The Simplest Explanation: They Are Evil

"Evil" is a hard concept to get your head around. We can get close to it when we say things like "The cruelty is the point," but that was truly about the first Donald Trump administration, with its scattershot acts of savagery, many of them mitigated by courts and by stronger Democrats and even a few Republicans who still had souls and spines. The cruelty had no real ideology behind it, just the sheer deranged pleasure of hurting people. Systematic, planned cruelty with a goal of hurting everyone who ever opposed you and your ideology? That's evil. We don't want to think that we are confronting evil now because it seems melodramatic and frankly unfathomable. If we have leaders who keep acting in ways that are evil, as in directly contrary to any concept of "good," then we need to acknowledge that we are in an evil country living through an evil age. 

I just can't think of any other clearer way to describe what the Trump/Musk administration has done in this first month of its four-year (minimum) reign of terror. We want them to be stupid, and we need to think of them as incompetent, like when Musk's Department of Government Efficiency fired 300 workers from the National Nuclear Security Administration because they didn't understand that those workers are responsible for the safety of our nuclear arsenal, not a bunch of hippies inhibiting the nuclear power industry or whatever the hell they believed, and now they're scrambling to rehire them. But stupidity and incompetence lets them off the hook to an extent in a "they know not what they do" kind of way. Fuck that. 

These motherfuckers know exactly what they're doing. They are seeking to undermine the functioning of the federal government, getting rid of any checks on the power of the president and wanting to privatize much of its work, in order to make the nation a de facto autocracy that exists for the benefit of a few wealthy patrons, with the population kept in line by an enforced Christian nationalist morality. In other words, Trump and his enablers are acting like just about every fucking totalitarian regime in history. And its goal is to harm anyone or any idea that opposes their power, from entire institutions and populations and on down to the lowest-level individual bureaucrat who didn't pledge their loyalty. It is a kind of coup, a willful abandonment of the protections of the Constitution while pretending to save the country from crises that simply don't exist. 

I don't know how you describe the actions the administration has inflicted on the country in another way that makes sense. You have to remember that anything they say about why they're doing this gutting of the workforce is nonsense, not only in the amount of money DOGE and Musk claim they are saving, but also in the context of a proposed $4.5 trillion tax cut, which is something like 16 times the salaries of the entire federal workforce. If you fire a couple hundred thousand people who are doing well the jobs they were hired for, completely decimating their finances and upending they're lives and that doesn't help anyone else, that's evil shit. 

No matter where you go, evil is at play. Firing people involved in the prevention of bird flu and other viruses. Firing those trying to find a cure for cancer. Freezing and eliminating funding for USAID, which helps people in poorer countries survive diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and more. The firing of thousands of workers at the Forest Service and national parks. And so very much more. It's not just about the employees themselves, many of whom have been put through hell in the last couple of weeks, but it's about all the people who will be harmed and will die because of these cuts. 

And this isn't even getting into the disappearing of migrants to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to countries where they have no connection; or the proposed complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza so the United States can build some resorts; or the Justice Department's attack on the rule of law in the Eric Adams case; or the move to erase the existence of transgender people' or the unhinged attack on anything that supports non-whites or women as "DEI," which, we should all be reminded, means "diversity, equity, and inclusion," as if those aspirational ideas are bad. Or a thousand other things that I could list and that I'm sure you thought of, all, all, all with a goal to directly harm people or force them to kowtow to Trump and Musk (or, really, Musk because Trump is just his fucking poodle now). I mean, this is some supervillain shit going on right now.

"Evil" provides us with a way of framing this in the easy, Manichean way that most people prefer to view the world. I acknowledge it's got a religious sound to it. That's okay. That helps. It's an explanation that needs no elaboration. As a term it has potency because it gives the opposition a moral dynamic: we're fighting against evil. I also think that it's a way of making those who voted for Trump to articulate the way they feel like he's fucked them over (and, I know, it's a small percentage who might actually pull their heads of his voluminous ass in order to breathe the fresh air of reality). And it gives us a way to label the people who do Trump and Musk's bidding. They're not just assholes bro-coding us to the apocalypse. They're evil assholes who want to see the rest of us hurting.

