Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Guest post: Our time is not free for the taking

    Originally a hell no comment by Artymorty on He done been reflecting.

    Why are gay people the passive ones here? Are we all just sitting around waiting for someone to interact with us? Idle until someone walks up to us to “take” us for coffee? In video games, those are called NPCs — Non-Player Characters. They are the computer-generated and computer-controlled AI characters that populate the game world, which don’t have real-live human players behind them.

    An NPC is nothing more than a prop in the game’s world, whose only function is to fulfill the human players’ needs.

    Well, this is the real world, and I’m not a fucking NPC. My time is not free for the taking; I’m not just sitting around, waiting for a Muslim to approach and interrogate me about my gayness over a cuppa tea.

    In fact, I can’t stand when strangers treat me like the token gay.

    Muslims have plenty of resources to learn about homophobia and gay rights. The same as the rest of us. I’m not here to guide them through it. It’s almost as if they are the NPCs, completely lacking personal agency. Well, they can go right the fuck ahead and Here-Let-Me-Google-That-For-You their own way through it.

  • He done been reflecting

    Yes so that “Take a gay for a cuppa” thing is going really well for Harry.

    One, he’s so dim or sloppy or both that he can’t see even the most glaring typos, but more to the point, two, he’s surprised by the homophobic comments. Dude, what do you think Islam is? Just a few friendly suggestions? A close cousin to Quakerism?

    Glaring typo again, followed by idiocy. Go speek with the communnnniny, i.e. have a cup of tea with one Muslim man. Not a woman of course, Harry knows women are too stupid to talk to, plus her male relatives would throw him off a roof.

    Adam Sellers is right. Muslim bros get the cuddly treatment; uppity women are called names and banished to outer darkness.

    He’s quite the fool, this Harry.

  • The cuppa accords

    Communniny-thought at its most rigorous and powerful.

    See that? Having a cup of tea with one person=speak with the community.

    Dude, speaking with one person is speaking with one person. It’s not speaking with “the community” – whatever that is.

    One observer notes that he doesn’t give the same advice to himself when it comes to us pesky women who refuse to agree that men can be women.

    Yeah, Harry! Why don’t you invite us for a cuppa? One stubborn woman at a time?

  • Don’t accept the ludicrous rationalizations

    Jonathan Last at The Bulwark:

    Four days after Bari Weiss decapitated the leadership of 60 Minutes, she sent her new executive producer, Nick Bilton, to meet with the remaining staff. What happened will reverberate in journalism for years.

    In full view of the newsroom Scott Pelley took Bilton and Weiss (in absentia) to the woodshed.

    The best account is from Oliver Darcy at Status, who had a recording, and the short version is that Pelley:

    • Asked Bilton to explain the firings of correspondents and reporters.
      • Bilton absurdly tried to pretend that he didn’t know anything about these firings.
    • Observed that Bilton had only the most slender qualifications for the job of EP and that Weiss had no qualifications for running CBS News.

    That. That is the part that just completely baffles me. Since when do random outsiders get hired to run something as consequential as a major news organization? Trivial jobs like the presidency are up for grabs, but you’d think major news orgs would be more responsible and cautious and attentive to qualifications than the voting public.

    Weiss has attempted to do to journalism what Trump has done to American government: Transform an ancient, messy, imperfect—but basically functional—web of institutions into a corrupt gangland organization. To do so, both Weiss and Trump have depended on the opposition refusing to notice what they are doing and—when they do notice it—to accept ludicrous rationalizations.

    Ergo: Trump turns Elon Musk and DOGE loose on USAID and says it’s about saving money. Trump directs his attorney general to indict his enemies and says it’s about stopping the weaponization of government. Trump has ICE agents assault people and says it’s about deporting hardened criminals.

    Or: Weiss dismantles 60 Minutes and pretends it’s about getting more views on digital.

    Because she’s a whole lot less stupid than Trump, her rationalization is more credible. Evil, but credible.

    Here is why Scott Pelley’s stand was so important: He didn’t just refuse to be party to Bari Weiss’s lie—he stood up and exposed it. Even though she has the power and he does not.

    Remember Christopher Wray? He was the director of the FBI. Trump wanted to fire him. And Wray, instead of forcing the issue, meekly resigned his office and pretended that he was preserving the integrity of his institution.

    Followed by a long list of other examples. Surrender after surrender.

