@AesPolitics1 Well, didn't expect MTG publicly stating she made a mistake in supporting Sweet Potato Hitler on my bingo card, but here we are.
It's actually kind of refreshing. I hope more follow her example. Doubt it, but... 🤷♂️
BREAKING: “I WILL NEVER STOP!” Activist "JoJo from Jerz" reveals how Trump and Melania tried to SILENCE her with legal threats – and the single mother REFUSED to surrender!
Joanne Carducci, the firebrand progressive blogger known to more than a million followers as JoJo from Jerz, has revealed a months-long legal ordeal that she says left her crying every day, terrified of losing her home, and desperately trying to protect her two children.
Her account begins with threatening letters from attorneys representing Donald and Melania Trump, demanding that she retract statements, apologize, and pay money over things she'd posted online. According to Carducci, the demands eventually became entirely about Melania.
According to Carducci, the Trumps' attorney initially demanded that she retract statements she'd made online, including her claim that Trump incited the deadly January 6 insurrection. She was also ordered to issue a full apology, admit that she had knowingly lied, and agree to a financial payment, with just days to respond and the threat of punitive damages hanging over her.
And the price of refusing? Carducci says the lawyers eventually demanded a staggering $1 MILLION from a single mother who had once earned $16 an hour as a school paraprofessional.
“They would take my home,” she wrote in a deeply personal and powerful Substack essay.
Carducci says she kept the ordeal secret from her children, even as she struggled with the possibility that the house she'd worked so hard to provide for them could be taken away.
“She was swinging a fucking wrecking ball at a mosquito, and my children lived in the building,” Carducci wrote of Melania.
But Carducci refused to retract her criticism or issue an apology.
Former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin stepped in to help her without charge, providing legal advice and support while she faced demands she says she could never have afforded to fight alone.
Eventually, according to Carducci, the letters stopped. She never apologized, never retracted her statements, and never agreed to the demands.
What finally persuaded her to tell the world was watching Melania Trump promote women's empowerment on television.
“She’s for women’s empowerment, and I’m a fucking natural blonde,” Carducci wrote.
The contrast is striking: a first lady publicly encouraging women to find their voices, while a woman who had used hers says she spent months fearing the consequences of refusing to be silent.
Carducci acknowledges that she's still frightened. She also insists that her work as a satirist, mocking powerful public figures, is an exercise of her right to free expression.
And after months of keeping the ordeal from even her own children, she has a message for the people she says tried to intimidate her:
“Because I am never, EVER going to stop.”
There are still some republicans that have a spine. This interview is worth watching.
It is between Rachel Campos-Duffy and Brian Kilmeade, both conservative commentators.
Rachel: Yesterday, the president said maybe it’s time for an election, a new leader in Ukraine, because he keeps blowing up these refineries after the president said, “Please don’t do that,” especially before midterms. He keeps doing it, and it’s hurting President Trump’s administration, who’s been very generous towards him and his war.
Brian: The president got ticked off because Zelenskyy came out and said, “Do not buy 500 million tons of diesel, which is in violation, I thought, of the bill that they just signed, Lindsey Graham’s bill, that if you buy any energy from Russia, you’re going to get sanctioned and tariffed. Are we going to tariff ourselves? So, I have no idea. So Zelenskyy’s frustrated because now all this money is going to flow into Russia, who started this whole war unprovoked. They are the bad guys, and there is no way Zelenskyy turned down any plausible deal. In fact, since that time, when they told him he was going to lose the Donbas, he has gained back portions of the Donbas.
Rachel: Are you saying that there were not peace efforts?
Brian: There was no plausible, practical peace effort that Vladimir Putin would participate in effectively that would end this war. There’s one person who’s responsible. Vladimir Putin. That is it. And he’s getting his ass kicked.
Rachel: There was a peace deal that was, I think, Turkey was trying to broker it, and Boris Johnson advised Zelenskyy not to take that deal.
Brian: It doesn’t matter. I don’t know what Boris Johnson’s doing now. Is he in a retirement home?
