The Tates' current project, when not pretending there's no legal case against them and threatening women on social media, is called BRUV (presumably, CHAV, SPIV and CHUD were all taken), and while I don't pretend to be the great UK politics' understander, I'm not sure this is how any of this works.
I do know it's jarring to see Alina Habba (Trump's lawyer, future White House employee) hanging with Benny "Rubles" Johnson and fawning over Andrew Tate.
I have talked about the stupidity of using polling as a "story" for news purposes before. People are measuring opinions, but you can't measure facts. If an opinion is just wrong as to the facts, what did you learn? People might not answer honestly. They might be just vibing and have never thought about your question before. It might be useful for a news organization to see what sorts of things the public needs to be more educated about--but is it news?
Look, the above chart is from two years ago, about when I wrote the post I linked to. Yougov.com found that people wildly misestimate the size of various groups. When you see that people are estimating 21% of the population is transgender, bathroom panic starts to make more sense, until you ask yourself if people responding to the question even really understand fractions. Do people really think one out of five people are trans? Do they think like one in four are Muslim, and that one in three are atheist?
These numbers don't jibe with anything in people's actual lived experiences. What this poll shows is that people are innumerate. Their mental math is broken. They aren't converting their concept of how many people per are anything--they are just really bad contestants on "The Price is Right".
Someone pointed out on that bird website that when Elon Musk does his weird belly-baring jumping jack thing whilst hyping whatever he's about--he's trying to make an "X" with his body, and I couldn't unsee it. Symbols can be powerful things. He's trying to be his own brand--the logo/sigil that is a powerful thing which he calls the $44 billion thing he regularly is losing value on.
X. Which hardly anyone calls it, because it remains "Twitter." Because it really is stupid to name anything "X."
When Musk hypes Trump, he's trying to be part of a political movement. And he's a multibillionaire with services few could offer, so why hype anyone?
Well, maybe it's because he's gone down an apartheid rabbit hole and thinks the Great Replacement theory is a thing.
Q. Hearing John Kelly's disturbing revelation about Trump's admiration of Adolph H!tler, does it change how you feel about Trump?
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 24, 2024
Chris Sununu: No. We've heard a lot of extreme things from Trump. With a guy like that, it's kind of baked into the votepic.twitter.com/sMTbZicUrJ
So, I wanted to get this off my chest--fascism being "baked in" is the reason you REJECT a candidate, not the reason you support him.
I might charitably presume Chris Sununu thinks this is Trump saying "extreme things" that he does not mean, and that he can differentiate the extreme things Trump says from what he intends to do, and from what those who surround him want to do. If this is how he is looking at it, he is deeply stupid, because people who support extreme words do so because they like them and want them to be so. Trump says them because he gets away with saying them and presumes that he can do what he likes later on, because he has persuaded enough people that the previously unthinkable is permissible.
Sununu tells himself this is the direction that he believes people are going. So--he is following a multitude to do evil? He is being a go-along-to-get along, imagining someone else will fix the problem of fascism? Or is he willing to get his hands dirty, too?
The most striking thing that JD Vance has admitted out loud and in public is that even if Haitians are supposed to be here legally, he's still going to call them "illegal aliens". He knows and knew that the "people eating pets" thing was a lie when he spread it. He could easily bother to check whether crime really was up or whether communicable diseases were up, But the point isn't whether he's being honest--he's not.
It's whether he can induce people to follow up on his story and keep it alive as if it were a big deal. Just like big public lies could induce people to follow up on a land deal in Arkansas, or a lie about a man's honorable service in Viet Nam, or a lie about a fully American man's birth certificate, or an attack on an embassy in Libya by Islamic terrorists, or an email server, or a man's son's laptop, and try to make that into a big deal, whether it really is or not.
But there is something else in Vance's particular set of lies that is revealing--the idea that if a person can wave a wand over someone and declare them citizens, having a particular office means you can "uncitizen" them. Or unperson them.
