Winners & Losers | Veterans of Wars, Real & Fake

One thing that makes this entire regime so difficult to battle is the sheer idiocy of everything they’re doing. That’s not to diminish the suffering they are inflicting on virtually every community in America — from the violence in the streets of Chicago to the shuttering of rural clinics in the South to the potential hunger those of us losing our SNAP benefits are about to face. That is all real.

But it’s real stupid, too.

It’s like we’re playing in a basketball championship. The Republicans — our arch nemesis — have always played a boring old zone defense that slows everything down and is hard to watch, but has been effective historically.

But in this game, their strategy is to deport all the brown players on our team and accuse us of eating their cats and dogs.

It’s stupid, and there’s nothing we can really do about it. We’re just not playing basketball anymore. It’s a game of pretend where they make up the rules and they are all ambiguous and totally fucking pointless, and the refs are ignored.

Why are we bombing Venezuelan boats? Why all the shell-game tariff chaos, only to end up slightly worse than where we started (at best)? Why deploy troops or feds or any extra law enforcement to prosperous, peaceful American cities?

Because of … trans? Woke? DEI? CRT? What?

The world is what we make it, of course. We never had to leave the savannah. We never had to establish more permanent settlements or develop agriculture or sort out the laws of physics or invent golf. But we did. And now we’re choosing to do … this.

MAGA and the regime are cosplaying the absurd world that only exists inside of Trump’s addled brain, where windmills are killing whales and Portland is a hellscape of violence and anarchy. It’s like the Christopher Nolan movie Inception except the guy whose dream we’re all in is a fat, illiterate narcissist who only eats cheeseburgers.

Dumb.

But this cosplay has incredible consequences. While the cosplayers get soaked in cash, the rest of us are afraid to send our kids trick-or-treating because of tear gas. My friends in Los Angeles are carrying around their birth certificates and passports, even though ICE is claiming the only verification that matters is their face-recognition software.

My Loser this week is the latest little man to play dress-up, and my Winner is someone whose bravery unintentionally resulted in one of the most powerful symbols of resistance we’ve seen yet. ...