The Supreme Court vs. the United States, Part 1: Alito Loves Fetuses, Hates Women

You will never love anything as much as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito loves fetuses. That skeevy, creepy motherfucker is all about the fetuses; he loves fetuses so much that he doesn't give a fuck how many women must die in order for fetuses to live and become babies that he can then ignore and strip away their rights. Seriously, that savage cockscab must jack it to ultrasounds. You think I'm being hyperbolic? You think I'm just trying to be extra cruel to this ratcunt because he authored the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that specifically overturned Roe v. Wade and the guarantee of the right to an abortion in the entire country? You think it's because I fucking hate him and Thomas and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett for ensuring that women in some of our biggest cities, like Houston, Dallas, Nashville, and New Orleans, with Indianapolis and Atlanta no doubt not far behind, can't get an abortion and women from small communities can't travel to those cities and that all the women in these savage states will have to travel hundreds, if not a thousand miles (no, really) to reach a state where abortion is legal and that if they can't, many of them will resort to methods that will harm if not kill them? 

Yeah, all that. But also because Alito can't fucking get enough of fetuses. Check out the decision. Seriously, this part will make your head fucking explode: "The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life." You got that? Hey, little ladies, your burdens, all your health effects, all your difficulties are important, says big white male Alito, but, really, a clump of cells that can't survive on its own is just as important as you. 

By the way, 93% of all abortions are in the first trimester. Yeah, it's a fucking clump of cells for most of that and still completely nonviable towards the end of 12 weeks.

That clump of cells is given far more rights than women by Alito as he considers the notion of "viability," as defined by the Roe and Casey decisions: "According to the dissent, the Constitution requires the States to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed...If, as Roe held, a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life is compelling 'after viability,' why isn’t that interest 'equally compelling before viability'?" In other words, if a state thinks you should stay pregnant, bitch, you're staying pregnant. That fetus controls you. You only exist to protect the rights of the fetus. Your rights don't matter if you have a fetus.

Alito goes on, dickishly, "Due to the development of new equipment and improved practices, the viability line has changed over the years. In the 19th century, a fetus may not have been viable until the 32d or 33d week of pregnancy or even later. When Roe was decided, viability was gauged at roughly 28 weeks. Today, respondents draw the line at 23 or 24 weeks. So, according to Roe’s logic, States now have a compelling interest in protecting a fetus with a gestational age of, say, 26 weeks, but in 1973 States did not have an interest in protecting an identical fetus. How can that be?" Yes, it's so weird how things change with medical advances. C'mon, this is just making shit up to justify an obviously bullshit opinion. Or, you know, the conservative way.

You think that's mindbogglingly fucked up? Wait: "Viability also depends on the 'quality of the available medical facilities.' Thus, a 24-week-old fetus may be viable if a woman gives birth in a city with hospitals that provide advanced care for very premature babies, but if the woman travels to a remote area far from any such hospital, the fetus may no longer be viable. On what ground could the constitutional status of a fetus depend on the pregnant woman’s location? And if viability is meant to mark a line having universal moral significance, can it be that a fetus that is viable in a big city in the United States has a privileged moral status not enjoyed by an identical fetus in a remote area of a poor country?" Fuck Alito in every fucking hole he has and in a few that don't exist yet.

Alito and the rest of a cruel quintet who overruled Roe and Casey are quite literally splitting the country in two so that the quality of health care a woman receives will be dependent on which state she lives in. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that a fetus might live outside the womb if born prematurely a couple of weeks earlier in a city than in a village in the mountains of Ecuador? About 1% of all abortions happen after 21 weeks. How does that in any way justify a decision that will allow states to outlaw the 99% of abortions that clearly occur before the fetus can live on its own? Even John Roberts thought that was fucked. It's a fucking game to the majority. It's absolutely nonsensical, so much that it only makes sense if you say that Alito loves fetuses and hates women, which is part and parcel with a Christian extremist view of the sexes.

Because that's what this is, you know. It is a cabal of Christian extremists, radical Catholics and nutzoid fundamentalists, deciding that women have had enough freedom and those whores deserve whatever hell they have to go through. They are imposing their radical, extremist doctrine on the rest of us and pretending that it's freedom.

In my home state of Louisiana, the anti-choice Democratic governor signed an update to the state's trigger law on Monday that said abortion would be outlawed in the state the second Roe was overturned. And so it was. The three remaining clinics in the state, in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, stopped performing abortions. While the morning after pill remains legal, other drug-induced abortions are also outlawed, and there are no exceptions for pregnancies for rape and incest. With Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi also banning abortions, the closest place for a safe, legal abortion right now is in Pensacola, Florida, and who knows how long that will last with Ron DeSantis fascisting up the joint. Then women in Louisiana would have to travel to North Carolina or Illinois. Madness. And then states might pass laws that say you can't travel through them to get an abortion because of course they will.

