Tag: Trump

Las Vegas killer ‘not a lone wolf’, says wolf 

Rich Will1 Comment

The leader of a pack of wolves has spoken out against ‘ubiquitous‘ media descriptions of the perpetrator of the biggest ever mass shooting by a sole gunman on American soil as a ‘lone wolf’.

Speaking at a hastily-arranged press conference, the wolf, who refused to give his full name, expressed his ‘grave disappointment’ that such a term was being used to smear his species.

“Although there have, as we all know, been cases – often more mythological than actual – of wolves attacking groups of humans, this outrage was not perpetrated by one of our kind.”

He went on to point out that wolves do not possess the type of anatomical equipment necessary for the use of automatic weapons, and are also not conditioned by the same instincts of brutal, senseless cruelty which seem to have lain behind the slaughter in Las Vegas.

“We would like to make it very clear that the culprit in this case, lone or otherwise, did not belong to our pack, indeed was not a member of our species. In fact, he appears to be yet another example of a far more deadly creature: the white male human, armed not only with the kind of weaponry which should clearly be unobtainable for the ordinary citizen, but also with a deep-seated resentment against others of his species, indeed a contempt for the very notion of belonging to a ‘pack’. We would suggest that inquiries into how such an individual was radicalised, inspired and propelled to commit murder on such a massive scale might focus less on scapegoating the lupine community, and more on the role of media outlets such as Fox News (no pun intended) and Infowars. And should your species wish in all sincerity to address this problem, then call your NRA by its proper name: a terrorist organisation, one far more bloodthirsty than anything to be found in the animal kingdom.”

The wolf then excused himself, asking only that his “deepest condolences” be passed on to the victims of the massacre.

A prediction: Trump will tweet in favour of Catalan independence 

Rich Will3 Comments

Maybe if Scotland had opted for independence in 2014 the international context would now be different. Maybe the Brexit vote wouldn’t have happened and Trump would have lost. In such a scenario, the prospect of Catalan independence would have a very different meaning.

Catalonia is a country with a distinct culture, its own political traditions, a (partially recent) history of brutal oppression by the Spanish state and (most importantly) a consequent desire to be independent. The fact that it isn’t already is a pure accident of history. Nation states come and go; a country is, someone once, a dialect with a flag. As it happens, Catalonia has a very attractive flag, one that makes it look like its national anthem should be composed by Manu Chao. Partly as a result, Barcelona is generally seen as a a left-wing city – it has a radical mayor (who, as it happens, opposes independence). However, especially outside Barcelona, Catalan nationalism is not necessarily a progressive force. The Catalan left has nontheless partly presented this referendum as a vote against austerity and neo-francoist Spanish nationalism. (The spectacle of violent repression has given credence to the latter claim.) Nevertheless, a huge vote for independence will not be interpreted in such terms internationally. Nationalism, by definition, always involves a narrow set of concerns. The fact that deeply reactionary forces outside Spain will celebrate the victory concerns me more than the impact on dynamics inside the Spanish state. In the country where I live, Italy, the result will encourage the far-right to renew their campaign for more autonomy for the rich regions of the north, who have long complained about the burden of having to sustain the filthy peasants of southern Italy. There have been echoes of this kind of rhetoric in the Catalan case.

Hence the support of the global far-right for independence. The Italian fascist leader Matteo Salvini and the British far-right party Ukip have expressed support for Catalan independence; should the vote be tallied and independence be approved, their allies such as Le Pen and the AFD will present it as another Brexit, a vote against the European status quo. The Kremlin’s propaganda outlet Russia Today has made no secret of its affiliation, some of Donald Trump’s few remaining non-bot social media enthusiasts have expressed principled, albeit somewhat selective, concerns about political violence, and Julian Assange has been busy spreading disinformation about events via Twitter. Then there’s Trump himself. As is well-known, Trump loves to be on the winning side. Regardless of his previous stated support for Spanish union, he, seeing his political allies celebrating, will be desperate to join in. Trump is nothing if not inconsistent: witness how quick he was to disavow his support for ‘his’ candidate in the Alabama primary this week. Of course, he’s far too stupid to understand either the ins and outs of the plebiscite’s legality or the consequences of explicit US support for an unofficial referendum over the break-up of a major European power. He won’t reflect on how his actions will affect countries from Turkey to Italy to the US itself (how much does Puerto Rico gain from its status?). Trump has no consistency, no ideology, no loyalty and no strategy, and is in endless need of new distractions. That’s why I believe that in the aftermath of the vote and the near-universal revulsion that the violence has provoked, he will, with no regard for the implications, in between bouts of attacking hurricane victims, berating black sports people and trying as hard as his tiny fingers will allow him to provoke an actual nuclear war, tweet in support of independence for Catalonia. If he does, I hope the Catalan independence movement tells him very firmly ves-t’en a prendre pel cul. That would be a great symbolic statement of the kind of country they would like to build.

