Epstein files – Blood and Porridge

June 14, 2026June 15, 2026

How low will you go?

When The Simpsons was the greatest thing on television a long – a very long – time ago, I remember a 1999 episode, They Saved Lisa’s Brain, that began with a contest being held in Springfield and broadcast live on TV called How Low Will You Go? According to the entry about it on the WikiSimpsons site, How Low Will You Go? was ‘sponsored by Grandma Plopwell’s Pudding’ and its winner ‘would be the person who did the stupidest thing on the stage.’ Contestants included Bart Simpson eating ‘everything that was thrown at him’, Homer Simpson wearing ‘a suit made of popcorn kernels’ and singing a song called Kernel Knowledge, and Moe Szyslak ‘dressed in a sailor suit with a giant lollipop.’

When I saw the episode more than a quarter-century ago, I remember reacting to this indictment of how people are humiliated and degraded by TV and its promises of instant celebrity by thinking: Wow, that is pretty low! Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. In the decades since, TV – often of the ‘reality’ variety – has induced folk to do far worse things and make far bigger dicks of themselves on camera, to the point where cavorting around in a suit made of popcorn kernels actually seems quite highbrow in comparison.

Anyway, I feel like How Low Will You Go? has now become a TV series that’s in the middle of its second season. Each season lasts for four years and takes place in the White House whenever Donald Trump is the US president. Season one lasted from 2016 to 2020. Season two began in 2024 and is due to end in 2028. That is, if the USA still exists by 2028. Come to think of it, if the world still exists by 2028.

In season one, Trump proved that yes, he could go pretty low. He shamelessly sucked up to Putin. He belittled a war veteran, John McCain, who’d served his country in Vietnam and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war there. (“I like people who weren’t captured!”) He skipped attending an event in honour of American soldiers killed in World War One at France’s Aisne-Marne American Cemetery on the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day because he couldn’t handle the fact it was raining. He mocked a reporter suffering from congenital joint condition in front of a rally by doing an impersonation of him that an obnoxious kid would do of someone with cerebral palsy.

He suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. He describing developing-world nations as ‘shithole countries’. He leched after his own daughter, talking about her ‘breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her.’ He told 30,573 lies, according to the Washington Post. Oh, and when he lost the presidential election in 2020, he claimed, baselessly, it’d been ‘rigged’ and incited a mob of his dingbat supporters to attack the US Capitol, where they chanted about hanging Trump’s own vice-president and tried to prevent Joe Biden’s victory in the election being formalised.

The Trump version of How Will You Go?, season one, was a ratings hit. In fact, a sufficient number of Americans thought it was so wonderful that they voted Trump back into the White House in 2024 for a second season. And, so far, season two hasn’t disappointed. How far can the man go this time? Why, far, far lower!

He’s threatened to annex the USA’s next-door neighbour and important ally and trading partner Canada, so that now everyone in Canada hates his guts, won’t visit his country and spend money there, and won’t buy American products like American bourbon. He’s threatened to annex Greenland, which belongs to a country in a military alliance the USA is in, an alliance whose basic doctrine would require all the other member countries to go to war with the USA if he attempted to annex it. Makes sense, yes?

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

He’s shamelessly sucked up to Putin, again. He’s insulted reporters, often female ones – intelligent and independent-minded women are obviously a group he has serious issues with – calling them ‘piggie’ and ‘crooked or stupid’ and ‘corrupt’ with ‘hatred in her eyes’. He’s whinged like a spoilt brat about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s fallen asleep in meetings and press conferences after he sneeringly dubbed his presidential predecessor ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden. He’s relentlessly posted AI crap on his Truth Social platform, including footage of him in a plane dropping gigantic turds on ‘No Kings’ protestors, pictures of himself as Jesus, and images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

He’s also allowed himself to be bounced into a war against Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, with the result that the Strait of Hormuz, and the maritime route carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, are now blocked. The other day, he claimed his administration and the Iranians were on the brink of agreeing on a peace deal… But as he’s already claimed this about 40 times since the conflict started in February, I’m not going to hold my breath. At least for Trump, it takes folk’s minds off his sizeable presence in the Epstein Files.

