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. 

SCOTUS and the Ghosts

 

The Colorado web designer who wanted to refuse LGBTQ customers and just won her case at the Supreme Court had claimed in court filings that a man inquired about her services for his same-sex wedding. But the man says he didn’t – and he’s straight. https://t.co/idy1Jy1VI7

— CNN (@CNN) July 1, 2023

I wonder about SCOTUS mostly because I'm a non-lawyer, but I do watch the odd law-related television and follow a bunch of lawyers on Twitter, and it really feels to me like one doesn't have standing over imaginary shit?  Like, it's bad enough that student loan forgiveness seems to have been struck down because of political beef because not even the banks were mad about it, and I'm still not sure who affirmative action hurts. (Because AA only gets someone in the door, but they have to do the coursework. Save your money. Do excellent at your B or C school and transfer in if the big ol' name brand of the school means that much to you. Or whatever. I went to the school that was only one bus route away, myself. And I am definitely a white privilege kid. I'm an English major. I lack vision and purpose. Or so I've been told.)

Anyway--this woman's case was picked up by the ADF--that is, the Alliance Defending Freedom, because of course it was. I don't know whose freedom the Alliance is about--it just looks like Christian supremacy to me.  (And homophobia, transphobia, and the denial of reproductive health freedom. They descend from Dobson and Wildmon--that's all I need to know, fam.) Deep down, I don't love the idea of people discriminating against real people because of what they want to believe their imaginary friends have to say. (I have seen gay folks. I have never seen your god. Sorry if this offends.)

But anyway, this woman was just thinking about going into web design when the horrible thought hit her--what if she was FORCED to support a gay wedding? By making a website about a "happy" same sex couple! The idea! The scary idea! Of having compelled speech in her mouth! 

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."

Kanye and Consequences

 

Sometimes people talk about "cancel culture" as really being "consequence culture"--you have a right to free speech, but not consequence-free speech. The picture above depicts banners unfurled over a busy highway (the 404 in LA) reading: "Honk if you know", "Kanye is right about the Jews", and "Goyim TV TV Rev. 3:9 John 8:44." They were put up there by a notorious hate group: the Goyim Defense League. They are appalling, not amusing, and they are inspired by the inane ramblings of an irresponsible man with a big bullhorn.

So, they are amplifying what Kanye said--to amplify their own message of hate. Kanye sympathized with their message, and they are showing him the exact sort of love he should have expected, because of course, other haters were going to notice.

Who else notices? People who see that banner in their community and feel a tightness in their stomachs, People who were just singled out even though they have done nothing at all--but exist. 

I don't like revisiting this so soon--but the reason a figure like Kanye loses platform or business deals is because that speech has an effect. He isn't thinking about who responds to that speech and what they do. It isn't that he's responsible for what someone else does--he's just making them feel better about their choices. He's not being edgy or controversial--it's the same hate as preached by thugs and has no edifying value. His previous accomplishments don/t elevate it--but his profile makes it more visible for recruitment by groups like the above.

Maybe it affects his bank account that he's "canceled". It's not his place of worship that has to hire security. It isn't his families' headstones being desecrated. It isn't his place of business that would be vandalized by symbols of hate or his physical safety he fears for.  And his co-optation of Jewish identity with Black Israelite conspiracy shit just feels like trolling. It feels like he's daring people to make something of it, hoping one identity camouflages that he is using the same hate that white Christians have used. 

Occurring against the backdrop of a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment and political Christian nationalism it's shocking. Seeing it celebrated by hate groups is instructive.

Fox Mushroom Farm Has Really Been Spreading That Fertilizer

 

The things you will see on Fox News! (I have called them the mushroom farm which is terribly unfair to actual mushroom farmers and I still like my analogy.)  Apparently, Barr's appointed US counsel in charge of making the Russia investigation look like it wasn't great (despite the multi-volume Senate intelligence report on same) has filed a thing that isn't actually shocking--someone related to the Clinton campaign mentioned to a government agency that a thing they noticed should be looked into, and they never explicitly pointed out that they might be tangentially associated with that campaign, which was over at the time of their being asked. The thing was DNS traffic, and my god, anyone hyping it should have to spell out what they think analyzing DNS traffic means. Because it is actually really boring, and not actually spying or wiretapping. 

The October 2016 news story was so dull I called it "too good to be true" at the time and I'm an obsessive re: Trump/Russia. That's how not a big deal it was. But that doesn't stop the premier propaganda cable news network from bolstering Trump's claims that pointing out a fairly nerdy and easily dismissible propinquity regarding Trump Tower and a Russian bank based on web traffic should result in the electric chair. 

