Memorial Day reflections: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you

 

     Another old fart's Substack howler flew itself into my Yahoo inbox yesterday and set me to howling, too.

My Two Senses

“D-DAY 2024” 

Some thoughts on how we got here and why we can’t make it go away

OL’ FLAWRIDUH CRACKER

MAY 24, 2024

The Apprentice, and massive Fascist propaganda over a 40 year period generated millions of aggrieved Americans.

© MojoMan 2024

The turn to the far right for Republicans has it’s roots in an amalgam of Rich White Men who embrace Fascist ideologies, from race supremacy, antiSemitism to an obsessive fear of Communism stealing their ill-gotten rents. The road to Trump goes back to the Goldwater race for the White House. The Young Republicans and the JBS, backed by Corporatist Republican elites formed what amounted to a dopplegänger of the Communist Cadres they so feared.

This John Bircher Society ideology clearly inspired the 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” by Richard Hofstadter, that was and is still considered a seminal work that tracked the conspiratorial roots that would lead to the JBS. Later Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas” tried to relate how being aggrieved, and as Hofstadter put it, feelings of being dispossessed fueled resentment that took us into the Reagan/Nixon/Bush fiascos. Having been largely rejected as wingnut fascist ideology the Fascist loving billionaires put on a little lipstick and pretended to reflect mainstream thinking.

Now (talking about paranoia) I’m actually beginning to believe that microplastics in the diet of Far Right Republicans, whether put there by intent or as a bi-product of redneck lifestyle, is a likely major contributor to the cancerous mental malignancy reflected in todays Neo-Fascist ideology.

Along the same lines I have become a fanboy of Dr. Bandi X. Lee, and her recent work on “mass psychosis” Dr. Lee was academically cancelled from her professorship at Yale (thanks largely to the efforts of Allen Dershowitz) because she dared to correlate the clear symptoms of Trump’s “malignant narcissism” in explaining his bizarre behavior. This effort centers (and again I agree with her) on a lock and key paradigm of Trump to his base about that cements this “mass psychosis”. He seeks their constant adoration and they seek his ability to enact their insane dreams of revenge and overwhelming dictatorial rule.

Here we are confronted with essentially a religious cult, fueled by 40 years of paranoia, aggrievement and a complete embrace of Fascism/Christo-Fascism.

Is there a way outta here?

At some point I actually had genuine hope of finding the proverbial key to unlock the mind of these delusional masses, but today it appears that  the Fascist  Republican mindset is beyond any form of cognitive repair.

It is mirrored in science to cases if brain damage of the frontal pre-cortex suffered by veterans who have suffered TBI from being too close to blasts. Study has validated that there is a propensity to embrace deeply rightwing religous and political views.

Think about it. 50 years of constant Fascist propaganda packaged as “patriotism”, true Christianity, and White Identity. Do we really think there is a chance in Hell of helping these deluded masses to see how downright evil their thinking is in the next six months? 

Eighty percent of registered Republicans are prepared to go all the way with Trump and that means to avenge and destroy millions of decent Americans in his demigod name.

In closing I’d like to share that I just finished watching “The Manchurian Candidate” beautifully restored to hi-def black and White. Could it be that Ivanka (an FSB spy under direction of Putin) is Trump’s handler? I know, I’m again sounding a bit paranoid, but given our current threat to Democracy in Trump I’d like to consider it facing reality.

Sloan Bashinsky

A friend of mine once said, “Just because you're paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

“Deer Ed”, in honor of the key deer that inhabited Big Pine Key, operated the very popular “Coconut Telegraph” public forum at bigpinekey.com. The forum catered to “Kudos & Whiners”. 

Deer Ed built my websites, goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com, which were read all over the Florida Keys.

Deer Ed designed a campaign website for a woman friend of mine, who decided to run for sheriff in the Florida Keys.

One page of my friend’s campaign website described the sheriff department harassing her sons, whom the sheriff department contended were criminals, and she contended otherwise. She had some pretty good conventional ammunition, and she had something else. 

She became so concerned that sheriff deputies would find one of her sons and do him harm, that she sent him to work one day with his father, who operated a tree trimming company. Trimming a tree that day, their son touched a high power electric line and was electrocuted. His body was taken to the hospital on Stock Island, where the sheriff department and jail were, the island just above Key West. While she sat with her son’s body, grieving, the sheriff detective, who had pursued her son, came into the hospital room and made her leave so he could fingerprint her dead son’s hands and continue prosecuting him.

The Coconut Telegraph and my blogs heralded her campaign website coming online. The morning her campaign website went active,  bigpinekey.com was destroyed by hackers. Deer Ed was freaked out, because he had installed every kind of protection known at that time to protect his website.

