The Un-American Project 2025

 

Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" https://t.co/ndMJlNlUKH

— Media Matters (@mmfa) July 3, 2024

Look at this Bond villain bullshit: "which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." What he's saying right there is, will remain bloodless if the left lays back and lets it happen. Because I guess it's fun to threaten a whole Revolution. Tea Party people. I swear. They really want to see themselves proudly fighting to--

Install a monarchy? Undo the first American Revolution? Institute a lot of Christian nationalist and white supremacist rubbish that the majority of Americans don't want? 

Um--exactly. And there are a lot of former Trump Administration officials supporting this blueprint for chaos. 

Anyway, when I saw that term, "bloodless", all I could think of was 1/6 and the testimony of a Capitol police officer that she was slipping in people's blood that day.  They thought they were re-creating 1776. What they were doing was insurrection. What the 'bloodless" Project 2025 document boasts is undoing the American experiment of a government of, for and by the people--unless those people are conservative activists.

Six Days of Bomb Threats

 

There is one political side that has resulted in rhetoric that leads to the arson and mass shootings at mosques, gurdwaras, synagogues, and supermarkets and schools, and the threats of bombings at hospitals and now, six days of bomb threats at an OK school district over a video shared by a school superintendent. 

The threats began the same day that Walters retweeted a post from a day earlier on the conservative provocateur account Libs of TikTok, which featured a video of a librarian at Union Public Schools. The video shows the librarian walking next to a book shelf with the text “POV: teachers in your state are dropping like flies but you are still just not quite finished pushing your woke agenda at the public school.” That’s different from the caption that the librarian originally posted on her TikTok account, which Libs of TikTok removed: “My radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind — hbu??”

When Walters retweeted the Libs of TikTok post to his nearly 10,000 followers, he added: “Woke ideology is real and I am here to stop it.” 

See what happened there? The original sentiment of the librarian in question was "My radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind." Are conservatives deciding that loving reading and being kind really are some kind of scary agenda, and that the comment wasn't a frightening manifesto about left-wing indoctrination, but an ironic comment about how a librarian's job is to do something totally normal and not-scary: show kids that books are great. Encourage them to be nice to each other! 

Boogedy!

See, this is how easy it is to create a boogeyman. Just drop some charged language like "woke" into the mix and frame things as if they were a problem when they are not, and watch simple-minded drones fly in to stir shit because they want to signify for something. Look at me! I am a culture warrior against....

Literacy and decency. Good job, so-called Christian conservatives. Feeble sarcastic golf clap for the bomb threat people. You are literally barbarians tearing down Western Civilization. You've struck a blow against public safety and demonstrated the superiority of your side at mindless terroristic posturing. 

Makes You Wonder (UPDATED)

 

Although the video with the above fascist symbolism with Ron DeSantis superimposed was posted by, and then deleted by, a fan account, the troubling specter of That Gay Ad having been produced by a staffer with DeSantis' campaign does make me wonder. 

See, we've seen this before. Fascist imagery just showing up at random starts to show a pattern that doesn't really feel all that random at all, but more like a test-balloon. The atmosphere in Florida is a bit cozy for the Nazi-lovers, and the GOP in Florida seems kind of okay with their existence (and assistance). 

It's how I feel about the history curriculum in Florida whitewashing slavery. If it can be called ignorance, it's ignorance of a very deliberate kind (a kind Ron DeSantis himself is very much in step with.) Radicalization is a choice. (I don't even know where to begin with the idea of the Chiclet-heads of Prager U having anything to do with school curriculums.)

It's not just DeSantis, it's the party. It's just not usually as ham-fisted as the above, and of course, it was posted by a fan. (My gut says "Plausible deniability" after the Pride month ad.)  But whatever it is DeSantis seems to be doing, it looks like telegraphing to the white supremacists and Christian nationalists to get onboard with him. And that test-balloons like these are flying is a four-alarm fire.

