We Are More Fucked Than We Know in the USA

If you burn down your house, you can rebuild it. It sucks and you'll have lost a bunch of meaningful things and useless shit that you'll miss, but, ultimately, you'll have a new house and that's a way to heal after the trauma of the event. But if you're living in a relatively small town, if you spend years dicking over every contractor in town, if you were a prick at city hall when you wanted a permit to put in a new porch, if you cheat at poker with house painters and plumbers, if you fuck the wife of the only paving company in town and brag about it at the bar, if you just generally have created a situation where everyone thinks you're the asshole and can't muster a single dry rat turd of sympathy for you when your house burns down, well, you're fucked. Live in your ashes, motherfucker, or get the fuck out.

What we're seeing with the Trump administration is not just the dismantling of agencies and organizations that make the government function, although that's a big fucking deal. No, we're seeing nothing less than the defeat of the United States from a domestic enemy who lied his way into the presidency and is waging a bureaucratic war against the American people. Trump and Musk are tearing up the social contract that legitimizes the existence of government and turning it into an arm of an ideology that hates the masses, hates anything that hinders the authority of the executive, and hates anyone who doesn't grovel before them and their fucked up views of the world.

They're breaking shit, and we're not going to be able to put it back together because we'll have no one to help us do it.

The Oval Office meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and our goddamn president and creepy vice-president before the media was a national fucking embarrassment, for sure. It was victim-blaming on a scale that would have given pause to even the most craven propagandist, with the fat, slurring, demented president of the United States, egged on by his sociopath VP, berating the genuinely heroic leader of a country that had been holding up under attack from a far larger and better-equipped military. Zelensky was patient beyond any reasonable standard as he attempted to bring some facts to pierce the thick, empty skull of a harrumphing Trump. If Zelensky had said, "Get this little bitch JD Vance out of my face," no one would have blamed him. Well, no one with a brain and a soul. 

The effect of this meeting was to take the United States out of its place as a leader in the world. We are now on our way to becoming like Russia: a nuclear-armed corrupt shithole that is despised and feared and despised even more because of the fear of our crazy motherfuckers doing crazy shit. No nation will ever trust the United States on any long-term basis because why the hell would they? If we're so pathetic that we can't put the leader of a coup behind bars and bring his entire irrational movement to heel, if our courts and our Congress are beholden to the evil dickstain in the White House, under threats from the richest supervillain in history, if we might elect another Trump-like garbage sack even after chasing him from office (if that should happen), if every deal, every treaty, every alliance, every humanitarian outreach, even, is subject to the whims of the leadership, with no permanence and ready to be tossed aside when oligarchs with totalitarian ambitions trick enough rubes to vote for them, then I'd advise every sane country to run as fucking far away from us as you can. America is a whore that sucks Vladimir Putin's dick now like a Hoover on deep pile. That is our purpose on the world stage. Get away before we drag you down into the gutter on our scabby knees with us.

Meanwhile, tweaking savage weirdo Elon Musk is gleefully tearing apart the federal workforce, a workforce, by the way, that has not kept up with the population of the country. Musk's Department of Masturbatory Cruelty is firing every federal employee on probationary status (which is up to two years for some positions) either at the start of their careers or after being promoted, firing more employees and gutting agencies, and then salting the earth so that any department or office or agency torched by DOGE can't come back. Putting aside the gutting stories of people losing jobs, losing health insurance, losing housing, and more and putting aside the sheer waste of funding that DOGE is leaving behind, with half-done projects canceled and employees trained and paid to move now fired, the government is going to bereft of expertise in shit that matters, like at NOAA or the IRS or the NIH or, fuck, everywhere, even at the Social Security Administration.

Look at this article on some of those whose jobs in the Interior Department were murdered by Musk and his DOGE shits. They fired the guy whose job was to take care of the rescue sled dogs at Denali National Park in Alaska (they didn't change the name of the park, so suck it, MAGA freaks). They fired a soil specialist in Oregon who worked with timber companies on the best way to manage the old growth forests. They fired the people who make sure that waste and fraud don't happen in the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That's one tiny corner of the massive loss of people we really need in our government to make sure everything doesn't turn into a dystopian wasteland, although that's probably the plan.