 

The page on my friend’s campaign website, which contained the worst dirt on the sheriff department, was destroyed.

Deer Ed repaired his website and reported there what had happened, and the context. Some readers accused Deer Ed and my friend of being paranoid. Dear Ed responded with, “Just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

Deer Ed was a recluse, and he was reluctant to take my suggestion to get the FBI involved, but he finally asked them to investigate. He told me that the FBI finally told him that his site had been hacked, but whoever did it was really good and covered their tracks really well.

 

I ran ten times for public office in the Florida Keys: 6 times for mayor of Key West, 3 times for county commission, 1 time for school board. I got my belly full trying to change the minds of people on the left and on the right, whose heads seemed to terminally live where the sun never shined. Quite a few of them were regular readers of and contributors to the Coconut Telegraph. A lot of them were conservative Christians.

When Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race, I watched him adroitly pluck every last string in redneck Christian America. He plucked them like they were little red violins that had longed all their lives to be plucked. 

What bugged me most was the people who ought to know better, who were not little red violins, voted for Trump in 2016. I was just as bugged by the Democrats running Hillary Clinton against Trump. That’s when it saw just how truly fucked up America was. 

I had no clue how much more fucked up America would become. 

Putting In God We Trust on its money and One Nation, Under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, and claiming America was founded on Christian principles didn’t make it so.

When I was writing the goodmorning blogs, which eventually went to Internet heaven, I heard about a black comedian in Texas, who said something like, “Attending church has as much chance of making you a Christian as sitting in your automobile in your garage has of making you an automobile.”

There was a regular contributor to Kudos and Whiners, went by the handle “From The Right”, or “FTR”. I met him after he asked Deer Ed to see if I would have dinner with him and his wife and Deer Ed. FTR seemed nice enough. His wife seemed nice enough. FTR was well versed in all things conservative. It was his religion. He was articulate.

After he outed himself at Kudos and Whiners, FTR posted on his Facebook that, as devoted as he was to the Republican way, he would. not vote for Donald Trump if he gained the Republican nomination. I wondered if FTR would hold true to that. 

By then, I was publishing at my mew blog, afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com, that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should be locked up in adjoing cells.

After Trump won the Republican nomination, FTR announced on his Facebook that he would vote for Trump. That led so some interesting back and forth, and to FTR loosing his cool and tearing into me and displaying what I had figured was there all along.

Back when I was writing frequently at Kudos & Whiners, I developed a posse of Sloan haters, who took lots of pot shots at me from behind their fake names, which Deer Ed allowed them to have. I offered to meet them anywhere they chose, they could bring anyone they liked, and any weapons they liked, and I would bring me and the angels that never left me alone, and we could get to know each other. There were no takers. 

 

I think voting for Trump has as much chance of making God like you as waving a Confederate or Nazi flag has of making God like you. Alas, I don’t think voting for Joe Biden will get you any kudos from God, either. 

Old farts like you and me ain’t able to do the roughhouse things we once did, but we have l-o-n-g memories, and we know how to type, and we don’t like sitting at home playing TV bingo, and we still have some functioning brain cells, and we use them, and we shoot off our mouths, and it don’t change nothing, but at least we tried, and at least we are not going out brainwashed by cult leaders and stupidity, ignorance and gullibility.

Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker

I remain deeply, deeply distressed on this Memorial Day that the ultimate sacrifice and suffering of so many Americans that was about preserving our Democracy within a freely elected government acting in the spirit of E Pluribus Unum, is falling to a Fascist, Grifter Authoritarian hellscape. 

Sloan Bashinsky

That falling deeply distresses me, too, but I do think America’s wars during my lifetime were noble, given what America did to help those wars get started. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Uvalde school shooting massacre dimensional shift

AR-15

    

    On the 2nd anniversary of the Uvalde, Texas school shooting massacre by a natural born domestic U.S citizen terrorist toting a high capacity magazine AR-15 designed to quickly kill as many people as possible, I watched CNN interview bereaved parents who lost their children that horrible day. I thought, in my spirit code, 2 is the number for Jesus in the Gospels, who said to let the little children come to him, for of such is the Kingdom of God. 

    The day before, a Birmingham tattoo artist juxtaposed a yellow rosebud tattoo over a Vagrant tattoo a Key West tattoo artist had put on my right shoulder in 2007, when it was vogue in Key West to call homeless people, “vagrants”.

    The yellow rosebud tattoo represents the yellow peace rosebud on my infant son’s simple oak casket, when I buried him on September 12, 1968 in the family plot at Elmwood cemetery, in Birmingham. Crib death (sudden infant death syndrome) took him. No words can explain my bewildered shock and trauma, and their later effect on me.

