Democrats Have Stories to Tell (and Cory Booker Helped to Show How To Tell Them)

Mostly, what you've heard about Cory Booker's marathon floor speech in the Senate that started Monday evening and didn't end until over 25 hours later is that it was the longest speech in the history of the chamber and that he called out President Donald Trump and Republicans for their bullshit. But one of the key things that Booker did was make a case for the necessity of Democrats and Democratic policies by telling the stories of some of the people who have written to him about what they're going through. These include people who say that Medicaid saved their lives like a veteran who needs mental health treatment or the mother of an adult son with Down syndrome who gets all kinds of help from government programs that are on the chopping block. He read a letter from the head of an association of rural hospitals about how those will be decimated and have to shut down if Medicaid cuts go through. He read a letter from a researcher about the effects of gutting the NIH. So many stories. 

Booker was saying that Democrats have stories to tell. Republicans get out there and ghoulishly parade victims of violence committed by undocumented migrants and act like that's the only thing that the government should give a damn about. The most effective Democratic ad of the 2024 election cycle involved women who were hurt by the savage abortion laws. Tell the fucking stories. 

But there are so many other stories that Democrats need to tell, big stories about who we are as a country, a good many of them political, and they shouldn't shy away from getting that narrative out there.

Take, for instance, Trump and his fucknut cabal insisting that shit is being done because of some mandate by the American people due to his election. That's only part of the story, though. They elected Trump to be in charge of one area of the government. And while, yes, the House and Senate have majorities of deranged Republicans who climb over each other to demonstrate how they can lick Trump's taint better than other Republicans, it's not just Republicans who were elected. Democrats have a story to tell about how they were elected, too, and how those Democratic representatives and senators have a mandate to defend their constituents. They have a story to tell about the role of Congress and how Republicans are abdicating that role. And this is not to mention that 23 states, which have the majority of the population, are led by Democrats. They have mandates. The point is that it's fucking absurd for Trump's lackeys to constantly say that everyone, every elected official, every member of the media, every judge, hell, every American needs to knuckle under Trump's tiny thumb because he won an election. Yeah, that gives you a third of the levers of power, bitch. 

There are so many stories that Democrats can tell. They can talk to the country about how the United States is simply not in any emergencies that would require Trump to use emergency powers. They can tell the story of how the flow of migrants into the country has never reached a crisis stage that requires deporting people on visas for protesting. They tell the story about how the economy was, in fact, doing amazingly well and that the new tariffs (or just call them "sales taxes") are not a response to any-fucking-thing at all. They can tell stories of how diversity strengthens the country and that inclusion means special needs and disabled people being treated with the respect they deserve.  Yes, the left and center need their own media ecosystem to contrast with the firehose of flaming shit from the right's media meat grinder. But stop letting Republicans be the only people whose stories matter. Don't respond to their stories. Tell your own. Give people new stories. And tell the stories of migrants, the supposed "good ones" that Trump wasn't going to go after, and of small businesses and of families who have special needs kids, all of whom are being tossed in the Trump/Musk shitpile. 

And, fucking hell, give people hope by telling them the story about how we can return to normal, how it's not supposed to be like this. The way to do that is to tell the story about how Republicans fucked this country in two short months and that every day they are left in office is going to make it take longer and longer just to get back to where we were on January 19. Jesus, that was what the protests this Saturday were about: just let us fucking live our fucking lives like we were, not in whatever fucked up, cynical, nihilistic, destructive way is being forced on us for no fucking reason. 

I'm not saying Democrats haven't done any of this kind of storytelling. Kamala Harris did a lot of this kind of thing when campaigning, especially the idea of ending chaos. That was a start. Some, like AOC, are doing it now, and we need more. I keep saying to Democrats: stop playing on the Republicans' home field. Stop being the visiting team in your own country. 

Getting back to Cory Booker, I saw him at the Hands Off protest I went to in New Jersey. Unlike his reasonable and emotional marathon speech, this was Booker fired up, raging with a growl in his voice about how fucked things are. He was bringing us into the story he was telling. He said, "When they come after immigrants, when they come after our gay kids, when they come after our healthcare for those who are struggling, we all have to stand up and say, 'They’re coming after me. They’re coming after us.'"