Rachel: No, but I think that there’s a reason why the president is buying the diesel from Russia, and that’s because Zelenskyy keeps blowing up the refineries.
Brian: Can you blame him? That’s the war machine that’s killing his people, that bombs apartment buildings.
Rachel: But he is dependent on us, and the president said, “Don’t do that.”
Brian: The diesel fuel got stopped because Iran was blowing up the Gulf states’ oil and their refineries. And now all of a sudden there’s new emphasis on Russia. But for me, the way they innovated drone technology in order to take out what is fueling the Russian war machine is phenomenal. They’ll be writing about this in war journals forever. Ukrainians have modernized modern war before our very eyes.
Rachel: But I’m not so sure that’s a positive, Brian. I mean, there are 30,000 young men on each side that are dying every single month.
Brian: Vladimir Putin.
Rachel: Every single month. We should not be practicing drone technology and using these kids as guinea pigs. Have you seen the videos?
Brian: What kids?
Rachel: The soldiers. These are young men. These are young men.
Brian: Rachel, these are responses to attacks. They’re getting rocketed.
Rachel: The president said he wanted peace in Ukraine.
Brian: Tell Vladimir Putin!
Rachel: He said he was going to do that. Well, now, because of what Volodymyr Zelenskyy is doing, we’re probably going to get peace there because President Trump is now working with Russia.
Brian: It would be the biggest mistake of this administration to work with Russia. That is the modern Hitler of our generation. He is the cause of all the problems in the region, and now is helping Iran kill our guys and blow up our bases. And now, the story you pointed out to me today in The Wall Street Journal, you see that they and China are providing drones to the Houthis. China and Russia are the problem.
Writer Allen Clifton recently shared “a few random thoughts” he “needed to get off his chest” about Trump & his supporters. They’re worth your time ⤵️
1. I'm very confident that neither Donald Trump nor the majority of MAGA could define communism if you handed them a book and had them look it up.
2. MAGA, I have a bit of advice for you: communism and socialism are different. When you use them interchangeably to repeat the same attacks you've been using against Democrats for 50+ years, all you do is showcase that you don't know what either of them actually means.
3. The military, Medicare, Social Security, public roads, and first responders — all forms of socialism. All programs that are extremely popular among the vast majority of Americans.
4. If this nation was founded on Christianity, then why isn't there a single mention of God, Jesus Christ, or Christianity in the Constitution?
5. Do you all really not realize that the only difference between Donald Trump claiming an election was “rigged" or "totally fair" is whether or not he wins and/ or the results go his way? Do you all really not notice that clear and predictable pattern?
6. If Democrats could really rig elections, Donald Trump damn sure wouldn't be president, and Republicans wouldn't have complete control of Congress.
7. We're well over 40 percent of the way into Trump's presidency. Where's all the overwhelming evidence he claims he has that the 2020 election was "stolen"?
Also, how much longer are you all going to allow him to keep trying to blame Biden for anything negative?
8. If the Epstein files truly "exonerated" Donald Trump, why won't he order their full release? These are files linked to child trafficking, and he's ordering his Department of Justice to keep millions of them redacted and/or from being released to the public — why?
Please drop your answers in the comments!
“Basically, you're done, Trump. You're done, Hegseth. It won't be long before you're politically thrown down that dark, deep hole.” - Lieutenant Colonel Malcom Ritchie (retired) from the U.S. Army Reserve.
