The Mad King and his war against the Jews

 

By Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan with Spy Detroit Bureau Chief Betty McGlown in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

It could have been so much worse.  A deranged anti-semite tried to drive a truck full of explosives into Temple Israel, one of the largest synagogues in Detroit or for that matter anywhere.  Thanks to the heroic efforts of well-trained security guards, he was foiled and eventually killed himself.  The hundred plus children on the campus were safe.

There's no doubt that these are very scary times for American Jews.  Attacks on their houses of worship, ever since the Tree of Life attack in Pittsburgh that killed 11 back in 2018, have become a part of American Jewish life.  And it's taking a toll on them, or, to be more candid, us.

According to The New York Times,

Jewish institutions now spend $765 million annually on security, according to an estimate last year by the Jewish Federations of North America. A typical Jewish organization spends 14 percent of its annual budget on security, the organization estimates.

The president and chief executive of the Jewish Federations, Eric Fingerhut, called this a “Jewish tax” in a recent speech calling for increased federal funding for security, among other measures. 

$765,000,000 is a lot of money that could otherwise go for Jewish stuff, like education, religion, or tikkun olam.  But the toll isn't just financial:

“I think the Jewish community had just about had it,” Rabbi Steven Abraham, who leads Beth El Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Omaha, Neb., said on Thursday afternoon. “There’s a level of PTSD with the heightened awareness.” 

Is there anything that can done to help American Jews feel safer? Don't worry – we'll get to that.

First, we'll sample some of the reaction, other than generalized fear, grief, and anxiety.

The usual neocon suspects aren't wasting any time weaponizing these synagogue attacks against their usual suspects, which includes anyone, including any Jew, who doesn't buy into their neocon Likud fantasies.

David “Axis of Evil” Frum argued in The Atlantic (natch) that the Michigan attack shows that antisemitic violence has now become “mainstream,” whatever that means.  And therefore of course all sentient Jews owe Bibi Netanyahu their blind support, no many how many civilian lives he destroys for no adequate reason.

The idea that American Jews are floating in a leaky lifeboat in a vast and unfathomable sea of antisemitism is central to their fantasy.  Unfortunately for ol' Axis of Evil, it turns out that the terrorist responsible for the Michigan attack was not just another mainstream antisemite.  

Rather he had a very specific grudge.  His brothers and the brother's children had just been killed in a no-doubt very discriminating attack on supposed Hezbollah positions in Southern Lebanon.  The brothers may have in fact been members of Hezbollah.  No word on the sympathies of his kids. 

Now the Israeli bombing doesn't justify antisemitic violence against synagogues.  But the particular grudge this perpetrator had suggests that antisemitism is not some vast ineffable phenomenon.  This terrorist had a very particular motive and grudge.  There's no reasonable basis to connect his deranged reaction to his loss to every or indeed any Muslim or ethnic minority in the United States or to cite it as an example of how antisemitic violence has become the norm.

Unfortunately that doesn't mean that American Jews can ignore the possibility of violent attacks on their houses of worship.

These kind of threats seem like something that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should be concerned about and willing to assist Jewish organizations in preparing for.

Not in the Mad King's America.

Synagogues seeking grants to protect Jews from antisemitic terror from the DHS have been told that DHS will provide the money only if the synagogue's members betray every Jewish value and embrace the Mad King's bigotry, hatred, and racism:

Beginning in 2025, the Department of Homeland Security attached sweeping ideological conditions to new security grants. Recipients of new awards must cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, and must also agree not to “operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology.” They additionally must not run any aid program which “benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.”

When asked to clarify what those conditions mean in practice — whether a synagogue that declares itself a sanctuary for refugees would be disqualified, or whether a congregation offering programming for Jews of color or LGBTQ+ Jews would run afoul of the anti-DEI clause — the federal government’s answer has been months of contradictory guidance and confusion. 

As a result synagogues are having to tax their own members so they don't betray fundamental Jewish values:  

 Closer to home:

 

$200,000 is real money, even for a large temple in affluent Newton, Mass.  But if DHS is going to condition protecting Jews from terror on surrendering Jewish values, what choice did it have?

The imposition of this Sophie's Choice on synagogues by the hateful demented Mad King regime and its stooges (who until last week were spending DHS money, not on protecting Jews, but on Mile-High Club membership drives on government jets with private bedrooms) deserves condemnation from everyone.

We'll let you know whether the reactionary gasbags who inveigh against antisemitism as a way to smear anyone who doesn't agree with their Likud values like Frum, Bretbug, or even apostate Jew St. David Brooks, speak out against this evil.

In the meantime, we'll be preparing for Passover when Jews sit around a big table, eat inedible crap like ground up fish in aspic, and read from one of their well-known texts, the Haggadah, CCAR ed. at 56:

When a stranger resides with you in your land,you shall not wrong him....You shall love him as yourself for you were strangers in the Lad of Egypt.

