Judge Ana Reyes's Reaming of Trump Administration Lawyers Is About More Than Transgender Rights

In a DC courtroom this past week, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia held a hearing in the case of Talbott v. Trump, where a group of transgender members of the military are challenging President Donald Trump's January 25 executive order that bans anyone who is transgender from serving in the US military. The suit is named after Nicolas Talbott, a trans man who was able to fulfill his dream of joining the Army after President Joe Biden overturned Trump's 2017 order that overturned President Barack Obama's order allowing trans people to openly serve. Yeah, that's how whiplash fast this has all moved.

Reyes took no shit from the attorneys for the Trump administration and their assertions about trans people. From wrecking the idea that that sex only exists as an "immutable biological classification as either male or female" (as stated in Trump's other odious executive order trying to erase trans people from any kind of public existence) to treating the government's legal lackeys like children who need a spanking to absolutely embarrassing them on the very issue of the effect of transgender men and women on the military, Reyes reamed them out again and again with the spiky dildo of reality.

What Reyes did was cut through the bullshit and obfuscation that is the craft and trade of any lawyers for Trump. When one tried to assert that the ban was not, in fact, a ban, she asked him, "If we had President Trump here right now, and I said to him, ‘Is this a transgender ban?’ What do you think he would say?" The Justice Department lawyer, Jason Lynch, replied, "I have no idea, your honor." And Reyes more or less scoffed, "I do. He would say, ‘Of course it is.’ Because he calls it a transgender ban, because all the language in it is indicative." 

Reyes kept throwing Trump and his cretinous administration's lies and hyperbolic statements back at them. She read off a litany of things about the military that Trump claims are affected by treatment of gender dysphoria and proper pronoun usage and she asked if Lynch really believes it would affect military readiness. Then she cut off Lynch when he tried to respond, saying, "Because it doesn’t. We all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use. We have a military that is incompetent, if that is the case. Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn’t." And, goddamn, it's good to hear someone state, on the record, that at some point you have to fucking deal with what's real and not what some slimy power-mad fucknut says to keep the con going with the rubes. Hell, Reyes even got Lynch to admit that if he were in a foxhole with fellow soldiers during combat, "I doubt the gender identity would be a primary concern."

Perhaps the most beautiful moment was when Reyes asked Lynch to define what Trump meant by "radical gender ideology." He replied that he was "loath to speculate what the president had in mind when he signed this executive order." Reyes impaled him with her gavel when she said, "Well, it’s not like I picked you off the street and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Lynch, hey, let me ask you some questions about what the government thinks.’ You’re the government’s legal representative." Ouch.

At one point in the hearing on Tuesday, Reyes wondered aloud if the executive order met the legal definition of "animus," which is something done for no other reason than the hatred of a group of people. She said, "[The order] calls an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest, who lack integrity—people who have taken an oath to defend this country, people who have been under fire, people who have received medals for taking fire for this country. I want to know from the government whether that language expresses ‘animus.’ Does that express animus?" Lynch wouldn't answer so she cut him off with "This is a policy from the President of the United States affecting thousands of people… to call an entire group of people, lying dishonest people who are undisciplined, immodest, and have no integrity. How is that anything other than showing animus?" Lynch said he didn't know, which prompted Reyes to say, "You do have an answer. You just don’t want to give it."

Of course, the Justice Department made a complaint to the chief judge of the federal court in DC, calling for Reyes to be disciplined for making complete idiots out of the idiots who had to defend an idiotic policy. Of course, the complaint has got peak hypocrisy in it by saying that judges should always appear impartial, which is something no conservative should ever be allowed to say as long as Clarence Thomas's corrupt ass is still farting up the chambers of the Supreme Court.

As a defense of the rights of transgender Americans, Reyes was an absolute pit bull getting her teeth into the supple legs of the shitty men who dared to leap the fence into her yard. But just as important was Judge Reyes refusing to buy into the cruel fantasy world that Trump and most of the right in this country demand we all live in. There are immutable facts, to use the administration's word, about what sex actually is, about what actually affects the readiness of the military, about the honorable records of the plaintiffs who served their nation more than Trump and his garbage children ever have or ever could. And the same goes for so many other issues, like immigration and crime and election integrity and abortion and race and taxation and, really, every fucking thing that is being used to justify the insanity going on at the White House that's forced on the nation. 

At some point, Reyes is saying, it matters that we agree that reality is real, whether you like it or not, and it doesn't shift with whatever a cadre of evil motherfuckers want it to be. And real people live in reality and have to deal with its real effects. This shit matters, as Reyes asserted forcefully, because you can't just hate someone and then try to create a reason to justify harming the people you hate. Which is essentially the entire ethos of the MAGA movement.

