Buffalopundit

It’s amazing what happens when people can vote in secret. Apparently, there existed a ton of discontent and the younger, more passionate candidates thumped the staid, endorsed ones. Most of Hoak’s ads were just her walking around and almost all were paid by online betting firms. Rivera vs. Zellner was particularly nasty and devolved into who is more anti-Paladino, which really doesn’t move the needle given the various and sundry problems most people have.

Also, the left wing of the party is especially effective organizing in low-turnout elections such as mid-June party primaries.

It is the year of our Lord twenty twenty five and the Buffalo News is writing about Florida resident and pardoned felon Chris Collins, formerly of Clarence. As far as I’m concerned, Florida can have him and his idle rich gilded age family. I would love to never have to read about him again.

I will tell you this – if I became so rich that not only I, but my children, would never have to work again, I can think of a trillion things I would do before I would ever seek public office. Hell, I’d probably take some of that money and help unfortunate people, but then, I’m of the woke left.

Oh boo fucking hoo and cry me a river.

The thing about Collins is that he and Chris Grant are absolutely right:

“He was a MAGA originalist, and that matters,” Grant said. “Voters are going to ask: Are you loyal to the president? And there’s no one in the country that’s been more loyal to the president.”

It’s refreshing to see it in black and white. Because really, that’s all that counts for a MAGA politician – loyalty to the Dear Leader; to the dictator. There is no constituent but the one at Mar-a-Lago. There is no constituency than the other super-rich mfers whose only daily worry is, e.g., whether the help remembered to put 93 octane in the Aston Martin.

The theme of this entire “comeback story” is a typical one for MAGA: it is centered on narcissistic supremacy, misplaced grievance, and abject selfishness. Congress isn’t about public service, it’s about nobility. It’s about getting what they believe we people owe them – a title, some privilege, attention.

Chris Collins – the worst Erie County Executive since Joel Giambra – gives these reasons for wanting to return to Congress after having pleaded guilty to federal charges involving insider trading (i.e., cheating at the stock market), and being subsequently pardoned:

“Because I didn’t leave on my terms, and my reputation was trashed.”

“I want to think, you know, 25 years to go,” he added. “I’m 75. I’m gonna live to be 100. I don’t want my next 25 years to be as a convicted felon who went to federal prison.”

His reputation was not passively trashed – not by any of the prosecutors whom he singles out for hatred, if not revenge – and not by the woke left or anyone else. Chris Collins trashed his own reputation by committing crimes. The fact that he refuses (or is incapable) of acknowledging that simple fact explains why he is completely and perpetually unfit for any public office or public trust.

Look at this absolutely insane, high-school-quality, dime-store mob boss invective Collins hurls at the United States Government that prosecuted him for the crimes to which he admitted and for which he pleaded guilty.

“I’m hoping it’s interesting enough that people will read it, and when they come away having read it, they’ll realize the Department of Injustice persecuted me, prosecuted me, railroaded me, coerced me into that guilty plea – which will help me then also win my election.”

“Department of Injustice.” Maybe he should do what the rest of the Trump grifter class do and just host a podcast. I’m sure he can get some kind of testosterone powder and the low-T Financial Guys to sponsor it. Collins the criminal was treated like a criminal and did not receive special kid-glove treatment. That is at the heart of Collins’ complaints. He was treated like everyone else. Like regular people. Like you would be if you were dumb enough to insider trade and/or sloppy enough to get caught.

He said he would like to serve at least two terms if he returns to Congress, where he hopes to further Trump’s agenda. And after that, Collins envisions a retirement where he’s no longer the felon who was kicked out of the Brookfield Country Club, no longer the guy whose high school removed his picture from its hall of fame.

“I can see my last 20 years,” he said. “Now I’m welcomed everywhere. ‘And would you be on our board?’ ‘And would you come to our gala?’ And then I’ve got one hell of a retirement, which I really don’t have now.”

The megalomania is astonishing. He’s 75 and foresees living to 100(!) He wants to serve two terms in Congress servicing his master, Trump. That’s it.

What you don’t see is what you never see from Collins – he who cut services, did his best to decimate the arts and music in Erie County, to deny people health insurance, and to otherwise starve and eliminate basically anything that government helped to find that improved average people’s quality of life.

Collins has absolutely not one thing to say about the regular people whom he would ostensibly “serve” and “represent” in Congress. (I know, I know – it’s all about salvaging his tarnished reputation and doing Trump’s bidding, but let’s pretend for a moment that MAGAs like Collins give a whit about people whose last names don’t end in a consonant and who don’t live in 6 million dollar seafront homes in the ritziest area of Florida). Chris Collins doesn’t offer even a syllable – not a sound, not a consonant, not a schwa – explaining even one infinitesimal thing he might want to do as a Congressman to help regular people.