    Authoritarianism exploits politesse.

    The corrupter counts on the existing establishment normalizing her actions, hoping that they can work with her. She depends on people not noticing the plain reality and, if they do notice, politely looking the other way. Or quietly resigning. Not being unpleasant.

    Throughout the 60 Minutes meeting yesterday, one of Bari Weiss’s lieutenants begged Pelley to stop asking questions because, he insisted, Pelley was being “rude.” As if civility and obeisance were the same thing.

    Pelley would have none of it. He kept going. He said the things that were obviously true. He called things by right names.

    Politeness is not always the best approach. With people like Trump, it never is.

  • Guest post: Bad reasons rarely have just one effect

    Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The women don’t matter party.

    This is a point I keep returning to: It is perfectly possible to reach the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. It might be tempting to think that the wrongness of the reasons doesn’t matter as long as people end up accepting the right facts and supporting the right causes. The problem with that intuition is that bad reasons rarely, if ever, have just one effect. The same kind of wrong reasons that gave us Jainism (supposedly a religion of total pacifism) also gave us Jihadism*. Aversion to technology, or anything perceived as unnatural, chemical**, artificial, manufactured, synthetic, or man-made, may seem benign enough when it leads people to reject fossil fuels (hardly unnatural, admittedly), not so much when it leads them to reject vaccines.

    * Even if the wrong reasons lead you to embrace the most harmless and (in terms of consequences) benign conclusions imaginable it will be absolutely no thanks to you as long as the only thing keeping you from crashing planes into buildings or blowing yourself up on a bus is that the coin-toss of faith happened to come up heads rather than tails.

    ** I still haven managed to get any of these people to provide an example of a non-chemical substance. I guess technically dark matter qualifies, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what they have in mind.

  • If only it were true

    Andy Borowitz tells us:

    PYONGYANG—Embattled CBS News chief Bari Weiss abruptly left the network on Wednesday to accept a new role as general manager of North Korea’s state-run media.

    “I was a big fan of her work at CBS,” said the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. “I’ve spent years trying to purge all the news from our media and she pulled it off in a matter of months.”

    “Plus, her willingness to do David Ellison’s bidding proved she can debase herself to a leader who got his position purely from nepotism,” he added.

    But Weiss’s tenure at the North Korean network DLT (Dear Leader Television) got off to a rocky start as staffers quit en masse, complaining about her lack of television experience.

    That’s ok, she can do all their jobs herself.

  • Gender-neutral childmaking

    New York state did what now?

     A New York bill that replaces several traditional family-law terms with gender-neutral language is drawing backlash after passing both chambers of the state Legislature. The Assembly measure, sponsored by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, lists its purpose as replacing terms such as father, mother and filiation in state law.

    But…but…but you need terms such as mother and father in state (and national and local and international) law. Of course you do. The words name a reality, and the reality the words name is an important one, to put it mildly. Also, by the way, the words are not obscene or pejorative or abusive of others so why in hell would you want to replace them with something less informative?

    The bill text changes language in parts of the Family Court Act and related statutes, using terms such as parentage, gestating parent and non-gestating parent in places where older law used paternity, mother and father. The Senate page for the bill shows it passed the Assembly in March and the Senate on June 2.

    Ahhhh I see – gestating parent. It’s just another installment of this fun project to stop talking about women – this project to erase women from public awareness altogether. Listen, have you guys thought of forcing us all to wear burqas?

  • When he snapped

    Trump verbally abuses a female journalist again.

    Donald Trump lashed out at a reporter in the Oval Office yesterday who asked him a question about his $1.8 billion fund that he had the Department of Justice approve to disburse money to people he believes were unfairly targeted by the criminal justice system under President Joe Biden, including the Capitol rioters of January 6, 2021.

    CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump whether the fund was “dead or is it on hold,” and Trump said he would check with his lawyers, then started rambling about how the fund is “a beautiful thing.”

    It’s a very ugly thing. It’s not “unfair” to arrest and prosecute people who make a violent attempt to overthrow an election.

    Collins tried to press him on her original question when he snapped, “Wait a minute. Be quiet!”

    He told her she should be “ashamed” of herself. He then turned to the room to talk about her as if she weren’t there and said, “She used to be a conservative from Alabama, can you believe it?”

    …

    That’s when Trump started to ramble about her and her employer, calling CNN “a very corrupt organization” and her “a corrupt reporter.”