UPDATE: And it was apparently right to wonder- the person (now fired) who made the video was...an aide with the campaign.

UPDATE: This piece by Tim Miller describes just who this Nate Hochman is--a Generation Z edge-lord who considered Nick Fuentes "based" and was going to be putting the words literally in DeSantis' very large (I think his jaw unhinges like a boa constrictor!) mouth.  But here's the part that sort of reveals what the game is:

He went on to discuss the merits and demerits of one of America’s most vile humans, saying the fact that he has said “super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can actually accomplish in politics.”

“Edgy” is definitely one way to describe Holocaust denial!

When the Dispatch asked him about his Fuentes remarks, Hochman acknowledged that he said some “really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe”—but did not apologize.

"Edgy" is like "ironic" or "just kidding" or "sorry, not sorry". Walk-backs and obfuscation are tactics.  In the meanwhile, while we're just shitposting on the good old socials and all, just making our memes, some of the message gets through, and some more people are just a little radicalized. It's incremental and excremental. 

It's why I'm not putting all my hope on the youth--some of them are already on a pretty shitty path and after all, there were Boomers who were radical liberals and "didn't trust anyone over thirty" and my generation X had its share of folks who were about to "sell out" and some but not all millennials count as "woke". Grown people are supposed to demonstrate leadership and set examples. Just like we've got a lot of Gen Z young folks who are fed up with the system that put them through shooter drills and told them to expect less bodily autonomy than previous generations, we've also got some racist incels who legit think Elliot Rogers had a point. And that current is what deeply concerns me, because the pose of irony and the dismissal of actual empathy as "virtue-signaling" and "shitlibs" and being "snowflakes" is all a way of keeping the baby Nazis from wandering off and trying to be human.

But to bring it back to Meatball Ron--back when he was a teacher, in addition to getting history wrong, he was fraternizing with the kids and trying to be cool.  That's him also in this campaign--extremely online and led by callow youth instead of being capable of "leadership" until forced to fire an alt-right dickhead in the midst of also firing 1/3 of his campaign staff. (Which is still not leadership.)

What I'm saying is--I really don't wonder. The GOP invited the alt-right in and that's what they are going to be. 

Don't Know Much About History

 

WATCH >> Ron DeSantis defends new curriculum that will teach children how slaves *benefited* from slavery.

"They're probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into, into doing things later in life." pic.twitter.com/Ls1wyk3tr4

— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) July 22, 2023

They parlayed: only AFTER SLAVERY ENDED WHICH WAS NOT A GUARANTEE! Generations of unpaid skilled workers labored under the yoke of slavery incapable of seeking other opportunities because they were not treated as people, but property, with little post-slavery option outside of running for it and possible death or recapture. In the meanwhile, they were denied literacy, they were in a segregated church, they had their families sold away from them, they were heritable to other members of their owners' families.  (No, stop everything and read about slave law.)

And they could be abused to within an inch of their lives or past it including sexual abuse. They were used in medical experiments. They were believed to be less capable of pain, a belief that persists in medical practice sometimes even today. They made a straight face in front of white people to preserve their dignity before God and others. 

Klanned Karenhood and Their Fellow Travelers

 

I saw this on Twitter, and wanted to talk about why this particularly bothers me as (extreme Quark from Deep Space Nine voice) a "biological female"--there is a thing we don't really address much: toxic femininity. We can talk about abusive men, men who think with their fists, masculinity in the form of right-fighting and DARVO--but not these women. The ones who wouldn't do violence themselves but would cheer their men on for doing it. (They are also sister shafters--they would sell out any number of women in an instant to gain points with the patriarchy.)

Now maybe the above screencap of a freedom mommy calling for Biden's execution is unfair: she was mad because she thought US military service dogs were left behind, and while that wasn't exactly the case, I also hate to see animals potentially harmed and could get good and fighting mad about it. But I'd have checked the story, and not gone right to talking about execution because I'm not one of these ol' gals.  

