Mass Shootings Trump Style-Nazi Coup, Business As Usual-Is There A Difference?

I went to sleep on Saturday night with a troubled spirit, thinking about Donald Trump and Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, thanks to a soon-to-be-forgotten Trump-supporting scumbag terrorist who shot more than forty people in El Paso, Texas. A mother of three, an army veteran, a teenage kid. That’s who he was killing.

When I woke up and heard about another double-digit shooting committed by a maniac from deep within Trump country, this time in Dayton, Ohio, I took a deep breath and realized. It may well be beginning.

Folks, they’re killing us out here. Keep your eyes open, and be ready. It’s coming down like hailstorms all around us.

We tried to tell them, back then. The Jill Stein bots, the Bernie or Busters, etc. You people, I say to them, are the biggest morons to have ever disgraced God’s green earth, by the way; this is just as much your fault as it is the ones who support Trump outright. Vote for Hillary Clinton, or none of this will be stoppable. The strength of our coalition will only last so long without money or leadership. At this point, it’s just the sheer guts and toughness and endless determination of the people committed to Resistance keeping this alive.

Anyone out there thinking of dropping the torch ought to remember that. And Ilhan Omar, please remember next time your Party needs you all the times we’ve had to #StandForIlhan because you shot your mouth off and made yourself a Nazi target doing so. We’re just as against socialism as anyone else, probably more so. But you don’t want to be that guy who said nothing when they came for the Communists. That mistake has already been made. We’re all in it together, at this point. Up to our necks.

Speaking of Nazi-like mistakes, like support for Donald Trump, which wasn’t something you could be open about in 2016. It wasn’t safe to be an openly white nationalistic Nazi pig, and that’s how it should be. Nazi symbols and propaganda are illegal in most of Europe, and it ought to be here. While we don’t condone or advocate for people doing things like vandalizing cars or refusing to help Trump supporters stranded on the road, we can sure understand them. They were done to deter what is happening now.

Anyone who heard how Trump was talking leading up to the November disaster that was his illegitimate victory, coincidentally sharing its date with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles ninety-eight years prior, could not help but think of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis- and the Holocaust.

Back then, there was a particularly vile Nazi who went by the name of Julius Streicher. His newspaper was sexually perverse and went by the name of Der Sturmer- the Stormer.

These days a model of originality called The Daily Stormer exists in sour tribute to that one.

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer is one of the key contributors to the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. He wrote in the comments of a post on The Daily Stormer called “Full Text of Alleged Manifesto of El Paso Shooter” that violence against non-whites is “desirable.”

“Random violence is not detrimental to our cause, because we need to convince Americans that violence against nonwhites is desirable or at least not something worth opposing anyways, because there’s no way to remove a hundred million people without a massive element of violence,” Auernheimer wrote.

Back in the days of Nazi Germany, it was all unacceptable, right up until it wasn’t. Adolf Hitler was no billionaire like Trump, nor was he much like Trump in other ways, stupid, slow, slovenly. He was a pervert and a psychopath, but it must be conceded by any metric that the man was incredibly able. Intelligent, ruthless, and cunning. I worry every day about someone like him taking up the Trumpism torch.

But he did have the same sort of man-of-the-people air about him that Trump does, which is why-much like here- the political elites of Germany didn’t find it thinkable to accept him as the leader of the country. His movement was noisy, loud, common, and led by a former bum from the streets of Vienna. To call such a man their leader was not, in the beginning, quite the plan.

The final president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, used to refer to him contemptuously as “that Austrian corporal”, and would not until the final days of his life even consider the idea of making him the Chancellor, the second-highest position in the German government. But Hindenburg was old, disorder ruled the day. Democracy had never held a high place in the hearts of the German people, who grumbled about jobs and the trains running on time. Hitler used this to overthrow the social order entirely.

Hindenburg died not long after changing his mind, and when he did Hitler acted with a ruthlessness history has not often seen, purging the members of his own Party as well as other internal enemies in the Night of the Long Knives and setting himself up as Fuhrer, Supreme Leader of the German People. In just over a year and a half the Republic was no more.

In the process, Hitler laid out a set of blueprints that every dictator in the world has studied since. How to destabilize, terrorize, and coerce a country’s people into going along with things that should have been unthinkable. The Holocaust is the term for the slaughter of six million Jews. No one in history before had ever thought to wipe out an entire race of people. But now they have, and it’s on the mind of all these mass-murdering swine here in America, who are using the same propaganda tricks and lies to raise support and enthusiasm for a similar race war on North American soil.

Conventional wisdom since the war ended has said that it could never happen again. People know what the costs could be, whereas in the past they did not. Besides which, this is America. Land of the free and the home of the brave. No way would people ever be so cowardly here as to think they had to pick up weapons and set out to slaughter their neighbors. The Stanford Prison Experiments? Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority studies? Ah, only eggheads know about that stuff, what a bunch of weirdos.

Look where we are now. So much for conventional wisdom.

The Southern Poverty Law Center ran an article this afternoon with the headline in it, “White Nationalists Praise El Paso Attack and Mock the Dead.”

The Washington Post ran an article entitled ‘Shoot them!’: Trump laughs off a supporter’s demand for violence against migrants.”

policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics this week warned of racism’s devastating effects on children. It showed another study proving the stress of Trump’s rise to power caused more high schoolers to start doing drugs that year. Conventional wisdom is not doing America any good. It’s time to change our conventions.

The El Paso massacre began just as the fatal attacks earlier this year at mosques in New Zealand and a San Diego-area synagogue did. A racist manifesto and an announcement on the anonymous message board 8chan, one of the Web’s most venomous refuges for extremist hate. It’s as clear as anything ever has been in the history of all mankind this place is a terrorist recruiter’s dream come true. Our reasons for not treating it like one? The cops don’t want to.

This is because a sickening degree of white nationalist activity has taken root in our law enforcement agencies. The FBI has been warning us about this since the 1970s; a memo was put out on it as recently as 2006. Why has nothing been done? Nazism has a deep taproot in America because we took so many of them in after the Second World War finally ended.