Because American Jews hold fast to these timeless truths, the Mad King's regime is putting them in mortal jeopardy.

If you're looking for examples of antisemitism to condemn, you could start there, Bretbug.

Your Republican government inaction [Surely, in action? - Ed.]

  Dispatches from the War Fronts

 

By State Department Correspondent Varian Fry with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

WASHINGTON, DC. - Hundreds of thousands of Americans remain trapped in Middle East war zones such as the Gulf States and Israel unable to return home. In response to their plight, the State Department has – warned them to get the hell out of Dodge, but provided no useful assistance to rescue them:

 

 

How did we get here, and those hapless souls get marooned there?

As usual, the answer boils down to one word: Republicans.

To understand why, we have to do what Republicans hate: learn some history.

One might think that we would all agree that the State Department, charged with protecting Americans overseas, would do something to help.

But that kind of thinking is just an example of what Republicans have told us for over 40 years is a fallacy.

St. Ronald of Bitburg was venerated for incessantly proclaiming 

As terrifying as “Good luck, buddy, you're on your own?”

The lie that government can't, won't, and shouldn't help Americans who need such help was regarded by generations of Republicans as a foundational pearl of wisdom.  E.J. Dionne wrote years ago that contempt for government and what it does has animated Republicans ever since.

Then we get to January 20, 2025, when, to the amazement of future generations of historians, if there are any, Americans entrusted their government to a corrupt demented insurrectionist.

In turn, that depraved drug-addled lout turned over management of the government to an equally depraved and crazy drug-addled Nazi-saluting plutocrat.

Remember what happened next?

Ketamine Leon turned loose his untrained unschooled incels across the government, destroying entire agencies, like USAID, in violation of law, and decimating staff in many of them, including – the State Department, which has lost at least 20% of its career staff. 

They were replaced by unqualified, inept, and compromised real-estate finaglers, with predictable results, according to Columbia Professor Elizabeth Saunders: 

The carnage at the State Department, leaving aside USAID and the hundreds of thousands who died due to the illegal cut off of USAID assistance, was terrible.  At least 1,300 civil and foreign service employees were chucked out.  Another 1,700 experienced professionals, seeing Ketamine Leon's fork coming for their jugular veins, took the DOGE buyout offer.

The layoffs included 100 employees in Consular Affairs, the office charged with serving Americans overseas, 84 in Administration, and 89 in the staff Secretariat, which mobilizes, staffs, and manages crisis response. 

So when the Mad King let loose the dogs of war, trapping at least 500,000 Americans in the sights of Iranian missiles and drones, the consequences, according to Popular Information, were as expected:  

Due to the intensity of combat in the Middle East, other countries not directly involved in the conflict quickly began evacuating their citizens from the region. The Italian government has facilitated the evacuation of 2,500 Italians on commercial flights. The Czech Republic sent multiple flights to evacuate people stranded in the area. Several other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Greece, had organized flights scheduled for Wednesday, Reuters reported.

“It says, ‘You're on your own!’ ”

Americans in the area are in danger of being targeted, but the State Department did not advise citizens to leave the region before the strikes began.

Before the 2003 Iraq War, in contrast, the State Department advised citizens to prepare to evacuate weeks in advance and ordered a final evacuation days before fighting began.

This year, Americans in 14 countries were not advised to evacuate until three days after the Trump administration began major combat operations in Iran. By that time, much of the region’s airspace and most airports had closed.

According to the BBC, between “500,000 and one million US nationals are estimated to be living in the Middle East.”

The State Department told Americans to use “available commercial transportation“ to evacuate. On Tuesday, when Americans called a phone number publicized by the State Department, they received an automated message: “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation. At this time, there are currently no United States evacuation points.”...

An American businessman who has been stranded in the UAE told NOTUS that when he reached a live operator, he was told to sign up online for State Department security alerts but was not offered any other help. Several news outlets spoke to stranded Americans who described feeling “trapped” and “helpless.”...

Meanwhile, U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East announced that they were shutting down or unable to help stranded Americans. On Tuesday, the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem posted on X that it was not able “at this time to evacuate or directly assist Americans in departing Israel.” The embassy noted that Americans in Israel may be able to take ground transportation to Egypt and depart from Cairo’s airport, where flights have not been interrupted. However, the embassy’s post said that “the U.S. government cannot guarantee your safety” if Americans took this option.

Similarly, the U.S. embassy in Qatar told Americans they “should not rely on the US government for assisted departure or evacuation” and should “take advantage of commercial transportation options.” Other U.S. embassies, including those in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Lebanon, told Americans they could not offer assistance. Some also closed and cancelled appointments....

When asked on Tuesday why there was no evacuation plan for Americans in the area, President Trump argued that it was “because it happened all very quickly,” adding, “I thought we were going to have a situation where we were gonna be attacked.”

....Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) called on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “promptly appear before Congress and explain to the American people how they so poorly planned for the protection and evacuation of Americans.” When asked by Roll Call about the lack of Marines trained in evacuations in the armada around Iran, Republican Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “We may be asking about that soon.”  

Take your time, Roger.  No rush.

State Department Ops Center, post-DOGE

Of course the Mad King's mouthpieces denied that the insane DOGE-inspired cuts crippled the rescue effort, claiming that no overseas positions have been cut.  But the organization of a mass evacuation happens in the Operations Center in Main State, where teams of experienced professionals, who've been through the drill before, coordinate across the government the procurement, dispatch, and protection of evacuation flights, as well as sending individual implementation plans to each post.  

That didn't happen, in part because those people are gone and in part because the Mad King's insane decision-making process, which basically involves him watching Fox News and then deciding it's time to stage a spectacle of cruelty and destruction, short-circuits the former institutions like the National Security Council, who are there to make sure that obvious sequelae of war, like taking care of half a million Americans in harm's way, are considered and addressed. 

By gutting the NSC and putting the same thirsty coat-holder who serves as Secretary of State in charge of it, the Mad King has ensured that effective planning and governance cannot occur.

St. Ronald of Bitburg, who reveled in his destruction of America's air traffic control system on his watch, would have been so proud now that Republicans have instituted a government whose functionaries can proudly state, “I'm from the government and I'm here to shag my staff on taxpayer-funded airplanes.”

Victory in Iran War: Epstein News Obliterated

 Dispatches from the War Fronts

IT IS WAR!

MAD KING ORDERS BOMBS AWAY! 

HUGE SUCCESS: ALL EPSTEIN COVERAGE OBLITERATED!

HUNDREDS OF BAD ECONOMIC AND TARIFF STORIES WIPED OUT! 

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur with
Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk

PALM BEACH, Florida – From his command post overlooking the omelette bar at Merde-a-Lardo, the Mad King today ordered massive airstrikes on anything he could blow up in Iran, in coordination with his fellow despot, Melech for Life Bibi “I funded Hamas” Netanyahu.

Sources close to the club's top-secret massage rooms told the Spy that the results of the lethal attacks on Iran and its innocent population have already exceeded the Mad King's expectations.

Coverage successfully obliterated

“Through his bold long-fingered leadership, the greatest President in the history of the world has totally wiped out all Epstein coverage from America's media,” said highly reliable and not at all drug-addled Steve Bannon.

“Just yesterday the President was being attacked on all cable networks by unfavorable coverage of his ongoing cover-up of his sex crimes against children.  Now, that's been destroyed,” he said.

Other sources note that the Mad King was especially concerned about media attacks focusing on the Department of Justice's attempted cover up of FBI interviews with victims of his grotesque sexual assaults.  “We couldn't let this go on,” they told the Spy on condition that we would not reveal the identity of speaker Karoline Levitt. 

In addition to the utter obliteration of Epstein coverage, the Mad King's minions noted that the unprovoked attacks on Iran have also wiped out many other media targets, including the murder of a disabled Burmese refugee left to die in the cold in upstate New York, the confusion and inflation caused by the Mad King's illegal tariffs, his continued corruption and bribe-taking, and his increasingly demented utterances.

“Thanks to our magnificent military, all of these media targets have been taken out and no longer threaten the Mad King's Golden Age,” boasted clean and sober War Secretary Pete Hegseth in another highly-secure Signal chat (password: 12345).  He ordered a celebratory round of Jaeger Bombs for all involved in the operation.

The mood in Israel was almost as ebullient, at least among the toadies and hatemongers in the court of Melech Bibi Netanyahu, if not among the population cowering in shelters, reports Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan in Tel Aviv.

“Our Air Force has wiped out all media coverage of our brutal and pointless occupation in Gaza, as well as the wave of terrorist violence unleashed by extremist settlers against the rightful inhabitants of the West Bank,” said one member of the War Cabinet.

“And any inquiry into Netanyahu's disastrous policy of financing Hamas prior to the October 7 terror attacks has been blasted into smithereens.  Happy Purim!” the source added, swinging his gregor.  

Coverage of Kristi Noem's party plane wiped out!

Back in Washington, preliminary battlefield assessments suggested that once again the Mad King had succeeded in emasculating Congress, the only branch of government with the Constitutional power to declare war.  At the first sound of falling bombs, faithful Mad King taint polishers like confirmed bachelor Lindsay Graham and adoptive father of the year Mike Johnson surrendered to the Mad King's whims.

While there remained isolated pockets of resistance among a few die-hard Democrats, the Mad King's high command, after extensive analysis of the top-secret intelligence contained in their Twitter feed, remained confident that any opposition will be soon mopped up by calls for bipartisan cooperation and turncoat goons like Sen. Jon Fetterman.

