Trump 2.0, Project 2025, and Agenda 47: a truly fascist nightmare in the making

 ...Donald Trump... is now so openly fascist he may soon start wearing his Mussolini Underoos on the outside of his pants.
~ Aldous J. Pennyfarthing, Daily Kos, November 9, 2023

You might have noticed that the quiet parts are no longer merely being said out loud, but are now being shouted from the rooftops, in re the fascist aspirations (fascpirations?) of 2024 GQP (un)presidential front runner Donald John Trump and his cartel of powerful, deep-pocketed allies. Trump and gang have made no secret of the many ways in which they intend to crap all over the United States Constitution, and totally dismantle American democracy, if Trump wins another term in the White House.

Together, the Trump campaign's disturbingly authoritarian Agenda 47 and the alarming Project 2025 have all of the makings of a fascist nightmare in progress, a dystopian novel come to life. Moreover, in the unlikely event that Trump does not win the rethuglican nomination, we're still not off the hook; the backers of the extremely well-funded and well-organized Project 2025 -- the theocratic Heritage Foundation -- have briefed not only the Trump campaign but those of the distant-second rethuglican candidates, Nikki Haley and Free State of Floriduh Governor Ron DeSantis. It seems pretty clear that the Heritage Foundation is determined to force its Christofascist agenda on the American people in the event that any rethuglican wins the White House in 2024.

The nightmare features of Trump 2.0, including the plot to dismantle America and recreate it in the Trumpublican/Talibangelical image, are not really new news, of course, but they were pushed to the front in the news cycle again due to a report earlier this month from Washington Post. By now, everyone who has been paying even superficial attention to reports and commentary across the media spectrum has at least a glimmer of a notion that a second Trump term would be a vicious revenge tour. Unfortunately, it appears that many folks are totally fine with this. Trump may be an authoritarian asshole, but he's their kind of authoritarian asshole.

Behind the curtain there's not a timid little bald man, but an army of aggressive Trump loyalists
In case you can't get past the WaPo paywall to read the report cited above, there are scads of other sources covering this matter. Axios, in a piece published on November 13, 2023, is a good place to start if you want to catch up. The article provides a disquieting summary of the preparations being made behind the metaphorical curtain for a second Trump term.

If Trump were to win, thousands of Trump-first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory and domestic policy jobs. His inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile to the hard-edged, authoritarian-sounding plans he calls "Agenda 47."

• The people leading these efforts aren't figures like Rudy Giuliani. They're smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law.

Behind the scenes: The government-in-waiting is being orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation's well-funded Project 2025, which already has published a 920-page policy book from 400+ contributors. Think of it as a transition team set in motion years in advance.

• Heritage president Kevin Roberts tells us his apparatus is "orders of magnitude" bigger than anything ever assembled for a party out of power.

The late poet Maya Angelou is often quoted as having said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." Although many folks voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 -- and plan to vote for him again in 2024 -- because he repeatedly showed the world exactly who he is, there were many others, at least in 2016, who were in a state of denial, not believing that he would be all that bad once he assumed the office of POTUS. But he was by most measures far worse than even many of the "alarmists" had expected, and a second term would be even more ghastly. From Axios again:

Here's what the early days of a second Trump presidency would look like, based on his words and our conversations with Trump insiders:

1. His top obsession will be the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community — all of which he thinks conspired to investigate him, thwart him, screw him. He's been very clear that he's willing to unleash these agencies against political enemies.
2. The next priority will be the Department of Homeland Security and the border, with plans to erect sprawling detention camps, "scour the country for unauthorized immigrants," and "deport people by the millions per year," The New York Times reports. We're told Trump's top criterion for immigration officials will be whoever promises to be most aggressive. Trump has told allies he's confident the Supreme Court will back his most draconian moves.
3. As first reported by Jonathan Swan for Axios last year, a key tool for Trump's "revenge term" would be the use of Schedule F personnel powers to wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants across the federal government. Trump allies want a deep and wide purge of the professional staff that often serves across new administrations.
4. Officials close to the Pentagon tell us they're worried about a plan, articulated by former Trump official Russ Vought in the Heritage document, to direct the National Security Council to "rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory [and] manufactured extremism." Indeed, the Trump allies see obstacles to remove at every level of every agency.

The fourth item on that list, regarding the military, should be a matter of deep concern for anybody who cares about national security. And since we're on the topic of the military for the moment, anyone who thinks that Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville's ongoing blockade of military promotions is really just about abortion access isn't paying attention. On November 7, 2023, The Guardian published an opinion piece detailing the ways that Tuberville is in reality the useful idiot of both Trump and the Heritage Foundation, with goals much more far-reaching than merely sabotaging reproductive rights.

Idiots can still be useful idiots. There are larger purposes involved in [Tuberville's] scam kulturkampf. His subversion of the military is not just collateral damage. It is not the unintended consequence, but the overriding motive. His abortion ban is both context and pretext. Tuberville has opened Trump’s strategy for a second term to replace the professional class of officers pledged to the constitution with a collection of flunkies who will salute his command, legal or not. Tuberville is a blunt instrument, but, however crude, he is the available tool.

The Heritage Foundation – which has produced a blueprint for a Trump second term, the 2025 Transition Project, which includes firing the entire federal civil service and replacing it with Trump loyalists, and invoking the Insurrection Act on day one of Trump II to deploy the military against political dissidents – has evidently been behind Tuberville’s attack on the military. It circulated a letter of several far-right ex-military figures to Senate leaders demanding that they “Support Senator Tuberville’s Fight Against Woke Military”, which they denounced for “advancing the leftwing social agenda”.

Heritage published an article by one of its fellows claiming that Tuberville is the “one man” standing in the way of a dastardly conspiracy led by Biden: “Replacing the officer class of police and military ranks with politicized ideologues who will bend to a transformative dogma is a strategy that has worked in places like the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela … Tuberville, thus, is stopping the promotion of woke apparatchiks.” Like Trump, the Heritage cadres project their own scheme on to their enemies.

There are indicators that even the republicans in the Senate are finally growing impatient with Tuberville, but he has already done significant damage.

The Axios report concludes with a dire warning.

The bottom line: This Trump-allied machine has the most power over the formation of a potential future government of any group in U.S. history. Trump, if elected, will leverage it to do things with government that none of us has seen in our lifetime.

