It’s six months from Cocktober, and GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert has a question about Congress:

“Yeah, go to church, find Jesus. Like, I mean, why is everybody so horny here?” she asked.

And what did Lauren Boebert do the day after she Beetlejuiced her date at the touring production of Beetlejuice the musical? Was that the day she found Jesus?

We are just asking.

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So, we are sorry, but we need to take issue with Boebert’s comments here, because there’s a whole lot of bullshit in that six-second clip.

First of all, the scandals that led to the resignations this week from Congress are not horny. Horny would be, say, not being able to wait to get home before you start doing handys to your date right there at the touring cast production of Beetlejuice the musical in Denver.

That is horny.

Democrat Eric Swalwell has been accused of rape, sexual harassment, assault, and more.

Republican Tony Gonzales has been accused of sexual harassment and an affair with a former staffer, who later died by suicide.

There is a difference between sexual predator behavior — those guys, allegedly — and horny.

And spare us the fucking “they need to find Jesus” shit, because it’s a well-known fact that the most dangerous place for a child to be alone is with a member of conservative Christian clergy or ministerial leadership or youth ministry or AND SO ON.

You know. Statistically.

The Moral High Ground

Is It 'Anti-Christian Extremism' To Note How Often Conservative Christian Leaders Abuse Kids?

AT LAST, THE UPDATE WE HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR. Or at least I have. The project went on a sort of hiatus when I was out of the country for a couple weeks in September, and I’ve been chasing my tail ever since trying to catch up…

Read more

6 months ago · 170 likes · 26 comments · Evan Hurst

Boebert is unique among her Republican colleagues in that she actually seems to want accountability for the men all over the Trump-Epstein Child Rape files. (We will this one time ONLY also credit Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.) That’s a good thing.

Of course, it seems likely from Boebert’s behavior when she gets a microphone that she may only be interested in that because she literally believes the most bugfucking insane conspiracy theories on the planet, all of them about Democrats. Whereas the rest of us understand that Donald Trump is the star of the Epstein Files, that the dead child rapist Jeffrey Epstein was his best friend, and that the still-hidden revelations probably have something to do with that, Boebert used her time deposing Hillary Clinton (who didn’t even know Epstein) to babble at her about Pizzagate. Were there things about Pizzagate in the Epstein Files?

No, really. She literally asked Hillary about the deranged conspiracy theories that when John Podesta would refer to pizza or hot dogs in his emails, that maybe he was speaking in code about child sex trafficking.

“Have you reviewed any 2025, 2026 Epstein Files that were released that you believe reference or relate to those specific 2016 claims regarding the Podesta emails, Comet Ping Pong Pizza, used as code, possibly?”

At which point Hillary Clinton made the most wonderfully hilarious faces, you should watch the video all over again. Then Clinton said, “Pizzagate was totally made up, it was an outrageous allegation that ended up hurting a number of people, that caused a deranged young man to show up with his assault rifle and shoot up a local pizzeria. I can’t believe you’re even referencing it.”

In another interview this very week with noted sane person Benny Johnson, Boebert babbled about Frazzledrip, the nutbag conspiracy theory Wonkette has explained before, wherein — Wonkette quoting Wonkette here — “QAnon idiots believe that there is a video somewhere, codenamed FRAZZLEDRIP, of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin cutting the face off of a child and then prancing around wearing it like a mask, and then consuming the little girl's adrenal gland for the adrenochrome.”

In the Benny Johnson interview, Boebert barfed out weird conspiracy words about how she thinks the Epstein Files are connected to the Anthony Weiner laptop that she’s pretty sure has the “frazzledrip” video, because oh my fucking God, it will never stop being 2016.

“These things don’t just originate out of NOWHERE,” said this stupid fucking woman. “Wow!” said Benny Johnson, a well-known liar and plagiarist who Russia used to (?) pay to disseminate propaganda. “It’s been said that FBI agents that went in and viewed this laptop, many of them are not alive anymore!” said Lauren Boebert, who went on to suggest that maybe these FBI agents committed suicide, because of how they saw the laptop!

OR DID THEY???? LOTTA PEOPLE AROUND THE CLINTONS “COMMIT SUICIDE,” DONCHA KNOW

Anything to keep from confronting all the actual child rapists in your own party and religious belief system, eh, Lauren Boebert?

So that is the person who is asking why everybody in Congress is so “horny.”

To her credit, she is encouraging anybody who’s been victimized by anybody on Capitol Hill to let her know.

“If your boss is mistreating you, or someone else in the office, tell somebody—come to my office,” she told reporters Wednesday. “If you want to remain anonymous, remain anonymous. Let one of us loudmouths get it out there for you. I’m happy to issue receipts on behalf of anyone.”

Of course maybe she’s just saying that because she really thinks somebody is going to come tell her THE REAL TRUTH about the Frazzledrips and the Pizzagates.

Bless her heart.

[New York Post]

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Horrifying news first, I am so sorry: Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has murdered his wife, Cerina, and killed himself. Fairfax, a Democrat, was Ralph Northam’s lieut gov. When Northam was found to have done Blackface costumes as a young man, Wonkette demanded and party leaders considered asking that he resign — until women came forward to say Fairfax, who would have replaced him, had assaulted them, and Northam’s proposed resignation was shelved. Fairfax then tried to run to replace him after he was termed out, and lost badly. Their three children were reportedly at home. (NBC News)

Now on to things that are normal-terrible, and in some cases, even nice.

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How many WARS can Pete Hegseth fight at once, is it 100? (USA Today)

Ahhhhh yes, the 2019 impeachment whistleblower and the Inspector General “manufactured a conspiracy” by blowing the whistle on Trump’s perfect call and then informing Congress about it, yes yes yes. And now Tulsi’s filing criminal referrals. Because exposing illegal acts is illegal when the illegal acts are Trump’s. (Fox News)

The FTC found the antitrust! And so they … forced a settlement demanding companies advertise on Elno’s Nazi playground because “ad agencies violated antitrust rules by agreeing to a common set of brand safety rules.” Words have no meaning anymore :) (The Verge)

First ICE agent that I know of to be hit with felony charges for, you know, doing felonies in Minnesota to citizens and noncitizens alike. Go to jail forever. (Gift link Star Tribune)

Chris Geidner thinks Justice Sonia Sotomayor was if not right then at least not wrong to apologize to Brett Kavanaugh for explaining to law students how full of shit he is. Because I trust Chris Geidner then I suppose I won’t be mad about it. (Law Dork)

Illegal immigrants are keeping our Social Security and Medicare alive in addition to keeping our olds alive and our young cared for and the food on our tables and all of the other things. Receipts. (America’s Voice)

The “pink pill pipeline” is luring in young women with frothy celebrity content before sucking them into the sewer of “you don’t want to vote sweetie” and “birth control is unnatural, you should have babies and stay home.” (Kylie Cheung at Abortion, Every Day)

Yes, Virginia, Republicans are very concerned about your mean gerrymandering, a thing that they and Barack Obama would never do! (Bad Faith Times)

Philadelphia prettied up some blighted lots, and people were like “hey, let’s not crime!” (Reasons to Be Cheerful)

What the fuck, Fodor’s, that’s an Onion story. It’s not supposed to be real. (Fodor’s / The Onion)

Hope nobody was planning on flying anywhere! (Fodor’s)

Like for instance Hawaii, Hawaii, Montana, or SF!

Do-Do-Do-DOOOO! Announcing The 2026 Wonkette Friends And Family (That’s You, Dummies) Tour For 2026!

News From Places I Have Lived In!

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani didn’t just tax the rich on Tax Day, he got NY Gov. Kathy Hochul to go along with it too, heart-hug! (The American Prospect)

Mallory McMorrow (whom I’m supporting for US Senate from Michigan) and Abdul El-Sayed (whom you are allowed to support if you so choose) are neck and neck in the Democratic primary, and Haley Stevens, who is mortifying and for some reason Chuck Schumer’s choice, is trailing. Here’s a video from Mallory about surveillance pricing, UGH.

And here’s a blogpost by her (or her staff) about their Q1 fundraising and some other stuff, which I’m just linking for the bonus Donna Rose pic. (McMorrow substack) And here’s a post on her maternal mortality agenda, which I’m linking because Maternal Mortality. (McMorrow again)

California Wonkers, you’re something like a third of our readership, and we never even cover you at all, you’re too busy just being chill and mostly sane! But I’m going to try to do so more, so: Mayor Karen Bass has released her Climate Action Plan for LA! (Los Angeles City Dot Gov) Inside the 100 Hours Before Swalwell GTFO. (CNN) Whatchall think about Tom Steyer v. Katie Porter for CA gov? Or are you going Nice Becerra? I don’t hate any of them! Steyer’s a billionaire, but he and I are both practically one issue voters on climate change. Anyway, apparently he’s taken over all your airwaves, hope it’s not that annoying! This has been a blurb about California. (Politico)

Montana state supreme court just keeps refusing to be shitty, Trans Rights Are Human Rights edition! (Erin in the Morning)

And that’s the news in places I have lived.

News From the Place Dok Lives In

What the fuck, Boise? Almost a year after a county commissioner allegedly stabbed a minor girl and threatened to slash her mother’s throat after a drunken set-to on the river, the police haven’t finished their investigation because “case load.” (Gift link Idaho Statesman)

What the fuck even. World’s gone wrong.

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Gonna be a lot of taaaabs to change the way things are.

Everybody’s all shocked this week that the Republicans are being weird freaks about teen pregnancy — i.e., being for it — again, but I swear Robyn’s writing the same post since 2014.

Evan thinks everyone should boycott the US World Cup, but I think boycotts might be illegal now?

GTFO John Eastman!

Hey remember when Obama did the worst religious oppression ever by assuming those nuns could … sign a form if they didn’t want to offer insurance with birth control in it? What a tyrant freak.

And for your open thread enjoyment, here’s this … actually the best guy FEMA has going? Oh dear.

See you bright and early for tabs!

