“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
—Hannah Arendt

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There’s a reason ICE is so well-funded for the foreseeable future
Today the regime unveiled a domestic counterterrorism strategy—authorized under NSPM 7—formally classifying left-wing, anti-fascist, and “radically pro-transgender” ideologies as threats on par with al Qaeda and ISIS. White House terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka who has aligned himself, symbolically and politically, with Nazi‑aligned, virulently nationalist, antisemitic organizations—purposely designed the strategy to require no proof of violent intent, only ideological association—and promising “rapid neutralization” of “targets” which, to be clear, means any American citizen who Trump and his regime, and openly says so online or elsewhere. This is the blueprint for their purge—and it helps explain why ICE now has a budget bigger than many nations’ militaries.

DOJ asks Supreme Court to kill Carroll’s $83 million defamation verdict
The DOJ has asked the Supreme Court to let the federal government replace Trump as the defendant in E. Jean Carroll’s $83.3 million defamation case—a swap that would kill the lawsuit, since the government can’t be sued for defamation. A federal appeals court already blocked this move, ruling both Trump and the DOJ had forfeited the option by not raising it earlier, but the DOJ is betting the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority will do what the lower courts wouldn’t. If they succeed, and the scumbag who lost in court and now uses the court to lose the loss, the federal government will have effectively laundered Trump’s $83.3 million personal liability for rape and defamation into oblivion.

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FBI opens investigation targeting reporter who wrote about Kash Patel’s alcoholism and dereliction of duty
The FBI has launched a criminal investigation against Sarah Fitzpatrick, the Atlantic journalist who reported that FBI Director Kash Patel has not only an alcohol problem, but a problem taking his role as head of the FBI seriously—and that is a problem for us all. Patel is using the FBI’s “insider threat unit,” which exists to hunt government employees who leak classified secrets. But there was nothing classified involved. Patel’s arroagance and incompetence have been on full display since day one. This is the type of investigation that authoritarian governments reach for when the courts refuse to criminalize journalists for doing their job—someone can’t be prosecuted for publishing the verifiable truth about a public official’s drinking problem, but they can be buried under federal subpoenas, and sources can be burned and (illegally) prosecuted, all while signaling to every other newsroom in the country that the same fate awaits others who dare to report on Patel (or any other member of the regime) and whatever questionable behaviors or character traits these bastards display behind the scenes.

Kennedy launches campaign to push Americans off antidepressants
HHS Secretary Bobby Brainworm unveiled a new federal plan to financially incentivize doctors to taper Americans off their antidepressant medications like Prozac and Zoloft, calling the legitimate use of these drugs—by one in six adults—a “dependency crisis.” Most Americans can’t afford therapy, so antidepressants from a primary care doctor are often the only treatment they can get. Kennedy is taking that away while offering nothing as replacement. I have to admit a part of me hopes they go through with it because I’m sick of these fascists and their bullshit. Get your torches and pitchforks ready just in case.

This concludes your report for Thursday, May 7, 2026.

Through gritted teeth,
–Zappa

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~

Photo credit: Bruno BD

“The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith

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Turns out HHS is getting some help from the EPA in killing all of us faster
An internal memo from EPA deputy David Fotouhi declared the agency’s 40-year library of more than 500 different chemical safety assessments to be untrustworthy, and ordered reviews of every existing regulation. Fotouhi, a former attorney for—you guessed it—various companies who produce toxic chemicals, specifically flagged an initial reassessment of ethylene oxide, a known carcinogen used in everything from antifreeze to detergents. Who knew that making America great again could mean bringing back lead-based paint, arsenic in water, or adding more forever chemicals to our environment?

Trump raped kids and became president, but homeless people sleeping in public go to prison
The National Homelessness Law Center called Louisiana House Bill 211 “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country.” In the state with America’s highest poverty rate, the Western world’s highest incarceration rate, and a 100,000-unit affordable housing shortage, Republican officials are moving to criminalize the consequences of their own failed governance. As is everything with the GOP, their motives are two-fold: to curry favor with the Führer, who signed an executive order last year promising federal grant preference to states that criminalize homelessness, and to get their greedy hands on more of that sweet federal grant money. The bill, already passed by the Louisiana House is now before the Senate, and would impose exorbitant fines, jail time, and unpaid hard labor on repeat offenders. The only thing fascists love more than extracting labor from people earning poverty wages is extracting it from people who work for free.

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Regime proposal would ban trans people from homeless shelters
A new proposal from the Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD puts forward a rule requiring federally funded homeless shelters to only house people by birth sex, effectively banning homeless transgender people from finding safe emergency housing. LGBTQ+ advocates say most trans people will likely stop seeking shelter rather than risk confrontations, harassment, or violence. When a government criminalizes people for just being who they are, it enforces a politics of visibilty as criminality, and openly advances a purge carried out with grant guidelines instead of guns. If they get away with this, it opens the door to countless other domains where federal money flows to institutions who serve vulnerable populations. The cruelty is always the point.

FDA hid taxpayer-funded studies proving vaccine safety
All currently available vaccines have long been proven safe and effective, but that didn’t stop the Worst Kennedy from reinventing the wheel, having FDA scientists conduct peer-reviewed studies on the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines, and—surprise—they were again proven to be safe and effective. However, as the truth is incongruent with all official Trump regime narratives, the study results were buried deeper than Ivana at Trump’s New Jersey golf course.

This concludes your report for Wednesday, May 6, 2026.

Hey, look at it this way—the good news is that it can’t get any worse. The bad news is that the good news was a lie. Until tomorrow, friends.

From hell with love,
–Zappa

Democracy dies in darkness and in the widening gap between what independent journalists make and what they need to keep the lights on.
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~

(Photo credit: mana5280)

Welcome to the weekend edition of Gonzo Report.

How do you feel about Sundays?

Personally, I’m not a fan of the way it signals the end of an always-over-too-soon weekend then just hands you over to Monday like a fucking kidnap victim in a poorly planned hostage exchange. Deeply, profoundly rude. Yet, here we are, staring down the barrel of another week whether we like it or not.

Too much happens on a given day, let alone in a whole week, and important stories get memory-holed before we have a chance to catch up. That’s why this newsletter exists. You surely caught many of the following stories, but a few of these got buried under an avalanche of fascist assholes and weaponized algorithms competing for your attention.

I do my best to keep you informed without flooding the zone with more noise—that’s the job of mainstream media. So, avalanche of assholes be damned—consider this a recovery effort.

This is your report for the weekend ending May 3, 2026.

9 out of 10 dentists recommend supporting Gonzo Report with a paid subscription or a one-time donation. (The tenth dentist is a MAGA Republican.)

SCOTUS guts Voting Rights Act, Southern states scramble to silence Black voters
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority—six rats in robes—gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act last week, and within 48 hours of Alito vomiting out this inexcusable decision, at least three states—Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina—had already called special sessions to dismantle majority-Black districts, putting at least six majority-Black Congressional seats on the chopping block. This is the deliberate erasure of the Black American vote by an institutionally racist government that has spent every decade since the act’s passage looking for ways to strip away the very rights it guarantees. BIG FUCK YOU to Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett—and two Everest-sized middle fingers to Clarence Thomas on behalf of every Black voter in AmeriKKKa.

Mifepristone via telehealth banned, dispute headed to SCOTUS
A 5th Circuit panel of—gasp!—conservative judges has banned mifepristone—the FDA-approved, clinically safe medication used in the majority of abortions—from telehealth prescription and mail delivery nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal, forcing those in need to schedule in-person clinic visits that will hit low-income patients and those in rural areas hardest. Given that the SCOTUS conservative supermajority believes women controlling their own bodies makes Jesus cry, things don’t look good. With mifepristone access now in the hands of the same religious zealots who killed Roe, this latest affront to women’s dignity should be more than enough to have us madder than hell and marching in the streets. Again.

Violent assault of sailor’s wife prompts $7 million suit against Navy, DOD
The wife of an active-duty sailor has filed a $7 million suit against the DoD and the U.S. Navy alleging that 10–15 sailors assaulted her outside a San Diego nightclub in 2024—stripping her naked, beating her, assaulting her genitals, recording the attack, and circulating explicit videos on the web and within the Navy community—while Naval leadership knew and failed to act. There is a naive and sickening tendency to lionize any member of the Armed Services as if simply wearing the uniform confers virtue. Anyone can wear the uniform. It’s proof of character not wardrobe that determines worthiness of honor.

Rudy Giuliani hospitalized in critical condition
81-year-old disgraced Trump lawyer and real-life Penguin from Batman, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani has been hospitalized in critical condition, according to a post by his spokesman on X a few hours ago. I’m sharing this not because it’s truly important or consequential, but because I get excited when traitorous sexual predators have one foot in the grave and the other steps on a banana peel.

Judge refuses to let regime stall RFK vaccine lawsuit
Last year, HHS Secretary and man who looks like beef jerky someone left out in the sun too long, RFK Jr., attempted to ‘86’ the childhood vaccine schedule established by medical experts more than 30 years ago. Kennedy wanted to scrap the CDC’s universal recommendations that kids receive vaccines for COVID-19, flu, rotavirus, meningococcal, and hepatitis A and B. Thankfully, the American Academy of Pediatrics immediately sued. Trump regime lawyers then argued on Kennedy’s behalf that the court should pause the case while they appeal another federal order blocking this unnecessary change. And now yet another federal judge told regime attorneys to pound sand. So, yeah, things seem to be going well for the smart guy who snorted coke off dirty toilet seats and claimed he increased his GPA by becoming a heroin addict.

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ICE taps torture-accused contractor to hunt undocumented children
ICE has contracted with a private security firm, tasking it with locating undocumented children living with sponsors under the guise of “wellness checks.” This, despite the firm being credibly accused in an active federal lawsuit of abuse and torture for its role in Trump’s family separation policy during his first term. Not that we needed confirmation, but internal ICE documents reviewed by journalists confirm that “wellness checks” are code for arrest and deportation. This regime of bastards, led by Nazi Nosferatu, Stephen “Ghoul” Miller, is actively hiring monsters accused of torturing children to hunt down and kidnap more children. My only hope is that the next live mouse Stephen Miller eats gives him the rabies he deserves.

The regime cut 4.3 million people from food stamps, then lied about why
As of today, 4.3 million Americans have been stripped of their SNAP benefits thanks to the skidmark in humanity’s underwear, Donald Trump, and his One Big Bullshit Bill—which raised the work-requirement age to 64 and stripped exemptions from homeless people and veterans. Trump’s corrupt, science-denying Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, falsely claimed that those cuts are the result of the agency “reducing fraud,” which is demonstrable bullshit. Calling mass eligibility cuts “fraud reduction” and making millions of struggling Americans go hungry is indefensible, but Rollins reportedly sleeps fine at night because she has no conscience or soul.

Trump DOJ targets Biden administration for anti-Christian discrimination
The Trump Justice Department released a 200-page report alleging “anti-Christian discrimination” under Biden, citing as proof Biden’s support for LGBTQ+ rights, the lawful prosecution of clinic blockaders, a ridiculous, debunked claim that Biden “replaced Easter” with Transgender Day of Visibility, and a hospital fire-safety order requiring that chapel candles be shielded from patients on oxygen. The DOJ manufacturing victimhood for the most privileged and powerful religious majority in this nation is rich, given that their pants-shitting pedophile mob boss posts AI-generated images of himself as Jesus Christ on social media. Trump makes the biblical image of the Antichrist look like Ms. Rachel. (Zero offense to Ms. Rachel—I love and adore her—but, really, can you think of anyone more pure of heart?) None of the theocratic grifters who had a hand in this sham report give a single shit about Christianity beyond its utility as a cudgel to be wielded against everyone they hate.

How Qatar bought the Trump family—and what America gave them in return
The military has officially cleared the $400 million 747 “gifted” to Trump by Qatar—with its royal interior fully intact—stating that it will serve as Air Force One no later than this summer. In exchange, Trump has pledged U.S. military protection to defend Qatar, along with a new Qatari pilot training facility at one of our military bases in Idaho. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund is also backing a $5.5 billion Trump resort and pouring hundreds of millions into Trump son-in-law and devil incarnate, Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. Corruption? What corruption? This is all part of making America great, right?

Trump warns of the danger of being stuck with a moron for president
Speaking to a crowd of senior citizens at a rally in The Villages, an expansive Florida retirement community, Trump argued that presidential candidates should be required to take cognitive exams so—get this—voters don’t get stuck with a moron. “I mean, you get a guy who gets in there, he's got a good line of crap. He gets in, and all of a sudden, you're stuck with a man who's a moron.” He then cited his ability to identify a bear as evidence of his own superior mental faculties, a skill shared by toddlers and most golden retrievers. Irony isn’t just dead—it’s been attacked, dragged into the woods, viciously mauled, and eaten…by the bear.

This concludes another weekend dispatch from the crumbling American empire.

I’ll check in with you tomorrow. Thanks for reading and for being here. Everything sucks, but it would suck a lot more without you all.

Filed for the record,
–Zappa

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In March 2026, the Washington Post obtained and reported on an internal document acquired from Russia’s SVR—its foreign intelligence service—outlining a plan they referred to as “the Gamechanger,” which involved staging a fake assassination attempt on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was trailing badly in the polls ahead of Hungary’s April parliamentary election. Orbán’s re-election campaign was buckling under the weight of a weakened economy, and public support for Trump’s favorite European dictator was rapidly cratering.

According to the document, a staged attack would “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign,” not by solving any of Orbán’s actual problems, but by burying them under an avalanche of manufactured anxiety, outrage, and nationalist solidarity. The operatives calculated that such an event should “shift the perception of the campaign out of the rational realm of socioeconomic questions into an emotional one, where the key themes will become state security and the stability and defense of the political system.”

Essentially, the concept boils down to this: scare people badly enough and they comply, rally behind the embattled candidate, and never dare to ask inconvenient questions.

Fortunately for the people of Hungary, this plan never made it off the page, but given how precisely the blueprint mirrors what has now played out three separate times on American soil, it would appear the Kremlin wasn’t proposing some untested theory.

They were simply shopping a proven strategy to a new client.

In July 2024, another Kremlin asset held a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, during which an alleged gunman opened fire on Donald Trump, barely missing a headshot. The bullet instead grazed the top of his right ear, or so we were told. The ensuing chaos can only be described as more of a staged production than either Cats or Hamilton. Trump grabs his ear, goes down, Secret Service swarm him, aides usher photographers into place as a crane lowers an American flag, and once all these set pieces were moved into place, Trump stands and raises his tiny fist into the air, “blood” streaking down the side of his face, and he mouths a chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to the stunned and panicked crowd, many of whom were too busy trying to save lives to pay attention to the theatrics onstage.

Three attendees had been shot. Two faced life-threatening injuries, but survived. A third man who was shot in the head, did not, and was pronounced dead at the scene.

As for what happened next, Trump essentially went home, put a bandage the size of a dinner plate on his ear, and then—in the single most out-of-character move of his entire public life—emerged days later, increasingly downplaying the level of detail and the frequency with which he spoke about what happened. Unless you had the good fortune of being new to planet Earth, you knew that for someone who has never in his life passed up an opportunity to play the victim, that something was off about the whole thing.

As time passed, questions piled up, but answers never came.

Here was the ultimate victim card, dealt directly into his tiny, nasty hand: a gunman tried to kill him and nearly succeeded. Any other version of Donald Trump would have ridden the grievance train until it ran off the fucking tracks, past the 2020 stolen election bullshit, past the millions of other perceived slights and media injustices, all the way to his cursed grave. Instead, he just—for once in his miserable life—shut the fuck up about it.

What we suspected about Butler was never a conspiracy theory—it was an actual conspiracy.

He monetized it, naturally. Man Child von Griftsalot never met a tragedy he couldn’t exploit with a merch line. Fundraising began immediately. The unwashed rubes who date their cousins and can’t afford their child support payments fell all over themselves to send him more money. $5 here, $3 there. It all adds up and ends up lining his pockets, not those of the smooth-brained mouth-breathers who wear bald eagle, American flag, mayonnaise-stained t-shirts, otherwise known as the MAGA faithful.