Tell the fucking stories. Tell the stories that inspire. Tell the stories that enrage. Tell the stories that get us into the streets more and more. We have the American story, in all its fucked up horrors and glorious triumphs. Own it all and tell it all or there's not going to be any story left but the comforting lies and sinister hatred that we are bombarded with now.

(Note: Yes, you are very smart to point out that Booker votes to fund Israel's war on Palestine. Yes, that sucks. We still need him. You still need him. Suck it up and stop fucking acting like Democrats are the same as Republicans, you dumb fucks.)

Two Months into the Enshittification of America

Listen: The United States sent people without trial or even charges to a prison in El Salvador where they will be beaten, raped, and forced into slave labor. At least one of the over 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members is not a Venezuelan gang member and was in the US legally seeking asylum, which is something you'd think that you'd at least look into if you were sending someone to a prison in another country to be beaten, raped, and forced into slave labor. Our leaders are not only ignoring that, but they are asserting that they are all criminals and openly talking about sending American citizens to be beaten, raped, and enslaved. That's our country now.

Meanwhile, the United States is imprisoning people in awful conditions in detainment centers for overstaying their visas. The country is stripping people of student visas and green cards for merely supporting a protest movement and not committing a single crime. The country is arresting visitors for no reason and keeping them in prison cells with a single foil blanket on cement floors with fluorescent lights on for 24 hours a day for days or weeks before deporting them. The country is preventing foreigners who might have criticized the president from entering. Nations that were our closest allies are warning their residents that they may be subject to brutal treatment on a whim if they visit here. That's the United States right now. 

What needs to be emphasized again and again here is the pretext for these extreme and extremist actions is the utter and complete lie that there is a crime wave of murder and rape by undocumented immigrants in gangs. It's the whole bullshit justification for the idea of an "invasion" that would trigger the Alien Enemies Act. It's the reason that's given by Republicans that the country needs to go completely bugfuck insane over immigration and, apparently, tourism. The deluge of propaganda on the right has driven half the country insane with rage that is used as a justification for racism, isolationism, and abject dickishness, and it degrades every single one of us in this tragedy of a country during the stupidest of ages we're damned to live through.

The enshittification of the United States is moving at such a rapid pace that right now that it's impossible to list all the utterly depraved fuckery that's been done in a short period of time. When I sat down to write this, I wondered if I should focus on Columbia University turning bitch when threatened by Trump or the likely closing of the Department of Education or the dragging of a federal judge through the malicious MAGA mud puddle of death threats and impeachment threats or a hundred, a thousand other things. Truly, every day in the 2025 USA is like being forced to dangle your balls over a crocodile pit. It might happen right away or it might take a while, but at some point, a hungry croc is gonna snap onto your nutsack. It's just a matter of time. (Think of this as the less poetic version of "and then they came for me.")

But I'm concentrating on the savagery being done to all kinds of immigrants and tourists from other countries because it's repellent and awful and it certainly points to what they will do to Americans soon. And I'm not just talking about sending citizens to El Salvador's torture prison, the idea of which makes both Trump and El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, so giddy and hard that you know they get on FaceTime and watch each other jack off to the sounds of the screaming prisoners being reamed out by guards. 

I'm talking about how Americans will be treated if they cross this president and how they will be able to fuck with those of us who despise him and everything he does and are incoherently angry at the fact that somehow this orange-painted lump of Adderall, Diet Coke, and Big Macs is still alive. Fuck you, medical science, for this one thing. I pretty much promise you that they will get to us soon. If they don't fuck with us through our jobs (and I know they're gonna fuck with mine soon since I'm a liberal professor) or through the loss of government programs, they'll just come up with ways to discipline and punish us for our heresy against the MAGA madness.

