Mid-December Open Thread: Kluwe at Anaheim Dems. And everything else all at once.

By
Vern Nelson
– December 18, 2025Posted in: "The OC", 2026 elections, AD 72, Chris Kluwe, Deportations, Donald Trump, Fresh Juice, Gracey Van Der Mark, huntington beach, ICE raids, Matt Harper, mental illness


Open-thread me this: If a tree falls in the forest, and only one hand is clapping, how do we know, how can we be sure? Or to speak more plainly, what happens when the Epstein Files are released but there’s no Congress to get ’em cuz Grindr Mike Johnson sent them all home?

In short, this is the moment in our history (locally, nationally and globally) where all things are circling the drain at such an accelerating pace that a blog will need six open threads to keep up. Even our President (that Orange Piece of Shit, soon may he croak) had to talk extra fast last night in an effort to distract us from both the Advent of Epstein and the sea of barf he’d vomited forth earlier about the Reiner murder.

By the way, did you perceive in that statement (as did both I and George Conway) evidence that Trump first assumed (and hoped?) that the Reiners had been killed by one of his crazed MAGA followers, for their temerity in opposing him, and that the Reiners had it coming? Read it again:


We understand the urge to hold all one’s urine until there is a Trump grave to drench with it, but patience, and take better care of yourself. A brighter future cannot be far off. For now the best thing we can do is to let Rob keep speaking:


But it worked out well for Trump, pissing off everybody with his insane all-about-me Reiner tweet, because it made people forget THIS, his remarks at a Christmas reception the day before. Mira nomas:

I’m sorry but I’m going to take an uncharacteristically long break here, because only one Mary Geddry can properly explicate this passage, do it justice:

The Serpent That Slipped its Cage.

Trump’s unraveling jungle hallucination reveals a mind losing the boundaries between performance and reality.

Donald Trump has always been a fabulist, but his remarks today at a White House Christmas reception carried him into new and unsettling terrain. For nearly an hour he careened between tragedies, tariffs, grandchildren, golf pros, and grievances, his usual mixtape of self-affirmation and imaginary math. The greatest hits landed with their usual thud: $18 trillion in investment, elections “too big to rig,” and factories materializing by the thousands because CEOs simply cannot bear to pay tariffs. We’ve seen this show before.

Then the speech veered off the cliff and into a strange, cinematic realm that bore none of the familiar hallmarks of political spin and all the fingerprints of memory breakdown. Trump launched into a sprawling jungle epic involving a White House doctor, the Obama daughters, a Peruvian viper, and a miracle recovery that allegedly took two years and three sets of last rites. And he delivered it with the earnestness of a man who believed every word he was saying.

Even by Trump’s standards, it was bizarre. The story sprawled across minutes of uninterrupted monologue, growing stranger with each beat. There was a trip to Peru, a deadly jungle viper that supposedly kills “28,000 a year,” a bite that knocked the doctor unconscious “immediately,” a frantic call to Ronny Jackson (because of course), the reading of last rites not once but three separate times, and a miraculous recovery that took “two years.” Trump added the flourish that the doctor wrote a book about the ordeal, one that “sold two copies” until Trump posted about it on Truth Social, instantly transforming it into “the number one bestselling book” with “100,000 copies sold in one day.” He repeated that number with the conviction of a man who believes he can manifest reality by insisting on it loudly enough.

Not a single element of this tale exists in the real world. The doctor is untraceable. The viper’s annual kill count would exceed many small wars. There is no record of Malia or Sasha Obama bushwhacking through a Peruvian jungle under Secret Service protection. And if a book about a near-fatal presidential medical incident had suddenly sold 100,000 copies in a day, the publishing industry would have noticed. Reddit threads have formed around fact-checking the story.

What makes this moment more than just another Trump exaggeration is how he told it, and why it felt so unnervingly familiar. Because we’ve heard this story before, just not as nonfiction. It is, beat for beat, the skeleton of the poem he used to recite at rallies: “The Snake.” In that fable, a trusting woman takes in a wounded serpent that ultimately bites her, prompting its sneering confession: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” A simple parable, delivered with the sing-song cadence he slides into.

But this time, the parable wasn’t framed as a parable. It was reframed as autobiographical history. He took the metaphor and recast it as an event. He inserted himself into the narrative as both witness and savior. He collapsed the distinction between performance and memory, turning an old stump-speech bit into something he now “remembers” as having happened within his administration. The boundaries dissolved. And it’s that dissolution, not the snake, not the jungle, that should alarm us.

This type of conflation, the collapse of metaphor into memory, is not a quirk. It is a recognizable cognitive pattern, one often documented in frontotemporal dementia, where patients begin blending stories they’ve told with events they’ve lived, losing the ability to separate performed narratives from personal experience. They draw on familiar scripts because the scripts are easier to retrieve than actual memories. And the more emotionally charged the script, the more likely it is to be repurposed as truth.

Trump has always lied, but he used to lie intentionally. He lied to dominate, to distract, to humiliate, to win. Dare I say, he lied with strategy. This was different because there was no political purpose to an imaginary viper in Peru. No strategic benefit to placing the Obama daughters in a National Geographic episode. No reason to spend precious podium time recounting fangs, venom, unconsciousness, resurrection, and book sales. This was the kind of story that emerges not because it’s useful, but because the storyteller’s internal filing system has lost its tabs.

