Saturday Report 3/15/25 - Musk’s Hitler Post Sparks Union Fury: South African Apartheid Billionaire Blames Public Workers for Genocide!

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Just a quick reminder that we moved the monthly Zoom “Ask Thom Anything” chat to this morning because Louise and I were out of the country. If you’re a paid subscriber, you should have gotten an email with a link to our meeting 9 AM PT/Noon ET.

— Well, that was a TS Elliott ending: Not with a bang but a whimper. Chuck Schumer found himself cornered because he had not prepared in advance for a war with the Republicans. They, on the other hand, had an old playbook they’d used successfully many times. They had no doubt it would work, and they were right. Chuck Schumer is supposed to be one of the Democratic Party’s top leaders. He should show leadership. Instead, he behaved like a coward before Donald Trump, which dramatically increased the president’s power and will make it much more difficult to dislodge the South African billionaire tearing our country apart. Democrats should’ve laid the ground a month ago, talking in advance about all the horrible cuts Republicans will do in the continuing resolution. They should’ve made the CR toxic long before it came to the floor, so the American people were demanding that they kill it long ago. The Democratic Party would have then had confidence that the base would have their back. None of that happened. It’s time for new leadership.

— These Democrats have a plan and it’s a GREAT one! While this practice probably goes all the way back to the early days of our republic, my first contact with it was years ago when Congressman Mark Pocan, then Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me on my radio/TV show that he was visiting parts of Wisconsin represented by Republican members of Congress who refused to do town halls. Earlier this month Bernie revisited the practice, dropping in on several Red states, drawing massive (over 10,000 people) crowds, as Congressmen Pocan and Ro Khanna were doing the same in Red congressional districts in Wisconsin and California. Now Ken Martin, the new Chairman of the DNC, says the Party is taking the practice nationwide with plans to hit all 50 states. Every Democrat in the House and Senate should “adopt” a Red district or state and do the same; this is truly effective political theater and it’s drawing a great response from the public, including even disaffected Republicans and curious independents.

— Musk’s Trojan hounds: DOGE operatives penetrate Social Security & USPS in shocking power grab. Nobody elected this South African billionaire, Trump’s largest campaign donor, to do anything to America, but here he is with his chainsaw and his band of seemingly sociopathic barely-post-adolescent young men tearing our government apart. New reporting says of their invasion of Social Security’s offices, “This team appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.” Musk and his billionaire buddies must be drooling over the $2.5 trillion sitting in the Social Security trust fund; if they could privatize the institution and have the new banking operation he’s planning to connect to X distribute SS checks, just a tiny 1% skim off the top could make his money bin bulge obscenely. And then there’s the Post Office, the agency that Ben Franklin first led and is listed in our Constitution, that Louis DeJoy says he’s cut a deal with Musk to begin gutting, presumably with the ultimate goal of privatizing (both Musk and Trump have called for privatizing the mail service). To top it all off, in a post on his Nazi-infested social media site, Musk just listed other programs he alleges are being used as part of the Jewish-funded “Great Replacement” theory to give Black and Hispanic people jobs and lifestyles that should rightfully belong exclusively to white men. In response to a tweet from Senator Mazie Hirono which read, “Musk is spreading a lie that Dems use Social Security & Medicare to pay undocumented immigrants to come into the country” the Nazi-saluting billionaire posted: “Not just those programs! Democrats also use every other government money tool to attract and retain illegals, like unemployment insurance, disability insurance, tax rebates on nonexistent income, SBA loans, student loans, COVID payments, FEMA money for luxury hotels, etc., etc.” Looks like the destruction of our government has just begun…

— Women are NOW, TODAY having trouble registering to vote in NH because they've done the SAVE Act on a a state level...Where are the Democrats on this!? Robyn Pennacchia writes over at Wonkette that New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu recently signed a state-based version of the notorious SAVE Act that the GOP is currently trying to push through Congress. The legislation requires married women whose birth certificate names aren’t the same as the names on their passport or drivers’ license to “prove” that they were lawfully married and lawfully changed their names before they can vote. New Hampshire Public Radio reports that woman after woman was turned away from the polls in a local election Tuesday when they failed to find or bring to the polls a copy of their marriage license or proof they’d gone before a court to change their names. The state’s astonishingly dishonest Republican governor claims the legislation is necessary to stop undocumented immigrants from voting, but New Hampshire has never, ever, in its entire history, found or successfully prosecuted a non-citizen without documentation who voted. What’s really going on is that Republicans — some of whom have been calling for a repeal of the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote in 1920 — know that women are more likely to vote Democratic than are men. Republicans in Congress are thus pushing hard to get this into law nationally in time to block married women from voting — particularly in Blue states — in the 2026 midterm elections. It’s frankly astonishing that the media isn’t carrying anything about this, and that women’s groups haven’t yet organized mass protests. Once its in law, it’ll be too late…

— Musk’s Hitler post sparks public-sector union fury: Billionaire blames public workers for the Nazi genocide! Musk is famous for his Hitler salutes and his propensity to post 14 little flags in his tweets, presumably representing the “14 words” that every white supremacist must memorize and recite: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He’s also made wildly inappropriate jokes about the slaughter of Jews, retweeting: “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming!” But this time he really stepped in it, although the almost complete lack of coverage of the story by the nation’s mainstream media is downright eerie. Musk just tweeted, “Hitler didn’t murder millions, public sector workers did,” arguing that it was German government employees who were responsible for the Holocaust, not Adolf Hitler and his senior leadership who planned the so-called Final Solution. This strategy probably is designed to justify his mass firing of federal public sector workers, and Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, blasted back at him, writing: “America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich. They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers. Elon Musk and the billionaires in this administration have no idea what real people go through every day. That’s why he’s so willing to take a chainsaw to people’s jobs, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

— Consumer confidence crashes to lowest point in over two years. It’s been 29 months since American consumers were as worried about the economy as they are today, and back then inflation was screaming hot and Biden was just beginning to put the economy back together. Trump’s on-and-off-again tariffs and tariff threats are spooking people, and Musk’s chainsaw approach to the federal workforce is gutting consumer demand (because unemployed people don’t have disposable income) across the nation. Together, there’s a broad consensus that the two co-presidents will provoke a recession, at the least, and possibly even a worldwide trade war leading to a second Republican Great Depression. Gold just topped $3000 an ounce, further suggesting the near-panic isn’t limited to American consumers as that commodity’s price is defined by international supply and demand. Republicans seem not to care, because this is the opportunity they’ve been lusting for ever since Reagan suggested in 1981 that government wasn’t the solution to our problems but was, instead, the cause of them. Billionaires are actually looking forward to a crash; as I’ve written before, it represents a huge buying opportunity for them: Some of the country’s largest fortunes have been made during severe economic downturns when average people are forced to unload their stocks at a loss to pay the rent while rich people can scoop them up with their surplus cash. So, buckle up. This could become a wild ride…

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