Because of Florida's Stop WOKE Act, You Couldn't Teach Much of Florida's African American Education Standards

It should have been so fucking easy for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is always angry that a non-white person might be happy and wondering how he can ruin that. When he was asked about the social studies standards released by the Florida Department of Education last week, in particular the one that read that "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit," he could have just simply said, "I haven't had a chance to look that over." Or "I'm not an expert on that. You'll have to ask the DOE." Boom. Done. Controversy avoided.

But if you're a motherfucker, and Ron DeSantis has never met a mother that he didn't vigorously fuck, you do what he did. You double the fuck down. As DeSantis whitesplained, "They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life." Imagine someone who was whipped regularly, whose wife was raped, whose children were sold off. Now imagine them being grateful that they were taught to make horseshoes. It's ludicrous, and DeSantis got all the bullshit piled on him that he deserved, including a spanking from Vice President Kamala Harris and the NAACP.

Let's get even clearer here. Yeah, slaves were taught skills. That's because that way the plantation or wherever they were being held didn't need to hire anyone and, you know, pay them to sew clothes or make leg irons. As far as "later in life," there were generations upon generations of slaves who were taught things that mattered to no one except their owners. "Later in life" just meant "dying a slave" until 1865. And one other thing ought to be mentioned here. A slave who knew how to do more than field work was more valuable when they were sold. Yeah, in fact, those "skills" were advertised. 

You see that ad? Being a carpenter, brick maker, or tanner got your owner a better price for you. That's how the fucking skills were "parlayed" for almost the entirety of the savage history of slavery in this damned country.

Pointing out this deeply fucked up standard upset some on the right. According to them, we were picking out one thing from a long, comprehensive document. Attacking Vice President Harris, the National Review (motto: "As white and fragile as Buckley's bones") said, "If you are able to read [the standards document] and conclude that the single reference to slaves developing skills (which I’ve bolded) is indicative of the narrative direction of the course, rather than a tiny (and correct) part of it, then you are beyond saving and you deserve to live your life as an ignoramus." Yeah, but if I give a speech where I talk about how the races need to unify and then I drop the n-word in the middle of it, why the fuck should anyone care about the rest of what I said?

To be fair, the standards on slavery and on African American history (Florida is one of only 14 states that require its teaching) do cover a lot of ground. But here's where the rub comes, because there's always a fucking rub when it comes to DeSantis and Florida and fucking conservatives. 

See, Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act in 2022, which is pretty clear about how things are supposed to be taught. For instance, you can't teach in a way that "a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex." The way that's phrased makes it obvious that it's talking about white people. You can't make white people sad. It's ostensibly against things the authors of the bill don't understand, like critical race theory, but, basically, it's about history making white people think, "Man, I feel like shit that my ancestors fucked people over so horrifically. Maybe we should do something about that." Fuck that feeling, man. 

Now, I'm not sure how you're supposed to learn some of the things in the standards, like the Underground Railroad, slave revolts, and more, without blaming, you know, the whites who did all this to Black people. Even moreso, I don't know how you can teach that without someone feeling guilt or anguish. Jesus, I remember when I watched Roots when I was a kid. I was fucking enraged at white people and I'm really goddamn white. History should make you feel shitty. That's what makes you want to do better.

But it gets even more absurd. See, the standards list people that it would be good for students to learn about. One standard is to "Identify African Americans who demonstrated civic service," and it lists people like Colin Powell or Hiram Revels, who was a senator during Reconstruction. Also on that list is Carter G. Woodson. And that's where shit gets weird and tricky. 

See, Woodson was a historian and educator who believed that, as an NAACP biography says, "the white-dominated historical profession had little interest in Black history. He saw African-American contributions 'overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.'" In 1933, he published The Mis-Education of the Negro, a book of his articles and speeches where he talked about how education reaffirmed white supremacy. As Woodson put it, the white-based education system had succeeded in cowing African Americans: "They usually say the races here are getting along amicably now, and we do not want these peaceful relationships disturbed by teaching of new political thought. What they mean to say with respect to the peaceful relation of the races, then, is that the Negroes have been terrorized to the extent that they are afraid even to discuss political matters publicly." 

Woodson saw it, man. He saw how this shit worked: "If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself." He called for the study of Black history, in the United States and elsewhere, which is one reason he started the movement for what became Black History Month, which is probably why he's on that list up there. 

But what Woodson really did was to provide a foundation for critical race theory in education. That's right. The Florida Department of Education wants students to learn about the guy who started CRT, which is prohibited by the Stop WOKE Act. 

That's how stupid this shit is. It's not only racist. It's not only anti-historical. It's not only hysterical. It's fucking farcical. 

And that should very much cause guilt, anguish, and psychological distress.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's District Owes a Lot to the New Deal and the Great Society (profanity free for the kids)

(If you want a rude version of this, check out my latest video for the Political Voices Network.)

Not to educatorsplain things to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the enthusiastic genital displayer from Georgia's 14th District, but during her speech last weekend at one of those endless streams of conservative conferences that seem to be as frequent as a new Marvel thing, she went off, oddly, on how Joe Biden's policies were helping people. "Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete," she said. Unsurprisingly, Biden's campaign for president used Greene's words approvingly, flipping the context to how, yeah, Biden's done some good things for the country and thanks, Marj. 

But there's another aspect to Greene's ignorance that deserves more attention. She very specifically went after Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. She sneered, "The Great Society were [sic] big government programs for education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare" and more things. It should benoted that the fact that what she's listing are considered bad things by the gathered future fascists of America points to an emptiness in what we might quaintly call their "souls." 

The thing is that both the New Deal and the Great Society (including the War on Poverty) were very much targeting regions like Appalachia, part of which is in northwest Georgia, which is where Greene's district is. The New Deal created the Tennessee Valley Authority, and northern Georgia benefited with two hydroelectric dams that still provide power to several counties in the 14th. In fact, the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 was a major factor in the modernization of northwest Georgia and the electric cooperatives created by the law are still keeping the lights on there. 

Unlike the contemptuous Greene, FDR actually had a fondness for rural Georgia. He had what he called his summer White House in Warm Springs, which is in west-central Georgia, a couple of counties down from what is now the 14th District. Roosevelt found that the waters of the springs gave him relief from the pain of polio, and he got to know the farmers and workers in the state, learning about the rampant poverty there. There's no need to go through everything that the New Deal did for Georgia, with schools, subsidies to farmers, jobs, and housing, all while the short-sighted Gov. Eugene Talmadge was trying to hinder the programs, especially the ones that helped Black people.

But it's worth pointing out that in Greene's district alone, Fort Mountain State Park was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The city halls in Dalton and Cedartown, as well as the Post Office in Summerville, all came from New Deal money and effort. (By the way, even though it's out of her district, it's worth noting that the University of Georgia, where Greene went to college, was pretty much kept alive during the Depression by the millions invested in new buildings and programs through the New Deal.)

And the Great Society? Over 100,000 people in the district are on Medicare or Medicaid (with tens of thousands more eligible). The Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 led to massive economic development. The poverty rate in that area of Georgia dropped by over half, from 38.5% of people in 1960 to 16.9% in 1970. And Greene supposedly cares about fetuses since she is rabidly anti-choice. So why would she want to tear down a program that helped fetuses stay alive.  In 1960, the infant mortality rate in northwest Georgia was 29.1 deaths per thousand. In 1975? 16.4. Nearly 50% fewer babies were dying because of the Great Society. Seems like a really pro-life thing, no?

In other words, Greene's district pretty much simply exists because of two Democratic presidents. She should be on her knees every day, thanking FDR and LBJ, and she should be begging Joe Biden to continue helping the 14th as much as the other two leaders did. But, no, it's just easier to pretend that anything the government does is evil. 

(If you want the uncensored version of the video, subscribe to my Patreon.)

