Akua Reindorf on the protracted refusal to comply:

Even for grizzled veterans of the gender wars, it was surreal that the court needed to spell out that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, a woman is a person born female and not a person born male. More surreal still is the fact that, for ten months now, many employers and service providers have simply ignored the judgment and have continued to allow males to use women’s facilities.

What is not a surprise is that this widespread defiance of the law has been brought about by a campaign of disinformation waged by trans rights activists. It was just such a campaign that convinced employers and service providers they were legally obliged to allow trans people to use opposite-sex facilities in the first place. That false idea should have been laid to rest by the judgment in For Women Scotland. Instead, activists claimed that the judgment is “not yet law” until parliament passes the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory code of practice.

Which parliament is conspicuously not getting around to doing. What a surprise.

Last Friday the High Court rejected the latest attempt to frustrate the process through a judicial review brought against the EHRC by the omnicause campaign group the Good Law Project. The High Court dismissed all the arguments deployed by GLP’s barristers against an interim update published by the EHRC last year. It also rejected the submissions made on behalf of Phillipson, who was an interested party in the case. Having stated that she was taking a neutral stance, her submissions were obviously aligned with those of GLP.

That last sentence is ambiguous. I think it needs a “despite” before “Having stated.” I think the point is that Phillipson claimed to be neutral but has come down heavily on the side of the men in lipstick.

A letter sent by GLP to Phillipson on the same day demanded that she return the code to the EHRC to be rewritten, on the basis that it was now clearly “wrong about the law”. Nothing in the High Court’s judgment remotely resembled this egregious spin.

Depressingly, at least three MPs immediately went in to bat alongside GLP. It is likely that these backbench interventions will intensify the pressure on Phillipson.

All for the glorious cause of demolishing women’s rights.

You have got to be kidding us.

Oh yes, there’s a lot we take for granted, because we’re…not punished for acting in a way that is feminine. Is that right Bucko? Are you sure? Have you ever taken a peek at the stats on male violence against women? Given those stats, isn’t it kind of obvious that we are punished for acting in a way that is feminine? Granted not in the way you mean, i.e. being a man and putting on lipstick and a tiny skirt, but in the more general way, which codes everything women do as irritatingly wrong and sly and womany. Women are very much at risk from men with short tempers, and such men are not scarce. Your discomfort with yourself is a you thing, and we do not care.

Andy Borowitz:

California US House Rep. Ted Lieu has dropped explosive new allegations against Donald Trump over the mention of the latter’s name in the Epstein files. Lieu claimed that the unredacted Epstein files, which were viewed by a select group of US House Reps, contain disturbing allegations against Trump.

“Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times,” Lieu said. “In those files, there are highly disturbing allegations, allegations of Donald Trump raping children and threatening to kill children.”

I don’t think he would risk saying that if it weren’t true, because Trump.

We do keep pointing it out – that misogyny is a thing, that it’s not obscure or rare, that a lot of men really do have profound contempt for women, which can easily tip into hatred and violence.

Millions of files related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a “global criminal enterprise” that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council has said.

The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US justice department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls.

“So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” they said in a statement.

We keep telling you…

Jolyon gets dragged by a minor local journalistic outfit known as The Times.

That’s gotta sting.

Lawyers, academics and activists have turned on the Good Law Project, accusing it of “selling hope” through fundraising to fight for transgender rights, despite being repeatedly defeated in court.

In a letter to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, more than 30 barristers and legal academics accused the project, a non-profit campaign organisation, of publishing “egregiously false” claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces last week.

Mr Justice Swift on Friday dismissed a legal challenge brought by the project against Britain’s rights watchdog over a now-removed update on its website, which said that trans women “should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities” in workplaces or public-facing services such as shops and hospitals. The same applied for trans men using men’s lavatories.

Yes, but trans men are not a potential threat to men the way trans women are a potential threat to women.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published the update in April last year, just over a week after the UK’s highest court ruled in April that the words “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 referred to a biological woman and biological sex.

…

Jolyon Maugham, the founder and executive director of the Good Law Project, said after the judgment that “the judiciary can’t be trusted always” in a reaction that critics have dubbed “Trumpian”.

The project claimed the ruling meant that Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces, and started a fundraiser that has brought in tens of thousands of pounds to appeal. Separately, it has crowdfunded more than £150,000 for its “fighting fund for trans rights”.

One has to admit, they’re good at the grifting part. Results, not so much.

