impeach_the_imposters: In December 2024, Adam Zarnowski, ex-CIA agent and author of Jörmungandr was personally involved in an NSA‑authorized forensic audit of the 2024 election. He says; “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz won—by a wide margin. Trump lost dramatically. There are multiple layers of complexity to this cover‑up, including transnational organized crime syndicates that extend far beyond the United States and our elections. To that point, I work in the human trafficking sector, which intersects with the stolen election(s) and has ties to Trump and Epstein—not to President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Walz, but to the allied interests responsible for burying the audit.” — Adam Zarnowski, ex-CIA agent and author of Jörmungandr.
That’s all very well and good, but when wil any of these criminals be punished for their crimes? Felon 45 is pretty much off limits—for now—but Musk? Haul his ass in!
And more than anything else right now, JUST ONCE, I’d like to see someone’s fist wipe that smirk off Felon 45’s face. Seriously.
In case you missed it the other night, Bill Maher, the oleaginous, unctuous, supercilious, smugly self-satisfied septuagenarian sleazeball with the permanently pursed expression of a man who genuinely enjoys the smell of his own farts, who has spent decades steeping in stale dissent and the accumulated fumes of his own self-regard, stood on the Real Time stage in the middle of his own comedy show and decided that with wars raging, Donald Trump wreaking havoc and all manner of genuinely important shit happening in the world, Americans were spending entirely too much time talking about the death of Dolly Parton.
No tenderness. No affection. No meaningful acknowledgment of what she gave the world, what she created, what she meant to millions of people or why they might be gutted that she was gone.
Just this dry, drive-by little cheap shot tossed at a woman three days after she died, and then on to the next joke.
Fucking hilarious, Bill.
Really.
And I know exactly what some people are going to say.
Jesus Christ, Jo, don’t be so dramatic. Dolly made jokes about her tits all the time.
She sure did.
Dolly joked about her boobs, her body, her hair, her clothes, her face, her makeup and practically every visible inch of herself that some tedious man had already scrutinized, underestimated or decided was available for public inspection, because she had that magnificent ability to grab whatever cheap shit somebody intended to use against her, bedazzle the bastard, turn it inside out and make the joke hers before the other person even realized she’d stolen the weapon out of their hand.
And I guarantee you Dolly wouldn’t have cared what Bill Maher said about her on his stupid show.
She was a better person than I am by a factor of a thousand, to say the very least. She probably would’ve laughed, waved one perfectly manicured hand and gone on with her day.
I, on the other hand, am a petty, vindictive bitch who relishes any opportunity to eviscerate a sexist little hobbit with a superiority complex, so here we are.
Because it pissed me off.
And I know I’m not the only one.
The thing is, if a different comedian had made the exact same joke, I might’ve laughed.
This isn’t about the boob joke.
It’s about the fucking asshole telling it.
Context matters. History matters. And he did not materialize on that stage Friday night freshly hatched from some politically incorrect chrysalis, shiny and innocent and unburdened by decades of his own bullshit about women.
He has spent a career pawing through women’s bodies, beauty, brains, boundaries, bedrooms, breakups, beliefs and basic autonomy with the proprietary disgust of a man who thinks female existence is a defective appliance he alone has been burdened with troubleshooting, turning every woman who displeases, defies or simply declines to flatter him into another recurring exhibit in his personal Museum of Why Everybody Else Is Wrong About Everything Always.
So no, I’m not clutching my pearls because somebody joked about Dolly Parton’s fun bags.
I don’t even own fucking pearls.
I’m saying that when this particular man, dragging this particular history behind him, looks at the death of this particular woman, surveys this immense eruption of grief and gratitude, complains that she’s getting too much attention and then points at her chest, the punchline arrives with a long, greasy receipt attached.
Because Dolly was warmth and wit, humor and heart, bawdy and tender and glamorous as hell, deeply rooted in her faith, ferociously ambitious and astonishingly generous, with this uncanny gift for making people feel welcome in her presence instead of inspected by it.