One Reason for a Speedy Trial for Trump: We Need to Know If He's Guilty Before Voting in 2024

Let us say, and why not, that you have a child, a son, at a local day care. Every morning you drop him off at, hell, let's call it "Little Tykes' Awesome School." You trust that they will make sure nothing bad happens to your son, and you've heard nothing but good things about LTAS. But then one day, you see something on your parents' group chat: one of the teachers has been arrested. You try to tell yourself that it could be any number of things that a teacher has been arrested for, but you're still freaking out. Then it turns out that it's the owner of LTAS who's been arrested. Jeremy Tykes was taken into custody after a parent told police that her daughter said...oh, shit. No, no, this is all rumor, you say. Then you get a link to a news story which says that there are video recordings of Tykes walking little girls into his office. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck. You tell your boss you gotta go, jump in your car, and go get your son. After you pick him up and get him home, in a safe place, with safe snacks, you ask him if anything happened to him. No, your son says, nothing happened but he played with his friends and wants to watch TV. 

After his arrest and arraignment, where he actually gets bond for some reason you can't figure out, Tykes says he wants his trial delayed while he looks for work. He hopes to get another job running a day care or at least working for one. Really, he wants to run the one that he had run already. It's what he's passionate about, he says. Besides, he says through his lawyer, he's totally innocent, and there are no videos of him doing anything to any of the kids, and if some of them say he did something terrible, well, those kids were coached because some of his co-workers were out to get him. 

Listen, you know that false allegations have been made in these situations. You know there have been witch hunts that have destroyed careers. You know that, in theory, everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court. You know all that, and you believe in it. But, still, you fucking well know that that motherfucker shouldn't be anywhere near kids until his innocence is established. Right? And that trial better happen really fucking fast before he gets another day care job and perhaps fucks up the lives of some more children.

See, one thing I keep coming back to with the potential delays in the trial of Donald Trump over his weird use and abuse of classified documents is that we better fucking establish his guilt or innocence before he's allowed near classified documents again. I mean, in seeking an indefinite delay, ideally until after the 2024 election, Trump's lawyers write, "While the Government appears to favor an expedited (and therefore cursory) approach to this case, it cannot point to any exigency or urgency requiring a rapid adjudication.  There is no ongoing threat to national security interests nor any concern regarding continued criminal activity."

And then, in a part that sounds like it was dictated by Trump and ordered to be included, they go on, "President Trump is running for President of the United States and is currently the likely Republican Party nominee.  This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on November 5, 2024...[Preparing for trial] requires significant planning and time, making the current schedule untenable and counseling in favor of a continuance."

This needs to be stated plainly: The ongoing threat to national security is that Donald fucking Trump can get his tiny orange paws on more top secret shit and do whatever the fuck he wants with it. Of course this is a national security issue. And, of fucking course, voters need to know that Trump fucked with our national security before they vote because there are still millions of people in this country who are stupid enough to vote for Trump. Even Trump's lawyers recognize this when they say, "[T]here is simply no question any trial of this action during the pendency of a Presidential election will impact both the outcome of that election and, importantly, the ability of the Defendants to obtain a fair trial." The impact on the election is the fucking point. Why shouldn't a conviction on mishandling classified shit not have an impact on an election? Would you say, "Yeah, he was found guilty of fucking kids, but we should totally let him work with kids again"?

Luckily, Special Counsel Jack Smith wasn't having any of it and said, in essence, "Are you assholes serious right now?" As the government writes, "Defendants Trump and Nauta claim unequivocally that they cannot receive a fair trial prior to the conclusion of the next presidential election, urge the Court to withdraw the current scheduling Order, and request that the Court not even consider a new trial date until some unspecified later time. There is no basis in law or fact for proceeding in such an indeterminate and open-ended fashion, and the Defendants provide none."

And it adds, "Finally, the demands of Defendants’ professional schedules do not provide a basis to delay trial in this case. Many indicted defendants have demanding jobs that require a considerable amount of their time and energy, or a significant amount of travel. The Speedy Trial Act contemplates no such factor as a basis for a continuance, and the Court should not indulge it here." Yeah, motherfuckers, everyone's got shit to do and would rather do that than go on trial for something that could put them in prison for years.

But, hey, if Trump's bizarre, self-aggrandizing reasoning actually works, hell, every accused criminal can say, "Yeah, I know I'm accused of murdering a classroom of a children, but I gotta work my shift at the 7-11 so, sorry, Judge, but I'm gonna have to take a raincheck on my trial date. We good?" Or maybe just, "I'm running for president, so I can't be bothered."

(Note: In one draft, I made the owner of the day care Donald Trump, but I realized that MAGA cretins would have no problem putting Trump back in the day care, and they'd likely be proud to have their children molested by him. I don't even think I'm being hyperbolic for effect.)

Where Is the Freakout Over the Assassination Attempt on Barack Obama?

About a year ago, an armed fucknut showed up outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house. Remember that? The fucknut was suicidal, angry about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and ready to take out some judges on his way out the door. It's scary shit, no doubt, but, fortunately, the fucknut called the cops and turned himself in. And his gun was unloaded, but, you know, still scary shit. 

For a couple of weeks, right-wing media and the GOP lost its goddamn mind. The Republican National Committee put out a statement calling the fucknut "The Democrat SCOTUS Assassin." Fox "news" went nutzoid, with Jesse Watters, who always looks like he knows which room the passed out coed is in and can't wait to tell the other frat brothers, just asked questions about the fucknut's intent, like "Do you think that idea just popped into his head? Or did the orders come all the way from the top?" On Newsmax (motto: "Giving a handjob to crazy every night"), some fuckin' host whose name no one will ever know wondered, "Are Americans right to question if [Nancy] Pelosi was actually hoping for or encouraging violence that could lead to Joe Biden appointing a new Supreme Court justice?" Other conservadrones said that the national media wasn't spending enough time on the "horrific assassination attempt on Kavanaugh" (really? "Horrific"?) It didn't matter that it was covered extensively everywhere. Republican officials blamed Chuck Schumer, who had said, "You will pay a price" over the Roe decision to the Supreme Court and to GOP members of Congress, meaning, clearly, you'll face hell at the ballot box. Squamous creep Ted Cruz, manly but fleeing Josh Hawley, and the corpse of Chuck Grassley all attacked Schumer and Democrats for the fucknut's self-aborted assassination attempt.

In other words, it was an occasion to pile on Democrats. Republicans are always good at making poisonous lemonade out of bullshit lemons. And this batch had the bonus effect of distracting from all the violence by right-wing fucknuts who far outnumber the lefty ones. 

So when we learned that Taylor Taranto, a QAnon-believing shit-for-brains who was already wanted for whatever he did at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was arrested on June 29 with weapons near former President Barack Obama's house in DC, certainly it would be different. Certainly those same people who complained about an alleged lack of coverage of the incident with Kavanaugh would be eager to cover the Obama assassination attempt and Taranto's desire to kill Jamie Raskin, Kevin McCarthy, and others. He was live streaming his search for tunnels in the neighborhood because QAnon morons think children are always being dragged into Democrats' houses through tunnels so they can be eaten and raped. Probably not in that order. Probably. Taranto didn't turn himself in. No, the cops found him and even chased him for a bit. Taranto is obviously fucking insane, but he had two guns, a machete, and 400 rounds when he was caught. Crazy can still kill. 

Then, it turns out that Donald Trump, on June 28, posted a 2017 garbage dump of a piece praising his first 100 days in office and it included the addresses of both Obama and his former chief of staff and nexus of all things crazy people believe, John Podesta. Taranto said he was targeting both of them. In fact, "Taranto reposted a Truth Social post from Trump containing what Trump claimed was Obama’s home address. In a post on Telegram, Taranto wrote: 'We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s.'" You got that? The wannabe killer is saying he got his intel from Trump. 

Trump's Truth Toilet post is still up. You can look for it, if you want. I'm not fuckin' linking to it or screenshotting it. But of course Trump's not gonna take it down because that would mean he admits having been a factor in the potential assassination of a former president. It would mean he did something wrong. And that cockdribble never would do that.

While Fox "news" has covered it a little during the, you know, "news" part, as of today, there's not a goddamn thing about it on its website. But you know what else? It's gone from NBC's website. And CNN's. There are day-old articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere. And while Chris Christie has blasted Trump for it, there's been virtual silence from Democrats about it. 

