Declaration of Incoherence

 

This guy just shut down the Department of Education. pic.twitter.com/SSwsrw7oll

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 1, 2025

I fully intend to add to this, but my word, it is made of stupid. The man literally seems to have no idea what the Declaration of Independence is. And he just says random things. 

 UPDATE: I do not know where his brain short-circuited, but Harvard went in one ear and Harlem came out of his mouth:

Smith asked Trump what he would say to those who view his attacks against the Ivy League school as “an attack on academic freedom, rather than a defense of fairness.”

“Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and frankly if you look at what’s gone on—and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side,” Trump said.

“You know I got a very high Black vote. You know that? Very, very high Black vote. It was a very great compliment to me,” Trump continued.

You know what never happened? That. That never happened.  

The Homegrowns are Next

 

Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough." pic.twitter.com/o20thGNK9e

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2025

Trump is serious, He wants to deport US citizens to an El Salvador hellhole. Don't kid yourself it will be for "good reasons".  Accept and believe the evidence of your eyes and ears: this man genuinely believes that people who criticize him or those who help him should be labelled criminals. The threat of being "disappeared" is how Trump means to manage dissent in this country.

But it's not just the first amendment that is in danger. It's the whole bill of rights. 

 He doesn't believe in due process or the Constitution, and neither does his attorney general. His White House is full of people who will simply lie regarding this one man--but they will also lie about anyone Trump deems an enemy of the people, because that is how the lies of weak people work. 

They don't suddenly develop a conscience somewhere down the line. The weakness corrodes every scruple, and soon the rule of law is gone.

This should be front page, five-alarm, screaming bloody murder news. It's time to call it fascism, and it's time to seriously talk about impeachment and removal. It's past time, even. But it might not be too late.

Free Speech, Responsibility, and a Caution

 

I take potshots at VP JD Vance, as is my right as an American, and I do so only with a little guilt that he's a barrel of fish--a target-rich environment. All the same, something about him irritates me right in the patriotism.  I have described him as being if chewing on tin foil with a mouthful of fillings was a person, and I am not backing down from that. 

Take today as an example--he weighed in on Margaret Brennan asking Secretary of State Marco Rubio (a man chained in a dungeon of his own making, performing Trump's foreign policy while I guarantee you knowing better at any instance) if there was anything amiss in Vance's Munich speech regarding the "enemy within" and meeting with AfD where "free speech" led to the Holocaust. 

I' m going to help everyone out by stipulating that the Nazis were not big fans of free speech. They banned books, you know. "Un-German" books regarding different races, people who were considered deviant, people who were liberal or Communist. They would have really hated DEI. 

The Elephant at the Protest

 

I am completely opposed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, I genuinely think the Rafah operation will be a bloodbath and should be reconsidered, and I am highly skeptical that the eradication of Hamas is fully possible without what already are proving to be unacceptable human casualties. I want to believe that in a different political situation, Gazans might want something more like Fatah (which Hamas exterminated in that region) leading them in an autonomous state. I support the free speech rights of the protesters at various colleges, even to the extent that I am dubious of the effect of the protests and don't truly believe they are as well-informed as they need to be.

I do not want a recap of National Guard breaking heads at Berkeley, or Kent State. Reactionaries are looking for the opportunity to have hardhat riots and so on, and some people are openly fantasizing about the Democratic National Convention being another 1968. 

Given my feelings about all of the above, let me be that wet-blanket Gen X asshat who wants to tell the children, ever so delicately--the hell you are doing the same thing my parents' generation did. When pro-Palestinians all say "Genocide Joe", maybe they think they are just echoing their grandparents' asking LBJ how many kids he killed that day. But Joe isn't dropping the bombs, and Israel is getting incoming missiles all the time from Hamas, Hezbollah, and there is a threat of war from Iran.

Which leads me to point out that young man in the picture above with the Hezbollah flag--with a machine gun on it. Almost a gentle hippie, just repping something that is by no means a peace movement, but terrorism. 

When 1968 begat Nixon, he prolonged the Vietnam War. No, really. My dad's generation was drafted. He (Nixon) on the advice of Kissinger, prolonged the war. 

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. 

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.

Night of Elon Knives

 

So, I can co-exist with the best of them, and I won't Tweet this link out on Twitter because I think I understand the new rules, but apparently, if you are a journalist who mentions Elon Musk, Twitter isn't your home anymore. 

Now, it feels kind of thin-skinned, and it is. After all, Musk once talked about something like free speech maximalism, and this is definitely not that. 

He took not his worst critics, but his truest critics, and shat them out the airlock. Maybe he didn't want them to leave voluntarily--but he was fine with them getting bounced. 

Of course, the right wing folks he's been sucking up to love this, because they don't understand the terms of service, they just think that if conservatives anywhere get banzored, then liberals everywhere should be banzored. How else would life be fair? It doesn't sit right with me because I was following basically all of those guys and they were doing the work. 

