Rage Against the Regime

Rally talk August 2, 2025 “Rage Against the Regime”

Welcome everyone! We were prepared to read Jeffrey Epstein’s client list to you, but I left it on my desk. It’s been sitting there for months! Instead, we’re going to launch a new tradition: it’s called OUTRAGES OF THE WEEK. They do pile up, it’s hard to keep up with them, so we’re going to help you out with that.

(Today is “Rage against the Regime” day, so after each outrageously factual news item, let’s all yell DUMP TRUMP!)

OUTRAGE #1: (drumroll) In Belgium there stands a big warehouse full of contraceptive devices and medications that USAID was supposed to send to developing countries where people desperately need them. Not only is the Administration not going to send them now, but they’re going to BURN the 18 million dollars’ worth of contraceptives!

#2: (drumroll) As part of Trump’s deal that allowed Skydance to buy CBS / Paramount, the FCC chair is appointing someone called a “bias monitor” who will make sure the CBS’s news reporting conforms to Donald’s idea of news. Yay, police state!

#3: (drumroll) Israel is planning for Jewish resettlement in Gaza, with our United States eyeing the coastline for building more Trump resorts. First, Israel has to get rid of two million Palestinians by shooting them or starving them to death. Don’t be fooled by airdrops of food: they are a drop in the bucket.

#4: (drumroll) Trump’s EPA is revoking the 2009 official declaration that greenhouse gases heat the atmosphere and pose a threat to human habitation. In other words, now, climate change doesn’t exist, and thank goodness, we can drop all those regulations against oil and coal pollution.

#5: (drumroll) Not only is the government rounding up innocent immigrants to incarcerate, but now Trump is criminalizing the homeless and mentally ill.

#6: (drumroll) Most of Trump’s ever-changing tariffs on imports took effect yesterday, the first of August. Up to now there has been a 1.3% tariff on EU goods, now it’s going to be 15% because of the “deal” with the EU. That’s low compared to other countries. Brazil gets 50% tariffs because Trump is personally insulted that they’re bringing their dictator Bolsonaro to justice. Hey! Guess who’s really going to pay those jacked-up prices for everything we import?

#7: (drumroll) Health & Human Services secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, and replaced them with stooges. But more interestingly this week, RFK Jr. wants Canada to pardon 400 ostriches. (Long story.) In other news, Kennedy’s CDC will stop recommending the fluoridation of the water supply, and they’re investigating vaccines as the “root cause” of autism yet again.

#8: (drumroll) Nothing big here, just a few more near-misses in the friendly skies of commercial aviation-- airplane fires, botched communication from understaffed air traffic control, plane tires falling off, extreme air turbulence as a result of climate change, that sort of thing.

#9. (Drumroll) Donald’s Executive Order of this past week makes it okay—even advisable—to pray AND to proselytize about religion to co-workers in government offices.

OUTRAGE #9a (drumroll): Columbia University, as part of its newest effort to appease Trump and get its federal grants reinstated, is giving $200 million to the government—wait, no, make that $200 million to Trump’s “presidential library,” which will be of course be filled with all three books Trump has read. 

#10. (Drumroll) On the presidential greed front, there’s always plenty of new developments. Remember the $400-million luxury airplane Qatar gave Trump as a “gift”? The plane that will be the new Air Force One? Rachel Maddow reports that a federal budget item of around nine hundred million dollars to do maintenance on America’s nuclear silos so they don’t disintegrate and explode on the public, was just quietly canceled, and that same amount has just been allocated to retrofit Trump’s new gold-plated plane. The plane that he’s going to personally keep when he’s no longer president. So: our tax dollars are no longer going to nuclear risk reduction, but to Donald’s personal mega-plane.  

Finally, OUTRAGE #11, just in yesterday: Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because the facts obliged it to issue a very weak jobs report. Trump’s solution was to shoot the messenger. Economists are in a state of alarm, since the world, and we, can no longer look to the US government as a trusted source of information.

We talked last week about the step-by-step capitulation of the media, the normalizing of the dictatorship we’re under now. Let me just briefly tell you about last night’s news on PBS, one of the most trusted, if not the most exciting, television news in America. The anchors calmly announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down.

They did not say what that means for their own news program, just announced it and moved on to the next story. A few stories later, an ultra-conservative economist being interviewed said matter-of-factly that the steep tariffs Trump has imposed on imports from 80 countries are a good thing, and gave some wildly nonfactual reasons why. The PBS anchor simply accepted what he said, didn’t even ask questions. Then another calmly delivered story said that the eliminating of watchdogs at federal agencies is normal for an autocratic administration, as if anything about autocracy is normal.

At the end of the show, one of its frequent commentators, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, announced he’s leaving his job at the Post because of censorship. He was smiling, the news anchors were smiling, it was all so pleasant. Even PBS is normalizing the dictatorship.

So. we’re in shock at the dismantling of the guardrails, the capture of the Supreme Court, the round heels of Congress. We’re in rage, we’re in disbelief, we just want it to be over now.  As a fast-food culture, an Amazon culture, we are used to getting everything we want within hours. But we have to understand that this regime is going to last--probably well past the midterm elections, and very possibly past 2028.

Do you think Trump would be adding a 90,000 square-foot gold-plated ballroom to the White House if he were planning to leave in 3 ½ years?   So look around you and start processing the idea that this is a long-term relationship. It’s a necessary relationship—no one is coming to save us but US.

The people you see here in orange vests have been doing this for six months, and we need help. To continue doing this work, keeping North Kitsap informed and hopeful and active and making all our voices heard, more of us need to be involved and committed. Every precious soul has skills to contribute. During World War II, Americans came together to support the war effort.  Well, this is a war – we’re at war with fascism in our own country.

Now that we see the Führer has no clothes, everyone needs to pitch in for the resistance. Donald Trump is clearly not going away unless ALL of us find our talents and our imaginations to resist, to protest, to join in boycotts and strikes, to get out the vote, and make our voices heard no matter what.