In other words, the Kavanaugh sort-of assassination attempt got far more coverage than the nearly, actually committed assassination attempt on Obama, inspired and directed by another former president who is the frontrunner for his party's nomination. Trump should be fucking hounded endlessly about this. Frankly, we should be freaking out about it. It's one thing for an address to be public record. It's another for a vengeful cockdribble to spew it out to his idiot hordes looking for anything that means they should go get shooty at last. 

But, no, instead, do go on about the fucking little bit of cocaine some idiot left at the White House. That's so much more fucking important. 

Once again, our media attention, and, therefore, our own attention is being driven by whatever the right demands it be driven to. And Democrats play along, refusing to squeeze those lemons for themselves. 

In Its Affirmative Action Decision, the Supreme Court Shits on Higher Education

I was trying to figure which of the Supreme Court's 6-3 fuckings this week to write about. Perhaps the full-on face fucking of allowing any business that declares what they do "expressive" to discriminate agains LGBTQ+ people (or, really, anyone) because they think an invisible sky wizard will be mad at them if they don't. Is cooking expressive? Is diagnosing medical conditions expressive? Who the fuck knows? Or maybe the large strap-on ass fucking of the court blocking President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan where, in essence, the majority added back $10k or more in debt that had been eliminated. Thanks, John Roberts, you vicious, psycho numb nuts. 

But perhaps, as a college professor, I am best suited to talk about the pair of cases that led to the majority overturning affirmative action programs in higher education because that shit is dead center in my wheelhouse and I'm gonna fuckin' swing for the fences because I know what the fuck I'm talking about. The majority came to my fuckin' place of work and shit all over it. I don't go over to the Supreme Court and slap William Rehnquist's dead dick out of Roberts' whore mouth. 

See, in the roughly 250 or so years I've been teaching, I've led classes with little to no racial diversity and classes with extraordinary diversity. I've seen how diversity in hiring has an effect on the students and I've seen how diversity within the classroom impacts all students, white and non-white. So let me put this plainly: diversity and equity in higher education are pedagogically important in the classroom in a way that continues after graduation. Lemme put it even more plainly: this shit matters so that students of all races learn how to fucking exist in the real world. 

I could get anecdotal here pretty easily. I could tell you about amazing discussions in classrooms around works of literature where one student of one race will talk about how something is true to their life and another student of another race will say they never knew. I could tell you how blowing up the literary canon to include far more women writers and non-white writers and non-Western writers has enriched the classroom experience. I regularly teach works by American writers who are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, African, and more, along with white writers you've heard of, and students are fucking thrilled by it because many of them end up finding something about themselves in that work and then it matters more and then it opens them up to other works. Every fucking year this happens, and the experience of those works is heightened by the diversity of the class itself. And then I see these students hanging out and making plans together. It's fucking beautiful. 

Frankly, I think that's what the people who are against affirmative action fear most: the normalization of diversity. Goddamn, I have taught in places where classes of 30 or 40 had one or two non-white students, if that. I loved teaching those students and gave it my all, but it feels so divorced from what they are almost guaranteed to experience outside that classroom. It matters. I know everyone on the right thinks higher education is either a waste of time or a means to a job, but it's also teaching you what it means to be in a diverse country. It makes you a better, more open-minded member of this damned society. 

But that's my personal shit and everyone in higher education can give you examples of that. Instead, let's get some research up in this motherfucker. For years, studies have been showing that a diverse student population has a net positive effect on socialization, on civic engagement, and, yeah, on grades. A 2013 study out of Princeton concluded, "Diversity of all kinds is generally associated with positive learning and performance outcomes. Not only do experiences with diversity improve one’s cognitive skills and performance, it also improves attitudes about one’s own intellectual self-confidence, attitudes toward the college experience, and shapes performance in the workplace."

You might say that the Supreme Court shouldn't worry about the pedagogical aspect of diversity in higher education. But ignoring it is tantamount to the Court setting curriculum for all colleges, participating in pedagogical decisions quite fully. And, as both Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in their dissents, abandoning diversity as a goal for the classroom and campus has larger societal impact because the students go into the workforce. "Greater diversity within the teacher workforce improves student academic achievement in primary public schools," writes Sotomayor. "A diverse pipeline of college graduates also ensures a diverse legal profession, which demonstrates that 'the justice system serves the public in a fair and inclusive manner.'" That last part is quoting a brief from the American Bar Association. Diversity in higher education makes everything stronger.

And what about the notion put forth by some on the right that we just don't need affirmative action programs anymore? That's bullshit. "Current rates of change suggest that it would take about 70 years for all not-for-profit institutions to reflect underrepresented students fully in their incoming student population...For Black and Native American students and for faculty from all underrepresented populations, there was effectively no progress from 2013 to 2020," says a 2022 report. If anything, the actual numbers would call for more intensive emphasis on diverse recruitment. That's reality. And we know in places where affirmative action has been banned that the numbers of Black and Hispanic students dropped a whole lot in flagship universities. 

Roberts goes on endlessly about the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. But if you're going to apply it to justify eliminating programs that attempt to enhance the education of all students under the idea that all races aren't being treated absolutely, totally, constantly equal all the time, then why not  use it to ensure that equality of opportunity in all education is assured? Why not force states to make sure that public schools in all places are offering the same level of funding and same level of services? In other words, if you wanna eliminate the need for affirmative action, then eliminate some of the things that cause it to be necessary. 

Or you just want to harm Black and brown people and don't give a fuck otherwise.

(Note: I can't leave this fucked up discussion without saying something about elite colleges, two of which were the defendants in these cases. Really, this was all about some students upset they didn't get accepted to Harvard or UNC-Chapel Hill, even though they might not have gotten in anyways. It's fucking absurd that we give so much importance to schools that are circle jerks of privilege, as if that's the only route to success in an area. US News and World Report's rankings can go suck all the dicks. You can get an amazing education in hundreds of other schools. Why would you want to got to schools that let George W. Bush or Jared Kushner in just because of their rich daddies?)

This Pride Month, They're Trying to Drag Everyone Back Into the Closet

On Friday in NYC, the annual Drag March for Pride Month got under way in Tompkins Square Park. It was the expected array of fabulous, fantastic, and/or delicious people decked out in outrageous finery, crossing and uncrossing gender lines. The march is the cause of the latest right-wing freak out over a perceived LGBTpocalypse because of a portion of a chant. 

One part of the marching group chanted, "We're here! We're queer! We're not going shopping!" as an anti-capitalist stance by some queer organizations going all the way back to at least the 1990s.  The freak out is because in the video clip that made the rounds of Nutsyzania (and apologies for linking to a right-wing dipshit for this) you can hear one guy and maybe one other person chant, "We're here, we're queer, and we're coming for your children." It's a clever joke playing on the worst fears of the most ignorant motherfuckers out there. It is so insignificant, like a flea fart in a hurricane, but conservative media, including Fox "news" and the New York Post and assorted cockmites of the right have picked up on that little bit of a sound bite and treated it like the entire goal of Pride Month is to force kids to go on puberty blockers or some such shit. 

The usual fuckers did the usual fuckery, leaping in to do their best dance of fake outrage. "This movement grooms minors to have mastectomies and castration and fuels a multi billion dollar medical child abuse industry," screamed rat banshee Marjorie Taylor Greene. Lesser animals talked about murdering LGBT people ("There's not a woodchipper big enough" or "Come and try") or "This is what evil looks like" or disgust at the very existence of people in drag or topless women (there's one in the video with nipple pasties) or assertions of "grooming" and pedophilia. You know the routine by now. Truth Toilet has lost its tiny mind over the whole thing. I'm sure we'll hear how this was supposed to distract us from Hunter Biden because every fucking thing seems to have that purpose now.

We are in the midst of an enormous backlash against the rights of queer people in this goddamned country. Things have moved really fucking quickly from drag queens in front of kids to drag queens in general, from trans kids to trans people in general, from banning books with queer characters to banning anything with a friggin' rainbow in general. We're in the midst of an attempt to drag us all back into the closet and lock the door, and lemme tell you, as someone who fought this shit already to get us to where we were before the slavering hatemongers came up with a new way to make bank once the same sex marriage issue seemed to be settled, it's fucking frightening, fucking enraging, and just fucked in general.

