What the Hell Are We Talking About?

National World War II Memorial and Washington Monument, Washington DC, April 2022 ^{(Credit: Author)}

I’m going to make a few apologies up front today. This is not a typical article where I try to dive into a specific issue and make light on something that’s going on with society these days. To tell you the truth, I hate writing articles about what is going on so constantly. There are lots of great entertainment, historical, and other interesting subjects that I want to delve into, but quite frankly, the motivation hasn’t been there as of late. Therefore, I am apologizing for writing more of an editorial than a more fact-based piece this week. But I won’t apologize for it being well-researched and sourced enough to count as an actual article.

Second, I am going to speak a lot more casually than I usually do. I try to use the full array of my skills in the English language (skills which I paid a lot of money to learn) in order to make my point eloquently. Today, I will be throwing a lot of that out to speak more plainly and akin to how I normally talk. There will be eloquence, yes. However, this apology is for the foul language I am about to use. Those of you who know me in real life know I have a sailor’s mouth, and those who don’t, you’re going to learn.

Finally, I want to apologize for letting more of my personal beliefs show through than I normally do. Most of the time, I do let my opinion be known based on how I approach things, however I try to maintain the air of fairness and lay out opposing arguments in order to refute them if they conflict with the majority of credible evidence out there in the world. Today, I will be less forgiving, and so I apologize for my objectivity being set aside for a week.

I’m writing this because I feel as though much of this needs to be said. These are unprecedented times, and I think a foul-mouthed, plain-spoken, decently-well-researched sanity check needs to be written. Even if it’s just to get my feelings out of my head because this has been eating at me, and I refuse to stand guard while America dies.

With that being said, let me get to the central point for this week.

What the fuck are we talking about!?

The last few weeks have been a bunch of absolutely insane headlines coming one after another like Ivan Drago beating the pulp out of Apollo Creed. I outlined the doomsday scenario which leads to World War III in my article a few weeks ago. Since then, we’ve hurtled towards that scenario at lightning speed, with an assault on the American civil service, our military, our economy, and the people living, working, and building the modern America with their blood, sweat, and tears. To that end, I also discussed how the callous response to immigration is not conducive to America staying on top of the global pecking order, and that Trump’s stances on immigrants are morally repugnant and fly in the face of American values.

Perhaps my tone in those articles was a little too much one of logical consternation and academic concern. Allow me to disabuse you of any wrong calculations as to my mood. I’m fucking pissed. I’ve talked before about how the majority of my friends fall into one or multiple of the following categories: women, racial or ethnic minorities, members of the LGBT community, the disabled, and immigrants. The war that the conservatives have been waging on those groups will affect me personally because the people that I love will be impacted. If you think I’m being overdramatic or their human rights is too high a price to pay for lower egg prices (which aren’t real, thanks to this president’s economic policies), then I would like you to take a good look in the mirror and just think about the values you hold dear. See if you understand what empathy is. And ask yourself, “is the destruction of our entire democracy, the mostly stable world order ever created, and the lives of millions of innocent people worth a short term, minor economic gain for me?”

Donald Trump will no longer be president after this term. There are no rules which allow him to be president again. Constitutionally, he is done after this. So this bullshit about him “exploring options” for a third term is attempting to normalize a power grab akin to Putin’s Russia. It should come as no surprise as the New York wannabe tough guy who is such a smart businessman that he bankrupted three casinos would idolize an unimportant KGB officer who came to lead a mafia organization masquerading as a failed state through violence and intimidation and a few lucky breaks. He’s done on January 20^th, 2029 at 11:59:59 AM for eternity, a second before his successor is sworn in as President of the United States. This desire to be a three term President is the desire to be crowned an Emperor, seeing as Congress has already ceded most of its power to the President, enabled by a Supreme Court which has been compromised by “conservative” donors who would grievously offend even Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan.

