The War on Terror comes home as a TV Show For A Death Cult

Recounting a surreal night spent at City Hall

What’s up, everyone! Took me all week to catch up on the week I missed and I don’t even know if “caught up” is even... Listen, we live in crazy times. Past few months have felt like a roller coaster that only goes down down down. Reaching speeds previously unknown. Is this thing even on the tracks? It must be. We’re looking at each other nervously. ‘You check.’ ‘I’m not gunna check, you check.’ It has to be on the track still, right? Right? Should we... should we check?

I don’t know if I can make it but there’s a rally at City Hall today—not explicitly about any local issue, but part of the national standout against the Big Beautiful Boy’s North Korean birthday party. 1- 3 p.m., Jim McGovern scheduled to speak at 2 p.m. If you’re going and want to write a dispatch for Worcester Sucks please send me a line! billshaner@substack.com.

And then just minutes before my posting this, Katie’s on her way to work and she sends me this pic of the Rte. 9 overpass on I-290…

It can be easy to forget but it is so so so important to remember that people here are overwhelmingly good people. People here give a shit. There is, in fact, a silent majority—just not the of the kind that’s convenient for the powers that be. “Made me tear up a little 🥲” Katie texted me. Demonstrations like this matter. Thank you to everyone who was there on that bridge, who will be down at City Hall in a few minutes.

Before we go any further, a hilarious mea culpable: The promo code I set for paid subscribers on the second run of the Bad Brains shirt was set to “two uses” on the back end. I thought that meant two uses per customer. Nope. Two uses overall. Big ups to Big Cartel for not explaining that even a little bit. So, if you tried to use the code and couldn’t, you can now! Here’s the link to the shirts, and the link to the promo code for paid subscribers. Pre-sale runs until next Thursday, the 19th. That’s the five-year anniversary of this outlet by the way. Half a decade. Crazy.

Celebrating the occasion in a few ways (one exciting one to be announced!) including a very generous 50 percent off deal for a year! If you’ve been a free reader all these years, thank you, and now is your chance to show a little love!

Tips and merch orders are of course also great ways. My birthday is Monday (a big week in terms of occasions) so you can consider it a birthday gift for ol’ Bill if you want to.

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store

Or buy one of the silly tracks on the new Worcester_Sucks.MP3 Bandcamp page, which is just for fun and not to be taken seriously in any way! However, this one is appropriate for today I think.

Next week I’ll be writing a five-years-in-review type piece. If you have a favorite Worcester Sucks story, anecdote, remember-that-time-when or anything else to share about this weird little outlet that could, send me a line at billshaner@substack.com or leave a comment or throw it in the chat. Would be nice to share some testimonials from readers next week!

But for now there’s the matter of this week to attend to. The whole city’s abuzz with chatter good bad and ugly after activists shut down the city council meeting Tuesday. Naturally, that will be the focus. And I will be addressing it in pointedly gonzo fashion with the use of both present and future tenses for something that by now happened in the past.

Soundtrack for the post below...

The War on Terror comes home as a TV Show For A Death Cult

It’s a ridiculous thing to do in the first place, to bring your little phone on your little handheld tripod into city hall to pipe an in person angle back to your little community of city council watchers on the Twitch show you’ve been doing for like four whole fucking years now with the only three other people perfectly happy to be public ne’er-do-wells in the minds of the local society types and also know/care about the machinations of city government¹. But there I was on Tuesday, piping my POV feed from my little phone to our loyal and demanding little audience of a few dozen regulars, a handful of trolls, and one or two johnny-come- latelys who stumbled upon the feed from god knows where for god knows what algorithmic reason. I taped two and a half hours, and the result, looking back, is art. Found art. Accidental art. But also, a surrealist quality. A splash of Ddada. Goofy and galling at the same time, in the grand tradition of American Pop. It’s so good and it is so so so obscure. But for the handful of people I know will find it deeply edifying, I’m duty bound to walk through it in detail. I Mr. Magooed myself into producing an avant-garde documentary about the true and intangible spirit of the times. This American Life could never. Only trouble is the footage is garbage.