There is a direct correlation between then and now, and that is what this article is saying.

This can all be viewed as having taken place on a timeline. After Germany lost World War Two, American democracy was up against a group of thugs and criminals who had murdered even more people than the Nazis had, the Soviet Union, of which Russia was the central state (So clearly, we get it, but still).

To compete with Soviet intelligence services, the CIA under Allen Dulles took in thousands of Nazis, who became influential at the highest levels of the government. President John F. Kennedy fired Dulles after the Bay of Pigs invasion became a fiasco. Soon Kennedy was assassinated, then his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was assassinated, and then a whole lot of other people ended up dead.

Does it not bother anyone, after all this time, that all of Lee Harvey Oswald’s friends were Nazis? One man, George von Mohrenschildt, wrote a letter in 1976-a year before he died, also under suspicious circumstances- to George H.W. Bush, then the CIA director under Gerald Ford. He was also the uncle of H.W.’s prep school roommate. See what I mean? Two generations of Bushes became president behind the one who actually helped to finance Hitler’s rise to power, W. Prescott Bush. It’s crazy.

On the way to that period of time, we got to take a trip through the wonders of Watergate and the Richard Nixon presidency. We went all over this during Robert Mueller’s Russiagate investigation, which had a sad end. Mueller went before Congress and said that Trump knew the Russians hacked our election, welcomed their help, and expected to benefit from it. Total disregard of morality in the pursuit of power is the key at the heart of fascism.

The kinds of things that were done by Nixon’s thugs from the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) were no different, and many of the same characters were involved, e.g. Roger Stone. All were from the Nazi playbook. Agent provocateurs, break-ins, blackmail, the political dirty trick campaigns known by Karl Rove’s old mentor, Donald Segretti, as “ratf*cking, as in, f*cking a DemocRAT.

G. Gordon Liddy, the guy who actually executed the break-in, was a neo-Nazi himself. The case study of this one guy will spin your head about what’s going on with the Nazis in our government, who have almost always made their home in the Republican Party.

I read his biography, WILL. He admits openly his inspiration for the title was the famous 1934 Leni Riefenstahl film that became hugely influential as a propaganda film for Hitler and the Nazis, Triumph des Willens, or The Triumph of the Will. Apparently, his mother used to sing it to him as a child. He also boasted of having walked naked down the tier in the Washington, D.C. country jail while singing the Horst Wessel song, Raise High the Flag, which made a national martyr out of a Nazi pimp. Yet for all that he was a tough guy and supposedly trusted by Nixon, he was beaten like an animal by two men who got right out of jail again, shortly before announcing he would never, ever testify. He didn’t mention that part.

It goes on and on. Operation Bluebird and MK-Ultra were mind control experiments done with the hope in the mind of creating super-soldiers known as Manchurian candidates. We can’t even rule out that the CIA may have actually invented crack cocaine to fund Nicaraguan armies of contras.

How do you shoot yourself twice in the head with a shotgun? I don’t know, but Gary Webb does. He was the investigative journalist who broke the story. Supposedly that’s how he took his own life.

As for Trump himself, his connections to white nationalism run bone-deep. His father was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927. Notorious political hamstringer Roger Stone has said of Fred Trump that he was a member of the John Birch Society, which was founded by Fred Koch, father of the infamous Koch Brothers who built a near-billion dollar political machine in this country according to researcher Jane Mayer. He was an oilman who built refineries for the Nazis. Trump was raised at a time in New York when “conservatism was on the cutting edge”, according to conservative historian Rick Perlstein. This stuff was “in”.

Obviously in the mind of this president, it still is.


We don’t have all the answers as to what is going on in this country. It remains to be seen if there is anyone alive who does. Only one thing is beyond doubt. Things have to change. America has become a powder keg, and Donald Trump’s rhetoric looks more like a fuse every day.


Battle on the Border- Why The Democratic Fight Against Wall Is Worth It.

The Berlin Wall of Shame is a mistake that should remain unrepeated.

“Something there is that does not love a wall”, said the famous American poet, Robert Frost, in his famous poem Mending Wall, and that seems like a good place to start, in discussing the proposed border Wall of Donald Trump, a completely unAmerican project if ever there was one. A constitutional crisis has come to our Southern border, latest in a long line of artificial disasters created by the illegitimate and infantile man who with Russian help stole the 2016 election.

Returning again to his use of executive power to bring chaos to the country and deflect national attention from his crimes, crimes which his old campaign manager Paul Manafort got a 19-year prison sentence recommended for last week, Donald Trump has declared a national emergency where there isn’t one, announcing his intention to try and build the Wall he’s been screaming about, twelve hundred miles worth of ugly mess and dark symbol on our entire Southern border.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff gave us the story Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He’s pretty much daring the court to strike this down,” the California Democrat said. “It is going to be a real test for my GOP colleagues in Congress and their devotion to the institution.” Knowing the Republicans, they will roll right over for Trump.

It hardly bears repeating why this whole thing is moronic and despicable. Readers of this blog will most certainly already know. But what’s the other side of the story? How can the Republicans possibly justify this? What are the Fox News talking points? How could the fight be worth it in their ridiculous eyes? As they see it, here’s how the story goes, at least in the observations of this Millennial Democrats contributor.

The Wall is not immoral because it has a door. People will be allowed through according to legal channels. The current state of affairs wherein new waves of immigrants pass under bushes and across the desert to flock into our country by the hundreds will be ended. What Trump is doing is understandable, he needs it for his base, and above all, the fight is not worth it for the rest of us. It cost the country $7 billion.

Their solution? We should simply give up the fight and let him build the thing.

Let’s start out in the Aristotelian model, by conceding that there are aspects of truth to this. As always with Trump, like Charles Manson, he is very good at taking the truth and making a lie out of it. Another point to consider is that if the president of the United States wants a $5 billion appropriation for a pet project that’s important to him personally and partially fulfills a campaign promise, then he ought to be able to get it.

