I want to borrow some of your valuable time today to explain how I would not only save the faltering MSNBC, but also help it positively thrive, all while putting Republicans’ ongoing attack on America and our flickering Democracy on the front burner of the national discussion.

I admit that I come to all this as an unlikely savior.

As a curmudgeonly newspaperman, I have not been a fan of 24/7 cable news ever since it so unfortunately came into existence. I mean, what in the hell prompted us to think we needed “BREAKING NEWS” shoveled at us all day via these oh-so-sweet and handsome television toothies to further complicate our busy lives?

Much better newspaper professionals packaged all you needed to know in a neat, tight bundle delivered at your doorstep so you could process it all with your coffee in the morning, or an extra-dry martini after work. And if you needed a stiff chaser, there was always Walter Cronkite kicking around to serve it to you straight.

When it was clear the never-ending news blaring from our TV sets was here to stay, I let go this stellar quote in the newsroom one gloomy afternoon: “Turn that shit off. Nobody has time to watch this amateur crap all day.”

Well, it turns out I was wrong about all that, and I’ll spare you what I said about the Internet when it barged into our lives, because chances are you’d quit reading right here and now.

(I did think the Beatles would be a major hit when they came long, so occasionally my predictions hit in spectacular fashion.)

Ever since the latest godawful election night in America, MSNBC’s ratings have been in the toilet, with some parts of their programming dropping audience share by nearly 50 percent. Turns out, many viewers aren’t happy with their appeasement of the American-attacking Trump in some parts of their 24/7 programming, or their attempt at “fair and balanced” news coverage that preceded the election by normalizing a hardcore racist who writes love letters to dictators. Then there was the not-so-subtle banging on the Democratic Party by some of their mouthy, daytime anchors, who just couldn’t acknowledge the party was correct on nearly every single major issue, but ironically lacked the bandwidth to tout their stellar work.

There’s speculation that MSNBC’s ratings dive will slow when the America-attacking Trump is sworn in on January 20th, and all the terrible things he ran on officially become all-too real. Good people are just tired right now, and trying to claim the next two months for themselves, before all the blood righteously pumps from their hearts with a gush straight into their exploding heads.

Fox News went through a similar down cycle after Joe Biden beat the America-attacker in 2020. The right-wing propaganda station lost lots of its viewers, but they all returned in time.

I am not sure that will be the case here — my shaky history of predictions aside.

The gods at Comcast, who own MSNBC, have announced they have plans to “spin off” the network, along with some other channels in their vast catalogue into a separate company. Nobody knows what in the hell all this means, but in researching this write, I can tell you there are a s----ton of “media insiders” who aren’t shy about making semi-educated guesses.

Some have speculated whatever it is that is spun will be sold to the highest bidder — maybe even Fox’s Rupert Murdoch. Others say the place will just look a little different, but remain under current ownership.

Only one thing seems crystal clear: America has never needed reliable, left-leaning news programming more than it does right now.

The notorious messaging problem wasn’t as prevalent for Democrats this past election cycle, but platforming their message was. They (we) simply no longer have the bandwidth to compete with the Republican’s myriad industrial pollutants that poison the air with their lies. They are literally everywhere. They control the radio airways, our TV channels, and the digital media. Billionaires like the grotesque Elon Musk are throwing their money and their allegiances to fascists like Vladimir Putin to help finish off America for good with their odious, never-ending lies.

Our corporate media is now officially disgraceful, and failed to do its job by giving the greatest internal threat to America since the Civil War the attention it deserved. Democracy and our rights as Americans are hanging precariously by a thread, and these incompetent, bought-off boobs in the working press are in large part to blame for it. Regular visitors to this space will know how I feel about all this and them, so for the sake of time, I’ll just leave it at that for now.

The communications landscape has been turned completely on its head, and liberals’ rigid, straight up approach to reaching people is honorable in its intent and embarrassing in its execution and results. Unless and until this is fixed and pronto, Democrats and left-leaners in this country are in deep, deep, trouble.

We are losing the communications battle, but if MSNBC would just get the hell out of its own way, we could start to reclaim the high ground.

Here’s how that happens:

• Start listening to your audience, MSNBC. They hate you right now. They believe you have failed and betrayed them. Stop trying to be some “both-sides-do-it” news organization, and start capturing the millions of people who are starving for truth, and know a revolting racist when they see and hear one. Stop trying to be too many different things to too many different audiences. Immediately dump the half-baked garbage on your station — like, Morning Joe, for instance. Seriously, what is it that show supposed to be doing? What crucial niche is it fulfilling? Is showcasing two lily-white people kissing the two-ton ass of a dictator that important? Their stupid show bleeds into a significant problem I’ll delve into a bit more shortly: What the hell is your penchant for recruiting Republican refugees as headliners on your station? It’s disgusting. Start listening to what your audience wants immediately. Start giving them what they want instead of what you think they should want. It’s haughty as hell. They, not you, are all that matters.
• Screw it, let’s deal with this Republican problem right now. The station is littered with them. Do these people really think their noxious party is coming back from the America-attacking Trump? Is being a part of the gruesome Tea Party movement something to be proud of and looked back on with reverence? Are trying to kill abortion rights and Obamacare a badge of honor? Were things “great” for them when they had the House and Senate back then? And former staffers for the hideous George W. Bush are everywhere. Here’s a bulletin: He is a terrible, terrible man. A damn war criminal. A complete idiot. I mean, what the hell am I supposed to make of all this, people? Look, I’m not here to entirely wipe ‘em out, but how is it they have ascended to such loud platforms in the Democratic communications ranks? The Lincoln Project, despite some pretty significant hiccups, has done some good work, but nobody deserves extra credit for simply doing the right thing and turning away from a revolting political party that falls at the fat, little feet of a complete lying racist, deviant, who assaults women and our country and brags about it. But MSNBC can’t seem to get enough these old, white Republican men, and as an old, white liberal man I find it really creepy and disturbing. Here’s what I’d like to hear them all say, “We were wrong. The party we supported is terrible, it really is. Turns out the folks on the Left were right about us all these years. I fervently hope they will accept our apologies.” Otherwise, they can hit the road, and shouldn’t be trusted. I have warned before that many of them are just dying to do the wrong thing again, and go back to their revolting party.
• Don’t be shy about letting your audience know that you are direct counter-programing to the ghastly Fox network, and in fact are taking them and their bulls--- head on. Make a point of destroying them. Belittle them. Fact-check the hell out of them. This will be delightfully easy to do and so much damn fun to watch. WE NEED SOME FUN, DAMMIT. Say what you will about Murdoch’s odious network, but it has succeeded beyond the ancient man’s wildest dreams. There is no America-attacking Trump without Fox. Period. They are ratings stalwarts that traffic in lies and are expert at exploiting what is buried in their audience’s cold, white hearts. They are proof as Mark Twain once quipped, that “a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Call them out on this 24/7.
• Focus. Make it clear as day you are 100 percent, left-leaning programming that proudly and unswervingly stands for women’s right, human rights, voters’ rights, environmental rights, workers’ rights, healthcare rights, and Social Security and Medicare rights. In other words, all the things the Democrats have stood for during the past 100 years. Except too many Americans don’t know that in 2024, because the message and that fact have been completely stolen. This horses--- that Republicans are running with the idea that they care about working-class Americans is grand larceny and should have NEVER been allowed to happen. By their dirty deeds, Republicans actually HATE working-class Americans. This has been a massive messaging problem for the Democratic Party, yes. But the pathetic mainstream media, with your help, MSNBC, helped people buy into this. Stop trying to do too many things half-decently, and home in on doing one thing great: spreading the truth.
• Give Pete Buttigieg a big, fat contract and as much airtime as he wants. I’m being partial here, but the dude might be the best communicator I have ever heard. Maybe even consider some Crossfire variant where he calmly smashes a conservative lackey to smithereens on a weekly basis. Again: WE NEED SOME DAMN FUN.
• Enough already with all these double-talking “legal experts” on your shows. This should need no explaining after what happened first with Bill Barr and the Mueller Report, and then Merrick Garland and the attack on America he ignored. It took forever to hear a single criticism of Garland from any of these on-air lawyers. Some still haven’t gotten there yet. They have been wrong about almost everything, but have proven the legal system in this country is in a complete shambles. The notion of law and order, and that nobody is above the law in the United States is a pathetic joke. Our Supreme Court is the most gory example of this. Give me legal people who say what need saying in plain, non-lawyered terms, and will be critical of other lawyers, and keep the rest of them the hell off the air.
• Create the biggest, ever-expanding, liberal, pro-Democracy bubble in history, and don’t apologize for it. If the worst thing that happens is that your growing audience is stuffed full of righteous, good-hearted people, while all hell comes raining down from the White House the next four years, things could be worse. You have a real opportunity here, MSNBC. Tens of millions of us, are looking for a place we can trust to hang our hats, while the storm rages. I suggest you get the hell out of your own way and just take it.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

I have been alive long enough to see presidents shot dead in the street, civil rights leaders gunned down in their hotel rooms and horrible, horrible wars started on the wretched basis of disgusting lies. But of all the things I have seen in my long life, nothing compares to Wednesday, January 6th, 2021.

On that day ... a terrible, singular day that is burned into our hearts and minds, an evil, broken sociopath who had been voted out of power by the citizens of the United States of America did everything he could to hold onto that power and set the match that led to the most gruesome internal attack on this country since the Civil War.

And when that attack was at full boil, the entire world watching with horror, the President of the United States, the son of a b---- who triggered it, did nothing to stop it for more than three hours.

Instead, he hoped that it would prevail.

Even the monster’s ghastly family begged him to call off his rabid dogs, while brave, overmatched police officers were stomped into the pavement and beaten with American flags -- FLAGS!

Members of Congress -- Republicans and Democrats -- ran for their lives. The monster’s vice president was whisked away by the Secret Service so as not to be hanged.

Finally, after nearly 200 minutes of doing nothing but root for its success, we know that the America-attacking Trump finally relented and tried to quiet all the dark voices that live inside his fat head. We know he pushed himself away from his TV in the White House dining room, where he was watching his attack unfold, and huffed and puffed his way to the White House lawn, where he recorded a message to the nation in which he ordered his fascist thugs to go home — but not before telling them that he loved them.

This foul, disgusting man told the people who took a hammer to our country and killed and beat on cops that he f------ loved them ...

Once these gruesome thugs got the orders from General Mayhem to disperse, they packed away their ropes, flags, pepper spray, zip ties and radios into their duffle bags and hightailed it the hell out of town …

Again: On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump attacked our country and tried to incinerate our votes to remain in power. Fake electors were lining up in states across our nation to overturn the election. Law enforcement officers were beaten to a pulp. He watched and did nothing.

It was appalling, and terrible, but at least — AT LEAST — there would be consequences, because NOBODY was going to get away with attacking the United States of America without facing severe consequences.

And, hell, it would be the easiest case ever to make. Hundreds of millions of people watched it unfold, after all.

Unless your Attorney General is Merrick Garland.

Instead of moving with alacrity after his appointment to AG, while the political winds were at his back, and leveling the full weight of the law against the disgusting traitor, Garland apparently decided to avoid the whole thing like Trump avoids vegetables.

It got so bad that Garland was forced out of hiding by the press and many House Democrats 18 MONTHS following the attack on America to give any indication he was moving on Trump and the so-called lawmakers who provided cover and aided in the breathtaking assault.

Finally, while everybody leaned in close during a July 20th, 2022 news conference, the quiet man said in an emphatic whisper that “no person is above the law” before he presumably returned to his cave for hibernation.

So we all got back to waiting. That’s when I began to fret nothing would happen …

Finally, on November 18, 2022, nearly two years after the attack on America, Garland, the alleged three-dimensional chess-playing, grandmaster law-and-order expert carefully considered the board, and deftly put himself in check by pawning off his responsibility to somebody else.

After Trump did the most predictable thing ever by announcing his crooked run for president to avoid prosecution, the pathetic Garland appointed a special counsel named Jack Smith to handle things.

It is impossible to believe that Garland was the only person in America who didn’t think Trump would run again, especially if it meant the possibility of saving his two-ton a--. So why did he wait 22 months until Trump made his run “official” to abruptly change course and appoint a special counsel?

I have come to the grudging conclusion that Joe Biden was at least initially not much interested in seeing Trump prosecuted for his myriad crimes. There has been reporting indicating as much.

I am not saying that he was pumping the brakes on any investigations, but my hunch is he was hoping Trump’s political life would die a slow and natural death in the months following the 2020 election, and he could get to the vital work of gluing this shattered country back together again.

After all, this is what he ran on. It was an admirable notion until it became crystal clear in the weeks and months following the election that Trump was not going away and, in fact, would continue lobbing bombs at us, first from the White House and later, the safety of his country club in Florida.

The America-attacking Trump was a clear and present danger to our country and needed to be jailed for the rest of his miserable life.

<sigh>

We know now, Garland and Smith never laid a glove on him, and on November 5th, 2024, the America-attacking jackal was re-elected as the President of the United States of America.

Our worst nightmare had come to life.

On Monday we learned that our so-called “Justice” Department was abandoning the two criminal cases it took them forever to file against the most dangerous person in the world.

Less than three weeks after the most consequential election in American history, they waved the white flag of surrender. They were cutting and running. How appropriate for these weaklings.

It didn’t stop them from all their double-talking, however, which frankly I could have done without. I have heard enough from these appeasers forever. I just wish they'd get the hell out of our lives and stay there.

They have done enough damage to the United States of America.

Because no matter what kind of bulls--- they are lobbing at us now to explain their way out of the terrible mess they left us in, only one thing is true at this terrible moment in American history:

Justice delayed is justice denied.

NOW READ: Your holiday mail is at risk as USPS copes with alarming rise of theft and security issues

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

In the wake of this terrible election, I will NOT be a part of this self-loathing and whining by too many in Democratic “leadership” in this country right now as they try to convince people like me — a high school dropout — that I am some college-educated elite who doesn't understand what the majority of the “hardworking” white voters want in this country.

They can save it.

Look, if these complete morons on the Right want to vote against their self-interests and America, they are beyond help, and all I will do is keep working my a-- off to make sure people understand this.

What we have is a failure to communicate on the Left, but much more on that in a minute ... (And a warning: I am typing like the sailor I was right now, so if four-letter words offend you, you can skip all this. And happy Veterans Day to my fellow vets.)

I will not take even a scintilla of blame for supporting the smart, qualified, career public servant who understands the dangers of unchecked racism and fascism and was part of an administration that inherited a dumpster fire from the son of a b---- who attacked us and provided 16 million jobs to the American public.

So listen to me, you haughty, Democratic know-nothings, I have seen what the majority of white voters want because of WHAT THEY TAKE:

-They TAKE Social Security and Medicare.

-They TAKE the recent cuts in the obscenely high drug prices.

-They TAKE the higher wages and better-paying jobs.

-They TAKE the high-paying union jobs.

-They TAKE the money from the America Rescue Plan.

-They TAKE the money for disaster relief.

-They TAKE the millions of jobs from the once-in-a-century Infrastructure Law.

-The TAKE the good-paying jobs and starter money from the CHIPS and Science Act.

-They TAKE the healthcare that doesn’t penalize people for pre-existing conditions.

-They TAKE the childcare tax credits.

-They TAKE the free lunches for their children, so they don’t go hungry.

-They TAKE the new broadband Internet access.

-They TAKE all of these things and much, much more than good-hearted Democrats have worked hard to provide them during this administration and the decades before.

Me? I support the party that is providing these whining babies all this because it is the right thing to do, even if they refuse to grow up and get the f--- out of their own way to see it.

I am not remotely wealthy, but I gladly pay a s----ton more taxes living in the suburbs here in Wisconsin than these brainwashed babies do in the country so that THEY can benefit.

Now I ask YOU: WHAT DO THEY GIVE PEOPLE LIKE ME?????????

I’ll wait …

You know, I see their giant f------ Trump signs stuck hard in the farm fields in my state and wonder just what it in the hell it is they could possibly be thinking about. If the fascist, orange goon they supported follows through and runs undocumented and “lesser-thans” out of this country those farms they own will most certainly die.

Worse. They know it. They know full well those farms can only exist because of the labor our new immigrants provide and the government subsidies they have been receiving from me (us) forever. That on one hand they need these folks (and funds) to operate, and the other, still support the man who campaigned on running them out of this country, is some of the most hardcore bigotry I have ever heard of.

And our Democratic leadership wants us to try to wrap our heads around THAT?

The truth is these people support the America-attacking blowhard because he stirs their cold blood. He makes them feel good about looking backward instead of at all the possibilities ahead. He makes them feel good about thinking they are the only thing that matters and that they have somehow been cheated out of their dark, empty lives.

They aren’t garbage. They are actually worse than that: They are selfish.

So again, WHAT ARE THEY DOING FOR ME?????

I’m still waiting …

These whiny white people are angry because they’ve decided to plant their a-----in place and expect everybody to meet them where they are and see things their way. They want to be coddled and held, just like the babies they are.

They don’t want to make America better. They want to make everybody else’s lives worse.

All they are is angry, and have finally found a lewd, racist conman who can put a megaphone to their tantrums, and deal the rest of America plenty of pain. He has no goddamn answers for them or us.

ZERO.

He gives tax breaks to billionaires and multi-millionaires who supported his crooked run for office and writes love letters to the dictators who have infiltrated our political system and completely jammed its gears to help him get elected.

That is ALL HE DID. I mean, besides assembling a Supreme Court that believes he should have unchecked power so that he is free to do whatever the f--- he wants to — like strip women of control over their own bodies.

So go ahead, and keep reading this wrong, you Inside-the-Beltway morons, but don’t expect me to listen to it.

What we have right now is a MASSIVE messaging problem.

From the minute the Biden Administration took power it worked like hell to tackle a global crisis that was exacerbated by the previous administration. I mean, holy s--- even infrastructure got done, and do you know who has benefited most from that? White people.

If that didn't resonate, it’s not because it didn’t happen. It’s because too many people didn’t know about it.

Do you think these Trump bottom-feeders are listening to NPR or reading the both-sides bullshit the corporate media slops out at us every hour — the very media which completely missed the biggest story in American history: The threat and the looming fall of our democratic republic?

Now THERE are some elitist, overly educated folks right there, if you are into pointing fingers right now.

Seriously …

These selfish Conservative babies exited the road to progress years ago to search for a dead end where they could be coddled and burped by right-wing phonies who are happy to make house calls in exchange for their undivided time and money. They aren’t interested in real news; they are interested in propaganda that makes them feel good about themselves and America, which never existed. It’s all over their radio stations and in their churches … It’s on the Internet, their TVs, and even in their newspapers that Conservative billionaires have bought up in increasing numbers.

There is nothing comparable to this information machine on the Left, and as I wrote a few weeks ago, it needs to be addressed, but quick.

Until and unless this gets fixed, we are done.

And we don’t have long, because fascism is here and spreading through the countryside like wildfire, and taking root in places like those damn farms.

These white people have proven without a shadow of a doubt that they will literally eat their own if it means holding onto the power they have had in this country for 248 years.

Because THAT is what this is all about, you Democratic dummies. And what really confuses me is that while you might not know much about the electorate, you do know that. Power is everything in politics, and your mealy-mouthed approach to getting it back is doomed.

What you most certainly need to hear is this: We will end you, if you don’t have the self-decency and the fight to scream long and hard for all the good things Democrats and the Left have done for America, and what little the people you want to appease right now have done for us.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

One of the most grotesque things a journalist or any media entity can do is to make a story about — or draw attention to — themselves.

