Long ago, mostly for personal reasons, not tourism, I visited the South American countries Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. We started in Buenos Aires. I’m not sure what the Peronistas and the future Pope Francis were doing there at the time, but, as has often been the case, our dollars went a long way because of the high inflation. We met a crazy taxi driver there  (his idea of parallel parking was to get halfway into a space and then ram the rear car back out of the way), a nice porteno who agreed to haul us around the city, and even up to Asuncion and Montvideo, for a reasonable price. (Buses would probably have been more economical, but they would typically be filled with produce and poultry in addition to people. I saw this almost everywhere in Latin America. Just part of the local color!)

My lasting impressions of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay? Fascism! Specifically, armed military in the streets, supposedly to maintain order, but often more dedicated to annoying people by interrogating them, checking IDs, and patting down the women. I repeat: Armed military! Regular people seemed to be chatty and friendly toward this “gringo grandote.”

Armed militia patrolled the streets, though, and they were often more numerous than the regular people who in general love to be out and about and are very friendly and sociable. I saw this in Italy too during the time when the military police patrolled the streets, airports, and bus terminals using the excuse that they were looking for Red Brigade members.

I also saw fascism on a train ride through East Berlin on my way to a conference in West Berlin: Stasi roamed the train’s aisles asking for papers from anyone who remotely looked a bit suspicious, and dog teams searched underneath the train cars for any East Germans trying to escape to the West. (Is it any wonder that my character Esther Brookstone was an MI6 spy during the Cold War, doing her part to take down that fascist government in East Germany? Note that I call these so-called communists fascists as well. There’s really no difference. Putin is a fascist, one-hundred percent! Always has been. Every Russian leader from Lenin on was a fascist.)

All this was a revelation for me: Fascism hadn’t ended with the Second World War with the defeat of Germany and Japan; it was still present in South America and Europe. Unfortunately, I’m seeing it now in Washington, DC—our nation’s capital!—and LA, both cities being places where I once lived or regularly visited without seeing fascist military patrolling the city streets.

Now, everywhere I look within the Trump administration, I’m reminded of those glimpses of evil fascism that I had long ago in Paraguay, Uruguay, and elsewhere. And now I’m fearing a fascist takeover in this country, our US, after seeing similar scenes here. Donald Jackass Trump is nothing but a puffed-up orange version of Mussolini and those Latin American fascists in the Southern Cone that the CIA once coddled. No wonder he supports Bolsonaro and loves Kim!

What can we do to stamp out this contagion that has threatened humanity for so long? I can only look for answers in my fiction…and still do! As Clancy stated, ficti0n has to seem real, and I realism now is that fascism is on the march here and abroad!

This is exactly why nearly all of my latest novels in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” and “Inspector Steve Morgan” contain the theme of fascism in some way. I battle fascism with my words, striking out against it in my prose. I suppose the fascist MAGA maniacs and members of the Fascist Party of America (once called the “Good Old Party” or GOP!—only a joke now!), if they can read at all (always questionable, especially our illiterate president!), aren’t readers of my books. Even in my very first published novel, Full Medical, you can see the approaching fascist fanaticism of RFK Jr. (And weren’t Putin and Chi talking about harvesting body parts to live forever? Cloning is just an extreme version of this!)

Authors of sci-fi thrillers, or even less futuristic standard mysteries and thrillers, are often fortune tellers describing the atrocities some fascist humans rain down on other humans. In that sense, we’re still in the Dark Ages. Or maybe we never left them?

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Full Medical. This first novel in the prescient “Clones and Mutants” trilogy introduces the clones but also a fascist conspiracy. It takes place on a frightening future Earth that eventually leads to the Chaos portrayed in the novel Survivors of the Chaos (this novel is now only available in a second edition that’s the first novel in the Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection). It’s a lot scarier than any horror story because what’s portrayed here could really occur as fascism marches on in our country and the world.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Nobody calls it that, but that’s what Project 2025 is. It’s a plan to destroy American democracy but also shows how to implement that plan. You can either try to read the almost thousand-page document released by the Heritage Foundation, or David A. Graham’s little book titled The Project (Random House, 2025—consider this post a review of the latter). It should be required reading for any responsible voter or soon-to-be voter.

