QAnon sub-cult leader Michael Brian Protzman, aka “Negative48,” died at age 60 last week in a hospital in Rochester, Minnesota of injuries suffered in a dirt bike accident, Vice reports.

Protzman, whose “Negative48” nom de guerre came from a MAGAfied version of the ancient Jewish numerological system called Gematria (“Evil” is E[5] + V[22] + I[9] + L[12] = 48, hence “Negative” 48), gained fame for his subgroup’s November 2021 to March 2022 vigil for the resurrections of John F Kennedys Senior and Junior at the site of the former’s 1963 assassination in Dallas. The gathering devolved into a scene of absolute squalor, with Protzman and his retinue of thralls occupying the upper floors of a nearby hotel over the months, catering to the whims of their prophet and drinking hydrogen peroxide cocktails out of shared punchbowls to stave off COVID infections. The whole story was deeply tragic for the families of those brainwashed into Protzman’s cult, among them an Arkansas nurse who abandoned her three young children, one of them an infant, to await the return of the Kennedys… and Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Tupac Shakur, Prince, and others.

So you probably already figured out how the remnants of a cult obsessed with the idea that certain famous politicians and celebrities aren’t really dead is handling the death of their own leader, with Vice reporting that Negative48 acolytes pretending it didn’t happen, even to the point of banning chat room members simply asking for updates on Protzman’s condition after he was hospitalized. Excommunicated former Protzman lieutenant Shelly Mullinax told Vice that only the “evil version” of her messiah is dead, but the good one, JFK Jr disguised as Protzman, is alive and well.

It really seems like in this interview on idiot Tomi Lahren’s show that heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is saying that his fat orange rival let trans women compete against cis women in the Trump beauty pageants – and that the trans women had a competitive advantage over the cis women because DeSantis contrasts it with Trump’s rhetoric on girls’ athletics.

Loyal Trump minion Walt Nauta finally hired a lawyer to represent him as he faces multiple federal felony charges for doing the Orange God Emperor’s bidding in helping to hide stolen classified documents from federal officials, The Messenger reports. Nauta will be represented by Sasha Dadan, described as a “a 34-year-old Republican all-purpose criminal defense attorney who ran in 2018 for the Florida House,” as he enters a not guilty plea Thursday. A failure to secure counsel could have further delayed proceedings, which is exactly what Trump wants to do.

The monthly jobs report from ADP – which typically drops the day before the government’s official Bureau of Labor Statistics one – showed a massive gain in new private sector jobs with 497,000 added for the month, beating the Dow Jones “consensus estimate” of 220,000, CNBC reports.

OMG 😍😍😍 Threads ROCKS! So cool we can be on ANOTHER social media network! We just used it to post a little sneak preview of an earlier version of this article! Join and follow us @nationalzerousa right now! It’s great to have a completely different neuroatypical sociopath billionaire’s platform as backup for Twitter’s inevitable collapse. Even better is how Threads has virtually no desktop functionality, forcing us to use the mobile app to scroll for breaking news to use for our content.

Senate Minority Leader Moscow Mitch tells Punchbowl News he supports Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez’s plan to withhold the sale of F-16s to Turkey to get asshole dictator Recep Erdogan to quit fucking around and greenlight Sweden’s bid to join NATO. “I’m one of those who are not in favor of the F-16 sale to Turkey until the admission of Sweden gets behind us,” said McConnell said in an interview. “We had anticipated that would happen in Vilnius.”

A Politico Magazine/Ipsos public opinion survey on disgraced former President Trump’s upcoming trial for stealing and hoarding classified documents from the White House finds that 28 percent of Republican voters and 31 percent of independents claim they would be less likely to support the fat bastard in the 2024 election were he to be convicted on the 37 counts against him.

“The results also suggest that the numbers could get worse as Americans learn more about the pending charges. Roughly one-third of respondents said that they are not particularly familiar with the allegations in” the both the New York and federal cases, Politico writes on the finding.

On the question of “Should Trump be tried before the 2024 presidential election in the case related to retaining sensitive documents?” 62 percent overall said yes, including 46 percent of Republican voters. On guilt, 25 percent of Republican voters and 36 percent of independents think Donald did what those of us who paid attention know with certainty. As for a sentence, 43 percent said imprison him, 18 percent said probation, 17 percent said fines only, and 22 percent said no punishment at all. Naturally no punishment led with Republicans at 39 percent.