But the freedom mommies don't need good reasons to want violence--it avenges them. Or at least satisfies them that their loyalty to the patriarchy has a payoff. See how they love when the daddies get in on the action? Think of a woman goading her significant other to go fight that man who has been looking at her. (Think about the history of white women and lynching, and TERFS and violence against trans people.) They don't get to rock the block of someone they don't like, but they do get told that the one who rocks the cradle rules the world. 

I'm not blaming William Ross Wallace for it--that was the era. We just aren't in the 19th century anymore. And my real problem is--WE AREN'T GOING BACK TO IT, EITHER!

ABC "Falls" for the Mommaganda

 

Let's try this again, ABC: These moms call themselves joyful warriors, but they are a dark money-funded astroturf group that is allied with the Proud Boys and Oath keepers and are a bunch of Hitler-quoting fascist homophobic Karens. Being a little confused by these concerned women whooping u on their local school boards might have been excusable--if local underfunded media outlets were the ones falling for it. When networks like CNN and ABC are falling for this shit TODAY after all the water under the bridge?

Oh hell, no. That's not these guys falling for the hustle--that a CHOICE. That's ignoring that these folks are using a misguided interpretation of "parental rights" to try and change up the educational programming for other folks' kids and insert their own conservative and religious dogma and, sorry, folks, flat-out bigotry.

There's really no excuse at this point for letting the words "Mom" and "Liberty" stimulate some kind of pavlovian respect response. They are just a cynical political hustle. No one here is brand new to this stuff--and I think we need the goddamn mainstream media to step up to where independent media and left bloggers were, what, like one-two years ago. They came to Philadelphia, a big liberal city in a swing state, for reasons. 

They aren't mad. They aren't fired up--they are just boosting Republican signals ahead of 2024.

Climbing One Hill After Another

 

A Florida School Has Banned the Poem Read at Biden’s Inauguration

Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb is restricted after just one parent complained about it.https://t.co/AMLRSaUSOA #BannedBooks #IStandWithTheBanned

— PEN America (@PENamerica) May 23, 2023

There is some back and forth over what we count as a "ban" for purposes of conversation--so let's go with "restriction". One parent complained about this poem. One confused parent, who thought it was written by Oprah Winfrey (which right there is a bit of a red flag--no?) And so it was decided on the basis of one opinion that maybe the younger ones would be "confused" or "indoctrinated" by a poem that was read at a presidential inauguration for all the world to hear. 

So, let's talk about the parent--who apologized for promoting the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a notorious anti-Semitic hoax that still has a lot of play among a certain set of conspiracy theorists. She admits she's not much of a reader. One could argue what sort of thinker she is. But the point is--she's one person.

And she has the ability as a parent to restrict her own's kids' reading. I can wonder about what sort of strange, unwell bonsai her kids' curiosity might be pruned to as a result. But my own parents pulled messy romance novels and Mad Magazine out of my sweaty little hands as a kid--it was their right. At issue is whether a very few, and possibly very cranky few at that, should have veto power over all the kids' reading. 

After all, just eleven people filed most book bans across the country. Maybe these people need new hobbies, because that sounds like an industry, if not its own agenda.

I can't say age restriction is wholesale bad--I definitely question things of a sexually explicit nature being in the hands of kids and think maturity restrictions do make sense, in context. But, for example, nudity was used as a reason for banning the graphic novel "Maus" in a context that had no sexual conten. And I can see where there are challenges to LGBT+ content on the basis of "sexual references" where nothing is explicit. (I want to put out there that not all "coming of age" novels are for the people who are coming of age themselves, but for people who have also been through it.)  But also, just because something is contentious doesn't mean it's wrong, as in the case of, I dunno, the grand sweep of American history.

Those decision aren't one hill to climb--but one after another. And shouldn't be lightly decided just because school officials can't be bothered to fend off random cranks.