Where the fuck is the labor movement on this? Why aren't workers all over the country shutting shit down in solidarity with federal workers? Why are we letting them get away with degrading people who did nothing wrong but work, some of them their whole lives, for the United States? We fucking owe them our rage. This is a goddamn workers' rights issue, and union leaders have issued statements and then done dick after. That's how fucking scared everyone is now. And don't get me fucking started on the fecklessness of all but a handful of Democrats. Give me the fucking movement to follow. 

Our international standing shattered. Our government shattered. And the people we need fighting for us and leading us failing everywhere. We are fucked because we have lost shit that we will never get back. 

And it sucks. It fucking sucks. Because if we have elections again (and that's not a glib aside - it's a very real possibility that democracy is done in the United States except in a few states that have it for old time's sake) and Democrats win back the presidency and the Congress, the clean-up is going to be nearly impossible and just getting back to zero, to where things were torn apart, is going to take a massive, time-consuming effort, just in time for Republicans to once again convince the inattentive yahoos to elect another wrecking ball and it all falls apart again. Why do I predict that? Because that's what the fuck has happened since Bill Clinton cleaned up the mess left by Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr., and then you assholes elected George W. Bush to fuck it all up again. Then Obama saves our asses. Then Trump nearly kills us. Then Biden saves our asses again. And now Trump is back to finish the job.

None of this makes sense in any kind of rational way. Not the actions by the administration and not the range of reactions from Republicans, especially. Honestly, at this point, I'll believe any reason people come up with for what Trump/Musk are doing. You tell me that it's Trump's vengeance on a nation that betrayed him by not re-electing him in 2020, and I'll say that that sucks, but it makes sense. You can tell me that Trump's softening up the country for an invasion by Russia or that Russia has threatened to kill any Republicans who get in the way of Trump destroying the U.S. or that Musk's incel brigade has hacked into everyone's wifi and knows what porn they're into and they're using that to blackmail people, I'd be convinced. Or you could say that this is all a massive robbery by Musk so that he can either go to Mars or become the eternally-alive transhuman that he and all the ultra-rich nutzoids thank they need to be before the Earth devours itself (helped along by their greed), and I'll say that at least we fucking know what we're fighting. You can tell me it's all just so that Stephen Miller can masturbate to climax to the images of all the Africans who will die because USAID is gone, and I'll say that's crazy but it's something.  I've been calling all of them "evil," and I stand by that. But chaotic evil is the worst fucking kind. We're the bad guys now. 

I want to end this on an optimistic note. But words are getting more and more useless. We are seeing the beginnings of something, some embers of a potential backlash in the town halls where the constituents of Republican House members and senators are giving hell to their elected officials. Take advantage of that energy, Democrats. Get people out there. Make Republicans run the fuck out of office. Or make them change parties or go independent and join the Democrats to turn the House and maybe the Senate back to the people who might actually use the power that a co-equal branch of government is supposed to have. And, for fuck's sake, talk about all the people dying because of Republican actions. I mean, there are measles outbreaks around the country and it's killing children. Make that the beginning of the end for these vile fucks.

Christ, put AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Raskin, and a few others in charge. It's time to shoot tradition and decorum in the head to clear things out for the fight we should be deeply engaged in already. 

Judge Ana Reyes's Reaming of Trump Administration Lawyers Is About More Than Transgender Rights

In a DC courtroom this past week, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia held a hearing in the case of Talbott v. Trump, where a group of transgender members of the military are challenging President Donald Trump's January 25 executive order that bans anyone who is transgender from serving in the US military. The suit is named after Nicolas Talbott, a trans man who was able to fulfill his dream of joining the Army after President Joe Biden overturned Trump's 2017 order that overturned President Barack Obama's order allowing trans people to openly serve. Yeah, that's how whiplash fast this has all moved.

