TRUTH, NOT SOCIAL

Truth, Not Social, is the opposite approach. It flips the obvious living oxymorons of our times into what they miss, the truth.

Experiencing or finding truth is not a social event, but done mostly in isolation even while in a large crowd.

Kissing Lips at The Mar-a-Lago 

To get past the velvet ropes and the guys with the earpieces down in Palm Beach, you don’t need a resume, and you certainly don’t need a conscience. You just need to show you’re ready to bend at the waist. You go down on your knees, you kiss the pink, fleshy ring, and only then do you get to stand back up and call yourself a statesman.

Take JD Vance.

A few years back, Vance was the darling of the Sunday morning talk shows, a clean-cut boy from Ohio who wrote high-minded prose about how the Boss was “America’s Hitler.” He was going to save the working class from the snake oil. But then he smelled the soup cooking. He realized that in the modern racket, principles are just dead weight that keep you from getting a seat at the table.

So he took the ride. He went down to the sand, did the necessary bending, and came out the other side as the heir apparent.

The beautiful part of it—the pure, intuitive art of the hustle—is that the Boss didn’t mind that Vance used to call him a monster. He preferred it. If a guy has always loved you, he’s a sap. But if a guy hated your guts and now he’s on his knees singing your praises, you’ve got him by the short hairs. It proves he is 100% transactional.

A man with a price is a man you can trust. You know exactly what valve to turn to make him jump. The moment you make that trip to the beach and kiss the ring, you aren’t just making a deal—you’re handing over the deed to your own skin.

Now, Vance struts around using his hillbilly pedigree as a shield, acting like getting raised by a grandmother he called “Mamaw” and having a mother who struggled with heroin addiction somehow makes him the voice of the righteous. But nobody is buying the sob story anymore. Nobody wants the country’s second-in-command using a history of family addiction as a cheap shortcut to credibility and heroic speaking. A hard-luck story isn’t a substitute for character, but in this administration, it’s the only currency they have left.

Vance isn’t even the wildest example of the golden flip.

Look at Bobby Kennedy Jr. He spent his whole life as a loose cannon, a guy who could have run as a Democrat, an Independent, or anything in between. But the Boss dangling a Cabinet post was all it took. Kennedy made the trip to Palm Beach, bent the knee to the pink flesh ring, and suddenly the crown prince of the environment is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

And what do we get for it? The nation’s top health official addressing medical conventions by boasting, “For most of my life, I was a heroin addict,” and dropping casual gems on podcasts about how he’s not afraid of germs because he spent twenty years snorting cocaine off toilet seats. It’s a circus where the ringmasters use their old mugshots as credentials.

Meanwhile, the working class is starting to realize they were suckered. Plain and simple. But to the Boss, that’s their problem. He’s a dealmaker who never gave a single shit about them to begin with.

The deal he offered them was beautiful in its cynicism: “I’ll put an extra hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty bucks a week in your paycheck, just as long as you get my face carved onto Mount Rushmore.” That was the trade. A few extra crumbs in the wallet in exchange for immortality.

But it’s completely un-American, this pathetic, endless drive to re-litigate shit that’s already been settled and litigated hundreds and hundreds of times over. He doesn’t even bother to put up a facade anymore—he is running the country for the sole purpose of settling old scores, nursing past grievances, and crying over election bullshit.

History doesn’t bend like that. You can’t change what has already happened, and you damn sure can’t change fact and truth. All you can do is bend it, warp it, and try to make it look like something it’s not, just to align with the delusional vision of a con artist—a fake billionaire, reality-TV host, casino-bankruptcy piece of bullshit who wants to rewrite reality because his ego can’t handle the truth.

He actually thinks he’s going to go down in the history books as one of the greatest—no, the greatest—to ever do it. He’s obsessed with the legacy. But when the ink dries, the history is going to look ridiculous. He won’t be remembered as a builder of empires or a savior of the common man. He’ll go down in the books for exactly what he is: the loudest, most obnoxious, completely self-centered egoist to ever occupy the office.

And you still hear the hardcore MAGA crowd defending it. They shrug, they look you in the eye, and they say the quiet part out loud: “Yeah, he’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”

It’s supposed to be pragmatic. It’s supposed to be tough. But here’s the real truth of it: he’s an asshole, sure, but I don’t let any fucking assholes into my life. Why the hell would we let one run the country?