DeSantis is Not Sanitary

 

Ron DeSantis wiped his snot on a man in Iowa pic.twitter.com/1sme5S2c23

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) May 19, 2023

Look, if you can get beyond "pudding fingers"--great and good on ya.  But if you can't draw the line at snot fingers, I don't know where to go with you. Because stunad just wiped his nose on his hands and his hands on a wheelchair. 

Now, that isn't the worst about DeSantis you'll see recently.  There's the utter torture his anti-abortion bullshit is putting pregnant families through. The Washington Post has a story about a lovely family that had to watch their little baby die because they could not mercifully end that pregnancy before their child was born to suffer a horrible death, and you will never, never, never convince me this is pro-life. 

There will be other stories just like this. This asshole's politics is about people suffering for his culture war bona fides. I don't know what he or his conjoined twin wife Casey believes as a Catholic or a Republican, but I know he doesn't give a shit about whether other people suffer for his ambition. They are against public schools, because wow--why sanctify education, right?  If critical thinking makes you less conservative, more liberal, more inclined to dissent--and wow! Does this prickly pants hate dissent! 

(But while he absolutely hates protests outside of homes of officials, he really likes depositing immigrants outside of where liberal officials might be.) 

Suffice it to say--his hands aren't clean.

Ron DeSantis Just Dropped Some New Racism

 

This signifying white supremacist just came out in favor of choking out homeless people of color by smearing progressive DAs as being controlled by a (((globalist))))? This is deeply racist. Manslaughter is not what a Good Samaritan does. https://t.co/QaJUiBXChO

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) May 13, 2023

In 2018, Ron DeSantis' gubernatorial opponent made the most succinct summation of what DeSantis was about: The racists believe he's a racist.  The racists had every reason to believe DeSantis was a fellow traveler. We know pretty well from what Tommy Tuberville thinks about MAGA and white supremacy what the score is with MAGA Republicans. If you want to score MAGA points, you have to signify white supremacy.

You have to deny the Ocoee Massacre and the Rosewood Massacre (they aren't even teaching positive Black history there, as far as I hear it.) You have to direct a policy of downplaying white complicity in a systematic degradation of people of color. You have to pretend this is because it's mean to depict white people as racist--and then, be this guy. The guy who can't say "Boo" when racists broadcast anti-Semitism all over his state. And then celebrate a guy who choked a homeless man to death for being publicly upset about an actually very upsetting reality: Hunger and thirst and no place to lay his head where the law would not call him a vagrant and penalize him for the sin of being an unhomed person.

 

The Un-Woke Mind Virus

 

Consider if you will, unwoke Ron De Santis--the bland Florida man at war with Disney and Dylan Mulvaney. (Do I need to tap the scoreboard on old Ron?) making his pitch to the American people and the world he's ready to fight for them because...he's mad at Disney and mad at Bud Light, and mad transgender people exist and also still mad about CRT which has never been taught at K-12 and probably mad that Gitmo prisoners both threw up on him and remember his face. He's cautioning against the "woke mind virus."

Who knows if he actually gives a fuck about any of that--the bandwagon exists and the man has feet. I didn't know who Dylan was myself until the Bud Light kerfuffle and now want to protect her like she was my own daughter. If someone thinks it's okay to demonize someone just trying to live their life and be enthused by stuff, surprise--you are the weirdo. Hating someone for their gender expression makes you the hater. That's how it works. Supporting Dylan, or supporting so-called "wokeness" isn't a virus, it's basic decency. I share a planet with other people and we need to coexist. It costs me exactly nothing to respect someone else's pronouns, and it actually enriches me to know that human experience is diverse. 

Just the other evening, Elon Musk sat down with Bill Maher and they talked about the "woke mind virus."

The Fundamentals of My Feminism

 An artist depicted a Great Wall of Vaginas (Vulvas, actually) and because I'm me, I thought about the amazing plaster caster Cynthia Albritton of recent blessed memory, who got depictions of the units of so many male artists including Jimi Hendrix. The monuments to assorted gifted phalli aren't necessarily controversial--but someone has decided to be the decider of correct and appropriate vulvularity. 