Like, look up things that are publicly available and render an unfavorable conclusion and apparently, that is way too much for our society to bear. That is what this mishigas is about. Someone noticed something in the Trump milieux and not realizing His Nibs was sacrosanct, mentioned it. This got enlarged to supposedly spying on the Trump Administration, and no--the period involving White House traffic was the Obama Administration. Like, maybe Obama can get wee-weed up about it, if he was the type. But I think not. And this is in no way analogous to Trump being "wiretapped!" 

Not That I Care About Joe Rogan

 

Joe Rogan has deleted his birther tweet. pic.twitter.com/sEClihi5H9

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 25, 2020

I really have been keeping out of the Joe Rogan thing because I don't fucking care about podcasts, but this is what I see: When I saw the same thing from Breitbart, I wrote "Show Me The Plane Ticket" because this was literally the dumbest thing set before me for my rational mind to reject. A person whose backstory was meticulously washed(allegedly) to not make him seem like he was born anywhere but the United States, is caught admitting to being Kenyan for the sole purpose of selling books, because whatever? No. That's not proof of anything. That's dumb. The people promoting it are racist and dumb. Barack Obama is an American-born son of an African man and a White American woman. He's Black all day because that's how society treats him and American forever.

Critical thinking isn't dead, but it isn't exactly being loved, cherished and obeyed by people who could really stand to take up the practice. Anti-vaccination and anti-mask views are bad science championed by "outsiders" because their contrarian behinds got thrown out for making the same arguments that keep getting debunked. They aren't rebels and underground scientists. They are fuck-ups. They've just discovered they can get paid for saying fucked-up things so they do.  Edgy! Far out! 

All Lies and Jest

 

The funny old thing about the First Amendment is that you can say what you want to say, and while the federal government can't prosecute you (unless your speech was sedition or fraud, and like, we are definitely going to see some cases about those kinds of things, right?) for the things you say, other people can criticize the hell out of you. And that is what is happening to a father of four from Oregon, who decided that "Let's Go Brandon" was part of his Christmas message to the White House. 

And I am all about Jared Schmeck's First Amendment rights--he exercised the heck out of it for the opportunity he had. It was the rhetorical equivalent of saying "Bababooey" and accomplishes nothing to advance the MAGA mindset, It was something akin (not to be ableist, I hope) to political Tourette's syndrome, in that he spontaneously behaved in an asshole manner according to his politics, and we can assume his upbringing otherwise would not have him wishing people get fucked in answer to Christmas well-wishes. 

But because I'm me, I do think it funny that he's shocked that he isn't greeted with universal high-fives, but is getting static from other people just exercising their free speech, and I also wonder if he ever considered that making Christmas a whole political to-do kind of made the White House call less a cool thing for his kids and more like a resignation to accept this is their dad now, the guy who did the thing. 

Of course Schmeck, a former Oregon police officer who resigned for reasons he doesn't want to talk about and who is now employed by the family business, thinks he is the persecuted one here. I don't want him persecuted. I think his pluck is revelatory, but not damaging to our democracy or anything--we have greater threats. But he thought he'd be more universally applauded for his MAGA cult catch-phrase. And he thinks telling us he's Christ-following now changes whether people find what he said disturbing.

Some people will. But if I say Trump can eat shit and die, people will criticize me for that, no matter how genuinely I mean it, or even if he somewhat deserves to swallow his own words and face the consequences of them in the figurative way I might have meant what I said. This is the consequences of my free speech. I will be criticized, and I accept that my whole online life. A long online life. 

So what I'm saying is, he isn't a free speech martyr because here he is! Still good. And he said what he wanted to say, and maybe discovered not everyone agreed with him. Oh, careless speech, there are sometimes reactions. This is called a conversation! Despite all lies and jest still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. But I want to think we can do better.  

Schmeck can do better and I hope he has the opportunity. But no, he isn't a free speech martyr, and I wish him both a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, because I am exactly that kind of commie asshole. 

Where's Your Dr. Seuss, Now?

 

Texas school district pulls 400 books from libraries after state GOP lawmaker's inquiry https://t.co/YFZ3PoP9VI pic.twitter.com/gn68pUEnTi

— The Hill (@thehill) December 7, 2021

Before I freak entirely out:

Many of the books on Krause's list center around abortion, teen pregnancy, sex education, LGBTQ narratives, the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism. Some of the popular titles on the list are "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" by William Styron, "The Cider House Rules" by John Irving, and "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy" and "Between the World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

"Most of those are appropriate and will stay on our library shelves as is, however, some may contain content that needs further review to ensure the books are accessible based on age appropriateness," Aubrey Chancellor, executive director of communications for the school district, said in a statement obtained by NBC. "For us, this is not about politics or censorship, but rather about ensuring that parents choose what is appropriate for their minor children."