Although Iran retains some ability to retaliate against U.S. military installations in the Middle East, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi the Puppy Killer Noem downplayed the possibility of any Iranian attack on the United States.  “One minute after they launch a missile, it'll be over, based on my experience,” she explained before retiring to her flying love shack for an “important briefing” from her personal Staff [Surely, Chief of Staff? – Ed.] Corey Lewandowski.

Western Civilization and the Discontented Pundit

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell in Cambridge and Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

If you think that the real crisis in America was that democracy was under attack, that must be because you’re not reading the pearls of wisdom nested inside the hard shells of deep thinkers like New York Times columnist Bret “Bretbug” Stephens and former Times columnist David “My Dinner With Jeffy” Brooks.

According to these savants, all of our problems can be traced back to a single cause: the supposed assault on Western Civilization by a non-Western elite which has supposedly banned the teaching of great chestnuts of that civilization in elite universities.

Bretbug: Why aren't they reading Plato?

Here’s Brooks, taking a break from whining about the high price of Scotch at Newark Airport:

Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans

Name three educators who decided that. Three is a good number because it equaled the number of drinks Jeffrey Epstein’s boon dinner companion sucked down before decrying the death of the liberal social order at the Newark Airport Food Court.

Not to be outdone, here’s Likud spokesman Bretbug beating the same drum (probably a timpani to avoid any pollution by bongos or African percussion instruments):

What, exactly, is Western civilization? Americans younger than 50 might be excused for hardly knowing. A 2011 report from the National Association of Scholars found that not one of America’s top colleges and universities had a required survey course in Western civ and only 32 percent even offered it as an elective. In 1964, 80 percent of these institutions had some form of introduction to Western civ. What many universities do offer...is what amounts to an education in anti-Western civ: the examination of all the ways in which Western civilization is, purportedly, an extended act of imperialism and colonialism, human exploitation and environmental despoliation, misogyny and white supremacy and phobias of every kind.

As for his smears about “Anti-Western civ,” Bretbug, like his illustrious ignorant reactionary forebear Col. Robert McCormick, “cited no authority, being it.” 

If only she had been taught Aquinas, mourns Brooks

At the risk of polluting this elevated debate with dreary facts, let’s take a look at what actual universities are actually offering their students. (We’ll let you decide for yourself whether historical facts justify a critique of Western countries due to tiny flaws like slavery, genocide, mass warfare, oppression of women and minorities, environmental catastrophe, and giving reactionary gasbags like Bretbug a no-heavy-lifting sinecure as a New York Times columnist). 

Not far from here there’s a well-known university that offers a lot of courses on Western Civilization to their undergraduates, even if most of them involve sitting in the second balcony of Sanders Theater listening to some tenured gasbag bloviate.

Here’s one:

A course called “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times”, featuring readings from “Aristotle, Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls,” all of whom sound pretty Western to us.

Or how about:

The Ancient Greek Hero, based on translated versions of ancient Greek classics. That’s as Western as Gunsmoke.

And if you really want to learn how we got so wrapped up in the distinction between Western Civilization and other stuff, try

The Crusades and the Making of East and West.

We’ll recommend that one to Bretbug specifically.

And these are plucked just from Harvard’s General Education offerings (the survey courses that Bretbug holds so dear).

The only civilization worth fighting for, says Bretbug

There’s more stuff in the departments for those interested in Western Civilization from Plato to Netanyahu:

The Department of Classics offers a mere 31 courses this spring, although we’ll leave to greater minds like David Brooks whether the study of Hittite counts as Western Civilization.

The Department of Government, home to generations of reactionary white men bemoaning the supposed assault on Western Civilization, offers 57 undergraduate courses this spring, of which 10 are focused on non-Western states, as might be expected given that the Department, even in the halcyon days before wokeness ruled, regarded Comparative Government and International Relations as part of its remit.

Over in the History Department eager young minds can partake in 29 courses on various aspects of Western Civilization, including, for this purpose, the Holocaust,which last we looked did not occur either in Asia or Africa. 

Columbia, now accused of all sorts of dastardly crimes against thought, has in fact pioneered just the kind of mandatory survey course that gets Bretbug hot.  All Columbia undergrads must take a year long course called Contemporary Civilization.  Here's the fall reading list (instructors choose from this list; if you tried to read everything on it in one semester you'd throw yourself in front of the 1 train):

The only highlight of Western Civilization Columbia omitted is the Colonel's 20-piece bucket.

Just for s***s and giggles, let's take a look at what is offered by the alma mater of David “Jeffrey, you're a genius” Brooks, the University of Chicago:

They too have a core curriculum requiring courses in civilization. 

Shockingly however, their offerings include not only courses on Western Civilization but also the civilizations of cat and dog eaters and even some that dare to examine all civilizations, not just the one that gave us Bretbug and the Likud.  But no one ever accused the University of Chicago of any pretensions to intellectual rigor, so we'll have to cut Dave's school some slack. 