First they abandoned the Puerto Ricans

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I once tried to watch a documentary about the political status of Puerto Ricans. With all its myriad details of unincorporation vs statehood vs self-determination, it was considerably less entertaining than ‘West Side Story’. Now, for more than three million people, such issues may be a matter of life and death.

Donald Trump doesn’t know much about Puerto Rico either. He’s been told that it’s an island, and sort-of foreign and sort-of not, but he also knows that the people there can’t vote. He’d really rather just tell people things are going great and go and play golf. It doesn’t matter to him what happens to the people there. It’s an island, for Christ’s sake. Trump wouldn’t have the capacity to help even if he wanted to. He just has no intrinsic motivation to care about people who can’t do anything for him in return. (EDIT: The US has brought back Trump’s five predecessors to coordinate the reconstruction, due to the fact that the current office-holder so obviously does not give a shit.)

Trump also has no impulse control. Since he became president, he’s spent more than two months on the golf course. Although (as I wrote shortly after the inauguration) he’s the kind of leader that the US has imposed on so many other countries, it’s not so much that (as some claim) he’s following an authoritarian playbook; he’s too stupid, arrogant and lazy to read. Instead he’s an instinctive tyrant, his instincts conditioned by the crudest imaginable form of Social Darwinism. The notion that life is all about competition is a suitable ideology for someone who’d already been awarded the gold medal before they’d even drawn their first breath. This is not story he tells himself, of course. He just knows he’s entitled to go and play golf whenever he feels like it. His ideology, then, is Neoliberalism at its most basic: the market works for me, so it must work for everyone else. More competition is always good, because I’m the guy who owns all the starting pistols and the finishing tape. Now kneel before me – or, rather, stay on your feet or I’ll use the starting pistol on you.

Now, such a person has an instinctive understanding of threat posed by climate change. To people like Trump, the idea that society might – indeed, must – become more cooperative is worse than the reality that our habitat is collapsing. As Naomi Klein has cogently argued over the last few years, capitalism (particularly in its turbocharged, scorched earth variety) is simply incompatible with the continued existence of our species.

Of course, it’s easy to blame our leaders for our plight. There’s also the question of our own responsibility. We, as a ‘civilisation’, long ago collectively decided to ignore the implications. That is, after all why Trump was elected: there’s nothing less real than reality TV, so one way to escape from a frightening reality was to elect a reality TV star, someone who plays the role of a tycoon for the cameras. Facebook, Twitter have happened along, not quite by chance, at just the right moment to enable us to screen out those aspects of reality that make us uncomfortable. It’s no accident that Trump once declared that “All I know is what’s on the internet“. While Obama was the first black president, Trump is the first internet one. (Not to mention the “first white president“.)

Puerto Rico is an instructive case. It’s not like parts of Bangladesh, Houston, or Miami, i.e. part of a larger territory into which our perception of its suffering can be subsumed. It’s isolated, so presents a very stark test case of whether or not we actually give a flying fuck about our future. If we don’t respond to calls like that of the Mayor of San Juan, and not just with donations but with political action, we are truly lost. Every city on earth will face similar existential crises,often part of bigger ones, like the coming wave of crop failures. The market – the rising price of food and energy, which some are lucky to be able to afford – will only protect us so far. Its not just that our current leaders will let us starve or drown, they will actively ignore our plight just as they denied the circumstances that made it inevitable. We have to recognise that what is happening in Puerto Rico is a climate catastrophe, part of a much larger and even deadlier global transformation, and act accordingly by making sacrifices on behalf of those already suffering and by getting rid of political leaders who refuse to even acknowledge the nature of the crisis. We must build local and international solidarity networks and demand that those we elect to govern our cities develop infrastructure to withstand the inevitable. If we don’t do these things, there will be no one left to speak up for us.