This is also true. The time-honored way for him to get it is to do what Trump promised above all else- come to the negotiating table, and make good deals. But back at the beginning of 2018, we were ready to cut a deal that could have given him the wall if in so doing we could have secured legal rights of citizenship for our DREAMers, the roughly two million Latino-Americans who were brought here by their parents as small children.

We, Democrats, came to the table offering a compromise involving wall money and a path to citizenship for DREAMers. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer came up with a good plan and brought it to the table for him to sign. He almost went for it, too. It was immigration hardliners in Trump’s own administration who scuttled the deal, and that is what brings us to the core truth of this whole standoff.

The Wall is a completely pointless waste of time.

Everyone knows it, including the immigration hardliners. They themselves clearly don’t think the wall is particularly useful or important in the real world. If they really wanted a wall, they would go get a wall by offering something in exchange for it, like protection for the DREAMers or letting the immigrant children their thugs have hijacked out of the warehouses they’re keeping them in, or some other thing. Nothing has been offered and nothing will be, because the only one who wants this done is Trump. As for the aforementioned hardliners, they know the whole concept is idiotic, so they won’t offer to trade for it. It’s as simple as that.

That the Wall is pointless and not worth it is true enough, and it is also Trump’s fault. He himself immediately admitted, “I didn’t have to do this” and then went on to recite his worn out old stump speech for the umpteenth millionth time. This whole boring episode makes it clear that Trump is even more isolated in his position that what’s happened on our southwestern border constitutes any kind of a national emergency than he was when he first caused the #TrumpShutdown. The immigration hardliners and the sane center agree on that much.

But where considerations of silver and gold are all that kind of person sees, it’s only where we’re getting started.

For one thing, the belief that a wall alone will keep anyone out of anything is just plain stupid. It’s a ridiculous concept all around. It’s a medieval solution to a post-industrial problem. If they really wanted to keep immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande they would lock up the guys hiring these guys. If they didn’t know they could come here and get jobs easy, they would stay back home.

Trump cites the “migrant caravans” as a reason why this is a crisis, pointing to the disgraceful failure that is Venezuelan socialism and noting that the refugees heading out of that area are in desperate straits. He sent our troops to the border in response to one of these just before the midterms.

Now that was disgraceful.

Militarily speaking, there are no modern examples of a wall being a successful defending strategy, but there sure are lots of examples of their failure. We don’t have to go all the way back to when the Mongols hopped right over the Great Wall of China, nor do we have to make mention of the founder of Rome, Romulus, having killed his brother Remus for mocking the wall he’d built around the city. He laughed at him, just like we’re all doing at Donald, which should serve as an abject lesson of how ugly people can be in a state of wounded pride.

Fixed fortifications failed the French at the Maginot Line, which was the most heavily equipped fortress of a border there ever has been. The Germans simply drove tanks through the Ardennes Forest around it, and conquered France in a little over six weeks back in 1941.

Likewise, in 1944, American troops stormed the beach at Normandy and cracked Hitler’s vaunted Atlantic Wall in one day.

France proved our point again on its way to dragging the United States into Vietnam, by getting themselves annihilated at a fortress called Dien Bien Phu.

But above all others, it was a non-military barrier as this one will be, as ideological as physical, the border of the Berlin Wall that stood for many years as the world’s largest eyesore.

The premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khruschev, put it up across Berlin in 1967. It was the result of a fit of petty rage, his own pride wounded when he understood just how unpopular his communist system was, that many people were escaping to the free lands of the West through the part of Berlin controlled by the Allied powers.

This was because, above all else, people wanted to be free than live under the hells of socialism. We still do.

Someone ought to tell Bernie Sanders that, not that he’d listen.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1991, right behind the evil empire of the Soviet Union that was propping it up, and it’s nothing but a memory now. But the scars it has left on the psyche of the human race are very large and have yet to fully heal. Something there is that does not love a wall, indeed. Willy Brandt, the Social-Democratic mayor of Berlin, and soon to be chancellor, called it the Wall of Shame. The term caught on quick and was totally accurate. If Trump does build a new one, it will be revived.

In the end, it isn’t all a question of money and impracticality. Trump’s Wall is a symbol and an evil one just as much as the one in Berlin. As Nancy Pelosi said, it really was total immorality. To placate his base would be insane, since they are all insane, and there’s no sense in appeasing dictators or their bases anyway- because it can’t be done. They will take and take until there is nothing left.

As the old saying goes, and as we have written in the past, never give Poland to Hitler. If we rolled over on this Trump would be emboldened to try for the next wicked item on his unending agenda of corruption all the harder, not that that will ever happen. Walls keep people from coming together, and that’s exactly what the human race does not need. Our history is vibrantly sad already. It’s time for us to begin learning how to heal, not to begin inflicting new wounds.

All cancer comes from one form of inflammation or another. This has gone on for too long. It’s bad for the presidency, it’s bad for America, and it’s bad for the whole human race. The border must remain open, the government must remain open, and Donald Trump must be made to stop using his powers in this egregiously ridiculous and damaging way. America has had enough.

Bombs Sent to Democratic Leaders- Fascism Rising in America.

Fascism is on the rise in the Trump era.

Despicable cowards tried to murder all our greatest Democratic leaders today.























Enemy of the People- Trump’s Attacks On Media Border The Deranged.

Our illegitimate president behaving like a thug.

When demagogues incite their followers to violence, they are to blame. Perhaps they are not solely responsible, but they play a key role, a bigger role than any other person. That is what Donald Trump either doesn’t understand- or understands all too well.

Controversy has emerged in recent days over a story carried by CNN in July that was co-written by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. In it, the story gets broken that Michael Cohen knew that Trump knew in advance about the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between members of his campaign team and Russian individuals.

Cohen’s lawyer later said he misspoke, but CNN stands behind the story. Two of its employees told Business Insider senior politics reporter Allan Smith the network’s level of commitment to its story is “100%.”