Had someone actually tried to kill him, had he actually bled, he would never have shut the fuck up about it.

You know it, I know it, and he knows it, too.

For all his stupidity—his staggering, flabbergasting stupidity—Trump understood that getting away with it clean was the win. “Clean” meant “clean for him,” not for anyone else. Besides, Trump “honored” the man who was killed, Corey Comperatore, the following week at the RNC in Milwaukee by claiming to have the deceased firefighter’s jacket and helmet displayed onstage (which Trump walked over to and awkwardly kissed) only there was one problem—it wasn’t Comperatore’s jacket, because where an emergency responder’s name appears on the back of the jacket, Comperatore’s surname appeared misspelled as “Compertore.” Speaking of the victims’ families, Trump said they were “serious Trumpsters and still are, but Corey, unfortunately, we have to use the past tense.”

How crass. Classic Trump.

Trump’s televised appearances continued for weeks with that absurd oversized Maxi-Pad on his ear, and his brain-dead supporters—collectively possessing an IQ lower than the average person’s shoe size—dutifully wore bandages on their own ears in solidarity, because nothing says “this was a legit assassination attempt” quite like cult members coordinating matching ear bandage costumes. Meanwhile, Trump was photographed multiple times glad-handing the scumbags who hang out at Mar-a-Lago, conspicuously bandage-free. I guess staying in character 24/7 is hard.

Two years on, we’re no closer to a straight answer on any of this, but just as you don’t need to stick your hand in a fire to know it burns, we know what Butler was—an elaborate staged production in which things got out of hand.

It was, as Trump claims anything true to be, a hoax—another con pulled off by a lifelong con man. His followers bought it—hook, line, and sinker.

It was bullshit.

Fast forward to this past Saturday.

The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was being held at the Washington Hilton, or the “Hinckley Hilton” as it’s nicknamed after John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan outside the same hotel in 1981. The regime’s official narrative holds that a 31-year-old mechanical engineer with a PhD in computer science—Cole Tomas Allen, of Torrance, California—plotted to assassinate not only Trump but as many cabinet members as possible. Why his manifesto specifically named Kash Patel as someone to be spared remains, for the moment, one of the evening’s more interesting unanswered questions.

Details continue to emerge about the security that was, or more accurately, wasn’t, in place that night. Regardless of details, Allen never got within earshot of Trump (see what I did there?) much less close enough to shoot him or anyone else. Secret Service agents reportedly fired at Allen five times and missed every shot. The regime claims Allen shot a Secret Service agent, striking his bulletproof vest, but independent reporting now contradicts that, suggesting the agent was hit by friendly fire from a colleague—which, if true, is the kind of embarrassing operational incompetence that raises its own set of questions.

The staged-event calls came fast, and I made them too. As with Butler, things don’t add up. But unlike Butler, the degree of incongruence isn’t even close — and the most telling difference is how much we were immediately told about Cole Allen. Compare that to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the alleged Butler gunman about whom we still know virtually nothing two years later, and the contrast is stark enough to raise the question of whether or not they learned from Butler’s mistakes—that a total information blackout breeds more suspicion than it prevents and so, they deliberately overcorrected?

Maybe.

Are there people out there who hate Trump enough to die trying to kill him?

Obviously, yes.

However, it strains credulity that someone with a PhD and a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory internship on their résumé would execute a plan this badly, but rage has a way of making fools of brilliant people and a decision to attempt political assassination isn’t a logical one—it’s a desperate external expression of an internal emotional detonation to which even the best and brightest among us aren’t immune.

So, regardless of whether or not this was another bullshit assassination attempt, the ending is the same. The fascist opportunists are going to use this to get what they want. What’s worse than that, and mark my words, they will find a way to use this against us.

Within hours of the incident, right on cue, the congressional lapdogs were stampeding over each other to get in front of cameras and declare the ballroom Trump has spent years fantasizing about an “urgent matter of national security.”

Lindsey Graham—who has never once in his life missed an opportunity to genuflect before his orange messiah—threw a press conference together faster than he can “slip into something a little more comfortable,” if you know what I mean. Flanked by fascist senators Katie Britt (R-AL) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO), the Divine Lady G announced $400 million in proposed federal funding for Trump’s ballroom. The same ballroom, by the way, that last year on the campaign trail, Trump claimed he’d pay for himself. And that is also the same ballroom that two months ago Trump claimed would be paid for by private donations.

Funny how things like this always have a way of happening with Trump.

Every Republican politician, pundit, and podcaster took the same cue and flooded the zone in unison, demanding $400 million of taxpayer money—your money—for Trump’s ballroom, posthaste, zero debate.

To hell with hungry kids in this country. Fuck the sick peons who don’t have health insurance. The millions upon millions of struggling Americans who can barely get by? According to Trump and Republicans, they can all eat shit.

Nothing else matters. Donald Trump needs his ballroom.

Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana said that it was “an embarrassment to the strongest nation on earth that we cannot host gatherings in our nation’s capital...without the threat of violence.”

If these rat-fucking, spineless weasels got even the teeniest, tiniest taste of what it feels like to fear for their lives, they wasted no time making sure it never happens again — demanding $400 million in public funds to erect a gaudy, fortified fortress from which they can safely watch an 80-year-old diapered pedophile eat Big Macs and shit himself, insulated at last from the violence they’ve spent their entire careers refusing to take seriously when it was happening to everyone else.

As always, when the safety of rich white men is threatened, when they are afraid for their lives, no action is too swift, no sum too obscene, no legislative priority too urgent.

Remember this the next time little kids are slaughtered in their classroom and these same subhuman pigs offer nothing more than their useless goddamned thoughts and prayers.

At this point I’m not asking the aliens to save us—I’ve accepted that ship has sailed—I’m just asking them to save me, personally, and maybe a short list of people whose names I’ll submit upon request. If you, too, want off this planet, drop your request in the comments. I’ll put in a good word for you.

I recommend a couple of deep breaths before you dive in because this email contains a whooooole lotta buuuullshit.

Sigh. This used to be a serious newsletter.

… House Democrats, led by Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, filed six articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, accusing him of multiple war crimes, compromising national security, contempt for constitutional authority, and for being an insufferable pompous douchebag.

… Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent an hour publicly eviscerating her conservative colleagues for rubber-stamping Trump’s agenda through a conveyor belt of unexplained emergency orders—calling them “scratch-paper musings” issued with willful blindness to the real human beings they crush—a remarkably respectable breach of institutional decorum that signals the court’s liberal minority has run out of patience for the Christofascist majority’s bullshit and their obvious willingness to function as Trump’s appellate arm.

… Judge Jeanine “Box o’ Wine” Pirro—drunken former Fox News host, now installed as drunken U.S. Attorney for D.C.—has filed court motions to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of a dozen high-ranking Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who led the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which should complete Trump’s methodical erasure of the legal record of his own inbred-led coup attempt. History is being rewritten by people who built their careers on being criminals.

… That thing Trump appointed as Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., once pulled over on a family road trip to amputate a dead raccoon’s penis while his kids waited in the van because he wanted to “study it later.”

… The roadkill enthusiast has launched a government-funded podcast on which he plans to “name the names of the forces that obstruct the paths to public health,” which is rich coming from the anti-science moron who happens to be the single greatest obstruction to public health. A podcast is the perfect vehicle for RFK Jr., given how universally beloved the sound of his voice is.

… Utah has now logged 602 measles cases—85% of them in unvaccinated children in preschools and elementary schools—with a third of patients hospitalized, marking the effective end of an era in which measles was considered eliminated in the United States, thanks to a burgeoning anti-vaccine movement led by the guy with the brainworm who used to snort cocaine off dirty toilet seats. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children should be punched in the babymakers, then throw in prison for willfully failing to protect their children. Subhuman trash. Fuck those people.

… Acting CDC Director and longtime vaccine skeptic Jay Bhattacharya buried a public health report showing COVID vaccines cut emergency room visits and hospitalizations by 55% last year.

… In the first prosecution under Trump’s “Antifa terrorist” designation, the FBI recovered encrypted Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone—even after the app had been deleted—by extracting cached push notification previews stored in a persistent local database stored on the device. If you haven’t already, you should immediately disable notification previews for every messaging app on your phone.

… The once solely American epidemic of school shootings continues to infect other parts of the world—this time Turkey, where a 14-year-old opened fire on two classrooms at a Turkish middle school killing a teacher, ten students, and injuring dozens of others in the country’s second school shooting in as many days—a grim sign that this horror knows no borders and will never go away. The day before, a former student shot 16 people—mostly kids—at a high school in nearby Sanliurfa province, then turned the gun on himself. According to reporting by the AP: “Until this week, school shootings were rare in Turkey. But dozens of students were arrested Thursday over social media posts implying they might stage similar attacks.” It’s getting harder by the day to not crumble under the sinking weight of what a living fucking nightmare this world has become.

… Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts—architect of Project 2025, the engine behind American democracy’s dismantlement—toasted white nationalist Paul Gottfried at a dinner thrown in his honor, pledging Heritage’s resources to expand the reach of Gottfried’s magazine Chronicles which the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a publication catered towards the “more educated white nationalists.”

… PragerU, a right-wing propaganda outfit masquerading as a nonprofit educational institution, produces kids content under the label PragerU Kids, and a recent Media Matters review found that recently produced indoctrination videos by these scumbags “downplayed systemic racism, rejected multiculturalism, understated the European role in slavery, downplayed the consequences of colonialism, demonized communism and socialism, spread climate and science misinformation, and promoted religion in schools”—and this is what Trump’s Christian nationalist regime has chosen to replace legitimate educational programming from PBS which Trump ruthlessly defunded last year.

… All of the above was horrible, but I saved the very best (most ridiculous) for last. Directly quoting Richard Luscombe writing for the Guardian: “It was perhaps inevitable that a braggadocious Christian nationalist defense secretary elevated from his role as a weekend Fox News television host would pluck a fake Bible verse from a violent Hollywood blockbuster and present it at a Pentagon prayer session to rally the troops for the ‘holy war’ in Iran.” I can already hear you saying “Oh no, he fucking didn’t,” to which I can only respond, deadpan as a coroner, “Oh yes, he fucking did. Read the article.”

If the mothership shows up before the next report, it’s been an honor.

Heart’s full. Bags packed. Can’t lose.
—Zappa

Dearly beloved,

By now, most of you likely assumed I had been abducted by aliens, or that the great deal of time I spent away was due to my being trapped beneath something heavy.

I wish I could say either were true. I sure could have used a vacation. No, I’ve been around. You may have occasionally spotted me hanging out over in the Notes aisle. I needed a little time to work some things out.

Here’s what I can tell you for certain: I left, the world got worse, and now I’m back.

You can draw your own conclusions about causality.

But for now, I’m itching to hop back on the bike and see if I still remember how to ride this fucking thing. Chain is rusty. Tires need air. Horn honks though. You can ride on my handlebars. Be cool. Don’t make it weird.

I missed you. Thanks for leaving the light on for me.

Now let’s cause some trouble.

Oh, but do tell me more about how he’s just like Jesus…
Trump posted his most unhinged threats against Iran yet, in what can only be described as the single most dignified Easter morning social media post by a “president” ever.

Wham. Bam. Fuck you, Pam.
What do you get when you mix toxic landfill runoff and excess grease trap waste from a Mar-a-Lago buffet with whatever septic detritus lies at the bottom of Steve Bannon’s laundry hamper? You get a badly-aging, sun-damaged, unemployed golem like now former Attorney General, Pamela Jo Bondi. Big Orange shitcanned Tyrannosaurus bitch despite her covering for him on the whole Trump-is-a-fucking-pedophile thing. All I can say is that I wish her the absolute worst and hope she ends up in a prison cell someday, right between King Incontinence and the Couch Fucker.

Hey, these bombs ain’t gonna pay for themselves, alright?
Trump again proposed major cuts to federal K-12 education programs, including $2.2 billion in teacher professional development, $890 million in ESL services, and $1.4 billion in academic enrichment programs—zeroing out all Congressionally approved funding. Between the ballooning deficit, the mind-blowing cost of his war, the roughly billion dollars of taxpayer money he’s spending to renovate his White House “forever home,” and the billions of dollars he’s already stolen or allowed others to, there’s no money left for things like education, school lunches, childcare, food and nutrition programs, healthcare, infrastructure, housing assistance, emergency disaster response, or clean drinking water, you big silly!

These goddamn Nazis are back on their bullshit.
DHS/ICE is stockpiling a $50 million arsenal of “less lethal” weapons including tear gas foggers that disperse chemical agents over an area the size of an Olympic swimming pool, scattershot projectiles (the kind that blinded 400 Chilean protesters,) and 13,000 high‑intensity acoustic weapons producing 175‑decibel blasts which can instantly cause permanent hearing loss. All because we oppose Nazis kidnapping people and throwing them into concentration camps.

We already knew he makes really bad decisions. I mean, have you seen his tattoos?
Hegseth lifted the ban on troops carrying personal firearms on military bases. Amid record-low morale and widespread anxiety about the US-Israel war crimes in Iran—a policy guaranteed to increase gun violence and suicides among service members sounds exactly like what was needed right now. Whew! Good thing Hegseth is Secretary of War right now—imagine if we had some fucking idiot running the show.

Join the US Army for their Grand Wizard opening of Racists ‘R’ Us
Speaking of this racist/sexist greaseball piece of shit, Hegseth blocked the promotions of two Black and two female colonels to one-star generals despite their status having earned the promotions through their exemplary service records. Dingus Khan’s chief of staff told the Army Secretary responsible for promotions that “Trump wouldn’t want to stand next to a Black female officer at public events.” And I just really can’t wait to see all these fuckers imprisoned for the rest of their meaningless, worthless lives.

If you expect you’ll be lied to then the US government will never disappoint you.
The Pentagon is lying about the numbers of US troop deaths from the “Trump is beholden to Netanyahu because of pedo stuff” war in Iran, lowballing and slow-walking casualty updates while refusing to put forth real numbers on how many American lives have already been sacrificed by these psychopaths since February 28, 2026. Independent analysis based on international reporting is putting the actual number anywhere between 750-2500 U.S. troops killed or wounded.

Let him go ahead and restore it. We can put him there.
Trump requested $152 million to restore Alcatraz as a federal prison, a project devoid of logic or reason, and one that experts say would cost over $2 billion, therefore, making no fiscal sense either. That is unless you’re a narcissistic grifter obsessed with locking brown people up in symbols of American decay.

Hey man, look—we’ve all blacked out in the back of a taxi before.
A top FEMA official, appointed by Trump, who has zero experience in disaster and recovery management despite now being in charge of ((— checks notes —)) disaster and recovery management, continues to claim he has been teleported by God to a Waffle House. That’s it. That’s the story. I can’t make it any weirder than it already is.

He likes people who weren’t captured, okay?
Close to 100,000 US veterans have fallen far behind on mortgage payments or are already in foreclosure after Trump killed the VA Servicing Purchase program, with more than 10,000 having already lost their homes. Tens of thousands more hang in the balance. This has earned him the title of “the most anti-veteran president in history” from Sen. Tammy Duckworth. I’ve got a lot of other titles for him.

Big Bird to Trump: Fuck you. Pay me.
A federal judge blocked Trump’s assault on NPR and PBS funding, ruling that his executive order violated the First Amendment, amounting to unconstitutional discrimination and political retaliation. In other words, Trump and Brendan Carr can FCC off. (Sorry.)

You’re so vain, you probably think this airport’s about you.
An airport near Mar-a-Lago was cleared to be renamed after Trump just hours before he unveiled plans for his Miami skyscraper presidential library which features a golden escalator and a golden statue of himself. He’s even launched a donation page for those who wish to help him fund it. I could come up with so many punchlines but they all make me want to punch myself.