That's the kind of stuff that should be keeping you awake at night.

The gaffes are good for laughs, but the plans (and the fetish for brutality) are anything but funny
The conservative Bulwark has had a lot to say as well about Trump's dick-tatorial wet dreams. In a November 13, 2023 piece, Charlie Sykes warned that while Trump's numerous verbal blunders are a target-rich environment and provide ample fodder for comedians of all stripes, we really should be focusing on his clearly stated plans as well as his fetish for brutality. Sykes wrote:

Understandably, it’s tempting to focus on Trump’s gaffes, which are, indeed, a target-rich environment. The stumbles, the bumbles, the confusion.

But the problem with Trump isn’t the gaffes — underneath the verbal clownishness Trump is telling us who he is and exactly what he intends to do.

He genuinely admires the brutality of the Chinese; he finds violence exciting; and he’s a sincere fanboy of the world’s fascists. And he keeps tell[ing] us what his presidency will mean if and when he regains power. There’s no subtlety here.

It’s also no secret what he thinks about his fellow Americans.

To illustrate the latter point about Trump's regard for his fellow Americans, Sykes compared the November 11 Veteran's Day social media messages from Trump and from President Joe Biden. Biden's message on Xitter was clear and simple and decent:

Today, we honor the story of our veterans -- the story of our nation at its best.

On Veterans Day, let's recommit to fulfilling our one sacred obligation as a nation: to prepare those we send into harm's way and care for them and their families when they come home.

Trump, on the other hand, had this to say on his exceedingly ill-named platform, Truth Social:

In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran's Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

And Trump amplified his message in a Veterans Day speech, in which he not only repeated the "vermin" comment but also claimed that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country." He got a lot of blowback for these comments, which are eerily similar to the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini, but he and his army of defenders have, not surprisingly, dismissed the criticism. Trump campaign spokesmonster Steven Cheung, for example, told the Washington Post that the critics are snowflakes. From Axios, November 13, 2023:

"[T]hose who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House," Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told the Post in a statement.

Cheung later said he was referencing their "sad, miserable existence" instead of their "entire existence," the Post noted.

Oh, okay. So that makes it all right. Trump and his authoritarian army will only crush the "sad, miserable" existence of critics instead of the critics' "entire" existence.

On the Bulwark piece, Charlie Sykes continued:

So, once again, it is essential to pay attention. Trump may be clownish, but the clown car is carrying a neutron bomb. Possibly several.

Last week, the Washington Post detailed how Trump and allies are planning to weaponize the Justice Department to go after his opponents and critics. Trump himself confirmed as much.

This weekend, we got a deeper glimpse at Trump 2.0 from the NYT: “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans.”

Former President Donald Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up people living in the United States without legal permission on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

Camps.

Sykes later added, "You can't say we have not been warned."

Asleep or awake?
The big mystery to me is why so many people still don't seem to be particularly concerned about this whole mess. Whether they consider themselves to be conservative or liberal, republican or Democratic, or essentially apolitical, anybody who really cares about American democracy should be sounding the alarms full blast.

I hate coming across like one of those intensely annoying conspiranoids who claim that only they and a few others are totally awake and aware, while the masses of sheeple snooze on unaware. Truth is, I don't consider myself to be totally awake and aware about anything. But I am awake and aware enough to understand what Trump and his backers are trying to do to the country I love. And so, of course, are millions of other people, but there are also millions for whom all of the above is NBD.

Like most of us who have been blaring warnings about Trump for years and years, I have been repeatedly accused by Trumpanzees of being an alarmist, a snowflake, a libtard, and a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome (when in fact supporting Trump is the true derangement). The accusations don't bother me.

What does bother me is that the US as a nation appears to be sleepwalking towards authoritarianism, in the words of Professor Brian Klaas on a recent episode of "Morning Joe." Klaas said:

I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don't know how to say this more clearly. We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism, and people are not waking up to this. And the Constitution is not written with magical ink. It is protected by the people who make brave choices during moments of political peril and we are in one of those moments.

So the question is, do voters wake up as well? Because our political class is not rising to the challenge. They're not distancing themselves and the Republican Party from this rhetoric. They're just sort of pretending like it doesn't exist. And we are literally walking towards a world in which Donald Trump is going to consolidate power, politicize the rule of law, and break down democracy one day at a time, and I think that's something that we have to really grapple with as we head towards the election next year because that is the biggest story in American politics and nothing else comes close.

It's definitely time for more folks to wake up and smell the fascism.

The next Big Lie is adding fuel to the fire
America is still reeling from the effects of Trump's initial Big Lie, i.e., his repeated, obsessive claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen (or "stollen," as he has put it more than once) from him. But as Amanda Carpenter and Deana El-Mallawany wrote in a November 15, 2023 report on The Bulwark, Trump's next Big Lie -- his tall tale about "weaponization" of various institutions whose purpose is to uphold the rule of law -- is already here. And not only is it adding fuel to the fire that led to January 6th, it is in certain fundamental ways more dangerous than the original Big Lie.

The authors warn that we should recognize the power the second Big Lie may hold over the 2024 campaign, as well as its potential to inspire violence the way the original lie did on January 6, 2021. In fact, as detailed on Carpenter's and El-Mallawany's Bulwark piece, the false weaponization claims have already inspired disturbing and credible threats of violence to witnesses and prosecutors in Trump's various legal dramas.

But the danger to the rule of law cannot be overstated.

TRUMP’S 2020 LIES WERE AIMED at holding on to power; the damage they caused to the rule of law was collateral. With his 2024 lies, opposition to the rule of law is the very purpose. No one is supposed to be above the law, not even former presidents. Yet Trump resists any form of legal accountability for his acts because, as he has said, “I was always of the opinion that a thing like this couldn’t happen. In other words, you protect your former presidents.”

Like many aspiring autocrats, Trump is engaging in the democratic process in hopes of becoming powerful enough to subvert it. Should he win the presidency, he will use his powers as both a spear and a shield—both to “dismantle” the government and to protect himself from accountability.

Anyone who is either unconcerned by, or actively supports, Project 2025, Agenda 47, and Trump's whole body of lies and his revenge agenda is very much a part of the problem, and is either willfully blind or not very bright... or is a fascist too. And as I've said many times before and will no doubt say again, anybody who still supports Trump and his allies specifically because of their rhetoric, actions, and plans deserves to live under an authoritarian, fascist regime... but the rest of us do not.