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Donald Trump is a busy man, what with all the important planning he needs to do for his big ballroom and redesigning Air Force One so it has an all-marble fuselage, as well as little annoyances like his war that’s costing a billion dollars every day. So it’s probably no surprise that when Trump was asked to comment on Gregg Phillips, the FEMA official who continues to insist that he really did teleport to Waffle House, Great Leader wasn’t so sure about any of it, including apparently the very concept of “teleportation.”

In a brief interview with CNN on his cellphone Thursday morning about Phillips, President Donald Trump said, ‘What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?’

Told that Phillips was not kidding, Trump responded: ‘I don’t know anything about teleporting. … It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.’

According to CNN’s follow-up reporting on Phillips (paywalled, unfortunately), shortly after CNN’s initial report in late March about Phillips’s claims, the White House got in touch with Homeland Security and told them to get rid of Phillips or hide him somewhere out of public view, maybe with the Epstein files or in that warehouse where they keep the Ark of the Covenant and the 100-MPG carburetor. A White House official told CNN, “Everyone’s thoughts were, ‘What the hell is this? This guy has got to go.’” But this time, for a change, Phillips has stubbornly refused to teleport out of the public eye.

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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Phillips is still somehow in his job as the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, the number-three job in the agency. That’s the biggest division in FEMA, which is responsible for coordinating disaster response, getting teams and equipment to the site of an emergency, as well as providing aid and temporary housing to people as the community recovers.

But as CNN reports, Phillips was abruptly unpersoned from a Capitol hearing where he was supposed to testify, and since then has been

quietly sidelined from parts of FEMA’s operations, according to multiple agency sources. He was also directed to stop posting about teleportation on Truth Social, a source familiar told CNN.

Several sources said Phillips was furious — and is now convinced that Trump officials at FEMA and DHS were angling against him. Since then, he has grown increasingly agitated and suspicious, multiple FEMA insiders who work with Phillips told CNN.

Usually, “increasingly agitated and suspicious” is language you’d expect in a story about someone who’s been ordered to stay at least 1000 feet away from an ex-spouse, or who’s had their firearms seized for their own safety. These days, it just means you’re in tune with the president’s typical mood.

Or perhaps this simply illustrates the folly of trying to put in place a restraining order against someone who can transcend time and space.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Teleportation

Phillips does appear to have complied with the directive to shut up about the teleportation thing, at least following an April 1 Truth Social message in which he acknowledged that during the period when he was magically vanishing and then reappearing at various locations, he was under self-treatment for metastatic bone cancer. He said that “conventional medicine had exhausted its options,” so he underwent an “alternative protocol,” which CNN reports involved taking the antiparasitic drugs ivermectin and fenbendazole like he was a sick farm animal.

In that Truth Social post, Phillips explains that reporters got it all wrong, because they left out the important context that during his first “episode” of involuntary teleportation in 2023, he was “in the opening days of intensive treatment, heavily medicated, not thinking about future headlines.” Of course, he was presumably stone cold sober — and miraculously healed of cancer!!!! — by the time he told a rightwing podcaster all about it in January 2025.

Phillips added that there is nothing odd at all about what he’s certain happened, because it’s really common in the Bible:

The word 'teleportation' was not mine. It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are 'translated' or 'transported' — not new ideas for people of faith.

He noted that 162 million Americans are Christians, implying that obviously they all believe God sends people gallivanting through space from time to time, so how dare anyone question him. “If you believe that God moves in ways we cannot fully explain, as I do, then having faith is not a soundbite. It is the whole point.”

He added that millions of people have survived cancer, and know all about fighting for their lives no matter what, but that “The press chose to mock that fight.” Because obviously, if you make fun of the weird shit he says he “remembers” from a period when he was heavily medicated and operating a motor vehicle, you are mocking every Christian and every brave cancer survivor in America. Indeed, you are ridiculing all the people of faith in our constitutional republic, and he will not stand for it while you badmouth the United States of America. Then he presumably began humming “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he hit “send.”

Are These Actual Miles?

The CNN report also gleaned previously unreported details from Phillips’s podcast appearances, most of them with his longtime conspiracy-theory collaborator Catherine Engelbrecht. When not streaming bullshit about teleporting Christians, Engelbrecht’s the founder and leader of the grifty “True The Vote” outfit that spread — with help from Phillips — the thoroughly debunked “2000 Mules” conspiracy theory about nonexistent “fraud” in the 2020 election. Among other Amazing True Spiritual Adventures, Phillips said in April 2025 that a friend in Mobile, Alabama, said all Phillips’s mystical travels meant he was “half in and half out” of heaven, but remained in the earthly realm to keep doing God’s work (of lying about the 2020 election, we guess).

The friend joked that Phillips was “God’s zombie,” and he readily agreed, claiming that “I’m actually dead. But I’m here doing God’s stuff. And so we laugh about that a little bit.” Somebody should tell him that he’s actually doing the Zen Buddhist practice of “living as one already dead,” just to freak him the fuck out.

We already knew about his claim that this one time when he was driving, his vehicle “lifted up” and miraculously reappeared in a ditch near a church 40 miles away from Albany, Georgia (remember, he was heavily medicated but not driving while impaired, no no no). But apparently his vehicles fairly regularly took flight in those days, like a wingéd chariot in the Bible, or Fred MacMurray’s Flubber-enhanced Model T! In that January 2025 podcast where Phillips said he’d teleported to Waffle House, he also

described a near-crash in the desert in which he said a deceased girlfriend appeared inside his moving car and lifted it off the road to avoid an oncoming truck. Phillips said he was driving a car he had recently won in a poker game.

“The girl that I had dated came into the car with me, the girl that had died,” Phillips said. “She said ‘You’re not going to survive this. So I’m going to take you away.’ And she lifted me and the car up and out of the way from a truck that had slid across the road and had come all the way across the road and was about to hit me.”

We assume this has to be a separate Harry Potter Magic Car flight, since there aren’t any deserts near Albany, Georgia. Unfortunately, CNN doesn’t say where he ended up after that encounter on a dark desert highway: A ditch, a Waffle House, or the Hotel California.

Phillips has also talked several times about a time where he vanished from a Lowe’s hardware store in Indianapolis for two hours, then reappeared in his car in a McDonald’s parking lot across the street, but his phone showed he had taken 15,000 steps! Phillips says Goddiddit.

“The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all — it fell with me,” he said. “This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing.”

“At some point, I had gone through the drive-through, apparently, gotten a Coke and a Big Mac, and then parked and fell asleep for two hours[.]”

Very stupid scientists all agree this bizarre event cannot possibly be explained in earthly terms like “driving across the street, ordering food, then blacking out without remembering everything you did.”

A Small, Weird Thing

Finally, in a detail that most coverage of Phillips seems to have overlooked, the CNN story also notes that, for all his very weird weirdness, Phillips actually has been one of the few top FEMA appointees to resist the massive layoffs and spending cuts imposed by others in DHS, go figure!

Phillips repeatedly warned that those moves were putting Americans at risk, earning him respect from some senior agency staff who worry FEMA’s capabilities have been crippled in Trump’s second term.

For months, those senior staffers have argued that despite Phillips’ checkered past and history of controversial, conspiratorial statements, he has been the most reasonable and trusted political appointee inside the agency. Phillips, they said, was one of the few willing to push back and protect his team.

Now that his history of bizarre spiritual claims has surfaced, some career officials worry that firing the freaky weirdo could actually make things worse at FEMA. One called the situation “Kafkaesque,” and another said, “Yes, it’s hard to trust the judgment of someone who said they teleported and then doubled down on it. But he seems to really care about people, which I really appreciate. And I think he cares about readiness for hurricane season.”

Strange enough that a FEMA head honcho even knows there’s a hurricane “season.” The risk of keeping Phillips, of course, is that he may decree that rather than wasting money on evacuations, we can just trust God to translate or transport worthy survivors away from impending disasters.

OPEN THREAD.

[MS NOW / CNN (paywalled) / Mediaite]

In the midst of an ongoing slap-fight with Pope Leo XIV, Donald Trump has abruptly killed off an $11 million contract with Catholic Charities USA in Miami, Florida, to house and care for immigrant children who have come here on their own. The non-profit has long had a contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to find foster homes and forever homes for these children, apart from the state’s foster program.

“The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski wrote in a statement to the Miami Herald. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.”

“Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months,” he added.

If a Democrat defunded a Catholic non-profit a few days after the Pope criticized birth control or abortion, Republicans would lose their goddamn minds and yowl about religious freedom until the heat death of the universe. In fact, we’re so old we remember when it was the height of religious tyranny when the Obama administration suggested Catholic agencies could … sign a form if they wanted to opt out of providing birth control through insurance.

One might think, given how frequently Republicans profess their great love of the children, that they might be partial to a program that helps those children. But because it’s Trump, and because it’s a program for refugee children, they’re mostly pleased as punch about it.

Catholic Charities USA’s refugee resettlement programs and advocacy for immigrants have been a right-wing bugaboo for a minute now, but it has really ramped up in recent days as Trump has been criticized for going after the Pontifex for criticizing his war on Iran and the rhetoric around it. In hopes of changing the subject, MAGA stalwarts like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec have attempted to flood the zone with criticism of the organization.

This is likely why, aside from his usual pettiness, Trump has chosen this time to kill the funding. His attacks on the Pope have not gone over especially well with many of his Catholic supporters, and he likely thinks that attacking Catholic Charities for being too nice to immigrant children will win back their favor. It’s possible he may not have thought this one entirely through.

There could be an upside, though. After many years of fighting for government funding for “faith-based initiatives,” some on the Right are now arguing that the government shouldn’t be giving any money to religious charities at all.

On Xitter, our old pal Todd Starnes, who once raged against Florida officials telling a Christian charity that fed the poor that they couldn’t get government funding from the USDA if they insisted upon proselytizing to people, wrote, “Why are we giving $11 million in tax money to Catholic Charities? If the Catholics want to provide charity it should come from their parishioners. Same for the Baptists and the Methodists and the Pentecostals...”