Reyes took no shit from the attorneys for the Trump administration and their assertions about trans people. From wrecking the idea that that sex only exists as an "immutable biological classification as either male or female" (as stated in Trump's other odious executive order trying to erase trans people from any kind of public existence) to treating the government's legal lackeys like children who need a spanking to absolutely embarrassing them on the very issue of the effect of transgender men and women on the military, Reyes reamed them out again and again with the spiky dildo of reality.

What Reyes did was cut through the bullshit and obfuscation that is the craft and trade of any lawyers for Trump. When one tried to assert that the ban was not, in fact, a ban, she asked him, "If we had President Trump here right now, and I said to him, ‘Is this a transgender ban?’ What do you think he would say?" The Justice Department lawyer, Jason Lynch, replied, "I have no idea, your honor." And Reyes more or less scoffed, "I do. He would say, ‘Of course it is.’ Because he calls it a transgender ban, because all the language in it is indicative." 

Reyes kept throwing Trump and his cretinous administration's lies and hyperbolic statements back at them. She read off a litany of things about the military that Trump claims are affected by treatment of gender dysphoria and proper pronoun usage and she asked if Lynch really believes it would affect military readiness. Then she cut off Lynch when he tried to respond, saying, "Because it doesn’t. We all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use. We have a military that is incompetent, if that is the case. Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn’t." And, goddamn, it's good to hear someone state, on the record, that at some point you have to fucking deal with what's real and not what some slimy power-mad fucknut says to keep the con going with the rubes. Hell, Reyes even got Lynch to admit that if he were in a foxhole with fellow soldiers during combat, "I doubt the gender identity would be a primary concern."

Perhaps the most beautiful moment was when Reyes asked Lynch to define what Trump meant by "radical gender ideology." He replied that he was "loath to speculate what the president had in mind when he signed this executive order." Reyes impaled him with her gavel when she said, "Well, it’s not like I picked you off the street and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Lynch, hey, let me ask you some questions about what the government thinks.’ You’re the government’s legal representative." Ouch.

At one point in the hearing on Tuesday, Reyes wondered aloud if the executive order met the legal definition of "animus," which is something done for no other reason than the hatred of a group of people. She said, "[The order] calls an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest, who lack integrity—people who have taken an oath to defend this country, people who have been under fire, people who have received medals for taking fire for this country. I want to know from the government whether that language expresses ‘animus.’ Does that express animus?" Lynch wouldn't answer so she cut him off with "This is a policy from the President of the United States affecting thousands of people… to call an entire group of people, lying dishonest people who are undisciplined, immodest, and have no integrity. How is that anything other than showing animus?" Lynch said he didn't know, which prompted Reyes to say, "You do have an answer. You just don’t want to give it."

Of course, the Justice Department made a complaint to the chief judge of the federal court in DC, calling for Reyes to be disciplined for making complete idiots out of the idiots who had to defend an idiotic policy. Of course, the complaint has got peak hypocrisy in it by saying that judges should always appear impartial, which is something no conservative should ever be allowed to say as long as Clarence Thomas's corrupt ass is still farting up the chambers of the Supreme Court.

As a defense of the rights of transgender Americans, Reyes was an absolute pit bull getting her teeth into the supple legs of the shitty men who dared to leap the fence into her yard. But just as important was Judge Reyes refusing to buy into the cruel fantasy world that Trump and most of the right in this country demand we all live in. There are immutable facts, to use the administration's word, about what sex actually is, about what actually affects the readiness of the military, about the honorable records of the plaintiffs who served their nation more than Trump and his garbage children ever have or ever could. And the same goes for so many other issues, like immigration and crime and election integrity and abortion and race and taxation and, really, every fucking thing that is being used to justify the insanity going on at the White House that's forced on the nation. 

At some point, Reyes is saying, it matters that we agree that reality is real, whether you like it or not, and it doesn't shift with whatever a cadre of evil motherfuckers want it to be. And real people live in reality and have to deal with its real effects. This shit matters, as Reyes asserted forcefully, because you can't just hate someone and then try to create a reason to justify harming the people you hate. Which is essentially the entire ethos of the MAGA movement.

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 giving those who voted for Trump a word 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 out 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.)