It also forces us to ask questions to anyone who supports them: What actual good has been done? Can you tell us one thing that's been accomplished that makes your life better or easier? What is being proposed that would make your life better or easier? Because the answer across the board is "Not a goddamn thing."

They are fucking up the lives of Americans. They are driving people to despair. I have said that I believe the real goal here is to provoke a violent response from a group or individuals, giving Trump the chance to declare martial law and just have his way with us as surely as if he were keeping us chained to a wall. We are in the midst of evil, awaiting to see what other evil will occur. 

And now we need to respond as if evil motherfuckers have taken over our occasionally decent nation. Call it out as evil, protest, and kick your members of Congress in the ass. The time to act is now while we're still allowed to act.

Democrats Need to Stop Being Afraid of Being Democrats

In Kamala Harris's speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in Chicago in August, one key word and its variations were conspicuously absent, and it's a shame because she was speaking to a huge audience that needed to hear the words "Democrat" and "Democrats" and "Democratic Party." The only reference was a worthless nod to dead bipartisanship: "Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades." Awesome. Now how about all the shit that was done by Democrats?

In other speeches, she didn't mention the party at all, and sometimes that was just odd. At a rally in Atlanta, Harris said, "We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth; a future with affordable health care, affordable childcare, paid leave." While this was in a comparison to Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric, she never expanded "we" beyond her and her voters. That "we" should have been "Democrats."

I know that a parliamentary system requires a different kind of approach to an election, but look at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's speech when the 2024 campaign started over there. He ties the success of the country to the success of his party: "A vote for Labour is a vote for stability – economic and political. A politics that treads more lightly on all our lives. A vote to stop the chaos." Candidates know in other countries that the only way to success is for their party to win, and they campaign on the good their party can do. Throughout its electoral history, Labour has put the party front and center in its advertising. While Starmer did have one poster that just had his image and "Change" on it (like Obama), I honestly can't remember a Harris/Walz sign that even mentioned they're Democrats. In fact, I can't remember seeing a single "Vote for Democrats" poster for anything beyond local offices. I know they exist. I've seen them online. But they weren't prominent by any stretch, and they never have. 

It's not just Harris. Even when a Democratic leader talks about Democrats, it's in the most polite and milquetoast way, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a press conference last week: "Democrats are always, always ready, willing and able to work with anyone to find the common ground necessary to solve problems on behalf of hardworking American taxpayers." Jeffries went on to describe Republicans as the party that wants to cut taxes on billionaires. That notion, that Democrats will "work with anyone," is, yes, the reality for a party in the minority. But it's not something anyone can rally around. No one is going to say, "Yeah, fuckin' go, Democrats. Compromise!"

After the 2024 election, when Democrats lost the presidency and the Senate and failed to retake the House, the punditocracy went into high gear about how the brand of the Democratic Party is "in the toilet" or "toxic." Actual elected Democrats joined in the beatdown, declaring, as Washington's Adam Smith saying the party is "broken." Most recently, Senator John "This Year's Sinema" Fetterman also called his party "toxic" and said that its "primary currency was shaming and scolding and talking down to people and telling them, ‘Hey, I know better than you,’ or you’re dopes, or you’re a bro, or you’re ignorant or, ‘how can you be this dumb? I can’t imagine it.’" Considering that Trump and Musk and all of those bros and dopes and ignoramuses and dummies on the right insult everyone not them, Fetterman's accusation is self-serving and wrong, and it's a shame to watch this once bad-ass warrior for the working class become a simp making nice with Republicans. 

My response to all of this is "What Democratic brand are they talking about?" Because, see, Democrats have forgotten to make their brand meaningful. Every fucking good thing in people's lives right now from the federal government came from Democrats. That what they should be selling. You like Social Security? Democrats got you that. You like Medicare and Medicaid? Democrats did that. Civil rights? You know it's Democrats who got that done. You like having access to health insurance? Motherfucker, there's one reason they call it "Obamacare," and that's because of Democrats. Don't fucking talk about shit that was done across the aisle. Don't fucking say shit like "Well, Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to undocumented migrants and raised taxes to save Social Security," like you're making some big point about how Republicans have changed. Goddamn, Republicans trot out fucking Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to say, "Look how great we are." Democrats can barely mention FDR and LBJ. 

