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Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, And MAGA's Misogynist Mythology

Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, And MAGA's Misogynist Mythology

I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. The first time I read her name was in the summer of 2019, long after her years as one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of teen girls and young women lured into Jeffrey Epstein’s world and passed around “like a plate of fruit,” as she put it, to powerful men. Her name was prominent in hundreds of pages of court documents from a defamation case Giuffre had filed against Epstein procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell, a wealthy British socialite, had publicly called Giuffre a liar for claiming that Epstein trafficked her around to powerful men, including Prince Andrew. Giuffre took her to court, and Maxwell eventually settled, but the record remained sealed until just a day or two before Epstein died.

The documents were filled with redactions – powerful men had been fighting the release of their names in court for years – but it was also filled with horrifying Easter eggs, like depositions from other teens lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach lair, household staff describing the endless parade of girls paid by Maxwell, some of them lost and terrified.

I sat up all night, glued to the stomach-turning pages, and wrote about the documents for Rolling Stone a few days later. In 2020, I worked as executive producer on a three-part series about Ghislaine Maxwell, still streaming on Peacock.

That’s all to say: I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. As does most of the informed public and the legion of Epstein conspiracy theorists. I know enough to recognize that the MAGA cult belief that Donald Trump was put on this Earth to vanquish “pedophile”* sex trafficker Epstein and his ilk ought to go down in history as one of the greatest branding psy ops in recorded history. Trump and Epstein were close pals, sleazeball, greasy, handsy Manhattan modelizer running buddies in the 1980s, a fact easily ascertained in pictures, and if you don’t want to believe your eyes, listen to recorded tapes of Jeffrey Epstein that Michael Wolff released last fall.

I might have liked to talk to Virginia someday, but now she’s dead, reportedly by suicide, after long battles with physical ailments and depression. Virginia, like many girls lured into the sex trade, had already endured a difficult childhood: she was from a poor family, abused by a family friend at age 11, and in and out of foster care. Maxwell, always cruising for fresh teen flesh for her sometime boyfriend Epstein, found Giuffre (then Virginia Roberts) at age 17, working as a “spa attendant” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

Maxwell and Epstein soon groomed Giuffre into a plaything under their control, a young woman without agency. And that is not good for any woman’s mental or physical health.

There is a cherished lie that many men – and some women – tell themselves that women like Virginia are naturally pliant and happy to service men for money as part of “the oldest profession.”

This myth of the happily pliant and transactional female is not just resurgent but increasingly enforced in the Trump years. We are now witnessing increasingly brazen applications of raw state power over female physical autonomy, reduced public authority for women including electoral disenfranchisement, forced marriage via legally limiting divorce options, public humiliation and threats of violence toward women in power, social and cultural marginalization and erasure of women, and the reduction of women’s roles from economic agency to isolated baby-maker in abject dependence on a man.

You hear it in public statements – utterly unthinkable just five years ago – that maybe women shouldn’t vote because husbands know best, that no fault divorce should be rescinded because it’s too easy for women to leave their household duties, and that women should not have jobs. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh and others have even started to attack their own prominent working women on the right as de facto feminists.

You see it in Mark Zuckerberg’s latest project, revealed in the Wall Street Journal - a sex-playing AI chatbot that can pretend to be a “Submissive Schoolgirl” pretending its interlocutor is a middle school principal. Zuck is so pissed he missed out on Snapchat, he whined to colleagues, he wants to get out ahead on the AI sex bot.

You see it in Elon Musk’s insane harem of an untold number of women paid to incubate IVF embryos selected for male chromosomes.

You see it in porn that suggests girls and women like to be choked – which we now empirically know causes violence against women in the real world.

The Silicon Valley authors of our virtual world have been setting this up for a long time. It’s all around us. Online, we swim in a miasma of sexism. Ask AI Google what women want. I did this recently, looking for the famous Freud quote. AI will tell you that what we women want is empathy, love, and affection from a man, and nothing more than a relationship. Ask it the same question about men, and it adds an entire section about what men want beyond a partner, all of which have to do with worldly accomplishments.

This is exactly the crap that Christian nationalist pastors like the utterly mad and yet influential Doug Wilson (one degree separated from open affiliation with Vice President JD Vance) preaches, besides arguing that marital rape is impossible by definition, that women are constitutionally incapable of having a “mission” or “purpose” in life beyond marriage and childbearing, while men require the chance at least to aspire to greatness through worldly accomplishments. (The sermon is here, titled “The Natural Use of a Woman”.)

This age-old mythology was born in the eons before contraception, modern medicine and rape laws, in the dark ages when women were denied even a glimmer of economic independence and died often in childbirth. It has survived the epochal changes that modern science and feminists have managed to achieve for women over the last several decades, and is now the framework on which the whole MAGA enterprise with respect to women lies.

The primary plank of the Trumpist anti feminist movement is the notion that a viable route – and perhaps the only viable route – to success as a woman is to have children and serve men who need assurance that we are nothing more than sexual playthings with no agency.

This is, of course, a lie – both that women could or should ever be reduced to that and that it’s any kind of path to real success. The sad childhood and adolescence, the slow physical decline, and now death by suicide of Virginia Giuffre – if it means anything, and it should – reminds us that the myth of the naturally pliant woman is evil and damaging. And it is absolutely at the core of MAGA politics with regard to women.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.


With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

On Roman streets and the worldwide web, a half-joke was making the rounds yesterday: Catholic convert JD Vance, emissary of America’s empathy-challenged hard right, was the last visitor to Pope Francis before he died and somehow… did him in.

Here at the Freakshow, we disregard conspiracy theories like these until shown hard proof. But it is a fact that a cabal of powerful right-wing American Catholics is not at all sorry to see Francis pass away – on Easter Monday, no less. These men have been licking their chops for more than a decade for a chance to conclave and install a man more of their ilk, someone who might help persuade millions of Catholics that Jesus was really a social Darwinist.

“The ultra-conservative wing of the US Catholic Church – a group made up of cardinals, bishops, priests and wealthy individuals – has spent years preparing for this precise moment,” says British investigative journalist Gareth Gore, who last year published a book on the strange and secretive Opus Dei cult, including its growing power in the heart of Washington. (I covered it for New York Magazine).

Pope Francis was one of the more progressive church leaders in recent Catholic church history. He acknowledged the effects of manmade climate change and made small – but, to the far right, significant and alarming – statements about market capitalism and the poor. Those positions are clearly aligned with Jesus’ actual teachings, but ultra conservatives have abandoned them in favor of the prosperity gospel and drill baby drill.

Francis’s support of social justice made him anathema to hard-right American Catholics like Leonard Leo and billionaires like California real estate attorney Tim Busch. Busch’s Trinitas Cellars produces red wines named after the Virgin Mary. Many Opus Dei-affiliated and other hard-right Catholics in Washington (JD Vance and Leonard Leo among them) have boarded jets west to attend gatherings at Busch’s Napa Institute School of Business.

Last year, Busch hosted a conference on “woke capitalism,” and in the past, he’s invited speakers questioning the authenticity of the civil rights movement. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops cut ties with Busch’s Napa School in part because event agendas include praying the Patriotic Rosary, a devotion invoking divine “continuance on our cause and our people” using the words of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee – that specific cause, of course, being the perpetuation of slavery.

In addition to annoying rich MAGA extremists, Francis had asked church officials to live more modestly. “We pastors must not be men with a ‘princely mindset.’” he once said. This did not sit well with rightist clergy who live for cosplaying royalty. American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke was among them. He insisted on continuing to wear trains of watered silk, scarlet gloves, and jeweled red hats – all while calling gay marriage Satanic and accusing Obama of being a totalitarian because of the ACA.

Some of the kookiest hard-right Catholic clergy are American or are operating in this country. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former pontifical vicar to the U.S. under the arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a wildly nutty letter in support of Trump in 2020, calling the election a battle between the forces of light and darkness. He also publicly called Pope Francis a “false prophet” and a “servant of Satan.”

Cardinal Burke, discussed above, defied the Pope and refused to give communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. He had considered serving as honorary president of a “gladiator school” for white religious nationalists that Steve Bannon was building in Europe. (He backed off when Bannon said he might make a documentary about pedophile priests.)

During his tenure, Francis demoted Opus Dei and expelled some of the more extreme bishops aligned with Christian nationalism and alt-right conspiracy theorists. Last year, the Pope excommunicated Vigano for “schism” citing his "refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff.” Francis had removed Burke from the Vatican’s highest court and then revoked his salary and Vatican quarters.

Gareth Gore has reported that a secret cabal long schemed to get rid of Pope Francis. They used some of the same opposition research tactics to investigate rising left-leaning leaders within the church that (Opus Dei-affiliated Catholic) Leonard Leo and his Judicial Crisis Network have applied in media and influence campaigns to stack the Supreme Court with far-right Catholics.

“While Francis was alive, the [right-wing Catholic billionaires and clergy] actively sought to discredit his papacy with smear campaigns, leaking unfounded accusations that the late Pope had covered up cases of sexual abuse – and then using the right-wing Catholic media to spread those rumours far and wide,” Gareth Gore told me. “At the same time, they were financing a campaign to influence the next Conclave, hiring former CIA and FBI agents to dig up kompromat on liberal cardinals who might follow him. Their aim was clear: to discredit Francis and his progressive agenda, and to ensure that the next Pope is a man aligned with their world view - someone who agrees with their ultra-conservative reading of the Bible. That plan is now cranking into action.”

These same men are busy today and in the weeks to come, plotting to ensure the Catholic Church gets back to the business of the Inquisition and witch burning.

Ok, I jest.

But the Catholic hard right and their allies in Washington are not too sad today. They have waited a while for this opportunity. When Gore interviewed Tim Busch for his book, the Californian was explicit about the far right outliving a progressive Pope. “I think something important is happening, something not so good,” Busch said. “I think he’s tightening the noose, but I don’t think he’s going to have enough time.”

But Gore also believes the rightists face an uphill struggle. “The ultra-conservatives, while wealthy and powerful, are a tiny proportion of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world,” he told me. “The Conclave to elect the next Pope will be largely made up of cardinals appointed by Francis himself. While they may not necessarily share all of his views, they will see the positive impact that his progressive agenda has had on the Church, and will likely want to build on his legacy.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.



Why Trump's War Against Women Doesn't Really Disturb Bill Maher

Why Trump's War Against Women Doesn't Really Disturb Bill Maher

Last week, HBO comedian Bill Maher waxed effusive about Trump’s graciousness and charm at a White House dinner the president hosted for him, Kid Rock, and UFC head Dana White. On his Real Time show, Maher said: “You can hate me for it, but I’m not a liar. Trump was gracious and measured. And why isn’t that in other settings? I don’t know, and I can’t answer, and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw, and I wasn’t high.”

I’m usually a Bill fan. I was on his show once, and I like that he brings together opposing views but also pushes back on lies and bullshit –unlike Joe Rogan, for example. Communicating with people whose politics differ from ours is good for a healthy democracy: D.C. dinner society once included people from most of the political spectrum – I wrote a book about it.

That Washington waned and then disappeared roughly around the time Newt Gingrich rolled into town on the coattails of the long game the right had been playing to foment public distrust and loathing toward the entire government. Now, while one side still plays by the old rules, the other mounts a fascist insurrection and hangs “Fuck Biden” flags on the lawn for school children to see.

But all the vileness Trump and the MAGA cult have unleashed in American political discourse pales compared with the damage done to women. The dreadful things happening to American women and girls in the abortion ban states are some of the most dramatic stories in the country today. Women are getting sepsis and losing their reproductive organs. Some are dying.

Every one of those individual horrors was caused by one man: The leader of the greatest misogynistic backlash in modern U.S. history is Donald Trump – yes, that gracious dinner companion.

This is the man who crafted a Supreme Court that has set women’s health back into the Stone Age. This convicted sexual abuser and famous public denigrator of females packs his cabinet with accused predators and sex pests. Accused rapist Russell Brand recently posed with White House officials Peter Navarro and RFK Jr. at some tropical hideaway. The Trump regime just invited into America – and granted safe haven, literally – to the rape-accused domestic abuse propagandists that are the Tate brothers.

