Speaking of the Satanic Panic... I highly recommend watching this vintage example of 100% pure evangelical insanity dating back to the early 1990s. There are numerous unintentionally hilarious bon mots packed into Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults, a "documentary" that features the wit and wisdom of Cop/Pastor Gordon L. Coulter, but one of my personal favorite lines might be: "Witches are known for their artwork." They are indeed! Alert the National Endowment for the Arts! Now pack a bejeweled crucifix, a 32-ounce bottle of holy water, and a .38 revolver blessed by the Pope himself and prepare to enter the unfettered Freudian dreamscape of American Law Enforcement circa 1994...

Law Enforcement Guide To Satanic Cults:

PAGAN THREAT: THE MUSICAL!!!

Here's an excerpt from my 8-13-23 SALON article entitled "QAnon's Weirdest Obsession: Why Does the Radical Far Right Fear the Masons?" which focuses on the strategic resurrection of the Satanic Panic among far right-wing conservatives (what was considered the far right in 2023, of course, has now become the mainstream Republican Party):

In a recent interview with the Times Union of Albany, New York, historian Mitch Horowitz, author of “Occult America” and “Uncertain Places,” observed that “with the advent of QAnon, we may be a whisker away from a new Satanic Panic”:

That movement swept the United States and Britain in the 1980s and early ’90s on account of a cultural myth and canard that child-sacrificing Satanic cults were at work. In time, and after some really tragic and disruptive criminal trials and false accusations, media coverage exposed the Satanic Panic as a widespread hoax and a kind of cultural spasm. It may have been a reaction against changes in the workforce and the economy, in particular women entering the workforce en masse, and people turning to childcare centers and other alternative forms of daycare.

This theme has reasserted itself through the work of Alex Jones and people adjacent to the QAnon movement, and it’s now commonly encountered online. And despite the news coverage and the widespread debunking of the Satanic Panic, we seem to be going through this cultural amnesia in which we’re revisiting it.

Revisiting it indeed! Charlie Kirk wrote the foreword to Pastor Lucas Miles' new book (please note that the word "foreword" is misspelled on the cover) entitled PAGAN THREAT. Not surprisingly, Trump's ultra-right wing disinformation factory, Newsmax, the modern equivalent of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, is exploiting Kirk's death to help promote this 21st century MALLEUS MALEFICARUM. If it wasn't obvious before, it should now be painfully clear that the Old School Satanic Panic is back in full-force and isn't fading away anytime soon. If you want to induce an instant migraine headache, please click HERE to get a load of the contents of this most learned tome. If you lived through the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, you're about to get hit in the face with the unmistakable sense of déjà vu.

(My personal favorite aspect of this cover, by the way, appears at the very bottom: "AUTHOR OF WOKE JESUS.") 

Rather than wasting your time reading PAGAN THREAT, however, I highly recommend checking out this book instead: SATANIC PANIC: POP-CULTURAL PARANOIA IN THE 1980s (FAB Press, 2016) edited by Kier-La Janisse & Paul Corupe, an indispensable collection of personal essays that reveal the true extent of the psychological and legal terror unleashed on scores of innocent people by fanatical evangelicals during the height of the Reagan/Thatcher era. SATANIC PANIC also serves as a useful guidebook in regard to predicting the theocratic direction in which the United States is now headed. 

REVEALING THE NEW SPANISH EDITION OF CHAMELEO!

Heads up! The brand new Spanish edition of CHAMELEO: A STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF INVISIBLE SPIES, HEROIN ADDICTION, AND HOMELAND SECURITY (translated by Elías Ortigosa Román) is now available for purchase courtesy of Yonki Books...

THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK Makes the Final Ballot of the Wonderland Book Awards!

I'm pleased to announce that my 2024 book, THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK, has made the final ballot of the Wonderland Book Awards alongside nine other quaint & curious volumes of forgotten lore! Congratulations to all the other nominees!!! 

There are many weird & wonderful books represented on this list, including NYMPHO SHARK FUCK FRENZY by Susan Snyder and Christine Morgan and APESHIP by Carlton Mellick III. Check out the complete unhinged final ballot right HERE.

And if you want to purchase a copy of THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK, click HERE!

PRAISE FOR THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK:

"Robert Guffey’s The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook is weirder than parthenogenesis, weirder than the Republican Party, weirder than the fetishizing of pregnancy that suffuses our culture, weirder than all the back issues of Weird Tales combined. You will laugh, gasp, and scratch your head in pleasurable bemusement. I can’t recommend this tongue-in-cheek tour de force too highly."