Look, I feel like it's thought-policing the kiddos to limit their choices based on what adults think is age-appropriate because I can not begin to tell you what my hyperlexic reading list was about when I was like, 10 or 11, and my dad gave me a dollar to not read Pearl S. Buck's Pavilion of Women when I already had reread it a few times. (This logically drew me to want to read D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and other verboten authors--and I still don't know exactly what made my dad find that one fraught because it isn't exactly a well-known title and I don't know if he skimmed it and went "whoa!" or what. My baby brain never saw the "Whoa!" bit.) 

Local Man in Financial Straits Sues Big Companies

 

Trump held a press conference to announce that he has lawyers who will pretend to fight the big companies that are holding conservatives down by kicking them off their platforms when they really go out of their way to violate the terms of service that they agree to when they signed up for the platforms in the first place, and the fundraising commenced immediately thereupon. 

So far, the suits are apparently filed in the wrong venue, allege that the private companies are actually the government, and may be "sticking it to the man" by forcing a definition of free speech that will make platforms accept socially unacceptable speech--that can include open hate speech, harassment and porn. In other words, it's good the arguments don't appear defensible because the results would be intolerable. 

On the plus side for Trump though, he gets to be in the news for other reasons than his staggering electoral loss, his multiple tantrums since, his possible criminal wrongdoing via Trump Org and any other bad news that comes along. Oh and the fundraising. 

Yeah. The multi-billionaire who is always asking for folks' money, It would make you reallllllly think, if you were so inclined to do that. 

Unintended Consequences

Although the Trump Administration is coloring an upcoming executive order that will redefine Judaism as a nationality rather than a religion as a means of combating anti-Semitism, I'm deeply skeptical. A nationality implies that all persons considered "Jewish" are of a particular nation--presumably Israel, but this doesn't take into account that American Jews are American, and hail from many different geographical areas. It isn't just a way of blurring out the identity of Jews as Americans, but it feels a little like a form of erasure of the diversity of the diaspora. 

Also, it is a mistake to associate disagreement with the policies of a nation, Israel, in the form of its current government, with a hatred for Jewish people--these things are quite different. Americans are not a monolith, and American Jews are not a monolith; there is diversity of opinion, which includes proponents of BDS regarding the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli territory. This move appears to conflate freedom of speech against policies with hate speech against people--it limits freedom of political speech and action in a way that is shocking for an administration that found there were good people on "both sides" of a conflict where one side chanted "Jews will not replace us." (And whose greatest apologists on Fox News often cite Soros conspiracy theories.)

It also perpetuates a trope about dual allegiance by Jewish people to their home country and their larger identity as Jews. There is nothing about this that will not have unintended consequences, but the Trump Administration being what it is, I struggle to understand which parts are the fully unintended ones.  Singling out people by nationality simply has a bad historical precedent. This administration has tried a Muslim ban and centered it on certain countries, and has detained people of many countries who seek immigration or asylum under heinous conditions. I don't like the looks of this lurch towards Nuremberg.

Eventually McGahn-a Testify?

So, this is totally being appealed and we'll just see where that leads, but Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson basically dismantled the idea that White House and former White House aides can claim "absolute immunity" from testifying to Congress. The Don McGahn's testimony doesn't seem so important right now, in the midst of discussion of Ukraine, but if the House wants to more fully explore the regular pattern of obstruction that the White House has engaged in at every turn, it becomes a pretty significant part of the picture. And of course, this ruling effects other Trump Administration and former Trump Administration folks who have declined to speak--Mulvaney, Kupperman, Bolton, etc. 

It's hard not to read through the decision, though, and not hear a refutation of AG William Barr's speech to the Federalist Society. 

Presidents are not kings. They just aren't. 

Speaking of McCarthyism

Just to follow on from the preceding post, where I noted that Sen. McConnell is a bit off with respects to what McCarthyism is, I regret to inform that Sen. Ted Cruz probably knows exactly what it is, because he's basically practicing it with his proposition that Antifa be treated as a domestic terrorist organization. And for what it's worth, President Trump also seems to be onboard with the notion (even if people who understand these things somewhat better than Trump find it ridiculous at best, chilling at worst). 