    “Never smiles. She’s a young, beautiful woman, never smiles!” he said about Collins, not explaining why she should smile as he berated her for trying to get answers about the legal status of his slush fund.

    “I never see a smile on her face. I see her standing there with hatred in her eyes.”

    Women are supposed to smile radiantly at him at all times. He can snarl and bark and insult and sneer all he wants, because he has a dick, but women must smirk and simper and placate, because they have no dick.

    Anderson Cooper defended Collins, saying on CNN, “That’s the president of the United States, a nearly 80-year-old man who has no problem commenting on her physical appearance and telling her she needs to smile… That doesn’t happen to men. No one’s ever said that to me in an office setting.”

    “She was there like every other journalist doing her job, standing around with a bunch of nonsmiling men, by the way, all behind her,” Cooper added. “She gets singled out.”

    Because Trump thinks women are inferior and subordinate.

  • Just slap a coat of paint on it

    What a strange thing to do.

    When soccer fans converge on Dallas this month for World Cup games, the aesthetically inclined ones will encounter a city home to art museums, galleries, and public art. And yet, the city will be missing a major and longstanding public artwork, after a conservationist artist’s beloved mural was painted over in May.

    Florida-based artist Robert Wyland has filed a $25 million federal lawsuit against FIFA and the owners of the building where his mural had appeared for a quarter-century, who, he says, painted over Ocean Life (1999), one of a hundred murals he painted around the world to raise consciousness about marine pollution and conservation efforts. The eight-story-high, 17,000-square-foot mural showed endangered humpback whales and dolphins and other marine life. 

    Why would you do that?

    It’s all the more appalling given the ugliness of everything else in that photo. I count at least nine nasty-ugly buildings plus a nasty-ugly parking lot full of boring cars. The mural is the only pleasing thing to look at in that entire swath of urban landscape. Why destroy it to promote a temporary football contest?

  • The Women Don’t Matter Party

    The Green Party boasts of its campaign to re-bulldoze the rights of women.

    Legislative action must comply with every demand of entitled men at the expense of those worthless people known as women. That’s the Green Party’s take on this issue.

    What exactly is “green” about it?

  • To find a way back

    The struggle continues.

    That’s his version of course; Bari Weiss’s is bound to be very different.

    I still think Bari Weiss running CBS is like Trump running the US. Amateur Hour type of thing.

  • Queer pagan liminal healing practices

    Colin Wright gave us this gem:

    This person just got a PhD in human sexuality for a thesis about “How Queer Witches Heal Without Western Psychology” and why “magic” should be a “public health priority.”

    From the abstract:

    “What can queer pagan liminal healing practices teach therapists and other practitioners? Investigating the dichotomies of clinical versus spiritual and history versus present, as well as the inherent liminality between queer memory and queer futurity, aid us in understanding the many subaltern patterns of queer witch healing that are created in the absence of support from mental health fields of practice.”

    Liminal AND subaltern – that is deeply impressive.

    The dissertation was submitted to the – wait for it – California Institute of Integral Studies. Does that sound prestigiousy or what?

    So let’s take a look.

    CIIS Academics

    CIIS cultivates therapists, thought leaders, creatives, and activists through integral education — an embodied and whole-person approach to learning, teaching, and knowing.

    Oh I see, that kind of “academics”. Thought leaders and creatives and activists are all…how shall I put this…self-described. Anyone can call herself a thought leader or creative or activist, without any board of qualification asking to see her credentials. In short there are no criteria, no barriers, no requirements. Therapists are a bit more…liminal?…being as how some kinds of therapists do have to have credentials, but I think people are still free to declare themselves therapists without having to know anything.

    CIIS blends intellectual rigor with embodied practice, offering flexible formats and deeply relational learning environments. Whether online or in person, in community or in solitude, our students engage in transformative education that bridges theory and lived experience.

    That sounds nice, but it also sounds like hokum. Furthermore, it tells us absolutely nothing. It’s just “we are good” but in more words.

    It has a Department of Women’s Spirituality.

    Our Women’s Spirituality programs at CIIS are rooted in deep exploration as a means to create extraordinary change. 

    The Department of Women’s Spirituality envisions a new kind of scholarship, one that puts our interconnectedness at the center of all that we know and do. We offer a transdisciplinary, multicultural, and socially engaged approach to the study of gender and spirituality.  