I believe that, at some point soon, some American returning from visiting family in, say, Canada will be asked to open up his phone at the border by CBP. He can refuse, but he'll have his phone taken and forensically searched. And they will find texts or social media posts that are critical of the Trump administration for being such a cockhead about Canada. And they will say that he is not allowed to criticize the US when he's in another country or some invented bullshit. And they will take him into custody and send him to El Salvador or a detention facility. And when they've done it once, they will have no qualms at all about doing it a million times over while courts tell them again and again that they can't because it's illegal and unconstitutional and, instead of blatantly ignoring the courts, the Justice Department comes up with another appeal angle that delays shit and allows time to round up more of us.

Some of you reading this will say that that's ridiculous, that there's this or that law that will protect citizens, that I'm being hyperbolic for the sake of being hyperbolic. To which I can only say, calmly, without malice, "Then you haven’t been paying attention, you poor, naive motherfucker. Look at how far we've fallen in just two months. Now ask yourself where we'll be in six months. Or a year."

Oh, and spare me the cries of "That's our government, not us. Don't blame us." Until we are out there shutting shit down and using our bodies to block this government from doing such fuckery, it is us. That's the burden we all need to bear. It's all being done in our name. Every act by the government is done in our name. And that's why this shit is eating away at me. 

What gets that acid churning even more intensely is that so many of us warned the leaders on our side: You have to punish motherfuckers for fucking mothers or they'll just fuck more mothers and fuck them harder. They didn't arrest the bastards who created the torture regime and the habeas-free zone at Gitmo in the Bush administration. They slow-walked the prosecution of Donald Trump because of fear of seeming vengeful. Now that the bad guys got away with so very much, fuck it, they believe they're gonna get away with it again. And it's hard to blame them.

Schumer Fucked It All Up

Here's the thing that's bugged the shit out of me about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's betrayal of Democrats in supporting cloture on the continuing resolution (or, you know, the budget stopgap funding bill) on Friday: if, as he said, he was doing it out of some gut-level fear of what Elon Musk and his rotting meat puppet Donald Trump would do during a government shutdown, then why the fuck wasn't that the reasoning all along? 

Schumer said, "I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option" than passing the CR. The just-passed bill gives Trump and his cabal of assholes, cocks, cunts, and shit-for-brains six months to fuck things up, with total free rein from Congress. Meanwhile, we await the coming battle over whether or not court decisions and laws fucking matter to them anymore. So if Schumer has some secret fucking knowledge, some source that told him, "Oh, yeah, if you have a shutdown, Trump is gonna jack off in a corner while Musk whips his 20 year-old cryptodouches as they ass-rape every area of government. It'll be sticky and bloody and disturbing as fuck and then even stickier," then he should have told us that. Seriously, clue us in to what the fuck changed his mind between Thursday, when Schumer said they'd shitcan the CR, and Friday, when he caved, along with nine other Democrats. 

I'm not being glib or bullshitting here. After coordinating with the House on how Democrats were going to take a mighty stand against the extravagant criminality of the Trump White House, aided and abetted by Republicans who saw their jobs as giving Trump and Musk tongue baths, Schumer reverted to the same weak-kneed stance that Democrats always take in these situations. So I wanna know: What the fuck did he know? Did he have any hard evidence of some coming fuckery that he didn't happen to share with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries or the rest of his caucus in the Senate or all the American people? Why wasn't that in ads or in talking points repeated endlessly in the media? Show us the reality that only you, Senator Chuck motherfuckin' Schumer, can see. 

Right now, it's a goddamn mystery. But what it looks like is that Schumer started to shit himself over taking an honest-to-fuck political risk, one that might alienate a few big donors and fuck up his book tour. It could have been the start of a political war that would have inspired the base and gotten progressives energized and unified Democrats in the House and Senate. Instead, he fucked it all up. He torched his relationship with the House and ignited a growing call for his ouster as the Democratic leader in the Senate. Yeah, instead of going to war, Schumer decided to go on vacation and make money.

In folding, Schumer tried to portray himself as the grown up (as opposed to the performative acquiescence of people like John Fetterman and Kirsten Gillibrand), that he alone understands the consequences, that he'll take the blows that come with his sudden change of heart. And it's just the goddamned rantings of someone so out of touch with the electorate, so beholden to Wall Street, so enamored of the smell of his pickle farts that he can't comprehend the actual world we live in now. He's delusional and thinks that Republicans will work with Democrats again once Trump's approval ratings tank further. No, that's 2017 thinking. That's pre-Elon thinking. Every Republican has a billion-dollar primary threat hanging over their head. They're not gonna do shit that might get that crazy asshole to turn his Twitter army of incels and inbreds on them.