More than any single man or woman in my lifetime, Trump ushered in the ongoing and vicious legal and cultural assault on women and girls. Banning abortion was only the beginning. The fanatic MAGA misogynists who engineered this situation want the Jezebels to suffer more. A lot more.

States are passing “fetal personhood” laws giving embryos more rights than the women carrying them and enabling hundreds of arrests already. States are considering and passing laws to make abortion data public. Many are considering and some are passing laws to imprison women and doctors over abortion. A few are even trying to institute the death penalty.

Feminist journalist Jessica Valenti publishes a phenomenal compendium of the maniacal proposals and new woman-hating laws, Abortion, Everyday. I consult it for my daily dose of rage. Here you will learn, for example, that state legislators in Texas want to start testing the water for birth control hormones because they might be harmful. These are the same legislators, of course, who seem to be opposed to federal clean water regulations).

Remember, this is not just a legal assault, it is cultural: Peter Thiel’s conservative women’s magazine Evie routinely spews nonsense about the dangers of hormonal birth control. Anti-abortion propaganda (in the form of a movie called “Baby Olivia” produced by anti-abortion fanatics) is now mandatory in North Dakota, Tennessee, and Idahoschools and is being considered in Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

And the Trump administration recently yanked NIH funding for the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient behind a major longitudinal study that examined the effects of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. The research found that abortion does not harm women’s health and well-being, in contrast to points made by anti-choice fanatics, but being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health, and family outcomes for women.

We are living through a time of truly crazy cultural assault on women’s agency rights, in addition to the violations of our bodily autonomy. Trump’s first election made misogyny cool again. His second regime is cementing that success into law and culture. Ideas that once festered in the incel basement chatrooms are now common currency in the mainstream. Maybe divorce is too easy for women. Maybe women shouldn’t vote (since they overwhelmingly do not prefer Trump).

The House recently passed a law that potentially disenfranchises 80 percent of married women by requiring voter IDs to have birth names, not married names. And states have been considering laws to repeal no-fault divorce, which has repeatedly been shown to reduce domestic violence.

Bill Maher was charmed by Trump, a disgusting oaf and abuser, who spent a full decade pal-ing around with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein per Michael Wolff’s tapes, competing for sexual access to pretty women before falling out, not over Epstein’s predations, as the deluded QAnon cult believes, but a real estate deal.

There’s a good reason why Maher is charm-able. Predations against women don’t trouble him too much. Like many left-ish cads, he’s not too bothered by “the woman stuff.” In fact, as Sophie Gilbert writes in her essay on women and porn in The Atlantic today, liberal - libertine - men in entertainment always promoted the hard-core sexualization of women and girls that preceded this Trumpy-Tate bro era.

Last week I heard Clara Bingham read from her best-selling new oral history, The Movement, on women behind the so-called “second wave” of the fight for women’s equality in America between 1963 and 1973. The changes those women were able to effect are nothing short of epochal. In 1963, American women couldn’t open bank accounts or get credit cards without men, couldn't serve on juries, and were generally limited to work in nursing, teaching, or, until the wizened age of 32 or earlier if pregnant or married, flight attendants. Women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Contraception was hard to get, limited to married women and secret terrifying back alley abortions were the norm.

The women in that generation who fought for equality were subject to endless public ridicule - from men on the left and the right. But, by 1973, everything had changed. The lives of those women’s daughters and granddaughters are unrecognizable. Their achievement was epochal, making women and girls first-class citizens for the first time in history.

That didn’t sit well with many men, who spent the following decades relentlessly denigrating these heroines and downplaying their success. Men like Bill Maher -- nominally left-center but well-known habitué of strip clubs and serial dater of young women -- belong to the great cohort of American men who, while not MAGA, are simply not as horrified as they should be by what Trump has inflicted on half the American population.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.

Autocrat (And Felon) Trump Yearns To 'Disappear' American Citizens, Too

Autocrat (And Felon) Trump Yearns To 'Disappear' American Citizens, Too

Hello from Union Station on a cold spring day in DC. Blossoms are out. The Capitol dome rises a few hundred yards away. The “city of magnificent distances,” as a 19th-century Portuguese minister once called Washington, is as elegant as ever. But all is not well.

I started out covering politics in the nation’s heartland: Springfield, Illinois. I was schooled under that smaller Capitol dome, not far from where Lincoln once practiced law, in the varieties of democratic compromise and the inexorable pull of public corruption. Almost all the governors of the state of Illinois during my years there ultimately wore the prison stripes – including, most recently, the man with the great hair, Rod Blagojevich.

One of the first lessons I learned at Springfield was the old saw about how the ingredients of lawmaking, like sausage, are not pretty to look at. Still, things got done. Sometimes, the things seemed unfair and regressive. Sometimes they were good things, improving lives, maybe righting wrongs. Whichever way things went, the framework of the law was not perfect, but it felt solid. And the public lawbreakers with hands in the treasury till or holding out the bribe bag still had to watch their backs.

Now, on this cold spring day in Washington, less than a hundred days into MAGA’s second term, that framework feels very, very shaky indeed.

The governors of Illinois went to prison one after another because the justice system – in most cases, the dreaded feds – had eyes on them as they grifted and grafted. I’m pretty sure they all would have liked to say the law was “weaponized” against them. But juries of their peers found the facts at odds with that assessment – including in the corruption case against Blagojevich, AKA Blago, that Trump erased with a pardon a few months ago.

The pardon of felonious Blago, like almost everything felon Trump does, was, first of all, a thumbing of the nose at the people who uphold norms and the structure of the law. For a man who claims to love cops and offshore slave prisons for the (never even charged with a crime) “alien enemies” among us, and who can’t wait to invoke the Insurrection Act to sic the military on dissidents, he sure hates the law.

MAGA voters empowered this man to wreak his vengeance, and he is peculiarly fit for the task. He doesn’t seem to know how to read three sentences into a law book, but he’s probably put in as many hours in consultations with lawyers as he has doing anything (other than playing golf).

He has a knack for finding lawyers to manipulate the law as a delay-delay-delay defendant, and to weaponize it (yes, it was projection) as a plaintiff. Now, he’s been empowered to systematically break the system.

Of all the unlawful activities we’ve witnessed since the inauguration, the one that chills to the bone is the plucking of un-charged mostly Hispanic, Muslim, or otherwise non-white people off the streets or from inside their homes and “disappearing” them into the tropical dungeon of El Salvador or the for-profit Louisiana prison network, our own swamp gulag.

The Supreme Court just “stayed” a lower court order demanding that these extralegal kidnappings be reversed. As Liz Dye explains in Public Notice, while the ruling is not permanent, it is an ominous signal, a feint to procedural bullshit, suggesting that the justices are ready to bail on due process rather than set up a crisis situation where the fake businessman they basically “kinged” with unlimited immunity last year just ignores them.

The day after that order, Trump’s Olympic Gold medal level lie spewer of a spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that her boss had been musing about a point in the perhaps near future when he might be able to deport not just “aliens” but American citizens.

So sure is Trump of his omnipotence over the rule of law that he has hung his Georgia felony charges mug shot as his official portrait in the Department of Justice. He put his personal attorney, Todd Blanche (who lost the Stormy Daniels hush money case), in charge as DOJ deputy, and appointed anti-abortion MAGA fanatic Ed Martin* in the critical post of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Blanche already won some DOJ toady chest ribbons by dispatching armed marshals to the home of a (female) Justice Department attorney the Trump clan fired over her refusal to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost that right after a 2011 domestic violence conviction. The marshals were called off only because attorney Liz Oyer heard they were on their way and accepted the order by email.

So much plotting, so much lawbreaking, in so little time.

For the last few weeks, Trump’s minions have been drawing up executive orders aiming to restrict law firms that have ever worked for political opponents, individual and organizational, NGOs, nonprofits, or have employed lawyers who worked on any of the criminal and civil cases against Trump. Since Trump has spent most of his life fighting lawyers with other lawyers, the list is long.

Trump only skated away from the various cases against him in the year before the election by manipulating the courts with incessant delays and Hail Mary legal arguments, one after another. Trump’s orders bar targeted firms from federal contracts, strip their lawyers of security clearances, and – outrageously – prevent them from entering federal courthouses. "It sends little chills down my spine," U.S. Judge Beryl Howell said, to hear the government argue that such orders are lawful if the president thinks the firm’s cases aren't in the nation's interest.

Howell and other federal judges have “temporarily restrained” most of Trump's executive orders against the firms that fought back. But incredibly, a number of the nation’s largest, richest, and most powerful firms - “Biglaw” in the industry parlance - took a knee and negotiated themselves out of danger for now - by offering millions of dollars of hours of “pro bono” legal work for Trump’s pet legal projects.

Now the legal community, rather than standing united against these diabolical and patently illegal orders, are cutting deals individually, basically prostituting their lawyers to service the vengeful oaf with countless hours of legal harassment. "They're just saying, 'Where do I sign? Where do I sign?'" Trump bragged after the first ones broke without a fight.

Every American lawyer has taken an oath to uphold the law, both state and federal. What about the Constitution? What about that oath?

The bitter old man counts on one principle above all others in his relationships with everyone, from his wife and children to his political friends and foes: everyone has a price. And here, he didn’t even have to pay them, just threaten their income. They couldn’t bear to lose a few clients while they fought for their rights in court. “They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and ‘money, money, money’ is all that motivates them,” Bernie Sanders said in an interview on CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”

The sheepdogs are leaving the field.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

I Dream of Greenland

Why Greenland Became The Ultimate Fascist Dreamscape

Ever since Don Jr. and his “Trump Force One” team of bobblehead doll righties landed at Nuuk Airport a day after the fourth anniversary of January 6, we’ve all been scratching our heads. It’s hard for normies like us to comprehend the deranged, anachronistic white supremacist lunacy behind the Greenland fantasy. Yes, there’s the newly melted Arctic and its soon-to-be-contested waterways, yes, there are rare earth minerals, and yes, it’s sparsely inhabited by indigenous people that Trump and MAGA seem to regard as lower races.

But going to the mat for it, with Trump browbeating and insulting the prime minister of Denmark? JD Vance flying over uninvited with his wife by his side? During my process of researching a long article for New York magazine about Donald Trump Jr., it became clear that the Greenland play is, on one level, a giant dog whistle to the white fascist extremist base.

Greenland has been – for decades – a neo-Nazi fantasy. Julius Evola, a mid-20th-century Italian philosopher and now “the internet’s favorite fascist,” proposed Greenland as “the primordial homeland of a highly civilized prehistoric white race … sufficiently civilized to be conceived as ‘divine’ by the ancients.” (Evola’s explanation for how these divines could morph into actual non-white indigenous inhabitants is that their divinity was perhaps diluted by, you guessed it, breeding with lower orders.)

The online intellectual fascist influencers followed and amplified by Vance, Junior, Musk, Marc Andreessen, and countless Trump administration minions (who we have covered in previous Freakshows) are deeply attached to this mythology.

An anon called Plethonist (who seems to have now deleted his X account after we started writing about fascist Xitter) writes in an online white supremacist-friendly rag called IM1776. The magazine is published by The Arts & Literature Foundation, an outfit that bills itself as the “leading publication of the New Right.” It is housed in the same building near Capitol Hill as other hard-right, well-funded conservative outfits, including the Conservative Partnership Institute and the extreme Zionist Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and ironically, was home to far-right Liberty Lobby (founded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto). Its editor-at-large writes and tweets under the pseudonym Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Here is Plethonist in IM1776 waxing hysterically Rudyard Kipling about Greenland, a month before Trump started to publicly lay claim to it:

“Projects call us now. Recently, some have spoken of plans to purchase Greenland, either for the United States or for the creation of a new state entirely. In either case, this would mean the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain. A hard people then, and rich perhaps, from the resources they could exploit there, or through the domination of advanced technology in a land free from pinching regulation and a parasitic governing class. It is no longer so hard to believe that this will happen, after what we’ve seen. I hope it does, and I would like to offer one thing to the men who, now or in the future, make that island noisy with ambition and industry: Palingenesis.” (Palingenesis is an ultranationalist concept of racist rebirth.)

Don Jr.’s pal Jack “Jack P” Posobiec wasn’t on the trip to Greenland, but he was definitely in on the joke. Two days before Christmas and more than two weeks before Junior and his posse landed in Nuuk, he posted on Xitter a long letter to Greenlanders which reads in part:

“Dear Honored Residents of Greenland, Imagine a Greenland where the promise of your land's vast potential is not just a dream but a reality. A Greenland where your children can dream bigger, your economy can grow stronger, and your voice can resonate louder on the world stage. This vision can become your reality by joining the United States of America.”

