Listen To This Story

It’s suddenly dawning on more and more people that something went very wrong in America. They wanted a tough guy who said crazy things to just DO it!  Just do each one of those crazy things! And he has, in spades. 

It’s Labor Day in Trumpland, and with the November election finally slouching into focus for millions of Americans, including MAGAs, there seems to be, as Creedence Clearwater Revival put it — a bad moon rising. 

A bad moon pulling ocean tides into a perfect storm where the GOP and its propaganda machine get everything they wished for — or what the MAGAs thought they wanted. But here’s what they’re actually going to get (and in some cases, are already getting): 

• Hardworking members of the MAGA base will be increasingly replaced as nonessential because many of the jobs they hold involve repetitive functions more cheaply performed by AI agents.  

• Their neighborhoods will be overrun with the blight of vast data centers sucking up indispensable resources like water and power.

• Nobody will be available to take care of their kids, their yards, or the crops that put food on their tables, because the people who did those things will no longer be in this country, with those remaining under effective house arrest. 

• And it won’t matter anyway because the MAGAs won’t have the wherewithal to pay for any of that. 

• And the “Don’t Tread on Me” absolutists will be surveilled in every aspect of their lives from driving to work to shopping at a local market to places where their children play.

Of course, it won’t be just MAGAs suffering. The whole country, especially the poor, whether Democrat or Republican, will suffer because of what they enabled — in their heedless ignorance.

An Angry Fox Awakens

MAGA cable mascot Maria Bartiromo was just fired for allegedly leaking internal network guidance directly to GOP White House agents… again.

Meanwhile, in Texas, a Trump stronghold, Republican officials and farmers are beginning to discover just how much the state depends on federal funding — roughly one-third of its budget — and undocumented labor to get the crops in. 

In June, a local Fox affiliate reported a growing crisis among Texas growers and ranchers, under the headline “Immigration enforcement takes toll on Texas agriculture.” It quoted Texas Agriculture Secretary Sid Miller, a Republican rancher, expressing deep concern:

On a dairy, those cows never stay milked. You milk them three times in a 24-hour period. So if the crew doesn’t show up, these dairymen go into panic mode. 

Two months later, Fox News — the default MAGA state media — is waking up to some problems. While still pushing the patriotic imperative of keeping Trump and Republicans in power, it is increasingly featuring stories about people harmed by what the Trump-Fox propaganda machine made possible. This story, for instance.

US ranchers face historic cattle shortage, brace for AI data center impact

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller discusses Tyson Foods closing beef plants amid a historic cattle shortage and the impact of rural artificial intelligence data centers on local water and land resources on The Will Cain Show.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch — one architect of this chaos — will eventually take his eternal resting place, presumably enjoying the very climate change hellscape he spent his life enabling.

But the rest of those who eagerly worked for and invested in him will reap the blowback. 

As for the non-MAGA multitudes: Well, California — which produces an outsized share of the nation’s crops and whose voters in general do not support Trump — has been hard hit by the ICE raids. As reported by the Fresno Bee, the Los Angeles Times, and other media based in California, the continuous raids have resulted in almost half of all farms pivoting to heavily regulated H-2A guest worker programs, speeding up automation, or just shrinking their operations altogether.  

World Ending on Schedule 

On top of that, people are kind of feeling global warming without discussing it as such. Remember that “fake news/hoax-y” thing? Well, the UN, which 10 years ago said just how much we had to limit temperature rise or risk disaster, now says we’re blowing way past that threshold, and our only hope for species survival is to find a creative way, somehow, eventually, to lower temperatures. 

Good luck with that! Maybe Elon Musk will claim to invent something like a lunar air conditioner run on dark matter to blow SpaceX coolness to Earth. 

As for those hardcore MAGAs who face going broke, sweltering, drowning, losing their waterfront homes and health insurance — anecdotal evidence suggests they’re making their  embrace of The Donald even tighter.

People at car and boat shows catch TV glimpses of Nepalese and foreign tourists swept to tragic ends by glacial collapse, shake their heads in bewilderment, then go out and push more carbon into the atmosphere. 

Trump, of course, functioning as the global assassin that he is, has withdrawn the US from international cooperation efforts to save the planet, eagerly ramping up oil and gas production and terminating environmental measures at every turn. 

To repeat a point I keep making: The Democrats really ARE incompetent. They have SO MUCH that could make for powerful persuasion, such as:

— Ads showing the horrific consequences of climate change, with ordinary people saying to the camera: “I voted for Trump and the GOP — but I didn’t vote for THIS.” 