Unfortunately, this happens all the time these days, in the United States of Clickbait.

The crap that passes for news on TV — MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance — do this with reckless abandon. And please stop watching this nonsense, dear readers. I know for a fact, you are better than this.

Places like The New York Times and The Washington Post not-so-subtly draw attention to themselves every chance they get by making front-page news of their never-ending political polls. These papers can literally go on for days touting their manufactured garbage, and actually employ well-paid staffers who write and edit about nothing else.

I mean, why report urgent stories warning about the looming fall of our Democracy if you can just pay staffers to endlessly weigh in on a bunch of meaningless numbers that are nothing but a big f------ guess?

It’s reprehensible, it really is.

Our corporate media is a terrible joke right now, and thankfully, more and more people are becoming aware of this. These major newspapers and TV shows are dropping viewers and readers by the tens of thousands, and deserve every bit of it.

So having typed all that …

… you just knew where all this was going, didn't you?

Yep, I want to quickly talk about me and a story WARNING SHOT that I produced Tuesday.

Respectfully ...

Since moving my office over to Substack just 27 months ago, I haven’t written a piece that has garnered anything even remotely close to the attention this one has. It has resonated with people and I take heart. To give you some idea of how well-read it has been, it is on pace to get five times the number of page views I normally receive from a story.

I am proud of the write, stand behind it, and as I said in the lede:

“I considered waiting to publish this dire warning about what will be coming in the wake of the America-attacking Trump’s inauguration in two months, because too many good people are being asked to process too many terrible things right now.”

Of all the awful things the America-attacking Trump has planned for the citizens of the United States, attempting to use our military to exact his revenge will be the most heinous thing of all. He is a monster without chains, and has a 6-3 Supreme Court that will allow him to do all his terrible harrumphing through the countryside.

Anyway … once the story was published, my one-person marketing team, me, hung it in all the likely places — Notes, Twitter, Facebook and Bluesky hoping it might get some attention. Except only two of those places allowed it on their platform.

In Twitter’s case (and, yes, I am working my way out of that garbage dump, but not before I bring over as many of my 80,000+ followers as possible before I do) even though it did not allow the link to the story to get eyes as is their anti-free speech policy, I was able to post about the story, and did my best to steer readers to the link on my profile that then took them to this Substack site where the story is housed.

Sometimes I am smarter than the average bear.

And a million thanks to all of you who have subscribed from Twitter this week. Hundreds and hundreds of you have come over, and I am appreciative as hell. Welcome, and I will do everything I can to make it worth your time and money. The November 5th attack on our Democracy is taking all my time these days.

In Facebook’s case, they just flat censored the story. I put the post on my author’s page, which in all candor, I don’t water and nourish near enough, and it was taken down saying it was “spam” and violated community standards — as if a site that allows predators to stalk our children has any damn standards.

I went to Facebook politely screaming blood murder about this, and they have so far ignored my concerns. Many of you have told me that you, too, tried to post the piece with similar results. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your efforts.

Which takes me to the main reason I am in full belly-aching mode right now.

As the Republicans push us toward fascism and authoritarian rule, you can expect to see far more of this type of thing. If they get their way, and I can’t think of any sound reason they won’t, they will take a sledgehammer to the Fourth Estate and try to beat it to death.

We know this, because they have told us this is exactly what they intend to do.

Ice-cold irony then that the mainstream media, which is currently screaming loudest about this now, failed us catastrophically before by not reporting on the consequences of another Trump “presidency.” They refused to give the greatest internal threat to America since the Civil War the editorial weight it deserves, and now here we are: royally screwed.

I have typed before to you that information is POWER, (See Tip No. 1 in my guide to the way out of this catastrophic mess ... ) and Trump’s Republicans will do everything they can to mitigate that power.

While a huge part of me wants to see the corporate media get exactly what it deserves for their atrocious both-sides, shoddy approach to covering the most pressing story of our times, we still need them around to stand up and call power into account when they occasionally feel brave enough to do so.

We also really need to support the other credible media sources out there, that are doing tremendous work and don’t have the vast resources of the largest planets in our communications orbit, places like the NYT and WaPo.

Trump has said in no uncertain terms that he will be going after everybody and anybody who crosses him — like me, for instance. This is what authoritarian regimes do with vigor. They could easily wreck many of us by simply levying bullshit lawsuits and/our suing us at random.

Bigger media operations have legal teams that handle nothing but these kinds of things. Ninety-nine percent of the rest of us don’t.

The America-attacking Trump is going to spend a lot of his time trying to stifle and tax free speech, while pouring those profits into his bottomless pockets.

And if you think I’m sensationalizing the threat, consider that on Thursday the Republican-controlled House voted to pass H.R. 9495 — also known as the "Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act."

The bill looks innocent enough, allegedly written to authorize the treasury secretary to designate some nonprofit organizations as supporters of terrorism and strip them of tax-exempt status.

Except who decides which nonprofits deal in terror? What through the bloodshot eyes of say the American-attacking Trump, even defines terror?

Thanks to reporting in AlterNet:

“H.R. 9495 could feasibly be used against some of the groups that vocally opposed Trump during his first administration, like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center among others. It could also potentially be used against nonprofit news outlets like ProPublica, Mother Jones, the Texas Tribune and the Center for Investigative Reporting.”

One needs not stretch the imagination too much to see the America-attacker and his Court going after some of these news outlets and organizations simply because they offend him.

Worse — much worse — while all the no votes were from Democrats, 15 of them had the unmitigated gall to support the bill including Reps. Colin Allred (D-Texas), Yadira Caraveo (D-Colo.) Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).

I’m guessing they voted on their knees as they submitted to the mad orange king. This is outrageous, folks.

The clear-eyed Maryland congressman, Jamie Raskin, said this about the bill: “A sixth-grader would know this is unconstitutional. They want us to vote to give the president Orwellian powers and the not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has so far been quiet as to his position on the bill, which is just outrageous, it really is.

I urge you to call your representative in Congress and give them an earful about this one. They must do everything they can to suppress the America-attacker’s powers, not enhance them.

That would help people like me, to continue standing up for people like you.

-Thank you

NOW READ: The end of left-leaning news?

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

I have an admission for you: I never took even a single second to consider the terrible residue of a Democratic loss in this month's elections, precisely because of the terrible things that happened last week.

When others brought it up, I would simply defer and say something that tasted like this: “I can’t allow myself to go there, because the consequences will be too grave to even imagine. My focus and energy need to be on ONE thing: WINNING. We must get Kamala Harris into the White House. Losing is just too devastating to contemplate.”

Now that might sound naive and foolish, and I guess I get that, but I am not built to consider losing. As a half-decent athlete in my younger days, and a high-octane competitor always, there has never been a game, or a contest, or a political battle that I engaged in when I ever considered losing.

I grew up in the days of Hall of Fame football coach and Democrat, Vince Lombardi, who famously said, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing.”

ALSO READ: How to find hope in a near-hopeless time

I went onto become a sports writer and then a sports editor before shifting to news, so I’ll spare you the 172 clichés that apply to what just happened in America.

And before I leak too much testosterone all over this page, I am not for one minute comparing some football game to the most important election in American history.

What I am telling you is that a lot of people laid their time, treasure, heart, and soul on the line the past eight years, only to end up right back where we started.

This wasn't just some gut-wrenching loss, it was the end of an America that fancied itself a place that doled out liberty and justice for all. Instead of being a beacon for democracy across the world, we now provide safe harbor for murderous fascists.

This could not have been conceivable even 10 years ago.

I am not writing to knock you further into despair today, good people. I’m really not. I have written during the past week that there are ways out of this, because there simply have to be. Namely, we must not submit.

Except that is exactly what many in our Democratic leadership seem to be doing right now, and it is positively blowing my mind.

While we are being steamrolled by Trump and his nuclear-powered propaganda machine fueled by greedy, blood-thirsty billionaires, Democratic leaders are pointing fingers, and climbing over one another to tell us all what went wrong in the election.

While they draw attention to themselves in all the wrong ways, the morbid Trump is settling in to what he hopes will be a long and comfortable dictatorship, and picking one revolting loyalist after another to staff his cabinet and inflict as much pain on us as possible.

Consider what happened on Wednesday alone:

Joe Biden symbolically surrendered to the repulsive Trump in front of a roaring fire in our White House (talk about a terrifying metaphor), and actually said, “Welcome back!” This is the guy Biden himself has warned about in the starkest terms, and over and over again.

This is the guy who instead of gracefully conceding defeat attacked our country, did nothing about it for hours, and then told the people who did it that he loved them.

HE TOLD THE PEOPLE WHO ATTACKED US THAT HE LOVED THEM.

This is the guy who is a convicted felon, and a rapist. But, sure, how do you take your coffee, Donald? Would you like some cookies with your shit-eating grin?

And of course, Trump’s billionaire boss, the absolutely repulsive Elon Musk, was in tow, because, well, that’s completely normal ...

And forget the fact, the America-attacker has NOT yet signed (nor will he) the Presidential Transition Ethics Agreement as required by law ...

He deserves nothing but scorn, not public congratulations and warm welcomes by the fire. And if Biden just HAD to do this, why so damn soon? My God, most of us haven’t gotten over the shock yet.

Some never will.

Then there’s news Special Counsel Jack Smith will be quitting, rather than making Trump fire him, and that is pathetic. And has anybody heard from Merrick Garland since he crawled underneath his bed? He, more than anybody, is responsible for this terrible mess we are in by failing to do the most important part of his job: protecting America.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who I like very much, is literally everywhere saying we need to take the high prices in America more seriously, as if Vice President Harris didn't talk about this endlessly on the campaign trail. Unlike her ghastly opponent she actually had a concrete plan to help correct this, and not some bullshit “concept” of one. Again, why so soon, my good man?

Fully five people in Democratic “leadership” have let it leak that they will be running for president in 2028, as if there will even be an election in 2028. They will get no mention here.

Talk about grave-dancing …

And, hey, go ahead and slam me for not considering the consequences of a Trump win, but at least I got the same memo that Harris did. We both understood Trump is a fascist, and is not really keen on elections.

Frankly, she is one of the few who has accorded herself well though this ordeal, and while I have no proof of this, it is starting to feel to me like she is being hung out to dry. Nancy Pelosi can’t stop letting it be known that Biden should have stepped down sooner, and there should have been a primary to determine our Democratic candidate for president.

She might be right about that, but she is dead wrong for intimating we would have got a better candidate than Harris, who ran just one helluva campaign, and is a top-notch person. I’d still run through a brick wall for her, because she is everything right about the nasty world of politics.

Ya know … I’m not advocating a violent attack on America like Trump did, but I am advancing the fact that the Democratic Party needs to stand up straight and tall, and show some damn backbone and grit.

We are fully capable of doing both a thorough autopsy on our terrible loss, while sending the message loud clear that we still have plenty of damn fight left, and aren’t going anywhere — that fascism has no place in America.

There is a prevailing feeling among many outside the Beltway that our leadership has abandoned us, at the very time we need them most, and this will not be forgotten.

It feels like a catastrophic storm has come ashore, is gaining steam and will slowly and methodically wipe out everything in its path. I cannot tell you how many hardworking and good-hearted Democrats who have told me, “Fuck it. I’m done.”

This is how a bad situation gets even worse.

I talked with one of the smartest people I know about this Wednesday night. Christopher Webb is a Democratic Strategist in California, and he’s seeing and hearing the same things I am among the Black community, who are the greatest patriots among us:

“Black folks are tired right now. Sick and tired! Especially Black women. They do the heavy lifting every election cycle. They always lead the way, and this time we had a supremely qualified Black woman nominee, but we had to watch her torn down by racism and misogyny coming from the right. We constantly had to hear that she’s dumb. Where are her policies? She’s a DEI hire. She’s trash. She slept her way to the top. Black women activists put anger aside and pushed back with the facts: Kamala is supremely qualified, and here’s why. She’s here to fight for us. Here are her policies. But it didn’t matter.
Post-election, there’s a lot of anger, frustration, and even hopelessness within our community.
We love the party, but it feels like the party does not love us back.”

“But it feels like the party does not love us back …”

Man, this makes my blood boil. That Democratic leadership I have been trying to slap some sense into here need to hear this. We ALL need to hear it.

I want to add that Christopher said he’s “more than ready” for the fight ahead.

Me too.

While, I totally get the inclination to bolt, I am not done. I will stand here and fight, but I need to know just who in the hell is with us. I need to know who is out there speaking for our concerns and not capitulating to fascists.

We cannot surrender. There is no “waiting it out.” We must take the fight to these b-------- right now because we — not them — stand for what is most certainly good and right in this country.

Or as Lombardi said: “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.”

NOW READ: America is at a crossroads

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

I considered waiting to publish this dire warning about what will be coming in the wake of the America-attacking Trump’s inauguration in two months, because too many good people are being asked to process too many terrible things right now.

This simply had to be put to paper, though, because I would be remiss if I didn’t urgently warn you that Trump’s takeover of our military is at the top of his dirty to-do list, and at the tip of his toxic spear in his quest to murder our Democracy.

Once you understand that Trump will use his presidency and whatever is left of his miserable life to settle scores and return the favors of the crooked dictators, and slobbery weaklings in his political party, who helped put him back in office, you can better prepare for the hell that’s most assuredly coming.

You can never say you weren't warned, because if you believe nothing else I type today, you damn well better believe this:

NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America.
EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.

Please read that again, and bookmark it.

By words and by deed it is clear as day that Trump has absolutely no respect for the United States of America he violently assaulted, or our men and women who wear the uniform, because like any authoritarian leader he sees them as servants to him, and not our country.

The flashing red lights are everywhere, and our pathetic and complicit corporate media are still by and large ignoring them and missing in action.

As Trump begins his assault on our freedoms, senior general and flag officers will be his primary targets, because he sees them as a threat to his unchecked power — impediments to allowing him to rain hell on anybody who disagrees with him. He has called our generals and admirals “woke, weak, and ineffective leaders,” and has said repeatedly he knows how to do their jobs better than they do.

He intends to make these men and women bend the knee to him, or else.

In his first term, the despicable Trump thought he could make military leaders like Generals Jim Mattis and John Kelly see things his way by appointing them to this staff. He called them, “my generals.” When that didn't quite happen, he had somebody else fire them, because he was too gutless to, or they simply quit, because they could no longer surrender their dignity to such a fragile, evil little man.

You’ll remember that throughout that first presidency, which just had to be his last, he was dying to have tanks roll down the streets of Washington, D.C., because there’s no sense being completely inadequate unless your are going to show it to the entire world.

Trump is wasting no time with his second chance to destroy America, and chillingly confirmed on Monday that he intends to declare a national emergency as soon as he assumes office, and will use our military to assist in the mass deportations of illegal immigrants in our country.

This comes after repeated warnings on his campaign trail of fears about “the enemy within.” This was Trump in a Fox News interview only last month:

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big problem — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

He is telling us that he is coming for us.

The gruesome man, who won the vote by roughly one percentage point, believes he has a mandate to get the military under his fat, little thumb immediately … the high price of eggs the voters said they cared about be damned.

His nomination last week of a Fox News commentator, Pete Hegseth, to be the next Defense Secretary on the surface is laughable, but it is also incredibly dangerous and shrewd if you are a dictator looking to connect directly with the troops by going around senior military leadership to do it.

Hegseth is a terrible man, who does not believe women should serve in combat, because “it hasn’t made us more effective.” This is no surprise coming from a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017, and then paying her off for her silence.

Hegseth was also flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by members of his military unit because of a tattoo on his bicep that’s commonly associated with white supremacist groups.

• Sexual abuser: check
• Racist: check
• Trump’s kind of guy: check

With this nomination, Trump is going out of his way to signal that he is no longer asking his hate groups to “stand back and stand by” but to “stand up and move in.”

My guess is that while many of our enlisted men and women couldn’t pick out the very top military leaders in their chain of command in a lineup, they damn well know Hegseth because of his role on Fox News, which can be seen littering the TVs on our military bases. Count on this kind of rightwing propaganda only increasing as Trump’s oily term slops along.

In Trump’s dirty mind, when (not if) he uses the military to put down protests in our streets, he is going to need troops who are willing to go along with all that, and he will count on lowlifes like Hegseth to go around the military leadership to make his bankrupt case.

And what will Trump’s autocratic, isolationist tendencies mean for our military footprint across the globe? What of our NATO and our Asia-Pacific military alliances? Well, you know the answer to that. Trump has just been dying to kill them, both to repay the love of the dictators on the Korean Peninsula and in Eastern Europe who he admits to writing love letters to, and to bolster defenses back here for all the evil he has planned.

Because I am telling you again that you have to understand that EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.

Expect Trump to drawdown many of the hundreds of thousands of troops that are serving overseas to protect us, and bring them back to U.S. soil to protect him.

And if after reading all this you are saying that Trump cannot do many of these things because he neither understands the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), nor the Constitution, I am telling you strenuously that he doesn’t give a single damn about either one of these things.

If you think that mere documents will prevent this ill-mannered lout from exacting his revenge, and doing exactly what he wants, then like our bought-off, useless corporate media you just haven’t been paying attention.

Remember: Trump, and his Supreme Court see his power as absolute. There is NOTHING that applies, or restricts him from doing whatever the hell it is he thinks needs doing in the interest of national security, which as of January 20, 2025, will mean his security.

So now we are counting on our military not to obey unlawful orders and defend a Constitution their Commander in Chief could care less about. That’s a mighty big ask.

According to one defense official in the Pentagon:

“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders. But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”

And if you are saying I don’t have much respect for the military, because I’m intimating that our leadership will go along with all this, I am saying that’s bullshit, but also that we understand first that they are mere people, and second that because they are mere people are fully capable of doing rotten things.

I served in the Navy, and was later the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent daily newspaper that serves the troops and their families overseas. I saw firsthand both the abundant good that our military does, and the occasional bad.

Few people were thought to have more respect for the military than Colin Powell. Remember him?

Powell was a decorated four-star general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and later the Secretary of State under George W. Bush during his first term. Powell was thought so highly of at the time that he was at, or near the top, of the list to succeed Bush on the GOP presidential ticket in 2008.

That all ended when he disgraced himself and America during a speech to the United Nations Security Council, where he cited false intelligence about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq that served as the pretext to our disastrous war there.

Thousands died and hundreds of thousands were wounded in that terrible war, and a lot of their blood was on Powell’s hands. He resigned in 2004 admitting that his speech at the U.N. “contained substantial inaccuracies.”

Read: “Gruesome Lies.”

Throughout history, supposedly good men have been talked into doing heinous things because of blinding misjudgment, weakness, or rocket-fueled ambition.

Trump is counting on this weakness to exploit our military for his rotten gains because NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America.

This not a story of hope, my friends, but words of warning.

Like it or not, and as tired as we are, we must be vigilant and NEVER accept this as anything approaching normal in this country.

A repulsive coward who never had the guts to serve will be do everything he can to get our armed forces to serve only him.

WE must be the resistance.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

I have an admission for you: I never took even a single second to consider the terrible residue of a Democratic loss in this month's elections, precisely because of the terrible things that happened last week.

When others brought it up, I would simply defer and say something that tasted like this: “I can’t allow myself to go there, because the consequences will be too grave to even imagine. My focus and energy need to be on ONE thing: WINNING. We must get Kamala Harris into the White House. Losing is just too devastating to contemplate.”

Now that might sound naive and foolish, and I guess I get that, but I am not built to consider losing. As a half-decent athlete in my younger days, and a high-octane competitor always, there has never been a game, or a contest, or a political battle that I engaged in when I ever considered losing.