We did not need that. Purity culture is already doing a wonderful job of telling female-bodied people we are having bad vulvas. They are telling young girls they are used up by just using tampons for their menses. 

We are told we are worth less because of our "body count" and that multiple penises and births are making our one interesting feature (our vag) less useful. Sloppy, slippery, loose, etc. 

They do not seem to know we have muscles on our pelvic floor that can push out whole human life many times over. We are not spent because of little penetrations (tampons, penises) when we are made to birth big-headed babies. Vulvas are elastic and fantastic. 

But anatomy is not destiny. Having a vulva or a uterus does not mean you identify as female, and I support referring to people who birth, menstruate, or have uteruses or vulvas, as being referred to in that way as appropriate. I am not being referred to when someone is talking about a "birthing person" and I don't feel excluded by that. I technically might be able to--but I know despite being female, that isn't me. It's a term of fact, not a judgment. 

A View of DeSantistan

 

“Leave our country go back to Israel”
“Heil hitler” “sir do you think you should be put in an oven”

These “GDL” nazi animals have been terrorizing & targeting Jews & Jewish communities with impunity

Police are refrained from doing anything. This needs to be stopped pic.twitter.com/WGJrt9GZjE

— Baruch Sandhaus (@BaruchSandhaus) February 22, 2023

While I could talk about how Trump threw hats at the good folks of East Palestine and offered them his brand-name bottled water, I am more interested in what is happening in the state where his chief rival is governor--his "home" state of Florida (since New York's fine but it ain't home no more). More than a year ago, I noted that Florida Nazis were a very bad sign. I think something is very rotten in Florida.  I understand this guy--I do. 

He looks like a little pouty potato, but he's always thinking about how to destroy the history he learned so that no one is ever troubled by it again. He's a clever spud who wrote his own book trying to ignore race and its impact on our history, He would rather no one was ever confronted by bad thoughts. So he's removing the libraries and the people who want to remember what libraries used to be. 

The Litter Box, Or: WTF is Up With These Weirdos?

 

The Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota repeated last week a bizarre hoax claim which has been debunked that children are being allowed to use litter boxes in schools https://t.co/cgxDpN1Lo7

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 3, 2022

I know this is really far down on the list of story priorities, except it isn't really, not when Pizzagate morphed into Q and wankers are trying to storm libraries because gay people are reading stories while dressing in colorful costumes. 

So, when a handful of people try to tell a tale of kids using litter boxes in schools because they "identify" as an animal, wow.  These rubes are actually running for office. I'm not 100% on this, but I think the litter box thing was operant in a recent post of Matt Schlapp of CPAC when he began: 

"We go in the toilets and we believe God creates boys and girls and guns are legal and murders are rare."

In Kansas, they go in the toilets: in some weird dystopian metropolis, there are kids with bunny ears dropping their pellets in a sandbox set up in the gender neutral lavatory. 

Can real people think this is even a thing? That the sanitary concerns would not be something any reasonable institution would balk at? That parents whose children did their business outside of regular indoor plumbing would not be seeking psychiatric help?  

The History of Labor Day

Greeting fellow workers! Hope you treated yourself and considered your value today!

UPDATE: Did you know approval and appreciation of unions is on an upswing? My personal guess is it has a lot to do with COVID-19 when we collectively experienced crises related to the fragility of our employment status, the need for health benefits and paid leave, and absolutely treacherous workplace safety. Work is political. People work to earn a living, but work is not one's whole life. Supporting your fellow workers to make workplaces better improves productivity and helps the business thrive by decreasing turnover, burnout, and improving employee service. It's a good thing!

UPDATE: We often talk about how the labor movement put an end to child labor (conditionally) but the labor movement also protects aging workers by making retirement more comfortably possible. 