Sorry. I'm not thinking completely rationally today. We've known this day was coming for a long time. We've been waiting for it since at least the 1990s, probably since Clarence Thomas was confirmed. Many of us have been waving our arms and screaming that this was coming, to stop trusting any motherfuckers who said not to worry, to stop pretending that anyone on the right was honorable. We knew it would happen. 

But that expectation doesn't make it hurt less. It doesn't reduce the feeling of panic. It doesn't mitigate the despair for what a fucked beyond fucked nation we've become, what backwater we've turned into. We're not a shining city on a hill. We're a teetering shack on a pile of shit.

Mostly, though, it doesn't make me feel less sorrowful for women, from the preteen rape victim to the mother who doesn't want another child to any woman or girl who fucking wants to choose when she has children. If my nieces get pregnant, I will fly them anywhere they want to go if they want to get rid of the fetus. Fuck that fetus.

We failed. We fucked up and we failed. We let the worst fucking people keep winning. We can't let that keep happening. There's going to be a pile of women's corpses to remind us of that. 

The vile Christian pricks have tasted blood. They are completely unleashed, and they are heading for a feeding frenzy. We better be ready. It's about to get genuinely frightening out there. 

More on that coming up.

Call It What It Was: An Assassination Attempt on Mike Pence

I have despised Mike Pence longer than most of you, even before he was that fuckin' conservative prick in Congress from 2001-2012, even before he was that motherfucking governor who refused to allow a needle exchange program in a town with a high rate of HIV (until he prayed and partially gave in). Yeah, see, I was damned to live in Indiana in the late-1990s when Pence was a right-wing radio twatmite, advocating for laws against adultery and railing against the cartoon Mulan for daring to say that women could be in the military with men and hating on LGBT people with a fervor that could only be described as protesting way, way too much. When I say, "Fuck him in every hole from ass to eye," I mean it. 

So if I say anything that is perceived as a kind word about him, just know that I really think he's lower than worm shit. 

That said, yeah, Pence did one good thing with his sad, homophobic, nutzoid Christian life. He stood firm against a wave of spittle and being called a "pussy" and "wimp" from Donald Trump, as well as Trump's caricature of a mob boss threat that "I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this," and ratified the electoral count in the 2020 presidential election. I don't think he did that for honorable reasons. He consulted with, among others, former Vice President Dan Quayle, who told him, "I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power" when Pence sought his blessing in overturning a clean election, which would have thrown the country into dictatorship. Pence had spent the last five years being Trump's most loyal lickspittle, a remora suctioned onto Trump's ass so tightly that he may as well have been Trump's vestigial tail. Pence wasn't strong. Pence certainly wasn't a goddamn hero. He was scared that he'd break the law and end up in prison if it all went sideways. He didn't want to commit a crime. He didn't do the right thing so much as he didn't do the wrong thing. So, fuck it, may as well act like the great defender of the Constitution.

And what did Pence get for his trouble? As his chief of staff Marc Short told the January 6 committee, he was so worried "that the president would lash out in some way" over Pence's disloyalty that Short contacted the head of Pence's Secret Service detail to make sure they were ready in case shit went south. And south it went.

Let's stop beating around the goddamn bush with this shit. The January 6 attack on the Capitol was, among other things, a coordinated assassination attempt on Mike Pence, one that was cheered on, if not directed, by the President of the United States, who really was Donald Trump. 

In front of a mob that was there specifically to stage a coup (which is what it's called when a group tries to use force to throw out the results of a legal election and install their own people, whether that's as electors or president), Trump kept expressing how Pence "is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn't, that will be a sad day for our country." Trump didn't stop there, coming right up to the line of threat: "And Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you're not, I'm going to be very disappointed in you, I will tell you right now." 

Of course, Trump didn't have to threaten. He had a horde of cretins who were slobbering all over each other to do his bidding. I mean, did no one remember what happened at Trump's Nazi rallies when he verbally attacked protesters and cheered on and encouraged physical violence against them? People fucking did it. They got violent on his order. Trump fucking well knew the powder keg was right in front of him, and that narcissistic cockscab wanted to see what would happen if he lit the fuse.  And when Trump had a chance to calm shit down, he threw fuel on the fuse by tweeting that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done." That's insanity.