The whole fucking world stopped when she died.
It stopped in pink light and porch flowers and church pews and beauty shops and bars and kitchens and parked cars where people gripped steering wheels and cried into sleeves because Dolly had been there for so long, in our kitchens and cars and childhoods, in our mothers’ record collections and our grandmothers’ living rooms, on movie screens and radios and in books arriving in little kids’ mailboxes, that somewhere along the way we stopped imagining a world in which she wouldn’t be here.
Stories poured out about mothers and grandmothers, childhoods and first dances, long drives and hospital rooms and terrible years made softer because somewhere in the middle of all that shit there was Dolly, all bouffant, brilliance, bedazzled benevolence, and boobs, cracking filthy jokes one minute and putting books into children’s hands the next, writing songs people would carry for the rest of their lives, giving away fortunes, showing up after disasters and remaining unmistakably, gloriously herself through every bit of it.
I’m still not over her passing, and I don’t honestly expect I ever will be.
Losing her felt like somebody removed one of the load-bearing beams of human tenderness, something so constant that millions of us had forgotten how much weight she was carrying until she was gone.
That grief crossed generations, politics, religions and cultures because people weren’t mourning a résumé.
They were mourning Dolly.
And watching that ocean of affection scratched something raw in two sexist birds from the same rotten feather pile.
Donald Trump tried to jam his grubby little snausage fingers into her story by posting a fake AI image of himself walking arm-in-arm with her at the White House after she died, manufacturing a moment that never happened with a woman who spent her entire career being extraordinarily careful not to let politicians claim her for themselves.
Think about how fucking grotesque that is.
Even in death, he couldn’t leave a woman’s image, boundaries or legacy alone. He had to insert himself into the frame, manufacture an intimacy she never publicly gave him and paste his own face into her history after she was no longer here to tell him to get the fuck out of it.
The man has plenty of authentic photographs and archival footage of himself hanging around Jeffrey Epstein.
But Dolly?
He needed AI.
One grasping, glory-guzzling egomaniac tried to counterfeit closeness to her.
The other tried to cheapen the mourning.
Same fucking sickness: a beloved woman dies and two swollen male egos immediately start clawing at what she left behind, desperate to wedge themselves into a story that was never about them.
And the irony of Maher complaining that everybody was devoting too much attention to Dolly while IMPORTANT THINGS were happening could choke a python.
He was delivering a monologue on a television comedy program.
This wasn’t the chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupting a briefing on troop movements because somebody wanted to discuss Dollywood. Nobody burst into the Situation Room waving a sequined butterfly and screaming that the Empire State Building had gone pink. He was standing under studio lights being paid an enormous amount of money to make jokes about current events while scolding ordinary Americans for caring too much about the death of one of the most iconic and beloved entertainers this country has ever produced.
The intellectual ouroboros here is fucking magnificent.
A snake eating its own asshole while explaining that everybody else has lost perspective.
I used to watch him a lot. Many, many years ago, I watched his show constantly because I thought he was sharp and willing to say the uncomfortable thing.
Now I can’t stand the sound of his fucking voice.
That resin-reeking, booster-bitching podcast pustule has the ineffable aura of a man who has been sitting on the same steakhouse barstool since 1997, slowly pickling himself in Maker’s Mark, stale aftershave and the sour backwash of his own bullshit while explaining to a succession of increasingly alarmed cocktail waitresses that women used to have a sense of humor.
He’s a human oil slick of smugness, scotch breath and unsolicited opinions, a pocket-sized, pontificating prick with the puckered little face of a man who’s been sucking Warheads through a cocktail straw since breakfast, carrying himself with all the swaggering, sneering self-importance of Lord Farquaad while radiating the unmistakable energy of somebody standing furious beneath the little wooden hand that says YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE THIS RIDE.
He has calcified into the ageing, pretentious pub bore he would’ve mocked thirty years ago, mistaking irritation for intelligence, contempt for sophistication and chronic obnoxiousness for some rarefied capacity to perceive truths unavailable to the rest of us slobbering civilians.