    It could talk that kind of toe-curling guff and still be a genuine college of some sort…but…that kind of guff is bound to repel any genuine academics, so I have to wonder what the faculty is like.

    There’s one very odd thing about the photo on this page though. It shows a bunch of people on chairs in a big room that doesn’t resemble your basic classroom or seminar room. The odd part is: they are all women. It’s downright spooky.

    Actually, on second look, more than one very odd thing. There are no desks. No laptops. No books. They’re just sitting in a big circle, having a good laugh. Inside the circle there’s a weird Magical table of some sort with totems on it. I guess it’s an interconnectedness seminar.

  • Controversial efforts

    CNN predicts a lawsuit.

    CBS News fired veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, one day after he sharply criticized the newsmagazine’s new leadership in front of the staff.

    CBS said Pelley was terminated for cause, and industry analysts immediately predicted that Pelley might take legal action against the network.

    Here’s hoping.

    The firing is sure to trigger even more scrutiny of CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and her controversial efforts to overhaul the network news division.

    Controversial in part because she is such a random choice for CBS News editor in chief.

    The letter referenced Pelley’s decision to pointedly question and criticize Bilton in a staff-wide meeting on Monday morning. Pelley’s scathing remarks immediately leaked to outside news outlets and ignited a crisis inside CBS.

    In the meeting, Pelley pressed Bilton to explain last Thursday’s firings of top producers and two correspondents at the storied newsmagazine. Bilton, who was appointed on the same day, tried to reassure staff that he respected the program’s legacy while arguing that changes were necessary.

    And a random tech journalist is exactly the right person to make those changes!

    Pelley also accused Weiss, who was not in attendance, of “murdering” “60 Minutes.” When Bilton said Weiss loves the show, Pelley responded, “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

    Pelley’s charge had political overtones. President Donald Trump sued CBS in 2024 over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, and even though legal experts said the suit was frivolous, Paramount’s previous ownership team decided to settle the case in July 2025 rather than defend the program in court.

    Furthermore, Paramount’s new ownership team has sought a close relationship with Trump and his administration, and some critics of CBS have asserted a link between corporate attempts to appease Trump and the current overhaul of “60 Minutes.” 

    Gosh, ya think??

  • It ain’t broke so we’ll break it

    The Bari Weiss 60 Minutes continues to scorch the earth it stands on.

    CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, jettisoning one of the network’s best-known journalists in a clash over the future of “60 Minutes,” the country’s top-rated news program.

    Mr. Pelley, 68, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and a former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” joined the network in 1989. At a staff meeting on Monday, he accused the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” citing the ouster last week of the program’s leadership team and two on-air correspondents.

    “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who was hired last week as the new “60 Minutes” executive producer, wrote in a memo to the show’s staff on Tuesday night.

    Why the flaming hell hire a tech journalist to run 60 Minutes?

    To ruin it, that’s why.

    The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss’s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months.

    It also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss’s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at “60 Minutes,” CBS News’s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has no experience in broadcast TV, to oversee the show. The program’s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation’s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen.

    It ain’t broke, so Bari Weiss is fixing it, i.e. tying it to a cannonball and throwing it overboard.

    At the staff meeting on Monday, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley repeatedly pressed Mr. Bilton about the network’s decision to fire Tanya Simon, the show’s previous executive producer. He also told Mr. Bilton that he had “slender” qualifications to oversee the show and that he would “never be welcome” at “60 Minutes.”

    In his letter to Mr. Pelley on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton expressed his deep frustration with those remarks.

    “You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Mr. Bilton wrote. He called it a “performative display of hostility” that “demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.”

    Me me me, my my my – but what was he doing there in the first place? Why hire a tech journalist to run a muckraking show like 60 Minutes? To kill it, that’s why.

    Ms. Weiss was appointed last year by CBS’s owner, the tech scion David Ellison, with a mandate to revamp the news division for the digital era. An opinion journalist with little experience in broadcast television, Ms. Weiss was also a longtime critic of the legacy media

    Tech tech tech, digital digital digital – all presentation, no substance. If it ain’t broke, don’t revamp it.

  • Addendum

    Nice for some.

    The Department of Justice has permanently abandoned plans for a $1.8 billion anti-weaponization compensation fund created to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump against the Internal Revenue Service, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified to a House panel on Tuesday.

