Doom Report (Week 1: Shock and Aw, Fuck)

Well, there was definitely no week 0 for this shit.  Week 1 of the Trump regime (credit to Robert Reich for proposing that alternative to “administration”) was a shit-show, with Trump demonstrating Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy, but also the military strategy of “shock and awe.” It’s important to remember, as you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, that that’s all by design.  If you’re too overwhelmed to focus on any one thing, then at least some of it will slip through the cracks, and that’s all they want.  Divide our focus, blast us with a firehose, then watch as we scramble around uselessly trying to recover.

So, there have been executive orders a-flyin’, for everything from cancelling DEI programs to a literal royal decree that trans people don’t exist.  Looks like project 2025 is right on track!  On the one hand, it makes me want to call my friend and remind him of his claims that Trump wasn’t running on Project 2025—not to mention the actual scoffing I mentioned last week at the suggestion that Trump wanted to erase trans people—but I don’t think I can.  It would be too exhausting.  And, if he didn’t express remorse over his arguments, then I don’t think we could be friends any more, and I don’t want that.  Because, even though this week’s Even More News posits that people are starting to regret their choices, and even talks about how we really need to talk to them about that with empathy and not just devolve into “I told you so!“s ... I’m not sure the time is right for that.  Oh, I think they’re absolutely right about what needs to happen eventually; I just don’t believe the people who voted for Trump are getting it yet.  Sure, it’s true that he’s mainly done a bunch of culture war bullshit, like pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accords (because climate change isn’t real) and pulling us out of the World Health Organization (because ... I dunno, pandemics aren’t real either, I guess?), and in all of that was absolutely nothing that could possibly make the price of eggs go down or end the war in Ukraine, which are two major campaign promises he made, and (at least for that first one) the primary reason most people gave for voting for him, but I think people, if asked, would just say, “well, let’s give him some time.” (Of course, on the Ukraine thing he said he could end the war in 24 hours, and it’s been closer to 150, but we’re not supposed to take him seriously when he says stuff like that ... remember?)  Typically, when humans make mistakes, it usually takes a while before they’re willing to admit to them.  And of course some never will.  But I don’t think very many Trump voters are regretting their choices ... yet.

So, while a lot of the executive orders are just silly—I think trying to rename Mount Denali back to “McKinley” or imagining that he can unilaterally change “Gulf of Mexico” on all the maps is basically a white supremacist temper tantrum—and some of them (like his feeble attempt to end birthright citizenship—already struck down by one conservative judge—and the mass firing of inspectors general on Friday night) will not survive legal challenges, but buried in there are some actual harms.  Including the two Project 2025 gems I led with: the DEI rollbacks, and the attempt at trans erasure.

The MAGA crowd often claims they want to replace DEI initiatives with a focus on choosing whoever’s the “most qualified.” Sadly, “most qualified” seems to be code for “whitest.” Look at how they blame the LA wildfires on black mayor Karen Bass and lesbian fire chief Kristin Crowley: it’s because they’re “DEI hires.” It’s never stated why this means they’re unqualified, but the unspoken undertone is that there were obviously some straight white guys who could have done a better job, but were passed over.  Poor straight white guys: always getting the shaft.  Still, we can try to find some heartening news in all this.  For instance, Costco’s shareholders voted by more than 98% to resist the pressure that the government (via Right Wing thinktanks) is putting on corporations to eliminate their DEI policies.  Which makes sense: the business world figured out a long time ago that diversity increases profitability, and they’re only going to engage with your idiotic culture wars if they think it will impact their bottom line.  Obviously companies like Meta/Facebook and Amazon do think that.  They have government contracts to protect and government regulations to avoid.  But I think most companies won’t be interested in any sort of pressure: they just want that profit line to keep going up.  As for the gender thing ...