Note--an important part of the end of child labor is free, compulsory education. A free and fair society means that our children have the means to grow up and fend for themselves because they have the knowledge to do so. A free and fair society means we don't write off people because they are no longer productive workers. 

And Forgive Us Our Debts

 

In another BFD kind of day, President Biden announced the forgiveness of student loan debt up to $10K for borrowers with incomes up to $125,000 ($250,00 if filing jointly) and up to $20K for Pell Grant recipients. This is going to help so many people--

The White House said that 43 million student loan borrowers will benefit and that as many as 20 million borrowers will have their full remaining student loan balances wiped out.

That will be very significant for those households. Due to debt obligations, people have put off on home-ownership, starting their families, and more. Adjustments to the payments owed will also give people whose debt has not thoroughly been retired welcome breathing space. It may not be what they hoped for, but it is a change in the right direction.

Of course, people have to complain. I'm not going to focus on the more left-based criticism that the debt forgiveness should have gone further because I'm in agreement with it--I am a Gen X kid whose working class to middle class family was able to manage my education, and I acknowledge my privilege. My degree was invaluable to me, though, and I encourage people to get a good education because the broader your horizons, the better your damn time here on this earth. I got a BA in English Lit., which is one of the most humanities of the humanities degrees. It means I am proficient in my mother tongue and can discuss works people have been reading for pleasure for a long time. 

Jesus, Guns, Babies, SCOTUS

 

The Dobbs bomb dropped today, and it was already quite a week for SCOTUS conservative signifying. There was an elevation of the free exercise concept regarding religious liberty over the establishment clause, which feels sloppy as hell. Free exercise doesn't to my mind imply taxpayer-funded exercise. We have now introduced a situation in which, having opened the door to funding some religious-operated schools, would the state government be determining a cut off at some point?  All religious schools? Scientology, Hare Krishna, Church of Satan? 

(Look, I'm not a Mainer or Maine's mom or anything, but why do you have such a thing as areas that don't have an actual public school? Instead of offering tuition to anyone, just do a school. I think the world would be a better place if there were more schools. Figure out where there is a gasping need, build it. I don't know how a community exists that doesn't think there is a need for a local school, but okay, village, if you don't build it, the state can just step in that way. Shrug. Of course, I don't believe in private or homeschool education because there's a risk of things being way off standard. Ever see the Abeka curriculum? Yikes on bikes.)

We also saw a radical dismantling of gun control, also pretty bizarrely decided, with Justice Thomas telling us somberly that Justice Taney had some good points in the Dred Scott decision. Wait.. Have we retired the idea that you absolutely do not have to hand it to the Dred Scott decision; because I feel like I missed a memo. Last I checked we were not handing anything to the Dred Scott decision. 

But while the conservative justices were feeling extra cute with their decisions (history might delete later) it's no surprise that Thomas once again added to the obvious furor that the Alito-written Dobbs decision was going to cause by actually saying the unravelling part out loud--yeah, we're coming for Obergefell, Lawrence and Griswold.  (Who is going to check us, bitch? he did not add.) You don't have a private life that isn't dictated by the state. We can control your vertical and horizontal--the outer limits of your physical choices. You will fornicate inside the lines. God will decide if child will issue or not. If you die, you die. 

MTG and Entropy

 

The funny thing with the recent Tweet I want to highlight from perpetually aggrieved Rep. MTG is that she right off the bat starts with the most obviously offensive thing that liberals actually don't defend. She writes:

"If you are defending pedophile priests and those that protect them, groomer teachers & Disney LGBTQ propaganda, Drag Queen story time, saying it's not Satan convincing women to abort their unplanned child, and that children can be mutilated to change their gender, you're wrong."

While I'm in favor of freedom of religion, I've long deplored the Catholic Church's cover-up of pedophilia in the clergy and would not ever defend it, and many people would tend to agree with that--particularly former Catholics and people who define themselves as atheist, agnostic or "none of the above" religiously. If anything, the Church's protection of perhaps 2-5% of clergy in those hopes of preserving its worldly reputation and self-defense against outside criticism has displayed the rot of an organization closed to debate. 