To spice things up even further, the producers of season two of How Low Will You Go? have brought in additional cast-members to give Trump a run for his money in going low. Thus, we’ve had Vice President J. D. Vance insulting single women who keep cats and being a malicious prick towards the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a leader with more courage in his little finger than Vance and Trump have in their entire, make-up-enhanced bodies.

They’ve also introduced the ultra-ridiculous Pete Hegseth, who was Trump’s Secretary of Defence until Hegseth persuaded him to change the title to the more manly and harder-sounding ‘Secretary of War’, and who pees his pants in rage when press photographers take pictures of him from what he considers unflattering angles. At a recent gathering in France commemorating the 82^nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, Hegseth gave a speech condemning European nations for allowing their beaches to be “stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”, i.e., people he considers not sufficiently white enough and Christian enough to be let in. I really don’t know why Hegseth turned up at this event. After all, 82 years ago, his side lost.

Today, June 14^th, we get another episode in How Low Will You Go? It’s Trump’s 80^th birthday and he’s marking it by staging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts on the South Lawn of the White House. The Las Vegas-based UFC organises ‘mixed martial-arts’ combat – basically, violent ‘anything-goes’ scraps – inside cages. So, the seat of the American presidency is about to host cage fights. That really resonates with the dignity of the place and those who’ve lived there in the past, one-time holders of the USA’s highest office like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. If Honest Abe, FDR, JFK and the rest are watching this from the clouds, they’ll be doing so between their fingers.

What’s been installed for those UFC bouts consists of an enclosed octagonal ring with a huge, claw-like superstructure built over it with clusters of lights and big TV screens attached. The ring is emblazoned with the names of sponsors like Bud Light, Toyo Tires and Pit Boss Grills. And, inevitably, the web address crypto.com features prominently too.

It makes me think of the 1986 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the hemispherical gladiatorial arena where Max and Blaster had to fight it out with chainsaws and sledgehammers. Trump’s spectacle at the White House sounds just as dystopian – though at least in the Mad Max movie, the dictator presiding over things was played by Tina Turner. I’d have her as my dystopian overlord rather than the revolting, decaying Trump any day of the week.

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros / Kennedy Miller Productions

Oh well, I suppose there’s one silver lining to this. Trump’s crass preoccupation with having UFC fighters slug it out on his lawn has at least diverted his attention from the Football World Cup, which kicked off in Canada, Mexico and the USA a few days ago. He hasn’t tried to insert himself into that, so far. I was particularly worried he’d turn up at yesterday’s match between Scotland and Haiti in Boston, since he loves talking about his Scottish roots – his mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis – and since he hates Haitians. (During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, both he and Vance yet again showed how low they’d go by lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s domestic pets.) If he’d shown his orange face at the match, I think I would have found myself wanting Haiti to win, just to sicken him.*

*Trump didn’t appear, I was able to support Scotland as normal and Scotland won, just about. Phew.

March 7, 2026March 19, 2026

The missiles are flying… Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

© Paramount Pictures / Dino De Laurentiis Company

With Donald Trump enacting his latest insanity – joining forces with Israel and bombing the bejeezus out of Iran, which has prompted the latter country to retaliate by firing ordinance in all directions and lighting up the Middle East like a Christmas tree – I find myself thinking of Greg Stillson, a character featuring prominently in Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone (1979). In the David Cronenberg-directed movie version of The Dead Zone (1983), Stillson is played by Martin Sheen. It’s Sheen, as Stillson, who utters the quote that’s this blog-entry’s title.

Stillson is a psychotic bully who begins as a salesman, becomes a businessman and then a politician, and finally leads a populist movement that sweeps him into the White House. Well, he does in one timeline. Before winning the presidency, while he’s on the campaign trail, he shakes hands with The Dead Zone’s hero, Johnny Smith, who’s been blessed – or cursed – with the power to see into people’s futures just by touching them. He has a vision of Stillson’s future wherein, as a despotic and unhinged US president, he presses the buttons that trigger an apocalyptic nuclear war. Thereafter, Smith has to decide how he’s going to stop him. (Spoiler – he does, but with tragic consequences for himself.)

I don’t know if anyone with clairvoyant visions touched one of Trump’s little hands a couple of decades ago and witnessed him pressing buttons and wiping out humanity in 2026, the 250^th anniversary of American independence. But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had.

