I am old enough to remember when we used to take pity on risible weirdos inappropriately wailing in public and making wild and creepy threats.
Now, we elevate them to become top officials and celebrate their nuttery.
Well, not all of us.
I’m done with trying to read some sense of normalcy or cogency into the antics of the shrinking tribe of right-wing radicals stymied by a nation that pushes back at their attempts to radicalize others.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Republican Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles said in a social media post over the weekend.
When critics called him out for his preposterous bigotry, almost none of them fellow Republicans, he doubled down.
“Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back,” he said.
Go back? Back where? Millions of Muslims were born here, and those who weren’t are every bit American as the rest of us.
He’s not the lone voice of howling racism and insanity at the U.S. Capitol.
“The enemy is inside our gates,” Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville wrote Thursday in response to a photo of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sitting on the ground during an iftar dinner at New York City Hall, the Associated Press reported. The photo was joined with a historical photo of the Sept. 11 attacks.
It drew immediate outrage from critics pointing out how sick and dangerous such white supremacy is.
So Tuberville doubled down.
“To be clear, I didn’t ‘suggest’ Islamists are the enemy,” Tuberville posted on social media. “I said it plainly.”
In case you forgot, that kind of crazy crap endangered the lives of millions of Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks, including thousands here in the Aurora area.
It’s part of a recurring vile and false narrative that impugns our Muslim neighbors the exact same way German Nazis accosted the Jews.
But the nuttery doesn’t stop there.
On Friday, a federal judge in Washington quashed subpoenas sent to the Federal Reserve issued by Trump-FoxNews Department of Just Us anchor Jeanine Pirro.
The order, by Judge James Boasberg, is the latest in the Trump reality revenge show against anyone he doesn’t like or who doesn’t do what he wants. Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump appointed, has told the president on many occasions to suck eggs when it comes to lowering federal interest rates just because the smartest man in the White House ever says to.
Exasperated by laws and regulations meant to protect the nation against presidential whims, and presidents like Trump, he dreamed up a faux scandal about cost overruns for remodeling the Fed headquarters.
Pretending to be serious, like she did on Fox News, Pirro took the empty suitcase to a grand jury, which issued a “subpoena” for details.
Boasberg called it out for the dangerous and disingenuous farce that it is.
At a press conference Friday, Pirro lost her crap when reporters pressed her for these things called “details” and “evidence,” and she started yelling about how her cast of characters in her office are pressing charges against everyone for everything, everywhere, even though the grand jury keeps returning endless no true bills or the courts just call her a quack.
She doesn’t mention that the American justice system calls her behavior out as unconscionable, citing that pesky “reasonable doubt” and “whole truth” thing underlying our court system.
But wait, there’s more.
Pirro is the same former FoxNews crackpot who tried to press charges against Aurora Democratic Congressperson Jason Crow and five other veterans of the military and federal intelligence
A grand jury in Washington refused to indict Crow and other Democratic lawmakers in connection with a video in which they urged U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders.”
“Donald Trump’s DOJ just tried — and failed — to indict me in front of a grand jury,” Crow said last month. “Americans should be furious that Trump and his goons tried to weaponize our justice system again against his political opponents. His attempts to intimidate and silence us will always fail.”
Grand jury rejections very unusual but have happened repeatedly in recent months in DC as jurors who have heard the government’s evidence have come away “underwhelmed in a number of cases,” the AP reported after they agreed there was no true bill from yet another Pirro farce.
Trump’s FBI chief Kash Patel in November began harassing Crow and other lawmakers while Trump’s toadies ramped up efforts to punish political opponents of the president. Trump and his pals said a video release was “seditious” — and Trump said on his social media account that the offense was “punishable by death.”
Pistol Pete Hegseth, another flaming Fox Newster, was shocked, shocked and dismayed that Crow and other military veterans would dare to imply that an administration that previously incited the Jan. 6 insurrection and then worked endlessly to undermine bringing the criminal participants to justice would have anything to do with directing members of the military toward committing any kind of crime or unethical behavior.
So, you knew this was coming.
Speaking during a Pentagon press conference Friday about the Iran war, Hegseth told reporters, the U.S. is advancing against Iran and will “keep pressing, we will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy.”
Rim shot.
The “no quarter” red flag is a well-known war crime.
What it refers to is when soldiers or armies push their enemies into an untenable situation, ending in surrender, but the “winners” kill them anyway. If that sounds eerily like when Hegseth told military personnel who had shot and sunk a ship in the Caribbean on Sept. 2, 2025 to “kill everyone,” that’s exactly what it is, a ghastly war crime.
If the Secretary of War doesn’t know the meaning and gravity of “no quarter,” he shouldn’t be secretary. If he does, and floated the idea that soldiers would be ordered to commit war crimes, he needs to be court martialled before he endangers the careers and lives of U.S. military personnel under his command.
“An order to give no quarter is a war crime,” Crow said Friday. “I’ve fought in combat. I’ve trained service members on the law of war. Our military has an obligation to follow the law. The Secretary of Defense having such a complete disregard for the law is reckless and dangerous.”
Finally, another infamous professional was drawn into the Herculean Trump effort to end the First Amendment and American Democracy.
Brendan Carr, chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission, jumped into action this weekend after the latest Trumper tantrum over bad press, especially on the TV.
Even though Trump’s meltdown was over accurate and unfavorable coverage of his administration’s handling of the Iran War, Carr took aim at TV news, which is under his regulation.
The author of Project 2025 has now threatened to pull broadcast licences of newsrooms that run what he and his boss consider negative coverage of the war. He was talking about news covering how Team Hegseth apparently sent a U.S. tomahawk missile into an Iranian school, killing more than a hundred girls who were students there, as well as staff.
“The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” Carr said in threats made public, where else, but on his social media account.
If all this sounds unnervingly like chapters out of George Orwell’s “1984,” Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and every credible history book covering the rise of fascism before World War II, Trump, Pirro, Carr, Tuberville, Hegseth, Ogles, Patel and the rest of Trumpageddon don’t want to talk about, and they don’t want you talking about it, either.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com