Posobiec (who has called Democrats and progressives “unhumans” and named dictators as political role models) has been grifting off Trumpism since 2016. The longtime neo-Nazi collaborator is so highly regarded among Trump cabinet members that Treasury Secretary Bessent invited him to Ukraine. Hegseth reportedly wanted to bring him to Europe (but Posobiec, clearly a man in demand, declined the latter invitation).

On Xitter, extreme right Passage Press publisher Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman amused himself after Junior’s visit by proposing that sacked DEI federal employees could be sent to Greenland to mine rare earth minerals. (America’s Siberia, for now, appears to be ICE’s swamp gulag in Louisiana.).

Another Greenland dreamer is Dryden Brown, a Peter Thiel acolyte, who designs for building utopian cities for the tech elites in a project called Praxis and who was covered rather fawningly not long ago in the New York Times.

Brown was moved to advertise his own white nation fantasies the same day Junior landed in Greenland, in a giddy tweet that included a map (see below) of a new American empire encompassing all the white-led nations on the planet.

For a while after Junior’s expeditionary assault, MAGA tried to claim Greenlanders really want America to invade (which is a lie). Of course, what Greenlanders might actually want is of no real concern to men seeking a new homeland from which to “re-breed” Aryans.

In his Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth, Yale historian Greg Grandin proposed that Trumpism, and the big beautiful border wall of the first MAGA regime specifically, signaled the end of the nation’s founding ethos. He proposed that only endless expansion had kept the violence at the heart of the American experiment at bay. Now, with the oil wars lost and the nation too broke to conquer farther frontiers, we were shut in together, with no steam valve for the hate.

A white nationalist beachhead in Greenland buys more time for us, perhaps.

The fantasy is one-half X-Box sword-wielding hero homunculus and one-half emulation of Hitler – the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. The bros read their Tolkien. Their thumbs were weaned on the controllers moving heroic medieval knights and sorcerers. For the Millennial fascists in Junior’s set, Greenland promises manly ardors and challenges where a new race might emerge from the chrysalis of the 21st-century American Everyman, waddling between SUV and front door with a Diet Coke in hand.

Donald Trump might be a vulgar marketer of money-laundering condos and cheesy merch – but when they squint, he’s the vessel by which the white philosopher-priests that inhabited Hyperborea might return.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER'S American Freakshow.


MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

Welcome to the final installment of your Freakshow guide to the extremely online Nazi influencers of Trumpworld. It’s been a sickening tour, so take your anti-nausea meds one more time, and let’s get cracking...

First, an update on Canadian racist Geoff Martin, who we covered two weeks ago. Martin, who calls himself Captive Dreamer, includes Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and other high-profile Trumpies among his fans. But you will recall that Dreamer/Geoff’s day job was office drone at Canada’s largest Christian university, Western Trinity – an institution presided over by his own father.

After Geoff was outed, his father Todd Martin renounced his spawn’s views, albeit without naming him. In a video posted online, the senior Martin said, in part: “I reject white supremacy and any ideology that elevates one group of people over another. I denounce the use of derogatory and disparaging labels and language and any attempts to dehumanize another individual or group. I strongly oppose the use of social media as a means of spreading such harmful ideas.”

(FWIW, your Freakshow author reached out to the university’s media office inquiring about whether Geoff Martin is still employed. Their reply: “As a matter of policy and in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act, we cannot disclose personal information about current or past employees. However, we can confirm that no individual by that name is employed by the university.”)

Dad’s renunciation didn’t sit well with Dreamer’s online fans. American racist influencer Mike Cernovich called Martin’s video “a degrading struggle session imposed on him.” As if the president of a university (“Christian,” no less) that advertises its “inclusivity” could maintain his position without denouncing the odious public views of his spawn.

Dreamer belongs to a pack of non-American influencers with advanced degrees who don’t all vote here but who have been drooling over the prospect of a fascist America for years. We’ll have one more quick look at two of them here before we bid them all good riddance (for our reading purposes at least – when it comes to the Trump administration, they don’t seem to be going anywhere).

The king of MAGA’s online fascists is a Romanian named Costin Vlad Almariu. Almariu, born in Bucharest in 1980, is a greasy hyper-misogynist racist, with a Yale PhD in political science, who posts a lot of photographs of oiled-up bodybuilders in Speedos. He argues that modernity has stripped (white) men - especially progressive men - of their manliness.

No “I like beer” Trumpworld frat boy’s shelf is without his best-selling 2018 manifesto, Bronze Age Mindset. The tome has been compared to a modern, non-German Mein Kampf. His ideas have even earned him an ism - BAPism, which stands for “Bronze Age Pervert” per Almariu’s Xitter handle. Bronze Age Mindset’s ironic tone and elevated vocabulary gild the savagery of his ideas (boiled down by him to “the desire to be worshipped as a god”).

Like last week’s Freak, Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, Almariu believes anyone who isn’t white is naturally inferior, and that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”

BAPists also presume self-reliant women are the cause of all modern male problems. Almariu’s personal misogyny is bottomless. He loathes us, routinely referring to us as “grils” or with the obscene insult “roasties” or, if he paid one, “prosties.” On International Women’s Day last week, he tweeted a picture of a woman eating raw tuna, with the caption: “Highly repulsive. I will generally not see a gril again after she eats in front of me. I stopped seeing a favorite prostie after I made the mistake of having delivery sushis with her at my place.”

Almariu’s 186,000 followers include Trump Junior, Vance, and many mod Nazi fellow travelers like Charles Cornish-Dale, another offshore fascist who spews into the U.S. radicalization pipeline under the username Raw Egg Nationalist on Xitter. “Yes, disgusting’” Raw Egg responded to BAP. “Eating is a big test of compatibility. How a woman holds a knife, whether she takes time eating her food, small gestures like using napkin properly, etc.”

Delicate, napkin-noticing Brit Cornish-Dale is another MAGA favorite (followed by Musk, Vance, Trump Junior, and Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen). As recently as last fall, Trump Junior was retweeting Raw Egg’s bullshit about FEMA and DEI programs.

He has an Oxford PhD (his thesis was on the religious history of an English parish), and now edits and writes a hilariously homoerotic (given Cornish-Dale’s other sentiments) magazine called Man’s World, with covers that include AI-generated classical male nude sculpture with futuristic eye beams and an apparently erect member. A British anti-hate group that outed him reports that he lives at home with his mommy in England.

Devoted to the goal of “superlative male flourishing,” Cornish-Dale advocates “slonking” 36 raw eggs a day among other wackadoodle muscle-building cures. Tucker Carlson featured him in his ball-tanning documentary on men not long before Fox sacked him.

Cornish-Dale has promoted Mein Kampf, eugenics, and the great replacement conspiracy theory. In a recent issue of his magazine, he posted a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream - Panzerschokolade - a concoction of cocoa powder and speed that gave the brave frontline Nazi tank troops more energy! (see below)

Last week, Cornish-Dale posted an AI “portrait” of JD Vance, his pudgy face slimmed down and decked in mutton chops and 19th-century colonial uniform, leaning on a sword, with an Indian woman coiled at his feet.

Cornish-Dale, Almariu and Martin, all born or living abroad, are invested in the American fascist experiment and are engaged with, platformed, and retweeted by men with immense power over global affairs, national policy, and American people’s freedom of speech, assembly, and the pursuit of happiness. They radicalize American Trump racists suffering from the Obama Derangement Syndrome that has motivated MAGA since 2015.

For decades after 9/11, the U.S. government blew tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-radicalization efforts aimed at Islamic extremists. Meanwhile, this clan formed and spewed scholarly Nazism and Euro-fascist crap into the American mainstream. They are empowered by and influencing an administration that claims to see anti-Semitism on every campus and is weaponizing that accusation to deport people, all while refusing to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute.

These freaks remind us that whatever the appeasers (ADL, Bari Weiss) want to pretend, the sieg heil means exactly what it always has: jackboots, thugs, and mass murder.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.


Heart Of Darkness II: A Trump Appointee's Deleted Racist Tweets

Heart Of Darkness II: A Trump Appointee's Deleted Racist Tweets

This story was originally published in COURIER's American Freakshow newsletter

Racist pseudoscience and flirtation with fascism were always in the water around Trump. But the influential online eugenicists and neo-Nazis of 2025 are not your grandad’s German Nazis, nor are they David Duke or even Richard Spencer (tiki torches, khakis, and gaiters are so 2017).

The Trump 2.0 white pride influencers often have academic cred. Their erudite snark appeals to the self-regard of Silicon Valley oligarchs and their fanboys who think being in a computer lab when the sum of all human knowledge initiated the digital era makes them superior DNA-bearing geniuses.

Last week’s featured Freakshow freak Geoff Martin and many of his fellow online racist anons, like Texas race pseudoscientist Jordan Lasker (who Elon Musk has engaged with dozens of times), prefer to lurk behind pseudonyms.

But some out-and-proud white nationalist/race scientists don’t mind putting their real names to tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – the white supremacist online pseudo-scientists’ current favorite insult. Trump’s acting Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is Darren Beattie, and his white nationalist affiliations were too much for Trump 1.0. The White House sent him packing, and he went on to found a right-wing media outfit called Revolver News.

But in the new Trump regime, publicly declared racist views that might once have gotten pretty much anyone fired are now job qualifications. Beattie, like the rest of the creeps* who make up the MAGA Heart of Darkness, has academic bonafides. He wrote his PhD thesis on Nazi Martin Heidegger.

A typical Beattie tweet would be one in 2023, when he went on a tear about online street fight videos online, apparently unaware that Trump was getting cozy with UFC cage match tycoon Dana White, king of fight videos.

Many of Beattie’s Tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – always understood to be people of color and not MAGA-white rabble – are still online. But his deleted tweets reveal another, sicker layer of sentiment, more familiar to movie-going Americans perhaps in the character Leo DiCaprio played in Django. Pure, deplorable, antebellum and Jim Crow racism.

The January 6 insurrection provoked Beattie to a frothing frenzy of anti-Black rage that he vented on Twitter for hours and then deleted. He was clearly more upset about what he might consider uppity Blacks on TV than the White horde that had just smashed, grabbed, and defecated on the walls of the capital.

He spent the afternoon and evening of that day calling for Black public commentators during the televised violence to get back to their “proper place” in the under-class. Some examples of now deleted Beattie tweets on January 6th:

“Ibram Kendi needs to learn his place and take a knee to MAGA. Learn his proper role in our society.”

“Kay Cole James of Heritage Foundation needs to learn her natural place and take a KNEE to MAGA.”

Beattie even took swings at Trump loyalist Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina:

“Tim Scott needs to learn his place and take a KNEE to MAGA.” (Scott is still a Trump-supporting Republican Senator. Whether he’s “learned his place” is not for us to judge.)

By midnight, Beattie had completely lost it, demanding that pretty much every Black person in America get to the back of the bus, with this tweet:

CNN unearthed some other deleted Beattie bon mots this week. In one tweet that was removed for violating Twitter’s terms of service, on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Beattie’s Revolver News posted about the decision maybe permitting shooting at women who get abortions.

He has also accused his now-boss (in name only, apparently), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, of being “low IQ” and closeted, referencing a high school curfew violation at a park:

He followed that up with: “What happens in the Cabana stays in the Cabana #Rubio.”

When reporters asked Rubio about Beattie’s new position as his State Department’s “public diplomat” (before the latest round of personally insulting Tweets was revealed), Rubio kicked the can: “He went through the process that the transition office went through,” Rubio told a press briefing. “He’ll be acting in that capacity, and he’ll largely be focused – as that department will be – on not wanting this Department of State to be involved in censorship.”

In other words, Beattie is on board to make public racism great again.

Obviously, putting this man in this position is just a big troll. One can easily imagine Team Trump elves smirking as they added his name to their vetted list. Think Stephen “Goebbels” Miller or Donald Trump Jr., who hosted Beattie at least seven times on his Triggered podcast in the last two years, possibly a record for him for one single guest.