Why isn’t Trump dead yet?

Rich Will6 Comments

Around 15 years ago it became commonplace for anyone who spoke up in defence of basic human rights to be posed the following hypothetical dilemma:

You say it’s always wrong to torture people. That’s fair enough. But what about terrorists? What if the authorities somehow knew that a captured suspect was planning to blow up an entire city? Wouldn’t it be morally right to put pressure on such a terrorist in order to save millions of lives?

Of course, such questions were a red herring. There never has been or could be such a textbook case. No authority could claim foreknowledge which allowed it to abandon universally agreed principles of respect for the judicial process and for human rights. That doesn’t mean they don’t try, and this ubiquitous theoretical challenge to the foundations of human rights – at every level of culture, from the front page of Newsweek to ten or so series of the TV show ’24’ – was accompanied by a very non-theoretical assault on those principles, most spectacularly in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. This is how we arrived at the point where the most powerful political figure in the world can openly instruct police officers to exceed the bounds of legal conduct in the treatment of anyone they don’t like and/or suspect of (potentially) committing a crime.

As the previous paragraph made clear, I believe that human rights are inalienable. No authority has the right to exclude any individual from fair judicial processes or to negate their physical existence.

But there’s something about the current conjuncture which I find puzzling. The most powerful position in the world, one that grants immediate access to weapons that could annihilate human existence at the touch of a single button or at the posting of a single tweet, is in the hands of a man who is deeply psychologically, mentally and emotionally unstable, has no moral scruples which might serve to regulate his impulses, and no meaningful understanding or apparent sense of the consequences of his actions for either his morally hideous family or the entire human race. He has also repeatedly demonstrated that he has no respect whatsoever for the vast majority of that which his compatriots hold most dear, including – particularly if they happen to be black – their lives. This in a country which has huge numbers of very heavily-armed individuals who have been brought up by Hollywood movies to believe that it is right and good to use violence, up to and including self-sacrifice, to redress the moral balance of the universe, and that God has uniquely anointed the American people with this redemptive task.

As I say, I personally don’t believe in political violence, and I don’t believe that any institution or individual has the right to deprive anyone else of life. There are, however, many people who do believe such things, and who have the means and motivation to act on their beliefs, on our behalf.

Where are they?

(P.s. I’m well aware of the argument that those who focus on Trump as the exclusive source of the world’s problems and ignore the brutal history of American imperialism are guilty of naivety. As it happens, such notional individuals are not nearly as naive as those who, like Glenn Greenwald, argue that those who focus on Trump as the source of the world’s problems and ignore etc, etc, etc are patronising. Greenwald was, until recently, a fine and principled journalist; now, he’s working for the other side.)