The desire to be President for life isn’t the most egregious of the imperial moves which Trump has been salivating over for years. He envisions a gentle annexation of Canada much like the Anschluss between Hitler’s Germany and the Federal State of Austria in 1938. Except Canada isn’t in the same dire straits Austria was after losing a war a few years prior (Canada hasn’t fought a war recently), having lost territory (Canada’s borders have pretty much stayed the same since they became an independent nation), or suffering economic turmoil (Canada’s economy was doing excellent until Trump decided to set fire to the American economy and Canada’s caught aflame by virtue of being next door). There is zero desire for Canada to become part of the United States from all parties save for the exceptionally delusional nutjobs who are supporting Trump’s desire for violent and bloody conquest. While cutting the military’s ability to effectively respond to threats. The naked desire for Greenland to secure the land which will open up for Arctic oil drilling as the polar ice caps melt (sparking ecological Armageddon) aside, this administration’s desire is to protect American interests from China, at least regarding the Panama Canal.

While conquering Panama is another bout of utter insanity from the current administration, why the hell aren’t we countering China’s moves in the Pacific? Trump’s pointless trade war with the entirety of the world is only serving to bring China closer together with Japan and South Korea. Traditionally, all three of these nations hate each other. Japan conquered parts of China and committed mass murder and rape of Chinese civilians during World War II, and subjugated much of the Korean peninsula in the same timeframe. Japan has still not formally apologized for its actions during that time frame. China and South Korea hate each other thanks to China’s support for the North during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Trump’s committing of economic suicide only serves to push our friends closer to our enemies. It doesn’t rip down the world order he hates for reasons stemming from the fact that he is a two-bit conman who created a religion out of his myriad character flaws, and he knows it along with the fact that he will never truly be strong or great or beloved. It only serves to vacate the throne at the top, and permit someone with more sinister ambitions in mind to become the world’s new top dog, or plunge the globe into economic warfare not seen since the imperialism age of the 1800s when Africa was carved up by the great powers of Europe for their own gain.

In today’s age of globalization, the United States has divested of almost all of its manufacturing capabilities. Blue collar jobs are mostly about logistics and facilitating the transportation of goods from afar. For example, the Port of Baltimore is thriving despite the fall of manufacturing, but the land where the Bethlehem Steel plants and shipyards used to sit in the area were left to rot for years before redevelopment started. Coal isn’t used for fuel as it’s less efficient and more environmentally harmful than other sources, American steel mills cooled their furnaces decades ago, railroads are nowhere near the level of ubiquity they are in Europe or other nations. Detroit suffered its major decline when automobile manufacturing went overseas decades ago. Pittsburgh and Baltimore suffered the same fate with the decline of American steel manufacturing. The mountains of Appalachia were hit with the decline of coal mining. And hundreds of other smaller towns across the country felt the same impact when America stopped making things and started shipping them in from other places. Amazon became one of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies by being, first and foremost, a logistics company.

A nation which shipped its manufacturing overseas over the course of decades following World War II to build a more interconnected world in hopes that global trade would end global wars cannot spin up production overnight. Tariffs on foreign goods will not generate the wealth for American manufacturing which President Trump and his stooges say it will. We lack the resources, capabilities, and institutional knowledge to bring American manufacturing back to the way it used to be. We won’t see a windfall of money for the American people, it will just hurt anyone and everyone across the world as markets tank and the value of companies which rely on each other to do business are wiped out overnight. Put plainly, THESE TARIFFS WON’T FUCKING WORK. This isn’t up for debate. This isn’t a matter of opinion. The overwhelming majority of economists agree that tariffs don’t work because the nature of the world has changed so dramatically in the last 80 years. We’re not headed for another economic recession like 2008 after the housing crash or another near miss like in 1987 when the stock market tanked. We tried the tariffs a century ago, and it led to the Great Depression. We’re looking at repeating history with these tariffs, breadlines and all. Only this time, there is enough liquidity amongst the absolute richest amongst our society to buy up everything they can at pennies on the dollar, which will create a new feudalistic society. To be frank, sounds like an oligarch’s wet dream and a nightmare for the rest of us.