And spare me the mythology that all this sanctimonious shit makes him some fearless fucking truth-teller.
George Carlin was.
Richard Pryor was.
Joan Rivers could verbally skin somebody, salt the hide and have the poor bastard laughing while she did it.
They were adored.
Being incisive doesn’t require being insufferable. Saying something shitty that makes everybody groan doesn’t automatically turn you into Lenny Bruce because you leaned backward afterward and looked pleased with yourself.
Sometimes a prick is just a prick.
Dolly will outlive all of this.
Her songs will still be playing. Her movies will still be watched. Children will still open books because of something she started long before they were born. Families will still tell stories about her generosity, her one-liners, her ridiculous hair, the places she showed up, the people she helped and the particular way she made kindness look less like sainthood and more like common fucking sense.
Fifty years from now, people will still know Dolly Parton.
Bill Maher will be a grainy thumbnail somebody scrolls past while trying to remember why the fuck anybody ever cared what he thought.
He has spent his life acting like the smartest man in every room and still gets aggrieved whenever the spotlight lands somewhere he can’t slither underneath it.
So finally, New Rule:
Trying to diminish Dolly Parton doesn’t make you daring, dangerous or defiantly unconventional. Taking a cheap shot at a legend three days after she dies because the scale of everyone else’s grief annoys you isn’t intellectual courage. It’s just cheap, sour little cruelty dressed up in the moth-eaten costume of rebellion.
It makes you look like a bitter, brittle, boozy, blowhard little loser, marinated in misogyny, embalmed in ego and pissed off that a woman whose kindness, talent, humor and humanity dwarfed yours by several fucking zip codes received the kind of love you could spend another hundred years chasing and never catch.
Dolly Parton will be loved long after all of us are gone.
You weren’t too intellectually superior to grasp that.
You weren’t too edgy to understand why the whole world stopped for her.
You were just pissed off because you’re a small, spiteful, smug, sexist, solipsistic, sententious pseudointellectual little excuse for a man, and you know goddamn well the world will not pause, let alone stop, for one single solitary second when it comes to you.
yesterday afternoon, the White House press pool was summoned to the Oval Bordello for a hastily-organized, unscheduled dog-and-pony show.
when they arrived, there was Preznit Fuckwit, seated behind his Big Boy Resolute Desk, surrounded by his emotional support flunkies and visual aids.
the gathered reporters were all ‘what the fuck?’ — but as word-adjacent noises began to seep from Dear Leader’s rancid anus-mouth, they realized they were about to have their time wasted on the pettiest bullshit imaginable.
“okay, uh, the purpose of this, more than anything else, is we’re gonna be— changing the name of Lake Ontario— effective immediately, to Lake America. that’s gonna take place right now, as I sign the— order.”
oh, for fuck’s sweet sake. seriously? this is what this spite-obsessed imbecile remains laser-focused on, as the world all around us turns to shit?
he’s going to make good on his infantile threat to ‘rename’ a lake — all because Ontario Premier Doug Ford had wounded his precious fee-fees by suggesting Donny might ought to kiss his ass.
as the price of goods and services continues to soar, as the unwinnable clusterfuck in Iran goes on, as sailors starve and armed federal thugs invade our cities, as climate change caused a glacier to fucking collapse, killing hundreds in Nepal, this shithead is wasting everyone’s time on settling scores.
he’s such a child. ‘I’m going to call you Premier Poopyhead, and then you’ll be sorry!’
ace job, Donny. you sure stuck it to Canada. I’ll bet Doug Ford is sorry he ever tried to mess with the Supreme Re-namer of Water.
here we go again, and it’s all so predictably stupid. Donny does something pants-shittingly imbecilic, and the press falls all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to normalize it.
