Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Foreign Policy says Trump has lost his mojo.

Trump, now focused more on ballrooms and pools than on the Nobel Peace Prize he lobbied for just one year ago, only has himself to blame for prematurely morphing into something resembling a lame duck. The chief cause is surely his decision in February to go to war against Iran. More than six months in, the conflict has drained U.S. resources, raised the cost of living, and turned Trump into one of the most unpopular presidents in recorded history. 

Baffling, when wars of choice are usually so much fun.

Trump’s once loyal cabinet officials are now telling reporters that their boss ignored their concerns about attempting regime change in Iran.

The war has almost irreparably damaged Trump’s foreign-policy toolkit. Short on both offensive and defensive missiles, Trump can no longer dangle the possibility of changing battlefield dynamics in Ukraine, a conflict he promised to end in one day, or provide a suitable deterrent to China’s ambitions in Taiwan. The hard realities of a slow industrial base will severely constrain his ability to project power. Inflation, made worse first by tariffs and then by the war’s impact on gas prices, will stymie his decision-making at home and abroad. 

Yes but besides that…

The friendships Trump has chosen to trample on—from Canada to Europe to India—were in fact Washington’s secret sauce, the one thing Beijing couldn’t manufacture. In squandering those partnerships, Trump has accelerated the diffusion of U.S. power as well as the process of his own declining influence.

He had a lot of fun trampling though. That’s the important thing.

Easy for him to say.

It’s only women and girls after all. A nasty business, but not important.

But what are the real problems facing Britain? Not this.

No of course not, because “this” is only about female people. The importance of it, the problemishness of it, is automatically limited by the fact that it’s about people who don’t matter all that much – people not like Rory Stewart.

It gets nutser by the hour.

Simmering turmoil over the future of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts boiled over on Tuesday as the center abruptly closed to the public and President Trump threatened to cancel a planned $257 million renovation if his name was not returned to the front of the building.

Allies of Mr. Trump have been pushing for months to close the center for major renovations and to honor the president by affixing his name to its marble facade. A federal judge has blocked both efforts.

There is no reason to “honor” Trump by sticking his name on the building that honors an assassinated president. They might as well make a statue of Trump to sit on Lincoln’s knee at the Lincoln Memorial. The Kennedy Center is nothing to do with Trump, end of story.

On Tuesday, the center aggressively tested the judge’s order not to close by shutting its doors in what officials called an emergency action designed to protect people from deteriorating conditions inside the building. Shortly after 4:30 p.m., employees heard a sudden notice on the P.A. system: “The center is now closed to the public. Please exit the center by way of the Hall of States.”

That’s not testing the judge’s order, it’s ignoring it, flouting it, disobeying it.

The Kennedy Center said in a statement that an immediate temporary closure of the building was necessary for safety reasons but that an extended closure would begin once the court gives its approval. Earlier on Tuesday, the center’s Trump-allied board voted — for a third time — to close the building, citing a recent incident in which a five-foot-long section of ceiling plaster fell amid a storm.

But lawyers for Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democratic ex officio board member whose lawsuit is at the center of the court battle, signaled that they would view any closure as in direct conflict with a court order.

“If true,” the lawyers, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said in a statement, “it would appear a direct violation of the court’s order and courting contempt.”

We’re not lawyers, so we can skip the “would appear” bit. It is a direct violation; couldn’t be much directer.

The Kennedy Center quickly filed a notice of appeal, and Mr. Trump responded on social media with a stark ultimatum. If an appeals court does not agree to allow his name back on the building, he said in the post, he would block the renovation of the center that he has been championing for more than a year.

“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said in the post, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

He also said the building would close “immediately.”

Trump’s expertise is all we need to know.

According to Donald Trump, concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence technology – that “robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all” – are a hoax.

It’s the kind of language the US president typically reserves for the objects of his most intense derision – theories about human-driven climate change, investigations into Russian election-meddling, and the drives to impeach and remove him from office during his first presidential term.

Derision is one word for it; others are rage, fury, eruption.

Styling himself as the “hoax buster”, in a series of social media posts on Monday he issued a full-throated endorsement of what he called “the greatest economic development engine in history” and scorned those who doubted the benefits of the technology.

Well that will be because he knows nothing about it.

The ranks of doubters have been growing in recent weeks, however, amidst anxiety over the disruptive nature of AI – if not worries about potentially civilisation-threatening danger – among some industry insiders and politicians, including from within Trump’s own Republican Party.

