Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Flashy, provocative – and steeped in misogyny

    Helen Lewis on Yiannopoulos and the populist right:

    Alas, poor Milo Yiannopoulos, we hardly knew ye. Well, actually, that’s not true. I first encountered Yiannopolous in 2012, when he tried to slut-shame a friend of mine, sex blogger Zoe Margolis, after she criticised his tech site, the Kernel.  “We write about how tech is changing the world around us,” he tweeted. “You write about how many cocks you’ve sucked this week. Back off.”

    It was a typical Milo performance. Flashy, provocative – and steeped in misogyny.

    Misogyny was his chief claim to fame for years.

    Helen’s take on the claims about his rise and fall is the same as mine.

    What changed CPAC’s mind? On 18 February, the organisation had tweeted that “free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective”.

    Milo’s important perspective on what was left unanswered, because it is unanswerable. Does anyone, really, think that Milo Yiannopoulos has deep and rigorously researched convictions? That his statements on feminism, on transgender people, or his criticisms of Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones, spring from some deep well of evidence and sincerity?

    My point exactly. He has no important perspective, he has only the habits of a bully. The two are not the same. CPAC invited him to “speak” because it likes that kind of bullying.

    For those on the left, the overwhelming reaction to all this has been: why now? Why these comments, not the ones about “preening poofs“, or lesbians faking hate crimes, or the danger of Muslims, or the harassment campaign against Leslie Jones which got him permanently banned from Twitter? (Do you know how consistently and publicly awful you have to be to get banned from Twitter???)

    There’s only one answer to that, really: yesterday marked the moment when Milo Yiannopoulos ceased being an asset to the mainstream right, and became a liability.

    Why yesterday and not before? Because, frankly, misogynist bullying just doesn’t count.

    The strangest part of yesterday was seeing Milo Yiannopoulous’s increasingly sincere Facebook posts, as the awful realisation dawned on him – as it dawned on Nigel Farage during the referendum – that the sweet shelter of the mainstream right was being withdrawn from him. When he had attacked his female peers in the London tech scene, when he attacked transgender people for being “mentally ill”, when he attacked an actor for the temerity to be black, female and funny in a jumpsuit, he was given licence. He was provocative, starting a debate, exercising his free speech. But yesterday he found out that there is always a line. For the right, it’s child abuse – because children, uniquely among people who might be sexually abused, are deemed to be innocent. No one is going to buy that a 13-year-old shouldn’t have been out that late, or wearing that, or brought it on himself.

    Unless maybe the 13-year-old is black and wearing a hoody.

    I would not be surprised if this isn’t the end of Milo Yiannopoulos’s career, and I will watch with keen interest what strategies he will use for his rehabilitation. He’s still got his outlaw cachet, and there are still plenty of outlets where the very fact that people are objecting to a speaker is assumed to mean they have something that’s worth hearing. And there are plenty more ideas that some on the right would be happy to see pushed a little further into the mainstream – with plausible deniability, of course. If that’s the extreme, then the mainstream shifts imperceptibly with every new provocation. Because he’s not one of us, oh no. They’re not, either. But you see, they must be heard. And provocateurs are useful, until they’re not. But it’s not the left who decides when that is. Only the mainstream right can stop the extremists on their flanks.

    Which is too bad, because most of them seem to have no intention of it.

  • That’s $250 k gone

    Now Yiannopoulos has lost his book deal.

    Publisher Simon & Schuster announced Monday it cancelled Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’s book deal, the latest development in the growing backlash over resurfaced videos of the far-right provocateur criticizing age-of-consent laws.

    A statement from the publishing house offered little explanation: “After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of ‘Dangerous’ by Milo Yiannopoulos.”

    After careful consideration of what, one wonders. Not his notorious extended career as a Twitter bully, certainly, because that’s how he became pseudo-famous, and that’s why Simon and Schuster wanted his “book” in the first place. Not his provocations since then, for the same reason. Not the fact that he’s obviously a nasty shit. So, what, then?

    I suppose the fact that the water got too hot once even CPAC disavowed him. Yesterday they thought he was worth a quarter of a million bucks, and today they decided he’s not, because oh gee gosh look, he’s not a nice guy. Who knew?!

    Simon & Schuster faced a flurry of criticism from the literary worldlate last year when word got out that the publishing house paid Yiannopoulos a $250,000 advance for a forthcoming book.