Congratulations! we’re all women now.  Yes, in their haste to attempt to erase trans people from existence, the moron architects of Project 2025 have adopted the clumsiest language possible (I even heard one pundit claim it must be AI-generated), with the stunning end result that, according to an executive order that claims to “defend women from gender ideology extremism,” every human on earth is now, technically speaking, female.  Now, while it’s true that this embarrassing boner likely won’t mitigate the cruelty that will result from its “enforcement,” I disagree with people who have said it doesn’t matter.  Because what strikes me about this little bit of idiocracy is that, for years now, conservative pundits and influencers have opened shows featuring liberal guests with the “gotcha” question of “can you define what a woman is?” And now, when they finally have the chance to answer their own question, they’ve totally blown it.  Because defining something like that is not easy.  Here’s their attempt:

“Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.

and then:

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

So, first thing, notice how they’ve slyly introduced the very controversial concept of fetal personhood right into the language, no doubt in an attempt to normalize it.  But here’s where they fucked up.  First of all, at conception, zygotes can’t produce reproductive cells at all.  And, once they can, they’re all female.  For at least six weeks.  And of course the 1.7% of the population that’s intersex has just been left wondering what the fuck this all means for them.  Also worth noting: the second episode of Zeteo’s new show American Unhinghed observed that there are currently more anti-trans bills than there are professional trans athletes.  Truly this is a “solution” in search of a problem, but it’s also not much of a solution.

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And we’re back.  If you want to know more about the Laken Riley Act, I would direct you to The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart interviews AOC.  Key facts include that Riley’s parents did not want their murdered daughter’s name on this bill, but Republicans just ignored that, and that 46 Democrats in the House, and 12 in the Senate, voted for it (theoretically because they were afraid to look “weak” on border issues), thus allowing conservative media to crow that the bill was passed with “bipartisan support.” Again, it’s week 1.  I think the Democrats should probably pace themselves a bit more: they’ve still got 207 more weeks to spinelessly cave in to Trump’s fascist agenda.  Don’t blow your wad all at once, guys.

What else?  Oh, yeah, President Musk did a Heil Hitler salute.  Twice.  Weirdly, some people—including the Anti-Defamation League, which is an organization that’s supposed to be fighting against anti-Semitism—have defended this.  I’m not sure why ... it’s not particularly defensible.  He literally did it twice.  This “it was just an awkward gesture” thing is so bizarre: as the folks on Even More News pointed out, if he had actually done it by accident, he would have apologized for it.  Instead, he posted a bunch of Nazi puns, which ... I mean, why are Nazi puns even a thing?  I think maybe they aren’t a thing and Musk is just gaslighting us.  Even the ADL reversed course after that bit, alhtough I believe Netanyahu is still on board.  Which I suppose makes sense, actually: when you’re doing a genocide yourself, you probably figure the Nazi supporters are totally going to be on board.  Also, given the fact that Musk has boosted white supremacists on Twitter and even openly supported a neo-Nazi party in Germany, we may want to heed the words of Jon Stewart on The Weekly Show: “This all does fit together.  It’s not like it comes out of nowhere.” Also also, as someone this week noted (sorry, I can’t recall who it was right now), the conservative shitbags claiming we need to give Musk a break because he has Asperger’s are the same pitiful excuses for human beings that made fun of Tim Walz’s son Gus.  So, you know: fuck them.

And so many things we don’t even have time to get into.  The brave Episcopalian bishop who Trump and his allies called nasty and extreme because she had the audacity to express the radical ideas of that crazy liberal, Jesus Christ; the massive pardons for the insurrectionists, including some who violently assaulted police officers, about which Trump said, pithily, “Fuck it: release ’em all.”; the so-called QAnon Shaman adopting a bad British accent in a desperate attempt to turn the tables on a BBC interviewer when her questions got too uncomfortable; Trump literally saying that America was at its richest during the Gilded Age, so that’s what we’re shooting for again.  Or how about Carrie Underwood desperately attempting to sing “America the Beautiful” despite some amusing (though not, apparently, to her) technical difficulties?  Kimmel here makes fun of her (or at least of the situation), as many did; conservatives, on the other hand, focussed on her “the show must go on” efforts to sing a cappella when the music just refused to cooperate.  I had a different take altogether.  I think this episode was emblematic of how the Republicans assume that they just don’t need anyone, so they try to do everything themselves.  Sometimes that even works.  And, sometimes, they just embarrass themselves.  Well, they would, but I think they’ve all had their shame surgically removed, so it doesn’t seem to bother them too much.