So what did Pence get to hear from the hooting cretins who were heading towards and into the Capitol? Chants of "Hang Mike Pence!" and "Bring out Pence!" His Secret Service team brought him to a secure location in the building, coming within 40 feet of Trump's zombie army that he could hear rampaging around, calling for murder of him and anyone who would betray their orange idol. And Pence refused to leave in a Secret Service vehicle, fearing, at the very least, that the president would order him driven away and kept away from the count. That is fucking insanity. That is fear of assassination by the mob, ordered or at least ordered-by-implication by Donald Trump.

You can say that Pence bravely stuck to ratifying the electoral vote count, but that fear of prison hung over him hard. And I think fear is why Pence will not testify before the January 6 Committee. Sure, I know he's delusional and craven enough to think that he might have a chance at a future in politics that will be shitcanned if he puts a stake in Trump's desiccated heart, not realizing his career is dead already, and I know that Liz Cheney and the committee are doing their damnedest to spin things as if there are decent Republicans, even if Pence helped the country get to the point where a goddamned coup was attempted by vigorously bobbing on Trump's knob for the entire term. 

But Trump's army is still out there. And they're armed. And they are violent and insane. And they want blood, specifically Pence's blood, for his betrayal. And you know that life has been one nonstop death threat for Pence and his family because that's how these motherfuckers roll. If we can call the non-attempt on Brett Kavanaugh's life an "assassination attempt," then this is an ongoing assassination plot to kill the former vice president.

So I'm gonna say the possibly kind words about Pence here: If this fear of being killed is figuring into Pence's silence and it's not just false hopes of a political future, I sympathize. That means he's capable of feeling trauma, as any normal person would, and it means he wants to protect his family. Again, he's despicable in every other way and, mostly, I don't give a shit if he lives or dies now, but I get it and it makes sense. 

But that also means he can't be a hero in this story. He's just the guy in the horror movie who walked away after the monster seemed to be defeated, not making sure that fucker can't rise again and kill even more people in the sequel.

(Note: I do hope the 1/6 Committee is going to look into the other assassination attempts on Nancy Pelosi and Democrats, and not just leave it at Pence.)

Liz Cheney Is Trying to Save the House She and Her Father Built and Other Observations on the 1/6 Hearing

On Thursday night, the Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol finally, after far too long, frankly, made its case to the American people and the world. The committee wasn't talking to you and me, we who are damned to spend far too much of our time elbow-deep in the clogged sinks of political shit. The committee wasn't talking to the scores of MAGA drones who are joyfully face-fucked by dildos of misinformation, disinformation, and lies and will never return to what we like to think of as "reality." They were clearly talking to other entities, including, as many have noted, Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose Justice Department is moving at a pace that might be best described as "nearly still" when it comes to charging top officials with crimes related to the attack. To my weary (and currently Covid-addled) mind, the hearings had another target: Americans who checked out after Donald Trump's second impeachment and haven't followed the evolving story. For them, much of what was said on Thursday was new, and let's just fucking hope that at least a few of them watched. 

As strong as committee chair Bennie Thompson's opening statement was, with its clear and almost immediate assertion that "Donald Trump lost the presidential election in 2020. The American people voted him out of office," as well as clearly placing Trump as the central figure in a conspiracy to overturn the election, it was Republican Rep. Liz Cheney who truly brought the wood chipper to shred the MAGA right and, most especially, Trump himself.

Cheney's purpose was also clear: to separate the good Republicans from the Trumpist Republicans, and to give those supposedly good ones a chance to come clean by warning them about what's coming. In essence, Cheney was trying to save the party that her father built, one that she worked on, too. The MAGA right has turned away from the beliefs and projects of Cheney and daddy Dick, the former Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and member of Congress. Among other things, that GOP was pro-business no matter what (none of this bullshit condemning a corporation for an internal policy) and pro-intelligence community. Cheney constructed a GOP that was for a strong interventionist military, especially with the goal of "spreading democracy" at the end of a gun, which was incredible for profits for companies aligned (mostly but not exclusively) with the GOP. Trump mocked that and turned the party more isolationist, and he attacked IC for its perceived disloyalty to him. You might not remember, but a decade ago, Liz Cheney and your new Twitter buddy William Kristol led an organization called "Keep America Safe," which was all about attacking Democrats for being soft on Muslims. They went after anyone who supported the "Ground Zero Mosque," and they attacked lawyers who defended detainees at the Guantanamo Naval Base, calling them the "Al Qaeda Seven," questioning their loyalty to the country. She's just the fucking worst. 