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Catholic Charities is … a mixed bag, to say the least. They have absolutely done some very good work, particularly in the areas of disaster relief, helping the unhoused, helping veterans, and caring for immigrants and refugees. They were the ones who came to help the day I found an unhoused man sitting on Michigan Avenue with a four-inch icicle hanging off of his nose. They’ve also done some truly fucked things over the years, famously fighting to be allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples in foster care and adoption, against trans people in sex-segregated shelters, and fought against covering birth control in their insurance plans. Not to mention historically fighting against government programs designed to fund child welfare initiatives and universal healthcare, because of how they’d take away their spirit of Christian charity if the government took proper care of its citizens like a normal country.

That being said, this particular program has done a lot of good, and there is almost no chance that the government would subsequently go and give that money to a secular organization doing the same work. Clearly, they prefer caging children to finding them homes.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

A good thing at this moment in Trump 2.0 is that we are starting to see news on a fairly regular basis about lawyers who have served Donald Trump by committing crimes or ethical violations for him or otherwise licking his balls the way he likes, facing accountability. Last week, the story of dipshit Ed Martin and his battle with the DC Bar over his reported violations of the constitutional rights of Georgetown students when he was acting US attorney in DC, and his obstruction of the investigation into it.

The humiliation of Lindsey Halligan is a hoot. The ongoing humiliation of Alina Habba.

One of the greatest prayers you can pray for these people — even better than Pete Hegseth’s violent loser Pulp Fiction prayers — and for people like Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, is that when they shuffle off this mortal coil on a one-way ticket to eternal damnation, they will do it as non-lawyers. Same way Rudy Giuliani one day will. Same way Roy Cohn did.

And now, the same way John Eastman will. That’s right, one of Donald Trump’s number one coup lawyers, who helped him construct the plan to overthrow the United States government and overturn the 2020 election, and the Trump lawyer who looks most like the Harry Caray character on SNL just after getting smacked in the face with a Looney Tunes anvil, has been fully and finally disbarred in California.

Say it with us: Hahahahahahahahahaha.

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As The Hill explains, the California state supreme court told Eastman to fuck off with his begging that they review a lower court’s decision to disbar him for his illegal and anti-American efforts to overthrow the government and install his white supremacist Dear Leader in eternal power. And this is all they had to say about that:

“The court orders that John Charles Eastman … is disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Respondent’s name is stricken from the roll of attorneys,” reads a terse order on the docket of Eastman’s case.

Done, goodbye.

Eastman’s lawyer, who is still a lawyer, released a long-ass whine about how they’re going all the way to the United States Supreme Court, how not letting Eastman do coups is a violation of his constitutional rights, blah blah. We don’t feel like reprinting it.

Eastman was the architect of Trump’s coup, as much as anybody else was. He was the one who had the idea and wrote the memos to the effect that Mike Pence could just throw out electoral votes for states that had been unfairly won by Joe Biden receiving a majority of the vote. They could replace them with these fake electors he found right here in his yellowed tighty-whities! He was also a fan of admitting on camera that he just wanted Mike Pence to break the law some on January 6, how is that so bad?

Eastman was indicted in Georgia for his election-stealing activities, he lost his job as the dean of Chapman University’s law school (where he used his work email to leave behind lots of evidence), his disbarment hearing was a clownshow of shitfuck proportions, he was found liable for 10 out of the 11 counts against him, and he was recommended for disbarment back in 2024. Also he begged Trump for a pardon back in those days, even though he hadn’t been charged with a federal crime. “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” he wrote, about what he had decided the punishment should (not) be for the crimes he committed. He finally received that pardon last year.

Oh yeah, and his stupid kids think their daddy is just like Jesus. In fact, out of all the loser Trump lawyers, Eastman may be the most whining-est professional victim of all of them, or at least tied with Rudy Giuliani.

A statement from the pro-democracy side of things:

“Eastman played a central role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election—pressuring state officials, advancing baseless claims in court, and promoting a fringe theory that the vice president could reject certified electoral votes. His unethical actions have had real, lasting consequences for our democracy, and we applaud the California Supreme Court’s decision to disbar him,” Christine P. Sun, Senior Vice President of Legal at the States United Democracy Center, said in a statement. “This decision is part of a broader reckoning for those who seek to undermine the rule of law in this country. While Trump tries to consolidate power, the states and courts continue to successfully check executive overreach and the unlawful actions of his administration.”

A delightful addendum to this news is that, while Eastman is/was one of the most prominent anti-democracy lawyers in the country, before that, he was one of the most prominent gay-hating bigot lawyers in the country. In fact, it could be argued that he earned his place in fascist legal circles by translating God Hates Fags into legalese.

He was the chairman of the National Organization for Marriage. Remember them? He compared the anti-gay fight against marriage equality to the fight against slavery. More:

In 2000, Eastman called homosexuality an indicator of “barbarism.” He called the Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence decision, which overturned laws criminalizing consensual gay sex, a “despotic” decision.

Oh yeah, and he just loved Uganda’s evil “Kill The Gays” law.

And because basic bigots are always basic bigots in every basic bigot way, Eastman also wrote that racist Newsweek op-ed arguing that Kamala Harris’s parents were too stinky and foreign, therefore she is not really a natural-born citizen. He’s big into the “birthright citizenship doesn’t say what it fucking clearly says” thing, for obviously white racist reasons.

This son of a bitch should rot in prison forever, and then hell, since he was the architect of a coup that led to a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol, but he’s old and by the time real accountability comes for him, he’ll probably be dead and gone and nobody will remember him besides those stupid kids.

But now he’s not a lawyer in California. Proceedings are ongoing in DC to make him not a lawyer in DC. He’s suspended at the moment.

May his humiliation continue.

[The Hill / Democracy Docket / Right Wing Watch]

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We’ve discussed here a number of times that the World Cup should be canceled and countries should start boycotting the event. Especially after Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth started massacring little children with their chosen war in Iran, there’s no moral argument to be made for why the US deserves the glory of hosting such an event, and Trump’s maniacal, evil anti-immigration crusade means no person traveling to the US for the tournament can feel safe from harassment, persecution, or worse from US immigration authorities. (Read this Politico for a detailed look at the difficulty of keeping Iran’s team safe, as they are top competitors.)

New reporting suggests that, boycott or no boycott, cancellation or no cancellation, people are voting with their feet and their dollars, and those feet and dollars are staying the fuck away from the United States. The Financial Times reports that hotels in the US, specifically in the cities hosting World Cup matches, are cutting their prices in hopes somebody, anybody will book them.

The word one of their expert sources used? “Panic.”

Match-day room rates in host cities including Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia and San Francisco have dropped about a third from their peak earlier this year, according to data tracker Lighthouse Intelligence, in a sign of lower than anticipated demand.

“I’m seeing a lot of people start to panic and lower their rates,” said Scott Yesner, founder of Philadelphia-based short-term rental and boutique hotel management company Bespoke Stay.

Yeah, that’s crazy, Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, all wonderful cities except Dallas, can’t get their hotels full in the summer. It’s almost like nobody wants to come to the World Cup or the United States.

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Articles abound on the subject. The Canadian travel boycott of the United States hasn’t lost a bit of steam. Estimates say the US lost $12.5 billion in tourism money last year alone. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council and Oxford Economics, the US was the only country out of 184 they looked at that lost money last year.

Because that’s how shitty at business and art-of-the-dealing Donald Trump is, that everybody in the world thinks the United States is a shithole, as long as he’s its leader.

If you travel abroad or talk to non-Americans, people are coming back with the same anecdotal stories: that literally zero people they discuss the subject with have any desire to travel to the US until or unless this [gestures wildly at all this] takes a radical turn for the better. People aren’t hopeful.

More from the Financial Times:

Many in the industry had hoped the World Cup, which the US is staging alongside Canada and Mexico, would help reverse last year’s slump in travel to the country, when revenue per available room declined for the first time since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Well that was a stupid thing to hope, somebody should tell hospitality industry executives to get their noses out of Donald Trump’s anus and check in with the real world occasionally.

Speaking of noses and Trump’s anus, Financial Times quotes FIFA head Gianni Infantino, who told all these cities in 2024 that “hundreds of thousands” of people would come visit them for the World Cup. Maybe that might have been true if Kamala Harris had been elected president. But it ain’t true now:

Vijay Dandapani, president of the Hotel Association of New York City, said he could “categorically say we haven’t seen much of a meaningful boost yet . . . It’s possible we will get some more demand, but at this point it certainly will not be the cornucopia that Fifa was promising.”

The World Cup starts June 11, with the first US match happening in LA on June 12. If people haven’t started booking hotels yet, they aren’t coming. (Lots of matches happening in Mexico and Canada, though! Those would be cool to go to.)

And it’s really not true ever since Trump started fighting Benjamin Netanyahu’s idiot war in Iran. Aside from how Trump is the only American president stupid enough to ever say yes to Netanyahu’s Iran bombing begging, it turns out starting this war was just about the stupidest thing Trump could have possibly done for American business and tourism at this specific moment in history. Not just because everybody hates Trump and has no desire to come to the US, but also because Trump’s stupid fucking war is making things like airfare much more expensive and general economic uncertainty over things like inflation are rising. Financial Times isn’t done with the expert quotes:

Lior Sekler, chief commercial officer at hotel operator HRI Hospitality, […] blamed dissatisfaction with Donald Trump’s administration and its visa and immigration policies, as well as the instability triggered by the war in Iran, for cooling international demand: “Obviously, people’s desire to come to the United States right now is down.”

Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics, said the research group was still expecting an “incremental boost . . . but there’s concern about ticket prices, there’s concern about border crossings, and there’s concern about anti-US sentiment — and that’s been made worse by the Iran war”.

Welp.

The Financial Times notes that the 2030 World Cup is being held in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, in case people want to get a head start on looking for hotels.

Now that sounds fun.

[Financial Times]

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There was a time when people said that those likening the coming Trumpocalypse to The Handmaid’s Tale were being ridiculous and hysterical. No one was coming to kidnap all of the women and force them to breed children against their will. At one point even I started feeling like “Enough already, can we find a new analogy?”

