Opinion

The US has a fascism problem. In its culture, in its hero worship, in its ideological makeup. Donald Trump was the culmination of that.

His supporters tried to whitewash the specifics, but they believed in a fascist hierarchy. There's no other explanation. Even for the current Republican Party, made of power-craving vultures whose only plan for America is inflaming white race hatreds and removing rights (voting, reproductive, et al.), January 6 should have been too far.

This is one that you just have to listen to.

I'd been talking to a caller on my SiriusXM show about the right-wingers and Trumpers who listen to the show and claim they just are cruising down the dial and find it —- when, lo and behold, Dan from Omaha calls in and claims just that.

Congressman Ruben Gallego got it right when he recently described his House colleague, Paul Gosar, as “Just an awful human being."

Gallego was commenting on the news that Gosar had posted an altered anime video of himself on Twitter, which he's since removed, that depicted him executing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, by slashing the back of her neck with a sword and nearly decapitating her, and then attacking President Joe Biden — the animated version of “Gosar" freezing a split second before his blades make contact with the president's head.

Sen. Joe McCarthy is alive and well in Wisconsin. The bullying, sneering, dishonest demagogue who dragged so many people through the mud with his specious “investigations" of “unAmerican activities" in the 1950s would be impressed by the Wisconsin Legislature's phony hunt for election fraud.

McCarthy would be particularly proud of Michael Gableman, who, for the sheer audacity of his presentation to the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee on Wednesday, wins the McCarthyism award.

My mother taught me at a young age to appreciate people who learn quickly.

Of course, Mom's definition of "learning quickly" was that you only had to stick your finger in a light socket once before learning not to do it again.

Suspected white supremacist Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial, facing two counts of homicide and one count of attempted homicide.

While the fate of Rittenhouse is yet to be determined, his trial, much like the trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, is about much more than one individual. About more than Kyle Rittenhouse.

The Trump advisor who wrote the infamous pseudo-legal justification for overturning the 2020 election also helped to create a blueprint for what Donald Trump could do to hang onto power by force.

John Eastman joined a couple dozen right-wing operatives in simulating the aftermath of a closely contested election. The report was published in mid-October 2020 and co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute, the think tank where Eastman works.

More Hollywood celebrities with no political pedigrees are floating their names as potential state and federal candidates, with former President Donald Trump having single-handedly obliterated what was once an expectation for candidates to have political experience before running for higher office.

On Wednesday, radio icon Howard Stern, known for hosting Sirius XM's "The Howard Stern Show," suggested in a broadcast that it was his "civic duty" to run for president in 2024 if Trump does.

My grandmother was the wisest person I have ever known. She had a fifth-grade education. She lived under and survived the terror regime of Jim and Jane Crow in the South. She and my grandfather owned a small farm — they were not sharecroppers or tenant farmers. They raised many children related to them by blood or marriage: nieces and nephews, younger cousins and so on. They also took in the children of neighbors and other people who, for whatever reason, needed help. No one was turned away if they needed food or a place to stay. Many of the children my grandparents cared for went on to become doctors, bankers, teachers, lawyers and morticians.

My grandmother also offered prophecies and interpreted dreams. What she foretold and interpreted almost always came to pass. I wish I had listened to her more than I did. Sometimes prophecies and predictions must be forced into being; outcomes are never preordained. That is the riddle and paradox of such things.

Location, location, location. For good or evil, history often is made in the confines of a hotel room or suite: whether the first meeting of the post-revolution Soviet government at Moscow's Hotel National in 1918, or the drafting in 1922 of Ireland's constitution at the lovely Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.

So to anyone who has even a little knowledge of Washington, DC, history, it should come as no surprise that the grand Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a couple of blocks from the White House, was a hotbed of conspiracy in the post-election days leading up to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar shared an altered video Monday of himself killing New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening to kill the president. It was a joke, Gosar's press office said, so everyone just relax. Some jokes aren't meant to be funny.

The incident sparked condemnation and calls for banning Gosar from social media. This isn't the first time. Gosar has been one of the former president's most vocal seditionaries. He is connected to organizing the January 6 sacking and looting of the United States Capitol. Earlier this year, he joined an event organized by an avowed white supremacist.

For better or worse, the nine unelected elite lawyers who hold lifetime tenure as Justices of the United States Supreme Court have the last word on the interpretation of the Constitution. They and they alone get to pass final judgment on fundamental issues that touch all of our lives.

It is critically important, therefore, that the methodologies the Justices use to decide constitutional questions meet certain standards, and that their rulings are not only consistent with the text and history of the Constitution, but also responsive to the evolving needs and values of ordinary Americans.

COVID-19 is increasingly a red-state phenomenon. Among the many statistical analyses that demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of the vaccines, perhaps the starkest are those that reveal a dramatic divergence in pandemic severity between red and blue states. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out on Monday, before we had vaccines, there "simply was not a strong partisan pattern" to the spread of disease. But after vaccines became widely available — and especially as Republican voters refused to vaccinate in large numbers — "a gap in Covid's death toll quickly emerged." Now that difference "between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month," Leonhardt wrote, to the point where counties where a large majority voted for Donald Trump have a death rate "more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties."

Leonhardt tweeted out these statistics in chart form, as well.