F**king Mondays: The Not-So Deep State, Gross Biden Cancer Reactions, Tax Cut Failure, and Pope Leo Snubs MAGA

A scintillating round up to start your week off!

When Deep State conspiracy theorists join the Deep State.

Welcome to another edition of F**king Mondays! In the roundup today:

The not-so Deep State

According to Dan Bongino in 2024, Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset for “people in the Middle East”, almost certainly didn’t kill himself, and may have been taken out by the Clintons.

Fast forward to 2025, and the newly appointed Deputy Director of the FBI and his equally conspiratorial boss Kash Patel are now going public with their belief that — wait for it — Jeffrey Epstein did kill himself!

“He killed himself,” Bongino told Maria Bartiromo. “I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.”

MAGA world has understandably not reacted well to “one of their own” going to the dark side:

There are two possible scenarios here:

1. The Deep State is so powerful that once you are in it, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, George Soros and Anthony Fauci have you by the balls and you toe the party line.

2. Or, faced with the actual evidence, Bongino and Patel finally realized their paranoid conspiracies were nonsense—and the Deep State doesn’t actually exist.

Just as the Covid truthers who ended up in the ICU after refusing the vaccine discovered, reality has an annoying way of asserting itself in the end.

Far left and right react to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis

It was terribly sad to hear about Joe Biden’s advanced cancer diagnosis. Everyone with a beating heart should feel sympathy for a genuinely decent man who dedicated his entire life to public service, regardless of whether you agree with his politics.

But not on the extremes of the political spectrum, of course—where blind tribalism and obsessive single-issue crusades give rise to sociopathic outbursts like this:

And this:

The first offender is Owen Jones, the Guardian columnist with reliably awful takes on pretty much everything. This isn’t about Jones’s take on the Israel/Gaza conflict (for the record, I think he’s ludicrously one-sided but occasionally right), or Biden’s healthcare record. It’s his inability to step outside his ideological bubble, ever.

For Jones, every event—no matter how personal or tragic—must be filtered through his myopic hatred of Israel or anyone insufficiently socialist. So when Joe Biden gets diagnosed with cancer, Jones’s first response isn’t to offer sympathy — or even stay quiet about it. To Jones, Biden’s support for Israel means he is comparable to brutal dictators who poison their enemies, throw detractors off of buildings, and invade sovereign nations to pillage their resources:

The second offender is the delightful Donald Trump Jr. who took time out of his cocaine sniffing sessions to insult Biden’s wife and promote unfounded conspiracies about the former president’s health. To Don Jr., liberals aren’t humans, so it is fair game to subject them to appalling abuse even if they have been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

Surely it is possible to offer sympathy to a dying man without promoting your pet political issue?

A good rule to follow: if you don’t have anything nice to say in moments like this, at least have the decency to shut the fuck up about it.

Tax cuts for the rich aren’t good for the economy

As shocking as this might sound, it turns out that handing billions of dollars over to the extraordinarily wealthy isn’t actually good for the economy. Just ask Moody’s, the financial services company that provides credit ratings for global capital markets. Moody’s just downgraded the U.S credit rating because of Republican efforts to make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent, leading to a significant sell off of U.S. stocks and bonds and the dollar. Reports the NY Times:

One factor jarring markets is a bill in Congress that would make President Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts permanent and could add trillions of dollars to federal debt. A House committee voted to approve the bill Sunday night, although it was expected to remain a focus of contentious congressional debate.

The United States’ loss of its last triple-A credit rating late on Friday and mounting concerns about government debt have threatened to disrupt the relative calm in markets that has prevailed since Mr. Trump paused many of his tariffs in recent weeks.

In downgrading the U.S. credit rating, Moody’s cited the tax cut legislation along with broader concerns about the fiscal deficit and growing debt costs. The move by Moody’s means that all three major rating agencies no longer consider the United States qualified for their top credit ratings.

The logic here is straightforward: tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy don’t pay for themselves. As study after study has shown, they rarely boost economic growth in a meaningful way, and instead balloon the deficit, concentrating wealth at the top while depriving the government of revenue for things like infrastructure, healthcare, and education—investments that do actually stimulate economic activity. Wealthy individuals tend to save, not spend, meaning that money essentially exits the real economy and flows into financial markets, not into the hands of workers or small businesses. Republicans know this of course, but their donors aren’t interested in economic growth — they are interested in protecting their wealth.

Moody’s downgrade is a serious hit for the U.S economy: all three major rating agencies now agree that the U.S. is no longer worthy of a top-tier credit rating. And contrary to Republican orthodoxy, the cause isn’t too much spending on social programs. It’s tax cuts for billionaires.

New Pope snubs MAGA and Putin

I’m not extremely well-versed in the politics of the Vatican, but I greatly admired Pope Francis and saw him as a force for good in the world. Francis, it seemed, behaved like a Christian—exuding real kindness and humility through his lifestyle and commitment to the most vulnerable people on the planet.

The new pope appears to be very much in the Francis mold and has used his new position of authority to highlight the plight of Ukrainians. Reports the BBC:

Pope Leo XIV has called for unity at his inaugural Mass at the Vatican attended by thousands of faithful and world leaders including Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky.

During the address on Sunday, he criticised economic systems which he said exploited "Earth's resources" and and marginalised the poor.

He also said he would seek to govern "without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat".

The Pope noted efforts to end the war in Ukraine in a prayer after the service and also held a meeting with Zelensky. The pontiff had called for an end to the war in his first days in office.

The Ukrainian leader thanked the new Catholic leader for his "support for Ukraine" and "clear voice in defence of a just and lasting peace".

Zelenskyy was the first foreign leader to speak with Pope Leo XIV via phone, and the first to meet him in person following the his election earlier this month. He did meet with JD Vance and Marco Rubio at a later date, but the order mattered.

The message the Vatican is sending to Trump and Putin is clear: autocracy, aggression, and plutocracy are not Christian values. In the tradition of Francis, Pope Leo XIV is signaling that the Church stands with the oppressed, the poor, and the victims of war.

You know — like Christians are supposed to.

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