Anyway, it doesn’t need saying, but Trump’s actions – which began on February 27^th, when in conjunction with the Israelis and under the moniker ‘Operation Epic Fury’, he had his military bombard Iran with missiles and drones; one source estimating on March 4^th that nearly 900 people had been killed so far, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – are a vastly bad idea for many reasons. Here are some of those reasons.

From wikipedia.org / farsi.khamenei.ir

One. The attack is illegal under international law. In the Conversation, Shannon Brincat and Juan Zahir Naranjo Caceres have written that “Israel said the strikes were ‘preventative’, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat.” However, they point out that “preventative war has no legal basis under international law. The UN Security Council did not authorize any military action, meaning the sole lawful pathway for the use of force for self-defence was never pursued.”

Two. The attack went against the American constitution. The American historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted on her Substack: “In his letter to Congress notifying them of his attack, Trump said he had acted under the 1973 War Powers Act, which permits a president to attack another country if there is an urgent threat. But the letter itself doesn’t identify any such urgent threat. It simply said Iran is one of the world’s largest sponsors of state terrorism and that it ‘continues to seek the means to possess and employ nuclear weapons’… The Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president above all because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man…”

Three. It’s likely Benjamin Netanyahu bounced the USA into the attack. Going back to Reason One, the supposedly ‘preventative’ nature of the USA and Israel’s assault on Iran is torturous to say the least. A few days ago, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States… We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

In other words.. We had to attack them before they attacked us, which they would surely do because Israel intended to attack them first. This means the USA’s vast military firepower isn’t actually under the control of the American commander-in-chief, but under that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The wily Netanyahu says ‘Jump’, the Americans say ‘How high?’

Four. Dodgy Middle Eastern deals are possibly involved. Who else, besides Netanyahu, has a finger in the pie here? In 2025 Trump did investment deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which he claimed were worth over two trillion dollars. Qatar saw fit to gift – some would use the verb ‘bribe’ – Trump with a 400-million-dollar Boeing jumbo jet that he plans to turn into a new Air Force One, making one wonder how much of these investments will be enriching Trump and his clan rather than the USA itself. Also, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff – the real-estate developer whom, laughably, Trump sent into negotiations with Russia about the Ukraine War even though he had zero diplomatic experience – have been in the Middle East lately as ‘envoys’, hawking the idea that the decimated Gaza should be reinvented as a luxury resort with ‘180 skyscrapers’ (and any remaining Palestinians, presumably, doing jobs like cleaning the toilets).

In the future, if a saner administration ever comes to power in Washington DC and launches an investigation into this debacle, it’d be wise to ‘follow the money’. I’ll bet at least some of the encouragement for this war came from business interests and wealthy leaders in the Middle East who regarded the Iranian regime as an undesirable neighbour, lowering the tone and property value of the area, and wanted it removed.

Five. It’s actually Operation Forget Epstein. Trump likes to distract. When the headlines look bad for him, he does something outrageous that generates different headlines – not necessarily favourable ones, but enough to banish the previous, bad headlines from people’s memories. This works especially well in our screen-obsessed, social-media-fixated era where attention-spans are short.

On February 25^th, the New York Times published a report under the headline EPSTEIN FILES ARE MISSING RECORDS ABOUT WOMAN WHO MADE CLAIMS AGAINST TRUMP. This mentioned documents “released by the Justice Department” that “briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor.” Yet other documents relating to these allegations have been withheld or removed from the public database about Trump’s paedophilic, sex-trafficking old buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

And two days later, the assault began on Iran. Funny, that.

From wikipedia.org / © Jesse Monford

Six. There’s no plan and no objectives. The George Bush Jr-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which toppled Saddam Hussein but created massive instability and led to huge numbers of fatalities – estimates of which range “from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 (per the Iraq Family Health Survey) to 1,033,000 excess deaths (per the 2007 Opinion Research Business [ORB] Survey)” – was a ruinous fiasco. It was also built on the lie that Saddam possessed ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. But compared to Trump’s Iran incursion, it looks like a masterpiece of planning.

For one thing, to have a plan, you actually need to have objectives, i.e., things to plan towards. Trump and his cabinet apparently have no idea what the goal of all this is. Rubio, as we’ve seen, has said they’re waging war simply because that’s what the Israelis are doing. Meanwhile, Trump has suggested at one point it’s to achieve regime-change in Iran and replace Khamenei with someone more compliant to US interests, as was allegedly done in Venezuela after the abduction of its former president, Nicolas Maduro. Though the other day Trump admitted there was a problem with this because his airstrikes had killed all the possible candidates to take over: “…none of the people we had in mind are going to come to power, because they are all dead.” No, so far, that doesn’t sound like a brilliantly executed plan.