By the time you’re reading this you’ll have already seen the headlines: activists, upset by ICE activity, shut down council meeting. But it was so much more than that.

⩫ Scene One: I’m in my car, scrambling, a little late, a little harried. My car idles in front of city hall, across the street from the grand concrete promenade that’s soon to become a parking lot, playing its role in taking a relic from the City Beautiful and repurposing it for The City Surveilled. A casualty of a grand safety plan rolled out by the city manager after his police department helped ICE rip a mother from her screaming daughter—but not because of that fact, though. There was another unspecified safety incident. They didn’t help ICE either, actually, because that’s against state law. We don’t do that here.

So yeah I’m idling in front of all that thinking about all that and I can’t get my freakin headphones to work as a goddamn mic making a fool of myself in front of our dozens of loyal fans and once I get myself all copacetic I’m going ‘hey gang, watch me as I go through this brand new security system they got running with a lot of stuff on me that should trip the alarm.’

From a distance I see the metal detectors just inside the front door and I expect when I draw nearer there will be some sort of guard situation. Some sort of municipal TSA. But no, no one. I walk through the metal detector with a portable charger, an iPhone, a metal tripod, a GoPro, all manner of wires, not to mention the goddamn ear buds and I expect a beep from these new things they bought with our money but nope, not even that. I laugh. You just gotta laugh. From that moment on I decide to approach the evening with a hearty and good humored HA HA attitude. City hall is to be my Leaf of Grass and within it I will contain my multitudes. Mixing metaphors here but I’m going to dare to eat my peach and walk upon the beach, you feel? You get the idea?

I round the corner to the third floor and I see a lot of cops. HA HA. I see Fred Nathan, the unofficial orator of the cranks, reliably regurgitating whatever’s been on the radio at whatever city council meeting is taking place, always first in line, always saying something he means to be so sinister and cutting but lands so innocently and so surreally, every week the best Tim and Eric bit you’ve ever seen in your life. I walk right up to him and shake his hand. Put it here, Fred. HA HA. What do you think about ICE, Fred? HA HA. Yes I also hate Bill Clinton, Fred. Him and Trump. With any luck they’ll be on whatever they’ve got for a Mount Rushmore down in the ninth layer. This observation confused Fred. Later on he’d go, hey Bill you know everything, where’s the order about ICE on this agenda? I said it’s in section 23 and someone corrected me ‘no it’s section 24.’ Guess I don’t know everything, Fred. Etel walks by and she goes, ‘Fred, are you smiling at me?’ And Fred’s loving it, this attention from the woman he and the rest of the cranks have made enemy number one. We’re all just having fun. I bring John Keogh over and ask him a few questions about the story This Week In Worcester put out. Most of you likely know the one: about how Thomas Duffy bullied the chief into going forward with charges against Etel. The one the department released an entire statement about, lying in order to say the report is full of lies.

Right, so I should say this is the first meeting back since the WPD brass, capitulating to its most feral union official, pressed charges against Etel Haxhiaj. This happened last week, while I was on vacation. Most of you likely know the whole deal. If you don’t, a short reading list:

∿ June 4: Telegram: “Worcester city councilor charged with assaulting police after ICE arrest” |

∿ June 6: This Week In Worcester: Union Leader Threatened Police Chief if Councilor Not Charged

∿ June 7: Post up on the WPD Facebook page: “A recent article by a local online publication made several false statements and outlandish claims...” It says three of the claims made in TWIW are “without merit” but doesn’t say why or how. It is signed by Saucier, Duffy, and the four deputy chiefs we have due to post-War On Terror administrative bloat in the punishment bureaucracy.

∿ June 10: TWIW: “Response to WPD’s Smear of our Reporting”

“We went to the wall sourcing this,” John tells me, adding that they’ve spoken to dozens of officers. “The stories are too consistent.”

On Facebook, it’s ‘all lies.’ In private conversations, it’s ‘yeah that happened.’ Of course to publicly confirm it would be career suicide for any cop, so... here we are.

As Keough talks about this saga I think about a Hannah Arendt quote from her last interview. "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."

HA HA.

