A Case for Letting Trump Back on Twitter: I Know, But Listen...

I know, I know, I fucking know. I remember that tense feeling, somewhere between shit-yourself anxiety and stroke-inducing rage, of wondering what deliberate, fuck-up-your-day provocation Donald Trump had tweeted. Of course, if you're of a devolved or brain-damaged or cynical mindset, you looked forward to the Trump tweets like they were worms disgorged from Daddy Bird's beak into your hungry, squawking throats. And then the rest of us would get extra rage jolts from the idea that all the greedy-mouthed baby birds were loving this whole situation.

So I'm not here to tell you that Donald Trump should be allowed back on Twitter because of free speech or censorship or whatever. Twitter is not a government entity. Trump wasn't banned for being conservative. He was banned for being a lying dick. His First Amendment rights weren't violated. No one is passing a law saying he should be punished for being a lying dick. He's free to be a lying dick in lots of places, and, well, he totally is. So, no, I don't actually give a fuck about Trump being banned. I've been tossed from shitty bars for being less of a dick and I wasn't a whiny bitch about it. I just figured it was the bar owner's prerogative and went to the next bar.

But now we're hearing that potential future Twitter owner Elon Musk (motto: "I'm not a megalomaniacal sociopath with delusions of world domination. Society just needs to bend to my will.") would allow Trump back onto the social media platform that runs many of our lives. And former CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack "Totally not a supervillain beard" Dorsey agreed with Musk, calling the decision to ban Trump something that should be reversed because the situation has "evolved." It bears saying that the reason Trump was finally banned was because he had helped foment an insurrection against the United States, but, hey, that was over a year ago. No big. 

Already the debate is under way about whether a freed Trump twittering away will destroy the country or destroy Republicans. Jill Filipovic makes a ton of good points, as she usually does, in a CNN column about how Trump drove the news cycle, in part through his Twitter feed, during the 2016 election, encouraging his debased troll army of followers, leading to both his election and the 2021 insurrection. In Slate, Richard Hasen sees the corrosive effect of a tweeting Trump on election laws and voter rights, arguing that Twitter employees should raise hell to make sure he's not allowed to return. On the flip side, Democrats and others have said that Trump's tweets will remind everyone of what an abject cockscab he is and that will work for Democrats. 

Obviously, the line between giving air to Trump's embers of lies and bullshit and giving Trump enough rope is contingent on a lot of factors, none of which we can predict. This isn't 2015 or 2016. Our fascism cherry was popped when we were fist-fucked on January 6, 2021. We are far more aware about how we're lied to. And you can make the case that a muted Trump is far less dangerous than a Trump farting loudly into the mad echo chamber of right-wing media and salivating mainstream media who want some spark in the news that isn't Ukraine or abortion. 

Except I'm not so sure. Lemme take this in another direction. It's not just that Trump has a way of fucking himself when he's allowed to speak without restraint. It's that a loud Trump with a giant microphone shuts everyone else down. He also fucks everyone else because that's what a gelatinous shit blob running on batteries of ego and hatred would do.

Listen: Right now, without Trump on Twitter, we have a bunch of voices driving the crazy right-wing conversation, mostly little Trumps and Trumpettes and Trumpazoids. It frankly makes their batshit positions seem a great deal more popular than they are. In the wake of a marginalized Trump, only speaking to fringe outlets and Fox "news," making statements that get a scintilla of the coverage his tweets got, we have this Fellini-esque parade of freaks and frauds and fuckers and Boeberts and Gaetzes and Jordans and Greenes and more, all bleating variations of the MAGA sheep-credo: "Fuck you, give me your money."

I'm asserting two things here. The first is that Trump will be a triumphant snaketwat about returning to Twitter and all of MAGA world will be wetting itself with glee. And he will suck all the oxygen out of the MAGAverse, leaving his acolytes and ass lampreys gasping for air, even as they beg him for his blessings. The second is that his novelty factor is gonna wear off pretty fuckin' fast when everyone remembers, "Oh, fuck, that's right. We really hated hearing what that orange jagoff had to say." Voters are mostly dumb and selfish and have no sense of history, even recent history. There were Obama voters who turned to Trump. Then they turned against Trump. Now they're ready to go back to Trump because they forgot how much chaos he sowed. They're not watching what he says on One America or Newsmax. They don't give a fuck about his pathetic assistants tweeting out some statement from him. They're taking hits of Trump mixed with baking soda. But the pure shit jacked right into their veins is too much. Whatever satisfying jolt of warmth you get is immediately followed by vomiting, shitting, and regret. 