Lake Great River

To understand how a guy with a billion dollars and a private jet looks at a map of Ohio, you have to understand the mind of the modern disrupter.

These guys don’t see land, water, or history. They see assets waiting for a restructuring. They see an ancient legacy that hasn’t been properly optimized for c commerce and the latest cable news cycle.

Vivek Ramaswamy, fresh off playing co-CEO of the “Department of Government Efficiency” with Elon Musk—a partnership that went about as well as you’d expect before their public falling out—Vivek pulled the ripcord to run as the Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio. Needing to show the local folks that he was a man of bold, disruptive vision, he rolled into a GOP fundraiser in suburban Toledo, took a look at the great, grey expanse of the water, and tossed out a classic, Trump-style trial balloon.

“Anybody think if there’s a Lake Michigan, maybe there should be a Lake Ohio around here? I’m feeling that. We’ll talk about that a little bit more as this campaign progresses.”

It is the perfect, synthetic hustle. It’s the PT Barnum school of public relations: say something so blindingly, aggressively stupid that everyone stops what they’re doing to stare at you, and then, when the laugh track dies down, shrug your shoulders and say, “Hey, I was just joking. But wouldn’t it be great if we did?”

It’s “disruption” for the sake of the algorithm. But Vivek missed the most beautiful, double-layered satirical joke in the entire state.

See, Ramaswamy wanted a great, patriotic, nationalistic rebrand of the map. He wanted to get rid of “Erie”—which he probably thinks sounds too foreign or too old. But because he’s a tech-bro who has never looked at a map without a GPS, he didn’t realize that “Ohio” is already an Indian name.

He wanted to strip away “Erie”—named by the Seneca for the ancient Cat and Panther People (erielhonan) who lived along those shores—and replace it with “Ohio,” which is also an Iroquoian Seneca word. His big nationalist play was to swap one Iroquoian dialect for another.

Even better? “Ohio” literally translates to “Great River.” So Vivek’s grand, billion-dollar, disruptive rebranding of a massive inland Great Lake was to call it “Lake Great River.” It is geographically, historically, and linguistically brain-dead. It’s like calling a mountain “Mount Valley.”

If Vivek ever wakes up to the fact that renaming Lake Erie to Lake Ohio makes absolutely zero sense on any etymological or historical level, he’ll probably pivot to calling it “Lake McKinley.”

Hey, Lake Michigan is named after Michigan. And Michigan is also an Indian name for Great Lake so, perhaps, Lake Erie should be renamed for the Erie Indians name for Great Lake which no one will ever know because they will wipe down by the Iroquois and also pushed out. I’d stick with Lake of the cat. No question.

Lake McKinley fits the brand perfectly. It’s a tribute to Canton, Ohio’s own William McKinley—the “great American” whose name was famously stripped off North America’s tallest peak and returned to its traditional Athabascan name of Denali in Alaska, only for Donald Trump to immediately change it back.

And we all know why the Boss loves McKinley: he thinks of him as the ultimate Tariff King. Trump’s favorite word is “tariff,” and he loves to wax poetic about how McKinley made America rich by slapping a 50% tax on imported tinplate and wool back in the Gilded Age.

But there’s a slight hitch in the history lesson. That was 125 years ago, before global supply chains, instant communications, and the modern world even existed. Not to mention the glaring little legal detail that the Constitution explicitly gives the power to lay and collect tariffs to Congress, not to some imperial president wielding them like a personal club. The whole executive tariff-man act is a completely unconstitutional power grab, but since when has the Constitution ever gotten in the way of a good vanity project? Like “Liberation Day”

To deliver this performance in Toledo of all places makes it even richer.

Historically, this wasn’t just some suburban banquet hall; this was the heart of the Ohio country, the stomping grounds of Tecumseh—the legendary Shawnee chief who was perhaps the greatest American ever to walk this soil, right up there with Sitting Bull. Tecumseh fought along these rivers to preserve a vast, pan-Indian alliance against the very colonial forces that wanted to erase his people’s footprints. He died at the Battle of the Thames just across the border, from Detroit, in Canada, fighting for the land, the rivers, and the truth.