Junior used to close every rally speech in support of his father with the sign-off: “We will make liberals cry again!”So, haha, you, dear reader, are supposed to be crying as an out and proud racist serves as the face of American public diplomacy for the next year (although he will not be permanent – the regime doesn’t really need his services, just his presence as a billboard insult).

These people aren’t new among us, but Trump has empowered them. The mainstreaming of eugenics was already in full sway during the campaign last summer. The Atlantic ran an article headlined “The Far Right is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ: Race Science has returned.” Ali Breland pointed out that the eugenics clan (Klan?) uses a kind of code to know and amplify each other. They call their observations about racially-based inferiority “noticing.”

The pathology that infects these men is eloquently explained in Sven Lindquist’s “Exterminate All The Brutes.” The title comes from the supposed last words of Captain Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel about Europeans in the Congo, Heart of Darkness. Lindquist traces how European racial superiority ideology has led to countless massacres and genocides throughout history, from the indigenous Americans to the people of the Congo to the Jews of Europe.

The offensiveness of this ideology is only exceeded in vileness by the passivity and toadying of the political and corporate leaders in America right now who are not objecting to the mainstreaming of the sickness.

STAY TUNED: In part three of our MAGA’s Heart of Darkness series, I’ll introduce the popular MAGA fanboy who has published a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream. Take your anti-nausea medicine.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


MAGA Heart Of Darkness: Tracing JD Vance's Favorite Nazi Troll To Canada

MAGA Heart Of Darkness: Tracing JD Vance's Favorite Nazi Troll To Canada

The MAGA universe is a big tent of incels and NASCAR fans and frat boys with rich daddies who “like beer.” Dear Leader’s bleats and Jesse Watters's insult comedy fluffs them up – but they’re not all paying close attention.

Then, there are the others – men with convictions and post-graduate degrees, who read European fascist texts and applaud each other’s ravings about the revival of a race of white men whose virility and mental force has been diluted by mixing with the lower orders and attenuated by feminism.

Most Americans, and probably many MAGA voters, have never heard of them as they go about amusing each other, advocating for eugenics, and translating dead fascist writers (IYKYK).

But they are the plutonium pit of the MAGA bomb. Racism and domination of the naturally inferior sex is not a casual pastime for them, it’s their raison d’etre.

Some of the most powerful men in America are tuned in to them. They are the brain trust, the moral – if you want to twist that word – nerve center of the Trump 2.0 movement.

Donald Trump famously amplified one of them, a Canadian millennial who tweets under the name @CaptiveDreamer7, which is a reference to a memoir by a fascist Frenchman during World War II who joined the Waffen SS, during last fall’s debate with Kamala Harris.

Trump shouting “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” is a badge of honor that still makes this man who amplified that lie to the attention of the candidate’s debate briefers giddy with joy. He was still ecstatic during the Veep debate a month later, when moderators put the question about the lie to JD Vance, erupting into all-caps joy: “Springfield in the FIRST FUCKING QUESTION. MY FUCKING PRESIDENT!!”

Offline, @CaptiveDreamer7 is a low-brow Bartleby the Scrivener in a Canadian Christian university’s purchasing department. Online, like Clark Kent transmogrified to Superman, he spews white nationalist trash into the powerful American right-wing mainstream.

A pair of intrepid journalists at the Daily Dotouted him this week. Over here at the Freakshow, we’ve been following Geoff Martin, the man behind @CaptiveDreamer7, for some time in connection with a long project that required me and a researcher to dive into fascist Twitter. (FYI, yes, I crave a shower after just 15 minutes in their spew.)

Here’s a sample of what you will find in Dreamer’s disgusting oeuvre: In June 2024, Dreamer tweeted and has since deleted: “I believe in Hitler. In National Socialism, in Total N***** Death. They win [sic] about how I talk but that’s because I’m Aryan, I’m confident, and I’m not a fucking Mexican F***** like they are.”

With habits of self-expression like that, it’s no surprise Dreamer burned through dozens of Twitter accounts in the pre-Musk years. He was repeatedly booted off the site until Musk stepped in. Welcomed back on the platform, he promptly got on a Twitter space with fellow travelers and sighed: “Total Aryan victory. Total victory of the white man. We’re back. The white man is back. Total victory of the Anglo. Musk is not a Boer. He’s an Anglo like you and me. Total victory.”

Dreamer lives in a larger online network of fashy white nationalist social media anons who also sport PhDs or other post-grad credentials. Many have been outed against their will, like @CremieuxRecueil, a pseudonym linked to race-scientist academic Jordan Lasker. Along with America’s fashy brain trust, Dreamer has academic cred, having, according to his tweets, studied philology and philosophy. He has written that he was driven out of academia by “leftists” who forced him to read feminism. “The Thucydides to NS [National Socialism] pipeline” is what he’s called his journey.

His intellectualism flatters the Trumpy policy drones and maybe some of the “I like beer” crowd in D.C. “You have the comic trolls like [Nick] Fuentes, people recognize there is no seriousness to them,” says researcher Will Stancil, who has tangled with Dreamer on X/Twitter before. “They are treating it like a real intellectual movement, this ridiculous hallucinatory Nazi stuff, and these ideas are clearly driving policy at the White House level. If you are familiar with these ideas, you can see they are leaking out all over.”

So back to the Great White North: How does an intellectual millennial Canadian* go all Nazi?

One thing we do know is if you poke at just about anyone on the MAGA fringe, you will find a wackadoodle religious upbringing. The parents and grandparents of Martin (AKA Dreamer) were members of the Worldwide Church of God, whose founder, Herbert Armstrong, was a mid-century radio preacher. Armstrong taught that white Anglo-Saxons are among the ten lost tribes of Israel and are the real Jews (maybe, one of my Israeli sources who interacted with them told me, because the word “Brit” in Hebrew means covenant).

The notion that white humans are the true ”chosen people” of the Bible was/is also a tenet of the Ku Klux Klan.

Former members of the Armstrong sect have described harsh child-rearing methods Armstrong advocated, listed in this guidebook by Armstrong’s son. They include beating toddlers in order to fend off nascent criminal impulses and ensure respect for authority.

After Armstrong’s death, the sect reportedly modified its views and renamed itself Grace Communion Church. Martin’s father is now president of Canada’s largest Christian university, where young Geoff – thanks, Dad! – has a job in the purchasing department.

Dreamer/Martin’s avatar is a picture of pedophile David Koresh in a MAGA hat. The Daily Dot reports Dreamer/Martin has advocated for lowering the legal age of marriage for girls to 14. David Koresh had a harem of wives as young as ten. Dreamer/Martin is apparently married – he has tweeted praise of a wife who thinks his Nazi bookshelves are “cute.” He may have spawned: He has tweeted pictures of a chubby (white) baby’s hand reaching for books about Hitler, to the delight of his followers, with one snapshot getting more than 2,000 likes.

It is no exaggeration to say that this man’s repulsive ideas intrigue, excite, and – if I may resort to our Dear Leader’s vermin metaphor – infest the minds of many extremely powerful men in America right now.

Dreamer/Martin has positioned himself as a white nationalist intellectual who offers strategies to mainstream his and his friends’ brand of fascism. In one recorded Twitter space in 2022, Martin chatted with Nick Fuentes (the odious white nationalist who has actually dined with Trump) and others. Someone mentioned “TND,” which is a code for “total n***** death,” as racist listeners in the space would know. Martin inquires whether the movement can “appeal to a middle America and portray your message in a way that is palatable to them?”

Dreamer has 71,000 Xitter followers in his radicalization pipeline, including major Trump administration figures and MAGA stars like Vice President JD Vance, Chris Rufo, Marc Andreesen, Curtis Yarvin, DOD deputy press secretary Kingley Wilson, and acting Washington, D.C. federal prosecutor Ed Martin. Elon Musk engages with and amplifies him. Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (and out-and-proud eugenicist) Darren Beattie has featured Martin's tweets under his many different usernames in his Revolver News, a site promoted by both Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Beattie appears to have consciously followed Martin/Dreamer across various X/Twitter bans. Late rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia’s grandson and namesake, who now works at Peter Thiel’s data and surveillance defense giant Palantir, is also a Dreamer follower.

If there is a segment of MAGA world that still finds Nazis repulsive, maybe the outing of Geoff Martin as an influencer to Musk and Vance will wake them up. But when even the Holocaust-remembering ADL and major media organizations call Musk’s Nazi salute just a gesture, I’m not holding my breath.

* Martin claims U.S. citizenship through his mother.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from Courier's American Freakshow newsletter


'Give Us Your Rapists And Millionaires': MAGA Welcomes Andrew Tate

'Give Us Your Rapists And Millionaires': MAGA Welcomes Andrew Tate

This is reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow newsletter.

At dawn Bucharest time yesterday, two stars of the worldwide misogynist movement boarded a plane in Romania, arranged for them by Trump’s regime, and soon sailed through the air across the Atlantic to Florida. Just when you thought the regime couldn’t get more vomitous, accused rapists Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were on their way to America, sprung by an adjudicated sexual assaulter who has extracted them from the Romanian justice system, with blithe insult to prosecutors in both Romania and the United Kingdom.

By evening, these incel-fluffing rapey freaks were likely to be ensconced in a Miami luxury highrise, sipping cocktails and live streaming themselves watching the sun set over the Everglades.

Tate and his brother were arrested near Bucharest in 2022 and charged with with rape, human trafficking, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. They have denied the allegations.

Tate’s grift relies on the tried and true “shock jock” calculus that provoking male insecurity about women is a sure fire way to get famous and maybe even rich. Major male podcasters (like American Dave Portnoy, a fellow “survivor” of sexual assault accusations) and television personalities Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson have platformed him.

Online, his brand of rank misogyny and get-rich-quick male empowerment (for a time, he sold a pyramid scheme called Hustlers University) made him rich – Tate reportedly has 15 luxury cars in Romania. It also attracted a legion of teenage and young men around the world. His influence among middle school boys is such that academic papers have been published and online seminars presented to help educators worldwide deal with the Tate contagion of implied and actual violence against schoolgirls.

Tate’s resume includes not just domestic violence and rape propaganda but his own personal assaults on women: He was booted off the 2016 cast of the reality show Big Brother after a British tabloid published a video of him beating a woman with a belt. He claimed it was consensual. He also bragged that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight: He said he “ended up in court” after he was charged with causing “bodily harm,” but “got away with it in the end.” He has been accused of violence against women repeatedly, including a standing case against him brought by four women in the UK, for which authorities were trying to extradite him from Romania.

At some point, he also had a career as an online pimp. He has stated that men should choose girlfriends under age 20 because they are less likely to have had sex and can more easily be “imprinted.”

In one interview, Morgan asked him whether he felt marketing naked girls on the internet was unethical. Tate replied that he kind of does now -- having converted to Islam -- but that at the time, he came to realize how “my girls” prevented suicides among unhappily married men.

His social media empire relies heavily on a global following of teen boys and incels that lap up his public misogyny. In 2017, as the #MeToo movement was in full swing, he tweeted that women should “bare [sic] some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted and, in general, blamed women for male violence. According to NBC, in 2022, Twitter “permanently banned his account.

But banning a rape celebrator from social media is so 2017!

Musk promptly let him back on, and as of today, his @Cobratate account has 10.7 million followers. On February 23, he posted a tweet with a video sprinkled with images of Trump doing his YMCA dance and Barron Trump gazing off into oblivion, as well as himself stalking hotel hallways, working out shirtless, and spewing his trademark rant about male empowerment including “You have to make a decision if you’re a winner or a loser, because if you’re a loser, you’re gonna hate the next four years!”

Today, the four British women who have accused him of rape and are still waiting for justice released a statement: “We are in disbelief and feel re-traumatised by the news that the Romanian authorities have given into pressure from the Trump administration to allow Andrew Tate to travel around Europe and to the US.” Their lawyers urged the UK government to intervene, saying it would be “a complete abdication of its responsibility to the victims if it stands by and lets this continue.”

One of their lawyers, Matthew Jury, called the release of the Tates “equal parts disgusting and dismaying” and said: “The UK authorities must take immediate steps to secure their extradition to the UK to face charges for the offences of human trafficking and rape they are alleged to have committed in this jurisdiction.”

Today, this far-right hero is being welcomed back to befoul our soil. He walks among us thanks to our MAGA friends, who installed the rapey-criminal Trump administration and whose predator’s ball would not be complete without a Tate or two.