And maybe one more: over here in Sanityville, USA, we fucking hate Donald Trump. Whatever visceral hatred we have for Marjorie Taylor Greene or Ted Cruz or whoever, you can multiply that by degrees when it comes to Trump. You want to inspire Democrats to vote? Give them the visibility of the loathsome pumpkin-headed former president spewing noxious insults and brags, ejaculating his ego-spunk all over the internet again. Democrats will be begging to wreck that motherfucker one more time, even if through his proxy candidates. 

These kinds of things are all conjecture, no matter which side you land on. I know this could be totally wrong, as can any prediction of what happens with a mute or blaring Trump. But we can all agree on one thing: Fuck you, Elon Musk. Just fuck you in your stupid face. Go make a fuckin' battery or a train or some other bullshit thing you promised and never delivered.

Men Are Mostly Responsible for the End of Roe, So Fuck Up Their World, Too (Updated)

The Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a draft decision on which was leaked this week, centers on a law passed by the Mississippi legislature in 2018 and signed by its governor. That law banned all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It was struck down by lower courts because it patently violated what the Supreme Court allowed in the Roe v. Wade decision. And now we know that a majority in the Supreme Court is willing to shitcan Roe in order to drag the nation into becoming a Christian theocracy.

Here's the thing about the Mississippi legislature...well, lemme let a couple of graphs do the talking.

This is the gender breakdown for Mississippi House of Representatives: 

And here it is for the Mississippi Senate:

The big purple block is males. The little lavender one is females. Now, I'm no expert in reading graphs, but my rudimentary understanding of such complex pieces of information is "Holy fuck, there's a fuckton more men than women making laws in Mississippi." And, in fact, "fuckton" would likely be a term of art here because "Approximately 12.5% of members of the Mississippi House of Representatives and about 17.6% of members of the Mississippi Senate are women." If you're like me, you're assuming that Mississippi isn't a state that happens to be bereft of women. That assumption is correct. In fact, there are more women than men in Mississippi: 51.5% of people there call themselves "women."

You could look in many of the states where they have draconian anti-abortion laws or trigger laws that will toss abortion rights completely once the Roe decision is final and find a similar or close number of women in their legislatures. Alabama? 16.4% Oklahoma? 20.8% In no state with over 40% representation from women is the right to abortion threatened. But those places with roughly 65% or more men in the legislature? Shit has gone mad. Men have decided to fuck up the world for women. So, hey,  fuck their world up, too.

If I were a pro-choice legislator in one of those ludicrously savage states, I'd be proposing all kinds of fuckin' laws to bring the pain to men. For example, one Democrat in Florida,  Tina Scott Polsky, proposed an amendment to that state's 15-week abortion ban that would force the fathers-to-be to start paying child support at 15 weeks of pregnancy. Of course, that (and every) amendment failed to be voted into the final dickish law, including one that would have added back exceptions for pregnancies from rape, incest, and human trafficking. The gender breakdown of Florida is 51.1% women. Only 35% of the state legislature is women.

Despite the failure of Polsky's amendment, this is the kind of shit that Democrats should be introducing and emphasizing. The vast majority of women don't get pregnant without men involved (leaving out sperm donors, who are generally anonymous). So while working to get anti-abortion laws overturned or to get a majority in the state legislature or Congress to make abortion rights legal everywhere, use the bullshit against men. Come up with savage child support laws. For instance, in most states, a parent needs to be behind by a certain amount before wage garnishment and other collection methods are introduced. Lower that number to $0. That's right. You miss one payment and fuck you. Suspend your passport and your driving privileges. Take money from you wherever you get it. Taxes, lotteries, your grandma, whatever. And fucking jail you if you still don't pay up after one missed payment. Call it the "Men Make Babies, Too" Act.

Let's also add that if you're a rapist who impregnates a victim and you're in jail and you happen to live in one of the states where your family can sue to stop your victim from aborting your fucking baby, write a bill that makes that family responsible for the cost of the child from pregnancy until 18 years old. Call it "Love Your Son's Rape Baby" law or something. Then you can say, "Oh, you don't love your rapist son's rape baby enough to pay for it?"

