Apparently Trump has nothing serious to worry about right now.

Say WHAT? Who tf is Bubba Wallace and why tf is Trump babbling about NASCAR and ratings? As the pandemic infections and deaths keep shooting up up up while the rest of the world is pushing theirs down?

CNN explains:

President Donald Trump on Monday bemoaned NASCAR’s recent decision to ban the Confederate flag from all races and events.

The Confederate flag. Not the US flag, not the flag he rages over when football players don’t salute it in the way he thinks they should be forced to – but the flag of the move to secede from the US in order to preserve slavery. That’s what Trump is raging about.

As the coronavirus pandemic rages across the country, Trump has largely moved on, seeking instead to place focus on his “law and order” message through a series of inflammatory speeches, tweets, and statements defending racist monuments and digging in his opposition to renaming Army bases named for Confederate leaders.

Trump has “moved on” from the pandemic. We wish we had that luxury.

NASCAR has said that the presence of the Confederate flag “runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry.”

As in, you know, the people whose great-grandparents were born into slavery. Those people. It seems Trump doesn’t want to provide a welcoming and inclusive environment for them.

Speaking at the base of Mount Rushmore Friday evening, [Trump] railed against what he called a “merciless campaign” by his political foes to erase history by removing monuments — even though the sculptures memorialize parts of America’s racist past.

“As we meet here tonight there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for,” Trump said. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”

So slavery was a blessing? Generals who fought to preserve slavery are our heroes?

I think not.

He says that thing he keeps saying, with that same note of surprised happy: “I think I look good in it.” As if we’re all anxiously leaning forward worrying about how he looks in it. As if we give the tiniest rat’s ass about how he looks in it. As if he doesn’t look like a festering pile of burger grease and evil no matter what he puts on his head. As if how he looks in it has any bearing whatever on the issue of stopping the lethal pandemic.

It turns out that cringey BBC “let’s you trash ‘Karens'” tweet didn’t go down all that well.

Really not well at all. I’ve scrolled and scrolled and haven’t seen a “good stuff” reply yet.

Helen Joyce: I can only shudder when I think just how ashamed these women are going to be of their ageist younger selves in, ooh, about 15 years. Talk about internalised misogyny

TheMoominmama

You would [think] after being dragged to court by its experienced female presenters for age & sex discrimination that the bbc would have learned it’s lesson. Sadly no. The broadcaster thinks broadcasting pejorative ageist & sexist language & popular abuse among the woke crowd i[s] ok.

ThePen: ‘Don’t be so loud’. When did these libfems decide it was their job to help men in shutting up women? When did racism become women’s problem to solve? And calling women ‘Karens’ is just another silencing mechanism. The self loathing of these young women makes me want to weep.

Republicans are shocked, shocked that Trump appears to be a racist.

President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.

Now? What, he hasn’t been showing his “racial animus” all along? The guy who was saying Mexicans are rapists before he even stole the election?

Trump has left little doubt through his utterances the past few weeks that he sees himself not only as the Republican standard-bearer but as leader of a modern grievance movement animated by civic strife and marked by calls for “white power,” the phrase chanted by one of his supporters in a video the president shared last weekend on Twitter. He later deleted the video but did not disavow its message.

Come on. This is not a surprise to anyone. Remember birtherism? The Central Park Five? The Muslim ban before he even know where the White House kept the burger dispenser?

Over the years, some Republicans have struggled to navigate Trump’s race baiting and, at times, outright racism, while others have rallied behind him. Bursts of indignation and frustration come and go but have never resulted in a complete GOP break with the president.

No shit, because they like him and his racism a hell of a lot more than they don’t like it.

Trump’s repeated championing of monuments, memorials and military bases honoring Confederate leaders has run up against the tide of modernity and a weary electorate that polls show overwhelmingly support the Black Lives Matter movement — a slogan that Trump said would be “a symbol of hate” if painted on Fifth Avenue in New York.

…

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret — mostly privately, to avoid his wrath — that Trump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change. Coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis, these Republicans fear he is not only seriously impairing his reelection chances but also jeopardizing the GOP Senate majority and its strength in the House.

Well let’s hope so.

If Trump can corrupt and silence even the technical experts what hope is there?

Not much.

On Saturday night, President Donald Trump made the dangerously inaccurate claim that 99% of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.” On Sunday morning, one of his top health experts failed to correct the assertion, a stunning breakdown of the government’s core duty to keep Americans safe and protect the public health.