In her truly great presentation on the evidence against Trump and his despicable co-conspirators, like a compelling opening statement in a huge trial, one thread that ran under it was that you could be an honorable Republican or a dishonorable one, and she was pretty fuckin' clear about who she thought was on the side of honor. She showed a clip of Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr, who was also AG when Dick Cheney was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, declaring that the allegations of voter fraud were "nonsense" and "it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that, and it was doing a great grave disservice to the country," even backing up the opinion of Barr with video of Ivanka Trump saying, "I respect Attorney General Barr. So, I accepted what he was saying." Mike Pence is also praised by inference, playing a clip of him saying, "President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election," along with video of Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley saying that Pence was giving orders about securing the Capitol and not Trump. "Look at these loyal Republicans," Cheney was saying, "this is who this party is supposed to be."

It's worth noting that not a single clip of a Democrat reacting to the attack or condemning the attack was played. Just Republicans.

So let's be clear: Yes, obviously, her running at Donald Trump with a dagger to cut his throat and dance in the arterial spray is awesome. At this point, we'll take anyone who will actually help turn this ship around before it plunges off the edge of the world. I'm totally fucking here for Cheney burning down the house of Trump. But Cheney is doing it to preserve an already corrupt and harmful party. Jesus fuck, Trump wasn't president when Mitch McConnell blocked the consideration of Garland for the Supreme Court. Trump didn't force Cheney to vote against voting rights legislation. She has done exactly one thing to try to save the country before she goes back to destroying it under her terms.

It sucks, but we'll take it because while we may all be circumspect about what will come, what we know is that we were almost fucked in January 2021. One or two factors could have fucked it all, from Pence deciding to throw in with Trump to the violent shitbirds succeeding in murdering some legislators. We were so close to fucked that we need to ally with those who we would otherwise want to defeat. And we need to save ourselves from what is the inevitable next phase of this coup and from Donald fucking Trump, who comes across not as a buffoon in the evidence presented so far, but as an angry hippopotamus, ready to use his girth to wreck anything that pisses him off, not giving a shit what gets destroyed as long as he ends up getting his way at the end.

Liz Cheney may be a plague, but Trump is a poison. Stop the thing that acts faster before going after a cure for the other.

(Note: I couldn't work him into this piece, but, man, fuck Jared Kushner in every fucking hole he has in his soft, patrician body, and even in a few holes that aren't there. What a goddamn worm.)

Uvalde, the Southern Baptist Church, and the Murderous, Traumatizing Failure of Conservative Ideology

What do you do when your belief system allows for the murder and rape of children? What do you do when the things that the leaders you trust have said to you, messages their media figures have inundated you with, when the outcome of that is the destruction of kids? A sane person would want to repent, get out, try to change. But we are a nation filled with incoherent rage and fuck-everyone-but-me-and-mine madness. Lemme explain.

In Texas, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District has a police department. According to its webpage, "The primary goal for the Uvalde CISD Police Department is to maintain a safe and secure environment for our future leaders to learn and our current leaders to educate while forming partnerships with students, teachers, parents, and the community while enforcing laws and reducing fears." Do you understand that? Like many places around the country, the schools have their own cops. And, in nearly every case of a school shooting, the cops or security officers failed to even hinder the shooter. 

Like so many things about Uvalde, it demonstrates the utter failure of all the ludicrous bullshit that conservatives throw at us. The Uvalde cops were shit-scared, even with the military equipment they had, pictured looking so goddamned tough, just more security theatre, which is about 75% of American policing, all screaming and tasers and shooting unarmed people. But the truth is that the fucking guns, man, the fucking guns are too much for them. They pissed themselves rather than risk their lives. It's disgraceful and disgusting and all of the cops who stood outside the classroom or sat in their cars should be fired. If they have any self-respect left at all, they should quit first. 

Also, look at the Preventive Security Measures document for the UCISD. Robb Elementary "has fencing that encloses the campus [and] is designed to limit and/or restrict access to individuals without a need to be on the campus." It advises, "Teachers are instructed to keep their classroom doors closed and locked at all times." Do you understand that part? 

They fucking were supposed to do it all, all those things that conservatives say schools need in order to be secure in our fucked beyond fucked post-Columbine, post-Newtown nation. Good guys with guns. Extra security. It was all there and it didn't fucking matter because the one factor that got those 19 kids and two teachers slaughtered was the guns, and we have a crazed minority in this country with a fuckton of cash that prevents anything from being done about the goddamn guns when most of the country knows that it's the guns, even most of those who say it's not the guns know it's the fuckin' guns.

Every cop organization in the country should be agitating for military-style rifles to be banned and that there should be more laws restricting gun ownership. If not, you're saying that you don't give a shit that your officers are gonna get killed, too. Or that they shouldn't try to stop an armed fucknut from slaughtering kids.