The Simplest Explanation: They Are Evil

"Evil" is a hard concept to get your head around. We can get close to it when we say things like "The cruelty is the point," but that was truly about the first Donald Trump administration, with its scattershot acts of savagery, many of them mitigated by courts and by stronger Democrats and even a few Republicans who still had souls and spines. The cruelty had no real ideology behind it, just the sheer deranged pleasure of hurting people. Systematic, planned cruelty with a goal of hurting everyone who ever opposed you and your ideology? That's evil. We don't want to think that we are confronting evil now because it seems melodramatic and frankly unfathomable. If we have leaders who keep acting in ways that are evil, as in directly contrary to any concept of "good," then we need to acknowledge that we are in an evil country living through an evil age. 

I just can't think of any other clearer way to describe what the Trump/Musk administration has done in this first month of its four-year (minimum) reign of terror. We want them to be stupid, and we need to think of them as incompetent, like when Musk's Department of Government Efficiency fired 300 workers from the National Nuclear Security Administration because they didn't understand that those workers are responsible for the safety of our nuclear arsenal, not a bunch of hippies inhibiting the nuclear power industry or whatever the hell they believed, and now they're scrambling to rehire them. But stupidity and incompetence lets them off the hook to an extent in a "they know not what they do" kind of way. Fuck that. 

These motherfuckers know exactly what they're doing. They are seeking to undermine the functioning of the federal government, getting rid of any checks on the power of the president and wanting to privatize much of its work, in order to make the nation a de facto autocracy that exists for the benefit of a few wealthy patrons, with the population kept in line by an enforced Christian nationalist morality. In other words, Trump and his enablers are acting like just about every fucking totalitarian regime in history. And its goal is to harm anyone or any idea that opposes their power, from entire institutions and populations and on down to the lowest-level individual bureaucrat who didn't pledge their loyalty. It is a kind of coup, a willful abandonment of the protections of the Constitution while pretending to save the country from crises that simply don't exist. 

I don't know how you describe the actions the administration has inflicted on the country in another way that makes sense. You have to remember that anything they say about why they're doing this gutting of the workforce is nonsense, not only in the amount of money DOGE and Musk claim they are saving, but also in the context of a proposed $4.5 trillion tax cut, which is something like 16 times the salaries of the entire federal workforce. If you fire a couple hundred thousand people who are doing well the jobs they were hired for, completely decimating their finances and upending they're lives and that doesn't help anyone else, that's evil shit. 

No matter where you go, evil is at play. Firing people involved in the prevention of bird flu and other viruses. Firing those trying to find a cure for cancer. Freezing and eliminating funding for USAID, which helps people in poorer countries survive diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and more. The firing of thousands of workers at the Forest Service and national parks. And so very much more. It's not just about the employees themselves, many of whom have been put through hell in the last couple of weeks, but it's about all the people who will be harmed and will die because of these cuts. 

And this isn't even getting into the disappearing of migrants to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to countries where they have no connection; or the proposed complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza so the United States can build some resorts; or the Justice Department's attack on the rule of law in the Eric Adams case; or the move to erase the existence of transgender people' or the unhinged attack on anything that supports non-whites or women as "DEI," which, we should all be reminded, means "diversity, equity, and inclusion," as if those aspirational ideas are bad. Or a thousand other things that I could list and that I'm sure you thought of, all, all, all with a goal to directly harm people or force them to kowtow to Trump and Musk (or, really, Musk because Trump is just his fucking poodle now). I mean, this is some supervillain shit going on right now.

"Evil" provides us with a way of framing this in the easy, Manichean way that most people prefer to view the world. I acknowledge it's got a religious sound to it. That's okay. That helps. It's an explanation that needs no elaboration. As a term it has potency because it gives the opposition a moral dynamic: we're fighting against evil. I also think that it's a way of giving those who voted for Trump a word to articulate the way they feel like he's fucked them over (and, I know, it's a small percentage who might actually pull their heads out of his voluminous ass in order to breathe the fresh air of reality). And it gives us a way to label the people who do Trump and Musk's bidding. They're not just assholes bro-coding us to the apocalypse. They're evil assholes who want to see the rest of us hurting.

It also forces us to ask questions to anyone who supports them: What actual good has been done? Can you tell us one thing that's been accomplished that makes your life better or easier? What is being proposed that would make your life better or easier? Because the answer across the board is "Not a goddamn thing."

They are fucking up the lives of Americans. They are driving people to despair. I have said that I believe the real goal here is to provoke a violent response from a group or individuals, giving Trump the chance to declare martial law and just have his way with us as surely as if he were keeping us chained to a wall. We are in the midst of evil, awaiting to see what other evil will occur. 

And now we need to respond as if evil motherfuckers have taken over our occasionally decent nation. Call it out as evil, protest, and kick your members of Congress in the ass. The time to act is now while we're still allowed to act.