But the Carrie Underwood appearance—as well as others such as Nelly, Snoop Dogg, and even the Village People, who not only performed but also announced they would sue anyone who referred to “YMCA” as a “gay anthem”—raises a more sinister spectre.  Remember in Trump’s first term when he had trouble finding performers for the inauguration?  And remember how many sports teams refused to accept invitations to come to his White House?  But now football players are doing the Trump jack-off dance in the end zone and Snoop Dogg is at the inauguration.  He’s been normalized now.  The times, they are a-changin’.

If you’re looking for only one political show to watch this week, I’d recommend the AOC interview over on The Weekly Show.  If you’re willing to go to two, try the first episode of America Unhinged (and, if you’ve got a third hour to invest, the second episode is pretty good too).  The only other video I’d recommend this week is perhaps Legal Eagle’s breakdown of Trump’s executive orders.  He does a pretty good job of outlining what will and likely won’t pass muster.

Finally, I’ll try to end on as hopeful a note as I can manage.  I noted that AOC, in the interview I mention above, when talking about insider trading by Congresspeople (of both parties) says that:

... it explodes the cynicism that fuels the Right.  It doesn’t benefit us.  It benefits Republicans because they make no bones about ... what class they are here to serve.

And I think she has a point.  Cynicism is almost inevitable with weeks like this one, but it’s only going to help the other side.  And let me be clear what the sides are: we’re talking about right-wing fascism vs progressive liberalism.  Screw Rebpulican vs Democrat.  Rapper Talib Kweli was on The Daily Show on Thursday, and he put it brilliantly:

I’m not a Democrat.  I’ve never been a Democrat.  I voted Democrat before; I’ve never voted Republican, but I’ve never identified as a Democrat.  This is not about Democrat vs Republican: this is about good vs bad; this is about the oligarchs vs the poor and working class people.

And AOC, I think, summed this up trenchantly when she talked about how in the world people could simultaneously vote for Trump and for her, two people who seem diametrically opposed on the political scale:

They see two people that are fundamentally anti-establishment, two people that do not respect a rule
if the rule does not lead to ... a positive outcome.

And, when I heard her say that, despite the fact that it’s a seeming compliment to Trump, I couldn’t help but remember that Monday, apart from being the spectacle of the launch of yet another disastrous Trump regime, was also Martin Luther King Day.  And I had gone back to reread some of Dr. King’s words that I quoted in a post several years ago, and one of those quotes was this one:

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

We already knew that Trump was willing to break the laws he doesn’t care for.  But hearing that there are people like AOC who are willing to break ... if not the laws, but at a minium the rules ... that she can’t abide—that’s what gives me hope.  Let us all hope for more progressives—for more politicians of all ideologies—to make what Civil Rights icon John Lewis often referred to as “good trouble.” And pray that Trump can’t keep up this pace.  He is, after all, very old.

Doom Report (Week -1: Hot Flashes)

In 1935, about 100 cane toads were imported into Australia to control the cane beetle, a pest which was destroying crops.  By 2011, there were an estimated 200 million: they eat bugs that native species used to eat, edging them out; they poison anything that eats them, from native species to family pets; and, to add insult to injury, Wikipedia says that “there is no evidence that they have affected the number of cane beetles which they were introduced to prey upon.” And that’s how cane toads became the poster child for the law of unintended consequences.

Once upon a time we thought eating butter was bad for you, so we invented margarine, which we made out of trans fat, which (it turns out) is way worse for you than butter.  And remember how our government had this briliant idea to cure public drunkenness and alcoholism by inventing a little thing called “Prohibition”?  Turns out what they actually invented was organized crime.  Well, in the grand tradition of all those brilliant ideas, today (literally the day I’m posting this), our government brings you yet another one: they’re banning TikTok.  Can’t imagine there’ll be any unintended consequences from that.