The United States has failed its children. We have decided that it’s better to be armed than worry about the occasional massacre. We have decided that it’s better that the seas rise and the temperatures soar and the droughts and fires wreak destruction than to actually do the work of moving off fossil fuels. And how many churches need to cover up massive sex crimes against children before we start treating them like a criminal enterprise, like the Mafia with an omerta against ratting out child rapists. What more do you want to do to kids? 

And what of this conservative ideology that is supposed to be about protecting children within the bounds of traditional family, within a traditional public education system, within the churches that are supposed to inculcate traditional values? If that ideology has led to piles of murdered children inside classrooms, if it has led to thousands of children being raped by leaders in the Southern Baptist Church, the very heart of the evangelical movement that has so poisoned this country and whose leaders are treated like sages instead of pariahs, then that ideology is corrupt and profane and debased. It needs to be burned to the ground, degraded to the point where all who so much as whisper its tenets are seen as fools who need to be banished to the political and social hinterlands until and unless they scourge themselves clean. 

You right-wing motherfuckers spent time banning books about gender identity and banning lessons in the cruel history of the United States, a savage heritage that you are doing nothing to counter. You decided it was more important to get gay and lesbian teachers out of schools than it was to keep weapons of war out of people’s hands. You should be forced to live in a classroom with the ripped apart bodies of 19 children rotting in front of you. You goddamned ghouls should never get a moment’s peace or happiness the rest of your miserable, cocksucking lives.

And if you believe that a kid saying she’s transgender is worse than a school shooting, you should never be allowed to comment in public again. I mean, Jesus fuck, the kids from Robb Elementary are turning to GoFundMe to pay for the therapy they'll need. It's trauma and cruelty on top of trauma and cruelty. Anyone who thinks that's okay should never be allowed near children, let alone writing policy that affects them. 

I have written so much about guns, so much about Christian fundamentalism, and I don’t know if I’m repeating myself anymore. Post-Reagan conservatism is, at its heart, at its base, a death wish because of the insane adherence to fundamentalist Christianity, which sees our time on earth as a way station before the bliss of the grave when your soul can join Jesus. Of course the guns don’t matter. Of course the deaths of children don’t matter. Why, those kids are lucky that they get to be with Christ so soon and not suffer all the awful sins of existing as a physical being. If you’re bathed in the blood of Christ, then what does it matter if your blood bathes the walls of the elementary school. It's madness, and it should be treated as madness.

Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of talking about what complete, breathtakingly fucked hypocrites Republicans are. They call us “groomers”? Please, SBC. They call us baby killers? They call themselves “pro-life”? It’s a fucking joke. They’re a fucking joke. Go after guns. Go after evangelicals. And stop trying to say there are any "good" Republicans. Just because Liz Cheney hates Donald Trump doesn't mean that she's a motherfucking hero. She's gonna vote for more guns and fewer voting rights and more abortion restrictions and bans. Fuck her. Destroy the word "Republican." Wreck "conservative." Make it poisonous because it is. We have thousands of dead and traumatized children to prove it.

One day, perhaps, in a future that I’m not sure is going to happen, historians will hopefully look back on this era and write new textbooks for kids at school. Those textbooks will hopefully talk about how a cabal of wealthy fucks tried to hide the past from its children while at the same time allowing those same children to live in a nation that requires them to learn how to attempt to survive being massacred in their classroom. Those historians will hopefully teach the kids of the future the cruelty of the leaders who thought a book about being gay was more obscene than children's bodies being shredded by bullets. And those historians will hopefully say that this was just a continuation of the very violence and hatred at the core of America's story, that what those terrible people were trying to hide was themselves. 

If we don't do better, if we don't take this anger we have right now, this despair, this sorrow and turn it into action, then we deserve to be a footnote in that history. And that footnote will say that we knew that an ideology of hatred and violence was ruining another generation, yet we still failed to do everything we could to stop it. We failed to save ourselves or our kids.

Let's not be like the Uvalde cops. 

A Poem for Memorial Day

Lists and Scales

by Chantelle Bateman

I hate being alone with him again

Even in my mind

Trapped in his looney bin of an office

Suffocated by these four walls

Padded in frames full of bullshit

His accolades for a job well done

From people who don't know how to do their damn jobs

I can feel him staring at me

Counting my tics, fidgets, and sweat beads

Sizing me up to see if I’m a good fit for crazy

Talking to me very slowly

With small words

About things bigger than he understands

Asking me questions

And only listening for answers from his lists

That tell him how far up I am

On the “About to lose her shit” scale

We begin down the list

“Do you know why you’re here today?”