One could make the argument that the Trump administration is playing a skillful game to try and correct markets and contain our enemies by using tariffs. However, rolling them out on all of the world at once at such ridiculous rates only serves to harm American credibility, the global economy, and the dollar as the global reserve currency, which would, in turn, will kill the American economy as other nations start to rise from this body blow. That could, as I previously wrote about, kick off World War III in short order because nations always fight for resources they cannot barter for. Therefore, enacting tariffs on every other country in the fucking world, aside from the aforementioned mafia state, including on UNINHABITED ISLANDS ONLY POPULATED BY PENGUINS,¹ and then defending the move as being anything other than the sheer lunacy that it is sounds practically satirical. It’s less shooting ourselves in the foot, and more blowing our legs off with a shotgun, and then blaming other people for it.

So again I must ask: What the fuck are we talking about?

Immigrants are also a featured group in this hellish production. Sorry, you want to commit economic suicide, then throw out every immigrant and expect that our economy won’t suffer for it? When the hell did my country start getting run by dumbasses who make the Keystone Cops look like strategic geniuses!? Wait, I forgot, it isn’t incompetence, it’s cruelty. This administration is so bigoted that it would prefer to destroy the nation because it has so thoroughly demonized people from different countries. The cruelty of these actions is the point.

Let’s start with the deportations. Deporting a person is merely sending them back to their home nation. Not to a prison in El Salvador. Yet hundreds of men are being sent to a prison in El Salvador because they are accused (not found guilty) of being associated with a Venezuelan cartel. Why are they being imprisoned? The punishment for these crimes in the United States is being imprisoned in our criminal justice system, or being deported from the nation. That’s all well and good, but first, they have to be convicted of a crime. Due process is the bedrock upon which the entire legal system rests. It is guaranteed in the constitution. So, to border czar Tom Homan with his assertations that due process does not exist for these people, I say, “Go fuck yourself.” Due process determines whether someone is a criminal, so someone cannot be deported as a criminal until they are tried and convicted of a crime. We also have this principle that someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in this nation. Being here without proper documentation is not a felony, meaning it is not grounds alone for someone to be deported. None of it even fucking matters when people with green cards – meaning they are legally allowed to live here, hence why they are called ‘permanent residents’ – are being deported, again, for no discernable reason. That’s not even mentioning the fact that the current administration wants to start deporting American citizens. You know where you deport American citizens to? AMERICA. These chucklefucks are so dumb or callous, or both that they don’t understand you cannot deport a citizen from their own fucking country. It’s painfully obvious that this has become a naked excuse to exercise hatred and bigotry. So it should come as no surprise that the administration is looking at monitoring immigrants’ social media for “antisemitism” as an excuse to deny immigration benefits. I am absolutely certain that this won’t lead to an easy excuse for deportation of people this administration deems politically inconvenient or otherwise undesirable because where the fuck have we ever seen that before.

So I gotta ask one more time, what the fuck are we even talking about!?

Between all of this, life in America is exhausting. Immigrants are being treated as subhuman when they are legally afforded almost all of the rights as American citizens. Tariffs don’t work. History shows us. Economists tell us. Yet still, the American people cannot fathom that the experts in their fields know what the fuck they are talking about. So they pretend to know better. And the current administration just lies and says that all criticism is made up. We’re downsizing our military and economically decoupling from our longest allies while beating the war drums for no good reason.