On Wednesday, Trump called Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, who co-wrote the piece, “sloppy” and a “degenerate fool” in response. Bernstein retorted on Twitter that he has spent his “life as a journalist bringing the truth to light, through administrations of both parties.”

That may be true, but it sure isn’t what Trump wants to hear. And it isn’t what he wants people to do. That’s why he’s always going on vile rampages and outbursts against the American press, people whose jobs are getting more dangerous by the day.

Earlier this year five journalists were massacred at the Annapolis Capital Gazette, and for a few days in the aftermath, Trump toned down his slanders and slurs. He invited New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger to the White House, and for a second it had started to look like things would be okay.

But the next day he reverted to his Stalinist slogan, “Enemy of the People“, to incite his followers to future mayhem.

Not long after, Trump held a “campaign” rally in Tampa. At it, a frenzied mob went berserk with reviles and rage toward CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.

The scene left most of us who write about politics deeply shaken, including Acosta.

“It felt like we weren’t in America anymore,” Acosta said.

Earlier this week, a man named Robert D. Chain was arrested for allegedly threatening to murder journalists at the Boston Globe.  He was said to have been mimicking Trump’s language.

“You’re the enemy of the people, and we’re going to kill every f***ing one of you.”

Anytime in the past that we’ve had this sort of thing, we’ve always come together to insist that we won’t have it. Whoever our leader has happened to be at the time has always done what they could to help things calm down. They certainly haven’t made it their policy to make things worse by inciting it.

The fact that Trump is doing just the opposite is yet another warning, a huge flashing neon sign, that things have gone wrong and we are now all in a really bad situation.

Earlier this year, we were dismayed to learn the U.S. has dropped to spot 45 in this year’s ranking of countries based on press freedom, conducted by the non-government association(NGO) Reporters Without Borders.

Their survey ranked 180 countries based on factors such as pluralism, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of their news.

Unsurprisingly, the report specifically calls out Trump as the reason for the United States’ reduced standing.

“A media-bashing enthusiast, Trump has referred to reporters as ‘enemies of the people,’ the term once used by Josef Stalin,” the report says.

Trump has done more than anyone to appropriate and misuse the term “fake news” in retaliation for critical reporting, even though his campaign was the source of most of the garbage that brought the term into common use.

He also got us bad marks for revoking the broadcasting licenses of media outlets who are critical of him and his lousy policies.

Last year Trump released a doctored pro wrestling video of his halcyon days hanging out at the Madison Square Garden, clotheslining an opponent who has the CNN logo slapped over his head. It was pretty ridiculous to think that such a man is now our president, but that is nevertheless how it went.

The first time it was merely silly, but nobody is laughing now.

This morning, on the topic, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote that whether rhetorical excesses can be blamed for violence or the threat of it is a complicated topic, with no easy answers.

I’m not sure I agree. The complexity lies only in degree; it seems pretty clear that people can whip each other up into violence if they’ve got a stage and a microphone.

You don’t have to be Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, either; there’s no wizardry of dialect needed. Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst told his fans to “get angry” at Woodstock ’99, and they did, and people rioted, and a girl got gang-raped in the middle of the mosh pit.

Is Fred Durst a man who is blessed with the same rhetorical gifts as Cicero or Demosthenes? Doubtful, but he does at least seem to be better than Trump. Was he solely at fault? No. But he certainly helped to kick things off.

Likewise, our nation’s 45th president will have helped to kick off his own fanatical followers, if any of them decide again to actually do what he’s been nudging them to do, and treat members of the press as though they really were Enemies of the People.

Here at Millennial Democrats, we want to emphasize how important a free press is, how important it is to adhere to journalistic standards. Without one we’re back in the Dark Ages. The media is the friend of the people, because they bring the people its information. It’s good to promote this point of view, going forward.

Russians And Republicans- A Match Made In Helsinki.

Donkey Punch.

It has been an interesting week for America, but not a good one. Trump sold us out for Putin on Monday in Helsinki and it’s all gone downhill from there. Things have come to quite a pass when it’s okay in the president’s eyes for American citizens to be sent to Russia for “questioning”.

Trump slobbered on Putin Monday. There is just no other fitting word. He was justly criticized for this all day on Monday, by Democrats and also many Republicans.

On Tuesday he appeared to change his mind.

But then on Wednesday, he said he was considering Vladimir Putin’s offer to take people like Bill Browder- one of the architects of the sanctions against Russia in the Magnitsky Act- hostage, in return for their assistance with the Mueller probe.

And on Thursday he invited Putin over here to hang out.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that Trump will discuss allowing Russian investigators to come to the United States to question U.S. citizens, including Browder, a prominent Putin critic who is the former American ambassador to Russia.

That did not go over well.

Trump backed down and punked out, of course, and now says that he “disagrees” with Putin’s proposal. But the fact that he spent ten seconds on considering it confirms the very worst things ever said about him. And on Thursday he invited Putin to Washington, D.C.

How much more is it going to take? Probably more crap than even the Russians have got! Republicans are in love with Russia now. The number of them who view Russia in a positive light has more than doubled, according to recent statistics.

Ronald Reagan is rolling right over in his grave. He’s headbanging and moshing down there.

Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), as well as Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), introduced a resolution to stop such a thing from ever happening, a resolution which was voted on and confirmed by the Senate.

They voted overwhelmingly against letting that ever happen, by a vote of 98-0. Even Bernie Sanders voted against Russia this time.

“A resolution is the minimum we can do,” said Schumer in a statement Friday. “Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are so cowered by a president that they cannot stand up for national security. They cannot stand up to Vladimir Putin, just as the president seems not to be able to.”

That is exactly right, but try telling this to his devotees.

They said Trump was right on Monday when he was defending his groveling behavior during the Helsinki Treason Summit. But they also said he was right once he backed down off it the next day, citing a whole new set of nonsense reasons. Finally, he invited Putin to come over to America and hang out.