In their letter to Phillipson, the lawyers and academics said GLP had made inaccurate conclusions about the ruling, specifically in claiming “the High Court makes clear that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services”.

Hey it’s just a typo. Nobody knows how that “not” got in there. Must be the intern.

The project also claimed the court had said it was “not true” that allowing a woman-only space to be accessed by biological women and transgender women was “very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination”. The lawyers’ letter said: “The Good Law Project’s assertion to the contrary is straightforwardly false.”

The letter said any “uncertainty or complexity” around the Supreme Court judgment last year was “compounded (if not directly caused) by the dissemination of false information, such as that now promulgated by the Good Law Project”. It added: “We are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.”

Ouch. That’s harsh. I hope Joly is reading it over and over and over…

Jolyon gets the attention he so richly deserves. The Times:

More than 30 barristers and academics have accused the campaign group of making ‘egregiously false’ claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces.

In other words they have accused Jolyon and his groupuscule of repeatedly lying.

Lawyers, academics and activists have turned on the Good Law Project, accusing it of “selling hope” through fundraising to fight for transgender rights, despite being repeatedly defeated in court.

In a letter to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, more than 30 barristers and legal academics accused the project, a non-profit campaign organisation, of publishing “egregiously false” claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces last week.

Mr Justice Swift on Friday dismissed a legal challenge brought by the project against Britain’s rights watchdog over a now-removed update on its website, which said that trans women “should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities” in workplaces or public-facing services such as shops and hospitals. The same applied for trans men using men’s lavatories.

You’d think it would be self-evident. Men don’t get to use women’s facilities, because men are men. Duh.

The project claimed the ruling meant that Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces, and started a fundraiser that has brought in tens of thousands of pounds to appeal. Separately, it has crowdfunded more than £150,000 for its “fighting fund for trans rights”.

Well you don’t expect them to do all this pestering for free do you?

In their letter to Phillipson, the lawyers and academics said GLP had made inaccurate conclusions about the ruling, specifically in claiming “the High Court makes clear that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services”.

That’s not so much inaccurate as…how shall I put this…an untruth.

The project also claimed the court had said it was “not true” that allowing a woman-only space to be accessed by biological women and transgender women was “very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination”. The lawyers’ letter said: “The Good Law Project’s assertion to the contrary is straightforwardly false.”

The wording here is fuzzier than I would like, but I think what it’s saying is that Jolyon’s Project said things that are not true, aka straightforwardly false.

The letter said any “uncertainty or complexity” around the Supreme Court judgment last year was “compounded (if not directly caused) by the dissemination of false information, such as that now promulgated by the Good Law Project”. It added: “We are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.”

Ouch! That’s not flattering.

Posting on a popular pro-transgender forum, one user said: “Maugham always pretends he’s had some sort of win even when he has unambiguously and comprehensively lost. He did the same with his Brexit cases. I’m fed up of this turd polisher claiming he does so much for us.”

snerksnerksnerk

Originally a comment by Artymorty on If.

It’s extra infuriating when it’s gay men making these kinds of arguments, because we know more than most how much male transvestism is driven by fetish — we see it in our community, on the dating apps, in the leather bars, etc. Within the gay male community, both online and in the real world in virtually any big city, there are designated secluded, judgment-free zones for men to let their sexual quirks and kinks out in private.

I can see how at least some degree of cameraderie between gay men and straight or bisexual transvestites emerged: both groups lived with sexual desires that were seen as incompatible with proper society. But as homosexuality has found mainstream acceptance, transvestism cannot follow in its footsteps — at least not in the way that it wants — because it’s a fundamentally different thing. Homosexuals can integrate happily into society without forcing anyone to play along with a lie, and without impinging on other people’s rights. (Well, maybe a few Christian wedding cake bakers will take issue with that last point.)

Transvestites can in theory integrate into society, too: they just have to stay out of women’s spaces and stop demanding that everyone call them women. And they don’t want to do that.

And gay men who style themselves as allies to transwomen are failing to see that the conditions required for transwomen to get what they want are not the same as the conditions that gay men required to get what we wanted. We only needed people to tolerate us. The transwomen want women to actively play along with a fantasy. That’s not the same thing at all. It’s a great big fork in the road, where their paths and ours diverge.

