regondi Offline

Great times.

They aren’t defending the nation. They’re redefining who belongs. It started, as these things always do, with fear. With lies about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation. With the old Nazi tropes dusted off and repackaged for prime time. With chants about invasions and caravans and vermin. With slurs that painted the undocumented as rapists, murderers, terrorists.

And then came the solution. Military-style raids. Mass arrests. Deportations. Internment camps. Fast-track removals with no due process. Detentions in foreign prisons under the label of “terrorism.” These weren’t policies—they were performances of power. And they worked because the target wasn’t just the undocumented—it was the public imagination. The goal was to shift the line between “us” and “them.” And now that line is shifting again.

This time the targets are foreign students with legal visas. Green card holders. People who followed the rules, passed background checks, paid tuition, and trusted the system. Their crime? Expressing views the administration doesn’t like. That’s all it takes. Visas revoked. Deportation orders issued. And just like that, First Amendment protections are quietly narrowed—redrawn not by law, but by the mood of the regime.

Because once speech is a privilege, not a right, it becomes a test. And the message is clear: if we can do this to them, we can do it to you.

Even naturalized citizens are no longer safe. Trump’s orbit has floated the idea of revoking citizenship for those deemed “domestic threats.” Due process is still legally required—for now—but the groundwork is being laid in the court of public opinion. We have seen this before. First comes the naming. Then the shaming. Then the stripping of rights. Then atrocities. And always, the justification: security, order, patriotism.

But this isn’t just about immigration. This is about who counts. Who has rights, and who doesn’t. Who may speak, and who must stay silent. Who gets to belong in the nation—and who may be erased from it.

This is how authoritarian regimes operate. Not all at once, but piece by piece. They criminalize identity. They weaponize fear. They conflate dissent with disloyalty. They declare some people disposable, and others untouchable. They erase the idea of shared rights and replace it with a hierarchy of obedience. The signs are there for anyone willing to look.

Trump’s language isn’t accidental. Calling immigrants “animals” or “poison” or “terrorists” is not just rhetoric—it’s a strategy. It frames entire populations as enemies of the state. And history teaches us what happens next. Civil liberties shrink. Rights are suspended. Groups are rounded up. Camps are built. All in the name of law and order.

This isn’t about securing the border. It’s about redrawing the boundaries of citizenship—narrowing the circle of who gets to be protected, who gets to speak, who gets to stay.
And once that circle is redrawn, it can be redrawn again. And again. Until the only ones left are the loyal, the silent, the useful.

We’ve seen this logic before—in authoritarian states, in colonial projects, in genocidal regimes. It always begins with a question: Who really belongs? And it always ends the same way: with fewer answers, fewer rights, and fewer people left to ask the question out loud.

So ask it now, while you still can. Before asking becomes a risk. Before silence becomes a condition of staying. Before belonging becomes a test—and citizenship a privilege granted only to those who serve, submit, or disappear.

Because in a state where citizenship can be revoked, protest criminalized, and speech punished, the line between the citizen and the exile, the protected and the persecuted, isn’t law—it’s whim. And no one is safe from that.

--James Greenberg

Happy Everything, kids.

The confidence game doesn’t begin with a lie. It begins with a story—one so emotionally resonant it feels like truth. It offers meaning, identifies villains, flatters the audience, and—when fully deployed—quietly opens the vault.

Donald Trump’s political rise is not just a break from convention. It’s a textbook long con. Not in the casual sense of dishonesty, but in the classic structure: the Big Lie, the emotional hook, the moving target, the victim narrative, and finally, the identity trap—where the mark can no longer afford to walk away because belief has become inseparable from self.

The script is familiar. Whether in a Ponzi scheme, a shell company, or a populist campaign, the pattern is the same. The conman begins not with evidence but with a narrative. Trump’s version is always some variation on a central myth: America has been betrayed, the system is rigged, and only he can fix it. The villains rotate—immigrants, globalists, bureaucrats, journalists—but the goal is constant: create clarity through division, and turn grievance into identity.

The genius of this narrative lies not in its truth, but in its simplicity. It sells not just an outcome, but a self-image. You’re not just supporting a candidate. You’re seeing through the lies. You’re part of the resistance. To believe is to belong. To doubt is to defect.

This is the first move of the long con: the Big Lie. Not just a falsehood, but a worldview. “The election was stolen.” “The deep state is after me because I’m fighting for you.” These aren’t claims to debate. They’re loyalty tests. And the price of failing them is exile from the story you’ve been promised.

And the mark? The mark is not foolish. The mark is angry, disillusioned, and tired of being told to trust institutions that no longer deliver. Trump didn’t invent that despair—he capitalized on it. He gave it direction. He gave it enemies. And he offered himself as both weapon and refuge.
Once belief takes hold, facts become noise. The con fuses politics with identity, and identity with moral survival. Doubting Trump means doubting yourself. And so the mark invests more, not less.