Democrats Need to Stop Being Afraid of Being Democrats

In Kamala Harris's speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in Chicago in August, one key word and its variations were conspicuously absent, and it's a shame because she was speaking to a huge audience that needed to hear the words "Democrat" and "Democrats" and "Democratic Party." The only reference was a worthless nod to dead bipartisanship: "Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades." Awesome. Now how about all the shit that was done by Democrats?

In other speeches, she didn't mention the party at all, and sometimes that was just odd. At a rally in Atlanta, Harris said, "We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth; a future with affordable health care, affordable childcare, paid leave." While this was in a comparison to Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric, she never expanded "we" beyond her and her voters. That "we" should have been "Democrats."

I know that a parliamentary system requires a different kind of approach to an election, but look at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's speech when the 2024 campaign started over there. He ties the success of the country to the success of his party: "A vote for Labour is a vote for stability – economic and political. A politics that treads more lightly on all our lives. A vote to stop the chaos." Candidates know in other countries that the only way to success is for their party to win, and they campaign on the good their party can do. Throughout its electoral history, Labour has put the party front and center in its advertising. While Starmer did have one poster that just had his image and "Change" on it (like Obama), I honestly can't remember a Harris/Walz sign that even mentioned they're Democrats. In fact, I can't remember seeing a single "Vote for Democrats" poster for anything beyond local offices. I know they exist. I've seen them online. But they weren't prominent by any stretch, and they never have. 

It's not just Harris. Even when a Democratic leader talks about Democrats, it's in the most polite and milquetoast way, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a press conference last week: "Democrats are always, always ready, willing and able to work with anyone to find the common ground necessary to solve problems on behalf of hardworking American taxpayers." Jeffries went on to describe Republicans as the party that wants to cut taxes on billionaires. That notion, that Democrats will "work with anyone," is, yes, the reality for a party in the minority. But it's not something anyone can rally around. No one is going to say, "Yeah, fuckin' go, Democrats. Compromise!"

After the 2024 election, when Democrats lost the presidency and the Senate and failed to retake the House, the punditocracy went into high gear about how the brand of the Democratic Party is "in the toilet" or "toxic." Actual elected Democrats joined in the beatdown, declaring, as Washington's Adam Smith saying the party is "broken." Most recently, Senator John "This Year's Sinema" Fetterman also called his party "toxic" and said that its "primary currency was shaming and scolding and talking down to people and telling them, ‘Hey, I know better than you,’ or you’re dopes, or you’re a bro, or you’re ignorant or, ‘how can you be this dumb? I can’t imagine it.’" Considering that Trump and Musk and all of those bros and dopes and ignoramuses and dummies on the right insult everyone not them, Fetterman's accusation is self-serving and wrong, and it's a shame to watch this once bad-ass warrior for the working class become a simp making nice with Republicans. 

My response to all of this is "What Democratic brand are they talking about?" Because, see, Democrats have forgotten to make their brand meaningful. Every fucking good thing in people's lives right now from the federal government came from Democrats. That what they should be selling. You like Social Security? Democrats got you that. You like Medicare and Medicaid? Democrats did that. Civil rights? You know it's Democrats who got that done. You like having access to health insurance? Motherfucker, there's one reason they call it "Obamacare," and that's because of Democrats. Don't fucking talk about shit that was done across the aisle. Don't fucking say shit like "Well, Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to undocumented migrants and raised taxes to save Social Security," like you're making some big point about how Republicans have changed. Goddamn, Republicans trot out fucking Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to say, "Look how great we are." Democrats can barely mention FDR and LBJ. 

Last week, I bitched about the lack of energy in the Democratic response to Trump's fuckery and the GOP rolling over telling him to fuck away on the ass of the Legislative branch. That energy is surging, finally. But it's got to go further, and it has to be framed that Democrats want to keep the lights on at hospitals and punish financial institutions that harm everyday people and prosecute corporate criminals and not tear down the FBI and CIA and the military and keep people from starving. It's not just that Republicans are the assholes here. It's that Democrats are the ones who can make it right. 

Stop being afraid of being part of this party. That's letting Republicans define you and accepting that it's the only way to think about the Democratic Party. Fuck that. Don't ask people to vote for you because of how well you get along with Republicans. Ask them to vote for you because you're a Democrat, and if they elect Democrats, you can get shit done for them. 

You know who knows how to talk about the party? Barack Obama. At the DNC, Obama discussed what the party and Harris and Walz believed about how to help people, saying, "That’s the Democratic Party’s vision. And our job over the next eleven weeks is to convince as many people as possible to vote for that vision." Of course, he said the opposition was "the other side," not "those filthy fucking Republicans." But at least he embraced who he is.