Frankly, it’s disgusting that such a vote ever had to be taken. It’s sickening to the core.

Post-truth is pre-fascist, and that’s what we’re running into right now. Fascism has reared its ugly head.

Hitler and Stalin would be mighty proud, and many of the enemy’s participants in this conflict are aware of that and proud of it themselves.

It should not be forgotten that during the World Cup last week, while Putin was playing the genial host and offering visa-free entry into Russia for all the soccer fans, the dictatorship that Putin has created remained every bit as brutal as ever.

The only ones in Russia to make any sort of a meaningful statement was the band Pussy Riot, who have demonstrated their bravery in the face of this authoritarian state before.

They dressed up like police and rushed onto the field, pell-mell.

It was great.

Pussy Riot listed several demands as part of its World Cup action, including the release of all political prisoners in Russia, not locking people up for things “Liked” or “Posted” on social media, stopping illegal arrests during rallies. They also brought up Putin’s not allowing political competition in the country.

While they were being arrested, one police officer went up to them and said, “You shit all over Russia, yes? Too bad it isn’t 1937!”

That is a reference to the Red Purge, in which Josef Stalin killed untold multitudes of his own people as dissidents and “thought criminals”. The true number of victims can never be known, but the estimates range in the tens of millions.

That is what Donald Trump was talking about letting them do to us. And the way things have been going, it cannot be doubted that many Republicans would already be glad to acquiesce as well.

Any “policeman” who yearns for that as the good old days should be in prison, not putting others there. It really says it all about what we are up against. And regardless of that cop’s thuggish remark, on Tuesday, Pussy Riot defeated Russia, in the European Court of Human Rights.

At Millennial Democrats, we stand in solidarity with all people everywhere who are being suppressed illegally. One day, we will see a better world. In the meantime, we’ll be right here, working for the good health of this one.

America has heard the voice of treason loud and clear, and while Republicans waffled, Democrats responded forcefully. The day must never come when political prisoners in America can be sent to a Russian gulag. Those who understand that will understand the need for a strong Blue Wave.

The Failure of Socialism- Bernie’s Legacy.

The Failure of Socialism- Bernie's Legacy.

Contrary to the ongoing narrative regarding the politics of our millennial generation in the media, not all millennials are in for socialism, or Bernie Sanders. Most of us are not. That narrative might have had some truth to it, once upon a time, but not anymore. Millennials have learned.

Hard and painful experience has taught us not to invest in a gambler, or his roulette table.

Since the upset victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over New York Democrat Joe Crowley last month, there has been a lot of talk about this, and most of it has revolved around the question of socialism. The concept has come to be notoriously misunderstood, and most of the reason why is thanks to Bernie Sanders.

The prime minister of Denmark said it best when he pointed out that Bernie did not understand socialism in the context of Denmark; he could have added any other context and been equally right. Bernie didn’t understand socialism at all.

The Nordic countries have excellent social services, which to be fair were adapted from socialist theory. Governmental regulation and social work are both taken seriously there. But their economies are free-market, which means that they are capitalist. Completely capitalist.

The only countries that can legitimately lay claim to being socialist are those countries that have fully planned, one-size-fits-all, Big-Brother-is-watching style economies. Like Venezuela.

The mixup comes from a confusion over two terms, Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism. They sound a lot alike, but that is where the similarity dies.

Tempering the harshness of laissez-faire capitalism has been a good thing for the world, and is known as Social Democracy. Every civilized country, including the United States and Sweden, uses a type of social democracy to govern its people.

Bernie switched around the order of the words and called it Democratic Socialism. No one knows why Sanders insists on using that term, but in our opinion, it’s because he enjoys getting the attention that comes with being contrary and starting arguments all the time.

People have been going around repeating it ever since he first began, but in fact, the phrase doesn’t even have a precise meaning. Thirty seconds worth of using Google is enough to tell you that.

Socialism has been floating around for 188 years, since 1830, and not once in that time has it led to a successful society. Aspects of it have been implemented in normal societies and its influence in putting the social welfare of workers on the agenda is important.

As an overall idea, though, it has been a disaster, as nearly every country to have tried it has ended up with the goose-step and the concentration camp.

Back when it was just an archaic, discredited system, I thought it was kind of neat. I used to think about it while jogging. It was kind of like a Sudoku puzzle for me.

Once people started to take it seriously again, though, I stopped musing and started figuring out how to explain the inescapable truth- that socialism is a disaster, completely incompatible with human freedom and dignity.

Why can’t we learn from all the times it failed? All the horrible revolutions that produced even worse regimes? The thousands who had to die because of someone who wanted to apply ideas from a political theory to the real world?

Mark Perry, the creator of the popular economics blog Carpe Diem, referred to socialism in 1995 as “The Big Lie of the 20th century”. He reported in 2016 that he was shocked at its resurgence, such a short time after the fall of the Soviet Union, the so-called “Worker’s Paradise”.

“I perhaps assumed the failures of socialism were so apparent and obvious it would be forever considered only as a discredited system of the past, and never as a viable option going forward into the future!”

“Given the recent resurgence of socialism, especially as it is now being embraced by young Americans, I thought it might be a good time to review why socialism: a) failed in the 20th century, b) is failing in the 21st century (e.g. Venezuela, see photo above), and c) will always fail. And that’s because it’s a flawed system based on completely faulty principles that aren’t consistent with human behavior and can’t nurture the human spirit.”

This has always been the case. People are people. And while the socialists do join us in believing society can do better in many areas than it is doing now, the transcendental human change required as a prerequisite for socialism shows no sign of taking place next week.

Socialism does not mean Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. It only begins there. It ends with Hitler and Stalin. Going forward, we’ve got to raise awareness about this until people understand. Socialism is a universal failure. did a piece called “Socialism and its Characteristics”, telling us that there are eight types of socialism, but really, the distinctions are semantical. There is only one type of socialism. The evil kind.

Human Rights Crisis on the Border- Children of Immigrants Warehoused.