There was a time when, if we could agree on anything, as a people, save for like some real freaks, it was that teen pregnancy was a bad idea and a thing we wanted to prevent. Sure, we had different ways — they had abstinence-only education, which did not work, and we had comprehensive sex-ed, which did.

However. In the last few years, the Right — especially the very online Right — has become increasingly hysterical about the birth rate. Some states have sued for the tort of “not enough teen moms.” And it should come as no surprise that they have a solution to this problem, and that their solution is not all that far-off from Gilead. Now, I’m not saying they want to kidnap anyone (just yet), but they are working their damned asses off to convince women that they are worthless garbage unless they get married very young (as virgins!) to some guy (whether they like him or not) and start popping out babies.

As such, we now must contend with a bunch of absolute freaks who are somehow upset about the teen birth rate going down.

One of these absolute freaks is Katie Miller. You know, the woman who found Stephen Miller so very sexually attractive and charming that she married him and had three of his babies (so she claims).

On X the Everything (but not yet) App, she wrote:

Since 2007, the teen birth rate has fallen 72%.

Hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies — it’s killing population growth.

For the first time ever, birth rates for women in their late 30s have surpassed those in their early 20s.

Our biological destiny is to have babies — not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.

So weird that people are increasingly responsible. It’s almost as if they’re … evolving? Becoming more civilized?

It should be noted that Katie Miller was not a teenager when she had her first, uh, offspring with Stephen Miller, that she has her Master’s, and that she has had several prestigious jobs, having acted as Mike Pence’s communications director and later press secretary while he was in the White House.

In fact, basically none of the (admittedly very few) pick-mes who parrot this line were teen moms themselves. Katie Miller, in particular, has not said that she regretted getting married at the ripe-old-age of 28. She hasn’t said she regrets going to college. She hasn’t said “Boy, I sure wish I’d gotten knocked up at 15!”

That’s for other women who aren’t as special and important as she is.

Of course, Miller wasn’t the only one talking about how terrible it is that high school sophomores are not getting knocked up on the regular. Fox News health expert Dr Marc Siegel also mourned the decline in teen pregnancy.

“But the problem,” he opined, “is teens and young adults from ages 15 to 19, the fertility rate is down 7 percent, and it’s down 70 percent over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, until they’re more financially secure. Maybe they haven’t found the right partner …”

Um … yes? And can someone check this guy’s hard drive? Also the hard drives of any other adult men pushing for this, given that around 70 percent of teen pregnancies, the father is over the age of 20 and around 4-6 years older than the mothers are.

Siegel went on to talk about how his wife had their second (of three) child at 36 and was a physician and a neurologist. Katie Miller, it should be noted, had her first child at 29 and, again, has her Masters and has had a prestigious career. So it seems like what these people want for themselves and those close to them is very different from what they want for other people.

One of the things I’ve come to enjoy about these kinds of posts is that there is always at least one “OK, I’m conservative, but …” from a woman who was not aware the leopards planned to feast on her face. For every post about how women are horrible for not getting married young because their “standards are too high,” there are multiple Republican woman going “But wait! I want to get married now and I promise I have super low standards! It just hasn’t happened yet!” and a million angry men snapping back that their standards aren’t low enough and they will be horrifically miserable and lonely later in life if they don’t get married and have kids, wishing that they had just settled for whoever was willing to have them. For every post about how women who don’t have children are entirely worthless, there are multiple conservative women who physically cannot have children desperately promising these incel losers that they’re not bad, they just had health problems.

On both of these posts, there was our gal, former Ron DeSantis spokesperson, Christina Pushaw.

To Miller’s post, she responded:

“Isn’t it better for everyone involved, including society, to have a kid at 32 than 16? Kids of teen moms tend to grow up with a lot of instability, poverty, different stepdads, worse outcomes overall. Of course there are exceptions … but teen pregnancy overall is not a great or aspirational thing for society.”

And on a post featuring the video of Siegel, she wrote:

“Why not focus on the decline of birth rates in the 20s age groups instead? Less teen pregnancy is a good thing. Teenagers are kids, they should be studying and having fun with their friends. 20s is a better time to have children AFTER establishing a stable marriage. The real issue is the decline of marriage among non-college-educated Americans.”

That’s right. Christine Pushaw is making sense. Of course, all of that is the point. They do not want teen girls studying and having fun with their friends. Studying means they might go on to college and have careers. Friends might talk them out of a bad relationship. No, they want them to become stay-at-home moms who are entirely dependent on their husbands and unable to leave for economic reasons.

It sounds like I am exaggerating, but … that’s kind of the majority sentiment on that site these days.

Incel logic has taken over. The men (and a lot of women) on the site are obsessed with virgins, the evils of supposed female hypergamy (women wanting to date men with a higher status than they have), telling women that feminists “lied to them” by telling them they’d be happier with careers than with being mothers, claiming that women become hideously unattractive once they are over 25 (“hitting the wall”) but that men are attractive forever, that women who don’t get married and have kids are “miserable,” that women who have sex with multiple people lose their ability to “pair bond,” that having sex with multiple different men somehow affects the appearance and grip of female genitalia in some way that having sex with only one man does not, and generally trying to create a culture in which more women have so much anxiety over all of this that they are willing to settle at a very young age, ideally before they’ve even had sex, for a man who kind of sucks. Which is convenient, given that these men (#NotAllMen, just the creeps on Xitter) are absolutely fucking repulsive.

Men, of course, do nothing wrong.

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Reality is a whole lot different. In real life, a recent study found that only a third of British women under the age of 25 hold a positive view of men and are twice as likely not to want children. It’s probably worse in the United States, as women have moved to the left and so many young men have MAGA-poisoned brains. Women are outnumbering men in college, outpacing them in prestigious careers, and instead of bettering themselves in ways that don’t involve hitting themselves in the face with a hammer, they’ve decided to go with this tactic of freaking out about birth rates and demanding that women get pregnant as teenagers and become stay-at-home moms.

It’s unfortunate, however, that it is going to work on some women, particularly those who are more vulnerable and insecure. Hopefully most figure it out it’s all bullshit before it’s too late (or before they decide to get knocked up at 15 to appease these creeps).

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Good morning good morning, it’s time for your tabs!

JD Vance and Holy Mike Johnson are trying to popesplain the Pope about Just War Theory. The US Bishops have thoughts, they are shut the fuck up. (US Conference of Catholic Bishops)

You’re doing great with American Catholics, sweetie. (Jay Kuo) Hmmm, “abruptly” canceling contract with Catholic Charities to house migrant kids, hmmm? I’m sure no lawyers will be able to point to any “animus.” (Miami Herald) I’m with Amanda: They BEEN depicting him as Jesus this whole time, how was he to know they’d “get mad” about it? (Amanda Marcotte at Salon)

It’s not censorship if it’s state-run propaganda the new Hungarian PM is shutting down :) (The Guardian)

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DOJ moves to dismiss all sedition and terrorism convictions for the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, also to let them have weapons again, upside down smile emoji. (Emptywheel)

But they keep busting all the January 6ers for more and more child sex abuse. Like this guy, who tried (unsuccessfully) to argue his pardon covered making child sex abuse material with a child under 12. (NBC News)

Here’s someone with #math.

Yes, please impeach Pete Hegseth. (HuffPost)

Well huh! I had no idea the law that FINALLY made shell companies report their owners, which I am very much for, was actually written by Marco Rubio. Gotta … hand it to him … I guess? Anyway, the Trump administration is no longer enforcing it, surprise! (More) fraud and moneylaundering for everyone! (Senate Banking Democrats)

This unfortunate young man Clavicular apparently ODed while livestreaming, right after the entire Internet had a very good time laughing at him getting “mogged” by an objectively much handsomer man. So he seems troubled! (The Hollywood Reporter)

“Ragebait streamer” Johnny Somali just got six months in South Korea for being an antisocial piece of shit, and I’m fine with that! (The Guardian)

Do the other Justices hate Brett Kavanaugh like all the senators hate Ted Cruz? Might be! (Balls and Strikes) Oh for fuck’s sake, she apologized. (NBC News)

RFK Jr.’s diary as gross as you would expect RFK Jr.’s diary to be. (People mag)

India’s doing great on solar! Good job, India! (PV mag)

STOP! Mamdani Time.

Second homes should be taxed as fuck. Hochul and Mamdani agree! (AMNY)

Pssst wanna see some bathrooms? Some are nice and some are fugly! (Houzz)

My beloved friend the late Chris Gaffney would always play this song as soon as I walked into the bar, even if he’d already played it: Saw your brother yesterday, he’s a loser. Living in Fontana, with a kitchen for his farm. What about the poor mom-and-pop Montana (rhymes with Fontana!) kitchen farms? Montana Sen. Steve Daines would just like to know. (Lizz Winstead on Facebook)

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Do-Do-Do-DOOOO! Announcing The 2026 Wonkette Friends And Family (That’s You, Dummies) Tour For 2026!

There were tabs, and they were mighty.

Evan made fun of JD Vance and Erika Kirk, so that was a good time!

Not a good time? This by Marcie!

Giorgia Meloni breaks up with Trump.

Everybody breaks up with RFK Jr.

And LOL treat yourself.

That’s it for today, see you bright and early for tabs!

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Donald Trump may be a senile dumbass who knows so little about literally every subject that he’s too stupid to even grasp what he doesn’t know. But he does have a certain degree of gut smarts, the kind that knows how to be a conman, the kind that knows how to bullshit, and he knows how to use those powers on people who are every bit as daft, conniving, grifty, power-hungry, and vain as he is. Sometimes he uses those powers like one uses a laser pointer to distract a cat.

When Trump fired Nazi Barbie Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security, he made up a job for her. The title, if we remember correctly, was Mighty Morphin Elsa From Frozen Cowgirl Power Ranger Mr. Wonderful Wizard Of Oz Galinda Elphaba Davy Crockett Jesse James Calamity Jane Bonnie and Clyde Warrior Princess Medicine Woman the Vampire Slayer.