Here's some shit that happened in just the last month or so:

In New Hampshire, fucking Nazis showed up outside a coffee shop in Concord to chant and yell slurs while a drag queen story time was going on inside. And then I'm sure they all went back to someone's basement and circle jerked in triumph while talking about straight they are. 

Crazed white nationalist protesters showed up outside a school board meeting in Glendale, California, to rant and get violent about LGBTQ content in the district's curriculum. They had Proud Boys, January 6th insurrectionists, and other assorted fucknuts there, and riot police were present to separate the fucknuts from the LGBTQ supporters, parents, and people. And then I'm sure the Proud Boys went back to someone's basement and totally didn't jack off because, no, really, they actually believe that shit. 

Nazis also showed up at a drag brunch fundraiser to support LGBTQ+ kids in Columbus, Ohio. That roused Republican Governor and crazy son of a bitch who is actually less crazy than most of the GOP Mike DeWine to pen an editorial condemning the existence of Nazis, even if he didn't offer any support to the queer community. 

And then there are the laws that have been passed and stopped by various courts that ban treatment for trans kids or ban people in drag in places where children might be. But that hasn't stopped those same states from banning discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in their public schools. It's not just Florida's Ron DeSantis, who always looks like he's telling someone, "This dick won't suck itself" as he shoves their head into his lap. Oklahoma's governor just approved rules that could take away a school's accreditation if their libraries have "sexualized materials" (which sounds like cum rags, frankly). 

According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, more than 200 anti-drag protests, threats, and violent incidents have taken place in the United States in the last year. That's IRL shit. It doesn't count online harassment and hate speech, which is probably so high that it's impossible to register how much of it is out there. 

The problem has always been that a small, loud contingent, with politicians who want to fan the flames of fear and hate to get votes, can make life a fucking misery for a lot of people. And that dopamine jolt of getting "likes" makes people believe jump on the hate bandwagon, whether they truly give a shit or not. And you know what? Most of them fucking don't. They just think they're supposed to. 

Lemme end this with an anecdote. On the NYC subway right now, you might see ads from the dating site Tinder. Leaving aside whatever you think about Tinder and swipe culture, the ads themselves are fascinating because they show various kinds of couples in romantic situations for various gender combinations: same-sex, opposite sex, even non-binary (with the line "A toothbrush at their place"). I really dig their positivity and, really, sexiness. I sat on the subway on Friday thankful that I live somewhere that this kind of thing causes no issue whatsoever to almost every single one of us. No one gave a shit.

You know who else didn't give a shit, too? The people bringing their kids on the train. No one told their children not to look. No one fucking cared. And that goes for the two obviously tourist families who went on and off (I was on a long ride into Brooklyn). They had southern accents, and each was two straight parents and three kids of various ages. They glanced at the ads and then went about their business, like the rest of us did. If they had given a shit at all, they could have gotten off and gone onto another car. They didn't because it didn't matter that much if they saw two men who love each other. (Yes, I know they could have been southern liberals.) 

I fully believe that most people in the United States don't believe any of this is a threat to them or their precious kids. But, like with so many issues, they give into pressure from their peers or their churches to hate where they just don't have that hate. Yeah, that makes them suck, too. But that means they might be persuadable. As we learned with same sex marriage, once it was decided, it went away as an issue (until recently when the Christian nutzoids realized this insane Supreme Court might actually overturn it). 

As Pride Month winds down, we need to push the zealots and Nazis back in the closets. That's where hate belongs, not love.

Get in the Fucking Game on Trump's Indictment, Democrats

President Joe Biden has been very clear: No, motherfuckers, he will not answer your goddamned questions about the federal indictment of former president Donald Trump on 38 counts of just being a fucking cockknob and possibly, but not provably (yet), a traitor. Not only will Biden not answer your questions, he won't comment on it. And he doesn't want anyone in the White House to talk about it, nor does he want his reelection committee or even the Democratic National Committee to say jack shit. And, yep, as of this writing, the DNC has not a peep on its website. 

To an extent, sure, yeah, I get it. As we're told on tiresome repeat, this prosecution is "unprecedented" and needs to be handled with utmost respect for the Justice Department and for the justice system of the United States in order to preclude any accusations of politicization. I mean, you don't want people thinking that this is Biden and the Democrats jailing Trump because he's the leading candidate and almost inevitable presidential nominee for the Republican party. You don't want them to think that the Justice Department, the Attorney General, or the Special Counsel aren't acting independently. You wouldn't ever want that narrative to get out there. You wouldn't want to help that narrative.

Oh, wait. Except for the fact that it's the narrative that's now congealed on the right and the silence is feeding it to bloating and crowding out other narratives. In fact, here's what Trump said last night at his shitpile country club in New Jersey: "Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abusive power in the history of our country, a very sad thing to watch. A corrupt sitting president had his top political opponent arrested on fake and fabricated charges." And then, later in his pissy, tired little speech (which was interrupted, no shit, by the pathetic sycophants present singing "Happy Birthday" like they were shrieking a funeral dirge), Trump promised that, if he's reelected, "I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president of the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family." The yowling savages in the crowd chanted, "Lock him up!" in response because everyone loves the hits.

You got that? Trump said that it's wrong if he's prosecuted but he will make sure that Biden and his family are prosecuted. In other words, the open politicization of the Justice Department that Trump wanted in his first administration would occur in a presumed second. That orange, dough-faced shitmonger has no problem laying it all out there (although you'd probably wanna ask his voters how it went locking up Hillary Clinton last time around). 

By the way, for the record, Merrick Garland, not Joe Biden, appointed Jack Smith.

Republicans have been all over the airwaves, with most of them denouncing the indictment in varying ways. There have been a couple of outliers, especially in the Republicans running against Trump, who condemn him for, you know, criming so blatantly. And a couple of those have promised to pardon Trump if they're elected because reasons. 

But the near-silence from elected Democrats has been ridiculous. Here and there, some have spoken out forcefully about the severity of the indictment, like Rep. Daniel Goldman of New York, who was the lead counsel in Trump's first impeachment, on CNN on Sunday. But most responses have been like Rep. Don Davis of North Carolina, who addressed things in the most milquetoast, weak tea, pedantic way possible: "What I believe is important is to allow the facts to continue to come forth through a process here and let's allow the Department of Justice to continue to do its work." On the floor of the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, "This case must be allowed to play out through the legal process, without outside political or ideological interference." Nice, inoffensive, and completely fucking useless. 

Even Adam Schiff was on CNN last night and he was muted, talking mainly about how sad it is that Trump still has support. About the whole situation, he told Anderson Cooper, "It's a sad day when a president is again indicted, and what so many Republicans are doing to defend him by attacking the Justice Department, by sowing -- you know, an effort to sow disbelief and discredit the FBI, this is another way they're damaging the country, damaging our national security besides the risk it was already taken by having these documents in an unsecure place."

That last remark there is what should be the thing that elected Democrats are hammering constantly with at least the same intensity that Republicans are insisting it's all a witch hunt or that it's no big deal or that others did it or whatever random bullshit they pull out of the giant bag of bullshit they always carry with them. It's mind-boggling that Democrats are once again unilaterally disarming here (and, yeah, if Biden is making them do it, he's fucking wrong). 

This isn't that hard: Talk about the fucking crimes. That's it. Talk about the crimes. Talk about how fucked this all was when it comes to national security. Ask if people feel okay about nuclear secrets laying around the bathroom of a country club that was infiltrated by spies. Ask if they feel safe with that happening. Keep shoving this up the fucking asses of any Republicans who defend it. We're not talking about a love letter from Kim Jong Un. We're talking about documents that say, "Oh, hey, here's where the US is weak, enemies, so you can probably blow shit up here." And ask what kind of fucking asshole does this shit and what kind of assholes say it's all fine. Get angry about it, Democratic leaders. Let the public know that Trump's accused of doing something really shitty and harmful and he's pretty much admitted that he did it.