Even wearing a 7’ tall dick costume, she still wasn’t the biggest prick in the squad car.
In a case of “not all heroes wear capes, some wear inflatable penis costumes,” a 62-year-old Alabama grandmother was assaulted by police, arrested, and charged for wearing an inflatable penis costume to a No Kings protest. When the cop asked for her name, she replied, “Aunt Tifa.” Rather than acknowledge they fucked up by violating her First Amendment rights and dropping the initial obscenity charges, prosecutors doubled down, adding additional charges. I guess dickheads are only allowed in public if they wear robes with pointy white hats.

And that, my friends, is where we leave it for now.

Did this count as cardio? Because I feel like this should’ve counted as cardio.

Always glad we did this,
—Zappa

At 2:30 in the morning on Saturday, February 28, 2026, while most of America slept, the Pedophile in Chief took to his dime store social media platform to announce that, at his behest, America had illegally entered into a war with Iran.

It would make sense to ask questions about how and why this happened, or about how this will bring down the price of groceries, gas, electricity, or rent, or perhaps about how this will improve our ability to access affordable healthcare or how it could boost the economy and create more jobs—but to ask any of those questions would presuppose that Donald Trump were a legitimate president and that any of us were living under the delusion that he sought office to make life better for anyone other than himself and that is most certainly not the case. Our reality is far more grim and, if we’re being honest, bleak.

And so, here we are, some 48 hours into a brand new unnecessary war started by a convicted criminal who fraudulently occupies the Oval Office—a malignant narcissistic sociopath on a mission to destroy us, our country, and it would seem the same goes for any other country he can invade for no real reason at all.

By the time our Great National Embarrassment posted the eight-minute, bush-league-quality video declaring that American forces had launched “major combat operations” in Iran, bombs had already fallen on Tehran.

Appearing on camera under the shoddiest lighting imaginable, the tinpot dictator lumbered behind his podium, more visibly sweaty than normal, likely due in part to the ever-present south Florida humidity, as he couldn’t be bothered to drag his obese meatsack all the way to Washington to make the sobering announcement. No, instead, the lazy lardass spoke to the world from his fake-gold encrusted, bedbug-infested roach motel for grifters and whores in Florida—otherwise known as the STD-ridden limp dick of America.

Foregoing his standard-issue, comically-long red tie, he went with the unbuttoned-collar look, as if to signify working long and hard for a people who, in reality, he wouldn’t piss on were they on fire. In a display of authoritarian strength, Moron Von Shitzhispantz wore one of those embarrassingly cheap white truck-stop hats with USA emblazoned on the front—less the dignified look of a strong and competent leader of the free world, more the look of a washed-up slob whose only real achievement in life was reality TV show host, though truth be told, he never even could have achieved that were it not for his toxic family’s money.

It’s quite remarkable to witness a quintuple draft-dodger cosplaying as a commander in chief, condescendingly telling Americans that “we may have casualties…that often happens in war” with all the philosophical equanimity of a man who has never been within a thousand miles of war.

I have a strong hunch we’re about to learn that bone spurs are a hereditary trait.

But, for a moment, let’s set aside the farcical spectacle of it all and consider the fact that what Agent Orange has done is, by any honest reading of the United States Constitution, yet another in his long list of crimes—a list that grows longer by the day. The power to declare war resides in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution, and it belongs exclusively to Congress. You remember Congress—that feckless bunch of crooked, spineless rat bastards who work for the corporations and foreign lobbying interests that bought and paid for their loyalty with blood money? They’ve been neutered and sidelined for so long that it’s easy to forget they once existed as a co-equal branch of government intended to serve an important role in what was supposed to be a democratic system of checks and balances.

Before Trump announced that the United States was at war with Iran, Congress had neither been briefed or consulted, nor had they made any formal declaration of war. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island—the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose role is explicitly to oversee and understand the nation’s military posture—learned we were at war at the same time and in the same manner you and I did.

And let’s not forget—since every member of the press corps seems determined to—that this is the same president who, eight months ago, stood before the American public and declared that we had (again, illegally) bombed Iran and that their nuclear program had been, according to him, “completely and totally obliterated” by Operation Midnight Hammer, which sounds more fitting as the title of a low-budget porn flick than a necessary and strategic military mission. But this raises the obvious question of why a country’s nuclear program which Trump claimed was “completely and totally obliterated” suddenly required an urgent rush to war to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Don the Con may still have some sheep that buy whatever bullshit he’s selling, but he can’t have it both ways—either he was lying then, or he’s lying now.

The answer is C: all of the above.

If he’s breathing, he’s lying. Besides generally being a disgusting piece of shit, it’s what he does best. It’s in his blood. It’s who he is. It’s who he’s always been—a dirty, rotten, compulsive liar. Unethical and untrustworthy. Nasty. Cruel. Irredeemable. A man so constitutionally incapable of honesty that the truth physically repels him like a crucifix to a vampire—except vampires have the decency to recoil. Trump doesn’t. He doubles, triples down, burying one lie under an avalanche of more lies, bigger lies, and then has the audacity to dare you call him on it.

Donald Trump is a morally bankrupt lowlife.

Hail to the thief.

So let’s examine his stated case for an illegal war against Iran.

Trump said Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the American people. He ran through forty-seven years of grievances—the 1979 hostage crisis, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, the Khobar Towers bombing, the proxy attacks on American bases across the Middle East—a recitation that may or may not be wholly accurate as history but which, nevertheless, is dishonest as strategic justification, since none of these things happened recently—his job was not to relitigate the Carter administration’s foreign policy decisions—and the question before Trump should have been whether starting a war with Iran was unavoidable due to an imminent threat to the American people. Amid ongoing peace talks, Iran was already willing to make concessions that served our national security interests and those of other nations. The maintenance of peace, of world order, was well within his reach, but being the imbecilic chump he’s always been (it takes a special kind of idiot to bankrupt a casino) he fucking blew it.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, in a 2025 report, confirmed that Iran possesses no intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States. It added that Iran could potentially develop them by 2035. Could. Potentially. By 2035. We bombed a country over a potential threat that may or may not ever materialize.

Iran’s nuclear program was described by the CIA, after the June 2025 strikes, as “severely degraded.” Not “obliterated.” Degraded. Set back approximately two years. And Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour “that we did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”

Who could’ve guessed that Weapons of Mass Destruction, America’s favorite recurring villain, would be wheeled out of storage, dusted off, and thrust back into the spotlight for a 2026 appearance.

The part of this story that has received the least attention is what happened just before the bombs fell. The Omani foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi—who had been mediating talks between Washington and Tehran—flew to Washington personally to speak with Trump and Vance to assure them that progress was being made, that Iran had agreed to cease stockpiling enriched uranium entirely, and that any nuclear threat, America’s primary concern, was a non-issue as any stockpiles of uranium were being blended down to be converted into fuel, which he called a “big achievement.”

The next day, a barely noticeable headline noted that Trump said he wasn’t happy with how negotiations were going—and within hours, the United States and our BFF in all things war-crime-related, Israel, began dropping bombs on Tehran, one of which hit an elementary school for girls, killing at least 153 people, most of them children between the ages of 7–12 years old.

The question of what America gets out of this is not rhetorical, and I’ll tell you upfront it doesn’t have a good answer. Yes, we’re always down to invade another country and steal their oil, but beyond that grim tradition, the strategic case for American involvement here is nonexistent. The case for Israel’s involvement, on the other hand, is elementary.

Netanyahu has spent more than thirty years arguing—to anyone who would listen, in front of any audience that would have him—that Iran represents an existential threat to Israel and must be destroyed. Thirty years of lobbying American presidents. Thirty years of intelligence briefings, private meetings, public speeches, and theatrical displays at the United Nations complete with cartoon bomb diagrams. The problem Netanyahu faced, year after year, was that no American president would back a direct attack on Iran—because nobody wants to be responsible for kicking off World War III. Every president before Trump—including Trump, in his first term—told him no.

That is, until now.

Without American backing, Israel cannot realistically take on Iran alone—a country 75 times its size—while simultaneously managing the constellation of hostile actors pressing on it from every direction: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq. Israel’s dependence on American money, weapons, and carrier strike groups isn’t merely strategic or tactical—it’s existential.

In June 2025, still running hot from successfully flattening Gaza without meaningful intervention from the international community, Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran. Trump initially warned Netanyahu against it—publicly, anyway. Within hours of the first Israeli bombs falling, Trump was glued to the resulting wall-to-wall coverage, and the White House apparatus was monitoring prominent MAGA influencers for their reactions. The New York Times’ account of his decision-making process is not flattering. He was moved, substantially, by the hot takes of Fox News guests—because, and I feel like this goes without saying, Trump is a simpleton with zero understanding of geopolitics, world history, or the long-term consequences of military escalation—a man whose foreign policy instincts are formed entirely by ego, television ratings, and the approval of cable news personalities who are themselves auditioning for his attention.

By June 22nd, American bunker-busters were falling on Iranian nuclear facilities and Trump, in his trademark bombastic manner, declared Iran’s nuclear program “completely and totally obliterated.” Only it wasn’t. The CIA assessed the damage and determined Iran’s nuclear program had been set back months, not years, and that much of the enriched uranium had been moved before the strikes hit.

Eight months later, here we are again.

This time Trump has named an explicit objective—he wants regime change, telling the Iranian people, “When we are finished, take over your government.” Despite his regime offering no theory of how an air campaign could produce such a people’s revolution—there are, however, as has been noted by people who study these things, almost no successful examples in modern history of regime change achieved exclusively from the air. Still, for now, it seems that’s the plan and the talking point delivered to Trump’s alcoholic SecDef Pete “Kegstand” Hegseth who will go down in history as a wholly unqualified DUI hire—the only human on earth to receive such a level of job promotion to go from weekend Fox News anchor to leading the largest and most powerful military on planet earth.

What Israel gets out of all this is clear.

The end of Hezbollah’s primary funder. The destruction of Hamas’s primary backer. The Houthis cut off. Iran’s military weakened, if not decimated, and the guaranteed end to any nuclear program, real or imagined, they may once have had. Netanyahu goes down in history as the man who finally finished what he started—the remaking of the Middle East in Israel’s image, with American pilots and American munitions and American carrier strike groups doing the work he could not have done alone. General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned Trump privately that we cannot afford to spend down our stockpiles like this. Trump being Trump, however, that advice went in one ear and out the other with less than zero resistance on its short and uneventful journey.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain what we get. And when I sit with that question long enough, I keep arriving somewhere most major media outlets refuse to go.

What I’m about to lay out is documented, sourced, reported journalism—not conspiracy theory or speculation. The conclusions it implies have not been proven, and I won’t assert that they have. But the pattern of Trump’s behavior toward Israel—across two terms, on issue after issue, at the consistent expense of American strategic interests—is not the behavior of a normal relationship between allies. It’s the behavior of a man operating under constraints he cannot publicly acknowledge.

Given all I’ve learned over the last year, I find a conspiratorial explanation increasingly plausible: that Donald Trump has always had more than one puppetmaster. Vladimir Putin has held kompromat on Trump for decades and pulls his strings accordingly, but in recent years, thanks to Trump’s pedophile best friend Jeffrey Epstein and his numerous, well-documented connections to Israeli intelligence—specifically to the Mossad—Netanyahu likely has more dirt on Trump than Pam Bondi could ever hope to redact in a lifetime. This is my opinion. I could be wrong. I don’t believe I am—not when I trust my own eyes and ears as reliable witnesses.

Since 2024, a hacking group with documented ties to the Iranian government has released hundreds of thousands of emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak—one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates. The highly respected, non-profit investigative outlet Drop Site News has spent months publishing major investigations built on these files, and what they found is this: Epstein worked to expand Israel’s cyber warfare industry into foreign countries. He brokered surveillance deals on Israel’s behalf. He communicated with Ehud Barak in terms that made clear he understood himself to be operating inside an intelligence framework—carefully routing certain deals away from “number 1,” a long-established internal nickname for the head of the Mossad.

An high-ranking Israeli intelligence officer named Yoni Koren used Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse as a regular address. And Epstein worked, according to Drop Site’s reporting, to steer American policy toward strikes on Iran—demonstrating “his knack for steering the superpowers toward Israel’s interests by leveraging a social network that intersected the Israeli, American, and Russian intelligence communities.”

That is published. That is documented. That happened.

Donald Trump and Epstein moved in each other’s orbit for years—photographed together at events, constantly present in the social world of the other, sharing flights and the darkest, sickest, most criminal of secrets, vouched for by mutual friends. There is a civil lawsuit, filed and then dropped under circumstances that were never explained, alleging that Trump and Epstein together sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old girl on at least one occasion.

Major media outlets won’t ask the question, but I will: Just what, exactly, does Israel have on Donald John Trump, the so-called “President” of the United States?

I don’t know. Few people do. But the question is not a conspiracy theory—it is the logical inference from a documented pattern: a morally-void crook who spent his first term warning Netanyahu not to strike Iran, who ran against interventionism, who branded himself the great dealmaker and the anti-war candidate—this man has now taken the United States into its second full-scale military confrontation with Iran in eight months—one in which at least four American service members have already been killed. And he launched it without congressional authorization, justifying it with dubious claims the DIA, the CIA, and the IAEA have all contradicted. He rejected any diplomatic solution that was already on the table. He overruled his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And he did all of it in service of a foreign government’s agenda, against every campaign promise he made to the MAGA faithful who voted for him.

Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, who have done more original reporting on the Epstein-Israel intelligence connection than any journalists working in America today, have noted plainly that the major outlets simply “don’t want to talk about it.” The same corporate press that spent years not reporting what was actually happening in that Manhattan townhouse is today covering “Operation Epic Fury” as a straightforward national security decision with a straightforward national security rationale.

It isn’t.

The bombs falling on Iran are not falling for you or me to keep us safe. They are not falling for any American interest, or any threat that any recognized expert or authority has substantiated. The bombs are falling on Iran because Benjamin Netanyahu has a thirty year plus hard-on for this outcome, and he appears to have found, in Donald Trump, a useful idiot finally willing—or unable to refuse—to give him exactly what he wants.

That distinction—willing versus unable to refuse—is the one to pay attention to.

On the morning of September 15, 1963, at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, approximately 200 men, women, and children gathered at 10:00 a.m. for Sunday school—as they did every week—prior to the 11:00 a.m. church service.

At 10:22 a.m., a bomb planted under the front steps of the church detonated.

The concussive explosion tore through walls, sent debris flying both inside and outside the building, and filled the entire block with smoke. To state the obvious, the violence of this terrorist act reverberated far beyond the church’s decimated walls, shattered windows, and shaken foundation.

It was far from being the first racially-targeted terrorist bombing in Birmingham. In the aftermath, The New York Times reported (on page 26) that it was the 21st such atrocity to date. What set it apart was that it was the deadliest. In fact, the bombing was one of more than 50 terror attacks against the Black community to rock the city between 1947 and 1965, earning Birmingham the grim nickname “Bombingham.”

As a result of the explosion, dozens of parishioners suffered serious injuries. But in the basement women’s lounge, five young girls had gathered that morning to prepare for singing in the choir—Denise McNair, age eleven; Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all age fourteen; and Addie Mae’s ten-year-old sister, Sarah. The blast instantly killed the four oldest girls. Ten-year-old Sarah, though gravely wounded, was the only one who survived.

News of the bombing traveled nationwide with alarming speed.

That evening, renowned jazz vocalist and classically trained pianist Nina Simone sat in the living room of her home on Nuber Avenue in Mount Vernon, New York, watching the news report of the bombing in a state of stunned horror. Tears poured from her eyes. From the depths of her soul, a rage began to boil—one she would later describe as being so intense that she started looking for materials to build a gun, unable to think of anything else besides seeking revenge on the monsters responsible for the massacre. After a long stretch of consolation from her husband, Andy Stroud, Simone was persuaded to channel her fury into music rather than retaliation.

The church bombing was the catalyst for what would become a brilliant expression of previously repressed righteous anger that had been accruing for years—probably a lifetime—and was compounded by earlier brutalities that took place in neighboring Mississippi: the recent assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers earlier that summer and the barbaric murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till a few years earlier.