I grew up in the days of Hall of Fame football coach and Democrat, Vince Lombardi, who famously said, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing.”

ALSO READ: How to find hope in a near-hopeless time

I went onto become a sports writer and then a sports editor before shifting to news, so I’ll spare you the 172 clichés that apply to what just happened in America.

And before I leak too much testosterone all over this page, I am not for one minute comparing some football game to the most important election in American history.

What I am telling you is that a lot of people laid their time, treasure, heart, and soul on the line the past eight years, only to end up right back where we started.

This wasn't just some gut-wrenching loss, it was the end of an America that fancied itself a place that doled out liberty and justice for all. Instead of being a beacon for democracy across the world, we now provide safe harbor for murderous fascists.

This could not have been conceivable even 10 years ago.

I am not writing to knock you further into despair today, good people. I’m really not. I have written during the past week that there are ways out of this, because there simply have to be. Namely, we must not submit.

Except that is exactly what many in our Democratic leadership seem to be doing right now, and it is positively blowing my mind.

While we are being steamrolled by Trump and his nuclear-powered propaganda machine fueled by greedy, blood-thirsty billionaires, Democratic leaders are pointing fingers, and climbing over one another to tell us all what went wrong in the election.

While they draw attention to themselves in all the wrong ways, the morbid Trump is settling in to what he hopes will be a long and comfortable dictatorship, and picking one revolting loyalist after another to staff his cabinet and inflict as much pain on us as possible.

Consider what happened on Wednesday alone:

Joe Biden symbolically surrendered to the repulsive Trump in front of a roaring fire in our White House (talk about a terrifying metaphor), and actually said, “Welcome back!” This is the guy Biden himself has warned about in the starkest terms, and over and over again.

This is the guy who instead of gracefully conceding defeat attacked our country, did nothing about it for hours, and then told the people who did it that he loved them.

HE TOLD THE PEOPLE WHO ATTACKED US THAT HE LOVED THEM.

The is the guy who is a convicted felon, and a rapist. But, sure, how do you take your coffee, Donald? Would you like some cookies with your shit-eating grin?

And of course, Trump’s billionaire boss, the absolutely repulsive Elon Musk, was in tow, because, well, that’s completely normal ...

And forget the fact, the America-attacker has NOT yet signed (nor will he) the Presidential Transition Ethics Agreement as required by law ...

He deserves nothing but scorn, not public congratulations and warm welcomes by the fire. And if Biden just HAD to do this, why so damn soon? My God, most of us haven’t gotten over the shock yet.

Some never will.

Then there’s news Special Counsel Jack Smith will be quitting, rather than making Trump fire him, and that is pathetic. And has anybody heard from Merrick Garland since he crawled underneath his bed? He, more than anybody, is responsible for this terrible mess we are in by failing to do the most important part of his job: protecting America.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who I like very much, is literally everywhere saying we need to take the high prices in America more seriously, as if Vice President Harris didn't talk about this endlessly on the campaign trail. Unlike her ghastly opponent she actually had a concrete plan to help correct this, and not some bullshit “concept” of one. Again, why so soon, my good man?

Fully five people in Democratic “leadership” have let it leak that they will be running for president in 2028, as if there will even be an election in 2028. They will get no mention here.

Talk about grave-dancing …

And, hey, go ahead and slam me for not considering the consequences of a Trump win, but at least I got the same memo that Harris did. We both understood Trump is a fascist, and is not really keen on elections.

Frankly, she is one of the few who has accorded herself well though this ordeal, and while I have no proof of this, it is starting to feel to me like she is being hung out to dry. Nancy Pelosi can’t stop letting it be known that Biden should have stepped down sooner, and there should have been a primary to determine our Democratic candidate for president.

She might be right about that, but she is dead wrong for intimating we would have got a better candidate than Harris, who ran just one helluva campaign, and is a top-notch person. I’d still run through a brick wall for her, because she is everything right about the nasty world of politics.

Ya know … I’m not advocating a violent attack on America like Trump did, but I am advancing the fact that the Democratic Party needs to stand up straight and tall, and show some damn backbone and grit.

We are fully capable of doing both a thorough autopsy on our terrible loss, while sending the message loud clear that we still have plenty of damn fight left, and aren’t going anywhere — that fascism has no place in America.

There is a prevailing feeling among many outside the Beltway that our leadership has abandoned us, at the very time we need them most, and this will not be forgotten.

It feels like a catastrophic storm has come ashore, is gaining steam and will slowly and methodically wipe out everything in its path. I cannot tell you how many hardworking and good-hearted Democrats who have told me, “Fuck it. I’m done.”

This is how a bad situation gets even worse.

I talked with one of the smartest people I know about this Wednesday night. Christopher Webb is a Democratic Strategist in California, and he’s seeing and hearing the same things I am among the Black community, who are the greatest patriots among us:

“Black folks are tired right now. Sick and tired! Especially Black women. They do the heavy lifting every election cycle. They always lead the way, and this time we had a supremely qualified Black woman nominee, but we had to watch her torn down by racism and misogyny coming from the right. We constantly had to hear that she’s dumb. Where are her policies? She’s a DEI hire. She’s trash. She slept her way to the top. Black women activists put anger aside and pushed back with the facts: Kamala is supremely qualified, and here’s why. She’s here to fight for us. Here are her policies. But it didn’t matter.
Post-election, there’s a lot of anger, frustration, and even hopelessness within our community.
We love the party, but it feels like the party does not love us back.”

“But it feels like the party does not love us back …”

Man, this makes my blood boil. That Democratic leadership I have been trying to slap some sense into here need to hear this. We ALL need to hear it.

I want to add that Christopher said he’s “more than ready” for the fight ahead.

Me too.

While, I totally get the inclination to bolt, I am not done. I will stand here and fight, but I need to know just who in the hell is with us. I need to know who is out there speaking for our concerns and not capitulating to fascists.

We cannot surrender. There is no “waiting it out.” We must take the fight to these bastards right now, because we — not them — stand for what is most certainly good and right in this country.

Or as Lombardi said: “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.”

NOW READ: America is at a crossroads

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Say, remember all that happy talk about how younger voters were going to save us in the most important elections of our lives?

Good times …

Turns out that didn't happen, because according to this grim AP story published Friday:

“Americans ages 18 to 29 swung toward President-elect Trump in this year’s election, but they came to his coalition with sharply different views and interests than older conservatives or most top Republican leaders.”

More from this jarring eye-opener:

“Trump won nearly half of voters in the age group, compared with about one-third in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. That means that although the youngest voters made up a relatively small share, about 15%, of his coalition, he was nearly as strong among this group as Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate.”

Unfortunately, this is one of the only things I got right leading up to this absolute catastrophe. I was banging around on a few political podcasts as we descended toward our latest November crash, and when this subject came up, I made it clear I had my doubts about what younger voters planned to do with their vote.

I’d been hearing about a lot of confused, angry kids, who were living in a steady state of disillusionment. I heard from many of my readers, who warned that the young-adults — mostly men — in their families were threatening to pull the lever for Trump.

Turns out that helluva lot of ‘em followed through on those threats …

And look, I am not bagging our kids here. They are still relatively new to this ridiculously wonderful and dangerous world, and have only a small sample size of life to reflect on. They are coming off an orbit-altering killer pandemic, and live in a steady state of uncertainty and bewilderment, featuring bright colors and plenty of darkness. Just for good measure, they lug their phones around with them everywhere they go, just to be reminded of every damn thing, every damn second.

The doom and gloom is lurking in every corner, and if you get on the wrong end of some vicious algorithm, or grow up in the wrong household, using your vote to lash out starts to make some bizarre sense.

So a quick story:

It was 1980, and I was a young, confused man fresh out of the Navy, who couldn’t find a job. I mean, there were no damn jobs back then.

I resisted collecting the unemployment that was due to me as an honorably discharged veteran, because there was a stigma attached to it. I didn’t serve my country just to turn around and go on the dole.

Well, I’ll tell you what, miss a few meals, and it’s amazing how quickly you are able to check your pride.

I grudgingly collected an unemployment check from the government for a few weeks, before finding a job at a delicatessen. When that place was on the verge of closing, I went back to collecting a government check until that was inches from drying up, too.

I was broke, and on the brink of homelessness, and feeling terrible about myself. I considered reenlisting in the Navy, but I won’t lie to you, I hated taking orders from too many dummies. Starving to death was a better alternative.

I will never forget standing in a long line waiting to fill out an application to work at a service station pumping gas. I hitchhiked to the place, because my beat-up VW Bug was suffering from my affliction. By the time I got my shot to make my case, the manager told me more than 200 people had already applied for the position.

I said, "Should I even bother filling this f------ thing out?'"

He said, "Probably not, but thank you for your service ..."

I had seven bucks in my pocket and rent was overdue. I got through it somehow, but I never wanted to be that desperate again. In 1980, America had energy problems, inflation problems, job problems, Russia problems, and hostages in Iran.

We had so many problems, the show "Nightline" was born just to talk about all of 'em at the end of every day.

It was a far cry from the 24/7 supersonic crap screaming at us nowadays from all these alleged "news" outlets, but it was significant back then.

And even with all that pain and heartache … Even literally starving … I never had a single doubt in my mind that Jimmy Carter was a very, very good man. Thing is, he was the guy who was easiest to blame for all my troubles.

So I voted for Ronald Reagan.

I literally felt like I had nothing to lose, because I literally didn’t.

And if yer thinking right now I was a stupid idiot, I suppose that’s fair, but at least I can tell why I did what I did. I can also tell you why a lot of younger folks did what they did on November 5.

At least I think I can.

Like these kids today, I didn’t vote with those Republicans because they were necessarily good people, I voted for them because my young life was in a shambles, and I needed help but quick.

I believe too many of these kids today are desperate, and need something to change in their lives. The terrible irony, of course, is they are most likely desperate because of so many of the heinous things the Republican Party believes in, and has laid on them.

This AP story says as much:.

“VoteCast found that Trump’s younger voters were more motivated by the economy than by immigration, were broadly concerned about climate change, and wanted more government involvement in health care and canceling student loan debt.”

I know. I just pulled a neck muscle from shaking my head, too.

Thing is, when you get your news from God knows where on your phone, there’s a damn good chance it passes through some Russian filter. Disinformation is everywhere. Lowlifes like Elon Musk market in it. It’s clever, and it’s aimed at the destruction of our democracy.

And let’s not underestimate the terrible effect of being raised in a household full of complete, heartless a--holes, who call domestic terrorists “tourists,” and believe there are people of color who are out there lurking in their yards trying to eats their pets.

We are in a very, very bad way in America right now, and it’s probably prudent to ask ourselves just why in the hell it is we thought younger people were coming to save us, when the real question is, why in the hell it is after all these years we are still incapable of saving ourselves.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

This morning I want to start with some facts by vividly setting the scene …

Donald Trump is a dirty, old man, and a convicted felon, who attacked the United States of America, and most white people are completely good with it. Their notion of law and order, and Christian values are as completely phony and as pathetically weak as they are.

They talk out of both side of the same dirty mouthes they choose to eat with.

The double-standards in this country are — and have been — appalling and have been gruesomely normalized by a both-sides, worthless corporate media that profits by reacting to danger, instead of warning about it.

To Trump supporters I say this: If you have somehow twisted yourself into some self-righteous pretzel to justify your vote for a violent, racist, election-denying fascist YOU are the damn problem in this country, not us. This has happened many times before over the centuries with your type to no good end. If you would read even ONE history book your party wants burned you’d be forced to understand this, and maybe even deal with it. Oh, and here’s a dirty, little secret: The elites who run your dirty party fully know all this, and are using you for their terrible devices. As long as you support this, there is nothing you can say that I will ever listen to. You are a complete moral wreck. A mess. A five-alarm fire. You say you want cheaper gas and eggs, but fawn over the horrible man and circumstances that helped lead to their high cost in the first place with his subhuman response to a once-in-a-century pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of us needlessly. Even wearing masks to help prevent the spread of this invisible killer was too much to ask of you. Seriously, go straight to hell.

I typed all that high-octane facticity as a pretext for saying that I am NOT going to sit here and navel-gaze about everything Democrats allegedly did wrong the past four years, when no matter what they did right was roundly ignored in that media, while it was busy normalizing treason, the broken people who supported it, and tossed poll numbers at us like loaded grenades.

Joe Biden by and large did an excellent job of digging out of the mess TRUMP LEFT US. He stood up for our Democracy, rebuilt our infrastructure, added an incredible 16 million jobs, and as Forbes decided to FINALLY report today MOST of them did not go to new immigrants as Republicans alleged.

He was the right man for the right time, and has left the repulsive person replacing him a country that is in far better shape than he found it. Four years ago, I would have been typing this wondering when Americans would stop dying, and if ANYTHING would ever return to normal again ...

The biggest mistake we can make right now is to concede ANY ground to these rotten Trump bastards, who see good people on both sides of a KKK rally, our fallen as “suckers and losers” and shower love on people who stomped on and beat law enforcement officers, as they came within inches of overthrowing our government.

These are very, very dangerous times in America, led by dangerous people, and doubting that, or running away and hiding is exactly what they want.

So what to do right now?

1. Turn off and tune out most of that corporate media. Bare minimum, be very careful what you consume, and call out the nonsense when you see it. They have proven they are not interested, nor are they capable of, providing context and the necessary heft to report on what is happening in this country right now. They will continue to dance around it. Normalize it. Find independent journalism, journalists, and thinkers who you trust, and support them. They are out there, and doing tremendous work. Democracy needs more bandwidth. This is critical. Information is power, and we are being battered by the dangerous right-wing propaganda where truth has no place. Places like Fox “News” have literally broken this country in two. It is infiltrating hearts and minds. I could stand to see some sane, good-hearted billionaires funding independent journalism that plainly reports on, and illustrates the extreme threat to our country right now, and shines a light on the good things and the good people who are standing against it. That is, if these democracy-supporting billionaires even exist …
2. Stay involved in your grassroots organizations in your communities. These do not necessarily need to be political, and right now it is probably best that they aren’t. I am talking about the good-hearted folks who support women’s reproductive rights, the environment, and the new immigrants and refugees in this country, who are scared to death and living in fear right now. There are hundreds of groups doing tremendous work. Find them. Lend a hand. Throw them a few dollars.
3. Stop locking yourself into Democratic idioms and supposed truisms. They are a cancer. There needs to be a marketplace of ideas right now. We are in unprecedented territory. I am not advocating blowing anything up, but I am stressing that we must not lean on old, tired assumptions. I’m a white man in my 60s, and have absolutely no idea what is in the head of a 20-year-old college student, or a 33-year-old carpenter. Listen more, talk less. I know I need to do A LOT more of this.
4. On that note: One thing that is being missed — and badly in my opinion — is that more Americans identify as Independents than they do Republicans or Democrats. They don’t trust either party. This year, more Independents leaned Right than ever before. From Gallup in January: “As 2024 begins, the parties are closely matched based on political party identification and leanings. However, Democrats are clearly in a weaker position than they have been in any recent election year.” This was a very ominous warning that was completely missed. Mega-parties don’t have the answers, people do. I am an Independent, who right now exclusively votes for and works for Democrats. I am not a registered Democrat, however. I am an American voter. While I agree wholeheartedly with most of what I know to be the Democratic platform, there were some big misses the past four years that needed to be called out and weren’t. Chief among them was allowing Donald Trump any room to breathe after he violently attacked our country. Merrick Garland needed to act with alacrity following that homegrown terrorism, to make sure EVERYBODY understood you NEVER cross that line in America. Attacking America IS NOT OK. Instead Garland himself, proved to be a massive failure and a national-security nightmare. And if you are tired of me typing that, tough. Just LOOK who is moving back into our White House. Finally, do not listen to ANY Democrat who is talking about 2028 right now, because it is clear they completely missed what just happened.
5. Don’t breathe the noxious gas that there is a Republican mandate right now. Battleground States flipped. It happens. Here in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris actually got more votes than Joe Biden did on 2020. We worked our asses off up here and simply got beat in large part by the massive rightwing propaganda machine that I warned about above. Wisconsin is 90 percent white and under conventional wisdom should be a bright-red state. It’s not, because we have leaders and ideas that resonate with everybody. In fact … the best thing we can hope for is that Republicans read this election as a mandate, because as you know most of their odious plans will sting their voters at least as much as everybody else. Let them get out over their skies as far as possible, and then watch them crash.
6. Do not let your cynicism overtake your anger and resolve. This happened to me in 2016 and I literally published the book on it. This time is different. Trump proved without a doubt just how loathsome and dangerous he truly is. Millions of people’s lives are in danger, and we need to be vigilant. Find the happiness in your life wherever you can, and celebrate it. Some sort of balance is important for your mental and physical health. Again, this is something I need to work on.
7. Find good and necessary trouble wherever you can. I understand if you are disheartened, exhausted and fed up right now. You are all of these things only because you have the audacity to care. Many Americans don’t give a good goddam about this country. Fully a third of them couldn’t be bothered to vote. I do understand why some of these people think it is futile, because conditions never change for them no matter who is on the White House. For many of these folks voting itself is a grind. Did you see the endless voting lines in our cities on Election Day? This is completely abhorrent, racist as hell and intentional. We have failed these folks completely for decades, and cannot sit back and keep accepting that this is OK, or normal. It’s not. Voting should be the easiest thing in the world in a Democracy. Keep screaming about this. As to the rest of the people who don’t vote or engage out of laziness and willing ignorance, grab them by their collars, shake them, and call them out. Democracy is no free ride, and you have to pay the price for your freedom. You don’t get to just sit it out. These are the people I loathe most of all.
8. Do no submit. Let me type that again: DO NOT SUBMIT. Take heart you are on the right side of the fight and give it hell. We must win this battle, because losing is NOT an option this time around.

Onward!

NOW READ: ‘Inflation is radioactive’: Trump’s victory is part of a global populist wave

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

I have absolutely no regrets.

This time, I fully knew what my country was capable of, and I did everything I could to work toward a better outcome.

If the majority of my country is OK with an America-attacking, vulgar racist, whose only true talent is the ability to somehow always go lower, I find it terribly, terribly sad and wildly dangerous.

This does not make me a better or worse person than anyone else, it just makes me, me, and I am very proud and comfortable with that. And if you stood for what is good ... and right … and decent, you should be plenty proud of yourselves, too.

I don’t expect this to take the sting and the terror away, but I am typing that if you can’t live with yourself and your choices, then you are on a horrible journey with no good end.

I am very proud and comfortable with the people I align myself with these days, and if that is an ever-shrinking circle, I take heart and surround myself with their love, strength, and wisdom.

I know where I stand in life, after having survived many falls, and have the scars to prove it. I am proud of where I have landed, and will hold my head high. If anyone needs a hand up, they need only ask. This is a time for strength and heart, even if our grief will undoubtedly wallop us with the occasional gust.

After the terrible blast eight years ago, I was stung by the reality that I did not do enough to prevent it. I vowed that would never happen again, and I got busy. Seldom an hour went by during the past eight years, when I wasn’t tormented and motivated to protect my country and the people who so richly deserved it.

As a white man, I had failed them for too long, casually keeping the riches of my lucky privilege tucked away where it did far too little good, for far too few people.

It was time to do better. Much better.

Even before that dark November evening in 2016, I never put my country on a pedestal, because I had seen what it was capable of. That it could hit rock bottom with such a gruesome thud, was a shock to the senses that will never leave me.

So we worked, and we rallied.