Meanwhile, the bill itself actually codifies big cuts to IRS enforcement and the National Institutes of Health. Yeah, that's right. Motherfuckers slipped that in. And it'll let Musk and his DOGE shits go bonkers on the destruction of the federal government. Yeah, that's right. It gives Trump more of a free hand to jack off on the Constitution. I'd bet there's fuckery buried in there that no one even noticed until we find out that everyone has to cut off a finger and send it to Stephen Miller or some such weird, sick shit.

While there are a number of Democrats who get it, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chris Murphy and Jasmine Crockett and Tina Smith and Jamie Raskin, there's a contingent of Democrats in leadership, like Schumer and Dick Durbin and even, most of the time, Jeffries, who don't understand the rules of the game we're in now. We are hungry for the fight. We want to fight. But we need to see our elected leaders fighting, too. Fucking hell, the American Federation of Government Employees, the biggest union of government workers, said that a shutdown was better than giving Musk and Trump the budget to keep dicking over workers. That's a blaring damn siren telling Democrats what they should have done. That's actual cover for doing something semi-radical.

I will say it again: the Republican Party is evil. Trump and Musk are evil. MAGA voters are evil. Once you understand that, once you take that to heart, you have clarity in how to act and react. You don't ever do anything that makes life easier for evil motherfuckers. You do anything to stop them. And if you don't or if you can't, you get the fuck out of the way so that the people who want to stop them can lead the way. 

15 Things to Ask Republicans If They're Okay With If Democrats Are Ever Allowed to Be in Control Again

Next time someone has a Republican in the hot seat for an interview, just for shits and giggles, see what they say when you ask them if they'd be okay with a potential Democratic administration doing any of the following by executive order:

1. Threatening to withhold disaster funds from any states that don't secure abortion rights or pass gun control laws.

2. Taking away federal money from any schools that allow a Turning Point USA chapter on campus.

3. Making it policy that no religious symbols of any kind can be displayed in federal offices and firing anyone who does so. 

4. Arresting and deporting any foreign students who support Israel and its genocidal war against Palestine.

5. Allowing George Soros to decide what federal employees should be fired, including those from departments that regulate his investments, and giving him access to the personal and financial records of every person, organization, and business in the United States.

6. Appointing Rachel Maddow as Secretary of Defense, Mehdi Hasan as Secretary of State, and Joy Reid as head of the FBI. 

7. Dismantling the Department of Homeland Security. [Okay, actually, this is a good idea.]

8. Firing the leadership of the military for being white men, with Secretary Maddow stating that racism gives white men an unfair benefit. 

9. Declaring that any entity receiving government funds must immediately hire trans people, and if they don't, they will not get any government contracts.

10. Immediately cutting all government funding for the oil and gas industry. [Yeah, I wish they'd do this.]

11. Granting amnesty to every undocumented person without a felony criminal record. [Again, this ought to be done.]

12. Allowing for tens of thousands more refugees to come to the United States. [Yep, this, too.]

13. Firing any employee who isn't fully vaccinated against anything they can be vaccinated for.

14. Halting funding of any conservative policy research through grants or other programs immediately on the basis that conservative ideology is automatically racist.

15. Shooting Elon Musk into space with no way for him to come back. 

This is a worthless exercise because Democrats would never do any of this, even the good stuff. Sure, some of it is a stupid and destructive way to run a country (although I'd argue that Rachel Maddow would make a far better Defense Secretary than drunk Nazi Pete Hegseth). But it's a thought experiment (and this is the shit I came up with in about ten minutes of thinking. I'm sure I'll add to it as things pop into my head or I get suggestions on the socials, like maybe "Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Obama.")

In other words, how the hell would you like it, conservative fucknuts, if the federal government decided to fuck up your world for no reason other than the president could do it and no one would stop him?

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 owner 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 be 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 fraction 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 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 elections 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 think 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.