Team Apocalypse

Death at scale: Oligarchs, Trump, and Christian Nationalists

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From the great 1966 Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth:

There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear
A man with a gun over there
A-telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

I love this song. It speaks to an era of people standing up. What is happening here, now however, is perfectly clear.

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There are endless ways to kill people. Not all of them need to be as overtly evil as the Gaza genocide which the US has made possible by supplying tens of billions of dollars in weapons to the psychopath affectionately nicknamed “Bibi.” Recent US weapons sales to Israel include $38 billion from Obama in 2016, $20 billion from Biden in 2024, and $12 billion more since Trump returned to office. Seems low? No worries, as of September, crypto boy is planning on another $6 billion of assistance. It costs a lot to mass murder over 66,000 civilians (20,000 of them children), with their backs to the Mediterranean (just coincidentally filled with 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas), but it’s reassuring to see bipartisan agreement in our divided nation, don’t you think? Cumulatively, the US has sold hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to Israel’s since its formation in 1946.

This graphic and more on aid to Israel here.

In the land of the free and the home of global scale CIA backed neoliberal coups and shakedowns, indiscriminate killing is practiced both institutionally and individually. Could we expect less from a country built on the extermination of Indigenous people who preceded us by 12,000 years? It’s in our DNA as Britain’s offspring. Another overt form? The hundreds of mass shootings that take place in America every year from sick fucks allowed to wander around with guns to protect our “freedom” to be dumb, even in places of worship. The Mormon church slaughter in Grand Blanc, Michigan just days ago marked the 324th such event this year.

Open slaughter sanitized by our mainstream media has been the standard for decades. Long gone are the days when news was considered sacrosanct and investigative journalism was properly financed and understood to be the guard against tyranny. Now, it is expected to pull a profit. During the Vietnam War, American boys coming home in caskets were shown on all the networks and Watergate was exposed.

Contrast that to the false Iraq War with “embedded” reporters. It was known Iraq possessed no WMDs, and our corporations did big business with the evil known as Saddam Hussein. Hell, I knew it from listening to interviews of international weapons inspector Scott Ritter on my regional PBS station. Our military killed at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians for WMDs that didn’t exist. Empires have no regard for civilian lives, either overseas or at home.

That war was costly, (unless you were Lockheed Martin, Raytheon or Halliburton, STILL making money on Iraq’s destruction, exciting press release here), but we can create death far more covertly and that’s the goal of the Trump administration and Team Apocalypse as fascism strangles the country daily.

We can destroy the federal workforce and cut social welfare programs (just get a third poverty gig baby, is the Dollar Store hiring?), while continuing to subsidize the fossil fuel industry. At global scale this amounted to $7 trillion in 2022.

In the US, Trump and company has added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas and coal in 2025, $4 billion each year over the next decade with the Big “Beautiful” Bill this summer. That’s in addition to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

Oh yeah, and the military budget is set to exceed a trillion dollars in 2026.

We can stop collecting greenhouse gas emissions on polluters, eliminate the domestic and world markets farmers depend, putting them out of business. We can eliminate USAid which fights worldwide hunger and disease, one such market, a paltry 0.49 percent of the federal budget or about $105 per US citizen a year to ensure SpaceX pays virtually no taxes. The elimination of USAid has resulted in over 20,000 lost American jobs, over 238,000 worldwide, and is expected to result in 14 million otherwise preventable deaths by 2030.

And we can employ unelected billionaires like Musk and Project 2025 players like Russell Vought who wishes to install a theocratic dictatorship to accomplish this. Watch the current government shutdown turn federal workforce furloughs into illegal firings. Federal workforce job eliminations were already estimated to reach 300,000 this year.

We can drive inflation sky-high with tariffs, rattle our sabers, and pretend we’re in a drug war with Venezuela to justify violating civil rights.

From Heather Cox Richardson who is doing an outstanding job documenting the assault on our democracy:

At about 1:00 on Tuesday morning, federal agents from Border Patrol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) raided an apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive. Using helicopters and large vehicles, as well as flash-bang grenades, and dressed in military fatigues, agents broke down the doors of the residents of the five-story building and pulled them from their homes in zip ties, some of them naked. Agents left the people tied up outside for hours before letting all but 37 of them go. The apartments residents returned to were trashed.