We picked ourselves up, and put one foot in front of the other until all of a sudden we were running with the wind at our backs. We discovered a bigger purpose, and ourselves. We marched, and rallied. We showed up, and we won.

Still, the darkness lingered … and even through our joy we knew the evil still menacingly stalked us.

We never could chase it away. Our government failed us catastrophically by not rounding up the terrible man who attacked us, locking him away and pronouncing loudly and clearly: NEVER AGAIN.

Instead our “justice” system let him linger to fester, and ooze. They normalized him with their disregard, and instead protected an ugly status quo in America in which all men and women are most certainly not treated equally.

The traitor should have never seen the light of day again. EVER.

Instead, the odious bottom-feeder was allowed plenty of air and water, and slowly we watched him grow and come to the surface with a renewed sense of entitlement, and ghastly purpose.

Our corporate media treated it all like some terrible game, when they should have been sounding the alarms and giving the most menacing threat in American history the editorial weight it deserved.

As a career journalist, it will always be impossible for me to reckon with this, and I call them out today and will continue to in the future with a renewed disdain.

So thanks to the failure of our justice system, and our broken media, it was once again going to be left to us to deal with the monster, and that has been the greatest insult and travesty of my lifetime.

There were mechanisms in place to deal with this man, and they purposely and catastrophically failed us.

It turns out there really was nobody coming to save us, and none of us should ever be good with that.

Today we have been left to fend for ourselves, but we are not alone. If you can hold onto just one thing, I hope it is that, good people.

We must lean on each other and stay together. We cannot succumb.

We have done all that we can, and should have no regrets.

Me?

I am NOT going back.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

It was just about two years ago to the day ...

I had finished up a last-second voter canvas before the polls closed and started revealing how the 2022 midterm elections would fall.

It was a sporty, three-layer November evening in Madison, Wisconsin, featuring a nagging north wind that whipped at the fingers and toes, and turned the ears red, as Mother Nature boldly previewed what was sure to follow in the months ahead.

Ardent Democrats had done about all they could on the frontlines of this political battleground to stave off the nasty forecast of a terrible Red Wave that was going to rip through the countryside and tilt the balance of power of the world’s most flawed and formidable nation.

The pollsters assured us the outlook was plenty bleak for the blue army. These hucksters, who graciously allow themselves margins of error while conducting their diabolical work, were also informing anybody stupid enough to listen that they had done all they could to rejigger their numbers to account for all kinds of mysterious and unsavory statistical oddities that led ‘em to get things so damn wrong, so damn often.

ALSO READ: Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose

This time it was going to be plenty bad for Democrats, they breathlessly warned us. Besides, the party in power always got slaughtered in the midterms, don’t you know.

Good thing we didn’t listen to them, and nevertheless persisted ...

As we collected at our Team Gold West Madison headquarters, downloaded our info, and told war stories about our forays through the neighborhoods, I was glad to see the incomparable Ben Wikler had stopped by to thank us, and just generally add some positivity and heft to the place.

Wikler is the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, and has ascended as the preeminent figure of the 50 other people who hold this position in the United States. Wikler is a mountain of a man, and a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, who patrols the Badger State top to bottom, planting the seeds of hope and change.

Shortly after the terrible blast in 2016, Wikler returned from Washington, D.C., to his home in Madison to help resuscitate our fortunes, and lead us out of the darkness that had descended on his beloved state.

Long story short, he got busy, we got busy, and all of a sudden we started winning up here again.

Before leaving the select gathering that evening — I’m not much for watch-parties and prefer taking my medicine in the privacy of my own home — I sauntered over to Ben to small talk (that’s a picture I found of the two of us at that very moment) to thank him for his leadership and get his professional take on just one pressing question:

Of all the races on the board that night, which ones did he reckon were the most important?

It took him no time at all to answer.

“I’d say the governors races here in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania,” he said.

“The Blue Wall,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

Well, that made all the sense in the world.

Armed with the best political take I was going to get anywhere, I thanked him again, and headed home to brave what was coming at us as the polls closed East to West across America.

Turns out that Red Wave never happened, and all those pollsters proved yet again that getting it right isn’t in their job description. Just being in the vicinity of some mysterious plus-minus alibi would be enough to keep them employed, so they could screw things up next time, and give all these newspapers enough endless copy to completely scare the shit out of us in the months leading up to the next election.

Good work if you can get it.

Those governors races Wikler tipped me to all stayed Blue, and did so with surprising ease. None of them were even close.

Tony Evers won in Wisconsin. Gretchen Whitmer won in Michigan. And Josh Shapiro won in Pennsylvania.

The Blue Wall held again, just as it did in 2020 to help propel Joe Biden to victory, and it was months away from being fortified.

When a key Wisconsin Supreme Court election went blue later that spring the final brick in the wall fell neatly into place, and all three states proudly sported Democratic governors, attorneys generals, and liberal State Supreme Courts.

The miraculous rebuilding effort was complete, and ready for whatever anti-American Republican shenanigans were coming at us in 2024.

As I type this, voting is underway in these battleground states, and I don’t need any damn polls to tell you what is happening here in the present, and what has already happened in the past.

Early voting has been off the wall in these three states and we know a majority of the voters are women.

In the meantime, the dirty old man, Donald Trump, is leaking oil all over the campaign trail as he stumbles into garbage trucks and plays his tired, perverted lounge act to the same old, broken white people who were already voting for him no matter what.

He’s subtracting, not adding. He’s diminishing, not rising.

The majority of America is sick and tired of the foul-mouthed racist, and late-breakers are backing the woman, who is closing like a damn freight train.

Kamala Harris’s miraculous 100-day sprint to the finish line is now in its final kick, and the only one gasping for air is her pathetic opponent.

She is positively burying him.

Democrats are wary of saying these things out loud, because they have seen how bad it can get when they run on reputation instead of heart. The Year 2016 hangs over us like a dark cloud.

But I’m here to tell you that when the sun sets on Tuesday, it will be another winning night for Democrats, and another loser for Republicans and the pollsters. It’s been going in that direction for seven years now, and to think it will all of a sudden stop at the biggest election of our lives, is just plain dumb and illogical.

Bouncing around some of the likely spots, I’m incredibly bullish on Georgia, where the early numbers and Democratic energy have been inspiring. Sources I trust on the ground there, believe Democrats are doing more than enough to win. Women are a whopping +12 with the early vote in the Peach State.

Look, Jimmy Carter didn’t hold on this long, just to lose ...

North Carolina is 50/50 right now, and no matter what happens there, the fact Republicans are spending their time and resources defending the place are sure signs they are fighting on their heels and not from their toes.

Of Trump’s nine limping campaign stops before the polls close, four of them are in the Tar Heel State. If Republicans lose there, it is going to be a complete wipeout.

Arizona’s been stubborn, if we are to believe those polls (cough, cough …), but since I don’t, I put it right there with North Carolina. Democrat Ruben Gallego will win that key senate race over his ghastly opponent, Kari Lake Inferior, and I believe this helps Harris win the day there.

Florida, and its senate race got closer thanks to Trump’s bombardment of Puerto Rico last weekend, and Republicans are sweating a key senate race in Texas, where one of the most despicable men in politics, Ted Cruz, is oozing his characteristic slime.

I am telling you right now, it is going to be a very, very good night for down-ballot Democrats all across the country on Tuesday. I expect Democrats to take back the House, and win some surprising races at the local level.

I also expect a state or two we are not even talking about will be far closer than anybody thinks it will. Kansas, Iowa and Ohio come to mind. Nebraska’s senate race is terrifying Republicans right now.

Mark my words: Harris is going to throw a mighty scare at Trump in a state or two she has no right being competitive in, and you can thank her stellar candidacy and Roe for that.

My distrust of white men, is the only thing keeping me from calling this a complete wipeout for Democrats. Too many will defend the indefensible, because they are weak, and long for a past they never lived in, instead of living in the present and longing for a better world for everybody.

We won’t be able to save everybody this election, but our defense of our Democracy will prevail.

No matter what happens anywhere else, though … when the Blue Wall holds again, Kamala Harris will be our nation’s 47th president.

We built that.

Now let’s finish strong, patriots.

ALSO READ: Not even ‘Fox and Friends’ can hide Trump’s dementia

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

It’s been three months since I last spoke to you directly, so with less than a week to go before the most important election in American history, I think it’s important we have one final chat just to make sure we are on the same page.

I know there are other places you’d rather be, so if you don’t have a mother, daughter, sister, aunt or niece you are free to go do all your important, macho white man things.

Otherwise, please stick around, and thanks in advance.

Oh, and women, you are certainly free to go, but I’m always better with your company, and thankful for your strength and wisdom. As always, if you have anything to add, the comment section will be left open to you.

It’s never too late for us white guys to learn a thing or two … Right, white guys?

ALSO READ: Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose

Look, I’m addressing you again today because frankly, I’m concerned I’m not getting through to too many of you white dudes out there, and selfishly it’s beginning to embarrass me. You are now on the verge of being absolutely impossible to defend, or even be around.

If you read me at all regularly, you know I’m not much for all these damn political polls. I think they are endlessly wrong and often politically loaded, but enough of them consistently reveal the same odious thing: The majority of us white guys in America are lining up to do the worst-possible thing, and support the putrid, nuclear-powered liar and bigot, who attacked us.

I mean, W - T - F?

How is it you STILL don’t understand that there is no excuse for defending such a low-grade creep, who brags of writing love letters to dictators, and groping women because he thinks he can?

Do you really defend this? Well, DO YOU??? What if he did this to your wife? Or your daughter? All good?

THINK about this, damn you.

And what about the endless attacks on our military, where many of us served? He calls our fallen “suckers and losers.” He tromps on their graves to score political points. He has been called “the most dangerous person to this country” by HIS chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I served my country, men, and this is absolutely disqualifying.

And before we go further here, I’d like you to stop the childish eye-rolling about why I am only addressing white men, and not other men with this stern talking-to. I’ve heard some of you whine before about this one, and I am sick of it. It’s pathetic. Grow up (but more on that later).

I am addressing only white men, because we are so obviously the damn problem right now, and because I have had 64 years of experience being a white man, and not a single second of experience being a Latino, or a Black, or an Asian, or any other man ... I do know enough of these folks, however, and try my best to walk a mile in their shoes. I can tell you for a fact there are plenty of rocks in their roads that you (we) never once had to tiptoe over.

Our skin color has given us ridiculous privilege we have not earned, and if you lack the minimal capacity to acknowledge at least that, then answer this question for me: Why, in the entire history of this country, has there only been one man of color elected president, and NO women?

And another: Why, are the 10 richest people in America all white men?

And one more: Why does the typical white household have nine times as much wealth as the typical Black household in America?

I’ll give you a brief answer to these questions before moving on: Because the capitalistic system was set up by white men to benefit other white men that’s why. Because for hundreds of years only white property owners —men — were even allowed to vote in the “United” States of America, that’s why.

And if I’m breaking through at all here, and you want to learn more, please take the time to listen to this interview by the great Terry Gross on NPR with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson, who makes the iron-clad case American’s caste system is behind our nation’s terrible inequities.

When you understand all this, is it any surprise then, that these damn polls consistently reveal the fact that men of color — some in overwhelming numbers — support Kamala Harris for president? Because of the path they have walked, they are smart enough to know for a fact that Trump is only interested in supporting the billionaire bastards who have been stepping on ALL OUR NECKS for centuries.

It’s why he gives THEM tax cuts, not us. They OWN him.

He doesn’t give a single shit about you, white guys. He only sees you as another pathetic mark in his endless con.

So a diverse cross-section of Americans, who bring a wealth of important and telling life experiences to the table, support the woman for president, and only us white guys are holding out for the monster who degrades them.

You realize how that makes us look, right? RIGHT????

I’m not good with this, dammit, and for the life of me will never understand how you are either.

But if after reading this, you still aren’t convinced, and are plenty pleased with yourself with being conned by this 78-year-old, dangerous jackass, and voting against your own interests, I have one final ask:

I’d like you to go find a picture of that special woman in your life. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

OK, are you looking at this beautiful person? Are you thinking about all she has done for you, and given you?

Keep staring into her beautiful eyes … and ask yourself why you wouldn’t do everything — I mean EVERYTHING — in your power to support her and the choices she makes.

Ask yourself if you would allow this beautiful person to be jailed by another man who disagreed with her choices? Because this — and nothing less — is what is on the line in America right now, white men.

And what if this woman you love so much was raped by another man, was impregnated, and because of Trump’s heinous laws was forced to carry the fetus to term? You good with this, guys? Well, ARE YOU????

What if this woman you love was bleeding out on an operating table, and because of Trump’s depraved laws doctors were prevented from saving her life?

Still all good?

It’s not, is it.

It’s terrible and barbaric.

You know, I’ve seen some pretty clever ads from Democrats recently aimed at women who live in households with insecure, abusive white men who expect their wives and daughters to vote like they do. You know what I’m talking about, fellas.

These ads make the sharp point that nobody has to know how you vote — that what each of us do in the voting booth is completely private. If quietly voting for the candidate who has your interests at heart will keep the peace in the household, then so be it. It is far better than acquiescing and voting for the monster, who wants to drag you back into the 1950s.

Well, if any of you guys still aren’t ready to publicly stand up to your macho male friends and relatives and urge them to do what’s right by supporting the candidate who will protect all our rights, maybe the very least you can do is the right thing in the privacy of the voting booth.

It’s a step in the right direction, and I guarantee the people you allege to love most will thank you for it.

NOW READ: Why is this election even close?

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

I have been a subscriber of The Washington Post for 26 years.

I devoured it each day while riding the Metro from my home in Northern Virginia to the National Press Building in Washington D.C., where Stars and Stripes was published.

When I transferred to Stripes’ overseas headquarters in Europe in 2004, I kept a digital subscription out of loyalty, and because I believed papers like WaPo were essential to a thriving democracy.

That ended this afternoon with the newspaper’s failure to endorse the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris, who is a champion for a democracy they allege to care so damn much about.

I am done with them.

As a longtime newspaperman, and reader, this is a very sad day for me, and an absolutely tragic one for our nation, as we try to withstand a fascist onslaught from the Right in America that is led by moral-less, soulless, vindictive man who has proven beyond any doubt that he means our country harm.

There have seldom been more dangerous times in this country.

Why, just short of 46 months ago, in fact, this was the front page of their newspaper:

That “president” who “incited the crowd to acts of insurrection and violence” is now back to try it all again, and the only person standing in his way is the woman running against him.

Endorsing Harris wasn’t a hard call. It was the only call.

Their failure to make this endorsement goes beyond a catastrophic lack of judgment, because we know they know that what they are doing is nothing but a gutless attempt to appease a would-be dictator.

Do no let them try to spin this any other way, which is what they are currently doing while they hemorrhage readers, and try to stave of the unrelenting criticism that is coming at them in waves.

Let this be the latest.

And if you don’t take my word for just how horrid this decision was, have a look at this powerful statement from former Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron:

"This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage."

Read that again, because it is chilling …

I have been on the record many times saying that newspaper endorsements don’t mean a whole heckuva lot as far as moving the needle on voters’ decisions at the ballot box either way, but they do represent the values of the people who run these newspapers.

In this case, WaPo put their alleged values at the very top of the paper for everybody to see each day:

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Incredible, isn’t it?

I am also painfully aware that since the billionaire Jeff Bezos purchased the newspaper, those values have been on a slow and steady decline that accelerated with the hiring of the disgusting Will Lewis to become the CEO of the newspaper.

Among Lewis’s stops during his disreputable career were editor of conservative Telegraph in the United Kingdom; publisher of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal; and consultant to Conservative UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

How a guy with such a warped notion of sound editorial judgment can run any newsroom completely sickens me.

As I type this, it is Bezos who is owning this odious decision not to endorse, and it flowed like sludge down to Lewis and into the editorial offices.

Worse — and I will predict this will only get worse — it is being reported that the paper had an endorsement of Harris ready to be printed this weekend, so I am positing again that this was nothing but a reckless decision to appease the America-attacking Trump.

In closing, I want to type again that a newspaper needs two things that are absolutely critical to its success. Without them, they are worthless to their readers.

The first is accuracy. A newspaper simply must prove itself to be consistently accurate to be considered trustworthy. If a newspaper gets things wrong, they are worthless.

The second thing is credibility. Readers must believe their newspaper is credible, and worth trusting with their precious time.

When a newspaper with the logo “Democracy Dies in Darkness” fails to endorse the candidate that stands up for that Democracy, they are not being accurate or credible.

They in fact are completely worthless.

Dead.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

I have heard way more than enough of this grotesque garbage that perhaps we should try to understand what makes the Trump voter tick, and somehow sympathize with their support of an unapologetic loudmouth who is so vile he sees “good people” on both sides of a violent white supremacist rally.

Have you seen or heard any of this crap?

Have you seen or heard this heated drivel that Kamala Harris and other Democrats have done an inadequate job of connecting with Trump voters who see nothing dangerous about a man who refers to human beings as “vermin,” and has adopted Adolph Hitler’s talking points at his odious campaign rallies?

Have you seen or heard this absolute low-grade nonsense that we should work to lower the temperature in this country, and maybe not take it so personally when one party has gone completely in the tank for a hideous man who told the people who attacked America on January 6, 2021 that he “loves them?”

It is deplorable, and I’m here to remind you it is not normal.

These Trump supporters are shattered people, who have proven only one thing the past eight years: They can ALWAYS go lower, even if it means diving into the dumpster themselves to prove that they truly do believe in their lower cause.

Do not allow yourselves to be gaslit during this the most important election since the Civil War. Understand: If you support the Democratic Party, it does not make you perfect, but is does put you squarely on the right side of human decency and history.

This not only needs to be said out loud, and over and over again, but SHOUTED, because if you are telling me you support the despicable Donald Trump, you have essentially told me everything I need to know about you.

-You have told me you don’t really believe in “law in order” because in fact you support a convicted felon, who is currently facing scores of other felony charges for all manner of crimes, instead of supporting the career prosecutor who locked cheating lowlifes like Trump away behind bars ...

-You have told me you don’t believe in democracy, because you support the traitor who helped plan and execute the first attack on our Capitol since 1812, and attempted a violent coup that was one corrupt vice president away from possibly succeeding.

-You have told me you don’t believe in truth and honesty, because you support the man who told an astonishing documented 30,573 lies and mistruths during his epically awful presidency, and does nothing but lie from the time his fat little feet hit the deck in the morning until he finally passes out from overexposure at midnight.

-You have told me you don’t believe in our children’s future or the future of our planet, because you support the complete imbecile who is a sworn enemy of science, thinks climate change is a hoax, and that wind turbines cause cancer.

-You have told me you don’t have a shred of respect for the women in your lives, because you support the felon who physically attacks and berates them, and does not believe they should have the same rights men do.

-You have told me you don’t believe in a strong economy because you support the guy who wrecked the perfectly good one he inherited from Barack Obama so magnificently by failing to pass the only real test of his gross presidency. His multi-pronged failures to answer the COVID crisis, was among the greatest failures in American history. He simply couldn’t find it in his dark, empty soul to drum up even a shred of compassion for the millions of Americans who were sick and dying, and even went so far as suggesting that maybe we try drinking Lysol to combat COVID’s terrible effects. Even wearing masks was a bridge too far for the guy who would have died from the disease if he had listened to is own sickening counsel.

-You have told me you don’t believe all Americans deserve affordable healthcare, because the guy you support tried to do away with that without any plan to replace it, and now pathetically tells us he has “a concept of a plan” to make it better. Can you really be this damn stupid?

