As we all know, the big story last week was the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dropping the revelation of that cringy birthday letter and drawing Trump sent to Epstein. The news of that broke on Wed July 17th. Trump of course sued them for $10 Billion.
The WSJ had it all gamed out. They expected the lawsuit and were ready with more.
Meanwhile you-know-who has been cranking up “Obama Treason” BS to try and distract (more on that below). Then, just when you think it has all been forgotten, on Wed July 23rd this week the WSJ brought it all back into focus with a second story, one that reports that in May 2025, Trump was personally briefed—by Attorney General Pam Bondi—about his name appearing multiple times in DOJ files related to Epstein.
Yikes, no wonder he wants to distract everybody and keep it all suppressed. As for his response to the second WSJ story, well you know his playbook, Don the Con did his usual thing of declaring it “Fake News”.
Will the WSJ have more?
The whisper on the street is that they have a third story lined up and it is apparently a real bombshell.
Shutting down the House to stop “Release Epstein Files” votes
House Republicans are deeply terrified of voting to release the Epstein files so MAGA Mike is sending them all home early for the summer …
Hot Political Tip: If your political party just shut down the entire government to protect a pedophile, newsflash, you are NOT in the political party that is concerned about pedophilia.
The Epstein Distract-a-thon – Targeting Obama with made up BS
Trump has been frantically promoting a totally bogus claim against Obama (and Fox News is vigorously striving to get the MAGA mob to gravitate to this as an Epstein distraction).
His “Irrefutable Proof” is indeed pure unadulterated bovine waste.
Whatever Trump did to kids—and to be clear, the allegation, which you can watch on video from at least one accuser, is Child Rape—it’s serious enough that he’s now considering arresting and seeking the execution of a former POTUS to distract from it.
Meanwhile Obama Claps back (Hell yea) …
The projection in play is literally off the charts …
Joe Heller – (Joe also says, “Apologies to The Stones“)
Doing a deal with Maxwell
What we know is that Trump’s personal lawyer has been having multiple meetings with Maxwell. Ron’s speculation below is quite distinctly possible. The conflict of interest in play here is on the scale of the Grand Canyon …
If you want the truth, then it might be worth remembering that the credible sources are the victims, not the person serving time for trafficking them, and potentially willing to do anything for a pardon.
Can we at least all agree a Ghislaine pardon would be a confession right? www.thedailybeast.com/why-donald-t…
- “Jeffrey Epstein was a sick pedophile. But she (Maxwell) was the mastermind.” -Virginia Giuffre, 2020
- For details see link here to victim statements from her trial in 2022.
- Trump’s corrupt DOJ is most probably going to put out a statement full of lies by sex trafficker Maxwell who is trying to get out of prison, while refusing to release the statements of the victims and witnesses which would prove she’s lying. DOJ is now siding with sex traffickers over victims.
Ron also nails it with this …
Now they are trying to whitewash the reputation of Trump’s Hail Mary, Ghislaine Maxwell…
What we are all now learning is this – the best way to make a deal to get out of a child sex trafficking conviction is to have one of your clients get elected president …
Clay Jones – What’s in it for Ghislaine?
Multiple layers of Lunacy and utter incompetence
CNN: “FEMA Search & Rescue chief resigns after frustration with the Texas flood response + Trump’s efforts to dismantle the agency… unable to quickly mobilize critical resources in the first hours of the flood…” www.cnn.com/2025/07/21/p…
The raw stupidity of their Tariffs and Trade deals – US manufacturers are screwed, and now Toyota has a huge financial advantage.
- GM might as well buy Toyotas manufactured in Japan and re-badge them, it would be a lot cheaper.
While we kick our own companies out of lucrative markets like Brazil because of our stupid tariffs, China is rushing in to take our place. The 21st century will be a Chinese century. And it’s all our own fault …
Full impact looming …
Alternative argument: It’s not cognitive decline, he has always been this stupid …
- The Environmental Protection Agency has come up with a plan on how to avoid protecting the environment! – This is beyond absurd and lethally dangerous!
- I can’t wrap my head around the sheer dumb assery of this.. and every thing else the regime is doing. It’s mind boggling.
- Meanwhile the NYT framing is quite frankly dire. A ‘scientific finding’ can’t be repealed. The finding is being discarded, scrapped, trashed.
“Worries!!!”, she was explicitly warned, but opted to believe the lies, and she had the decisive vote, so now her state reaps the consequences …
- She literally voted for this.