CNN’s Dana Bash pressed US Food and Drug Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn repeatedly Sunday morning to explain the President’s false statement in his Fourth of July speech from the South Lawn of the White House, one that minimized the devastating effects of the virus and seemed to encourage Americans to ignore the deadly risks of a pandemic that has so far claimed more than 129,000 American lives.

And that “so far,” remember, is in just the last four months, and it’s picking up speed at a terrible rate.

“I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong,” Hahn, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, told Bash during CNN’s “State of the Union” when she asked him to explain the basis for the President’s claim and why he would be pushing the narrative that most Covid-19 cases are harmless when his public health experts are saying the opposite.

What a ridiculous thing to say. This isn’t a frazzled parent mediating between two children who are arguing about who is the best spitter, this is a rapidly escalating pandemic. Getting into who is right and who is wrong is of vital importance.

Bash asked him a fourth time to correct what Bozo said, but he simply said “this is serious.” Yeah thanks, that’s a big help.

Hahn’s refusal to specifically address Trump’s misleading claim underscored the growing trust gap between Americans and this administration. Hahn apparently was afraid to correct the President — a pattern that has repeated itself over and over again in an administration where disagreeing with or undercutting Trump has cost many appointees their jobs.

In other words we’re screwed.

We’re doomed.

So what happens around July 18?

God damn it Beeb!

Oh holy god it will be like this, won’t it.

H/t latsot

So Trump was playing with his toy trucks before it was time to get on the chop-chop to the Big Plane to the Faces Rock, and he was having ever such a nice fantasy about building a huge Disneyland kind of thing all full of the best Americans ever, like Donald Trump and Billy Graham and the guy who invented graham crackers and some crackers in uniforms and people like that.

Among the combative and unusual ways President Trump chose to celebrate Independence Day, some historians were particularly puzzled Saturday by his announcement for a new monument called the “National Garden of American Heroes” populated by a grab bag of historical figures chosen by his administration.

Well not puzzled so much. The Post is always so polite, but really the historians were more rolling their eyes than puzzled.

The garden, Trump explained in a Friday night speech at Mount Rushmore, was part of his response to the movement to remove Confederate statues and racially charged iconography across the country.

“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” Trump said. “This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped.”

Well now that raises a question, doesn’t it, because how are statues that celebrate generals who defended slavery a symbol of “our magnificent liberty”? Unless by “our” he doesn’t actually mean “our” [as Americans] but “our” [as white Americans]. I know, I know; of course that’s what he means. The South seceded in order to hang on to its “magnificent liberty” to keep people enslaved so that they [the enslavers] could continue to get rich growing cotton. Their magnificent liberty, other people’s slavery. Trump is angrily defending that version of “magnificent liberty.”

In response, Trump said he plans to build “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.” Among the statues to be erected in the garden — spelled out in an executive order — are evangelical leader Billy Graham, 19th-century politician Henry Clay, frontiersman Davy Crockett, first lady Dolley Madison and conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Other must haves: George Wallace, Byron De La Beckwith, James Jordan and Wayne Roberts, James Earl Ray, Thomas Dixon Jr, Gregory and Travis McMichael, George Zimmerman, Derek Chauvin…Gee it’s a long list, it will have to be a massive space.

“It’s just so random. It’s like they threw a bunch of stuff on the wall and just went with whatever stuck,” said Karen Cox, a history professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, after struggling for several minutes to describe the order outlining the proposed monument. “Nothing about this suggests it’s thoughtful.”

Well. They don’t do thoughtful. That seems to be pretty much the whole point of them.

“The tragedy is an undertaking like this could actually be a good idea if serious,” said Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University. “You could engage artists who are hurting for work right now. You could be innovative and really rethink the idea of what it means to memorialize things and how we do that. You could even break out of the whole classical/neoclassical forms we’ve been stuck in when it come statues. But I don’t think that’s what Trump has in mind.”

No, I don’t think it is either.

In the executive order, Trump says all statues will be lifelike or realistic, “not abstract or modernist representations.”

Ah now there is the true Hitler note. Museum of Degenerate Art much?

