The State of the Union

My fellow Americans, the State of the Union is not good.

Indeed, we are in an extraordinarily perilous time, one that the American republic may not survive. This union has endured through a great many challenges – through wars and pandemics, though economic collapse and through civil disorder – and through it all there has been one constant: the most dangerous enemies of the United States have never been external. They have always been among us.

This was true during the Civil War, this union’s gravest threat, when treasonous southern states nearly destroyed the country to further their empire of human slavery, and it is no less true today.

We today in the United States are ruled by a collection of neo-Nazi ghouls using a senile child rapist as a meat puppet in order to reduce the country to a dictatorship while a corrupt Republican Congress stands idly by and cheers, and the only things that are standing in their way are the fact that they are blisteringly incompetent, the fact that the federal judiciary is still doing the job it gets paid to do, and the fact that the mass of Americans refuse to allow it.

All of those ghouls are home-raised, and whatever the statistical anomalies might say the official record states that the child rapist won the 2024 election with the support of a plurality of those Americans who bothered to vote. The call is coming from inside the house, my fellow Americans.

Let the following be submitted to a candid world:

Under the US Constitution, only Congress has the authority to declare war or commit US military forces into battle, and yet today this rogue administration has launched a war against Iran, one that has already killed more than fifty schoolgirls at an elementary school. This war stands in violation of both the US Constitution and the UN Charter – to which the US and its partner in this travesty Israel are both signatories – and constitutes a war crime. In a just world the people responsible for it would have already been arrested and held without bond for trial. In this world, where those people have access to power and make further claims to unlimited power, this will take some time.

The unprovoked attack on Iran parallels the unprovoked attack on Venezuela of just a few weeks ago. Whether the regimes in those countries are good, evil, or indifferent – and it would be hard to generate much sympathy for either of them on their own terms – the fact remains that it is not the job of the US to use military force against them unless they represent a clear and active threat to the United States, and only after such force has been Constitutionally approved. Further, the long-term consequences of these assaults are not predictable and, historically, these wars have not ended well for anyone involved.

What they are, however, is a desperate attempt to distract the American people and the world from the rapidly expanding horror of the Epstein Files.

Let’s start with the fact that the regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains in violation of the federal law that requires them to have released all of the files by now. According to estimates from British intelligence the US Department of Justice has released barely 3% of the files and the screeching banshee who runs that department went before Congress, lied under oath about that, and then refused to speak with or even acknowledge the Epstein survivors who were there in the room with her. She carried in an binder detailing everything that members of Congress had accessed while the DOJ had permitted them to look at the files – a grievously illegal but not at all surprising authoritarian move – and her main response to being asked about the pedophiles in power was to shout about the stock market.

Again, they’ve released barely 3% of the files. Files with victims’ names out in the open and pedophiles’ names redacted just in case you can’t figure out who they’re working for and what they’re trying to do. 3%. The fact that the allegations and documentary evidence regarding the rape and murder of children contained in those files is horrifying and deserving of pitchforks and torches should give you pause because that 3% is what they thought they could get away with releasing. Imagine the nightmare fuel that is in the other 97% of these files.

I saw an Instagram reel recently from a guy named Nick J. Freitas who summed up the only possible reaction to that. “You know,” he said, “whenever somebody says that maybe it’s time to move on from the Epstein files I’m always like, ‘Great, I totally agree. I think we should have moved on to the public execution phase of this a long time ago. So what’s the hold up? Do we not have enough woodchippers? I’ll donate.’"

Put me down for a donation as well, and I’ll also happily kick in some time building bleachers for the American public to watch when it happens.

We know from these files that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is credibly accused of raping girls as young as 13 years old. We know his name appears in these files over 38,000 times – an order of magnitude more than anyone else’s other than Epstein himself. That’s almost 40 more times than Jesus appears in the Bible. It’s more than double the number of times than Harry Potter’s name appears in the entire seven-book series that’s named for him. Representative Jamie Raskin, who was able to view the unredacted files, searched for Trump’s name and got “more than a million” results. They’re Trump’s files more than they are Epstein’s.

You know who’s not in the Epstein files? Drag queens. Transgender people. Immigrants. Brown people. No, this is entirely about wealthy straight white men. Maybe the Republican Party needs to rethink its definition of a threat. Or maybe they already know and are okay with it. One or the other.

“The United States government is engaged in an active cover-up of the largest sex trafficking scandal and influence peddling scandal in the history of the United States, and Donald Trump is right at the center of it,” noted Representative Melanie Stansbury. The UN has noted that the crimes committed by Epstein and his crew are sufficiently vast that they fall under the heading of Crimes Against Humanity.

The cover up being conducted by the DOJ is open, blatant, unrepentant, and doomed to fail. At least nine other countries are investigating these files now, none of which are planning to hide the evidence they have. Britain’s Prince Andrew has already been arrested and will likely face serious legal consequences as a pedophile – the first senior royal to face serious legal charges since 1649, which didn’t end well for Charles I. Norway has arrested a former prime minister. Poland is well into its own investigation. It’s all going to come out, and when it does all hell will break loose. There will be blood.