And here’s the thing: they know something about it, and he doesn’t, and worse than that, he doesn’t know he doesn’t. He thinks he knows everything about everything. We know this from hearing him talk for the last (sob) eleven years.

None of that has deterred Trump, however, whose latest social media fusillade was only his latest effort to turn back growing AI scepticism through sheer force of will.

Because will is what he has instead of intelligence and the ability to take in what other people say. Will is a really really bad substitute for those two qualities.

“Congress under both Democratic and Republican control has been asleep at the wheel,” [Bernie Sanders] said. “And now we have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing.”

According to Trump, however, what’s needed isn’t debate or new policies, it’s trust in his authority and judgement.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” he wrote. “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies.”

That’s a minor masterpiece of self-undermining. Zero intelligent people would ever refer to themselves as SMART (High IQ!).

Labour says men can be women.

TUC Motion 17 commits 5.3 million trade unionists to campaign for gender self-declaration. It never once uses the word “woman”. This is how a movement legislates over women’s rights while pretending not to see them.

Read Motion 17 as many times as you like. Count every line, every clause, every one of its two hundred-odd words. You will not find the word “woman” anywhere in it. Not once. Not “women,” not “sex,” not “female,” not “girls.” A motion built entirely around reversing the practical effect of a Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of sex under British equality law manages, across five resolutions and four sub-clauses of condemnation, never to mention the people that judgment was about.

I’m so tired of this blithe erasure of women. I’m so tired of this endless hostility and indifference and absolute determination to demolish our rights.

On Monday 14 September, delegates at the TUC Congress in Brighton carried Motion 17, “Oppose the EHRC Code of Practice (Services, Public Functions and Associations),” without a recorded opposing speaker and without, as far as any published account shows, a card vote. It came from the TUC’s LGBT+ Conference, was moved on the floor by Maria Exall of the Communication Workers’ Union, and was endorsed for the General Council by the TUC’s Assistant General Secretary, Kate Bell. It commits the entire trade union movement, nearly five and a half million working people, to campaign for the reintroduction of gender self-declaration into UK law. And it does so while treating the women whose legal protections are actually at stake as a subject too awkward to name.

Solidarity fornever, right? For the union makes us misogynists.

More of how ridiculous this fuss is.

Now the Government has a different solution in England to help children maintain a healthy diet: don’t give them a choice. New standards announced this week will further restrict fried, battered or breadcrumb-coated food; limit consumption of cakes and biscuits; apply restrictions to packed lunches; and demand high-protein meals, resulting in endless lentils and chickpeas, which are historically not English in the slightest.

Wtf? So what? Is there some rule or norm that says children can eat only food that is historically [relevant nationality here]? Lentils and chickpeas aka garbanzo beans are not so weird or gross that they can be eaten only by citizens of Legumeolandia. They’re a tad boring if cooked boringly, but then so are the everlasting fried potato sticks. With any luck the schools will serve the lentils in delicious curries and tomato sauces and similar.

Babyman tantrum due any minute.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could not honor President Trump with an inscription on the institution’s exterior, blocking an effort by the center’s board to restore the president’s name to the building.

“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington wrote in the order. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

Yebbut he fixed it up! You gotta give him credit for that!!

The center first affixed the president’s name to the building in December, after its Trump-allied board voted to add it to the institution’s formal title in recognition for his role in securing $257 million for a sweeping renovation project.

In May, Judge Cooper ruled that the renaming as the Trump-Kennedy Center was unlawful and could only be decided by Congress, which had authorized the creation of the center and its dedication to President Kennedy. The judge ordered the letters spelling out the president’s name removed from the marble.

As it pursued an appeal, the center complied.

But last month its board voted to restore Mr. Trump’s name in a different form, aggressively testing the judge’s previous order. The resolution approved by the board proposed an inscription under the building’s main signage that would read “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump.”

Which is so dumb. It’s an interruption, a change of subject, an irrelevance. The memorial to Kennedy is a memorial because he was assassinated. Who came along and tidied it up 60+ years later is entirely beside the point.

Since the president took over the institution at the start of his second term, it has seen waves of cancellations by artists, plummeting attendance by audiences and withdrawal of support from some donors.

Well…ok…so can we put his name on it in recognition of that?

The board’s decision to recognize Mr. Trump with an inscription was an effort to find a workaround to a provision in the federal law governing the Kennedy Center that says “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas.”

There’s no room for a workaround there. Not so much as would let a flea get in.

Even the unions hate women.

