I'm a vermin; what are you going to do about it?

Team Vermin's quarrel isn't with Trump, your Senile Bonesaw Jesus. It's with you, the people who would make Team Exterminator possible. And your weakness gives us strategic advantages to exploit.

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I believe the passage that follows is the most pathetic thing I have ever read. Note the parts in bold.

Karl told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Monday evening that the unnamed official served Trump “loyally” for more than a year “at a very high level inside the West Wing, very close to Donald Trump” and hasn’t been publicly critical of him.

Psaki read the full quote from the official:

“He lacks any shred of human decency, humility or caring. He is morally bankrupt, breathtakingly dishonest, lethally incompetent, and stunningly ignorant of virtually anything related to governing, history, geography, human events or world affairs. He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and the rule of law.”

“It gets to a fundamental truth about Donald Trump, and that is the most piercing and searing criticism of him,” Karl said. “The people that are sounding the alarm loudest about what a second Trump term would mean are those who are closest to him.”

Karl told Psaki that the former official hasn’t gone public because he fears “retribution” from Trump against himself and his family.

Who’s the bigger traitor in that passage?

Senile Bonesaw Jesus (SBJ)? Or the coward who empowered him to get tax breaks for rich people — or for whatever other venal reason — and who hopes to hide now with anonymity from the gross dictatorship he or she enabled?

This cowardly “former official” owes the country some personal risk as atonement. We won’t get what we’re owed, though, ever, from any “powerful” MAGA-enabler.

Pick a side: Team Vermin or Team Exterminator

At this point, most self-identified “Republicans” or “conservatives” in my community are either MAGAs or more “respectable” MAGA enablers — like the cowardly official above.

That distinction doesn’t matter to me at all.

If you’re not openly on Team Vermin now; I have to assume you’re on Team Exterminator and behave accordingly out of self-defense. It doesn’t mean I don’t like you or that you don’t have pleasant qualities. But I can’t afford to rely on your personal goodwill when you’re ready to bring a verminizing dictator back to power, who says “we pledge to you that we will root out …”

You are freely including yourselves in his we. And you are all I care about. Without you, Senile Bonesaw Jesus is nothing more than senile. My quarrel is with you, not him.

Thus, I spend quite a bit of time confronting my community’s MAGAs and their weak enablers to their faces, both digitally and in the flesh. I sometimes get some credit for courage from that.

But I shouldn’t.

Taunting my local MAGAs and their enablers into impotent silence is integral to a conscious self-defense strategy I’ve developed since Jan. 6. That’s when Trump, MAGAs, and their enablers declared open war my country and my citizenship.

A successful strategy for fighting the civil war declared on Jan. 6th

My non-violent approach to fighting this ongoing civil war declared on January 6 revolves around three realities that I see as strategic advantages:

1. The police (the forces of the American state) fought the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, the Q-Anoners, and all the other MAGA thugs on behalf of Team Vermin on January 6. Some died for it. It was their duty; but I remain eternally grateful for their courage and clarity in executing it. It is the most important development in this country since the MAGA era began. If police and military had joined the J6ers, I don’t where we’d be. That is always the greatest danger fascism poses — that rogue elements of police and military will turn their guns on law abiding people like me in the service of a lawless, lynch-mob dictatorship. Without that implicit threat, SBJ and MAGA are nothing.

2. MAGAs and their enablers are a weak, pathetic, incompetent, grifting bunch who lack the courage of their extermination convictions. Even the J6ers lacked any conviction. One skillful police bullet broke their Capitol lynch mob. MAGAs shrink from every personal confrontation in which they can’t play the bully. They all try to wriggle out of the vermin talk by saying: you aren’t one of the vermin, Billy. It’s all those other vermin that we don’t know personally. Why would we come after you? I’ve already had this exact exchange with a MAGA. And I laughed at him. Of course I’m a vermin. Anyone who tries to restrain SBJ’s personal indulgence or temper his voraciously corrupt need for personal gratification is a vermin to him. Hell, Ron DeSantis is a vermin to SBJ now because of his comical disloyalty and weakness. (Thoughts and prayers, Ron.) All of you MAGAs know this.

3. MAGAs generally crave indulgence and approval, not actual violence or cruelty they will have to inflict personally, face-to-face. And they demand and depend on the responsibility and productivity of the people they claim to hate to make their communities function. Thus, I am far more willing to be non-violently, personally cruel to them in the service of decency than they are to hurt me personally in service of SBJ. When cruelty is the point of the civil war, that’s a strategic disadvantage.

MAGAs pursue transgression and disorder for its own sake, for the sake of how it feels. SBJ is just their crack pipe. But to feel the full high, they need the power of the state or the tacit social approval of power in their communities to enable them. And they need decent people to surrender public space to them because the necessary confrontations are unpleasant and it seems safer to be anonymous and out of the public sphere.