Oh, wait: there already are.  See, TikTok creators, in anticipation of the looming shutdown, have started flocking to RedNote, an app much more closely tied to the Communist Party, and whose terms and conditions are entirely in Mandarin.  Reporting on what you’re actually agreeing to when you click on that varies—it’s a bummer, but apparently no one in the world can read Mandarin and tell us what it says—but, at a bare minimum, you’re apparently agreeing not to “slander” the culture of China, nor violate the basic principles of the Chinese Constitution ... you know, the document that establishes the Chinese Communist Party.  Actually, the proper name of this app is “Xiaohongshu,” which more literally translates to “Little Red Book.” So glad that our government is keeping TikTok from collecting everyone’s data!  You tell ’em, Congress, and also Biden, and also the Supreme Court: if you want Americans’ data, you’ll just have to buy it from Facebook and Google like everyone else!

Since this is (ostensibly) a short post week, I’ll keep the remainder of my comments on the cesspool of the week’s news to quick takes:

• The Republicans are quite outraged at the mismanagement of the wildfires in Southern California, and they’re claiming that they’re going to condition aid on policy changes.  I mostly agree with Jonathan Harris over at Some More News, who says this is probably all performative, but they’re really hammering on the bits about Gavin Newsome taking all our water because of smelt (which is complete bullshit), and Karen Bass (who is obviously a DEI hire because she is neither white nor a man) cutting the budget of the LA fire department.  They probably have a reasonable point on that last one at least, but it’s also instructive to listen to Heather Lofthouse, who pointed out on this week’s Coffeee Klatch:

But I mean, it’s “Karen Bass cut the budgets: how dare she” is ... kind of the headline, as we give Elon Musk an office in the White House and his mandate is to cut the budgets for vulnerable people and for the things that matter.  I mean the hypocrisy around that and “I’m not going to spend it, I’m not going to spend it, I’m not going to spend, but that person cut budgets in the wrong way” is wild to watch, too.

• But the thing that most irks me about the wildfires is the utter refusal to understand how climate change is such a huge factor.  Instead we have Joe Rogan trotting out his “whiny liberal” voice and mocking people saying “it’s climate change!” and then following up with “no, it’s arson, stupid.” Which, even if it were arson—which there is currently no evidence to support, at least for the largest of the fires—but even if that were true, is arson making the winds blow 60 – 100MPH and spread the fires over miles in seconds, and also whip up the fires to truly horrific peaks?  (Or, as Jon Stewart put it on The Daily Show this week, it’s like fire fucked a tornado.)  Arson didn’t cause the flooding last year, nor the drought this year, the combination of which resulted in a massive quantity of new growth which is now bone dry and just waiting to catch fire at the slightest provocation.  I honestly thought that once climate change started costing all the rich assholes a lot of money, they’d finally do something about it, but it turns out that the response to insurance companies losing billions in natural disasters like this is that they just stop insuring people.  Whew! problem solved.

• Biden and Trump have been fighting over who deserves credit for the cease-fire agreement in Gaza.  How about we wait to see if it actually happens before we quibble over who gets the kudos?

• Biden gave us a farewell address in which he warned us about the dangers of oligarchy.  Many this week lamented “where was that message during the CAMPAIGN??” Which is fair.  Of course, Biden essentially has senioritis (in multiple meanings of the word, I suppose) and has entered his “I don’t give a fuck” phase.  But note how neatly this lines up with my thoughts (such as I outlined last week) that what the Dems really need to do is start talking about how evil the billionaires are.  (Also it amuses me that Biden, 82, is finally catching up to Bernie Sanders, 83, and Robert Reich, 78.)

• People are also whining this week about how the lack of reporting on Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s insurrection indictment is a failure of the traditional media.  Well, duh: the traditional media is now all owned by the same billionaires who are funneling all their money to Trump.  The meme that people are stupid from getting all their news from the Internet is dead: the implication was always that you might not be able to trust what you hear from some rando on Reddit or Facebook.  Now, sadly, you might be able to trust what you’re reading in the Washington Post or the New York Times even less.

• On this week’s The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviewed historian Jon Meacham.  As expected, he trotted out one of his favorite talking points: that democracy is, increasingly, an analog system in a digital world:

And the chasm that that creates between the emotional catastrophizing of its people versus the kind of glacial pace of change—I do think democracy itself has to find a way for government to be more agile and responsive.