Right now, according to one poll, 63% of independents think the indictment is a serious matter. As the narratives develop around the case and around Trump, if the main one those voters hear is from the GOP crime-enablers, it could have an effect on the pudding-brained independents whose whims seem to shift from election to election. Democrats can get them on board by making clear that you can ally with the criminals or you can ally with the ones who believe that you shouldn't put the nation at risk. There's a window of time to accomplish this, and Democrats have gotta jump on the messaging train. 

We keep pretending that all this shit is normal because Trump and his spokeworms get away with saying it. No, it's not normal for a president to just take whatever the fuck they want when they leave. Trump keeps lying about it. Last night, he told the Bedminster zombies and plague rats, "Hillary Clinton took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of furniture, china, flatware, rugs, and more from the White House and she wasn’t prosecuted. How about that one? She took the furniture and the china." The Clintons weren't prosecuted for the $190,000 in gifts and other things they took because they either returned them or they paid for them in a settlement of the issue. In other words, it's the complete opposite of Trump and the documents. 

But these stories and Trump's telling of them become accepted as fact, no matter how many fact checks there are. That often happens because Democrats try to be decent or upstanding or what the fuck ever when they should be laying it on the line and creating the narrative instead of responding to it and certainly instead of being silent.

The Trump Indictment Is Just Embarrassing (Sorry, MAGA Cretins, Not for What You're Thinking)

 

Look at this shit. No, not just the boxes of government documents that former President Donald Trump, who is probably already working on bragging that his ass is worth more cigarettes than anyone else's in the federal pen, hoarded like a deranged squirrel anticipating a long winter. No, look at the bathroom and shower in The Mar-a-Lago Club’s Lake Room, which seems to be a sitting or dining area.

Truly, what the fuck is this? This is some trailer park shit right here. Like when you're trying to make your double-wide look palatial (and I can make these jokes because, yeah, I lived in a trailer park in a double-wide when I was a kid and I fucking visited friends whose bathrooms were pimped out like a white trash Louis XIV decorated it). I mean, beyond the fake marble and fake gold fixtures, even beyond the whorehouse chandelier and the chintzy sconce that must have hit Trump in the head every time he got a blumpkin from a lucky bride before he wiped his ass with classified docs, what the hell is that shower curtain? That's Dollar General chic right there. You know the joint is filled with black mold.

Why give a single fumbling fuck about the decor of a Mar-a-Lago shitter? Because it's representative of fucking everything to do with Donald Trump, the man and the president. Mar-a-Lago was, in his telling, the "Winter White House," a place so gorgeous, such a signifier of wealth and power, that it deserved that moniker. But, as with all things Trump, it's just some gold paint on a pile of shit. And that gold paint might fool those inclined to see all shiny things as valuable and important, but everyone else knows it's just shit.

That's fucking embarrassing. In fact, the whole indictment of Trump on 38 counts of document fuckery is embarrassing. 

And dangerous. Trump did, in fact, put the security of the nation at risk. It's beyond doubt that he had documents that related to the defense of the country, the nuclear arsenal, the weaknesses of our defenses and those of our allies and enemies, and so much more. He kept stuff that was so top secret that a president on their own couldn't declassify it. That's reality. That isn't up for discussion. And if you acknowledge that reality (which MAGA freaks and Republican cowards are loath to do), as well as the reality that anyone with the right amount of money could get membership to the club, then you cannot escape the conclusion that the former president at least set up the circumstances where spies for unfriendly countries could read about how to attack the United States. That's scary shit.

But that doesn't in any way hinder how embarrassing the whole affair is because, from what we know now (and, sure, it's definitely possible that a thousand more shoes will drop), it looks like Trump did all this just because he wanted to keep important shit and show off what a big shot he was. Motherfucker waved around documents and talked about how secret they were. It was just another version of dick measuring: "Oh, you own a Picasso? Well, I can tell you how to blow up France. Top that." And he didn't want to give them back because then he wouldn't be that big shot anymore. They were his and fuck you if you wanted them back. 

 

I mean, honestly, it would be less embarrassing if this whole thing turns out to be espionage because at least there's a fucking purpose beyond feeding the voracious ego of a soulless orange monster with mommy, daddy, and every other relative issues. At least it would mean more than impressing the dead-eyed zombies with botox smiles parading around a cut-rate Xanadu, pretending to worship the moron king who gets off playing DJ, spinning "YMCA" while everyone gorges themselves at the overpriced feed trough. God, this is all so devoid of meaning that the nation should be ashamed that it allowed his election, that it allowed him to roam free for so long, that it didn't rise up and vomit him out like bad, overcooked steak.

For many others, it would be tragic, but tragedy is only for those who were once or who could have been heroes. It would require a genuine fall, but Trump was always this farting, pie-in-his-face clown. This is cringe comedy at its cringiest, and, for fuck's sake, for the good of a country he has driven mad, let this be the thing that puts a stake in the heart of Trump's narcissistic, criminal existence.

The Real Mind Virus Is the GOP's Attack on Reality

There is one question that I don't see being asked of right-wing politicians when they start talking about all the things they want to ban from the "public" (and I put "public" in quotes because the real public doesn't actually give a shit about any of this, but a fantasy public that the GOP pretends exists sure cares a lot about making sure their kids don't learn that it's possible for same sex couples to love each other). It's a simple one: "What's your end goal here?" Or, to put it more simply, "What are you trying to accomplish?"

As often as Florida governor, GOP presidential candidate, and man who looks like making children cry arouses him Ron DeSantis talks about crushing the "woke mind virus," which I think means, "Shit I can make sound scary," as often as he promises to "leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history," as he does in his truly, laughably shitty campaign website, I haven't seen a single challenge to him where he's asked, "The fuck do you want?" 

Because what would be the answer? What could possibly be the answer to, say, the desired outcome in eliminating all programs at schools that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion? Just to game it out here, those in the DeSantis/Christopher Rufo camp of purging the offices of diversity or any academic programs that teach things like "racism is bad" would probably trot out their evil initials of doom and declare that, in and of themselves, DEI and CRT (whatever the fuck they think critical race theory is) are discriminatory. But how they're discriminatory is never explained because the explanation would have to include "against white people" and as blatant as they are about their racist intentions, they never quite make the leap to that. (Yes, there are exceptions who have always been shitheels and say the worst things possible.)

Even more insidious and directly harmful are the anti-science attacks on treatment for trans youths and the absolutely insane crusade against drag in public. It directly crosses with the book banning and curriculum censorship because anything that mentions LGBTQ+ people is seen as somehow "grooming" kids to become gay or trans or something not straight and cisgender. (And, by the way, fuck you if you have a problem with the term "cis." Language changes. Deal with it.) 

Again, we haven't heard what the final objective is from DeSantis or legislators in all the states that have lost their goddamn minds (and court cases) over drag performances and trans treatment. They'll say they're preventing child sexual abuse, except facts don't back that up. They'll say it's for the welfare of children, except that makes zero sense in a world inundated with sexual imagery, images and ideas that don't necessarily say they are targeting only feels of heterosexual lust. I mean, I know a few lesbians who thoroughly enjoy the Tennessee Titans Cheerleaders. 

I mean, it's fucking obvious what they want. They want to curtail the power of non-whites, power they see growing along with the teaching of the harm whiteness in this country has actually done. They want to push LGBTQ people back into the closet, or the prison, by making their existence illegal. They want to control speech, control sexuality, control all those things that they see as threats to their power, a power that is enforced through hegemonic whiteness and enforced heterosexuality. 

Or, to put it another way, the politicians and media apparatchiks who push this agenda are fucking frightened little bitches asserting their remaining power to fuck shit up for everyone not them. (And let's be clear: the public doesn't support most of this shit.) They want to fuck up public education. They want to be able to jail or punish ideological enemies. And they want to do it by pretending that's what the endgame of "wokeness" is when the endgame of wokeness is really, simply to fucking ask people to stop being assholes and to acknowledge that reality is fucking real. Yeah, that means teaching children that shit was fucking awful and, hey, let's learn about the awfulness so we can be less shitty. Yeah, that means saying that trans people need our support and that queer couples are just couples. But I guess it takes some effort to do that. It's a hell of a lot easier to tell people, "You should be afraid. Go hide and cower with your guns until we make it safe for you again."

