I come from a working class family. I grew up watching my father struggle, often working two jobs, just to make poverty level wages. He’d come home with calloused hands stained with oil and grease, and would be too tired to play with his kids. My mother was a full-time homemaker, with 6 kids, and she worked just as hard — and later, when I was in high school, she also took on a full time job. They both worked at Boeing, a capricious employer, that would lay them off if they didn’t get a contract one year, and then they’d have to scramble to find new jobs. They managed to keep us kids fed and clothed, but I don’t know how, as I managed to crawl up to the middle class, and I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the stress and responsibility of just 3 kids.

And that is why I can never support any Republican, and way too many Democrats, because they’re the ones making the smug statements Zinn describes here.

Throw the rascals out in November.

This sounds like a fascinating, factual documentary.

Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s 4-hour documentary about Elon Musk may be the most important film of the year. After the first two hours, audiences will learn that he is better at engineering everything around him to suit his ego and his bank account than he is at engineering his many products. We see the damage he has inflicted, including horrific dash-cam footage of fatal accidents involving self-driving cars. Many who watch it will be rattled but consider it as remote if they don’t buy a Tesla or have stock in SpaceX.

The second two hours are when it gets really scary, because that is when audiences learn how he affects every one of our lives, in the United States and throughout the world. Gibney asks, “How could Musk assume so much power and why had we given it to him?”

Musk hates it. What’s really scary, though, and demonstrates the chilling effect billionaires have on our lives, is that it’s already being censored.

The documentary is facing more than a war of words from Musk, however. The film’s distributor, Bleecker Street, has not been able to run paid advertisements on several major social media platforms. As of Sept. 25, YouTube, Meta, TikTok and X had all refused. YouTube, where the trailer had been available through regular channels, and Meta have since reversed course, saying that it had been flagged for “political content.”

There are also concerns about whether “Musk” will eventually land on HBO as originally planned in the aftermath of the Skydance merger, the new entertainment giant created by Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. CEO David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, is friendly with Musk.

WOoooOOOOOooooo! Who needs Hallowe’en when the ghouls have taken over?

If that’s just too depressing for you, here’s a comic to cheer you up.

Oh, what a happy fantasy!

(There’s a whole series of anti-billionaire comics at that site. Expect the creator to be censored soon.)

Trump has been raging against Ilhan Omar for years, and now he has had her home raided…on suspicion of what? It’s not at all clear. There was no reason to think a sitting congressperson was somehow involved in any kind of criminal activity, and no evidence of such has been presented. It’s nothing but targeted harassment driven by a fat old pig’s bigotry.

And Ohio crowd chanted “deport” as President Donald Trump blasted Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., during a campaign rally speech on Monday night.

Trump held the rally in Youngstown, Ohio, just hours after federal agents executed a search warrant on Omar’s home in relation to a criminal investigation.

Trump took aim at Omar and the wider Somali community in Minnesota.

“She’s a disaster. She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military. All they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and she says, ‘I have a constitutional right,'” Trump joked. “She’s got a constitutional right. She’s telling us about the Constitution and she’s coming from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet.”

That’s the real reason for the raid: he just hates all people from a country in Africa. This is criminal prejudice and an abuse of federal law enforcement for a partisan purpose. Arrest Trump, not Omar.

I’m not in her district, but if I were, after this I’d be even more committed to voting for her, and I’m also more committed to seeing Trump impeached. It’s too bad congress is stacked with corrupt and stupid Republicans so that won’t happen.

He should have been gone after this blatant criminality.

The President is shit-talking Minnesota again. He really hates us.

Somali immigrants are a tiny minority here, the ones I’ve met have all been good citizens, and no, I can look out the window and read the local newspapers and see a generally small amount of Violence, Murder, and Mayhem. As for our governor, that’s just projection — we all know which executive is raking in billions from corruption, and who has handed out billions to his own children. I think the only person viewing Minnesotans as “weak and stupid” is the guy whose brownshirts were run out of town by our resistance.

Do MAGAs actually believe what’s coming out of Trump’s colon? I’m sure some of them do, but a lot are beginning to resist. Did you know that Ben Shapiro’s hack propaganda company, the Daily Wire, is trying to make a tasteless pro-ICE movie in Montana?

The film blends a fictionalized depiction of the Renee Good shooting in Minneapolis in January with a narrative centered on armed shopkeepers defending a store from Antifa rioters, including dialogue in the script referencing “rooftop Koreans” firing from a grocery store roof.

The cinematic tension on set was quickly mirrored by real-world friction in downtown Livingston, where residents began staging demonstrations against the production over its controversial themes, unannounced gun-toting stunts and street closures disrupting local businesses and organizations.

There is no way they could make such a movie in Minnesota, so they’re filming in Montana…and Montanans are having none of it. I am aware that Montana citizens have a strong independent streak, but they also tend to be conservative, and they’re protesting ICE propaganda.

I will be interested to see how the Daily Wire can turn a scene involving black-clad masked men with guns against unarmed citizens into a heroic representation of ICE. Probably by lying a lot, like any Republican.