Immigrant Children

Officials from the Trump administration have been snatching children from their parents upon their arrival at the border, hoping to create a deterrent to immigrant parents trying to enter the United States.

Their concept is that fewer parents will ever try to enter the United States if they fear their children will be stolen from them.

Using the misery of children as a way to manipulate their parents is the act of a terrorist, not a president. Not only is this a cruel and savage policy, it isn’t even working. Leave it to the Republicans.

Friday’s revelation that the Trump administration separated 1,995 children from 1,940 adults between April 19 and May 31, according to a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, has painted more of the picture for us, in stark and ugly relief.

The administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which was announced by the Department of Justice in April, separates children from their parents or legal guardians because the adults have been referred to DHS for prosecution for illegal entry into the United States.

The officials could not say whether parents were allowed to say goodbye to their parents before they are separated. Some reports have said parents are told their child is being taken to a separate facility for a bath, only to never see them again. In some cases, the children have been sent to places as far away as Chicago.

Separating parents from children was rare under the Obama administration and even the early Trump administration according to Reuters. They just started doing this, and it’s already been two thousand little kids. That’s approximately 46 children per day, over a six-week period.

We are not going to forget about those kids, and we’ll make sure no one else does, either. I wish there was more I could do.

The people who are responsible for this show no signs of allowing themselves to be held accountable by civilian authority. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, when he tried to visit the facility on June 3, was turned away at the door. They also show no signs of planning to give those children back.

This is not the way things are done in the country we grew up in.

It seems like common sense to us, but not to the chief law enforcement officer in the country, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who used a Biblical passage on Thursday to try and justify these cruel and extreme actions.

“I would like to cite to you the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13,” Sessions said in a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Sessions went on to insist that the Bible argues Christians must “obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

That same Bible passage was formerly used to justify slavery. It’s worth remembering here that Coretta Scott King herself warned us about Jeff Sessions.

As a brief aside, there are few things worse than using the sincere and earnest faith held by others as a way to convince them to go along with something ugly. The history of Christianity in America is full of that already, and we’re not about to accept this anymore. Do not drag the Bible through the mud.

As it becomes more clear that our worst nightmares have come true with this president, it becomes more clear as well that we have come up against something here that we have really got to resist.

This is not a game, nor a faux revolution. They’re locking up children in warehouses and holding them hostage. You cannot look something like that in the face and turn away without having made a choice. Silence is consent.

Hitler could never have come to power without the “ordinary Germans” who were willing to turn their backs on it all, for a comfortable life and trains that ran on time.

The comparisons to Nazis grow harder to ignore by the hour. The White House barked at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough for coming out and saying it, but he was right, of course.

If only Trump took not acting like a Nazi as seriously as he seems to take not looking like one.

We have to hold out hope that there are still people out there in his camp that can still be convinced not to support him, by shining light on what he’s doing and making it impossible to ignore. We will accept any help, we will work with anybody.

Going forward, we can keep the pressure on them by raising awareness about what they are doing. Trump’s new policy is repugnant even for him.

This is a human rights issue, one that may well be the biggest of our time, and history will not look well upon those who are on the wrong side of it.  We’ve got to keep speaking out until they finally hear us.

If ever there was a time for a widespread moral outcry, this is it.

From MLK to Saheed Vassell- Fifty Years of Police Brutality.


Editor’s note- This is one of the most powerfully stated opinion editorial pieces ever published by Millennial Democrats. As always, the views of the writer are his own, and not necessarily reflective of the organization as a whole.

But people need a place to tell their stories from their side. Hosting that is what we do, and thus, the mic is handed over.

I was feeling fed up the other day when I wrote the Stephon Clark piece. That’s why I wrote it. But now tonight they gun down this guy Saheed Vassell on the streets of New York City, less than two weeks later?

On the 50 year anniversary of Dr King’s murder? Now, I am really, truly angry. And I am not alone.

How blatant can you get? How stupid can you be? How many actual people have to get ruined and butchered and slaughtered, before you people will say enough is enough? Somebody has to say it, even if you refuse.

WE ARE TIRED OF GETTING SHOT. PERIOD. Do something to protect us, or face the consequences that soon everyone will fully realize that you can’t.

The people who are supposed to be protecting us are becoming nothing more than the biggest, baddest gang of all. An American citizen has a duty to speak out against such a travesty.

