Erika Kirk clearly can’t tell the difference between piety and hypocrisy, between grief and grift, and seems to have convinced herself that we won’t be able to either. Sadly, she has that in common with most of her fellow MAGA enthusiasts. If they weren’t so smug about their ambitions, it’d be a lot easier to pity them.
General Scumbaggery
Unbidden Bits—December 9, 2025
The US Supreme Court majority, in an excess of misbegotten sanctimony, seems determined to turn our entire government over to a coprophile-in-chief and his legion of wannabe Nazi camp followers. Decent people, however, look forward to the day when all six of these black-robed poseurs find themselves plunked down next to the Trumps, the Vances, the Millers, et al., in the prisoners’ dock of a long overdue re-run of the Nuremberg Trials.
Deus vult, it turns out, doesn’t especially care who does the invoking, as long as its divine need for victims is respected.
Rum, Buggery, and the Lash
Judging by his extended prance before the nation’s grand assembly of military poobahs this past Tuesday, Secretary of Cosplay Hegseth seems to have decided that Britain’s 18th century royal navy had developed almost the perfect formula for military effectiveness.
He did, however, trim the original just enough to take all the fun out of it. This may have seemed a bit weird for someone reputed to be both a drunk and a misogynist, but it was perfectly in tune with the Trump administration’s oft expressed infatuation with ignorant belligerence. Oorah! Semper Fi!
What If…
…Putin decides it’s time to drop a 10 megaton ICBM warhead on Quantico while Secretary of War Cosplay Hegseth is lecturing 800 generals and admirals on personal hygiene and lethality make-up essentials? What will the rolling MAGA clownshow have Ms. Leavitt say then?
Goodfellas
A coincidence of images? I blame the Zeitgeist.
The Kirk Circus
Everybody has a take. Everybody is deploring, threatening, scribbling cringeworthy hagiographies, lowering flags to half mast, offering up thoughts and prayers.
Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. He got what he’d already said he’d be willing to accept, if not endorse, as collateral damage in pursuit of what he considered to be a vigorous and necessary defense of the second amendment.
He never imagined that he’d be the one with a fatal bullet hole in him. Those would be reserved for Jews, immigrants, black and brown people, gay people, women who refused his benevolent instruction, empathetic people, people who’d read the wrong books, and above all, people who’d had a belly full of his trumpeted triumphs of the will to come, the triumphs that he and his equally deluded buddies were peddling to anyone stupid enough to take them at face value.
Civil society is in abeyance in the US. This was never our fault, but restoring it is nevertheless our duty. We can start by not shedding any tears for this sad, sick, puer aeternus, whose intelligence matured tragically earlier than his wisdom.
La fanciulla del West
Lethality Fashions
Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025
Does Stephen Miller really not realize that in painting targets on all our backs, he’s also painted one on his own? I can’t imagine being thrilled at the moral certainty that millions of people are wanting me dead. Despite all Miller’s public bravado, I have no idea how he can either.
I suppose sadomasochism has its own logic. I’m grateful I’ve never felt the urge find out how that logic works.
Trumpism’s Unspoken Antecedents
Joachim von Ribbentrop for foreign policy
The East India Company for economic policy
Joseph Stalin for scientific policy
The Taliban for social policy
The Spanish Inquisition for jurisprudence
Louis XIV of France for taxation
The Eastern Roman Empire for internal staffing and administration
The End Of the Beginning….*
The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?
*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q