We have to outvote them.

Update: December 1, 2023: In a followup to its disturbing November 13 report, Axios revealed on December 1 that it has obtained copies of the exact questionnaires Trump allies are using and that then-President Trump used himself during his final days in office.

The 2020 "Research Questionnaire," which we obtained from a Trump administration alumnus, was used in the administration's final days — when most moderates and establishment figures had been fired or quit, and loyalists were flexing their muscles. Questions include:

• "What part of Candidate Trump's campaign message most appealed to you and why?"
• "Briefly describe your political evolution. What thinkers, authors, books, or political leaders influenced you and led you to your current beliefs? What political commentator, thinker or politician best reflects your views?"
• "Have you ever appeared in the media to comment on Candidate Trump, President Trump or other personnel or policies of the Trump Administration?"

Axios noted that similar questions are being asked for the Talent Database being assembled by the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.

An alumnus of the Trump White House told us both documents are designed to test the sincerity of someone's MAGA credentials and determine "when you got red-pilled," or became a true believer.

• "They want to see that you're listening to Tucker, and not pointing to the Reagan revolution or any George W. Bush stuff," this person said.

Both documents," Axios added, "are striking for their emphasis on what you believe rather than your credentials or accomplishments." Copies of both docs can be viewed at the end of the Axios article (here's that link again).

Reportedly, Trump himself has been irritated by all the attention Heritage and other outside allies have received for, as Axios puts it, "the prefab administration that's being assembled."

• The Trump campaign's top two officials, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, issued a statement in mid-November saying that "none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign. We will have an official transition effort to be announced at a later date."
• "Unless a second term priority is articulated by President Trump himself, or is officially communicated by the campaign," they added, "it is not authorized in any way."

Um...okay. But I think we've heard and seen enough from Trump himself (and his campaign) to know that he poses a threat of the highest order to American democracy.

DeSantis: Der Führer of Flori-duh is a rising star in America's growing fascist movement

 

This post has been updated with additional content as well as editing of original content for the purpose of flow.
~ CC

It can't be stated loudly enough or often enough: Florida governor Ron DeSantis is a fascist. As of now he's a mere spark, relatively speaking, but his elevation to the U.S. presidency could very well burn our democracy to the ground. What DeSantis is doing to Florida, he apparently wants to do to the entire country. In other words, "Make America Florida." Gaaagh!

I've spent years barking about #NeverWasMy President Donald John Trump -- and I know that this has cost me some readers, but so be it -- but in many ways, DeSantis is ever so much worse. That's no exaggeration; DeSantis is so bad that even some (actual) conservatives are very concerned.

Granted, it's all too easy, particularly in these deeply divisive times, to slap the label "fascist" or "Nazi" on people, organizations, ideas, or actions with whom one disagrees, and I am well aware that those labels have at times been unfairly applied to opponents by both "the right" and "the left." But I think it is entirely appropriate to employ such words when referring to DeSantis. For starters, follow the first link in the first paragraph (here is that link again). It contains links to articles about various aspects of DeSantis' fascistic tendencies, including opinions by experts on the history of fascism, authoritarianism, and autocracy.

Or if you want to narrow your focus a little bit, check out this February 10, 2023 Esquire opinion piece by Jeff Vandermeer, who, speculating about a DeSantis presidential run (or, worse, a win) wrote:

In the end, it may not matter whether DeSantis is a “mad king,” a cipher like Rick Scott, an ideologue, an oligarch, an autocrat, or a rather ordinary politician in the right place at the right time. The effects of DeSantis’ actions remain the same, while in his rhetoric he often takes the term “bully pulpit” as literally as possible.

Florida and its people don’t deserve this desecration—no place does, even as DeSantis and his Republican predecessors have managed to turn an absolute paradise into a place that is close to a failed state. Because what Ron DeSantis does, at base—including to his base—is simple. He inflicts damage in pursuit of political gain. On purpose and with abandon and with no regard for collateral harm.

What trickles down, then, in the end, along with all of this “freedom,” is nepotism, corruption, cruelty, greed, and—both by design and as a byproduct of all the rest—shockingly bad ideas about governance.

Why would you want any of this inflicted on the nation?

This is the Ron DeSantis of Florida, who wants to become the Ron DeSantis of America. To tell us to our dying day that we are not communities of loving grace and communion, that we are not all connected, that acts of loving kindness are for fools and traitors. To tell us that only some of us matter, not all of us.

Maybe, in the end, if we do not heed the warnings, DeSantis will tell us, in a thousand lacerating ways, direct and indirect… that none of us matter.

Unfortunately, most mainstream media coverage so far seems to have understated the threat. This December 2022 Truthout post by Henry A. Giroux addresses the infamous migrant-busing political stunts orchestrated by Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott. Giroux lamented the fact that most of the mainstream media reporting on the matter failed to connect the dots between those stunts and unpleasant historical precedents.

It is worth repeating that little was reported about how this story echoed a segregationist past of Jim Crow racist policies and violence. And almost nothing was said about how DeSantis’s politics of disposability was part of a similar logic carried to extremes in the past in fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany. Not only did DeSantis build on the legacy of American white supremacists such as former Gov. George Wallace, he also took a lesson from the history of fascism in trying to ride white supremacy and nationalism to further his political career.

DeSantis’s publicity stunt of using migrants as political pawns was also disconnected in the mainstream and liberal media from his attempt to erase the history of the Jim Crow era as part of his larger project of a politics of disposability. For instance, little was said connecting this racist policy to DeSantis’s passing laws banning books about Black history and racial narratives from schools and libraries, along with limiting what teachers can teach about racism — a policy that clearly indicates how DeSantis is following in the footsteps of the Nazification of education in Hitler’s Germany...

Presidential aspirations aside, DeSantis appears to be on the fast track to becoming the dictator of Florida. And Florida's republican supermajority has happily handed the reins -- and the reign -- over to him. From The Guardian, February 18, 2023:

It turns out, following a special legislative session last week that handed DeSantis victory after victory in his culture wars against Disney, transgender communities, students, migrants and communities of color, the person with the greatest freedom in Florida to do exactly as he pleases is the governor himself.