—James Morrow, award-winning author of Only Begotten Daughter and Behold the Ape 

"We've got plenty of people who think that they know best--better even than a given pregnant woman. We don't need more of them, but we could damn well use more examples of them turned into buffoons just like we get to see in the Handbook [...]. [The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook] is often weird, often funny, frightfully well written, and it gives us that unique satisfaction that only fiction can provide by putting the bastards into a magic circle of their own disinformation and locking them away. Isn't it sweet to think that they'd stay there."

 —Géza A. G. Reilly, Dead Reckonings

 

Trump vs. Escalator!

From Jen Psaki's 9-24-25 MSNBC article entitled "Embarrassing U.N. Escalator Debacle Sets Off Another Trump Rage Cycle":

During an address to the U.N. General Assembly in 2018, Donald Trump said that his administration had “accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” In response, the crowd, full of world leaders and foreign dignitaries, broke out into laughter.

It was definitely not the reaction that a world leader hopes for when addressing the United Nations. But it was especially concerning for Trump, a man so thin-skinned and so obsessed with his self-image that he rarely lets any slight go unanswered.

And so on Tuesday, you could only imagine what was going through the president’s head when, in front of a gaggle of cameras at the United Nations, an escalator abruptly halted, leaving Trump and first lady Melania Trump flummoxed for a few seconds, before they ultimately decided to just walk up the immobile staircase.

Now, basically everyone who has ever used an escalator has had some version of this exact same experience. Sometimes, escalators malfunction and you are left to just treat them like a regular staircase. It happens.

But for Trump, the brief inconvenience of having to walk up a nonworking escalator while on camera was enough to provoke outrage. Moments later, the president took to the stage to address the assembly, and it was clear the incident was still on his mind.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” the president said. “And then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things that I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”

Yes, the president of the United States really did lash out at an assembled gathering of world leaders because the escalator didn’t show him enough respect. It was, to say the least, a ridiculous thing to bring up over and over again in a speech to the United Nations.

But the escalator crisis did not end there. Just a few hours after that speech, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X: “If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.” The White House press secretary called for an investigation into the world’s largest intergovernmental organization because an escalator stopped working.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

Escalator Stops Right as Trump Gets on at the United Nations

Escalator Breakdown | Uncle Grandpa | Cartoon Network

Uncle Grandpa | Breaking News | Cartoon Network

Stuck on the Broken Escalator

HAPPY AUTUMNAL EQUINOX!

 "THAT'S A WHOLE LIFETIME OF NIGHTMARES!" 

No Jokes, Please: The Weird, Crooked Road to UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES (REDUX)

What follows is a repost of an article I wrote to promote the publication of my first novel, Until the Last Dog Dies (Night Shade/Skyhorse), which was released in November of 2017, exactly one year after the election of Donald Trump. The novel is about a global pandemic involving a virus that attacks only the humor centers of the brain. The virus doesn’t kill you; it just wipes away your sense of humor. Until the Last Dog Dies is told from the point-of-view of a young standup comedian living in Los Angeles. I think you might find that this novel ended up being prescient in many unexpected ways...

No Jokes, Please: The Weird, Crooked Road to Until the Last Dog Dies

Rachel Pollack, the World Fantasy Award winning author of such sui generis novels as Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency, kickstarted my novel Until the Last Dog Dies without realizing it. When I was attending the Clarion Writers Workshop in the summer of 1996, during the final week of the workshop, Rachel gave the students a unique assignment: to dream up an idea that was unimaginable. My fellow student, Justina Robson, came up with the following: “Imagine a universe without the concept of God.” This intrigued me, as the implications of the concept were so vast that they seemed to defy any attempt at fictionalization. 

A few days later, while waiting in an unusually long line at the Seattle airport during that pre-9/11 era, I glanced up and saw something I’d never noticed before: a glowing, rectangular sign that read “NO JOKES, PLEASE.”

Of course, the purpose of the sign was to discourage people from making casual comments about having thermonuclear warheads tucked away inside their luggage. Haunted by Rachel’s mind-bending assignment, however, I chose to interpret the sign in a completely different way. The characters, the locale, and the basic plot of a most peculiar tale began to percolate in my brain at that moment. The first few bricks in the weird, crooked road to Until the Last Dog Dies had just begun to be laid down.