A DC federal judge on Wednesday denied a request by convicted Ohio Capitol rioter Kenneth Thomas to “network” with other pro-insurrection scumbags at an event this weekend in Rogersville, Missouri following Thomas’s recent guilty verdict on multiple felonies including assaulting law enforcement officers during the January 6th, 2021 attack on American democracy.

Judge Dabney Friedrich, who is set to sentence Thomas in September, cited prosecutors’ opposition which noted that the MAGA shitweasel had already been caught violating his pretrial release conditions back in March when he traveled to the DC area to attend the CPAC cult gathering.

Now if this all sounds familiar and you remember a story here about that from March you’d be mistaken because it was a completely different Capitol rioter named Gabe Garcia who was also caught defying the court’s pretrial release restrictions by going to CPAC. Funny thing is however, that in the Justice Department’s opposition to Thomas’s request they include a Telegram post by Thomas taking a selfie with Garcia in the lobby at the cult gathering. So close enough.

Australian Home Minister Clare O’Neil on Thursday taunted Donald Trump Jr for canceling his speaking tour in the country while his host – the Down Under branch of small-faced scumbag Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point – falsely tried to spin it as a visa denial, Reuters reports.

“Geez, Donald Trump Jr is a bit of sore loser,” O’Neil tweeted before later deleting it. “Donald Trump Jr has been given a visa to come to Australia. He didn’t get cancelled. He’s just a big baby, who isn’t very popular,” she wrote, while also adding that poor ticket sales for the three scheduled appearances were probably the real reason he canceled. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also weighed in, telling reporters “Donald Trump Jr’s visa was dealt with in the normal way. Like anyone else, he was entitled to come here. The deferral of his travel is a matter for him.”

Fat former President Trump is starting to get sick of Kari Lake always hanging around and acting like she’s already been picked to be his running mate in the 2024 campaign, the Daily Beast reports.

“She’s a shameless, ruthless demagogue who wants power and will do whatever she has to do to get it,” a Trump adviser told the Beast without any hint of irony whatsoever. Another said the Orange God Emperor thinks Lake should stop “running around saying she should be Vice President.”

Within four hours of launch on Wednesday evening, Meta’s new microblogging platform Threads has more than five million users, according to a “thread” posted by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Politico reports, introducing a new competitor to Elon Musk’s flailing Twitter, Politico reports.

The site allows people to post messages of up to 500 characters, nearly double Twitter’s capacity.  It allows people to like, reply and repost comments, but it does not yet have a hashtag function.  At least initially, you’ll have to have an Instagram account to sign up; the app is a text-based version of the Instagram platform, according to Meta.  Users can set up a placeholder Instagram account to sign up for Meta, if they don’t have one already.

The system is not without problems, however, as the platform was unable to retrieve some messages on demand, although the rollout has been relatively smooth when compared to the Truth Social comical debut.  The launch was originally supposed to happen Thursday at 10 a.m., but the app appeared in the Apple and Google app stores at 7 p.m. Wednesday. 

US Navy forces stopped two Iranian military attempts to take control of two commercial oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, just outside the Strait of Hormuz, the Washington Post reports.  American forces monitored via radio and drone as an Iranian military vessel ordered the tanker Richmond Voyager, about a mile away from it, to halt.  Drone footage showed what appeared to be bullets ricocheting off the tanker’s structure.  The guided-missile destroyer USS McFaul sailed to the area, forcing the Iranians to withdraw.

A few hours earlier, the McFaul responded to another ship, the Marshall Islands-registered tanker TRF Moss, which also had been ordered by a different Iranian vessel to stop, a prelude to boarding and seizure.  Navy officials have increased patrols in international waters in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman since May when Iran became more aggressive with international shipping traffic.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index which tracks the wealth of the richest 500 people in the world, that cohort increased their collective net wealth by $852 billion in the first half of 2023, or $14 million per day per individual on the list, USA Today reports.  Shockingly, that wasn’t a record, which was set in the latter half of 2020 as the world’s economy started regaining footing after the start of the coronavirus pandemic.   That’s roughly half of the 2.3% growth, amounting to around $1.9 trillion, the entire world economy was expected to see in growth in the first half of 2023.

Like father, like son.  A singer and reality television personality who appeared on The Apprentice has come forward with a claim that she had an affair with Donald Trump Jr. in 2011 while he was married to his first wife, and they consummated the relationship in the bathroom of a gay club in New York City, notorious gossip site PageSix reports.

Aubrey O’Day, a member of the reality show-created band Danity Kane, claims that Junior was so smitten with her after she appeared on Season 5 of Celebrity Apprentice that when she told him she was going to be at a gay nightclub–“Everybody was in a g-string or less,” she describes–he didn’t hesitate to make his way down there.  And Junior “got busy” with O’Day in the bathroom of the club; no word if it was a men’s room or a women’s room the pair violated, but regardless, one of them did violate Junior’s anti-LGBTQ ranting about people using the wrong bathroom.