#TUC Motion 17 commits 5.3 million union members to campaign for gender self-declaration, reversing a Supreme Court ruling on women’s sex-based rights. Refuges. Changing rooms. Prisons. Women-only spaces. All at stake. Yet the motion never once uses the word “woman”. Ask your union rep why.

Read Motion 17 as many times as you like. Count every line, every clause, every one of its two hundred-odd words. You will not find the word “woman” anywhere in it. Not once. Not “women,” not “sex,” not “female,” not “girls.” A motion built entirely around reversing the practical effect of a Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of sex under British equality law manages, across five resolutions and four sub-clauses of condemnation, never to mention the people that judgment was about.

That is not an oversight. It is the whole story.

New hatred of women just like the old hatred of women.

Trump is so mad at the Supreme Court.

Trump upbraided Supreme Court justices as “shells” beholden to “crazed” liberal interests in a lengthy online screed a day after the court blocked his plan to execute dramatic changes to mail-in voting ahead of the midterms.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

They were supposed to side with him every single time no matter what! Surely they knew that. It’s all so shocking.

None of the justices Trump appointed to the court during his first term — Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett — noted disagreement with the majority opinion blocking the mail-voting changes.

Traitors!

Nothing to see here folks.

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands.

…

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

…

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family.

Sound filthy at all?

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection? 

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

But instead it’s not just thinkable but doable, and done. Filth times a thousand.

I’m seeing a lot of outrage at this, including from people I like.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell said the new standards for England are a once in a generation change and take effect from September 2027 with secondaries getting until September 2028 for some rules

Fried eggs pastries chocolate spread and high sugar cereals are also out and ketchup is limited to 10g of a reduced salt and sugar version

Cakes and desserts will be once a week in primaries and twice in secondaries and every dish must include fruit or vegetables

Yes, and? What’s so awful about that? Deep fried food is in fact not a great choice, so why not decide to eliminate it from school meals? If the kids must have their grease-food they can still get it at home; why should schools provide it?

Is it really bad to serve vegetables or fruit with every meal? In fact isn’t it kind of gross not to?

It’s odd to see adults furious that children won’t be able to eat deep-fried foods at school. There really are more delicious foods you know…

Meidas Touch two minutes ago:

BREAKING: The Supreme Court has DENIED the Trump regime’s emergency request to enforce new mail-ballot restrictions ahead of the midterm elections.

The ruling leaves in place a preliminary injunction blocking the U.S. Postal Service from requiring states to submit voter information through a federal portal, obtain approval for ballot-envelope designs, and comply with new barcode requirements.

Justice Kavanaugh joined the denial, writing that imposing the rule so close to the election would likely be “arbitrary and capricious” because state and local officials lack sufficient time to implement it.

Justices Alito and Thomas dissented. The underlying litigation will continue, but the restrictions remain blocked for the 2026 midterms.

Sux to be you, Donny.

TERF Times on Facebook:

Yesterday, the organisers of the Great North Run flushed away women’s dignity. While men were provided with urinals, thousands of women were expected to squat in unisex, so-called PEEQUAL units: holes in the ground with no doors, no privacy, no toilet roll and only a bag for used sanitary towels and tampons.

And, by the sound of it, no actual toilets. It’s neither comfortable nor sanitary for women to pee without an actual toilet. It’s like the difference between watering a newly planted garden with a hose, and throwing a bucket of water over it. Yes, some women in third world countries have grown up squatting to pee, but that hardly makes it ideal.

Apparently unconcerned that this toilet provision raised obvious questions under the Equality Act, the organisers emailed participants beforehand to say that facilities would include “portaloos, men’s urinals, and PEEQUAL – an open-air squat urinal designed for women, trans women, AFAB, and non-binary runners”.

Reports from the event suggest that women who wanted privacy were forced to queue for portaloos.

The piss-taking did not stop there. While the 20 elite female runners were permitted to compete against their own sex, in accordance with British Athletics rules, women in the mass race had to compete against men.

Great Run permits males to self-identify into the female category for its mass-participation events.

Gee thanks Great Run. The stars get fairness but all the other women just have to give up at the outset.

The split between elite and ordinary runners gives the game away. Great Run recognises that sex matters: men were provided with urinals and the 20 elite women with a protected race. Yet it refused to extend either privacy or fair competition to the thousands of women making up the mass field. The organisers had the facilities, the rules and the evidence in front of them.