When I eventually began writing the story that became Until the Last Dog Dies, I asked myself, “How would the world look if people began losing their innate sense of humor, slowly, over a period of months or even years due to a virus that affects only the humor centers of the brain?” My initial assumption was that this would require complex world-building skills on my part. Two seconds later, the obvious, dreadful answer came hurtling back at me: “It would look exactly like the world in which you’re living now.” No world building skills required. Just open your eyes and look. What evolved from this process was a contemporary novel built on what at first appeared to be a completely science fictional concept. The result: a science fiction novel for people who don’t like science fiction.

Almost all my short stories and novellas were written within a relatively short amount of time. The road that led to Until the Last Dog Dies, however, branched off into several byways, almost all of them dead ends. At one point this novel was over six hundred pages long and told from the point of view of various comedians. I knew, instinctively, that something was way off with this approach. 

Sometimes you have to back away from something to get a more complete view of it, so that’s what I had to do with Until the Last Dog Dies. I put the manuscript away for a while, refused to even think about it. But I discovered that I had to return to the idea when I realized that the world around me was growing more and more like the “slant” world of Until the Last Dog Dies. Eventually, I realized what should have been obvious from the beginning: I was overcomplicating an idea that’s main asset was its utter simplicity. It became clear—in a dramatic flash of heavenly illumination—that the entire story had to be told from the point of view of Elliot Greeley, who was always destined to be the main protagonist. For you writers out there who find yourselves stalled on a project, and you’re not quite certain why, just know that the answer to your problem will often reveal itself to you when you stop thinking about it. 

This novel ends with the Presidential election of 2016, despite the fact that I finished writing it during the summer of 2015. By the spring of 2016 the novel had been sold to Night Shade/Skyhorse, so it was very peculiar to watch some of the stranger aspects of this story come to life in the real world while this book was heading towards publication. In fact, if I may say so myself (and I will), I don’t think there’s a more relevant novel than Until the Last Dog Dies in bookstores at the moment, though I wish this was not the case. If you hadn't noticed, the trend these days—from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum—seems to be an extreme push toward UTTER AND COMPLETE SERIOUSNESS. At one time the court jester—the standup comedian—was the one person on the planet who could get away with skewering an entire culture without being burned at the stake. Now even the most successful comedians are on Imagination Lockdown, as they need to spend more time worrying about social media shit storms and government censorship than doing what they do best: telling the truth (as Emily Dickinson once famously wrote) by telling it “slant.” Ernest Hemingway once said that you know you’re living in a banana republic if the buses don’t run on time, but you can buy a lottery ticket on every corner. I would amend that statement by saying you know you’re living in a banana republic when even the comedians are too terrified to be offensive. As Charles Fort, one of my main influences, once wrote, “I do not know how to find out anything new without being offensive.” 

If Ezra Pound was correct when he said that the poet is “the antennae of the race,” then poets—artists of all sorts, including standup comedians—have to do everything they can to resist this trend toward UTTER AND COMPLETE SERIOUSNESS that attempts to overwhelm the imagination of an entire society with fundamentalist restrictions forged in the hollow minds of creatively-challenged automatons. 

Or as W.C. Fields once said: “I never met a blind man who wasn’t a son of a bitch.” 

The ultimate cure for the humor virus is A) resisting the order of the day and, of course, B) buying a copy of Until the Last Dog Dies. Feel free to laugh your ass off… yes, even if the humor feels somewhat “inappropriate” at times. The truth, you see, is that nothing’s inappropriate in the ethereal realms of the human imagination. 

Oh, and those of you who find yourselves reading the novel with a leaden expression plastered on your roadmap of a mug… well, you may want your family doctor to test you for telltale signs of that pesky humor virus. As you will soon learn when reading Until the Last Dog Dies, those unfortunates infected with the humor virus are often the last to realize it. Beware.

Now let’s end on one of my favorite quotes, profound enough to be a religious mantra:

“Because you know what they say about honey bears/When you shave off all their baby hair/You've got a hairy minded pink bare bear.”

--Lou Reed, “Andy’s Chest,” 1972

To buy a copy of Until the Last Dog Dies, click HERE. 