    In 1988, I felt moved to return to his grave for the first time. Years before I had planted a climbing yellow peace rose bush where I lived, and i drove there and snipped a rose off that bush and drove to.Elmwood Cemetery. I did remember how to get to the family burial plot, and I didn’t remember where my son was buried in the plot, and I had not had a marker put on his grave. I stopped at the business office of the cemetery and asked for directons and was told how to get to the family plot and that my son was buried at the foot of my mother’s gave stone.

    I parked my car and got out and walked toward my mother’s grave stone and as I neared it I came unhinged and fell to my knees and bawled and bawled and balled by heart and eyes out. I came back to this grave maybe half dozen times with a yellow peace rose, until no more tears came. I went to the cemetery office and selected a small flat granite grave marker and asked them to put on it, “Infant son, he opened our hearts and set us on our journey."

   Watching CNN’s Uvalde school shooting massacre coverage the morning after getting the yellow rosebud tattoo, I thought owning such guns as the Uvalde shooter used, AR-15, really is about deranged men wanting to feel better about their peckers; and if women want such guns, it’s their penis envy. 

    I thought the U.S. Supreme Court never once considered the right of the citizens to bear arms in the 2nd Amendment is predicated on the need to have a well-regulated militia to preserve the free State, and there has been no well-regulated militia in America since the American Revolution.

Amendment 2 

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    I thought the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures had unleashed the hounds from hell on America, which was never the Founding Fathers’ intention.

    I thought about the right wing Christian from Texas, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who had defended the 2nd Amendment right of the Uvalde natural born domestic terrorist to have the AR-15 he used to slaughter all of those school children and two of their teachers. 

    I hoped Cruz has a chance someday in space and time to feel just like the parents of those slaughtered Uvalde school children feel today.

    I hoped every member of the NRA, and every member of the Supreme Court, and every member of Congress, and any state legislator, who shares Cruz's view, gets to know how the parents of the slaughtered Uvalde school children feel. 

    No, I do not want more school children to be slaughtered in their schools, but given how sacred owning guns designed solely to quickly kill as many people as possible is in America, I see so other way to get gun nut lovers' attention.

    Now if my saying that causes anyone to think I am a horrible person, that I should be stuck dead by God’s lightning and die and burn in hell forever, consider that when I was writing The Golden Flake Clown’s Tale in 2022, free read at the internet library https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale, it came to me from out of the blue that angels known in the Bible had initiated a new school shooting massacre protocol in America, as follows:

    When there is a school shooting, children whose souls have  not signed up for such a demonic experience are carried away by those angels and new souls come in who need to have that experience. With God, anything is possible.

    If someone thinks I’m batshit crazy for saying that, in early 1994, this poem leaped out of me

Only fools rush in

where angels fear to tread,

but if there were no fools, 

who’d lead the angels?

    Right away, I started feeling something huge and wonderful trying to squeeze into me. I felt it physically and energetically. There were lots of teary and sublime moments, day after day, night after night, for two weeks. 

    I was in the habit of taking a long walk every morning. About two weeks into that experience, at the turnaround point in a morning walk, I felt the presence of angels around me.

    I heard, “This thing coming into you is your angel twin, all people have an angel twin, and yours will live out your life with you.”

    I thought, That’s neat.

    I heard, “By the way, this is your son.”

    My heart heaved, tears welled in my eyes, my knees buckled, I nearly fell to the ground.

    I stopped feeling something huge and wonderful trying to squeeze into me.

    

    I eventually came to see that my son’s death had so unhinged me, that despite how hard I tired, I was unable to fit myself into the plans my father and mother and their parents had for me, nor into any plans I had for me.

    I hope the bereaved families of the massacred Uvalde school children, and the bereaved families of children massacred in other American schools, someday, somehow, have their own yellow rosebud experience.

    

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Unified Reich

    The gem below arrived in my Yahoo feed today and I could not help but pile on.

Mark Fiore's Cartoon Update

Yikes! 'Unified Reich?'

😬He keeps getting Nazi-er & Nazi-er...

MARK FIORE

MAY 22, 2024

OKAY, MAYBE IF THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME ANYTHING NAZI WAS SAID OR SHARED BY DONALD TRUMP WE COULD LET IT SLIDE.

Maybe it really was just an over-eager staffer who didn’t notice the “unified reich” part of the video shared on Trump’s Truth Social account.

But there are those other pesky words that Trump has said: warning of immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country” or “vermin” destroying the United States.

Never mind the slightly more coded words like “globalist,” “international bankers” and the ever-present “Soros” boogeyman.

Oh yeah, and there were Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” . . . except only one side was chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

So for this cartoon, I figured it’s only a matter of time before Trump puts on an SS uniform and calls Joe Biden an anti-Semite.