We could go on to obscure rural schools like Dartmouth, but the drift seems pretty clear: there’s plenty of attention paid to courses in Western Civilization in American higher education.  Any claim to the contrary is simply falsified. 

If their argument is just crap, what's the point of harping on it?

Many reasons.

First, it's an effort to shift blame for the corrupt white racist misogynist Mad King regime, which continues to be supported by unanimous Republican support and most powerful plutocrats, from white racists and plutocrats to these pundit's liberal adversaries.  David “ Pass the Lafite, Jeffrey” Brooks actually claims that the Mad King's reign can be explained by the false narrative that Western Civilization is no longer being taught to  eager young minds prepping for Rush Week at 'Bama.

Related to that argument is their prescription: not curbing the power of plutocracy and fostering a climate of tolerance and inclusion, but sending us back to church and Western Civ classes until in some distant era these problems magically vanish.  It sounds astonishingly vacuous, but this is an accurate summary of Brooks's, um, thought.

You can learn so much from the ancient Greeks!

Note that a key feature of these pundits' lament about the supposed decline of Western Civilization is the mockery of those who point out its modest shortcomings, like slavery, exploitation, genocide, and mass warfare.  Bretbug might regard these defects as trivial compared to the magnificent achievements of Western Civilization including the endless pasta buffet at Olive Garden or cars that autonomously trap and kill their passengers, but the rest of us don't have to.

The Bretbugs of the world are in fact terrified about rigorous inquiry into the, shall we say, imperfections of our current culture because an honest reckoning with them might lead to discussions of appropriate remedies, like the triple horrors of diversity, equality, and inclusion.  You can't understand DEI without knowing what makes it necessary, and the last thing that Bretbug and Brooks wants is for college students, or anyone else, to understand that reality. 

Worst of all, it's the faculty lounge version of white supremacy, which sounds so much better in well-crafted if empty sentences on the Times Op-Ed page than in the mainstream Republican version as articulated by defenders of Western Civilization like Marco Rubio, Nick Fuentes and Rupert Murdoch's parade of racist sock puppets.

Now we have nothing against Western Civilization. We think more students should read Plato. And if they read the Symposium, they’ll learn one vital truth about the founder of Western philosophy that Republican bigots may prefer you didn't know: he was gay af.

Dispatches from the War Fronts: V-ICE Day!

  Dispatches from the War Fronts

V-ICE DAY!

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! 

Mad King's troops withdraw in disgrace!

MINNESOTA CELEBRATES VICTORY; STARTS REBUILDING  

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur with
Minnesota Bureau Chief Murray Slaughter 

MINNEAPOLIS – Mad King Occupation Army Commander-in-Chief Tom Homan unconditionally surrendered to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Thursday at 12 midnight, Minnesota War Time.

The Mad King's rabble surrendered in droves

Gov. Walz announced that he had accepted Homan's unconditional surrender and the bag of cash Homan tendered to him.  In accordance with the Midwest customs of war, Gov. Walz returned the bag to Homan, who retreated to the Mad King's Mar-a-Lago headquarters in disgrace.

News of the unconditional surrender was greeted with cautious optimism by the long-suffering residents of the Twin Cities.  At first, the terrorized populace remained in their homes, still fearing attacks by the undisciplined rabble that constituted the Mad King's Army of Occupation.  

As word of the surrender sunk in, the people cautiously emerged, blowing their whistles no longer in warning, but in triumph.

The normally-impassive Minnesotans took the streets proclaiming, “Hey, this is pretty good” and bringing out their victory hot pots brimming with kielbasa and melted Velveeta.

The surrender followed months of violent attacks on the defenseless people of the Twin Cities, including the killings of two innocents whose only crime was to nonviolently express their displeasure with the cruel occupation army.

And hundreds of Minnesotans, including many small children kidnapped on their way home from school, remain trapped in the Mad King's gulags located in the wastelands of faraway Texans.

The sneak attack had come without warning or justification.  Later, in a futile effort to manufacture a rationale for their naked aggression, the Mad King's flacks and commanders claimed that the war was made necessary by ongoing fraud investigations, which had been successfully prosecuted for years without war crimes.  Some of the Mad King's apparatchiks like Attorney General and Mean Girl Pam Bobndi had even suggested ending the war in exchange for Minnesota surrendering their voting lists.

At first the Mad King's undisciplined heavily armed hordes achieved success with their surprise attacks on Minnesotans taking their kids to school or simply driving around trying to carry with their lives.

Having alienated the population with their policy of relentless cruelty and war crimes, the locals responded with a well-organized guerilla war featuring whistles, video cameras, and law suits.

Military commentators noted that the opposition forces wisely avoided rioting and the use of force, thereby making it impossible for the Mad King to invoked martial law and thereby justify wholesale slaughter of the population.

Others commented that the Mad King's ill-trained ill-led ill-clothed forces never had a chance against the united opposition of millions of people.  “What a pitiful effort this was to destroy a great city!” one commented.