 

PRAISE FOR

UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES

“By turns mystical and ashcan-real, insanely funny and grimly ghastly, Guffey’s novel cuts a zigzag trail through conventionality as it follows Elliot Greeley in his half-serious, half jesting quest for some deeper meaning to existence. If you build your life on laughs, what happens when the laughs disappear? Kissing cousin to Max Barry’s novel Lexicon, about killer language, and to Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, about language killed, Guffey’s standup debut is standout speculative fiction.”

--Paul DiFilippo, Locus 

“Taps into the cultural zeitgeist…. A nihilistic satire that takes the idea that death is easy and comedy is hard to a whole new level.”

--Kirkus Reviews 

“Guffey’s debut takes full advantage of an absurd, unexpected premise, delivering one of the strangest dystopian novels in a year filled with them.”

--B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog 

“Guffey’s sardonic, cleverly written comedic debut relies heavily on absurd synchronicity, bold characterization, and heavy irony to make its points about the apocalyptic nature of American humorlessness.”

--Publishers Weekly 

“Not only a novel unique to this [political] moment, but one that is to comedy what Catch-22 was to war. One of the great books of the year.”

--Adam-Troy Castro, Sci Fi Magazine 

“A playful amalgam of Andy Kaufman and Philip K. Dick by way of Shaun of the Dead.”

--Damien Lincoln Ober, author of Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America 

“This satirical tale explores the role of comedy in maintaining a healthy democracy…. A clever concept.”

--Kirkus Reviews

 

Is the unforgiving scythe of the Grim Reaper coming for those who do not avail themselves of the hermetic wisdom contained within Until the Last Dog Dies? Who the hell knows? The universe is a vast entanglement of strange and unlikely possibilities... 

 

Susan Zakin on Trump's Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel

From Susan Zakin's 9-18-25 JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEARS article entitled "Letter From Spain: Is It Fascism Yet?":

My cousin Ellin wrote a whole book on satire in the 1960s and 1970s, using it as a vehicle to reflect the zeitgeist of those rebellious years. Do satirists change the zeitgeist? Possibly. The unfortunate thing is that someone in the Trump administration clearly believes that.

When Stephen Colbert’s show on CBS was canceled, it was sad and shocking but he’s still around for now so perhaps the effect was muffled. The craven cowardice and corruption on the part of CBS, now controlled by Larry Ellison’s Nepo Baby son, created such a tsunami of criticism that somehow it didn’t seem as bad.

One by one, though, it adds up. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Smithsonian. The Kennedy Center. All gone or desecrated.

Trump is killing art and substituting his fascist gilt and ormolu.

But Jimmy Kimmel? An everyman, a genial family guy who talks about his kids, crinkly around the eyes, clever but somehow sensible, with Kimmel defenestrated a Rubicon has been crossed. That’s true even here in Spain, where everyone is talking about it.

Well, we still have South Park, we tell each other. And Substack.

Maybe we should stop kidding ourselves. Listen to Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov on his Substack:

“It’s not ‘really’ censorship, they say. There are still other critical journalists, shows, outlets, so it can’t be as bad as you say. That’s what we were told as Putin cracked down a more every day, every year. Don’t make excuses for abuse of power. Don’t comply in advance.”

To read Zakin's entire article, click HERE. 

THE DAILY SHOW on Trump's Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel

Jon Stewart's Post-Kimmel Primer on Free Speech in the Glorious Trump Era: 

Ted Cruz on Trump's Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel

From Frank Thorp V and Dareh Gregorian's 9-19-25 NBCNews.com article entitled "Ted Cruz Rips FCC Chair's Jimmy Kimmel Threat as 'Unbelievably Dangerous'":

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel's show, calling the Trump administration official's actions "dangerous as hell."

“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, "Verdict with Ted Cruz."

“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,” Cruz said.

Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr's actions could have long-term consequences.

“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it,” Cruz said.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

THE NEW YORKER on Trump's Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel

From Inkoo Kang's 9-19-25 NEW YORKER article entitled "How Donald Trump’s Culture-Wars Playbook Felled Jimmy Kimmel":

On Wednesday, bowing to pressure from the Trump Administration, ABC pulled the late-night series “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air. The show, which had run for more than two decades, was shelved indefinitely over a monologue addressing the murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk—one in which Kimmel did not disparage Kirk, nor, indeed, comment on him at all. Instead, he directed his contempt at those eager to exploit the activist’s death: members of “the MAGA gang” who were, he said, “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” It wasn’t clear whether Kimmel was suggesting that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer, was “one of them,” but his ideological foes pounced on the ambiguous phrasing. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called Kimmel’s words “truly sick” and threatened retaliation through his agency. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, on a right-wing podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead” [...].