What he wants is gala invitations and board appointments. Chris Collins’ run for office isn’t about the people or the constitution or the law or the country or Florida or whatever constituency he’d represent. Chris Collins’ run for office is about Chris Collins and, by extension, Donald Trump.

He is a sad state of affairs in a country that is in a sad state already. It is altogether possible that he wins himself a return to Congress. (Hope he doesn’t spend so much that his kid might have to get a job.) A corrupt and morally depraved country led by corrupt and morally empty people deserves no less than this megalomaniacal cult nihilist.

There were a thousand outrages that took place on Inauguration Day 2025, but one really cements several fundamental truths about contemporary American politics, and that is the blanket pardon of 1,500 January 6th terrorists and putschists.

Elon Musk doing the Führergruß a couple of times at a DC hockey arena was just the most visible of the outrages. And when Trump/Musk apologists start in with the “it wasn’t a Hitler salute” or “he’s just got Autism/Asperger’s” or some other form of deflective gaslighting, just go watch the video. You saw it. You see it. It is what it is. It is what you know it to be.

And the Republican Party in its MAGA formulation is little more than a mirror image of everything they like to tell you about their bogeymen Black Lives Matter or Antifa. For all of their relentless and breathless bleating about “woke”, their WWE production yesterday was just sad. The pageantry and tradition of yore transformed into a fetid swamp of grievance and hatred. Anti-woke is the new woke. It is tired and reductive and dumb.

So, just as we can call Musk’s salute what it is – a Führergruß – we can call what happened in December 2020 and January 2021 a Republican coup. It wasn’t an attempted coup – it was the real thing. Although it initially failed, the Republican refusal to denounce and walk away from its coup attempt allowed Trump to return to office, triumphant and out for revenge.

The MAGA Coup of 2021 centered around what had hitherto been a purely ministerial device – the certification of the results of the electoral college. Typically, a formality, Republicans conspired to object to the certification of certain states’ electors under the pretext of manufactured claims of voter fraud. In 2020, a lot of people voted by mail and via absentee ballots in 2020 because of Covid. Turnout was high. When turnout is high, Republicans lose. When people vote, Republicans lose. That is why the narrowing and minimization of voting rights is such an important ideological goal of the Project 2025-ers. In 2021, the idea was to have Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over this joint session of Congress, delay the certification of the electoral vote and help steal the election for Trump. “Voter fraud” was the pretext.

This MAGA Coup of 2021 had three main fronts. On the one front, you had the “Stop the Steal” rally and subsequent storming of the United States Capitol. The genius of Roger Stone is to label the thing you’re doing as the thing you’re trying to prevent the other side from doing. In other words, if Roger Stone is planning on, say, robbing a bank, he accuses his opponents of being bank robbers. When Roger Stone is helping to plan a coup, he accuses Democrats of launching a coup. The facts underlying that supposed Democratic coup? Voter turnout which they characterized as voter fraud.

The second front of the MAGA Coup of 2021 was what we now recognize to have been the fake elector slates. So, say your state voted for Biden. You get as many electoral votes as your state has House representatives. So, say New York got 29 electoral votes and all of them went for Joe Biden. If there was going to be a scheme to steal that election, the Republicans would put up a phony electoral slate and count on the Vice President to certify that one rather than the actual slate. To do it right, the Justice Department would declare that there had been massive voter fraud in certain swing states. Republicans in those swing states would put up fake elector “alternative” slates and certify those through the Republican-led state legislatures, and thereby steal the electoral votes from that state with connivance from figures in Washington. This all took place as part of a Trumpworld conspiracy in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The third front was the willing participants in Congress – people like Ted Cruz and Mo Brooks and Josh Hawley. The idea was that they would take a false DOJ declaration of massive voter fraud and run with it, objecting to electoral college results based on that, and substitute in the fake electors with the help from the VP.

That whole process was interrupted by the violent storming of the Capitol, where thousands of MAGA followers convened to batter police, halt the transfer of power, steal the election from Biden, and do real physical harm to anyone who would stop them. It was a shocking display of violence unseen before in contemporary American politics.

In any normal country, there would have been bipartisan condemnation of such a coup. For a day or two, there was. But Trump being Trump, he saw these people as his loyal supporters and when they were arrested and prosecuted for their crimes – and in many cases convicted either by plea or jury of their peers – Trump called them “hostages.” That rather than cop-batterers, they were “political prisoners.” That they were somehow good guys to be lauded for their bravery.

The MAGA Coup of 2021 was a national disgrace, and every one of its myriad perpetrators deserved prosecution and punishment if found guilty. Trump just pardoned them all.