In November, voters granted DeSantis’s wish of a veto-proof Republican supermajority in the state legislature. In a five-day session, those politicians validated every one of his demands.

They granted DeSantis total control of the board governing Disney, the theme park giant with whom he feuded over his anti-LGBTQ+ “don’t say gay” law.

They gave him permission to fly migrants from anywhere in the US to destinations of his choosing, for political purposes, then send the bill to Florida’s taxpayers.

And they handed unprecedented prosecutorial powers to his newly created, hand-picked office of election “integrity”, pursuing supposed cases of voter fraud.

The special session is over but DeSantis’s devotion to seeking retribution against those who disagree with him is not...

 In other words, he's not just a tyrant, but a petty one at that. 

From the tyrant's playbook: seizing control of education and the media

Dumbing down the schools and universities
DeSantis is working hard to push his "anti-woke" agenda at all levels of education in Florida, from elementary schools to colleges and universities. Arguably, education has always been political, but DeSantis seems to be ratcheting the politix up to alarming new levels, waging a war on Florida students of all ages, as well as those tasked with educating them. From a February 28, 2023 piece in The Nation:

Teachers, superintendents, and school board members in Florida have been assaulted, demeaned, and targeted with death threats. Their classrooms are being surveilled, and anonymous members of the public contact administrators to report a “crime” as benign as finding a rainbow flag pinned to a bulletin board.

Amid the threats, DeSantis has signaled that he will fight a federal investigation into increased teacher harassment in Florida and nationwide.

As this is happening, children watch and learn and get caught in the middle. The people they rely on in school are forced to pay more attention to being under attack than on teaching. Politicians and extremist school board members tell them that some classmates are less equal than others. And the stories they read and the way they learn have been yanked away from them...

I don't know about you, but those pictures of empty bookshelves in elementary school classrooms haunt me.

But I would be remiss if I were to completely gloss over the nuances of this issue, and there are indeed nuances, as explained in this thoughtful March 1, 2023 piece on the Bulwark site, by Cato Institute member and contributing editor to Reason Cathy Young. To put it very politely, I am not a fan of libertarians, particularly in their current incarnation, but Young aptly points out that along with the illiberalism being pushed by DeSantis and his ilk, there's such a thing as progressive illiberalism as well. Citing DeSantis' "War on Woke" on education, particularly as reflected in Florida House Bill 999, Young wrote:

But Democrats and dissident conservatives attempting to describe and respond to this worrisome trend often resort to badly flawed narratives that distort the overall picture in several ways.

First, these narratives sometimes exaggerate the right-wing depredations they critique—for instance, by equating the rejection of the African American studies AP curriculum with an outright ban on teaching African American history.

Second, they tend to discount the very real problem of left-wing illiberalism and ideological diktat in education, dismissing all complaints about it as either astroturfed right-wing disinformation or misguided centrist panic that plays into the hands of the right. To acknowledge that at least in some cases DeSantis and his imitators are responding to real problems and tapping into valid concerns may complicate the narrative, but it doesn’t mean that the “anti-woke” right is fighting the good fight. It just means that the political fights over these issues often pit the proverbial two wrongs against each other—and that the sane middle desperately needs alternatives.

Young went on to list a few examples of "progressive illiberalism." I know what you're thinking, but it would be a mistake to dismiss this piece as mere "whataboutism" or "both-sides-ism." And she did draw attention to an important distinction between the two types of illiberalism.

Attorney and writer Wendy Kaminer, a former American Civil Liberties Union board member who has for years been a strong critic of what she sees as the progressive abandonment of free speech principles, is equally harsh about the right-wing pushback in Florida and other red states. The new Florida legislation and the earlier Stop WOKE bill, she told me by telephone, represent nothing less than “a state-imposed orthodoxy on education, and especially on higher education. It’s saying that there is no such thing as academic freedom, that professors are simply employees of the state and they have to parrot whatever the state tells them to parrot.”

But Kaminer (who is a FIRE advisory board member but stressed that she was speaking only in her capacity as an individual) also pointed to an irony that she believes a lot of progressives miss: The conservative backlash operates by using “theories that were developed on the left” and have been widely applied through college speech codes over the past thirty years or so—theories about the harms of speech that is viewed as traumatic to the listener and the right of listeners to be safe from hurtful or offensive expression.

“You see a very similar hostility to free speech coming from both the ‘woke’ and the ‘anti-woke,’” says Kaminer. However, she adds, while progressives have largely censured speech that they regard as harmful—essentially, as a form of assaultive conduct—using “cultural power” and institutional power, the right, with its current strength in state legislatures, is currently doing it “by force of law.”

"By force of law" -- that's the crucial difference. Cathy Young continued the thought, explaining that this is not an absolute distinction, as, "To some extent, laws prohibiting racial and sexual harassment under Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act bring the federal government into speech regulation that is not always limited to targeted harassment of individuals." Even so, she added:

In some ways, red-state “anti-woke” bills are broader and cruder in their attempts at speech regulation: No campus policy against “discriminatory speech” has ever tried to kill entire academic programs and majors the way HB 999 would kill critical race scholarship and gender studies. (Here, DeSantis is taking a page from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the proud champion of “illiberal democracy” and the darling of American “national conservatives,” who signed a decree effectively banning gender studies programs in Hungarian universities five years ago.)

Indeed. Nuances aside, in my book the DeSantis/anti-woke brand of illiberalism is doing the most damage by far to educational systems, not only in Florida but all across the nation. Notwithstanding the usual gang of hysterics who can't stop working the base into a frenzy about the "woke mob," "progressive illiberalism" isn't even in the running, damage-wise.

Jackboots stomping all over the First Amendment
And then there is DeSantis' war on the news media. Similar to Trump's threats, during his first presidential campaign, to "open up libel laws," DeSantis wants to rewrite defamation law in America to make it easier for "public figures" like himself to sue news outlets (and, apparently, others who post critical content about said public figures). From Politico, February 23, 2023:

At the governor’s urging, Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature is pushing to weaken state laws that have long protected journalists against defamation suits and frivolous lawsuits. The proposal is part DeSantis’ ongoing feud with media outlets like The New York Times, Miami Herald, CNN and The Washington Post — media companies he claims are biased against Republicans — as he prepares for a likely 2024 presidential bid.