Within a single hour at the piano, Simone performed a kind of moral and emotional alchemy in doing what great artists sometimes do when life’s circumstances leave them no other outlet: she transmuted the apoplectic rage that threatened to consume her into a transcendent work of art. In what she would later describe as a “rush of fury, hatred, and determination,” she wrote—in one sitting—both the music and the words to what was her first unambiguous civil-rights song, “Mississippi Goddam.”

“Alabama’s gotten me so upset,
Tennessee made me lose my rest,
And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!”

[…]

“Lord, have mercy on this land of mine,
We all gonna get it in due time,
‘Cause I don’t belong here,
I don’t belong there,
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer…”

[…]

But my country is full of lies,
We all gonna die, and die like flies,
‘Cause I don’t trust nobody anymore,
Keep on saying, “Go slow”

But that’s just the trouble (too slow),
Desegregation (too slow),
Mass participation (too slow),
Unification (too slow),
Do things gradually (too slow),
But bring more tragedy (too slow),
Why don’t you see it?
Why don’t you feel it?
I just don’t know…

Sixty-two years later, in the same country that bombed those little girls in Birmingham, I find myself in a similar place to the one Nina described—watching reports of government-sanctioned murder, paralyzed by a rage so consuming it threatens to devour me whole.

This past Saturday, January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Trump regime’s Nazi death squad—spuriously known as ICE—executed 37-year-old American citizen Alex Pretti on the street, in broad daylight, in cold blood, for no goddamned reason.

Alex was there as a peaceful observer, documenting what was happening with his phone, and when he was jumped and beaten senseless by multiple assailants, he was trying to help a woman one of the fucking pigs had pepper-sprayed and shoved to the ground like the domestic abusers these bastards are. At least seven of them piled on top of Alex, pistol-whipping his face until one drew a gun and fired, prompting two others to do the same. Alex was defenseless on the ground—immobile, incapacitated. One Nazi emptied his clip into Alex’s lifeless body.

Alex is now the second person murdered by regime-authorized subhuman scum in Minneapolis in two weeks’ time. The other, of course, was 37-year-old Renee Good—a wife and mother of three—shot in the head and killed by Nazi vermin Jonathan Ross.

Prior to Alex and Renee’s murders in Minnesota, on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, another stormtrooper executed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old devoted father of two daughters, aged 10 and 20. Keith was known by family and friends as a “performer” who loved lifting people’s spirits by making them laugh.

Over the past year—before these three most recent executions—multiple people have died at the hands of this degenerate gang of domestic terrorists, including many whose names have never been made public. Among those identified: Parady La, 46, a father; Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, 34, a father of two; Victor Manuel Diaz, 36; Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, 68, a father; Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, 42; and Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55. Each name, a life extinguished. Each death, a family shattered. Each murder, state-sanctioned terrorism committed with impunity.

These roving criminal gangs of impotent, inbred losers are murderous, opportunistic predators drunk on power, operating with complete disregard for human life and anything resembling the rule of law. Many are MAGA insurrectionists—members of the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Atomwaffen Division, Blood Tribe—bona fide, goat-raping, cousin-fucking Nazi terrorists granted explicit permission from the Trump regime to maim, injure, and murder us. Any of us. Any time. For any or no reason whatsoever. In exchange for total immunity and the assurance of a tyrannical state that will laud and lionize them for carrying out their mission.

No laws or restrictions exist to restrain these rabid dogs. They are free to wage their campaign of terror against the American people however they see fit—beating people including high school students, chasing and tackling 10-year-olds in the street as they try to make their way to school, tear gassing day cares and elementary schools, using children as young as five years old as bait, driving recklessly and fleeing the accidents they cause just as surely as they flee the scenes of their murders.

They do not care what they do, who they hurt, whose property they destroy.

They steal and wreck people’s vehicles. They illegally abduct people coming out of grocery stores and steal the food they just bought. They steal iPhones and Androids from teenagers, drop them in ecoATM machines, and pocket the cash. They eat lunch in Mexican restaurants, then arrest everyone working there. They photograph innocent citizens observing them, then taunt them with promises of being added to a government watchlist. They verbally threaten people, asking, “Did you not learn your lesson from what happened to that woman?”

They stalk, harass, and intimidate. They bully, rape, and kill.

These monsters are scum—hateful, racist, cruel, violent, and—thanks to this evil, white nationalist, Christo-fascist regime—empowered. They are, unquestionably, the worst of the worst of us.

Alex, Renee, and Keith were the exact opposite. They were the best of the best of us—loving parents, hard workers, intelligent and empathetic human beings. Alex was an ICU nurse who cared for critically ill soldiers at the local V.A. hospital. A colleague remembered him as someone whose “default expression was a smile.” Another nurse who worked alongside him recalled, “He wanted to be helpful, to help humanity and have a career that was a force of good in the world.” Alex’s next-door neighbor described him as “the sweetest, kindest, most unoffensive, most nonviolent person you’d ever want to meet.”

And what makes all of this even more unbearable—more enraging, more sickening—is the lies. The slander. The posthumous denigration of their character by this regime and its ghouls. How fucking dare they? How fucking dare these bitches and bastards have the unmitigated gall to insult innocent people they themselves have killed—and falsely characterize them as “domestic terrorists” to justify their own atrocities? It literally can’t get any lower than that. There is no deeper moral rot.

For Alex, Renee, Keith—and all whose names we may never know, whose lives were needlessly, senselessly taken—their legacies will live forever. And when the reckoning comes—and it will come—they will be honored and remembered as what they were: the very best of us.

Nina Simone channeled her fury into a song within an hour. I have struggled with this piece for days, and still I cannot adequately express the depth of my loathing, my disgust, my white-hot rage for ICE pigs and the regime that set them loose—nor can I fully articulate the devastation I feel for every person they have harmed or killed.

I can say that I want all of these fuckers to suffer. I want them to know what it feels like to be hunted, to be afraid, to have everything ripped away. I want their names synonymous with shame for generations. I want their children to change their surnames, disowning the genetic cesspool they’ve come from. I want to watch all of them hang, to pay for their crimes against humanity, and for the entire nation to celebrate their deaths by spitting on their graves.

Each one of these Nazi cucks has a name and an address and a family who will one day learn what kind of monster daddy (or mommy) was and what horrific things they did for a living. And when this evil regime falls, there won’t be a hole deep enough for these fucking rats to hide in—because in the same way they track us by taking our photos and adding us to their watchlists, we’re tracking them: documenting names, faces, identifying marks like their Nazi tattoos, vehicles and license plates, VIN numbers, as well as photo and video evidence of their myriad crimes.

They should be afraid. Not of me—but of all of us, and of the consequences of their own goddamned actions. Nobody made them become Nazis. They weren’t forced against their will to join Trump’s death squad. Their bigotry and hate drove them to this. They did it all to themselves. They made their beds, and now they can lie in them while they’re on fire. Fuck ‘em.

Nina’s song outlived every man who planted that bomb. It outlived every racist terrorist, every murderer, every segregationist who thought that through violence and terror they would win. They are nothing but dust. Forgotten. But the song endures.

Likewise, this report—and everything you and others document and save—will outlive Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, Todd Lyons, and every other piece of Nazi trash who are currently terrorizing innocent Americans.

What we document can serve as evidence at their trials or as testimony at their graves.

Either works for me.

I stand with my fellow Americans, the true patriots of this country, like Alex and Renee and Keith; like Parady and Heber and Victor and Luis and Geraldo.

I stand with the millions of others in this country who believe that the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

Fuck ICE.

Abolish ICE.

Minnesota goddam.

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1.

After hearing hundreds of stories about gross medical neglect in ICE detention facilities over this past year, including the denial of critical medications, chemotherapy, dialysis, prenatal care, and more, it’s horrific yet unsurprising to learn that ICE has stopped paying for detainee medical treatment. We’re only now learning that this has been the case since October 2025.

Considering the countless reports of deplorable conditions inside these facilities, to say nothing of those who ICE is raping or murdering, detaining and deporting the “worst of the worst criminals” like menacing 5-year-old Liam Ramos in his Spider Man backpack and bunny hat, or the wrongly imprisoned innocents who have disappeared entirely, suspected to have been trafficked by Elon Musk to serve as lab rats for his Neuralink brain implant experiments—none of this outrageous news should leave anyone thunderstruck because we should already be aware that concentration camps aren’t concerned with the health or dignity of their internees.

2.

A leaked ICE memo just revealed the Gestapo have the green light to kick down your fucking door armed with nothing more than a piece of paper they wrote themselves—”administrative warrants” self-issued by ICE or DHS rather than approved by any actual judge, because who needs the Fourth Amendment when you’ve got fascism to implement?

The memo, dated May 2025 and exposed through a whistleblower complaint, is already being weaponized to train freshly minted jackboots deployed to Minneapolis and other cities as part of the regime’s ethnic cleansing campaign. The Associated Press witnessed this constitutional vandalism firsthand—agents ramming through a man’s door with rifles drawn while clutching their bullshit DIY warrant like it was a permission slip from god himself.

Worth mentioning is the fact that people are finally starting to wake up and realize that this is exactly why the 2nd Amendment exists.

3.

ICE is wasting $100 million of taxpayer money on a “wartime recruitment” blitz to hire 14,000 new deportation officers—geofencing ads targeting UFC fans, gun show attendees, and conservative podcast listeners while dropping $8 million on influencer deals and dangling $50,000 signing bonuses like participation trophies for fascists. The agency has received 220,000 applications and issued 18,000 tentative job offers in just five months, more than doubling its workforce while removing age limits for applicants because apparently even geriatric rage-cases are welcome to join the ethnic cleansing squad. A former Obama-era ICE director warned that the campaign’s combat framing risks attracting “untrained recruits eager for all-out combat,” which is the entire fucking point.

This ideological pre-selection by the surveillance state, algorithmically targeting people who consume right-wing media and attend gun shows, demonstrates how ICE is deliberately building a workforce primed to view immigrants as enemy combatants rather than human beings, essentially outsourcing political vetting to ad-tech algorithms.

The “wartime” framing does double duty: it justifies extralegal brutality while attracting exactly the kind of untrained, combat-hungry, video gaming incel psychopaths who fantasize about hurting brown people for a paycheck and a chance to be somebody, though they’ll never be anything more than fragile losers with inferiority complexes and bruised egos over their physical inadeqacies and their inability to make a woman come.

The regime is building a paramilitary death squad, one inbred, microdick, mouthbreathing dumbfuck at a time.

4.

+ Always one to find a way to make a bad situation even worse, the eyeliner king himself, JD Vance, showed up in the one place he is definitely not wanted right now—Minneapolis.

Amid widespread anger over Nazis in their streets and mass protests sparked by one of those Nazi bastards murdering Renee Good, the condescending, dirty fucking liar who calls himself VP, lectured local leaders, doubling down on defending the regime’s expansive, violent crackdown while vilifying local resistance.

Vance—a man so fundamentally repellent that no one can stand him—argued that Minneapolis is “chaos” only because officials refuse to collaborate with the regime’s thugs, dismissing demonstrators as “cowardly” agitators instead of acknowledging documented abuses and the right of communities to oppose a militarized occupation by lawless, violent racists. His posture—flanked by ICE vehicles and officers, blaming the left and local leaders for the unrest rather than the feds’ domestic terror attacks—reveals an arrogant, punitive worldview that elevates the power of the regime’s enforcement state over the lived trauma of residents and protesters alike, completely oblivious to their justified outrage.

Vance is a contemptible coward who wouldn’t recognize human decency if it slapped that smug fucking smirk off his fat chipmunk bastard face. The man is a walking, talking, moral vacuum with less charm or charisma than two-day-old roadkill—a pathetic loser who sold what little soul he once had for power. I personally despise the subhuman son of a bitch.

If only his mother had traded him for a handful of Percocet.

5.

+ Just as Punxsutawney Phil’s shadow guarantees six more weeks of winter, Ted Cruz spotted at an airport before a Texas ice storm guarantees the power grid is about to fail. Last time, Theodore the Terrible fled to Cancun. This time, the coward is California-bound—Laguna Beach, specifically. So if you detect a foul odor wafting through Orange County’s idyllic art community in the coming days, now you know why. According to a spokesperson, “Senator Cruz is currently on pre-planned work travel that was scheduled weeks in advance. He will be back in Texas before the storm is projected to hit.” If true, Ted should be spotted in an airport today catching his return flight—assuming he can find one that isn’t delayed by the very infrastructure failures his party of pedophile protectors refuses to fix. Besides, we all know that “pre-planned work travel” is Republican-speak for “already packed and halfway to the beach.” The only thing Ted Cruz schedules weeks in advance is his escape route for when the shit hits the fan.

6.

+ House Republicans, joined by seven spineless Democrats, rammed through a DHS funding bill (220–207) to meet the Jan. 30 shutdown deadline.

Democrats pretended to force accountability for the regime, escalating what’s known in mainstream media as “immigration enforcement operations,” but which is recognized among the people of this country as an aggressive terror campaign waged against both immigrant and citizen alike. It’s a story as old as Mitch McConnell: “must-pass” budget brinkmanship is weaponized to launder additional deceptive legislation. The Republicans get exactly what they want. The Democrats, as usual, act like they’ve done something when, in fact, they didn’t do shit. This funding bill ensures that ICE stays fat and happy, adding another $10 billion to the almost $75 billion allocated under the stupid and evil “One Big Beautiful Bill,” while Democrats define “accountability” as giving ICE $20 million for body cameras.

Democrats could fuck up a wet dream.

Reforms aimed at documenting atrocities while doing fuck-all to prevent them leave the underlying fascist machinery of illegal raids, violent detentions, and illegal removals not only fully intact but emboldened to continue violating everyone’s Constitutional rights. Democrats split between pragmatic capitulation (avoid a shutdown that could give Trump even more executive discretion) and an abolitionist current demanding real constraints or dismantling ICE entirely—but leadership ultimately folded like a cheap suit, accepting a compromise that normalizes an aggressive fascist enforcement agenda by treating ethnic cleansing as just another line item in the budget.

Nothing says “resistance” quite like writing a $10 billion check to the regime’s secret police while convincing yourself that you achieved something for the people who put you in office. (Spoiler alert: you achieved nothing.)

7.

+ Factoid: Amid the dangerous rhetoric about Trump mistaking Greenland for yet another thing the orange rapist feels entitled to grab, it’s worth noting that the last time Denmark sold territory to the US was in 1917, when it transferred the Danish West Indies—including Saint Thomas, Saint John, Saint Croix, and roughly 50 smaller islands and cays—for $25 million in gold. One of those uninhabited cays was Little Saint James, which Jeffrey Epstein privately purchased in 1998 and later became known as “Epstein Island.”

I believe Sascha Riley.

BREAKING NEWS

Roughly an hour ago, multiple sources began reporting that numerous explosions rocked the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and surrounding states early Saturday morning, leaving scared residents running into the streets and parts of the city without power. A US official speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity confirmed what we all feared was coming—the United States has launched military strikes inside Venezuela.

That’s right—the Trump regime is openly bombing inside Venezuela.

Venezuela’s government condemned what it called a “very serious grave military aggression,” accusing Washington of attacking both civilian and military targets in Caracas and the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira. President Nicolás Maduro declared a national state of emergency and ordered the implementation of all national defense plans.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called for the UN and OAS to “meet immediately,” writing on X: “They are bombing with missiles.”

This is the escalation we’ve been watching build for months. Since late August, the Pentagon has amassed some 15,000 troops, aircraft, and warships in the Caribbean—one of the largest naval deployments to the region in decades. The US military, commanded by a cognitively deficient white trash drunk, has already attacked dozens of small vessels it claims were smuggling drugs, killing at least 115 people in what a broad range of legal experts have called illegal extrajudicial killings.

Last month, the CIA conducted a drone strike on a Venezuelan port facility—a clear signal that the regime was escalating its attacks. Trump said land strikes would come “soon.” That statement reflected more than posturing alone–it clearly signaled intent.