    Known for inflammatory comments about women and Muslims, Yiannopoulos is an openly gay and self-described “free-speech fundamentalist” who has declared that “feminism is cancer” and was blocked on Twitter after sending tweets targeting  “Saturday Night Live” cast member Leslie Jones, who is black.

    “Free speech fundamentalist” my ass. He’s a professional troll, and nothing else. I blame the BBC for inviting him to talk on its news shows on the basis of nothing other than his history of trolling.

    Now even Breitbart is edging away…which is pretty ridiculous, really.

    By late Monday afternoon, there were ongoing discussions at Breitbart about Yiannopoulos’s future at the company, according to two people familiar with the organization who were not authorized to speak. Inside the newsroom, several staffers made clear to senior leadership that they felt uncomfortable and may decide to leave if he stays, the people said.

    A bit late for that, I think.

    In a Facebook update Monday, Yiannopoulos conceded responsibility for the way some have interpreted his comments.

    “I’m partly to blame,” he wrote. “My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, ‘advocacy.’ I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways.”

    Ha. He deeply regrets nothing. He likes drawing emotional blood. All he regrets is misjudging what his buddies would put up with.

  • Still standing by

    More on Yiannopoulos:

    Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart senior editor and right-wing provocateur, has been profiting from a feedback loop of predictable outrage for some time now, and the alt-right’s takeover of the Republican Party has helped him take his trolling to an even bigger audience.

    His trolling. Not his writing, not his ideas, not his thought – his trolling. He’s not a writer or thinker, he’s just a troll. He’s just a smartass who enjoys bullying people until they squeak, because that’s what trolls do. That’s all there is to him, and that’s why he’s not any kind of poster boy for free speech. Free trolling, yes, but then free trolling isn’t the same thing as free speech.

    On Saturday, Yiannopoulos scored his biggest prize yet (aside from, perhaps, this Trump tweet): an invitation to speak at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “An epidemic of speech suppression has taken over college campuses,” said CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp. “Milo has exposed their liberal thuggery and we think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective.”

    Utter bullshit. He has no “important perspective.” He’s a troll. That smelly kid in the back row who keeps throwing used kleenexes at people has no “important perspective” either; he’s just a bully. There’s no important principle or freedom at stake when it’s trolls or bullies. Trolls and bullies can be told to go away and not come back, and nothing of value is lost.

    Then a couple of conservative groups started circulating videos of Yiannopoulos saying good things about sex with young boys. There was outrage. Outrage was merited, but there should have been outrage years ago. CPAC shouldn’t have invited a notorious trolling bully to “speak” in the first place. It’s revolting that overt public bullying is not enough reason to avoid him.

    CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp was still standing by Yiannopoulos on Sunday night, though he did not address the videos directly. He said in an exchange with National Review’s Jonah Goldberg:

    He is “fighting back” by bullying people. That doesn’t work out well.

  • A nod to the free speech issue on college campuses

    Huh. It turns out that it is possible for Milo Yiannopoulos to say something that will motivate conservatives to de-platform him. Nothing to do with the public humiliation and bullying of women, of course, oh god no, that could never possibly be a reason to tell him to fuck right off.

    Milo Yiannopoulos lost his keynote speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference after tapes surfaced of the right wing provocateur and senior Breitbart editor advocating for sexual relationships between “younger boys and older men.”

    “Due to the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia, the American Conservative Union has decided to rescind the invitation,” said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the group which sponsors CPAC, in a statement Monday afternoon. The group called Yiannopoulos to “further address these disturbing comments,” but defended its original decision to invite him as a nod to “the free speech issue on college campuses.”

    Ah yes, yes indeed – because when it’s a matter of bullying women off social media, that’s free speech, and the consequences to women are just way too trivial to notice. But then when it’s revealed that yes he really is a shit who does bad things to male people too – then the “nod to the free speech issue on college campuses” is no longer worth nodding.

    The statement went on to declare that CPAC does not endorse “everything a speaker says or does.”

    But it does make judgments about which things a speaker says and does constitute a reason to rescind an invitation. Relentless systematic harassment of women, no; advocacy of child sexual abuse, yes.

    Some prominent conservatives seemed to suggest that CPAC had provoked the maelstrom by tying itself to such a controversial figure.

    “The Milo Test,” wrote Charlie Sykes, a conservative former radio host who has written critically of the Republican Party since the rise of Trump. “Anti-Semitism, ok. Racism, ok. Alt Right, ok. Advocacy of pedophilia? Is THAT the bridge too far?”

    Notice he doesn’t even mention the misogyny and harassment.