Having a hard time coming to any conclusion besides the obvious one about what Rich Lowry catches himself blurting out here pic.twitter.com/PFHQMCS8UP
— Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) September 16, 2024
Now it's time to play the inciting new game show, "Do You Hear What I Hear?" where the contestants try to make out whether it's the word we are not supposed to say, or just a terrible, terrible slip of the soft palate. In our clip today, we have Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, on Megyn Kelly's show, which I guess is a thing, extremely butchering the word "migrants" or "immigrants" until it sounds like....
Well, you be the judge.
OK, time's up, audience. So, as is the catch phrase of our show: "Did you hear what I hear?"
No. You actually don't need more time for this. I don't know what part of NR or Megyn Kelly or Rich Lowry confused you about whatever is "in their heart". The actual answer is--the reason people are hearing it isn't about whether it has been said out loud, it's about this dumb dance we are doing around immigration trying not to make it about---that, when we know damn good and well it is.
You can actually not use that one word and still be saying that word more than you know. That's the whole answer. We don't need a whole lot more episodes.
So those of you who got the right answer here, you win a lifetime supply of the baggage of knowing about it, and for those you who didn't know, you get the parting gift of probably figuring it out but most likely not from this blogpost.
Thanks for playing everybody! And let's meet again probably sooner than we think we should right here in the 21st century but apparently not!
UPDATE: Here's a bonus round, Christian supremacist edition:
Trump just said he wants to deport Haitian migrants — who are in the country legally — from Springfield, Ohio to Venezuela. Deporting legal migrants.
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 13, 2024
This is always where it was going to end up.pic.twitter.com/plm8NTDsUa
I guess I know what probably happened here. Trump was going to use the "Venezuelan gangs took over Aurora, Colorado" thing but then his brain got hijacked into the Haitian story. Which being all about Ohio is obviously a JD Vance joint. But because his few braincells are just playing a massively information-losing game of "Telephone" amongst themselves, he forgot why deporting people to Venezuela wouldn't be correct.
Trump has been referencing Venezuela a lot though. Maybe he thinks he wants to do like Matilda in the old Calypso song. He takes the money and runs to Venezuela. He surely thinks Caracas is nicer than Washington DC. He wants to meet with his friends there. I guess they don't have extradition to the US. Maybe he has his mind set in the Carribean for some reason. Not everywhere has the Pacific Ocean, but the Carribean is quite nice.
Obvious plant Catturd cut right to the bone, here. I mean, seriously, he ate. You can free-associate how the imaginary problem of pets being eaten by people who just want to come somewhere with good-paying jobs and settle down is a "real issue", but the real issue is: are we othering Kamala Harris enough and making her the foreign person who might even eat pets herself?
Sure, it's an obvious form of faked-up concern a la the litter boxes and the on-demand sex change operations in public schools and all that. But what they are also doing is trying to make that about how immigrants and people of color are not like us--and neither is Kamala Harris. It's going from John Eastman-style "Where's the birth certificate?" to "Obama ate a dog."
Maybe she identifies more with the supposed pet-eaters? The ones that don't actually exist? Maybe she identifies with this weirdo who at least has an immigrant parent who kills local animals:
If Nikki Haley, who dropped out weeks ago, is pulling 20% in the GOP primary against Trump in Ohio--this is a worrisome thing for him. Here's what I'm thinking--it's well-educated and female voters who realize that Trump is an appalling person. Some of these people will end up voting for Biden. Some will stay home. But this is an issue that Trump actually CAN'T address.
What do I mean by that? Take the E. Jean Carroll defamation suit. He counter-sued and lost, because what in the hell is the difference between assaulting someone digitally vs. with a penis? He's going back in against ABC and George Stephanopoulos because Nancy Mace kind of made him do it. So we are now going to be talking about Trump's being a rapist and Trump INVITED it.
We are going to go back to the Ukraine issue in the first impeachment because Trump invited that, too. We are going to se him condition Jewishness as it relates to Zionism, for a degree of Zionism that truly is anti-Palestinian. We are going to question what he REALLY wants done at the border because he stopped the border deal. We are going to question whether he understands foreign policy because after all--Russia is being expansionist, dare I say, imperialistic? And there's stupid tyrant fanboy Trump, wanting to be recognized by the Big Kids Dictator Club.