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The pretext remains the “narco-terrorist” label Trump slapped on Maduro and his government. Never mind that US intelligence agencies have assessed that Maduro is actually at odds with the Tren de Aragua gang, or that analysts say the so-called “Cartel de los Soles” doesn’t exist as a concrete organization. (This is just like the US government declaring Antifa a terrorist organization when Antifa as an organization does not exist.) But facts have never mattered to the orange psychopath or his fascist toadies—what matters to them is doing whatever the fuck they want to do, consequences be damned.

Venezuela accused Washington of staging the assault to seize the country’s oil and mineral resources. As someone with a pulse and functioning brain, I’d say this tracks, but there’s even more to the story.

Venezuela sits on more oil than any country on earth—more than Saudi Arabia, more than anyone. And for decades, the US dollar has been king because of one simple fact: if you want to buy oil, you need dollars.

This is the petrodollar system. Basically, countries need energy. Energy gets sold in dollars. So countries need dollars. This creates permanent demand for US currency, which means America gets to play by different rules than everyone else. We can borrow more, spend more, and rack up more debt than any other nation because the whole world needs our money to keep the lights on. Economists call this “exorbitant privilege.”

Hugo Chávez understood this. So did Nicolás Maduro. Both tried to sell Venezuelan oil in currencies other than the dollar, and both cozied up to China and Russia, who would love nothing more than to knock the dollar off its throne.

And that’s the real story behind the regime’s obsession with Venezuela. It’s not about the laughable narrative of narco-terrorists flooding America with drugs. It’s about protecting the dollar’s dominance. Because the moment countries stop needing dollars to buy oil, America loses the privilege that’s bankrolled our empire for half a century.

The petrodollar wants what the petrodollar wants, and Venezuela has what the petrodollar wants.

And beyond protecting dollar dominance, there's the simple fact that Trump wants to steal Venezuela's oil and mineral wealth outright—because that's his modus operandi.

Until now, there is no record of an overt US military combat operation conducted directly on Venezuelan soil. That history ended today.

We’re witnessing the United States wage open war in the Western Hemisphere.

Let the record show that on January 3rd, 2026, our government launched an unprovoked military assault on Venezuela. Not a proxy war or a covert operation buried in classified briefings, but missiles fired in airstrikes, bombs dropped on people because the madman who sits in the Oval Office decided that stealing from Americans wasn't enough—he now wants what belongs to another country, and he's willing to violate international law as casually as he violates domestic law to take it.

This is who we are now.

It’s what America has become thanks to Trump and MAGA. There’s no walking this back. No spin that sanitizes it. No pretending we didn’t cross a line that cannot be uncrossed.

The American empire has dropped its mask, and whatever comes next—the blood, the chaos, the international condemnation—belongs to every single person who enabled this regime’s rise to power.

BREAKING UPDATE (4:13 AM ET)

Before this could even go out, Trump announced that US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, forcibly extracting them from the country in what he called a “joint military and law enforcement operation.” ​

Don’t misunderstand me—Maduro is a tyrannical piece of shit who has brutalized his own people, and has an extensive record of unfathomable corruption and systematic human rights abuses. His crimes against humanity are real, but so is this: the United States just launched large‑scale strikes on Venezuela, almost certainly killing or injuring civilians, and then abducted its sitting head of state and flew him out of the country. That is the textbook definition of a crime of aggression under international law, and it likely involves multiple war crimes in the sloppy and reckless way it was carried out. After all, that’s the Hegseth way—sloppy and reckless.

If setting this precedent doesn’t sicken you, you fail to grasp the grave consequences of accepting “might makes right” as a governing principle. Once you swallow that logic, you surrender any legal or moral footing to object when it is applied to anyone else—and someday that might include you. ​

The international legal order exists precisely to prevent powerful states from toppling governments and kidnapping leaders whenever it is politically convenient. The United States doesn’t get to drag foreign heads of state away in chains simply because it wants to—that is the logic of empire, and it directly undermines the principles of sovereignty and international law the United States of America once claimed to uphold, even as those norms have been selectively applied, bent, or entirely ignored across the Western Hemisphere for decades. ​​

This is empire doing what empire does best—overreaching, destabilizing itself further, and spiraling toward an inevitable collapse.

What could be more American than that?

This is a developing story.

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I submit for the record today’s dispatch from the crumbling American empire.

I’m wishing you all a happy new year, despite the fact that I know we’re in for anything but happiness, or growth, or prosperity. Normally, I’d never kick off a new year being such a downer, but [motions at literally everything around us.]

At the stroke of midnight, as the ball dropped and champagne corks popped across the country, the Trump regime delivered a devastating blow to the American people—millions lost access to anything resembling affordable healthcare. This, not to mention another year of fascism stretching out before us like a prison sentence we’re serving for a crime we didn’t commit.

Out with the old, in with the same old same old.

I see no reason for celebration. Fuck a ball drop—I’m saving up to celebrate when the One Big Beautiful Obituary drops. Let’s hold out hope and remember that anything is possible. May the odds be ever in our favor.

This is your report for January 1, 2026.

The Lede

On New Year’s Eve, as Trump was auctioning off a painting of white Jesus to a room full of billionaire assholes at Mar-a-Lago, the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced subsidies expired—and with them, any remaining pretense among the ignorant that this regime gives a single solitary fuck about whether they live or die. We with more than three brain cells have known this from day one, but some people are slower than us and will have to feel the sting of illness or a loved ones death before they’re going to wake the fuck up.

For the roughly 22 million Americans who will suffer because of this, their premiums are skyrocketing by an average minimum of 114 percent—over a thousand dollars more per year—because Republicans in Congress wouldn’t extend the tax credits that made coverage affordable for these Americans.

A breast cancer survivor in Indiana watched her family’s annual premium jump from $9,100 to $23,400. A chiropractor and his wife in New Jersey—healthcare providers who can no longer afford their own healthcare—are going uninsured in 2026. A Vermont farmer’s premium is going from $900 a month to $3,200. These aren’t statistics—they’re human beings. People who will delay preventative care and surgeries, people who will ration or skip medications altogether, and yes—people who are going to die. For this regime, the cruelty is always the point.

The Report

PAY MORE, GET LESS

As if the ACA disaster weren’t enough, pharmaceutical companies are ringing in the new year by raising prices on at least 350 medications—including vaccines for COVID, RSV, and shingles, plus cancer treatments like Ibrance. The median increase is about 4 percent, but Pfizer’s jacking up its COVID vaccine by 15 percent. This comes despite Trump’s much-touted “most favored nation” deals with 14 drugmakers, which apparently did jack shit to stop companies from continuing to gouge Americans who already pay nearly three times more for medications than people in other developed countries. Trump bragged that these deals represented “the greatest victory for patient affordability in the history of American health care.” Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi, Novartis, and Boehringer Ingelheim—all signatories to those deals—are raising prices anyway. May he choke on his lies. Meanwhile, the con continues…

INJUSTICE SERVED

The House Judiciary Committee released Jack Smith’s 255-page deposition transcript on New Year’s Eve, and it’s exactly as damning as you’d expect. The former special counsel told lawmakers his team “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump was guilty of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and illegally retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Smith called Trump “the most culpable and most responsible person” in the January 6th conspiracy and said the Capitol riot “does not happen” without him. He revealed that Republicans—including a former congressman who was going to be a Trump elector in Pennsylvania—were prepared to testify that “what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and was illegal.” Even Rudy “Colludy” Giuliani, in a recorded interview, “disavowed a number of the claims” about voter fraud. Of course, none of this shit matters now. The felon took office, the cases were dismissed, and Smith himself expects to be indicted for doing his job which was to follow the facts and the law. That used to mean something.

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HEART? WHAT HEART?

In a Wall Street Journal interview, Trump dismissed concerns about his health—the sleeping during public appearances, the thick patches of makeup covering bruises on his hands, the MRI or CT scan or whatever the fuck he had. The ridiculous orange shitweasel then revealed he takes 325mg of aspirin daily—about four times the typically recommended dose—and does so against his doctors’ advice. “They’d rather have me take the smaller one,” Trump said. “I take the larger one.” He explained he wants “nice, thin blood pouring through my heart.” The man who mocked Biden’s mental acuity for years is now publicly admitting he ignores his doctors’ medical advice which is on-brand for a dumb fuck who stares directly into a solar eclipse, but hey—I’m actually with Trump on this one. I think he should take forty-four times the recommended dosage, and ignore all the expert medical advice any reputable doctors give him. Instead, he should look to RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and Ronald McDonald for guidance on all future health decisions.

BONJOUR, MOTHERFUCKERS

George Clooney is a real bastard—he’s insanely handsome, filthy rich, and no longer living in the United States thanks to his newly obtained French citizenship. Of course, he’s not really a bastard—I’m just jealous he cllimbed out of the dumpster fire before any of us did. Of course, Dear Leader attacked the actor—calling him “one of the worst political prognosticators of all time” with “totally mediocre movies.” Clearly, the very stable genius has never seen a Clooney film, nor does he have any idea what the word “prognosticator” means. Clooney fired back: ”I totally agree with the current president. We have to make America great again. We’ll start in November.” Let the orange piece of shit stress over that for the next eleven months. I hear lots of stress is bad for one’s health even though, according to him, he’s in “perfect health.” Be a damn shame if something happened to his “perfect health.”

The Rest

• New immigration restrictions now in effect: Travel to the U.S. from Burkina Faso, Laos, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Syria banned as of today

• Trump still contemplating revoking citizenship of Somali Americans

• Superbug hits 27 states: A deadly fungus is spreading across the country

• Alzheimer’s Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say

The Kicker

That concludes today’s report.

I spent New Year’s Eve the same way I spend most nights—researching rat bastards, reading about atrocities, cataloging cruelties, and trying to process the sheer scale of what’s being done to this country and to us in the past year.

2025 was the dress rehearsal for the horror show that will be 2026.

That’s not doomsaying—it’s our reality. It sucks now, but it’s going to fuck us up soon. They’re just getting started. The cruelty is accelerating. The institutions we counted on to stop all of this have been gutted, captured, or cowed into submission. I hope you aren’t still waiting for someone to swoop in and save us, because that’s not happening. No one is coming—not the courts, not the military, not George Clooney or Taylor Swift or Jesus Christ.

This is the cost of denial. It’s what repeating the lie “it can’t happen here” looks like. It’s what ignoring privilege and taking things for granted gets us. It always had the possibility of happening here. And now it is. Here we go again.

Officially over this stupid shit,
—Zappa

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I submit for the record today’s dispatch from the crumbling American empire.

It’s my hope that everyone managed to find some semblance of peace over the holidays, whatever that looks like. For months on end, many of you have been encouraging me to slow down and take better care of myself, specifically suggesting that I get more sleep, and I’m happy to report that I finally took your advice. Over the past two weeks, I’ve sacrificed time I felt I should have been working here to sleep, as if it were my job. To be transparent, I didn’t have much choice because, despite my best efforts to avoid it, burnout caught up with me and kicked my ass. All those nights I sacrificed sleep to read, research, and write, the sleep debt was silently accumulating until I reached a point where taking a break was more of a non-negotiable demand imposed on me by a mind and body that were breaking down.

I know all of us are running on fumes, and quite honestly, the regime is counting on that. They recognize exhaustion as an effective weapon. By keeping us too tired to think, too drained to fight, too anxious about survival, and too demoralized to hope, we will be easier to control. But the thing I’ve realized about burnout is that sometimes your body forces you to stop because it’s the only way to keep going, and that the flip side of burnout is bouncing back stronger. I believe we’re all due for such a rebound and that when the time comes, we’re better prepared to kick some ass. The same way one can’t sprint a marathon, one can’t fight fascism on no sleep, no matter how much willpower you summon. Pacing and endurance matter, and as much as I hate admitting it, our humanity demands self-care as a tactical necessity, not as a pointless act of self-indulgence. If only I could be part machine.

Finally, I wanted to share with you that on Christmas Day, I celebrated two years of sobriety.

Two years of choosing the hard thing every single day. Two years of staying present for every brutally depressing and demoralizing, exhausting, and maddening moment of this slow-motion fucktastrophe we call life. Two years of facing one hardship after another with clear eyes—no numbing the pain, no checking out, no instant escape hatch.

Just me, out here raw-dogging reality like some kind of goddamn psychopath on a mission to be a better version of myself.

So yeah, two years sober and still basically feral—just with better recall of where the fuck I put my keys.

This is your report for December 29, 2025.

The Lede

Remember when Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”

We now understand why he’d say such a thing: because he’s committed acts far worse than shooting one person on Fifth Avenue, and he’s never faced a single meaningful consequence. That’s not confidence talking—it’s experience. A lifetime of escape from accountability has bred within him a dangerous delusion: an ingrained belief that he is untouchable, that consequences are for other people, that he can commit any abuse and simply walk away.

Last week, another batch of Epstein files dropped. Among the flight logs and botched redactions—internet sleuths discovered a simple copy/paste into a text file revealed what the incompetent schmucks at DoJ tried to hide—were two unclassified FBI intake reports that, if true, implicate Trump in crimes far worse than any of us imagined.

One report documents a woman’s claim that she was raped in the late 1990s by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein after being lured to a “fancy hotel” by a woman implied to be Ghislaine Maxwell. The woman later reported the assault to police, expressed fear for her life, and was subsequently found dead in Kiefer, Oklahoma, from a gunshot wound to the head.

The other documents a tip submitted to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center by an individual claiming to be a victim of child sex trafficking involving Trump in 1984. The complainant alleges she was trafficked by her uncle beginning at age 12 to Donald Trump and others, that she became pregnant at 13, and that her newborn was murdered by her uncle and dumped in Lake Michigan—with Trump present.

Circumstantial details in both cases could align with Trump’s known movements at the time. But perhaps the more damning truth is this: we’d believe either allegation because we know what kind of monster he is. We understand he’s capable of such things.

Will these allegations ever be proven? Almost certainly not. The institutions that might have pursued justice are now staffed by his loyalists. The man who should be answering questions under oath is instead signing executive orders from the Oval Office.

And that’s the point. Trump didn’t say he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue because he was being hyperbolic. He said it because he knows—from decades of lived experience—that there is no crime he cannot outrun, no accusation he cannot outlast, no victim whose suffering will ever matter more than his survival.

Shooting someone on Fifth Avenue wasn’t Trump showing us how low he’d go. It was us failing to grasp how low he’d already gone.

The Report

JOURNALISM = TERRORISM

A solid indicator that you live in a fascist dictatorship is when your government reclassifies the work you do as a journalist so it can label you a domestic terrorist. Unfortunately, as we round out the worst year so far in our nation’s history, this is our reality in the United States of America. It isn’t a joke or a headline from The Onion, but it is fucking insane. Back in September, in the wake of bigoted podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump regime published NSPM-7, a national security presidential memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” which is a fascist directive that brands a wide variety of opposition as terrorism—if you are an opponent of ICE, or if you are anti-fascist, anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism, or anti-traditional-family-values, the government is training their crosshairs on you. The Guardian is now reporting that the FBI has opened domestic terrorism investigations into “anti-ICE activity,” targeting activists for even so much as an “indicator” that they’re researching ICE agents’ movements online, monitoring any public officials, or even using the encrypted messaging app Signal—in other words, activities common to basic journalism and various forms of civic accountability. Essentially, documenting government abuse is now grounds for a domestic terrorism investigation into your actions. Big Brother is coming for anyone who dares to watch them too closely. Ask yourself why that is.