To which Meacham pointed out that this was the same argument Anne Morrow Lindbergh used to justify her “America First” position in 1940 that the US needed to become more like Germany and Italy and Russia: obviously totalitarianism was the solution to the sluggish response time of democracy.  Not saying I’m favoring Meacham over Stewart here, but it is food for thought.

• Speaking of The Weekly Show, every episode ends with Jon talking to some of his producers.  At first, this was Lauren Walker and Brittany Mehmedovic, but within a few episodes they were joined by Gillian Spear, who, in addition to being an associate producer, is also their fact checcker.  I really enjoy these post-show chats, and especially appreciate the fact that Spear often drops little truth bombs.  So here’s your Gillian Spear fact-of-the-week:

... the Democrats haven’t won the white vote since 1964.  And what happened after 1964?  The Civil Rights Act ...

• If you recall how this whole series started, you’ll remember my talking about the phone conversation I had with my friend.  I mentioned in passing that I’d pointed out to him that Project 2025—and, by extension, Trump—wish to erase trans people.  I did not, however, mention his reaction: he scoffed at me.  In this day and age, I don’t experience a lot of scoffing.  But I can’t think of any other word to describe it.  This was, to judge from his reaction, an utterly ridiculous prospect.  Except that, of course, here we are 10 weeks later, Trump hasn’t even taken office yet, and already utter psychopath Nancy Mace has introduced a rule to ban transgender people from using public bathrooms that don’t match their “biological sex”—a rule that would impact a single person, by the way (incoming representative Sarah McBride)—and the Republicans in the House have voted to ban transgender athletes.  So, I dunno ... maybe not so crazy after all.

• On this week’s Election Profit Makers, we are somehow still talking about Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter.  Apparently a listener wrote a long email about how disappointed he was in Biden for doing it, and then another listener wrote back challenging that opinion, and so forth.  My opinion is simple: I care not one whit that he pardoned his son—it was a thing any father should be willing to do for his child, especially one that was being harassed by bullies.  I was a bit disappointed in him saying he wasn’t going to pardon him ahead of time.  It’s the same situation with Bush (Sr) ... remember how that guy said “read my lips: no. new. taxes.”? and then he went and raised taxes?  Same deal: the sin was not in the doing, but rather in the foolish promise prior to it.  A stupid promise that was nearly impossible to keep ... one would think politicians would learn not to do that by now.  Apparently not.

• It’s also occurred to me that Trump has so flooded the zone with shit (as I discussed last week) that he’s managed to completely eclipse the news coverage of the New Orleans terrorist attack.  Of course, part of that is probably because the MAGA nutjobs got so excited over the fact that the terrorist drove his truck across the Mexican border that they wet themselves, and then it turned out that the guy was an American—not a naturalized immigrant, but someone born in the US—and then all of a sudden they found other interesting things to talk about.  And it saddens me that we, as a nation, didn’t even talk about it very much.  I’ve been to New Orleans 3 times in my life, and I’ve walked down Bourbon Street in those packed crowds, and it hurts my heart to think that 14 people died and we never even made the Repubs babble on about how everything was to blame except for the AR-10 rifle and the Glock wielded by the domestic terrorist.  It’s like it’s now so commonplace that we can’t even be bothered to go through the motions any more.

• And, while I continue to be skeptical of Brian Tyler Cohen’s repeated screeds about how the entire problem is that mainstream media is overlooking important stories (although also see first point), I do wonder how no one is reporting nationally on the Republicans in North Carolina literally stealing an election from an NC supreme court judge.  Democrat Allison Riggs, one of only two Democrats on the court, won her election by a mere 734 votes.  A slim margin to be sure, and her opponent demanded a recount, as well he should.  Riggs won that recount by the exact same number of votes.  So her opponent demanded a second recount, which seemed a bit over the top, but, sure: that’s his right.  Riggs won that one too, by, say it with me now: 734 votes.  So then the crazy Repub demanded that the board of elections throw out 60,000 votes.  Yes, that’s correct: sixty thousand votes.  But only for the supreme court justice race, of course: the votes would still count towards Trump’s victory in NC.  The NC board of elections (obviously) rejected this insane request.  But the schmuck appealed it ... to the NC supreme court.  The elections board tried appealing up to a federal level, but they kicked it back.  So now we’re waiting for 4 Republicans and 1 Democrat (Riggs recused herself, obviously) to decide whether they will unilaterally just pick their fellow Republican over the will of their own electorate.  And I think we’d better be cognizant that, if it works there, it’ll become the new pattern of how to rig elections in the future, everywhere.  So it may not be hyperbole to say that the entire fate of respecting election results depends on whether at least 2 Republicans on the North Carolina supreme court have any scruples or not.  I’m not hopeful.