Many people, especially those with Trump Derangement Syndrome, said “No, that’s not a job.”

But oh yes it was, because Donald Trump, he who createth and destroyeth, who giveth and who taketh away, made it up for a very specific reason, namely to keep the baby distracted so she didn’t get excited about something like running for the Senate.

This report comes from PunchUp, a Daily Beast newsletter from veteran reporter Tom Latchem (paywall, that we paid, so that we might tell you things):

President Donald Trump invented a senior government role for Kristi Noem to stop her from running for a seat in the Senate this year, administration sources tell PunchUp,

The title of “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas”—announced on March 5 by Trump, 79, as he publicly fired Noem from her role as DHS secretary—was effectively fabricated to ensure she missed the filing deadline for the South Dakota Senate race and would thus be unable to challenge incumbent Sen. Mike Rounds, according to multiple sources.

“It was made up to keep her busy,” one source close to the administration told PunchUp of Noem’s new role. The source said the White House’s private view was that Noem had become so toxic it needed to “put her out to the glue factory”—and so invented an opening that kept her on the government payroll and off the ballot, but with no real power.

Oh no! One could say Trump was trying to take Kristi Noem to a gravel pit and shoot her like a common innocent puppy named Cricket!

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What’s amazing is that this clearly did distract her, if this reporting is correct. She’s so irredeemably vapid, craven, and narcissistic that it sounds like she was like “YES I WILL BE PRINCESS OF THE SHIELD!” and literally nobody in her life was willing to tell her that wasn’t a thing. Not her reported fuckhumping buddy Corey Lewandowski, and definitely not her husband, because he was at the balloon animal store trying on boobies that day, we bet.

The Trump regime people apparently were scared that she could pose a challenge to Mike Rounds in deep red South Dakota, and it’s not like team Trump is known for loyalty, especially to Republican senators, so it must be because they realized that if she beat him in a primary, she’s such a complete joke now that she could lose a Senate seat in the ruby red state where she used to be the governor.

There were whispers about this in Republican circles, reportedly. There was a deadline a-comin’. Quick, Trump, invent the Shield of the Americas and declare Kristi Noem its high priestess!

To secure a place on the primary ballot, Noem would have needed to collect 2,171 petition signatures and file them by 5 p.m. on March 31.

She had 26 days but no time, as she threw herself into her new job, with sources saying that Noem felt she had no choice but to show her willingness to toe the president’s line.

Latchem’s sources say Trump really threw that shit together. Made up an event at Trump National Doral, got whichever Latin American leaders were willing to hop on planes we guess for the sole purposes of honking horns and jangling keys to make Kristi Noem laugh and distract her until the filing deadline passed. Rubio was there, Secretary Shitfaced Hegseth, plus the leaders of Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

And then she got to go on a trip, around Latin America! Yay! And Corey CumAndBoneMe got to come with, and maybe he brought their humping blanket, and maybe they humped it in Spanish, and then …

The White House panicked as they realized Noem was treating the role as substantive rather than symbolic. “They didn’t expect her to take it so seriously,” the administration source said.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

So they had created a monster, one under the impression that it had been sent on a secret mission.

This is all … oh my God. They tried to unring the bell by having her report to one of Rubio’s underlings instead of Rubio himself. That guy, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, “has now nuked the whole thing,” says Latchem’s source in the administration.

She tried to bring 10 staffers along to her fake job. Three have already been fired, from even more fake jobs. The ostensible reason for their firing from fake jobs? Because they were Lewandowski loyalists. But really, says Latchem?

The simpler reality, though, is that “there is no job” for them, according to PunchUp’s sources.

And now Kristi Noem will probably have to be Cricketed to death from her new (fake) job because oh boy, they really did not think she would be taking this so seriously, oh boy, this sure did get out of hand!

Well, if all else fails, she can always run for president. It’s not like it’s gonna be JD Vance.

OPEN THREAD!

[PunchUp]

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You know, it just doesn’t seem like this week is going very well for anyone in the Trump administration, and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no exception. And not just because of how it came out that he spends a weird amount of time “unfavorably” comparing Cheryl Hines to his previous wife, Mary. You know, the one he allegedly drove to suicide by constantly screwing other women? Also that he “seems to have drifted away from Hines and no longer desires to spend much time with [Hines].”

Bet she’s glad she blew up her entire career and lost all of her friends for this prize, huh! But that’s not all that’s going on with him.

For years, Kennedy, like every other kook on earth, has been on one about the supposed dangers of fluoridated water. In the last year or so, since he’s become HHS secretary, both Utah and Florida have eliminated fluoride from their drinking water, which I guess means the Mormons won’t be shaming the rest of us with their perfect chiclet teeth for very much longer. Other states like Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma have legislation pending.

Curiously, this mainly seems to be an issue for people at the legislative level, as a poll from July of last year showed that Americans are overwhelmingly good with fluoridated water (81 percent) and only six percent actually wanted to see it removed from all drinking water. Similarly, 4.75 out of 5 dentists support fluoridated water, which you will note is far higher than the percentage of dentists who believe you should be chewing Trident gum.

So, as it turns out, the people and the dentists are right and the politicians are wrong. A new, long-awaited study on the effects of community water fluoridation published Monday in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that there were no intelligence or brain function differences between people who grew up drinking fluoridated water and those who did not, up to age 80 (they only studied people 80 and under). Though the latter group likely does have a few more cavities.

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This study is of particular importance, as previous studies that have made some connection between fluoride and lower cognitive abilities really only looked at people in countries like China with very high levels of fluoride that are nowhere near what US Americans consume through our drinking water or even at the dentist. This is not particularly helpful as, you know, “the dose makes the poison.”

The study was led by Rob Warren, a sociologist and population health expert at the University of Minnesota, using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a long term study of 10,317 people who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The subjects took IQ tests at the age of 16 and then took them again at ages 53, 64, 72, and 80. Taking into account factors like moving to different areas with different fluoride rules and when or if water fluoridation began where they lived, the study found that there were just no cognitive differences or changes in people related to their level of exposure to fluoride.

The study was incredibly comprehensive compared to previous efforts (though there was no way to determine the specific amount of fluoride each person consumed in their lifetimes), though Warren did say that his study should not be considered “the final word” on the subject, and hopes to see it studied further. Probably because he’s a smart guy and knows that, while some things are a lot more likely than others, it’s not always possible to have a 100 percent definitive answer on something like this.

But, you know, it’s pretty unlikely that water fluoridation only failed to make people in Wisconsin stupid, so I think we’re probably quite safe.

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In other bad news for RFK Jr. — a recent poll from 314 Action and Data for Progress has found that his MAHA movement is not very popular and may be a pretty big liability for Republicans in the midterms. It also found that, the more people learn about him and his background, the less they like him.

More specifically, the polling determined that:

• While 39 percent of voters say they support many of MAHA’s goals, only 14 percent consider themselves a part of the movement.

• Among Democrats, independent and third-party voters, even less identified with MAHA, while in swing districts, only 13 percent identified with the agenda championed by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Only among Republicans did support for the MAHA agenda go up, with 29 percent saying they identify with it.

• Voters indicated they would support candidates who champion policies like requiring routine vaccinations, increasing funding for diseases like cancer and dementia, limiting pesticide use in agriculture, banning food dyes and boosting funds for mRNA research.

• Among independent and swing voters, half said they do not believe the MAHA movement is delivering on its promises.

• More than half of all likely voters said they trusted organizations and agencies like the HHS; World Health Organization; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); and “vaccines in general.”

• Pollsters noted that favorability towards Kennedy fell among participants after the survey, during which they learned more about his history.

This is good news, because it means that people are being normal. They don’t want a ton of pesticides or food dyes that are banned in Europe in their food, but they also want vaccines and more funding for cancer research and MRNA vaccine research. That is a very happy and sensible medium — although, when you think about it, it shouldn’t really be a “medium.” People do care about their health, just not in a crazy way that makes no sense and actually makes them less healthy and more likely to die of measles.

Hooray!

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Donald Trump attacked the pope again yesterday. (Evergreen statement at this point.) But this time was slightly different, because he seems to be trying to lose his only remaining (sort of) friend in all of Europe, the kinda weird, kinda fascistic leader of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who really seems to be threading quite a needle these days between her authoritarian impulses and staying in Europe’s good graces.

You see, Giorgia Meloni is the prime minister of the country that encircles the tiny independent nation-state of Vatican City, where the pope lives and runs the Roman Catholic Church. As in Roman, as in of Rome. In Italy. You might have heard that Italy and a whole bunch of similarly positioned Mediterranean nations, and a whole lot of Europe in general, are pretty fuckin’ Catholic. So anybody could predict — as long as they are not an ignorant, self-centered, know-nothing dipshit who thinks they’re literally Doctor Jesus — that the prime minister OF ITALY might not think it’s so hot for people to be attacking the pope every single day.

But if you are Stupid Doctor Trump Jesus, you might not be bright enough to make that connection.

Trump was speaking to the Italian newspaper Corriere delle Sera, and whined that Meloni is “very different from what I thought,” and bellyached that she wouldn’t help him open the Strait of Hormuz, which he through his incompetence and stupidity managed to get closed.

Perhaps because he is senile and doesn’t understand things, he claimed of Meloni and Italy that “They pay the highest energy costs in the world and are not even ready to fight for the Strait of Hormuz ... They depend on Donald Trump ​to keep it open.” (It was, again, open before Trump decided to try to help.)

He additionally said:

“I’m shocked by her. I ⁠thought she had courage. I was wrong,” he was quoted as saying in the Italian-language article.

And here is what he said about her harsh words for his constant attacks on the pope:

“She is the one who is unacceptable, because she does not care whether Iran has a nuclear weapon and would ​blow Italy up in two minutes ​if it had the chance.”

What terrible words had she uttered to provoke such a pissy baby overreaction? In a statement on Monday, Meloni said, “I find President Trump’s remarks about the Holy Father unacceptable. The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and proper that he call for peace and condemn all forms of war.”