Because I'm fucked up

Because I want help

And I'm here today of all days

Because I couldn't get here any sooner

5 years of wandering

3 years of darkness

And 18 months of trying to get this stupid red tape to feed through your system properly

18 months of waiting for someone to say they are ready and willing to hear my story

"Yeah," I shrug "I lost my marbles somewhere between here and Iraq."

He moves me up the scale

Down the list

“Do you think about hurting yourself?”

I think about how I hurt myself with each piece of my humanity I gave away

Avoiding eye contact with people who look like my kin

Believing in enemies

Provoking and consuming fear

The pain of remembering is far greater than any I could inflict upon myself

I cut myself to find relief

“I think about stopping the pain”

Up the scale

Down the list

“What about angry? Do you feel angry?”

THE FUCK KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT ANYWAY?!?

Do happy people come here?

Of course I'm fucking angry

I'm angry about your stupid questions

I'm angry that no one seems to notice people are dying in war

While everyone else agonizes, over which brand of bottled water to choose

And I'm pissed that I can't just go back to not giving a fuck about any of it “Yes, usually.”

Up the scale

Down the list

"Were you ever raped or sexually assaulted?"

Rape is sexual assault douche bag

And your question is reminiscent of the act

Penetrating and touching me without my consent

Whatever I tell you won't matter

I know you aren't here to help me find justice or peace

Where is the question that asks "have you sexually assaulted anyone"

How many crazy points is that worth?

"Yes"

Up the scale

Down the list

"How many times a day do you think about your triggers?"

I roll my eyes into the far corners of my mind

Into the memories that landed me in this chair

They appear sporadically throughout my day

When my bathroom suddenly becomes a port-o-john shaped death trap

A helicopter overhead converts my backyard into a flight line

Or the 4th of July turns the whole world into place rated for hazardous duty pay

But my memories aren't on his list

His questions are too one size fits all for that

"A lot I guess."

Up the scale

Down the list he continues

In an effort to get to know me

And ascertain how much less like myself I have become

How strange is it to get to know someone

whom you intend to forget

At the end

I feel at the top of his scale

The whole experience

A deployment déjà vu

Of unpacking and re-packing sea bags of crap

Just to make sure you've still got it

His questions forced me to open up my whole box of awful

And inventory its contents

But no one tells you what to do with what's inside

I guess I will just pack it all up

Haul it back home

And try not put any of it in the wrong place

(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.)

America's Mass Hysteria: Can We Please Talk About Crazy Motherfuckers Like They're Crazy Motherfuckers?

I've been trying to articulate for the last week this feeling of things spinning off their axis. I'm in the UK right now, a place I now end up spending about a month a year, and I was talking about politics with a young man from Northern Ireland. He had supported Brexit, yes, because he had believed the Conservatives' utter garbage about how much funding would go to the National Health Service. Now that Brexit is so obviously the clusterfuck of regulations and shortages that the Stay coalition had said it would be, as well as there being no benefit at all to having left the EU, Donal is, to say the least, done with Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. 

I pointed out to him that at least politicians in the UK don't pander to religion quite as blatantly or quite as regularly as American politicians do. "You don't see anyone here talking about how God wants them to do something," I said.

"No, they don't," Donal said. "Everyone would look at them as if they're quite mad."

And that was it. It's not that religion doesn't matter (Donal being from Northern Ireland knows that quite well). Indeed, some bishops sit in the House of Lords, an outdated notion in a very outdated institution, and about two-thirds of the public think that's bullshit. But I realized that one of the things we don't talk about enough in the United States is just how many crazy motherfuckers are in power. We treat crazy motherfuckers the same way we treat sane politicians when, truly, we have to call crazy motherfuckers "crazy motherfuckers."

Right now, the media and other politicians are still indulging the complete madness of those who believe in the lie that there was massive voter and election fraud that changed the outcome of the 2020 election. Of course, a good many of those who are spouting this don't believe it and are merely playing along in order to stay in good graces of Donald fucking Trump, and that's just Ol' Yeller levels of pathetic. But a whole bunch of people really believe this shit. And those who know it's not true are not doing enough to say, objectively, they are wrong. There are no "doubts." There is no hidden evidence. There's nothing. It's the electoral equivalent of insisting you see leprechauns fucking mermaids on the backs of unicorns and wanting to fight anyone who tells you it's not true. Sorry, but you're just fucking insane. 