‘of course a president would rename a body of water out of spite. why wouldn’t he? it’s the most perfectly reasonable thing in the world.’
we need to step back — because first of all, Donny’s executive order ass-clownery didn’t actually change the name of shit.
can I just remind everyone of something that the worthless scribs seem to have forgotten?
Executive orders are issued from the executive branch of the government, specifically the U.S. President. An executive order is not a law in the sense that it does not go through the legislative process. It is not binding on everyone, only on employees of the executive branch.
got that? none of Donny’s moronic EOs are actually laws, and no one has to abide by them except the poor unfortunate schnooks who work in the executive branch.
Donny hasn’t actually stuck it to anyone. no one outside of the MAGAverse and the media gives a shit about his nonsensical royal decrees. the entire world is laughing at the embarrassing antics of America’s Boy King as he quite publicly pisses his pants — and the stupid fuck thinks he’s winning.
Canadian PM Mark Carney, can you step in here for a quick minute and explain to my nice readers how Lake Ontario got its name?
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”. The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms. Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.
Donny doesn’t know any of that shit. nor does he care. all he knows is that the dude who runs Ontario was very very mean to him, and so now all patriotic Americans are forever forbidden from saying its name.
it’s all so eternally moronic.
it’s stunning how quickly the entire Donnysphere has risen up as one to demonize the nation of Canada. tell me it’s not a cult.
last week, nobody gave a shit about Canada. they were simply America’s hat, quietly doing whatever the hell is it they do up there, above the 49th Parallel. this week, they’re the Evil Red Menace to our north.
“all of this is a warning what will happen to our country sixty-nine days from now, if radicalized Democrats get their way, and win the midterms. Canada’s become so woke, so far left, so anti-Trump, so radical socialist left, they have become crazy climate alarmists, and they’re wrapped up in this idiotic land acknowledgement whatever scheme of theirs, gender theory, that they seem to view communism, and, yeah, the communist Chinese as a better partner than the US.”
that’s right, Mr and Mrs America — while you were innocently asleep in your beds, the entire nation of Canada turned communist.
I knew it. I knew these fucking lumberjacks were commies the first time I laid eyes on them.
if an unpopular president choosing to gin up a pointless war with Canada in order to distract everyone from his own failures sounds familiar, that’s because it is. it’s the plot of the 1995 comedy Canadian Bacon.
The plot of the 1995 satirical comedy film Canadian Bacon centers on an American President with a low approval rating who decides to start a cold war against Canada to boost his popularity.
for decades, Canadian Bacon was notable only for being John Candy’s final role prior to his untimely death.
now, it’s a guidebook for an administration that’s already been using 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale as instruction manuals.
“you talked yesterday in your interviews about how you’re confident that a deal can be reached, but today you were talking about the problems that people like Howard Nutlick— Howard Lutnick and other members of the administration present.”
tee fucking hee. you just know that everyone calls this him ‘Nutlick’ in private. it was only a matter of time before someone slipped up in public.
sorry Howie. ‘Nutlick’ is canon now.
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
brendannorth: These dangerous anti-surveillance saboteurs have really done it this time. Placing a live bird directly in front of a Flock Safety camera forcing its motion activated sensor to record hundreds of useless photos and video clips? Absurd!
“Birds of a Feather De-Flock Together” is my latest protest art piece that attempts to draw parallels between a canary in a cage and the mass-surveillance apparatus being built up around us.
Cameras on every corner. Data collection in our pockets. Algorithms watching what we buy, where we go, who we talk to, and what we believe. Every day, more bars are added to the cage. We only escape by fighting ba
filastinian: This post highlights the power of staying calm, informed, and confident when speaking with immigration officers. Instead of reacting emotionally, the person in the video keeps bringing the conversation back to the law and asks direct questions like, “Did I commit any infraction?” and “Can I leave?” That approach makes the moment feel less chaotic and more controlled, because knowledge becomes the real source of strength. The message is simple: when people understand their rights, they can protect themselves with composure and clarity. It also shows that respect and firmness can go together, even in a tense situation. Overall, the video encourages viewers to stay alert, speak carefully, and rely on facts instead of fear.