Not enough popcorn in the world, really.

This is what they’re trying to distract you from with the attacks on Iran.

They’re also trying to distract you from the ongoing thuggery of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private unaccountable army as ICE continues its reign of terror across the country. They have continued to execute people without consequence, they are stockpiling weapons as if they are preparing for war, and they are trying to build a network of concentration camps across the country to warehouse all of the people that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his neo-Nazi ghouls declare to be undesirable and if you think that’s going to stop with immigrants (documented or otherwise) then you clearly haven’t read a history book in your life.

Folks, immigrating to the US without documentation isn’t a crime. It’s a civil offense. It’s a misdemeanor, roughly on par with a parking ticket. You know what is a felony? Raping children. Consider that.

Every statistic that has come from people other than the thugs currently running amok in this country notes that the overwhelming majority of the people kidnapped by ICE have no criminal record and weren’t even considered threats by the regime that sent ICE after them. In point of fact, given the dregs of society that ICE is reduced to hiring since nobody with any moral fiber will work for them, statistically speaking if you kept all of the immigrants (documented or otherwise) and deported the ICE agents the crime rate in the US would decrease.

Meanwhile Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s tariffs were shot down by his own handpicked radical right Supreme Court, but not before upending world trade, spiking inflation, and alienating most of our trading partners. Now that the highest court in the land has told him to knock it off, his response has been to double down and try to weasel his way to do it again. Because your ability to afford food is not really his concern.

And with all of this – the illegal war, the pedophile protecting, the violent ICE thuggery, the continuing economic collapse of a country that had mostly recovered from the pandemic by the end of 2024 – the neo-Nazi ghouls running this shitshow know very well that they cannot win a free and fair election this coming November. That any such election will likely be such an overwhelming repudiation of their twisted agenda that they could not only be stymied from furthering it but also prosecuted for doing what they’ve already done.

Naturally their solution is to try to prevent any such election from happening.

They’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which would effectively disenfranchise anyone who has ever changed their name for any reason, such as most married women in the US. It would require burdensome and unconstitutional documentation for voters – you’d need a birth certificate and a passport, for example, and unless those are provided free of charge that would constitute a poll tax. And the administration is making those documents harder to get by ordering libraries not to provide pathways for them the way they’ve done in the US. The related MEGA Act – introduced by Wisconsin’s own Bryan Steil – is more or less the same disenfranchisement in a different package because the GOP is many things but imaginative isn’t one of them.

Meanwhile both the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation – two of the most right-wing organizations in the US – have publicly stated that voter fraud (and particularly the non-citizen voter fraud that the perpetrators of the SAVE and MEGA Acts are in theory so worried about) simply does not happen on any noticeable scale. The Heritage foundation examined US elections from 2003 to 2023 – over a billion separate votes – and discovered 24 instances of noncitizens voting, most of them by accident, for a fraud rater of 0.0000076%. The Cato Institute notes that Utah has 2.1 million registered voters and an investigation showed exactly one was a noncitizen and that person never cast a ballot. In Georgia there were 15 noncitizens loudly declared by the GOP to be registered in Macomb County, out of 724,000 voters, it turned out that three actually were citizens, four had already been removed from the rolls, and four more were already under investigation. This is a non-issue for anyone who actually has a clue.

It's about voter suppression, not election security. It’s just another form of gerrymandering – if they can choose who gets to vote, then they can determine the outcome of the election. A free and fair election with widespread voting from American citizens will be the death of MAGA and they know it.

The SAVE Act appears dead in the Senate at the time of this writing, and the MEGA Act hasn’t even passed the House. But news broke this week that figures in the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump are circulating plans for an Executive Order that would allow Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to seize control of the November elections completely. The odds of that succeeding are low but not zero, and the mere fact that it is even being seriously planned is enough to justify prosecution and punishment.

This would amount to a coup, and since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already gotten away with one coup attempt unpunished it is not farfetched to think he’d try for a second.

Steve Bannon – one of the ghouls leftover from the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – has already floated the idea of using ICE to enforce who can and cannot vote in November. That ICE has no such authority is not apparently an issue for him. That conducting elections is, according to the US Constitution, the sole province of the states, doesn’t seem to be either.

As noted, the State of the Union is perilous and the survival of the American republic is not guaranteed. Nothing is. The Founders understood that republics were short lived, historically, that eventually they succumbed to authoritarianism, anarchy, or vice. They didn’t know how long their republic would last.

We, my fellow Americans, can make it last that much longer if we are vigilant, if we are active, and if we refuse to let this country be taken over by the sorts of people our ancestors shot in World War II.

This is our country.

The ghouls can’t have it.

Thank you, and good night.