Needless to say, if Democrats attempted something like this (they wouldn’t, because they believe in the rule of law), there would be furious reaction from media and the right. We would never hear the end of it. But MAGA gets to do a coup and just four years later, poof it’s like it never happened.

They tried to steal an election. There was minimal blowback. We just re-elected the guy who did the coup, and for whom the coup was planned, with his approval, knowledge, and involvement.

This country is cooked. It is finished. It has become a lunatic asylum. MAGA are well on their way to turning the greatest country built out of the Enlightenment and turn it into a dark and cruel dictatorship. I hate what MAGA have done to this country, and how they are systematically dismantling our country’s traditions, freedoms, and norms.

They can say that they’re “making America great again” but what they’re really doing is transforming America into a right-wing dictatorship with unchecked power for the right and years of wilderness for anyone else.

And the response from the left, with an infinitesimal number of exceptions, has been shamefully ineffective and silent.

This is the most hilarious shit I’ve seen in a long time. Rupert Murdoch – he who has single-handedly helped to steer the US, UK, and Australia to the hard right to the benefit of their super-wealthy elites and the detriment of regular folks, owns the famously anti-elitist blue collar newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

A key part of the Murdochian assault on civil societies in Anglophone countries throughout the world is the substitution of fear and hatred for facts. It’s why all three of the aforementioned countries have taken such detours into the fever swamps of the far-right, complete with all sorts of various and sundry paranoias. Hatred and fear of immigrants and immigration is a common denominator in the countries whose civic discourse has fallen to unplumbable depths thanks to Murdoch.

So, the hysteria du jour has to do with drone sightings, especially in New Jersey. Chances are pretty good that it’s nothing to be all that concerned about, and that a lot of people own drones and a lot of times people are mistaking airplanes for drones. Whatever it is, it’s now a thing and it has gone so far as to become another Q-Anon-adjacent conspiracy theory about an alien invasion or maybe Iranian malevolence. Iran, which couldn’t protect its proxies in Lebanon or Syria is supposedly technologically astute enough to – what, to fly drones over suburban New Jersey and then do nothing for some unknown reason.

But Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal knows who’s really to blame. Brandon.

The Biden Administration has squandered its credibility to the point that it’s rational not to believe what it says. Remember the Chinese spy balloon that traveled across the continental U.S.? The Administration downplayed its importance while it was courting better relations with Beijing, only to shoot it down over the Atlantic Ocean. It also downplayed Rep. Mike Turner’s warning, based on solid intelligence, about the danger from a potential Russian nuclear blast in space.

The Administration failed for months to be candid about its migrant flights from the border to the U.S. interior. And for months it covered up the truth about President Biden’s declining mental and physical fitness, only to have it exposed in a debate. The government’s attempt to censor alternative views about Covid shutdowns during the Trump Administration also spread mistrust. The more Americans don’t trust their government, the more panic or protests are possible.

It would be funny if we hadn’t just – as a country – re-elected one of the most untrustworthy hucksters ever to be chief executive. Chinese Spy Balloon, Migrant Influx, Biden’s fitness, Covid misinformation, Russian nuclear blast that wasn’t – it’s a fucking hit parade of right-wing scaremongering from the last four years.

The only thing missing here has to do with Hunter Biden and his corrupt ties to Ukranian energy company Burisma. You know why it’s missing? Because the right-wing scaremonger machine’s 8-year-long effort to discredit Biden through his last surviving son turned out to be a big lie, just like the idea that Trump actually won in 2020 or that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was just a friendly and happy outing.

But the American right would never admit that its neverending divebombing of bullshit might have contributed to Americans’ distrust of government.

The American right wing is definitely in its ascendancy despite everyone’s efforts to return to reality and normality. Trump’s re-election despite a booming economy is proof of this. If you’re wondering why the Democratic Party’s response to all of Trump’s novel incompetence and malevolence (see Hegseth, Gaetz) has been so quiet and poor, it has to do with the fact that we Democrats don’t know how to fucking deal with an Orbanist/Putinist coup that is slowly taking place right now. The levels and degrees of unbelievable bullshit that are emanating from the incoming Trump regime make any misstatement or miscalculation by the Biden Administration look like George Washington and the cherry tree by comparison.

Far be it from me to take the time to recount each and every one of the lies told by the first Trump regime and campaign from 2015 – 2024, but for the serious people at the Wall Street Journal to try and suggest that mistrust of the government begins and ends with Joe Biden is just too funny.

And if you don’t believe me, I’ve got a wall that Mexico paid for, bleach injected to kill Covid, and a loving kissy-poo relationship with Kim Jong Un to show you.