If the "anti-woke" forces had to say what they ultimately want, it would sound vile. It's about erasure. It's about elimination. It's about returning to an imagined past that they keep insisting was somehow good when, really, it was just a clusterfuck of hate, violence, and repression. That's why they need to be pushed to say it. 

There is no "woke mind virus." There is only what's real and what's fake. And the GOP can't face reality.

A Poem for Memorial Day

Game Over 

by Eli Wright

Maybe it was our aimless idealism,

or misguided patriotism.

Maybe we just didn’t understand what we were

getting ourselves into.

Driven by the desire to serve some greater good,

or follow in the footsteps of our fathers.

Some of us needed money for college,

or wanted to see the world in a new way.

But we couldn’t find any other way to pay for it.

We wanted to prove that we were men,

So we took the oath,

then traded our Nintendo’s for M-16’s.

We started out pushing buttons,

ended up pulling triggers,

and it was like no game we had ever played before.

When we first tasted war, we became addicts.

Got hooked on bullet crack and artillery blast.

Every day one of us would overdose on sniper shot or IED.

Some of us never got sober, relapsed on 3 or 4 tours.

Wishing we could just go back

to playing video games or Cops & Robbers again.

But there was no reset button this time.

No getting back up after counting to ten.

Our eyes were sewn open,

unable to look away from horror stories

unfolding in front of us.

We came home incomplete,

with no words to describe

how our hearts are now beating us black and blue

for some of the things we had to see and do.

We all got what we asked for, in one way or another.

But maybe we bit off more than we could chew

and we’re still struggling to swallow it all.

We’re still choking on the truth that we were lied to.

And even though they said our war was over,

it sure doesn’t seem that way.

But hopefully,

one of these days,

we’ll finally make it back home.

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)

In the UK, They Banned Knives When Knife Crime Rose

As an American, it's easy to be cynical about knife crime in the United Kingdom. I'm here right now, and already I've seen multiple TV news segments about all the stabbings and threats of stabbings with knives and machetes. When I saw a BBC report with the chyron "Knives: can we end the violence?" my gut Yank instinct was to think, "Oh, England. You're adorable that you're only worried about one-on-one knife attacks. Try living every fucking day of your life damned to be in a country where mass shootings happen with a frequency approaching hourly." 

Last night, I saw the play Dismissed at the Soho Theatre, which I disliked a great deal for being didactic and over-directed and more. But it sure seemed to be relevant to the nodding audience. It's about a teacher reporting a student who brought a knife to school, and her agony and guilt over the boy's coming expulsion. Now, in the US, schools do freak out over any weapon brought to school property, even in a student's car. Hell, they freak out over Advil. But, again, I thought, "Damn, must be nice to live in a place where that knife is the worst of your worries on school grounds." 

I mean, the idea of getting knifed is fucking frightening, so I'm not trying to diminish or infantilize the amount of knife crime in the UK, which has risen since the fucking Tories have gone full austerity on things like government services, including the NHS. This is mostly a result of the utterly disastrous, laughably and obviously dumb self-inflicted wound of Brexit, which was supposed to bring a bounty of funding to the UK, especially the National Health Service. But it's a fucking failure, a pile of lies, and no one with any real power is suggesting that the nation unfuck itself, including the feckless Labour Party.

But, yes, it's true that violence with crime has risen under Conservative leadership, and, yes, the right-wingers are using it as an excuse to push for harsher punishment for knife crimes perpetrated by anyone over 16 and tactics like "Stop and Search," which is essentially "Stop and Frisk," except with a more polite British-sounding name. And, yes, that shit hasn't really done anything because the problem won't be solved until Brexit-driven inflation and Tory-driven austerity is brought under control. 

So far, pretty much like the United States except with far, far less murder (262 "sharp object" killings last year). However, one thing is very different.

See, in 2019, as a result of the rise in knife crime, the UK government, which, again, is led by the Conservative Party as it has been since 2015 (or 2010, depending on how you count a coalition), tightened a ban on "offensive weapons," as in "can be used in a criminal offense," not "they stink." Prior to the new law, you couldn't carry the banned knives in public. Now, you can't even own them. If you do, you can face up to six months in jail. The laws fully went into effect in 2021. And you know what? The level of knife crime declined. It's still higher than it was, but it's lower than it became.

Think about that. There was a rise in violent crime and they banned the weapons being used in the crime. No movement to halt the ban gained any traction because while, sure, a person with a knife is responsible for the crime, it sure is harder to hurt someone if the knife isn't available. 

One type of knife that has gotten really popular, especially with young people, is the "zombie knife," which is a supposedly cool-looking blade that resembles hunting knives in zombie movies and TV shows. And there was a loophole in the law that allowed for certain kinds of those knives to be sold online, along with machetes that aren't used for gardening. Right now, the UK Home Office is looking into closing that loophole because that's what the fuck you do. 

This shit isn't hard. In the United States, we make it hard because we pretend that the Constitution gives us the right to individually own the means to destroy ourselves. Here, that kind of thinking is seen as madness and completely antithetical to the safety of the public. Or, you know, common fucking sense.

A Brief Observation on the Verdict Declaring Donald Trump Sexually Assaulted E. Jean Carroll

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when it was just fine to sexually harass and assault women. Slapping a woman on the ass was supposed to be taken as a compliment. Discussion about women's looks and their fuckability was a constant in workplaces. And by "fuckability," I mean "rapeability" because it didn't matter if the woman wanted to be judged that way. Consent was something that was given the moment a woman agreed to be alone with a man. It was a bullshit, stupid time, and a good many men didn't buy into it. But a whole fuckin' lot of them did and not enough of those good men did enough to stop it. So there was a kind of impunity, especially since a woman who didn't "happily" accept the ass slaps and tit comments and sex propositions was seen as uptight and man-hating while a woman who didn't give in to fucking when alone with a man who wanted to fuck was seen as a cocktease and prude. And if you were a woman who was raped by a man, your entire sexual history would be questioned, as well as what you wore and what you did to make that man rape you.

This is the gendered world that both E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump came of age in. And when Carroll was alone with Trump in that dressing room at Bergdorf-Goodman, this fucked up sense of male desire being more important than female agency was overtly present. Trump (and, sorry, I'm not going to mince words because I'm not on a jury and I don't have to follow legal definitions) raped Carroll because, in his own words, he felt he could. Because not only did the unwritten rules of celebrity demand he be allowed to, but everything that Trump believed about masculinity said it was his right. And those same fucking terrible ideas about female sexuality and the treatment of rape victims affected E. Jean Carroll, which is why, despite being the wise, witty feminist that she was, she mostly stayed silent. Hell, one of her friends who she told about the incident even advised her to shut up about it because "He's got 200 lawyers. He'll bury you." It wasn't just the lawyers. It was the toxicity of Trump's ideas of masculinity and his proprietary belief about women's bodies. And that was the 1990s, for fuck's sake.

The difference, as revealed at the trial, is that Carroll evolved and Trump did not. Carroll was emboldened by the MeToo movement and contemporary ideologies of bodily autonomy. That propelled her to an act of exceeding bravery in suing Trump for her rape and for his defamation of her. Knowing the onslaught of threats and insults, of barbaric attacks on her credibility, her looks, her career, her motives, everything, she still took him on, even as it meant the end of her long career at Elle magazine, even as it placed her in a limelight she never asked for. Most of us would never be that courageous.

Meanwhile, Trump insisted that Carroll was a crazed liar. He said that she wasn't his type, implying, quite plainly, that there was a type that he would deem rape worthy. He insisted that every famous man could do what he said on the Access Hollywood tape and could get away with it, that it wasn't anything different than what's been done for "the last million years...unfortunately or fortunately." And that last word, "fortunately," is just fucking galling. Women are supposed to be grateful that a star sexually abuses them? Fuck him. Fuck him utterly and completely.