This is so crazy, man. I’m just going to let the words flow through me as they see fit, today. The time for a massive public outcry has come.
How many more of these is it going to take?
I must know fifty guys like that guy Saheed Vassell. It might have been me, but for a few twists of fate.
Life is hard for them, and people are not always kind. People look at them as deserving of their fates somehow, as if a lifetime downtrodden by your own bad habits and mental illness is not enough. Nobody gets mad when they die. So I will. I will get mad enough for millions.
The police and correctional guards- They were left alone, by Scott Walker, when he came for the pensions of state workers in Wisconsin. Teachers were to be destroyed, schools ravaged, but the police were left alone. They almost always are. People are afraid of them. They’ve become a domestic army, and ultimately, they take their orders from themselves.
And they’re the ones who have got all the guns.
When Hitler came to power in Germany, one of the very first government institutions he was able to twist and corrupt was that of the police. Why? Because he knew that half of them were all thugs and hatchetmen already. That’s why they got the job. They had nothing to offer the world except muscle and bone.
Soon the worst started seizing key positions, the best lacked the conviction to stop them, and the rest was soon to follow. It could again. At any time.
Maybe corruption and a thirst for slaughter are inherent in the position, but maybe not. Going without them should at least be tried.
The trouble is that if we Democrats don’t want to end up like Social Democrats did back in Germany, we’ve got to be really careful. Because they know, that we know who they are. And that is very dangerous. It’s scary to even publish this. I know what the cost of freedom is.
This is the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s murder. Today. No one will ever convince me that it wasn’t either set up that way or fate. Random is out, in my opinion.
The days of international police control are here, and guess what? There’s more chaos in the streets than ever, because of it! Nice!
How long is it going to take this time, before people get fed up? You can already see the makings of Nazis in half of your neighbors, right? They don’t want to hear about what the Russians are doing, they don’t want to hear about what Trump is doing, they just want to be left alone.
And jobs. Like Roseanne was saying. They want to be given jobs to do, where they can have all their needs taken care of, earn a scale of varied punishments or rewards, and have lots of less deserving others to abuse.
That is the promise that one Trump voter makes to another. If you go to work on time and you vote Republican, then it’s You beat your wife, I’ll beat mine, and neither one of us will judge the other(at least, not publicly.) It’s a part of his right, part of living as a successful man.
That is the nature of the Nazi. To acquiesce with a turned away glance, to refrain pointedly from speaking out. To condemn himself with silence and sleep.
May all of us root out the inner Nazi in ourselves and destroy him! Annihilate him! Drag him out into the light to die in shame!
At any rate, we had better do it to him, before he does it to us. 
You don’t want to be standing in the dock at Nuremberg.
This has been an ugly rant, I think to myself, as I am writing it. I don’t like to levy such mass criticisms unless the need is utterly dire. Police aren’t inherently evil, just the opposite. But the spirit of “To Protect and Serve” is long gone, and most likely never to return.
Vassell just hits close to home, for me, because I KNOW these guys, God damn it! I listen to their stories! I try and make sure they all eat lunch, I take care of them anytime that I am able.
The same was done for me when I was young and poor and crazy.
I got through it, though, and now I do my best to pass it forward and to be a good shepherd because that is what God commands us to be! Why is that so hard for others to understand?
The people who are wearing those uniforms are people, too. But they have entire colleges, entire levels of training, between their souls and anything you could reach. They are systematically built up and made into monsters! And then they are sicced on the public, which is told, in effect, Do what you are told because if you don’t the police will come, and those people will kill you!
Not all police are fascist pigs, of course, and the state of things obviously causes great dissonance to many officers. But the tendency for all too many, when things start to go bad, is to do what they’ve been taught and follow orders.
How do we remove their influence from our society without letting ourselves become just like them? It’s hard to say. A new system, a new indoctrination? It’s all been done before. Is it the people, or the uniforms that are causing this corruption?
Only one thing is certain- There’s no way to know if others can do better unless it is tried and the way things are now has become intolerable.
There are certainly such things as humane re-education processes. They put us in them all the time, right? They call it counseling, or rehab, or what have you, but what it really amounts to, is a bunch of hoops you’ve got to jump through in order to claim a reward that is yours by birthright! If it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.
It’s all got to be tried. They’re people, there’s hope for the reform of anyone, but the American police today are all too often a bunch of good ol’ boys going deer hunting on the streets.
That state of affairs is a sickening atrocity. And until people get so fed up they are ready to purge their systems, it will remain so.

Cold War Two- The West Is Not Anti-Russia. Just Anti-Putin.


Cold War Two is heating up, as the diplomatic conflict between Britain and Vladimir Putin, caused by the murder by poison of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal is reaching a fevered pitch. Moscow’s embassy in London has been urging Russians against traveling to the UK or sending children to school there.

Putin’s orders to the embassy were to tell their citizens that British authorities may single out Russians for various persecutions, citing “the anti-Russian policies and an escalation of the British side’s threatening rhetoric”.

The Russian embassy even urged fans of football team CSKA Moscow flying to London for Thursday’s Europa match with Arsenal to exercise “extra vigilance” because of Britain’s “anti-Russian campaign”.

Britain does not even have an anti- Russia campaign.

It doesn’t even have an official anti-Putin campaign, although it needs one.

Everything everywhere needs to have an anti-Putin campaign. Not anti-Russia. Anti-Putin.

The two are not synonymous. Russia produced Stalin and Putin, it’s true, but it gave us Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Alexei Navalny as well. Russian people are not our foes unless they’re here on Putin’s orders to disrupt and destroy our countries. And even then, they’re just extensions of Putin.

Millennial Democrats would like to extend our sympathy and solidarity with Russia’s people, and with all good people everywhere who are stuck beneath the heel of that tyrant, or any other tyrant.

Putin has continuously kept pushing this matter. He’s not going to just let it go. He’s angry because he’s finally met resistance where there didn’t use to be any.

Next, Putin ordered the summoning of British ambassador Laurie Bristow on Friday. He wanted to tell her that London is being given a month to cut the number of diplomatic staff in Russia to the same number Russia has in Britain.

The measure came after Russia expelled 23 British diplomats, closed a British consulate in Saint Petersburg and halted the activities of the British Council educational and cultural organization last month.

Bristow was evicted by Putin along with the heads of missions from 23 other countries, almost all of whom are EU member states.

Russia suggested parity. The British side has more than 50 more people,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told AFP.

Parity? Did we come into your lands, and poison anyone you granted asylum, Vladimir? It probably wouldn’t be too hard to get at Julian Assange, the pet rat you keep in that Ecuadorian embassy cage(they just shut off his Internet! LOL!), but we don’t, out of respect for the rule of law.

There’s no parity in Putin expelling a single one of those diplomats. We didn’t do anything to him. We’re not the ones extending tentacles of chaos all throughout the world, encouraging ethnic violence and poisoning people we disagree with. We are also not the ones who keep on with continuous escalation.

The Pentagon’s concern this whole time has been not that Putin is strong, or fearsome, but rather that he’s getting old and sloppy.

They fear that he’s finally deluded himself into thinking he’s rebuilt the Soviet Union- Russia’s economy is a sixth of what the Soviets enjoyed- and will make a gross miscalculation that leads us all into war, as Hitler eventually did.

The way in which Putin is encouraging distrust among his people against any outsiders is also Hitleresque. A tyrant needs to have his country’s population scared and angry so that they will fight like desperate men, if he wants to try and conquer the world by force.

But he had better realize he will never have enough power. You cannot kill the human desire for freedom. And you cannot push us into giving up what we hold sacred. Donald Trump will not be in power forever.