Now, I have no social media skills (nor 44 billion to buy social media skillz, amirite?) so I don't think I'm big enough to get bounced for my lil Elon parody songs, or whatevs.  But there's the principle of the thing--do I stay when free speech is no longer the point, when the conversation palls, when the party isn't over, but the hosts are worn out and the food sucks?

Yeah, I stay. I don't quit Twitter, it quits me. Because I was here before Musk took over. Because I was a bullied queer kid and am used to hostile environments. Because Musk came to journalism central and tried to gatekeep truthtellers in a world where we all have been gatekept by the dastardliest. 

He had knives out for some of our best--and will need to expect people to want to do their worst. 

He will shut down the servers before he shuts down this roast. Because we operate this spit and the coals and Elon is very high profile and very roastable. He doesn't have a discourse, the discourse has him. 

That's the parasocial relationship Musk developed with actual hyperliterate assholes. It was a bad idea. We like Mars and electric cars, but we will find options. Will he? 

Putin Wants to Mudwrestle In the Wrong Pit

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin shot back at Western leaders who mocked his athletic exploits, saying they would look "disgusting" if they tried to emulate his bare-torso appearances. https://t.co/nT1HEVWKKZ

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 30, 2022

This is just a quick observation, and I know Boris Johnson is a big old load of pasty business and I am not talking about him being any kind of shirtless hot--he's standing up against Putin though, and if I give him nothing else, his standing on that is the best thing you will ever get me to agree with on a Conservative. (The Tory threat against him makes me wonder what Tories are about since he's still here. You all fixing to do better than still represented? I have questions.)  But Joe Biden could bike shirtless and look great for a man that's my Dad's age and the fact he falls off his bike and gets up again isn't disgusting--that's amazeballs. His hips are intact. Yowza. For elderly levels of resilience. 

How Now, "Mad at Cow"?

One of Trump's especially dumb toadies, Rep. Devin Nunes, had the extraordinary stupidity to file a suit against parody accounts purporting to be his cow and his mom, and for some reason, he also sued Liz Mair, because they said mean things about him. The parody accounts, as a result of the attention from the lawsuit, did not in fact die, but became more powerful (followed) than Nunes anticipated (see "Streisand effect"). It was recently determined that there was no real way to find out who Devin Nunes' cow actually was, and a recent ruling decided that Twitter was not to be held liable for what randos post there.

This isn't exactly a case of Nunes suing an internet cow and losing. It's more like, because he's a weird conservative conspiracy theorist, he thinks being criticized on the internet is some kind of ploy against him. But no, it's just...speech. Which, like a dumb fuck, he has called attention to in such a way that statements like "Devin Nunes is suing an internet cow" and "Devin Nunes is losing to an internet cow" can be made.

But the grotesque little point to his exercise is twofold: to purport that social media habitats are biased against conservatives because, I guess, accounts critical of them exist? And to try to shift bias rightward.

I have been following the foofaraw about Section 230 for a minute, and have some feelings.  I have existed as a semi-anonymous pseudonymous personage online for over 20 years, at this point, for a dozen on this blog. I think anonymity for non-public figures helps enable free speech without individual penalty and the toll to an internet persona should be reputational for that persona. Providing critical content, even derogatory content, shouldn't be censored so long as it isn't a threat of actual material harm (beyond hurt feelings or whatever). If you are stalking, making terroristic threats, are a straight-up criminal--okay--that's different. But just saying mean stuff? Give me a break!

Conservatives have been alleging "liberal media bias" for as long as I can remember, so claiming social media bias isn't a big shocker. But knowing how the internet or social media works, it means they are kind of pointing out that they aren't actually that popular and are getting a lot of push-back, and when they explain they are going to flounce off to Gab or Parler or whatever, it's kind of like "Welp, let's fuck off to wherever they banished the neo-Nazis to." Because  the thing where people get kicked off of social media? It's not for bias, it's usually for being a damaged tool that that can't even play well with others.

So anyway, am I saying Devin Nunes is definitely a damaged tool? Well, I'm not not saying that! But his district should seriously consider whether a person with a lot of time on his hands to fuck around about internet cows has any bandwidth left for his constituents.

I am in Favor of The Boycott

The History of the Boycott starts with a man named Boycott, who was a Sassenach with a negative attitude towards the Gaelic people of Ireland who did not know that the free will of persons in regards to his activities could result in a general failure of all his works and designs, and was then made aware that such person had a power in their union when they did conspire against him by shunning all things in which he had a hand. 

The Boycott in modern times is best recalled in terms of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but we know they sometimes work, and sometimes they don't.  There is a current question about whether it is good and necessary to boycott the sponsors of Tucker Carlson, who is apparently the very good friend of white supremacists. 

And I must disagree with the idea that the boycott is a pall on the First Amendment or whatever. The boycott is the most free market expression of "Fuck You" allowable by dollars, which is the only currency shit-talking fuckwagons like Carlson understand. He would not be making yon mouthnoises about the dirtiness of immigrants if he thought it would cost him his digital pulpit, and yet cost him it must. If Fox News Corp does not think his digital pulpit could be better used than by Himself saying nasty things about better people than he ever was, then we need to show them by taking away the dollars that make his pulpit possible. Full stop.