Last week, I bitched about the lack of energy in the Democratic response to Trump's fuckery and the GOP rolling over telling him to fuck away on the ass of the Legislative branch. That energy is surging, finally. But it's got to go further, and it has to be framed that Democrats want to keep the lights on at hospitals and punish financial institutions that harm everyday people and prosecute corporate criminals and not tear down the FBI and CIA and the military and keep people from starving. It's not just that Republicans are the assholes here. It's that Democrats are the ones who can make it right. 

Stop being afraid of being part of this party. That's letting Republicans define you and accepting that it's the only way to think about the Democratic Party. Fuck that. Don't ask people to vote for you because of how well you get along with Republicans. Ask them to vote for you because you're a Democrat, and if they elect Democrats, you can get shit done for them. 

You know who knows how to talk about the party? Barack Obama. At the DNC, Obama discussed what the party and Harris and Walz believed about how to help people, saying, "That’s the Democratic Party’s vision. And our job over the next eleven weeks is to convince as many people as possible to vote for that vision." Of course, he said the opposition was "the other side," not "those filthy fucking Republicans." But at least he embraced who he is.

Note to Democrats: We're Freaking the Fuck Out and You're Not Helping Us Enough

I know so many people who are scared to death or freaking the fuck out about all of the ways that the administration of Donald Trump (aka "Elon's Meat Puppet") is fucking with their lives like a deranged child pulling the wings off moths. In just the last week:

- A dear friend with a trans teen is making plans to leave the country for at least the next four years. Gender-affirming care saved my friend's kid's life, and the fact that hospitals are pulling back on that care since Trump issued his savage, ignorant executive order has made them decide to get the fuck out of here. They're not the only family with a trans kid I know who are leaving. Of course they're leaving. That's what you do for your child. You make sure they aren't harmed. (And, yes, I recognize that there is a great deal of privilege in having the financial ability to leave.)

- Someone close to me helps run a food bank at an area church where many of the people who get meals and groceries are undocumented. The workers there are getting training for what to do if ICE shows up. They have cards they hand out to the people who come there that give them some direction if they are confronted by the federal government. Everyone there, from the minister on down, feels it's just a matter of time before it happens, and, yeah, it's scary.

- At my university, we've been given guidance, too, on how to handle any situations like that, with our administration reminding us that the university "requires a judicial warrant for any federal or local law enforcement official who comes to a campus seeking to make an arrest" and that an administrative warrant "is not a judicial warrant." We're still freaked out and not just about that.

(If I'm being vague here in identifying people, it's intentional because I don't trust these Trumpy motherfuckers in the least.)

- We're worried about the crackdown on what we teach, from our majors to our courses to the very content in the classroom. We're worried about getting doxed for expressing our disgust with the disgusting acts of this repulsive administration. We're worried about showing up on some fucknut's Twitter feed. I've had that happen to friends of mine, and the mongrels start chomping at the door pretty goddamn quickly. (And God fucking help you if you express an opinion on Palestine that isn't kissing Bibi's corrupt ass.)

And this is just about me and others living in our blue state safe space. I have friends in the MAGA States of America who are losing their fucking minds. They've had to deal with the barrage of hate and horror from their state governments and now it's all being compounded and double affirmed by the federal government. If you're already seeing abortion rights being tossed out, book bans, attacks on LGBTQ people, forced Bible shit, enforced patriotism, and more, at least there was a hope that Washington might mitigate some of the awfulness when Biden was in office. Now, it's like being held in a pit in a basement by the killer from Silence of the Lambs and when you fall asleep, Freddie Krueger shows up and you're not fucking safe anywhere. 

So I say this with hope and with the knowledge that none of it will be easy and that Trump is completely insane and has stormtroopers ready to go apeshit on whomever he screeches about on Truth Toilet: Democrats, you need to fucking act. You need to do something that makes us see you as a genuine resistance. And by that, I don't mean just posting videos explaining tariffs. I don't mean tweeting or skeeting or threading about how the price of eggs hasn't come down or how Trump said he would solve the Ukraine war in 24 hours but hasn't done jackshit about it yet. Those are nice gestures, but that's all they are. They are icing on the resistance cake. Now bake the fucking cake.