- You know how this political cosplay works. Murkowski is always “worried.” Susan is always “concerned.” and so they keep getting votes despite them voting for utter lunacy that is directly attacking the interests of those that vote for them … every single damn time.
- There is a long list of Republican senators who signed a letter to Trump last week urging him to unfreeze congressionally approved education funding, They appear to forget that this is what they all voted for.
- She’s a day late and a dollar short. She had her chance to do the right thing and she refused. Now, she must suffer the consequences of her actions/inactions.
Trade “Deals”?
- Trump deals: Many nations have figured out that they just need to nod in front of the camera with Trump, and then do nothing.
Corruption
Enabling corporate corruption …
Paul Waldman on @SenatorHagerty’s GENIUS act: “It’s a story of the remarkable power of money in politics, and of presidential corruption on a scale that not long ago was unimaginable.” www.publicnotice.co/p/genius-act…
ICE Gestapo updates
GUARDIAN: “Migrants at a Miami immigration ICE jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates ‘like dogs’…” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025…
@kerrykennedy.bsky.social : “Why is our government treating these men and women with such contempt and cruelty? One reason is George Group is a private prison company… ICE Detention centers must be shut down, not invested in.”
Gaza Genocide
The entire GAZA population is being deliberately starved, it is literally part of an on-going Genocide that is being committed by Israel …
Dismantling the BS (Full thread is here) …
Hey, do you remember that previous Israeli claim was that Hamas stole all the food – they now admit that claim was total fiction …
War Crimes are happening and being witnessed …
- Article link here
- Quote …
…Speaking to the BBC in an interview on Friday, Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Aguilar said he had never seen such “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population”.
“I’ve never witnessed that in all the places I’ve been deployed to war, until I was in Gaza at the hands of the [Israeli forces] and US contractors,” he said.
“Without question, I witnessed war crimes by the Israeli Defense Forces, without a doubt. Using artillery rounds, mortar rounds, firing tank rounds into unarmed civilians is a war crime.”
Aguilar, who is a veteran of the US Army’s Green Berets, said he saw Israeli troops and US contractors firing live ammunition, artillery, mortar rounds and tank shells at starving, unarmed Palestinians awaiting aid. …
One last rather important point – It is not antisemitism to tell someone that they have descended into barbarity, even if they are Jewish.
Christian Nationalists
The nuttier right-wing religious fanatics within the MAGA cult are as always doing their thing.
Each and every week, you are more or less guaranteed to see them promote deeply weird stuff. Below are a few samples from the past week…
- Christian nationalist pastor Leon Benjamin claims the Founding Fathers guaranteed the freedom of religion in order to prove to those of other faiths that Christianity is the one true religion. — (It’s such a shame that we don’t have reams of documents from the Founding Fathers refuting this specifically … Oh wait)
- Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith supports rape exceptions to anti-choice laws provided the rapist is charged with murder for the ensuing abortion: “Carry out justice on that man for … bringing an innocent life into the world and then ending that life.” — (Fact Check: Abortion is not murder … legally, ethically, or morally, being opposed to it is Catholic belief that Evangelicals adopted in the late 1970s as a means to motivate political involvement when they lost the racial segregation battle – see here)
- MAGA Pastor Joshua Haymes claimed this past week that “the First amendment was designed to ensure that every American can be any kind of CHRISTIAN he wants”: “It was not designed to ensure every American has the right to publicly worship demons. False religion should can and should be banned from public life.” — (To quote the 1790 Washington letter to the Touro Synagogue, the government “gives to bigotry no sanction” and “to persecution no assistance.” … which I suspect is rather bad news for bigots like Mr Haymes)
- Fascist Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon says that anyone who votes for a “foreigner” like Zohran Mamdani or Vivek Ramaswamy is “a traitor to God and country.” — (Just like GOP Jesus said, “Curse them who vote for foreigners“. He is not the only one to believe this weird BS. The actual border crises we now face is the one between the church and the state)
- MAGA pastor Jackson Lahmeyer says Obama must be arrested and imprisoned for life. Oh, and he also should have his passport revoked before he’s able to flee to an Islamic country: “This is a smooth criminal.” — (The only actual “crime” that Obama is guilty of is that he is far superior to the orange turd intellectually and morally by literally every single measure, and is also not white. Side Note: When he ran for election in 2022, even deeply red and deeply religious Oklahoma gave a very robust “Absolutely no way” after they took one sniff of all Lahmeyer’s BS in the primary).