Kimmel’s censorship comes just two months after the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” under similar duress, but the differences between the two incidents are significant. Colbert got nearly a year’s notice before the end of his show, giving him time to conclude things on his own terms. In contrast, the abruptness of Kimmel’s suspension has sent shock waves throughout Hollywood [...].

By now, it’s clear that the Trump Administration intends to radically reshape America. Cultural institutions are very much a part of that agenda, which has seen a deformation of the Kennedy Center, a forced resignation at the National Portrait Gallery, and censorship at the Smithsonian. The President formed strategic alliances with the world’s two richest men, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison (though his relationship with the former has since fractured spectacularly). Musk remade the site formerly known as Twitter in his own image; Ellison is now in talks to control both TikTok and Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN and HBO. It was inevitable that the Administration would come for television—by all accounts Trump’s favorite medium. During his first term in office, some critics turned on late-night hosts, deriding the frequency of “clapter” and their tendency to preach to the choir. Even the catharsis that they had to offer came under suspicion; perhaps the nightly dissipation of outrage also sapped political will. But if liberal late night didn’t affect much in the way of the real world, it still got under the President’s thin skin...

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

THE FARM: "The Charlie Kirk Assassination, Israel & Years of Lead"

Recommended Listening: In the 9-15-25 episode of THE FARM PODCAST (entitled "The Charlie Kirk Assassination, Israel & Years of Lead"), Steven Snider covers such topics as the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Years of Lead, Operation Gladio, Vance Boelter, the engravings on Tyler Robinson's ammo, Camp Williams, the Utah Data Center, the NSA, Dugway, the 19th Special Forces Group, Utah's importance to the national security state, the links between the 19th Special Forces Group & fundamentalist Mormons, the links between CIA/FBI & LDS, George Zinn, "Groyper" army & wars, Nick Fuentes, JD Vance & Kirk, Kirk & Peter Thiel, Israel's attacks on Qatar prior to the Kirk assassination, why the Kirk assassination is a professional hit, etc.

To listen to the entire episode, click HERE.

 

Charlie Kirk in a Nutshell

From Alexa Lisitza's 9-13-25 HuffPost.com article entitled "If You're Wondering What Charlie Kirk Believed In, Here Are 14 Real Quotes":

Kirk was a controversial figure, and in light of his passing, many of his most talked-about quotes and beliefs are being resurfaced online. Here are 14 moments of Kirk’s that are going viral once again:

1. At a Turning Point USA event in 2023, Kirk said he thinks gun deaths are “worth it” to have a Second Amendment.

“We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty... We need to be very clear that you’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment,” he said.

2. On his self-titled radio talk show, Kirk expressed his dislike of the word “empathy.”

“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually,” he said. “I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.”

3. Appearing on Jubilee’s internet show “Surrounded,” Kirk insisted Black people were “better” in the 1940s under Jim Crow laws.

While debating a college student, Kirk said, “They were actually better in the 1940s. It was bad. It was evil. But what happened? Something changed. They committed less crimes.”

The person he debated responded, “4,000 Black men, women, and children were killed in violent lynch mobs. Racial terror permeated American culture for hundreds of years. You don’t think that affected the generational psyche of an entire group of people?”

“Black America is worse than it has been in the last 80 years,” he interrupted.

4. During this same Jubilee episode, Kirk was asked what he would want his daughter to do if she were 10 years old and pregnant following rape.

After calling the scenario graphic, he responds, “The answer is yes. The baby would be delivered.”

To read all fourteen quotes, click HERE. 

Henry Giroux on Trump's Necropolitics

From Henry Giroux's 9-12-25 COUNTERPUNCH article entitled "Trump’s Theater of Cruelty":

What emerges from this spectacle is more than a provocation; it is a declaration that cruelty is both pleasure and policy, a gleeful admission that state violence has become theatre, and that politics itself has degenerated into necropolitics: a regime in which sovereignty is measured by the power to decide who suffers, who is dispossessed, and who is left to die. This grotesque performance exposes the pathological core of an authoritarian war culture, where cruelty is transfigured into pleasure, violence becomes the grammar of belonging, and politics is reduced to a performance of derangement. In Trump’s hands, deportation is stripped of its bureaucratic disguise and reimagined as an ecstatic ritual of exclusion — a celebration of malignant aggression that reveals the fascist subject in its most naked form, finding joy only in the infliction of suffering.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

Censorship Corner: DC Cancels Gretchen Felker-Martin

From Cydney Yeates' 9-11-25 DAILY MAIL article entitled "DC Cancels New Comic Book Series as Writer 'Celebrates' Charlie Kirk's Death":

DC has cancelled a brand new comic book series on the same day as its launch after its writer made insensitive comments about Charlie Kirk's death.