Trump denied he ever read it during his 2024 campaign—probably true because he won’t even read his security briefings! (You have to wonder if he can even read.) But those who whisper in his ear, his Hitlerian-like puppet masters, are following Project 2025 because it’s not just policy but how to execute it. In other words, it’s indeed a blueprint for a fascist takeover of the US government that will destroy American democracy if executed.

Don’t think that Project 2025 is just based on the Trump campaign platform either because it’s a lot more than that! Most everything our wannabe dictator has done or tried to do so far comes from that blueprint, and many of Trump’s handlers actually worked on the project and are anxious to implement it. It’s not religious in the constitutional sense; it’s Christian nationalism on steroids, though, where any president becomes America’s ayatollah. But it’s also a proposal for a fascist plutocracy and how to create it. And it’s definitely anti-American! Its authors think the American system is so rotten that they just want to burn it all down. We can’t let that happen.

There are political tomes that have injected evil into the world’s body politic: Those by Marx and Engels and later by Hitler led to a lot of death and suffering. We don’t want that to occur in America!

***

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“Steve’s Bookshelf.” The non-fiction books listed on this webpage outnumber the fiction books, and they represent some of the reading I do as background for my novels…and for my voting! They cover a variety of topics for that reason. If you want to learn about where I get some of the themes in my fiction, this is the place to start.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Progressive protests start with a few concerned and responsible citizens deciding they’ve had enough. I can’t claim to be the first (the EU has been going after Google for a while), but I’ve hated Google for a long time. I finally did something about it.

Long before their kissing Ronald McDonald Trump’s fat McD’s butt and changing their map names (Denali to Mt. McKinley and Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America), Google’s browser Chrome was annoying me a lot. I’d already stopped using Facebook and X; Zuckerberg had proven himself to be a kiss-ass fascist oligarch backing Narcissus le Grand; and that slimy Elon Muskrat, who has no creds as a serious leader or even an elected office and is a complete fascist, lost my support the moment he walked into the X HQ with his kitchen sink. (The Muskrat probably had it lying around one of his penthouses, having replaced it with a gold one, because he’s emulating his fuehrer’s love for gold that represents their fascist greed and desires for power.)

Most progressives more than likely grimaced when they saw those fascist oligarchs sitting there as special invitees to the Donald Jackass Trump’s inaugurations events, the Muskrat not hiding his obsequious attitude with his ubiquitous Hitlerian salutes. And right there among those fascist oligarchs were the owners of Google whose names, like Voldemort, I’ll avoid saying so their evil will not fall upon you!

So, my personal vendetta against Google is because I know these American versions of Russian oligarchs much better than Putin’s. All of them—that Big Bot Bezos, that slimy Muskrat, the arrogant Sugar-Mountain Zuckerberg, etc., these “made men” in the jackass’s mafia—negatively affect my life and yours (if you’re an American) a lot more than Putin’s. But Google’s SOBs were also affecting me, a writer, every day of my writing life.

Their trackers followed me everywhere I went on the internet. Every search produced pages of unwanted ads, allowing Google’s oligarchs to become even richer by selling everyone’s information and ad space in searches to unscrupulous company CEOs just as abusive and greedy as Google’s masters, as if I’d ever buy anything from the bastards!

How did I strike back? There’s not much an author can do, I’ll admit, but I severed all ties with Google! I use DuckDuckGo now. I never used Gmail for my own fiction writing. (AB Carolan needed an address to register his stories with the Big Bezos Bot’s Amazon, which is generally a waste of time. Since I also hate the latter oligarch, readers can now write to AB by using the “Contact Page” at this website. [wink, wink])

As an FYI and added benefit, DuckDuckGo beats the crap our of Chrome! It has new features I’ll use a lot as an author. (For example, I can make both a “printable version” or a “PDF version”  of a web article, ones that are actually readable. Chrome still depends on MS Edge to do the latter, which often produces a damn mess. What? Is Bill Gates part of this evil oligarchy?)

I haven’t begun to explore all the other options available in DuckDuckGo’s dropdown menu and elsewhere, but it’s straightforward search results without Chrome’s annoying ads by themselves is worth the change! (For example, as an author, I might search for old KGB agent Putin’s favorite Russian poisons. Before, I fully expected that I’d receive offers to buy some samples at least for a few days from suppliers in Moscow if I used Google’s Chrome!) If you’re an author who just wants dependable and factual information without pages of annoying and useless ads, don’t use Chrome!