Is that fair? Well, it's not fucking fair to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and force her to give birth and force her to face all the medical problems and bodily changes that accompany pregnancy and birth while your male ass goes about your life. So, yeah, it's more than fucking fair.

And it shouldn't need to be said, but I guess it does. While what they might go through with the end of Roe is infinitesimal compared to women's forced childbearing, in states that outlaw abortion, it's gonna make the lives of forced fathers miserable, too. Whether it's through child support laws or through changing their lives and their futures around a child they never wanted to have, men's lives in Alabama, in Idaho, in Texas, in Missouri are gonna get fucked up. 

But you know who's to blame for that? Mostly other goddamn men.

Update: As several of you have pointed out, this is a shitty idea because it will naturally hurt the working class and those in poverty, just like anti-choice laws do. Not to be a douche here, but it's kind of the point: meet their shitty, outlandish idea with a shitty, outlandish idea of our own. Let there be consequences across the board, not just on women. 

The "Grooming" Bullshit: They're Coming Up With Excuses to Murder Us

I have lived through a whole lot of rhetorical fuckery in my exhausting time dealing with the American right. I've seen us called every -ist that they found scary: Marxist, communist, socialist, anarchist (as if those are bad things). I've watched us be called demonic and anti-Christian and, heavens forbid, atheists (as if that's a bad thing). According to conservatives, we on the left hate the country, hate the troops, hate the flag, hate the police, love terrorists, love socialism (that one again), love taxes, love drugs, love perverse sex (as if that's a bad thing), and love killing babies. Specific Democrats have been baselessly accused of murder, and a couple of those specific ones are specifically Bill and Hillary Clinton. 

But we're now experiencing what I think is the first time that the idea that Democrats and the Left in general are, as a group, committing evil and that the idea has spread beyond the usual assortments of paranoid nutzoids, religious freaks, and barbaric cretins (or, you know, Fox "news" viewers). Right now, the idea that Democrats and anyone who doesn't believe Donald Trump really won in 2020 either fuck children or enable people who fuck children is being endorsed by elected Republicans. 

The attack is especially vicious against LGBTQ people, who, as a group, are being called either "pedophiles" or "groomers," meaning that they are getting kids ready to have sex with them (or, really weirdly, turning them transgender). This has gotten so ludicrous and insidious that the crazies at Moms for Liberty (motto: "The name is ironic if you're gay or trans") are going after the Trevor Project, an organization whose purpose is to prevent suicide and self-harm by young people struggling with gender and sexual identity. Why? Because the group's website allows teens to chat with counselors, but the chat function has a quick exit button that erases the chat and clears the browser history so that parents can't see that the kid they beat for being a sissy is asking for help. Yeah, that's right. Whose bullshit often drives LGTBQ kids to suicide? Dads and Moms, who wouldn't know liberty if it bit them in their evangelical, cruel asses. So, now the organization trying to keep kids alive is filled with "groomers," according to the assholes of the right.

And the definitions of "pedophilia" and "grooming" have expanded to include "discussing any relationship that is not straight and cisgender." That's not even a bit of hyperbole. It's exactly what creepy-ass lie gremlin Christopher Rufo is redefining it as, and that shit is being gobbled up on Fox "news. The supporters of the "Don't Say Gay" law in Florida (and now being passed or considered in other backwards ass states) say that it's an "anti-grooming" law. Since it prevents discussion of "sexual orientation or gender identity" in grades K-3 and then only "age-appropriate" discussion after, if that's "anti-grooming," then that means saying that gay people exist and are in relationships with other gay people qualifies as "grooming." 

By the way, yeah, you could say it also means heterosexual relationship discussion is banned, too, but, c'mon. Be fucking real here. Unless they wanted to test the law, no one is gonna complain if a female teacher tells her first-graders that she's got a husband. Everyone involved knows what the fuck the law is talking about, and pretending otherwise is just bullshit. No one accused Disney of grooming kids with all the straight kisses in its films and TV. It was just when the company said, "Hey, we're gonna have more characters with different gender and sexual identities in our shit" that it all of a sudden became time to go mousefuck crazy on them. 

I mean, look at this madness from The Federalist (motto: "Our first drafts are all scrawled in our own shit"). Bear in mind that this is an example of how Disney is "grooming" children: "In movies like 'Finding Dory' (2016) and 'Toy Story 4' (2019), same-sex couples can be seen in the background strolling down the street, sitting close to each other, and hugging a child." In other words, if you show children how the world exists in reality, you are grooming them to be gay or trans or get fucked by adults or I don't fucking know since this whole thing is oppressively dumb. 