Anger at the unfairness is growing. Reality Rules Runners UK, a new sex-realist Parkrun club, is campaigning to restore fair competition and sex-based categories. It is aiming to recruit 800 more women and men before 3 October, putting it among Parkrun’s 20 largest clubs and demonstrating the strength of support for rules that reflect reality.

And thus provide fair competition.

Not reassuring.

Trump on Monday rejected calls from leading artificial intelligence executives for new limits on the technology, writing on social media that the only guardrail the industry needed it already had: “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

Well we’re in deep trouble then, because “smart” people don’t talk like that. They really really don’t. “Smart” people – even the nerdy ones – understand enough about their fellow humans to avoid vulgar self-admiration in public. “Smart” people at least know how to veil their conceit under a veneer of normality.

Mr. Trump inserted himself into the intensifying national debate over how to handle a rapidly evolving technology that researchers and industry leaders say poses major risks like mass unemployment, a new wave of biological weapons and autonomous warfare. The president did not address those risks directly. Instead, he questioned the sincerity of the executives who have been calling to slow the technology’s development.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Mr. Trump posted. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!”

That’s not a smart person talking.

Oh good, a new entry for the category “what weird shit is this now?”

A member of the cultlike group known as Zizians has been charged with murder in the shooting of her parents at their Pennsylvania home on her 30th birthday, and a prosecutor said Wednesday she wasn’t acting alone.

…

The two deaths are among six linked to the Zizians, a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists who appear to share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence. Since 2022, members have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord, the landlord’s subsequent killing, the Zajkos’ deaths in Pennsylvania, and a highway shootout in Vermont that left a border agent and another Zizian dead.

Highly intelligent stuff.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

Sure, let men watch little girls take their clothes off; what’s the problem?

Male teachers could supervise girls changing under new NSPCC guidance for schools.

The child protection charity has now removed a policy which required adults supervising pupils as they change to be the same sex as the children.

Campaigners and MPs have now accused the charity of making the change under pressure from trans rights activists.

The NSPCC’s previous long-standing policy said: “Adults who are supervising children getting changed should be of the same gender as them [they are].”

But the children’s charity has now removed the line in its latest “safeguarding considerations for changing rooms” briefing, according to the Daily Mail.

The NSPCC said it made the change after a similar change from the Department for Education (DfE), but the Government denied this and said no such guidance was removed.

Oh. Ok, it was…um…some other department? A guy on the bus? Peter Tatchell?

The NSPCC said it did not change any policies because of pressure from activist groups and could change guidance again once more direction from the Equality and Human Rights Commission is given.

So why did it change the policy? Why did an organization whose whole purpose is to protect children decide that it’s fine to have men watch little girls take their clothes off? Please do explain, in simple words that we commoners can understand.

Surrender or we shoot the dog.

Officials at the Kennedy Center have warned it could face fiscal collapse within weeks unless President Donald Trump’s name is added back to the building, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Why would that be? What is the causal mechanism here? It’s not explained.

The warning appeared in a report circulated to the performing arts center’s board of trustees ahead of a meeting on Tuesday. The report, which includes two resolutions, said the center could be unable to make payroll and could go into bankruptcy in weeks, one source who read the report said.

The report was originally obtained and reported by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Trump has offered to raise the money needed to keep it afloat but the report argued that if the president’s name is not on the building he won’t be able to fundraise, according to sources.

He “won’t be able” to? How does that work, exactly? As a threat disguised as an impotence?

Adding to the financial turmoil, the center previously argued in court filings it would have to return millions of dollars in private donations it had already received if Trump’s name wasn’t on the building’s facade, citing the center’s bylaws.

I think “citing the center’s bylaws” is code for gangsterish threats. Put the boss’s name back or the kid gets the hook.

“All of this money, hundreds of millions of dollars, will have to be immediately returned, or not received by the Center,” the department told an appeals court.

Why? Doesn’t say.

Entertainment Weekly:

Lilly Wachowski accused J.K. Rowling of “funding trans genocide” and compared her to the Nazis — and now, the author is responding to the Matrix filmmaker’s criticism.

He’s not a “Lilly” of course. I forget his real name; I was never interested in the Wachowskis. Anyway – falsely accusing someone of genocide is libelous, if you ask me.

The Harry Potter author’s agent, Neil Blair, issued a statement to Entertainment Weekly denying Wachowski’s characterization of Rowling as funding anti-trans legislation.