Thus, mocking MAGAs personally and publicly, to strip them of any social respectability, to render them silent, is strategy for me. Depriving MAGAs of their intimidation space is strategy. Taking away any cruel fun is strategy. Making them own publicly the extermination implicit in verminizing their neighbors and fellow citizens is strategy. Forcing police and military power to take lawful sides against them is strategy.

MAGAs always imagine a gap between their extermination fantasies and their person-to-person behavior. They try to imagine a gap between Senile Bonesaw Jesus’ incitement and their personal responsibility. I seek to obliterate that distance at all times. I remind them there is no distance between their fake “beliefs” and my blood — and dare them to come take it. So my strategy boils down this: I’m your vermin. What are you gonna do about it?

I’ve been doing this to MAGAs and enablers, by name, since January 6th; and they’ve done nothing except take it. The strategy of non-violent confrontation and provocation is working on the ground here so far.

It’s what killed the CCDF and stopped Saga Stevin, etc. It’s put Jerry Hill in trouble with the Florida Bar and helped land Florida’s Department of Education in the sights of a federal grand jury. It’s made MAGA School Board Member Rick “T.I.T.S.” Nolte a gross joke with no relevance or chance of re-election and made the right-wing state government fine him for election violations. It’s neutered “local military czar” Gary Clark’s ability to give inciting presentation or trash talk America and its military with credibility to anyone but cloistered MAGA freaks.

Aggression met with weakness or silence did all of that; and I’m proud of all of it.

Open moral aggression is safer

The only individual MAGAs I consider physically dangerous in a person-to-person sense are gunsick murder/suicide husbands or the MAGA shooter/sex trafficking delusionals like Bryan Riley and the MAGA in Maine.

But those MAGA shooters pose a danger to everyone, very much including MAGAs themselves. And I firmly believe, based on close observation and study, that MAGA shooters are most likely to seek out people who are quietly and meekly just trying to get through the day.

Something about furtiveness — that hiding behind civilized notions of law and privacy — triggers dudes with AR-15s and delusions, especially when some freak occurrence focuses attention on some random place. This is especially true for public people or representatives of institutions.

When a normal person seeks protection by withdrawing from public sight to an illusion of safety, they trigger the MAGAs’ broken lizard brains. MAGA’s mental illness interprets a normal person’s rational treat from abuse as guilt — as suspicion that they’re hiding a dark secret. I think this is true of all MAGAs. Think how often you’ve seen the pattern repeat itself. It’s true that only a few MAGAs will act violently on it. The rest indulge their delusions from a safe distance, engaging in mass cruelty through abstraction. Trump’s very existence as a social and religious force is MAGA’s mass cruelty made flesh.

You created him, not the other way around.

So I see zero evidence of safety from you in keeping a low profile or pursuing illusions of anonymity.

Honestly, the next time some hospital or school or pizza parlor gets targeted in a MAGA meme, I think the right tactic is actually to escalate: well then, come get us MAGA shooters. Come murder innocent people.

I know that can’t happen in a practical sense. An institution can’t dare cowardly MAGA shooters to murder its people. But trying to quietly ride it out doesn’t work.

And I strongly believe aggressive and public moral confrontation with the lawless, murderous violence MAGAs want you to fear, before it happens, can suck the energy out of the murderous delusion and forestall the violence of the MAGA shooter militia.

Or you could just end your war

The best development in our community would be for its capital and political and law enforcement leaders to turn publicly and forcefully against Senile Bonesaw Jesus and his MAGAs and his verminizing and his J6 civil war.

But that will never happen.

You’ll have to ask them why. Too much status to lose or tax cuts to get, I suspect. Maybe it’s just fear; or maybe they agree that we’re vermin. Honestly, I have no real idea what makes Scott Franklin or Jennifer Canady or Grady Judd or Barney Barnett tick. I just know what they do and don’t do publicly. They make Senile Bonesaw Jesus and your J6 civil war possible.

Any one of these “leaders” can prove me wrong at any time. I’ll happily publish any denunciation of SBJ’s verminizing. I’ll publicize any offer just peace in the Jan. 6 civil war at anytime.

But I suspect we vermin are on our own — always will be.

But power and strength are different concepts. We vermin are personally stronger than the MAGAs and their enablers, who have trapped themselves in a social box of their own weakness, which undercuts their power.

They can’t admit they’re wrong and seek a just peace with their neighbors and communities. They can’t give up their dark fantasies about us. But they’re also too weak to act personally on the violent and immoral retribution SBJ demands of them for his J6 war on America. It’s tough to fight a gross civil war with troops that pathetic.

Team Vermin needs to keep them in that box — and exploit that disconnect, especially if SBJ gets back in office.

It’s a strategic advantage in this grinding, pointless, moral civil war of attrition that Team Exterminator could end at anytime; but Team Vermin can’t.

After all, vermin can’t compromise with exterminators.