The Plan to Steal America

Jack Ohman / Copyright 2024 Tribune Content Agency

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This cartoon is funny, but conspiracies are out there that are no laughing matter. I’ll get to that if you manage to read through to the end, which I strongly recommend you do, because what is happening is dire, dystopian, and potentially irreversible in our children’s lifetimes. —GD

Did I recently hear Trump say

We will impose 25% tariffs on Cantada and Toxico for undercutting our Fentanyl industry.

or was that a fever dream? It’s hard to tell these days.

During Donald Trump’s first term, the Washington post tallied his lies at 30,573, more than twice a day on average. And in the last campaign he probably uttered falsehoods faster than that. And so, many of his voters, thinking he lies to stick it to libs, didn’t take seriously some of his claims about what he would do as President. They may not have realized how many of his policy pronouncements were deadly serious, despite being taken from Project 2025’s playbook, which Trump claimed not to be aware of even though some of his closest advisors had shaped it. You have to hand it to him; the Great Fabricator is a master of sleight of hand.

Remember Trump pledging to “build a wall and let Mexico pay for it?” Well, he did and Mexico didn’t. And now he’s built economic walls between us and Mexico and Canada. The tariffs that started on March fourth have so incensed Canadians that many are boycotting American products if not the entire country. Here’s one quoted in Welcome to Hell World recently:

[I’m] Canadian with family in the US. Will not be traveling to visit them for the foreseeable future and cancelled 2025 plans to do so. I’ll add too that I (like a huge portion of our population) live in a town where cross border day trips were very common and the consensus among people I know is that no one has any interest in making those trips right now either.

This will be bad news for communities like Buffalo, NY that depend on revenue from trade and tourism.Tariffs on lumber and wood products will inflate prices for building materials and raise the cost of building and renovating properties. And tariffs on steel and aluminum will reduce revenues and employment in manufacturing industries.

The mass firings of Federal workers, many located far from DC, are already angering people, some of whom have been giving the Republican reps in Congress an earful in phone calls and town halls. Especially despised is the decimation of Veterans Administration staff and programs. There are lots of reasons vets and their families should be furious: cuts to VA, betrayal of Ukraine, being called suckers. I hope some vets organize a caravan to circle the White House and demand that Trump and JD resign.

Similar firings have taken place at NOAA, targeting workers tasks with monitoring severe weather and climate change. One hundred court cases are challenging the administration’s authority to dismiss civil service employees without cause in violation of statute and other power grabs. And as Trump has already ignored court orders to restore funding to current USAID obligations and NIH grants to scientists, what happens next?

As I pointed out last month, spontaneous protests erupted across the nation and continue to well up. Hundreds of people recently showed up at 145 or more National Parks and Monuments to protest the dismissal of more than 1000 National Park Service employees.

So many journalists who report on the Trump presidency are slacked-jawed at the lawless spectacles going on, which few in the corporate media dare to call “American carnage.“^* While the list of these outrages would fill many pages, fortunately, Radley Balko has enumerated several dozen of them that took place over just five days in a post to The Watch. Please read. Here’s a snippet from his category “Memory holing”:

• The Trump administration has deleted the database of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.
• They also deleted reams of data about children and disability at the Social Security Administration, climate data at the Department of Agriculture, and information about grants for hydroponic growing in urban areas.
• So far, the Trump administration has removed at least 3,400 datasets from government websites.

Once upon a time this would have been the work of Russian hackers. Now it’s been done by that piece of work Elon Musk, whose authority to invade Federal IT systems, under the auspices of DOGE, is being challenged in court. And After Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House’s Office of Administration, filed Federal court papers that said Elon Musk has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” the question became, so who does make those decisions. Shortly thereafter, Trump named Amy Gleason the official Administrator, seemingly to her great surprise and likely dismay. Conveniently for Trump, she was visiting Mexico at the time, an object lesson in how not to protect your ass.

Democrat leaders’ response to this blitz has been to roll over and play dead, hoping that the populace will rise up in great numbers to combat Trumpism. That estimate may be right, but as they are responsible for leading the opposition, this strategy won’t instill confidence in them, as this report from ABC News indicates. But Trump is not the real problem, something I hope they recognize should they be strategizing.

The erstwhile isolationist Trump lusts for new territory in Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Gaza, echoing his favorite predecessor William McKinley’s quest for empire. He thinks of the world as a pie he will share with Vladimir Putin. It baffles me that he didn’t include Cuba on his shopping list, given its potential for casinos and resorts. Maybe he’ll offer Vlad a deal to “develop” it, like he wants to do with Bibi in occupied Gaza.

Back to what Elon is up to. First, please know that Musk = Apartheid. Among others, he partnered with white South Africans Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha—grandson of former South African foreign minister Pik Botha—to found PayPal, and supports white supremacy to this day:

Musk, who was under federal investigation for racial discrimination in his Tesla factories—that is, until Trump took over—is supporting extremist movements across the world, using Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell Germans they should no longer feel “guilt” over it, and echoing South Africans who claim they’re victims of “white genocide.”
—Mother Jones

I implore you not to do business with Musk. Don’t buy any of his products. Sell your Tesla and any shares in his industries. Check your other investments and tell your 401 plan or investment firms to divest Musk’s holdings from their funds. And of course abandon X-Twitter to Musk’s sycophants. I suggest communing on BlueSky instead, which is what I’ve been doing.

Continue to pay attention: What’s happening to the Federal Government goes well beyond Trump, Musk, and even Project 2025. It’s a game plan genned up by a cabal of Silicon Valley crypto-anarchists including Peter Theil, Reed Hoffman, and other billionaires loosely called the “PayPal Mafia,” who groomed and funded JD Vance to win his Senate seat and then convinced Trump to make this political newbie his running mate. Their consensus seems to be, as Theil has said, that “Freedom and democracy are incompatible.” Once constitutional government is sufficiently crippled, they intend to divvy up the US into corporate fiefdoms, each with its own CEO/Dictator. This hard-to-believe scenario is cogently explained by Shane Almgren in Democracy Is Done: The Rise of Corporate Monarchy: The Real Agenda Behind Elon’s Coup & Trump’s Chaotic First 3 Weeks on Substack. Please read.

Hard to believe, maybe, but ignore at your peril. Why not write to your reps in Congress to the effect, “You better put a stop to this before Musk renders you and democracy redundant too.”

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^*Trump’s inaugural words were, “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
—from an article by Bill Barrow in the Associated Press

No. The real American carnage is just starting.

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