So, bye-bye greedy Google! I’ve been loyal to you since you were an internet infant in nappies. Now you don’t deserve that loyalty because you’ve become an evil adult supporting corporate fascism and terrorism in America, I want nothing to do with you! I hope everyone joins me to choose more honest and less evil internet service providers so that Google goes the way of the dinosaurs! Or straight to hell where they belong with Donald Jackass Trump!

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Fascism and terrorism. Fascism is a human affliction with symptoms of simple greed and a thirst for power, a mind-destroying illness many psychotic and sociopathic individuals suffer from. Terrorism is its deadliest and most extreme form. Although we are seeing too much of the former in the US and all over the world now (see above), the latter is increasing as well (attacks made by crazed people using cars as weapons, for example). I’ve been fighting the battle against both in my prose from my very first novel, Full Medical, to my last (for now), Fear the Asian Evil, and in most tales in between those two, even those tales geared to young adults (who also need to learn how to fight these deadly social diseases!). All these stories are honest portrayals of the damage fascism and terrorism can do to freedom and peace in the world. Brave people in these stories struggle and fight the good fight, so let them inspire you! (Fascists and terrorists, many of them controlling our own government and companies now, will not enjoy these stories, of course. Their ignorance will return to haunt them because they will pay the price sooner than later!)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Revolution! A Sci-Fi Fable…

Copyright 2025, Steven M. Moore

The middle=aged man code-named Zorro, host of the meeting, tapped his wineglass to bring the group to order. “Welcome, my friends.”

He smiled at the ethnic mix of women and men seated around the old table in the game room above the old pub’s main floor. All of them were patriots who, as refugees living in Canada, had organized the American resistance.

“We will now take the final vote on whether we’re ready to end the fascist reign of this moron who arrogantly believes he’s America’s new fuehrer.”

“It’s a big step to take,” Tinkerbell warned. As a Federal Appellate Judge, she’d refused to go along with the tyrant’s plans to insist that every federal employee had to take an oath of fealty to the despot. She’d also presided over a trial where America’s DoJ had dared to prosecute one of the principal oligarchs supporting the administration. Consequently, she had to flee for her life when some militia members the American dictator had released attacked her residence. The black eyepatch, showing how close they’d come, matched the one the militia’s leader wore.

Others in the room had similar grievances. Their stories were the glue that bound the group together. But were they resolute enough to commit what the American dictator would surely call treason, even though he’d attempted the same thing years earlier?

“It’s time to vote,” Zorro said.

The vote was unanimous. The invasion of their homeland would proceed as planned. It would be a massive attack moving south on three different fronts: From Vancouver, Windsor, and Prince Edward Island, mixed forces of American ex-pats and Canadian patriots would stream across the border to take over what they would soon call the North American Free States. It would still be a limited invasion, though: No one cared about the old fascist red states, what the invaders called the Fascist States of America and the center of the American dictator’s power. A new wall would be built to quarantine their fascists.

“Shock and awe” couldn’t begin to describe the invasion. The American dictator had to flee in Air Force One to Russia just like that Syrian dictator before him. The fascists in the US Congress and SCOTUS barely escaped with their lives to Florida and Texas where they might be safe for the time being.

Casualties among the invading forces from Canada were eventually buried with honor at Arlington Cemetery. Casualties from the fascist hordes were hauled away to landfills and unceremoniously dumped to rot like the rest of the garbage.

Eleven years later what remained of the Fascist States of America surrendered to the North American Free States that had been joined by the Canadian provinces along the old border, a just twist on the dream that the American dictator once had entertained. By that time, Mt. McKinley had become Denali once again; and the Gulf of America, a name no other country in the western hemisphere had ever used, once again was called the Gulf of Mexico.

Peace was once again restored in the Americas, and no one wanted to remember the threat of the old American dictator now giving worms indigestion in an unmarked grave near Moscow.

Morale? McD’s meals and fascism aren’t a good mix!

It’s not just about TikTok. Sure, the Chinese are using it, one, to brainwash its users, especially America’s youth; and two, to collect data about Americans to facilitate that brainwashing and other insidious things. But I saw that early on and never signed up to use it. (I’m paranoid. I don’t believe the fascist MAGA maniacs are the only ones out to get me. Xi’s assassins might be planning their revenge against me for writing Fear the Asian Evil, although the title hides the fact that it’s about Chinese perfidy. LOL.)