In the first decades of the 20th century, radical new art flourished in Germany. Established museums collected and exhibited contemporary work by Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and others, introducing them to a wide international audience that included Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director. After Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, Nazi agencies began to dismantle this progressive collection policy. In the years that followed, the Nazis removed more than 20,000 artworks from state-owned museums. In 1937, 740 modern works were exhibited in the defamatory show Degenerate Art in Munich in order to “educate” the public on the “art of decay.” The exhibition purported to demonstrate that modernist tendencies, such as abstraction, are the result of genetic inferiority and society’s moral decline. An explicit parallel, for example, was drawn between modernism and mental illness.

That’s what is squatting in the Oval Office these days.

Trump’s “look at the big guns” celebration:

The US president staged a “Salute to America” jamboree on the south lawn of the White House with flyovers by military jets, parachute jumps and patriotic songs, but little effort among guests to physical distance or wear face masks.

Stupid and pathetic way to “salute America,” as if military force were the whole story. How about instead showing off our music and dance?

“We got hit by the virus that came from China,” the president said, prompting a strange whoop and applause from someone in the audience. “We’ve made a lot of progress. Our strategy is moving along well. It goes out in one area, it rears back its ugly face in another area. But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned how to put out the flame.”

No we haven’t. That’s why the flame is not out, and in fact is burning hotter and hotter every hour. Our strategy (we have one?) is not “moving along well,” it’s failing disastrously.

And contradicting Fauci and other public health experts, the president offered a wildly optimistic prediction: “We’ll likely have a therapeutic and/or vaccine solution long before the end of the year.” The presidential election is on 3 November.

Not only is that not “likely,” from what I’ve gathered by listening to researchers it’s pretty much impossible.

But the lion’s share of Trump’s remarks were a rehashing of a speech he gave on Friday night at Mount Rushmore, breaking from 4 July tradition by seeking to stoke a culture war and pour salt on America’s racial wounds instead of a unifying message.

Because the goal is always to make us hate each other more. What a lovely man he is.

“We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children or trample on our freedoms … We will teach our children to cherish and adore our country so they can build its future. Together, we will fight for the American dream.”

He can’t though. He can’t force us to think what he wants us to think. He can’t force us to say America is perfect and always has been, and he can’t force us to ignore its past. As so often, it’s not his call.

And for someone who babbles about cherishing and adoring (ew) our country, he sure hates a lot of us.

Following his speech, Trump and the first lady watched a spectacular display of military jets that have taken part in America’s military conflicts from the second world war onwards.

Zoom zoom whee, bedtime now Donnie.

Another item from that oh so progressive Parliament Square rally yesterday.

Aw yeah. If you bitches don’t want men in your toilets here’s a nappy for you, hawhawhaw.

Nigel Farage has apparently violated the quarantine rules.

Nigel Farage appears to have broken the UK’s quarantine rules after posting a photo in a pub at midday today – less than two weeks after returning from the US.

And by the way who let him into the US? Trump slapped a spite quarantine on the UK ages ago.

There are calls for an investigation after the Brexit Party leader shared a photo with a pint as the coronavirus lockdown in England eased and pubs reopened for the first time. He wrote: “12 o’clock, first customer in. Love it.”

MSNBC footage shows Mr Farage at a Donald Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at 1.02am (UK time) on 21 June.

Commercial flights from Tulsa to England take at least 10 hours, so if Mr Farage stayed for the US president’s address, which ended at 3am UK time, he would have been able to arrive back in the UK at lunchtime the same day at the very earliest.

With this timeline, he should be quarantining until Sunday under the UK’s 14-day rule.

Ed Davey MP, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, says he has written to Kent Police asking them to investigate whether the 56-year-old has broken quarantine rules.

Maybe he had an Asshole’s Exemption.

Also, at the time of Mr Farage’s trip, the US had barred entry to arrivals from Britain, with the exception of US citizens, their family members and “individuals who meet specified exceptions”.

Bennie G Thompson, chairman of the House of Representatives’ committee on homeland security, said the decision to allow the visit raised “numerous troubling questions” at the time of travel restrictions from the UK.

Yeah well rules are for people who aren’t Trump or friends-of-Trump.

That is, a boy successfully fought his school so that he could use the girls’ toilet.

It doesn’t sound quite so progressive that way does it.

That’s why it’s necessary to keep putting it that way.

(Notice no mention of how the girls at that school feel about the boy’s successful fight to join them in their toilet.)

