Weekly Cartoon Roundup #16

A delayed lookback at two weeks ago in which the military was dispatched to an American city against its wishes and masked Gestapo continued to kidnap and disappear people from our streets.

In the age of AI and deepfakes, there is a constant effort to blur the lines between reality and falsehood, to make us believe in things that never took place. I thought it might be helpful to curate a list of things that we can confidently affirm do not exist, if only to keep the gaslighters at bay a while.

It seems I also could have added “2A fetishists who can correctly identify fascism to defend themselves against”, since the NRA crowd seemed suspiciously quiet when faced with the military being dispatched against fellow citizens.

I guess that’s what happens when book reading is a liberal cuckhoax and history is woke. Or, perhaps more accurately, when you’re on the side of fascists and the whole “gun rights” thing was just a substitute for a personality.

California, like Chicago, gets a lot of shit, but mostly from people who don’t live there. This is not surprising, given there’s been a whole cottage industry built around pumping conservatives with rage bait for decades, making them believe that all Democratic-led cities are nuked-out, obliterated Mad Max wastelands. All I know is that LA didn’t take an attempted autocratic invasion of their city lying down and showed us all how to stand strong in the face of oppression.

Of course, the whole mess didn’t need to happen in the first place. The plan all along was to escalate tensions through unnecessary force and aggression, using citizens’ response to these fascist tactics as pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act and, ultimately, martial law. Every - and I mean every - disaster is of their own gleeful making.

It can be easy overlooking every indication of our rapid decline into fascism when you have marines marching through our city streets and people being kidnaped by masked Gestapo. But one signifier deserves some attention: ABC’s decision to cancel journalist Terry Moran’s contract over tweets criticizing a neo-Nazi. The unflinching servility being displayed by some media outlets is something that should never be forgotten or forgiven.

This past Saturday saw the record-breaking “No Kings” protests take place in thousands of cities and towns across the world. Timed to coincide with the military parade Trump planned on the occasion of his birthday, it was a glorious repudiation of Trump and his fully fabricated popularity; reports showed a 29000% greater attendance at the protests than the birthday disaster.

I didn’t think I’d have time to make a sign for the Chicago protest, but also didn’t want to show up empty-handed so I dusted off one I made several years ago. Still feel like I was too generous with the hand size, though.

I had heard criticisms of recent protests as being overwhelmingly white with mostly older attendees (65+) but found the Chicago “No Kings” protest to be pretty representative of all walks of life. It was easily the biggest protest I had been in since 2003, when protests erupted across the country in response to Bush’s war on Iraq.

And since some people have a fetish for crowd sizes…

It was refreshing and reinvigorating to be surrounded by so many people similarly putting outrage into action and made facing the daily bullshit a bit more manageable. At least for a minute or two, until seeing ugly displays of Trump’s Gestapo tackling an NYC mayoral candidate and a goddamned sitting Senator.

Ending this missive with an illustration that can be applied to Trump’s approach to pretty much anything: set something on fire (international relations, a major American city, the rule of law, etc.) then try to take credit for putting out the fire.

Peace (of shit) president, maybe.

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Album of the Week

This week’s album comes from Kentucky organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith and his 1975 jammer “Gears”, a collection of songs expertly straddling the nexus between jazz and funk. Hammond had been putting out music for years - Gears is his 31st album (!!) as a band leader - and this shows the artist changing with the times, moving away from his earlier modes of hard- and post-bop into the funk terrain many of his contemporaries had begun exploring by the early 70’s. At just 6 songs and a runtime of 33 minutes, it’s a pretty short album but that just means all killer, no filler.

Here’s album closer “Can’t We Smile?” to add some breeze to this hot summer’s day.

The next week is comin up ASAP, stay tuned friends!

xo, jesse