Demonization of anti-fascists (remember, folks, the "fa" in Antifa stands for "fascism" and fascism is bad!) is happening at a very awkward time--it has been reported that white supremacist violence is on the rise, but Antifa, as a response to white supremacy, which takes several forms including nonviolent action, is the movement being singled out. What grips me about this is that there are numerous loose groups that protest fascism and racism (not a single, centralized organization) but there is a good probability that language that simply calls this activity "left wing activists" or "affiliated with Antifa" will be used to target any "fellow traveler". (One might recall that HUAC looked into civil rights groups, but kept their paws off the Klan.)

I don't like the implications of it--and with McConnell crying about McCarthyism, I guess I'm just saying it seems to me to be a case of one side accusing the other of the very thing they'd like to do.  And I guess I could just be misreading red meat for a red scare. Except there's also this denunciation of socialism proposed by Sen. Steve Daines.  For some reason, he associates socialism with lack of freedom as opposed to being an alternative to unregulated free market capitalism, but again, this is a denunciation specifically of "the left". 

Not Too Jaded, This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag

In a way, I feel a little trepidation stepping back into doing a TrumpWorld Grab-Bag blogpost, because they are pretty obsessive. It requires paying a lot of attention to little stories and trying to weave them together, which I don't necessarily have the time to do that I once did. I don't have any specialized knowledge (like, you know, legal stuff) or connections or insider tidbits. But I do read a shit-ton of news, and this is the internet, and I have one of those weird brains that likes sorting out details. Of course, I haven't done this for simply months.

And yet! One thing I have gained from my self-imposed vacation is that I have rested the little grey cells and am a bit less jaded than some Mueller/Russia investigation observers.  There were any number of Twitterati who were of the very strong opinion that surely, with the elections a fait accompli, Robert Mueller would now be handing out indictments like so much Halloween candy, certainly by Friday of this week.  Now that we are on the other side of midnight from Friday, the lack of a Don Jr. perp-walk (which seems like too much to ask of the times we live in, but people will dream!) might seem anticlimactic, but as for me, things continue to look pretty interesting.

For one thing, Trump basically fired his AG Jeff Sessions, largely because he never understood that by recusing from the Russia investigation, Session was doing him a solid. The President appears to suffer from the appalling idea that public servants are his servants, and doesn't entirely grasp that they give an oath to the Constitution, not to him, and clearly believed that Sessions' job was to be involved in limiting, ending, or waylaying the Comey investigation (at first) to help Trump. However, if Trump was ever to get any inkling that there are proprieties to be observed, the fallout from firing former FBI director Comey should have been a lesson in "what not to do". To wit: Trump fires Jim Comey for "reasons", partially because he claims the Clinton email investigation was handled badly, and had Sessions and Rosenstein fig leaf that justification with letters that sound serious enough, and then blows that reason up in a nationally-viewed interview with Lester Holt. (He also tells a few Russians, in a particularly stupid way.) And that is how he ended up with a Special Counsel. 

So how does he go about the firing of his AG this time out? Well, for one thing, he picks a very Trump-sympathetic hack (Bigfoots! Time travel hot-tubs! Massive hog toilets!) and then lets it be known he basically picked this person because he was a Trump-sympathetic hack. This might be construed, even to a layperson like myself, like even more obstruction of justice. (Like the Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, etc., things.) But then he has so little idea that what he is doing is abusive of justice, he just says what he did!

Meanwhile, the Mueller investigation does it's quiet and necessary work, despite obstacles. For one thing, an indictment made by Mueller's team against a Russian troll farm was upheld by a Trump-appointed judge. This is good news. (For another bit of good news this week, another Trump appointed judge ordered CNN reporter Jim Acosta's WH hard pass be restored, in a pretty refreshing victory for the 1st Amendment and reminder of judicial independence. )  Of note is that the indictment was about conspiring to defraud the US government. Free speech is one thing, but there are applications of speech that are by no means acceptable--for a recent example, the harassment of a Jewish woman by white supremacists was found not to be covered. 

Another interesting detail is the likely charges against Julian Assange of Wikileaks, which also carries potential First Amendment concerns. Nonetheless, the involvement of Wikileaks in disseminating Russian-obtained federal information specifically to act against the US government (specifically, the security of it's democratic elections) potentially at the direction of a foreign entity (Russia) seems like it supersedes straightforward First Amendment concerns. And that's something they kind of seem to have been doing. I don't know if, for example, Maria Butina's discussed plea deal will reveal information that enlightens us about that side of the operation, but on the "connections to GOP operatives" side of the equation, Roger Stone was apparently in the loop regarding what Wikileaks had and was dropping, and also, maybe, waste of protein Jerome Corsi (known for "Swiftboating" and "Birtherism"--two terms that never should have been entered into the American lexicon) both appear to have had relations with that man, Julian Assange (as had Dana Rohrabacher, with human hairy nevus Charles C. Johnson in his train--who also might be a yet another link to a potential Don Jr perp-walk fantasy, and Nigel Farage, who acted as if he always sometimes dropped by the Ecuadoran embassy for no particular reason).