America’s soft power has allowed us to influence the world on a massive scale, and Donald Trump set that on fire. Trump believes in hard power, since he likes to project strength by having the biggest, baddest military in the world. At least until he has Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense’s first DUI hire, crater the military’s competence, readiness, and troop numbers. But hey, we’re getting a military parade in Washington DC for Trump’s birthday this year! So Abrams tanks can crush DC’s streets, water and sewer lines, and critical city infrastructure because those streets were never rated to handle military hardware. Unlike a certain previously-discussed mafia state which constructed streets designed for that military hardware, even a single museum piece, much like their most recent parade, would still crush the DC streets into dust, which will be an even bigger burden placed on the already strained DC government. Which means that cost gets passed onto the American taxpayer because Washington DC’s budget is controlled by Congress, and we the people are responsible for funding it.

If there’s so much fraud and abuse in the federal government that the self-anointed visionary genius running a complete farce of an advisory board masquerading as a legitimate federal agency comprised of twenty-something former tech-sector criminals is able to unilaterally slash billions, why the hell are we paying for the same type of self-aggrandizement practiced by tinpot dictators around the world? I’m an American taxpayer and I didn’t sign up for that shit.

I did sign up for paying into Social Security, but Elon Musk is planning on gutting that too. It’s not a joke. It’s not hyperbole. I was taught in school what a great boon this legacy of FDR’s New Deal has been for generations. The fund is about to be zeroed in the name of “cutting down wasteful federal spending” because a social safety net is impossible to rectify to the richest among us who could lose 99% of their wealth for several years straight and still have more money than you or I will see in our lifetime. The spiteful part of me is saying, “Go ahead, kill Social Security. Not like I was ever going to see a dime anyways.” The American people voted for this, and until America understands the consequences of its actions, we cannot see meaningful change. Then I take a step back and realize that would screw over my parents and grandparents royally, and my people aren’t the only ones who would get hurt by that outcome. Same goes for Medicare. And the welfare system. And funding education. Because I’m not retired, nor over 65, nor on food stamps, nor have kids in school right now, I don’t see a direct benefit from any of these areas. However, all of these things make our society better, and when the lowest amongst us win, we all win. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a society is only as strong as the mass of its people.

I want to build the kind of society which will plant trees for my children even if I’m not around to see those trees bear fruit. And I’m several years off from even having kids at this point. America is only 250 years old, we’re practically nothing in the history of the world, and refusing to learn from the mistakes and poor decisions and violence of our older siblings is a monumentally moronic course of action to take.

The destruction of the civil service is ghoulish. The privatization of important governmental responsibilities so the modern aristocracy can continue to get richer is morally unconscionable while Americans starve in the streets, unable to put roofs over their heads or afford the medical care they need to literally survive. Attempting to replace frontline federal workers with AI is a particularly stupid move, especially in an area as sensitive as healthcare. There are federal regulations on all sorts of behaviors and activities which much be followed to ensure the federal missions are being carried out correctly by their respective agencies. AI does not have the same level of accountability. Crippling the federal workforce in accordance with Project 2025’s outlined goals will have ripple effects which damage all aspects of American society from defense to healthcare. What’s even more indefensible is the way it’s being accomplished.

There is an argument to be made that some federal fraud, waste, and abuse exists. There is no possible way it is to extent claimed by Trump, Musk, and the other cronies and cretins making their fortunes off the backs of the American people in this criminal administration. The broad methods by which these cuts have occurred are not acting within the responsibility the President and the federal government has to the American people. If an agency designed to find abuse and waste in the federal budget was to be created, it should have observed for a period of several years, and compiled a detailed report outlining the targeted areas, and a plan for downsizing, or restructuring. No doubt this should come with an improvement to the federal pay scale and an expansion in authorities and responsibilities for agencies in order to rely less on federal contractors. A report outlined this in 2013. The alleged fraud, waste, abuse is more often found in contractors who do things like lie about budget projections only to crawl back to the agencies and beg for more money after a contract is in place. Dishonest business practices are rewarded in the intersection between the public and private sectors, not punished as they should be. This Congress, which has given its powers over to the executive through a lazy delegation of authority is comprised of nothing but fucking cowards, enablers, or the inept. Allowing the executive branch to unilaterally decide how money is used and where it is paid out despite being written in the laws itself is a dereliction of duty, responsibility, and authority. Donald Trump has no power to decide the power of the purse, no matter what lies he uses to justify it.