- Pastor Rob McCoy declares that any pastor that didn’t instruct their congregation to vote for Trump will “stand before God and account for that”: “It’s criminal.” — (Reminder: A vote for Trump is a vote for a guy who is literally a criminal convicted in a court of law on both sexual assault and also 34 other felonies)
- Self-appointed “prophet” Lance Wallnau speculates that President Donald Trump’s diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency was caused by “that dang Covid vaccine.” — (Weird how nobody else who was vaccinated also got this diagnosis. Meanwhile for the curious, the actual cause is age, genetics, obesity, inactivity, and long periods of standing)
- Ryan Helfenbein lays out the biblical “case for mass deportations“: “When you import people from certain parts of the Third World, you’re bringing in paganism.” — (What does the Bible actually say God says? Just this – “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” — Leviticus 19:34 (NIV))
- Joshua Haymes thinks that “at our Nation’s founding, it would’ve been unthinkable to elect someone to public office who was openly non-Christian”: “Our founders were right.” — (The truth is the complete opposite. They literally wrote “no religious tests for public office” into the FOUNDING document, and were deeply opposed to religious rule. Also worth mentioning that most founders were not Christian, but Deists)
- Trump sycophant and a supposedly “Christian Intellectual” Eric Metaxas insists that the Trump administration’s Obama/Russia conspiracy theory is “literally the biggest scandal, political scandal, in American history”: “Nothing comes close. Watergate is not five percent of this. I’m not exaggerating.” — (Eric knows he is lying, it is the multiple commenters under it praining him in the name of Jesus that are the people to worry about. The phrase “delusional fanatics” encapsulates it all rather well)
- David Barton, the alpha source for a lot of Christian mythology, once again proved that he regularly has no idea what he is talking about when he praised the Trump administration for mediating a peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Barton claimed that “Rwanda is heavily Sharia Muslim and the Democratic Republic of Congo is heavily Christian” which regularly resulted in “big massacres of Christians.” — (This is Barton, so it more or less can be assumed he is spouting disinformation, and yes, sure enough, none of it is true.)
These next few are from our favourite well-known felon (the preacher who went to jail for insurance fraud). What he proclaimed this past week truly deserves a spotlight for mockery …
- MAGA pastor Shane Vaughn seized on the Trump administration’s Obama/Russia conspiracy theory to claim that Obama’s entire presidency was part of a plan by a group of fallen angels known as “The Watchers” to corrupt mankind — (Yes, he grabbed hold of Trump’s manufactured BS, and used it as a foundation to build an even more bizarre monument composed of bricks of pure BS. You don’t have to be insane to be MAGA but…actually, yeah, you do if you are in the market to seriously buy into this)
- MAGA cultist Shane Vaughn was also openly calling on Trump to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, bizarrely claiming that in seeking a pardon from Trump, Maxwell is proving that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein. (See his “logic” here professortoto.substack.com/p/ghislaine-… )— (As for his “reasoning”, there are only three parts to a syllogism and he still fucks it up, as he attempts to push for a convicted sex trafficker to be pardoned)
Then again, when it comes to crackpottery, Shane has some stiff competition, such as this guy …
- Claiming to have a source close to high-level Trump administration figures, QAnon conspiracy theorist Scott McKay reports that Hillary Clinton was executed at Guantanamo in 2018, there were 5 or 6 different people playing the role of Joe Biden, and the “fake Obama” is going to be arrested soon. — (We don’t just have a disinformation crises, we have a mental health crises).
For this next one, I’ve also separated it out because the hypocrisy in play is truly Olympic Class …
- Religious-right leaders are OK with Trump’s corruption and cruelty, but they can’t stand a TV show that treats a gay couple and their kids as a family — (Further context: Chip and Joanna Gaines, built a large TV following with “Fixer Upper,” a reality show about home renovation that featured their family and their Christian faith. The Gaines have produced a new show, “Back to the Frontier,” which follows the travails of three families as they give up modern conveniences to live for a month as if they were 19th century homesteaders. One of the families is a gay couple, and the religious right are freaking out about it).
Weirdest of the Weird
Michele Bachmann, who did “weird” long before it became official GOP policy, declared this past week that President Donald Trump is governing “in a way that is following one biblical pattern after another,” which is why “Satan wants him dead.“
- The only, and I really do mean “only”, biblical pattern that Trump conforms to is that he has “known” rather a lot of women in the Biblical sense of the word “know”, and some of them were rather young? (If you are truly not sure about that, then here is a handy little list that links to rather a lot of robust and highly credible evidence).