But of people who Mueller seems to have dead-to-rights from the Trump campaign as having been all up in some kind of skullduggery, it is interesting to me that sentencing is delayed for Rick Gates and there has been an extension in reporting on the status of Paul Manafort's plea agreement. One really cool interpretation of this is that they are both being so very helpful. So. Very. Helpful. To the investigation. Which seems truer when you consider both those things in tandem, but I would guess anything further might be delayed until after Thanksgiving--

And I don't even mind! Because I am not jaded, and am genuinely interested in how all of this shakes out!

What Did I Say?

CNN's Van Jones: “Do you trust the Saudis to investigate themselves?”

Jared Kushner: “We’re getting facts in from multiple places. Once those facts come in, the Secretary of State will work with our national security team to help us determine what we want to believe” #CITIZENCNN pic.twitter.com/JW8MDkHl3J

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 22, 2018

My last post was titled: "What Are You Willing to Believe?" because it seems quite obvious to me that one can't literally believe that KSA did not tacitly authorize the slaying of Khashoggi based on the surface data, and that any option that does not place the blame at the feet of the people who actually run shit in KSA is an exercise in what one chooses to look at--and away from.

I had not anticipated that White House Ken doll Jared Kushner would state it quite so baldly as I was implying (or in so nearly the same phrase), and in the face of a subtle Van Jones softball question that a legitimately schooled pol would have easily bunted. Even President Trump is willing to express skepticism, after a sort, regarding what has taken place, at this point:

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Trump said: "They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly and the cover up was the worst in the history of cover-ups."

"Where it should have stopped is at the deal standpoint, when they thought about it," he continued. "Because whoever thought of that idea, I think is in big trouble. And they should be in big trouble."

He's not morally expressing an opinion that doing away with a meddlesome journo is bad, however--it's just that it wasn't planned at all well, and they are so very caught. This would get one very fired if running a hit squad was a task on Celebrity Dictator Apprentice.  The peons who carried out the failure of a coverup should be punished, and the brain geniuses who couldn't wait until the extradition or whatever. But the idea that a journalist should not be killed for being even kind of a problem is  not his moral judgement to consider.

What Are you Willing to Believe?

The Saudi government is now willing to admit that Jamal Khashoggi has died, although they are currently saying he died in the event of a fistfight that broke out with himself and about a dozen or fifteen people upon entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. In the way, you know, that nearly 60-year old men simply acquiring paperwork for their upcoming nuptials will engage in a fistfight with a dozen or so men, especially when they are academically-minded and generally practice "using their words" to accomplish things.  

This is a story too late in the telling and too peculiar in the offering to be taken at face value.  To say that KSA has offered us the barest thread of a reason for what happened to the man whose body (or remains) have not been produced, is saying rather a lot. They seem to be wanting to get in front of whatever the Turks actually have (even if the digital proof is less than advertised, given the hide and seek that had gone on with whether US SOS Mike Pompeo has heard it), and still keep some face about whether whatever happened to the man was entirely KSA's fault. This might have been punctuated with something other that Prince MsB being given purview over any further investigation and being also charged with revamping the KSA intelligence services.

Well great, for MsB. How terrible though, for anyone who was rather hoping they might expect more. It gives every credence to the idea that King Salman is not fully compos mentis, and that Crown Prince Mohammed is making shit up as he goes along. It also reinforces the idea that reform is basically dead in Saudi Arabia--that the fate of the Badawi family, of Ali Al-Nimr, and others, that of people who for what it's worth, who even mildly and eloquently dissent from the view of the Saud family authority, and are severely punished. 

This is a horrifying thing for a government to turn into. This is a horrifying thing, also, for the US government, given what our ideals, constitutionally, should be, to endorse or even merely permit without strong comment backed with sanctions. And yet our weaksauce president, instead of championing human rights and freedom of the press, is still a little thug admiring the talents of other thugs. He champions thuggery here at home, too. 

