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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Part 1 is here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Make It Through the Next Four Years, Stop Hoping Someone Saves Us

Even though I've bailed on Uncle Elroy's Phantasmagorical Hellscape of Incel Nazis and Rapey Transphobes, I keep my ear to the social media wall over on BlueSky and Threads. And one thing that's bubbled up lately amid the shitting-oneself despair about the incoming Trump administration is a vague sense of hope because of the not really well-named "MAGA Civil War" over visas for foreign workers. It's a battle between the racist capitalists and racist isolationists over who is the better racist, the fight America deserves. Some are wondering if this will hinder Trump's agenda, which is really just "cause as much chaos to take as much money as possible until we die or are chased out of office."

Now, I'm not saying it's not well-named because we haven't gotten any fields covered with the corpses of MAGA foot soldiers, however gratifying that may be. I'm saying that because it doesn't matter what the MAGA freaks outside the administration want. Trump won. It's over. There is no war to be fought on any meaningful level until the 2026 midterms. Yes, everyone can position themselves in anticipation, but nothing anyone says will stop Trump from getting into office. But we're human, and we like to hope. We like to think that Trump will die in prison. We liked to think that Bob Mueller or Jack Smith or Kamala Harris would save us. We really wanna see Democrats throw a 14th Amendment Hail Mary pass. Perhaps we even need to think and believe that in order to keep going. I've said recently that we need to fight lost causes for that very reason. Today's lost cause can become tomorrow's victory.

I wanna offer an alternative idea here: Stop hoping for that miracle. That doesn't mean don't have a goal or a dream or whatever. But stop hoping that some magical deus ex machina is going to swing in and wave a stick and make it all go away. Stop hoping that past precedent shows us the future, as in "Well, in 1975, this happened so, obviously, it will happen to Trump." Stop hoping that Democrats in Congress will be able to slow down Trump's rolling meat grinder from leaving minced bits of the Constitution and tradition and everything else in the broken streets of America. Stop hoping that Trump and the Republicans will be a clusterfuck of dysfunction. Stop hoping that the courts will do something to mitigate the wreckage. When you stop hoping, you can clear your head and get to fucking work.

What's coming is a fucking nightmare. That's how I'm starting 2025. It's going to suck in ways that we can't even anticipate it sucking. I said in 2016 and I'll say now: It will be worse than you can imagine. And that's because I think that everything we're seeing shows that not only are the guardrails off, but that no one will be able to even find guardrails.

Trump is going to wield like a bloodstained hammer the Supreme Court's decision that anything the president does in his "official" duties is totally cool, even if it's something we might quaintly call a "crime." I believe wholeheartedly that when the courts step in to put a stop to whatever fuckery is afoot, Trump will ignore them and use the SCOTUS free pass as justification. That's not even to mention that it's likely that if a case makes it to the Supreme Court itself, the savage dicks in the majority will side with Trump.

And you can hope for process and law to save us here, but that's foolish, too. You can say, as some have, that the SCOTUS only gave Trump immunity, not everyone else who would carry out whatever criming he wants to do. So? Trump can pardon them from any federal charges. Hell, since preemptive pardons are all the rage, he can do that before they start to drag people out of their houses and lock them up without any due process. And if you think that due process is going to be followed, if you think that a "massive immigration court backlog" will slow them down, well, what do you think the camps will be for? To hold migrants until whatever kangaroo justice system is set up tosses them out. As for the states stepping in to somehow outmaneuver a Department of Homeland Security, Trump's "border czar" (one of many completely made-up roles Trump's created) said, "Either you help us or get the hell out of the way, because ICE is going to do their job." That promises a confrontation which might involve the military. Like I said, worse than you can imagine.

I'm not saying you should despair. I'm saying you should be ready for despair, be ready for what might happen, and use that shit to figure out where your energy for fighting can be used, whatever your income or general ability levels are. Start local. I joke around about there not being any future elections, but I don't think that's true, if only because states run them. Making elections secure from the ways Trump and the GOP can fuck with them is one of the most important things we can do, and that means organizing to toss out the assholes in your state legislatures who are making voting harder for some groups. Join organizations that are advocating for more state constitutional amendments on abortion rights. Get decent school board members elected. And find and support progressive media outlets because CNN and the rest of corporate media can get fucked. If things go full fascist at the federal level, any bulwark will at least slow shit down.

Right after the election, I texted a buddy, "I'm so exhausted by hoping." Hoping set me up too often for the almost inevitable failure of hope to win. But I'm never too tired to kick some ass. Too drunk, maybe. But never too tired. Fuck the new year. At best, it'll be a wash. But let's set shit up for the years beyond. 

(Note: Because caveats are necessary in this oversensitive age, I'm not saying you can't hope and work. I'm saying you can work better without the way I'm defining "hope" here. It's like if you get into an argument with your partner and think, "Well, when this is over, I know we'll have hot sex." That's gonna color how you argue, and you will find your unfucked ass out on the sidewalk.)

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