Meloni also said this week, “I ⁠express my solidarity ​with Pope Leo, ​frankly I would not feel very comfortable in a ​society where ​religious leaders do what political ‌leaders ⁠say.” (Yes, well, that’s the only society where weak-dicked fascists like Donald Trump and JD Vance do feel comfortable.)

Meanwhile, Trump, the stupidest man God ever expelled from His holy discard pile and accidentally sent to Earth, continued berating the pope yesterday, saying that “He doesn’t understand, and he shouldn’t be talking about war, because he has no idea what is actually happening. He doesn’t realize that, just last month, the regime in Iran killed 42,000 protesters.”

That’s right, the pope shouldn’t be talking about war, said Doctor Trump Jesus.

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It’s been a big week for Meloni with regard to the violently stupid war Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump to help him wage on Iran, something no previous American president had been braindead enough to go along with. Meloni announced that the Italian government won’t be renewing its defense agreement with Israel, “in view of the current situation.” This is something that usually renews automatically every five years. Not this time. Israel is upset, among other reasons, because the Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani criticized Israel’s “unacceptable attacks” on Lebanon.

This also comes after the Italian government refused to let the US use its Sigonella air base in Sicily as a staging or refueling ground for its efforts to explode little Iranian schoolgirls.

It turns out Italians hate Trump, and they hate his and Netanyahu’s stupid fucking war, and Meloni knows it. (And also would like to be re-elected in 18 months.) They also like the pope, as Foreign Minister Tajani explained on Twitter:

“And on Pope Leo XIV she said exactly what all of us Italians think. The prime minister and the government defend and will always defend only and solely the interests of Italy,” Tajani said.

So ciao, Donald Trump! It’s pretty clear from Meloni’s body language in literally any public appearance they’ve ever done together she personally thinks he’s gross, and always has.

We’ll close this post with these wise words from Jennifer Rubin this morning, about why Trump and his authoritarian regime are right to feel so threatened by Pope Leo. She compares him to Polish native son Pope John Paul II, and his role in ending communism there:

When a native son (Leo of America, John Paul II of Poland) expresses affection for and understanding of his countrymen in their native language during a time of the oppressive rule, the Pope can form an emotional bond that rises above politics. His message of faith, peace, and love reaches far beyond Catholic churches and compels people to focus on matters and values more profound and compelling than partisanship. A Pope in tune with his flock who promotes a values-based worldview can illuminate an autocrat’s smallness, meanness, and desperation.

As Catholics recall nearly fifty years later, Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in June 1979 helped ignite a movement that would upend the communist regime. The Pope’s visit attracted 11 million people (of a total 36M at the time) and “helped many Poles understand that they were not alone in their rejection of the regime.” Put differently, John Paul II helped Poles reconnect with their historic, religious, and patriotic roots, helping them to recognize communism as a foreign, transitory, and corrosive force. A year later, Solidarity formed in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk to spearhead the anti-communist political movement.

The Polish example reminds us that autocrats resort to bullying, violence, and fear because they cannot obtain people’s affection. Through personal experience with a despotic regime, regular people (whether in Poland in the 1980s or Hungary and the U.S. today) eventually recognize the regime as exploitive, corrupt, and cruel.

Once unleashed, these forces can level tyrants who previously cultivated the aura of invincibility.

Read the whole thing.

Yeah, it’s been a real bad week for American tyrants.

We’re more confident every day that it only gets worse for them from here.

[Reuters / BBC / The Contrarian]

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In the Senate yesterday, talks to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown broke down again, with Democrats refusing to budge on issues like identification for federal officers and having an actual judge-signed warrant before they bust down your door. So Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, said that Republicans will try to pass the money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection “the hard way,” by bypassing Democrats altogether with a budget reconciliation bill that only requires a simple majority vote in the 53-47 Senate.

Full-body hemorrhoid said what?

Trump has already said, though, that he won’t sign anything that doesn’t include the SAVE Act, which the Senate has been stalling on and seems unlikely to pass.

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And now the DHS under proud kid-beater Markwayne Mullin (and the likes of FEMA Waffle House teleporter Gregg Philips, and nervous-breakdown-having ICE head Todd Lyons) has ordered thousands of furloughed non-essential workers to return to work and to get paid, whether said budget reconciliation passes or not. Is that a legal thing they can actually do? Guess we’ll see!

Meanwhile, most Americans want what the Democrats want. Polls have found only about 38 percent approve of how Trump is handling immigration, his onetime-signature issue, and two-thirds think DHS has gone too far.

President Donald John Trump has never made a secret that non-MAGA humans are on the level with dogs to him, and he doesn’t much care for dogs. And about 38 percent of the country approves of his shoot-em-in-the-street attitude! Under his rule, DHS has been kidnapping, beating, and killing people, regardless of their citizenship status, and holding them indefinitely under conditions that violate international law, and sometimes directly in violation of judges’ orders.

Meanwhile, DHS continues to spend more than $100 BILLION dollars a year to hold between 60,000-73,000 people in 104 facilities, in conditions the ASPCA would deem inhumane, worse than ones furnished to serial killers on death row, but at least 70 percent of them without as much criminal history as a speeding ticket, and only 5 percent with a violent crime conviction.

And though DHS could afford to give them (and the rest of us too) all Japanese bidets, Italian sheets, and Peter-Attia-style lifemaxxing vitamins for that, detainees have been subjected to sardine-crammed cages and overflowing toilets and deprived of sanitary supplies and medical attention. They are often deprived of access to their lawyers, and facilities are frequently lacking translators, or translated paperwork. In Texas, ICE has detained and is trying to deport the only licensed Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu legal interpreter in the entire state, who has lived in the US for 35 years, and has been denying her access to medical care. So far 46 detainees have died in custody.

Many are refugees who arrived here seeking asylum from countries like Venezuela, Afghanistan, and El Salvador, or on valid student visas, only to have the regime yank the rug of legal protection out from under them and have masked monsters go after them and their families, sometimes with gas and bullets.

DHS has detained children as young as newborn age, kids with cancer, the disabled, pregnant, and elderly, and dozens of US citizens, some who claim to have also been beaten and choked by agents. And some US citizens have been detained by DHS with no charges just for protesting, and their faces put into the Palantir database and been flagged as enemies of the state. Did we mention the billions for all of this is coming out of cutting everybody’s already-shitty medical care?

No wonder Trump is so angry with the Pope. It’s morally indefensible under any moral code or any other rule of law but the Church of the Poison MAGA Mind, with its moral bottom that exists somewhere in the unknowable depths of Trump’s person-man-woman-camera-TV brain.

But even the inside of DHS and ICE is not so bottomless. The New York Times interviewed 80 former and current DHS and DOJ employees who shape a narrative of even true believers being bewildered, unprepared, frustrated, and confused by the new violent and chaotic regime.

And a federal appeals court has put a halt to Judge James E. Boasberg’s contempt investigation for those deportation flights. Supreme Court justices and especially Brett Kavanaugh say it is just fine for ICE to kidnap people off the street for having a mere foreign whiff about them.

Some times are nice times, but this is ICE times. May there be justice done some day, but that day doesn’t seem to be dawning any time soon.

[ProPublica / AP / New York Times archive link]

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JD Vance tried to do a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia, and it was disastrous. Nobody showed up, not even Erika Kirk and her tight pants and her mobile fireworks stand. Not to grift, not to hump up on that vice presidential couch. You think she hasn’t noticed what happens to people and things JD Vance touches? Let’s just say running your fingers through JD Vance’s mane isn’t the power move she might have originally thought.

There is so much humiliation to get through here, where to start!

Well, tickets were free at the Akins Ford Arena in Athens, home of the big flagship UGA campus. So it was really sad when the big event came but nobody else bothered to. Jake Traylor from MS NOW and others surveyed the wreckage:

Akins Arena has a capacity of over 8,000. That would mean maybe 2,000 people could be bothered to love or hate JD Vance enough to request a free ticket online, or show up without one and pray they got in. A local student-run news source was more generous, suggesting that the arena was maybe a third full.

And again, the turnout was so embarrassing, apparently, that Erika Kirk decided to stay in her hotel room and hate-watch Druski videos. Vance told the crowd — OK, he told the group of people who showed up — that Kirk had to cancel because of security concerns. If so, it’s pretty funny that nobody was apparently all that concerned about JD Vance’s security, since he is the vice president, a point we’re not the only one to make. As this MAGA journalist noted:

Spracklen is continuing to make fun of it on Twitter, asking, “Surely the FBI is investigating the threats against Erika Kirk right? Will we see an arrest or will Kash Patel address this?” LMAO.

Meanwhile Candace Owens — haha, that nutcase — clapped back directly at Erka Kirk’s face on the security thing, on Twitter. Kirk had tweeted, “I was so looking forward to tonight’s event at the universityofga with our Vice President JD Vance, but after all our family has been through, I take my security team’s recommendations extremely seriously. Thank you to our amazing Georgia chapter for your support. God bless you all!” Where would the “threats” have hidden? Behind one of the many attendees? Here’s Candace:

Hahahahaha, all these people should continue to fight.

Owens kept mocking Kirk, tweeting, “Please spare us the paid influencer campaign to convince us that Erika’s life was at risk from empty seats. Just this one time, please oh please spare us, Turning Point.”

At risk from empty seats. That’s gotta burn.

We think we see what’s happened here. Erika Kirk is one of the least highly regarded public figures in the entire world, who receives back the warmth she puts into the universe. Meanwhile, if those empty seats were threatening to bite JD Vance, not even the Secret Service seemed to care.

He’d probably like that anyway.

During the show — OK, it was more like a sparsely attended elementary school ballet recital than a “show” — the crowd — OK, the people who had literally nothing better to do that day — heckled Vance mercilessly, and he was just generally poorly received.

Vance, who became Catholic 12 seconds ago when he determined it would be good for his power acquisition ambitions, and/or when he heard they have really elegant couches in the Vatican, and who wrote an upcoming book about “Catholic” that features what appears to be a Country Time Lemonade Bible church on the cover, attacked the pope some more. “When the pope says that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword — there is more than a thousand year tradition of just war theory.” Wank wank wank. Have y’all seen that viral tweet about recent Catholic converts?