Another noted that the Mad King's hope to lure the citizens into joining their violent assaults against immigrants were doomed from the start.  “This isn't Texas.  You can't expect the residents to join a lynching,” they said on background.

ICE was no match for General Winter

Many commentators observed that perhaps the strongest ally the people had was “General Winter.”  “These untrained clowns didn't have proper winter equipment or training.  That's why they were always falling on their asses on the ice and unable to withstand the people opposing them in the freezing streets,” noted one military expert.

But even in victory Minnesotans assessed the damage and the lives that were ruined or lost.  Thousands of noncitizens were marched into captivity and their homes destroyed by the Mad King's looters.

“It will take years to recover from this war,” Gov. Walz told his state.  “But we will rebuild better than before.”

The brutal war has left Minnesotans with bitter memories of the collaborators in their midst.  A number of prominent politicians surprisingly collaborated with the Mad King's occupying forces or at the very least refused to support the brave resistance forces.

These collaborators included many of the state's largest corporations and one of its Senators, Amy “Hot Mess” Klobuchar, who urged Minnesotans to engage in “bipartisan cooperation” with the forces that were killing civilians and kidnapping children on the way home from school.

Is this Amy Klobuchar's fate?

Klobuchar, considered a wily politician, is now planning to run for Governor.  To do so, she will need to defuse the anger over her lack of support for the resistance in its darkest hours.  Historians noted that she is attempting the kind of political reinvention pioneered by French and German collaborators after the Second World War.

The murders and other atrocities committed by the Mad King's forsaken army have led to calls for war crime tribunals.  However, most believe that as long as the Mad King rules, there will be no justice for the fallen.  “We'll be lucky to get our kidnapped children back,” one resistance leader said.

Some Minnesotans have cautioned that the danger is not over.  They note that despite the surrender, the Mad King has thousands of violent stormtroopers at his command, and could always mount a second invasion.

Such a decision would raise further concerns about the Mad King's sanity.  But as he sulks in his Mar-a-Lago bunker surrounded by his toadies and fanatics, one thing is clear: as long as the Mad King remains in power, no one in America is safe.

Or for that matter anywhere else. 

There's good news tonight: David Brooks signs off

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

It was another week of terrible news in the ongoing coup against American democracy perpetrated by the Mad King and his goons.  Americans murdered and terrorized; journalists indicted for committing journalism; millions of children threatened by insane science-free vaccine recommendations; the destruction of America's alliances; and the Department of Justice committing criminal obstruction and perversion of justice every day.

Did we miss anything?  We did, but we'll get back to Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.

But there was one ray of light amidst the storm:  David Brooks is signing off.  

Or so he said:

After 22 years at The New York Times covering up the truth about the Republican attack on America and its free institutions, Dave is heading off into the sunset.

He summed up his Times career in a column in which he, wait for it, continued to cover up the truth about the Republican attack on America and its free institutions.  (He did not cover his earlier career at the Murdoch mouthpiece Weekly Standard shilling for George W. Bush and the insane Iraq War debacle.)

He looked back on his legacy, not entirely inaccurately:

We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country....Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations. 

Notice how Brooks, as he has done throughout his entire miserable career, blames the public for its malaise, rather than considering whether real events in the world have contributed to the public's disaffection with its lot.

For example, the reason why large majorities believe that elites don't care about regular people might well be because elites don't care about regular people. Since 2009, according to Robert Reich, 95% of the growth in wealth has gone to the top 1%, a statistic never quoted by Brooks, who strenuously avoids any criticism of the revolting rich.

Perhaps that's because he gets a lot of free stuff for his service to the rich and powerful, including free meals (a point of some concern to Brooks, who once wrote an entire column complaining about his $78 bar tab at Newark Airport).

In 2011 he enjoyed a free trip to a Napa resort to mingle with his fellow edgemasters like:

 

Let's see – that's billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire former Microsoft CEO and STD victim Bill Gates, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, billionaire former Google CEO Sergey Brin, billionaire former Amazon CEO Jeff “Steroids” Bezos, and some rando named Epstein.  Ring any bells?

Sounds like a fun weekend.

But Brooks couldn't get enough of these guys.  He managed to get an invite to another Billionaires' Dinner with some of the same folks, including this Epstein guy again:

The Moral Nine must be the gasbag version of the Magnificent Seven.  At any rate, we're certain the assembled plutocrats were struck by the brilliance of Brooks's insights (like the ones he chucked into his valedictory):

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history, philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans.

Fun fact: nobody decided that. Can he name one university in America that stopped teaching great Western philosophers?  Other than Texas A&M which banned Plato for his lack of “family values?”

The New York Times loses David Brooks!

There are of course a few evils that never seem to penetrate Brooks' work or apparently skull.  You'll search his litany of social ills in vain for trivia like white racism, sexism, the ravenous greed of his plutocrat dinner partners, environmental destruction, corruption, exploitation of workers, abandonment of civilized values like democracy and human rights, religious intolerance, and wallowing in violence and corruption.  None of which have anything to do with expanding the college curriculum to include studying these phenomena.

