South Park, 7/23/25 episode, is on Demand on Spectrum. Watch what everyone’s talking about.
https://newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/south-park-just-did-what-cbs-news
(You might have to subscribe for free to Home of the Brave to read this article)
White House Will Release $5.5 Billion for Schools, After Surprise Delay. The Trump administration had faced growing bipartisan pressure, including from 10 Senate Republicans.
The Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) fought the Republicans’ Big Bad Bill that, among many other things, rolls back clean energy tax credits. Volunteers with CCL generated 3,856 calls to the Senate in the days before their final vote, helping lead to the removal of a detrimental solar and wind excise tax, as well as other improvements, meaning the bill that ultimately passed into law was 25% less bad than where it began.
Even the Q’Anon Shaman has turned on Trump!
The tweet, which read “F* this stupid piece of s*… What a fraud,”
New mural in France shows Statue of Liberty covering eyes in swipe at Trump. “What was once a shining symbol of liberty now carries the sorrow of lost meaning,” the artist wrote in a July 4 post on Facebook.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/france-mural-statue-liberty-covering-eyes-trump-rcna219391
America First = America Alone = America Last
Borowitz:
The autocrats’ anxiety is entirely justified. Comedy is their kryptonite. They rule by intimidation, and when we laugh at them, their power to scare us evaporates. As Mark Twain wrote in The Mysterious Stranger (1916), “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
The demise of Trump’s lawsuit against Bob Woodward offers a reminder to his other targets
Polls show American backlash as Trump breaks promise to focus on criminals in anti-immigrant crusade. 62% Disapprove, 35% Approve of his Immigration Agenda
“If everybody always lies to you,
The consequence is not that you believe the lies,
but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
And the 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, one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century.
New website spotlights how Trump’s policies are harming ordinary Americans, Home of the Brave:
That’s Trump Derangement! – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody
The Secret to Elite Doomscrolling: You Must Hate Yourself
From The Borowitz Report:
A New Declaration of Independence from Tyranny
Effective July 4, 2025
JUL 4
Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to break from a leader who governs with cruelty, contempt, and corruption, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed with inherent dignity and unalienable rights—among these are life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of justice.
That to secure these rights, governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. When a leader becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right and duty of the people to refuse allegiance and to stand united in the defense of their freedoms.
The current holder of high office has shown himself to be unfit to lead a free and just society.
- He disrespects women, mocking survivors of violence and stripping away their rights.
- He fuels racism and white supremacy, scapegoating communities of color and denying their equality.
- He assaults free speech, attacking the press, punishing dissent, and spreading disinformation.
- He exploits public office for private gain, enriching himself and the billionaire class while abandoning the poor and working people.
- He undermines justice, ignores the rule of law, and places himself above accountability.
- He disregards science, endangering lives in times of crisis and sacrificing the planet for profit.
- He fans division and incites violence to maintain power, wielding fear as a weapon against the people.
Time and again, we have protested peacefully, spoken truthfully, and appealed to our shared humanity. We have been met with indifference, hostility, and violence. A leader who governs through hatred and greed is unfit to govern at all.
Therefore, we, the people of conscience and conviction, do solemnly declare our independence from this tyrant and all he represents.
We withdraw our consent.
We refuse to be complicit in cruelty.
We reject the abuse of power for personal gain.
We stand for dignity, truth, equality, and justice for all people.
With firm reliance on each other and unwavering hope in our collective strength,
We pledge to resist oppression in all its forms,
To uphold the rights of the vulnerable,
And to build a future grounded in compassion, courage, and shared humanity.
Let this declaration be both a breaking and a beginning.
Putin is invading more than Ukraine, his aggression is focused on the U.S. and all its allies.The lesson from Romania is clear: The best defense against propaganda is truth — and the courage to speak it.
The Borowitz Report:
Americans Favor Work Requirements for Billionaires Receiving Tax Cuts
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans support the imposition of work requirements for billionaires receiving massive tax cuts, a new poll released on Monday indicates.
In the words of one poll respondent, “With the exception of Donald Trump, many of these billionaires are able-bodied.”
According to the poll, an overwhelming number of Americans believe that, in order to receive their benefits, billionaires should collect trash along the highway or clean public toilets.
The broadest majority of respondents “strongly agreed” with the statement, “They should pick all the fruit and vegetables that used to be picked by migrants.”
“I watched in disbelief as businessmen voted for a repeat bankrupt, laborers for a boss infamous for stiffing his workers, evangelicals for a serial adulterer, women for an admitted sexual assaulter, patriots for a draft dodger who would sell his country’s secrets for trivial gain, educated men for an ignoramus. But they did so with fierce gladness in their hearts. Because what their chosen one had done was open Pandora’s box—yes, the old one, filled with the ancient calamities of race hatred and rage and cruelty and bloodlust and infinite greed—and tell them that these things were the remedy for all their grievances, that all their anger was justified, and most important: None of what ailed them was their own fault—or ever had been. They took to that like infants to a honeyed tit.”
― Greg Iles, Southern Man
From Facebook:
Pamela Saharah Dyson
oronseSdpt1al2445a66cu3ltfh8ag22i15mug73i0cm96f864hfi7h07824 ·
Nothing I can add, just noting that it is painfully accurate.
MJ Taylor
oronseSdpt1al24tA 6 cu ltfu8ag21i1Jmug73i0219yfM642f:7l05 2a ·
It takes the courage of a Canadian Journalist to really tell it like it is. Apparently, no journalist in the U.S. has the courage to say these things this clearly: I don’t think any US journalist has written as tough (and spot-on) a portrayal of the threat facing us as this Canadian, Andrew Coyne of the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.
The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.
At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.
At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.
The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”
Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.
All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.
All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.<<
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