To stand on the soil of Tecumseh’s people and suggest renaming a Great Lake because you want a cheap, brand-aligned campaign applause line is a bad insult. Why honor the great Shawnee or the ancient Panther People when you can just treat the landscape like a blank canvas for your political career?

Across the border, the mayor of Canada’s Pelee Island—which sits right in the middle of the lake—summed up Vivek’s proposal and this entire era of performance-art politics in one sentence:

“We live in the stupidest time to be alive. Not the hardest, not the poorest, not the sickest. The stupidest.”

Meanwhile, the actual lake is choking on phosphorus algal blooms, and the people living along the coast are watching their utility bills rise. But that’s the beauty of the transactional campaign. You don’t actually have to fix the water. You just have to promise to change the sign on the highway, collect the campaign donations, and move on to the next deal before anyone notices the ceiling is leaking.

The Footprint They Can’t Erase

Before Vivek or any other disrupter tries to run a squeegee over the map of Ohio, they ought to look at the list of what’s already written in stone, water, blood and soil. The indigenous history of this state is woven so deeply into its bones that you couldn’t scrub it clean if you tried.

The 17 Counties

County	Language/Origin	Translation & Historical Context
Ashtabula	Lenape (Delaware)	Ashtepihəle: “Plentiful fish” or “always enough fish to share.”
Coshocton	Unami (Lenape dialect)	Koshaxkink: “Where there is a river crossing.”
Cuyahoga	Mohawk	Cayagaga: “Crooked river.”
Erie	Iroquoian	Named for the Erie tribe (“People of the Panther”).
Geauga	Onondaga / Seneca	Jo’ä·ka’: “Raccoon” (originally the native name for the Grand River).
Hocking	Lenape	Hokhokken: “Bottle-shaped” or “gourd-shaped” (referring to a local waterfall’s shape).
Licking	English/Algonquian	Named for the local river, translating to salt licks used by game.
Mahoning	Lenape	Mahoni: “At the deer lick” or “there is a path.”
Miami	Miami (Myaamia)	Named for the Miami Nation (“people of the downstream”).
Muskingum	Shawnee	Mshkikwam: “Swampy ground” or “by the river side.”
Ottawa	Ottawa (Odawa)	Named for the Ottawa nation (“traders”).
Pickaway	Shawnee	Derived from Pekowi, one of the five principal divisions of the Shawnee.
Sandusky	Wyandot	Saandusti: “Water within water-pools” or “cold water.”
Scioto	Wyandot	Skɛnǫ·tǫ’: “Deer.”
Seneca	Iroquoian	Named for the Seneca nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Tuscarawas	Tuscarora	Named for the Tuscarora tribe (“open mouth” or “people of the trench”).
Wyandot	Wyandot (Huron)	Named for the Wyandot nation.

Major Rivers, Creeks, and Lakes

• The Ohio River: Derived from the Seneca (Iroquois) word Ohi:yo’, translating directly to “Great River” or “Beautiful River.”
• Cuyahoga River: From the Mohawk word for “crooked.”
• Maumee River: A French-English spelling variant of the name for the Miami people.
• Olentangy River: A Lenape name translating to “river of the red paint.”
• Kokosing River: From the Lenape word Gokhos-ing, meaning “Owl, here” or “place of owls.”
• Mohican River: Named after the Mohican tribe (Algonquian), closely related to the Lenape.
• Walhonding River: A Lenape word meaning “talon” or “hillside.”
• Kinnikinnick Creek: An Algonquian term referring to a traditional personal blend of tobacco, leaves, and red willow bark smoked in pipes.
• Tymochtee Creek: A Wyandot name translating to “stream around the plains.”
• Wabash River: Named from the Miami word Waapaahšiiki, meaning “it shines white,” referring to the river’s limestone bed.
• Lake Erie: Named after the Erie tribe, who occupied the southern shore until the mid-1600s.
• Pymatuning Lake: Located on the PA-OH border, from the Munsee (Lenape) dialect Piim’attoon’nk, translating to “here are facilities for sweating oneself” (referring to seasonal sweat lodges).
• Lake Mohawk: A major reservoir in Carroll County named after the Mohawk nation.
• Chippewa Lake: A natural glacial lake in Medina County, named after the Chippewa (Ojibwe) people.