Beyond making it easier to sue journalists, the proposal is also being positioned to spark a larger legal battle with the goal of eventually overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that limits public officials’ ability to sue publishers for defamation, according to state Rep. Alex Andrade, the Florida Republican sponsoring the bill...

...Free-press advocates call the measure unconstitutional and suggest it could have far-reaching consequences beyond major media outlets.

“I have never seen anything remotely like this legislation,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “I can’t say I have seen every bill ever introduced, but I’d be quite surprised if any state Legislature had seriously considered such a brazen and blatantly unconstitutional attack on speech and press freedoms.”

Here is a direct link to the proposed bill, HB 991, which was introduced by Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola), a DeSantis ally. A February 23 piece on the Florida Politics site has more about the matter. As well, the libertarian Reason site shed light on the consequences of this bill's passage.

This bill is only the latest attempt from Gov. DeSantis to chill dissenting speech in Florida.

"The bill is an aggressive and blatantly unconstitutional attempt to rewrite defamation law in a manner that protects the powerful from criticism by journalists and the public," says [Joe] Cohn [the legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression]."And it really champions the rights of the powerful and public figures in particular as compared to the rights of ordinary people to raise questions and lodge criticisms.

Understand, however, that Ron DeSantis certainly does not hate all media. To the contrary: he seems to adore FOX News, and vice versa, much to the growing chagrin of Donald Trump. And he is not above exploiting and weaponizing certain DeSantis-friendly alt-media. According to a February 28, 2023 Grid story, there are at present a half-dozen right-leaning conservative websites, some of which have only emerged over the past two years, that cover DeSantis on a near-daily basis and enjoy access to him and his administration that most of the rest of the media emphatically do not.

Currently the most notable of these is the online-only "news" site Florida Standard, which was only launched in July of 2022 but has published one-on-one interviews with DeSantis and his crackpot state surgeon general. That's the type of access that DeSantis rarely grants to mainstream Florida newspapers. From the Grid story: 

“It’s all built around a very partisan agenda,” said Rick Wilson, a Floridian and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “The desire to have your own biases reinforced is across the political spectrum, but only on the far right is it as sophisticated and weaponized — particularly here in Florida.”

These sites play an outsized role given their small staff and traffic, which hover around, or less than, 100,000 monthly viewers at each site, according to data from the media tracking service SimilarWeb. As DeSantis builds his reputation among Republicans nationally, there is a quiet pipeline flowing from these local sites up to major national figures. Conservative stars like Ben Shapiro (5.5 million Twitter followers), Mark Levin (3.4 million followers), Matt Gaetz (2 million followers) and Benny Johnson (1.3 million followers) have all tweeted DeSantis-focused stories written by small conservative Florida news sites, and articles have been routinely cited not just in the right-wing press but the mainstream media, too.

Florida Standard and its editor in chief, Will Witt (who didn't respond to interview requests and questions from Grid) have a fine record of pushing conspiranoid content.

In November of last year, Witt cited the baseless “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which has been embraced by extremists such as the Buffalo supermarket mass shooter, that today’s influx of immigrants is a deliberate attempt to increase the number of Democratic voters in the United States. Witt retweeted a clip of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) discussing embracing immigrants in the U.S. and added: “Great replacement is just a theory huh?”

And earlier this year, the Florida Standard published a series of articles about covid that falsely spread information about covid vaccines, such as a story focused on the idea that mRNA can spread from a vaccinated person to an unvaccinated person.

It all seems to fit right in with the DeSantis dystopian vision for Floriduh... and the nation at large.

Then, of course, there are social media, most notably Twitter. A January 25, 2023 article in The Daily Beast (updated on January 26) reports on how Ron DeSantis's political operation has silently been recruiting conservative "influencers." All of them seem to be fine, upstanding people, at least by current rethuglican standards.

According to five Republicans familiar with the discussions, the governor’s top lieutenants have quietly recruited a network of conservative social media influencers as part of a broader attempt to circumvent the mainstream press and appeal directly to GOP primary voters nationwide.

And who are, according to the three Republicans who received the initial pitch, among the ranks in DeSantis’ digital army?

Jack Murphy, a podcast host and self-described “alpha-male giga chad” involved in a quasi-professional cuckolding porn scandal. John Cardillo, a former Newsmax TV host and unregistered arms dealer who allegedly stiffed the Ukrainian government for $200,000 worth of body armor plates. Christian Walker, Herschel Walker’s right-wing influencer son who helped tank his father’s Senate campaign. David Reaboi, a Hungary-loving and Qatar-hating bodybuilder with longstanding ties to John Bolton. And Caleb Hull, an ex-Trump digital strategist who has said some very, very racist things.

This is the DeSantis A-team, and they’re fighting a battle for a presidential campaign that hasn’t even started yet—with plenty of DeSantis face time, dinners, and photo ops.

The only point with which I disagree is that DeSantis's presidential campaign "hasn't even started yet." That wasn't even true in January, and it's certainly not true now. In any case, it's a pretty sure bet that all of the restrictions DeSantis is frothing at the mouth to place upon real news media and journalists won't apply to the Führer-friendly "news" media and "influencers."

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

A history of cruelty and sadism?
Finally, there is some online buzz, though not so much from the mainstream media as of now, regarding Ron DeSantis' murky military history. How relevant this is to the DeSantis of the present and future, I couldn't begin to say, but it's worth noting that he has been accused of enabling and encouraging the torture of detainees back when he was a U.S. Navy JAG lawyer serving at the infamous Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba.

The Bulwark brought up this issue on a February 28, 2023 piece (see the second item, "Is Ron DeSantis a Sadistic Torturer?"). The piece references a transcript of an interview with one of those detainees, Mansoor Adayfi, formerly detainee #441 and also known as Abdul Rahman Ahmed. The interview was originally aired on a Nov. 18 interview podcast of Eyes Left, hosted by U.S. Army veteran and anti-war activist Michael Prysner. (The author of the Bulwark article, Bill Lueders, suggests that the House GOP, being on such an investigative frenzy, should investigate the allegations against DeSantis, among a couple of other matters. But he's not holding his breath, and neither am I, and neither should you.)

A January 26, 2023 article on the Florida Bulldog site has more detailed info about the torture allegations, as well as other aspects of DeSantis's military career. To begin with...