21 facts that PROVE Donald Trump is NOT racist

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  1. There are numerous photos in existence which show President Donald Trump in the presence of black people. Were he racist, he would have refused point-black to ever have his photo taken with any black people, punched them in the face and rapidly walked away from the camera. No racist on earth would ever think of not doing that, and it is absolutely inconceivable that Donald Trump could combine lifelong racist beliefs and behaviours with the occasional cynical photo opportunity for PR purposes. It’s also definitely the case that any black people who have been in shot whenever a photo of Donald Trump has been taken can be considered to have granted him unqualified support for anything he has ever said or done and will ever say or do. It’s like he owns them.
  2. A huge number of notable black people have expressed enduring respect for President Trump. Muhammed Ali called him ‘the greatest anti-racist activist that the world has ever seen’ on at least seventy-seven separate occasions, while Rosa Parks requested that the words ‘I would never have had the courage to sit at the front of the bus if it hadn’t been for the brave and principled leadership provided by President Donald J. Trump, truly the first black president’ be chiselled on her gravestone. Rapper Chuck D even named his first three children Donald in tribute to President Trump. (N.B. Although there is no actual evidence of any of these things being true and it may well appear that we have made all of them up on the spot, we refer you to points 3, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 19 and 20. below.)
  3. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  4. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  5. The notion that Donald Trump is racist is part of a witchhunt orchestrated by the Deep State. The fact that there is no evidence suggesting the existence of a ‘deep state’ (an expression imported from Turkey) is conclusive proof that the Deep State is so powerful it has covered up all signs of its existence, (c/f ‘The Usual Suspects’). The current secret leader of the Deep State just happens to be…Lebron James!!!
  6. Racism doesn’t exist. Albert Einstein called the very concept ‘a patent absurdity, a transparent Frankfurt School fabrication and an attempt to disguise the natural superiority of the white race’. (N.B. This quote has also been attributed to Anders Breivik.)
  7. Slavery existed before the so-called slave trade, etc etc etc (see stormfront.org for more background on this).
  8. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  9. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  10. There is nothing ‘racist’ about believing that human beings can and should be divided on the basis of genetic differences which determine their innate abilities and characteristics, that white people occupy the highest position in the racial hierarchy and that their resultant socio-economic and juridical superiority may at times need to be enforced by violence.
  11. Donald Trump is himself married to an illegal immigrant who barely speaks any English.
  12. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  13. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  14. There were some crimes in Chicago, or something. (I can’t remember the details, it was on Breitbart.)
  15. It is President Trump’s repeatedly stated belief that heavily-armed self-declared nazis and KKK supporters bearing burning torches and screaming about the innate superiority of white people over blacks and Jews is unproblematic, even healthy, and that those who oppose racism and fascism are terrorists who deserve to be met with extreme force. Those who connect these beliefs with his family history of KKK affiliation and a series of 1970s court cases which conclusively proved that his family business systematically discriminated against black tenants, add in the fact that he used to keep a copy of Adolf Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, and draw the conclusion that he is and always has been racist, are somehow, for reasons we prefer not to go into, missing the point.
  16. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  17. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  18. Purported recordings of President Donald Trump repeatedly using the N-word while filming The Apprentice has been hidden by the series’ producer, a confirmed Trump supporter, so no one needs to worry about that. Phew.
  19. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  20. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  21. President Donald Trump is clearly absolutely massively racist, but his supporters can’t admit this to others or themselves, so they run around in circles performing logical somersaults, making up bizarre lies on the basis of utterly implausible hearsay and humiliating themselves beyond repair.

Is Donald Trump literally illegitimate?

Rich Will1 Comment

I don’t just mean politically. Obviously he’s playing the wrong role, was swept into office on a frothing white tide, and is now a demented puppet of forces he couldn’t even begin to understand. I mean literally.

Clearly he had enough of a connection with his father to inherit his wealth and his hate-fuelled value system. But accounts of his life make clear just how insecure he is about his status in a range of fields. As President, he projects those insecurities onto others, tweeting and rabidly barking at his mirror-mirror-on-the-wall rallies about the illegitimacy of his political opponents. The force of his obsession with others’ illegitimacy was what took him to the White House. Of course, he focussed (and continues to focus) principally on Obama’s legitimacy as an American – maybe Trump, like many of his fellow racists, believes that all black people are literally bastards. As for Hillary, the fact that, as he flounders further and further out of his depth and the reality dawns even on him that he lacks even the most basic notion of what his rights and responsibilities as president are, his only consistent response is to whine about the illegitimacy of her defeat, is a clear sign that he knows that he is marooned in a role he is absolutely and uniquely ill-suited for.

I suspect that what lies underneath Trump’s almost crippling self-doubts about himself as a white heterosexual male is a fear that he is, in the deepest of senses, illegitimate. As he teeters on the edge of a full hysterical breakdown just at the moment when his emotional inadequacies may lead the world to an actual full-on nuclear fucking war, one way to send him gibbering away from the levers of power may be to state clearly to him what we all know: he is not only illegitimate as president, but also not the rightful heir to his father’s name and fortune. Not only is he pretending to be Commander-in-Chief; he is pretending to be the son of Fred Trump, and thus only pretending to be Donald J. Trump.

He tried to bring down Obama by casting down on his legitimacy, thus revealing his own Achilles’ (as he, less literate than any black high-school drop-out, would attempt to spell it) heal. Now’s the time we need to leave aside his tax returns just for a moment and ask: what are you hiding about your birth certificate, Donald? Could it be that the J actually stands for…Jamal?!

Maybe a good hashtag to use would be simply…#birther. Now, I wonder how we can go about getting Lebron James to tweet that?