Surely a coincidence, but the arrival of the Tate bros comes a day or two after Trump announced a Gold Card plan to sell American citizenships for $5 million each. And there is zero doubt who wants them here in this country.

According to the Financial Timesa few weeks ago, Richard “Ric” Grenell, now Trump’s “Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions of the United States,” personally leaned on the Romanian government at the Munich Security Conference to let the Tates out. The Romanian government at the time denied the pressure. But apparently, at some point before dawn on Thursday, they felt a little differently.

Grenell has already performed exactly this kind of official mission to spring another rockhard testosterone-poisoned accused foreign criminal. In 2019, as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, according to this great scoop by my friends over at Spytalk published in 2020, Grenell managed to get a criminal kickboxer from Europe to the US.

The US had denied a visa three times to German-Moroccan UFC fighter Abu Azaittar whose criminal past includes a conviction for beating a businessman and dousing him with gasoline and stealing his car, an accusation of punching and breaking a girlfriend’s eardrum, and other escapades. Azaitar and his brother were gang members who had earned the street nickname “the brutal twins.”

Then Grenell got involved. Shortly before he washed up in America at Mike Tyson’s Nevada ranch, Azaitar posted an Instagram picture of himself in a tight red t-shirt with Grenell in a dark shirt and black parka, looking chummy under an arched doorway. “Amazing time with mr ambassador …. Thank you for opening to [sic] door for me.”

I’m in New York City today, thinking of strolling down to the Battery to see if the “Give us your poor” bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty has been pried off and replaced with her new motto in this MAGA era: “Give Us Your Rapists and Millionaires.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible

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Luigi Mangione

The Stunning Normality Of Alleged Killer Luigi Mangione

DIY sleuths and amateur gumshoes (including yours truly) spent the five days since the murder of the CEO of what turns out to be one of the most hated companies in America debating whether the killer was a hired hitman, a corporate black bag job pro, or a DIY radical.

My very first thought at news of the shooting was, this is the first shot in the M4A* revolution, the shooter a 21st Century John Brown, ready to kill for single payer socialized medicine.

But as facts dribbled out - the gun with the silencer, knowledge of exactly which door and at what time CEO Brian Thompson would arrive at the Hilton in pre-dawn darkness, the use of cash and burner phone, the clever getaway by bike into camera-free Central Park - I started to waver. The mind wandered into cinematic territory: A billionaire Doctor No behind the United Health Care C-suite’s insider trading scandal, hiring a professional with a non-extraditable national passport. A fellow corporate suit with a personal vendetta, a love triangle, a dirty secret involving massive medical malpractice.

A few nights after the “hit” I cued up a movie that seemed in the spirit of the moment. Michael Clayton is a classic of corporate evil, Tilda Swinton as the pinched corporate lawyer who hires a pair of professional killers to commit a murder and hide the fact that her chemical agribusiness client has been poisoning farmers with a toxic product. George Clooney as the fixer is terrific. Swinton won an Oscar for it.

Corporate intrigue seemed possible. Black bag team. High end hit man already on a flight back to Belarus.

But this morning, it turned out, my initial instinct was kind of on target: The suspect is an all-American boy who, as an NYPD chief of detectives put it drily, “does seem to have some ill-will toward corporate America.” He even had an anti-insurance “manifesto” on his person when arrested.

Luigi Mangione, 26, charged with murder in a so-far sealed New York criminal complaint, is presumed innocent until proven otherwise, obviously. But the reported clues to his involvement are pretty damning. He was arrested with a ghost gun - possibly made with a 3D printer - that matched the one the killer used. He had on his person the fake ID the killer used to check into the New York hostel police had traced him to, and where, flirting with a female clerk, he had pulled down his otherwise ubiquitous face mask to flash a grin. And he looks like that guy.

Early reports are that either an “elderly customer” or the Altoona McDonald’s staff themselves recognized the patron and called cops.

Either way, online fans of the murderer (whose numbers are legion, who have started selling merch commemorating him, and whose existence has provoked reams of concerned analysis) apparently went on an immediate bad-review rampage, posting that the kitchen was rat-infested, etc. The fact that McDonald’s doesn’t offer its employees health insurance also came up.

The truth, as is often the case, turns out to be stranger than fiction.

Mangione reportedly studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was enough of an intellectual to have on his Goodreads account quotes from Bertrand Russell. (“Luigi’s favorites” include Russell’s: “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

He read Michael Pollan’s book on hallucinogens - How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics - earlier this year. His “want to read” list also included a tome called The Great Conversation: Volume I: Pre-Socratics through Descartes.

He gave Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto four stars and reporters have cherry-picked his commentary of that book because it seems relevant:

It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.

He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.

He added: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”

The New York Post, Murdoch rag, was first out of the gate with the predictable assessment that Mangione is a radical leftist. But even a cursory glance at his digital trail indicates it’s not that simple. He was engaged with the online male right, was an Elon Musk fan, seemed antagonistic to DEI, and even had Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on his “want to read” list.

He was the 2016 class valediction at Baltimore’s top boys’ prep school. My friend investigative journalist and author Dave Troy, happened to have a son who graduated in the same class of the Gilman School, and he first shared a video of the speech on X. In it, a composed younger Mangione - the same man in a hoodie and a mask New York City street surveillance cameras recorded shooting a man in cold blood and calmly walking away - wears a navy blue suit with a white boutonnière, surrounded by a sea of young men in suits.

His speech isn’t fiery at all. No politics even though it was an election year. No whiff of radicalization. He is not yet a murderer, just a thoughtful, poised young man, on the road to success, one of America’s more promising, poised and brainy Gen Z men, about to step out into an amoral world.

On the knife edge of adult understanding and his destiny.

Poignant, tragic and deeply uncanny - the video can be viewed on Youtube here. “The rush is on,” journalist Troy posted. “Was he a 'leftist', or radicalized by the 'online right'? Facts, as always, are more nuanced. Evidence suggests he is a smart, mixed-up kid with questions, who got turned inside out by a nasty world and did something terrible. Other takes are incomplete.”

As I write this “FREE HIM” is trending on social media.

*M4A - Medicare For All, the slogan that supporters of nationalized healthcare have been using since at least 2016, when Bernie Sanders ran on it, lost to Hillary Clinton, who then lost to Donald Trump.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.This post is reprinted with permission from her American FreakshowSubstack. Please consider subscribing.


Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

Alleged Assassin Of United Health Care Boss Nabbed At McDonald's

Alleged Assassin Of United Health Care Boss Nabbed At McDonald's

DIY sleuths and amateur gumshoes (including yours truly) spent the five days since the murder of the CEO of what turns out to be one of the most hated companies in America debating whether the killer was a hired hitman, a corporate black bag job pro, or a DIY radical.

My very first thought at news of the shooting was, this is the first shot in the M4A* revolution, the shooter a 21st Century John Brown, ready to kill for single payer socialized medicine.

But as facts dribbled out - the gun with the silencer, knowledge of exactly which door and at what time CEO Brian Thompson would arrive at the Hilton in pre-dawn darkness, the use of cash and burner phone, the clever getaway by bike into camera-free Central Park - I started to waver. The mind wandered into cinematic territory: A billionaire Doctor No behind the United Health Care C-suite’s insider trading scandal, hiring a professional with a non-extraditable national passport. A fellow corporate suit with a personal vendetta, a love triangle, a dirty secret involving massive medical malpractice.

A few nights after the “hit” I cued up a movie that seemed in the spirit of the moment. Michael Clayton is a classic of corporate evil, Tilda Swinton as the pinched corporate lawyer who hires a pair of professional killers to commit a murder and hide the fact that her chemical agribusiness client has been poisoning farmers with a toxic product. George Clooney as the fixer is terrific. Swinton won an Oscar for it.

Corporate intrigue seemed possible. Black bag team. High end hit man already on a flight back to Belarus.DIY sleuths and amateur gumshoes (including yours truly) spent the five days since the murder of the CEO of what turns out to be one of the most hated companies in America debating whether the killer was a hired hitman, a corporate black bag job pro, or a DIY radical.

My very first thought at news of the shooting was, this is the first shot in the M4A* revolution, the shooter a 21st Century John Brown, ready to kill for single payer socialized medicine.

But as facts dribbled out - the gun with the silencer, knowledge of exactly which door and at what time CEO Brian Thompson would arrive at the Hilton in pre-dawn darkness, the use of cash and burner phone, the clever getaway by bike into camera-free Central Park - I started to waver. The mind wandered into cinematic territory: A billionaire Doctor No behind the United Health Care C-suite’s insider trading scandal, hiring a professional with a non-extraditable national passport. A fellow corporate suit with a personal vendetta, a love triangle, a dirty secret involving massive medical malpractice.

A few nights after the “hit” I cued up a movie that seemed in the spirit of the moment. Michael Clayton is a classic of corporate evil, Tilda Swinton as the pinched corporate lawyer who hires a pair of professional killers to commit a murder and hide the fact that her chemical agribusiness client has been poisoning farmers with a toxic product. George Clooney as the fixer is terrific. Swinton won an Oscar for it.

Corporate intrigue seemed possible. Black bag team. High end hit man already on a flight back to Belarus.

But this morning, it turned out, my initial instinct was kind of on target: The suspect is an all-American boy who, as an NYPD chief of detectives put it drily, “does seem to have some ill-will toward corporate America.” He even had an anti-insurance “manifesto” on his person when arrested.

Luigi Mangione, 26, charged with murder in a so-far sealed New York criminal complaint, is presumed innocent until proven otherwise, obviously. But the reported clues to his involvement are pretty damning. He was arrested with a ghost gun - possibly made with a 3D printer - that matched the one the killer used. He had on his person the fake ID the killer used to check into the New York hostel police had traced him to, and where, flirting with a female clerk, he had pulled down his otherwise ubiquitous face mask to flash a grin. And he looks like that guy.

Early reports are that either an “elderly customer” or the Altoona McDonald’s staff themselves recognized the patron and called cops.

Either way, online fans of the murderer (whose numbers are legion, who have started selling merch commemorating him, and whose existence has provoked reams of concerned analysis) apparently went on an immediate bad-review rampage, posting that the kitchen was rat-infested, etc. The fact that McDonald’s doesn’t offer its employees health insurance also came up.

The truth, as is often the case, turns out to be stranger than fiction.

Mangione reportedly studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was enough of an intellectual to have on his Goodreads account quotes from Bertrand Russell. (“Luigi’s favorites” include Russell’s: “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

He read Michael Pollan’s book on hallucinogens - How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics - earlier this year. His “want to read” list also included a tome called The Great Conversation: Volume I: Pre-Socratics through Descartes.

He gave Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto four stars and reporters have cherry-picked his commentary of that book because it seems relevant:

It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.

He added: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”

The New York Post, Murdoch rag, was first out of the gate with the predictable assessment that Mangione is a radical leftist. But even a cursory glance at his digital trail indicates it’s not that simple. He was engaged with the online male right, was an Elon Musk fan, seemed antagonistic to DEI, and even had Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on his “want to read” list.

He was the 2016 class valediction at Baltimore’s top boys’ prep school. My friend investigative journalist and author Dave Troy, happened to have a son who graduated in the same class of the Gilman School, and he first shared a video of the speech on X. In it, a composed younger Mangione - the same man in a hoodie and a mask New York City street surveillance cameras recorded shooting a man in cold blood and calmly walking away - wears a navy blue suit with a white boutonnière, surrounded by a sea of young men in suits.

His speech isn’t fiery at all. No politics even though it was an election year. No whiff of radicalization. He is not yet a murderer, just a thoughtful, poised young man, on the road to success, one of America’s more promising, poised and brainy Gen Z men, about to step out into an amoral world.

On the knife edge of adult understanding and his destiny.

Poignant, tragic and deeply uncanny - the video can be viewed on Youtube here. “The rush is on,” journalist Troy posted. “Was he a 'leftist', or radicalized by the 'online right'? Facts, as always, are more nuanced. Evidence suggests he is a smart, mixed-up kid with questions, who got turned inside out by a nasty world and did something terrible. Other takes are incomplete.”

As I write this “FREE HIM” is trending on social media.

