The political world has been consumed over the past few days with a Republican meltdown about Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.
The story began when Democratic Georgia senator Jon Ossoff said at an event for his reelection campaign on Sunday that Trump does not appear to want to do the job of the presidency. Ossoff added: “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” That was it. That was all he said.
On Monday, CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump to respond to Ossoff’s comment. Trump first referred to Ossoff as Pee-wee Herman, a child-man film character created by late actor Paul Reubens, then defended the ballroom and attacked the reporter. Later, as Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported, the White House rapid response team took to social media to call Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”
Then, in an unusual escalation, the account targeted Holmes’s children, posting: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
You could almost feel the palpable relief that the White House might be able to gin up a controversy that could rally the base, one that, for the first time in a long time, didn’t automatically show the president or the administration in a bad light. Undermining Ossoff, whose speeches have been a particularly sharp thorn in the administration’s side lately, appeared to be icing on the cake.
Certainly the call went out to right-wing media figures to pile on to the idea that Ossoff was making a sexist attack on Harp. Megyn Kelly posted that Ossoff “was clearly implying that Trump is having an affair w/his staffer,” and Michael Knowles wrote: “Every time I see a woman at work, I just know she’s sleeping with her boss! Am I right? Anyway, am I the new Obama yet?” White House spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote: “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” and Newt Gingrich posted: “Jon Ossoff owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her.”
Matt Royer of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council noted: “The word “affair” was never uttered, and yet apparently every single conservative talking head in the world heard it anyway, so what does that tell you?” He added: “Never have I seen a more exquisite example of the Streisand Effect where someone’s supporters fall over themselves to basically accuse them of adultery when it wasn’t even brought up.”
Commandeering the news cycle with manufactured outrage distracted attention from other issues Ossoff did call attention to in the same sentence. Ossoff called out Trump’s apparent stock manipulation, an issue Trump highlighted recently when he sold early access to his Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 a month. It has been widely reported that investors appear to be making a killing by anticipating Trump’s posts as they make markets go up or down.
An investigation by Casey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman of CNN published on July 16 found that Trump himself “made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week before he posted a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives or their products.”
“He’s selling faster access to his tweets, and then you can bet on the markets,” comedian Shane Gillis recently told popular podcaster Joe Rogan, “It’s literally insider trading.” Rogan, whose support for Trump in 2024 was important to his victory, responded: “Wait a minute, is that real? How is that legal? Who’s telling him this is a good idea? $100K to get early tweets? That’s literally crazy. He’s just on a grab.”
As Matthew Chapman of RawStory reported, the two went on to discuss Trump’s involvement with cryptocurrency. “This government has done some (expletive) that no government has ever done before and one of them is the crypto stuff,” Rogan said. “The crypto stuff is nuts. Trump has made billions in crypto. Then you got his sons and his sons are involved in these weird business deals, and there’s a lot of money flowing around that you could dig in and start arresting people.”
Attacking Ossoff for allegedly smearing Harp also shifted attention from Trump’s ballroom, which is enormously unpopular and which is in the news as Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court to override lower courts’ rulings that he does not have the authority to build such a structure without the permission of Congress. Even Republican members of Congress seem reluctant to grant such permission, as it highlights Trump’s grabs for luxury while Americans are hurting under high gas and grocery prices caused by Trump’s tariff wars and war on Iran.
Recently, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who with Jonathan Swan wrote about Trump’s second administration in Regime Change, has told podcasters Ezra Klein and Axios’s Mike Allen that Trump spends about “70%” of his time working on his Washington, D.C. projects. “He is spending a huge amount of energy, mental and otherwise, on these renovation projects, beautification projects around Washington, and then monuments to self,” Haberman told Allen.
She described a visit with Trump seventeen days into the Iran war in which “it was very clear what his mind was on while we were there. And what it was not really on was the war.” “You would think that on the 17th day of the war that he would have maps of the Middle East or maps of troop deployments—who knows,” Haberman said. “He picks up these pictures, and [they’re] of maple trees. And he says: ‘I am choosing maple trees for the White House. I am good at picking trees.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but that is pretty much what he said.”