Where she goes from there is a peculiarly tightening circle of pronouncements of less certainty--groomer teachers? Sure, I think teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau or Pamela Joan Rogers or Debra Lefave are deeply troubling, but it seems to me that this is not exactly what Greene is referring to. She appears to be considering simply being LGBTQ-affirming with being a groomer, and with being Disney "propaganda".  

The common understandings of words like "groomer" and "propaganda" have negative connotations and she is employing those negative connotations to distort the impression of the actual things many teachers (like a teacher recently censured for putting up rainbow stickers in her classroom) might do without any malicious or nefarious intent or what Disney had done (mildly support LGBT people).

To put it bluntly, she's trying to make people agree with her wildly false interpretations of the world. And no, Marge--I know a lie when I see one. Sorry. 

She also throws in Drag Queen story time which is a thing that amuses me--wearing women's clothing isn't a problem when I (cis-gender female) do it, but suddenly becomes a problem when men do it? So weird! And yet, I imagine there's considerable overlap between the people who would consider a man wearing women's clothing wrong and who would definitely ask a woman "What were you wearing?" if she were sexually assaulted, so I guess there's that. But there's nothing really disturbing about reading by a drag performer in a well-attended public setting vs what quite normally-attired, heteronormative persons have gotten up to when quite out of sight.

Maybe her real problem is people being exposed to books in the first place. There is a GOP war against schools and libraries, after all. 

The Satan part is entirely "creation by Marge" in that she recently said women were consorting with Satan in hopes of entrapping a man with their foul ensnarements and chemical conjurings...which is some wild Malleus Maleficarum throwback which I find fairly extraordinarily on-the-nose. And last of all, her comments regarding surgery or mutilation don't display that she understands anything about the subject at all. 

But of course, people who disagree with her POV, however uninformed it might be, are the ones who are wrong. This is how a person ends up spouting weird things about Jewish space lasers--a closed system choking on its own decay. It's a fascinating thing to see so concisely within one Tweet the range from epistemic closure to entropy rapidly increasing in a thick skull.

Highly Visible and Easily Defined

 

Take a look at this SOB, won't you?

Rep. Good: Thank you Person Speaker. I say Person Speaker because I’m not a biologist… pic.twitter.com/0sWkfpBgTQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 31, 2022

This is following on the peculiar trolling of the Ketanji Brown Jackson judicial hearing, in which she was asked to define what a woman is by the notable public intellectual (sinkhole) Marsha Blackburn. Rep. Good is being exceptionally foolish--if he understands very well what a woman is, he doesn't need to be a biologist to say so--isn't that supposed to be his point? And in any event, Speaker Pelosi has always gone by she/her pronouns. All he ever needed to do to be sure was ask. 

 Now, I offer an answer to the question of "What is a woman?" that you can all use if you like, free of charge: A woman is the term commonly understood to mean an adult female human, although the definitions of "female" may be disputed in terms of genetics, anatomy, socialization, politics or law. But under the Constitution in the US, all human beings are entitled to the protection of the law, without respect to gender. And I hope that helps. 

Newt Gingrich is Saying What Republicans Think

 

I was just mentioning that Newt Gingrich is a huge part of the reason why you have to treat Republicans as potentially hostile, but Jonathan Chait explained Gingrich's influence on today's GOP more fully in response to Newt explaining to a fish-jawed Bartiromo that in the event of Republicans taking the House back, the January 6th Committee would be going to jail.

Jail? Is investigating a presidential administration's response and responsibilities regarding a terror attack (because the riot that day was, indeed, domestic terror), then why did nothing happen to House Benghazi investigators? Could it be that no random statute exists preventing Congress from investigating matters of government that concerns them? 