NONE OF THAT JAZZ

Chuck Redd is a musical fixture in the world of jazz—equally credible as both a legendary drummer and vibraphonist, the highly respected virtuoso has played with the likes of Charlie Byrd and Rosemary Clooney, and sat deep in the pocket, grooving with the illustrious Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. Since 2006, he’s also hosted a free, annual Christmas Eve concert at the Kennedy Center, but this year, after Bozo the Bastard Clown illicitly slapped his cursed and reviled name on the performing arts center Congress legally designated as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy, Redd cancelled his performance in protest. As a result, Richard Grenell, the Trump-appointed Kennedy Center board president, is threatening Chuck Redd with a million-dollar lawsuit for “damages.” It’s worth noting that Grenell, a blindly loyal, brown-nosing, bootlicking bitch for Trump, was once an unregistered foreign agent for Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán and, of course, no unqualified regime stooge’s resume would be complete without adding his status as a Fox News contributor like his fellow toadies who now serve their fascist orange master: Pete Kegsbreath, Jeanine Pirro, Sean Duffy, Janette Nesheiwat, Monica Crowley, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Tammy Bruce, Sebastian Gorka, Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Huckabee, Tom Homan, Mike Waltz, Dan Bongino, Alex Pfeiffer, Sergio Gor, Leo Terrell, and Abigail Slater—a clown car of Fox News parasites who now cosplay as legitimate public servants.

CONDÉ NASTY

An anonymous hacker dumped 2.3 million WIRED user records online—data stolen from parent company Condé Nast. Exposed for all were subscriber email addresses and display names, and for some users, their full names, phone numbers, birth dates, gender, location data, and full physical addresses were leaked. Those responsible claim WIRED is just one part of a larger Condé Nast breach, suggesting more users across other Condé Nast brands are likely compromised. Condé Nast, naturally, has been silent about how this happened, who’s responsible, or what they’re doing to protect the people whose data they failed to secure.

MOTHER IS A MONSTER

Karoline Leavitt, the regime’s top propagandist, announced she’s pregnant with her second child—a baby girl due in May 2026—and all I can think is how this poor child will have a fucking monster for a mother. Leavitt gushed about Trump fostering a “pro-family environment” in the White House and about her “gratitude to God for the blessing of motherhood.” The sheer audacity of this hypocritical bitch touting a “pro-family environment” in the White House while stormtroopers terrorize communities across the country, ripping families apart, disappearing children into concentration camps, separating mothers from their babies, and legal residents from their pregnant wives—all inhumane results of policies she defends for a living. So instead of congratulations, a simple “fuck you” feels far more appropriate, followed by a preemptive apology to Leavitt’s unborn child for the undeserved anguish that awaits her when she someday learns that her mother was a moral void in human form.

SHITBUILDER

Orange Clown announced big plans for a new “Golden Fleet” of multi-billion-dollar “Trump-class” Navy battleships that, in his words, will have “guns and missiles at the highest level,” a warship description one might expect to hear from a kindergartener. Experts assure us that such delusional plans will never actually materialize; however, Chief Petty Officer Petty Bitch asserts he will lead on fleet design. Trump claims the first ship will be named the USS Defiant, but if we’re naming vessels in his honor, a more fitting name would be the USS Pedophile.

The Rest

• Brigitte Bardot, Movie Icon Who Renounced Stardom, Dies at 91

• People Who Drink Bottled Water on a Daily Basis Ingest 90,000 More Microplastic Particles Each Year

• What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?

• Squirrels can find 85% of the nuts they hide

The Kicker

That concludes today’s report.

Between the link I shared to the “What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?” article and Trump, the biggest asshole on earth, I realize there was a lot of ass-related content in this issue—not that this is much different from any other issue, I guess.

I’d say that I’ll do my best to make sure the next Gonzo Report has less “butt stuff,” but let’s face it, pretty much all I do is write about assholes.

Always screaming on the inside,
—Zappa

The last week has been filled with one senseless tragedy after another.

From the killing of American troops and an American interpreter in Syria to the mass shooting at Brown University to the terrorist attack against Jewish people at Bondi Beach in Sydney to the shocking and horrific murder of Rob and Michele Reiner—it’s been a long, dark, and shitty December with two weeks yet to go.

And leave it to the human equivalent of an overflowing septic tank to make the Reiners’ deaths all about him: the orange pig released a statement so disgusting it even drew criticism from most Republicans. In it, he condemned Rob Reiner for speaking out against him (those pesky First Amendment rights!) and turning the brutal murder of two genuinely good people into ego feed for his bottomless narcissism—proving, once again, that even in moments of shared horror, he can’t resist centering himself and shitting on the real victims of tragedy.

This odious hellbeast can’t rot in hell soon enough. The sewer-grade, bile-raising, white trash son of a bitch and every chaw-chewing, mouth-breathing, cousin-fucking, inbred dipshit who supports him can fuck off into the sun.

But I digress.

2025 has been a garbage year, and I’d be lying to you if I said 2026 was going to be any better because you and I both know it won’t be. Runaway trains don’t slow down, nor do they care who’s tied to the tracks ahead. The crash is inevitable. All we can do is brace for impact. But don’t ever forget who was driving when it all went off the rails.

At least we can take comfort in knowing that the wreckage tends to bury the engineer first.

This is your report for December 16, 2025.

The Lede

Gonzo Report is entering its second year, and I’ve been thinking about you—my readers, my friends—about how honored I am to have you here and how much I want to deliver real value for your investment in me and my work. I’ve given serious thought to where I hope to take this, and I’d like to share what I’ve come up with.

There are plenty of great political newsletters out there, but the vast majority—this one included, until now—have been doing the same thing: offering commentary on stories you’ve already seen, news broken by mainstream outlets, and stories gone cold by the time they reach you. If that works for some people, that’s fine, but I have no interest in being a carbon copy of anyone. I want to do things differently—things no one else is doing.

Going forward, Gonzo Report will focus on the unreported and underreported stories that mainstream media ignores. Of course, I’ll still cover major news stories when they demand attention, but independent journalism should stand apart from corporate media, giving you reasons to show up beyond reheated takes on yesterday’s headlines. It should offer you something you won’t find anywhere else—and that’s precisely what I intend to do.

Independent journalism should actually be independent—in voice, in focus, and in what it chooses to give a fuck about.

Gonzo Report isn’t a hobby or a side hustle; it’s my job—still, it’s second in priority to my most important job: being a parent. Caring for, raising, educating, and supporting my kid will always come first. Gonzo Report takes a tremendous amount of work. Parenting takes insane, oh-my-god, holy-fucking-shit levels of work. My sense of self-worth is inextricably tied to being a damn good journalist, but it’s even more deeply rooted in being the best dad I can be.

All that to say that my publishing schedule bends around my responsibilities as a dad, not the other way around. Gonzo Report, to me, is the second most important thing I do. So, when you don’t hear from me for a few days, know that I’m still working every chance I get—reading, researching, writing, and building something worthy of your time, attention, and financial support, while spending a minimum of 12 hours every day trying to keep a tiny human from setting the house on fire. It’s easier said than done.

To those of you who’ve been here since the beginning—thank you. You took a chance on me, and you stuck around while I figured out what the fuck I was doing. I won’t ever forget that. I owe you one.

Year one was about finding my voice, refining my process, and working out all the kinks. Year two is about finding the news no one else is reporting on, much like shining a light into that darkness and watching the rats scatter. What this looks like in practice will reveal itself soon. I have so many ideas—new sections, recurring features, different formats—but honestly, I’d rather show you than tell you.

I hope you’ll consider Gonzo Report required reading for many years to come.

Looking forward,
—Zappa

Welcome to your daily dispatch from the crumbling American empire.

CONTENT WARNING: Please be aware that the last story in this report contains discussion centered around sexual assault. I wanted readers to know in advance so each person can make an informed choice about reading to the end. Please prioritize your emotional safety. 🖤

This is your report for December 8, 2025.

1.

K IS FOR KENYA AND KICKBACKS AND KLEPTOCRACY

Despite gutting nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and dismantling USAID, which has already killed an estimated 600,000 people globally (two-thirds of those being children), the Trump regime seemingly about-faced and suddenly cares deeply about forming health alliances with many of the nations affected by the shuttering of USAID. As a matter of fact, the first such initiative is already underway, with the U.S. government sending $1.6 billion to Kenya, funding programs to prevent and treat diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

If that sounds uncharacteristically benevolent for the Trump regime, that’s because this has as much to do with humanitarianism as architecture has to do with fucking.

Let’s put on our PPE and sift through this filth. Here's how this particularly slimy scheme works: the Kenyan government has agreed to pay $2.1 million per year to a firm named Continental Strategy, LLC. Framed as a “government relations and lobbying” firm, Continental effectively functions as a pay-to-play tollbooth for foreign governments and corporations seeking access to Trump.

But wait—there’s more.

Continental Strategy, LLC, was founded by longtime Trump ally and one-time Trump campaign advisor Carlos Trujillo. Interestingly, within days of Trump’s debatable election win, Katie Wiles, the daughter of Susie Wiles, Trump’s former campaign manager and current chief of staff, was hired on as director. And within days of Marco Rubio’s Secretary of State nomination, his former Chief of Staff Alberto Martinez accepted a role as the company’s D.C.-based managing partner. What a convenient coincidence.

In exchange for Kenyan government contracts with Continental, Trump agrees to unlock $1.6 billion in taxpayer-funded foreign aid, though crucially, the terms of this deal mandate that all foreign aid dollars be funneled to “faith-based” partners like the Christian Health Association of Kenya and the Catholic Church, specifically directing funding away from secular NGOs and toward these religious networks that align with Trump’s “Christian” base. Since Trump took office, Continental’s quarterly revenue has exploded from $300k to $6.5 million. U.S. taxpayers are unknowingly subsidizing religious-based health organizations while our own safety nets are slashed here at home.

Of crucial note: this Kenyan deal is reportedly only the first of around sixty different global health funding agreements that are currently in the works.

2.

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP ON CHOPPING BLOCK

Lower courts have already ruled against Trump’s executive order aimed at eliminating birthright citizenship, rejecting the EO as an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. A responsible Supreme Court would have allowed that lower court ruling to stand, but ours—at least the conservative supermajority—has agreed to hear Trump’s appeal, thus legitimizing a fringe legal theory claiming the amendment only intended citizenship for freed slaves’ children—not for so-called “illegal aliens” or “birth tourists.” After all, what’s 127 years of constitutional precedent? We’ve already seen that SCOTUS gives as much weight to long-established precedent as it does to what they are having for lunch. The Supreme Court didn’t stumble into this—they sprinted toward it willingly. The über-conservative SCOTUS supermajority isn’t interpreting the Constitution anymore—they’re just wiping their asses with its remains and torching what’s left, all on Trump’s behalf. 127 years of precedent gone the instant it no longer serves their orange messiah and his white-nationalist agenda. Do they think their robes do anything to conceal the stench of corruption underneath? Clarence, please.

3.

BRAINWORM 1, BABIES 0

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has been entirely reconstituted under alleged active illicit drug user RFK Jr. Among what once was a panel of vaccine experts now sits a motley crew of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and grifters who politicize science and discredit legitimate voices in favor of pushing horse dewormer as a solution for human patients. This committee of cuckoos voted Friday to end the 34-year universal recommendation for hepatitis B vaccination at birth.

Under the new guidance issued by these quacks you wouldn’t trust to recommend a good coffee shop, now only infants born to mothers who test positive for the virus—or whose status is unknown—should now receive the shot immediately. For all others, they suggest delaying the first dose until at least two months of age—a determination plucked straight out of someone’s ass. Here are the facts: hepatitis B infections dropped nearly 90% since 1991 precisely because universal vaccination prevented the 95% of infant infections that become chronic and deadly.

Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) who is a proponent of vaccines—i.e., he’s legit/not a fucking idiot—spoke to CNN’s Pamela Brown and confirmed what we already knew—that ACIP axing this vaccine recommendation “wasn’t based on data.”

4.

SCROOGE IMPERILS SNAP (AGAIN)

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has threatened to withhold federal SNAP funding from over 20 Democratic-led states unless they surrender sensitive personal data—including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses—of millions of food stamp recipients by next week.

Rollins claims the data will help the agency “combat fraud”—a complete bullshit line you can rest assured means the opposite—but Democratic governors warn it will better enable immigration enforcement targeting vulnerable families, which is precisely what this is about. Twenty-eight largely Republican states have already complied since May, because of course they have, while over 20 million beneficiaries in non-compliant states face potential benefit loss. This extortion follows last week’s lawsuit by 21 Democratic attorneys general challenging GOP legislation blocking legal immigrants from SNAP access. The timing reveals the administration’s strategy: weaponize hunger to force data handovers that further grease the wheels for the regime’s mass deportation efforts.

5.

TODDLER IN CHIEF WINS FAUXBEL PRIZE

It’s difficult to decide which is more pathetic: the fact that FIFA President and Kiss-ass Extraordinaire Gianni Infantino invented a “Peace Prize” specifically to award Donald Trump at Friday’s World Cup draw, or Trump himself, beaming obliviously with the hubristic pride of a first grader receiving their first participation trophy for simply showing up to class, or Trump basking in the afterglow of his coveted win while doing his stupid double-fisted jerkoff dance while The Village People personally serenaded him, performing his favorite song—which will never make sense to me—1978’s smash disco hit “Y.M.C.A.”

There’s no way to choose what’s more cringeworthy, but the entire ordeal was yet another humiliating embarrassment on the world stage for Trump and for the rest of us. Unfortunately, Americans (and the rest of the world) see what a pathetic dog and pony show this was. Trump, on the other hand, was clueless—too busy being a self-indulgent and self-congratulatory narcissist. He’s characteristically oblivious to the spectacle he’s become, and that, is what’s most pathetic.

6.

SEXUAL ASSAULT ON LGBTQIA+ INMATES OK BY DOJ

The corrupt DOJ has ordered prison auditors to immediately stop enforcing key Prison Rape Elimination Act protections for LGBTQIA+ inmates, eliminating safeguards like separate shower access, bans on genital searches, and safety considerations for housing assignments—all changes that align with Trump’s executive order from January 2025, which proclaims that the United States only recognizes individuals as male or female. LGBTQIA+ inmates face six times higher sexual assault rates than cisgender prisoners. The cruelty here is transparently strategic: by suspending enforcement before officially rewriting related regulations, the administration creates a grey area of legal confusion that effectively nullifies these protections while allowing them to maintain some level of plausible deniability when, unfortunately, in the not-too-distant future, more LGBTQIA+ inmates will start being assaulted and killed and no one will be held accountable.

That concludes today’s report.

This one was a long time in the making. I hate to cut it short, but I’ve got to check my eyelids for cracks.

See you at the next secret meeting under the burnt-out streetlight.

From hell,
–Zappa

Dear friends,

Welcome to another daily dispatch from the crumbling American empire.

Ruthless summaries await below for your cathartic pleasure, but before we dive in, I want to ask that if you appreciate the way I condense the chaos and verbally assault those who are most deserving of a good lashing, please consider lending your support in the form of a subscription or a one-time donation.

There are costs associated with any independently produced work, and my work here is no exception to that rule. I write for you, but the man still demands his cut. Also, kids cost a lot of money, and I have one of those.

Okay, fundraising pitch over. Thanks for understanding why that’s necessary. Let’s see what fresh hell awaits us today, shall we? After all, the abyss isn’t going to stare into itself.

This is your report for December 2, 2025.

GESTAPO ALERT: MINNEAPOLIS
100 Gestapo agents are headed to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to target innocent members of the Somali community, 87% of which are naturalized U.S. citizens. Get ready for dozens of swamp-rooted, mud-mouthed, snuff-spitting, mask-wearing, goat-banging, Nazi Klan members to racially profile everyone in metro MSP who isn’t Miracle Whip white. Seriously though—the uber-corrupt Supreme Court greenlit racial profiling, so all non-white residents need to exercise extreme caution, and just typing this goddamn sentence makes me want to fucking scream.

GESTAPO ALERT: NEW ORLEANS
250 Gestapo agents are headed to the Big Easy in an attempt to terrorize residents, to which I say GOOD LUCK, FUCKERS, because the people of New Orleans can handle anything—hurricanes, floods, Mardi Gras—so they will not be intimidated by a bunch of generationally inbred, Oakley-wearing, chaw-chewing, cousin-fucking Nazi Klan members.