Trump and his poisonous minions like to say that "the American people elected Donald Trump to do all the shit we're doing." Although, c'mon, not exactly this shit, like having Elon Musk take over large parts of the functioning of the government in a de facto coup. I don't remember any campaign speech with that in there. But you know what else we elected? Our fucking representatives and senators, and we expect them to follow through, too.

You have to show us action, even action that fails, so we know that you have our backs as we go through this shit. There's actually quite a bit that Democrats can do. If much of it is symbolic, well, symbolic acts inspire people. That's why they're done. 

Have constituents in Republican states and districts flood their senators and representatives with calls and get them out to the townhall meetings. Make Republicans feel the heat of an angry electorate. File more lawsuits and make a big public deal about them and their purpose, and make sure you tie them to the Democratic Party, saying that you're trying to solve the problems the GOP is creating. Demand arrests of people who violate the law, like, you know, Elon Musk. Do something like going down to the Department of the Treasury and demanding to be allowed to have access to the same records that Musk is getting. Get arrested trying to do it, if you have to. 

Most of all, stop making nice with the bastards. Sen. Amy Klobuchar recently said that Americans want Democrats and Republicans to "find common ground," which is patently absurd. Americans don't give a fuck about that or they wouldn't have voted for the candidate who explicitly said that Democrats can go fuck themselves. So fuck that. Grind the working of the government to a standstill with on unanimous consent, with bill readings, with whatever weird shit you can do in the Senate for some ancient reason. Do not support a single nominee. Make Republicans own it all. 

And use their shit against them. Tariffs making prices go up? Propose a hike in the federal minimum wage, saying that it's unfair that working people have to pay for Trump's tariffs. Make that a big focus: Republicans are forcing you to spend more. Democrats want you to have more money. If conservatives try to say it'll hurt businesses, then ask them why CEOs are making billions of dollars while their employees are on SNAP benefits. Fuck it, go all in. Say you want to raise taxes on the super-wealthy to eliminate medical debt in this country. Have the fucking class war. Why not? What the fuck do you have to lose? Your donors? Your post-Congress jobs? Then fuck off.

Finally, don't abandon the people who need you. The only reason the GOP attack on trans people got any traction is because Democrats took the fucking bait instead of saying, "What fucking business is it of yours?" and moving on. The same goes for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Defending it is ridiculously easy (and Democrats have done a bad job explaining it). Instead, we get Democrats saying shit like "Maybe we need to just concentrate on bread-and-butter issues." That's tacitly admitting Republicans are right. Don't play on their fucking field. Bring the ball to your home stadium and make them come there. Minimum wage hike - that's bread and butter. You know what else would be bread and butter? A general strike. 

It sucks. Everything suck right now. And every day is like lining up for the next forced face-fucking from these felonious freaks. It's gonna suck for a long time. So we need Democrats to get out there, in real life and not just online, and rally us. We need you to do that or a hell of a lot of us are going to be lost in our fear. Even if it all fails, at least it rallies us. Goddamn, we need it.

Oh, and, for the love the god, please stop putting Chuck Schumer out there. Just fucking stop.

Week One in the Death of America: There Is No United States Without Diversity

If you're like me, you're sitting there thinking, "What the actual fuck is even happening?" in reaction to the wave of nation-wrecking executive orders and actions by massive sentient pustule Donald Trump and his vile administration. I knew there would be fuckery. I just didn't think about how detailed the fuckery could be, how fast it would all go down, and how it could get into all the spaces of the federal government, like toxic ooze that is flowing quickly through the streets of your town and you realize then that open basement windows and the water system are now filling with poison and you don't know where the fuck you can go to get away from it. 

It's honestly hard to pinpoint what the worst thing is. The war on migrants and the southern border is fucking awful. The birthright citizenship challenge undermines the entirety of the purpose of the United States. The pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists is breathtaking in how it undermines the rule of law. The pure utter cuntishness of revoking security protection for people who have pissed Trump off demonstrates just how petty and insane the orange motherfucker is. And then there's the attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal workplace or in general, where the goal seems to be "get all those" insert every derogatory term you know here for anyone not straight, white, and male "off my lawn."