President Trump and the Very Fake News

In a stunning display of failure to be self-aware, President Trump Tweeted a condemnation of "(Fake) news" in the form of CNN International while boosting the signal of an on-line conspiracy-theory mill, which probably ought to call into question whether Trump possesses any discernment at all for separating truth from lies, if one, for some peculiar reason, still had any question about this. What I don't necessarily think is a coincidence is that just recently, Russia declared that outlets (independent, not state-owned media outlets, mind you) like CNN International, should be treated as "foreign agents" in the way that the US now treats RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik, both of which have been found to have been useful in pushing the line that Trump was preferable to Clinton in the 2016 election.

But of course, Trump has had a storied issue with CNN. He has Tweeted a wrestling meme in terribly poor taste regarding CNN, and Tweeted and deleted an even more distasteful one regarding a cartoon in which a CNN reporter is killed by an oncoming train.  He has threatened CNN as a business over their coverage, and looks to be making good on that threat.

CNN's Twitter responded back,

But who knows what good that will do? Trump doesn't seem to even recognize media he himself was a part of as being real, as he has apparently intimated that he thinks the "Access Hollywood" tape that shows him stating he grabs women by the pussy had been doctored.

It is as if he views the only legitimate media as that which fluffs up his image, giving him awards and so forth, and he wants to be dismissive if not abusive towards any other kind. But he represents the US government. It's not his job to hound the media. And if he wanted them to make a better report on him, he could try doing a better job, right? (Oh right. He's Trump. He never will.) And yet Trump loves Fox News, which is basically the Trump Propaganda Network at this point.

Trump cries "fake news" because he worries the truth is getting told on him, and it isn't very favorable. But what are you going to believe, Trump's alligator mouth or his dead-canary understanding of what's going on in the bullshit mines?

Now, Live From the Thunderdome, Julius Caesar by Billy Shakes

Just a little background--prior to the play written by William Shakespeare, an Elizabethan playwright and possibly political pundit (no, really, how else explain all the "Henry" plays?), in about 1599, which is over 400 years ago, there was an actual guy called Gaius Julius Caesar, who was a general in the Roman Republic who became a dictator and was assassinated. The play derives from the historical events. This was about 2,000 years ago. He really was assassinated. Being assassinated is not a modern thing. Kings and Emperors and all kinds of leaders have been going out that way for millennia. Go read Frazer's The Golden Bough. Literary and historical long story short: folks come at a king. But they best not miss. Or it does not go well with them.

There has been a recent foofaraw regarding the decision of the New York Public Theater to stage the 400+ year old play in modern garb--even though staging Shakespeare's plays this way to make them seem timely is a long-observed trick.  The same was done with Obama. The same was done with other US presidents. It is, for the most part, just a statement updated for the times. The message of the play remains the same--don't fuck with violently disturbing the civil order, or worse will follow in it's wake. Cassius and Brutus aren't heroes in Julius Caesar, they are displayed as petty and divisive insecure men who carry out this act because the fault was not in the stars but in themselves. 

So when a couple alt-right goobers try to disrupt the play in the name, ironically, of free speech? Or something? I cringe at their pitiable education. I'm not sure you can rep for Western Civilization when you actually display no depth of understanding of it. And I am not sure how you play at being for freedom of speech when you are scared of this ancient and accepted speech that has been happening without your asses for years. Welcome to the conversation: now shut up and learn.

Obviously, we've established that updating Shakespeare is just a thing. (I personally fell asleep during a viewing of Richard III set in the 1930's with the outstanding Ian McKellan, Annette Bening, and a host of my actual favorite actors.). Dire cinematic representations of current or more-recent leaders are nothing new, though. When Shakespeare was doing his thing, his historical British monarchs were commentary on the current ones. Today, we can argue whether Olympus Has Fallen was meant as a commentary on Obama. There was even a fake docudrama based on George W. Bush called Death of a President. It was not pro-assassination--in that narrative, things became more authoritarian as Cheney came into power.

A play is the thing to capture the conscience of a king. How the in-group treats free speech, art, derision, the free press, says a lot about how secure the "King" must feel. I do not think this would-be King is very secure, based on how his followers cavort. They are jesters all, that say him mortal. The play Julius Caesar wreathing Trump in an actual warrior's laurels does him an honor he never earned. To have him seen as executed for growing too powerful, and not because his Tweeting became a danger to himself and others, is a favor.

One truly great actor, Marlin Brando, played the Godfather and Marcus Anthony.  Trump is a reality tv guy--no Brando. But he seems at times to reflect Godfather values, and Caesar tragedy. He is Fredo and Brutus. Gifted with momentary power, and likely to fuck it up. He seems a cautionary fable in the making.