Trump has also claimed the war is to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons, even though after the USA carried out a bombing raid on Iran in June last year he was adamant that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” Trump has tried to justify this new war by saying Iran was – here plucking a figure out of his arse – ‘two weeks’ away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Elsewhere, it’s been suggested the war is to encourage the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime that’s oppressed and abused them for 47 years; to stop Iran sponsoring terrorism; and to destroy Iran’s navy. But most likely it’s because Trump woke up the other morning, looked out of the window and thought, “Gee, this would be a good day to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.”

Seven. This sort of thing has been tried before. Vietnam… Afghanistan… Iraq… Libya.

Eight. Possible destabilization of the Middle East. Even if by some fluke Iran ends up with a Trump-and-Netanyahu-approved government, it’s difficult to see how it can impose order on a country so diverse and, after all this devastation and upheaval, febrile. Iran’s population is 61 percent Persian, 16 percent Azerbaijani and 10 percent Kurdish, and the rest of it includes people like Lurs, Arabs, Baloch, Arabs and Turkish groups. While it’s overwhelmingly Shia Muslim, 9 percent of the population are Sunni and other sects of Muslim and there are also Baha’i, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews and Sabean Mandeans. That’s before we get to political differences. Has anyone in Washington DC considered this? I doubt it.

Civil war in Iran could have devastating consequences for the Middle East. We’ve already seen the current conflict’s knock-on effects on the world’s oil supply, especially the disruption of tanker-traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, and on air travel, with more than 20,000 flights grounded and a million people stranded around the world since late February. The Middle East going J.G. Ballard is not good news for anyone. Well, apart from Vladimir Putin, who’ll see an increase in demand for Russian oil.

Nine. China may be thinking, “Hold my beer!” Trump’s rhetoric about attacking Iran sounds uncomfortably like Putin’s excuse for invading Ukraine in 2022 – his goal was to ‘demilitarise’ and ‘denazify’ the country. I also suspect China is watching keenly and wondering how it could cook up a similar motive for taking over Taiwan in the future.

Incidentally, Taiwan is the world’s foremost producer of Artificial Intelligence chips and according to the New York Times, without those chips, “the tech industry and the US economy would be crippled.” Haven’t thought that one through either, have you, Donald?

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

February 9, 2026March 7, 2026

Democracy dies in Donald-grovelling

From wikipedia.org / © The Washington Post

“What would you say to Epstein survivors…?”

“You are so bad. You are the worst reporter. No wonder CNN has no ratings. She’s a young woman. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. They should be ashamed of you.”

On February 4^th, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins was cut off in the middle of a question about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, notorious paedophile, human trafficker and friend to the rich and famous, at a White House press conference. Cutting her off was President Donald Trump, coincidentally someone who receives, according to the New York Times, 38,000 mentions in the Epstein files so far released by the US Department of Justice. Evidently, in Trump’s mind, you need to smile when you ask questions about victims of paedophilia and human trafficking.

I find his objection ironic considering that for the last 21 years Trump’s been married to Melania Trump, a woman on whose visage – gimlet-eyed and as smooth, hard and unyielding as an iron bedpan – anything resembling a smile rarely flickers. Obviously, though, if you were expected to share a marital bed with Trump, your face wouldn’t be projecting sunbeams and rainbows either.

Lately, Melania Trump has been in the news because of the release of a new documentary movie about her. Entitled Melania, it focuses on her during the run-up to her husband’s second inauguration as president. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon paid 40 million dollars for the rights to the documentary – 28 million of that reportedly going straight into Ms. Trump’s pocket – and another 35 million to advertise it.

Reviews of Melania have not been, shall we say, overly enthusiastic. The last time I checked the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, its ‘Tomato-meter’ had it at seven percent. William Thomas at Empire magazine advised, “Do try not to choke on your popcorn.” Sean Burns at North Shore Movies observed, “At least Leni Riefenstahl could frame a shot.” Mark Kermode at Kermode and Mayo’s Take – The Brand New Podcast described it as “the most depressing experience I have ever had in the cinema.” He added, “I mean, I’ve seen A Serbian Film (2010), I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust (1980), I have never felt this depressed… I thought it was absolutely repugnant.”