“Freedom of speech is a principle we should all cherish. What matters is that J.K. Rowling’s views, as with anyone else’s, [be] represented accurately, fairly and respectfully and that individual opinion does not detract from those views,” Blair said. “To correct Lilly Wachowski, through The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, J.K Rowling supports women taking legal action in the UK to preserve their existing rights under the Equality Act 2010, which are often overlooked or threatened. She does not support legal actions aimed at harming transgender people or efforts to limit trans rights.”

Blair added, “People are free to disagree with her views but seriously defamatory allegations of this nature, even outrageously invoking the Nazis and the genocide that they committed, should never be presented as fact when they are clearly fabricated and not based on any evidence.”

Which is libel. The UK does not treat libel as a joke or a minor oopsie.

Blair’s statement came in response to comments made by Wachowski, who publicly came out as transgender in 2016, in a new interview with Variety.

“She is funding trans genocide,” Wachowski opined. “J.K. Rowling funds trans genocide, full stop.”

Yeah that “full stop” doesn’t help. Neither does saying it twice. If I were JKR I would be sorely tempted to inform “Lily” that she would win a libel case against him should she decide to proceed.

Wachowski suggested that consumers should take a principled stand against Rowling’s work, including the forthcoming HBO Harry Potter series. “In the same way that if you are against Elon Musk, you boycott or don’t buy Tesla; and if you’re against global warming/climate change, you try not to buy as much gas, you try to mitigate your use of these products,” she said. “It’s simple math. So, your enjoyment of these shows, and continued support of these shows, is supporting my eradication.”

Does transing rot people’s brains? Or was he always this dumb? He’s not being eradicated. It’s not “simple math” to accuse people of genocide for saying that men are not women.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

The mainstream media are still reporting on Trump as if he were normal.

NPR for example:

Trump on Sunday downplayed concerns that AI could go rogue after several leaders in the tech industry called for putting the brakes on its development.

Speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg golf resort in Ireland, the president said the dire warnings about AI were exaggerated and that “negative forces” are making claims about things that won’t happen.

“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump said. “And we can put guardrails, we can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up.”

The first two paragraphs make it sound as if he made an argument, like a normal adult. The third paragraph, that quotes him directly, shatters this illusion, making it very clear that there was no argument, just his usual mindless blurts. The person with access to the nukes talks and thinks like a child.

Trump did not explain what he meant by “negative forces.”

Yeah no shit. That’s NPR’s subtle signal that everything he said was mindless blather, as it always is.

Originally a comment by quixote on Misogynist made human rights boss.

Gender critical voters are feminists.

(The clue is in the name. They’re critical of gender. They view it as stories we tell ourselves. They’re happy for you to tell yourself any story you like. You’re male and you like to knit? No problem. Knit all you like. No need for vaginoplasty to enable you to knit. What they’re against is people who tell others which stories to believe.)

They’re also rare right now in the US, already concentrated in liberal districts, and hence unlikely to move the needle as voters. Politicians are infinitely aware of how little gender critical feminists matter to them.

What the Dems do need is the votes of people who tell themselves they don’t care about any of that. They just want their kids to be safe and successful in gym class.

Trans rights activists’ instant outrage at the assumption that trans people could be perverse makes no sense to these voters. It’s not about trans people. It’s about their kids. (The concept that anything could be not about trans is very confusing to TRAs.) If anyone can declare he belongs in their daughter’s gym class, what’s to stop real pervs from lying their way in? Have TRAs never heard of some of the scoutmasters in Boy Scouts?

The sad fact for TRAs is that people do lie to get what they want. Reality has a huge gender critical bias. So even though voters ignore gender issues, their sense of “No!” goes off at the idea of males being included among women when biology matters.

And the Republicans use that to the max. Voters aren’t deep into linguistic usage when they hear “they/them.” All they hear is “I’m one of the loonies who lives in la-la land.”

Republicans come at it from a different universe, of course. To them, gender is the only thing that matters. They’d rather you change sex to play the right part than make the least dent in the strict divisions and hierarchies of gender. (That leads to stuff like the Iranian mullahs allowing sex change operations rather than tolerating the slightest deviance in dress codes. Early on, Republicans, eg Rick Santorum, leaned this way too, until they noticed what it said about them.) So Republicans “agree” with feminists that sex matters, not because equality requires recognition of differences, but because that’s the only way they have to lock you into one of two boxes.

The Dems don’t help themselves by their desperation to avoid any taint of feminism. (What could be more uncool? Really. What?) If they could shake that off, it’d be simple. And because it’s true it would resonate with all those voters who “don’t think about it.” As Rowling said dog’s years ago, “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill” / X 2019/12/20.