“…. And I'm here today, not as a candidate, making that disclaimer. I am here to express my outrage at the meeting in Quantico, Virginia between Hegseth, Trump, and all of the senior officers in the United States military and the senior NCO corps. Those generals, Admirals, and senior NCOs sat there in stone face silence, listening to the most outrageous speeches ever made in United States military history by the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States. Secretary of Defense on his this ridiculous rant. Trying to take to school, Generals, Admirals, senior NCOs with 10 times the leadership ability, the education and the experience. that the failed Major Hech could ever begin to understand. And then they have to listen to the cognitively declined President of the United States who I would now name as dictator of the United States. tell all this audience that they will be expected to wage war against the American people. That's exactly what Trump said. So don't get on here and try to tell me that he didn't say it. training grounds in American cities. What's that mean? They're going to go in locked and loaded into American cities, American neighborhoods and use American citizens as pop-up targets on a live fire training. range, This is absolutely astounding. Abuse of power which makes by my estimation Donald Trump a domestic enemy of the Constitution. Because my oath is to the Constitution and don't you think for one minute, Mr. Trump, that there aren't millions of other veterans and retirees that feel exactly the same way. We are enraged, we are beyond enraged, and we will protest peacefully. And we will go out and vote for the candidates of our choice in the 2026 midterm election, which you better not even try to stop. If you try to stop that by force, that's the nightmare scenario. And I'm not saying by violence, I'm saying politically. Basically, you're done, Trump. You're done, Hegseth. It won't be long before you're politically thrown down that dark, deep hole. But don't think it's not going to cause a lot of trauma on the American people, as they clutch to the roots of the hole on the way down, trying to survive something that they cannot possibly survive because this nation is a republic and it will not fall to a fascist regime.”
In 2018, comedian Michelle Wolf hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and was PANNED. Now, 8 years later, the joke’s on her haters: everything she said aged extraordinarily well 👍🏾
On Trump not showing up to the dinner: “I would drag him here myself, but it turns out that the president of the United States is the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab. He said it first. Yeah, he did. You remember? Good.”
On Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka. “She was supposed to be an advocate for women, but it turns out she’s about as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons. She’s done nothing to satisfy women. So I guess, like father like daughter.”
On vice-president Mike Pence: “He thinks abortion is murder. Which first of all don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it, you gotta get that baby out of there. And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want, I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion, you know, unless it’s the one you got for your secret mistress.”
On White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway: “You guys have to stop putting Kellyanne on your shows. All she does is lie. If you don’t give her a platform, she has nowhere to lie. If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree? I’m not suggesting she gets hurt. Just stuck. Stuck under a tree.”
On former press secretary Sarah Huckabee: “I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”
Immediately after the dinner, the White House Correspondents’ Association issued an apology — saying the night was supposed to “unite not divide” — and dozens of papers panned the comic in their reviews.
But dozens of comedians rushed to Wolf’s defense. Stephen Colbert, who was the featured entertainer at the 2006 event, said it best: “This is the correspondents' dinner, celebrating the freedom of speech. You can't just say whatever you want!" 😝
8 years later, Wolf has still never apologized. Nor should she! She got the last laugh 🎤 ⤵️
🚨Florida’s own MAGA Santa, John Meister Sr., who shared images on Facebook portraying LGBTQ people as demons praying on kids, was just arrested on 16 felony counts of possessing child s*xual abuse material. Bond is $160,000.
The Wakulla County man who played Santa for local kids was banned from wearing the red suit and any contact with kids by a judge.
The guy who shared images calling LGBTQ Pride “shame” and drag queens a school threat now faces the exact charges he loved pinning on everyone else.
An off-duty ICE agent from Texas was found sleeping on a Fresno family’s lawn around 3 a.m. Police say he appeared intoxicated, assaulted a 72-year-old man, then attacked his daughter when she intervened.
The father shot him, fearing for their safety. The agent is hospitalized and facing felony assault charges. The father faces no charges.
Federal agents are supposed to uphold the law, not wake up from a drunken stupor in a stranger’s yard and assault the people living there.
So we’re livestreaming military executions now?
American soldiers shooting a man in a wheelchair for the whole world to watch?
What in the blood-spattered, bread-and-circuses bullshit are we doing?
Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people. He deserves punishment.
I’ve been to Fort Hood many times in my life. I stand with the families who lost someone they loved that horrific day, who have spent every day since living with an absence nobody can fill.
Their loved ones deserved to come home. Their families deserve our support. Turning the man who took them into the star of a worldwide broadcast is a grotesque way to dishonor everything he stole.