Recent news reports tie the lack of supplies on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to Iran’s damaging strike on the only U.S. naval base in the Middle East, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, in the first weeks of the war. Trump has downplayed the poor conditions aboard the vessel, infuriating the families of the sailors.
He continues to downplay the flailing of his administration in Iran, as well, as Iranian forces continue to control the Strait of Hormuz. When asked today about the strait, he told reporters: “Last night we had a lot of boats come through, we have possession, complete control of the strait, I mean, outside of nuisance value—and there is nuisance value when they shoot a drone every once in a while, but and not everybody’s going to go through. But they come through. And over the last couple of weeks, we had a lot of oil coming in, a lot of oil. It’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s a lot of oil coming in, a lot. In fact, people are amazed.”
Scott Waldman of Politico reported on Monday that while an average of almost 140 ships a day traversed the strait before the war, last Sunday only 3 did.
The Harp story also has taken oxygen from increasing pushback against the Trump administration. Yesterday ABC and its parent corporation, The Walt Disney Company, launched a federal lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), saying the Trump administration violated their free speech rights. The lawsuit claims that administration officials tried to do Trump’s bidding by launching investigations and challenging broadcast licenses because Trump didn’t like their talk show opinions, news coverage, and late-night comedians.
As David Folkenflik of NPR noted, the lawsuit began with the words: “Government censorship is deeply un-American.”
This is a one-eighty for ABC. In 2024 it agreed to donate $16 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit Trump brought over the assertion by George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. In fact, Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse, and the judge said that while what he did fell under the common definition of rape, New York state law had a very precise definition that his actions didn’t fit.
The settlement made ABC one of the first to settle with Trump. That money seems to have disappeared, and there is currently a congressional investigation into where it, along with almost $50 million more from similar settlements, has gone.
FCC chair Brendan Carr seemed to back away from previous threats, saying that ABC and Disney were acting too hastily and that the FCC has not yet decided whether to renew the licenses. “Ultimately,” he said, “they’re going to get a fair shake before the agency.”
Jeremy Barr of The Guardian shed light on the issue today when he reported on new documents obtained thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit from Democracy Forward showing that Carr has been working closely with the White House and right-wing media. In addition to talking and meeting with White House officials, Carr has been working with the Fox News Channel and the chair of the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that the national debt passed a record $40 trillion yesterday, much sooner than expected. The U.S. is currently spending more than a trillion dollars a year to pay interest on the national debt, more than it spends on defense.
As Steven Rattner noted in the New York Times yesterday, Trump said in his 2024 campaign, “We’re going to grow like nobody’s ever grown before,” but in fact, the economy is slowing. He promised to bring the cost of gasoline below $2 a gallon; it is now above $4 a gallon.
In 2025, Trump said he would balance the federal budget, but in fact, thanks largely to his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the deficit is growing. Also in 2025, Trump promised that his new tariffs would enable him both to cut taxes and to pay down the deficit; in fact, the national debt relative to gross domestic product (GDP) is about to break the record set during World War II.
Republican operatives appear to have thought that the Harp story could enable them to pivot to attack Ossoff and change the narrative, but it seems they miscalculated. Their attention to Ossoff’s statement that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” has brought attention to the relationship between the 80-year-old president and the 35-year-old aide, who was once a host on the right-wing OAN network.
Maggie Haberman told MS NOW that for Trump, Harp “is sort of his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket.” She is the main buffer between Trump and the outside world, filtering the information the president sees, setting up meetings and passing along messages, writing social media posts, and printing out articles praising Trump.
In their book, Haberman and Swan wrote that Harp leaves “adoring letters” to Trump in “private spaces,” saying things like: “you are all that matters to me.” CNN’s Holmes reported that Harp is “physically close to Trump at all hours of the day” and that Harp once jumped into the trunk of an SUV to stay close to Trump after being told there was no room for her in the vehicle.