Cities, Towns, and Settlements

• Chillicothe: Named for the Chalakatha division of the Shawnee. It was traditionally the name of their capital village, which moved with the tribe.
• Piqua: Named for the *Pekowi division of the Shawnee.
• Delaware: Named for the Delaware (Lenape) people who settled in the area after being displaced from the East Coast.
• Wapakoneta: From the Shawnee word Wa·po’kanite (“Place of White Bones”), heavily associated with the local Shawnee Chief Black Hoof and his family.
• Wauseon: Named in honor of Chief Wauseon, an Ottawa chief who lived in northwestern Ohio before the forced removals of the 1830s.
• Tontogany: Named after a prominent Wyandot chief in the Maumee River Valley.
• Zanesfield (Myeerah): Named in honor of Princess Myeerah, daughter of the great Wyandot Chief Tarhe.
• Pusheta: A township in Auglaize County named after local Shawnee Chief Pusheta.

High Schools and Mascot Monikers

• The “Redskins” Mascot (10 Districts): Port Clinton, Wapakoneta, Caldwell, Coshocton, Fort Loramie, Indian Creek, St. Henry, Utica, Arcadia, and Anderson (the latter retired in 2020).
• The “Indians” Mascot (Over 25 Districts): Including Piqua, Wauseon, Carlisle, Canal Winchester, Copley-Fairlawn, Girard, Hillsboro, Mechanicsburg, Fort Recovery, Mount Gilead, Norwood, Peebles, and Newton.
• The “Braves” Mascot (8 Districts): Olentangy, Indian Hill, Indian Valley, Logan Elm, Shawnee Local, Clark-Shawnee, Talawanda, and Whetstone.
• The “Warriors” / “Redmen” Mascot (Over 20 Districts): “Redmen” is used by schools like Bellevue, Bucyrus, Fostoria, and Rock Hill. “Warriors” is used by Mariemont, Goshen, Mohawk Local, Carrollton, and West Branch.

Historical Earthworks and Landmarks

• Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (UNESCO World Heritage Site): Encompassing eight sites in Licking, Ross, and Warren counties (including the Newark Earthworks and Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe). Built 2,000 years ago, these massive earthen enclosures track complex astronomical alignments.
• Serpent Mound (Peebles, OH): The world’s largest surviving effigy mound, constructed in the shape of an uncoiling snake holding an oval object in its mouth.
• Great Council State Park (Xenia, OH): Built on the historic site of Old Chillicothe, a major 18th-century Shawnee town. The park preserves the memory of figures like Tecumseh and features an interpretive center designed to mirror a historical Shawnee longhouse.
• Logan Elm State Memorial (Pickaway County): A historic site marking where the Cayuga/Mingo orator Chief Logan delivered his famous “Logan’s Lament” in 1774, following the slaughter of his family by white frontiersmen.
• Fort Ancient Earthworks & Nature Preserve (Oregonia, OH): North America’s largest prehistoric hilltop enclosure, constructed by the Hopewell people as a sacred social and ceremonial gathering place. 

The Easter Monday Miracle

You like conspiracy theories? I’ve got one for you. And the best part about this one is that the math actually adds up, which instantly makes it more respectable than 90% of the garbage circulating on the internet.

We have to look at the Grand Flipper of our time: JD Vance.

This is a guy whose spiritual journey reads like a guy trying to find a radio station with a decent signal on a long drive through Ohio. He starts out evangelical Baptist, flips to comfortable Yale Law School atheist, and then, in 2019, realizes that if you want to be the intellectual heavyweight of the new nationalist right, you need a faith with some medieval pedigree. So he converts to Catholicism. He’s a “baby Catholic,” he tells everyone.

Fast forward to early 2025. Vance is the Vice President, and he starts using high-minded Catholic doctrine—specifically ordo amoris, the “order of love” from St. Thomas Aquinas—to argue that Jesus actually wants us to run mass deportations. He essentially tells the public that true Christian charity means loving your own borders first and the desperate stranger last.

The only problem? The CEO of Catholicism, Pope Francis, didn’t agree with the Vice President’s theological interpretation.

Francis, eighty-eight years old and incredibly frail, actually issued a direct rebuke, warning that stripping people of their dignity violated everything the Church stood for. He practically called Vance a heretic in diplomatic code.