• Finally, I’ve been much amused over the past few weeks as Brian Tyler Cohen and other pundits claim that the only “good” thing about the Republicans having control over all 3 branches of government is that they no have no one else to blame: whatever mistakes there are going forward, they own them.  To which I can only reply: oh, my sweet summer child.  If you think the Repubs can’t blame the Democrats when the Dems have nothing to do with anything, you just haven’t been paying attention.  Remember when it took 15 tries to elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House and they blamed the Democrats?  Remember all the whiny Trump moments from his first presidency?  It’s the Democrats, it’s the Deep State, the system is rigged, my enemies are everywhere: I’m the most powerful man in the world, and anything that gets accomplished is absolutely my doing and also anything that didn’t happen is someone else’s fault.  Blame shifting is the most powerful weapon in the Republican arsenal.  Expect to see it on full display, starting ... well, tomorrow.

Well, this “short” post ballooned into something out of control.  So I’ll leave it there for now and wait for ... week 0? week 1?  I haven’t quite decided if this should be like going from 1 BC to 1 AD or if it should be more mathematical than that.  I guess we’ll find out next week.

Doom Report (Week -2: That's Enough Flooding, Thank You)

A few months back, I watched a really good Some More News video on Ronald Reagan.  Specifically, on how Reagan led us to Trump, and that included a long section on how Reagan fucked up the Democratic party.  This was a thing I had never considererd before: while I understood that Reagan fucked us over in a number of really important ways (his racism amped up the “war” on drugs; his economic policies started the whole “trickle-down” lie; his man Robert Bork reinvigorated corporate greed by saying that, no, monopolies were actually good for consumers; he killed the popularity of unions by firing all the striking air traffic controllers, which the safety of the air travel industry has never recovered from; etc etc etc) ... while I knew all that, I never thought that the Democrats might have gotten fucked up too.  But, what Cody and team point out in this quite persuasive video is that Reagan beat the Democrats so badly that they all started to adopt his policies.  Clinton, for instance, ran on “ending welfare as we know it” (which he delivered by crippling the program in ways from which it’s never recovered), passed crime bills that led to today’s mass incarceration crisis, and signed NAFTA, which allowed—nay, encouraged—America’s corporations to move jobs off-shore to get cheaper labor, thus screwing over the working class.  Really, if you think about it, Clinton often sounds more like a Republican president than an Democratic one.  Even Obama, who campaigned on hope and change, sadly listened to all those Third Way advisors and in the end actually delivered very little of either.  And the point of all this is, the Democrats learned the wrong lessons from Reagan.  They figured, he beat us, and he pushed this stuff, so now we better push this stuff too.