This isn't Art, and Not a Good Point

I guess, arguendo, different people will have different ideas about what constitutes "art". Art is something like porn was for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: You know it when you see it. This is a definition that doesn't satisfy, and as every good internetizen knows: YMMV. (For what it's worth, if you just put the search words "porn" and "potter" in a search engine now, you will be confronted with pages of Harry Potter porn links. Some of them might conceivably be at least a little artistic, porn and art not being mutually exclusive.) But I think the standard where an image of the red-headed comedian holding aloft a fake-blood-covered Donald Trump mask in an imitation of a beheading falls a bit short of art, and seems a bit more like political porn.

There is a stuffiness about discussing "redeeming social value". Art isn't always redemptive--it can sometimes be cynical and stark as all hell. But points have to be given on the basis of whether a piece effectively conveys what was intended--and I can't say that this does. The "Trump" imagined by Kathy Griffin's pose is, perhaps, a gorgon:

Or a dragon or a giant or a lamia or any other sort of beast that can be beheaded in a legend without our considering that entity as human, but fully monstrous. In a profession where targets are "roasted", audiences are "killed", and failing acts "bomb", this over-the-top symbolism might make sense: It was comedy that killed the beast. (After the tagline of most renditions of King Kong--substituting "comedy" for "beauty".  Contra Keats, what is beautiful is not always true, but comedy usually works because of a kernel of truth. Truth, reality, is the anti-matter to a lying regime. But it only works if the joke doesn't need to be bloody explained.)

We don't live in such times where we are dealing with mythological creatures in a way where an audience accepts legend as our referent. Donald Trump is, whatever his faults, a human man, and the worst thing we can say about his policies is that they are centered in dehumanizing others: criminalizing immigrants, privileging some religions over others, encouraging punch-down violence. Where, then, is the sense in dehumanizing him, and making violence a matter of smirking exultation?

It was misguided, and not supported by most liberals, and Griffin herself has now apologized. As a bad bit of art that should be and was rubbished, that should be that. And yet we now have a counter-example to whatever violent image fuckery we on the left mean to decry-- "But Kathy Griffin". This is absurd, and completely expected.

It should not take the sting out of factual claims about what is happening on the right, however. The gorgon's head was never meant to shock us liberals, you know. Attention-sponge and thirsty-comedian Kathy Griffin was pushing RW buttons. And I would be afraid to wade in into her social media mentions right now, because that woman is probably getting cause to call the authorities--and that? Is as well worth talking about as her satire-misfire. I believe she intended no threat (does anyone seriously think even a D-list celeb is going to be a fence-jumper?) and is probably just being nearly Ted Nugent-levels of shit-talking stupid.

But if you come to "But Kathy Griffin" at me, I will "but BLM" forever. Or "but queer-bashing" forever. Or "but Portland" forever.  Because a ham-fisted visual message isn't the same thing as actual physical violence, any more than eating a menu is just as good as eating a sandwich. And while Griffin's message was botched, she wasn't actually trying to get anyone killed.

Depressed Conference

There's nothing better for democracy than good, old-fashioned transparency, am I right? When the government does the people's business, we surely hope they are going about their affairs in an above-board manner, and if there is anything amiss, we'd like to know that the fourth estate is on it. Or one would think that's how it should go, but Wednesday's presser was a shitshow, and does not bode well for the future relationship between a Trump Administration and the news media.

I'd like to draw your attention to the staging--there were props. (He has used props before.) The above file folders are supposed to represent all the paperwork involved in turning his business over to his sons. No journalist was able to look at them, and they are probably just filled with blank paper because this is obvious bullshit.  The Chief of the Office of Federal Ethics has derided the scheme as "wholly inadequate". Trump thoughtfully provided his lawyer to take questions regarding the set-up, but she is not a constitutional lawyer and seems to be under the impression that "emoluments" is something more like gifts or profits and not just payments in general from foreign interests. Just owning his business is a problem--especially since you can't miss assets that have his name on a big sign overtop of them. And do we really expect him not to talk shop with the lads? Also, because this is Trumplandia, his lawyer's firm won Russia's law firm of the year. It just feels wrong not to point that out as a weird coincidence, even if its significance is sketchy.

You want transparency? Meh. He's not giving up tax returns, and if you want to know whether any of his campaign or transition staff have ties to Russia, you're either history's greatest monster or something from Nazi Germany. And in light of the media's coverage of the dossier regarding his potential compromised position by Russian intelligence, he's not really copacetic with the press right now, anyway--as in, well, had he been during his campaign?