I’m supposed to believe that America is still in its infancy, that it is a beautiful but complicated idea, that we simply haven’t become what we can and will become.
I’m supposed to remember that history is cyclical, that all barbaric regimes are temporary, and that every evil empire invariably falls.
I’m supposed to hold fast to the dream that we will emerge from this scalding present crucible, transformed and made better by the conflict.
I know that I’m supposed to believe that we have still not seen our best days yet, and that when we eventually do, it will be worth all the struggle we’ve endured to claim the nation our forebears dreamed of.
In the past, I’ve often believed that. I’ve written it. I’ve preached it.
Now, I’m not so sure.
250 years into our collective lifespan, we are as afflicted with systemic racism as we’ve ever been, white nationalism has completely infected the entirety of one of our political parties, and we are teetering perilously close to extremist minority rule that will in effect, permanently silence the voices and votes of the vast majority.
With every bit of the planet’s accumulated information now literally in the palms of our hands, too many of our people are still believing easily disprovable falsehoods, still falling victim to nonsensical conspiracies, still vulnerable to baseless lies about their neighbors.
Even with the benefits of hindsight of our shameful and bloody history, a toxic cocktail of overt racism, neanderthal theology, intellectual ignorance, and self-preservation has rendered a large swath of America hostile to Science, terrified of diversity, and irrationally violent toward vulnerable people.
And perhaps worst of all, a substantial portion of this nation remains emotionally tethered to one of the single most reprehensible human beings on the planet, despite a decade of prolific lawlessness and unrepentant moral filth. His ineptitude, immorality, predation, and criminality have not proven to be dealbreakers but selling points.
How are decent, reasonable people supposed to work with this? How do we find common ground with those who insist on dehumanization of those who are different? How can we engage in constructive conversation or honest dialogue with people whose reality is so arbitrary, whose truth is so malleable, whose moral goalposts are forever shifting? How can we forge a new and more equitable America, while so many Americans live perpetually backwards, pining for a bygone day when fewer people had a voice or a vote? How can we coexist with those who would rewind this nation to a time when women, people of color, and LGBTQ human beings had their value determined, their options dictated, and their futures defined by straight, white men?
If our families and friendships and workplaces and churches and political systems are all still this saturated with supremacy, can an interdependent community of disparate humanity with equitable access to life, liberty, and happiness ever be a reality here?
Romanticism and misplaced optimism aside, is America as we envision it still possible, with MAGA’s poison having infected its bloodstream?
It may of course still be possible, yet with every year I think it becomes less and less probable. The longer we live as a nation with these untreated collective cancers of heart and mind, the greater opportunity they have to metastasize exponentially and the less chance we have of eradicating them for good.
History reminds us that the more we abide brutality and tolerate discrimination, the more normal they become, the more difficult they are to excise. Our present normalis not sustainable if we’re ever going to grow into something truly beautiful.
I want this nation to become what the songs and the anthems declare we can be, but I’m not sure we all share that desire. I think many of us want the ugliest atrocities of our past to be our future, and that may be a disease too invasive to be healed of for the rest of us.
There’s an old saying: when the horse is dead, dismount.
The ride may be over for America.
Maybe this horse is beyond saving.
Yes, I’ll show up again today, leveraging my time, my resources, and my voice in the cause of equality and empathy; to do all I can let freedom ring and let justice roll down like a river, though I admit, it feels like a fool’s errand.
Still, I want to know I left this life doing everything I could to help us get well, and that’s what will propel me back out into the fray once again.
I’m waking up in this America that is, and will be fighting like hell to craft the America that could be, as futile as that sometimes seems.
For ten interminable, exhausting years, MAGA has been an invasive, insidious national cancer.
I wonder if we can survive it.
What about you? How do you view the damage of the last decade? Do you see our demise as a foregone conclusion, or do you feel hopeful that transformation can and will come? Let me know in the comments.