This is not about the First Amendment at all, because the boycott is enjoined by persons, not the government in all its pomp and powers. It is the right of free individuals to use the dollar power granted to them by capitalism to decide who wins and loses by their vote by expenditure. It is the purest expression of speech--putting one's money where one's mouth is.  And if anyone were to defend, say Citizen's United, then I would say they needed to recognize "boycott" as similarly an expression of expense as a version of free speech. But denying expenditures towards a supporter of repugnant ideals.

There is an argument regarding boycotts to the side that dollars can be denied to marginalized groups because of prejudice etc. This already happens without being officially labelled, and is a whataboutery. Also, historically, right wing boycotts might have names like "a million moms" but really aren't, while left wing boycotts got more teeth.

I believe tv channels do their cultural bit for views and commercial funding, and if this makes repugnant political shows scarce, I can't argue with the taste of so many.

I refuse to see the voice of many being an undue pall on free speech, so much as a part of the dialog. If a voice is valid, it will find its audience. It does not require a subsidy of enforced goodwill. And Tucker Carlson does not need my civil libertarian ass backstopping his message of hate. And I will not do that.

The boycott is a voice of the marginalized, and the marginalized need to have a say by their amassed organization to direct action. Full damn stop.

A Trump Abroad

I'm not by nature a pessimistic person, which regularly shocks me--my generation is known for cynicism and snark and sarcasm. But I sometimes am hopeful about things, like maybe that the White House plans hotel bookings for the President when he does important stuff abroad so he doesn't have to schlep a room in an embassy like he was Julian Assange or something. (He's staying in Hamburg's Senate house--it's nice, and I am just being mean.) Sigh. I wish I felt better about his being out and around people, is all.

Maybe he would just give a great speech in front of a sympathetic bussed-in crowd. Maybe it wouldn't be a weird white nationalist rant about Western Civilization. Maybe he wouldn't get some historical thing, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, really wrong. Maybe he wouldn't mention his election results. 

I also was hopeful that the US President who took an oath to the Constitution would not actually deride freedom of speech and the press which is a big thing, really. (That hope got dashed.) And if I was looking for some kind of acknowledgement that Trump understood that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections and probably was going to try it again, well, again, disappointment.  Trump basically agreed Russia could have been involved but so could anyone and anyway nothing is proven, blah blah blah. Which is itself fake news. There is a lot of consensus that meddling came from Russia to benefit Trump.  And that they will try it again. Right now, they seem to be trying out our nuclear plants. 

I would like to think that a person who put "America first" would be mad about this kind of invasive attack by any foreign government on our infrastructure--whether our electoral infrastructure upon which our faith in government might depend, or on our electric grid. That someone who was speaking for the US interest in, well, anything, had a plan.

But this self-interested SOB can't even admit that Russia is a problem. He is going to go into his meeting with Putin with a handful of people--Tillerson, Lavrov, some translators. And I don't feel good about this based on his meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak.  But maybe we will see, despite efforts to keep this meeting very closed. 

The Rocket's Red Glare

In honor of the July 4th holiday, I decided to avoid discussing any other disturbing Tweets in favor of the couple that let us know what our Commander-in-Chief is like as a strategic thinker. The above screen-capped sample notes that North Korea has launched another missile (a thing they have been doing of late with Trump in charge--this one qualifies as an intercontinental ballistic missile, which is something of a big deal).

North Korea has been specifically signaling the US regarding its missile-related objectives. But Trump specifically calls out South Korea and Japan and also China as being the nations who need to keep North Korea in line. I don't think it is the US president's place to direct what should be done with the JSDF or South Korean military--although a joint South Korean/US operation is also making missile splashies to show NoKo what's up.  I seriously doubt China will decide now is the time to invade and occupy North Korea because NK just doesn't have their shit together. North Korea has not had its shit together for awhile, and China just has had that be the status quo. Don't know why now would be different.

In other words, Trump is dropping names before he's even got a plan. This bothers me. It bothers me because one of the issues many of us 2016 voters had with Trump was competency, and whether Trump had adequate quantities thereof. The news orgs sort of implied he didn't. People who were more inclined to ignore news orgs voted for Trump.

In a test where some basic knowledge would help, quantities of us don't know whether our chief executive is ready for this. Understanding the world matters. Knowing the rules of dealing with other countries matters. It is true that US firepower is such that we could annihilate NK. It is also true that an anti-proliferation scheme and diplomatic alternatives should have been a consideration, well before Trump took office, amongst his foreign policy advisors (if he listens to any).

Many of us just don't trust a President Trump with stuff like this. We are informed by the media regarding his positions, and what we have heard appalls us. Our republic depends upon an informed populace. I worry about our republic, on this anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, because this president had eschewed learning and assaults the media who try to deliver facts.