Much earlier, though, predating TikTok and Truth Social by years, I began to post on Facebook and Twitter. So-called PR and marketing experts were telling authors even back then that social media was “the thing,” i.e., a wonderful tool to reach out to potential readers. (Now I tend to think that too many people emulate Trump—i.e., they don’t read much and can’t understand what they read.) Some of these “experts” even went so far as to say that a “Facebook page” was more important for authors to have than a website. What BS!

In any case, I continued to participate on Facebook and Twitter (even when the latter became X), but less and less as time went on. I finally realized just how much they provide clear evidence for Musk and Zuckerberg’s fascist tendencies. Walking in with the kitchen sink ended my days on X long before Musk became the super-fascistic cheerleader for Trump’s plan to destroy American democracy. Seeing Zuckerberg’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for stopping Putin and friends’ interference in the 2016 election (fact-checking will now be left to the users) was also sufficient motivation to suspect that SOB’s MAGA proclivities, now in full display as he visits Mar a Lago along with Musk to kiss Donald Jackass Trump’s butt.

It took me less than a half hour to give those two fascists the finger and end my association with their anti-democratic, evil, and oppressive social media creations. Frankly, I can’t understand why any author who lives in and loves democracy and its free speech features that allow us to stick it to fascists and all their autocratic and Machiavellian machinations would use any social media, but especially Facebook and X. An author might as well be bound and gagged and rotting in a prison cell!

What about that famous dialogue authors should have with potential readers, you ask? Forget about it! First, let your artistic creations be your weapons of choice, not social media. Second, it’s not worth losing your integrity (as the Big Five publishing conglomerates and their so-called but rarely “non-political” authors do)—let’s call it “losing your soul to fascism”—by pandering to people who don’t give a rat’s ass about what’s right and wrong, only greed and power. (That’s basically the definition of fascism, of course.) Be true to your art, in other words, and kick Musk and Zuckerberg in their goolies. (Oh right! Like Trump, they don’t have any, at least not in the moral sense.)

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Fear the Asian Evil. This last novel in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy begins with the shooting of one of Steve’s sergeant’s sister-in-law. The investigation leads Steve’s team to a Chinese plan to destabilize the UK in the Bristol port area. Intrigue and suspense await the reader. (And don’t worry: All novels in my series can stand alone.) Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

[Note from Steve: I’m posting this article to both my blogs because it’s about politics as well as reading and writing. If you object to that, you don’t have to read it!]

Although I’m sure the neo-Nazi and white supremacist MAGA maniacs and their fascist fuehrer, Donald J. Trump, don’t give a rat’s ass about Hispanic heritage (not to mention all those other bigots, haters, and general assholes who supported him in this last election, some even Hispanics!), I want to write first about our US immigrant heritage in general.

Let me say this to a lot of dumb SOBs out there: The only native Americans are Native Americans (and even they came over that land bridge from Asia to America long ago!). We’re all immigrants! There were waves and waves of immigrants to the New World. (I suppose today the FPA—that’s the “Fascist Party of America,” once was the Republican Party until Trump turned it into the FPA—would call all immigrants “evil migrants” today.) Yes, they came to our shores in waves and waves—Europeans in the east, fleeing wars, famines, and religious persecution; Africans in the south, most unwillingly as slaves, to maintain an evil way of life by making it economically feasible; and Asians in the west imported to work essentially as slaves to America’s robber-barons, themselves the sons and daughters of immigrants, to connect east with west. (Yeah, you might think that’s a “woke” statement. Tough!)

All the while, Americans methodically killed, enslaved, and “resettled” tribes of Native Americans, destroying their culture and civilization in the process. Let’s remember, though, that this also occurred elsewhere in the American continents at the hands of European invaders. Many of them were Portuguese or Spanish. Those decades of exploitation couldn’t stop the wonderful blending of Portuguese and Spanish colonists’ cultures, at least their positive parts, with those of America’s indigenous people, leading to what we now call Hispanic culture.

All that great Latin American diaspora has now settled into our country is the latest wave of decades of immigration to the US that is still going on, so for the bigots, haters, and racists of the FPA, they’re the obvious ones to take on the role of scapegoats for all the problems people believe they have, making them targets of their ire.

