Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 459 of 479
Quote:United States President Donald Trump, his family and his businesses have been granted immunity from any ongoing audits into their tax affairs, according to a directive by the Department of Justice. In a one-page document, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Justice Department said authorities would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from “prosecuting or pursuing” tax claims against Trump, members of his family and his businesses.
Originally posted by second:
My favorite word for today is Nihilist. 6ix, Trump, and his Trumptards are Nihilists, those for whom important things are meaningless. (Oh Well: On Nihilism, Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 5:00AM by Marie Snyder, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/oh-well-on-nihilism.html )
The Looting of America
MAGA corruption reaches the point of no return
Nathan Goldman, a professor of accounting and tax expert at North Carolina State University, called the move “unprecedented”.
“The clause within the settlement that Trump and his family will no longer be subject to the audit process breaks from the current tax policies and puts Trump in a situation where he can pay what he believes is the correct amount without any fear of prosecution.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/20/us-president-trump-and-family
-given-immunity-from-pending-tax-audits
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Where Are the Republicans Who Put America First?
By Thomas L. Friedman | May 19, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/opinion/trump-republican-party-gerr
ymandering.html
As President Trump and his administration head toward the midterm elections, it’s now clear that the Republican Party has split into three factions: the “Never Trump” Republicans, who refuse to ever vote for this unethical man; the “America First” Republicans, who favor Trump’s policies but won’t countenance his destroying American norms and laws; and “Trump First” Republicans — those who think Trump’s dictates come first and the Constitution and traditional norms come second.
The most alarming thing happening in America today is that the Trump First Republicans, on Trump’s orders, are purging the few America First Republicans. So should the G.O.P. hold the House and the Senate in the midterms, there will be no brakes whatsoever on this party and this president. I would not at all rule out their pushing for a third Trump term. We are going to a very bad place.
Just look at the trend-line: The Never Trump Republicans, who included traditional conservatives like Liz Cheney, John McCain and Mitt Romney, did not believe in Trump the man or many of his ideas. They thought that he both dishonored the Constitution and true conservative principles. Alas, though, McCain died, Cheney was forced out of the party and Romney quit politics altogether. On Tuesday, another Trump antagonist in the Republican Party, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, lost a primary to an opponent handpicked by the president.
The America First Republicans were ready to sign on to many Trump ideas — lowering taxes or limiting immigration or deflating the woke left — but when it came down to a choice between advancing those ideas and undermining democracy, this faction drew a red line. They put America first, not Trump first.
I am talking about people like former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and the Indiana and South Carolina state legislators who refused to go along with Trump’s shameful out-of-cycle gerrymandering of electoral districts just to increase the G.O.P.’s odds of holding the House. But now they too are being driven from the party.
Cassidy, the two-term Republican who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, was just defeated by a Trump First Republican in his primary. The back and forth between Cassidy and Trump was revealing. While he did not mention Trump by name in his concession speech, there was no doubt about whom Cassidy was talking about.
“Let me just set the record straight,” Cassidy said. “Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Trump’s response was more direct — and incredibly revealing. He wrote on social media of Cassidy: “His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!”
Read those words carefully: “His disloyalty to the man” — not to the Constitution — is what got him defeated. Trump first.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who seems willing to abandon any principle he ever held to stay on Trump’s good side and remain his golfing buddy, expressed the essence of the Trump First Republicans after Cassidy lost:
“You can disagree with President Trump,” Graham said, “but if you try to destroy him, you’re going to lose, because this is the party of Donald Trump.”
Read those words carefully, too: It is not the party of Republicans, it is “the party of Donald Trump," which means it is whatever Trump says it is. But the most revealing part of Graham’s quote was: “If you try to destroy him, you’re going to lose.”
Translation: If you vote, as Cassidy did, to convict Trump after he was impeached for inciting an insur
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Tax world gawks at Trump audit agreement: 'Never seen anything like this'
A DOJ agreement ending any current IRS audits of the president, his family or his businesses stuns tax practitioners and could reignite Democratic lawmakers' pursuit of Trump's tax returns.
By Brian Faler | May 20, 2026 04:04 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/tax-world-gawks-at-trump-audi
t-agreement-never-seen-anything-like-this-00929576
President Donald Trump is flipping what had been a doomed lawsuit against the IRS into a free pass from the agency.
Astonishment is rippling through tax world at a settlement that goes far beyond the specifics of Trump’s suit — he sought billions of dollars as compensation for some of his tax records being leaked to the news media — to instead provide him, his family and his businesses sweeping protections against government scrutiny of his taxes.
Under the plan signed off on by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the IRS would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from all audits of “any matters currently pending.” What’s more, some worry it may mean Trump will never again be audited by the agency, pointing to vague language in the settlement barring examinations that stem from “lawfare.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Steve Rosenthal, a former longtime senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
The one-page document the Justice Department released Tuesday represents the most audacious step yet in Trump’s ongoing efforts to shield his taxes from scrutiny. https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1441216/dl
Trump has long bucked a decades-old tradition of presidents voluntarily releasing their filings, but this would prevent the IRS from examining them as well — special treatment that the IRS does not provide any other American. It would also flout the agency’s longstanding policy of automatically auditing every president.