-You have told me you don’t really support blue collar, working Americans because you support the guy who passionately hates unions, refuses to support raising minimum wage, and has relentlessly stood up for the corporations, starting with Big Oil, who grease his bottomless pockets.

-You have told me you really aren’t Christian, if I am to understand this religious orthodoxy at all, because I just don’t think Jesus Christ would have much respect for a foul-mouthed, abusive slob, who dutifully avoids church, belittles people who have less than him, and pawns off Bibles online like they are some steak, sneaker, or watch to pay off his endless stream of lawyers, and pad a lifestyle spent behind locked gates, where he cheats at golf and avoids working-class Americans at all costs.

-You have told me you don’t really support the men and women in uniform because you bow to a reprehensible draft-dodger who calls our fallen “suckers and losers” and just weeks ago disgraced the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery for a cheap, campaign photo op. The last two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of staff, including one he appointed are telling you that the man you support means our country harm, so kindly save all that phony patriotic garbage you are trying to dump on the rest of us.

Truth is, I could go on for three full pages here pointing out your wretched hypocrisies, and gladly would if I thought it would have the positive effect of shaking some damn sense into you.

But I’m not interested in wasting my time with that. You have successfully proven you are broken beyond repair. So congratulations for that.

I am only interested in making good and damn sure people know that YOU, and YOU alone, are responsible for the extreme danger that this country finds itself in right now.

You are complete frauds and phonies, who are most likely white, male and angry to the point of violence. You are going nowhere in life, except lower because you are weak in character, and have allowed gravity and depravity to tug you in that lazy, misguided direction.

You want everything done for you and handed to you on a silver platter, because despite your despicable selves, you somehow think you are owed everything simply because of the color of your lily-white skin.

In fact, you are racist as hell, even if you’d like to somehow think you aren’t, because you lack the capacity to do even the minimal amount of introspection needed to attain the most basic understanding that in this country ALL men (and women) are supposed to be created equal.

You don’t believe in a better America, you believe in an America where you can legally drag good people through the dirt, who you still somehow think are lesser than you, and then have a good laugh about it.

You support the monstrous, orange man because he has given you license to be just as completely awful as you want to be. He brings out the very worst in you, and because you are weak in character, you somehow get off on it.

I will always blame the gross “leadership” in your broken party — 80 percent who know better — for the predicament we are in, as we fight tooth and nail to keep this anti-American loudmouth out of our White House, and preserve our republic.

How dare you put this on us, and threaten to end a country 250 years in the making so casually and pathetically.

And I will alway blame my former brethren in the bought-off, reprehensible corporate media for normalizing one of the worst people in world history. They have done catastrophic damage with their refusal to cover one of the biggest stories ever with the weight and vigor it deserves.

He will do everything he can to end us, and YOU know it, damn you.

But it is you, Trump voter, who I reserve the majority of my disdain. You have been coddled long enough in this country. You aren’t misunderstood. The truth is you have very effectively spent the past eight years making it crystal clear to anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention just how revolting and toxic you truly are.

I understand you all too well, and hope you all go straight to hell for the damage you have done to America, the majority of our people, and the brave souls who gave their lives defending her.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

As this piece publishes, I will have started on the 1,200-mile trail home that bends hard to the northwest and connects the Battleground State of North Carolina to the Battleground State of Wisconsin.

Such are the highly charged political times we live in …

I am remembering a similar journey almost eight years ago to the day, when my wife and I made the drive to South Carolina and back. Those were less ominous days when I lived in a place inside my head that arrogantly ignored all the warnings, and was incapable of even considering the looming attack.

All along the route that cut through rural Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and finally South Carolina, there were thousands of signs cautioning of the impending storm that was coming.

They littered yards, highways, and strip malls … They were in front of building and along byways …

Those blasted blue, white and red signs stood planted in the ground one after another defiantly daring people not to stare at the them.

Trump/Pence … Trump/Pence … Trump/Pence …

They were in every predominantly white community we breezed through during our whirlwind ride, but we paid them no mind, because what on God’s green Earth did these people have to be so damn angry about, and what could possibly recommend such an obviously vile old man?

The economy had returned to what passes for normal in America after the terrible crash eight years earlier. We were finally the hell out of Iraq, and the United Kingdom was proving they were the misguided country by voting for something that was preposterously stupid, self-defeating, and racist called “Brexit.”

I mean, what kind of country is stupid enough to vote against its own interests …?

Besides, Hillary was going to win no matter what all these ridiculous signs said, because the alternative was just too impossible to even contemplate. I remember telling a variation of this, replete with a haughty shrug, to anybody who was foolish enough to listen to me.

We never did see even one Clinton/Kaine sign during the 1,150-mile drive.

Not one.

Then came the horrific blast on the evening of November 8, 2016, that rocked the world, and sent me spiraling. At four in the morning the next day, I sat alone in the darkness of my den, slugging from a celebratory bottle of booze that had now turned elixir for my pain. I called my daughters, but only got through to my youngest: “I’m sorry,” I said when she picked up. “I really didn’t think we had this in us …”

I’m guessing you’ll have your own story.

Never forget …

For the past 28 days I have been on the windy Outer Banks of North Carolina pacing the beaches, and working feverishly to spread the good word about the accomplished woman, who simply must be the one who finally smashes the glass ceiling and claims the top prize.

Once again I’m telling people that the alternative is just too impossible to even contemplate. Only now I am saying it with an urgency that worries even me when I really get to thinking about it — which is pretty much all the time.

The warning signs are everywhere. The madman is once again on the loose. The guardrails that are supposed to keep such evil in check have been smashed to smithereens. There have been catastrophic failures by our Justice Department and the woeful press.

Trump’s very own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is telling us Donald Trump is the most dangerous man in America, and it is barely getting a shrug from people who should damn well know better.

I came to North Carolina searching for perspective, and to draw strength for this endless presidential campaign’s finishing kick. I’m not sure I found all that, or have even an inkling of what the majority of the good people in that state will do with their votes on November 5th.

But there are signs of hope …

The state has the look and feel of a classic toss-up, where the littlest thing could make an enormous amount of difference. The governor’s race is on the ballot, and though it seems impossible, the revolting Republican candidate, Mark Robinson, could actually be a drag on the bottom-feeding Trump, who has endorsed Robinson and all his hate and ugliness.

The Democrat Josh Stein will win that race, or I will eat every hat in my closet November 6th. The race for the presidency could well come down to how many Republicans split their votes, and somehow tap both Stein and the despicable Trump.

Signs are Robinson is only hurting the ghastly Trump, though.

I’m a big fan of the state’s Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton, and believe she is a generational talent who has her finger on the pulse of the voters in Carolina. She knows that turning out those voters will be the key to the kingdom. Too many people who should don’t vote in the Tar Heel State, and in the past that has spelled Big D Doom for the Little D Democrats.

This certainly isn’t specific to North Carolina, but in a state that is on the political knife’s edge, just a few votes here or there can end up making a clear-cut difference.

I departed the state just as early-voting was starting, and with the high hopes that buoyed my arrival: If not this year North Carolina, when?

There are more good signs that Carolinians are turning out and voting like never before. Experts in the state will point you to Mecklenburg County, the home of Charlotte, as Ground Zero for a real opportunity for Democrats to find thousands of new voters. For example, fewer than 19 percent of registered Mecklenburg County voters cast ballots in the 2024 primary in March, compared to 24 percent statewide. This disparity has played out in just about every election in recent memory.

Voting lines were long in Charlotte on Thursday, and Clayton and her lieutenants have made sure there are salaried boots on the ground in the city for the first time ever to keep driving this crucial Democratic turnout.

These voters have unique super powers because of their proximity to the front lines of this epic battle between good and evil. They have influence many of us don’t. If you’ve got some spare change jangling around in your pockets, or some time on your hands, the hard-working Democrats in Mecklenburg County could put it to good use ...

Now I have unpinned myself from the Atlantic Coast. I am once again working my way north/northwest, keeping my eye on the road, but always looking for the signs.

I am a far different man than the one who made this similar journey eight years ago. I am weary … less trusting. I know what my country is capable of now, both the good: “We must take that beach no matter the cost to beat back the Nazis …” And the bad: "We got a lot of bad genes in our country. They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats …"

We have it in us to do literally anything, but I once again have chosen to expect the best. Sure, I will give the worst its due because it has proven itself a devilish adversary, but I will not fear it, because I have far better things to do with what little time we have left in this election.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be coming to my town with the man Kamala Harris tapped to be her Vice President, Tim Walz.

I plan to be there with gusto.

I will be shoulder to shoulder in Madison, Wisconsin, with thousands of others who have done nothing but meet the moment the past eight years.

We have worked tirelessly and swapped out a bought-off Republican governor, Scott Walker, for a two-term, popular Democratic one named Tony Evers. We have put in the time to win a handful of huge elections that turned our State Supreme Court from hard Right to a steady Left. We have finally thrown out the most gerrymandered maps in the nation, and replaced them with fair maps that favor only the better candidates — Blue or Red.

We have beaten the traitor, Trump, and damn sure will again.

Wisconsin has done what North Carolina most certainly has it in it to do, and I bring news that there are signs everywhere that they will.

NOW READ: Not even ‘Fox and Friends’ can hide Trump’s dementia

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”

Read that quote again. I’ll wait.

Read it one more time …

Those chilling words came from the stiff upper lip of retired General Mark Milley. Milley was once the most powerful military person in uniform when he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Trump and Biden.

They aren’t aimed at Russia’s Vladimir Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They aren’t carefully targeted at any number of terrorist leaders inside or outside our country … they are a direct-hit on the man he once served under: the repulsive and anti-American Donald Trump.

This is absolutely breathtaking ...

It is not the first time Milley has warned America of Trump’s fascist tendencies — he did so expansively in The Atlantic’s sensational profile of the man: “The Patriot” last year — but it is by far his most direct broadside attack on the deranged loser, who lacks even a morsel of any redeeming character.

Milley re-upped these words of warning recently for Bob Woodward to use in his forthcoming book “War.”

I will refrain from expanding further on what I think about journalists who bury news for their fat profit, but it makes Milley’s words to Woodward that I led off this piece with no less stark or damning.

The normalization of the America-attacking Trump by our corporate media and the unhinged Republican Party has been the sorriest and most dangerous thing I have ever witnessed in my long professional life.

Trump is provably a bigot, a tax-cheat, a felon, a serial liar, a traitor, and a complete fraud. He verbally and physically abuses women, and writes love letters to dictators like the two murdering men I mentioned above.

He insults our military, our NATO allies, and lately has gone full-Hitler on the campaign trail spewing some of the most disgusting venom that has been heard in this country in 100 years. He calls his political opponents “vermin.” He has encouraged Americans to blame the Jews if he loses, and has accused hard-working immigrants of some of most abominable and heinous things imaginable including “raping our women” and “eating our pets” — just to name a few.

With his fresh comments and words of warning, Milley joins a small but slowly growing list of retired military heavyweights who are sounding the alarms and warning us of the dangerous man they served under.

Retired General John Kelly, who was once Trump’s Chief of Staff, said this on CNN nearly one year ago to the day, when asked about his former boss:

“What can I add that has not already been said? … A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

He wasn’t done:

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

Just last month — doesn’t it feel like a year ago? — another Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, saw the need to take to the editorial pages of the Washington Post to explain why Trump’s abhorrent political event on Arlington National Cemetery’s hallowed grounds obliterated the lines of decency. Nobody has ever explained this breach of honor better than Mullen:

“To intrude upon that scene — to visit politics upon it — is to do much more than violate those rules; it is to betray the very nature of Arlington. It is to mock the apolitical nature of our military and to dishonor the sacrifices made by those who rest there. Worse, it may lead others to think less of those sacrifices, to view them as smaller than they actually were. And that’s a travesty, no matter what the visitor may have intended.”

Retired three- and four-star generals, Mark Hertling and Wesley Clark, who along with Mullen, I got to know while Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes newspaper in Germany and Japan, have also strenuously warned us of the extreme dangers of another Trump presidency.

Clark said this in February:

“I do not say this lightly: The lives of every American, both in uniform and civilian, are at severe risk if Donald Trump wins this election.”

He, too, wasn’t done:

“For Trump to publicly signal to Vladimir Putin that he can take as much of Europe as he wants, and we will sit by and cheer him on, isn’t just breaking the promise the United States has made, and it isn’t just threatening Europe. It is encouraging World War III, which will hit our shores and cost American lives.
“It is the kind of statement that can only come from a deranged and twisted mind. I do not say this lightly: The lives of every American, both in uniform and civilian, are at severe risk if Donald Trump wins this election.”

“Deranged and twisted mind …”

If all this scares the hell out of you, it damn well should, because while these men have grudgingly used bombs to protect our nation’s interests, they most certainly are not bomb-throwers. They have spent their long careers choosing their words very wisely, because one slip-up can trigger unheard of and horrific consequences.

These men are telling us right now that the Republican nominee for president means this country harm, and for the life of me, I will never understand why our nation is not right now on wartime footing.

Why aren’t our national newspapers using their newsprint and reach to tell us every single day in plain words like these generals and admirals have, what is at stake in this election?

Why didn't our Justice Department move with alacrity to put this man where he most certainly belongs — behind bars?

We won’t survive another Trump presidency.

America will be toppled, and a madman will be given free rein to wage war and exact revenge on his own citizenry.

Look, you don’t have to listen to me when I tell you all these terrible things, but you’d be a damn fool not to trust the warnings of the professionals, who spent their careers protecting us from the worst men on the planet.

NOW READ: Trump keeps telling us he believes he’ll lose

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Merrick Garland's failure to protect us from the anti-American madman who attacked our country, and now wants to finish us off, has been a catastrophic dereliction of duty unmatched in American history.

I am not here to needlessly pile on or distract us from our important work of making good and damn sure Kamala Harris is elected next month, but I do think it is vital we understand that our attorney general’s — the most powerful law enforcement officer in the world — refusal and/or inability to do his job upon his appointment in 2021, has put this country in tremendous danger.

He is without a doubt Joe Biden’s greatest mistake, and we must now hold our breaths for the next 30-plus days hoping that that mistake won’t be a tragic footnote to the story about America’s once-great democracy.

In light of the eye-opening and much-anticipated filing from special counsel Jack Smith Wednesday, I feel it important to spend just a minute detailing for the record the breach of public trust in his office, and the terrible angst that Garland has inflicted on the American public.

Smith’s filing includes details of the horrific events surrounding one of the darkest days in American history, January 6, 2021, and Donald Trump’s intent to steal the election. It puts into stunning view the extreme threats on that day to law enforcement officers, HIS VICE PRESIDENT, and our vote.

We have learned among other things, that when Trump was informed of the threats to Mike Pence’s life from his violent mob, his reaction was simply and literally, “So what.”

As I typed in February, instead of moving with alacrity after his appointment to AG in March of 2021, and leveling the full weight of the law against the disgusting, orange traitor, Garland made the decision to avoid the whole thing like Trump avoids vegetables.

He said little to nothing about it.

We waited.

It literally took the guy well over a year to give us even the slightest hint he was at all interested in doing his job, by bringing Trump and his lieutenants to justice.

Finally, on November 18, 2022, nearly two years after the attack on America, Garland, the alleged grandmaster law-and-order expert carefully considered the board, and deftly put himself in check by pawning off his responsibility to somebody else.

There was never any damn reason for a special counsel. Trump running for office to avoid prosecution might have been the most predictable thing ever, but Garland either didn’t see it coming, or was pathetically blind to its hyper-predictable chances.

By waiting to act, Garland allowed the entire morally bankrupt Republican Party “leadership” to spin all this like some political persecution for the past three years. Many of these very same “leaders” of course came out hard against Trump in the days and weeks following the attack, figuring like we did, that Trump had gone too damn far.

Surely, Biden’s new AG would bring the America-attacking Trump to justice.

Now, with but 33 days until the most important election in American history, there are no guarantees that there ever will be a trial, and that Trump will be held accountable for his high crimes.

All of this doesn't excuse Republicans’ abominable actions throughout the past three-plus years defending their traitorous leader, but all of that should have been anticipated by Garland the very day he was sworn into office.

If we are able to weather the storm that is sure to follow the election in November, no matter who wins, we must demand that Harris makes dumping the pathetic Garland one of the first things on her agenda. We must demand that she replaces him with a person who understands that he or she works for us, the American public.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough

Buckle your seatbelts, friends, because I want to talk about The New York Times’ mind-bending endorsement of Kamala Harris this morning.

Before I launch, I’ll take just a minute of your time typing about newspaper endorsements of political candidates running for public office.

1. I’ve never much liked ‘em.
2. I don’t think they make a bit of a difference.
3. How a newspaper performs its job of informing its readers daily is all that matters.

In 2016, 99 percent of the newspapers in America endorsed Hillary Clinton, and we all know how that sorry election went. How well do you think newspapers did informing their readers of the candidates in that election daily?

However, these editorials can perform one valuable service to their readers, which I will address in earnest below.

I’ve always been of the opinion that a newspaper’s one and only job is to thoroughly cover the candidates and issues, inform its readers, and then allow them to make up their minds about what they will do with their vote.

Do that, and you’ve successfully done your job as a journalistic institution.

Many of my colleagues in the business disagree with my take, which has made for some robust discussions over the years. I’ll try to throw a blanket over the gist of their reasoning for supporting endorsements that goes something like this: Because readers are busy with their lives, newspapers can do a valuable service of letting them know who they think would best do the job in office. After all, their only job is to cover these candidates 24/7, so who then is a better expert on the subject?

OK … Maybe … But, still, I’m not too fond of it.

Let’s go with the line that newspapers, and in this case The New York Times, are the real experts on the candidates and the issues in this presidential election.

If that is the case, then the editorial The New York Times published today just demolished its very own news staff by exposing them for catastrophic and democracy-threatening incompetency.

Let’s get started:

Here’s the slammer the Times put atop their piece touting Harris for president:

THE ONLY PATRIOTIC CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT

OK, you’ll get no disagreement from me, so let’s hear more about this “patriotic choice.”

Well, you had to wait a bit because the Times’ editorial staff spent the first four graphs excoriating the nightmare Kamala Harris is running against, Donald Trump, for, among other things, “Proving himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.”

OK, yep, that’s the guy I’ve known for the past nine years. But please, go on, NYT ...

“Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.”

Incredibly damning. I mean, how is this guy even allowed outside the gates of his garish country club — or even a jail cell? But continue, please …

“This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.”

So The New York Times took out its flamethrower Monday, and laid waste to the 78-year-old America-attacking felon, before even mentioning Harris once. Seems like The New York Times thought it plenty prudent to lay out the stakes in no uncertain terms the calamitous effect another Trump presidency would have on this country.

After all, he lacks “wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, and discipline, but besides that, he’s got a lot going for himself.

So let’s duck in here real quick and launch a question aimed at the paper’s news department: Did you bother reading this editorial that rips into this disgusting, America-attacking man and his threat to our democracy?

Do you agree with this editorial?

Assuming your answers are even in the remote vicinity of yes, can you tell us why you have not covered him with the resources, urgency and editorial weight this gigantic new story demands during the past eight years?

Can you lower yourselves to reader-level and offer us at least a brief explanation for WHY you spend more time on your endless, self-serving polling than you do protecting your readers from a two-bit authoritarian thug who means to end us???

Look, as an old print guy, you continue to make me absolutely sick, but at least your editorial staff has now exposed you for failing to cover the biggest story in the United States of America since the Civil War with even a remote amount of adequacy.