Unsurprisingly, just like his daddy, Junior’s wife was either pregnant or post-natal at the time of Junior’s alleged affair; their son Tristan was born in October 2011.  O’Day claims they started a long-term affair, with Junior once professing that he would leave his wife.  Ultimately, he did, but for Fox sexual harasser and stepmother substitute for his Oedipal complex Kimberly Giulfoyle.

Republican former Arizona state House Speaker Rusty Bowers told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday that he’s been interviewed by the FBI about fat former President Trump and minions harassing him to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the Grand Canyon State. Last year Bowers testified publicly to the House January 6th Select Committee about the shit he took from the MAGA Reich in the aftermath, including multiple calls from Donald himself. After the testimony Bowers had famously said he would still support Trump in the 2024 election only to later walk that back and then the next month saw his political career ended quickly and unceremoniously when he lost a state Senate primary to a MAGA loyalist endorsed by the Orange God Emperor.

Beating the record set the previous day, July 4th was the hottest day on Earth in the last 125,000 years, USA Today reports, with the average global temperature reaching 62.7 degrees Fahrenheit.  Human-caused climate change combined with a stronger El Niño and the start of the Northern Hemisphere summer to set the highest recorded temperature since the data set was first collected in 1979.  Forensic indicators show the temperature was the highest since the Sangamonian Stage of the last interglacial period.

Once called “not mentally stable” by former GOP Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, the Republican nominee to be Hogan’s successor says he’s the target of fraud, claiming someone illegally filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to register his campaign for a House seat, the Baltimore Banner reports.

Republican House of Delegates member Dan Cox says someone else filed paperwork Monday announcing his campaign for Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, currently held by Democrat David Trone, who’s running for the seat of retiring Democratic Senator Ben Cardin.

A Southern Florida federal court on Wednesday unsealed a less-redacted version of the famous FBI affidavit in support of a search warrant originally unsealed on August 26, 2022 in the aftermath of the raid on fat former President Trump’s Floridian redoubt. It’s difficult to parse out the differences between them without an in-depth review, but one newly-unredacted section does stick out.

Item 51, referring to the grand jury subpoena for the return of the documents speaks to a whole shit ton of classification markings, suggesting a whole lot of incriminating acts by Donald: “Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, Top Secret SI-G/NOFORN/ORCON, Top Secret SI-G/NOFORN, Top Secret/HCS- O/NOFORN/ORCON, Top Secret/HCS-O/NOFORN, Top Secret HCS-P/NOFORN/ORCON, Top Secret HCS-P/NOFORN, Top Secret TK/NOFORN/ORCON, Top Secret TK/NOFORN, Secret/NOFORN, Confidential/NOFORN, TS, TS/SAP, TS/SI-G/NF/OC, TS/SI-G/NF, TS/HCS- O/NF/OC, TS/HCS-O/NF, TS/HCS-P/NF/OC, TS/HCS-P/NF, TS/HCS-P/SI-G, TS/HCS-P/SI/TK, TS/TK/NF/OC, TS/TK/NF, S/NF, S/FRD, S/NATO, S/SI, C, and C/NF,” says the newly-unredacted section.

The Georgia State Bar Association on Wednesday accepted insane MAGA lawyer Lin Wood’s offer to retire rather than face disbarment for his crazy fuckery in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

This was not a sure thing and the Bar could have refused the retirement offer and continued misconduct proceedings against him, yet a number of other outlets reported and/or headlined this as an immediate done deal as soon as they saw the letter. It might seem intimidating and complicated because its a little in the weeds of the legal profession, but it was simply not that fucking hard to get something like this right, and yet Mediaite still failed this morning by framing it as “Stop the Steal Superstar Lin Wood Agrees to Retire from Law Instead of Being Disbarred” and RawStory with “MAGA lawyer Lin Wood gives up his law license ahead of potential disbarment.”

Dem Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Wednesday signed a bill setting a $325 per student, per year increase in public school funding until 2425 AD, the result of some creative use of the partial veto authority granted to the Cheesehead State’s governor, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Evers took the sentence “SECTION 402. 121.905 (3) (c) 9. of the statutes is created to read: 121.905 (3) (c) 9. For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325 to the result under par. (b),” and vetoed words and hyphens to make it say “For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325 to the result,” for some masterful trolling by the former teacher.