— Footage of the detention and deportation of MAGA muppet Milo Yiannopoulos — and what he had to say about it. When ICE goons grabbed him at a Louisiana airport for overstaying his visa, he called the experience “humiliating,” “disorienting,” “physically degrading” and said, “I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America.” He also said he was “very ashamed” of having supported Trump.

Of course, candidates need to continue proudly showing themselves in uniform, being regular janes and johns, talking earnestly at barbecues about grocery prices, and how they really care. 

Still, someone else — some group of terrified citizens — could fund and put up the kind of ads I’m talking about. Zingers. Shockers. Get people talking outside their comfort zones. 

Pushing Back Against Trump

While so many corporate entities continue to cave, one company stood up to Trump — and has become all the rage among the IYKYK crowd. After refusing to follow Trump’s ludicrous dictum that Lake Ontario now be called “Lake America,” the mapping service MapQuest rocketed to the top US navigation app. 

I remember MapQuest from years ago, when it was a big deal. It’s been eclipsed by bigger outfits since then, but thanks to this bold move, it is surging in popularity, with, according to the company, hundreds of thousands of new downloads, and usage up by a factor of more than 50. Not 50 percent. 50 times.

The company had gone on to social media to declare that it was sticking with Lake Ontario: “We’re not changing it.” Google Maps pathetically bootlicked Trump, and Trump’s people even got Apple to comply as well.

Pushing Back Against Vilification

The dark money smear campaign against Abdul El-Sayed has created a cartoonish, mustache-twirling caricature. Now is the time to push back: Reject the baseless attacks and playground name-calling, inform voters that special interests are behind it, and recognize the motive — desperation to preserve Republican control of the Senate, protect MAGA figures from criminal investigations and possible prison sentences, and silence a viable Muslim candidate for the Senate in Michigan. 

In other words, this is a chance for anti-MAGA to go on the offensive and to turn this loathsome ad hominem assault into a weapon aimed right back at them.  

The Dark Money Monkey

“A monkey on your back” is the classic idiom for an impossible-to-shake, self-annihilating drug addiction. Dark money is the monkey on the back of almost everyone in the corridors of power. Even reporters inured to covert funds dominating politics sound deeply worried. A recent New York Times piece headlined: 

Millions of Dollars in Secret Spending Could Upend the 2026 Midterms

At least $1 billion from anonymous donors is flowing into the midterm elections. Dark money is not new, but it now permeates nearly every major contest.

It’s indeed out of control, but Americans are still not outraged enough about this to make it the topic of daily conversation that is required to change anything. 

And we have the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United to thank for this state of affairs. From the Brennan Center for Justice:

The justices said that the government cannot ban political spending by corporations and labor unions.

The ruling decided that spending money on independent ads is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

Corporations still cannot give money directly to candidate campaigns, but they can spend unlimited funds on independent ads and messages. [read super PACs]

Check out this lovely quote from retired Justice Anthony Kennedy in the Citizens United decision — which pretty much opened the floodgates to unrestricted anonymous campaign donations — where he basically said that drowning our politics in money-as-speech would be salutary to democracy, and would result in all sorts of wonderful things like greater transparency. 

Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people. The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.

We hesitate to pick on a long-retired and sometimes distinguished jurist — but where is the accountability for the profound wrongness of this ruling and the legislative destruction it perpetrated?  

I haven’t actually seen anybody write about the fraudulent nature, the blatant deceit behind so many SCOTUS decisions cloaked in lofty, high-minded language. As a colleague put it in railing against the dark money onslaught: “Moguls and corps want free speech, but they wanna do it with a bag over their head!” — and a blindfold over the public eye. 

When Citizens United first came out, along with the companion decision in McCutcheon, justices in the majority, when questioned, basically said, Oh yeah, well, Congress will take care of the “disclosure” part. So they passed the buck. 

And of course Congress did nothing about it because they aspired to join the dark money circus. The SCOTUS dignitaries knew what they were doing back then — and today’s bunch have certainly picked up that baton and run hard with it. 

In case you missed it, the “citizens” who benefit from Citizens United are not exactly you and me.

And there you have it: the state of labor and capital on Labor Day. 

Enjoy your picnic. But truly, let’s look for some hidden gems amidst the rubble, then come back refreshed for the fight ahead.