*M4A - Medicare For All, the slogan that supporters of nationalized healthcare have been using since at least 2016, when Bernie Sanders ran on it, lost to Hillary Clinton, who then lost to Donald Trump.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible. This post is reprinted with permission from her American FreakshowSubstack. Please consider subscribing.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

MAGA's All-American Gunners And The Political Violence Blame Game

MAGA's All-American Gunners And The Political Violence Blame Game

This week the MAGA Disinformation Industrial Complex is spewing blame on "the left" for the apparent second assassination attempt on Trump. On Sunday, a disturbed man who had racked up dozens of weapons violations but remained armed and free thanks to decades of MAGA-pandering, loose gun laws poked his machine gun through the fence around Trump’s Palm Beach golf course.

Agents nabbed him before he fired a shot, but the incident was another dot on the graph of rising American political violence this year, following the deadly Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt which left shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks and a rallygoer dead — and Trump with a bloodied ear.

Trump immediately went on Fox to accuse his political opponents — as he and his supporters did after Butler. The man with the gun in Palm Beach “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said the day after his security team apprehended Ryan Wesley Routh. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

Apparently, the idea is that Democrats should suspend their campaign against Trump/Vance in the wake of the latest — let’s call it a gun incident since Routh thankfully never got around to firing a shot from his AK-47.

J.D. Vance picked up the refrain, proclaiming at a speech in Atlanta that “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric, and needs to cut this crap out.”

Trump superfan Elon Musk gave his stamp of approval to this horrendous idea (translation: why aren’t people shooting at Kamala Harris???). He posted a perplexed face emoji under an X post repeating that no one has tried to kill Harris or Walz. The Richest Man in the World (tm) had second thoughts - as he often does - and deleted that implicitly threatening post, but not before harvesting tens of thousands of “likes.”

All the gaslighting this week about Democratic rhetoric obscures the fact that Trump himself raised America to this new level of violence from the day in 2015 when he sent his retired NYPD goon Keith Schiller out on 5th Avenue to rough up people protesting his “Mexican rapists” campaign slogan.

Besides vulgarity and shamelessness, the hallmark of the nine and counting MAGA years in American politics is the rising number of violent threats directed at elected officials across the country. This “tidal wave of menacing behavior,” as CNN put it, includes the skyrocketing number of prosecuted threats during Trump’s term in office, peaking in 2021 — with more than 40 percent of cases occurring in the final weeks of Trump's term. Threats are now rising again.

Trump has always urged his rally-goers to beat protestors. He now promises to embark on a “bloody” deportation project while suggesting his supporters will engage in violence if he loses the election. His rhetoric is effective. Even before his last violent insurrection on January 6, in May 2020, NBC found 54 cases in which the charged perpetrators of threats and assaults referenced Trump’s incitement to violence. “Reviewing police reports and court records, ABC News found that in at least 12 cases perpetrators hailed Trump amid the immediate aftermath of physically assaulting innocent victims. In another 18 cases, perpetrators cheered or defended Trump while taunting or threatening others. And in another 10 cases, Trump and his rhetoric were cited in court to explain a defendant's violent or threatening behavior.”

No one in the MAGAsphere seems to notice or care that their own resistance to reasonable gun control enabled misfit Routh - who has dozens of previous charges - to arm himself in the first place. Routh had been pulled over by police more than 100 times and was considered “a dangerous person,” but still legally stocked high-powered weapons and explosives. In a sane nation, a man convicted on a weapons of mass destruction charge - as Routh was after barricading himself inside his North Carolina roofing business with a machine gun after being pulled over at a traffic stop - would not walk free, let alone get to keep and expand his gun collection.

But Routh was sent home and remained armed.

The barricading incident was just one of the violent confrontations Routh racked up. He has convictions for carrying a concealed weapon, for possession of stolen property, for hit-and-run, misdemeanor convictions for resisting an officer and driving on a suspended license. Routh doesn’t seem to have spent much, if any time in jail. For all the convictions, he received a suspended sentence and parole or probation.

What was such a man doing free, locked, and loaded?

Committing a crime as a white man in Dixie is one answer. But there’s a broader political reason: In much of MAGA America, impunity for bullies and wackos includes the right to stockpile guns and ammo and carry concealed weapons.

For years, the Republican Party has been a shameless subsidiary and propaganda machine for the NRA and the gun industry. The creed is: Let no man’s guns be messed with. Gun worship is a plank of the Republican agenda, and that fact is rule number one in the GOP-controlled House. These are the politicians who invented the family Christmas card with ma, pa, and the kids all holding AR-15s in front of the tree.

Here’s a brief history of their moves, starting with the Sandy Hook school massacre, that hideous event that in hindsight, marked the end of any hope for a disarmed future.

In 2012, in the weeks after a severely troubled boy killed his mother, 20 children, and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, a majority of U.S. senators supported passing legislation requiring expanded background checks for gun purchases. But a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate killed that effort.

(That failure of political will was a moment of utter despair for any American still paying attention. If Republicans in Congress won’t do anything after the murder of a classroom of babies, they never will.)

Ten years and thousands of American gun deaths later, in 2022, a Democrat-led Congress eked out a bill that made incremental progress. It expanded the records used for background checks on gun purchasers under age 21, increased punishments for straw purchases, and closed the so-called boyfriend loophole, expanding the gun ban to people convicted of domestic violence against a dating partner as well as a spouse. But the final Senate-approved bill lacked any of the gun control provisions Democrats had included in the House-passed bills, including expanding background checks and banning assault weapons and bump stocks.

In the first week of the current Congress, in February 2023, Republicans sported cute little silver AR-15 pins on their lapels. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), a fierce opponent of federal regulations on firearms, who owns two gun shops, had handed them out. “They say the pins are symbols of their commitment to the Second Amendment and Americans’ right to bear arms,” reported a Time writer who canvassed the members.

Not that they likely cared, but Rep. Clyde, according to later reporting in the New York Times, didn’t tell his colleagues that his own gun business had fallen afoul of existing federal laws aimed at dealers of guns later used in crimes. One of his two gun stores, Clyde Armory in Athens, sold more than 25 guns later used in crimes, according to the Times.

The ATF had placed Rep. Clyde’s business into a federal monitoring program in 2020 and 2021.

Last year, after a weekend in which the nation racked up the highest death toll from mass shootings, Senate Republicans blocked a national assault weapons ban. Republican Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso objected to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s request for unanimous consent to pass the assault weapons ban, despite the pleas of Democratic senators who took to the Senate floor to recite American gun violence statistics. Republicans also torpedoed another Democrat-led proposal for universal background checks.

“Americans have a constitutional right to own a firearm,” Barrasso said. “Every day, people across Wyoming responsibly use their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. Democrats are demanding that the American people give up their liberty.”

Barrasso added that Democrats want to ban many semi-automatic firearms “because of the way they look.” (They look pretty bad to Secret Service agents who spot them poking through a fence on a Florida golf course, but OK.)

MAGA tools like Barasso on Capitol Hill are wildly out of step with the rest of America. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 92 percent of Americans favor requiring background checks for all firearm sales.

In pro-gun states, the insanity and hypocrisy defies belief. In Texas, for example, lawmakers loosen gun laws in response to massacres. The legislators passed permitless carry less than two years after 30 people died in mass shootings in just two incidents, in El Paso and Odessa. After 19 children died in Uvalde, neither Texas nor its Congressional delegation did anything besides transmitting thoughts and prayers. “It’s astounding to me,” state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat from San Antonio whose district includes Uvalde, told the Texas Tribune at the time. “We’re supposed to create things. We’re supposed to create legislation to keep people safe. By God, to keep children safe. And here we’ve done exactly the opposite.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible. This post is reprinted with permission from her American FreakshowSubstack. Please consider subscribing.

See Laughing Kamala Brush Off MAGA's Misogynist Rage

See Laughing Kamala Brush Off MAGA's Misogynist Rage

“Hillary sucks but not like Monica!” “A witch on a broomstick.” Elected women at all levels reduced to objects of porn and scorn. C-word, B-word…

That’s just a small sample of the shocking images, sounds, and memes hurled at women from the first Trump nominating convention in Cleveland in 2016 - the first full-throated battle cry of the misogyny he unleashed and that MAGA now celebrates.

After eight years of MAGA, women have come to expect AI deepfake porn and all manner of repulsive innuendo to be the first barrier to participation in American politics. The humiliation, sexualization, and abuse heaped on women in American public life has lost its power to shock.

So no one was surprised that within hours of Harris replacing Biden, two “patriots” posted themselves on social media holding American flags and a banner emblazoned with the words “Kamala is Blowing Guys Behind this Banner. $5 First Come First Serve.”

We may feel horror – but I doubt anyone was all that shocked. And in this cultural moment, we aren’t even surprised that women participate in the pile-on. Megyn Kelly, one of predator Roger Ailes’ “twirler” blondes, a woman with influence, access, and money, almost immediately used her elevated position on X to attack Harris for -- of all things -- non-marital sex. “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics and most women (and men) may learn that and see it for what it is: evidence of an unqualified political aspirant getting ahead based on smthg other than merit. It’s relevant, and fair game.”

Wow, Megyn.

Desperate times, desperate MAGAs.

Much of the rest of the world can’t understand us. When I was in Norway lecturing on U.S. politics before the 2020 election, audiences would sometimes raise their hands and ask, perplexed: “But what’s wrong with Elizabeth Warren?” I could only smile sadly and shake my head.

Oh you little lambs, I would think.

How could one explain to decent rational people who had somehow largely transcended gender as a political barrier that many American men of both left and right persuasions are so deeply frightened of women in power that they will unapologetically use inchoate, subjective responses like “I hate her voice” to explain their political choices.

But really, how is it that we, nation of Susan B. Anthony and Gloria Steinem and Brittney Griner and Shirley Chisholm and Megan Rapinoe – and Judith Butler for god’s sake – are so late to the party? Italy, one of the birthplaces of the word machismo, has a woman leader. More than a half dozen Latin American nations where machismo is also alive and well, such as Nicaragua, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Panama, already elected female leaders in recent decades.

America has sadly been a Western role model for the nations that reflexively cannot elevate women. We stand with countries in deep sexist backlash mode, including authoritarian and authoritarian-adjacent states like Hungary and Russia, and theocracies like Afghanistan and the Gulf States and Iran, all places where keeping the boot on women’s necks is critical to the larger enterprise of maintaining a claque of insecure men in charge.

Russian propagandist Sergei Mardan joined other Russian commentators insulting Harris as soon as she replaced Biden as the challenger to their chum, Donald – that manly hero who brought Miss Universe to Moscow. “The deep state really is planning to elect a baba for president,” he said, using a derogatory Russian term for an older woman.

How do you say “jackass” in Russian?

But the real hate is inside America. The underground river of misogyny runs from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and into the great institutions and academies. There has been absolute panic and loathing around women rising. We’ve been living with the open, fully locked and loaded backlash since the summer of 2016. Almost as bad as the MAGA hate is the toned-down resentment, shared by men on the left and the right and of all races. “I don’t like her voice,” “She’s too shrill,” “She’s not authentic…”

It’s been so unfair, so ugly, and so dispiriting.

But now a candidate has entered the field who appears to have the temperament to resist despair and resentment. One of the essential qualities of any successful politician, male or female, is the ability to let abuse roll off your back without going into an angry, defensive crouch. Never let them see you mad. Our last female presidential candidate, unfortunately, did not have that. Once the right put Hillary Clinton in their sights, the pile-on was relentless and she wasn’t able to laugh it off. Who among us could?

But Harris laughs. And laughs so well that it drives some men crazy.

Hungarian right-wing extremist export to America Seb Gorka, too brutish even for the Trump White House, which he left after shoving a journalist in Washington, complained that Harris “cackles like an insane woman.”

Sean Hannity devoted a segment on Fox to her laughter. A laughing woman leader, apparently, will invite our enemies to invade our country!

“I don’t care if it’s China, Iran, North Korea, Russia – they never feared Joe Biden. They did fear Donald Trump. They won’t fear Kamala Harris,” Hannity told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “They’ll laugh at Kamala Harris because that’s what she does half the time anyway. She giggles away, you know, her time. I don’t think they’ll take her seriously because I don’t think she’s a serious person.”

Remember that Sean Hannity’s idea of a “serious” candidate is a buffoon who rambles about sinking boats and electrocuted sharks while arguing against subsidies for electric vehicles.