I think about that this week because there appears to be a lot of learning the wrong lessons going around these days.  I mean, Trump won, right?  So obviously that means that the country wants its leaders to be more racist, attack minorities more, and be nicer to our poor, persecuted billionaire class.  At least that seems to be what people are getting out of it: Zuckerberg, for instance, says he’s getting rid of all Facebook’s fact checkers, moving moderation to Texas (because those evil liberal Californians can’t be trusted, obviously!), and that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.” Of course, the roots of Facebook are comparing women like cattle, so the fact that the restrictions against referring to women as property are now lifted makes perfect sense.  Or how about Amazon announcing that it would pay $40 million to the Trumps for the rights to make a documentary about Melania?  Attached to direct: Brett Ratner, who hasn’t been seen in Hollywood since being disgraced during the #MeToo movement.  (Side tangent:  People on the right are always going on about how you can never be sure whether the women who accuse men of sexual misconduct are telling the truth, and that people should be considered innocent until proven guilty.  And it’s true that there were a very few innocent people who got caught up in #MeToo (Chris Hardwick, for instance).  But I’ve never understood why people—on either side—have difficulty with figuring out whether someone is guilty of what they’re accused of when it comes to this particular behavior.  Basically, there are exactly two things that occur immediately after one woman comes out and says that a famous man assaulted her: either a dozen more women come forward to support her, or 3 or 4 women come forward to say they’ve never experienced anything but support from the man and no other woman agrees with the accuser.  If you ever hear about a situation that doesn’t fall into one of those two camps, then you can wonder whether the man’s guilty or not.  But so far I never have.  And, if it does follow one of those two patterns, no need to wonder: you know whether or not they did it.  By the way, guess which one Ratner’s story falls into?)  So, I guess the lesson we learned from Trump’s victory is, it’s okay to call LGBTQ people “freaks,” and also thatarapists aren’t so bad—after all, we’ve now elected our first rapist-American president!  Overall, the nearly immediate flood of fake headlines on Facebook, including one that announced that Zuckerberg was the “recipient of world’s first rat penis transplant,” is cold comfort.

Of course, the news this week has been dominated by Trump’s insane rantings about taking over Greenland and changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico.  (Presumably, he plans to do the latter by taking his trusty Sharpie and crossing out “Mexico” on all the maps in the world.)  He’s also talked about reclaiming the Panama Canal Zone, and even annexing Canada.  Don’t worry: it gets crazier.  President Musk has even started a poll to ask users of the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter if the US should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” I find it difficult to take any of this seriously, though, because that’s what they want us to do, and I’m just stubborn enough to refuse to do it.  Because, see, all this bullshit talk is Trump following the advice of Steve Bannon, who once famously said:

The Democrats don’t matter.  The real opposition is the media.  And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

Or, as Michael Lahanas-Calderón said in this week’s Coffee Klatch:

But isn’t this ... one of the many distractions that the Trump Administration presumably has—if not pre-planned, down the road will make up some—to keep hiding that oligarchic control that you’re talking about, right?  This is to throw people off balance more than anything ...

Which is spot on.  Because now the prime Minister of Greenland has to respond, and the government of Denmark has to respond, and the president of Panama has to respond, and the new president of Mexico has to respond, and the prime minister of Canada has to respond, and even the counter-extremism unit of Great Britain has to investigate.  Trump has managed to send dozens of world leaders—not to mention the media—scrambling after moronic ideas that will never come to fruition ... more importantly, that were never serious in the first place.  Meanwhile, the grift goes on: the billionaires are falling in line, the judge in the one case that managed to struggle through to conviction grants him an unconditional discharge, the special counsel that bedevilled him by actually listing all his crimes is resigning, and the media has no more space to report on his insane cabinet picks, such as trying to appoint a potential Russian asset as Director of National Intelligence.  The zone is flooded, the shit is knee high and climbing, Trump continues to live a consequence-free life, and the rich just keep getting richer.

Let me leave you with this.  I’ve been calling out Robert Reich quite a bit in my previous posts.  Partially that’s because I tend to highlight the opinions of pundits most when they’re different from my own: if we’re all in agreement, there’s not much more to be said.  But partially it’s because Reich, like many of the public personalities whose opinions I respect in spite of the fact that they’re Democrats, has just had some terrible takes on why the Democrats lost to Trump.  But, for all my criticism, I really do like Reich, and I really respect someone who’s achieved that level of old age without losing all their progressive fervor.  (While I like to think that I’ve thoroughly debunked the young-equals-liberal-old-equals-conservative meme, it is sadly true that the right wing tends to be dominated by old white guys, while the progressives are full of youth and diversity.)  And I like Reich precisely because he sometimes says some pretty smart shit.  This is what he said this week:

There really are two kinds of populism.  The right wing the ... Trumpers have been embracing for years: cultural populism.  And that means going after the symbols of elitism—many of them made up!—I mean, transgender people, you know, you go after them; go after immigrants; go after the Deep State; go after all sorts of symbols that people can get riled up again.  But the alternative to cultural populism is real, and that’s economic populism.  That’s going after the Musks and the people who abuse their their wealth, and and turn it into political power.  That’s what’s happening in this country, and this is why I am optimistic (just to repeat myself) that, as we descend into the horrors of the Trump Administration, people will actually see how important economic populism is.  Democrats will find their voice—and, if they don’t, we’ll have another party that will replace them and find its voice.