And the thing about admitting they’re men is, they already do it when they’re among us gay men. If a trans-identifying man enters a men-only bar or logs into a men-only dating app, he’s tacitly admitting that he’s a man. And it happens all the time. The apps are overflowing with them; the leather bars have special nights for them, etc. They often go further than that: the very same men who insist they’re transwomen when they’re at work or shouting at people on Twitter or whatever, they will categorize themselves as “CD/TV” (crossdresser/transvestite) in their online profiles when they want to socialize in men-only virtual spaces, for example.

They know what they are, they know what they’re doing. And so does Peter Tatchell.

Jonathan Kay at Quillette:

On 10 February, Jesse Van Rootselaar (also known as Jesse Strang) killed eight people in the remote British Columbia mining town of Tumbler Ridge. The first two victims were the killer’s mother and half-brother, whom Van Rootselaar shot at home. Van Rootselaar then went to a local secondary school and murdered six more people—five of whom were twelve- or thirteen-year-old students—before committing suicide. Twenty-seven others were injured. It was the deadliest Canadian school shooting in almost four decades, and the highest-casualty mass-shooting event in the nation’s history.

…

When news of the tragedy was first reported to Canadians on the afternoon of 10 February, it appeared to include a striking anomaly: The killer, we were told, was a “woman.” There are scattered examples of female killers in the annals of Canadian crime. But this would be the first time in the recorded history of Canada and its colonial antecedents—going back more than 400 years, to the early seventeenth century—that a woman had gone on this kind of murderous rampage.

It soon became clear, however, that Van Rootselaar wasn’t a woman. He was an eighteen-year-old man—a gun-obsessed, middle-school dropout whose many mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria. The mass murderer called himself a woman. But that doesn’t mean he was, or that the rest of us have to live in the imaginary universe he (literally) built for himself.

According to Royal Canadian Mounted Police deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald, Jesse was “a biological male” who “approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly.” In keeping with Canadian policies implemented by Justin Trudeau’s government in 2017, McDonald and other police officials then proceeded to refer to the killer with female pronouns, as if he actually were a woman.

It’s so heart-warming when the government orders us to lie about a male committing mass murder.

This kind of institutionally mandated misuse of language is dishonest at the best of times. But it is especially offensive when it serves to misrepresent reality on behalf of a murderer (posthumously or otherwise). 

And – what Jonathan Kay fails to point out – when it serves to misrepresent reality about which sex is more prone to extreme violence. Women just don’t do this shit, and that matters.

Men are more violent than women, which is why they account for more than ninety percent of the world’s prison population, and commit about ninety percent of all homicides. For acts of mass murder, US data puts the corresponding figure at 98 percent. This greater tendency toward violence is rooted largely in male evolutionary psychology, and doesn’t get erased when a man changes his pronouns or puts on a skirt. Simply put, being male (and young) represents one of the most important risk factors that exist when it comes to violent crime.

There. Better late than never.

The theocrat’s veto:

If the Turkish man on trial for burning a copy of the Quran loses his case on Tuesday, the Trump administration is preparing to offer him political asylum in the United States.

According to the Telegraph, State Department officials are already making plans to help him leave the country. Let that sink in. A man who came to Britain as a refugee — fleeing the Islamic terrorism that, as he puts it, destroyed his family’s life in Turkey — may soon have to flee Britain itself and seek asylum in America because we cannot protect his human rights. I cannot think of anything more embarrassing for Sir Keir Starmer.

So what’s this case about? On 13 February last year, Hamit Coskun — a Turkish-born atheist of Armenian-Kurdish descent — travelled to the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge and set fire to a Koran as a political protest against what he considers the Islamification of his homeland.

A passer-by, Moussa Kadri, attacked him with a knife before kicking him to the ground. Kadri received nothing more than a suspended sentence, but Coskun was convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence — another name for blasphemy, an offence Parliament abolished eighteen years ago.

Only eighteen years ago.

And only to replace it with a new form of blasphemy, which being interpreted is the audacious refusal to believe that men can be women.

The Free Speech Union, which I run, and the National Secular Society took up his cause. At Southwark Crown Court in October, his conviction was overturned.

Mr Justice Bennathan ruled that while burning a Koran might be something many Muslims find deeply upsetting, the right to freedom of expression must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.

But the Crown Prosecution Service, which originally charged Coskun with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to “the religious institution of Islam”, is now appealing to the High Court to get that acquittal overturned. The hearing is tomorrow.