By the way, the director of Melania is Brett Ratner, who in 2017 was accused of sexual assault and harassment by six women, accusations he’s denied. In photos recently released from the Epstein files, he appears sitting on a sofa beside the late, loathsome paedophile, both of them cuddling young women. The women’s faces are blocked to protect their identities, so you can’t tell how young they are.

I should also say that Melania made seven million dollars on its opening weekend, a decent haul for a documentary. Obviously, it appeals to a certain audience in the USA, i.e., cultish MAGA dingbats so worshipful of her husband they’d spend a fortune on eBay to acquire pieces of his used toilet paper, which they’d then frame and hang prominently in their living rooms. However, it still looks like it’ll be a long time before Amazon recoups anything like the 75 million dollars it invested in the movie.

In totally unconnected developments during Trump’s first year as 47^th president, the Orange One signed an executive order relaxing environmental rules about space launches (benefiting Bezos’s private space venture Blue Origin); signed an order preventing US states from enforcing their own AI regulations (benefiting Bezos’s AI start-up Project Prometheus); and generally created a oligarch-friendly climate that’s allowed Bezos and fellow magnificoes Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to increase their collective wealth by approximately 250 billion dollars.

But I don’t know why Bezos would take a financial hit by getting involved in Melania, a vanity project that nobody apart from those hardcore MAGA nutters would pay money to see. I really don’t know.

In other, totally unconnected news last week, the Washington Post, a once-respected newspaper whose motto is ‘Democracy dies in darkness’, and which broke the story about the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974, has announced a ‘strategic reset’. This reset involves showing a third of its current workforce the door. It’s also “ending the current iteration of its popular sports desk… restructuring its local coverage, reducing its international reporting operation, cutting its books desk and suspending its flagship daily news podcast Post Reports.” The loss of the Washington Post’s books desk means it’ll no longer publish its literary review supplement Book World.

The Washington Post has been on a downward spiral this past year, a spiral of its – or its proprietor’s – own making. Previously, and unsurprisingly, it’d not been enamoured with Trump. As 2024’s presidential race neared election day, however, and with Trump looking likely to regain the White House and launch his glorious new thousand-year Reich, the Washington Post’s editorial board was ordered not to publish an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival for the presidency. As a result, more than 200,000 disgusted readers – eight percent of its 2.5 million-strong readership – cancelled their digital subscriptions to the newspaper.

After the announcement of the Washington Post‘s downsizing, its legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward lamented, “I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis. They deserve more.” Meanwhile, Trump’s Communications Director Steve Cheung crowed on Twitter, “Just a reminder that printing fake news is not a profitable business model.”

Earlier, the Washington Post’s proprietor had defended his decision to have the newspaper sit on the fence before the 2024 election, which’d started the rot. He wrote: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election… What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” Aye, right. That’s the principled thing to do. When there’s a choice between a candidate who’s a convicted criminal and convicted sexual abuser and a candidate who isn’t, you say nothing. Heaven forbid anyone perceives you as being biased and non-independent.

And who’s the proprietor of the Washington Post? Oh look, it’s Jeff Bezos. Funny that he should take a hit by alienating his newspaper’s natural readership and sending it down the toilet, just as he took a hit by shelling out 75 million dollars for a dud like the Melania movie. It’s almost like he has an ulterior motive. Almost like he’s trying to… curry favour with someone.

But seriously. A while ago, I posted about “an unholy alliance of authoritarians, kleptocrats, fascists, media tycoons, tech bros and oil barons”, working hard “at stripping freedoms from those of us living in societies that, until now, have retained some freedoms; at transferring another huge chunk of wealth from our dwindling coffers to their swelling coffers; and at burning and poisoning the planet we live on in their quest for profits whilst aggressively pushing the line that any science questioning this policy is a ‘hoax’.” You see that here. Bezos grovelling to Trump by financing his missus’s dreadful movie and nuking the Washington Post. As a reward, Trump throwing him a few legislative and financial scraps from the White House table so he can carry on making pots of money for himself.