Red Hood, which was slated as an ongoing monthly series, was pulled on Wednesday just hours after its first issue was released.

The dramatic move came after its writer, Gretchen Felker-Martin, appeared to celebrate the death of right-wing commentator Kirk, who was gunned down during an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.

The conservative commentator, 31, was hit by a single bullet while speaking to a crowd at the public university in Orem at lunchtime after speaking for about 20 minutes.

Taking to Bluesky, Gretchen reposted a news article about Kirk's assassination.

Alongside it, she wrote: 'Thoughts and prayers you Nazi b****.

'Hope the bullet's okay after touching Charlie.'

Shortly afterwards, DC announced its decision cull Red Hood to retailers, revealing that they will also offer refunds on copies of the comic that have already been sold.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

From Zach Rabiroff's 9-12-25 COMICS JOURNAL article entitled "Horror 'It Girl' Gretchen Felker-Martin on DC Pulling RED HOOD After Charlie Kirk Comments: 'I Had No Regrets'":

At 10:30 p.m. ET, Felker-Martin said she received a phone call from DC Editor in Chief Marie Javins, who told her: “The story of the issue's release had gone from being celebratory to something that DC and Warner Brothers couldn't stand behind or defend.” When Felker-Martin asked why this was the case, she says that Javins replied, “That any kind of promotion of violence or harm is unacceptable to them.”

“I said that I've listened to Charlie Kirk being an overt Nazi for years of my life, and I had no regrets for what I said about him,” Felker-Martin said.

A DC spokesperson confirms that Felker-Martin was informed of the book’s cancellation in a phone call on Sept. 10, and that Javins was among those on the call, though the spokesperson did not offer further specifics as to the content of the conversations.

Others in the comics world have been less reticent to speak out about the firing. Writer David Brothers wrote of Felker-Martin’s cancellation on Bluesky: “Comicsgate ran wild for years, nurtured by people in comics who really should've known better because it kept them relevant or lined their pockets, but this right here is the line to draw? not when your own staff was getting harassed and hassled? C'mon son.”

Writer and academic Roxane Gay, who has previously worked for Marvel Comics, wrote on her own Bluesky account: “It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker- Martin for exercising free speech. … Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.”

For her own part, Felker-Martin said that she regrets that the rest of her creative team had been drawn into this situation, and that she had spoken privately with them following the book’s cancellation. For DC, however, she remains blunt. Referring to herself as “a more disposable person,” to the publisher, partly due to her transgender identity, she cited instances of what she feels were other controversial writers given more leeway by the publisher, noting specifically two high-profile former writers of Batman, Tom King (a former employee of the CIA during the Iraq War) and Jeph Loeb (accused in 2020 of making disparaging comments about Asian actors on television shows he produced).

“Frankly, I feel that they were interested in my cachet as a transgressive horror author,” Felker-Martin said. “And the moment that became politically disadvantageous for them, they cut and ran.”

She expressed that while she would be very surprised if they offered her work again, the point would be moot, as she would not accept it. “I have no desire to be part of any organization that wants to pretend that people like Charlie Kirk are decent human beings who deserve respect,” she said.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

"Pay No Attention to That Pedophile Behind the Curtain!": A Parapolitical Collage (Part 2)

(A flyer recently found pasted to a lamppost in Long Beach, CA) 

"Pay No Attention to That Pedophile Behind the Curtain!"

--Donald J. Trump

Here are some more key excerpts from recent (and not-so-recent) news articles about the ever-unfolding Jeffrey Epstein saga:

1) From Justin Baragona's 7-15-25 INDEPENDENT article entitled "Charlie Kirk Backtracks After Saying He’s 'Done Talking About Epstein,' Claims He Meant Just 'Yesterday'":

A day after proclaiming that he was “done talking about” Jeffrey Epstein and that he would “trust my friends in the government” amid the MAGA fallout over the Trump administration’s handling of the disgraced financier’s files, Charlie Kirk is now insisting that he merely meant “yesterday” and he would continue to discuss the issue [...].