Here’s more from the editorial:

“(This election) is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

Dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong …

I mean, HOLY HELL, people. How do you think this newspaper would be covering anybody but Trump, if they were telling us they were going to “dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong???”

Can you imagine for one minute the deluge of fire and heat they would bring against Harris if she had her sights set on dismantling OUR institutions? By the time they were done with her, she’d be carried out on a rail, and sent to Guantanamo Bay for the rest of her life.

Then The New York Times does the most New York Times thing ever and criticizes HARRIS for (prudently) avoiding them and their wreck of a news staff by writing this nuclear-powered bluster:

“Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.”

“Many voters” ... Screw off with that, you haughty fools.

How DARE they talk about “a disservice to the American people” when their very own news staff can’t find their a-- with both hands, much less identify the biggest story in 160 years.

Of course, she should avoid them and the incompetent boobs on the news desk: THEY ARE DANGEROUS.

This editorial is stuffed with so much unmitigated gall that I’m shocked it didn’t melt the presses when it was being printed. It exposed its very own news staff for incompetency that rises to disturbing levels, including this:

Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

And there it is. A second Trump term would do “lasting harm to our democracy …”

You’d think that would be all any half-decent newspaper would cover, especially given that a free press is one of the featured ingredients in any democracy.

Finally — and I am sparing you here because I could go on all day completely leveling this reprehensible paper — The New York Times attempts to out New York Times itself by ending its editorial with this:

“In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

“Kamala Harris is the only choice.”

Many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds???? Are you serious with this, you pompous idiots? I guarantee you there are tens of millions in this country who have been traumatized by this evil b------, and WISH they could put him out of their minds. But if you want to dig in and assume that is not the case, then let me remind you of this: It is YOUR JOB to remind readers about the dangers of this twisted idiot with your urgent reporting of those “excesses.”

My-God …

By running this editorial, The New York Times has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that if the news department isn’t in the tank for Donald Trump, then they are easily the most overpaid, incompetent nitwits who have ever staffed a newsroom.

Unfortunately, it’s most likely both.

NOW READ: Is this the October Surprise?

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough)

We have a complete madman running for the President of the United States, and it would be about damn time our national media started reporting it this way.

We are just over seven weeks from a landmark election that will determine America’s standing in the world, and her ability to protect the rights, welfare and lives of her citizens.

With all of this on the line, we have bitterly learned that we can no longer count on the fourth estate.

It’s a terrible thing. They have catastrophically failed us like never before.

We have been forced to wait helplessly, and wonder if these incompetent, ponderous idiots will ever stop ignoring what is so clearly right in front of our tired eyes: a dangerous maniac backed by a massive propaganda network that disgracefully fills his dark, billowing sails, allowing him to rumble unchecked and uncovered across the American countryside, taking a blowtorch to the truth, dead aim on our vote and our election workers, and repeating insane, dangerous and racist conspiracy theories that assault our senses, and could well result in the death of our democracy and many of our citizens.

That run-on sentence has never needed writing more, because while I typed it, our media continued to massively underreport, and even disgracefully normalize its chilling message.

This is NOT OK, people.

We must demand that our collective media FINALLY removes their blinders and their heads from their asses and starts reporting on what WE KNOW they have been seeing and hearing from the 300-lb. sack of dirt, and his revolting followers in Congress who swoon at his fat, little feet to provide him cover.

Donald J. Trump means America harm, goddamnit, and he is getting sicker and crazier by the minute.

So tell me: At what point does this become the only thing worth leading every major media outlet in this country????

At its core, the mission of the working press is cut and dry and pretty easily executed: Reporters and news departments are assigned to cover various beats and report out to the American people about what is happening in their coverage areas. The press has the privilege of being where we too often can’t, so that they can tell us what has transpired on the football field, or the court room, or a theater of war, or the school board meeting, or on the election trail …

We depend on them to be our eyes and ears, to describe as vividly as possible what is happening where they are. We depend on them to provide this information to the editorial leaders in their respective newsrooms, who are tasked with processing it all and giving it the weight and “play” it deserves.

We depend on their news sense and professionalism to understand what is important and what isn't.

We depend on them to be accurate and credible, because without those two things, they are done, and we all suffer for it.

Again, it really isn’t that difficult a job to carry out, but man, is it monumentally important.

Well, right now our incompetent and potentially bought-off media is making a complete and utter mess of things, and only a damn fool would rate their coverage of this election as even remotely accurate and credible.

It’s an absolute disgrace is what it is.

The Republican candidate for president is a complete madman. A racist. Unhinged.

Even the slightest amount of fact-checking and casual observation would confirm this.

So WHY isn’t it being reported this way????

We are in the middle of a national emergency, and I am going to continue to use my small but sturdy platform built on years in the newspaper business to ask just one more time:

What the hell is going on in our nation’s newsrooms? WHAT can they possibly be covering that is more important than the most serious internal threat to America since the Civil War?

We must ALL keeping asking these questions until we get a damn answer. Our safety and our democracy depend on it.

The guy they are normalizing is a slovenly, dirty old man incapable of cogently reciting even the most basic political policy. That should be the very least we expect from a candidate — even policy that was written FOR HIM like Project 2025.

The guy they are bucking up as some legitimate candidate often forgets where he is, and confuses people all the time. He talks up murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and talks down leaders — even American presidents — who have stood with us for decades.

This is what traitors do.

He doesn't understand or respect NATO, geopolitical affairs, or even American history. And he damn sure doesn’t understand the economy. Trump’s hotel and casino businesses have declared bankruptcy SIX times. He couldn’t even sell steaks, for crying out loud. So listen to me, you media suckers, and take this note:

Trump inherited a perfectly good economy from Barack Obama in 2016, who brought us back from the brink after Republican George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, and left it smoldering in flames by the time he finally exited the scene by taking a torch to our Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Were any you watching this????? Seriously, WERE YOU????

Look, just because he SAYS he built a great economy during his repulsive four years in the White House does not make it so. Why not do some real reporting, and look into that?

He often gives answers to even the easiest questions as if he were auditioning to be the star of some deranged carnival. Here’s but one answer of hundreds like this, he offered up about providing affordable child care last week:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it — in this country, you have to have it.
But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.
Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.
We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care.
I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, that I just told you about.
We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.
Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

Well? That’s a direct quote right there.

Time and again, you sanitize all this crap as if it were your job to listen to the nuclear-grade bullshit he spits out about God knows what, and twist yourself in a pretzel trying to explain to your readers what you think he was trying to say.

That is NOT your job, you fools. Your job is to simply report word for word what he said. And if it doesn’t make any sense, well you better damn well report it that way.

And what about Tuesday night’s debate? That one should have mercifully ended his career forever. He was so overmatched, so insane and so revolting, that the very least one of his gross lackeys could have done was lasso him and use a two-ton winch to drag him off the stage.

Instead, the aforementioned Rubio called it “a big win” for his master.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he had “the best closing in presidential debate history.”

Both of these feeble men warned us of the dangers of Trump in 2016. Now they disgracefully run cover for him. Is this no longer worth a mention? Can they ever be trusted again?

Here’s what your headline should have been after that debate:

TRUMP AGAIN PROVES HIMSELF COMPLETELY UNFIT FOR LEADERSHIP

I didn’t see that one anywhere. Why? What debate were you watching?

His despicable attack on Haitian-Americans right now, is no different than his attack on Asian-Americans four years ago, or his attack on Mexican-Americans four years before that. And what about his lifelong attacks on Black Americans, including the repulsive “birther issue” he created in the dark pit that doubles as his filthy mind to attack Obama?

He is the literal definition of a bigot. Why won’t you call him that? Does accuracy scare you?

His is a mountain of steaming hate — the throttle between his addled brain and filthy mouth is now completely burned out and inoperable. He’s the racist drunk at the end of the bar screaming into his empty shot glass and trying to make all his miserable problems everybody else’s.

He’s a convicted felon, admitted woman-abuser, and is charged with violently attacking the United States of America.

There is literally nothing he won’t do to win this election.

NOTHING.

Do any of you doubt he will will continue to incite violence when he loses on November 5th? Do any of you doubt that were he to win he would order his orcs to exact revenge on anybody and everybody he deems disloyal, including you? Do any of you have any doubt he will spread all manner of lies and hate between now and election day that will further muddy the waters of our once unassailably honest election system?

Any doubt at all?

Why aren’t you reporting it then? Why aren’t you giving this the urgency the potential end of our country as we know it demands? People’s lives are on the line, you blithering idiots.

This is the biggest story you will ever cover and you are blowing it so catastrophically I literally shake every time I am forced to address it.

You are cowards, you are worthless, and you have failed in your quest to uphold your most basic responsibility to the public: accurately and credibly reporting the truth.

The end of America is potentially here, and you are either too damn stupid to know it, or worse: complicit in its demise.

Those are the facts, and it would be about damn time you started paying attention to them.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

These are nervous, precarious times and I have turned around a lot of copy lately, but I felt it imperative that one of the most grievous, haughty, tone-deaf editorials I have ever come across was answered with the disdain it deserves.

Most of you are aware of my passion for journalism, and concern that we are being abandoned by our working press at this absolutely critical juncture in American history.

Time and again, our media has left the strong impression that they are simply more interested in their bottom lines than arming us with the information and first-rate coverage needed to protect us from Donald Trump and his Republicans’ ongoing attack on democracy.

Many of you have let me know you prefer I call the working press “the corporate media” and today I have reached the point where I am grudgingly inclined to concede to this reference.

Money is the impetus that drives too much of what we are being forced to consume in today’s polluted media landscape, and the American public is suffering mightily because of that.

I have written relentlessly on our corporate media’s failures since 2016. For eight years, our corporate media have proven unable to properly cover the felon, sexual-abuser, tax cheat, and America-attacking Donald Trump. My God, they still haven’t even done the bare minimum of calling him the damn liar he has proved himself to be literally every waking hour or so.

Nothing he says should get anywhere near print unless it has been strenuously fact-checked.

It has pained me to the point of tears to call these media entities into account, because I KNOW they shouldn’t comport themselves this way, and by doing so are insulting the thousands and thousands of people like myself who got into the business to make the world a better place by keeping our readers accurately and credibly informed.

Instead of the serious introspection needed to improve their work, and fulfill their mission to their readers — every paper should employ an independent ombudsman/woman — these dangerous, incompetent boobs have actually dug in, and somehow gotten worse.

You’ll find no better example of this than the most insulting editorial I have ever come across.

Get this, my friends:

In today’s editions of The Washington Post, you will find an opinion piece being given prominent weight written by none other than the The New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger.

Here is the unbelievable headline:

Sorry, COULD????

To be fair, as a longtime journalist, I would normally take heart in a piece like this one, but NOT when it is written by a man whose newspaper has aided and abetted the most serious attack on America since the Civil War, and has “ruthlessly curtailed journalism” in its own damn newsroom by refusing to practice it.

My blood boiled while I read this man’s endless piece highlighting what WE should be doing to protect press freedoms, when HIS own failing newspaper has abandoned the fight by very intentionally refusing to properly cover, and give proper editorial weight to Trump and his revolting party's ongoing attack on the truth, our vote, and our democracy.

Their despicable lack of reporting and absurd, both-sides bullshit on these critical issues has been absolutely breathtaking. They have literally surrendered wide swaths of their news hole each day in this “quiet war” to include authoritarian talking points, and right-wing conjecture that simply have no place in fact, and serve nobody but the fascist scoundrels who mean our democracy harm.

They have treated us to relentless horse-race political coverage, and done everything they can to leave their punch-drunk readers with the impression that both sides are somehow the same, and/or draw on false equivalencies THAT SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST.

As I was reading this editorial through rage, I thought to myself there is NO WAY this fool could turn around this bilge if he actually read his own damn newspaper each day. Then I wondered if perhaps this was simply projection of the highest order: Sulzberger was warning us of a plague that had already afflicted his staff of lightweight journalists.

Perhaps it is more simple. Sulzberger is a pompous hypocrite who doesn’t even listen to himself anymore. This was a quote that oozed out of his big, fat mouth just three months ago:

“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?”

Incredible, eh?

Nobody can be entirely sure what was behind this dangerous assault on the senses, and why The Washington Post, which is owned by the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, and helmed by the ethically challenged, Will Lewis, decided it was a good idea to print it, but I am certain there is more to it than meets the eye.

These newspapers are provably delivering exactly what Sulzberger is warning against — when he’s not defending it.

The “quiet war” they are pretending to be so upset about is already over, and this we do know for sure: They have played a significant and disgraceful part in the attack.

To hell with them both.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

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We need to talk about the abominable headline below, and how it is we have come to the fatal point where The New York Times and our broken mainstream media seem to need the America-attacking Donald Trump a helluva lot more than the America-attacking Donald Trump seems to need The New York Times and our broken mainstream media.

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During the past few, rocky years my feelings about the newspaper I grew up reading as a kid — the paper that influenced me more than any other to become a newspaperman — in the New Jersey suburbs have evolved from surprise, to shock, to disappointment, to anger, to rage, to complete revulsion ...

Aside from platforming maniacal, caustic headlines topping spurious content like the one above (which I promise to get to in a minute), this newspaper’s inability to spot the biggest news story of our lifetimes, and treat it with the heft it deserves, is journalistic malpractice, and a very real danger to our country.

The Times isn’t alone in its mishandling and disregard of the continuing attack on our country and its institutions that back it up. In fact, I can’t point to ONE so-called reputable news source in our “mainstream” media that has appropriately sounded the alarms, and given this perpetually breaking news story the treatment it demands.

There is not a single day that toddles by, when I don’t sit at my cluttered desk as the retired newspaperman I ultimately became, and stare at my keyboard wondering just what in the hell is being discussed in the newsrooms of our most foremost “news” operations in this nation.

Why have they abandoned us, and the most important story in the world?

Our country has been under steady attack for nearly four years now. Why aren’t our newsrooms on wartime footing? Bare minimum, why haven’t Democracy Desks been set up in these broken newsrooms staffed with journalists who do nothing but monitor the Republicans’ movements as they ruthlessly defend an attack on America, and go about annihilating truth, justice, and our right to even vote?

What news could possibly override monitoring the dangerous maneuvers of a sociopath, who is still free and on the loose after unleashing his rabid attack dogs to besiege our Capitol, stomp on law enforcement officials, seek out political leaders for harm and hanging, and prevent the certification of our vote, while doing nothing for three hours except root for the attack’s success?

Backed by his morally busted political party, the son of a bitch means to finish us off whether or not he ever gets power again. He is the literal definition of a terrorist and/or an authoritarian strongman — a thug. He bows to murderous fascists like Putin, and openly revels in their success.

There’s not a single thing I have typed here that isn’t completely true. So what in the hell is going on with our addled media, and their disgusting refusal to do their jobs?

Why just the the other day, this pathetic man outdid even himself when he illegally barged into Arlington National Cemetery for a photo op. He once again disgraced our fallen, who he has called “suckers” and “losers” to get his wrinkled, orange mug in front of a camera.

My God. Now let’s pretend what would happen if Joe Biden or Kamala Harris did something like that …

It has been more than 160 years since a threat like this presented itself in the United States of America, and we know how that turned out. Hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, an assassinated president, cities in ruin, and the very real chance that America would not be able to rebuild itself again.

She did, but all these decades later, still walks with a limp from that horrific period in her life.

We are but 69 days from repeating all this, though it could be even worse this time, because if the enemies of our Democracy win this election they will have successfully breached our Capitol, and will be setting up headquarters in our White House.

The repugnant Confederacy, thank God, never made it that far last time.

So I ask again: Just what in the hell is being discussed in all these newsrooms while Trump bangs the drums of hate, follows the roadmap created for him in Project 2025, and backstopped by a radical, bought-off Supreme Court, bolstered by known election-deniers, promises retribution to anybody who dares get in his way?

Since that terrible attack on our Democracy began four years ago, our broken media has given us almost nothing but normalization and capitulation.

How else to explain this headline and the story it trumpeted written by one of the NYT’s leaders in its editorial department, Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy:

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What matters most? You mean, the safety and well-being of our country and its citizens from those who would attack it?

Of course it didn’t mean that ...

That headline and the one I lead this piece with above topping an offensive, ridiculous slice of gaslighting by the ultra-Conservative Rich Lowry of the National Review, were splashed across the pages of The New York Times on Monday.

And let’s get this out of the way quickly: Yes, I understand that they were produced by the editorial department of this dumpster fire of a news source, but if that makes you feel any better about things, then they have you right where they want you: accepting that running this kind of propagandist bilge is acceptable.

It’s not.

It’s not from any news source that wants us to take them seriously, and displays the credibility that any reputable news organization must possess to serve its readership adequately.

My only plausible guess for the mainstream media’s failure to cover the attack on our country, besides sheer and incomprehensible incompetence, is that they are hedging their bets. Trump has been undeniably good for their bottom lines, which looks to me to be the only damn thing they truly care about.

If Trump goes away, so does the money. And what of the millions of dollars of tax cuts he’s promising to once again give the owners of these pompous rags?

Otherwise, there’s no making sense of any of this.

Regular readers will know that this is not the first time I have written about our media’s catastrophic failure to protect and inform us. And fair warning: Unless things radically change with the way our mainstream media comport themselves in the coming days, it won’t be the last.

I take these threats to our country and our media institutions very seriously, and I have learned many of you do, too. You (we) are owed a damn explanation for the greatest failure by our media in the 248-year history of our country.

We are furious about it, we have a right to be, and we deserve some damn answers PRONTO.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough

I am typing to you this afternoon with my chest puffed out, and with an extra helping of piss and vinegar, because Democrats just keep winning here in Wisconsin.

This time, it was Tuesday’s 2024 Partisan Primary election, where Democrats once again laid the wood to the Republicans by laying waste to their cheap, desperate constitutional amendments (power grabs).

Before I get granular with some eye-popping numbers that detail what happened to these initiatives, I want to get this out of the way:

The traitor, Trump, has NO SHOT in Wisconsin this year. None.

(Oh, but thanks for dumping all your money into our state with your joke of a convention last month. Very kind of you, sport. Hope yer bone spurs aren’t giving you too much trouble today …)

Listen to me, we take pride in being the battlegroundiest of the battleground states in this country, and for the seventh year running are taking care of the business of protecting our democracy.

So get a load of these election results yesterday, and why they spell doom for Trump and his America-attacking Republicans in November:

Where I live in Madison, we had a 45% turnout Tuesday — the highest for a fall partisan election EVER. This is an obscenely high number. The state overall was at a rock-solid 26% turnout, the highest in 60 years.

Don't pooh-pooh these numbers. There were no big, competitive statewide races on the ballot to drive turnout, which is why the Republicans tried to sneak those damn initiatives on the ballot that were designed to take power away from our Democratic Governor Tony Evers in the first place.

They failed massively.

Rest assured, you can expect the turnout numbers to be close to double Tuesday’s in November. So why does that matter?

Well, take a look at what we thought of the GOP's disgusting ballot initiatives. They lost statewide by a whopping 15 points -- 57%-42%. Again, this is a battleground state.

Here in Dane County, where I live in the city of Madison? Well, those initiatives were defeated by 66 points.

Read that again.

We voted them down 83% to 17%. Astonishing. Truly astonishing.

Statewide, the vote against this attempted GOP-power grab was 705,000 to 520,000.
Here in Dane County, the fastest-growing county in the state, the numbers read like this: 139,000 to 29,000 -- a 110,000 vote difference.

Come November, expect Kamala Harris to have a 200,000+ vote advantage here in Dane County alone. I am telling you right now, there is no making that up, even if the orange traitor has a half-decent showing elsewhere in the state (he won't).