As Margaret Atwood has pointed out: Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Harris is fully capable of laughing at men, and at one man in particular whose fear of laughing women is obviously bone deep. She can fight – but without the edge or rancor that misogynists find so scary in women.

Take a look at one of the Harris clips making the rounds, from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Boohoo Brett Kavanaugh.

In what the Washington Postcalled “a cool and deliciously patient voice,” then-Sen. Harris asked Kavanaugh about Roe v. Wade, a subject about which he, like the rest of the lying Leonard Leo nominees who gave women Dobbs, wanted to avoid:

“Can you think of any laws,” she asked the nominee, “that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

“Um,” Kavanaugh replied, “I am happy to answer a more specific question, but — ”

“Male versus female,” Harris offered, smiling, and when Kavanaugh still expressed confusion, she repeated her 19-word question: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

Kavanaugh responded, “I am not thinking of any right now.”

Kavanaugh of course, went on to cry -- sob uncontrollably -- defending himself against allegations of sexual abuse. His display of extreme emotionality -- traditionally considered a female failing -- would have been disqualifying in any woman candidate, for sure. Yet after proving he lacked all judicial temperament, off he went to get his black robe, a lifetime sinecure, and the right to decide how and whether tens of millions of American women receive health care.

These are not serious people. They carry serious hate and some of them have serious power and some of them carry weapons but they are not serious. They lack wisdom and self-knowledge and humanity. We can see that in their words, their rages, their hypocrisy, and their lack of shame.

The contrast between Kamala Harris and the women of Trumpworld is stark and bears noting. Every picture of women at Mar-a-Lago tells the same story, communicated without words: the saga of women so abject to male power and so sure that the only and best way to happiness and success is to attach themselves to and mollify a quivering insecure toxic masculine troglodyte with money and worldly influence. Made up into Trumpy beauty pageant standards, teetering on the obligatory stiletto… they must have to pretend to like it. Put another way: Have you ever seen Melania laugh?

Tell me again about authenticity.

Of course MAGA is aiming their disgusting firehose of misogyny -- she screwed her way to the top, she doesn’t have children, ugh, her laugh, her voice -- straight at Kamala Harris. They want to drown her in it because they need to give their thin-skinned bully time to get back up and help them with the memes and nicknames.

MAGA expects him to go for the jugular of this worst nightmare, a female challenger and person of color who laughs at him. They can’t have him sitting back in the rocking chair while Kamala Harris turns the campaign into a joyous rave. Instead of coming up with a snappy insult, he appears to be waffling on whether to debate her.

She who laughs first this summer will laugh last this fall. When Harris sails out of the MAGA sewer unscathed, she will bathe in Trumpy tears.

Reprinted with permission from American Political Freakshow

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


Felon: Will Trump's Conviction Break The Authoritarian Spell?

Felon: Will Trump's Conviction Break The Authoritarian Spell?

It only took a jury a day and a half to decide that Donald Trump, former President of the United States, was guilty on all counts. He will wear the convicted felon label on his back forever, no matter what happens in November. A jury of seven men and five women voted guilty on all 34 counts against him. He will be sentenced July 11. The penalty includes prison time. He likely won’t go, and in the unlikely event that he does, Never Trump conservative lawyer George Conway told me the Constitution would likely be read to require that any state holding him open the cell door if he is elected in November.

But the verdict is another historic landmark in the long list of awful firsts that the MAGA cult leader has inflicted on our country since he rode down the golden elevator in the summer of 2015, enthralling first the media and then a swath of America.

The first of those horrors is the separation of millions of Americans from faith in the law and process of democracy. In the hour after the verdict, on Xitter, on Fox, on rightwing platforms and channels, MAGAs were blind with rage, spitting accusations. It’s a measure of the success of this one man’s assault on American institutions - “fake news"!” “Deep State!” “Rigged against me!” - that untold millions will refuse to accept the fairness of the trial. His people are so unplugged from our commonweal that they are willing to believe the Manhattan DA works for a Hungarian billionaire whose name the rabid right made synonymous with their own invisible donor-monster the Koch family. They are willing to believe that a sitting judge who spends his days in a cold, smelly courtroom at 100 Centre Street, and the men and women of the jury who did their civic duty in the same room and listened to all the evidence, were just pawns of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Utter lunacy. Sadly, we’re used to it.

One of the rabble outside the courtroom was caught on camera threatening to go inside the courtroom and trash the place. AR 15 memes flooded the platforms. The sophisticates on social media flung profanity, the Overton window of civil political discourse long ago smashed by their Dear Leader.

“Bullshit!” Donny Jr. tweeted. “This Trump show trial is Bullsh!t,” wrote the soigné former Nixon aide, Monica Crowley.

Brother Eric, who squirmed in the courtroom through Stormy Daniels’ description of his father’s seduction technique, fumed at the outrage that a man could become a felon for just “a 130k NDA”!

Trained lawyer and TV personality Megyn Kelly, personally and obscenely trashed by Trump for asking him hard questions during a 2016 debate "(“she’s got blood coming out of her wherever!”) whined to her three million followers that “The country is disgraced” (yes, the rest of us noticed that, but back in November 2016).

Like so many Trumpers, Kelly also issued an implied warning, “They will rue the day they unleashed this lawfare to corrupt a presidential election.”

Rue the day. We’ll get you back. You’ll regret it. Threats, promises of violence, pictures of automatic weapons, bloodlust vengeance. All of it projected from their own Dear Leader and back out onto regular Americans just trying to make sense of it all.

Many MAGAs are now using the banana word. David Sacks, a grotesquely pro-Trump Silicon Valley billionaire, wrote, “There is now only one issue in this election: whether the American people will stand for the USA becoming a banana republic.”

The charitable view here is that Sacks is mainlining K with Elon and failed to notice that America went full banana republic on a summer night in 2016 when Gen. Michael Flynn led thousands of Republican delegates at the nominating convention in Cleveland in a chant of “Lock Her Up.” That Gen. Flynn ultimately got convicted himself (alas, not locked up) only proves the point, especially as he roams free today, another Trump pardonee like Steve Bannon, despoiling the political landscape and spewing conspiracy theories to low-information Q-Anon zombies.

Flynn’s rant and the crowd’s chant were unprecedented in American politics back then. It was shocking to witness the beginning of the idea of using the law for vengeance against one’s political opponents. In office, Trump tried to get his DOJ to manifest the authoritarian dream. But the “adults in the room” still clung to the mores of another era, and resisted, or quit.

The next administration will be vetted for people who won’t have those reservations. There may be none of them left.

Let’s be clear: the 91 criminal indictments against Trump are not “politically motivated.” Dozens of his minions in Arizona, Michigan and Georgia in the fake elector and January 6 conspiracy schemes have been turning like pancakes, or going bankrupt fighting a losing fight. He is recorded bragging about purloined classified national secrets.

Trump only still skates, he only still walks free right now because, contrary to the persecuted image he wants to project of “fighting The Man,” like the angry little guys who think he speaks for them, he is, in fact, The Man.

The New York judge and prosecutors bent over backwards allowing Defendant Trump to behave in ways that would have had any other accused individual locked up pre trial. Trump walks free with money in the bank even though he has already been convicted in a massive civil fraud trial, and of sexual abuse and forcible touching and then lying about it, in another civil case. Prosecutors have reams of evidence against him in the three criminal cases in two other states, cases that only thanks to the delay machinations of his lawyers and the horrifying ineptitude and bias of one of the judges, will not be decided before November 5.

Judging from the outpouring of anger at the conviction, his felonious status will not move his true fans. As historian Ruth Ben Ghiat wrote in her excellent book about modern dictators, from Putin to Xi, to Orban and Trump today and Mussolini and Hitler before them, the criminality of an authoritarian leader can be an essential element in his (always his, by the way, women need not apply) appeal.

“The strongman’s rogue nature also draws people to him. He proclaims law and order rule, yet enables lawlessness. This paradox becomes official policy, as government evolves into a criminal enterprise, Hitler’s Germany being one example and Putin’s Russia another. Millions around the world have found it intoxicating to be able to commit criminal acts with impunity… the thrill of transgression mixed with the comfort of submitting to his power turns the everyday into the exceptional, endowing life with energy, purpose, and drama.”

Trump was right about one thing in his surly first words to the public as a convicted felon, outside the courtroom, with his chagrined loser lawyer standing by (surely Todd Blanche was expecting to hear the L word from his belligerent client in the black SUV in short order).

The real verdict, the convicted defendant said, will be rendered on November 5. Right.

Will a majority of voters cling to the felonious leader’s fantasy that every institution and civil servant in America is utterly corrupted by “the left” and “Soros” and out to get him? Will they show up to vote having lost every iota of faith they ever had in the commonweal, in the possibility that their fellow Americans do the right thing in courtrooms and on juries and in the news media, believing that every non MAGA election worker, Capitol police officer, prosecutor, or New York state judge is engaged in a systematic conspiracy against Donald Trump?

The great question after today is whether the red F now stamped on Trump’s back, not unlike the Nixon tattoo on his fellow convicted felon Roger Stone’s back, will dampen the enthusiasm of any on-the-fence, decent, right-leaning voters still cued in to the possibility of the decency of our institutions after eight years of being persistently propagandized to abandon that faith.

Are there any left? Helloooo! Are you out there? Paying attention?

If so, you don’t have to vote for Biden. We will forgive you if you just stay home on Election Day and leave the man to his ignominious fate.

Reprinted with permission from American Political Freakshow

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, and documentary producer. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Happy MLK Day: Brotherly Love, Iowa, And The Prince Of Lies

Happy MLK Day: Brotherly Love, Iowa, And The Prince Of Lies

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

"Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love...violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”

Those are a few of the lines Martin Luther King uttered while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

King was born in Atlanta on another Monday, January 15, 1929. Had he not been assassinated in his prime in Memphis is 1967, he might even still be with us today, an old man. King is one of America’s greatest and most inspiring heroes. Why? Because he spoke eloquently and often about love and against hatee, even though he grew up Black in the south and had good reason to hate, as a Black man abused in a violently racist society.

We close schools and banks on his birthday to remember him precisely because of his ability to remind people living in this cruel, unjust, brutal world, that the only possible solution is not violence and hate but love.

King’s birthday this year happens to coincide with the day Republicans of Iowa are expected to become the first state to nominate Donald Trump to the their party’s presidential candidate. He will win Iowa in large part because of the influence of white Evangelical Christians, encouraged by men who, like King, root their rhetoric in the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus.

The megachurch stages of Iowa are populated by men who have twisted the teachings of Christ beyond all recognition. “You can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat,” MAGA megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin - a man with a million Twitter followers - said last week. Trump plays on the paranoid tendencies these pastors have encouraged in their flocks, promising to establish a commission if re-elected, to investigate the phantasm of “anti-Christian bias.”.

Trump’s sheeplike, hypnotized Iowa Christian followers are beyond satire. Their leader has been playing a video before taking the stage at Iowa rallies, called “God Made Trump” that could have been made in North Korea. It portrays the New York con man as the vessel of a higher power sent to save the nation. “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” the video opens, in what the New York Times reported appears to be an AI simulacrum of the voice of right wing radio broadcaster Paul Harvey. Trump, the voice says, “is a shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them.” Trump’;s also posted the video online, where it’s received millions of views.

It is mind-boggling to think that after seven years of Trump’s divisive lies and stochastic vitriol, his fascist tendencies (“Lock Her Up!” “I’d like to punch him in the face!”) Iowa’s white Christians, supposedly followers of the teachings of the same man Martin Luther King staked his life and rhetoric on, are driving the Trump bus back into the center of American power.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that threats to public officials have reached “unprecedented” levels.. “On a weekly basis — sometimes more often — I am getting reports about threats to public officials, threats to our prosecutors, threats to law enforcement agents who work in the Justice Department, threats to judges,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said during on ABC’s “This Week” recently.

Anyone paying the least amount of attention to current events knows the source of this trend. As the historian of fascism Ruth Ben Giat points out, since 2015, Trump has been trying “to shift the idea of violence into something positive.” The real world effects of that psychological shift are evident in the political violence all around us.