EVIL BIRDS OF A FEATHER...
In news that shocks absolutely no one: evil regime goes to bat for evil corporation. Trump regime lawyers filed a Supreme Court brief supporting Monsanto’s effort to use federal preemption to block state-level lawsuits over Roundup’s ability to cause cancer, arguing that EPA approval shields the company from liability despite the World Health Organization classifying glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, as “carcinogenic to humans.” I’m no public health expert, but advocating for the makers of a cancer-causing chemical while cutting cancer research and kicking people off their health insurance sounds to me like the opposite of making America healthy again.

COSTCO: NOW WITH FEWER IDIOTS
Bulk shopping at Costco should now be a less crowded experience: MAGA is calling for a Big Beautiful Boycott of the big box store after learning that the nation’s third-largest retailer is suing the fuck out of Trump, demanding full tariff refunds—a betrayal, in their eyes, because any challenge to their cult leader is heresy punishable by tantrum. In typical dumb-fuck Trump supporter fashion, MAGA is redirecting their business to Walmart of all places which couldn’t give less of a fuck about shielding consumers from tariff costs. But that’s MAGA for you—never in the history of ever have we seen a more vocal group of deadweight, braindead losers in possession of a larger cache of weapons-grade stupidity.

OF CIRCLE JERKS AND JERKOFFS
Trump held a cabinet meeting today in which he bragged about himself, lied incessantly, made up figures out of thin air on everything from drug price reductions to tariff revenue, rambled incoherently about dozens of topics, at times several topics at once; he said declared that affordability “doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” which is confusing considering just last week he declared himself “the affordability president.” Make up your feeble, failing mind, D-bag. He closed the meeting as only he could do in the most presidential way possible by called Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar “garbage” and then went on to say that “Her friends are garbage and we don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from.” Truly a president for the people. Class act. Wow. Bravo. (Said no honest person ever.)

After he finished word vomiting, Trump slept for the rest of the meeting. No, I’m not kidding. That’s what happens when a 79-year-old asshole stays up all night shitposting on red hat social media.

Of course, no Trump cabinet meeting would be complete without a roundtable of nauseatingly obsequious speeches by the biggest bunch of brazen, base, bullshitting, brown-nosing, bootlicking bitches and bastards a billionaire could buy. We had to listen to fawning, ass-kissing statements from:

• Pete “I’m officially a war criminal” Kegsbreath praised Dear Leader in a totally alpha adulatory alpha-male way while—I shit you not—he sat before a placard on the conference table that read “SSecretary of War” and no, I do not think the “SS” was either accidental or a typo, but you can see him here seated next to Droopy Don

• Howard “once a slimeball, always a slimeball” Lutnick was Don-Jr.-levels of excited if you (sniff) know what I mean (sniff sniff)

• Sean “I was on MTV’s Real World reality show, now I’m in charge of planes not falling out of the sky” Duffy

• JD “literally everyone hates me” Vance

• Kristi “Live, Laugh, Nazi” Noem

• Brooke “I can only get off when I take away people’s SNAP benefits” Rollins

• Doug “I brake for pedophiles (but hate women and gays)” Collins

• Linda “confuses AI for A1 but still oversees education LOL” McMahon

• Marco “I may be a self-loathing, Dumbo-eared little bitch but I’m never, ever, ever coming out of the closet” Rubio

• Doug “mayonnaise is more interesting” Burgum and, last but certainly not least...

• Robert F. “A worm ate my brain and now I’m going to kill Americans with the grating sound of my goddamned voice and/or by taking away your vaccines” Kennedy

Good god, we live in hell.

That concludes today’s report.

You probably need to decompress and dissociate for a bit after reading that. Hell, I wrote it and I’ve had root canals that were less painful. So, be excellent to yourselves and to one another. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Thanks for being here. Yes, you.

See you tomorrow.

Later alligators,
–Zappa

Dear friends,

I hope you enjoyed a relaxing holiday weekend devoid of awkward conversations with insufferable relatives and that you got to spend time with family and friends that was filled with restorative joy.

I also hope Mass Blackout participation is going well and that corporate America starts picking up what we’re putting down because we left them with no other choice. We have the power to stop these greedy bastards who are bleeding us dry. Stop buying their shit. Stop falling for their deceptive marketing. We don’t need what they’re selling, and nothing will send them a stronger message than us refusing to play their game anymore.

We’re done with the bullshit—done watching our take home get smaller and smaller while simultaneously costing us more and more. Some of us—hell, most of us—have felt the nickel and diming, the slow, steady creep of capitalistic greed squeezing the life out of us, month after month, year after year. They bled us dry. We were barely hanging on as it was, but now—now that the American government is 100% run by corporate whores under a money-grubbing, gluttonous pig, Big Everything is really going for it, really sticking it to us hard.

It feels a lot like this is their endgame and that they don’t see us lowly pawns ever winning.

But it also feels like an awakening—like we have collectively (finally!) decided that corporate America’s executive leadership and their avaricious shareholders can take their shrinkflation-fueled record profits and shove them up their asses.

We’re done.

Checkmate, motherfuckers.

But I digress. Some of us might have gotten a long weekend break, but fascists by nature are always busy being evil pieces of shit, so let’s catch up on some of their fuckery. Thanks for hanging in here with me. It means more to me than I can say.

This is your report for December 1, 2025.

INJUSTICE SYSTEM
Feckless prosecutors in Georgia have dropped the last remaining criminal case against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. According to them, pursuing the case would take years and would prove “unduly burdensome and costly” for the state. An admission of spreadsheet governance like this is a direct indictment of a criminal justice system broken beyond repair—one that operates not on equal treatment under rule of law, but on projection from a cost-benefit analysis deeming that holding wealthy criminals accountable for high crimes simply doesn’t pencil out financially—even if said crimes are seditious conspiracy in service of insurrection. I guess democracy dies not with a bang but with a line item in a budget meeting.

WHINYLITTLEBITCH.GOV
In his ongoing whinefest against the free press, Trump has taken things to the next level, weaponizing the official White House website by launching a “Media Offender of the Week“ feature—essentially, a hit list of journalists and news orgs who huwt his widdle fee fees. For someone whose inbred supporters consider an “alpha male,” his orange, porcelain-thin skin outed him long ago as nothing more than a flatulent paper tiger—an enormous ego so delicate and fragile it instantly shatters at the faintest hint of scrutiny. No doubt, this new taxpayer-funded propaganda portal is an Orwellian PR stunt, still it represents a widening and aggressive escalation in his bullshit infantile war against respectable journalists and news outlets who have now, thanks to this regime, had even bigger targets painted on their backs. Add this to the growing list of things these bastards will someday be prosecuted and convicted for.

STFU, PIG
The New York Times published an article clearly demonstrating how Trump is losing steam and slowing down—fewer public events, less travel, less golf even—visible signs of wear on the old pedophile who is, quite literally, asleep at the wheel much of the time. This wasn’t a sensationalistic hit piece—it was a data-driven analysis. And so, in a move as on-brand as ever when confronted with the fact that he’s slipping (and that we know it,) the geriatric turd’s response was to insult the article’s female co-author, Katie Rogers, calling her “ugly, both inside and out” while conveniently ignoring her male co-author Dylan Freedman entirely. Trump is, among so many other things, a rabid misogynist and he’s demonstrated this time and time again in recent weeks alone. Just as he snarled “Quiet, piggy!“ at Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey last month aboard Air Force One, and even more recently asked CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” after she had the balls to fact-check him live on air regarding the blame he placed on the Biden administration despite the fact it was Trump’s own regime who vetted the Afghan national accused of shooing two National Guard troops last week in Washington D.C. He’s flailing, and he’s too demented to defend his indefensible words and actions, so he bullies others, lashing out. No real man would ever do this, but then, we’ve never been under the impression that Trump was anything other than an inadequate lowlife prick who could barely spell his own name. The New York Times published a defiant statement standing behind Katie Rogers and her reporting, and plainly stated that they will not be intimidated. It was the right move, but it was also the only acceptable move at this point, as further capitulation by any media organization to this senile pig would be unconscionable. Donald Trump is, and always will be, equal parts hot air and bullshit.

That concludes today’s report.

I could go on, but I have to save some fun for tomorrow, right?

Before I go, I want to say that I view my work on Gonzo Report as serving two purposes: to keep you informed, maybe even entertained on occasion, and to preserve a record of what’s happening in fascist America. Trump’s lawless regime has operated thus far sans accountability or consequence, but honest reporting produces a record of objective truth—and objective truth produces the evidence which precedes justice. I sincerely hope like hell that we all live long enough to see these motherfuckers pay for what they’ve done.

More tomorrow.

Yours truly,
–Zappa

Last week, during a press gaggle aboard Air Force One, Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey asked the Notorious P.I.G. about the recently released Epstein emails in which his former pedophile buddy wrote that Donald “knew about the girls.”

Trump’s response managed to be deeply offensive in a way that even surprised those of us who have become accustomed to his limitless capacity for rudeness and crudeness.

Leaning forward, Trump prodded his finger at Lucey and snarled, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”

To make matters worse, this obscene exchange occurred among a crowd of other reporters (at least one of whom was male), yet no one said or did a goddamn thing to stick up for their insulted colleague. Instead, they cowardly pressed on, asking questions, entirely ignoring what had just happened. That silence wasn’t just cowardice—though it was most certainly that—it was also complicity in the psychological warfare Trump wages on others, especially those who challenge him.

The reporters who stayed silent on Air Force One understood this instinctively. They knew that speaking up carries consequences and that defending a colleague likely meant becoming the next target. They shamefully chose self-preservation over solidarity, and in doing so, demonstrated exactly how authoritarian power consolidates itself—through the quiet complicity of those who didn’t have the balls to stand up and speak out, choosing their own safety over doing the right thing.

Viewed through the lens of Trump’s psychopathy as a malignant narcissist and raging asshole, his scorning of Catherine Lucey—a respected reporter just doing her job—was an outward manifestation of the inhumanity that consumes him and the incivility that defines his persona.

It revealed the sadistic pleasure he takes in degrading others he feels are beneath him. As a rabid misogynist who is constantly at odds with the media, Trump has always been especially quick to shame and dismiss female journalists. And his absolute disregard for empathy, norms, and basic human decency speaks for itself.

Regime propagandist Karoline Leavitt attempted to do what she does best—defend the indefensible. She tried with a straight face to repackage Trump’s misogynistic insult as an example of the “authenticity” and “frankness” that won him a second term. How that vile creature looks at herself in the mirror and manages to sleep at night is beyond me. But then again, self-awareness has never been a prerequisite for working in Trump’s regime—which brings us to the darkest irony of this entire incident.

It should go without saying that the absurdity of Trump lobbing this particular insult—“piggy”—at another human being was lost on no one but the lowlife himself, who manages to make a warthog look svelte. There are few animal-based insults more fitting for the man who bragged that he could do whatever he wants to women, including “grab them by the pussy.” Rat, weasel, and jackass all work as descriptors—as does “hog” if we’re strictly speaking of his physicality—but in terms of filthy swine, Trump always places first in a competition for biggest pig.

Strip away the animal references and what we’re left with is this: the leader of the free world, the most powerful person on earth is not a man at all but a developmentally stunted toddler with the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity of a kindergarten bully—someone whose self-awareness, empathy, and impulse regulation never progressed beyond early childhood.

Trump has always demonstrated textbook narcissistic projection, the unconscious psychological mechanism by which he attributes his own loathsome qualities to those who threaten his carefully constructed delusion of superiority. How dare he be held accountable for his words or actions! What nerve one must have to hold his feet to the fire! After all, the fucker has bone spurs, remember?

Clinical experts agree that this pattern of behavior exists in those with narcissistic personality disorder—that when confronted with unbearable truths about themselves, they automatically project their inadequacy and internalized shame onto their accusers, thus making the “piggy” insult more of a confession than anything else.

Somewhere in the psychological dungeon where his true self lies imprisoned, he knows exactly what he is—a physically repulsive, morally bankrupt, revolting pig, wallowing in the intrinsic filth of his predatory behavior and endemic corruption. His disordered psyche, unwilling to bear those disturbing feelings within himself, projects them outwardly onto others, ensuring he never has to experience genuine reflection or face accountability. How convenient for the asshole.

Understanding this mechanism doesn’t excuse it—it indicts him further. His grandiosity isn’t confidence, nor is his bluster to be mistaken for strength. Instead, his constant bloviating and bullying are gross overcompensations for his glaring inadequacies. In Trump’s mind, cruelty equals strength. In reality, it’s nothing more than an unconscious admission of weakness—the impotent flailing of someone whose entire personality is built around avoiding his own pathetic mediocrity and moral emptiness.

The real tragedy here isn’t that Trump suffers from a personality disorder—plenty of people struggle with serious psychological conditions without becoming abusive assholes or sadistic tyrants.

The real tragedy is that Americans were stupid enough to hand absolute power to someone whose mental architecture is fundamentally flawed—someone with a severe psychological disorder that doesn’t limit him; it defines and disinhibits him.

And tragically, for us, it manifests in the form of weaponized cruelty, unbridled vengeance, and deliberate chaos.

Lucky us.

When Trump called Catherine Lucey “piggy,” he proved that hatefulness, cruelty, and abuse of power are core features, not bugs, of his dysfunctional character (or, more accurately, lack thereof.) Being an evil rat bastard comes as naturally to Trump as lying does, and lying comes as naturally to him as breathing, but make no mistake—becoming the monster we know today is the result of deliberate choices he’s consciously made, repeatedly, every day of his worthless life. And those choices have consequences that extend far beyond his own depravity.

But the greatest damage isn’t in what he’s said or done—it’s what he’s legitimized.

He normalized brutality, rebranding it as strength. He sanctioned bigotry and racism. He validated anti-intellectualism, affirming and encouraging the ignorance of the uneducated and easily manipulated dipshits who support him. He gave hateful ideology a presidential stamp of approval, and he institutionalized corruption. Now every racist, white supremacist, religious bigot, grifter, and con man sees their worst instincts reflected at the highest levels of power. The objectively treasonous has been repackaged as some bastardized form of patriotism where traitors are praised and rewarded with influence.

This is the actual poison in the well.

When a society rewards abhorrent behavior with power, when cruelty and brutality become acceptable, and when truth is silenced and dissent is oppressed, you don’t just get a more emboldened dictator.

You get a permission structure.

You get a blueprint.

You get a society overrun with brainwashed, dim-witted, dangerous assholes who’ve been given carte blanche to act on their worst impulses. They’ve been shown that sadism sells, brutality works, corruption wins, and decency and empathy are for losers.

You get rapacious dickheads like Elon Musk and JD Vance. You get religious bigots like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh. You get propagandists like Karoline Leavitt. You get grifters like Doctor Oz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You get monsters like Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller. And you get cowardly reporters who remain silent when the moment demands balls enough to speak out in defense of truth (and their colleagues.)

Catherine Lucey asked a legitimate question about Trump’s decades-long friendship with a notorious pedophile. For this, she was degraded, dehumanized, and dismissed—while her colleagues watched in silence. This is how authoritarian blueprints get drafted—one degraded journalist, one capitulating newsroom, and one normalized atrocity at a time.

Trump won’t be the last dictator America produces—he’ll be the prototype for a dynasty of monsters, each more dangerous than the last. There are quite literally millions of things for which I’ll never forgive Donald Trump and his vile supporters, but convincing others that cruelty is strength, empathy is weakness, and ignorance is virtue might be the worst of them.

May they all get what they deserve.

As for der Führer, I hope that someday, in his final moments, his own words are the last thing he hears repeated back to him, whispered mockingly in his ear by a nurse as she deliberately empties his morphine syringe onto the floor, forcing him to feel the same fear and pain he heartlessly inflicted on others simply because he could.

“Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”

There’s a special kind of rot that festers in right-wing media—a willingness to defend the indefensible, to rationalize the unconscionable, and to provide cover for monsters as long as those monsters serve the right political masters.