I tell him my new joke: What happens when you feed Aidan Kearney a rare candy of the Pokemon variety? He turns into Thomas Duffy.

HA HA.

Grace Ross comes over and she asks me to repeat the joke and I say ‘sorry Grace, you’d have had to have been 12 in 2000 to understand.’ Only the people who grew up alongside the War on Terror—who look at a picture of Pokemon Yellow in the back of a Gameboy and they can smell it—will get that one.

It’s around this time someone hands me a flyer for a demonstration. It says 7 p.m. June 10. Fred’s still next to me I say ‘hey Fred, isn’t it 7 p.m. June 10?’ and he goes ‘a-yup sure is.’

Kate Toomey walks by with a pissy look, making a beeline from the chambers to the nearest group of cops. Upon arrival she chums it up, all grins. Happy to be among the boys. Who she means when she says “we.” Hours later Toomey will post a late-night status to her Facebook page that reads, in full, “Police”

In college I went to Tobago for a few weeks on a mostly fake and possibly money laundering-related “music ethnography” trip that radicalized me more than anything else has or likely will (maybe one day I’ll write about why). There I learned about an old Tobagoan tradition: the eldest statesman of whatever community would mark a special occasion, say a funeral or a wedding, with a bizarre form of speech. He’d use the biggest words he could muster, reaching so hard and so far as to make most of them up on the spot—a rhetoric intended not to convey meaning but to imitate it. To dazzle, to coat the audience with words unknown to them. A confident orator unleashing a statement that must be profound because the audience cannot understand it. Beyond their grasp, it ensures both that a high-minded individual is in their midst and that they are not themselves of high mind. They’re to bask in the rhetoric, not learn from it.

This is how police officials speak to the council any time they’re called to. The rhetoric of the police and the rhetoric of the elder statesmen of Tobago working toward the same goal: A reassuring meaninglessness for those eager to absorb it. Only, the Tobagoan Man of Words is employing it to put on a nice party. The police use it to put more people in jail than anywhere else in the world, in the history of the world, then justify it with inscrutable nonsense for any would-be critics. Since no one really understood the argument, how could they possibly grasp a counter?

Incidentally, this is also the best way to understand Kate Toomey’s, you know, whole deal....

She’s Basking In It.

⩫ Scene Two: I figure it’s my time to go elsewhere before I lose my HA HA spirit so I set out to look for this concurrent demonstration I can neither see nor hear. I find it outside city hall, on the promenade soon to be a parking lot. (And thus much less accommodating for protests, surely a coincidence.) I see a group of about 50 people holding signs and chanting. I sit on the steps and take it all in. I light a cigarette. Before long like clockwork I’ve got an unhoused guy sitting next to me and I’m all but reaching for my pack yeah sure here ya go man yeah I got a light but he doesn’t ask, he unloads.

He says he sleeps up there most days. Points behind him with his thumb. Says the security guards give him a hard time but he just ignores ‘em and they don’t press it. It’s a nice spot, as much as it can be, out of view, away from people, covered. He’s 71, he tells me. He says he can’t get housing because of his criminal record. “I’ve tried everything,” he says. I tell him whoever’s responsible for the fact a 71-year-old man can go homeless should be swinging from a tree. He chuckles.

Senior homelessness is on the rise in Worcester as it is everywhere. Across the country seniors are the fastest-growing subset of the overall homeless population, a fact so grim it hurts to think about. In Massachusetts the number is set to triple in coming years barring some new (and unlikely) intervention. A good bit of messaging for progressive candidates this cycle would be something like “not one homeless senior in the city of Worcester.” Worcester has fewer than 100 homeless seniors by the last Point In Time Count. All of them could be housed tomorrow for about the cost of oh I don’t know... the $500,000 annual we fork over to Discover Central Mass, a Chamber of Commerce subsidiary, for the expeditions. We’ll find it one day.

I ask this guy if he wants to speak to the folks watching on my silly little phone, hoping he’ll say something so out of pocket as to stun, and he just says “yeah, get me a home.” His voice croaks a little. It sounds dry, hoarse. He looks so tired. A silence falls. I can’t think of how to reintroduce any levity. He breaks it.