Look at this one paragraph from one executive order, on the Federal Aviation Administration titled "Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation": "Illegal and discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring, including on the basis of race, sex, disability, or any other criteria other than the safety of airline passengers and overall job excellence, competency, and qualification, harms all Americans, who deserve to fly with confidence.  It also penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.  FAA employees must hold the qualifications and have the ability to perform their jobs to the highest possible standard of excellence."

That's some insidious shit right there. Look at everything it does. It declares a policy that no court ever found in violation of the law "illegal," so it's a fucking lie to call DEI programs that. A president cannot just say something is illegal and all of a sudden it is. That's not how government works (or, at least, used to work). It casts doubt on the hiring of anyone who is not white, male, and abled, claiming that diversity was more important than safety, which is also a fucking lie. It mocks anyone who belongs to diverse groups when it says that some people wanted jobs but "lack a requisite disability or skin color." And it implies that when diverse candidates are hired, they do not "have the ability" to do their jobs well, which is, again, a fucking lie.

The Trump administration's approach to DEI efforts is akin to the insanity over Communists in the government during the era of Joe McCarthy. In fact, you could replace "DEI" with "the Communist Party" in most of these statements, and it would pretty much sound the same. The most comprehensive of the executive orders starts with maliciously discrediting the entire attempt to make the federal workplace less discriminatory: "In case after tragic case, the American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing." Again, this just simply is a lie. Unless you can point out how, say, an incompetent Black woman was hired over a more qualified white man and that that hire would have stopped, say, a fire tornado in Los Angeles, then you don't have an argument. You have incitement, hyperbole, and all the -isms (race, sex, etc.). 

Next, Trump guts everything associated with DEI in the federal government. "I therefore order all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements." And just to make sure it's as dickish as possible, Trump revoked the 1965 EO that banned discrimination by any federal contractors. That's one way to welcome discrimination back to the businesses that work with the government, but it's not enough.

There's a section devoted to eliminating DEI in the private sector, too. The plan is to completely turn the idea of civil rights upside down. It's now a violation of the civil rights of white people if you value diversity in your workforce. If you do anything to hire because you want your business to perhaps reflect the population of your region, you could face litigation. Trump says he wants to "deter DEI programs or principles (whether specifically denominated “DEI” or otherwise) that constitute illegal discrimination or preferences." To do this, he's sending out his government to go after corporations and force them to comply or face action by the government that will result in expensive litigation: "As a part of this plan, each agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars" and go after them for supposedly making white men sad.

In addition to firing everyone involved in any DEI efforts, the McCarthyist part comes from memos sent out to the employees at various agencies that say, "We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to [a fucking email address I'm not including] within 10 days.  There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences." In other words, name names and inform on your fellow workers. Divide the workforce between the loyal and fearful workers and the ones who think this is all bullshit. Only if you suckle at Trump's sagging nipples are you considered legitimate.

It's all a blatant attempt to get rid of the legacy of the civil rights movement, and it probably will end up running afoul of actual civil rights laws, especially when it comes to private companies. But this administration and the Republican Party are here to take a wrecking ball to the legacy of anyone who dared to say that women or non-whites or disabled or LGBTQ people are deserving of the same opportunities as white men. It's an overwhelming use of presidential force to take back any power that was lost as the nation evolved over the last 60 years. They are beating the present to death in an alley for daring to look a white man in the face.  Next, they'll burn a cross on the National Mall.

The end of diversity is the end of the nation. The white paradise that squamous sleazebags like Stephen Miller envision is really the endgame for America, and they're just fucking fine with that. If you hate our diversity then you hate this country. You can live in Trumpland or you can live in the United States, but you cannot do both.

By the way, there's one extra-dickish part in the EO. It's a dig at academia and professors. It reads, "This order does not prohibit persons teaching at a Federally funded institution of higher education as part of a larger course of academic instruction from advocating for, endorsing, or promoting the unlawful employment or contracting practices prohibited by this order." To me, that's like bait, like saying, "Yeah, go ahead and speak out, evil professors. Nothing will happen to you" as they cross their filthy fingers behind their crooked backs and lick their lips at the chance to round us all up.