At the end of the day, it took only a couple of hours for the jury to decide that Carroll was telling the truth and that sometimes even Donald Trump has to be told, officially, that he's a fucking liar. No, they couldn't call him a "rapist" (but, again, I can and I will), but they could say he was a fucking monster. They could say that the past is fucking dead. Everything Donald Trump believes is dead. Let it fucking rot. And let's move into a future where women can name their rapists and be heard. 

No, everything is not going to change overnight. It's only changed disappointingly little since that older time. But Carroll has created a path to some kind of reckoning where evil men pay a price. We can cynically say that Trump won't change, that his voters won't give a shit, but sometimes things move forward quickly and sometimes slowly. And no matter how many troglodytes try to drag us backwards, no matter how many assholes on TikTok or Twitter try to say the old ways need to stay, they can go to hell. The movement is always forward. 

Human Life Is Cheap in the USA

I've been thinking about all the times that an obviously mentally-disturbed homeless man directly threatened me. There was the Black guy in Chicago who told me that he was tired, just out of prison, and ready to kill any white people who didn't listen to him. There was the tall white guy in Hoboken who yelled in my face that he was going to rape me and followed me along a crowded street for a while repeating the rape threat. I've also been thinking about all the generally upset mentally-disturbed homeless men I've been around. There was the man in an emergency room waiting room who starting yelling that he had mob friends, threw his coat on the ground, and shoved and broke the plastic partition that had been put up in front of the receptionist (this was in deepest Covid times), breaking it. The guard walked up to him and told him to calm down, asking him if he wanted something to eat. He seemed to relax and walked away with the guard. And on the subway in New York City? Man, I've lost count of the freaked out, freaking out, and desperate people who have screamed at, near, or just down from me on a train or on a platform. It never once even occurred to me to get violent with any of them. I don't think I even felt vaguely threatened, even when the dude was following me, although that one was a little weird. Mostly, I just hoped they got the help they needed.

Just a day or two ago, someone rang my doorbell. I opened the door, and it was a man looking for someone at my address who I had never heard of. The man said he had an appointment to discuss some woodwork or something. I told him he had the wrong place. He apologized and left. Twice I have had people get in my car and realize they were completely wrong, including someone who thought I was their Uber ("Not an Uber, man" was my response and we laughed before he got out). I don't know how many cars have pulled into my driveway and turned around. It never occurred to me that any of those people might be threats. You can argue that my guard was down and that's how bad shit happens. But maybe because I don't own a gun, my response isn't to think about using it. Maybe I'm just not a goddamn coward.

As we get the news of the latest horrific gun massacre in this country, as we fail to understand how anyone can think the murder of Jordan Neely on the subway was anything but a murder, as we pathetically move on from the murders of Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis, one thing has become perfectly clear in this idiot country during this sad, stupid age we're damned to live through is that human life has become cheap here. It has lost its value to too many of us. Sure, something like the strangling to death of Neely for daring to have a meltdown in public, as that's the only place an unhoused person can meltdown, that can inspire protests. But the numbers of people who truly believe that Neely's murderer, Daniel Penny, had a legitimate reason to murder him is depressing as hell. That comes form a longstanding hatred of the unhoused, with more than a little racism involved. Neely, who I'd seen dance in Washington Square Park, attracting a crowd with his Michael Jackson imitation, was dehumanized by our reaction to his circumstance, to his very existence, and once that happens, it's easier to allow for his murder to appear justified. 

We absorb horror after horror. I saw a photo from the Allen, Texas, massacre of victims of the shooter's AR-15, including a little girl with her brain splattered out. I cannot begin to fathom the depth of sociopathic depravity you have to possess in order to look at a picture like that and think, "Yeah, everything's fine with how things are going. More guns, please." I mean, if one particular gun is responsible for massacre after massacre, it's pretty clear that you need to get rid of that gun, at the very least. I mean, isn't that the most obvious, logical extension of any discussion of "what can we do"? 

But we see all around us the devaluing of human life, of any sense that we should give a damn about anyone other than ourselves and those closest to us. This is what it means to live in a nation where one in three people owns a gun, where at least 20 million of those guns are the same kind that is used in massacre after massacre. This is what it means to live in that armed country where a large percentage of us believe that we are under constant assault from people known and unknown, from migrant gangs, from marauding non-whites, from woke teenagers, from the very elected government, from forces and conspiracies that only exist in the fevered minds of those who want to believe them. And then you think a good many of those threats are armed, so you have to kill them before they kill you. Human life in general doesn't matter to you anymore. Humanity doesn't matter. You and yours, that's all that does. And your guns. 

When other countries look at the United States, they see this as madness. And it is. We have been driven mad by right-wing media and politicians who make coin and careers on exploiting the fears that right-wing media presents. I have friends in New Jersey who refuse to go into New York City because they fully believe that one of the safest places in the country is a deadly hellhole of murder. When I convince them to hang out, they are hyperalert, not thinking that everyone around them is just living their lives. No, they believe that one of them is going to rob them or take them out. And anything out of the ordinary, say, a homeless man ranting about needing food, confirms their belief that we're in a cesspool of people they should hate for existing. And then you don't have to care and think they deserve it when someone, say, chokes them to death because they think they might have a gun or might be a threat. 

If you see hurting people and you don't want to help them, if you don't want to increase funding for services or ban weapons of war, if you don't want to deal with housing the unhoused or showing compassion for migrants, if you don't want to do anything to stop the hurting, if you, in fact, want them to hurt, if you think everyday things people do, like ringing a doorbell, are threats that need deadly force, then they aren't the ones who have lost their humanity. You are. And if we keep allowing our leaders to make the country deadlier, then we aren't that far behind.

Of Course We're Fucking Gleeful Over Tucker Carlson Being Fired. Do You Blame Us?

All over Left Commentaria last week, an orgasmic yawp of glee was released, along with a good many actual orgasms, when Fox "news" announced that it had fired its biggest star, Tucker Carlson. The thrillingly ecstatic schadenfreude only grew exponentially as more details came out: Carlson and everyone outside the executive suite were caught off-guard by the firing, it was effective immediately, and his last show was on Friday, April 21, when he had promised he'd be back on Monday, with promos for whatever fuckery he was gonna do running earlier on the day he was fired. In the corporate world, this is an execution. The only reason he wasn't escorted out by security is that he wasn't in the building. But Carlson's email was cut off, and he wasn't even told why he was fired, which means he had all the job protections of a McDonald's worker, which, c'mon, that's just fuckin' funny. (Yeah, I know that a fired McDonald's worker doesn't get a huge payout, but I'm talking the actual firing.)

This reaction goes beyond just feeling great because someone awful lost their job and lost their megaphone. Generally, when we get to feel this way, it's fairly late in the career of the receiver of the boot, whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck fading into online isolation in their TV twilight (they do have big audiences, but no reach beyond the audience whatsoever) or Rush Limbaugh dying about 20 years after it would have made a difference or Megyn Kelly trying to go legit and flopping. Gratifying as all that was, it pales in comparison to Carlson's firing because none of the others had the political cache' he had at the time of the end of his current career. They may once have, but Carlson's savage ejection from the Fox "news" compound happened while he was poised to have a huge impact on the 2024 election. 

Tucker Carlson had become a uniquely powerful threat to the nation, and that was by design. His whole career since joining Fox has been centered on vengeance against those who he saw as harming and betraying him, all while gathering an audience of violent racists who saw him as their Goebbels. He mainstreamed white supremacism and Christian nationalism, all with a fraternity president's arrogance and misogyny. He gave hatemongers legitimacy and a microphone, all while coating it in a secret sauce of fake inquisitiveness ("I'm just asking questions" was his version of saying, "I'm just joking" after you've said something really shitty that you totally meant but didn't want to be seen as an obvious asshole for saying). 

Lemme put this another way: He isn't just a motherfucker. He's a motherfucker who loves fucking mothers. He gets his rocks off hurting people. He's got a bully's belief in his own power, and if there was anything Rupert Murdoch wasn't going to stand for, it was someone trying to out-bully or out-motherfucker him. 