Most of Trump’s vocal opponents, from the lowest state elections workers to law clerks and federal and state judges sitting on cases against him, to political journalists, are not at all surprised by that. Many live with death threats and the higher profile figures require round the clock protection. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is overseeing the case that charged Trump with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia, said back in October that she had logged 150 personal threats since indicting Trump.

In the New Testament, Satan is known as “the Father of Lies.” The term comes from a passage in the Testament of John, in which Jesus is quoted as saying: "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

How grotesque it is in America toda, that white-bread midwestern Christians turn away from the idea that MLK urged, of infusing secular politics with love, and toward the hate-filled rhetoric of a man who by 2021, had logged more than 30,000 lies in just four years in office -- not counting The Big Lie about the 2020 election that shredded the trust between citizens that is the basis of any democracy.

The “Christians” of Iowa might be beyond saving. But the rest of us can take a few moments today to remember that love, not hate is what will save us, and try to follow his lead. As King urged in his most famous speech in Washington in August 1963: "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plain of dignity and discipline.”

Amen. And Happy Birthday Martin.

Reprinted with permission from American Political Freakshow

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, and documentary producer. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Remembering January 6, the American Fascist Anniversary

Remembering January 6, the American Fascist Anniversary

I remember where I was when Trump was declared winner of the 2016 election. I think almost everyone does, unless they were asleep or medicating anxiety with valium or gummies. I was tucking my press pass inside my coat and walking the gauntlet of MAGA yahoos on 6th Avenue in Manhattan screaming “Lock the Bitch Up!” and waving American flags. In the dark, camera crews for European and Asian television networks were zooming in on the faces and catching the flecks of spittle and rage to beam back to watchers on the other side of the planet, where it was already a new day.

I, like many Americans, also remember where I was in the early afternoon on January 6, 2021. Upstate New York, walking in a snowy field with my dog and wondering whether, by the end of the day, the fascist-friendly conman voters had a few months prior ejected from power would manage to violently hold onto it, and whether the army would be on our side or his.

Having to ponder whose side the U.S. military would take was perhaps the most shocking part of the whole Trump experience, forcing us to concede that our national situation was now on the level with “shithole” countries where coups happened, where civil rights were suspended, where generals took over, where opposition leaders and journalists and activist dissidents went to jail, or got thrown out of helicopters over the ocean …. .

In the three years since January 6, 2021, we’ve watched the legal system try to confront it. The House Select Committee that investigated the coup attempt produced reams of evidence of a conspiracy. Prosecutors in the Department of Justice in DC have tried and won convictions in more than a thousand cases. According to the Associated Press today about 750 people have been sentenced, with almost two-thirds receiving some time behind bars. Prison sentences have ranged from a few days of intermittent confinement to 22 years in prison.

But ,any of the rioters are already out of prison after completing their sentences, including, per the AP, violent defendants like Scott Fairlamb — a New Jersey man who punched a police officer during the riot. Convicted trespassers and cop-beaters back on the streets consider themselves heroes. They have enough support that some, horned Q-Anon lunatic Jacob Chandler for example, plan to run for office.

Americans saw a coup attempt with our own eyes in real time on television on January 6, 2021. The volume of evidence produced into the public record sufficiently proved that the coup attempt was the result of a conspiracy -- however poorly planned and executed. But Trump and his craven supporters in the Republican Party have over three years,pulled off one of the greatest PR stunts in history, persuading a majority of Republicans that charges against their leader are baseless, politically motivated, and as he puts it, a witch hunt. He and his army of paid influencers have persuaded millions that what they saw on January 6, 2021 was actually a setup by the feds, or caused by Nancy Pelosi’s orders to the Capitol police to stand down.

In the face of this tsunami of bullshit, the American legal system has not proven -- yet -- up to the challenge laid down by the seditionists and their leader. Jack Smith, the DOJ’s special counsel probing Trump’s sedition, is currently hamstrung, as is the judge presiding over his case against Trump. The Supreme Court, with its majority Trump-appointed/ Trump-aligned judges will eventually decide whether Trump’s claim of immunity -- his claim to, essentially, monarchical or dictatorial status -- is legitimate. Elsewhere in the country, in Georgia, in Florida, the machinery of the law moves at a snail’s pace, and will likely not reach any kind of conclusions before the 2024 election.

The American legal system has, so far, failed. It is a broken machine. Since January 6, 2021, we have come to know how weak our laws and ethical norms really are, how dependent they are on agreement and acceptance of the compact, and how they collapse when an entire movement decides to ignore them.

Trump has chipped away at the foundation of democracy ever since he and General Mike Flynn started demanding that Hillary Clinton be “locked up.” Democracies can’t survive without trust between citizens who must believe that, even if they lose, the other side will not jail or destroy them. The MAGA Big Lie is all about destroying trust, which is the glue that holds democracies together.

The House Democrats’ volumes of evidence, the indictments against Trump and henchmen, have not removed the clear and present danger of the fascist movement that tried and nearly succeeded on January 6, 2021. The implied threat of the noose and gallows outside the Capitol remains as present now as it was on that day.

American prisons are packed with people whose crimes pale in comparison to those of Trump coup plotters and pardonees like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, and the rest of the big indictees still walking around in suits, sipping Scotch, golfing, protected by lawyers, horse-trading tidbits of evidence and running out the clock with technicalities, waiting for their Dear Leader to shut it all down. Legal elves at the Heritage Foundation have a playbook ready to go, a blueprint for autocracy that would, if effectuated, give Trump dictatorial powers, which would -- they all clearly hope -- put a much different answer to the horrid question of whose side the American military would support in a second Trump administration.

Reprinted with permission from American Political Freakshow

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, and documentary producer. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.


Ohio's Women Organize Against A Wealthy And Fanatical 'Knight Of Malta'

Ohio's Women Organize Against A Wealthy And Fanatical 'Knight Of Malta'

The Catholic Church does some good things around the world. Think of the nuns and priests murdered by death squads for supporting peasants in Central America. Or Pope Francis, reminding humanity to hold some compassion for the poor and downtrodden every Sunday from his Vatican balcony. Then there are its fanatics and extremists, men-without-women in red hats and red shoes, obsessed with controlling female reproductive organs and protecting pedophile priests. The descendants of Galileo’s jailers might be history’s longest running club of sick puppies. Increasingly, their medievalism is encroaching on Americans.

This week, Catholic extremism’s most high and efficient emissary in Washington, Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta Leonard Leo, will discover whether billions in anonymous donor money and a lifetime of DC networking will meet the limits of power in the voters of the state of Ohio.

On Tuesday, Ohio voters will decide whether to approve Issue 1, a ballot initiative that would establish an individual “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in their state constitution. The fact that the ballot initiative exists at all is a triumph. The Ohio legislature is captured by right-wing extremists engaged in an audacious experiment in despotism. They have ignored their own state courts and the will of the Ohio voters with respect to gerrymandering. They are bought and paid for by oligarchs and oil and gas interests for whom they have shut down environmental regulations and even legalized the sale of radioactive fracking waste as a road de-icer. (For more on this dirty business read David Pepper’s Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-up Call from Behind the Lines.)

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Ohio was one of the states that instantly became Handmaids Tale territory, with forced birth the actual law of the state. Other states had the same kind of ban on the books, just waiting for the SCOTUS green light, but Ohio made national news when a ten year old rape victim was impregnated, and the state refused to allow the child to get an abortion. Her trauma was compounded by having to travel out of state to get care.

Against great odds, prochoice forces in Ohio managed to get a constitutional right to abortion on the ballot. Ohio voters will now get to decide whether to follow states like Kansas and Michigan in returning bodily agency to women and girls.

The fight is ugly and expensive. Pro-choice forces have money and the wind at their backs with wins in other states. Desperate anti-choices in Ohio are flooding the zone with misinformation, claiming the amendment will lead to “abortion on demand” or “dismemberment of fully conscious children” if voters approve it. These lies are promoted on the official government website of the Republican-controlled Ohio Senate. (Issue 1’s text explicitly says “abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability.”)

Ohio Republicans have also used the levers of government they control to change the rules to make it harder to get initiatives on the ballot (they failed) and now, they’ve initiated last-minute voter purges. In a roundup on the Ohio tactics in Talking Points Memo yesterday, Kate Riga wrote, “The abortion rights supporters have money, polls and the recent history of other red-state abortion proposals on their side; the opponents have various schemes of essentially legalized cheating on theirs.”

Who helps pay for this effort to trick Ohio voters into privileging rapist sperm cells over 10-year old rape victims? The same strange little man behind the overturning of Roe, of course.

Leonard Leo -- the Knight-Errant in Italian loafers on a camel above -- is an ideological time traveler from the 11th Century, and he’s proud of it. He likes to include his status as a Knight of Malta in his official bios. The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta is a Roman Catholic organization founded in 1048 in Jerusalem as a monastic order that ran a hospital for Christian pilgrims, later tasked by Rome with military duties defending Christians from the local Muslim population. Ejected from Jerusalem when the Turks retook it, the order eventually settled on Malta, ruling it until Napoleon’s army dispersed them in 1798. They did not disband.

According to Foreign Policy magazine, the modern day Knights are a nonstate entity with 13,000 members, maintaining diplomatic relations with 104 countries. After centuries in which membership was restricted to European aristocrats, in 1956 a new rank, ''knights and dames of grace and devotion,'' was opened to commoners. The order operates out of a single building in Rome, with a famous “keyhole view” of the Vatican. Their leader is referred to as the prince and grand master, is elected for life in a secret conclave and must be approved by the pope.

Leo has enjoyed four decades of success in Washington, advising Republican presidents on conservative lawyers to fill the federal judiciary. He is responsible for the U.S. Supreme Court rightist quintet of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. As a young man, he helped Clarence Thomas through his nomination fight in 1991. Now he is using donor money to get extremists into state judgeships around the country.

The Knight mostly jousted in the K Street shadows. But since the overturning of Roe, and his historic $1.6 billion dark money treasure haul last year, which I covered for The New Republichere, reporters are paying more attention to him. He leads an increasingly lavish lifestyle in a coastal Maine palazzo (purchased from another Knight of Malta). I’ve been told he bought his own church, made his wife choirmaster and so has his own priest, like the Sicilian noble in Lampedusa's novel Il Gattopardo. His fans in the Catholic Church are pushing for sainthood for a deceased daughter.

Investigations at Pro Publica and Politico turned up accounting and other irregularities, prompting the DC attorney general to look into his networks. (In Ohio, anti-choice activists funded by his network have reportedly paid his consultancy some $2 million.) Shameless Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan recently announced he will investigate the Attorney General for opening that investigation.

Leo would clearly like to keep a low profile in Ohio. As recently as September, he was listed as President of Students for Life America, one of the most active anti-choice groups in Ohio. As the Issue 1 vote nears, his name disappeared off the website, where he has been on the board since 2008. Investigators at The Lever discovered one of Leo’s many pots of money, the Concord Fund, donated $18 million to an anti-choice outfit called Protect Women Ohio Action, with more than $6 million in the past two months.

Last year, the Catholic Information Center (CIC), with offices on K Street, gave Leo an award as a “champion of the rule of law.” The CIC describes itself on its website as "the closest tabernacle to the White House.” In his acceptance speech, which can be viewed on video, the Knight-Errant let loose: “Catholicism faces vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots. These barbarians can be known by their signs. They vandalized and burned our churches after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. … Our opponents are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of."

Calling pro-choice women devil-manipulated barbarians and bigots is both laughable and a kind of hate speech. Most American pro-choice women are like Thera Parks, 51, an Ohio insurance saleswoman, whom the Washington Post interviewed recently. Parks is a Republican who volunteered this spring to collect signatures to get the abortion amendment on the ballot.

Why would a Republican work to overturn her party’s signature achievement - the abrupt end of a right to privacy that women have enjoyed for 40 years? Here’s what she told the Post: “When reproductive rights are banned, parents don’t have a choice or say over their kids or their families or even their own bodies,” Parks said. “A little girl had to leave Ohio to receive care. A thought of forcing young girls to stay pregnant and carry to term is just terrible to me.”

Parks is one of the million points of democratic light around America who will prove to Washington’s Knight of Malta that medieval mores have no home here. As long as democracy exists in some form in the states of the United States, common sense will ultimately prevail over fanatical lunacy.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer, and publisher ofAmerican Political Freakshow, a Substack on politics. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Airmail, and New York. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.