How is it possible to cause alarm or distress to a religion or a “a religious institution” called Islam? A religion is an abstraction; it doesn’t have feelings. Islam did not quiver all over when Coskun burned the Koran; Islam in fact had no reaction at all, because it can’t, because it has no body and no brain.

If the CPS succeeds, it will establish a chilling principle: that breaking an Islamic blasphemy code — whether by burning a Koran or showing schoolchildren cartoons of Mohammed — will become a religiously aggravated public order offence, provided the blasphemer is violently attacked by a Muslim fanatic.

You’ve heard of the heckler’s veto. This would create a stabber’s veto. It would sound the death knell for free speech in Britain.

…

The FSU and the National Secular Society are jointly funding Coskun’s legal defence because this case is about far more than one man and one Koran.

It is about whether the criminal law can be used to enforce a de facto Islamic blasphemy code. It is about whether violent thugs get a veto over what the rest of us are permitted to say, write, draw, or burn.

And it is about whether Britain remains the kind of country in which political dissidents from tyrannical regimes can seek refuge — or the kind from which they flee.

Mind you, I don’t recommend fleeing to Trump’s US. He may welcome rebels against Islam, but rebels against the Maga version of Baby Jesus are a whole other story.

One small item from a Mother Jones piece about Trump and Epstein:

Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal’s response rips the hide off Trump’s case on many levels. For instance, it contends, rather reasonably, that reporting Trump was pals with Epstein before Epstein was busted is not defamatory. But the killer argument is that the WSJ article was “consistent with plaintiff’s reputation.” Trump, Murdoch’s lawyers maintain, “admitted to instances of using bawdy language when discussing women. Plaintiff thus cannot allege that the Article damaged his reputation.”

“Bawdy” is doing a lot of work here. Murdoch’s lawyers could have gone with “sleazy” or “lecherous” or “misogynist.” But they landed on a Benny Hill-ish description that’s less offensive in tone. 

Of course they do. Always. Mainstream bros writing and talking in mainstream media always minimize sexual harassment this way. They think it is minimal. They think it’s trivial, and they think women don’t matter enough to make it not trivial. Just bitches whining, amirite?

Murdoch asks the court to “take judicial notice of both the extensive public reporting of [Trump’s] past comments” and notes that Trump “has a well-documented reputation for bawdiness based on his past statements about women.” The complaint serves up examples starting with Trump’s infamous remark: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

There it is again, in the very next paragraph. “Bawdiness.” Not misogyny, not sexism, not contempt for and belittlement of women; just the playful and forgivable “bawdiness” that’s just good beefy fun for all concerned.

Once you notice this kind of thing you see it everywhere. That’s because it is, in fact, everywhere.

Peter Tatchell longs to see women’s rights demolished.

Peter Tatchell wishes women were required to have “a legitimate reason” for not taking our clothes off in the presence of male strangers. It looks as if he thinks simply not wanting to take our clothes off in the presence of male strangers is not a legitimate reason. All the tender concern is for men who want to watch women taking their clothes off; none is for women who don’t want to oblige.

Priorities.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s relationship with U.S. Coast Guard officials has become strained throughout her first year leading the department, according to two U.S. officials, a Coast Guard official and a former Coast Guard official.

The tensions between Noem and the only branch of the U.S. military overseen by DHS stem from some early decisions she made that rankled Coast Guard officials, including a verbal directive to shift Coast Guard resources from a search-and-rescue mission to find a missing service member, the sources said.

So she’s the “let them drown” kind of Coast Guard boss.

Noem’s focus on meeting the Trump administration’s deportation quotas appears poised to further impact Coast Guard operations in the coming months, according to new guidance recently issued to Coast Guard Air Station Sacramento this year. Based on DHS priorities, the air station, which is among those responsible for a majority of deportation flights, has designated its first priority to be the transport of detained immigrants on its C-27 aircraft within the U.S., according to multiple U.S. officials familiar with the orders.

The new orders moved search-and-rescue operations, which have long been the Coast Guard’s core mission, to a lower priority, the officials familiar with the orders said. They said counternarcotics efforts and Coast Guard training are prioritized above search-and-rescue operations.

A word of advice: stay away from bodies of water until the Trump regime is over.

The dissonance between Noem’s priorities and senior Coast Guard officials is a lesser-known part of the fallout from President Donald Trump’s mass deportations policy, and is largely playing out behind the scenes. Coast Guard officials have privately raised concerns with each other and confided in former officials about some of Noem’s directives and use of Coast Guard resources to service her and the administration’s priorities, the current and former Coast Guard officials said.