And a quick note on these blasted ballot questions, and why they are showing up with such regularity here in the Badger State:

The GOP knows they are no longer able to win statewide elections, so their majority in the state senate are trying to cram these confusing, lawyered-up questions on the ballot to sucker voters into giving them powers they have lost at the ballot box.

It is cynical and disgusting, but there is nothing they won’t do to try to hold onto what little power they have left up here.

Thing is, we are on to them.

Listen to me, The Rest of America:

We are a battle-tested group up here, who have been winning statewide elections at a steady clip. Since 2017, we have won the presidency, governor races, Senate races, flipped the State Supreme Court, the AG, have new fair maps, and CAN'T WAIT for November.

The only race I can point to that we didn't win in the last seven years, was one we should have, and man, it still stings: The 2022 Senate race between Russia Ron Johnson and upstart Mandela Barnes. In the days and weeks leading up to that race, national polling had Johnson beating Barnes by outside-the-margin-of-error numbers.

So the Democratic National Committee cooled their funding for Barnes, and spent elsewhere in what they deemed more competitive races. Well, they missed the fact that Barnes was closing like a freight train, and ended up losing that race by ONE PERCENTAGE POINT.

<argh>

But forget that. Seriously forget it.

Know this: Our win rate up here is well north of 90 percent. Thanks in large part to Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler, who is literally everywhere all at once building our vaunted team, you could call an election for anything at any time in this state, and we’d be at the polls in minutes.

Wikler, along with smaller, feisty teams all over the state, are working like hell as I type this, to make sure that when November gets here, we will bury the GOP.

I run with Team Gold here in West Madison. This is a group of old pros, who know a thing or two about activating the vote. They give of themselves, their homes, their time, and their money to do whatever is necessary to get the damn vote out.

We have a well-oiled machine that KNOWS HOW TO WIN. Again, there are teams like this everywhere in Wisconsin — even Red counties.

So I say this to you with love and respect in closing, patriots:

You handle your business in whatever part of the country you find yourselves, and I promise you, we'll handle ours.

We understand the assignment here in Wisconsin, dammit.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough)

(That’s Kamala Harris speaking in front of a packed house in Milwaukee last month. Wisconsin is plenty fired up and ready to lay a thorough ass-kicking on the traitor, Trump, and his GOP in November. To quote President Barack Obama: “It’s what we do!”)

It will come as no surprise to the regulars around here that I have soured to the point where I can barely pucker up to the work being done by our corporate, national media these days.

My love affair with the profession I gave most of my life to has ended in hurt and disappointment. Our national press too often presents as incompetent fools who are more interested in being led around by the nose than they are in sniffing out stories, including the biggest one of our lives.

Our democracy is under attack RIGHT NOW in America, but I bet if you took off and went running to find that reported in any of our newspapers of record in this nation at this very moment, you’d be hard-pressed to locate it in any proper form. There’s a political horse race to run you see, and anything that gets in the way of that, like the biggest story in America since the Civil War, is simply not fit for print.

ALSO READ: It's time for Bill Barr to be brought to justice

Imagine my surprise then, while lapping up coffee Sunday morning and poking around all the likely and unlikely places for news, I came across what we used to called a “blockbuster story” in The Washington Post.

I’ll guess they have a paywall on the thing, so I’ll be glad to help you through it here. It’s a damn important story, and one of those you might want to politely shove in the face of that certain Republican in our life, who thinks their party, and the orange huckster who is running it into the ground, gives a single shit about them.

Fact: They don’t.

I was also surprised that when I went looking for the story to share 24 hours later, I had to scroll through several screens to find it. These damn newspapers are so anxious to get back to their horse race, they are putting their own game-changing stories out to pasture.

This one needs some stubborn attention and sharing, though, so let’s begin …

Headline: INSURANCE LOBBYISTS BLOCK FEDERAL CRACKDOWN ON COSTLY RETIREMENT ADVICE

It’s backed with this subhead: The financial services industry has blocked the Biden administration from requiring brokers to put retirees’ needs first — above lucrative commissions.

Here’s the lede. I have highlighted a few passages for emphasis:

"To protect older Americans’ life savings, President Biden pledged in October to crack down on financial advisers who recommend investments just because they pay higher commissions. Then the insurance industry got to work."

Here’s the red meat backing that strong lede:

"Lobbying groups representing New York Life, Lincoln Financial Group, Prudential Financial and other companies first pushed back against the newly proposed regulations before suing to topple them entirely."
"Now the government’s latest attempt to protect retirees is in political and legal limbo, facing the possibility that it may never take effect."
"It is the latest example of a pervasive pattern: As the Biden administration tries to impose new restrictions on powerful industries, those businesses successfully turn to (Republican) Congress and courts for a reprieve. This time, the resulting clash centers on a basic question: Should federal law require more financial professionals to put retirees’ needs above all else — including their own paychecks — when they offer advice about how to invest?"

This is stunning, folks, it really is, and another direct attack on retirees by Republicans and the courts who own them. I say again: Anybody who tells you Republicans care about protecting you from financial predators is just flat lying, and might have some golden sneakers they’d like to sell you.

Further, they have absolutely no problem preying on hardworking people who spent their lives working their fingers to the bone and would like a few years to enjoy the fruits of that labor before limping into the sunset.

That’s a lot of necessary metaphors right there to drive home a point: If you are in, or nearing retirement, and are not voting Democratic, you are very much voting AGAINST yer own interests.

Back to the story real quick. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) was asked to comment on these heinous Republican actions, and said this:

“What they’re (GOP and these financial predators) saying is, the only way they can operate is by giving you advice that is not in your best interest. “If they hung that on their shingle … no one would go to that financial adviser.”

Dang, eh? Their success depends on screwing you.

Read that again:

Their success depends on screwing you.

So Republicans are busy little bees making it OK for your financial advisor to look you in the eyes and pick your pocket.

Back to the story:

In April, the Labor Department finalized rules that would subject a wide array of brokers to a higher legal standard, requiring them to act as fiduciaries. The effort primarily aims to protect the millions of Americans who leave their jobs, or otherwise need to roll over their retirement savings, and opt for tax-advantaged accounts such as IRAs — transactions that exceeded $770 billion in 2022 alone, according to federal estimates.
These savers face critical, one-time decisions about what to do with their money, and a miscalculation caused by conflicted investment advice could cut deeply into their retirement funds. But the Biden administration’s attempts to ensure Americans receive the best guidance have sparked immense political backlash, as financial services and insurance professionals try to avert what they see as costly, illegal federal mandates.
In July, the industries scored a string of critical early victories: Republicans in Congress took the first step toward invalidating the new rules, while judges in two federal courts blocked the government from implementing the proposal nationwide in September, as planned, potentially setting the stage for the regulations to be scrapped.

That’s a lot of evil to chew on, so here’s the nut: Republicans are actively working to protect these wolves, so they can eat YOUR savings. If this isn’t an abomination, I’m not sure what is.

Here’s some reaction to that crime:

Micah Hauptman, the director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, predicted additional delays as the fight winds its way to the Supreme Court — adding to the high stakes for Americans who already face confusing choices about what to do with their retirement money.
“Conflicted advice is very costly to retirement savers,” he said. “It can mean the difference between tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost savings over time.”

Again I say: DANG. Because when this all gets to the bought-off, radical-Right Supreme Court, you KNOW which way this is certain to go.

No surprise, the corporate bastards either refused to comment for this story, or churned out fatty propaganda like this:

The American Council of Life Insurers, one of the organizations that sued (the Biden Administration), declined to comment. But it cheered the court ruling in an unsigned statement last month, adding that the new fiduciary requirements threaten to “deprive millions of consumers [of] access to much needed retirement financial guidance and protected lifetime income products.”

Sorry, but this is a projection in the highest order, so a correction: “The fiduciary requirement threatens to deprive these corporate predators of access to the retirement funds of these retirees so they can pad their own fat pockets.”

Again, the Republican Congress and their chummy courts are on the take, and it is all right there for everybody to see.

Here’s something else that everybody needs to see. There has been a lot of talk about the safety of OUR social security and Medicare. Republicans don’t seem to like these programs much because they’d rather feed the thieves I alluded to above more of OUR money.

Don’t believe me? Well, slide this fact in front of that Trump-lover in your family:

In Trump’s final 2020 budget, before he left the White House, he proposed spending $1.5 trillion less on Medicaid, $25 billion less on Social Security, and $845 billion less on Medicare.

Facts are, this convicted felon and fraudster WILL cut retirement programs if God forbid he ever gets the chance. He cares as much about you as he does about the truth, which is to say, not at all.

Look, for a variety of reasons, you have to be nuts to vote for a Republican right now. They probably don't care about you or our country. They probably care only about the filthy-rich bastards who are funding their campaigns and lifestyles and the bought-off courts who are protecting them.

Isn't that right, Clarence?

ALSO READ: It's time for Bill Barr to be brought to justice

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough

I have always been at the right place at the right time. It’s an odd talent.

After a lifetime of living all over the globe, and in 26 different places, the last 13 years of my life have been spent in the ranch house where I am typing to you today in Madison, Wisconsin.

As I was reminded once again on Friday morning, Madison is Ground Zero for the most important election of our lives …

Word had filtered to the semi-connected, and hardcore Democratic activists in this capital city that President Biden would be arriving here at noon to pull out his sword and draw a line in the sand to defend his candidacy, instead of doing what so many in our broken media and the weak-kneed in his party wanted him to do, meekly fall on it.

The pea-brained vultures had been circling his campaign since his poor debate performance a week earlier, somehow forgetting all the good the man had done for America that past 50 years.

He deserved better than this.

As the minutes slowly drummed by feeling like hours, I learned that the good man would be speaking at Sherman Middle School on the city’s blue-collar north side in about hour’s time.

It was a 25-minute drive for me, so I filled up my water bottle, packed up all my enthusiasm, jumped in my Honda Accord, and busted to smithereens every speed limit I saw to make it an 18-minute trip around Lake Mendota and to the vicinity of where our president had decided to dig in and fight.

I was with him, and I was a bit surprised by just how important it was to me that he absolutely knew that.

Turned out, Biden was going to be joined by the mayor of our city, our congressman, our extraordinary Wisconsin Democratic Chairman Ben Wikler, and our popular, two-term Democratic Governor Tony Evers, who up until that point had been quiet about where he stood regarding Biden’s candidacy.

In retrospect, this was really no surprise, because Evers’ strength has always been in the power that resonates behind a few carefully chosen words, and not a wobbly trail of run-on sentences. He is a career educator, who knows that saying too much, instead of only what needs saying, is the most effective way to make a point worth remembering.

Evers was there on Friday to make things just as plain as day: He proudly stood with our president.

ALSO READ: ‘Harm Democrats’: Republican lawmakers practically giddy about Trump prison silver lining

I parked my car on a side street figuring I was about as close as I was going to get to the rally thanks to the battalions of law enforcement officers on every corner patrolling the roads, and protecting the most powerful man in the world.

I’d like to tell you there was a buzz in the air, besides those nasty vultures overhead, but that was not what I was feeling. There was an uneasiness among the people who had only just learned that Biden was in the neighborhood to tell America he was fighting on.

North Madison is a checker board of middle class neighborhoods. Modest two- and three-bedroom houses line the streets like those little green houses you’d find on a Monopoly board. The people are mostly no-nonsense, sturdy liberals.

Madison, is known in Wisconsin as “77 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality.” That one was lofted at the city by then-Republican Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus many years ago, who at the time called our home but “30 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality.”

Well, thanks to people like me happening on the place, we’ve grown over the years into arguably the most powerful Democratic voting bloc in the nation.

When Biden beat the traitor, Trump, in 2020, the Dane County vote where Madison is housed looked like this:

Biden: 260,185
Trump: 78,800

That’s a 76%-23% margin right there, and a whole helluva lot of reality if you are on the other end of a sound ass-kicking in a battleground state like this.

President Joe didn't forget, and he let all of us here know it when he picked this place to make his stand on Friday.

I reckon there were hundreds of us inside and outside the school where Biden and the big shots were making the case that they never should have had to make: Joe Biden was the man to lead us through these important times.

And here’s where I tell you that there are no two different things on Earth than Democratic and Republican voters.

Democrats don’t dress up like cheap fools in slobbery, red costumes to appease tyrants. We’re a quieter, more introspective bunch, who carry clever signs, and at least outwardly will politely respect others’ opinions in the crowd.

And there were other opinions. Some of the people gathered that day, had seen enough of Biden, and respectfully wanted him to step down. Some just weren't sure, and wanted to hear what he and his supporters on the stage had to say.

Then there were people like me, the majority, who just couldn’t believe we were putting ourselves through this, but four months away from learning whether America was going to remain the home of the free, and not a burial ground for the brave.

We had learned only five days before that our bought-off Supreme Court was ready and waiting to anoint their orange, traitorous king.

So just what in the hell did we think we were doing wasting our valuable time and ammo blasting away at this very good man when the barbarians were so clearly at the gates???

I never got close to President Joe, but I ended up watched him alongside the smartest person in the neighborhood, and was once again at the exact right place at the right time.

I stood next to a woman who was in the proximity of my age. Evelyn told me she was a retired teacher who taught at this very school, and had actually been honored by Evers a few years earlier for her long, stellar career guiding our children. She was a person of character and substance, and somebody you could learn from if only you kept your mouth shut and listened.

So I did.

She pointed at a lovely little girl about 10 feet from us who wasn't sure what the fuss was all about, but was patiently going along with it nonetheless.

Evelyn said, “I can’t believe I am standing here today having to show my support for a man who has done more for our country than any president I can think of. I can’t believe I had more rights than my granddaughter when I was about her age. I can’t believe that THIS isn’t all we are talking about. I can’t believe my party sometimes ...”

Biden went onto to give a rock-solid speech and said he wasn’t going anywhere, but those ugly vultures won’t stop circling.

Oh how I wish they all could hear what Evelyn said to me 48 hours ago in a working-class neighborhood of Madison, Wisconsin ...

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.)

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor after Monday’s devastating, anti-American ruling giving presidents immunity from prosecution for their official actions in office

Good day, my friends. I’d respectfully like you to read that again, because it is very possibly the most powerful and chilling dissent ever written by any Supreme Court Justice about anything.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,”

My God …

Monday was not a day to brush off, and casually forget. Monday, July 1, 2024, was the date it was confirmed to us, but three days before our wounded nation’s 248th birthday, that the end of our Democracy has arrived at our homes with a thunderclap.

Every one of us is under threat by a ruthless collection of six terrible lawyers, who have been handsomely rewarded by America’s oligarchy to do their dirty bidding and strip the citizens of this nation of the right to govern themselves with their vote.

These soulless, corrupt “justices” are backed by a sickly political party that came within a hair of incinerating our Democracy on January 6, 2021, and will not stop until they have built an authoritarian government in this country that acts on its horrible impulse and whims, instead of the desires and needs of the majority of this nation’s citizens.

These robed deviants have taken over the most powerful court in the world and proven they will stop at nothing to install a heinous, sick, lying king into our White House, who has proven beyond a shadow of any doubt that he will do any and all of the terrible things Sotomayor warned us about on Monday.

The end is here, good people, and we are but one election away from stamping that as official.

Look, I am not turning around this piece today to bum you out, or bring you down. If you aren’t there already, I both envy and pity you.

I am also not here to surrender any fights and crawl into a corner. I’m not built that way. In fact, I am oddly interested to see just how much strength I have left in the tank, and what I am capable of doing to preserve a Democracy I served to protect as a young man in the Navy who loved his country, but wasn’t yet mature enough to understand just how many people in it would toss her aside for an ugly conman.

I plan to show up every-damn-day until November 5 to do my part. Democracy will not go down without a fight as long as I still breathe …

I am here to tell you, though, that I haven’t felt this low since the breathtaking blast on November 8, 2016, that set this slow-rolling disaster in place. I needn't tell most of you how terrible that day was, when it was confirmed just how vulnerable all of us are to the evil that gathers strength in the shadows of this powerful, combustible country.

I finally realized on that terrible day that this was never news to the People of Color in this nation, who have always been under threat. But it was a new experience for this old, white man, who needed to be properly slapped across the face, to swing into action and begin doing everything possible to put down the selfish desires of the heartless maniacs who believe they have a right to their boundless bigotry, misogyny, and ill-gained power.

We have won significant battles since that November blast, despite long odds stacked higher by our ridiculous, anti-Democratic Electoral College, and gross Republican gerrymandering.

The House, the Senate and the Presidency have all been ours at one point during these past seven, grueling years. I believe our resistance to Republican fascism has been heroic, but we’ve never had time to exhale and celebrate our victories, because the Republican attacks have been relentless.

Dammit, on the day after we had FINALLY secured the Senate by winning both races in Georgia in 2021, the odious Republicans violently attacked our country and tried to overturn the election.

For the first time in history, there was no peaceful transfer of power.

Now we are staring down the barrel of the end, and instead of unifying as patriots to once again do everything humanly possible to save this country, we are skirmishing with one another.

Our panic and dread is understandable, but it can also be incredibly useful. We need only look at our response to November 8, 2016, to see ample proof of that.

There are more of us, and when we coalesce and fight as one, we can’t be stopped.

We are literally the only ones with the power to save our Democracy.

Can you please tell me how-in-the-hell THAT doesn't fire you up?

Listen to me: Joe Biden will be our candidate for president just as sure as I am typing this, because he won every primary he ran in BIG. He was virtually uncontested, because anybody who might have considered jumping in to replace him knew in their hearts this was no time for a Plan B or for them.

There will be no contested convention because as 1968 and 1980 showed us, they have proven to be nothing but self-defeating bloodbaths. Besides, it is exactly what these barbaric Republicans want. They drool seeing us at odds with each other.

Joe Biden won once, and he simply has to again.

The good news is, I am here to tell you he will carry the day if we can just quit bloodying each other, stand together and consider these chilling words of Justice Sotomayor each and every day we roll out of the rack:

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

If you want to a elect a president and not a king …

If you want a Democracy and not fasiscm …

If you want your vote to count in every election going forward …

… Then let’s unify and go to work. We owe it to ourselves, and our country.

And to ANYBODY pushing for fascist rulers in our country, well, let THEM be met by our fiery dissent.

NOW READ: Sonia Sotomayor: Supreme Court just gave presidents power to assassinate political rivals

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

If you dropped in here today hoping I would throw rocks at Joe Biden for his performance in this week's presidential debate, you can move along. Four months out from the most important election of our lifetimes, I simply have no damn time for that reactionary childishness, silliness, or you.

If you are looking for that kind of toxic write, I’ll be the bigger man and point you to The New York Times and The Washington Post where their ace columnists are currently falling all over themselves, and using their keyboards like steam shovels to bury Biden for good.

These are good times over at The Big Two, where their smirking gloaters are having a time of it pouring gasoline on the fires they have helped start, and telling us how sorry they are to do it.

On a day that the Radical-Right, 6-3 Supreme Court is using a flamethrower to do some very real and long-lasting damage to our vulnerable country, our national newspapers of record have decided to marshal their editorial forces to obliterate Joe Biden for his inability to crack through the barrage of steady lies that came at the American public from all directions last night by the sociopathic fascist the Republicans are running as their best bet to wreck this country for good.

Donald Trump hulked over his lectern and doubled down on his support for the deadly KKK rally in Charlottesville, saying “it was made up,” … the people who attacked our country on January 6, saying “What they’ve done to some people that are so innocent, you (Biden) ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’ve destroyed the lives of so many people,” … and saying that immigrants are “taking Black and Hispanic jobs,” which was undoubtably music to the ears of every bigot in this country.