Because he WANTED martyrdom, and Pete Hegseth, our secretary of day drunkenness, is gift-wrapping it with a camera crew.
Hegseth looked so excited discussing it with Pizzagate Posobiec, you’d think he’d been invited to a wedding with an open bar and a complimentary Nazi tattoo station instead of a photo booth.
This Pentagon pick-me prick is handing terrorist cells a propaganda bonanza. They can erase Hasan’s atrocities, sanctify his death and circulate those images for decades. That endangers my kids, your kids and our troops, because violent extremists LIVE for this shit.
And what are our children supposed to learn watching Hegseth impersonate Jesus one day and salivate over public slaughter the next?
Where in the Bible does it say, “And then Jesus said, ‘Get a second camera on the bloodlust’”?
Paul wrote, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him.” “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
How did you get “livestream the headshot” out of THAT, you sanctimonious, scripture-spouting salesman for state-sponsored sadism?
And by the way, isn’t this what they do in IRAN? You know, Iran—the brutal, murderous regime our tin-pot tyrant told us we were going to war to help overthrow?
You know who else does this shit? Afghanistan. Twenty years fighting the Taliban, and we’ve decided their public-execution program needed an American distributor?
We’ve started borrowing the brutality we claimed to be fighting.
This is sick. This is depraved. Hitler had executions filmed. North Korea assembles crowds to watch the state kill. And now the Pentagon wants a worldwide audience.
These were supposed to be the chapters in the history book that made us recoil. We weren’t supposed to finish reading and ask who owns the streaming rights.
Back in 1936, an estimated twenty thousand people gathered around the gallows to watch Rainey Bethea hang in Kentucky. That grotesque gathering became a national scandal that helped end public executions there.
Ninety years later, these sociopathic showboats want to bring the whole planet to the gallows.
But why stop at bullets? Why not stoning? Burning at the stake? The William Wallace treatment—hanged, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered?
Why not build your endcap emperor a Colosseum, Coors Light Callistus? His name in big gold letters. There’s a perfectly good spot where the Washington Monument is. Tear that shit down. What’s it doing? Remembering somebody ELSE?
Make it pay-per-view: free Trump coin with every subscription, commemorative Snuggie with the premium bloodbath package. Spectators can pay extra for seats in the splash zone.
We’re in a literal war with the world’s greatest sponsor of global terror, and all they want to do is exact retribution for the little girls we killed.
We can’t afford gas, groceries or healthcare, measles is making a comeback like Tiffany on a Long Island VFW tour, and THIS is what our government is producing.
How does this make us safer? Stronger? How does this psychopathic pageant honor thirteen murdered human beings?
Their deaths are being used to advertise his.
It’s barbaric. It’s fucking insane. This is not justice. This is fascism.
This is the Temu Taliban with bald eagles, a military band playing “YMCA” in the background, and better fucking lighting.
“If you don’t want to watch the execution, then don’t watch.”
Ok… let’s go with that.
Also, if you don’t support same-sex marriage, don’t have one.
If you don’t support drag shows, don’t go.
If you don’t support abortion access, don’t have one.
We can do this all day.
In 1984, a twenty-five-year-old woman stood in a hospital hallway in Arkansas and watched a group of nurses draw straws to decide who would have to enter a patient's room. A red biohazard bag hung from the door handle. Inside was a young man suffering from AIDS. He had been reduced to eighty pounds and was dying in terrible pain, whispering the same word over and over again: “Mama.”
Ruth Coker Burks didn't wait to find out who had drawn the short straw. She turned the handle and walked inside.
She asked the nurses to contact the young man's family, but they told her they had already been calling for six weeks without getting an answer. Ruth took the phone number and decided to try one more time herself. When the man's mother answered, her response was cold and final. She said her son was sinful and that, as far as she was concerned, he was already dead to her. She refused to come.
Ruth hung up the phone and walked back into the room. She sat beside the young man's bed and stayed there. For thirteen hours, she held the hand of a dying stranger, quietly whispering comforting words until he took his final breath.
