It’s time to tell the truth about Trump: he’s been an agent of organized crime and foreign governments for decades. And he’s continuing his work for Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and MBS — undermining Americans’ faith in democracy — to this day.

Trump’s 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, after all, just last month admitted that during the 2016 election he was handing secret campaign polling and strategy information off to Russian intelligence, presumably so they could successfully use it to micro-target vulnerable voters via Facebook and other social media in swing states.

Trump also sucked up to arguably the wealthiest oligarch in the world, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman. Breaking with the tradition of American presidents first visiting close allies among democratic nations, Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia, and the kingdom later gifted his family with $2 billion.

It’s still unknown if or how much money they might’ve transferred directly to Trump himself via one of his offshore accounts. Because Saudi Arabia is a police state, and Trump is really good at hiding his money after a lifetime of working with organized crime, we’ll probably never know.

Today's Republican Party is a de facto criminal organization. The crime boss is Donald Trump. Like in other criminal organizations, Trump rules through an inner circle of his closest advisors and lieutenants. Trump the boss also uses threats of violence and intimidation to keep control and to punish his enemies.

Unlike other criminal organizations, the Republican Party administers its loyalty oath in public.

As we learned from last week’s Republican debates, the leading candidates for the GOP nomination all appear to agree on a broad plan to gut American government and replace it with a strongman president and corporate rule.

The modern administrative state, sometimes called the “welfare state” by Republicans, was largely created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Republican Great Depression of the early 1930s. And every day since FDR was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the GOP has worked feverishly to dismantle his legacy.

Over the past two and a half years, Republicans across the United States have introduced nearly 380 bills aimed at establishing a climate of fear among educators, librarians, and other school officials, according to a report released Wednesday by the free expression group PEN America.

Distinct from the outright censorship measures that GOP lawmakers have unveiled in a number of U.S. states in recent years, "educational intimidation" bills "pressure educators to be more timid in the content they teach, pressure librarians to be more restrictive in the books they make available to students, and pressure students to limit their self-expression, without imposing direct prohibitions," the new report notes.

"Put simply, these 'educational intimidation' provisions... empower the use of intimidation tactics to cast a broad chilling effect over K-12 classrooms by mandating new and intrusive forms of inspection or monitoring of schools, as well as new ways for members of the public—including, in some cases, citizens with no direct connection to the schools—to object to whatever they see that they do not like....

The crisis we face today is a crisis of American democracy and specifically a crisis of the Republican Party. Part of what makes the crisis very difficult to address is that attempts to call out the problem... are often characterized as partisan, "shrill," or one-sided, and thereby relativized and minimized. But the fact remains that a substantial part of the population is made up of essentially authoritarian voters – people who, having witnessed the corruption, the coup attempt, and the ongoing festival of criminality that is Trump, continue to support him.

Democracy needs its gatekeepers, and it needs leaders in all parties who are willing to stand for principle and defend institutions. The leadership of the Republican Party has demonstrated a degree of corruption, hypocrisy, and cravenness in its quest for power that many would not have anticipated but that now stares us in the face.

Imagine you’re in the FBI overseeing national security and a candidate for President [Trump] hired a man who’d:

-taken $66 million from Russian intelligence services via Putin-friendly oligarchs
-helped Russia install their own puppet government in Ukraine in 2010,
-was paid $1 million a year to help the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), solidify his relationship with Moscow,
-forced his party to remove references in their platform to defending Ukrainian democracy,
-gave a Russian intelligence agent top-secret insider campaign information about voters in 6 swing states so they could run an ultimately successful micro-targeted Facebook campaign to help [Trump]
-offered to run the campaign for free because he’d been well-compensated by Russian intelligence services, and then
-repeatedly lied to the FBI about his connections to Putin and Russia, leading to his being charged, convicted, and imprisoned until [Trump] pardoned him.

... it’s important that we know Ikeguchi didn’t just come up with this level of rage at the sight of a rainbow flag all on his own, and his hate wasn’t only directed at LGBTQ+ people...

Travis Ikeguchi has been identified as the man who shot and killed Lauri Carleton over her pride flag. Based on his limited twitter activity, Ikeguchi was anti-gay, antivax, antisemitic, anti-choice, and an RFK [my correction to original text] Jr. fan.

Ikeguchi was obsessed with calling people pedophiles, believed Michelle Obama is a man, and thought the military was going to take over the country.