At times, the tensions have escalated into confrontations, the sources said. In one contentious incident in May, Noem’s top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, berated Coast Guard flight staff and threatened to fire them for taking off without one of the secretary’s personal items on board — a heated blanket, according to the current and former Coast Guard officials.

Let people drown, but don’t you dare forget to pack Noem’s heated blanket.

“The primary mission was search-and-rescue,” the former Coast Guard official said. “And now the number one stated mission of the Coast Guard is border security, that is a cultural change that the culture hasn’t quite caught up to.”

The official added that under Noem’s leadership “you never know what’s going to happen” and that morale at Coast Guard headquarters “is terrible.”

Same applies to Trump and all of us.

The Daily Mail on the fall of Lynsay Watson:

A transgender activist who accused Father Ted co-writer Graham Linehan of harassment has been arrested outside court over a separate case. Former police officer Lynsay Watson was detained by officers near Manchester Civil Justice Centre, with pictures of the appearance outside court widely shared online.

Widely shared because Watson turns out not to be a harmless slender wisp of a girl.

Former PC Watson was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.

Watson appeared for an oral permissions hearing for judicial review of a Cambridgeshire Police decision not to prosecute Helen Joyce for misgendering another trans activist, Freda Wallace. Watson was arrested after the hearing on the basis of outstanding arrest warrants for online harassment.

The ex-police officer was previously accused of reporting Linehan to police over posts on X that prompted the writer’s arrest at Heathrow airport last September.

Linehan later had action against him dropped. He was convicted last November, in a different case, of criminal damage after throwing a phone belonging to 18-year-old Sophia Brooks, though [he] was cleared of harassment.

“Sophia” Brooks is that other persistent nuisance and pest.

Watson had posted on X under the account name ‘SEEN police OFFICIAL Open Public Network’ before this was suspended. A subsequent similar account on rival platform Bluesky also no longer exists.

Ah, that explains why I couldn’t find SEEN police the other day when the news broke.

Watson was sacked for gross misconduct by Leicestershire Constabulary in October 2023 after trolling another free speech campaigner online, branding him a woman beater and a Nazi.

Watson has also been behind a large number of legal challenges related to gender and trans rights, including against three police forces, British Transport Police Federation and the Ministry of Defence.

Watson sent former police officer Harry Miller more than 1,200 messages over an 18-month period, describing him as a fascist and a bigot and labelled his campaign group Fair Cop ‘domestic terrorists’. Ex-PC Watson targeted Mr Miller because his views about gender identity were ‘in direct contradiction to her own’ a police misconduct panel was told.

In the messages Watson made ‘factual assertions that Mr Miller was violent towards women’. The panel heard Watson initially sent messages as a police officer – prompting Mr Miller to complain to Leicestershire Police.

And so on. The charge sheet is long. Watson is not a nice man.

Andy Borowitz yesterday:

Can the attorney general of the United States go to prison?

The answer, of course, is yes: John Mitchell, who served under Richard M. Nixon, later served 19 months behind bars for crimes related to the Watergate cover-up.

Will the toxin known as Pam Bondi follow in his footsteps?

It’s worth considering in light of her appearance before Congress on Wednesday, a performance that Kimberly Guilfoyle might call “too shouty.”

Her testimony was unquestionably obnoxious. But was it criminal?

When you examine the evidence, it doesn’t look good for Pam.

This was the pivotal moment: responding to a question from California Rep. Ted Lieu about the Epstein scandal, Bondi snapped, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime. Everyone knows that.”

Lieu, who must have been tickled that Bondi was dumb enough to step into the weasel trap he set for her, responded that the attorney general might have just committed perjury. Which, as every Watergate superfan knows, is exactly what earned her Republican predecessor, John Mitchell, a trip to the pokey.

She promptly blew a fuse, but the law is the law, an oath is an oath, perjury is perjury.

When the Trump shitshow is finally over, two things must happen. First, there must be a solid month of dancing in the streets. Second, there must be a reckoning: ideally, Nuremberg-style trials of the corrupt quislings who enabled this unprecedented crime spree. With those enjoyable tribunals in mind, let us now consider the case of Pam Bondi.

Remember when Trump nominated Matt Gaetz to be attorney general? We were so much younger then—although, it should be added, not young enough for Matt Gaetz.