Yep that one.

And then there was the whole thing where he got heckled and Jesus-splained, right back in his ugly bearded face:

As Vance was speaking, someone in the audience shouted out, “Jesus Christ does not support genocide.”

The VP was quick to address “whoever yelled that out from the dark,” saying, “Yes, I agree, Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide... I think that’s a pretty easy principle.”

The heckler then appeared to yell, “Why are you committing genocide in Gaza?”

Vance continued, “First of all, random dude who’s shouting, can I finish my point and then I’ll respond to what you just shouted. Is that okay? Great.”

Vance finished his thought on the pope, noting that “we can of course” have disagreements on “whether this or that conflict is just.”

He added, “In the same way that it’s important for the Vice President of United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

That’s right, that’s JD Vance telling the pope how to pope.

Vance continued to babble at the heckler — who also yelled “You’re bombing children!” — blaming Joe Biden and claiming regarding Gaza that “We’re the administration that solved that problem.”

(By “solved” we guess he means that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have a plan to build a Trump Tower on top of it?)

Here’s some video of that:

Elsewhere during the event, it was pretty pathetic when JD Vance tried to pretend Donald Trump hardly knew his best dead pedophile child rapist friend Jeffrey Epstein.

We guess if you really want to hear what else JD Vance said, some news organizations went into more detail. The student newspaper we linked above had a pretty good summary.

Or you could make like all those empty seats and skip it.

It’s only JD Vance, after all. It’s not, like, an important guy or anything.

[Daily Beast]

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Good morning friends, what are we reading today? FIRST ONE’S BAD.

Eric Swalwell sure did have a lot of young staffers who said they overserved themselves and then woke up later after blacking out, in some cases “bruised and bleeding.” This woman says she had one glass of wine with him and was “incapacitated.” It does awfully sound like that hilarious (not hilarious) old Cosby “joke.” She is filing evidence with the LA sheriff. (Politico)

Sure, it’s still going on (maybe forever!), but we all should know we just lost a war that Trump chose to enter. (Public Notice)

Trump’s losing another war of choice, and it’s with conservative Catholics who are siding with the lib commie woke Pope. (Letters From Leo)

You’re not going to believe this, but the New York Times has deigned to wonder out loud if the president of the United States of America may, possibly, could be the teeniest bit out of his fucking gourd. (Gift link NYT)

Jamie Raskin gon try to 25th Amendment President Idiot. (MSNow)

Derp.

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People mad because prices high? Yes. People mad because prices high. (G. Elliott Morris)

But also!

These Emperors have no clothes, but they can still bomb Iranian elementary schools. They can still use ICE as their personal Gestapo. They can still kill Americans in the street.

No wonder we’re all losing our goddamn minds! (Garrett Bucks at The White Pages)

Trump administration backs down from stupid, stupid, stupid decision to bar the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument. (AP)

BOY that teleporting FEMA official has an interesting life!!! (Archive CNN)

This guy who shot someone outside a Planned Parenthood last November seems to be getting his case slow-walked. That’s weird and also a cool coincidence that the Trump administration is firing DOJ lawyers who prosecuted abortion clinic violence because abortion clinic violence is “protected religious expression”! (Abortion, Every Day / ibid, scroll down / MSNow)

California is starting to build housing finally, and many YIMBY wins are only just now coming online. Yes In All Of Our Backyards! (M. Nolan Gray)

Are Texans and the Right having a normal one about the growth of the Indian immigrant population in Frisco, Texas? Gonna have to ask the Magic 8 Ball on that one. (TPM)

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There were some tabs! Jesus …. is your friiiiend.

Not fuck things up? That doesn’t sound like our way at all!

Another Trump LOLsuit bites the dust.

Now the DOGE tell-alls are coming out. They’re very bad!

And here’s why I personally have been having a very bad day!

She seems nice, but really she seems nice. Hope her husband gets better!

And two sex pests gone, with some House members’ with their hands in the kitty soon to follow.

Thank you for being our friend. We love you!

What a difference an hour makes! Yesterday, after suspending his campaign for governor of California, Rep. Eric Swalwell resigned his seat in the US House as well. Then an hour later, so did Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas. And now Swalwell is facing a fifth accuser, who claimed today that he drugged her, raped her and choked her unconscious.

The two resigning together was no coincidence, and Punch Bowl News has a rundown of the horse-sausage making and trading that went on behind the scenes, and the respective strategies taken by Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Democrats on the other side.

Short version, Republicans and Speaker Johnson stayed quiet for a month about accusations that Rep. Tony Gonzales sexually harassed and then had an affair with a staffer, who later died by suicide, setting herself on fire.

An affair that Gonzales denied, claiming his staffer’s suicide was because her widower was gay and also that the widower was trying to blackmail him, until volumes of evidence came out. And Johnson was happy to ignore it all until Gonzales’s re-election bid faltered and headed to a runoff in March. Only then did Johnson call for him to end his re-election bid, and the House opened an ethics probe, though Johnson still didn’t call on Gonzales to step down. The Aristocrats! Can’t risk that razor-thin majority!

But bad news about Gonzales kept on coming. As it always does with sex pests! When do they ever pester just one? Last Monday more disgusting text messages came out showing Gonzales, married father of six, harassing a different staffer, four years before, and similarly relentlessly, daily, pestering her for nudes in spite of her many refusals (“I know what I want and won’t stop until I get it”), badgering her to ask what kind of panties she wore and fantasizing about how he wished she would squeeze his balls.

So when Eric Swalwell resigned and Republicans saw the opportunity to rid themselves of dead weight with a side of virtue-signaling, they told God to go tell Tony Gonzales to GTFO pronto!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark, and fellow Californian Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar quickly released a statement calling on Swalwell to drop out of the gubernatorial race about as soon as the allegations came out, though still not going as far as to say he should resign. And Jeffries did not speak with Swalwell at all, hoping the trash would take itself out. And Nancy Pelosi counseled Swalwell behind the scenes that while it was his decision, “If you have a challenge that you have to address, it’s best addressed not as a candidate for governor and not as a member of Congress.” Well put! And off the trash went.

The MAGA propaganda then churned its gaslighting up to 11, as typified by Ron DeSantis:

Yeesh, that part, and as if that wasn’t exactly what everyone just watched with our own eyeballs with Gonzales until the minute he was a proven loser! And as if the Democratic leadership wouldn’t have twerked its heart out like the rent was due if it would have gotten walking-time-bomb Swalwell out of the CA governor’s race sooner than 50 days before the primary and before he became the frontrunner for California governor.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) said Swalwell lied to everyone, and seemed at one point on the verge of tears.

It should be noted, Gallego has had his own issues with women, bitching in texts to a friend about how un-hot he thought some Dem women are, and commenting on a meme of Connecticut’s Rosa DeLauro labeled “if erectile dysfunction had a face” with “they aren’t wrong!” And is also a trans-hate apologist. So fuck him too!

And if you guessed that worse was about to come out about Swalwell too, add drugging, choking and another rape accusation. While his wife was home pregnant in 2018. Allegedly.

Drewes’s revelations came a day after he dropped out of the governor’s race and House, so guess the accusations were not just political after all. What monsters, these men!

Anyway, the mutual probing still isn’t done. Next week the House Ethics Committee will hold a sanction hearing for Florida Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick; in November she was indicted on charges accusing her of stealing $5 million in federal disaster funds and using some of the money to aid her 2021 campaign, and then last month the Committee found her guilty of 25 charges and Republicans have vowed to force an expulsion vote.

And Democrats have vowed to move against Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, remember that freak? He was last seen getting evicted from his $20,000-a-month DC penthouse for nonpayment of rent, then slapped with a restraining order by former Miss United States Lindsey Langston, after she showed a judge texts of Mills threatening to release revenge porn of her if she wouldn’t get back together with him, and threatening to physically assault anyone she dated other than himself. Not to be confused with Mills’s other former girlfriend, 17-years-younger Sarah Raviani, co-founder of the group Iranians for Trump, who called 911 claiming the then-married (now separated) Mills had assaulted her, and then-acting US Attorney for DC Ed Martin refused to sign Mills’s arrest warrant.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Llorona of the Lowcountry, introduced a measure to censure Mills back in November, and the House instead sent the issue to the House Ethics Committee, where it still sits, next to the other allegedly ongoing probe of Mace herself over allegedly double-dipping the housing costs of her sex condo and AirBnb. Mace’s House term will end January 3, 2027, BTW, and she’s vying to be the GOP candidate for governor of South Carolina, the polls all over the place.

Anyway, BYE, you two (alleged) nasty fucking creeps, and maybe someday the rest too. Because if you can’t keep your schwanz in your pants or your fingers out of the taxpayer kitty (and/or worse), you have no business making laws for other people!

[Punch Bowl News / San Antonio Express]

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Yesterday, the Trump Regime tried to do something good for its narrative by staging a photo-op with a so-called “DoorDash grandma” who came to the White House to deliver unto Donald Trump some future diarrhea, in the form of a sack full of McDonald’s. It was one of those Republican things where we’re all supposed to be excited about some bullshit BAND-AID intended to distract us from underlying injustice or brokenness in the system.

You know those Facebook memes/viral stories where we’re all supposed to go “AWWWW!” and have our hearts warmed because the community came together to GoFundMe a firefighter who lost both their legs saving a cat from a burning tree and then they got ass herpes (unrelated, not from the cat) and the medical bills from the amputations and the ass herpes bankrupted their family, which caused their grandma and their dog to starve to death, but it’s OK now because the GoFundMe has enough money in it to buy a casket big enough to fit grandma and the dead dog? Aww! All the feels!

Maybe if we had a decent healthcare system in the United States their cat-saving amputations and their ass herpes wouldn’t have bankrupted their family IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE!