Of course, there's an evangelical Christian element to this. As Sojourner magazine details, the modern version of the lie about homosexuality and pedophilia goes back to Anita Bryant's crusade against gays and lesbians in the 1970s. Fucking hell, this tweet from some shitheel conservative "Christian" could have been from the disgraced orange juice pusher herself: "While I think Florida’s bill could go much further, I’m glad it only applies to K-3rd graders, because the left’s hysterical reaction highlights how pedophilic & predatory their ideology is. They are truly outraged they can’t talk to 5 year olds about sex and gender switching." It's "pedophilic" to tell kids that it's okay for a woman to hold hands with a woman in public. That's not deranged and traumatizing at all.

This garbage isn't even subtle. They are completely open about it. If you decide to spelunk in the toilets of nutzoid right-wing message boards, they are pretty much calling for the deaths of Democrats because we're all groomers or groomer-enablers. Teachers are especially targeted if they happen to teach a book that doesn't condemn gay people. They see educators as the greatest threat because they are telling children that the world is not the hellscape of ass rape and forced castration that their parents make it out to be. And, yeah, that's how bizarre this has all gotten. Fuck, there's a thread attacking Kellogg's (I know, I know, fuck them) for putting out a cereal last year that celebrates all gender identities. 

What we have here is a mass hysteria-inducing election power play by some motherfuckers who don't understand what they are unleashing, along with ones who understand perfectly well that they are setting free the savages and want them to run rampant. I keep telling you that the end result of the Trumpist ideology is them killing us. Or making what we think illegal and rounding us up. Goddamn. Every LGBTQ public school teacher in a red or slightly purple state must be fucking terrified. 

The left better step up its game and soon. Shit, I guess we made a strategic mistake by not labeling the entire GOP a bunch of child-fuckers after one of their actual leaders was sent to prison for fucking a child. 

I'm So Sorry, But We Need to Talk About Climate Change

A couple of times a year, I write about the catastrofuck or the fuckpocalypse or the fuckageddon that will be caused by the effects of climate change. Sometimes it's about searing temperatures somewhere in the world, the effect of which will be eventually be to cause a refugee crisis in the neighborhood of a billion people and pretty much completely upend the way in which we all exist. And that's not even mentioning the floods, the fires, and the wildly fluctuating weather and its effects. We're screwed. But every single time I write a climate change post, without exception, it does some of the lowest numbers of anything I put out.

We know that's one reason why there is so little coverage of climate change even as its effects ram our asses every day: no one wants to see that we're fucked by something so massive that it would require the entire world to do something about it. Of course, you can make the news compelling if you want, but I guess that inevitable doom is a turn-off.

But we need to talk about climate change. And I'm really sorry. I know you'd rather the political shit that goes straight to the dopamine center of the brain and floods you orgasmic satisfaction. Trust me, I'd much rather be writing about Tucker Carlson's nut tanning or the ludicrous decision by a Trump-appointed idiot judge that overturned the mask mandate for public transportation. I'd love to spend my time mocking them and calling them horrid names. (I mean, to be fair, last Friday, I already spent a good bit of time on Tuckus.) 

So fucking listen for a few minutes here because we're fucked beyond fucked, fucked in a way where you look at everything going on and think, "Yeah, it's horrible that such suffering goes on, but, basically, we've got a few decades and we're all gonna be suffering horribly." I know, I know, I fucking know that you know this and you try to put it out of your heads, like we good Gen Xers did with the threat of nuclear annihilation back in the 1980s. But listen:

A couple of weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from the United Nations put out the third part of its assessment of the state of the climate crisis. This was the final piece of the assessment, and it focused on "Mitigation of Climate Change," as the title read. It was the section that was supposed to give us hope after the screaming alarms of the first two parts. Except this one screamed at us, too. And the scream was "What the fuck is wrong with you? We're gonna die and you're doing almost nothing to stop it!"

Without getting into the weeds of the findings (although feel free to read them), what we're facing is that while some mitigation of fossil fuel and other harmful emissions has slowed, it hasn't by nearly enough. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres put it, "Current climate pledges would (still) mean a 14% increase in emissions. And most major emitters are not taking the steps needed to fulfill even these inadequate promises." You got that? The shit that everyone said they're gonna do, including the Paris Climate Accords, isn't enough, even if everyone comes through, which, let's face it, if the barbaric Christian extremists in the GOP take over, the United States will be saying, "Suck our coal, fuckos" to the rest of the world. 