Because this endlessly evil regime cannot leave beauty alone. It cannot encounter anything wild, vulnerable, ancient, communal, unowned or gloriously beyond its control without reaching for a blade, a bulldozer, a budget cut, a branding iron, a buyer.
Wild horses, these sovereign, almost mythical beings of the American West, born under enormous skies and built for distance and instinct and survival, moving through wind-scoured ridges, shadowed cuts in the land, high meadows silvered with frost and strange red-rock country glowing rust and copper beneath the sun.
Mothers keep their young close, stallions pivot toward danger, whole herds gather and break into motion at once, hooves pounding hard earth, manes whipping, nostrils flaring, dust blooming gold behind them, breath clouding in the cold, the sound of them rolling across the open ground like thunder you can feel in your ribs, all that sinew and speed and wild intelligence moving together until for a few seconds the land doesn’t look occupied by them so much as alive because of them.
They are magnificent.
And this fascist wrecking crew looked at all that living splendor and found a way to turn it into inventory.
Sixty-eight of those wild mustangs, just one group among thousands sold off by the government, were chased down by helicopters, torn from the desert country their bodies understood, confined for years in an Idaho feedlot while the government claimed to be searching for “loving homes,” and then, this March, sold to an Ohio livestock trader for twenty-five dollars apiece.
Twenty-five dollars for a living being that survived drought, hunger, injury, scorching summers, frozen ground and every pitiless test nature could throw at it, only to encounter the one predator capable of inventing a purchase order.
Us.
They were packed into cavernous haulers and carried 1,800 miles east, away from the vast ground they knew, until two double-decker cattle trucks arrived around midnight, ramps clanging open beneath hard artificial light, frightened bodies crowding together while hoofbeats boomed through steel and darkness closed around them.
The buyer won’t say where they went. They never surfaced at public auction. Other federally sold mustangs have turned up bound for Canadian killing floors, where horses can be exported alive, butchered and sold as meat abroad.
The cruelty almost disappears inside the vocabulary. That’s the whole grotesque fucking trick. Years of captivity become “care.” A midnight disappearance becomes “placement.” A terrified horse becomes a transaction, and somewhere far enough down the chain for everybody responsible to avert their eyes, death waits with a price attached.
So spare me the antiseptic official bullshit about “placement,” “disposition” and “transfer,” those anesthetized little words buffed smooth until nobody can hear the panic or picture a horse bracing against the walls around it.
Wild horses are being funneled into a death pipeline.
And it is so perfectly, hideously Trump.
There is a predatory pathology underneath all of this that feels sickeningly familiar. Grab the woman. Grab the land. Grab the horse. Take what you want because you want it, because you can, because consent and stewardship and restraint are merely inconveniences standing between appetite and acquisition. The same man who bragged about grabbing women presides over a government that treats the country itself like something to be seized by the fistful.
Everything goes into the grinder: forest, shoreline, canyon, prairie, wildlife, human being. Anything precious eventually collides with some grasping, gouging, gluttonous bastard clutching a calculator and asking what it is worth once stripped, sold, excavated, exploited, pulverized or dead, because this fascist criminal enterprise sees trees and thinks timber, ridgelines and thinks minerals, public acreage and thinks private profit, suffering and thinks savings, and a wild horse and thinks twenty-five dollars.
The legal shell game is revolting. A federally protected mustang gets posted on an adoption website. No takers after three one-week listings? The government can designate that horse “unadoptable” and sell it. Same heartbeat. Same watchful eyes. Same warm breath. A different box gets checked, federal safeguards evaporate, and something that belonged to the American landscape becomes ordinary livestock on paper.
That is how wildness gets laundered through paperwork until the blood becomes somebody else’s technical responsibility.
I’ve loved horses since I was a little girl. I grew up on a rural road in New Jersey, and nearby were horses neglected so badly they eventually slipped into a strange wild existence of their own, wandering and grazing, keeping close to one another, disappearing and returning according to rhythms entirely their own.