Which will, once again, make for a busy day for Trump’s spokespeople.

The Defendant-in-Chief just can’t seem to help himself when it comes to Nazi terminology and big strong dictators. 

 

In one of the most ingenious works of spin doctoring, campaign press secretary Caroline Leavitt pointed out that Trump couldn’t possibly have posted the “unified reich” video . . . he was too busy at his pornstar-hush-money-election-interference trial!

(This is one of those cartoons that really just write themselves. Just turn the floor over to the nutballs.)

Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll have to keep paying attention to what Donald Trump is saying or doing for at least the next several months. 
I don’t have a good feeling about this. 
In the meantime, we can share a laugh at his expense and let people know the consequences of a second Trump presidency.
Thanks so much for your support, I’ll see you back here shortly!
-Mark

In case you missed it earlier, I posted a time-lapse drawing and commentary video earlier today . . .

Cartoon Foreshadowing

MARK FIORE

·

MAY 22

Read full story https://markfiore.substack.com/p/cartoon-foreshadowing

 

Sloan Bashinsky 

Sloan’s Newsletter

Yikes!, is dead f-ing on the mark, Mark :-).
The guy who wants to be Commander-In-Chief again allows underlings to post stuff on his Truth Social account? For real? Shucks, every post at my Facebook page was put there by me, because I'm the only person who knows the top secret password. 
All in the same day context of The Great Pussy Grabber resting his case in New York City, without testifying, after saying he would testify, and daily shooting off his mouth to the media and on Truth Social about the trial, the judge, the witnesses, the jury, the prosecutors, and claiming President Biden sent the FBI to his Mar-a-Lago home to kill him and his wife and their son if necessary, to steal HIS classified documents from him, and Nikki Haley saying she will vote for Donald Trump, although when she was running for the Republican nominee against Trump, she said he was “unstable and unhinged”, which caused me to wonder if Trump had grabbed her pussy, or she had grabbed his pecker?
Recall when Trump and his father got busted by the State of New York for ethnic discrimination in their New York City apartment buildings.
Gander photos and film footage of the Charlottesville Confederate Monument removal protest and see the ocean of angry white people. Gander photos and film footage of Trump rallies and see the oceans of white people. Gander photos and film footage of the January 6, 2020 goose step riot and see that ocean ot white people.
Recall back when former Klu Klux Klan Imperial Wizard and Grand Dragon David Duke endorsed Trump in 2016, and when asked what he thought about that, Trump pretended he’d never heard of Duke and was quite a while saying, well maybe he didn’t want Duke’s endorsement.
Recall before Herr Donald Trump got it into this apprentice noggin’ to run for president, Vanity Fair published an article quoting Trump’s ex-wive Ivana, she said when she and Donald were married, he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed and sometimes he read it at night.
Recall American news media asking 2016 president Donald Trump about that and he said, where did they hear that? But if he ever had such a book, he didn’t read it.
Recall telling American news media the book was given to him by a friend. 
I have a photo of the book, but I don’t see a way to post it here. The title is MY NEW ORDER. It’s easy to find using Google images.
Recall Trump bragging the German Chancellor Merkel told him that only one other political leader drew bigger crowds.
Recall, after learning that Vladimir seemed to have gotten himself elected president of Russia for life, President Trump said on national TV, I saw the news clip, that he liked that idea, president for life, but maybe he shouldn’t say it.
Earlier this week, Trump floated the idea of having three terms in the White House, then he said, well, he would not challenge the 22nd Amendment, but only wanted 4 more years in the White House. 
Don’t know where you live, Mark, but I live in Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born and raised. Birmingham is a blue city surrounded by MAGA counties.
I have regular dealings with MAGAs. They attend church. They worship Jesus. They remind me of Islamic jihadists. They view Democrats like right wing Mulsims view America.
I think Joe Biden and the Democrats are manifestations of the mythical Fukawy tribe, which was forever getting lost and gathering in a circle and sitting down and holding hands and closing their eyes and chanting, “Where in the fuck are we? Where in the fuck are we?”
I after graduating from the Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa, in 1968, clerked for a United States District Judge in Birmingham, who presided over ever federal criminal prosecution in north Alabama. 
I think Joe Biden and his son Hunter should be criminally prosecuted over how Hunter got rich off Ukraine while his father was Barack Obama’s vice president.
I think President Joe Biden should be prosecuted for war crimes for helping Israel obliterate Gaza.
However, Joe Biden and the Democrats do not remind me of Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, which Donald Trump and his MAGAs do.
America and the world should be so lucky as to have Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate and be struck dead by the same bolt of lighting?

    When Pigs fly?

    Don't American Blacks know that “Stop the steal” is code for “Stolen by Blacks”?

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words Art Gallery

 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com