Martin Luther King Would Still Fuck Trump's Shit Up (Into the American Twilight Edition)

I don't have the bandwidth to go deeply into the complete fucking over of everything Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and died for with today's presidential inauguration of a man who is the opposite of King in every way possible. So rather than go with a whole history lesson about how King would have had hundreds of thousands of us in the streets today to show we won't go gentle into that Trump night, I'm just gonna give you a couple of quotes from King's 1959 sermon, "Unfulfilled Hopes." It's about how people deal with dreams that are shattered (in fact, he would title a later version "Shattered Dreams"), and he makes reference to how, in the Bible, the apostle Paul wanted "to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to Spain" but never gets to Spain and ends up in a prison in Rome.

In describing how we react to disappointment, King talks about various kinds of people, including this:

"Have you ever seen mean people? Now, sometimes you take a good psychological analysis of that person. You look back, and you discover that that person had a distant Spain in mind that he wanted to go to, and he had a great hope and a great desire and because of the forces of circumstance something happened and he never got to that Spain. And he ended up confined in a little cell of life that had been brought up and built up around him by the very forces of circumstance. And now he lives in his cell, bitter and angry with life, and he has a sort of demonical grudge against life. This is his response. And he seeks to solve his frustration by taking all of this out on other people. And so maybe sometimes he’s mean to his children, or he’s mean to his wife, or she’s mean to her husband, or mean to people round and about because he can’t find life itself. Life is intangible in a sense; it’s invisible. We, we, we don’t see life; we see the manifestations of life. And you can never take life and hit life and beat up on life. And so he discovers that he can’t get life itself to beat on and pay back for what the universe has done to him, so he finds people that are tangible, and he finds things that are tangible, and he takes this bitterness and this hate out on these things. And this is the solution to his problem, he thinks. The bitterness within, and the anger, he becomes angry with the universe. And he fights the universe through people and things. This is one way that people deal with this problem of unfulfilled hopes. They react with bitterness and mercilessness and meanness."

No matter how much he cruises through the world, Trump believes he's owed more and more: more money, more power, more love, more worship. And because he can never be satiated, he's put himself in that "little cell of life." King would fuck Trump's shit up because he understood exactly who someone like Trump is, how vain and small and awful he is. 

And since teaching the truth about the history of this country is about to become banned in many places, here's what King, in the same sermon, had to say for anyone who tries to cover for the sadists and racists in the American past:

"I look back over the dark days of slavery. Let nobody fool you about it. We can romanticize all we want to about the beauty of slavery. There are those who would still try to romanticize about the beauty of slavery, and they, they have their minds back to those good old days. Slavery was a tragic thing. All that the Negro had to look forward to was rows of cotton, sizzling sun, the whip of the boss, and the barking of bloodhounds. This is what he faced. It is tragic to be cut off from some things, but there is nothing more tragic than to be cut off from your language, cut off from your family, cut off from your roots. This is what the Negro faced—going over in ships out of Africa, huddled up in ships, not able even to talk to each other, thrown up and brought over to distant countries to work, nothing in their past to hold on to."

His point was that Black people faced horror upon horror and still found the strength to keep going, keep fighting, and keep the faith. It's a lesson I truly hope I can live up to in the next four years. 

(15 years ago, I wrote about how King would tell Democrats to sack up. Sadly, it's still relevant.)

Informing Ourselves to Death: Trump's Win and American Stupidity (Part 2)

(Part 1 is here.)

We've seen definite signs of the abject stupidity of the American voter in 2024 in so many ways. There are the states where voters put abortion rights in their constitutions but voted for senators who want a national ban. The fact (and it is a fact) that searches for "Did Biden drop out?" spiked on Google on Election Day, as well as searches for "tariffs" and "who pays for tariffs?", may seem like small data points, but it points to a larger issue with deliberate ignorance. Apathy is one thing, as in "I don't care about politics," but that's not an excuse to be totally disengaged. I don't give a damn about football, but I know the Giants and the Jets suck because I pay attention to the world around me. 