Newsweek reports:

After a month of tweets, back and forths and intense scrutiny over her views on transgender issues, J.K. Rowling has ignited the debate once more by thanking Harry Potter fan site founder Emerson Spartz, of MuggleNet, for supporting her.

Well she didn’t “ignite the debate.” She thanked someone. No one was required to shout the house down in response. None of this stupid hounding of Rowling is necessary or inevitable. It’s people choosing to make a huge fuss over the trivial subject of people’s personal feelings about their “identities.” It’s not the most intelligent or useful choice I’ve ever seen.

“After hours of stomach churning & frantic pacing, I decided that, as founder of MuggleNet, I have to say something. I can’t believe I have to say this, but @jk_rowling is NOT transphobic,” posted Spartz.

“Thank you, Emerson,” posted Rowling a few hours ago, “for being who I always thought you were.” At the time of writing, the tweet had already garnered close to 1,000 comments.

It’s Twitter, and it’s Rowling. It could be a million comments, it still wouldn’t mean much of anything.

Rowling later published a 3,600 word essay discussing her thoughts about trans issues on her personal website, in which the Harry Potter creator doubled down on her views and revealed that she’d suffered violence and domestic abuse.

That is, she went on thinking what she thought and explained why with facts and arguments. We’re allowed to do that.

He’s not into any of that namby-pamby weenie-peenie Bring Us Together shit, he’s into saying THOSE DIRTY OTHER PEOPLE ARE ENEMIES and we gotta crush them like bugs.

Standing beneath Mount Rushmore on the eve of American independence day, Donald Trump staged a defiant celebration of what critics say is white identity politics and warned the nation’s history is under siege from “far-left fascism”.

Having it both ways, isn’t it. Fascism is by definition far-right, not any kind of left.

The US president defended the symbolism of statues and monuments before a packed crowd at an event that revelled in political incorrectness calculated to enflame the country’s current divisions and enrage liberal critics. There were few face masks and even fewer people of color on stage or in the stands.

It didn’t revel in political incorrectness, it reveled in open racism and authoritarianism.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Trump said. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

That is naked white supremacism right there. We’re not campaigning to “wipe out” our history, on the contrary, we’re campaigning to broaden and correct it. Yes, “correct”: correct the biases that ignored women, minimized slavery and the expropriation of Native Americans, paid more attention to the owners than to the workers, and the like. We’re campaigning for a much larger, fuller history, and against a version of history that emphasizes “heroes” on horseback.

It’s not “defaming our heroes” to note which one were slaveowners, which ones fought on the side of the slave states, which ones committed genocide against Native Americans, which ones fought in aid of an imperialist foreign policy.

It’s not “erasing our values” to campaign for more attention to racism and sexism in our past – on the contrary, it’s expanding and improving them.

Statues of people like Andrew Jackson and Jefferson Davis are not “our most sacred memorials.” Not even close.

In an effort to fight back, he announced a surprise executive order establishing “The National Garden of American Heroes”, a vast outdoor park featuring statues of “the greatest Americans to ever live” – a selection sure to provoke debate and controversy.

No, let’s not do that.

Trump says everything’s fabulous.

Donald Trump barely mentioned the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the US in his incendiary speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday night. But in an appearance at the White House to wish Americans a happy fourth of July, the president referenced the virus, albeit to tell people how great a job he is doing. Predictably, he also recycled his old tactic of blaming the virus on China.

Chinadiddit therefore it’s fine that Trump has done everything he can to make it far far worse than it had to be.

“We were doing better than any country had done in history … and then we got hit with this terrible plague from China and now we’re getting closer to fighting our way out of it,” said the president as numbers show Covid-19 cases are rising in 37 states across the US, and falling significantly in only one, Vermont.

That’s not getting closer to “fighting” our way out of it. That’s getting closer to being submerged and defeated by it.

Despite evidence to the contrary, the president then suggested America was on its way to beating the virus. “Our country is coming back, our jobs numbers are spectacular, a lot of things are happening that people don’t quite see yet,” he said. “We’re on our way to a tremendous victory. It’s going to happen and it’s going to happen big. Our country will be greater than ever before.”

We’re not though.

The people who write speeches for Trump to mouth should take more care to make them credible. The “Racism is Awesome” speech yesterday for instance:

“There is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance,” the president told an audience of several thousand, gathered at the base of Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota.

“If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished. Not going to happen to us,” he said.

