Trump Keeps Saying We Won't Have Meaningful Midterms

Plus "missionary lizards" and JD Vance, plus homicidally stupid press tricks, plus music

View of Kaneohe Bay from He’eia state park (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

Trump Keeps Saying We Won’t Have Meaningful Midterms

Not in those exact words, of course; even our self-mutilated institutional press would have to report that. But he has made plain that he views a potential GOP loss as apocalyptic, and he has taken or supported measures aimed at tilting the elections in his favor, including but not limited to pressuring states into mid-census efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of their seats and pushing for ever more restrictive voting requirements.

More than that, though, he precipitated a violent insurrection aimed at invalidating his 2020 loss, and has since demanded and gotten an effort from congressional Republicans and regime officials to erase that picture and replace it with a pastoral scene of patriots handing out flowers to cops instead of beating them.

And of course he set out on a years-long effort through the courts and the reactionary media to create the enduring myth that the 2020 election was stolen—a myth that the courtroom rout of Fox News following their assault on Dominion Voting Systems, which led to a near-billion dollar settlement with the primary villain of the myth, didn’t dent.

And oh yeah—Dominion has since been sold to a former GOP election official from St. Louis, who changed the company name to Liberty Voting but promises nothing else will change. The nothing else that will change will be not changing just in time for the midterms, coincidentally.

Throughout his current term, Trump and other regime officials have been threatening to flood large Democratic-leaning cities with federal thugs and National Guard troops, and we’ve seen him both carry out those threats to varying extents and, probably more important, successfully inciting his homeland security troops, whose numbers the regime hope to increase by 10,000 or more, to violence.

One of the more extreme measures, along with declaring martial law, that Trump was urged to take by his more virulent supporters after the 2020 election was sending the National Guard in to seize Dominion voting machines in the swing states he lost. He was ultimately persuaded not to do that by, among others, the then-amazingly corrupt attorney general William Barr, who, unlike the current occupant of the office, was apparently possessed of at least one remaining democratic principle.

But, as Trump told the New York Times last week, he very much regrets that decision.

President Trump said during an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, even though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order effectively.

The remarks by Mr. Trump in the interview last week harked back to one of the most perilous moments from his first term in office, when he was urged by some advisers to order his national security agencies to take control of machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to find evidence that they had been hacked to rig the election against him.

The headline on the story is weirdly straightforward by Times standards: “Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election.” The story itself dilutes the impact of the headline somewhat by ascribing Trump a motive—something the paper has historically been unwilling to do when the subject is a love of violence, or racism, misogyny, xenophobia or some other form of bigotry.

He wanted, they say, to prove fraud; no hint that he may have simply wanted to reverse the election results at gunpoint, which would be the obvious motive if a different one hadn’t been stated—especially in light of what he did a few weeks later with his failed insurrection.

Still, the story stated plainly that he wanted to seize voting machines in states he lost and that he would have used the military to do it, although the reporters ignored the question of what would happen to the machines afterward or whether they could even be used to prove fraud if it existed.

Trump didn’t have compliant military or Pentagon leaders at that point but he does now, and he doesn’t have advisors willing to contravene what he wants. He’s been able to either compel or persuade some of his top military officers to take and give illegal orders, and he has advisors and cabinet heads, including Whisky Pete, who fetishize violence as much as he does.

None of that appears in the story, but it’s all true and it all bears upon what he’s willing to do and what his capabilities are.

Missionary lizards and JD Vance

“Missionary lizards” is one of those terms one would never predict seeing in print, but there it is.

Evolutionists claim dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. But it is important to realize that when they dig up a dinosaur bone, it does not have a label attached showing its date. The Bible states that God made the land animals, including dinosaurs, on day six (Genesis 1:24–25), so they date from around 6,000 years ago.
. . .
In Genesis 6:19–20, the Bible says that two of every sort of land vertebrate (seven or seven pairs of the “clean” animals) were brought by God to the ark. Therefore, dinosaurs (land vertebrates) were represented on the ark.

Although there are about 668 names of dinosaurs, there are perhaps only 55 different “kinds” of dinosaurs. Furthermore, not all dinosaurs were huge like the Brachiosaurus, and even those dinosaurs on the ark were probably “teenagers” or young adults.
. . .
As Christians, we can use dinosaurs as “missionary lizards.” We can take what is popular with the culture and show how God’s Word explains it better. For example, soft tissue, like blood vessels and red blood cells, has been found in dinosaur bones. This soft tissue couldn’t last millions of years. The fossils confirm a young earth. We can use dinosaurs to help people trust the history of the Bible and also trust in the message of Jesus Christ that is also found in God’s Word.

There’s a short film about these critters but I couldn’t find it online. I did find a bachelor’s degree thesis on the subject, though.

Part aesthetic and part scientific, children’s fascination with dinosaurs presents a challenge to conventional Christian doctrine as well as a unique opportunity for Christian children’s media. On one hand, dinosaurs are inevitably linked to secular evolutionary theory; on the other, the excitement and intellectual engagement dinosaurs elicit in children provide a potentially powerful gateway for education and indoctrination. Without a space in the Christian doctrinal canon for dinosaurs, American evangelicals would find themselves hopelessly outmoded in the modern media marketplace; dinosaurs are simply too colossal a presence in children’s imaginations to ignore or discount, even if their presence in the Bible is hardly obvious.