"I think it's gonna rain, you know?”

“Yeah... yeah it’s gunna rain.”

And this senior citizen will be out in it in the richest country in the world, I think to myself.

“You know it’s going to rain,” he repeats, this time a statement.

In Los Angeles, the Department of Homeland Security flew Predator drones above the demonstrators over the weekend, ostensibly to surveil, but more likely to show they can and will do that—fly the wedding busters over an American city. A performative bit, like everything else. A single Predator will run you $30 million. That’s without the warehouse full of pilots and techs and their managers and middle managers and assistants to the middle managers and trainers and deputy trainers and training programs for the deputies and recruitment drives for the deputy training operation.

One estimate puts the cost of one hour of Predator flight at about $12,000. That’s without whatever munitions they load onto the things. Predators often carry two Hellfire missiles, at a cost to the taxpayers of $150,000 each. So let’s call it a cool $40 million to pull that stunt in LA.

On the other side of the country, several days later, I reach into my pack and give this man as many cigs as I can pinch. It’s the most I can think of doing. I tell him I hope things turn around for him. That I wish people were doing more for him. He asks me if I have any money and I say no I don’t and I’m not even lying like I do sometimes in these situations because I’m not a millionaire nor a cash machine and I ask him if he’ll be up there next time I’m around and he says yeah probably. I make a mental note to swing by and check when I’m inevitably back here, then walk away abruptly. I’m about to start crying. In my ear I've got Travis Duda, running the stream at home, telling me I’m “a good dude for that” and in my head I’m thinking “for what?” Out loud I say “yeah yeah whatever” in change-the-subject fashion.

⩫ Scene Three: I take a walk around the perimeter of the demonstration and, a little bored by it at this point—it’s a sleepy affair, far as demonstrations go—I start filming the otherwise desolate streets, cracking jokes about Worcester’s vibrant downtown, and a guy about 40 years old, white, bigger than me, crew cut, wearing a tactical green, military-style fanny pack over his chest, comes up and says, “Don't you want to hear a conservative’s opinions?” I sigh. Point my silly little phone at him. “Ok, what are your opinions?”

“My opinions are, you know, what Trump is doing in...” He trails off.

“You like it, yeah?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Okay.”

“I love Trump.”

“What do you like about it? What do you like about what he's doing?”

“I like our country being strengthened. You know what I mean?”

“So, what does ‘strengthen’ mean?”

“I like the way our country is being governed.”

“You like the vibes?”

“Yeah, good vibes.”

It goes on like this for a few agonizing minutes until eventually I’m telling him there are plenty of better places to live than America. I tell him I’d rather be living in Denmark, personally. He says that’s a socialist country. I ask him a series of questions about his health insurance, learning eventually he gets his for free from the state. I say congrats, dude and give him a high five. “That’s socialism.” I feel him get angry at me. He talks faster. I start noticing the way he calls me “sir” after every statement. Something’s off. I need to leave.

I pull away and crack a whispered joke about how I thought I was about to get popped. Half meant it. He was so close to me just then, his eyes intense and far-away at the same time. “What’s in the bag,” a commenter asks. What’s in the bag. Later tonight, when I review the footage, I’ll notice the bag was cracked open at the top, as if for a quick draw. And he was there by himself. And he had no idea what he meant but he believed it. He believed no one would listen to him. No one would talk to him. I did, and it was like talking to a ghost. ‘Sir, sir, sir, sir.’ Staring at me. Getting closer to me.

⩫ Scene Four: The clamor of the protesters, the homeless senior, the ghost… overwhelmed. I head back upstairs for the safety of the quiet fourth floor. On the walk, the stream commenters are telling me to shut up. Tracy Novick is testifying on the new safety measures, the ones I just passed by with ease, and I’m yapping too loud. They can’t hear. Novick says:

Since the council itself recognized security arrangements for city hall as being under the purview of the council and taking up Councillor Bergman's petition, those who rejected my petition, none of whom serve on this body, in claiming that city hall was not under council purview, violated my free speech rights. That's viewpoint discrimination, something with which some of you may be familiar from Thayer v. Worcester. I would note in passing, Mr. Chair, that rule 42's avoiding of personalities and maintaining decorum—

Silence. She keeps talking but the mic turns off. A new policy, abruptly bringing a citizen’s allotted two minutes of participation to an end. Whatever else she has to say is inaudible on the televised recording, which, because there are no transcriptions, remains the only official record of what was said when in our local government.