When his family refused to claim his body, Ruth decided she would bury him herself. She paid for the cremation out of her own pocket, found a chipped cookie jar from a local potter to hold his ashes, and took him to her family's cemetery in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Using posthole diggers meant for building farm fences, she dug the grave with her own hands. When the grave was finished, she said a quiet prayer over the soil.
Word of Ruth's kindness slowly began spreading across the South. People heard about a woman in Arkansas who wasn't afraid. A woman who would sit beside you when you were dying and make sure you were treated with dignity when no one else would claim you.
Over the next decade, Ruth Coker Burks personally cared for more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS. Most were young men who had been abandoned by their families and communities during the height of the crisis. She buried forty of them with her own hands in her family's cemetery. Her young daughter often went with her, carrying a small toy spade while Ruth worked with the heavy posthole diggers.
Many of the people Ruth cared for had lost their jobs, their homes, and almost everything they once had. She scrambled to help them buy medication and food and to keep up with their rent. She needed money to continue, and the local drag queens stepped in to help. Every Saturday night, they hosted shows and pooled their tips so Ruth could keep supporting the people who depended on her.
By the late 1990s, medical treatments had advanced and the immediate crisis had begun to change. Ruth's urgent work slowly became less visible, and over time, her story faded into quiet history. But the forty small graves in Hot Springs remained. They became sacred ground, cared for by a woman who had refused to let people die believing they were unwanted or disposable.
When fear and panic sweep through a society, it can be painfully easy for communities to turn their backs on the people who need help the most. Ruth Coker Burks chose to do the opposite. She walked toward the fear, sat beside those everyone else had abandoned, and made sure that even in death, they were treated like human beings.
When Franklin joined Peanuts in 1968, his arrival may have looked like a small change to a comic strip, but it carried much greater significance in the America of that time.
Franklin was introduced just weeks after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during a period when the country was confronting segregation, racial violence, school integration and the struggle for equal rights. His presence in one of the most widely read comic strips in America gave millions of children something they rarely saw in mainstream popular culture: a Black child simply existing alongside white children as an equal.
Created by Charles M. Schulz, Franklin was not introduced as a stereotype or as a character whose entire personality revolved around race. He was simply Franklin. He was polite, thoughtful and confident, and he interacted with Charlie Brown and the other children as a friend. He could talk about school, play baseball, share lunch and take part in the everyday situations that made Peanuts so popular. That normality was important because representation at the time was often limited, stereotypical or completely absent from mainstream American media.
The circumstances surrounding Franklin's introduction are especially important. In 1968, the United States was still deeply divided over racial equality, and many communities were resisting the integration of schools and neighborhoods. The Civil Rights Movement had achieved major legal victories, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but laws alone did not immediately change attitudes or everyday life. Against that background, a nationally syndicated comic showing a Black child and a white child as ordinary friends carried a message without needing to make a speech about it.
Schulz also faced criticism over Franklin's presence, particularly when Franklin was shown sitting beside Charlie Brown at school. The objection was not simply about adding a Black character. It reflected the racial attitudes of an America where even fictional children sharing a classroom could become controversial. Schulz nevertheless kept Franklin in the strip and resisted pressure to make his character something other than what he had intended: another child in the world of Peanuts.
That is what makes Franklin's story so significant. He did not need to deliver a political speech or become a symbol of protest every time he appeared. His importance came from being treated as a complete human being rather than a racial stereotype. For children reading Peanuts, the image of Franklin sitting with Charlie Brown, talking with him and participating in the same world helped make interracial friendship feel ordinary.
Franklin's introduction reminds us that cultural change does not always happen through famous speeches, marches or landmark court decisions. Sometimes it happens through the everyday images that children grow up seeing. A Black child appearing naturally beside a white child in a comic strip might seem ordinary today, but in 1968, that ordinary image challenged assumptions that were still deeply embedded in American society. Franklin became part of the funny pages, but his place there also became part of the larger story of representation, equality and the changing face of American culture.