Ramble On: How Are You? (video)

Fourth of July thoughts on the Bigly Bad Bill, ICE expansion, Florida concentration camps, MAGA cruelty, and the urgent need for a new greeting

Good morning. How are you?

Today is the seventh anniversary of the time that eight Republican lawmakers—the Fourth of July Traitors, as I call them—celebrated Independence Day in Moscow, Russia: Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who led the delegation, along with Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, Steve Daines of Montana, North Dakota’s John Hoeven, Jerry Moran of Kansas, South Dakota’s John Thune, and Rep. Kay Granger of the 12th District of Texas.

That’s right—our current Senate Majority Leader is a Fourth of July Traitor!

Here is today’s ramble:

And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. Happy Fourth of July. As you’re watching this, it is the Fourth of July, Friday morning. I am recording it on Thursday afternoon at 5 o’clock PM, right after the passage of a bill so awful that…well, we’ll get to that in a minute. It’s a bleak day for America. Let’s just say that. There’s no getting around it.

As I’m looking out the window, there’s dark clouds coming. The storm is coming. The wind is blowing, the rains are coming, and I feel like it’s a pretty good metaphor for how things feel right now.

On Wednesday, I logged into The Five 8 1/2 virtual greenroom, so I could talk to Lisa Graves and Nadine Smith, just to make sure everything was all settled and they had everything they needed before the show started.

I pop in and I say, “Hey guys, how are you?” Because that’s reflexively how I greet people. And everyone just sort of stopped and looked at me and sighed. And I thought to myself, “That’s where we are right now. We’re at the phase right now where we can’t even ask someone ‘How are you?’”

Because things are so bad in the country that it’s impossible to not be affected by it emotionally, unless you are actively evil, are not paying attention, or—that’s it, really. There’s no way to look at what’s happened to the country in the last five and a half months and not feel this way.

And I feel like they’ve taken this away from us. It’s another in the long list of things that Trump has taken away from us. Our greeting of “How are you?” has now become a dreaded question to have to answer. Because how do you answer it? It was hard to answer before, to be fair, but now it’s like, “How am I? The world is on fire, man! You know, how can I possibly be?”

The only silver lining I can see with this bill is that people will now—I think—have to start waking up to the reality of what we allowed these Trump people to do in our name, with our votes, whatever.

A friend of mine at work, who’s young, his mother is a citizen but wasn’t born in the United States. And I said, “You better keep an eye on your mom, make sure she has her papers when she travels, maybe she shouldn’t get on an airplane anytime soon. Just, you know, be careful.” And he said, “Well, why?” I said, “Because they might, you know, round her up. That’s what they’re doing.”

And he said—because he’s a smart kid, and he’s a logical kid—he said, “Why would they do that? It doesn’t make any sense. It costs a lot of money. And why would they arrest someone who was here legally? I don’t think they’re going to do that.”

I said, “They’re already doing it. It’s already happening. Now it’s just going to get worse, so you really have to be prepared in case something happens.” And he didn’t know what was happening, and he looked shocked. I still think he doesn’t quite believe me, but, that’s what’s happening now. ICE is already going around and kidnapping, there’s no other word for it, they’re kidnapping U.S. citizens—people who are here legally, who came here legally, who have been here for decades, who have families, who have businesses, who have places in the community—and they’re just taking them away. Why? I don’t know. I do know, but there isn’t any good reason why; it’s a waste of money. It’s a waste of effort. It’s a waste of talent. It’s a waste of resources that could be used to enforce actual laws that are being broken, etc. But instead we’re wasting all this money doing that.

The purpose really is to terrorize everybody. It’s to terrorize everybody.

There are by some estimates between 11 and 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Trump and Vance kept saying 22…first it was 18 million, then it was 22 million, then it was 25 million. The number keeps getting higher, and they’re building these concentration camps—let’s call them what they are. The most recent one being in Florida, in the Everglades, there in the swamp, which they’ve given this ridiculous name that I’m not even going to say.

And part of the reason why they do these things is to make us all so triggered. I don’t like that word either, but it’s what it does. Something like that is so obviously horrible and horrifying on so many levels that it makes you either depressed, enraged, whatever it is: you have an emotional response to it. And you can only feel that way for so long before you just stop feeling anything, and you just crawl under your desk and curl up in a fetal position. And that’s the purpose to all of this horrible stuff.

So we have concentration camps already being built. We have a government that, as I discussed on Tuesday, is actively fascist, late-stage fascist, that keeps raising the number of supposed illegal immigrants in the country. (Like, I think a lot of them have left, guys.) And the number keeps increasing. We know they’re going to put people in these concentration camps. They didn’t build them just to build them, right? And they’re still deporting people to El Salvador. Also, the Supreme Court, in another genius, compassionate¹ decision, said it was okay for us to continue deporting people to third countries. So now people who have been for months in some camp in Djibouti, which is on the equator basically, are now going to be sent to South Sudan, one of the least safe places on Earth. Why? They’re not from there! Because I guess Trump struck a deal with South Sudan? That’s a place that’ll take our money to take people in so that we can torture them or have them tortured and claim that we didn’t know that that was what was happening. As we’re seeing now in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is back and documenting all of the horrific things that happened to him during his stay in CECOT in El Salvador. (Just trust me that it’s bad. And if you picture something that’s the most awful prison you can imagine, that’s basically where he was and what happened to him. So don’t read the transcripts if you’re going to get viscerally upset by it.) It’s very upsetting, and should be for anybody with any kind of moral compass, which obviously the Republicans do not have.