Note to Democrats: We're Freaking the Fuck Out and You're Not Helping Us Enough

I know so many people who are scared to death or freaking the fuck out about all of the ways that the administration of Donald Trump (aka "Elon's Meat Puppet") is fucking with their lives like a deranged child pulling the wings off moths. In just the last week:

- A dear friend with a trans teen is making plans to leave the country for at least the next four years. Gender-affirming care saved my friend's kid's life, and the fact that hospitals are pulling back on that care since Trump issued his savage, ignorant executive order has made them decide to get the fuck out of here. They're not the only family with a trans kid I know who are leaving. Of course they're leaving. That's what you do for your child. You make sure they aren't harmed. (And, yes, I recognize that there is a great deal of privilege in having the financial ability to leave.)

- Someone close to me helps run a food bank at an area church where many of the people who get meals and groceries are undocumented. The workers there are getting training for what to do if ICE shows up. They have cards they hand out to the people who come there that give them some direction if they are confronted by the federal government. Everyone there, from the minister on down, feels it's just a matter of time before it happens, and, yeah, it's scary.

- At my university, we've been given guidance, too, on how to handle any situations like that, with our administration reminding us that the university "requires a judicial warrant for any federal or local law enforcement official who comes to a campus seeking to make an arrest" and that an administrative warrant "is not a judicial warrant." We're still freaked out and not just about that.

(If I'm being vague here in identifying people, it's intentional because I don't trust these Trumpy motherfuckers in the least.)

- We're worried about the crackdown on what we teach, from our majors to our courses to the very content in the classroom. We're worried about getting doxed for expressing our disgust with the disgusting acts of this repulsive administration. We're worried about showing up on some fucknut's Twitter feed. I've had that happen to friends of mine, and the mongrels start chomping at the door pretty goddamn quickly. (And God fucking help you if you express an opinion on Palestine that isn't kissing Bibi's corrupt ass.)

And this is just about me and others living in our blue state safe space. I have friends in the MAGA States of America who are losing their fucking minds. They've had to deal with the barrage of hate and horror from their state governments and now it's all being compounded and double affirmed by the federal government. If you're already seeing abortion rights being tossed out, book bans, attacks on LGBTQ people, forced Bible shit, enforced patriotism, and more, at least there was a hope that Washington might mitigate some of the awfulness when Biden was in office. Now, it's like being held in a pit in a basement by the killer from Silence of the Lambs and when you fall asleep, Freddie Krueger shows up and you're not fucking safe anywhere. 

So I say this with hope and with the knowledge that none of it will be easy and that Trump is completely insane and has stormtroopers ready to go apeshit on whomever he screeches about on Truth Toilet: Democrats, you need to fucking act. You need to do something that makes us see you as a genuine resistance. And by that, I don't mean just posting videos explaining tariffs. I don't mean tweeting or skeeting or threading about how the price of eggs hasn't come down or how Trump said he would solve the Ukraine war in 24 hours but hasn't done jackshit about it yet. Those are nice gestures, but that's all they are. They are icing on the resistance cake. Now bake the fucking cake.

Trump and his poisonous minions like to say that "the American people elected Donald Trump to do all the shit we're doing." Although, c'mon, not exactly this shit, like having Elon Musk take over large parts of the functioning of the government in a de facto coup. I don't remember any campaign speech with that in there. But you know what else we elected? Our fucking representatives and senators, and we expect them to follow through, too.

You have to show us action, even action that fails, so we know that you have our backs as we go through this shit. There's actually quite a bit that Democrats can do. If much of it is symbolic, well, symbolic acts inspire people. That's why they're done. 

Have constituents in Republican states and districts flood their senators and representatives with calls and get them out to the townhall meetings. Make Republicans feel the heat of an angry electorate. File more lawsuits and make a big public deal about them and their purpose, and make sure you tie them to the Democratic Party, saying that you're trying to solve the problems the GOP is creating. Demand arrests of people who violate the law, like, you know, Elon Musk. Do something like going down to the Department of the Treasury and demanding to be allowed to have access to the same records that Musk is getting. Get arrested trying to do it, if you have to. 

Most of all, stop making nice with the bastards. Sen. Amy Klobuchar recently said that Americans want Democrats and Republicans to "find common ground," which is patently absurd. Americans don't give a fuck about that or they wouldn't have voted for the candidate who explicitly said that Democrats can go fuck themselves. So fuck that. Grind the working of the government to a standstill with on unanimous consent, with bill readings, with whatever weird shit you can do in the Senate for some ancient reason. Do not support a single nominee. Make Republicans own it all. 

And use their shit against them. Tariffs making prices go up? Propose a hike in the federal minimum wage, saying that it's unfair that working people have to pay for Trump's tariffs. Make that a big focus: Republicans are forcing you to spend more. Democrats want you to have more money. If conservatives try to say it'll hurt businesses, then ask them why CEOs are making billions of dollars while their employees are on SNAP benefits. Fuck it, go all in. Say you want to raise taxes on the super-wealthy to eliminate medical debt in this country. Have the fucking class war. Why not? What the fuck do you have to lose? Your donors? Your post-Congress jobs? Then fuck off.