Trump lied about everything last night. As a colleague of mine put it, “He lied about the economy. He lied about foreign policy. He lied about his record. He lied about his crimes. He lied about women’s rights. He lied about immigration. He lied about his lies. He lied about our soldiers he disrespected. He lied about law enforcement attacked by his supporters. He lied about who he has had sex with. He lied about his racism. He lied about our country.”

Trump told more than 50 big lies during the debate, which over the course of 90 minutes works out to more than one every two minutes. This is roughly on par with the 30,573 lies he told during his disastrous presidency that we barely survived from 2016-2020.

Why isn’t this is the most noteworthy thing people are talking about this morning? Have we really normalized projectile lying and vomiting?

For those of you who have stayed and are still reading, I also want to make it clear that I am not here to gaslight you: Joe Biden did not look good last night, particularly at the outset, when it was clear he was packing plenty of disgust, but not nearly enough statesmanship and decorum to rise above the raging dumpster fire on his right.

Biden too often looked like the repulsed grandfather at the dinner table, who would have rather been anywhere else than listening to the crazy, old racist with the dead ferret taped to his head seated across from him spitting all over everybody’s carefully prepared meal.

It was hard to watch.

The repulsive Trump did and said nothing that should have surprised Biden, yet it took him fully half the debate before he’d finally had enough, and started laying into the America-attacking racist, who’s steady barrage of heated, noxious lies were beginning to melt the silverware.

I am not sure how to explain this, except to say this very good man looked and sounded old because he is, which was the least surprising thing I saw last night.

His campaign said he had a cold, which is certainly plausible, but they would have served themselves (and us) better if they let us know that before the debate, and not during it.

It just sounded like a cheap excuse this way.

Have we heard yet from the Republican Party why Trump looked and sounded like a racist, who had just emerged from getting an orange spray tan from David Duke?

I’ll wait …

So Biden had a bad debate. Barack Obama had a bad debate in 2012 against Mitt Romney, and there are still four-letter adjectives hanging in the air over my den where I watched that colossal disappointment.

Romney hammered Obama, who did and said virtually nothing. It was truly shocking.

Not one Democrat or liberal columnist from the two papers I mentioned above called for Obama to step down the next day. We all wanted — needed — him to improve during the next debate, and sure enough he did, walloping Romney twice before winning the election in a landslide.

“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me I know,” Obama said this afternoon. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”

Amen.

It doesn’t feel like it, but there is still plenty of time before November, and I will bet everything I have that Biden will rise to the occasion and do what is necessary to win the election.

Losing is not an option.

To give up on him now after one tough night, would be pathetically shortsighted, and do enormous harm to the unified approach we will need to prevail on this mine-strewn political battlefield.

You have to be old and wise to remember this, but the split Democratic Conventions in 1968 and 1980, resulted in devastating losses for Democrats, and ushered in Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Who in their right mind wants a repeat of that?

Just this morning, Biden spoke at a rally in North Carolina and acknowledged, “I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. The choice in this election is simple. Donald Trump will destroy our democracy. I will defend it.”

Any disagreements there, folks?

South Carolina’s king-making congressman, James Clyburn, also came out this morning and put all this Biden stepping down bullshit to bed saying, “(Democrats) should chill out, and stay the course. He’s the best Democrat we got.”

Like many of us, Clyburn called Biden’s poor performance, “Strike one, but if this were a ball game he’s got two more swings.”

I’ll reference again, the Obama-Romney contest. Four months is an eternity in politics.

Not to be outdone, the great Nancy Pelosi put it this way today: “(Biden) got off to a bad start, but I thought he came through OK on the issues later,” before adding, “I think that on his worst night, his presentation of integrity was far better than the other guy’s dishonesty.”

Now you can say that Pelosi and Clyburn are old, and you’d be right, but if that is your reason for doubting their judgment, then maybe there is something else at play here, and if that’s the case, that is an ugly indictment on you, and not them or Joe Biden.

Four more years.

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

I am seeing the same dangerous narrative from the political, horse-race, corporate media as you are, folks, and it would be entertaining and laughable if it wasn’t so damn dangerous.

If you perused only the headlines of two of the most influential newspapers in this nation, The Washington Post and The New York Times, you might come around to believing that President Joe Biden is in deep trouble, and the felon and serial liar, who does nothing but attack America 24/7, Donald Trump, is somehow in front as we crash toward the most important election of our lives.

All of it defies belief, of course, but that’s exactly how these two baloney-and-cheese dealers like it. They want you, the suckers (er, readers) who are slopping through their endless menu of tasteless political treats to believe they are seeing things through the thick walls of their offices that you somehow aren’t in your communities where the voting actually takes place.

They lean on polls that may or may not be right, and that they themselves don’t trust, and the opinions of political experts and “insiders” who have made handsome livings being wrong approximately half the time to spin their tales that are heavily disguised as news stories.

These papers occasionally pull themselves away from the safety of their cocoons inside the Washington Beltway to visit suburban diners, where they have decided all the undecided, disillusioned voters go to eat in the seven battleground states they tell us 27 times a day will decide the election.

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They do literally everything they can to avoid doing what they absolutely should be doing as alleged robust news operations, and newspapers of record: reporting facts and educating the voters who they haughtily seem to think they understand so well.

Rather than relentlessly reporting about what is at stake in this election, so that our electorate can be informed, they trumpet how little these people know, or in many cases even care.

It’s like they get off on belittling voters, rather than educating them, which is the most important thing any good newspaper can do.

Rather than reporting on the enormous consequences of this election and major issues at stake such as democracy, healthcare, social security, women's rights, our vote, environment and Supreme Court, just to name a few … they’d rather tell us what voters are thinking, as if they really have a single clue.

Lately, and mostly, they are telling us that Joe Biden is in deep, deep trouble with these people, which is akin to starting fires all over town, and then reporting how poorly the fire department is at extinguishing them all.

They seem to get off on watching people react to a narrative they have helped set. It’s morbid, it really is, but apparently not beneath them.

Before typing farther and citing a couple of deliciously appalling examples of their journalistic malfeasance, I’ll break any suspense you might be harboring and tell you why they are doing all this: There is HUGE money in it.

Fear and suspense sells, baby. Only Trump loves the low-information voters more.

So now I’ll quickly bring you just two examples of this terrifying nonsense I came across on Monday — one from The Washington Post, and the other from The New York Times that is so obviously over the top it’s a marvel it didn’t bleed out all over the newsroom floor before publication. The thing needed bandages not editors.

Apparently, some reporters and editors at The Post had a get-out-of-the-office day, went out on an exciting adventure, and returned to dedicate about 100 column inches to people they have called “The Deciders.”

Ooooooo … “The Deciders” ... It sounds like some bad TV series from the ‘80s.

Tucked under their headline: “Who are the deciders and what makes them tick” they made sure to quickly make clear what doesn’t make a Decider tick: voting.

According to the endless piece, this powerful non-voting bloc comprises people who “voted in only one of the last two presidential elections; are between ages 18 and 25; registered to vote since 2022; did not definitely plan to vote for either Biden or Trump this year; or switched their support between 2016 and 2020.”

The piece is replete with comments that these “Deciders” may or may not take back two days from now. They literally could do anything, but for now they are plenty undecided about everything, except for the fact they think they are mostly leaning toward Trump, unless and until a stiff wind blows in and they change their minds.

These are the people The Post has decided will be deciding who the next President of the United States will be.

What The Post is obviously hoping is that they never learn a single thing about what is at stake in this election, and will do everything they can to make sure they don’t. It is much more entertaining to watch “The Deciders” twist in the wind armed only with heavy doubt about what they may or may not do with their vote in November — and if they decide to bother voting at all.

At any rate, the suspense should be killing the rest of us, because The Deciders have the fate of the free world in their slippery hands. What will they be thinking a month from now … two months from now?

I bet even they haven’t decided yet.

Not to be outdone Monday, The New York Times Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy tried to keep up with his own run-away story headlined “Why the election is slipping away from Joe Biden right now”

Whoa. Talk about having the pulse of the election.

I was literally holding my breath because I was about to learn why everything was slipping away from Biden RIGHT NOW in the middle of June.

My heart was beating inside my head before I got to the part where Healy boldly put his entire reputation on the line by typing this:

“When this spring began, on March 19, Trump had a polling average lead of 2 percentage points over Biden nationally, according to Real Clear Politics. As spring ends, Trump leads by about 1 percent. I think a successful spring for Biden would have had him ahead.

I think that paragraph needs a moment of silence …

Go ahead, read it again. I’ll wait.

The writer thinks that because Joe Biden is gaining ground the election is slipping away from him. This would make sense in a flat world that was round, where no means yes, up means down, undecided voters are called deciders, and Healy is to be taken at all seriously ever again.

Sorry, but how in the hell isn’t the headline on Healy’s fable, “Biden making up ground in new polling”

And it gets even worse with this sad and pathetic story where worse means better, because he somehow waded into the looming Presidential Debate to buttress his narrative that the sky is falling on Biden, while he gains ground he allegedly lost to Trump.

Read this whopper:

“Trump isn’t doing much campaigning prep, according to my colleagues Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein, but the expectations for him are lower than for Biden. Many voters expect Trump to be the same unhinged guy he was in the 2020 debates, ranting and talking over Biden. Trump can afford to spend time in must-win Pennsylvania while Biden tries to ensure his summer is better than his spring.

Now read THAT slop again. I’ll wait.

Healy and his newsroom buddies, who presumably lunch together and tell each other knock-knock jokes when they’re not busy filling the NYT news hole, have decided that the debates will be worthless because Trump will just be the same unhinged guy he was in the 2020 debates which then is a tremendous advantage to him because it frees him up to do some unhinged campaigning in Pennsylvania, while Biden continues to take his job as president very seriously by preparing for a debate he should win, because he’s not an unhinged guy, but is nonetheless watching an election he is gaining in slip away in June …

How much more of this are we supposed to take?

I haven’t mustered the guts to read either paper yet this morning, because I thought it was important to think straight while I rattled off this column. I am prepared to predict, however, that they are busy spinning new narratives rather than educating the American voters who they so clearly hold in such contempt.

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

The United States has the fastest-growing economy in the world.

I ask you to read that again, and say it quietly to yourself. How does that make you feel? Proud, I hope, because it should.

Now I’d like you to say that out loud ... Once you have it down, I want you to add this: Democrats mend economies that Republicans shatter.

Now I want you to say these two things together and to anybody who matters in your life for the next five months, because it would be about damn time they heard a truth that even many Democrats are curiously hesitant to shout out loud.

The United States has the fastest-growing economy in the world, because Democrats mend economies that Republicans shatter.

I don’t know what it is, but historically Democrats have never understood how to message on all these economies they fix. I suppose they are being gracious in an effort not to insult the minority of the population who are being left behind when we charge ahead, but their hesitancy to tout their achievements borders on malpractice.

My dad used to call it this, “hiding your light under a bushel.”

The last three Democratic presidents have inherited troubled, and in some cases catastrophic economies, from their predecessors and turned them around:

-Bill Clinton from George H.W. Bush

-Barack Obama from George W. Bush

-Joe Biden from Donald Trump

Going back further, since World War II the GDP has grown an incredible 1.6 times faster under Democratic administrations than Republican administrations.

These are called, facts.

Now tell me how many times you have heard over the course of your lifetime that Republicans are better for the economy than Democrats.

These are called, lies.

Democrats have always believed that the economy should strengthen our country and work for every American, not just those at the top.

Republican trickle-down economics DO-NOT -WORK. History tells us this.

Yet the lie somehow festers and is again, because the May jobs report came out this morning and it turns out a breathtaking 272,000 jobs were added to the economy. By comparison, the Trump Administration lost an incredible 2,876,000 during his failed presidency.

Can you imagine how loud the orange traitor and his pathetic GOP servants would have been if he added 272,000 jobs in ONE MONTH, while Barack Obama lost nearly three million jobs during his administration????

My God, they’d be banging their drums so loud the people in China couldn’t sleep. It would be incessant — so booming, in fact, that the corporate media would invariably join the chorus.

But they didn't, because Democrats mend economies that Republicans shatter …

And, say … Remember that killer recession that the corporate media incessantly warned us was on the way three years ago? Yeah … well it never arrived, and it won’t during Joe Biden’s administration. That alone is miraculous.

Me? I’d say the dude’s owed an apology, eh?

Instead, the stock market has climbed to record highs and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics we are enjoying the greatest period of employment since the 1950s. Americans have not had this kind of job security in 72 years. One more time for emphasis, because we are all going to be touting these numbers to everybody we know for the next five months: The United States is in the middle of its greatest stretch of employment in 72 years.

Are things perfect in our economy? Of course not. There is no such thing as a perfect economy. But, again, I’d like to you to point to any other country that is doing better than the United States right now.

I’ll wait.

Look, I’ll certainly concede prices are higher than we’d like for things like food, but even those prices have been steadily falling in the past three years, much to the chagrin of our greedy corporations who have raked in record profits since the pandemic.

The only people besides them who are unhappy about this are the bought-off Republicans they own.

Oh, and it gets worse for these greedy corporations because wages have increased under Joe Biden, and the minimum wage has increased in 29 states and the District of Columbia.

But I can already hear you thinking that inflation is wiping out any pay increases, because that’s what the corporate media has taught you to believe. Well, that is complete bull, too. Reports by experts like Payscale, Gartner and WorldatWork are projecting pay increases for 2024 to be higher than the actual rate of inflation.

I know, right?

So why don’t we hear more about this? I’m here to politely say that we might be part of the problem.

I swear to you, I have come to the realization that people have been brainwashed into thinking things are horrible right now.

It’s just plain weird.

Last week, I was having a conversation with a young woman in North Carolina. Ever since the blast in November of 2016, I have developed a weird talent for sussing out quickly what side of the political spectrum somebody inhabits. It comes in handy just in case I need to be politely confrontational to keep everybody’s facts straight, or in worse-case scenarios break glass, and get the hell out of there.

At any rate, the woman was nice enough, but it was clear she was not a fan of our president and the job he is doing. Finally she said, “Everything is so expensive and terrible.”

“Everything is so expensive and terrible …”

She said this while standing on a sun-drenched deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean of a beachfront property she was renting …

I bit my tongue for a second or two until it bled before informing her that things were far, far better here than anywhere else, and certainly better than they were four years ago when we couldn’t even find toilet paper.

That’s when things got eerily quiet as she realized the old, white man she had been stereotyping wasn't listening to her nonsense.

This morning, I’m going to guess that this woman didn’t get the news from any of the rightwing propaganda outlets she invariably monitors that the economy continues to heat up under Joe Biden, and that things are immeasurably better than they were four years.

I plan to share this news with anybody I encounter today, and going forward the next five months.

I hope you will join me.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

The morally busted, anti-America Republican Party has wedded itself to the most vile, corrupt politician who has ever run for anything anywhere in this country, and right now they are busy working overtime trying to somehow make this the Democratic Party’s problem.

They are immersed in trying to make this the American voters’ problem.

They are busy trying to make themselves victims … and I swear to God, don’t you dare fall for all this nuclear-powered gaslighting, dammit.

Rather than dumping the reprehensible Trump like a 300-lb. sack of dirt, his odious party has now hitched themselves with a double-knot to this two-bit thug who’s never respected a single thing in his miserable life except ill-gotten gains.

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By associating themselves with this disgusting, slobbering phony the Republican Party has no place left to go but even lower, and I’m telling you right now as sure as I write this, anybody who follows them there and tries to legitimize this as normal can never come back from it.

Anybody who tells you that their situation is somehow better for all of this should never be listened to again.

The Republican Party is done, and the only people who don’t seem to realize that are the carnival-barkers who run their rightwing crime ring, and the corporate media who somehow think it is their job to legitimize this unholy mess by looking for the other side of the story behind the GOP’s shit-splattered wall.

There are two sides to this disgusting mess alright: one side is dirty, corrupt as hell, and will legitimize literally anything, while the other is trying to rise above it while looking down with anger as the media and Republican Party attempt to make their slobbery orange idol everybody else’s problem.

Well, goddammit, we have had more than enough of this.

By associating themselves with this gutless phony, the soulless Republican Party has lost the right to say anything to America worth listening to ever again, and if you see this being reported any other way anywhere you need to slam it shut, turn it off, and never return.

They have completely lost the thread.

The Republican Party has screwed themselves into a dark, empty socket, and the only thing left to do now is throw the switch and put them out of their misery.

Do not let them get away with selling us this unmitigated crap that their broken slob of a nominee is something to aspire to, or worse is some poor victim, and should get another crack at flushing this country down one of his garish toilets at his gross country club, where he plays people like them for suckers the minute he rolls out of the rack and his fat little feet hit the floor in the morning.

He’s got them over a barrel, and everybody just needs to step aside and let ‘em drown.

The Republican Party’s standard-bearer is a lawless, perverted thug who doesn’t possess even one redeeming quality, and as of Thursday afternoon is a convicted felon staring at jail time, and a date with a probation officer.

A 12-person jury of Trump’s peers sat through weeks of testimony and wasted no time unanimously convicting America’s biggest loser on all 34 counts he was charged with.

UNANIMOUS. The case was not even close. Open … SHUT.

There was no gaslighting allowed in the courtroom. There was no safe harbor for the unsubstantiated bull that’s rolled out by the GOP daily in public, and then spread like crap by our media.

There were simply the facts, and when the jury heard those facts the rest was easy.

The rotten SOB was guilty as charged.

Now the Republican Party knows it is left with a complete anti-American, uncivil lowlife who lies as he breathes, and contaminates everything he touches.

So they are trying make this our problem now.

Incredibly, they have grabbed every microphone they can get their dirty hands on to convince us he is a victim, when all he really is is absolutely pathetic.

He sidles up to dictators, stroking them as he would an idol. He attacks America and tells his army of gutter rats that he loves them.

He’s nothing but a cheap, empty suit with a tie long enough to wipe the sweat off the brows of the endless stream of deviant lawyers who somehow think he’s worth defending.

Now ask how many of these smarmy lawyers get paid ...

He whines like a baby when he loses, and carefully paints himself orange each day because he obviously can’t stand the hideous creature he sees staring back at him in the mirror each day.

He knows how ugly he really is. How else to account for looks like a dead ferret taped atop his fat head thinking it compliments his sweaty, orange glow. We all know how utterly ridiculous he looks, and mostly his fawning Republican groupies, who haven’t the guts nor the self-respect to say a word.

Their nominee is a bonafide racist and has been all his life. He sees good people at KKK rallies, and was allowed by the media to rake his disgusting birther lies like manure all across America’s amber waves of grain.

He grabs women because he thinks he can, and made good and damn sure to appoint lying crooked Supreme Court Justices who would disavow them of their rights, and control them.

THIS is who the Republican Party has chosen as their leader, and it is every bit their problem not anybody else’s.

Every interview with a GOP groupie should start with this: “Will you replace this terrible man on your ticket? If not, why not?”

It is still not too late to dump this foul, one-man crime spree, but I guess we all know they won't, because they are weak, subservient and lacking any good judgment. They have gutlessly decided to align themselves with hell.

That doesn't mean they shouldn’t be relentlessly pressed about it, though.

Howling like spoiled toddlers with a bad case of diaper rash that America was somehow victimized when their career crook was finally held accountable for one of his many crimes is absolutely pathetic.

Do not — I repeat — DO NOT let them get away with this.

He is their problem, not ours, and it’s about damn time they did something about him.

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(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.)