I don't understand why the first question to any politician or pundit on any non-Fox "news" show isn't "Was Joe Biden legitimately elected president?" And if that politician or pundit doesn't say, clearly, "Yeah, of course, I'm not a crazy motherfucker," then the interview is over. Why should we give a shit what a crazy motherfucker or someone who helps keep crazy motherfuckers crazy has to say about a goddamn thing? Why would the next thing be "Well, Senator Crazy Motherfucker, you refuse to acknowledge reality when it comes to the election, but, hey, let's treat your opinion on tax policy as legitimate." Fuck that. Fucking hell, because of the failure to call out crazy, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania is fucking crazy.

And the crazy keeps going. The Great Replacement Theory, which motivated the rabid little dickhole to drive to Buffalo and gun down people at a supermarket, is racist madness, the kind of mass hysteria that motivates genocides, like in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, or fascist lockdowns of nations, essentially becoming North Korea. It doesn't even make any goddamn sense since it takes years for immigrants to become citizens in order to vote in national elections. Again, factually, the whole thing is bullshit, but people cling to it like the last piece of white driftwood in a black and brown flood. 

I'm not even getting into the Covid madness, where all of a sudden, billions of people getting a vaccine is seen as "experimental." Fuck you, you fucking bugfuck insane disease vectors. And I'm not even talking about QAnon and other warped shit. I'm talking mainstream crazy.

Yeah, whenever I hear a politician on any side say that our rights "come from God," I think, "Oh, shut the fuck up." But this shit is getting nuttier and nuttier. It's the 21st fucking century, but our leaders are expected to talk like they're pilgrims on the Mayflower or some such shit. In her commencement speech at the University of Wyoming where she said some bullshit about "two sexes" and later apologized, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis also said, "There are those in government who believe not that the creator endowed us with inalienable rights … but that government created those rights." And Democrats say shit like that, too. Government did create those rights. That's why those rights are in the U.S. Constitution but not in others. Unless your god's a pussy and couldn't get other countries to guarantee them. But Republican nutzoids like Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet shit like "Our God is bigger" and speak about how "godless" the nation is and how Satan is doing shit and what the fuck are they even talking about. 

Look, we're used to stupid. We're used to corrupt. We're used to manipulative. We're used to that shit. But widespread crazy is scarier than all of that. Widespread crazy will lead to more violence. Widespread crazy will lead to condemnation of those who refuse to give in to the crazy. Widespread crazy is a goddamned virus that is only happy if it spreads.

And what I figured out is that too many of our leaders and media figures are not holding people accountable for crazy. Crazy is not merely problematic. It's not just another side of an issue. It's fucking crazy. This country is going fucking crazy, driven there by Fox "news" and online bullshitters who get off on making people crazy and crazy people themselves, who now have a megaphone that can be just as big as anyone trying to tell people that reality is reality.

The problem is the insanity. I wish I could give you a solution. But crazy brings out crazy, madness brings out madness, rage brings out rage. I think a box has been opened and I don't know that we can close it.

The one hope I can offer is that Donal did change. He didn't blame the anti-Brexit voters for the failure of Brexit. He blamed those who made impossible promises, and he knows that he was wrong. In fact, attitudes to immigrants have softened post-Brexit, as if everything the Leavers said was a lie. I'm not saying that kind of change of heart is possible in the United States, where people wear their madness proudly like a red cap made in China. But humans do have that capacity. Just maybe not American humans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the gender breakdown for Mississippi House of Representatives: 

And here it is for the Mississippi Senate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tucker Carlson Has an Orgasm: A Fantasia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democrats Should Go on the Offensive By Celebrating Accomplishments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans Force Ketanji Brown Jackson (and All of Us) to Live in Their Disturbing Fantasy World

The Republican Party demands that we accept a reality that is not reality. That much is clear. If they're not demanding that we accept that the 2020 presidential election was really won by Donald Trump, they're demanding that laws be passed to prevent "voter fraud" that doesn't happen. That's the range of opinion on that matter, and to accept either as a rational position is to allow the GOP to keep spinning a fucked-up web of that fantasy. 

But the GOP Fantasy World is not limited to the Big Lie of 2020. It's not limited to declarations that the first impeachment of Donald Trump was based on what they see as Democratic delusions about Trump's relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia and his blackmailing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to get dirt on Joe Biden. No, the GOP say, all of that is innocent and fine. It's not even limited to whatever bizarro shit they think is on Hunter Biden's laptop computer, like it's a Rosetta Stone of corruption (side note: Republicans treat technology like it's some kind of mystical art with sigils that cannot be understood by mere mortals).