It also promises a massive fight with Democrats if they vault back into power in this year’s midterm elections, with the agreement rocketing up lawmakers’ oversight to-do list.
“Democrats are going to fight every element of this,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Finance committee.
It’s also likely to become an ongoing headache for Republicans who have had little to say publicly about the plan.
And it’s the result of a lawsuit that was unlikely to be successful in the first place.
Result of ‘phony’ litigation
Trump had sued the IRS in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax information by an agency contractor, Charles Littlejohn, to the New York Times. Littlejohn, who pleaded guilty to the leak in 2023, told a court he released the information because he was incensed by Trump’s refusal to release his returns.
The administration has cast the settlement, which would also set up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate those allegedly harassed by the Biden administration, as a response to the “weaponization” of law enforcement by the previous president.
But the leak actually happened in 2019, during Trump’s first term in office, and Littlejohn was prosecuted by Biden’s Justice Department. The Times used the information to produce a blockbuster report in September 2020 showing Trump frequently paid little or nothing in taxes. Littlejohn also leaked tax records of numerous other prominent wealthy people, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, to ProPublica.
Experts noted Trump’s suit over the leak was never likely to succeed, in part because he missed the two-year statute of limitations to file a civil suit over the unauthorized disclosure of tax information. And there were major questions about whether there was a legitimate dispute for a court to referee since Trump was effectively both plaintiff and defendant. Trump pulled the suit in favor of the settlement shortly before a judge could weigh in.
“This all arises out of a phony piece of litigation,” said Rosenthal.
When Ken Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire whose tax data was
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Donald Trump’s Ritualistic Humiliation of His Children Reaches a Charming New Crescendo
By Heather Schwedel
May 21, 2026 5:58 PM
https://slate.com/life/2026/05/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bettina-anderso
n-iran-news.html
I would call what President Donald Trump just did to his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a slap in the face if it weren’t for the existence of a widely circulated anecdote about a time Trump once allegedly literally slapped Jr. in the face, in front of a bunch of his college classmates. Still, as figurative slaps in the face go, this one had to hurt: The president just told the world that he’s not sure if he’s going to make it to Don Jr.’s wedding this weekend.
Don Jr. is set to marry socialite Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas in the coming days, and while taking questions in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump was asked if he plans to attend. “Uhhhh. He’d like me to go,” Trump said. Already with that loaded uhhhh, he wasn’t off to a great start. “I’m gonna try and make it. But it’s going to be a just a small, little private affair. … I said, ‘This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called “Iran” and other things.’ ”
Sigh. Even when he’s being dismissive of his own flesh and blood and flippant about war, in addition to being just kind of out of it, the man still has a way with words. “A Thing Called Iran” sounds like a lost Tennessee Williams play. Does anyone actually buy that he’s too busy to attend? While it’s true that we’re at war, it’s also true that Trump started the war, and now we can’t rule out the possibility that he did so in order to get out of going to this wedding. Not to mention, Trump finds time to golf one out of every five days—he can probably find a few hours to zip down to his son’s wedding.
Trump went on, “That’s one I can’t win on. If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed.” By the media, he meant, of course. While it’s entertaining to think Trump might sincerely believe that skipping his own son’s wedding would be counteractively good for his image, because it would show not that he is a cruel man who doesn’t love his son but a hardworking one, the far likelier explanation is that Trump just doesn’t feel like going. He doesn’t take the same sort of pride and joy in his children that others do, his relationship with Don Jr. has always been fraught, and he thinks weddings are boring because they’re not about him, so yeah, he’s not going to pretend to be excited.
My guess is that he will end up going in the end anyway—wars are clearly boring to him, too—rendering this fuss he’s making about how he might not completely pointless. It’s mean and messy for no reason, which is classic Trump. What’s the fun of just being a dutiful father? This way he still gets to withhold something and ensure that Don Jr. never for even a minute feels secure in his father’s love for him, which is sick, but such is the Trump family way. It’s the kind of thing that might make you feel bad for Trump Jr., if he weren’t who he is.
Later in the video that’s circulating online, Trump says one more thing of note, but sadly I have to debunk what people online think he said. He did not say, in reference to his son, “He’s a person I’ve known for a long time,” as funny as that would have been. What he actually said was, “No, but he’s got a very—a person I’ve known for a long time.” While he definitely got a little lost in that sentence, it seems pretty clear to me that he was talking about the woman Don Jr. is marrying, Anderson. I did wonder, though, if Trump has actually known her a long time, because even though he may have encountered her in Palm Beach, Florida, where she’s from and he has a home, she and Don Jr. are a relatively recent development. They got together in 2024, when the younger Trump was actually still engaged to his previous fiancé, Kimberly Guilfoyle. I don’t think Trump was trying to make a dig at his ne’er-do-well son’s awkward dating history per se, but Trump has seen Jr.’s romantic partners come and go. He himself has been married three times.