Finally, don't abandon the people who need you. The only reason the GOP attack on trans people got any traction is because Democrats took the fucking bait instead of saying, "What fucking business is it of yours?" and moving on. The same goes for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Defending it is ridiculously easy (and Democrats have done a bad job explaining it). Instead, we get Democrats saying shit like "Maybe we need to just concentrate on bread-and-butter issues." That's tacitly admitting Republicans are right. Don't play on their fucking field. Bring the ball to your home stadium and make them come there. Minimum wage hike - that's bread and butter. You know what else would be bread and butter? A general strike. 

It sucks. Everything suck right now. And every day is like lining up for the next forced face-fucking from these felonious freaks. It's gonna suck for a long time. So we need Democrats to get out there, in real life and not just online, and rally us. We need you to do that or a hell of a lot of us are going to be lost in our fear. Even if it all fails, at least it rallies us. Goddamn, we need it.

Oh, and, for the love the god, please stop putting Chuck Schumer out there. Just fucking stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Part 1 is here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This was originally published on my Patreon page for subscribers. You can join starting at $1 a month. You can do an annual subscription so you don't have to keep track of another monthly thing. But join in. The other subscribers are awesome, with smart, feisty comments and discussions.)

Haiku Review of 2024: Slow Haikus

Okay, one more round. While the vast majority of the haikus couldn't get past the election (which, well, we never will), a few other subjects came up, including the annual check-in from Hong Kong and, wait, sports? Enjoy the final dose of haiku:

From Tasha in NC:

The Fuck-ry

Black women stare now

At fools who won’t vote with sense

The fuck-ry cometh

From Earl in Nashville:

So much depended

On electing Kamala--

Damn those white chickens

From Mary in Minnesota:

Reality Bites

Vikings’ year at last?

Until they choke down the stretch.

Tale as old as time.

From AlContraire in Shawnee, KS:

Dumpster Ire

Dead child in the trash

Couldn’t afford to feed it

Then why was it born?

From Chris in HK:

Hong Kong's 45 Jailed Democrats

The law said they could

Xi JinPing said they couldn't

Guess who fucking won

From Jack in a deep red section of a blue state:

A Lesson On Consequences

This ain't Passover, 

Trump voters are not exempt;

ALL will feel this pain

From Kristina in Holland, PA:

Jimmy Carter died

He was very old

but why not someone shitty

I won't name instead?

From QSantiago on Planet Earth

2024 DONE!

Fuck off, ‘24!

We will never be the same

Trump and Musk did it

And from me:

Sad Billionaire

Being rich doesn't

Make you happy. Elon proves

Losers are losers.

If We Had Listened to Jimmy Carter

Everyone laughed 

At White House solar panels

As the world burned down.

Big, huge thanks to everyone who sent in your haikus this year. I read every single one of them, even if they sucked (and very few did). Let's kick this bullshit year out of the bed at last. Who knows what kind of lover the next year will be? I'm guessing rough and barbed, without a safe word. But we can do this, everyone. We can fucking tell them we won't be beaten down. 

Haiku Review of 2024: What We Do in the Haiku

Man, you all are pissed off in your haikus this year. I got a whole lotta variations on "Fuck you, [insert name]" and "We're fucked" and "Fucking Trump voters, man." 

From DJ in London, Ontario: 

No Thanks, Orange Cretin

Fifty-first state, huh?

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Trump;

Canada’s all good.

From Dick Fritter of the Great White North: 

Fraud?

What happened to their

Massive fraud accusations?

Bullshit, bullshit. FUCK

From RG in Illinois:

Can't fix stupid...

Yep. Voted for him.

Punched myself right in the dick.

I'd do it again.

From Rob J in NYC:

Concepts of a plan

dawdle about in Trump's head

never to be free

From Nancy in the Pacific Northwest:

Our Mainstream Media

Sanewash the insane,

whitewash the incoherence,

greenlight a fascist.

From Esquire:

MAGA Originalist

I don't understand

Amendment One. Must rely 

on Amendment Two.

From Jim in CA:

Meanwhile, Justice Alito Sleeps Like a Baby

I’m pregnant.  What state

Do I move to?  Or is it

Another country?

And me:

It's Obvious

Anti-DEI

Is just racism from some

Butt-hurt white people.

Gaza Wasteland

I'm wondering when

it stops being defense and

Is just genocide

Okay, one more day of this and then we're done with this bitch of a year. Send 'em on: rudepundit@yahoo.com. And don't forget the form: a line of 5 syllables, a line of 7 syllables, and a line of 5 syllables. Title it if you want. Let's keep it going until the bitter end of the bitter times.

Haiku Review of 2024: Some Haiku Somewhere

Keep 'em coming, motherfuckers. Once again, I asked and you have already sent a shitload of haiku. Coming in from sea to dingy sea, you're once again defining the year with your simple, short poems. Here are a few of the absolute best I've read so far:

From Tom, missing friends in Asheville:

Ode to Climate Change

Helene's fury proved

That mountain towns are not safe

From hurricanes' wrath

From Heather in Minnesota:

Snow drifts white this eve.