Hell, we don't even have to wait until then. Guterres also said, "Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness," madness that the United States is engaged in now. At least we're doing some spending on renewable energy, even if we need so much more. If Republicans get back into power, that pittance will disappear.

Remember when we hoped to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to prevent the worst catastrophic effects? Yeah, you can flush that down the shitter. The only way we're getting there is if we get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2060. "That would require using about 95% less coal, 60% less oil, and 45% less gas by 2050," and even then we'll need a fuck-ton of trees and technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. So the best we can hope for, really, is 2.2 degrees, which will murder the coral reefs and render large parts of the planet uninhabitable, killing masses of people and bringing about that migrant crisis I mentioned at the top. I'm pretty sure that it means shit will get miserable for the rest of us, too. 

You feeling terrible yet? Remembering why you don't read this kind of news because it seems so insurmountable, so existentially hopeless? Well, it's about to get worse because, see, according to many scientists, this is the watered-down version of the report, avoiding getting too real about the kinds of emissions-cutting that are needed because it will make rich countries sad. That's why when this report was released, a thousand climate scientists engaged in civil disobedience around the world over national governments' inaction; they blocked entrances, chained themselves to buildings, including the White House fence, and more, getting arrested in the process, all to make someone listen. It failed.

Most of us didn't hear a goddamn thing about the report or the protest. I get it. An article on the protest has been sitting in my tabs for the last week or more, reminding me to write about it. And I'm not saying that shit like the war in Ukraine or "Don't Say Gay" laws or gun violence in the United States aren't important. Absolutely they are, and, as awful as they are, we can comprehend those challenges in a way that we can't with the climate emergency. 

But we better figure this shit out, and by that I don't just mean eliminating fossil fuels. We better figure out a way to make everyone care, to attempt to unify over this, to act or die. 

Okay, that's it. You made it. Next up, I'm sure I'll write something about Ron DeSantis getting ass-fucked by a horny Goofy or some such shit. And climate change can go back to that threatening thrum in the background until hurricane season.

Tucker Carlson Has an Orgasm: A Fantasia

Tucker Carlson is checking the strength of his belts. He's putting them over the reinforced bar in the closet in his office and pulling with both hands, sometimes even seeing if he can lift himself off the ground. He knows from experience that it's not the belt's ability to hold his weight briefly but for two or three minutes. That's key to the whole thing. He thought he only bought the best, toughest leather, but last time, the belt snapped, and he ended up hitting the ground, pantsless, almost jamming a wingtip into his asshole in the process, which is not an unpleasant thing, just one you want some anticipation for. Luckily, he hadn't passed out, so when his assistant knocked on his door to ask if he was okay, he could gasp out, "Fine. Fine. Just doing some pull-ups." That's why he told the Fox News execs he needed the bar: because he's so into fitness that he might want to do pull-ups before he hits the set. Although, truth be told, they knew exactly what it was for because Sean Hannity has it. O'Reilly had one. It's almost as if it's a requirement in order to be a male host on Fox.

The last belt checks out. It'll work great, Tucker Carlson thinks, and it feels comfortable enough around his neck. Now it's time to get everything ready. He's got footage from Bucha, Ukraine, all unedited and unblurred, every detail of every wound, every bleeding orifice, every body part visible in HD, filmed by locals who they pay on the cheap to risk their lives to get news out about the reality of the war in their country, not realizing that at least one nightly "news" show host finds it all kind of, for lack of a better word or, indeed, any word at all to adequately convey the visceral feelings at play here, hot.

He turns the big screen mounted on the wall so that it faces the closet. He does a bump of Adderall off his desk, which focuses him on the task ahead. Tucker Carlson pulls off his pants and carefully places them over the back of a chair. He takes off his underwear and sniffs them, inhaling his own ball sweat and fart smell deeply. Then he folds them and puts them on the seat of chair. He takes out a Tiffany box from his desk and opens it, revealing a butt plug with Vladimir Putin's face on it. Tucker Carlson removes it, tells it, "You're not some woke beta cuck," and then lubes it up before shoving it into his sphincter, grunting as he feels Putin's love nuzzle his prostate.