That’s not to mention the other ridiculous, absurd, and hateful lies Donald Trump has trotted out either. Like claiming ‘the Nazis treated the Jewish prisoners with love.’ I understand the dialogue around antisemitism is charged right now due to the decades-long clusterfuck that is Israel and Palestine, but trying to downplay and normalize the Holocaust in order to do the same forcible deportations, imprisoning an outgroup for the simple fact that you don’t like them, and preparing the way for slave labor or eventual extermination is morally indefensible. My great-grandfather did not liberate Dachau only for us to turn around and do the exact same shit exactly 80 years later. The familial trauma courtesy of his drinking habits because of the horrific sights he saw in that camp isn’t something I feel comfortable passing down to another generation. The only human directive that should be universal is to leave the world better than our parents left it for us. Yet here we are, fighting the same fights our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents fought for us. Are we fighting those same battles because they are taking far longer to fight, like the Civil Rights Movement? No. We’re fighting those same battles because, decades later, we decided that maybe the monsters who systematically exterminated eleven million people in addition to the roughly 32,000,000 people killed by the wars they ignited had a valid point. With that high of a body count, fuck your validity.

Do I want to be this angry about politics? No. Do I want to spend the two articles I work on for this website each month to point out the dangerous or morally indefensible actions which the Trump administration seems to delight in taking? No. Do I feel as though I should speak up, both for those who cannot, and for those who do but whose voices are routinely ignored? Absolutely. I don’t want to make this a partisan slapfight. However, one party is engaging in dangerous actions, while hacking off pieces of our democracy and the checks and balances which were put in place to prevent kings from arising in a nation which owes its existence to a war of secession fought to stop being ruled by…wait for it…drumroll please…a damn king.

I would be saying the same thing if a Democrat was torching our norms for the sake of even a benevolent dictatorship. Donald Trump is far from benevolent. He is a danger to the fabric of this country, and the angry mob which makes up the majority of his voting base aren’t much better. I do not believe the Republican party is a steward of conservative values and has not been for a long time. My entire adulthood – ten years next year – will have been spent under Trump’s shadow. I long for the days when I can wake up and not fear for my job because we’re making blanket cuts to the federal budget, where my brother can have a lab funded so he can do research in his field for grad school, when I’m not scared my friends will be thrown out of the country and back to the wolves despite coming here legally and being documented themselves. If your concern started when your investment portfolio started tanking, welcome to the party. Glad you’re here at all, even if you are a bit late. If your concern started ten years ago when he rode down an escalator, started quoting Hitler, and bragging about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it, thank you for applying some logic and reason since the beginning. If you don’t see the utter danger this man represents because he’s not targeting you specifically, I’d just ask why. A man beloved by Christians despite not being Christ-like in any which way, with the reputation of a smart businessman despite bankrupting not one, not two, but three casinos, and who claims to be anti-war but is preparing us to conquer Canada, Greenland, and Panama with violent rhetoric should have enough of a track record to prove he’s a hypocrite.

There is a way forward that will do the best for our country and the world. Trump destroys everything he touches. Therefore, I will criticize him until I have no more breath left so long as he continues his reckless, hateful, and destructive course of action. It is the responsibility of any good citizenry to push back on illegal, immoral, or idiotic decisions its government is making. We have the right to free speech as guaranteed by the Constitution, therefore, it is not only our right, but our obligation to criticize our politics. Loving America doesn’t mean you don’t get to be disappointed in it, nor furious with its leaders. In fact, I’d argue it demonstrates that you love America so much more than people who are willing to accept cruelty and mediocrity. Call to mind the famous Mark Twain quote, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.”

It’s time to drink some tea with honey and lemon, get the signs ready, and shout like hell from the rooftops, because I love America, and I think you do too.