Hate, greed, or war, no matter

Snow'll be red by morn. 

From Rabbitearz in L.A.:

Beware of Beardo

If that couch could talk...

That weird eyeliner guy is

Holding the NUKE CODES.

From Not Clever Enough to Think of a Clever Name: (me: oooh, meta)

Too Depressed to Think of a Title 

fight fight fight he said

as bullet tore through his ear

more guns than voters

From Debbie in Dallas:

OH, LOOK!

it's a guillotine

Sharpened and ready to go

Whom is it for - OH!

From TMangrove in Wisconsin:

Four More Years

I can’t I just can’t.

It’s hard. They are relentless.

I will not give in.

From VJ in NJ:

Suit Up!

We now stand against

Weaponized stupidity

A blitzkrieg of dumb

And from me:

Not Until the Sepsis Starts

A pregnant woman

Bleeding in a hospital

Parking lot, Texas

The Real Threat

Drag queens don't rape kids.

But in the church's rec hall

Your youth pastor does.

Keep on sending them in to rudepundit@yahoo.com. I've got dozens more to get through, but I want to get haiku'd in the face repeatedly. Make that happen, rude readers.

(Note: The titles of the posts will be variations on my favorite TV shows of the year, in case you're wondering.)

Haiku Review of 2024: 20th Anniversary of Reducing the Fuckery to a Size We Can Handle

That's right. Back in 2004, I did my own review of the year through the delicate poem with the incisive power of a stiletto made of metaphor. Then rude readers started sending me their own, which led to me just saying, "Well, fuck it. Join in." And you have joined in, emailing, at this point, over a thousand of the little bastards. So let's do it again. For the twentieth goddamn time. Let's skullfuck this bullshit year with haiku.

The deal is the same as it ever was. I'm a stickler for the form: three lines of 5 syllables, then 7, then 5 again. But the subject is wide open. Be serious, be stupid, be your incredible or fucked up you. Email them to rudepundit at yahoo dot com. Whichever ones make me laugh or make me cry or get me all hot and throbbing or some combination of two or three of those will be published on the blog. I'm the only judge here, and I'm probably drunk right now, so no insult if you don't get in. 

Give it a title. And include some name and place, like "F. B. from Trumpwillfuckusover, Alabama" or "Jackie from Tucson" (I'll miss you, What We Do in the Shadows) or "Elon's Burning Tesla from NYC."

Here's a few for inspiration:

The Consultants Fucked It Up

"Weird" was the best way

"Weird" said, "They're awful, just creeps"

Should have stuck with weird

A Thing I'll Never Understand

No one tried to stop 

Penny from killing Neeley.

Riders with blinders

When We Eat the Rich

I'll skip my portion.

Too full of hormones and shit.

Stringy with smug hate.

Okay, it's early and I'm out of practice. But now it's your turn. Flood me, motherfuckers. 

The Rude Pundit's Annual Nativity-palooza, Now with Bonus Cultural Insensitivity

Like movies about suicidal snowmen and tortured ghosts and pole-frozen tongues, some things are a tradition around the rude house. Beloved reruns are good for the soul. My favorites to trot out this week are the Invader Zim Christmas episode and Olive the Other Reindeer. Even here, in Left Blogsylvania, we can indulge in revisiting old posts.

Before Threads, Twixter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Buzzfeed, and many other places you can get your fix of weird shit, I posted this Christmas blast back in 2004, updated yearly with new bits of freakishness (some links might not work anymore, but they were or are all real and unironic):

Xmas - And, lo, a small teddy bear will lead them:
In the days before Christmas, the Rude Pundit roamed his neighborhood, looking at the displays in the charming stores and corner markets. There he saw the agony of so many dichotomous feelings about this holiday. One window had a kneeling, praying Santa next to a baby Jesus in the manger. Santa's hat was off. He was balding. Another display had the jolly old fat man landing his sleigh and reindeer on the roof of the manger. Surprisingly, neither Mary nor Joseph seemed rattled by the noise, although a camel was looking upward, as if asking, "What the fuck?" The Rude Pundit loved that camel.

Ah, sweet camel, what the fuck, indeed. Christ and commerce, Alleluia. The Savior has been born and he thanks you for your presents. Santa showing that he'll even honor the king of the Jews in the land of Islam. There's no telling what it means (and don't get all up in the Rude Pundit's face about St. Nicholas). Except this: we want to embrace both things, good deconstructionists that we are: Santa, who soothes our greed, and Jesus, who promises us peace. Either way, we want them both to tell us we're good people, nice people. And, of course, guilt-ridden Christians want to make sure that Santa toes the party line, you know.