Hurricanes Imelda and Humberto just lashed the North Carolina coast. A half dozen homes were taken by the Atlantic. These are individual nightmares, but the damage goes far beyond the homes, threatening billions of dollars in the tourism economy. Will there be any federal assistance? Trump is no FEMA fan, spitting on its efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene which also devastated North Carolina just last year, tracking hundreds of miles inland, a result of global warming, brought to you by Big Oil enabled with your tax dollars. I wrote of this disaster here. Estimated losses ranged from $110 to $160 billion.

Equally disturbing, deaths from such fossil fueled horrors will continue for years to come. 215 people were known dead from that storm when I wrote of it. However, a study published in Nature has shown FAR more people will die years down the road from heartbreak, trauma and loss, on average a shocking 7,000 to 11,000 additional deaths in the next fifteen years. Tragedies like Helene wreck lives far after the event.

Hurricane Humberto at work.

Welcome to the carnival

Trump is a mob boss, racist, rapist, a terrorist of the American people and the world. He’s the carnival barker for the clown car of human greed, fueled by citizen ignorance and a billionaire owned media of lies and omission launching Homo “sapiens” off the cliff of The Sixth Extinction. Corrupt and inhuman to the core, he’s simple. Just pay him off. He’s netted $3.4 billion of wealth from two presidencies so far including $2.3 billion in global warming crypto, raising his wealth to $5.6 billion, according to Forbes. His meme coin left small investors with $100 million in losses.

Stealing the cumulative earned wealth of Americans by cutting education assistance, Medicaid, Medicare and SNAP for billionaires tax breaks is another form of “covert” death. That Big Beautiful Bill is projected to add $3.8 trillion to the national deficit. You and I will be financing it. More heartbreak, trauma and loss on the horizon as these policies guarantee additional poverty and homelessness.

Team Extinction, sorry, I’m changing the name now, wishes to kill as many of us as possible, as quickly as possible. The world is running out of resources, after all. Citizens have always been expendable in the face of ideology. The only real ideology is greed. The rest are labels to keep us fighting each other.

This sickly alliance of dementia riddled, little girl fiddling Trump, the tech oligarchs putting their finishing touches on a crushing surveillance society, and machine gun-toting “Christian” nationalists wrapping themselves in the flag, fervently hope to speed the “rapture.” Although their reasons differ, that’s what they have in common. They believe the end of the world is at hand. Not Trump, who only believes in thirteen-year-olds.

The oligarchs have concluded they don’t need you and me. In fact, we’re a problem easily replaced by AI and robots.

Christian Zionists inanely believe they will ascend to heaven in spite of being responsible for hundreds of millions, probably billions of deaths ultimately, as climate change results in mass migrations, epidemics, destroyed economies and violence that engulfs the globe. The Gaza genocide is “evidence” of the sick “prophesy” they wish to fulfill.

So much for the Sixth Commandment. Hey, it’s just number six anyhow.

These knuckle-dragging creationists don’t recognize science. They believe they will ascend to some wondrous place in the sky, (not yet discovered by the James Webb telescope). They believe women are chattel. Astonishingly, their women seem to buy this, too. Sadly, Margaret Atwood, had so much right.

The women I like are smart and equal partners.

The depravity of men — primitive aggression programmed into us to promote passing the strongest physical genes — simply doesn’t work in technologically advanced societies. What works for big cats in Africa, the biggest lion winning, doesn’t apply to monkeys with nuclear suitcases. We need brainy genes. Pounding each other with rocks is no longer an effective survival strategy.

We were handed heaven on Earth, a brief gift of the Holocene, and chosen to make it Hell. Both places have been here the entire time. Whatever your religious beliefs, we have spit on creation. There is nowhere else to go.

Were it not for the discovery of fossil fuels, perhaps the predicament we’ve created could have been avoided. Perhaps in 50,000 years we could have evolved into a species of cooperation and non-violent wisdom, recognition that the planet and each other is everything to us. Perhaps we could have realized our common purpose, to be stewards of this beautiful, now grievously wounded Earth.

We’re not above creation, but a deeply interwoven part of it. Frighteningly, we must now fight fascism and climate change no matter the personal cost for the sake of our children and grandchildren The words Stephen Stills wrote, and Buffalo Springfield sang of apply.

There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

Be right. Fight.