The renewed scrutiny of Harp has turned up the story that for more than a year, she refused to get a routine security clearance to work at the White House. A national security official expressed concern to Jake Traylor and Jacqueline Alemany of MS NOW that Harp has more access to sensitive information than nearly all of the other White House officials.
When Trump left a decoy Air Force One airplane for a smaller plane in early July, he left behind cabinet secretaries but brought Harp with him.
On Saturday, August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S.
The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century. Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%.
But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. While they extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed without a single Democratic vote—they refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford healthcare insurance in the ACA marketplaces.
The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of healthcare insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.
They were unsuccessful, and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June 2026 showed that at least 5 million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about 13%. For those remaining, premiums have spiked: the editorial board notes that a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could pay an additional $3,500 a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts. Deductibles also jumped this year by about $1,000 a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.
Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about $1 trillion over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid. In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a “work requirement” on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.
But, as the editorial board notes, the “work requirement” is really a “paperwork requirement” that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork. As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.
They estimated that up to 15 million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, will force hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to cut back services or close. Although still legally required to provide services to everyone, they will not be reimbursed for the cost of such care and will drop labor and delivery services, for example. Those closures will not just mean poorer health care, they will mean lost jobs.
As the New York Times editorial board noted, Republicans deliberately put off the implementation of most of the Medicaid cuts until after the 2026 midterms.
New York Times reader KAM from Marin County, California, noted in a comment on the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defines onerous paperwork differently than Republicans in Congress. Bessent recently announced the Treasury will no longer require shell companies to disclose even the name, address, and identification of people who own an interest of more than 25% or who exercise “significant control” over the company, as Congress required in the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act. Congress designed the law to combat money laundering, but Bessent says the paperwork puts an undue burden on businesses.
In 1883, sociologist William Graham Sumner published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, concluding that the answer was: nothing. In a time when unregulated industrialization was making fortunes on the one hand and driving down wages on the other, creating extremes of rich and poor, Sumner turned on its head the traditional idea that the economy of the United States would provide a living to any man who worked hard. Instead, Sumner argued that anyone who did not succeed in the United States must be “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”
Not only was it unfair to make “the industrious and the prudent” responsible for such shiftless men, he wrote, it would ruin the country by destroying individual enterprise. Sumner called for a “laissez-faire” world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty and die to keep the U.S. from becoming a place where lazy people wanted a handout. In the end, such people needed to be purged from society for the good of the nation.
At the time, those succeeding in the industrializing economy nodded along with Sumner. The Republican New York Times editor wrote that even though Sumner’s “views are singularly hard and uncompromising, it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one’s finer instinct hurt by their apparent cruelty.”
The Trump administration seems to have embraced Sumner’s belief that the nation depends upon the survival of the fittest.
As microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole reported last year in Ars Technica, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to believe that the key to health is not to rely on the vaccines proven to prevent infectious diseases, but rather to have a strong immune system fortified, as he wrote in a 2021 book, “through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those who support vaccines of misleading the American public for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry.
This seems to explain why he has claimed—without evidence—that the Texas children who died of measles were malnourished and that “[w]e don’t know what was killing” the 83 Samoans who died in the country’s 2019 measles epidemic, during which Kennedy associated with members of the anti-vaccine movement there. It would also explain why he promised to turn away from promoting vaccination to exploring new treatments for measles, including vitamins.
And it would help to explain the effort to change the vaccine schedule for children by separating the MMR vaccine into single-disease vaccines. Rather than two shots, requiring two doctor’s visits, the vaccine series would require six. Experts say such a change will mean poorer children will not get the whole vaccine series, putting them and their communities at risk.
If overall health can fight off germs and illness, then measures like the pasteurization of milk and the tracking of foodborne illnesses are unnecessary.
The U.S. is experiencing a particularly bad wave of foodborne illness. It’s driven both by hot weather that nurtures food contamination and by federal funding cuts that scaled back the ability of federal agencies to conduct food inspections and provide grants to state and local health departments that used to be able to trace outbreaks quickly.
Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that so far this year, the U.S. has reported about 10,500 cases of foodborne illness. Between 2021 and 2025, the annual average was about 1,500 cases. At least 9,481 people in 17 states have fallen ill with cyclosporiasis carried by lettuce from Taylor Farms, and thousands more cases are being investigated. It’s the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, spurred by cuts of more than 40% to food safety detection systems.
It’s not just lettuce. Frozen organic blueberries sold in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia have been recalled for E. coli; fresh jalapeños from Taylor Farms have been recalled for salmonella; 1.5 million dozen eggs sold in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico have also been recalled for salmonella. Anna Skinner of Newsweek notes that while the focus has been on produce, in fact, FDA records show what she calls “a steady stream of recalls” that includes “prepared foods, salad dressings, soups, bakery items and ready-to-eat products,” potentially contaminated with salmonella, Listeria, or foreign materials, including pieces of metal.
As former U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in USA Today, “You cannot effectively focus on chronic diseases while you’re being repeatedly overwhelmed by acute infectious outbreaks.” He called for restoring the mandatory tracking of all eight pathogens that were covered by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) before the administration cut the surveillance down to just two, and for filling the leadership positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that are currently vacant. He called for inspectors to prioritize high-risk foods and imports and for the Department of Health and Human Services to reaffirm that vaccines are safe and effective.
In the 1890s, the determination of those like William Graham Sumner to keep government out of society in order to promote individualism had undermined public health and safety. Producers adulterated tuberculosis-carrying milk with chalk and formaldehyde, decorated candy with lead paint, and scooped melted ice cream off the bottom of the vat to refreeze for sale the next day, and what was in sausage meat was a terrifying mystery.
In the early twentieth century, middle-class Americans demanded regulation of the food and drug industry, ushering in the reforms that we now call the Progressive Era.
The American right is now obsessed with freeing Derek Chauvin, the man who kneeled on George Floyd's neck leading to his death. This week, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, has been tweeting about Derek Chauvin nonstop. He writes, As anyone who endeavors to understand the facts knows, his murder conviction was morally and legally wrong. Musk also said this, Derek Chauvin was unjustly convicted of murder, therefore he should be freed. The facts show that he was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for a death to occur. The Christian nationalist Baptist leader, William Wolfe, agrees with Musk. He writes in response to Musk's tweet, Derek Chauvin is in jail because of one thing and one thing only, anti-white racism. The only crime, quote unquote, he committed is being born with white skin.
What we see in these tweets is a couple of things, one of which is obvious. There is a homicide denial of George Floyd's murder. And even though all of us watched the video and we have read the coroner's report, nonetheless, William Wolfe, a Christian nationalist, Elon Musk, a civilizational chauvinist, and many others are arguing that Derek Chauvin did absolutely nothing wrong and the only reason he's in jail is because he's white. Here is Ben Shapiro talking about the same issue.
Ben Shapiro wrote:If we are issuing pardons, however, there is one person that President Trump should pardon from federal charges forthwith. It would be incredibly controversial, but I think that it's absolutely necessary. That person is Derek Chauvin. President Trump should, in fact, pardon Derek Chauvin. He should. He should pardon him his federal charges.
If we are talking about reversing the evils of the last several years in American life, obviously COVID and its handling was a massive evil. Destroyed the economy. Set us on a path to fiscal insanity. Destroyed children. Led to massive health-related cover-ups. Just horrifying all the way around. And President Trump has taken on a lot of those things. But when it came to BLM, the inciting event for the BLM riots that caused $2 billion in property damage in the United States and set America's race relations on their worst footing in my lifetime was, in fact, the railroading of Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd.
Now, I want to come back to this, but what's important to notice here is that Shapiro starts with rectifying the wrongs of COVID and what happened in 2020 with Black Lives Matter. He argues that Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong because, in fact, George Floyd was somebody who was high on methamphetamines at the time and died of natural causes. Now, this is not an original argument on the part of Musk, Wolf, or Shapiro. Tucker Carlson made this argument way back in 2023.