Hitler and Stalin had the Jews; American Nazis at the end of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth had the Irish, Italian, and other more recent immigrants from Europe; fascist leaders in Africa now go after gays, sentencing them to death; Jews in Israel are out to exterminate all Palestinians; Russians call Ukrainians, who are led by a brave Jew, Nazis; etc., etc. But in the US, the FPA has decided to use Hispanics as their scapegoats and has done so ever since 2015 when the Donald came down that escalator at Trump Tower. That was the first sign that things were going horribly wrong in America. “Hispanics are rapists and murderers,” that new presidential candidate said. He’s never stopped saying it!

Unfortunately, even many Hispanics have betrayed their heritage and moved to support that “f$#%ing moron” (that’s a quote from ex-SecState Tillerson, whom Trump fired in his first term) and Trump’s planned pogrom to be launched against their people. Is this cultural suicide and death wishes on their part? It sure looks like it! Gone will be any appreciation for the literary Hispanic heavyweights of Isabel Allende, Luis Borges, Leon de Greiff, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Vargas Llosa, and so many others. Gone will be the wonderful dance and musical tradition of cumbias, bambucos, rancheros, tangos, vallenatos, and other musical forms of greats like Carlos Gardel, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and so many others. By destroying an entire people, America’s dictator and his crazy followers will destroy a culture just because American fascists need scapegoats to survive like Hitler and Stalin did. Fascist movements everywhere need people to blame. America’s Hispanics were the obvious choice for them, in their minds’ eyes a worthless minority everyone will love to hate.

If the internment and deportation program is successful (that mostly means that fascists will be willing to spend billions of your taxes on paying for it!), the fascist bigots, haters, and racists will get their wishes granted at the expense of killing American democracy. American fascists need a hard lesson of woke and DEI: America will die if it closes its borders to immigrants, and it will be a death by many cuts. Immigrants have always come to America to start new lives in the land of opportunity and have always contributed to building a stronger America. (Do you remember that Neil Diamond song?) The FPA and its fuehrer only want to tear America down. They even call themselves “disrupters”! Which future for America do you prefer? One controlled by the bigots, haters, and racists?

Like many others who have studied in detail at America’s current political disaster and its origins, something now so awful that the country looks like 1930s’ Germany, I’ve often thought of going elsewhere. During the Vietnam war era, I considered Canada. After all, I can live abroad and did so for more than a decade in Colombia, South America. Europe looks more sane too. But despite my age now that makes such a decision more difficult (although I’d like to leave the sinking ship because I know that, except for supporting their aging fuehrer, the FPA doesn’t care about the elderly—will Dr. Oz to offer euthanasia as a Medicare option?), all I can do is fight against fascism and for democracy in America with my writing during the years I have left; that includes my two blogs. That’s a promise I’ve made to myself. Won’t you join me?

What this Comedian Said Will Shock You: Bill Maher, author (2024). Just in time for the 2024 elections…wow! I needed this. An irreverent critique of everything going on, especially the political circus acts. It’s something that grabs you by the throat and makes you almost die laughing at the follies of human beings and their cultural milieu. (The ‘almost” will be considered below.)

We often take ourselves too seriously. Okay, life is serious. We’re now in a dash—no marathons now—for November, 2024 when we must decide if we still want some sort of democracy in America or some sort of awful fascist state where some fascist psychotic sociopath declares himself president-for-life and begins to mimic Stalin’s purges. (Neither Bill Maher nor I can know what kind of democracy either: There are so many things wrong with the current one, starting with the US Constitution!)

But we need to laugh a bit before we begin grieving over our dead democracy, especially at ourselves and our compatriots who are letting it die. If this book doesn’t accomplish that, you’re a brain-dead zombie. (Most MAGA maniacs are, of course, but plenty so-called liberals living in their echo chambers are too.)

Because a serious book review is supposed to contain critiques (verbal equivalents of a sharp elbow in the ribs), let me begin attacking Bill with this one: Your title is very misleading! What Maher states here isn’t all that shocking; I agree with at least 87.765 percent plus or minus 3.923 percent margin-of-error of what he says and have probably said more shocking things in my political blog at pubprogressive.com. (Why are the Big Five publishing conglomerates and TV networks afraid of calling Donald Jackass Trump, J. Done-Nothing Vance, and their cronies fascists? That’s what they are!)

Of course, I don’t say it comically; I’m deadly serious. What extremists (fascists come from both the left and the right, moving around that grand circle that’s humanity’s political spectrum to that one single point called fascism) have done to this country (let’s call it “ripping the country apart”) is beyond the pale because its source is the destructive evil lurking there in the dark ready to attack any good people who might be left in the body politic. (Extremists hog the internet with their blathering. Normal people can’t get a word in edgewise, which is why I’m no longer on Facebook or X. In those cases, of course, the extremists also run those websites.)