It's even worse when it comes to the things people believe that simply are untrue. For instance, a Gallup poll released this week showed that a majority of voters don't know what they're talking about. They were asked if "you believe the United States has made progress, stood still or lost ground in each during the last four years, since Joe Biden became president" on a variety of issues. A majority said we've "lost ground" on immigration (64%), the economy (59%), and crime (51%), among others. And that's simply objectively untrue. Immigration is under greater control than it's been in years, so much so that there isn't much for Trump to do at the southern border. The economy is doing great and crime rates are at historic lows. 

I get that we face a flood of disinformation, and that the right-wing, especially the MAGA-in-chief, is responsible for it. Just about every word out of Trump's mouth hole during the campaign was a lie, and he continues to lie. And he'll change his tune the second that he's inaugurated and declare that he alone is responsible for every good thing that he's inheriting as he comes into office. Of course, the slavering hordes of idiots who hang on his every word believe him over anything their eyes or ears might tell them. 

It's useless to get into the whole idea of how we used to gather 'round the TV and watch Walter Cronkite tell us what's what. It's useless to bemoan the end of newspapers and local media. It's useless to say that CNN used to actually care about that middle N, the one for "news," way more than it does now. It's useless to point out that getting your news from Facebook or Twitter is damaging what we used to think of as information. Every Pandora's Box around has been flung open and Hope had been beaten to death by the Evils in there.

But what I guess I'm getting at here is that while our access to information has blown up to an unwieldy size, so too, has our capacity for accepting facts and ideas that don't comport with what we desire to believe. And, again, I know that's not a new phenomenon, but, as I said last time, it's within the context of being able to challenge our orthodoxies. And that's disheartening. 

To put it simply, we who do profess to care about politics and elections are consuming more information than ever. But we do it with such prejudice that anything that doesn't confirm a belief we already hold is dismissed out of hand. So, for example, it should have been an easy task to disabuse people of the notion that trans people are taking over schools or whatever nonsense the right was propagating. There are only 5 trans girls competing as girls in sports in K-12 public schools. And there are fewer than 10 trans athletes in all of college sports. Every uproar on this issue is over a group of students so small that it is statistically zero. And the number of students taking puberty blockers is also so much smaller in proportion to the outrage being expended on the issue. It was a failure of Democrats to not make this their top talking point on trans kids. But it was a failure of anyone getting enraged by the idea that their little cis girl was in imminent "danger" of playing soccer against a trans girl. 

Instead, what the right especially is good at is flooding people with sources of information that all affirm each other, from Fox "news" and its devolved descendants to podcasts from verminous exploiters like Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro to other kinds of media, social or otherwise, so that people have the illusion of being informed because of this daisy chain of affirmation. You only need a couple of percent of people who aren't true believers to think that one lie or another is real and you've won an election.

We're moving into a government that is going to control the information it allows to be disseminated from the government. If one of the tenets of Trumpism is the need to deny that Trump lost the 2020 election, then any studies or research that could reflect badly on Trump will be, at best, suppressed, if not outright discarded, with the void filled with lies. This could be worse than the first Trump administration because at least there were career federal workers who would counter things like injecting bleach. If those workers are purged for loyalists, it's gonna be required that we all bleach our veins because dear leader said it works. 

The entire operation of our federal system will be wholly based on lies and disinformation. We don't need Greenland, but you can bet we'll be hearing how the absolute most important thing we can do is take it if we can't buy it. The same with the Panama Canal. (The Canada thing just seems like a joke to piss off Trudeau, but who knows?) And a great deal of effort will be expended to not just do things based on lies, but to actually try to shift reality into the way that Trump and his MAGA freaks want it to be. 

And the most aggravating thing about this is that, when asked about it, most voters do seem to have some concept of what's real. For example, a Wall Street Journal poll showed that 75% of people only want undocumented migrants with criminal records deported, with 70% want to "protect longtime residents from removal if they don’t have criminal records." I'd say to a whole lot of people in that poll that that's not what you voted for. You voted for the opposite. And it would have been ridiculously easy to find that out. 