And with Bezos and his ilk embracing automation and Artificial Intelligence to maximise profits by eliminating human employees, and salaries, the future looks grim. Journalists will soon go the way of lamplighters, elevator operators, switchboard operators and video store clerks. News copy will be written by AI technology, controlled by billionaires, who’ll make sure that copy panders to their interests and those of their political allies. And if there’s bad news they can’t avoid reporting, it’ll be blamed on those people not plugged into their extreme-right-wing, white-Christian-nationalist gestalt: blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, atheists, gays, trans-people, liberals, socialists, trade unionists.

Education will be similar. Teachers will disappear too and kids will be taught by AI, with the likes of Elon Musk deciding what’s in the curriculum. Indeed, Musk has done a deal with El Salvador’s government to “bring his artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, to more than 1 million students across the country… to ‘deploy’ the chatbot to more than 5,000 public schools in an ‘AI-powered education program’.” Yes, that’s Grok, the lovable chatbot that praises Hitler and puts tweens in tiny bikinis for the gratification of paedophiles, coming to a school near you to teach your kids.

The stinking rich and stinking powerful won’t only hoard wealth – they’ll hoard information too, whilst making sure only small, approved increments of it leak down to the masses they regard as their serfs and inferiors. Especially manipulated will be scientific information about the climate catastrophe posing an increasing threat to our civilisation’s survival on this planet. So that their environmentally-ruinous cash-generating projects, like power-guzzling and water-guzzling AI data centres, escape censure, they’ll suppress this information or bury it under an avalanche of counter-arguing pseudoscientific gibberish, or not collect it in the first place.

But let’s end positively. While it’s sickening to watch America’s business magnates, corporations, media organisations, law firms and universities bend over supinely and lick Trump’s gruesome arse, the way ordinary Americans have reacted to his policies gives glimmers of hope.

© MS NOW

I’m thinking especially of Minneapolis. Since December, the city has been overrun and brutalised by up to 3000 of Trump’s masked, violent, badly-trained thugs from Immigration and Customs (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol. Ostensibly, they came to crack down on fraud allegedly committed by Minneapolis’s Somali-American community. In reality, as Wikipedia reports, they’ve assaulted, harassed and detained people “on the basis of their alleged or suspected immigration status”, including “restaurant, airport and hotel workers, Target employees, children and families, Native Americans, students and commuters”, many of whom “have been US citizens, legal residents with work authorisation, or asylum seekers.”

This has disastrously impacted on the city’s businesses, schools and whole social fabric. ICE was accused of violating at least 96 court orders during four weeks in January alone; and they’ve executed two citizens during peaceful protests, Renee Good on January 7^th and Alex Pretti on January 24^th.

Obviously, the operation was designed to intimidate Minneapolis – whose state governor is Tim Walz, Kamala’s running mate against Trump in 2024 – and intimidate liberal-leaning cities generally. But local people are having none of it. They’ve protested peacefully, organized strikes, alerted neigbours about approaching ICE patrols, monitored and filmed their activities, and provided support for people at risk from those activities by helping them get to their schools and places of worship unmolested, running errands for them and raising money for them. They’ve stood by their fellow citizens in a display of decent, old-fashioned community values – values Trump would despise if his reptile brain could ever understand them in the first place.

One thing that particularly impressed and moved me was a viral clip showing a white-bearded old man protesting against ICE on a snowbound and teargas-fogged Minneapolis street on January 24^th. When a reporter and camera crew approached him, he raged, “I’m just angry. I’m 70 years old and I’m f**king angry.” Then, wearing neither mask nor goggles, he strode off through a billowing wall of teargas.

That furious but defiant old-timer, it transpired, was Greg Ketter, founder and proprietor of the Minneapolis independent bookstore DreamHaven Books and Comics. The renowned sci-fi and fantasy writer Harlan Ellison once described DreamHaven as “a book-seeker’s cave of miracles”.

I find it inspiring to see a man who’s devoted a lifetime to books taking a stand against Trump, someone who brags about not reading as if it’s a badge of honour. And by extension, against Trump’s billionaire toadies, currently trying to create an AI dystopia wherein novels and other human art-forms are replaced by soulless, AI-generated slop. And against Trump’s toady at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who’s just axed the Washington Post’s Book World, one of the very few literary supplements the American newspaper industry had left.