Not much is known about DeSantis’s duties at those locations [Guantanamo and Fallujah, during the Iraq war]. DeSantis has released only limited highlights of his military career – noting in a speech, for example, that he spent Christmas 2006 in Guantanamo without his family – and has declined repeatedly to be interviewed about it, most recently to Florida Bulldog. His official biography, cited by Wikipedia and other information sources, touts that he “still serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve,” but the Navy says otherwise.

A Navy data sheet about DeSantis provided to Florida Bulldog last week lists his separation date from the Navy as Feb. 14, 2019 – a month after his first inauguration. “He’s not active or reserve. He’s not a member of the Navy anymore,” said U.S. Navy spokeswoman Lt. Alyson Hands.

Forty-two pages of heavily censored U.S. Navy records released to the Florida Phoenix during DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign say his naval duties included things like assistant urinalysis coordinator. At Guantanamo, where hundreds of people scooped up in the George W. Bush administration’s post 9/11 War on Terror were held indefinitely without trial and amid multiple allegations of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross and others, the Phoenix reported the records showed that from March 2006 through early January 2007 “DeSantis’s primary duty was a trial counsel – meaning a prosecutor. The record also showed that DeSantis was described as a ‘JTF-GTMO [Joint Task Force Guantanamo] scheduler/administrative officer.’” No further details were released...

The aforementioned Gitmo detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, was held without charges at Gitmo for 14 years. He alleges that JAG Officer DeSantis observed, allowed, and participated in illegal acts of torture to help end a 2006 hunger strike by dozens of detainees.

“I saw a fucking handsome person who was coming. He said, ‘I’m here to ensure that you’re treated humanely.’ And we said, OK, this is our demand, you know. We’re not asking for much,” Adayfi said. He said DeSantis went on, “And if you have any problems, if you have any concerns, if you have…just talk to me.’ And you know we, we, we, we’re drowning in that place. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ That person actually writing something. He will raise the concerns, but it was [a] piece of the game. What they were doing, they were, they were looking what’s [going to] hurt you more, to use against you.”

Adayfi, now 44, said DeSantis watched with amusement as he and other detainees were repeatedly force-fed Ensure, a “meal replacement” shake, through a nasal feeding tube pushed down their throats.

“Ron DeSantis was there and watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair and that guy; he was watching that. He was laughing basically when they used to feed us, because…our stomach cannot hold this amount of Ensure. They used to pour Ensure, one can after another, one can after another. So, when he approached me, I said this is the way we are treated. He said, ‘You should start to eat.’ …I threw up on his face. Literally on his face.”

DeSantis’s office did not respond to several requests for comment this week. However, shortly after his election to Congress in 2012 he told PBS NewsHour his time serving in the Navy shaped him as a leader. He told PBS that senior officers are accountable for getting their job done because there are consequences if it’s not done well.

The Bulwark piece mentioned above also has details about the torture allegations.

Adayfi alleges that the Ensure was laced with “some kind of laxative” so he and the other prisoners were “shitting ourselves all the time.” After these sessions, “we were moved to solitary confinement—really cold cells. It was like five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day.”

He says the guards also beat them, with DeSantis standing by...

DeSantis didn't use his name in Gitmo, so Adayfi did not know DeSantis's true identity in real time, but says he recognized him after the governor rose to national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He insists that DeSantis is indeed the one who witnessed his torture, encouraged it, and laughed at his suffering. To my knowledge, DeSantis has not yet publicly commented on these allegations, but if and when he does I will add that information to this post

There's really so much more to write about Ron DeSantis, but this post is already more than long enough. But I'm not done yet. Expect more in future posts. For now, I'll leave you with this February 27 commentary regarding a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, said opinion piece having been penned by a self-described liberal, no less, who accused his "fellow liberals" of exaggerating the dangers of DeSantis. The "liberal," Damon Linker, suggested that DeSantis is not, in fact, worse than Trump. But there are different flavors of evil, and Trump and DeSantis are both in their own ways monstrously evil, and both would be disasters in the Oval Office. Linker's piece is pretty weak sauce. The bottom line is that American democracy has never been in greater danger from the rising tide of fascism -- and Ron DeSantis is becoming a bigger threat by the day.

PS, added 6 March, 2023: The inimitable John Oliver mercilessly roasts Ron DeSantis on everything from the latter's bizarre dating tactics back in the day, to the usual fascism stuff.
 

PPS, added 14 March, 2023: A key point of DeSantis' still-unofficial presidential campaign is his outrageously false claim that Florida (meaning DeSantis) was right and "they were wrong" regarding the state's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alternet (March 10, 2023) reports that Florida's "right" results rank among the worst in the nation. (But don't expect facts to get in the way of DeSantis' narrative and the "Freedom" Fascists' overall covidiocy.)

DeSantis isn't the only source of fascism in the Sunshine State. Next on my Whirled: In Ron DeSantis' Flori-duh, freedom's just another word for fascism.

From TRUTH Social to alt-health scam sites: Trump & other right-wing grifters continue to battle Big Tech, fuel fascism, & rob the rubes

By now you've almost certainly heard about #NeverWasMyPresident Donald Trump's grand plan to launch yet another alternative to major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook -- his way of sticking it to Big Tech for banning him.

I'm referring, of course, to the absurdly ill-named TRUTH Social, which will be developed by a new enterprise called Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG). Announced by Trump surrogate Liz Harrington on Twitter on October 20, 2021, TRUTH Social is being launched to "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech."

Trump had famously already failed at least once in the social media arena, promising months ago to immediately launch a platform of his own after he was booted off of Twitter and Facebook due to his incitement of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Or maybe his big plans just got delayed. In any case, instead of the promised social media platform, a laughable blog appeared briefly... and was gone within a month. There was buzz for a while that Gettr was the new home for Team Trump and his allies... but that buzz faded too.

The idea of alternative Twitters and Facebooks and so forth is not new, of course. Right-wingers have been snowflaking for the past few years about being "censored" online, and many have taken their toxic whines not only to the courts but also to numerous alternate social media apps that have sprung up in recent times. But a Trump-branded social media alternative is truly newsworthy, because Trump unfortunately remains so high-profile, not to mention that he's the biggest and loudest whiner of all when it comes to griping about censorship.