So what does the Grand Flipper do? He does what any self-respecting political operator does when the Vicar of Christ calls him out: he demands an audience. He packs up his family, flies to Rome over Easter weekend, and writes a whole book about it called Communion.

The timeline of what happened next is where the tinfoil hats start glowing.

On Saturday, April 19, Vance gets hauled into a closed-door meeting with Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State. The Vatican calls it an “exchange of opinions,” which is Church Latin for a brutal theological interrogation. They grill him on immigration. Vance gets defensive.

But he still wants the big prize: the photo-op with the old man.

On Easter Sunday, April 20, Vance gets his seventeen minutes. Pope Francis is confined to a wheelchair, barely breathing after a massive bout of double pneumonia, and visibly exhausted. Vance walks in, grabs the hand of the man who just spent weeks criticizing his entire political platform, looks him right in the eye, and says with a straight face, “I pray for you every day.”

The Pope, probably too tired to argue, has his translator hand over some chocolate Easter eggs for Vance’s kids and a Vatican necktie. Vance smiles, takes the tie, and hits the door.

Exactly twenty hours later—at 7:35 AM on Easter Monday—the Vatican announces that Pope Francis has suffered a massive stroke and died.

Now, look at the internet today. You’ve got the regular basement-dwellers cooking up the usual deep-state nonsense. They’ll tell you the Pope was taken out by the CIA, or microchips, or the Illuminati, or a secret globalist cabal operating out of a pizza parlor.

But the real, hardcore, practical conspiracy theory is staring everyone right in the face.

Pope Francis didn’t get taken out by a secret society. He survived eighty-eight years of Argentinian dictators, Vatican bank scandals, Curia infighting, and double pneumonia. What finally did him in was seventeen minutes of sheer, unadulterated aggravation.

Imagine being an eighty-eight-year-old saintly pontiff on your deathbed, and you have to spend your final Easter Sunday listening to a guy from Middletown, Ohio, explain to you how the Apostle Paul would have handled border enforcement. One look at that slick, transactional, chameleon smile, one handshake with the Grand Flipper himself, and Vance delivered a theological stroke instead—one that turned out to be absolutely deadly. The Pope’s heart simply gave out from the pure exhaustion of the modern hustle.

The conspiracy guys are looking for poisons and secret codes. They miss the human element. The guy went to Rome to get a blessing for his brand, and he went across the Atlantic and transactionalized the Pope right into permanent retirement.

The Drag Queen of Mar-a-Lago

You like conspiracy theories? I’ve got one for you. And we don’t even have to look at the Vatican this time. We just have to look at the digital fever swamp, where the self-proclaimed “transvestigators” spend their lives analyzing the collarbones of the global elite.

Lately, these basement-dwellers have turned their magnifying glasses on Mar-a-Lago’s very own Melania Trump.

They look at the photos, they analyze the video, and they whisper the big secret:

“Look at her. She never smiles. She’s got that sharp, stone-cold jawline. She’s as stoic as a bronze statue. Obviously, Melania is a man.”

Honestly? It’s the first conspiracy theory that actually makes her sound interesting.

Imagine the sheer, legendary scale of the hustle. If Melania is actually a man, she is the most successful drag queen in human history. She didn’t just win a crown at a pageant in Cherry Grove; she marched those six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered Slovenian bones straight down the runway, into the bed of a billionaire, and onto the portico of the White House.

She stands next to the Boss looking like she’s permanently waiting for a bus in the dead of a Siberian winter. It is a sternness that could curdle milk. She has a grim, unyielding man-face that refuses to perform the traditional, doting political-spouse routine. She won’t stand there grinning like a maniac while her husband rants about crowd sizes.

If she is a man, she is a genius. Because while the Boss was busy screaming at the television about “protecting our borders” and banning “chain migration,” she was running the single most efficient, gold-standard family-importation racket in modern history.

She entered the country on an “Einstein visa”—a specialized green card reserved for academic and scientific giants, which is hilarious since her primary contribution to American science was a QVC caviar skin-cream line that went bankrupt before it even hit the shelves.

Once she secured the fort, she didn’t just invite her family over for Thanksgiving—she brought the entire Slovenian clan over and set them up right inside the executive residence. Her parents, Viktor and Amalija, were practically living in the private quarters. They weren’t on the payroll as cooks or gardeners; they were just there, living the high life on the taxpayer’s dime, all while the son-in-law was on television declaring a national emergency over a fence in Texas.