But a con doesn’t pay off. So the grifter keeps moving the goalposts. The wall? Still coming. The swamp? Still draining. The deep state? Still lurking. Every failure becomes proof of sabotage. Every delay, evidence of how powerful the enemy must be. The promise is always just out of reach—and that’s the point.

And when reality intervenes—when courts reject his claims, when fraud is exposed, when indictments land—Trump doesn’t retreat. He adapts. Exposure becomes persecution. Accountability becomes martyrdom. The scam becomes sacred.

This is the fatal turn in the long con: when truth no longer matters. When reality is no longer shared. What remains is not democracy but spectacle—a theater of grievance, rage, and blind loyalty.

We’ve seen this before.

Mussolini cast himself as a savior while dismantling Italy’s institutions. Berlusconi blurred corruption with charisma, laundering scandal through media control. Ferdinand Marcos used crisis to seize power and enrich allies. Joseph McCarthy waved blank papers and claimed they named traitors. Each man sold lies as loyalty, and each hollowed out public trust from within.
And there may be another layer to this performance: a financial con wrapped inside the political one. The chaos isn’t incidental. It may be the plan.

In times of upheaval, those closest to power often find ways to turn disruption into wealth. Trump’s erratic tariff wars, billed as economic nationalism, upended markets, collapsed sectors, and triggered retaliatory shocks. But while farmers went bankrupt and consumers paid more, the market opened space for those with foresight—or insider access—to buy low and consolidate.

Geographer David Harvey calls this accumulation by dispossession: crisis used not to correct the system, but to extract from it. Devalue public assets. Destabilize protections. Create just enough chaos to buy cheap what others are forced to abandon. It’s not just policy failure—it’s extraction dressed as populism.

The con isn’t just psychological. It’s material. It’s not just about being lied to—it’s about being looted.

And that’s what makes this moment different—and more dangerous. The scam isn’t happening outside the system. It’s running through it. Congress, the courts, and the press are not just targets. They’re props. The goal isn’t to fix government. It’s to turn it into a shell—one that can still collect taxes, enforce laws, and declare wars, but no longer serve the people who fund it.
The stakes are no longer just political. They’re existential. Can we still agree on what happened? On what’s real?

Because here’s the brutal truth about every confidence game: it doesn’t end when the lie is exposed. It ends only when the mark walks away. And that is the hardest part—because it requires admitting not just that you were lied to, but that you believed it. That what felt like belonging was, in fact, betrayal.

But if that reckoning doesn’t come—if the spell isn’t broken—the damage won’t stop at the believer’s door. This isn’t just a private illusion. This is a public unraveling. A national hollowing-out of trust, truth, and democracy itself.

And so we must hope—urgently and without illusion—that those caught in the story come to see what it is. That they see the man behind the curtain, the sleight of hand, the fantasy sold as fate.

Because if they don’t, this story won’t end with the emperor having no clothes.
It will end with all of us—every institution, every safeguard, every principle—stripped bare. Not just humiliated, but exposed. Not just misled, but fleeced.

If the con holds, we don’t just lose our shirts. We lose the republic.