Last week, social media (at least, that side I’m interested in) was buzzing with hilarity at a conference announcement. The Kairos Christian Alliance had proudly advertised a weekend event, titled “Muscular Christianity”, and just the title was enough to clue everyone in on what it was going to be about: a domineering religion full of tough guys who were going to put women, Muslims, and brown people in their place. Little did we expect how cartoonish these people were going to be until we saw the poster.

It was going to be a bunch of white male dweebs strutting around, thumping their chests. These were all losers, and I hadn’t heard of most of them, except for Sean Davis, who was a founder of The Federalist, so I didn’t post anything. It looked predictably stupid. I figured I’d wait until after the conference and look for some reviews.

There weren’t any. This conference wasn’t at all newsworthy.

However, someone did an analysis of the speakers. She goes through each of the men on that poster, and they were, without exception, deplorable Christian nationalists who hate immigrants and think women should shut up, stay home, and take care of the kids. Follow that link if you’re curious about who they are.

For instance, David Schrock:

Conspiracy theories are also at the heart of some of the scheduled speakers, especially with David Schrock. Schrock is the editor in chief of Christ Over All. His X feed is filled with how to minister to Muslims, critical analysis of Islam and anti-Sharia laws in America, anti-vaccine posts, concerns that the church is too effeminate, and celebrations of the Southern Baptist Convention further restrictions on women in pastoral roles.

They’re all that pathetic. For a short summary of the whole group, consult this revised poster:

And here’s a more serious summary:

What we find in the speakers under the misleading title of muscular Christianity, is instead a MAGA Christian nationalism, whose men are the victims of progress, feminism, LGBTQ2SA, and democrats. The speakers are a convergence of conspiracy, racism, hate, extremism, and anti-LGBTQ2SA, hoping to mobilize Christian men to support their metapolitical movement. In the past when we have dismissed these movements it has been to the detriment of society, as distasteful as these groups are, they are having an impact. We may make fun of them, we may meme their posts, but we have to be aware and respond to them.

We do have to closer eye on these people, because the media won’t do it for us. These are jokers who have managed to work their way up into the highest levels of power.

Tommy Tuberville gave a 20 minute speech in which he claimed that furries were sick psychos who were flying passenger planes, and that all transgender people should be locked up in mental institutions.

Many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community, Tuberville said sternly. Lord help us.

It’s terrifying when you think about this, he continued. When you walk on to a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.

I think all airlines have a dress code for their crews that involves wearing a uniform. He’s wrong and is lying.

I am not all concerned about someone, in their free time, choosing to wear clothing that makes them happy, even if it doesn’t conform to conventional social expectations. They are not insane.

I’m more concerned about the lunatics who drag their weird, unfalsifiable, untestable and authoritarian religious beliefs into the public square, where they try to use them to oppress other peoples’ freedoms.

Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama, and is doing well in the polls. I’m sorry, Alabamians, you are confirming all the offensive stereotypes about your state.

I’ve been on TPUSA’s Professor Watchlist since 2016, and I was quite proud to be mentioned on Charlie Kirk’s hate list. All the best people are on it, you know.

Kirk created the Professor Watchlist 10 years ago on Turning Point USA’s website. Users were able to search college professors based on themes including “racial ideology,” “LGBTQ” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

According to a video on the website describing the watchlist, “The Professor Watchlist uncovers the most radical left wing professors from universities that are known to suppress the conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”

Sadly, it has been taken down.

But this month, the News4 I-Team found the Professor Watchlist had been taken down. Why is unclear, as no one from Turning Point USA is saying.

Also unfortunately, I never bothered to make a copy of my entry, so I don’t remember exactly what it said. It never really had any impact on me, but some people described the annoyance of the harassment they received.

For 10 years, the watchlist remained online, and the News4 I-Team spoke with local professors who said they were greatly impacted once their names were added to it.

Earlier this year, the I-Team spoke to Professor Bethany Letiecq with George Mason University, who said she received harassing and threatening messages on social media after she appearing on the list.

Letiecq recalled when it began: “It was shortly after I published a piece in March, February, March of 2024, and it got picked up by the alt-right media, and it was distorted in sort of a rage bait-y kind of way.”

Letiecq said the harassment she faced moved offline into her everyday life.

“That started just this bombardment of, you know, social media hits that were incredibly vitriolic and quite gross. I started getting emails to my work, voicemails to my work phone, calls for my firing […] and then I received several death threats,” she said.

I got a few nasty emails, which I still get anyway, but that was about it. A few student TPUSA members at UMM accused me of stealing their terrible student paper, which didn’t happen and for which there wasn’t and couldn’t be any evidence, and that prompted a bored campus police officer to ask me questions. There was no concern expressed by my colleagues or administrators.

The whole list was stupid, petty, and ineffective. Maybe TPUSA took it down because it was a reminder that Charlie Kirk was also stupid, petty, and ineffective.