And then there is the truly small-world, geopolitical icing on this cake.

Back in Slovenia, the gossip mills have always been incredibly active. It is a hilarious, undisputed little footnote of Eastern European elite circles that Melania’s close friend from her modeling days in Ljubljana just happened to be Alina Kabaeva—the Olympic gymnast who became Vladimir Putin’s highly classified, secret “first lady”.

It’s the ultimate “six degrees of separation,” except instead of Kevin Bacon, you get the Kremlin.

So let the conspiracy theorists keep analyzing her jawline. Let them whisper about the wigs and the stern, masculine glare. Even if she’s just a deeply bored, wealthy immigrant who is utterly exhausted by the American circus, she still managed to pull off the ultimate, back-door coup: she conquered the White House, moved her entire family in, and left the rubes outside arguing about the gate.

The Pure Organic Satire of Kristi Noem

Most working people go through life expecting a basic level of honesty from their neighbors. Not high honesty or lofty speeches. Just a basic, baseline understanding: you see the people on your block every day, everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows what time it is. You might not agree with everything a person does, but there’s no performance. Nobody’s wearing a mask—and even if someone tries to put one on, nobody is fooled, including the person wearing it. Whatever a person’s level of self-delusion might be, there is a general reality about them known to everyone they encounter, their reputations. That’s the actual and it’s reality, not digital video antics where nothing is proven, only provoked.

When you turn on the television and watch the political circus—specifically the self-appointed guardians of traditional values—and you realize you’re looking at a completely different species of fraud.

Take Kristi Noem. You don’t need a room of comedy writers, and you certainly don’t need an essayist to polish her performative prose. She arrives on your screen as pure organic satire—a pre-packaged, self-contained display of absolute, sociopathic hypocrisy that doesn’t need a single line of hyperbole added.

Start with the gravel pit in South Dakota. Long before she was lecturing the nation on law and order, she took a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket—along with a family goat—out back and put a bullet in them because they were acting up, ruining a hunt, and refusing to follow orders. That gravel pit wasn’t just a grim story in a self-aggrandizing political memoir; it was real and soon to evolve as the face of Homeland Security. If something misbehaves, doesn’t fit the photo-op, or gets in the way of the agenda, you don’t train it or fix it—you execute it and call it leadership.

The same arrogance defined her tenure at home, where she routinely picked fights with sovereign tribal nations, condescendingly referring to the sovereign Lakota nation as “my Indians” while lecturing them on how to manage their own heritage. When tribal leaders pushed back against her optics, Noem didn’t negotiate; she publicly slandered the Lakota and Dakota tribes, accusing sovereign tribal governments of being in cahoots with Mexican drug cartels and claiming tribal leaders were personally profiting off cartel activity. It was a smear so gratuitous that all nine federally recognized tribes in South Dakota voted to ban her from stepping foot on over 12 percent of the state’s land. To her, sovereign Indigenous citizens weren’t neighbors with legitimate legal standing—they were just convenient props for a cable news hit, or targets to be slandered when they refused to play along with her campaign stunts.

It was the exact same cold logic she brought to Washington when federal agents under her Department of Homeland Security descended on Minneapolis. The official line was a massive operation targeting Somali Americans over a gigantic fraud scheme—except all the individuals actually responsible for that fraud were already in prison or awaiting trial. What the agents actually found on the ground were hard-working, honest Americans who happened to be Somali. But instead of packing up and being ordered out of the city once the pretext collapsed, thousands of agents in full tactical armor were ordered into the neighborhoods to create mayhem and launch an attack against the actual American citizens of Minneapolis.

When an ICE officer put three bullets into Renee Good—a 37-year-old mother of three taking care of her family and standing up for her neighbors right down the block from her home—and when federal agents gunned down Alex Pretti, a VA intensive care nurse who stepped in to shield a woman being thrown to the ground on the sidewalk, Noem didn’t hesitate. Before the shell casings were cold, she took to the microphones to defend the killings, smearing those working-class American citizens as “domestic terrorists” who got what was coming to them. To her, a mother checking on her street or a hospital nurse shielding a neighbor aren’t human beings—they’re just Cricket in the gravel pit. Question the squad cars or get in the way of a photo-op, and you get put down.