For the holiday, here's a few of my favorite nativity sets, none of which are intended to be mocking of the event:

That right there is the Veggie Tales Nativity. In case you don't know, Veggie Tales are cute vegetables who love Christ and salad tossing. The newborn savior up there is a carrot. Get it? A baby carrot? What a delight.


Holy shit, that bear nativity is one of the creepiest fucking things I've ever seen. Staring straight ahead with their dead eyes, it looks like a satanic cult sacrifice to some horrible bear-demon. Although, the three wise bears have provided snacks for the blood rite: salmon, honey, and berries. All go well with cub entrails.

Every year, I think, "I wonder if there's an even weirder nativity set that I can find" and every year I come across something where I think, "Yeah, that's friggin' crazy shit, man." Here, it's the snow people nativity, with a snow angel, a snow Joseph, a snow Mary, and horrible, smiling snow kings. Did Snow Mary give birth to Snow Baby Jesus? Or did they all just make Snow Baby Jesus out of snow? And the temperature in Bethlehem this time of year is in the 60s. Is that why they seem to be festooned with turds, to try to hold their globular shape a little longer?

That goddamn nightmare fuel isn't a lab experiment gone horrible awry. It's a bunch of white mice with eyes so wide they look like someone laced some cheese with meth and let the little bastards go crazy. It's gonna be horrible when baby Jesus mouse gets crucified in trap.

This is not to mention the Chickentivity, the Moosetivity, the Barntivity, the Native American Nativity, and the various Beartivities, all available unironically for your Christmas consumption.

And then there's the baby nativity:

You might think, "Oh, that's adorable. What's so wrong with it?" To which I can only inform you that the implication of it is that a baby Mary shoved a baby Jesus out of her baby vagina.

Speaking of implications, think of what this dog one means:  

This means there is a dog Pilate who will sentence dog Jesus to dog crucifixion. It means that there is a dog Mary Magdalene who is a dog prostitute. This is not to mention the dog centurions who routinely torture and kill dogs, the dog slaves who serve their dog masters, and the Jewish dogs who get blamed for everything. But don't worry. Dog Jesus will rise from the dead in three days. Have some damn kibble waiting for him. 

And to all a good night.

Oh, wait. What's that you say? You think that last one was kind of a weak one to end on? Well, then, fuck you. Here's the Day of the Dead nativity:

Yeah, you might think they're singing Christmas carols, but they're all screaming in horror and pain. Essentially, that's Christmas in the time of MAGA and Covid.

Oh, wait. What's that? Those aren't that bad after all we've suffered? Then how about these terrifying motherfuckers:

Or maybe that's just how we'll all look after climate change has its way with us.

All of those are preferable to this fucking thing here. This might be the first of these nativities to make me feel visceral anger. Check this shit out:

It's like someone was taking a crap in an IKEA bathroom and thought, "I've got it! The birth of our lord and savior, but stackable!" Imagine the fun you could have with these. I'm already thinking about arranging the Wise Men around Ass for a sticky menage. Mostly, though, this is just middle finger to your guests if you put this out, like you're saying, "Oh, you expect a nativity at Christmas? Suck on these posts."

Wooden blocks not your thing? Want something that's a bit more of a weapon so you can strike down the heathens who won't let you say, "Merry Christmas"? Maybe a little more Flintstone-ish? Then here's some fuckin' rocks. 

Not enough like the nativity you might see on the mantle of the leader of a forest cult dedicated to cannibalism and blood drinking? How about this folk horror: 

It's like the last thing you see before the cellar door closes and you wait to find out if you're meant to be sacrificed to the corn god or impregnated by the cock of the spirit of the wheat in a fertility rite. Puritans would look at these Puritan-looking motherfuckers and decided, "Nope. There's no god. Let's just jump in the ocean."

But what is Christmas without a little cultural insensitivity? For that, you get the Apache Nativity: 

Nothing says, "Welcome Baby Jesus" like being born among the people that will be mass murdered and stripped of their land and religion, all in his cute widdle name.  Bonus points for the totem pole with a look of "What the fuck am I even doing here? And why have me shaped like a crucifix?"

Finally (for real), here's one I actually like. It's the Recycled Auto Parts Nativity: 

C'mon. It's got everything. Skeletal camels, edges that would slice open a loaf of bread and some fishes, and baby Jesus sleeping on a bed of chicken wire. That's awesome art by Armando Ramirez, and I'd proudly put that up in my home next to my Peanuts creche and dare some internet asshole to talk shit about it. 

Merry Christmas, baby. Let's just get out of this year alive. May George Bailey finally get to push Mr. Potter into the frozen river.

(Note: Previous editions of the nativity post have included the Zombitivity, Dogtivity, the Boyd's Bears Nativity, and the Rubber Duck...oh, fuck, you get the idea.)