We can no longer ignore why hurricanes – and earthquakes – are getting stronger

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Earthquake Strikes Mexico City

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” Sven Lindqvist.

If you’re not Mexican and you’ve lived in Mexico City, you’ve probably lived or hung out in La Condesa, with its tree-lined avenues, pavement cafes and energetic night-time economy. My wife and I recently spent a wonderful year (May 2015-May 2016) living in a 3rd-floor apartment on the corner of Calle Campeche and Calle Cholula, above a branch of the taco chain Tizoncito. Having seen the destruction around Avenida Amsterdam, just a very pleasant three-minute stroll or two-minute jog away, I hope our former home is still standing and that everyone who was in the building is safe and sound.

I experienced three small earthquakes in my time in DF (the most common local name for the city). The first time I didn’t notice, or at least I saw belatedly on Twitter that there’d been an ‘#alertasismica’. I subsequently tried to find out if the public alarm system had actually worked, because I certainly hadn’t heard it. The second tremor apparently took place while I was in the metro one afternoon – I only heard about it in retrospect. The third one took place during our farewell party. As about 20 or so of us bounced round our ultimately oversized apartment at 3am, someone pointed out that the lampshade seemed to have joined in with the manic dancing. Sure enough, when we went to peer over the balcony, the staff and straggling customers of the taco joint were gathered in the street looking a bit chastened. Ah, chingale, we thought, and went straight back to ‘Born Slippy’. It turns out that we were immensely lucky.

By far the strongest and longest earthquake I’ve felt wasn’t actually in Mexico. It took place in Rome a few months after we’d left DF, on the eighth floor of the maternity hospital where my wife would just a few weeks later give birth to our first child. We were visiting a fellow couple and their brand new baby when the water in a plastic bottle began to shake, and then the building began to wobble. Everyone went quiet – I think that was one of the uncanny things about it. Outside, down in the street, some people were gathered in small groups and others were just getting on with their lives. It seemed to go on for several minutes but afterwards the sensation of physical distress and disorientation went on for more than a week. I immediately felt inspired to write this short piece of absurdist satire in an attempt to turn my fear into something…useful? Meaningful?

The stories I’ve read in the media and posted by friends in the last few hours are genuinely shocking. By no means do I want to make a disaster I didn’t even experience about me, but knowing those streets and recognising some of the buildings, not to mention worrying for the safety of friends who still live nearby, has been a sobering experience. There have also been reports of acts of immense courage. For all its manifold cracks and faults, I felt that Mexico City is a place in which those who share space look out for one another to a greater extent than in both London and Rome, especially given the relative absence of the State. Events like this, and those in Florida and the Caribbean over the last few weeks are not a good advert for cutting back on the provision of centrally-funded emergency services.

The courage that ordinary Mexicans display in continuing to make do in the midst of constant dangers, big and small, from disappeared daughters to bent traffic policemen, is immense. Partly by virtue of living in Condesa, we were sheltered from so many of the threats that chilangos take for granted. I hope that if I were still there I’d have the bravery and integrity to help out. It’s becoming clear now that, wherever we live, the rest of our lives now will both trigger our instincts of self-preservation and also necessitate acts of great selflessness. I pray that incidents like Brexit and the election of Trump are not conclusive evidence that the two are mutually opposed.

Although I’d be hard-pressed to compare it to dragging people put of broken buildings, it did take something like courage to investigate something I’d purposefully been avoiding: the relationship between earthquakes and the changing climate. This article, by the highly-respected academic Bill McGuire, sets out the link. It turns out that as the planet heats up (and particularly as deeply-compacted ice melts, and hurricanes hammer at the surface), the earth shifts. (Incidentally, if you haven’t read the article, which was published in an eminently reputable publication and summarises the results of some very extensive research which took place over several decades and was subject, like all significant academic research, to extensive and rigorous peer-review based on the systematic application of doubt, please do not comment below.)

It’s immensely difficult to talk about climate change. We’re neither evolutionarily equipped nor socially encouraged to take it seriously. The most powerful forces on the planet employ endless legions of trolls to shout down any discussion of its causes and effects, often in the name of (ahem) “free speech”*. Republican and Conservative politicians insist that it’s never the right time to address planetary overheating, particularly at those moments when its consequences are most visible and stark. Anywhere I post this online there will immediately attract those who, without having digested or even nibbled at its contents, will insist on screaming with spluttering toddler-like outrage that someone has had the temerity to try to feed them the C-words. Their campaign of intimidation around an almost impossibly intimidating subject has made climate change into a taboo, a heresy.

