Three blog posts that arrived today — Nov 18, 2025:
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann tells us this today (Is the Epstein Scandal an Outlier or America’s Oldest Crusade Laid Bare?: How a single predator exposed a centuries-old system built to shield wealthy white men from accountability and forced the country to confront a truth its institutions have long concealed..., The Hartmann Report):
From the first days of European settlement, powerful white men have moved through this country with a kind of immunity that would be unthinkable for anyone else. That isn’t just a cultural habit: it’s the residue of the original architecture of America.
We built a nation on the belief that white men were entitled to rule, entitled to take, entitled to decide whose lives mattered and whose didn’t.
That belief never died. It adapted. It modernized. And today it animates a political movement that has captured one of our two major parties.
The root of the problem goes all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. A European/papal decree announcing that white nations had a God-given right to seize any land they encountered became the legal and moral starting point for American expansion.
The Supreme Court wrote it into our jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, and we never really let it go. From that twisted foundation flowed the taking of Native land, the destruction of Native nations, and the belief that whiteness itself conferred ownership.
He continues:
The Founders feared the domestic use of military force not because they were naïve, but because they knew exactly how easily power could be turned inward. They knew that once a government starts treating its own people as threats, liberty becomes the first casualty because they’d seen it done by the British in their own time.
The chilling truth is that the movement dominating the modern GOP has embraced that very mentality.
It draws its energy from white grievance and Christian nationalism. It relies on the belief that democracy is legitimate only when it protects white cultural dominance (which is why the Trump Department of Labor is exclusively posting pictures of white workers as if they’re the only “real” Americans).
In 1957, William F. Buckley wrote "Why the South Must Prevail" in which he asserted that white people are "the advanced race" and therefore, regardless of whether they are a numerical majority, "will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way." White people are "entitled" to do this, he said.
Nixon welcomed the old segregationist Democrats into the GOP. Reagan polished the rhetoric and wrapped it in patriotic language. The Republican Party spent years perfecting techniques to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, and reshape the judiciary.
By the time Trump arrived, the Party was ready for someone who would drop the coded language and say the quiet part out loud.
Most USAmericans, however, "don’t want Epstein-style impunity for morbidly rich white men."
Jared Yates Sexton
"We cannot let this desensitize us. We cannot, in any way, shape, or form, no matter how much it gets discussed or casually mentioned, allow this to simply become something that happened. In an era of ascendant fascism, we must keep our bearings and protect our ability to be shocked and horrified." (Jared Yates Sexton, It's Rotten All the Way Down: Epstein, Trump, and the Twilight of the Elites, Dispatches From a Collapsing State) The story here
"is how thoroughly and irredeemably America’s institutions have been corrupted.
Epstein’s 'friends' are everywhere. They are giants of finance, academic leaders, politicians. There is nary a corner of power within the United States that hasn’t been infected with his evil."
Further:
"These men knew Epstein and committed these crimes because they were in positions of power and their willingness to do so is inextricably linked to their willingness to carry out the projects power deems necessary. In other words, they were in their positions to engage in these crimes because they were the kind of people who would be willing to commit these crimes and that is what capitalism requires."
These are people whose jobs are "to engineer wars that kill millions of innocent people, to protect systems of intentional inequality and intentional scarcity, to ward off necessary reforms that would give people healthcare that could help them live longer lives, to deny them affordable housing, to conspire to create economic systems in which wages are kept below the poverty level, which leaves people endangered, terrified, dysregulated, to press your thumb on the balance in favor of your cohorts in the realm of wealth and power over living, breathing humans..."
Hurting children "is a thrill to those who have so thoroughly shut themselves off to basic empathy or compassion. They do not see you or me or anyone besides members of their circle as human or deserving of dignity." And apart from the thrill it might give them, being known within their circle to have done it is "the marker of reaching a certain level of power."
"What the QAnon conspiracy theory got correct was that elites were engaging in these crimes, but like all Right Wing conspiracy theories, it removed the financial incentives from the acts, creating merely a story of supernatural evil. But this didn’t happen because these criminals are doing it in the service of Evil. They’re doing it as part of their membership in a class status that has learned, correctly, they will not be prosecuted, they will not lose status or wealth, they will not fail, and their successes are directly linked to their willingness, and even eagerness, to hurt innocent people."
We know it's wrong:
"Epstein gives us an incredibly recognizable symbol of the corruption. Anyone with a conscience knows this is and was wrong. Watching Trump cultists contort themselves with every revelation, including trying to normalize grown men raping young girls, is something we can never forget or turn away from. It is madness. Unadulterated madness."
Denny Carter
And here's Denny Carter (Bad Faith And The Legitimizing Of An Immigration 'Crackdown': Right-wing framing of immigration depends on us accepting "crackdowns" as reasonable and even necessary, Bad Faith Times):
"Follow this entirely invented need for an immigration crackdown to its natural conclusion and you get secret police working directly for the president in the streets of cities that largely oppose his regime. Pull the bad-faith thread long enough – feed the unreality that necessitates a crackdown for long enough – and you get people like Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino cosplaying the gestapo, terrorizing American communities with a vile little grin, ignoring court orders from judges unwilling to enforce their rulings against his brutality and persistent law breaking, and leading the immigration "crackdown" that was so long ago mainstreamed by the newspapers run by rich guys who prioritize Republicans' feelings over all else. Feed this bad-faith machine enough and it'll shit out something shaped like Bovino, a man who takes glamour shots dressed as an SS officer and takes his orders from fascist influencers on the the democracy-incompatible X platform formerly known as Twitter.
* * *
The legitimization of immigration as a national emergency has given rise to men like Bovino, men who have waited patiently in the shadows for national leaders who will unleash pain and terror upon populations they hate and fear based on a version of reality that makes the unconscionable not just viable, but necessary. A vile man like Bovino would still be seething in the shadows, unknown to you and me, if Americans had not been conditioned to believe an immigration "crackdown" was in order.
* * *
We have been told over and over and over again that crackdowns are a legitimate part of a democracy's immigration policy. When we wriggle out of this fascist hell – and there's every reason to believe we will – we have to say clearly and forcefully that there is no place for a crackdown on immigration because there is nothing on which to crack down. Unless you buy into Greg Bovino's monstrously convenient worldview."
How POTUS behaves
Given all that context, it makes sense that POTUS calls a woman a "piggy." Cruelty is his ethos. The Epstein files are an indication that he doesn't respect women, and he knows there's no need to pretend otherwise right now.
'Quiet, Piggy': Trump Insults Female Reporter Asking About The Epstein Files The reaction from the White House press corps to a personal attack on a colleague has been muted — in an apparent attempt to avoid losing further access. Andy Campbell and S.V. Date, HuffPost, Nov 18, 2025