- It truly is bizarre to see not just Bachmann, but also so many other Evangelical “Christians” frantically supporting a guy who very publicly is working his way through the Ten Commandments as his personal bucket list. It tells you rather a lot about the true depths of their own personal moral depravity, and their willingness to sacrifice literally all the teachings of Jesus in exchange for power and influence.
Extremist incel Nick Fuentes encouraged this past week white men to aspire to greatness, like Ted Kaczynski, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin: “We are dangerous. We are fearsome. We are a martial race.“
- The three names on his list are indeed well known, not for a good reason, but because they were all psychopaths. So what exactly is Nick telling us about himself here via his public declaration that these are the people he considers to be his group?
Even More Political Cartoons from the past week
As always, there are many excellent cartoons, and so here are a few more.
Media Sane-washing of Tyranny
Media pandering to a tyrant simply leads to more tyranny …
Paramount gets its merger with Skydance, and the Trump regime says it has been given assurances CBS News coverage will be acceptable to Dear Leader Translation: South Park was on target. We are over the cliff here y’all. www.nbcnews.com/business/bus…
This next one exposes yet another Hannity lie (and yes, dropping “Fox News” into a section about the media is indeed a huge stretch, given that they only do propaganda and not actual News. It is however important to illustrate just how decoupled they are from “truth”)
- Pumping out a constant torrent of completely manufactured BS via outlets like Fox News is why we are in the mess we are now in.
Perpetual Reminder that sometimes Actions really do have consequences
- Quote: “The principle here is truth,” the Macrons’ lawyer Thomas Clare, co-founder of defamation specialist firm Clare Locke, told the Financial Times. “They believe it’s important to stand up for themselves . . . Owens has had multiple opportunities to do the right thing and in response she has only mocked them.” He said the French president and first lady were willing to travel to Delaware to appear in person for the trial.
Mehdi’s Jubilee Exchange with MAGA extremists
Journalist Mehdi Hasan did a star-chamber style debate with 20 right-wing extremist MAGA conservatives. It is literally a joy to behold as he proceeded to expose their lunacy.
If anybody is going to enter into a debate like this then Mehdi is the guy to do it, because he literally wrote to the book on how to debate, and so he came with all the receipts and exposed the extremism that has now gone mainstream.
Jubilee also fact-check in real-time. Each and every time Mehdi cited a name or statistic, a banner pops up on the right confirming that he is indeed correct, he really does know his stuff, and can cite it all off the top of his head without any notes.
His strategy is one where he simply asks questions and then lets them proceed to hang themselves with their own words.
Side note: Mehdi did not pick the participants, Jubilee did, and they did not warn him just how extreme they were. He later comments as follows on it all …
“I thought it would be an interesting exercise in trying to understand what genuine far-right conservative folks think. And it was kind of disturbing to see that they think what I thought they think, and they were happy to say it out loud. I am disappointed that I had to sit across from people who believe in white genocide, who believe I’m not a citizen. … The people here today were way beyond conservative.”
Here is a quick teaser …
… and another …
One of the 20 exposed himself as a rather blatant Fascist and when asked if he was a Fascist, he was quite delighted to confirm on camera in front of millions “Yea, I am”. Later this past week he claimed that ended up getting fired for those views, so he went to the Christian website GiveSendGo to grift. To illustrate just how mainstream this extremism has become, on the “Christian” website, he has raised rather a lot of $$$ for being a Fascist from other Christians…
Here is the interaction that he claims got him fired …
But hey, guess what, it would appear that Connor did not get fired for his appearance in the debate. It turns out that he was also claiming that he was fired back in January (released as a subcontractor), and so his plea for money is most probably a total con — Daily Kos did a deep dive a few days ago and came back with the receipts and verified that he was a …
Subcontractor cloud engineer at VeUP, November 2024 to January 2025. VeUP confirms: Released by a core contractor, not them directly. No tie to the video.
So did he ever actually get fired or is it all just a con. Actual evidence that he was ever fired from anything is just him claiming it, so no I do not believe him.
Polarized crowds love a martyr story, and so the gullible supporters that he is manipulating will donate while critics fume. In summary, he got lots of help from many media outlets that ran with “Man fired for political views“, without validating or fact-checking anything.
The full 100 min debate has gone viral (as it should), and so here it is up on YouTube …
Finally
This South Park take on Trump is truly wild. If he sees it, it will drive him nuts …