Later in the week, when I watch the tape back, I’ll find it unsettling: the feed giving out like that while a respected policy expert in our community is muted halfway through an articulate complaint about the violation of our rights by the new security measures. I’ll play the moment a few times, basking in the ambient dread.

The mayor cuts the mic on a few more speakers after that. I’m up on the fourth floor now, taking a breather, watching the stream on my cell phone, far enough away from the chambers that I’m not caught in the crossfire of a several-second delay between stream and reality. I hear the dull roar of cheers moments before I hear the same in my headphones. I’m ready to slip into a nice regular boring government meeting—watching this government body make such a big to-do about the minutiae of various threads of petty grievance, content mostly in their powerlessness, tending to their individual micro-domains in a cryptic, alien lexicon, one that’s mutated over decades of inscrutable dramas advanced behind the veil of niceties on that council floor.

Mauro DePasquale, trained as he is in these dark arts, speaks directly to that alien lexicon, taking a shot at the bugbear dujour: Thu Nguyen. He ladles himself with praise for all the supposed civic good WCCA TV accomplishes and then calls for a meeting of the most pointless subcommittee of the council, which of course was assigned by Joe Petty to Nguyen, to hold a meeting despite the simple fact the council has no authority, no soft power, no sway at all to do anything about cable access funding. He says:

But how is it going to impact the community if we diminish WCCA TV? And that's something that we really need to look at. In two minutes, there's not enough time to do it. It needs to go to committee. The committee chair doesn't show up, so there's going to be an answer. I like to see a committee meet so we can talk about this, respectively [sic].

Does he really want this meeting or is it the present opportunity to level a backhanded smear on Nguyen he’s after? I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader. Either way DePasquale deftly throws out some catnip to the kitties on the other side of the fence. I can just about hear Candy Mero-Carlson purring into her mic.

By the way, when our old guard councilors stress the need to “get back to work” or “get to business,” this is the kind of stuff they’re talking about. It is not work, nor is it business.

There’s one public commenter who does it right. He takes the opportunity to simply point out that public comment is pointless because the council doesn’t listen to or even really work for the public. His name is Nathan.

You work for yourselves, the landlords, land developers, and the cops. We know this. It's become much more obvious than ever in the last half of the year. And it seems like you've managed to piss off a lot of different groups, groups that are coalescing to make sure most of you don't get reelected in the fall.

He concludes:

We don't need Etel thrown in jail. We need to clone her, put nine more of her on the council. We need Keith Linhares in District One, Khrystian King for mayor, then maybe some good things can happen in the city. I yield the rest of my time.

⩫ Scene Five: It’s around this time I hear the protestors coming up the stairs, chanting. I think ‘ohhhh I didn’t know they were gunna do this.’ They pile into the chambers. ”No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA.” The cops start coming en masse, as if to give an Exhibit A of exactly what has the protestors so angry. Eventually the outside of city hall looks like this...

Photo: David Webb

Inside the building, a ring of cops forms between the chamber and the stairwell, their Axon body cameras all blinking their eerie three red dots, some of them wearing rubber gloves, others the Under Armor variety just as easily seen on a linebacker. I’m reminded of Officer Vallejo’s body camera footage from Eureka Street. The way he tightens those gloves up before running out of the car and throwing a teenage girl to the ground.

Petty is unable to gavel the demonstrators into submission. The more conservative councilors trickle out of the room. Then trickle back in. Kate Toomey huffs and puffs around, pacing. She personally ushers two of the demonstrators back within the sheep pen fencing that keeps public and the council separate. She wears a “job well done” look of satisfaction on her face once they’re back on the other side of the VIP rope. A few minutes later she takes out her phone and films the demonstration, her face dripping with contempt.