See what I mean? There’s the written speech, and then suddenly there’s Trump. It’s jolting.

“Make no mistake, this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

Translated into Trump:

These people hate our great country. They want to tear it down. We’re number one!

The gap between the two is too wide. Trump of course can’t amend his version, so the speech writers need to amend theirs.

Trump has made the removal of statues the subject of much of his ire during the protests, and has threatened anyone who vandalizes one with 10 years in prison.

It’s typical of his crude and impoverished mind. What matters? Not a large and complicated issue like racism, but a collection of physical objects. Not how we treat each other, but what kind of heavy stone statues we display. Not politics or social justice, but oversized toys.

Trump gave his Naziesque rant.

Trump focused most of his address before a crowd of several thousand in South Dakota on what he described as a grave threat to the nation from liberals and angry mobs — a “left-wing cultural revolution” that aims to rewrite U.S. history and erase its heritage amid the racial justice protests that have roiled cities for weeks.

Yes how dare we object to the murder of George Floyd and the long long history of white-on-black violence. White supremacy is our heritage!

Praising presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the men carved into the cliffs behind him, Trump declared that their legacies are under assault from protesters who have defaced and torn down statues.

He knows nothing whatever about any of them. If you asked him what their “legacies” are he wouldn’t be able to tell you.

“The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society,” Trump said. “It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and turn our free society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.”

“Our free society,” he says, while shouting that people who damage statues will get a minimum of ten years in prison.

Trump asserted that “children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe the men and women who built it were not heroes but villains.”

“This radical view of American history is a web of lies,” he added.

So it’s a lie that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves?

Though the Mount Rushmore trip was billed as an official White House event, the president made an overt appeal to his partisan supporters in attacking liberals. 

Which is not allowed. It violates the Hatch Act. [Which is sleazy and gross.]

Yet Trump’s efforts to rejuvenate his struggling reelection campaign with events in front of large crowds outside Washington was set back for a second time after Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign fundraiser who is dating his son Donald Trump Jr., tested positive for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, ahead of the president’s arrival in South Dakota.

I hope Junior gets it. I also hope Senior gets it. And Princess Ivanka and Prince Jared.

This is How It’s Done.

The simplest question – what are your thoughts on the minimum wage? – and he doesn’t remotely answer it, he says he’ll say stuff about it in two weeks and then he repeats his usual string of beads. Positive statement – putting people to work – record numbers – greatest economy histry of our country – China virus – bans on China – lotta things right – great job. He’s the kid who didn’t do the homework, not once in awhile, but always.

I missed this last October…Always Removes Female Symbol From Sanitary Pads:

In a nod to transgender and nonbinary customers, Procter & Gamble said this week that it was removing the Venus symbol, which has historically been associated with womanhood and the female sex, from the wrappers of Always brand sanitary pads.

Because now we have to pretend that anyone can menstruate, including men.

Steph deNormand, a patient advocate for transgender health at Fenway Health, who uses the pronoun “they,” told NBC that seeing “female-coded” imagery while purchasing menstrual products could create a sense of distress for some customers. “Trans and nonbinary folks are constantly misgendered, and a gesture like this can broaden out the experiences and open up spaces for those who need the products,” they said.

I can think of some more relevant gestures.

Be that as it may, the reality is both that women and girls menstruate and that the fact that women and girls menstruate is one reason they are despised and dominated, and it’s one reason they are persecuted and in fact excluded in the most literal sense. That is far more real, more material, more significant, than a few people’s manufactured angst about being “misgendered” when buying sanitary pads.

The redesign was also sharply criticized on social media by some for kowtowing to a tiny population and giving in to the demands of “crazy liberals.” The skepticism was also reflected in cynical headlines about the announcement.

That just trivializes it. I’m a crazy liberal myself, but I’m also an angry feminist, and I despise this fashion for erasing women.

The redesign was just the latest in a series of actions by companies to be more inclusive of customers who are transgender, genderqueer or nonbinary. In June, the ride-sharing company Lyft began allowing customers to share their pronouns.

Wut??? What can that mean? How could Lyft ever have stopped customers “sharing their pronouns”? Also why would anyone even bother since only the first and second person pronouns will be used anyway, and they’re already gender-neutral. “Hi, my pronouns are she/her.” “Why are you telling me this?”

Whatever. As long as it’s still women who clean the toilets who cares, right?