Racism and bigotry would seem to be assaults on our “humanistic core,” but not in Dave World.

He wanders further away from reality in his farewell:

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values.  

What shared moral order? The one that said all rewards in society should go only to rich white men? The one that persecuted and stigmatized LGBTQ individuals, often driving them to suicide? I sure hope that individuals abandoned that evil and oppressive social order that has benefited Dave as an untalented white man.

And David remains committed to his non-solution:

Where do people and nations go to find new things to believe in, new values to orient their lives around? Where do they go to revive their humanistic core? They find these things in the realm of culture. In my reading of history, cultural change precedes political and social change. You need a shift in thinking before you can have a shift in direction. You need a different spiritual climate. 

Here's a suggested change in spiritual climate:  Stop supporting and apologizing for vicious violent bigots and racists and start supporting human rights for all, ranging from immigrants seeking to adjudicate their status to women trying get Ross Douthat's hands out of their uteruses.  We don't need a shift in thinking.  We need to oppose and overcome the violent Republican campaign against the values we already hold, but Dave can't bring himself to express.

There's so much more but we'd refer to Mr. Driftglass for his decades-long dissection of David's “thought” in the service of Republican tyranny and corruption. 

But the biggest disappointment is the punch line of his farewell address: he's not really shutting his yap.  He's just moved to The Atlantic, at the invitation of his fellow Iraq warmonger, Jeffrey “Bombs Away” Goldberg.  Does this mean that we'll soon see Moral Mountain Dave on The Atlantic's TV gabfest, Washington Week?  If so, we have some bad news for Bombs Away.  We'll be shunning any episode that includes the ol' Perfessor in lieu of real journalists like Susan Glasser.

And he'll be pontificating at one of the leading universities in Southern Connecticut, where for the next five years he'll be a no-heavy-lifting “fellow” at some bullshit school not located within Yale's School of Arts and Sciences:

The Atlantic has even conned Yale into paying for a video podcast starring Brooks.  It's all part of rebranding  this long time lazy hack a “pop sociologist.”  That's like calling me a “pop neurosurgeon.”  Apparently at Yale “pop” means “not a.”  

We've always tried to avoid New Haven so it's unlikely we'll bump into the Fellow down at Mory's.  

But we can't avoid the lasting effects of the astonishing intellectual dishonesty and moral bankruptcy of generations of Republican apologists and bulls*** artists like David Brooks.   At least though, unlike Renee Good and Alex Pretti, we're alive to fight on.

Report from Occupied America: Minneapolis fights on alone

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki with Spy Minnesota Bureau Chief Murray Slaughter in Minneapolis

The attacks come from anywhere, anytime.  One minute it's a peaceful school, restaurant, or residential neighborhood.  The next minute, heavily armed paramilitary forces of the Fascist Mad King regime roll in, occupying, wounding, capturing and even murdering the residents going about their business.

The business could be picking their kids up from school, buying gas or groceries, or even going to the hospital.  The invaders don't care.  Anyone, anywhere can be a target, regardless of age, ethnicity, or immigration status.

Sometimes the terrified residents of Minneapolis get a minute or two of warning from the network of whistle blowers pressed into service to guard the streets.  Sometimes they are attacked or shot without warning.

The only offense committed by the traumatized citizens of Minneapolis: they voted against the Mad King's tyranny in the last election.

This is Minneapolis in the 250th year of American independence.

And yet the unarmed overwhelmed citizens of the city continue to resist the invaders valiantly.

Here's the front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune, still publishing despite the occupation:

The crimes against humanity committed by the Mad King's rampaging hordes are by now familiar, but still shocking:

● The brazen murders of an unarmed 37-year-old woman driving away from her murderers because the shooter was insulted by her wife and of a male nurse coming to the aid of another innocent victim.

● The repeated beatings and torture of unarmed civilians (whose only offense was to bear witness to the carnage) already tackled and immobilized:

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

[image or embed]

— John Abernathy (@john-abernathy.bsky.social) January 17, 2026 at 9:57 AM

● The use of small children as bait to seize their parents and the subsequent kidnapping of the kids after their parents have been arrested despite pending claims for asylum or other immigration relief.

The youngest victims of the Mad King's desperadoes 

That outrage sparked a deluge of Poland-invades-Germany lies from the Mad King's mouthpieces, who claimed that his stormtroopers had no alternative but to lock up the child because it had been “abandoned by its parents.”

The Department of Homeland Security has generally been unapologetic and defiant in the face of criticisms of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis....the department’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, limited her comments to [the child]'s father, who she called “an illegal alien” who had “fled on foot – abandoning his child.”

“ICE did NOT target a child,” she said. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended [his father].

