Fiction published by the Big Five publishing conglomerates, who now fight over what small number of readers are left, could never be called controversial! First, many of their editors and authors are far from being liberal and are okay with the Big Five trying to appeal to every reader by publishing fiction that’s mainly bland pablum. (I rarely read their books anymore as a consequence.) I doubt that someone like Huxley or Orwell could ever publish anything with them these days where fascism dominates our American lives. Of course, most of those old authors and publishers are greedy and dedicated to making lots of money, so a reader will find all sorts of opinions in the nonfiction books (except in those books written for celebs by ghostwriters).

One obvious positive about being a (mostly) self-published author I’ve enjoyed in my writing career is my freedom to include many plots and themes that no Big Five publisher or author would even consider. My fiction covers social topics like human-, sex-, and drug-trafficking; conspiracies, crimes, and murders; and many fanatical politicians and their policies. I began reading British-style mysteries because of Covid; I continue to do that because those British authors—and a few others, most of them not Americans!—also dare to write about those plots and themes.

One topic that’s often intertwined with those plots and themes is fascism. My campaign against fascism and fascists began with my very first published novel, Full Medical, and hasn’t ended with Fear the Asian Evil, my last published novel (so far). (I’m mostly writing short fiction now and giving it away. A lot of that is anti-fascist too. See the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website.)

Will these plots and themes turn off readers? Undoubtedly some, especially those with far-right and fascist proclivities! In the past, that’s gone from a Midwestern woman who complained about my use of swear words—her email carried the stench of an extreme religious right-wing fanatic—to ardent fascist fanatics—thankfully, no death threats so far. And do I give a damn? Not really! (If it’s any comfort for complaining readers, I have characters who echo their extreme opinions as well. My stories, unlike most published by the Big Five, reflect the reality I observe, not some Big Five editor’s prejudices. And readers have other books to read, including the Big Five’s pablum, if they find mine not to their liking!)

I’m not Superman, but I see my storytelling as one of the only tools I have to fight against what’s wrong in our world. The “fucking moron” in the White House and his horde of MAGA maniacs can try to silence me, but they will fail!

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

Our current POTUS has used AI to create images of himself feces-bombing some of the many thousands of marchers on “No Kings” day protesting his fascist policies. Of course, his sycophantic MAGA maniacs just laugh that off, ignoring that it’s neanderthal humor and not in the least presidential. That’s one negative example of AI we’ll probably continue to see in the future.

Using AI invaded publishing long before the feces-bombing images of the “fucking moron” (ex-SecState Tillerson’s description of our infamous president, not mine): AI can be told to study any author’s style and mimic it; I know because my son did it to me (it was an abject failure because I don’t have a unique style—it can change from story to story). Both the study (it’s often buried in the “training” of the AI) and the mimicry I deem illegal, although the legal eagles seem slow to pursue that illegality. (And that’s why I put a disclaimer now on every copyright page informing readers that no AI is used in my storytelling—if I can remember to do so! Of course, the copyright itself, any publisher or author’s, should legally prevent the hackers from using the published material with their AI. Pay attention, copyright lawyers!)

POTUS’s tomfoolery represents real danger, though. Political leaders, diplomats, other officials, actors, composers, writers, engineers, scientist, and other creatives can be mimicked and/or abused by using AI; and viewers usually can’t tell the difference! (While the situation is absurd, that AI version of fat-fascist Trump sure looks real and very much like a modern Red Baron!) And this is only using the current AI technology that’s still very primitive. That’s the present situation. Who knows what abuses the future might bring?

I can imagine an AI version of Vladimir Putin swearing peaceful coexistence with AI while bombing the hell out of some European capital with nukes. Or just helping the real Putin spread more lies while tightening his puppet strings on our POTUS? Human beings already have quite a propensity for evil high jinks. AI is yet another powerful tool in their technological tool boxes.

Even now, AI’s negatives far outweigh any of its positives. The province of Ontario used AI to produce visuals and reproduce President Reagan’s spiel knocking tariffs; his words were real, though, and our current POTUS reacted with yet another boorish and childish tantrum and cancelled all future tariff negotiations with one of our biggest trade partners. (I guess he can feces-bomb crowds and laugh about it; but, like most bullies, he can’t take it!) Whether your reaction to the Canadian ad is positive or negative (forget Trump’s—he’s just a pea-brained schoolyard bully) for either Canada or the US, there’s no denying that AI was used as a tool.

The overarching lesson here? In this period of initial and primitive use of AI, your motto should always be “Trust no one and nothing!” because, chances are, your encounter with AI will not be a happy one and often as disgusting as Trump’s created feces-bombing images.

Now, you might ask why didn’t our infamous POTUS just use AI software to hide the fact that he was destroying the famous East Wing of the White House? Was it just his lack of imagination? (Does the “fucking moron” have any, or does he just depend on more intelligent sycophants?) Or is a truly criminal and fascist mind not able to hide his crimes…with AI?

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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas…without AI!

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!

While I empathize with the main point that NY Times’s editorial columnist Maureen Dowd makes in her article “Attention, Men: Books are Sexy!” summarized in her column’s title (I certainly read a lot more than I write, so I’m not guilty as charged), I disagree with her implication that men should be reading irrelevant and obscure classics (especially not Jane Austen’s novels, the best cure for insomnia that I know of). I’ll also point out that on the whole neither women nor men read much anymore—the younger they are, the less they read!—because streaming video and computer games have stolen their souls.