One side of the belt goes around his neck. The other goes around the bar in the closet door frame. He has a stool with hand cream and a remote for the video player. Tucker Carlson already has an erection in anticipation. Hands moisturized, belt tightened just right, he presses "Play" and starts to touch himself.

Tucker Carlson watches the scenes of destruction, ruin, and massacre as he jacks off slowly at first. He doesn't want this to end too soon as more images appear: mass graves, bodies in the streets, dead children, torture victims with their hand tied behind their backs, the torn-up corpse pieces after a missile attack. He's jacking off faster now, leaning forward to start to cut off his breathing, with video of men crying over their murdered families, with the half nude bodies of women who were raped before being killed. "Oh, yeah," Tucker Carlson thinks, "that's it. That's it. That's strength. That's leadership." And, at last, he bends his knees and lifts off the ground, oxygen deprivation reaching a critical moment, and he ejaculates, and, yes, it's as divine as it always is.

He wants to cry out but is unable to, and in a split second, Tucker Carlson realizes what is happening, that he is about to pass out and that if he does, he will surely strangle himself dead, hanging himself. In that heartbeat span of time, just before his lights go out for good, Tucker Carlson sees himself being discovered, and he knows that enough people despise him at Fox that they would leak how he died, and everyone will cackle at the Prince of Frozen Dinners killing himself while wanking to the ruined asses and genitals of war crime victims, even if, truly, that is basically what Fox News does every day. 

He hopes that all those people who follow his every word, who think he's the top of the heap of modern white masculinity, the ubermensch to their worshipful aspirations, will believe his death is a fake, a false flag, something set up by the Deep State and Antifa to ruin him, more cancel culture, more censorship, and not, as it so obviously would be, just an idiot asshole who accidentally offed himself with his limp dick in his hand.

But then he finds some strength and he's able to stand up straight. He quickly loosens the belt around his neck and grabs a breath, the fog dissipating. That's better. He laughs at himself, shaking his head. No need to panic. He knows that people like him are never the ones who die doing this kind of thing or, really, anything. Yes, he nods, taking a wet wipe to clean his jizz off the faux wood floor, he'll always be fine. He has his new special on how men are being neutered by this degraded socialist AOC-run country. It's an important new piece of propaganda. He had to live to see it broadcast.

Tucker Carlson is about to pull Putin out of his ass when he decides, "No, leave him in there." He wants that guiding spirit as he gets ready to do his show. What's the topic tonight? CRT? Woke professors? Biden is essentially a zombie? Dystopian cities? Cops being mistreated? Billionaires being attacked? Who are the powerful people that he can give aid and comfort to? He's there for them, as he always has been and always will be. 

Pants back on now, Tucker Carlson does another bump of Addy and sends an email to the news division: "I need videos of some of those beheaded bodies." He smirks. He's ready to go again. 

(Note: I'm not saying that Tucker Carlson likes to wear a Putin butt plug and masturbate while choking himself as he watches videos of atrocities from Ukraine. I'm just asking questions.)

Democrats Should Go on the Offensive By Celebrating Accomplishments

A couple of things really stick in my craw from the last couple of years, and those are that we've been denied celebrating as a nation some pretty remarkable accomplishments. And while that denial is led by Republicans, quick to stomp any hints of optimism or hope like they're cockroaches, Democrats should have and still can embrace amazing things and turn it into a story that the nation is not failing. Rather the opposite. It offers a counter-narrative to Republican gloom, doom, and pedophilia. It massages the part of the lizard brain that is often used to getting dopamine hits of hate and rage. 

I mean, everything's not even in the neighborhood of perfect, but, c'mon, look at this:

1. I've said this before, but it deserves repeating: The 2020 election was a miracle, one that should give us national pride. In the midst of a global pandemic, at a point when cases were surging, despite all kinds of obstacles, the 2020 election went amazingly smoothly for the vast majority of Americans (that is, the ones who weren't forced to spend hours in line because of state incompetence or hostility to voting). By Donald Trump's own Department of Homeland Security's assessment, it was "the most secure in American history," with more people voting and no increase in the rejection of ballots despite the surge in mail-in voting. 

2. The United States played a big role in getting a vaccine against Covid-19 done in record time, which is the only reason we can even pretend that the pandemic is over (which it definitely is not). And I'm not just talking about the creation of the vaccine. The rollout of the vaccination program has been astonishing, with 563 million shots given in the United States in about 15 months, 11.3 billion shots around the world. Even acknowledging the need to do more in Africa and elsewhere and the intransigence of anti-vaxxers, that's a stunning pace. 