https://substack.com/@jamesbgreenberg

“When Nazis Are Quoted from the Bench: MAGA’s March Toward Tyranny”
By Tony Pentimalli
It happened in America. In 2025. In the halls of Congress.
Republican Congressman Keith Self, during a House hearing on censorship and public discourse, looked into the camera and quoted Joseph Goebbels — Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda — as if he were citing a respected authority on governance. “It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.” Let those words sink in. This wasn’t an academic comparison. This wasn’t a history lesson. It was a quote from the architect of the Nazi propaganda machine, spoken aloud by a sitting U.S. Congressman in defense of state control over speech.
There is no context in which quoting Goebbels is appropriate. Ever. But in Trump’s America — where the line between fascism and patriotism has been deliberately blurred — it’s not just tolerated. It’s a signal.
Make no mistake: MAGA’s flirtation with fascism is over. They’ve moved in, redecorated the place, and made it their home.
We are no longer watching the slow creep of authoritarianism. We are watching the sprint. And Donald Trump, now back in the Oval Office after the most disgraceful and dangerous comeback in American political history, is not merely condoning it — he’s fueling it.
When Trump praises dictators like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, it’s not hyperbole or entertainment. It’s aspiration. When he declares immigrants “poisoning the blood of our nation,” he’s not echoing Ronald Reagan — he’s echoing Adolf Hitler. And now, with Project 2025 well underway, his loyalists are pushing a roadmap that reads like a dystopian instruction manual: purge the federal government of dissenters, dismantle checks and balances, roll back civil rights, and crush independent thought.
But quoting Goebbels? That’s a new low — even for MAGA.
Let’s call this what it is: a brazen embrace of Nazi ideology. Goebbels was not a mere commentator on propaganda. He was its master, responsible for brainwashing a nation, silencing truth, and greasing the rails to Auschwitz with lies and hate. When a U.S. Congressman lifts his words to justify government control of speech, we are staring fascism dead in the eyes.
And don’t for one second believe it was a slip.
Keith Self sits on the same ideological team that celebrated January 6th as “patriotic,” that wants to erase uncomfortable truths from our children’s textbooks, that has outlawed books, banned history, and turned “wokeness” into a slur. These are not conservative values. These are authoritarian tactics. And they are working.
They’ve already dismantled reproductive rights. They’ve gutted voting protections. They’ve weaponized the courts — including a Supreme Court so compromised it shrinks from defending democracy and instead shields billionaires, guns, and bigotry. Trump’s allies now wear the language of fascism like a badge of honor: “retribution,” “domination,” “the enemy of the people.”
And we? We are told to be civil. To see “both sides.” To pretend that quoting Nazis from the House dais is just a political misstep and not a five-alarm fire.
This is not a drill. This is not about taxes or inflation or even the usual push and pull of partisanship. This is about whether America remains a democracy — or descends into something far darker. MAGA isn’t offering policy. It’s offering control. It’s offering submission. It’s offering a future where dissent is treason, where truth is decided by decree, and where quoting Hitler’s inner circle is not only allowed — but cheered.
The danger here isn’t abstract. It’s personal. If you’re Black, brown, LGBTQ+, Muslim, Jewish, disabled, poor, female, or an immigrant — you are the target. If you’re a teacher who believes in science, a librarian who stocks Beloved, a journalist who tells uncomfortable truths — you are the threat. If you believe that America is strongest when it defends liberty and not stomps on it — you are in the way.
And if we don’t stop this now, quoting Goebbels in Congress won’t be a scandal. It will be the standard.
History is screaming at us. The same tools used by fascists of the past — fear, propaganda, scapegoating, and the slow normalization of hate — are being sharpened by men like Trump and wielded by cowards like Keith Self.
We cannot wait for it to get worse. It already has.
This is the moment to speak, to act, to resist. Because when they start quoting Nazis without shame, the only thing left is whether we have the courage to say: Never again.
And mean it.
*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques.*

Going to the gig.

www.facebook.com/reel/1255282611595421

www.facebook.com/reel/659637426471988

President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, has a message for people who are excusing President Trump's racism:

"I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it. I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame former vice president Joe Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.
But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s 'The Cross and the Lynching Tree' off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Ga., in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary was 'stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.'
God help us. It is hard to write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and killing her child.
When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event, not just a normal day in campaign 2020. It is a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs’ graves. It is obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial. It is, in the eyes of history, the betrayal — the re-betrayal — of Haynes and Mary Turner and their child. And all of this is being done by an ignorant and arrogant narcissist reviving racist tropes for political gain, indifferent to the wreckage he is leaving, the wounds he is ripping open.
Like, I suspect, many others, I am finding it hard to look at resurgent racism as just one in a series of presidential offenses or another in a series of Republican errors. Racism is not just another wrong. The Antietam battlefield is not just another plot of ground. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is not just another bridge. The balcony outside Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel is not just another balcony. As U.S. history hallows some causes, it magnifies some crimes.
What does all this mean politically? It means that Trump’s divisiveness is getting worse, not better. He makes racist comments, appeals to racist sentiments and inflames racist passions. The rationalization that he is not, deep down in his heart, really a racist is meaningless. Trump’s continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever their intent — that those who play down, or excuse, or try to walk past these offenses are enablers.
Some political choices are not just stupid or crude. They represent the return of our country’s cruelest, most dangerous passion. Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical or minor matter indicts us."
— Michael Gerson

Thanks, JL...

It's not just that he is destroying our health,our safety,our welfare, and our standing among nations, or that he is delivering us into the hands of our enemies. He attacks our belief in our Constitution and in the system of ordered liberty that has been the ideal to which we aspire. In this he has no peer among American villains. Benedict Arnold and Tokyo Rose were traitors in wartime; Jefferson Davis sought to destroy the Union and form a separate slaveholding nation; Richard Nixon sought to use methods of warfare and espionage to win an election,then used the government he headed to conceal it; the grim parade of assassins from Booth to Oswald physically attacked and murdered our leaders. But Trump is different. In his glorification and pardon of violent thugs, his pride in his own criminality, in his belittling and unapologetic contempt for our war heroes living and dead, in his public and unmanly worship of dictators and strongmen, in his love of violence, in his gangster-like assumption that anything and anyone is either for purchase or for the forcible taking, he assaults our sense of right and wrong. A religious person might make a theological issue of it. But it is a measure of his obsidian stature that his followers regard him in just that way--as a god. No other American villain can claim to have achieved anything like it. It is one thing to assault and rob your victim. It is quite another to have your victim say, please sir, I am honored that you have done this, as it was right and proper and admirable,and I would like you to do it once more. Foreign and historic examples come to mind, but none who ever were Americans. Until now.

This weekend it was NJ Diner time with Grandma and her girls.

Wife and granddaughter loving it up.

: o )

Making America great again.