He looked pale, unsteady, gripping the podium with both hands, drifting through a hallucinated adventure as though it were briefing-room fact. The people around him watched politely because what else can they do? They can’t tell him it didn’t happen, they have to wait for the moment to pass and hope the next improvised myth isn’t worse.

Trump’s snake poem once served as his warning about other people’s treachery. Now, in its mutated form, it reads like a warning about his own mind. The snake he should fear isn’t coiled in the jungles of Peru; it’s coiled somewhere much closer, winding through the spaces where memory, fantasy, grievance, and mythology have begun to fuse, quietly, steadily, and now, unmistakably, in public view. If he ever revisits that MRI he bragged about “acing,” he may find the serpent sitting right there on the scan, coiled up patiently, waiting for the next story he can no longer tell apart from reality.

– Mary Geddry, 12-14-2025

Sasha says “What the hell???”

But I’m sorry, I digress. Just as Grand Funk was an American band, this is a Local Blog. And we have more happening here in Anaheim than unarmed teenagers getting killed on their doorstep by police, we have ICE at the very moment of this typing running rampant around our town and snatching away beloved friends and longtime residents.

For example. Up until 10am (four hours ago) a familiar sight was was Saul Perez, steam-cleaning the parking lot at First Stop Liquor, Lincoln & Indiana. Today two masked ICE agents just yanked him away – apparently for steam-cleaning while wearing a sombrero. The 46 year old leaves behind 2 or 3 kids, as well as his truck. We hope that he is documented, then they might let him go after a week; if not, this is a big problem for the kids.

UPDATE Friday 12/19

They let Saul go after a few hours yesterday and I talked to him today. He IS a legal resident, with a GREEN CARD, and he’s been in this country – he doesn’t remember but MORE THAN TEN YEARS. But when he went out to clean the lot he left his wallet inside the store; ICE came along in three big SUV’s and said to themselves “Look! Mexican!” And they wouldn’t let him go in to get his wallet and green card. Put him in the van, handcuffed him, took him to a Santa Ana immigration facility, confirmed his legal status by his fingerprints, and let him go. In Santa Ana. No explanation or apologies. World we’re living in. Arrested for steam-cleaning while looking Mexican.

*****************

On the brighter side, Chris Kluwe, the notorious former NFL punter, civil disobeyer and HB assembly candidate came and spoke last Thursday at the Anaheim Democrats Club general meeting – this cannot be gainsaid, they can’t take that away from us. I’ve been known to say, to anyone who will listen (a couple of people) that it doesn’t matter if we get more Democrats in the assembly and state senate, we’ve already got a super-majority. UNLESS…

Unless it is a progressive Democrat, meaning specifically one who will fight and vote for three things:

  1. Strong rent control (CPI plus nothing) and revoking Costa Hawkins;
  2. Police accountability – paring down POBOR and ending qualified immunity;
  3. and a serious single-payer universal healthcare system.

And good news, Chris Kluwe supports all of these so we are supporting him.


Chris is facing three Republicans (only one of which will make it through the June primary) MATT HARPER, a goofy mediocre Republican of a previous decade, whom we wrote plenty about when he was a Poseidon supporter; the notorious GRACEY VAN DER MARK, an extreme MAGA culture-warrior HB councilwoman whom we’ve written even more about; and now NICK TAURUS, running to Gracey’s RIGHT (!) – a SELF-AVOWED white supremacist. Given those three possibilities, the OCGOP has found Gracey to be just the right, Goldilocks, degree of nutzoid and is backing her. What a heartening coup it will be, if and when Chris beats all three of those reprobates.

My colleague Sam Myovich came to the meeting, and was so impressed with Kluwe that he’s planning to write up a big endorsement of him, which we’ll publish here when it’s done.

You know who’s not impressed with Kluwe? Is Dan Chmielewski of the ironically-dubbed Liberal OC “Channeling the Right-Wing Noise Machine.” A few months ago when Chris had a Democrat opponent, Dan was having a field day trashing Chris; but then that guy dropped out and endorsed Chris enthusiastically, making it hard for Dan to keep that up and still be considered a good Democrat (if anyone still does.) Best he can do now is call the 4-way race between Chris and three bad Republicans “a popcorn movie” by which he means to show his superiority and indifference to it all.

Remind me to never again use that stupid popcorn cliche, cuz Dan used it three days earlier when he posted about another HB Democrat he hates, the ineffable Gina Clayton Tarvin. Dan knows he gets more positive comments and hits than ever when he trashes Huntington Beach Democrats, egged on by rightwing knuckledraggers like Chuck Johnson (under various pseudonyms.)

Which, you may be wondering where this is heading, but jumping on the Bash-Gina Bandwagon was none other than the Troll John Mardahl (who called himself “Tito Watch” for a few years till I named him here, “kenlaysnotdead” in years previous, and now calls himself “Monica Romero” using a fake Teamsters e-mail.) Mardahl has got it into his noggin, first, that Greg Diamond is Gina’s lawyer (not sure where he got that) and second, that Greg is currently imprisoned in El Salvador (a joke me and Greg made.)

But who is dumber, Mardahl who takes our jokes seriously, or Chmielewski, who believes Mardahl?

Heh. Idiots. May we all have enemies that clueless.

NOW! OPEN THREAD!

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About Vern Nelson

Greatest pianist/composer in Orange County, and official political troubadour of Anaheim and most other OC towns. Regularly makes solo performances, sometimes with his savage-jazz band The Vern Nelson Problem. Reach at vernpnelson@gmail.com, or 714-235-VERN.