Gingrich knows that. He's also just trying to inflame public opinion against the committee and try to stop them from continuing their duty because he's partisan trash. He's creating that old "permission structure".  Republicans can have their riots, whether of the Brooks Brothers kind or the more army/navy surplus style one, but Democrats are barred from complaint. Democrats should be locked up.  Hillary Clinton, Ilhan Omar, Gretchen Whitmer, any of them.

But in lieu of jailing people for assisting the January 6th Committee, there is possibly, firing them: 

The top staff investigator on the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been fired by the state’s new Republican attorney general from his position as the top lawyer for the University of Virginia, from which he was on leave while working on the congressional inquiry. 

The office of the Virginia attorney general, Jason S. Miyares, said the firing of the investigator, Timothy J. Heaphy, was not related to the Jan. 6 investigation, but the move prompted an outcry from Democrats in the state, who accused him of taking the highly unusual action as a partisan move to further former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to undermine the committee’s work.

See, Virginia just came under new management, and now they are clearly doing things differently there.  Like, banning mask mandates (even though masks apparently help!) and setting up a hotline to snitch on teachers who might be teaching thoughtcrimes.  So why wouldn't the Virginia AG get rid of a troublesome lawyer? It's probably what Ron DeSantis would have done in his fiefdom state. DeSantis has created a climate of fear, and it really shows. 

Republicans talk a fun game about free speech, but hate being talked about. They still want to be McCarthyites and treat dissenters (even Republicans who disagree with them, who are RINOS) as somehow "un-American".  

I won't call Republicans un-American, though. Staging coups and voter suppression are as American as Red Scares and cherry pie. I am just saying they are wrong and there is never any good reason to support Republicans ever. Their policies are bad and their tactics are bad, and I can't even chicken and egg which part came first. 

This isn't a case of Newt Gingrich losing it--this is who he is and what he represents.  And others of his party in the "comment section" of life say worse all the time. 

Prager University is Definitely A Special Place

 

PragerU presenter Karlyn Borysenko has an interesting opinion about the Holocaust! pic.twitter.com/QlCbsfQ8FX

— Gravel Institute (@GravelInstitute) December 6, 2021

So, as you all know, among the luminaries of obviously original thought and deep study who occasionally drop videos at the not even remotely a university thing that Dennis (an entire racist asshole) Prager does, is Candace Owens, who for some wacky reason, thought the real problem with Hitler was trying to franchise fascism.  Because things were just super in Germany, but the daggone fool overextended himself. 

This Tweet is great shades of John Hagee (who endorsed John McCain) having extolled Hitler as a hunter of Jews who drove them into Zion. That was so incredibly disgusting that when unearthed, John McCain, who never did care for the religious zealots, disavowed that support. But you know it hardly matters when Trump openly embraced exactly this kind of antisemitic asshole. You all remember Donald Trump, right? 

You know the President who said maybe some of the people who chanted "Jews Will Not Replace Us" were good people?

So, because I do this, remember the thing of when there was a Let's go Brandon chant at a church? It was John Hagee's church. They got wise to the viper they let into their church I guess.  Which sounds like a very not-acceptable sorry/not-sorry for the antisemitism.

Anyway, Karlyn Borysenko is just the funniest of characters, a supposedly former Democrat who was traumatized by BLM.  She's good friends apparently with anti-CRT grifter Chris Rufo.  I said grifter and I mean it. I would guess this chick is mostly a person we aren't going to hear from again except of course we will because these Prager bots are infinitely recyclable, because this supposed educational institution is about no such thing. It's wingnut welfare for demi-fascists. Who funds this shit, even? (obviously, similar to Koch Bros.)  She'll get paid to read from another script. (Unless she just went rogue like Lara Logan is alleged to, over at Fox News. But wait--there will be a rehabilitation.) 

This is how assholes spread fascistic memes like antisemitism. It isn't subtle to people looking out for it. But it still gets out there, and has an audience. 

This is why Prager U needs to be scattered to the winds.