If you think that TRUTH Social is going to be a safe haven for "free speech," however, think again. First off, the site will censor its own users. Saying bad stuff about Dear Leader or his platform or its parent company is verboten.

And if you think that this platform is destined for long-term success, you need to reconsider that too. From The Daily Kos, October 21:

...Most of the attention focused on [the announcement about TMTG] has been centered around the announcement of something called “TRUTH Social”—also known as yet-another-Trump-focused-Twitter-clone. But that’s not the real point of TMTG. The real point is that this is a scheme through which Trump can collect several hundred million dollars, even if his new social platform never posts a tweet, or a toot, or a fart, or whatever they end up being called.

The truth behind TRUTH Social is right there in the first paragraph of the announcement, which is not focused on the technology behind the platform, or anything that Trump is bringing to the table. Instead, that paragraph is dedicated to explaining how the project has been given "an initial enterprise value of $875 million" and "a cumulative valuation up to $1.7 billion." Which is amazing, because what it seems to have is nothing more than a credit line and some highly generic code that was hacked within minutes of the beta address becoming known.

No sooner had the first test invites been handed out than someone spoofed Trump's account and posted, well, as Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli accurately puts it, "a photo of a pig defecating on its own scrotum." Two hours after it first went up, the whole site came down.

However, it doesn't matter if the site ever sticks its head above the waste pool again. Because that's not the point. Donald Trump is potentially walking about with $340 million, even if it fails completely. That's the point.

The site seems to be up again now, but right now it's just a page that invites you to "Join the Waiting List!" or to pre-order the app in the Apple Store. The launch is supposed to happen in November of 2021.

But there seem to be a few other bumps in the road, not the least of which are credible accusations that the Trump app's developers appear to have purloined code without giving due credit to the code's creators. Oops.

Coding issues aside, it goes without saying that this whole thing was designed as yet another money op for the former Grifter-in-Chief, who was a grifter long before he infested the White House, and has continued his grifting nonstop since being legitimately voted out. (If you sincerely believe he wasn't legitimately voted out, you're in a cult. Please seek help.) Like countless other media outlets that have reported this news, the Daily Kos article cited above goes on to explain the scheme.

What Trump is attempting here is something called a SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition [Company]. It's also known as a "reverse merger" or a "blank check company." It's a scheme in which some low-value shell company that's already listed on a stock market "buys" a private company, then relists itself under the name of that new company. In almost all cases, what's really going on is that the private company is just taking over the empty husk of that shell company—a company that may have existed for no other purpose than to serve as a placeholder for some future SPAC.

Why go through these steps? Because getting listed on a stock exchange generally requires clearing a number of hurdles, including meeting requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission. SPACS can just pop into existence, taking a fast track to a stock listing while dodging almost every qualifying step.

The Trump SPAC falls under a specific category known as a "celebrity SPAC," in which a high-profile person, known as "the Sponsor," raises capital by taking the SPAC public in an IPO. The SPAC uses the cash proceeds from the IPO and a large stock issuance to acquire a private company and make it public. But unlike traditional IPOs, the Sponsor gets a 20 percent stake without having to invest much of anything -- and there's much less regulatory scrutiny. While not all SPACs are scams, this one almost certainly is. The Kos article describes it as "nothing more than an exchange-based Ponzi scheme in which the original Ponzi is guaranteed to walk away with a mountain of cash." In short...

TMTG isn't a social media platform. It's a scam. Trump doesn't need another social media platform. He needs suckers willing to buy stock. And Trump has always been very, very good at locating suckers.

So while it's fun to point out that TRUTH Social has some of the most restrictive rules of any platform, including rules that prohibit criticizing TRUTH Social, it doesn't really matter. The whole platform can be sh#t pigs all the way down. It can collapse under its own incompetence. None of that means a thing. What matters to Trump is that he gets to walk away with a bundle.

That's pretty much all that has ever mattered to Trump.

The SPAC stock linked to Trump's platform is Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC), and granted, it was quite the talk of the market last week, when DWAC shares shot from $9.96 per share at closing on Wednesday, October 20, to $94.20 per share on Friday, October 22. That's an astounding 845% rally in a mere two days. But as CNBC reported today (October 25), DWAC was down 10 percent after 2:00 PM ET, so there appear to be signs that "the Trump-fueled craze has died down," according to the CNBC piece.

Short-seller Iceberg Research unveiled a bearish position on the DWAC on Monday, saying that investors face uncertainties in this blank-check deal as Trump could become a dominant shareholder after the merger.

“Now that initial excitement has passed, we see only risks for investors in near future. Based on Trump’s track record, at current price, renegotiation is likely to keep more of the merged company for him,” Iceberg Research said in a tweet.

“SPAC holders don’t own a piece of this project yet. Trump has leverage, not them.”

But I'm not shedding any tears for these investors. At this point, anyone who invests in anything related to Trump deserves to lose money. And as far as I'm concerned, that also goes for the countless small donors who have fallen for his myriad fundraising scams --- such as phony "membership cards" and other "exclusive" benefits (or promises thereof) designed to keep the rubes feeling like they're Someone Special. He'll almost certainly continue to run these scams long after the current SPAC cash cow has been milked dry. The cult members will just keep on forking over, feeding his coffers and his ego while he smirks and talks bad about them behind their backs.

* * * * *

Trump may be the most high-profile right-wing grifter to whine about Big Tech and try to compete directly with the major platforms, but he's far from the only one. Take Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams (please). Besides being a particularly vociferous Trump fanboy and advocate of martial law as long as a right-wing president is imposing it, Adams is a longtime peddler of alt-health frauducts and "advice" as well as a promoter of conspiracy theories and far-right-wing talking points. (He was also one of the featured speakers, along with Eric Trump and Roger Stone, at a three-day fascism/alt-health rally in Nashville this past weekend, The Truth [sic] About Cancer Live.)

Years ago Adams, apparently unhappy with the standards imposed by Wikipedia, created his own Wiki platform, "TruthWiki," which is every bit as hilariously misnamed as Trump's TRUTH Social. In an April 2016 Whirled post (under the sub-head, "Trying to conquer the Internet, one comical alt-site at a time"), I described Adams as...

...the guy who is so afraid of people finding out the truth about him and his colleagues that he started his own lame version of Wikipedia: the very ill-named TruthWiki. (Here's the TruthWiki entry about David Gorski. And while we're at it, here's Gorski, as Orac, writing about TruthWiki in 2014.)