That leads to another critique: Bill Maher is a bit simple-minded because he can’t imagine any of this country’s problems leading to another civil war. (I think he does mention the possibility of a Nazi-like putsch somewhere, though.) Would he be ready to fight for what’s right and good? I can’t answer that even for myself, but it’s a quandary he should have mentioned…except that it’s not very funny, is it?! (But maybe it’s a better and more practical use for all those damn guns?)

It’s easy to go after Narcissus le Grand and his MAGA maniacs, from the far-right wingnuts who support them, i.e., those evangelicals (unlike Maher, I refuse to capitalize that), Catholics (capitalized only because “catholic” can have a more general meaning—look it up), to white supremacists and a few crazed blacks and hispanics. It’s hard to look the other way at far-left extremists and recognize that they’re also approaching fascism as well, often supporting questionable causes (Hamas in Gaza, i.e. terrorists; eco-terrorists, i.e. tree-huggers who destroy trees; injuring or killing cops, i.e., anyone—everyone seems to hate cops now; believing in communism, with a small c or a big one, is the solution to everything; etc., etc.). Maher wraps all that up in his generic attacks on the nation’s youth (who all too often deserve those attacks of course!), when it’s not about immaturity (unless you want to call old Bernie Sanders “immature”?). The extremes of both political parties push their other more reasonable members toward the middle (maybe a good thing?), but that still allows the extremes to do a lot of damage on their way to fascism, so much so that it will likely destroy our country unless it’s halted.

Okay, I’ve proved myself wrong: What this comedian says is damn shocking because he tries to turn a serious debate into comedy. That should shock anyone who values our democracy. In fact, Mr. Maher is showing his age, not quite the comedians’ Biden yet, but his words seem an awful lot like my father’s. And my father lived in a better time when our family’s Eisenhower Republicans and Truman Democrats could get together for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter and not physically pommel each other. (Maybe go home a bit angry with the relatives, though.)

There are interesting little datapoints sprinkled throughout this book that are significantly serious, though. For example, the tragedy of some Trump MAGA maniacs: Consider Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force vet who needlessly died for Trump on January 6, 2021, believing that if he won, he might help her with the usurious loan she’d stupidly signed up for to save her business. (And Trump said no one died on January 6! She was your follower, you “f&^%ing moron”!) Another tragedy that obviously couldn’t make the publishing schedule for Bill’s book is found in the fireman who attended that recent Pennsylvania rally with his family and took a bullet for Trump while trying to protect his family. Trump doesn’t have to kill anyone on Fifth Avenue in New York City; he manages to do it at his rallies!

These cases and others are doubly tragic because the supporters of that “f%$#ing moron” (an ex-SecState Tillerson quote, by the way, in case you think I made that up) can’t seem to recognize that Narcissus le Grand only cares about himself; he’s a psychotic sociopath. That’s the diagnosis from an ad hoc committee of respectable mental health professionals published years ago. With his advanced age and impending dementia—he’s now the oldest presidential candidate ever!—he’s become even worse!

Unfortunately, Bill, those cases of lemmings among the MAGA maniacal hordes following their fuehrer over the cliffs aren’t comical—they’re an American tragedy in many ways. Treating them as comedy is easy; diagnosing and combatting the reasons why they’ve become mentally ill in that way is complicated and serious work that comedians like you and fiction writers like me can’t possibly do alone. Our society is sick and dying, and it needs some real professional help from many good people to find a cure if it’s going to survive.

And a final (and perhaps more light-hearted?) critique: What’s wrong with Bill’s sense of irony? He writes: “…when a big-game hunter gets trampled by an elephant and then eaten by a lion [it] is ‘hilarious.’” Wrong! It’s simple justice! (And why didn’t it happen to Don Jr.?)