Hitler found this out, too, once upon a time. The Western powers are goodhearted and kind and will give you the benefit of the doubt. But don’t be fool enough to delude yourself into thinking that means you can push us past a certain point. Or sooner or later, you will find two things out the hard way.

First, that the West has a very hard core.

And second, that we do not like being cheated.

GOP Sells Out America on Russiagate- Stand While You Can.

We are living through what is perhaps the biggest week in the entire Russiagate saga thus far. It reads like a grocery list, so we’ll just get started.

Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the FBI, resigned under pressure. He essentially was forced out.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted to release an illegally altered staff memo alleging FBI surveillance abuses relating to the Trump-Russia investigation.

FBI Director Christopher Wray’s warning that some of the information is classified and there are “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy” has been ignored.

The US House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff, immediately castigated Republicans for going so far as to physically amend a prepared memo about claims of FBI surveillance at the 2016 election.

“This is not about the facts,” Schiff said. “This is about a narrative the chairman (Nunes) wants to put out – a misleading narrative, to undermine the FBI, undermine the department and ultimately undermine Bob Mueller.

These changes were made minutes after the Committee signed off on it, and minutes before turning it in to Donald Trump. Two other memos on the subject are also floating around, but those are not likely to reach the public. What a surprise.

Next, within minutes of the committee vote, the Trump administration announced that it will not impose the new sanctions on Russia.

Both the House and the Senate voted nearly unanimously (another guy who refused to make that vote was Bernie Sanders) for the sanctions, but this also was ignored, even though earlier in the same afternoon CIA chief Mike Pompeo released a report of his conclusion that Russia is preparing to hack our midterm elections.

There have already been sanctions in place for Russia’s annexing of Crimea in 2014, and for its repeated aggression and provocations in Ukraine and elsewhere. This new set was intended to punish Russia specifically for meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But Trump, the beneficiary of all this hacking, has paid off for his master in a big way.

Looks like Vladimir Putin has finally made his next move.

They’re calling it his Saturday Night Massacre.

Leading Democrat Adam Schiff suggested the White House would use the memo, if released, to fire Robert Mueller or Department of Justice head Rod Rosenstein.

In December,Trump accosted Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, regarding his personal loyalties. He wanted to know whether Mr Rosenstein was “on my team”, CNN reports.

That’s the same sort of Hitler-esque loyalty oath he asked James Comey for. When he did not receive it, he recklessly fired Comey, opening this door and kicking off this whole process in earnest. That type of nonsense is what makes him an extremely useful idiot to Putin.

Russian TV was filled with glee, their jubilant anchor boasting that “Trump is ours again!” according to translator Julia Davis.

By subverting the Congressional Republicans, Putin has delivered the most tremendous blow yet to our democracy. This is a far greater coup than subverting one slovenly old debtor.

Trump in and of himself is nothing. He’s a babbling imbecile. No one pays him any mind on his own except his deplorable base.

The Supreme Court and Chief of Staff John Kelly, the real President, have done what they can to restrain him, but what’s really kept him from getting much done is incompetence.

With Putin there to provide strategic guidance, however, and both houses of the Congress in the hands of his Republican allies, Trump’s capacity to deal out damage in this whole mega-treason becomes enormous. The casual observer wonders about the purpose of a visit paid to Pompeo by top Russian spy chiefs, ostensibly to discuss counter-terrorism measures, earlier this week.

The actual Saturday Night Massacre refers to the incident of then-President Richard Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the Special Prosecutor assigned to handle the investigation of the Watergate scandal. It ultimately led to his impeachment, but not before doing much to complete the ideological cleaving of America. And the Congress that went through with getting rid of him was not the same creature as that of today.

We cannot be lulled into believing that this Congress will have the same sort of stomach and decency as the one that prepared to oust Nixon. Democrats hold neither house. And these Republicans have acted without conscience at every vote. There is not a sound reason to trust them, especially after the way they conducted themselves in regards to this anti-FBI memo.

The two top Democrats in Congress, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, have called for the removal of House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes in the latest development in a fierce battle over the chairman’s classified memo.

This development places us in the worst situation we’ve yet seen. The essence of it is that the Republicans and their billionaire masters, like the Koch brothers, have willingly turned a blind eye to everything for the sake of the fat tax cut they got. They’re bending right over for Putin.

Many of them are showing signs of indigestion of the conscience, as evidenced by the fact of so many of the GOP leaders in Congress retiring, but it’s a little late for that. They have already proven willing to accept anything for the sake of that money, even the death of our democracy and subservience to a foreign dictator. There’s no going back now.

On Wednesday, South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, became the third GOP lawmaker in just the past week to announce plans to leave Congress at the end of this term.

“Washington’s not a very pleasant place for anybody,” said former representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who retired in 2008. “The public hates you.”

The nature of their plot has now become as obvious as it was shortsighted- to take the money, and run before the Nuremberg trials start up.

Make no mistake, Democrats- We are on our own this year.

If the Blue Wave is indeed going to sweep over this country at the midterm elections, we are going to have to work very hard, because nobody is going to do it for us. We can expect no help whatsoever dealing with Russian cyber-aggression from the government, because we are not in control of the government. It is our opinion that everyone should be really careful.

Even earlier today, Millennial Democrats experienced a bruteforce attack. This hacker, from Lviv, Ukraine, tries this all the time, which does at least save us the trouble of having to assemble fresh pictures.

First we get an alert, as in Exhibit One.

Bored, uncreative loser who tried to hack me
Exhibit One- a turd who tried to hack us.

Then we go to a site called, and take a look at where the culprit’s from. The details thus given can be seen in Exhibit Two.

Exhibit Two- Lviv is a very famous place, world renowned for the quality of its IT experts. Unfortunately, it is also the host of this parasite.

We are going to need to stick closely together, as the only thing we’ve got left is one another. The Republicans are active hostiles. The Russians are digging in deeper every day. And we have no central leadership at all. If we don’t stand up now, we will never again be able.