They’ll minimize insurrection as tourism, repackage corruption as legitimate business savvy, and defend serial sexual predators as victims of politically motivated smear campaigns. They’ve normalized treason to their brainwashed audiences, celebrated cruelty, and—again, through a faux victim mentality—framed every crime committed by their side as a “witch hunt” orchestrated by their enemies.

But every so often, one of these moral lepers says something so repugnant, so nakedly grotesque, that a failure to call it out is equal to complicity, and we have a duty to call out this reprehensible shit every time this happens.

Case in point—Megyn Kelly went on her SiriusXM show and spent actual airtime arguing that Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t really a pedophile because he preferred 15-year-olds over eight-year-olds.

Let it sink in.

This is a woman with a law degree and a national platform who decided to broadcast pedophile calculus to millions of listeners. She called it “giving you facts” while characterizing Epstein as someone who was “just into the barely legal type”—a stomach-turning phrase that attempts to create daylight between child rape and…child rape.

Kelly’s latest obscenity came the same day the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 pages of Epstein’s emails—including ones where Epstein called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and said he “knew about the girls.” The timing wasn’t coincidental. Kelly needed to get out ahead of the story, to preemptively soften the blow, to make sure her audience understood that whatever Trump knew about Epstein’s “girls,” it wasn’t really that bad because those girls were teenagers, not toddlers.

This is moral rot masquerading as legitimate social commentary from someone who fucking well knows better.

Kelly went on to claim she knows “somebody very, very close to this case” who told her Epstein wasn’t a pedophile.

(I can think of someone who fits that description to a T(rump).)

This person claimed he (Epstein) just liked teenagers who “could pass for even younger than they were but would look legal to a passerby.” She’s literally describing sex trafficking of minors while trying to soften the language around it.

It’s obscene and unforgivable.

Jeffrey Epstein was a sexual predator monster—a pedophile who abused and exploited more than a thousand underage girls, some reportedly as young as 12 or 13. He ran an international child sex-trafficking operation with ties to some of the wealthiest, most powerful men on earth. Those are the facts—not Kelly’s anonymous source, who apparently thinks statutory rape is less heinous if the victim is old enough to drive with a learner’s permit.

Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit.

But here’s what really makes my blood boil: Megan Kelly is a mother to a 14-year-old girl. If anyone, she should understand, viscerally and without equivocation, that a 15-year-old girl is a child. Instead, she’s on national radio performing mental gymnastics in a vain attempt to make Epstein’s crimes seem less monstrous so that, by extension, that same logic might be applied to Donald Trump.

This is the same Megyn Kelly who, back in 2023, tore into Republicans defending Russell Brand against allegations involving a 16-year-old, saying “we’re done” with anyone who’d defend that behavior. “You’re 31 years old and you have sex allegedly over a three-month period with a 16-year old?” Kelly demanded, “We’re done. I’m unsubscribing. And I am sick of conservatives online trying to defend that as though she had a role in it. She was a minor. Just because you can’t be prosecuted for it doesn’t mean it’s right.”

The same woman who railed against grooming and “the exploitative and predatory nature of the entertainment industry for minors.” The same woman who interviewed survivors and spoke passionately about protecting children from predators like Jared Fogle, whose victims ranged from 6 to 17 years old.

Apparently, her moral clarity depends entirely on whose team you’re playing for.

Her Epstein apologia serves one purpose—protecting Donald Trump.

With new emails revealing even more about Trump’s deep connections to Epstein, Kelly rushed to muddy the waters, to make people question whether what Epstein did was really that bad, to create just enough ambiguity that Trump’s decades-long friendship with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker doesn’t seem quite so damning.

But let’s talk about the real consequences of Kelly’s “barely legal” distinction.

Take Marina Lacerda, an immigrant from Brazil who entered Epstein’s orbit as a high school student. She was working three jobs to support her mother and sister when, one day, she was offered $300 to give a man a massage. “It went from a dream job,” she said at a Capitol Hill press conference, “to the worst nightmare.” Lacerda was called to Epstein’s house so frequently that she dropped out of ninth grade and never returned to school.

She dropped out of ninth grade.

Her only escape came when Epstein told her she’d gotten too old to work for him.

That’s what Kelly’s hairsplitting looks like in practice—a child’s education destroyed, her life derailed, her innocence stolen, her future wrecked. But sure, Megyn, you fucking ghoul, let’s debate whether that makes Epstein an “actual pedophile” or just someone “into the barely legal type.”

This is a prime example of how authoritarianism consolidates power—not through dramatic pronouncements, but through the deliberate erosion of shared truth. When we allow people with platforms to redefine reality, to make the monstrous seem merely controversial, we’re already living with the boot on our neck. When we stop calling pedophiles what they are, when we split hairs about the age of rape victims, and allow powerful people to redefine reality to protect other powerful people, we’re fucked.

Kelly isn’t alone in this depravity. She’s part of a metastasizing cancer in American media—talking heads who willingly debase themselves and gaslight their audiences in service of authoritarian power. Whether it’s calling concentration camps “detention facilities,” Nazi thugs “federal agents,” or referring to a monster responsible for child rape as “just into the barely legal type,” the strategy is identical: make the unconscionable seem reasonable through the systematic manipulation and abuse of language.

That’s the definition of gaslighting.

Elisa Batista, campaign director at UltraViolet Action, an advocacy group against sexual abuse, got it exactly right when she called Kelly’s comments “reckless and irresponsible.” Batista’s response says it all: “Jeffrey Epstein is a pedophile. A middle-aged man grooming and sexually exploiting 15-year-old girls is child abuse. Full stop.”

Indeed. Full. Fucking. Stop.

To even hint that Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t really a pedophile because he preferred 15-year-olds over 8-year-olds requires an absence of morality so profound that it should unquestionably disqualify you from public discourse forever.

The Daily Show’s Josh Johnson perfectly captured the absurdity, saying, “Everyone knows there is never a good reason to be talking about that difference.” Christina Ricci accurately called Kelly “a danger to children.” My favorite reaction came from comedian John Oliver, who said that, personally, he’d rather die than “do pedophile math.”

Megyn Kelly used her platform to minimize the systematic rape and trafficking of children, and she should be drummed out of public life forever. That’s not journalism. That’s not a form of legitimate commentary.

That’s complicity in the sexual abuse of children. And that is fucking unforgivable.

Anybody who is still willing to give Kelly—or anyone of like mind—the time of day after this is telling you exactly who they are.

Believe them.

To hell with them.

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Gonzo Report turns one year old today, and about a week ago, a perfect stranger gave me an early—and absolutely terrible—celebratory gift: influenza B.

I’m convinced I’ve coughed longer and harder than any human in recorded history. Needless to say, the past few days have been truly miserable, but I’m finally on the mend. Not exactly how I imagined celebrating this one-year milestone, but it could always be worse.

I’m just grateful to still be here, and even more grateful that you’re here with me. As we all know, corruption never sleeps—so there’s plenty of fuckery to catch up on. Let’s fucking go.

1.

BAD DOG
House Democrats released a trove of Epstein-related documents, including numerous emails between the infamous pedophile and various people in his orbit. In one email, Epstein wrote of Trump that he “of course knew about the girls,” and in another—sent to his longtime sex trafficking co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell—referred to Trump as “that dog that hasn’t barked.” Trump’s silence wasn’t loyalty to his sexual predator friends but an acknowledgment of his own complicity in the worst kind of deviant crimes.

File this under: Things We Already Knew.

Trump and Epstein were bound together by nothing if not mutually assured destruction. If anyone believes that Jeffrey Epstein hung himself in his prison cell, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona I’d like to sell you.

2.

MORE THINGS WE ALREADY KNEW
The release of any Epstein files is truly a gift of accountability that keeps on giving. In another email released today, this one between Epstein and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard alum Lawrence Summers, Epstein writes, “I have met some very bad people, none as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.”

This clearly begs the question—what kind of lowlife sick fuck do you have to be for one of the worst criminal scumbags in all of history to describe you in such damning terms?

3.

THIS KIND OF LOWLIFE SICK FUCK
Trump has petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the 2023 verdict against him in which he was found liable for raping and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. The orange piece of shit appealed the judgment and lost. A second jury in January 2024 awarded Carroll an additional $83.3 million for separate defamatory statements Trump made about her during his first term as president in 2019. The Biggest Loser appealed this and lost, too. Trump has reportedly paid both judgments into escrow pending appeal, or—a more accurate way to state this would be that Trump’s inbred, mouth-breathing, cousin-fucking MAGA base paid both judgments into escrow because, to this day, multiple times per day, Trump still sends fundraising emails out to his loyal cult members, and they still give him their money like the poorly educated, gullible marks they are.

4.

NOTHING BUT SNAKES AND WEASELS
Senate Republicans snuck a provision into the government funding bill that would allow eight GOP senators—and only senators, not House members—to sue the federal government for $500k each because Jack Smith subpoenaed their phone records during the January 6 investigation. The provision applies exclusively to Senate Republicans, which is the only reason House Speaker and porn accountability partner to his own son, Mike Johnson, is acting to reverse it.

Senator Lindsey Graham has already publicly stated he plans to take advantage of the provision and sue the government for “much more” than $500k. If Johnson successfully removes this self-dealing clause, he’ll have to answer to Graham and the seven other unscrupulous worms—Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, Tommy Tuberville, Bill Hagerty, Dan Sullivan, and Cynthia Lummis—who wrote themselves this taxpayer-funded payday.

The self-dealing and corruption would be shocking were it not for the desensitization brought on by Trump’s incessant violations of law, ethics, and basic human decency.

5.

THE EIGHT WHO SEALED OUR FATE

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history ended Wednesday night when Dumpy Pants signed legislation in the Oval Office while doing his usual bash job on Democrats.

“Today we are sending a clear message that we will never give in to extortion, because that’s what it was,” Trump said, speaking like the Supreme Bully of the Republican Party that he is.

[Insert exaggerated eye-roll + simulated jerk-off motion here.]

Meanwhile, the opposition consists of spineless cowards who caved to GOP demands, like Angus King (I-ME), who literally went on television and uttered the phrase, “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work.”

What kind of fucking pathetic, weakling-ass bitch do you have to be to say those words out loud on national television? For fuck’s sake, King—even if this were true, which it isn’t, standing up was working; it worked for 43 days until you gutless chickenshits caved—but still, you don’t say…that. Unbelievable.

So, I want to wish a $300 million ballroom-sized fuck you to:

Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Dick Durbin (D-IL), John Fetterman (D-PA), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH).

Especially fuck that turncoat dickhead John Fetterman.

I’m amazed but unfazed by the mind-numbing stupidity of the goons we’ve managed to elect. This is (one of many reasons) why we can’t have nice things.

Right now, I’m going for the ibuprofen and antacids. You want some?

One year down, many more to go…
Zappa

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Dear resisters of wannabe Hitlers,

I believe Substack has shadow-banned me, and I’m speaking out in my defense.

First, in case you don’t know, shadow-banning is a moderation practice where a platform like Substack blocks or restricts a user’s account or their content from being visible to others without notifying the user that the restriction occurred.

The user can still see their posts, and occasionally the user’s subscribers will see their posts, but users who don’t already follow the shadow-banned account will not see the shadow-banned account or its content in searches, discovery feeds, or topic pages, greatly limiting reach and visibility to new audiences. Shadow banning operates through algorithmic suppression rather than an outright account suspension. When shadow banned, your account remains technically active, but the platform may assign lower visibility scores to your content, resulting in reduced audience reach.

Gonzo Report turns one year old next week. I guess time flies when you’re busy making friends and fighting fascism. From day one, I’ve been one of the loudest—and most unapologetically profane—voices on Substack in the fight against Trump and the fascist takeover of America.

In the first six months, from November 2024 to May 2025, I saw tremendous growth—often seeing several hundred new subscribers join in a single week. By the end of winter, I was already approaching 100 paid subscribers—6k subscribers in total.

After several consecutive months of sustained growth, I shifted my focus entirely to Gonzo Report, stepping away from other revenue-generating projects. The timing felt perfect—this new project I was passionate about had become a full-time income source, while the work I was leaving behind had made me miserable. I was looking for a way out but had no idea my passion project would be my exit strategy. It seemed like a win-win.

Of course, that was when the bottom dropped out.

I went from November 2024 to April 2025, gaining more than a dozen new paid subscribers (and hundreds of free subscribers) each month, to 2 paid subscribers in May, 1 in June, 1 in July, 1 in August, zero in September, 1 in October, and 1 in November so far.

I went from hundreds of free subscribers every week to having a total of 46 new free subscribers in the last 90 days.

I have been categorically erased.

If growth was initially a strong, steady heartbeat, it’s now a static, lifeless flatline.

The platform that once helped me reach and connect with others by speaking openly, honestly, and defiantly is instead, quite obviously, trying to bury me.

Gonzo Report is my expression of protest—it’s how I fight back. Keeping up with amphetamine-fueled fascists is hard fucking work, but the only thing I love more than doing this is getting paid to do this. My work here became my way of earning a living, allowing me to provide for my family while simultaneously fighting lies with truth, railing against the most evil and insidious movement I will ever see in my lifetime.

To go from explosive growth to nose-diving, stagnant silence almost overnight has me convinced that someone at Substack with political motives engineered a campaign of censorship against me and other political writers like my friend .

They don’t want dissenting voices to be heard, much less fairly compensated. But this isn’t just censorship—it’s wanton sabotage.

In hindsight, my biggest mistake was not speaking up about this sooner. Admittedly, I hesitated to criticize the very platform that had been elevating and promoting my work. Instead, I assumed that I must be experiencing an odd yet likely temporary algorithmic glitch. Several months later, I now see something more nefarious at play—something intentional, designed to force writers like me to choose between speaking out and struggling to survive.

I believe in myself. I believe in the work I’m doing here. And I know there are several thousand amazing people who’ve subscribed and supported me because they believe in me, too. But the extended, sustained suppression of my work these past months has resulted in extreme financial hardship, necessitating extensive pivoting on my part—hence my inability to maintain a regular publishing schedule over the late summer months.

Gig work is thankless and demoralizing, where even the poverty wages you earn are algorithmically dictated; still, I’ve had to resort to this recently. I’m primarily committed, as I should be, to providing for my family, but my secondary-level commitment is to my work here and to earning the subscription cost my paid readers so generously contribute every month. Striking the necessary balance here feels impossible, and trying to juggle everything leaves me sleepless and exhausted.

So, why write about all of this now?

Because this is my reality, and I realized that what first drew readers to Gonzo Report was my brutal honesty. People were drawn to me, my voice, the guy behind the angry screeds. I wasn’t breaking headlines or dropping exclusive scoops. I was just this guy who cared about people and their freedom, trying to inform others about what’s happening while expressing Everest amounts of righteous outrage and indignation.

No matter what the future holds—whether I gain or lose readers, whether I end up imprisoned in some goddamn CIA black site, or drop dead from exhaustion—the greatest gift I received from doing this will always be the friends I’ve made along the way. I’ll never forget the love, support, and encouragement you’ve given me, and I’ll never be able to thank you enough for that.

One of my strongest personality traits is that I’m stubborn as hell—so, unless I end up imprisoned or dead, I’m not going anywhere. I will keep pounding my head against this wall, day after day, maintaining belief in myself and hope that something eventually changes for the better—for me and for all of us. As long as I’m alive, I’ll be here calling out the bastards, pulling no punches, and giving zero fucks.

Old punks never die—they just buy more comfortable boots.

If this reaches you, please help however you can—a paid subscription (or even a free one), a one-time donation, a repost, a share, a like—literally anything will help tremendously. And if you know someone at Substack who’s willing to look into what the fuck happened to my growth back in May/June 2025, please reach out.

Most of all, your response to this post will show that even overwhelming oppression cannot silence or erase independent journalists on Substack or elsewhere. Anyone who speaks out now faces great personal risk. But standing on the right side of history is the only place I ever want to be.

Fuck the fascists.

Thanks for reading, for standing with me, and for helping out however you can.

Gratefully yours,
Zappa