I’m not sure I share his optimism that the Democrats might actually get replaced one day.  But I think he’s onto something nonetheless: maybe someone, somewhere inside the party, will learn the right lessons from Trump’s victory.  And the right lesson is that people are tired of all the billionaires standing on their necks while picking their pockets.  That people need change which actually accomplishes something, and they’re just going to keep voting against whoever’s in power at the moment until they get it.  That that FDR fellow was onto something when he decided, in the first hundred days of his first administration, that he would thumb his noses at the rich fat cats in the stock market (well, those that hadn’t thrown themselves out windows, at any rate) and actually help the working class for a change.  And, as long as the Democrats keep doing what Kamala did by staying hands-off the big corporations, they’ll keep losing.  When they figure out that that all that corporate money isn’t doing them any good if all the working class people hate them, then maybe we’ll see some change.

Doom Report (Week -3)

Well, it’s a New Year, finally.  I was supposed to celebrate the new year on Tuesday night, along with everyone else, but that didn’t really happen.  Having had the flu (or perhaps a bad cold) for several days just before Christmas (along with the rest of the family), I had stopped doing my daily fiber.  And, since I have diverticulosis, not doing fiber for an extended period has a tendency to result in a diverticulitis flare-up.  So that’s what I was doing on New Year’s Eve.

Happily, I soon recovered, and we celebrated New Year’s on Friday night.  It’s actually quite nicer when you can pause the ball drop at any time.  So a bottle of champagne for the older two, a bottle of sparkling strawberry lemonade for the younger two, and we “cheers"ed at whatever time the littlest one said she was getting too tired to stay up any longer.  So, 2025, ye have been rung in.  For all that’s worth.

In the ongoing political drama, the only interesting development, to my way of thinking, is the memo put out by Susie Wiles.  Wiles, you may recall, is slated to be Trump’s chief-of-staff.  She’ll be the first female chief-of-staff, which is nice and historical and all, but, as we might expect from anyone associated with Maga World, she’s not exactly a model human being.  Still, she seems to have a few redeeming qualities.

The first time I ever heard of Wiles was when it was reported that Trump had to pick Gaetz while Wiles was out of the room.  The implication was clear: if Wiles had been around, she never would have approved.  Even more intriguing, there was just a hint, just a whisper that Trump wouldn’t have dared do it if she’d been there.  Now, that is an impressive woman—actually, fuck that: that, friends and neighbors, is an impressive person utterly regardless of gender.  If there’s one thing that we can say about Trump somewhat consistently, it’s that he does whatever the fuck he wants.  The mere idea that anyone could control him—even a little!—is a bit amazing.  So that’s when I started to wonder who this pit bull of a person was.

And now, apparently, she’s put out a memo “reminding” everyone that people up for government positions do not speak for the incoming administration.  Now, she apparently stressed that this doesn’t apply to Musk, as he’s not actually up for a government job, because the “department” of government “efficiency” is a thing that doesn’t exist, and Trump can’t make it exist, because that’s not a power that presidents have.  So, supposedly, this memo has nothing to do with Musk, and nothing to do with Musk’s little kerfuffle with Bannon and Loomer (which I mentioned last week).  To which I, much like the author of the article at the other end of that link I pointed you towards, say: bullshit.  And, the best part is, it seems to have worked.  No more episodes of Vicious Tweets, at any rate.  Which means that the world’s richest man—a.k.a. the world’s biggest brat—just got put in his place by a little old white-haired lady who Trump, apparently, calls the “Ice Maiden.” Quite impressive indeed.

We shall see what the future holds, I suppose ...