Now, in 2017, everyone – particularly politicians and journalists – who talks about hurricanes without mentioning the changing climate is being cowardly and dishonest. We also owe it to each other, and to the new generation, the one which, absolutely blameless, is already here, to face up to the fact that our failure to even discuss the dangers before us has much deeper consequences than we blithely assumed. An essential step is to get rid, by any means necessary, of those ‘leaders’ who, by means of scapegoating and by encouraging inane conspiracy theories, deny reality on our behalf. They are the sort of people who should have hurricanes named after them: #HurricaneRickScott or #HurricaneScottPruit may have had more useful political impact than #HurricaneIrma. Perhaps, given his government’s stated intention to throw limitless amounts of fossil fuel onto the fire, this particular disaster should go by the name of Enrique Peña-Nieto.

* Such people specialise in belittling the suffering of anyone with darker skin, so climate change is an ideal topic for their trolling.

No one deserves to lose their home to a hurricane. Well, almost no one.

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The question of whether or not it’s acceptable to use violence to stop fascism was resolved to the satisfaction of pretty much the entire human race in the middle of last century. Few in the late 1940s would have had much respect for the notion that genocide is merely a expression of the right to free speech. But if, as Patrick Mcgrath argued cogently this week, fascism is a monster which keeps growing new heads, then each one that emerges needs to be crushed with maximum force – or, as the finale of Psychoville spectacularly demonstrated, exploded.

Many of those fleeing hurricanes in Florida and Texas over the last week will inevitably have more awareness of and engagement with the problem of the changing climate than the writer of this blog. Others will, like me, be aware of the basic facts and share in the generalised but rarely-acknowledged terror at what a righteously vengeful planet next has in store. But there are inevitably many of those currently witnessing the destruction of all they hold dear who have actively dedicated much of their time and energy over the last couple of decades abusing mass and digital communication media to spread disinformation with a view to ensuring that such catastrophes would both take place and be wholly unprepared for by states with the duty and means to protect their subject populations. Many of them will even have lent their support to corrupt and venal political demagogues who have built their careers and fortunes on the spreading of staggeringly irresponsible lies  which deny the present and future suffering of millions of fellow human beings.

Many of those victims happen to be poor, dark-skinned and far away. It’s by no means an accident that the kind of scum who marched straight from 4chan to Charlottesville a few weeks ago divide their online time fairly equally between scapegoating and ridiculing foreigners, threatening and bullying women who dare to speak freely and attempting to disrupt every single online conversation about how scientific findings account for extreme weather events. Climate denial is a key component of 21st century fascism, the formal and explicit imposition of elite power through violence. (Hurricanes are extremely violent events – no wonder the manchild Trump appears to revel in their power.) Just as when those who seek to gain power by means of violence are pushed back by any means necessary, when people who have inflated their egos, boosted their careers and augmented their Paypal balances by denying the experiences of climate refugees themselves become climate refugees, who can spare them any sympathy? Of all the tragedies to be visited on the US over these few weeks, maybe the greatest, or at least the most ironic, is that Hurricane Irma appears to be steering clear of Mar-a-lago. While some may be #prayingfortexas or #holdinghandsforflorida, I’m hoping that the next extreme weather event brings in its wake a tsumani of divine justice. In the meantime, perhaps a more appropriate nickname for a hurricane ripping apart the south-west corner of the United States would be simply #RickScott.

Support Trump? Want to earn $1,000?! Here’s how!!!

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Although I no longer have a Twitter account, it’s proven impossible over the last few weeks to divert my eyes from the rolling car crash dumpster fire of Trump’s hamfisted attempts at pretending to be President while hanging on to his (ahem) integrity. As things stand right now, with his entirely pathetic tweets praising protestors and protesting, he has lost, bigly, the respect of the only person whose opinion he truly cares about, a portrait of whom is apparently the only picture hanging in the Oval Office office: his KKK-supporting father*. Donald wanted so much to honour the memory of his progenitor by continuing to stand up for his white supremacist cheerleaders, but he couldn’t do it. Last night, unable to sustain the arrant sub-Alex Jones nonsense he’d been posting about ‘anti-police agitators’, he tweeted about the need to ‘heel’ America, oblivious to, or maybe secretly recognisant of, the fact that he and all he represents is the cancer that the country is trying to fight off. Trump is his own Achilles’ heal. (Although, to be fare, maybe he was actually trying to spell ‘heil’.)