I beg this very stupid man's entirely irrelevant pardon, but how does he think in this day and age that folks in Central American have not heard about Jesus? Just hordes of uncontacted tribes "with languages nobody heard before" I guess. https://t.co/n1LFvvPmJE
— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) March 1, 2024
There is a lot going wrong here in just a few brief sentences. The first thing I take issue with is that we need "God" in government at all. Individuals might take something from having the presence of a deity in their lives and have comfort and strength in their faith, but government itself--our government, is made of laws. Our country's population is made up of people with many different faiths. I think that the First Amendment to our Constitution is the remedy against the sectarian wars and religious persecutions our forefathers were well aware of in Europe--and Tuberville here completely demonstrates why the Christian nationalist desire to get God in government is folly.
Whose God? Because the various immigrants crossing the border aren't ignorant of the concept of God. It seems to me that Tuberville is concerned that they might be followers of the "wrong" God. All of my ancestors came from countries where Protestants and Catholics clashed. Does Sen. Tuberville think Papists follow the Whore of Babylon? Or has he been misguided into thinking "foreigners" are probably some sort of untutored heathens? Is he unaware that Protestant evangelism has penetrated Central and South America? The same religion, roughly, he himself follows?
This is a man who should be very careful indeed whom he considers to be untutored. I've met many a non-Christian whose grasp on theology is very likely better than the Senator's grasp on anything.
Trump: Things like supply change. You never heard that term pic.twitter.com/Cr0RU9z2F0
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 6, 2024
I've heard of the "supply chain" and so has everyone else. We heard about it especially when it was broken during COVID shutdown when you couldn't find toilet paper or rubbing alcohol or Lysol. Does Trump really misremember the phrase as "supply change"? As in, we changed from when we could find things in the store to where we could not find things in the store?
Trump's economy was stupid and not great. It really wasn't what we were promised. His only success was inherited. The story of his life.
Maybe he thinks this is a phrase he invented, like when he invented "priming the pump". Trump is the Edison of prevarication--he's always inventing things. Sometimes he Columbuses stuff people have known since forever and asks if they've heard about it, like he's a pioneer. This is because the guy who can't remember people's names, even now, always tries to cover up for his lapses. He's covering up for one of his major lapses right now--he forgot to secure the border during his first term. He could have made it a priority since he ran on it, but he forgot and only shut down the government when he lost the midterms.
And couldn't get his wall money because Mr. Art of the Deal had no leverage. And shutting down the government didn't help anything. It was costly and dumb. His immigration policy was meh at best. And abusive of human rights at worst.
What? Well, Gov. Abbott of Texas can't defend the border against (reads notes) US Border patrol and continue to hold up supply lines without the help of Trump's little Christian soldiers. I mean, can he? So of course he will need weirdo civilians showing up in job lots to just confuse the fuck out of everything, because that's completely effective border security. He will want a kind of posse, made up of the sternly written opinions of red state governors and maybe they send their National Guards to do nothing but stand about at the border. Bored and listless. Away from home.
This is the Republican approach to a serious issue--stunt-queening. The legislature could just vote on fully funding agencies involved with border security to do a really great job, but instead we get this shit. They want to impeach DHS Mayorkas because he can't do his job because they didn't give him the funds--even if he's still doing as much of his job as he can--within constitutional limits. I'm the kind of nut who thinks people get impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, not for trying to obey the law.
It's just as fucked-up as the GOP Hunter Biden investigation--it rests on the idea that the kayfabe of Breitbart and Gateway Pundit are real shit. It distracts from the GOP inability to do policy or govern ever. Let's interfere with the people trying to do the job, to hold up the job getting done. Let's not do an immigration deal--ever! Then bitch about there never being an immigration deal. Blame Democrats for existing. Blame them harder when they want to make a deal. Because how dare they!