With Kirk’s comments about moving on from Epstein drawing scrutiny and headlines, especially in light of his phone call with Trump, the right-wing activist took to his Tuesday show to maintain that he had never intended to drop the issue altogether.

Grumbling that he was responding to the “viral fake news” that he was done talking about the deceased sexual predator, Kirk complained about the amount of coverage his comments on Monday received before reading them back in full, claiming he was misconstrued.

“‘Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being.’ Nobody, not a single news outlet, said ‘for the time being.’ They did not include that second part of the sentence,” he groused. (For the record, most publications included that part of the quote – including The Independent.)

“Again, no one covered the second part of the statement,” Kirk continued. “No one covered it. This thing has, like, 10 million views on social media. And, unfortunately, too many people on our side fell for this garbage. And I get that it’s heightened — and, by the way, part of this is I'm gonna have some compassion. This is a very hot moment. Very hot.”

He also took issue with the amount of criticism he’s taken for saying that he's going to trust his “friends in the government,” noting that he’s “not trusting the government” but rather individual members of the administration that he knows his viewers admire.

“You guys are all fans of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel,” he said. “We are trusting that they heard you, they heard me, and they are working to fix this. Let me finish this. But let me say this again — I would love to see the DOJ move to unseal the grand jury testimony.”

After wondering if he “should I have said those five words in the sequence I said,” Kirk continued to bash the media’s coverage of his remarks before asserting that he merely meant he was taking a one-day break from Epstein-gate.

“When I said for the time being, I was talking yesterday,” he huffed. “I was telling the audience, guys, I got a whole deck of stories I gotta cover here. You see, they wanna cover MAGA in disarray, and there is so much going on right now.”

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

2) From Farrah Tomazin's 9-4-25 YAHOO NEWS article entitled "DOJ Posts Embarrassing Apology Over Official Caught in Honeypot Trap":

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s department was forced into damage control after a top justice official was secretly recorded telling a date that the Epstein files would be manipulated to protect Republicans.

Joseph Schnitt, an Acting Deputy Chief in the Department of Justice, was caught divulging the information by a woman he met on the Hinge dating app, not realizing she was an undercover operative for the O’Keefe Media Group.

In a video posted online on Thursday, Schnitt is recorded telling the woman that the department would “redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files, and have a very slanted version of it come out.”

He also told his date that the decision to move Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to a lower security prison went against Board of Prisons policy because she was a convicted sex offender, “which means they’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut.”

And he detailed the “internal conflict” between Bondi and FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, who famously clashed earlier this year over the Attorney General’s handling of the files.

“Second-in-command [Dan Bongino] at the FBI has been causing problems, because he’s like, ‘No, these [Epstein Files] have to be released… Bondi wants whatever Trump wants. Internally there’s a lot of conflict,” he said.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

3) From William Vaillancourt's 9-5-25 DAILY BEAST article entitled "Mike Johnson Drops Bombshell About What Trump Really Knew About Epstein":

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed President Donald Trump acted as an “FBI informant” on Jeffrey Epstein.

Johnson was questioned Thursday by CNN reporter Manu Raju about how the president has been using the term “hoax” frequently in regard to Epstein. This, Johnson argued, was not about downplaying Epstein’s abuse of underage girls.

“What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said.

“He has never said or suggested or implied—I’ve talked to him about this many times, many times. He is horrified. It’s been misrepresented,” Johnson said. ”He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”

When asked to confirm the claim that Trump was an “FBI informant,” a spokesperson for Johnson sent the Daily Beast the following statement: “The Speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump—who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago—was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator.”

The White House has previously said Trump kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club after his 2006 sex trafficking indictment, though that took over a year to take effect, according to The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency.

Epstein had a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal in 2007. Former U.S. attorney Alex Acosta said that was because he had been told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Acosta would later become Trump’s secretary of labor.

In July, Trump told reporters that he grew apart from Epstein after he learned he was hiring workers from Mar-a-Lago.

“When I heard about it, I told him, I said: ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people—whether it was spa or not spa—I don’t want you to take our people,’" Trump said. “And he was fine, and then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said: ‘Out of here!’”

Trump said nothing then about being an FBI informant.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

4) From Vicky Ward's 7-9-19 DAILY BEAST article entitled "Jeffrey Epstein’s Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight": 

Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.

“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.) [...]