Much like his verbal incoherence, Trump’s combination of limited vocabulary (like his Mexican counterpart, it appears he has never read a book) and partial iliteracy seems to endear him to his supporters, a large proportion of whom would not only put up with his spelling mistakes but actually anything  he could conceivably do (including total nuclear annihilation, but quite possibly excluding his speaking out for protests and against racism. They really won’t like that in the slightest). Maybe in tribute, his supporters’ tweets are similarly poorly composed. Uniformly so, in fact. Given that there are only 140 characters at steak, you’d think that just once one of them might produce an accurately-written post, but no. So far not one Trump supporter has been able to produce a single tweet which does not contain at least one glaring and laughable mistake.

Maybe it’s a question of motivation. After all, Trump’s political victory was the ultimate realisation of the principle that money is the only driving force in any human endeavour. Maybe if his hate-addled disciples had a gold-plated carrott dangled in front of their faces (they’re already seem vulnerable to various hypnotic effects), it might propel them to think more carefully about their spelling, punctuation and grammar. Trump’s own linguistic incompetence is not in this sense a cause for optimism, but maybe he just has too much money in the first place. Although he’d happily set fire to his own trousers for $1,000 (or its rouble equivalent), he’s not intrinsically motivated to do so. His supporters are another kettle of deplorables entirely. Lots of them could certainly do with such a sum.

I’ve decided to help out. I am offering that amount via Paypal to any Trump supporter who manages to compose an error-free tweet between now (mid-August) and Christmas. It does not have to be a work of pithy genius – a simple statement regarding current events from the standard wilfully myopic/blissfully misinformed perspective will do. It just needs to obey the basic rules of English orthography, grammatical structure and punctuation. If it were also possible to make it factually accurate, that would trigger a million-dollar jackpot bonus; however, its not feasible that any statement based on factual information could be supportive of Trump, and in any case I don’t have access to that sort of money, not being, like some, in league with the mob.

To give budding entrants some practice in spotting their errors, I’ve litered this post with several speling, punctuation and grammatical mistakes of my own. However, as always on this website, their are no prizes for pointing them out. This is, after all, merely a blog, not an official statement on behalf of the Comander in Cheif or anything like that. As for whether or not you should trust me…maybe you should look up the spelling and the meaning of the word ‘gullible’.

* Nigel “Nazi flags in 2017? Whoever would have thunk it?!” Farage seems to have similar issues with his own dad, his initials being by no means a coincidence.

** There’s also the hilarious possibility that Trump was trying to be presidenshul, viz. like Obama.

Wikileaks bravely shocks world with Trump Jr email revelations

Rich Will1 Comment

The world has been rocked to its core by the revelation that, contrary to all its previous claims, the Trump campaign did indeed have direct contact with individuals it knew to be directly connected to the Russian Government and who offered to provide it with information damaging to Hillary Clinton. The document in question was posted on the Wikileaks Twitter account a mere 25 minutes after Donald Trump Jr had shared it on his own Twitter feed. In a series of further revelations from Wikileaks, it has also been divulged that:

  • The Titanic was sunk by an iceberg.
  • There is very little actual chicken in KFC chicken products.
  • The terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks is called Al Qaeda.

    • Polar bears are not actually white.

  • Julian Assange doesn’t want to be put on trial for rape
  • Bonn is no longer the capital of Germany
  • Barack Obama was not born in Kenya
  • Bears shit in wooded areas
  • The Pope is not a protestant
  • Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails didn’t actually expose any serious wrongdoing
  • While Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are heroes, Julian Assange is a bit of a fucking joke
  • Wikileaks aren’t very good at hacking
  • Vladimir Putin used to work for the KGB

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appealed to world governments, civil society organisations and media outlets to act immediately on the revelations by helping him get out of the cupboard he’s lived in for several years so he can get to Moscow and recieve some sort of medal without having to pass through Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning on several charges of rape.