My statement on Texas’ constitutional right to self-defense. pic.twitter.com/seNFZdmujP
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) January 24, 2024
The governor of Texas seems to really be pushing this states' rights issue a bit hard in Biden's direction, but it's very curious to me that he's doing so precisely when congressional talks over a possible immigration deal are breaking down because Trump doesn't want them to do Biden any favors.
“Trump wants them to kill it because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” said the source. “He told them he will fix the border when he is president… He said he only wants the perfect deal.”
Trump’s meddling generated an “emotional” discussion in a closed door meeting between Senate Republicans on Wednesday, as senators vented their frustrations for hours about the largely secret negotiations over emergency aid for Ukraine, Israel and immigration. The conference is splintering into two camps: those who believe Republicans should take the deal, and those who are opposed at any cost.
“The rational Republicans want the deal because they want Ukraine and Israel and an actual border solution,” said the source. “But the others are afraid of Trump, or they’re the chaos caucus who never wants to pass anything.”
“They’re having a little crisis in their conference right now,” the source added.
(I know, I know, anonymous source and all that--but this is exactly what they seem to have been telegraphing they're doing, too.)
And we're going to see other Republicans stand with Abbott even though he's grandstanding over his death moat, not an actual solution to the immigration problem because, like I've said, it's partisan dick-slappery. Just with increasing levels of potential death and constitutional crisis, because Republicans aren't just unserious people--they are truly terrible unserious people. And this is Greg freaking Abbott, whose other answer to the immigration situation was shipping migrants from Texas to other states which is also not responsible, a total stunt, potentially dangerous, and not a serous solution to anything.
For a party that wants to make immigration a signature issue, the Republicans genuinely aren't interesting in doing anything sensible about it, but grandstanding and making things worse.
They should own every little bit of that.
And keep in mind that in part, this is also about Trump, who has long associated himself with Civil War ideation. He would rather see this country broken if he isn't to rule it. No person who thinks like that can be said to love this country. I strongly suspect that he doesn't, and neither do his confederates.
Trump praises an anti-immigrant military-style operation from the 1950s called “Operation Wetback” as he calls for rounding up Latinos in mass detention camps pic.twitter.com/9FYrI9zYQz
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 14, 2024
Detention camps. Build the wall. Iron Dome. Trump is full of unnecessary antihumanitarian gimmicks. I think I know pretty well what he thinks he means by detention camps--something akin to what his good buddy Sheriff Arpaio had. How in the fuck, into the 21st century, was this shit something we as a modern nation allowed?
They love the hate and the othering. Calling other people names is a good substitute, they reckon, for figuring out the real cause of inequality. The grotesque ease with which untermenchen always figure out how to keep punching down while never challenging the ubermen.
You know who also loves this stuff--Chip Roy of Texas. He applauded and supports Ron DeSantis because he shipped people from Venezuela who got to Texas all the way to Martha's Vinyard, because that is proof of something, and I want to say it is xenophobia and also proof that liberal cities are better at figuring out how to care for people than bigots in MAGAland ever could.
Which brings us to the tragedy at Eagle Pass, the woman and two children who died as Texas officials prevented federal officials from doing anything about them. This was according to design. This is what Governor Abbott expends his efforts with, instead of making life better for Texans. Like fixing the energy grid and shoring up protections for Texas residents in shit weather. Like accepting money to feed hungry kids.
Now, Greg Abbott is going to tell us that woman and those two children were already dead in the water.
Sure, that's how he wants it. From the moment they left home and threw themselves at the demented Jigsaw trap this psychopath put between them and a life that was still grueling, but had to be better than whatever they left if you understand what they had to overcome to get so far in the first damn place. Of course, they were. By design.
Speaker Mike Johnson says the House is working on releasing new Jan. 6 tapes and will blur out the faces of rioters:
— The Recount (@therecount) December 5, 2023
“We don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.” pic.twitter.com/dExchE0qbr
Rep. Mike Johnson doesn't want people who participated in the riot/insurrection on 1/6 to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ. Not retaliated against, as in, their neighbors would raise a hand against them? Interesting and prudent. Not charged by the DOJ? Is that like obstructing justice? Because that very definitely sounds to me like obstructing justice.
