Let The City Know.
Per Steve Scalisi, the majority leader for the U.S. House of Representatives, for the 2026 calendar year the House of Representatives is scheduled to be in session for 119 days.
Per John Barrasso and Dick Durbin, respective whips of each party in the Senate, the Senate is scheduled to be in session for approximately 158 days.
Start down the rabbit hole for your congressional representatives HERE.
J.T.
LET THE CITY KNOW:
You can also watch this episode on YouTube.
Deeyah Khan’s “White Right: Meeting the Enemy” is a must-watch this weekend.
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To support a Local Vendor Buyout campaign for East Hollywood, Virgil Village and Silver Lake, please do so via Quien Es Tu Vecindario.
J.T.
Today in Quantico, Virginia, Trump and Hegseth gave what will go down as the most treasonous speech since the South’s Declaration of secession in the 1860s, when South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas declared the end of their allegiance to the United States of America.
There are already plenty of commentators noting just how traitorous their words were, but also for the record, I’d like to point out that Hegseth utterly misrepresented none other than Thomas Jefferson’s actual contribution to the Declaration of Independence.
On the subject of toxic leadership, which Hegseth either unironically fails or flatly refuses to grasp is actually epitomized by himself and every last member of this administration, he claimed that: “Real toxic leadership is promoting destructive ideologies that are an anathema to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.”
The trouble is that to Hegseth, who is a Neo Nazi, ”nature’s God” is actually code for white people’s Christian God. To be sure this isn’t conjecture, look no further than the tattoos inscribed on Hegseth, including his “Deus Vult” *tattoo,* which is Latin for “God wills it,” and which is said to have originated from the first Christian Crusades of the 11th century.
Hegseth, or whoever else wrote his speech, must have thought they were being very clever by invoking Thomas Jefferson, a dead white forefather, in their attempt to pretend like they were simply carrying out “his vision” in 2025. But Jefferson is actually not credited for authoring this portion of the Declaration, and rightly so, since he actually wasn’t even known to believe in the Christian god. In fact, perhaps the most diplomatic quote of Jefferson’s on the whole idea of it goes as follows:
“Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man’s and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend’s or our foe’s, are exactly the right.”
But if you believe, as I do, that Jefferson was a simple statesman for the press when it was time, but far more complicated in his thought processes during his privacy, then the following quote from the Jefferson Monticello archives feels like a more accurate summation of his thoughts on Hegseth’s apparent religiosity:
“The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.”
In other words, it should be clear to any modern reader that Jefferson at the very least appreciated how much religious wars wreaked havoc on the world in centuries past, which is why he and the founding fathers enshrined the U.S. as a secular state through the 1st Amendment (1791). Thus, there should be no doubt that Hegseth’s conflagration of Jefferson and god in the Declaration of Independence is the very type of foolishness and hypocrisy Jefferson abhorred.
Nonetheless, Hegseth, like Stephen Miller, is ahistorical and has no interest in freedom of thought or religion, but seeks the very opposite of these things. Their sermonizing in Quantico today was a thinly veiled attempt to have the military fall in line for the latter’s vision of a white Christian ethnostate, which it should go without saying is the very anathema to the Constitution the “Secretary of War” was originally and actually supposed to stand against.
The gloves are officially off, then, but to be forewarned is to be prepared.
Let the city, each state, and every last one of the American people know.
J.T.
*This photo showing a partial view of Pete Hegseth’s right forearm, which includes the “Deus Vult” phrase, was taken by Gage Skidmore at an event by Turning Point USA in 2021.*
In our 43rd episode, we catch up with none other than Bethanee Epifani. We talk inauguration, Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” vaccination in Los Angeles, and even $100,000 dollars. That’s right. If you’d like to support more of the work at jimbotimes.com, you can join us for a new adventure on Patreon at patreon.com/jimbotimes. Our photo for this podcast is from theamandagorma.com and credited to Kelia Anne.
J.T.
If there’s still any question as to how serious this year’s health crisis has become, particularly in the richest nation on earth, consider that according to a report from the Washington Post, after the deadliest war in U.S. history, the four-year U.S. Civil War from 1861 – 1865, an estimated 750,000 lives were lost.
This year alone, as cases from the virus continue to surge, the U.S. has already lost at least 276,000 people to the crisis and counting. THAT’S ABOVE 1/3RD of the total lives lost during the Civil War in a fourth of the time that conflict lasted.
Consider also just a few differences between now and the U.S. 155 years ago:
In the 1860s, when the U.S. was made up just 33 states and less than 31 million people, “germ theory of disease was still a controversial idea and not yet widely accepted” among the predominantly white (27 million), working-class nation.
At the federal level in the 1860s, the 13th amendment, which outlawed chattel slavery–except where people convicted of a crime were concerned–was proposed only during the last year of the civil war in 1865 and not ratified until December of that year, seven months after the war was concluded; also in the 1860s, the 14th amendment, which granted citizenship to any persons born on U.S. land, was only passed by the U.S. Senate a year after the civil war in 1866 and not ratified until two years later in 1868.
More locally in Los Angeles, by 1860, when the county was made up of no more than an estimated 12,000 people (more than 11,000 of which were white, according to records), the L.A. County Sheriff’s department was only ten years old.
Likewise, the L.A. City Council, then known as the Common Council, was made up of just seven members and was also just ten years established; the LAPD, by contrast, originally made up of only six armed patrolmen, would not be founded until 1869.
In effect, as Jeff Bezos alone stands to add nearly $100 billion to his portfolio from the pandemic this year, the U.S. healthcare system is on track to count more casualties than the deadliest conflict in U.S. history in the 1860s, at the time of which the nation’s population count was only about 1/10th its size today, and before the advent of the telephone, mass production of Colgate toothpaste, or Ford automobiles, as well as 100 years before Lyndon B. Johnson would sign Medicare and Medicaid into law.
That’s the world we’re living in in 2020, and the one that, if communities and the “silent majority” don’t continue to demand change for, future generations across this country will have the unenviable burden of coming to grips with. If U.S. history shows anything, it’s that 100 years–or even 200 years–of discrimination can go by very quickly.
J.T.