If you don't understand what I'm saying, check out his speech at the 50th anniversary gala for the Heritage Foundation (motto: "Providing faux-intellectual cover for your cruelest impulses for a half-century"). He compares abortion to Aztec "human sacrifice." He declares Episcopalianism is "not even a Christian religion at this point." He attacks pronouns and trans people because of course he does.

And then there's this: "You look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs. If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine War, raise your hand."

You got that? The actions over the obvious execution of a Black man by a white cop, a very real pandemic that killed over a million Americans, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia are merely things you end up agreeing with because you want to stay employed. It's impossible for him to conceive of these things as the actual beliefs of "people you know." He is propagating a fantasy that involves, necessarily, calling reality a fantasy. And a lot of assholes buy into that shit wholeheartedly because it tells them that they don't have to give a shit. Giving a shit is hard; it means personal sacrifice and the effort to actually fucking solve problems. Much easier to deny they exist. 

This is why he was such a dangerous bacterial infection in the pisshole of the American soul. He told you that it was not only okay to lack any fucks to give about your fellow humans, but that you were a stronger, better person if you didn't give a fuck about them. In fact, the only humans you were supposed to give a fuck about were the ones that Carlson told you to give a fuck about, the ones like him, and, of course, himself. We on the left do throw around the Nazi comparisons a little loosely, and I'm not simply calling Tucker Carlson a Nazi. I'm going farther. I'm saying that the original Nazis would find a lot to love in Tucker Carlson's show. In fact, our current version of the Nazis sure do love him. And why not? He talks about people in terms of weak and strong, filthy and clean, them and us. We're getting really close to "May as well round them up and put them in camps" followed by that squeaky clown eunuch laugh of his.

Carlson's ejection from the biggest audience he could get is an objective good for the country. He's a sexist, racist attack poodle who put on working-class drag to hide his patrician airs, and he was not only willing to wallow in the foulest shit pools of American fuckery, but he discovered that he liked to swim in shit, that swimming in shit was his truest self, a hateful troll with a god complex.  And it showed too clearly, getting more intense as time went by. To use the epithet he apparently was a little too free with around too many people and in too many emails, Tucker Carlson was fired because he's a cunt. I mean, when you're too much of a cunt for Rupert Murdoch, you're an absolute cunt to your cuntish core.

So, yeah, we're thrilled to see him disappear for a while, even if he's promising to come back. It will take time for him to build the kind of influence he had, where he could make demands of political leaders and give airtime to candidates he supported, boosting their election chances. The bonus? Tucker Carlson's a vindictive little prick, and he'll be trying to settle scores with Fox "news." Until then, enjoy the Tucker-free era, however long it lasts.

The Pleasure of Watching Ron DeSantis Implode

There was never a chance in heaven or hell that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who looks like a 1980s shop teacher who gets off on breaking the birdhouses the kids make to prove "you can't build shit, you little pussy," was going to win the Republican nomination for president. I mean, put aside that Donald Trump owns the GOP no matter how much a few feckless fucks fail to pry it away from his tiny hands. DeSantis has all the personality of an angry Starbucks manager and all the charm of the least charming dung beetle. If you bottled DeSantis's vibe as a scent, it would be "old scrotum and expired Axe body spray." I mean, in Vegas terms, DeSantis is pissed off that the drunks at the buffet at the Tropicana aren't enjoying his terrible magic show while Trump is Siegfried and Roy rolled into one sparkly orange suit.

Beyond personality, though, DeSantis has been repeatedly stepping on his dick, misreading this moment in American history. The retro right in this country think that it's time to turn back the clock on everything, on abortion rights, on multiculturalism, on gender identity, on our understanding of history. With a complicit legislature, DeSantis has embraced this as his agenda, and he preens and prances around the country, pretending that he's some great warrior when, really, he's just "that prick, you know, that prick from Florida."

You can't go around saying stupid shit like "We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die" like DeSantis did in South Carolina this week, a variation on shit he's been saying for months. It's one thing to use the garbage word "woke" to describe everything you don't like. It's something completely different to stand there and pretend that you are some mighty warrior against...who exactly? School teachers? Writers? Cultural theorists? It's one thing to be a simpering little bitch about racism or drag queens. It's another thing altogether when you steal the language that Winston Churchill used in rallying people to fight the Nazis, you know, the ones who actually threatened to bomb and kill their way to conquering England, and use it to show that you are so tough that you'll pass a law that bans books about same sex penguins from classrooms. It's not remotely comparable and you just look like a pussy-ass tool for implying it.

In everything that DeSantis does, he has paths laid out for him: the rational, walk away, sweep it under the rug, everyone will forget about it path or the biggest fucking asshole in the world path. DeSantis has never seen an issue where he doesn't walk that asshole path. He could have just let it go when the Disney corporation criticized the "Don't Say Gay" bill that prevented any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity from K-3 classrooms. Nope. Motherfucker decided it was time to take a stand and attack Disney, one of the biggest employers in the state and, you know, fucking Disney. When Disney outmaneuvered DeSantis on the board that oversees the district Disney World is in, when DeSantis got pimp-slapped by a fucking cartoon mouse (with billions of dollars and the best legal team those billions can buy behind it), he didn't say, "Fuck it" and take the L. Nope again. He expanded "Don't Say 'Gay'" through 12th grade and threatened to do desperate shit like open a prison next to Disney. It's the kind of thing that can get other Republicans to say, "What the fuck are you doing?" to the governor, who got fucking married at Disney.

On abortion, on book bans, on concealed weapons, on academic free speech, and more, DeSantis is, yes, doing what he campaigned on, but it's fucking exhausting the Republicans in the state. The nation, especially young voters, look at Florida as if all you'll retch from the stink of sargassum, the seaweed that's smells like rotten eggs when it bakes in the sun, as it will when a giant patch of it lands on Florida's beaches soon. This is not to mention that Donald Trump is smacking around DeSantis with the sadistic glee of an abusive father whose son isn't wearing a suit to a baseball game. Jesus, that must be harsh, considering that DeSantis used his kids in a 2018 ad talking about how vigorously he sucked Trump's dick. And we oddly don't talk anymore about DeSantis kidnapping a bunch of migrants in Texas and flying them to Martha's Vineyard at taxpayer expense. He's just a fucking repulsive pit of pig shit. 

Meanwhile, Florida is fucked. It's fucked in so many ways beyond the seaweed swamp headed its way. Because the state is somewhere between "totally underwater" and "on the way to being totally underwater"on the climate change timeline, every big storm is going to be a fucktastrophe of flooding and fear. That fear, fed by shortages of gasoline and panic buying, which led to more shortages, is only going to get worse and shootier in a state with, you know, all those fucking concealed guns. And this has led to a property insurance crisis that oddly can't be solved by forcing teachers to subject their 1st-grade classroom libraries to an approval committee. It's true. You can't mitigate a 40% hike in your homeowners insurance by not telling kids about Rosa Parks.

Florida is one of a dozen states that haven't taken advantage of expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and the crisis that's going to cause is coming soon, along with the nursing shortage that is especially going to hit a state with a large elderly population. DeSantis likes to brag about Florida's supposed great reaction to Covid, but that relies on the short-term memory loss of Floridians. Shit got bad there, really bad, and it's not prepared if it gets bad again.

And yet he could have gotten past all of this if he wasn't such a proud cunt about everything. He's a void of charisma, so lacking in personality that he could say, "Florida is where charm goes to die" and you couldn't argue with him. So, no, he's not getting elected to anything outside of his increasingly dumb and deranged and dirty state. 

One of the great pleasures of this filthy, fucked age we're damned to exist in is watching the implosion of political figures who the posh pundits praise. We've gotten to see the collapse of Rudy Giuliani, the deflation of Chris Christie, and now the utter humiliation of Ron DeSantis. The best part is he's such a smug bastard that he'll stay on this damned path, snarling into oblivion. We can all eat our pudding cups with a spoon as we enjoy the crash.