3. And after the American economy was wrecked by Covid, the unemployment rate is now down to 3.6%, with wages rising more quickly than they had been. There are always caveats: wages should be higher, and inflation due to mostly worldwide factors makes those wage gains worth less. But people are working, and they are getting hired at rates we simply haven't seen in decades. We've gotten back 93% of the jobs lost in the pandemic shutdown. That's an incredible turnaround.

All three of these accomplishments are objectively positive. They are inarguably good. There is simply no way to argue that a well-run election, a vaccine to stop a virus, and more jobs are bad. Sure, if you're a terrible person, you can say that higher wages affect corporate bottom lines, but for most of us, it's awesome and meaningful. If you spin these as bad, you are actually degrading accomplishments that cross party lines. The federal election was run by a Republican administration, and most of the state elections were also run by Republicans. The vaccine was developed with support from a Republican administration. 

But you could pretty successfully argue that the first one, the successful election, is what led to the successful distribution of the Covid vaccine and the quick pace of the economic recovery. Because Democrats took over the running of the federal government, allowing for competent people to be in charge, we not only survived the pandemic, but we're thriving after it.  

The only way Republicans and their allied media could tear these things down is to outright lie about them. Despite what Republicans say, there wasn't widespread voter or election fraud or misconduct. The vaccine prevents hospitalization and death and isn't experimental. And the economy is doing great and isn't remotely a communist nightmare. And the lies worked. They made a large portion of the United States hate these accomplishments by creating a narrative about insidious incompetence, putting Democrats on the defensive, attempting to respond to the GOP narrative, which drowned out the successes.

I've talked for years about Democrats creating a counternarrative to the Republicans' insistence that we're living through a Soviet-era hellscape whenever Democrats are in charge. The narrative is there for the taking. 

Instead of being on the defensive, how about cheering on that we did this. Holy crap. How amazing are we? Don't you wanna feel good about things? Isn't it just incredible what this country can do when it tries? And the implication would be that if you don't think these things are good, you hate this country. I mean, it's one thing to be angry when the country fails and does harm, which it does all the time. It's entirely, willfully delusional to feel that way about things that are unalloyed good. I'm not saying there isn't a ton more work to do, but we're allowed to have a sense of having accomplished something.

I'm not even getting into things that could cause any dissent. We should be celebrating the first Black woman being confirmed to the Supreme Court. We should celebrate teachers who have worked so hard to get kids through the pandemic under ridiculous conditions. And there was so much more to celebrate, but conservatives decided to divide us further and further through lying and creating controversies where none exist.

Yes, of course, Democrats put out ads that talk about this stuff. Yes, of course, the mainstream media gives time and fuel to Republican lies with a both-sides obsession that makes those lies seem the equivalent of facts. And, yes, of course, none of this will break through the haze of Trumpist fanaticism that drives the right. 

But you want to inspire your own people to get out to vote. And you want to inspire non-voters to come and join in democracy.

If I were advising Democrats, I'd tell them to keep hitting on those three things up there. I'd tell them to pose a simple question to Republicans: Why don't you want to celebrate these accomplishments? Why don't you like seeing your country succeed? That's the message for Democrats: Despite what the right tells you, you can feel good. You've been through enough despair. You don't need to feel terrible all the time. We know it's been rough, and for many of you it's still rough. But we can still do great things. We can still do them, and it's okay to feel okay. 

The Only Thing Disney Is Grooming Your Kids for Is to Buy More Disney Shit

Of all the weird shit I've seen from the nutzoid Christian right (which, to be fair, is really just "the right"), the attacks on the Walt Disney Company over their criticism of Florida's "Fuck You for Being Gay or Trans" bill and the state's slimy, squamous governor, Ron DeSantis, as well as its declarations that its going to be friendlier to LGBTQ kids and adults in its parks and media, is some of the weirdest. I mean, it's conservatives have bitched about pop culture for a long time, but this is just fucking weird. 

It's not like Disney World is gonna feature "Baloo's Buggering Boat" ride or "Ariel's Muff-Diving Adventure" or "Goofy's Groomin' Gang" show. What Disney did was say that they would work to repeal the cruel law after they were criticized for not speaking out before its passage. It's essentially what every single corporation does all the time with legislation. Oil companies try to overturn laws that want to do some small thing about climate change, which, you know, is way, way more important than whether or not a teacher tells his 1st graders about happy gay penguins.