    But Trump, his family members and related business entities remain protected from tax audits and enforcement actions in connection with tax returns filed before last month’s out-of-court settlement of his lawsuit, Blanche told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies.

    So he can cheat with impunity. What a splendid system we have here.

    Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s criminal defense attorney, personally signed off on the DOJ’s May 19 addendum to the settlement of the lawsuit that gave Trump and his family that protection, a day after the deal was announced.

    The addendum also bars the DOJ from prosecuting Trump and the others for cases that would be based on “Lawfare and/or Weaponization,” without defining what those terms mean or what alleged conduct by the targets could entail.

    Never you mind what those terms mean. Trump will let you know what they mean when he takes advantage of them.

    “We are not moving forward with the fund, period,” Blanche told Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the subcommittee. But he later refused to put that promise in writing despite telling Meng that the DOJ would never relaunch the fund.

    Therefore there is no need to put the promise in writing.

    Critics of the fund said that the DOJ’s statement did not make clear whether the department had dropped any plans for the fund.

    Those critics, who include Republican senators, opposed the fund because of the lack of legislative oversight over the fund, and concerns that it would pay people convicted of attacking police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

    Well yes, those are concerns. Look at the pretty butterfly.

    Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., fumed at Blanche after he told her he would not rescind the addendum that granted Trump and his relatives protection from regulatory or legal enforcement actions related to their past returns.

    “Simply put, you just gave the president’s family a tax immunity to the tune of about $100 million,” DeLauro said, referring to the amount that The New York Times last month estimated could be the tax liability that Trump would have faced under a previously pending IRS audit.

    Blanche replied: “Not true.”

    DeLauro continued, “Well, yes, you have, my friend,” over his objections.

    “You know, look, and I just want to say this: the Save America PAC [political action committee controlled by Trump] paid you nearly $10 million between March of 2024 and December of 2024 to serve as President Trump’s personal defense attorney,” she said.

    Well by golly they got their money’s worth!

  • Fit for whose purpose?

    LibDems to women: you don’t matter.

    Civil war has broken out among the Liberal Democrats after Sir Ed Davey pledged to oppose official guidance protecting female-only spaces.

    Female people must not be allowed to have their own spaces. It’s a violation of the sacred rights of men to permit such a thing. Men are bosses, women are employees or slaves; women have no rights which the male person is bound to respect.

    Earlier this month, Bridget Phillipson finally published the long-awaited advice from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). It tells businesses and public bodies to bar trans women – biological men – from women’s toilets and changing facilities.

    The Liberal Democrat leader has written to Ms Phillipson to demand she withdraw the guidance, saying it was not “fit for purpose”.

    He said the guidance was not clear enough, did not protect trans people from discrimination and harassment, and was not “compatible with long-standing British values”.

    What he means is that it doesn’t protect men from being told to get out of the women’s toilet. Well guess what, bro: men shouldn’t be in the women’s toilet in the first place. I bet you used to know that.

    The statement drew stinging criticism from Dr Zoe Hollowood, chair of Liberal Voice for Women, a women’s rights campaign group within the Lib Dems. 

    She accused him of ignoring the views of women and prioritising the views of trans people.

    “Polling consistently shows that Lib Dem voters and members believe single-sex spaces should be protected based on biological sex,” she said. “Ignoring this reality is a betrayal to women everywhere, including in our own party.”

    It’s very embittering, this studied indifference to women.

    Sir Ed’s letter to Ms Phillipson was written with Marie Goldman, the Lib Dem equalities spokesman.

    They wrote: “We do not believe that the new code of practice is fit for purpose. It does not provide clear and workable guidance, and it does not do enough to protect everyone from discrimination, harassment and victimisation.”

    It’s not victimization to tell men they can’t invade women’s spaces. It’s victimization to let men invade women’s spaces.

    Dr Hollowood said: “Liberal Voice for Women is profoundly disappointed by Ed Davey and Marie Goldman’s recent letter to Bridget Phillipson.

    “By focusing on trans inclusion, the Lib Dem leadership has actively chosen to ignore the vast majority of women who rely on single-sex spaces when they are vulnerable and undressing.”

    That’s the thing. They can’t do this “let trans women use women’s spaces” thing without ignoring the vast majority of women who rely on single-sex spaces when they are vulnerable and undressing. The two are welded together. Davey and Goldman can’t be unaware of this, so they’re doing it on purpose.

  • No known background

    Nothing but the best.