Eventually, everyone leaves, the meeting is unceremoniously adjourned, the protestors walk out, the cops trailing behind them. Mission, such as it was, accomplished. There was no list of demands, nor a clear call to action. These are some constructive criticisms I’ve heard from friends deeply involved in organizing and weary of making them public. In a future post maybe we’ll explore them more deeply. There’s merit in such a conversation if we can all be adults about it.

But for now, the top-line takeaway: In Worcester, as in cities across the country, people got out in the street, put the pressure on their local governments, contributed to a chorus of anger and exasperation so loud as to not be ignored. They disrupted business as usual, and business as usual desperately needs disrupting. They made the feckless Democrats we have to pretend are an opposition party uncomfortable. They introduced a state of exception atmosphere into a room full of people overwhelmingly content to ignore the fact of the state of exception all around us. Protestors in cities around the country have been doing the same things for the same reasons. Nevertheless, the cranks have decided it’s the personal fault of two or three councilors. Oblivious as they are to the outside world, and to Worcester’s unique role in the present moment as one of the first places that actually fought back. Their worldview is so limited they can only absorb it as a bit of theater of the kind they’re used to playing. Another low-grade Machiavellian scheme. Because that’s all they know. All they do.

In the hours that follow, the statements come pouring in. Kate Toomey’s is so funny I just can’t help but marvel at it.

Tonight, the business of the people of the City of Worcester was aborted again due to people egged on by several of my colleagues to address national issues. Mid testimony, one of our residents who was talking about an issue regarding homeless women, was unable to continue because of the rude interruption. It is an incredible disservice to the citizens of our city. If people want to protest ICE, they should go to the Federal Court House. I am attaching a post from my colleague [Thu Nguyen] who is too afraid to come to meetings, but can encourage violence and yet still get paid. We had to leave the building because no business could be done. Such a travesty.

Folks, I regret to inform you the business of the people was aborted.

There’s no TV writer alive that could write a line that funny. The rest of the statement is grievance-soaked drivel of the garden variety. But my god, that first line. What a gift.

Like Toomey does above, and Pasquale did before any protestor graced the chamber, Candy Mero-Carlson takes her shot at Nguyen.

"This was not activism — it was obstruction, driven by Councilors Khrystian King, Etel Haxhiaj and Thu Nguyen. Councilor Nguyen, who helped orchestrate the disruption, refuses to even show up to council chambers and face the people they represent — all while collecting a taxpayer-funded salary. I fully support the right to peacefully protest, including opposition to ICE policies — but the Council Chambers is not the place to stage national political grandstanding. The people of Worcester deserve better."

We love this classic Democrat move: sure, protest, but not where you protested, and not the way that you did. As the protest experts—we fully support the right!—we advise if you want your protest to work you do it the one specific way that has the longest track record of not working. That this one allowed way is the way that’s most sure to present us no personal inconvenience at all is just a coincidence. We’re on your side. We hear you.

Case in point, Joe Petty’s statement: "In order for us to move forward and take collective action toward ensuring people’s rights are respected we must work together and have respect for one another.”

What work, Joe?

Worst of all, though, is Eric Batista’s. He takes the opportunity to further the clampdown, saying demonstrations in the chambers have always been against the rules, according to a longstanding policy document that, previous to his announcement, had “not previously been widely distributed.” The four-page document linked to in the announcement isn’t dated and the file name is City Hall Policy_0. An inspection of the metadata reveals the document was created on June 11, 2025, and the author is our newly appointed City Solicitor Alexandra Kalkounis.

HA HA.

These responses range from imbecilic to mealy mouthed, but they’re all par for the course for Dems across the country who are failing utterly to grasp the moment.

Later that evening, reading Melissa Gira Grant’s great analysis of the LA uprising in The New Republic, the parallels between their mayor and ours are striking:

Bass might say that she supports the people’s right to respond, but she wasted little time before admonishing her constituents for not responding in the right way. “The most important thing right now is that our city be peaceful,” Bass said at the Sunday press conference. “Expressing your fears, your beliefs, is appropriate to do, but it is just not appropriate for there to be violence.” Drawing lines between “peaceful” and “violent” is a common move for politicians amid popular protest.