Sometimes they chose me.
I’d bring carrots and celery and stand there with my little hand stretched flat, waiting through that quiet appraisal, ears swiveling toward sounds beyond my range, one heavy hoof shifting against the dirt before that enormous head finally lowered, warm breath spilling across my fingers, velvet muzzle brushing my palm, the carrot disappearing with that clean, satisfying crack between teeth.
There was something in them I felt before I knew how to name it, some deep, quiet presence behind those enormous searching eyes that made me feel as though I wasn’t simply looking at a horse but being regarded by another soul.
I remember the smell of grass and earth and sun on their hides, the extraordinary intimacy of standing beside all that strength and realizing it had chosen softness with me.
Horses taught me early that power didn’t have to wound, and trust from something you could never overpower was never yours to take.
It was theirs to give.
I thought that was magic.
I still do.
Maybe that is why horses reached me so early and stayed with me for so long. I grew up learning that the person who was supposed to make me feel safest could also be the person who hurt me, and that kind of betrayal rearranges a child’s understanding of love before she is old enough to understand what has happened.
But the horses were different.
They were the first creatures I remember experiencing as powerful without being frightening, enormous without being threatening, capable of hurting me and choosing not to.
They did not demand anything from me. They did not punish tenderness or turn trust into a weapon. They simply stood there, warm and watchful, and when one lowered its great head toward my little hand and accepted what I offered, I felt safe in the presence of strength.
I did not know then how much that mattered.
So this one got through. Straight through whatever emotional armor I’ve been trying to grow just to survive the news, because Jesus Christ, can we just make it stop?
Can we please just make it STOP?
Every morning another obscenity, another assault, another piece of wonder shoved face-first into the machinery, another stomach-dropping moment wondering which refuge, which species, which family, which child, which institution, which fragment of America we have to throw our bodies across now because some sadistic little apparatchik decided it could be sacrificed.
They ravage and raze, poison and pillage, strip and sell, gut and grind, and before one atrocity has settled into your bones another is crawling across the chyron.
It’s bleak and relentless and exhausting.
And I hate them.
I hate these people.
I hate what they’re doing to this country, to living things, to every decent instinct we’re supposed to cultivate in one another instead of crushing it beneath cruelty and greed.
And I don’t want to feel this way.
I don’t want to discover at noon that my jaw has been clenched since breakfast. I don’t want to look down and realize my hands have curled into fists. I don’t want that sick acceleration in my chest when another alert hits my phone, that split second when I’m almost afraid to open it because there is a decent chance I’m about to learn somebody is dead, a family has been blown apart, an animal has been brutalized, some irreplaceable piece of America has been carved open, and somebody in authority is already preparing the bloodless explanation for why none of us should care.
I don’t want hatred living this close to my heart. I don’t want these people colonizing my nervous system, taking something soft and human in me and keeping it perpetually braced for impact.
And I hate them for that too.
And DO NOT tell me this is about money.
Don’t fucking dare.
The numbers are obscene. The government can spend more than $3,000 capturing a mustang, sell that same horse for twenty-five dollars, and leave somebody farther down the chain able to make as much as $750 from its body. In 2025 alone, the government unloaded 3,700 horses and called the resulting $56 million reduction in future costs a savings.
Spend thousands wrenching them from the land. Sell them for almost nothing. Shed the responsibility. Call it efficiency.
And Project 2025 looked at these extraordinary beings and decided the real problem was the cost of keeping them alive, recommending that Congress allow the government to “dispose humanely” of excess wild horses and burros.
Dispose.
A cold little word for making a living thing disappear.
Too expensive.
They said the HORSES were too expensive.
Meanwhile Coupon-Code Caligula can conjure a UFC spectacle onto the White House lawn, turn Washington into an IndyCar track, tear apart the East Wing for a gargantuan ballroom, commission a multimillion-dollar granite helipad, inspect the work, dislike it, and have part of the thing ripped back apart and DONE AGAIN.