Now, as the GOP slips deeper and deeper into the absurd world of QAnon conspiracies, they want us to live in a world where all Democrats must be child sex traffickers, rapists, and pornographers. They dragged Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson into that fictional world during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings this week. It didn't matter that Jackson is easily one of the most qualified people ever nominated for the Supreme Court, vastly superior to all three justices that Trump put on there. It didn't matter that she's supported by groups across the political spectrum, with an A+ rating from the American Bar Association and two previous Senate confirmations under her belt, both with Republican support. It didn't matter that she's adjudicated over 500 cases. 

No, all that mattered is that in seven cases, Jackson didn't give as punitive a sentence as she could have to some scummy fucks who collected, looked at, and, in a couple of cases, traded child pornography. Most of the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee grilled Jackson on those cases. The clear implications of that questioning goes beyond an attack on her judicial philosophy. I mean, lots of judges believe that sentencing guidelines are ludicrously over-punitive, and that's a real debate Graham, Cruz, Hawley, etc. could have had with Jackson. 

But that wasn't the point of this. The real point was to say that Jackson enables child fucking and enables people to look at photos and videos of child fucking. The real point was to tie Jackson to all the fucked beyond fucked bullshit that a large portion of the GOP base and, increasingly, GOP legislators believe. That Graham, Cruz, and the rest decided to go apeshit on Jackson about her entirely mainstream sentencing of child porn offenders showed how desperate they all are to win that nutzoid base. There's nothing there. Nothing at all. They all stood there with flaccid, little cocks, screaming about how big a hard-on they had and the QAnon onanists nodded in agreement that, yes, those soft choads were mighty flesh rods of vengeance for the abused kids. It was revolting. (Sure, yeah, for Marsha Blackburn, change it to a dry pussy she said was gushing.)

But if you are inclined to want to rip your eyeballs out and flush them down the toilet, you can check out some of the QAnon message boards and see how outraged the onanists are that an "apologist for child molesters," as one of them described Jackson, will now sit on the Supreme Court. And it doesn't fucking help that Jackson was the judge who sentenced the guy who shot up the DC restaurant Comet Ping-Pong in the Pizzagate madness to four years in prison. If you remember, crazy motherfucker thought Hillary Clinton was raping and eating kids in the basement of the place or some such shit that is just as fucking absurd. Yeah, so Jackson's involvement there proves their shit, and they're all just declaring outright that "She's a pedophile" and theorizing (sorry, but you gotta know how fucked up this is) "I think she was groomed at a young age. She talked about how her uncles use to come over a lot. I bet she had a relationship with one of them, one that she still holds dear even though she knows it was 'wrong.'" Yeah, someone wrote that. And then that dickscab goes on about it. 

It's all because the Republicans on the committee decided to make her, again, entirely mainstream sentencing of child porn offenders into something insidious, just so they had something to attack her on. It's frankly slanderous, and they all put her and her entire family in danger. 

Another part of this is that preening pompous pricks like Graham keep talking about how the questioning is like some kind of payback for the "mistreatment" of Brett Kavanaugh, who had multiple people talking about him as a rapist and all-around creepy fuck, and Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote an article about the role her faith plays in her legal decisions. Those were real issues with real questions behind them. Jackson's sentences rise to the level of a question in passing, not a full-on gallop into a mad world. 

We are heading into the potential for a real nightmare, where the people that one party's leaders are trying to please are increasingly divorced from reality, where those fucking loons are getting elected, and where they try to impose that unreality on everyone else. We're seeing it in those voter fraud laws or anti-critical race theory laws or "Don't Say 'Gay'" laws, all existing to deal with problems that simply don't exist but feel like they exist to dumb people so fuck it, pass the laws. These are not politicians who give a fuck about the lives of anyone, child or adult. They are not serious people.

And yet throughout the hearing, Senator Dick Durbin and other Democrats kept talking to Republicans as if they weren't spouting shit-scrawling insane nonsense, insisting on talking about bills they were working on together, pretending to some kind of comity, as if that would slow them down. Instead, they bulldozed the Democrats, so the only fucking thing anyone is going to remember from this hearing is all this child porn bullshit and not what a compassionate, intelligent, wise, and experienced person Jackson is. They tainted her nomination, which was also the point.

Jackson would have been well within her rights to say, "Senators, you are accusing me of supporting child predators. You can go fuck yourselves" and walked out. Frankly, we don't deserve her. And this post doesn't even get into the crazed levels of racism and sexism in her mistreatment by the GOP. 

(One note here: If we've learned anything about Republicans, it's that when they get worked up about a legal or moral issue, it's almost certainly because they're covering for themselves or others who are doing the very thing they are decrying. I'm not saying Graham or Cruz or Hawley or Sasse or Tillis sexually exploit children. But, like their beloved Tucker Carlson, I'm just asking questions.)