Ben Shapiro wrote:Now that we know that it was not in fact a pandemic of the unvaccinated, now that we know that Ukraine is not actually winning the war against Russia, it could be time to revisit some of the other slogans we've been assured are true and ordered to repeat. Are they in fact true? Did, for example, a racist white cop actually murder a man called George Floyd, a civil rights leader, in Minneapolis on Memorial Day of 2020? Now we've been told that that happened, told it relentlessly for more than three years. So at this point, we've been told it so much that pretty much everybody seems to believe it. Now, we haven't just been told it, we watched it. Almost anyone listening or watching to this report will have seen the video of George Floyd having his life ended by Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck. What all of these commentators are trying to do is to say, well, this is common knowledge coming from a regime that A woke state, a liberal media that wants you to feel bad about being a white person because there's a war on you, white people, and therefore you should see this event as false history. This was not a murder. This was nothing more than a drug addict dying of natural causes while disrupting the peace. In the video, Carlson says, George Floyd, according to the official autopsy, was not murdered. So this was not a killing. It was yet another narcotics overdose.
Now, this is not true. And I'll just point you to what happened in the autopsy report. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner's autopsy did not record neck injuries. However, the report concluded that Floyd died from, quote, cardiopulmonary arrest, complicating law enforcement subdual restraint and neck compression. He died, in essence, of an abrupt loss of heart function in a person because he could not breathe.
Now, I could spend the next 10 minutes going through all the evidence that this was, in fact, a murder. I'm not going to do that. I just gave you the language from the autopsy report. You've seen the video, you remember what happened, and I'm not going to try to prove this and litigate it all over again. What I want to dig into is what's underneath this united claim from the American right that Derek Chauvin is innocent and in fact should be pardoned. What I argued last week in a piece at Rolling Stone is that there is an alliance among Western civilizational chauvinists and Christian nationalists. People like William Wolfe, who's an out-and-out Christian nationalist, who is a colleague. Thank you. Wolf and Engel and Isker argue that we should get rid of 100 million people from the United States because that's what it would take to restore, quote, heritage America. If you are a person of color, if you are not a Christian, they do not believe you can be a real American. Well, what do they have in common with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, one who notoriously is not religious, somebody who very rarely, if at all, talks about God or Jesus or Christian faith? What I wrote in Rolling Stone last week is this. While extremist Christians and Silicon Valley technocrats often disagree on issues related to AI, surveillance and family, they are aligned on the idea that saving Western civilization from external threats like Muslims and migrants and internal threats like Antifa, trans people and feminists is the paramount issue of our time.
Even though Musk is not religious, many Christian nationalists see him as an ally in saving Western civilization from the foreign and domestic vandals they believe threatened it. By couching their shared mission in civilizational rather than religious terms, they can forge a loose coalition against the groups they perceive as common enemies and existential threats to our way of life. Now this is the argument that I make at length in my new book, American Caesar. There I show that the alliance among technocrats, Protestant Reconstructionists, and radical traditional Catholics is based on the idea of saving Western civilization. But as I've said many times on this channel, saving Western civilization to them is not about the Enlightenment ideals of free thought or rational thinking. It is not about Athenian democracy or the republic that was built in Rome. It is about Caesar. It's about a strongman who will order the country in a way that will protect it from those they believe are external enemies and those who are domestic threats. In this case, the fascination with George Floyd and Derek Chauvin comes down to this. They believe that Antifa is the antithesis to the kind of social order they want. Queer people. Folks who are from other places, who have recent immigrant stories, perhaps mixed backgrounds, people who are atheist, people who are not Christian. Antifa is a holding pattern. Antifa is a structure that holds all of the categories of people they consider not really American. Well, Antifa is something that's been a kind of obsession of the American right for a few years. But before that, it was Black Lives Matter.
If you remember, Black Lives Matter became in their mind a terrorist organization. It became an organization that was trying to tear down the order of the United States. It was responsible for the, quote, burning of the cities across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. So when Ben Shapiro says it's time for us to rectify a wrong and he points to COVID and then he says all of the things that happens with Black Lives Matter, he gives away the game. He's saying that what has to be rectified is what those people did to our country. What they did to our cities and our police forces, the way that they try to have policies adopted that would change how law enforcement treat people in the United States. And that includes freeing Derek Chauvin. So they're going to couch it in the idea that Chauvin was innocent, that what he did was kneel on the shoulder of George Floyd, not on his neck, that Floyd was high on drugs and therefore probably at risk of dying anyway of an overdose.