Then came the money—$280 million straight out of taxpayer pockets. It was cash ripped from working people, spent so she could put on heavy makeup, plastic surgery, and custom cowboy gear to star in her own national TV recruitment commercials. A massive, taxpayer-funded vanity tour designed to buy prime-time ad space while portraying herself as a border warrior.

The circus reached its peak down in El Salvador at the CECOT mega-prison. The administration paid millions in tax dollars to hold over 260 Venezuelans in a complex where guards openly tell inmates the only way out is in a body bag. There she was, strutting through the cell blocks in front of dozens of caged, shaved-head prisoners, wearing tight designer gear and flashing a $50,000 gold Rolex Daytona for the cameras. It wasn’t law enforcement; it was a fashion shoot inside a human rights abyss. And after all that horror, tax dollars, and grandstanding, international outrage and political pressure forced them to release those same Venezuelans back home anyway—proving the entire violent exercise was a total sham from the start.

When Congress hauled her in to ask where that $280 million went, Noem swore under oath that Trump himself personally signed off on the whole campaign. But as soon as the heat hit the headlines, Trump publicly dumped her, claiming he never approved a dime and knew nothing about it.

That was the line that got her “fired”—or rather, shuffled off the board. Not the murder of innocent Americans. Because in this administration, “firing” a beauty queen doesn’t mean sending her to the unemployment line. It means the Kick-Up Promotion: inventing some obscure, newly created title or shuffling her off to a secondary post just to keep her out of the news cycle while saving face. It was the same routine Trump rolled out at every campaign rally, stepping up to the microphone, grinning at the crowd, and working the routine: “I really shouldn’t say this, you know, fake news will call me sexist, but isn’t she beautiful? Look at her, isn’t she beautiful?” It was never about governing or competence; it was about set design, casting, and keeping a trophy on stage until the contract ran out.

And while she was out preaching family values to the working class, the home front was a complete carnival. The tabloids pull back the curtain, and there’s her husband, Bryon—the guy sitting right behind her at the Congressional hearings looking like a modest midwestern rancher—allegedly caught up in secret online fetish accounts, posing in fake breasts and pink spandex, bankrolling adult performers, and living out an absurd double life. She finally filed for divorce after that whole fake-breast spectacle exploded, but long before the split, she and her top advisor were carrying on their own secondary plotline. Under the official cover of petitioning for government jets for immigration arrests, they had taxpayers foot the bill for custom aircraft fitted with master bedrooms and luxury lounges—turning government property into high-altitude love nests in the sky. You couldn’t write details like that in a Hollywood script if you had a month in the writers’ room.

If you dragged a pipe-smoking structuralist critic out of a university lounge, threw him into a booth at the local tavern, and forced him to watch this nightmare unfold, he’d wipe his glasses and call it involuntary performance art. But to anyone sitting at the bar trying to earn an honest living, it’s just repulsive.

She steps in front of the press corps wrapped in a total, outrageous illusion—the plastic surgery filler lips, the synthetic hair extensions, the spider-leg fake eyelashes, the heavy fuck-me makeup, and the skin-tight, fuck-me outfits with high-heeled fuck-me boots designed for a runway rather than a public office. It is a complete simulacrum of competence—a tailored jacket over a hyper-sexualized costume, a hardened executive glare, and the relentless posture of a culture warrior—masking a political operation that embodies pure self-referential absurdism. Every time the mask slips, the explanation is weirder than the original lie, confirming the punchline for the entire room while they pretend to be the victims of a media hit job.

Decades ago, a columnist had to work for a living—digging through city hall ledgers, chasing down bagmen, and crafting elaborate caricatures just to show the public what kind of phonies were running the city. Today, they live entirely inside their own video world, relying on the screen to separate the performers from the audience. They strut around in that virtual bubble, oblivious to how fake they look to regular people—the ones who are grounded, instinctive, and smart enough to recognize the shared reality we all live in, no matter how self-deluded a person might be. The theater writes itself, blocks its own movement, and delivers the joke without them ever getting it—that they are the unselfconscious, organic living joke that we all see right through. And unfortunately, it ain’t a fuckin joke, out here in reality. It’s a circus of incompetence performed by and idiot band of actors playing themselves as directed by their producer and leading man, our President.