What all people need to be doing in these troubled times is reading the non-fiction books that expose the fascist takeover in the US, including the war on culture, and the fiction books that treat variations on that theme. We learn about ourselves not by reading Jane Austen, Shakespeare, or other “classic authors” unless we translate their lessons about the human condition into modern contexts. It is far easier to read and relate to modern works that already make that translation for us.

We have to be a bit broad-minded—more so than Ms. Dowd, obviously—about what we mean by “modern,” of course. Gabo’s Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t modern, but his amalgam of banana-republic-like autocrats describes the man in the White House well. The double-speak of 1984 isn’t modern either; now we call that “alternate facts.” And we haven’t even had our Kristallnacht yet, but January 6, 2021 came awfully close.

Current fiction can remind readers about how easy it is to lose democracy, freedom, and our individual rights. It continues to provide valuable lessons and warnings that are educational, anti-fascist, and informative. Sometimes the NY Times and other news outlets can help in that process. But sorry, Maureen, you and that venerable rag blew it this time! Jane Austen isn’t going to solve any of our current problems! And, if you and they can’t see that, you’re part of the problem.

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“The Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries.” This trilogy of novels, Muddlin’ Through, Silicon Slummin’,,,and Just Getting; By, and Goin’ the Extra Mile, illustrate what I mean in the post above: Ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo Melendez fights dangerous various criminal groups and fascists in these tales, fascists from China, Russia, and the US, setting an excellent example in fiction for anti-fascism warriors everywhere. Way to go, Mary Jo! (Okay, at times the MECHs help her. They’re Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans.)

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!

Let’s consider the current political situation: Donald Jackass Trump and his whole horde of fascists from the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are bent on destroying American democracy! Maybe drastic measures are required? To help answer that question, let’s see what measures some screenwriters and fiction authors have considered appropriate.

For example, the incredibly original and unpredictable Tom Clancy might be able to offer a solution! The circumstances in Debt of Honor are different, but I’d like to remind everyone that what happens there is appealing, considering the takeover of our country by American fascists, especially in light of the Fascist Party of America’s letting Trump and his minions to literally get away with murder (pardoning those far-right snakes who maimed and killed cops on January 6, 2021, is only one of the orange devil’s sins). In effect, justice would finally be served even if fascist SCOTUS judges still considered Narcissus le Grand America’s king.

What happened in Debt of Honor? A pilot stole a jumbo jet, a 747, and crashed it into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, taking out a whole slew of inept politicians. A new beginning, I’d call it. I can’t remember the Hollywood version—maybe I never saw it!—but Hollywood producers and screenwriters often destroy good plots and create stereotypical heroes and villains in a way that often annoys me and many others. I do remember Clancy’s book and maybe audience reactions to the movie, so maybe I did see the latter but focused on audience reaction more?

I tend to do that. I’m a fiction writer, so I observe situations and people, even if they’re acting stupid (like the fools at a Trump rally!). I compare audience reactions too. For example, the rest of the Alien franchise couldn’t begin to compare with the shock caused by the first movie’s scene when the alien popped out of that guy’s chest. (Something like America’s wannabe Il Duce and J. Done-Nothing Vance berating and insulting our brave and courageous Zelenskyy.) The audience’s gasp was quite audible over the soundtrack. (I’m sure similar gasps were heard all over the US and Europe as they watched Trump and Vance’s performance.)

More memorable for me, though, were two other movies when the audience actually stood up and cheered: Clancy’s Debt of Honor, and when the aliens destroyed most government buildings in Washington DC—I think that film was called Mars Attacks and featured Jack Nicholson recreating his Cuckoo Nest role (what Trump has turned Washington DC into, by the way!) and playing the US president. (The real one, who’s also hilarious at times, is a vicious fascist pig in comparison.)

I’ll focus on the Clancy story, though. To paraphrase one of his quotes that run across the top of this website, old Tom once said that fiction has to seem real. I’m not sure that scene with the jumbo jet was all that realistic, in the novel or on the silver screen, but the audience reactions I remember in the movie theater were interesting, to say the least. Now I’m thinking the audience’s cheers would be even louder: Maybe we need that jumbo jet!

Everywhere I look, I see incompetence in government. Sure, the Fascist Party of America (FPA) and their fuehrer, Donald Jackass Trump, are pretending to “straighten out the country.” What BS! They’re only creating chaos, destruction, and human suffering! And the Dems are so flummoxed by their complete mismanagement of their 2024 campaign efforts that they’re acting like deer in headlights. Federal judges are trying to stop the FPA and aid the hapless Dems, but they’ll soon run afoul of the fascist SCOTUS or be impeached by an FPA-controlled Congress.

In other words, all three branches of the US government are dominated by incompetent hacks now, intent on siding with Moscow, and that’s putting it nicely. A jumbo jet crashing into the Capitol during a joint session (gee, one’s occurring tonight, right?) could just be what our country needs: A clean sweep and a new start! Of course, there’s no Jack Ryan to save the day but the idea is appealing…and why all those movie audiences and most likely readers of Clancy’s book cheered!

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Anti-fascism in my stories. That’s been a theme since my very first novel Full Medical, accompanied by the theme of terrorism (the latter is just an extreme form of the former, of course). Trump is both a fascist and terrorist, of course. In my fiction, those who fight for democracy and freedom usually win. (In the real world, that’s always in doubt with autocratic personalities like Putin, Xi, and Trump around.) Pick a story—Legacy of Evil, for example—and get some satisfaction that the good guys can win. You might even get some ideas about how to help them win in the real world? We certainly need to do that, even though the US has abdicated its role as the leader of the free world with Trump in charge.

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?