Dr. Gorski is an oncologist who's one of the people on Mike Adams' enemies list; Adams has seriously defamed him numerous times in his Natural News blog posts.

Then there's Adams' answer to Google, GoodGopher. From the 2016 Whirled post I quoted above:

GoodGopher very carefully filters out what they consider "disinformation" and government/Big Pharma propaganda, instead stacking their search results with alt-nutty and rightwing sites (which are euphemistically called "independent news media") such as NaturalNews (of course!) as well as Breitbart, The Blaze, Washington Times (owned and run by Moonies), Drudge Report, Western Journalism and more.

It's a pretty lousy search engine, but it's tailor-made for the no-evil monkeys who want to avoid any fact or opinion that might shake their carefully constructed world of alt-health advocacy, Scamworld delusions, conspiracy theories and right-wing spin.

I went to the GoodGopher site a little while ago, for the first time in years, and typed a name in the search engine. It was a name for which I knew there were numerous results on GoodGopher; at least there had been when I checked it last. But all I got for search results was a message: "Server is busying [sic] right now, please try again later." All righty, then!

Mike Adams may not be giving Wikipedia or Google a run for their money, but what his sites lack in quality they collectively make up for in quantity. His disinfo empire includes scads of alt-health and alt-"news" web sites, some of which are no doubt generating income from suckers, and with some of these sites he also seems to be succeeding in one important task: spreading the type of political disinformation that is eroding American democracy and further nudging us down the road to authoritarianism and fascism.

On October 18, ArsTechnica published the revelation that Robert Willis, aka "Hacker X" -- the hacker who helped build an enormous US-based disinfo network that helped Trump get elected -- had confirmed that he was actually working for Mike Adams at Adams' NaturalNews.com site.

Willis had joined NaturalNews.com in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election and helped the site build out a network of anonymized websites that looked independent but secretly promoted the "health" information and pro-Trump political writings of Mike Adams and NaturalNews.com.

NaturalNews has long been linked to disinformation. In 2019, The Atlantic named it one of the top producers of anti-vax content on the Internet. The site has touted homeopathy, urged "natural" remedies for things like cancer, and warned about "chemtrails." NaturalNews content has been banned from Facebook, and the site has been called a "powerful conspiracy empire."

Willis claims to have made little money from his work for Adams, and says that he has remorse "for a few reasons." He claims that he didn't really know what Adams was all about when he first joined his site, which is kind of hard to believe.

As for all the pro-Trump, anti-Clinton "fake news" that Willis eventually helped to propagate, he claimed that the reason he "didn’t know it was fake news at the beginning is because the machine needed to be built before it could be used, so I didn’t spend time inside stories outside of overseeing social media and numbers, at which point I did not factor in the aspect of whether the articles were true or not. I was strictly breaking down stories by headlines and breaking it down into numbers. With an occasional crazy headline that seemed harmless."

Okay, sure. Willis says the whole experience has made him apolitical and that he didn't vote in the 2020 election. Here's his statement about about his actions. And here's a post about "Hacker X" and Mike Adams by the aforementioned David Gorski, the target of some of Mike Adams' most vicious defamation.

* * * * *

If you feel like climbing even further down into the pit of alt-site failures, you might stumble across a silly Facebook alternative created last year by phony doctor/cancer quack/neo-Nazi/Trump fan/alleged predator and all-around evil dimwit Leonard Coldwell, who has been in a perpetual huff for the past decade or so about repeatedly being thrown into Facebook jail. Back in October of 2020 Lenny's favorite handmaid griped about Facebook for about the ten-dozenth time on his main English-language web site:.

Make no mistake accounts are being targeted. Those who have spoken out for truth on matters such as politics, COVID-Hoax, Masks, for natural health and not big pharma, called out Monsanto and Bill Gates, or even Georgy Sorros [sic] who wants to destroy the world as we know it are being scrutinized for every word they type.

Why?

Because Facebook is a communist/socialist website who [sic] is pushing the agenda of the New Normal hard. They want you all to be obedient. They want (end game) for you to be vaccinated mindless drone of a slave to the system.

But never fear; there was a solution from the great "Dr." C:

Dr. Coldwell has created his own version [of Facebook]. Champ book. You are invited! https://champbook.tribe.so/  while much of it is currently in German we also are gaining many English speaking members and would love to have you. There will never be censorship like there is on Facebook.

Which isn't to say that there won't be censorship, I suppose. But it all seems moot because Lenny and most of the rest of the world appear to have all but forgotten ChampBook, as you'll see if you take a look at the endless stream of spam that meets the eye when you land on the site. But I have to admit that there is quite an impressive list of "Most reputable losers users," with a very reputable spammer called Мария Иванцова being number one, and Lenny himself appearing at the bottom of the list of most reputable users when I checked the other day, and not appearing on that list at all when I went back to check today. (Мария was still number one, though.) Poor little Lenny: he can't even compete with spammers and bots on his own site. Sad.

* * * * *

None of what I've written above means that I am opposed to competition, including and perhaps especially in the area of social media and other online forums. Monopolies aren't good for business or, ultimately, for democracy. Nor does it mean that I am blind to the misdeeds -- some of them quite egregious -- of the Big Tech platforms. As more info continues to spill out about Facebook, for example, it becomes ever more painfully obvious that Big Tech companies value profit over any of the other fine values, such as truth or the well-being of their users, to which they pay lip service. But the problems created by Big Tech won't be solved by right-wing scammers, whose ludicrous forums are little more than echo chambers at best, and all too often are vehicles to pick the pockets of vulnerable people.

Grifting is not just a right-wing thing, of course. But these daze, the right-wing grift machine, fueled by an unending stream of fascist bat-crap both online and off, seems to be posing the greatest dangers, not only to public health but also to the health of American (and world) democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this problem, but it has been brewing for years now. Whether the grift comes in the form of a Trumpian "investment opportunity" and "TRUTH" platform, a slime trail of fake-news sites from "The Health Ranger," or a flaccid Facebook alternative from an angry and deranged little German scammer, it's all part of the same problem.

It has never been more important to stay informed, rather than misinformed or willfully uninformed. And it's never been more important for eligible voters who want to stop the madness to make sure they're registered, and then to get out there and vote.