At the time, I observed that Gaetz’s nomination was not what QAnon had in mind when they said they wanted to bring pedophiles to justice. In the end, Matt turned out to be as reckless with Venmo as he was about the age of consent, and Trump quickly withdrew his name.

Pundits claimed that Trump never expected Gaetz to pass muster with the Senate. By their reckoning, he was a “sacrificial lamb”—an odd way to describe a man who, in his personal life, had consistently behaved like a wolf. But by shitcanning Gaetz, the theory went, Trump was sending a signal to his Senate toadies that they’d better confirm all his other nominees, no matter how idiotic, incompetent, or drunk. When it came to Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Dr. Oz, Kash Patel, and myriad other passengers in Trump’s clown Cybertruck, the gambit seemed to pay off.

Is it clown Cybertruck, or cyber Clowntruck? I would have thought the latter.

As for the job of attorney general, Democrats and Republicans alike seemed relieved that it would not be filled by a summer-stock version of Jeffrey Epstein. Surely, whoever Trump named as Gaetz’s replacement would be an improvement.

Instead, Trump picked Pam Bondi.

In 2016, when she was Florida attorney general, Bondi secured her place in Trump’s heart with a speech at the Republican National Convention. Her bloodcurdling attack on Hillary Clinton inspired the GOP mob to break into a familiar chant, which prompted Bondi to comment, “Lock her up? I love that.” And so, by approving the incarceration of a woman who had never been charged with a crime, Bondi displayed an attitude towards due process that would someday serve her splendidly as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

She would, of course, have another opportunity to assert her preference for imprisoning innocent people with the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. On April 14, 2025, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump’s accomplice in the world’s most notorious administrative error, joined him in the Oval Office, receiving a much warmer welcome there than was offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After chummily congratulating each other on the abduction and deportation of a non-criminal, the two men started workshopping how their brilliant strategy might be applied to innocent American citizens.

“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”—a stroke of branding so cringe, it’s amazing it didn’t come from Elon Musk. “You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump advised him.

Billions for me, the gulag for thee.

It’s not that Bondi is bad at her job—it’s that she’s outstanding at the exact opposite of her job, that is, using the DOJ to subvert justice whenever possible. Bondi’s Department of Injustice, a mutant creation worthy of George Orwell and Lewis Carroll, has proven inhospitable to career DOJ lawyers, who have struggled in court to defend the indefensible.

One such staffer, senior immigration attorney Erez Reuveni, committed what Bondi apparently considers a cardinal sin: uttering a truthful statement within earshot of a judge. After acknowledging what was obvious to any thinking person (but seemingly elusive to Messrs. Trump and Bukele)—that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a mistake—Reuveni was put on indefinite leave and then fired.

Meanwhile, Liz Oyer, a longtime DOJ pardon attorney, was fired for refusing to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost them after pleading no contest to domestic battery charges in 2011. Apparently, Trump believes Mel Gibson needs lethal weapons more urgently than Ukraine.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see Trump standing up for the rights of domestic abusers, since a sizable number of the January 6 rioters he pardoned fit that description. He doubled down on his support for this cohort by appointing a crony accused of domestic violence, Herschel Walker, ambassador to the Bahamas.

And so on. Trump and his enablers are so horrible in so many dimensions that we literally can’t keep track, not if we want to eat and sleep and get a breath of fresh air too.

H/t Gnu Atheism

Krauss says let’s not go crazy here.

As Epstein was nearing the end of his thirteen-month jail sentence in 2009, he called me. He had learned that I had moved to ASU and that I was hoping to establish the Origins Project program there. Jail time, he said, had convinced him that making money should no longer be his primary goal. He wanted to support science and science education, and he wanted advice about where to direct his money. He expressed interest in supporting the ASU effort. I told him that the conduct for which he had been convicted had been, aside from its illegality, highly inappropriate and plainly stupid. I also thought that his plan was laudable and possibly redemptive. 

Notice anything missing?

No mention of the trauma of the girls caused by “the conduct for which he had been convicted”. Tut tut it was illegal and highly inappropriate and plainly stupid – dear me how naughty. Nothing about the harm done to the girls. No mention of the girls. No horror at what his friend did to the girls. No empathy for the girls. No mention of the girls. Abstract hand-wringing, but the real guts and gore of the matter left tactfully out. What a horrible man.

The nature of the crime of which Epstein was convicted—soliciting a prostitute who was under the age of consent in Florida (which he claimed not to have known)—didn’t seem, at the time, to be sufficiently monstrous to justify prohibiting him from further worthwhile social activity.