The assholes calling on "woke" Disney to be "canceled" are the usual array of motherfuckers. Fox "news" has gone to threat level 1619 on this bullshit, mentioning the company hundreds of time during the past week. And conservative cockfleas are looking for anything that can be perceived as dirt. For instance, at a Disney corporate Zoom meeting that was recorded and leaked to sentient scum skimmer Christopher Rufo (who caused the whole critical race theory lie to blow up our 2021), Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content, said, "I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually. One transgender child and one pansexual child, and also as a leader," which is nice and honest and also means she's evil and satanic and should probably have child services called on her or some such shit, except she's fortunate enough to live in California, which is notably sane.

She said she wanted the company to put out entertainment featuring "underrepresented" groups and "We have many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories, and yet we don’t have enough leads, and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters." The horror. That a trans woman might actually just be a hero without it being about the fact that she's a trans woman. Oh, no. The terrifying normalization of it all.

And if you wanna know how stupid this goes, they're also upset that Disney parks will no longer use gendered language in its announcements. No more "ladies and gentlemen" or "boys and girls." Instead, announcements will call people "friends" or "guests." To pretend that that's a big deal is to have no sense of proportion in your life. "Motherfucker," I'd say to someone who was angry about that, "don't you have bills to pay or a job to go to or something else to do?"

That's not even getting into all the religious shit underpinning this whole retro attitude towards LGBTQ people. "God’s gift of 'imagination' has been deeply corrupted in this case," writes some fucker for the Family Research Council (motto: "Grooming kids for Jesus's loving arms").

Why does this matter? Why waste our time talking about and thinking about this? I mean, after all, Disney is an over-huge megacorporation that tailors its shit to stay on the good side of vile governments in China and elsewhere. It's not some anodyne movie company forcing more Star Wars down our throats. It regularly dicks over employees. It's too fucking big and should be broken up. It will be fine no matter how many backwards ass yahoos decide to start watching Ben Shapiro's bullshit kids programming that the Daily Wire claims it's going to create with $100 million. In many ways, Disney is everything wrong with capitalism, and I don't say that just because a dear friend lost his job with Marvel after it was gobbled up by Disney, although that's certainly part of it. So why not just let Disney take its lumps and fuck them for being in bed with the fuck ghouls of the right in the first place?

Because it's fucked up. It's fucked up because if you oppose the very idea of "cancel culture," then you should oppose this attempt to tear down Disney (which will fail because see above paragraph) because what the fuck else is this but very real cancellation? Of course, those who screech about cancel culture are really just mad they can't use racist and sexist and homophobic and ableist language without consequences. So fuck anyone who wants to do the opposite.

Mostly, though, this is a very real battle in the Culture War. As I said above, right now, we're going through a whole lot of fearmongering over LGBTQ educators in ways that I really had hoped we were past. Instead, we're seeing a resurgence in the kinds of lies that are going to get people fucking killed: gay teachers are grooming children when they teach about Heather and her two mommies. In other words, those teachers want to fuck your kids and they're teaching them about queer shit in order to make them willing to be fucked. It's some QAnon-adjacent madness, the kind of unreal hyperbole we saw at the confirmation hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson, but it's spreading and it's going to silence LGBTQ teachers, if not drive them out of some states. It's also about stigmatizing transgender kids and their families, destroying them or banishing them. They are going all the way back to the really old days, with gays and lesbians seen as actively "recruiting" kids and molesting them. Like I said, it's fucked up. This retrenchment of homo- and transphobia in this violent age is fucking frightening. 

And in a frightening Culture War, you want a big fucking culture warrior on your side. So, yeah, I want Disney to fucking get active here and support some politicians and destroy others. I want it to threaten to take its entire fucking operation to another state. Florida was a shitty backwater state with NASA, Miami, and beaches before Disney arrived. In order to force Disney to back down, DeSantis is already threatening to take away Disney's self-government status, which it absolutely should never have had, but if it's enough to piss off the giant mouse, then let's go. Sometimes when you're the biggest motherfucker in the room, you gotta act like you are. Wreck these pricks and then Disney can get back to grooming kids to be good consumers of Disney products.

Of course, there is a very simple alternative: if conservatives want to ban corporate money from politics,  then let's fuckin' well get it done.