Does DOJ probably have all the tapes for the most part anyway? Likely. But why is Mike Johnson signifying he's trying to protect the January 6th people? He has to because he has to curry favor with the world's most undisciplined and ungovernable people? He basically is one?
Sure. Stuff like that. MTG has given him the malocchio. He's got pains in his liver already. The thing where he was against George Santos' expulsion but it happened anyway and the thing where he was against the ongoing shitshow of the Biden impeachment inquiry but then decided to be for it? This is what a man does when he's clinging to the side of a cliff by dry little crack-dwelling plants.
At seven months pregnant, prison officer Salia Issa reported contraction-like pains at work but wasn’t allowed to leave for hours. She later delivered a stillborn.
— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) August 13, 2023
Texas is fighting her lawsuit, in part by saying her fetus didn’t clearly have rights.https://t.co/Spn5mi6HVo
So, I feel like I just posted about how Texas isn't really pro-life, just pro-punishing female-bodied people. It feels like I just talked about how Governor Abbott turned the Rio Grande into a death moat--which had already taken life. And here we are, talking about how a pregnant person working for the state was told she doesn't have any rights as a worker as to the safety of her pregnancy and her fetus (a wanted child) didn't have any rights, when rights of the fetus was the exact reason why a healthy woman had to carry death in her womb--a fetus that would never be viable. Here we are, talking about a dead baby on a migrant bus on the way from Texas to Chicago, driven like a longhorn from ranch to packing lot.
I'm not here to say Ms. Issa's fetus had rights--I'm going to say she had rights as a human being who had a wanted pregnancy and whose life could have been in the balance over a problematic delivery. I'm not here to say Greg Abbott personally caused the death of the migrant baby that he sent on that final leg of their mortal journey--I'm saying he's oblivious to the value of that child, alive, and the value of that child's parents as workers, and migrants as being not a problem, but a community of souls.
I'm saying that a person who dreams of saw blades or razor wire greeting people who mostly walked over a thousand miles to find safety is a sadist of the worst kind--the kind with the power to practice his sadism on especially vulnerable people.
I don't know what it takes to get people like him out of office--the people had a more caring human being in his opponent in the last election. But if Democrats cannot demonstrate the examples of El Paso, Uvalde, the death moat, the migrant buses, and all the ways Texas GOP make the state more terrible and less secure for humans to have bodies in--what hope for humanity is there? Not that Texas would listen to me. But from where I am, what a government! When does it change!
The Tweet has context added at the bottom, that the bereaved woman that MTG is exploiting lost her sons in 2020, before Joe Biden became president. So obviously, it must have been some other president's policies that were wholly inadequate. This would be obvious to you, discerning Reader of this blog--it isn't necessarily to Marge's target audience.Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl. pic.twitter.com/HRD5SX0Td8
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) February 28, 2023
It's Christmas Eve and about 50 migrants were dropped off in front of Kamala Harris' residence with the temperature in the teens. Another stunt by Greg Abbott. pic.twitter.com/wUjkxplYmB
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) December 25, 2022
You can tell me there was no room at the inn, but does anyone honestly mean to say there was no room--in Texas? Or was it only that in his fondness for the stranger (as even He had been a sojourner in Egypt), Governor Abbott felt it correct to send these people across a storm-thrown passage because he couldn't be sure he could keep the lights on for them?
"I'm a victim. I will tell you. I'm a victim." pic.twitter.com/91HQfhOk9v
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 16, 2022
Some people will try and say that Donald Trump's main reason for running for the office of the presidency again is because he wants to avoid legal repercussions for (waves hands about) everything. But no--he enjoys the legal jeopardy from which he never suffered (yet) actual lasting harm. He is a martyr. A riveting icon. He's only being self-serving and opportunistic for you.
He gives. He gives. He keeps on giving and he gives some more. And all he wants is his spot.