I read this lengthy collection of comedy gigs in parallel with other more serious books. That’s called multitasking by some; I call it comedic relief from the more serious stuff. It’s not healthy to take life too seriously, but it’s also not healthy for us or the country to go laughing to our graves as American fascists set out to destroy this country and the world. We’ll see who has the last laugh, Bill. I’ve already prepared my “I told you so” speech, Mr. Maher. It’s a short one, and I quote a young acquaintance of mine: We’re so screwed!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. To prove I’m not such a serious fellow and that I can write comedy (or be bold enough to attempt it?), this sci-fi rom-com hopefully has given a few smiles to my readers and will do the same for those who missed it and peruse it now. It treats some serious themes, but it’s mostly tongue-in-cheek. And, by the way, it does time travel right, i.e., without paradoxes. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (You might even find it on Amazon among all the overly expensive crap the Big Five publishing conglomerates like to sell…like the above.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Hatchet Man. Elie Honig, author (2021, 2022). While one could argue that this is more a book for addicts of legal thrillers, it’s unfortunately non-fiction. It paints a disturbing picture of the man who never tried a case in his life yet became US Attorney General twice, William Barr. The focus here is on the second time, his two years as Jeff Sessions’s replacement in the Trump administration. In those two years, he preached the gospel of Trump’s “absolute immunity”; selectively released only aspects of the Mueller report to confuse people, and waved it off as a waste of time and money; damaged DoJ’s reputation (it’s still recovering); and promoted Trump’s “big lie.” And then he became the rat leaving the sinking ship by resigning!

I’d like to highlight four new things I learned in this expose of Barr’s incompetence and malfeasance in office. (Biopic? Chronicle? Call it what you want, but it’s an unflattering picture of an old fool who went out of his way to end his career by damaging so completely his reputation!)

First, by comparing Barr’s actions with the author’s time spent in the SDNY as a prosecutor  where he even prosecuted John Gotti a fourth time (the jury was incurably deadlocked, as in the previous three times), we not only see how unprepared Barr was to be AG but how much Trump and his family resemble a mafia family. More of an embellishment on what I already knew but with some surprises, and entertaining nonetheless.

Second, the book shows how complicit Barr was in destroying the DoJ’s reputation by turning his and his department’s focus on acting as the ex-president’s personal lawyers who would defend him at all cost. Added to the distrust we now have of SCOTUS and the court system as a whole caused by loading the courts with far-right judges, America’s justice system has been left in sad shape. It will take a long time for it to recover, if it ever does. Judges serve life terms, and Barr set the bar very low (pun intended) for any future AG who could very well think he can get away with the same crap.

Third, Barr’s actions were more driven by self-interest and furthering his own agenda. He viewed Trump only as a tool, a battle axe he could use to attack secularism in American society and promote the agenda of far-right Catholicism. I had no idea he was such an ultra-conservative Catholic. No one, absolutely no one, filled with such religious fanaticism should ever be AG! This unqualified and unscrupulous AG wrote papers about how secularism is corrupting America. Of course, evangelicals also saw Trump as their tool as well. This is also true of several current members of SCOTUS. The US barely escaped becoming an evil theocracy like Iran…and that still could happen!

Fourth, considering the damage Barr did to the DoJ, the reader of this review might ask what we can do to fix it. To Honig’s credit, he makes some sound proposals for reform in the chapter titled “The Road Back” that Garland and his minions should try to make DoJ policy. (Unfortunately, none of this chapter offers a solution for the problems with SCOTUS, which could do more lasting damage for a long time!)

This isn’t a long book, but it’s a pithy one. It will add a great deal to anyone’s understanding of how Trump and his MAGA maniacs almost succeeded in destroying democracy in America. It also provides a road map for what to avoid and what to fix in the future. Highly recommended!

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Menace from Moscow. Coming soon! In this third novel of this post-apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy, the critical and difficult management of geopolitics in a post-apocalyptic world caused by a worldwide bioengineered virus continues: Survivor Penny Castro and her friends’ new task is to recover nuclear-armed missiles aboard a US submarine that sunk off Cuba’s coast at the beginning of the pandemic. As if the train trip from Colorado to Florida across a dangerous, desolate, and devasted US isn’t enough, what awaits them in the Caribbean and beyond will put any fan of sci-fi thrillers on the edge of their seats. From SoCal to Cheyenne Mountain and on to Florida, Cuba, and what remains of the Russian Federation, Penny’s adventures are full of mystery, thrills, and suspense. This novel will be available at most online retailers (but not Amazon!) and at most library and lending services. For your consideration and enjoyment: The end of Penny’s post-apocalyptic adventures.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

[Note: This series will focus entirely on combatting fascism in America and around the world with my only weapon, words. (I’m not an NRA member!) It’s not antifa per se; it’s pro democracy. If you recognize words blasting your political preferences here, you’re part of the problem! To the rest of you, don’t worry about me. The fascist plutocracy of the 0.1% doesn’t do their own dirty work; and their toadies who do, don’t read very much, like their lord and savior, Donald J. Trump. So I doubt these essays will even hurt my book sales, mostly because that same plutocracy has already determined they will be low!]

