major" in quotes.

You're just a whiny little bitch.



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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
My favorite word for today is Nihilist.


You don't even know what Nihilist means. Anything above two syllables is to difficult for your tiny brain to parse.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, May 23, 2026 2:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Go fuck yourself, Steven Colbert.

Have fun ruining The Lord of the Rings. Looking forward to that huge box office flop.


You suck. Just go away now.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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