“Hardly obvious” indeed. Anyway, it turns out that far from being some really obscure Christian fundamentalist weirdo shit, missionary lizards are in fact some really popular Christian fundamentalist weirdo shit.

In related news, the Catholic Reporter took aim at revanchist Catholic apostate and venomous missionary lizard JD Vance—who has been condemned by two popes, one of whom he may have murdered or otherwise caused to let go of life—after he vehemently blamed Renée Good for her own murder, calling her a terrorist and assuring federal thugs that they have absolute immunity against prosecution for any similar murders and assaults.

As a Catholic, Vance knows better than to peddle this brand of gaslighting and agitation. Vance knows that, by virtue of her humanity, Good was endowed with inherent dignity, made in the image and likeness of God. Vance knows that only God can take life. Vance knows that protesting, fleeing or even interfering in an ICE investigation (which there is no evidence that Good did) does not carry a death sentence. Vance knows that lying and killing are sins.

Vance knows. He doesn’t care. Vance’s twisted and wrongheaded view of Christianity has been repudiated by two popes. His Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power.

The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith. His repeated attempts to blame Good for her own death are fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel. Our only recourse is to pray for his conversion of heart.

Damn. Damned.

Homicidally stupid press tricks

First up, the generally reliable Guardian U.K.

Morality? A sense of fuckin mischief? Morality?

Yeah, good, okay.

And here’s the Washington Post, still sporting what our friend Dr. John describes as the purely aspirational “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tag line.

This is a whole-ass story about how a GOP congressman and millions of like-minded Americans are willfully blind to visual evidence of a murder, but it’s couched in “he saw-she saw” language, as if maybe there’s some ambiguity.

Standing on the House steps after a vote 57 minutes later, Republican Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska watched the same footage.

He said he could not be sure of what he saw. “I couldn’t really see what was happening there,” Flood said.

You’d definitely want that guy on your jury, if you murdered somebody and you weren’t a liberal or some other lesser life form, and the prosecutors had you dead to rights on a video.

The Post is not alone in presenting the story as something of or explicitly a “Rorschach test,” the latter of which the New York Times did despite having published the most definitive moment-by-moment analysis of the multiple videos showing the murder. The Post published its own definitive, if not quite as deep, dive on the videos. Yet both papers insisted on presenting the videos in other stories as so much less than definitive that people can legitimately make of it what they will. It’s a butterfly. It’s a vulva. No, it’s a murder. Who can say?

Fuckin jamokes. Fuckin mopes.

The Post and the Times are the same two papers whose reporters and editors learned in advance that the U.S. was about to launch an illegal, unconstitutional assault on Venezuela but agreed at the regime’s request not to publish so as to protect U.S. military personnel as they carried out an unconstitutional and illegal assault on Venezuela with the intent of kidnapping the Venezuelan president, which of course is also illegal. And then they ran a bunch of stories about what a surprise it was and how well the regime preserved its secrecy while failing to mention that their own newspapers were the ones responsible for the immaculate secrecy preservation.

Fuckin assholes. The “time honored” coverup of the regime’s plans, as one reporter described it, carries a bit of irony this morning as the FBI raided a Post reporter’s home and seized her phone and laptops in connection with a classified documents investigation.

And finally, Sam Sifton of the New York Times goes completely off the rails in one of the paper’s morning newsletters. Here he is describing, um, tensions twixt federal thugs and Minneapolis residents.

Some of the stops go beyond ordinary law enforcement. In a few of the run-ins, you can feel the animosity building between federal officers and citizens they serve. One man The Times spoke to said he was glad that there were other people around to film his encounter with federal agents, which occurred after they rammed their car into his, forcing him to a stop.

He said he believed the presence of people with cameras had helped lead the agents to let him go. But as the crowd grew — the crowds always seem to grow now — and began to yell at the officers, he worried that the situation could tip over into something darker, something violent. “It makes them act different, like they have more power,” he said.

Animosity “between federal officers and citizens they serve.” An encounter which “goes beyond ordinary law enforcement” because federal agents rammed a car evidently for the hell of it; they didn’t even charge the guy with a crime and you know they would if they thought they had a sliver of a reason to. Fear that “the situation could tip over into something violent.” Like murder, maybe?

There is no animosity between masked federal thugs and the citizens they serve, because the only citizens they serve are all officials in this increasingly Nazi-like regime, who are fine with this behavior and worse—in fact they’re demanding it. ICE and other “homeland” “security” thugs for goddamn sure aren’t serving the people who live, love and work in Minneapolis.

How do you both-sides this shit? What is wrong with these people?

Music

Dylan Cartlidge, “Show Up”

spill tab, “PINK LEMONADE”

Snocaps, “Coast”

Greentea Peng, “Green”

Panda Bear, “Ferry Lady”

Unknown Mortal Orchestra, “BOYS WITH THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WOLVES”

Adrian Sherwood, “Dub Inspector”

Amyl and The Sniffers, “Big Dreams”

Courtney Barnett, “Stay In Your Lane”

English Teacher, “Mastermind Specialism”

La Luz, “Always in Love”

And that, Comrades in the media desert, is all we got. If you like it, please share and let me know. If you like it even more than that, please consider a free or paid subscription if you’ve not already.

Be well; take care.