Let’s get one thing straight: America’s potentially fatal sickness doesn’t depend on semantics; the words used to describe it are irrelevant. How the fascist plutocracy treats the sick patient is what’s terribly wrong and un-American. Differences between “fascism” and other names for the sickness are akin to the difference between “flatulence” and “fart”: both words describe a stench. America is no longer a democracy or republic—it’s a country where a fearful plutocracy does its best to ensure that it survives so they can become richer at the expense of the rest of us. Wealth distribution in America is the worst it has been during its previous history. You might call it “us vs. them,” but it’s really more “plutocracy vs. the common people.” It is in that sense that we now have the Fascist States of America.

I’ve discovered a little book (ooh, maybe a second book review this week?) that makes many of the points I’ve made in this series, probably doing it better than I have…except for semantics. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson in Let Them Eat Tweets use the term “plutocratic populism” for “fascism.” I don’t understand why so many like them are afraid of the word fascism. I started this series with part of Wikipedia’s definition: “Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy….” That’s plutocratic populism as defined by those authors. Let’s not sugarcoat it by avoiding the word fascism.

Otherwise, I have to give credit where credit is due: Those authors have analyzed the hell out of our current conundrum, the turn to fascism in America driven by s plutocracy that uses the tools of outmoded institutions of American government and exploits fanatics who believe they’ve been stepped on (they have been, but by the plutocracy and their serfs, the Good Ole Piranhas). These fanatics are generally white males, who are uneducated, blue collar or rural, and religious to the extreme. They have been left behind and are unprepared for existence in the modern world, and they’re stupid enough to drink the plutocracy’s Kool-Aid.

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[Note: This series will focus entirely on combatting fascism in America and around the world with my only weapon, words. (I’m not an NRA member!) It’s not antifa per se; it’s pro democracy. If you recognize words blasting your political preferences here, you’re part of the problem! To the rest of you, don’t worry about me. The fascist plutocracy of the 0.1% doesn’t do their own dirty work; and their toadies who do, don’t read very much, like their lord and savior, Donald J. Trump. So I doubt these essays will even hurt my book sales, mostly because that same plutocracy has already determined they will be low!]

By unfairly blocking Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS), Mitch McConnell aka Moscow Mitch aka Merkle the Turtle aka The Grim Reaper began turning US courts into fascist servants of the plutocracy. Wannabe fuehrer Trump eventually named three hard-right fascists, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, to SCOTUS, tilting the court far to the right and endangering American democracy for many years to come.

Those three fascist judges were just frosting on the cake, though. McConnell also succeeded in stacking lower federal courts with these orcs. The whole federal judiciary now has a fascist tilt that makes courts the places where progressive policies go to die. This has always been a wet dream of the American plutocrats. Elected officials are transitory; federal judges are there for life, or until they retire or are so ill they can’t put on those spiffy black robes. The plutocracy knew this flaw existed in US government, and. like the Senate and the Electoral College, they knew how to exploit it. They just needed willing lackeys like Moscow Mitch and Il Duce (Trump) to do their dirty work for them, the first to approve them in the fascist Senate and the second to nominate them.

Along with the Senate and the Electoral college, SCOTUS and that autocratic tilt now provides three solid legs to support fascism in America. No matter what Biden, Schumer, or Pelosi do, the fascist plutocracy can continue to demolish American democracy. But they’ll do so at their own peril! Their devious machinations can’t go on forever. Some are beginning to realize that.

Why not? Remember the crowds dancing in the street in glee when Trump lost big time and Biden won? I was in the hospital at the time. Cheers filled the rooms, wards, and corridors too. Outside there were cheers and car parades with horns blaring You see, the fascist plutocracy is a minority—that 0.1% out to dominate American democracy represents very few fascists. And their toadies who implement their cruel and insidious plans find that a fascist plutocracy in America appeals to fewer and fewer Americans. Plutocrats and fascists are an endangered species, and history is against their ilk. Demographics will vanquish them in the end, one way or the other.

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