Trump has demonized the press for just covering him and quoting him accurately.  His campaign on occasion outright banned certain outlets from coverage. His rhetoric and the zeal of his supporters against journos is highly worrisome--a threat to freedom of speech and to the lives and welfare of people who are just trying to cover the news. In his presser, Trump struck out at Buzzfeed, who published the dossier, and CNN, for reporting about it.  Chillingly, Buzzfeed was advised that they would "suffer the consequences" for reporting. Jim Acosta, of CNN, was threatened with ejection by Sean Spicer, who has opted to behave like a newly-hired nightclub bouncer trying to impress the boss.

So much of this would be viewed by folks like me as pretty hostile and not at all a great indicator of how well Team Trump is going to manage dealing with the press, handling ethics issues, or responding as if Trump was not actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Putin Enterprises LTD.  (His protestations of "NO LINKS!" did not, actually, distract from the previous "hell yes, links" coverage previously uncovered. ) Also, Trump being unhinged, he revealed something that sounded exactly creepy--he assumes that in hotels, there are cameras everywhere.  He owns a mess of hotels! And there were reports he was bugging guests at Mar-a-Lago. (What is he trying to say--are his own properties some kind of Orwellian Total Information thing? Should one worry one's own stay might result in kompromat?)

No good communication happened. Trump had paid staff cheer and clap for him to create an atmosphere where he could seem to be "winning", even if a close review of what was actually happening didn't look positive at all. Maybe they were also there to audit who the "good ones were" amongst the paid ink-daubers? But the laughing of his paid audience, the empty files that make it look like he offered transparency, and the reflexive anti-media bias atmosphere he created made this circus satisfying for his fans. This is what they wanted. He reinforced their biases--he made himself appear the victim of a vicious news media that destroys people for just being conservative. (Poor Orange Snowflake!) He even ended the performance with the catchphrase of his reality tv show'' he implied that if his boys didn't manage his business well, he would be telling them "You're fired!" It was a show. A put-on.

Tragedy and farce are seldom so entwined.

Don't Rush to Give Trump Credit

There was an amusing story from just the other week where Donald Trump took credit for stopping a Ford plant from moving to Mexico when it never was actually going to go to Mexico. That was a cute way for Trump to telegraph that he was taking no prisoners in his quest to give himself the best possible press for genius deal-making. It doesn't have to be true, it just has to play into his campaign persona.

So, take the Carrier deal as a great example of this: he used Carrier many times in his stump speech about companies draining jobs away from the US. So it was "trumpeted" just recently that he negotiated another of these great deals to keep Carrier--his regular stump speech bogey--operating in Indiana. Well, a portion of the staff. And with a considerable tax break from the governor of that state. Who is the VP-elect, Mike Pence. More details are pending. But some jobs are definitely still going.

Surely, offering local tax deals to any company thinking of leaving the US or willing to say they are mulling it over isn't an especially sustainable method of keeping businesses here. Local municipalities depend upon "ratables"--and when the option to gain revenues from a local business is eliminated, that business is essentially receiving local government services gratis. It's corporate welfare. How many corporations might like a piece of the action where the threat of flight rains down an operational cost-assist? They aren't being cajoled, badgered,  or leveraged into behaving as good citizens of the areas in which they were making their profits--they are being rewarded for having "tried it". I'm not even sure this model disincentivizes "trying it again" to see if better rate-paying can be gained.

What I do know is that this model doesn't promote fair taxation or equitable distribution of social responsibility, which is, in part, what we'd like the relationship of taxpayer to taxing authority to be. Arbitrariness is a lethal trust concern.  Some companies "getting over" is a bad case of cronyism, lather, rinse, repeat. And it sort of betrays the whimsical association Trump makes with the relationship of entities (whether individual or corporate) to government altogether--he has never considered whether government has a point. Ours- the US of A's, has very much a point laid out in the Constitution. I do not know if he has read it--he just burbled some anti-1st Amendment nonsense on the Twitter-machine that should really give us all pause. He considers flag burning to possibly be worthy of losing one's citizenship. Becoming stateless? For what has previously been ruled an exercise of free speech? What can we expect from such a mind regarding unfavorable press?  (Even regarding, perhaps, D-list bloggers?

But among things Trump has tried to take credit for--trying to "apparently" divest from his business holdings while not actually divesting and hoping the world pats him on the back for it  takes the taco. There is a Twitter thread o' snark from the US Government Office of Ethics that uses the term divest to try and shame Trump into admitting that handing his business' reins over to his kids (who seem to also be his gov't advisors) and pretending he will pay no attention to those multi-million dollar assets is just weak-sauce, and leaves plenty of room for conflict-of-interest.

In other words--I feel like the media should wait until they have found the "damn" before they trot out even faint praise.