The Immigrant "Invasion" Is Just WMDs All Over Again

There is no immigrant invasion at the southern border of the United States. That needs to be said at the outset any time you wanna talk about What's Wrong With Our Country. No matter how many times people say it, no matter how much it's covered, no matter even if elected Democrats agree, it's simply not true. The immigration system in this country is broken but that's because Republicans have refused to fund the courts needed to quickly process asylum claims and other cases. 

The idea of an immigrant "invasion," as Donald Trump (who we really elected president for a second time - I know, it's fucked up, right?) puts it constantly, has one purpose, and that's to scare the public with a lie so that a cabal of power-mad assholes can remake the nation to suit their warped, contorted viewpoints. That should sound incredibly familiar for those of us with brains that actively remember shit more than a tweet-cycle old. 

It's weapons of mass destruction all over again. 

Oh, sweet children of America, you need to know that in the scary months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (that's the "9/11" you hear about every year, in case you weren't born yet or are fucking dumb), the administration of President George W. Bush decided that the nation of Iraq needed to be attacked and remade as a "democracy," free of its dictator Saddam Hussein. The fact that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks and the fact that the dictator of the country that did have a great deal to do with them, Saudi Arabia, was apparently off-limits was not something you were allowed to say openly lest you be labeled anti-American. Besides, we were assured, endlessly, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, big missiles, perhaps nukes, shit that could fuck up, say, Israel or even our allies in Europe or maybe even the USA itself. So we had to invade Iraq, take it over, and prevent the mad leader of the country from unleashing hell on the earth. In 2002, the president was given blanket authorization to use military force against Iraq by a bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress. Again and again, we were told that we needed to bomb the fuck of the country to prevent a mushroom cloud over DC. Anyone who disputed that idea was treated as a traitor, even if you were a veteran. Ads were run declaring your support of terrorists if you dared say that WMDs (as the shorthand went) were a lie. The foreign policy and economic policy of the United States was remade around the goals of eliminating WMDs and turning Iraq into a shining example of freedom in that region of the world. If that sounds weird and hyperbolic, if anything, I'm understating how this shit went. 

And, of course, it was all a lie. There weren't WMDs. The whole thing was bullshit, but two-thirds of Americans believed Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Two-thirds believed the WMD lie. All of them were wrong (I could say, "All of you were wrong" since I was right, but I don't wanna be smug about it), but Democrats and Republicans leaned into the lie because of the fear of opposing such a huge part of the population. Nearly three-quarters of the country supported the war, which eventually changed to over half coming around to saying it was mistake. But the damage was done to Iraq and to the US, even if the defeat of the GOP in 2008 was one of the outcomes of the entire fucktastrophe. 

Of course, since we're Americans, we're damned to repeat every goddamned mistake in an endless cycle, and while we're not being lied into war this time (although there's weird talk about sending troops into Mexico), we are once again watching policy decisions being made that will wreck millions of lives because of hysteria over a lie that has caught fire. 

So not only did Donald Trump run and arguably win on his unending declarations of "the greatest invasion in history" happening at the US-Mexico border, but it's become a standard line for every Republican in office at all levels. And Democrats have joined in, going from accusing Republicans of stoking fears with their rhetoric to campaigning on the very restrictions that the anti-immigration right wants. Hell, even some supposedly left-leaning pundits have used Trump's language. And, again, it's all a lie. I don't want to go into all the ways it's a lie (like the fact that the majority of undocumented people came into the country legally and just stayed).

Like the WMD lies, this lie serves a policy purpose and it's not just to get the rubes all heated up to vote for fascists, although that worked pretty fuckin' well. The very word "invasion" is important because a declaration of an invasion could be a pretext for Trump using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to get the military involved in rounding up and deporting anyone who is undocumented. Beyond that nightmare, making everyone believe that the hottentots are rampaging through the border in order to pillage our villages and rape our dogs and murder our women or whatever the fuck puts a violent justification on policies that are simply ignorance and racism, stopping the Great Replacement and White Genocide and that kind of bullshit that gets Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk all hard and throbbing.

And, like invading Iraq (and that was really an invasion), billions of dollars will be spent to act on this lie. It will enrich a few loyal companies who get the contracts to build the detainment camps. It will cause wanton violence as every armed fucknut jonesing to go nutzoid on their immigrant neighbors tries to "help." And, eventually, it will fail as people realize what a horrific clusterfuck of family separation, caged children, and decimated workforces is doing to the country. 

What can be done now is for Democrats to stop giving in to the Trump language on immigration. Leave that shit to Fox "news" and it's devolved descendants. Let shitheel podcasters scream into the void about migrant caravans or whatever. We've already ceded so much ground by allowing the GOP to exploit every story of a migrant committing a crime. How about instead talking about how migrants are mistreated and killed. How about showing some goddamn strength instead of going along with the raging pitchfork-waving mob? Put out some torches instead of helping to light them.

Maybe, just maybe, we can stop this lie before it fucks things up as badly as the last lie.