So the point to all this is that the information is there. It used to not be there. But it's all there. You can know what’s real and what’s not. You choose not to. That’s what makes you stupid. And that’s what makes you even stupider for electing Donald Trump. 

That's my thesis for understanding 2024: the voters "informed" themselves to death, meaning they embraced false information and pretended it was real and didn't care when it was pointed out that they were objectively wrong. For whatever reason, racism or transphobia or misogyny or whatever, facts went out the window, and, frankly, you're just stupid if your prejudice matters more than the truth. Stupidity won, so we get stupidity personified running the joint. 

(Coming up: Okay, smart guy. So what do we do?)

Informing Ourselves to Death: Another Explanation of Why Harris Lost (Part 1)

We keep getting "deep dives" into why Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won. They can be big reasons, like racism and sexism, or the ability of Trump's campaign to exploit the anti-incumbent zeitgeist through bro podcasts and transphobia, or Harris and the Democrats courting anti-Trump Republicans while taking other Democratic voters for granted. 

But I will always blame voters more than I will blame campaigns because, ultimately, each individual American had to decide whether to vote and who to vote for. I'm a fan of simple explanations, and the simplest explanation, by far, is that the majority of Americans of voting age are stupid. I mean that in a few ways. If you stayed home and didn't vote because you don't care about any of this, you're stupid. If you didn't vote because you hated both candidates, you're stupid. People on the left who didn't vote or voted third-party because of specific issues? Stupid. If that includes you, then I mean you. Letting Donald Trump back into office is the stupidest thing this country has done since at least the Vietnam War. (Yes, it is stupider than electing him the first time.)

By far, though, and it's no contest, the absolutely stupidest voters were the ones who voted for Trump. Let me qualify that: if you voted for Trump, you're stupid or evil or some unholy combination of both, in which case you've probably been tapped to be in Trump's administration. I've gone on at length before about my contempt for Trump voters and my refusal to try to "understand" them. (As I've said, I won't treat them like children. I'll treat them like adults who made an adult decision that's objectively wrong and respond accordingly.)

Here's the thing that gets me about all this stupidity (and, believe me, I know people have been stupid forever). We exist in a time when the amount of information available to us at any moment is beyond comprehension. If you want a government report, you don't have to order it and wait for it to be delivered. If you want to read legitimate scientific and medical research, it's a few clicks away. It's all there. All the real information you could ever want. I don't expect everyone to want to access it. I don't expect everyone to have the time to look everything up. The point is that more facts are out there than ever before, as well as everything that proves those facts.

When pundits and politicians (primarily Democrats) talk about The Way Things Used to Be when it came to governing the country, one of the things they mean is that we used to have a relatively stable group of agreed upon facts on an issue. Politicians of both parties would look at crime statistics, for example, like those provided by the FBI, and then they'd argue about what to do as a result of those statistics. Democrats might argue for gun control and poverty programs. Republicans might argue for more guns and more cops and more incarceration. You had a group of facts interpreted through different ideological lenses. 

And, for the most part, that's how it worked on most issues: taxes, spending, foreign policy. Sure, there was hyperbole and posturing and accusations about how one side wanted to let criminals run free or the other side doesn't care about children being killed. There was manipulation of facts, sometimes egregiously (as in the Willie Horton ad in the 1988 election). But, again, a great majority of this had some basis in reality. Even if it was stretching the truth, it was still founded in some truth. (Yes, there are many, many exceptions you can come up with throughout our history, especially those based in racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and more.)

Somewhere in the 1990s, reality began to wither with the rise of the internet. Believe it or not, children, there was a huge conspiracy then about the supposed "Clinton Body Count," where millions of people believed that the then-President and First Lady, Bill and Hillary Clinton, were personally responsible for murdering or having murdered dozens of people. That one never went away. I heard people talking about in 2016 as if it were real. Then came the 9/11 truthers. And then came the lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then we went to war based on that. That should have led to a rededication to reality. Of course, then social media kicked into high gear, and, well, that was it. 

So, despite all the information at our fingertips, information we had during all of these lies, a fantasy version of reality has taken over and infected everything, like some kind of slime mold you can't scrub away. 

What's my point? What's this got to do with Harris? More on that in a couple of days.