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Last year, Jeff Bezos and other tech billionaires evidently believed that they could insulate themselves from criticism — and secure their wealth against both taxation and regulation — by allying themselves tightly with Donald Trump. Notably, Amazon is one of the companies paying for Trump’s grotesque ballroom, along with Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
But Trump is now exploring new frontiers in presidential unpopularity, and Republicans are facing a wave of public revulsion so strong that it will probably overwhelm even their strenuous efforts to rig the midterm elections.
So paying court to the mad king isn’t looking like the smart political move Bezos and his ilk thought it was. How, then, can they defend themselves against the threat of taxes and regulations that might make them slightly less rich?
Well, Bezos evidently thought that the threat to his billions was sufficiently important to justify going on CNBC to lecture the rest of us about the evils of taxation — but not sufficiently important for him to learn a few facts first.
Somehow, I don’t think this new political strategy will work.
More about Jeff Bezos lying on TV about his taxes at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bezos-backlash-and-zombies
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You faggots loved Bezos.
Look at you little bitches whining today.
You're all a fucking joke. Paul Krugman is the least funny joke ever written.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump’s Ritualistic Humiliation of His Children Reaches a Charming New Crescendo
By Heather Schwedel
Maybe he hates his fucking son, Heather.
Maybe it's NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS, Heather.
And look at faggot second throwing around this OK! Magazine ladies bullshit.
You're a fucking joke, dude.
Get a life.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:My favorite word for today is Nihilist.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I forgot to put "major" in quotes.
You're just a whiny little bitch.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
You don't even know what Nihilist means. Anything above two syllables is to difficult for your tiny brain to parse.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Go fuck yourself, Steven Colbert.
Have fun ruining The Lord of the Rings. Looking forward to that huge box office flop.
You suck. Just go away now.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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If MAGA is a cult, what happens when it crumbles?
Donald Trump has built a cult of personality, but as his actions become more erratic, his hold on his followers may be slipping
By Elizabeth Yuko | May 25, 2026
Bioethicist and Adjunct Professor of Ethics at Fordham University
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/if-maga-is-a-cult-what-happens
-when-it-crumbles/ar-AA241H7c
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/maga-cult-donald
-trump-1235568069/
Donald Trump's supporters have been nothing if not loyal to their leader. For the past decade, MAGA has stood by their man through 34 felony convictions, endless hate-filled rhetoric, the killings of innocent Americans, and potential war crimes, all while blatantly disregarding the Constitution and constantly lying.
MAGA's fanatical devotion to the president has prompted some experts to suggest that it constitutes a cult. Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America, is one of them. "We're not being hyperbolic when we call [MAGA] a cult," she says.
More specifically, MAGA is a cult of personality, says Steven Hassan, PhD, author of The Cult of Trump and founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, a consulting and educational organization that helps people leave destructive cults and authoritarian groups and heal.
A cult of personality is the "godlike glorification" of a charismatic leader whose followers perceive as superhuman and infallible, like the Jim Jones-led Peoples Temple - which ended in the massacre of more than 900 people at Jonestown in 1978 - and the Children of God, a Christian apocalyptic cult founded by David Berg in 1968.
Political parties can also operate as cults of personality, Mestyanek Young tells Rolling Stone. "Beyond Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, there are clear examples of political movements, including Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, and the hereditary leadership system in North Korea," she says. In this case, it's the MAGA arm of the Republican Party's devotion to Trump - especially those who subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
In addition to the requisite charismatic leader, MAGA also shares other key characteristics with cults, like black-and-white thinking, and viewing politics as a fight of good versus evil. Like other cults, MAGA has adopted their own version of reality and history - most notably, claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Along the same lines, Trump has managed to get his MAGA followers to reject rational analysis and critical thinking, and support his interests and positions no matter what.
Trump appealed to those who had lost faith in the government and were looking for something (or someone) to believe in. His campaign rhetoric promising to "drain the swamp" - or rid America of corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and unnecessary governmental bureaucracy and oversight - resonated with those who felt disenfranchised and abandoned by traditional political parties.
But there are signs that Trump's grip on his followers is starting to crumble. A few weeks ago, after he threatened to wipe out a civilization, verbally attacked the Pope, and posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, which he later claimed was him as a doctor, several prominent MAGA and Trump supporters - including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candance Owens, and Megyn Kelly - broke with the president. And things have only escalated from there.
Declining approval ratings suggest rank-and-file MAGA members have begun to jump ship, including some of Trump's most ardent conservative Christian supporters. Does this spell the beginning of the end of the MAGA cult? If so, what happens next? And is now the time to reach out to family members and friends who may be rethinking their position?
The birth of MAGA
When the Tea Party formed in 2009, one month after President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the members were an odd mix of right-wing populists and free market ex
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