Note the “at the time.” I suppose that’s because nobody happened to say so in Krauss’s hearing at the time. Apparently he was and is incapable of figuring it out for himself.

Lawrence Krauss says we’re making too much fuss over Jeffrey Epstein.

Wikipedia:

In 2005, police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein after a parent reported that he had sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter. Federal officials identified 36 girls, some as young as 14 years old, whom Epstein had allegedly sexually abused. Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He was convicted of only these two crimes as part of a plea deal agreed by Alexander Acosta of the U.S. Department of Justice, and he served 13 months in custody which included extensive work release.

Do we think that’s too harsh?

Even Republicans.

Trump’s most unbridled critics at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference have not been Europeans but Americans – and not just Democrats.

A few Republicans, out of earshot of the US president’s favoured Fox News, have had the courage to challenge Trump’s diet of tariffs and unpredictability.

If only that were all. There’s also the diet of stupidity and egomania and brutality and greed and the list goes on.

Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, accused Trump of “doubling down on stupid”. He said: “Never in the history of the US has there been a more destructive president than the current occupant of the White House in Washington. He is trying to recreate the 19th century. He is a wholly owned subsidiary of big oil gas and coal.”

There it is. The stupidity part must never be overlooked or obscured.

Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor warned: “Trust is built over generations and it can be lost fast. In the last 14 months we have done a lot of damage. If you say no to Canada, you say yes to China.”

A Republican in attendance, Senator Thom Tillis, echoed her, warning the law of economics tariffs were going to cause damage. Strikingly, he also challenged Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest Republican allies, who recently said, “who gives a shit who owns Greenland?”

Appearing at the conference, Tillis said: “The 85,000 Indigenous people in Greenland give a shit about who owns Greenland. And at the end of the day, we need to show respect.”

Well said.

Peter Baker on Trump’s personality cult:

After a year back in the White House, Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote himself as the singularly dominant figure in the world have become so commonplace that they no longer seem surprising. He regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.

One thing that’s interesting about that is the focus on quantity as opposed to quality. Trump is going for the Too Dumb to Notice crowd as opposed to the Not That Dumb one. The more he leans into the vulgar boasting the more he disgusts the kind of people he wants flattering him.

While Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime promoting his personal brand, slapping his name on hotels, casinos, airplanes, even steaks, neckties and bottled water, what he is doing in his second term as president comes closer to building a cult of personality the likes of which has never been seen in American history. Other presidents sought to cultivate their reputations, but none went as far as Mr. Trump has to create a mythologized, superhuman and omnipresent persona leading to idolatry.

Not least because it doesn’t work, because it can’t work. See above. It’s grotesquely trashy and absurd behavior, so it’s only going to appeal to trashy absurd people and crooks.

Many presidents have enjoyed being the center of attention. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth notably said her father “always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” Others struggled with that kind of politics. George H.W. Bush painfully tried to avoid the first-person singular “I” in sentences because growing up his mother taught him that it sounded boastful.

Boastful is not something Mr. Trump ever learned to avoid, nor can he fathom why predecessors passed on self-promotion. When he visited Mount Vernon during his first term, he expressed surprise that Washington did not name the estate for himself. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” Mr. Trump told people.

And by “stuff” he meant “everything”.

Let the cars run free!

The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official.

The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.

That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped on Thursday by its killing of the “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.

Oh who cares about human health. What a silly thing to protect! The important health is the health of cars! They need to run free every day.

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups.

“Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”

We’re special. It makes us so proud!

Car buyers could still vote with their wallets, demanding more fuel-efficient cars. California has vowed to sue to maintain stricter standards. And the Department of Transportation still regulates fuel economy under rules meant to conserve oil.

But last year, the Trump administration proposed weakening the fuel economy standards to largely irrelevant levels. The Republican-controlled Congress also set civil penalties for violations at $0, essentially making them voluntary for automakers. In addition, Congress last year blocked California’s clean-car rules.

Dirty air is better! It builds character.

Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, called the end of the finding “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” He accused Democrats of having launched an “ideological crusade” on climate change that had “strangled entire sectors of the United States economy,” particularly the auto industry, which has struggled to sell electric vehicles.

While pretending climate change/global warming is fictional or trivial or both is not ideological at all.

Hoooooooooly cow – he didn’t – did he?

He did.