It should be said that Worcester officials have done nothing. At least in Boston, they’re trying. Mayor Wu signed an executive order this week to regularly FOIA the Department of Homeland Security. In Everett, the city government is trying to limit where ICE can stage.

All of it is lacking. But at least they’re trying. The same cannot be said for Batista’s administration and the city council majority that ostensibly oversees him. In this moment when US troops are being deployed in an American city, we have councilors like Candy Mero-Carlson, content to say the council chambers are not the place for grandstanding about “national issues,” as if it wasn’t a uniquely Worcester issue just a month ago. Unreal.

The only thing unique about our city in this moment is how little our elected officials even pretend they care.

Hamilton Nolan puts a pressing thought well in a recent post.

But there is another important thing to be said directly to the men who go to work every day and don the tactical vests and facemasks and act like the willing gestapo agents of our idiot political leader: You guys are fucking cowards.

This extends to Candy Mero-Carlson, Kate Toomey, Joe Petty. You guys are fucking cowards. And in an entirely unremarkable way. These local Dems failing like they are all over the country to pass the moral courage test, showing they have no real desire to intervene, that they’re content to let the cops take over once and for all. If this is the way, so be it. So long as they can maintain their petty dramas, so long as they maintain just a little more sway than those to their left...

The Imperial Boomerang of the War on Terror finally comes home, and Dr. Phil is embedded with it, taking the opportunity to launch his new TV network, Merit, with a two-night special on the heroic actions of the troops in LA. It even has a sit-down interview with the Border Czar himself, Tom Homan, in which the pair “break down the multi-agency raid targeting cartel-linked businesses in LA’s garment district.”

All these cowards in masks and cowards wringing their hands about how to protest, all for the sake of content. They sent the military into LA for the content.

The War on Terror comes back home as a TV Show For A Death Cult.

Real life.

HA HA.

Odds and ends...

So great to be back, lol. Thank you to reader Boris Peon who helped me make the custom section breaks like the one above work better. Appreciated!

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Don’t forget to send in some thoughts on this newsletter turning five if you have any! Billsahner@substack.com.

A few stray thoughts...

Local Rich Guy Cliff Rucker gives a $100,000 donation from his foundation to the Worcester Guardian. That’s a lot of money for press release rewrites if you ask me. But hey at least this large sum from a member of the Chamber of Commerce will keep the Guardian, owned by the Chamber of Commerce, the totally “independent” outlet it describes itself as.

Luckily there are real independent outlets. Jenn Gaskin has been on a tear over at Bacchanal Business lately.

We know that ICE is a federal agency. We know how jurisdiction works. But what we don’t understand—and will not accept—is how and why City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj has been charged with assaulting a Worcester police officer when we all know that didn’t happen. We’ve seen the body cam footage. We’ve seen the truth. There was no assault. What we are witnessing is a retaliatory move by the Worcester Police Department—meant to punish those who dare to speak up, to dissent, and to challenge power.

Over in New Bedford the city council accidentally got rid of single family zoning, which rocks lol.

Oh shit almost forgot: look at this amazing pic Telegram photog Rick Sinclair took of me speaking at that rally after Eureka Street, and the unofficial hype man of the event, who became the source of some very avoidable controversy.

Ran into Rick at the standout for Etel Monday. He said he’s been holding onto it. Some pics you can’t use for anything but that doesn’t mean they’re not perfect he told me. So good. Thank you Rick!

Friend of the newsletter Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha got me on a Sun Ra kick with their last postcards from the end of the world post. So let’s play this one out with “Nuclear War” because, well...

Til next time! Unless they push that button and there isn’t one.

1. For the unaware, I’m referring to Worcestery Council Theatre 3000, a weekly Twitch stream in which me and some guys from Wootenanny, our local comedy squad, watch city council meetings and make fun of them. Tagline: the only tolerable way to watch the Worcester City Council. WCT3k for short. Here’s the Twitch page and Instagram and archive of old shows on YouTube. It’s a good time! And possibly in the running for weirdest use case in Twitch history.