Overcast with on-and-off sprinkling showers this late-afternoon Sunday here in California’s Central Valley — fairly-heavy rain forecast for tomorrow, so we’re going to be wet for a couple of days.

In scrolling the news this afternoon — and today mostly — did run across a couple of tweets that seemed to tie together the horror seen in the depth of the serious nature of our life here in the US of A. The T-Rump running the Republican party has made/tossed any kind of decent, democratic future up in the air. If the GOP take the midterms, we are horribly fucked. And what’s worse, even if they lose, they won’t acknowledge it — violence and crazy are now hand-in-hand.

History repeats:

The people at Nazi rallies in the 1930s were told their country was going to hell, their leaders were weak, there were forces secretly controlling the govt behind the scenes, and only one man could save them leading a nationalist movement to fight the socialists and communists.

— Ron Filipkowski ?? (@RonFilipkowski) September 18, 2022

Add that shit to T-Rump’s rally last night:

It’s really something to see tough Russia talk from the guy who was impeached for trying to hold Ukrainian military aid for ransom to get dirt on his political opponent https://t.co/qJ9IbbA0sY

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) September 18, 2022

I can’t/don’t watch T-Rump for more than a few seconds — gives me anxiety and makes my blood boil, and I’m too old for that shit — and yet he’s the centerpiece in the clusterfuck that’s maybe heading our way.
Chas Danner at New York Magazine this evening does it for me:

Trump rallies are still in some ways a singular phenomenon in American politics, but rarely does anything truly unexpected happen at them. The events typically feature more of the same, from the vivid demonstrations of Donald Trump’s cult of personality, to the all-too-familiar grievances and claims that make up the bulk of the former president’s long, rambling, partially improvised speeches. These days, Trump is just as likely to go on and on (and on) about the 2020 election and Hunter Biden and the Mar-a-Lago raid as he is likely to barely mention whatever GOP candidate he’s ostensibly appearing to support. But Trump’s rally in Youngstown, Ohio on Saturday night broke some new weird ground — surprising even longtime observers of the events.

At the end of his speech, eerie music began to play on the loudspeakers as Trump reached the part of his remarks where he ominously goes through a list of all the many ways America and the world are becoming an apocalyptic hellscape without him as president. The music was a song inspired by the QAnon conspiracy theory. And while this was happening, many in the crowd raised their arms and pointed a finger upward. It’s not clear what the gesture meant.

The song, as the New York Times pointed out Sunday, was nearly identical to a track named “Wwg1wga” — an abbreviation of the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all.” The same song — which Trump aides told the Times was called “Mirrors” — was also used in a recent Trump video his team produced and was played at the end of Trump’s recent rally in Pennsylvania, too.

In a statement to the Times, a Trump spokesman reiterated the claim that the track was just “a royalty-free song from a popular audio library platform.” He also waved off criticism of them using the music as “a pathetic attempt to create controversy and divide America.” Last month, VICE News reported that the two songs were definitely one in the same, according to several analyses, and that regardless of what the Trump team claims, many QAnon supporters view the use of the track as a not-so hidden message meant for them.

Meanwhile, the finger-pointing gesture which spontaneously broke out among the crowd on Saturday night seems to have professional Trump-rally watchers and extremism analysts stumped, at least for now. The Times reported that “scores of people in the crowd raised fingers in the air in an apparent reference to the ‘1’ in what they thought was the song’s title,” and that “It was the first time in the memory of some Trump aides that such a display had occurred at one of his rallies.”

Bad shit there.

Despite the day, once again here we are…

(Illustration out front found here.)