So there’s lots of horrible things in this bill. I haven’t documented them all. I don’t know what they all are yet. My guess is there’s a lot of booby traps and poison pills in this bill, and we’re going to find out as the weeks and months roll on just how horrible it is. I know that the Medicaid cuts don’t start until after 2026, apparently—after the midterms, supposedly, because they don’t want to run on this. That’s encouraging, because I guess it means maybe that now we know that there are going to be midterms?

But there’s lots of stuff we’re going to find out about in this bill that’s really horrific, that makes people less safe, makes people poorer, sicker, weaker, that wrecks the economy faster. And why? So rich people can get super rich. And these—whatever the Leonard Leo cabal, whatever you want to call the radical Catholics and the Evangelicals who think this is all a wonderful thing; I don’t even know what word you want to use for them; “agents of Satan,” I guess we could say?—they think it’s wonderful because I guess they think the Rapture is coming, and somehow making poor people more poor and miserable is going to endear them to God and Jesus somehow? I don’t really understand how that works.

But the thing that we know is happening is that now there is a huge budget increase for ICE. ICE is going to have a budget larger than, you know, basically every police station, DEA, there’s a whole list of things that it’s going to surpass. And I’m told the DOD is encouraging military members who are leaving the military to go join Homeland Security ,and go to work for these masked goon squads. So what’s going to happen in this new budget is, we’re going to have an expanded police force, a secret police force—call it what it is, it’s an American Gestapo—that can basically do whatever it wants, has very little oversight, very little consequences for being violent and stuff like that, and for roughing up whoever it wants. That’s definitely happening now.

And okay, the midterms are coming. Yeah? Well, I don’t know how many people they’re going to arrest, but it seems to me that they have all these people in ICE—they can simply arrest a whole lot of people and just keep them in jail and not let them vote. Right? Isn’t that what they’re going to do? Something like that? We have to start thinking the way that they think. It’s like Silence of the Lambs. You have to get inside the mind of the psycho, of the serial killer, in order to catch the serial killer. You have to profile them. These MAGA people are sadistic psychopaths, and they want to bring misery. They feel joy in contemplating the misery of other humans. And we saw it this week. They went down to that ridiculous Everglades concentration camp, and Trump and Kristi Noem and Ron DeSantis and some other asshole are there just snickering. Like it’s somehow funny to have this place and joke about alligators eating people. Which is also racist, by the way. It’s a racist trope which they know that they’re appropriating: alligator bait. And they’re loving it. Trump looks like he’s having a hell of a time, you know?

So what does this mean? I don’t know. I don’t know what it means, but it’s terrifying, it’s scary, and it just means that the descent of the United States into fascism has been massively accelerated. My prediction that if Trump won, that by the Fourth of July 2025, the country would not be recognizable, has come true. Because it is not recognizable. This is not how the United States is supposed to be.

Now you might push back and say, “Hey, Greg, what do you know? This country was founded by slaveholders. The Constitution was written to allow for slavery, and that’s why we have the Electoral College, and that’s why we have the Senate being disproportionate to the population. And we did all these terrible things. We committed genocide on the people who lived here before. We actively had institutionalized racism and sexism for decades and decades and decades and decades. So this is just of a piece with how America really is.”

But I don’t like to believe that. I think that we have made progress, especially in the last hundred years, especially in my lifetime, the last 50-some-odd years: so much progress in terms of equality. And this bill, this administration, this political party has worked very hard to snuff that out. Make America Great Again? No. Take America back to, I guess, the McKinley Administration. That’s what they’re trying to do.

And you know, with the passage of this bill, I think they kind of succeeded. So I feel sad. I feel angry. But I also feel really resolute that we need to band together. And I think this will wake people up. I think that however many people there were before that didn’t like Trump and what he was doing, this is going to exponentially increase the number of people who don’t like what’s going to happen now. So we’ll see. We’ll see if there’s enough people, if there’s a critical mass of people who actually give a shit about their fellow human beings, give a shit about democracy, give a shit about the future of the country and the planet and our children and grandchildren and all that stuff. We’ll see.

Again, it is Friday, it’s now 5:17 PM as I’m speaking. The storm is still here. On the Fourth of July, at high noon, I am going to do a Substack Live with Nadine Smith of Wide Awake America and The Five 8 1/2.

Nadine is wonderful. So that’s gonna be fun. You can check that out. We’re gonna be, like I said, live. I’m sure we’ll talk about the bill and lots of other things.

And then: there is no new Five 8 show tonight, Friday night, but my plan is, I’m going to replay the live noontime me-and-Nadine convo, in the eight o’clock time slot tonight for The Five 8. So we will have content tonight on that channel. If you feel like getting your Friday fix and hanging out, please go join: 8 o’clock PM Eastern Standard Time.

Nadine is also a very hopeful person, one of the most hopeful people I know. And I am hoping that she will make me feel…better? I don’t know. I don’t feel hopeless. I really don’t. I feel like there is a point at which people will wake up and say, “This is enough.” I reached my point personally a long time ago, but other people still are in denial that stuff’s even happening. The ostrich method is going to be gone very soon. And then we’ll see where we’re at.

And I have confidence in people. I believe in humanity and essential goodness of humanity. And I really like to think that all of the horrors in the world are being perpetuated by a very small minority—a very powerful minority, but a very small minority.

On this Fourth July, I’d like to kick them out. I’d like to declare independence from them.

So have a great long weekend, if such things are possible. Until next week, we shall—we shall—prevail.

---

SHOW NOTES

• Watch the High Noon Substack Live with Nadine Smith at 12 PM ET today here.

• Browse my Keats “Grecian Urn” t-shirt and other cool literary and art shirts here.

• Links to all my various and sundry other projects can be found here.

1. Note: sarcasm.