It helps to see Trump as an avatar of a primordial attention-daemon that has to publicly jerk itself off to continue existing. I mean, maybe it doesn't, but it helps me, anyway. This guy gave a long-ass speech to pretend to justify what his ends were in running. He could have just said: "Where's my spotlight?"
Now, he could have said: "Show me the money." We know now that foreign governments did their best to influence Trump via spending at his properties. (You know how foreign governments always are trying it. Russia no exception, am I right?) But Trump also milked the federal government for all it was worth. I mean, worth to him. Every penny he charged the Secret Service, and all that.
You can try and sell me a story that Trump took those documents he had at Mar-A -Lago, and they were all about his ego, and I might say sure--but only because he was too daft to figure out how to capitalize on them in a timely fashion, and he would have gladly accepted cash. What with him being so generally cash-poor and over-extended credit-wise anyway.
So sure, Trump can paint a rosy picture of the four years where he spent decades not getting us into war, and never bat an eyelash. Surely, he means, he dodged personally getting himself into war fifty years ago by bearing the same affliction as Oedipus, for which I have a handy sobriquet for him that I will leave to your imagination. Although we certainly fought in Niger, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, with Iran--only, other people took the blows. And Trump never understood their sacrifice or what it cost. He was too busy congratulating himself over his love letters with the man who sent Otto Warmbier to us more dead than alive.
He can, in an obviously Stephen Miller-influenced speech, reinvoke American Carnage, but he is nonetheless the man who wanted to shoot border crossers in the knees, cleared peaceful protesters with tear gas, and raised up an insurrection on the Capitol complex itself.
As unfit as Trump was in 2015, when he came down his golden escalator and told a crowd paid off for $50 apiece that he wanted to fix America with "branding", he is so much more unfit now that it should be criminal to even contemplate how...how...how obviously broken the GOP must be that they will probably not stop it. Their donors, their electeds, even their propaganda wing. They might know he's a saggy old self-regarding fool who will be a disaster--and they are ready to court disaster again.
Even if he's under investigation for however many terrible things. They don't learn. They realize their bench is replete with boring assholes and nattering dipshits. And he already demonstrated he could win, once.
What have they got left to lose? Dignity? When they hold a seance for their dignity, the Ouija board catches fire.
The party either figures out how to eject Trump, or this is really all they will have. Nothing but Trump. And he never should have been it, all along.
Parents are stunned by a school board candidate’s comments in an Indiana town:
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) October 20, 2022
“All Nazis weren't 'bad' as you specify. They did horrible things … Who is to say if we were both there in the same place and time, that we wouldn't have done the same thing” https://t.co/AzrR4qIUOl
Loads of people over the years have asked themselves what they would be doing if they were living in Nazi Germany and how they would resist and not go along with genocide or maybe think about how they would sabotage the movement, but Dr. Matt Keefer has a different take: wouldn't you just do a little genocide, because everyone else was into it? It's not like it makes you a bad person if basically everyone else was into it.
Sure. Myself, I get that peer pressure makes people smoke, do crack, sleep with everyone they know and vote third party, but I tell you what, I draw the line at genocide.
A lot of conservatives these days seem genocide-curious. At Meghan McCain's husband's little website, somebody definitely seems into it:
On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.
If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.
What the writer is implying, is that public LGBT identity needs to be erased, and straight allies need to be punished for their support of gay and trans culture. Why? Because the writer is discomfited that these people exist. He is irked. His feelings are deranged. He is a melting snowflake in a warming world.
But I genuinely do not doubt that his fears of a gay-friendly planet are dangerous--and echoed in the culture. Take Matt Walsh. He too, wants to see people punished for supporting queer culture. He wants people who support queer culture to be treated as child abusers, when the system he wants to impose on queer youth is child abuse, and well-documented as such. So do the jumped-up neo-Nazis who turn up in LGBT -friendly spaces at the exhortation of Libs of TikTok.
It certainly has been a minute, hasn't it? So, what brings me out of self-imposed blogging exile, if not something very relevant to my...