“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

What they mean by that brazen lie is that the parents were fleeing or fearing unlawful arrest, which would lead to the seizure of their child no matter what they did.

It's the parents' own fault if they don't report to the transports. Got it. 

The list of brazenly unlawful attacks is endless.  We'll mention only one more: the willingness of the occupying forces to break down the doors of private homes without a warrant issued by a judge, in defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and hundreds of years of its application by all three branches.

The Mad King's legions are now falsely claiming that they can issue their own “warrants” to invade and rampage through your house.

This would in practice repeal the Fourth Amendment and represent a long march toward nationwide tyranny.

But, you say, the courts will surely protect us.

Let's check out that hypothesis. 

On January 16, 2026, the federal district court in Minneapolis, after carefully reviewing the evidence submitted by both sides, issued an 83-page preliminary order preventing the occupying troops from engaging in certain brazen illegal acts:

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez in an 83-page order blocked federal agents who are deployed to Minnesota as part of the Trump administration's immigration operations from using pepper spray or nonlethal munitions on peaceful protesters. The order also barred them from arresting peaceful protesters.

It also barred federal law enforcement from stopping or detaining drivers and passengers when there is "no reasonable articulable suspicion" that people driving near protests are forcibly interfering with law enforcement operations. 

The injunction lasted four days.  The relevant court of the appeals, the Eighth Circuit, decided to liberate the occupying troops from the fetters imposed on them by the lower court with the following order, included in its entirety:

 

At this point an observer may be compelled to pose that classic legal query:  What the f***?

And what is an “administrative stay” anyway?  Those who practiced before Courts of Appeals in the previous century never heard of them.  But in recent years, they have been used to block lower court decisions the appeals court doesn't like, for reasons they don't have to disclose.  They are only supposed to last a few days while the appellate court figures out what to do, but in some notorious cases beneficial to Republicans they have lasted for months. 

Notably the appeals court has no obligation to explain why it is issuing a stay, or even which judges authorized it.  

What could possibly explain this appellate thumb-twiddling while Minnesota is under violent and unconstitutional assault? 

Let's start by looking at the distinguished thumb-twiddlers of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

There are 11 active judges who are eligible to sit on motions panels and rule on things like administrative stays.  Here they are:

A minute's analysis will demonstrate that 10 of the 11 are Republicans appointed by Republican Presidents, including 4 by the Mad King and 5 by George W. Bush.  What are the chances that a Court 90% of whose members are Republicans will vote to call a halt to the depredations of a Republican administration?  So far, they don't appear too terrific.

Just for the fun of it, let's learn more about these great jurisprudes.

Chief Judge Colloton as a mere law student advocated bravely for the rights of white male Princeton a******s to eat and vomit in the comfort of their eating clubs without those pesky women telling them to chew with their mouth closed.  Later he clerked for two insane reactionaries: Laurence Silbermann and Bill Rehnquist.

Not great.  

Ray Gruender voted consistently to impose forced-birth ideology on unconsenting women.  What do you think he'll do with respect to federal stormtroopers rampaging through an unconsenting state?

And whom did the Mad King install on this august court?

L. Steven Grasz won an unusual and prestigious “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, citing his “temperament issues, particularly bias and lack of open-mindedness.”  So of course a Republican Senate confirmed him. 

David Stras wrote an opinion stating falsely that Section 2 of the Voting Rights could not be invoked by minority voters who alleged disenfranchisement in violation of that law because – that outcome is good for Republicans who want to disenfranchise minority voters.

The ABA rated this distinguished nominee “not qualified” 

Jonathan A. Kobes was also deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.  His confirmation squeaked through thanks to a tie-breaking vote by Mother Pence.

So how likely is it that the Eighth Circuit will protect the innocent citizens of Minnesota from outrages perpetrated by the Mad King's goons?  Anything is possible but based on their backgrounds and the issuance of the ridiculous administrative stay, we're going on Fan Duel and put a unit on not bloody likely.

And even if the Eighth Circuit upholds the law, what will happen when the regime's body snatchers appeal to the Republican-bent Supreme Court? 

Which brings us to the larger point.  The bent Eighth Circuit, like the equally bent Supreme Court, is not solely a confection of the Tangerine-Faced Traitor.  They were built, human brick by human brick, by over 30 years of Republicans, including lovable mainstream Republicans named Bush, to serve as tools of permanent Republican domination of all three branches of government.

That means that anyone who supported or shilled for any Republican Presidential candidate since 1988 owns a piece of this cracked edifice, including our wonderful and wonderfully-pious Republican allies, some of whom, like Mr. Kellyanne Conway, have the great brass balls to seek elective office as Democrats.

If it turns out that the Eighth Circuit fails to enforce the law and protect the citizens of Minnesota from summary execution at the hands of the Mad King's sadistic content-generating goons, assign the blame not just to one demented tyrant, but to the entire Republican Party apparatus that supports his reign of terror.