In 2007 and 2008, as the FBI prepared a 53-page indictment that would charge Epstein with sex crimes, Epstein’s powerful legal team played the influence card.

After the one meeting with then-U.S. Attorney Acosta, where presumably “intelligence” was mentioned, the indictment was shelved and, instead, Epstein signed a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors, pleading guilty to one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of procurement of minors for prostitution, which earned him a cushy 13 months in county jail, from where he was allowed to leave to work at his office and go for walks.

The deal granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators.” Most significantly, federal prosecutors agreed to keep the deal secret from Epstein’s victims, which meant they would not know to challenge it in court. As it turned out, this actually broke the law, because victims have a right to know of such developments, under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

5) From Tom Winter's 9-6-25 NBC NEWS article entitled "DOJ Says Names of Two Associates Epstein Wired $100K and $250K Should Stay Secret":

The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge overseeing the case of deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to deny a request from NBC News to unseal the names of two associates who received large payments from him in 2018, court documents show. The Justice Department cited privacy concerns expressed by the two individuals as the reason for not making their names public.

The first associate received a payment of $100,000 from Epstein and the second associate received a payment of $250,000, both in 2018, days after the Miami Herald began publishing a series of investigative stories where victims criticized a plea deal he received in Florida in 2008.

As part of the plea agreement, Epstein secured a statement from federal prosecutors in Florida that the two individuals would not be prosecuted.

The payments became public after Epstein was indicted and arrested in New York in 2019 and asked to be released on bail. Federal prosecutors in New York filed a memorandum on July 16, 2019, that argued Epstein should remain in jail to prevent him from tampering with witnesses.

They cited the payments he made to the two individuals, which began two days after the Miami Herald began publishing its stories on Epstein’s plea deal, also known as a nonprosecution agreement, or NPA.

Prosecutors wrote that on Nov. 30, 2018, Epstein “wired $100,000 from a trust account he controlled, to an individual named as [REDACTED] a potential co-conspirator — and for whom Epstein obtained protection in — the NPA.”

Prosecutors also wrote that “this individual was also named and featured prominently in the Herald series.”

Prosecutors added that “the same records show that just three days later, on or about December 3, 2018, the defendant wired $250,000 from the same trust account to [REDACTED], who was also named as a potential co-conspirator — and for whom Epstein also obtained protection in — the NPA.”

The prosecutors continued: “This individual is also one of the employees identified in the Indictment, which alleges that she and two other identified employees facilitated the defendant’s trafficking of minors by, among other things, contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with the defendant at his residences in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

6) From PBS News' 9-10-25 article entitled "See Epstein’s Full ‘Birthday Book,’ with Alleged Personal Messages from Trump, Clinton and Others":

A collection of personal notes penned for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday offers a portrait of the convicted child sex offender through crude drawings, images and messages filled with sexual content or innuendo.

The Epstein estate delivered an electronic copy of the book Monday to the House Oversight Committee, which posted a redacted version of the file in a Google Drive folder.

The bound volumes, titled “The First Fifty Years,” were compiled in 2003 by former Epstein girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell. A table of contents includes a list of alleged contributors, including former President Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, entrepreneur Leslie Wexner and President Donald Trump.

After The Wall Street Journal first reported on the book’s existence in July, Trump denied writing a sexually suggestive letter for the collection and filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper.

Democrats on the Oversight committee released an image of the alleged letter, which has “Donald J. Trump” typed above a scrawled signature at the bottom, on social media. Trump and members of his White House staff have said the signature on the note is not his. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the White House would welcome expert handwriting analysis and called the Epstein case generally “a hoax” meant to distract from the Trump administration’s accomplishments.

Maxwell began the collection with a handwritten note to Epstein. “The idea behind this book was simply to gather stories and old photographs to jog your memory about places[,] people and different events. Some of the letters will definitely achieve their intended goal — some well … you will have to read them to see for yourself.”

In one drawing, a male figure who is presumably Epstein is giving lollipops to a group of girls, labeled 1983. On the right side of the page, an older Epstein is shown being massaged by four nearly naked women, labeled 2003.

On another page, a photo shows Epstein holding a large novelty check for $22,500 with a “DJTRUMP” signature. An accompanying note jokes that Epstein sold a “‘fully depreciated’ [woman] to Donald Trump for $22,500.” The New York Times reported the page was made by Joel Pashcow, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.

To read the entire article, click HERE.