There is always money for marble and motors, spectacle and self-worship, hospitality suites and presidential pageantry, always another corporation with fortunes tied to federal power eager to underwrite some gleaming shrine to Donald Trump’s diseased appetite for himself.
But keeping a horse alive?
NOW comes austerity.
Now, beneath an open Western sky beside beings whose only offense is costing money to keep breathing, this malignant little kleptocracy suddenly discovers fiscal restraint.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
Can’t they leave one thing alone?
Can’t they leave one goddamn pure, beautiful fucking thing alone?
Leave the high country where first light spills slowly over stone, wetlands waking beneath pale ribbons of mist, badlands burning copper and crimson as evening comes down, great unfenced plains where wind can run for miles without striking a wall. Leave the places where stars crowd the heavens until the sky feels bottomless, where silence has weight and dawn arrives across untouched ground in long washes of gold, where the horizon still belongs to itself.
Leave the horses.
Because these aren’t isolated little acts of ugliness anymore. They’re scars. Physical scars gouged into the land, institutional scars carved through agencies and safeguards and public trust, moral scars etched into all of us from waking up day after day and watching people entrusted with this country dispose of it piece by piece because to them everything is transactional, everything is consumable, everything has a price and nothing has inherent worth once it has ceased to serve the only thing they truly revere: themselves.
They are cutting pieces out of America, hacking into the wild places and public places and fragile places, tearing through things we inherited from people who understood that preservation was a promise made forward, an obligation to people they would never meet. They are leaving wounds that won’t close when that motherfucker is finally gone one way or the other, damage that won’t disappear with a new president or a new Congress or the ceremonial scrape of his name off whatever he managed to glue it to on the way out.
Our children and their children will inherit these injuries. It may take decades to restore what can be restored, generations to regrow what can be regrown, and there are lives being extinguished right now that no election, apology, appropriation, investigation or act of contrition will ever bring back.
Human beings are dying. Animals are dying. Children around the world are dying, and we are living through it in real time, absorbing one fresh horror before the last has found somewhere to settle, carrying this accumulation of grief and rage and helplessness inside our bodies while the people inflicting it move briskly along to the next atrocity.
And my heart is absolutely breaking for these horses, for beings whose whole lives were made of open country and changing seasons, hidden water and hard ground, summer heat shimmering above stone, the herd gathered close after sundown and mornings arriving pale across an unobstructed horizon, until human greed reached across all that distance and dragged them into a world of fences, forms, freight and confinement.
They knew freedom.
We gave them fear.
And we have to remember that. We have to remember all of it, what they bulldozed and butchered, what they poisoned and despoiled, what they sold and scarred and sacrificed, the people they hurt, the families they devastated, the places they wounded and the creatures that had no vote, no lobbyist, no lawyer, no way to defend themselves from the people who were supposed to protect them.
Not the bleached, sanitized version that will someday be compressed into a chapter called “the Trump years.” Not a collection of dates and executive orders and election results scrubbed clean of what it actually felt like to live through this.
Remember waking up afraid to look at your phone. Remember the clenched jaw and balled fists and pounding heart. Remember what it felt like to watch cruelty become governance, callousness become currency, destruction become routine, empathy treated like some embarrassing weakness that serious people had finally evolved beyond.
Because forgetting would be one final cruelty inflicted on everything and everyone they harmed.
Some of these scars will fade. Some will take generations. Some never will.
We cannot get these horses back.
We cannot resurrect the dead, unbreak the terrified child, reassemble every shattered family, coax every ancient living thing back from ruin or return every frightened animal to the life it knew before somebody decided its existence cost too much.
But we can remember exactly what it looked like when cruelty was given power, exactly what it sounded like, exactly what it cost, and carry that memory forward like a promise to the people who come after us that no matter how much time passes, no matter how carefully somebody tries to sand down the edges of this history, we will tell them what happened here.
We will tell them what was done.
We will tell them what was lost.
And we will tell them why we must never, ever fucking let it happen again.