I've already read you the coroner's report. I'm not going to go into that again. What I want you to see here is that there is an alliance among those who hold that people who are not white patriarchal men, those who have a different understanding of how society should work. Why does this matter? It matters because they may give lip service to an argument that Derek Chauvin was in fact innocent. But what's really here is a revenge fantasy. That they don't want to see any white person in authority facing consequences. That they don't want someone like Chauvin to have to be jailed because he murdered someone. That cannot be the story. That cannot be what happened. It must be something else. It must be that it was a black man overdosing on drugs and assist him out to get white people. That has to be it because there's no way it could be that this man, a white man, We cannot admit that. We cannot have that in an example. And that needs to be rectified. And if it did, if it was rectified, it would be a powerful symbol of the way the United States works. That's why Ben Shapiro says he should be pardoned. That's why Musk and Wolf and so many others are on this train. Now, one of the points that's been made online is that even if Trump pardoned Derek Chauvin, he would still face state charges. And Tim Walz has said that there's no way he's going to get out of those state charges. He would spend his time in a state prison rather than a federal prison. In response, William Wolfe said this:
William Wolfe wrote:What we need to start doing with these blue states holding political prisoners under unjust pretense, fraudulent convictions, is to treat them like foreign countries who do the same. Sanction them, deny their officials access to Washington, cut off their funds, etc. Send in hostage release negotiators and twist the screws on them until they free Derek Chauvin, Tina Peters, etc.
Let's key in on one really important part of this post. He says, we should treat them like foreign countries. We should treat them like foreign countries. What he's saying there is blue states, those that are under the political power of Democrats, those that don't align with the Christian nationalist vision for the country, those whose policies don't align with the Western civilizationalist discourse coming from Musk and his allies. Well, they're like foreign countries. We should treat them as such. We should treat them like they are foreign enemies. We should call them communists. We should call them Islamists. We should call them in bed with foreign cartels because that's a way to explain why they would act this way. And it's also a justification for us to treat them this way, to deny officials access to Washington. Unconstitutional. Not part of our democratic process. Totally against policy and law. But we should do it anyway because they are like foreign enemies. We should send in hostage release negotiators as if this is a foreign entity that has taken over an American state, as if this is a situation where an outside force is colonizing the United States in some form. This is a window in how they think about anyone who doesn't align with their vision. And the argument I make in Rolling Stone last week and in my book, American Caesar, is that this is why they see democracy as a problem and not a solution.
One of the things that I think is so key in understanding this is that in 1999, Paul Weirich wrote a letter. Now, Paul Weirich was the architect of the moral majority, the mastermind behind the religious right, the guy that made Jerry Falwell into the national figure that he was as the leader of those movements. Paul Weirich, though, after decades of organizing, said in this letter, "I no longer think there is a moral majority." He was admitting that all those years of electioneering and political maneuvering were not going to reach the conclusions he wanted because the country was, in fact, not majority on his side. That, in fact, the majority of the country was opposed to his patriarchal white Christian retrograde vision of the United States. And what he concluded in that letter is that the only way to win would be through guerrilla warfare tactics and tearing down the institutions of the United States. To me, that was a canary in the coal mine from 25 years ago. Because now, if you examine the rhetoric of people as disparate as Elon Musk and William Wolf, they agree wholeheartedly with what Paul Weyrich says. There's no sense here of wanting to work democratically with fellow citizens who disagree with you. There is a sense that we are foreign enemies, people they have to overcome to run over, even if that means trampling democracy in the process. Democracy is not sacred to them. It's in fact a problem. The solution to restoring American greatness is not power to the people, but power away from the people in the hands of a few or the one who will restore the order that they desire.
When they say to rescue civilization, what they mean is a civilization that works for a few and suppresses the many in the name of God and order.