    Trump named Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday, a surprise move that would elevate a political ally with no known background in intelligence to a key national spy post.

    Well Trump has no known background in government and that didn’t stop him, so onward with Amateur Hour!

    Pulte made headlines last year for recommending the Department of Justice investigate Democratic lawmakers, Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud. None of the allegations have led to a conviction.

    Pffff who cares. Accusations are fun!

    In a statement, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended the pick: “The President chooses the best and most talented people to serve in his Cabinet. That is why this Administration has achieved record successes for the American people. Bill Pulte is a great selection and he will do a great job on behalf of the American people,” he wrote.

    Hahahahahaha yeah that’s a good one.

    “This appointment speaks volumes about what this president expects from the nation’s top intelligence official,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Rather than selecting a respected national security professional capable of delivering independent judgments, the president has chosen an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political retribution.”

    Boys just wanna have fun.

  • Ok for them but not for us

    Disability Rights UK defends purported trans rights at the expense of genuine women’s rights.

    Disability Rights UK expresses our solidarity with trans & intersex people and the wider LGBTQ+ community following the release of The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s Code of Practice, which sets a dangerous precedent for the weakening of protected characteristics and risks further ostracisation of trans & intersex people from public life.

    What about the weakening of the protected characteristic of being female? What about the ostracism of women from public life? Don’t female people count? If not why not?

    Disability Rights UK issues our unequivocal solidarity with trans people, who should not be forced to choose between risking harassment in public facilities – or not using them at all.  

    But no solidarity with female people, who should be forced to choose between risking harassment in public facilities – or not using them at all?

    Why? Why is it ok to take away women’s rights for the sake of men who pretend to be women?  

    I don’t expect an answer any time soon.

  • There will be no Donaldtown

    Trump’s attempt to throw the best anniversary party is flopping on the beach at low tide.

    …the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!

    On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.

    The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14.

    Well it’s asking a lot to expect Trump to know the difference between royalism and republicanism. He would have to know what the words meant, just for a start.

    Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac.

    It’s bread and circuses but without the bread.

  • Slender qualifications

    A bumpy Monday.

    CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and accused Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program.

    In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

    The 10 a.m. gathering, held at the program’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, was intended as a formal introduction to Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker who was appointed last week as part of a major shake-up at “60 Minutes.” CBS fired Tanya Simon, the previous executive producer, and her deputy, along with Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two of the show’s correspondents — an event that Mr. Pelley referred to as “Black Thursday.”

    Yeh but it’s a shakeup. It’s always good to have a shakeup. Even if it shakes things up from good to bad, it’s good to have it, because of the shaking part. Without shaking everybody gets stale. A nice big pie in the face works wonders.

    The meeting quickly turned tense — not a surprise after months of strain between veteran journalists at “60 Minutes” and Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist who was a longtime critic of legacy media institutions before she became the head of one last year. She was appointed by David Ellison, a tech scion who took control of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, in a multibillion-dollar merger.

    An opinion journalist with no apparent experience or skills that would qualify her to be the executive producer of 60 Minutes.

    Mr. Bilton, who had never worked in traditional broadcast news, opened Monday’s meeting by trying to assuage the anxieties of staff members who believed he might fundamentally change the decades-old DNA of the country’s top-rated news program.

    See that’s the thing right there. The top-rated part. See for reference: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Why mess with 60 Minutes when it’s top-rated? I can see suggesting ideas for subjects to cover, but bouncing in and blowing everything up is another story.

    [Bilton] also warned that the broadcast television industry that incubated “60 Minutes” would soon be obsolete. “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting, OK?” Mr. Bilton said, saying the show had to adapt. “Bari loves this institution,” he added. “She loves ’60 Minutes.’”

    At that, Mr. Pelley interrupted.

    “She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

    Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

    Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”

    Yeah, it’s so exciting watching vandals destroy what has been a pretty valuable resource.

    Ms. Weiss’s handling of “60 Minutes” has generated internal turmoil for months.

    In December, she pulled a segment reported by Ms. Alfonsi, about the brutal treatment of migrants in a Salvadoran prison, saying that it needed more reporting. The segment was critical of the Trump administration, and Ms. Alfonsi said the decision was “political.” The piece ultimately aired with some additional comments from the Trump administration.

    Well that’s great because the Trump administration is such a poor struggling isolated little group being bullied by those mean journalists from the tv.