Well listen, because DoorDash Granny has a sob story too (and a GoFundMe), Trump and the Republicans have a solution that doesn’t solve shit about fuck, DoorDash Granny is a prop the Republicans have dragged out before, and DoorDash Granny wouldn’t even go along with it when Trump started babbling about transgender people playing women’s sports. (That’s the one redeeming thing in the entire photo-op.)

Here is the stupid video.

In the photo-op, DoorDash Granny delivers the burgers unto Trump, the human Big Mac vacuum, who replies, “This doesn’t look staged, does it?” Ha ha! He then explains the reason for the photo-op.

You see, according to the White House, and according to Trump in the video above, Sharon Simmons, a 58-year-old grandmother of 10, saved $11,000 DOLLARS last year thanks to Donald Trump’s “No Tax On Tips” policy, which is Trump’s stupid policy that sounds nice (if you’re an idiot), but doesn’t really help most people in the service industry. Simmons will use that money, the White House says, to pay for her husband’s cancer treatment.

You know, instead of having a healthcare system where a DoorDash Granny from Northwest Arkansas doesn’t need to spend an extra $11,000 on her husband’s cancer treatment. Or where granny doesn’t have to deliver DoorDash to pay for her husband’s cancer treatment.

Also, you might be wondering how much Granny DoorDash is making if she’s saving $11K in taxes by not having to claim tips. Hold that thought.

Trump, continuing to babble his way through the photo-op, tries to get Simmons to comment on whether men should play in women’s sports. “I don’t really have an opinion on that,” explains Simmons, who was there to do a photo-op about No Tax On Tips.

And yes, if the setting looks familiar, it was indeed during this very same photo-op that Trump lied and said he posted that picture of himself as literally Jesus Christ because he thought it depicted him as a doctor.

But let’s get back to Sharon Simmons from Northwest Arkansas who allegedly saved $11,000 in taxes as a DoorDash driver by not having to declare her tips, and now she can use that money for her husband’s cancer treatment, praise Doctor Jesus Trump from whom all blessings flow.

Here is Sharon Simmons from Nevada, testifying in a House hearing last year for GOP Rep. David Kustoff, about how much Trump’s Big Ugly Bill will help her as a DoorDash driver paying for her husband’s cancer treatments. Yes, they’ve trotted her out before! We guess they couldn’t find another DoorDash driver or tipped worker in the whole country willing to do this shit.

Kustoff didn’t ask her what she thought about men playing women’s sports, because he may be a fascist and a son of a bitch, but his brain isn’t made of squirrel droppings like Trump’s is.

And now here is Simmons on Fox & Friends this morning, explaining that she is not a paid actor. If true, then she’s taking time away from some very important DoorDashing to shill for the exact people who are fucking her, and she’s doing it FREE! (DoorDash has confirmed in a statement that it was a stunt.) She told Fox & Friends that she indeed recently moved from the Vegas area to Fayetteville, Arkansas. She also explained in the interview that she made $11,000 in tips, which is decidedly not the same as saving $11,000, as Trump lied, as the White House has explicitly and repeatedly lied about on social media, and as she herself lied in the photo-op with Trump above.

The rest of the clip is obviously trademark Fox News doing one of its fascist feel-good stories about people living in a society where not having to pay taxes on $11,000 to try not to go bankrupt while paying for your husband’s cancer treatment is treated as miraculous and wonderful.

In another Fox News clip, Simmons explained that “over half” of her income is tips, which means if she made $11,000 in tips, she made (max) $22,000 last year delivering DoorDash. In that clip, she estimated that she’s saved $3-4,000 in taxes. Now, we don’t know everything about her filing status, and if her husband is also bringing in money, that could change her tax bracket.

But let’s look at some numbers. As this fact sheet from Fidelity explains, if you’re married and you want to take the No Tax On Tips deduction, you have to file jointly. If Sharon Simmons saved $3-4,000 in (federal) taxes on that $11K, then she and her husband would necessarily have to be in one of the tax brackets that for the year 2025 starts at $206,050 in yearly earnings and cuts off at $501,050. If she was single, for 2025, and that was her income, then the first $11,925 of that $22K wouldn’t be subject to federal income taxes in the first place. Note also that No Tax On Tips doesn’t apply to payroll taxes or anything else besides federal.

And again, and regardless, in the richest country in the world, we shouldn’t have to elevate sob stories where an alleged $3-4,000 in tax savings is some kind blessing from above for a woman trying to pay her husband’s medical bills for cancer treatment!

Fuck.

In summary and in conclusion, if Sharon Simmons isn’t getting paid by the GOP for all this shilling, she should bill them. See how much husband cancer treatment that buys her.

(Hope he beats the cancer.)

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Content note: sexual assault, sex trafficking, real bad misogyny

On June 9, 2024, a 26-year-old former soldier and security guard named Kyle Clifford went to the home in Hertfordshire, England, where his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt lived with her mother and sister and killed all of them using a crossbow — though not before raping and torturing Louise Hunt for several hours.

Hunt had recently broken up with him over his “views and behavior.” Not surprising, given the fact that it was later discovered that, in the run-up to the massacre, the soon-to-be family annihilator spent many hours listening to Andrew Tate.

Prosecutors argued that this should have been admitted into evidence because “the sort of violent misogyny promoted by Tate is the same type of motivation that … fuelled both the murders and the rape.” The judge, however, determined that it would be “deeply prejudicial” as Tate was “almost a poster boy for misogynists.”

Why am I telling you this horrible, horrible, deeply disturbing story? Because just recently, Andrew Tate — the violent, (alleged) sex trafficking misogynist who was in prison in Romania until the Trump administration freed him (no sex trafficker left behind!) and who makes a large portion of his money teaching men how to trick women into making them money as cam girls and allegedly inspired Kyle Clifford to violently murder three women — shot to the very top of Substack’s New Bestsellers list. Tate joined the site earlier this month and has since racked up 1.1 million followers … which is pretty incredibly depressing.

As a result, Substack ended up trending on social media yesterday, with many people (fairly!) saying that they would no longer support any site hosted on the platform. Who is a website hosted on the platform? Wonkette is a website hosted on the platform. Many users already left Substack when it was revealed that they hosted several anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi sites (and made money off of them, too). It’s likely that more will leave now.

I’m a big fan of free speech — even beyond the idea that it’s only illegal if the government censors speech, which is factually true. And this isn’t like, complaining that Bari Weiss’s “Free Press” sucks. (Bari Weiss’s Free Press sucks.) But there’s a difference, a big one, between permitting speech and platforming it, and an even bigger difference between that and making money off of it. Substack takes 10 percent of every subscription, so they’re technically making money off of Andrew Tate, an (alleged, but also self-confessed) sex trafficker and rapist who makes his money off of teaching young men how to be garbage human beings who think women are obligated to serve them.

There’s an argument that could be made for allowing all speech, no matter how vile, but there’s not really one for allowing (and benefiting from) monetization. Nearly every content creation site that allows for monetization allows for this.

On YouTube, creators who reuse content, who make automated, repetitive content, or who engage in hate speech or even serious profanity cannot make money off of their videos. The site has also banned several users entirely … including Andrew Tate. TikTok bans hate speech, bullying, and hateful ideologies and will demonetize or ban users who engage in this. Users like, again, Andrew Tate, who is also banned from TikTok. Even Meta, which, grossly, specifically allows users to “call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality,” says they ban “hateful conduct” against protected classes and still restrict hate speech on monetized content. Andrew Tate is also banned from Meta. Twitch also bans hate speech and will demonetize content creators who violate that policy. Andrew Tate is also banned from Twitch.

Hell, even The Site Formerly Known As Twitter will take away users’ ability to monetize their feed, though less for hate speech than for, uh, getting mad about people using AI to post fake child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) of them. That would, for the record, be just about the only site other than Substack that has not banned Andrew Tate (well, since Musk has been in charge, anyway, he was banned before that).

It is worth noting that while it’s not very substantial, Substack at least has a policy against inciting violence against protected classes.

Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.

We can’t know what Tate is publishing on his Substack, as it is for paid subscribers only (unlike Wonkette, which will always be free), but we do know he has a long and storied habit of encouraging violence against women — who are, in fact, a protected class.

He has bragged about breaking a woman’s jaw. Once, when describing how he would react if a woman complained about him cheating on her, he said, “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.” He has said that women should “bear some responsibility” for being raped. He’s also been accused of raping and strangling at least two women he’s dated.

In fact, he directly told one of these women “I love raping you.”

On top of that, for several years now teachers have said that they and their female students now have to deal with sexual harassment and bullying from boys as young as 11 who idolize Tate. That might not directly be “violence” but it seems highly unlikely that it won’t get to that level eventually, as these boys grow up. Even when he’s not actively encouraging violence against women, he’s promoting hatred of them in a world in which nearly 9 out of 10 women who are murdered by men are murdered by men that they know, in which we’ve seen myriad men go on mass murder sprees simply because they hate women. Indeed, an Andrew Tate admirer in the UK was sentenced to six years in prison a couple years ago after plotting an attack on his university.

If we can’t see his posts, we can’t know what kind of violence he is encouraging against women, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of that policy. Given that we know, for a fact, that this is one of his areas of interest, it would really behoove Substack to follow in the footsteps of practically every other platform on earth and kick his ass off.

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Substack is not a publicly traded company. If it were, one could say it had an obligation to its stockholders to not do anything that would damage the brand so severely. However, they should feel some obligation to the world at large to not promote and make money off of someone who encourages violence against women (or anyone!), as well as to their other users who stand to lose subscriptions and money as people defect. (That’s us again, hi.)

Unfortunately, we are not in really a position to leave because (inside baseball!) we have 22 years of posts that would need to be transferred to a new site — something that took many months and tens of thousands of dollars the last few times we’ve done so. It would be a whole lot better for us if the platform would just not host and make money off of neo-Nazis and violent misogynists. It’s not actually that hard. If practically every other site on earth can do it, we think Substack can manage.

But if you’d like to continue (Or start! Always feel free to start, any time!) supporting us without supporting Substack, you can donate through Paypal, join our Patreon, or buy our merch.

We appreciate you. This bullshit, not so much.

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