    Yiannopoulos is aggrieved.

  • If it’s on Twitter it’s true

    Donnie from Queens is still insisting on his tv-sourced claim that Sweden is in tragic disarray because of the Foreign Hordes, even as everyone in sight tries to explain to him that Fox News isn’t the best place to get intel.

    Officials in both countries expressed alarm and dismay on Monday at Mr. Trump’s remarks. Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said the president should get his information from intelligence agencies and not from television.

    Right?? I told him that myself yesterday, but I doubt he manages to read all the responses to his tweets. (I’m kidding. I know damn well he doesn’t read any of them. If he did how would he find time to watch Fox News?)

    The Swedish Embassy in Washington offered the Trump administration a briefing on its immigration policies. Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Lofven, said he was surprised by Mr. Trump’s comments, and noted that Sweden ranks highly on international comparisons of economic competitiveness, human development and income inequality.

    “We have challenges, no doubt about that,” he allowed, adding: “We must all take responsibility for using facts correctly and for verifying anything we spread.”

    Yet even before the prime minister spoke, Mr. Trump pursued his attack. On Twitter, he suggested that the news media was covering up problems related to migration in Sweden.

    In other words, not all immigrants are perfect. Who knew?!

    Also it’s kind of funny how Trump’s grandfather was an immigrant, and his mother was an immigrant, and two of his wives are immigrants. His children are the children of immigrants!!

  • A formal process

    I still say people are confused about this.

    Campaigners have welcomed a decision by a private girls’ school to allow students to use boys’ names and wear boys’ clothes should they wish under a new “gender identity protocol”.

    Oh golly, a girl can wear jeans and call herself Jack. Couldn’t she do that before? Perhaps the school had a very narrow uniform policy which meant she couldn’t wear jeans, and now the school has made it less narrow. Good, but that’s not “a new gender identity protocol.” It’s just wearing trousers instead of skirts.

    St Paul’s girls’ school in west London, whose former pupils include the MP Harriet Harman and the actor Rachel Weisz, will now consider requests from students from the age of 16 to go through a formal process to be known within the school either as boys or as gender-neutral.

    Thus making it seem as if girls who don’t go through “a formal process” are girly-girly all the way down. I’m still not convinced that’s a gain.

    The move is a response to pupils questioning gender identity and an attempt to ensure the safety and wellbeing of pupils who “don’t want to identify as one gender or another”, the high mistress Clarissa Farr told the Sunday Times.

    But it’s not questioning gender identity – it’s reinforcing it.

    Sue Sanders, chair of Schools Out UK, called it a “sensible and smart” move. While enabling students to decide which gender they wanted to be should automatically be protected under the Equality Act, it was a positive move to be welcomed – particularly as it came in LGBT History month, she added.

    “The gender fluidity of young people has become more pronounced in the last three to four years; there is a growing confidence in young people to challenge binary constraints,” she said. “This is really about organisations keeping up with how people are perceiving themselves – this is part of the whole process of exploding those gender boxes.”

    But it isn’t. It’s the opposite. Saying girls who don’t want to wear skirts are therefore not girls is the opposite of challenging gender constraints. Making girls who prefer to wear trousers – and calling that “wearing boys’ clothes” – is not “exploding those gender boxes,” it’s locking people into them and throwing away the key.

  • It was on teevee

    Trump explained on Twitter that his random remark about last night in Sweden was actually about this thing he saw on tv last night. So he’s like those people who prattle artlessly about what Joanie said as if everybody knows who Joanie is when nobody knows who Joanie is. I’ve always said his Theory of Mind was shit, and this is an excellent illustrations of that. We were supposed to understand “Sweden last night” as “that stupid thing on Fox News that Donald Trump watched last night.”

    Derp.

    So here is that story.

    https://youtu.be/OSzjfAMk-RI

    Scholarly stuff, for sure.

  • Be för Sverige

    #PrayForSweden

    https://twitter.com/quintasinjustas/status/833327104234225665

    https://twitter.com/aarontor/status/833338084775297025

    SO MANY IKEA jokes, and no Volvo jokes, no ABBA jokes, no Wallander jokes, no Stieg Larsson jokes? Sad.

    https://twitter.com/jesseberney/status/833117578604212224

  • Mandatory “respect” for religion

    The National Secular Society via Spiked:

    University administrations are becoming increasingly “censorious”, with 43% of universities censoring speech that might “offend” religious people, according to online magazine Spiked.

    The magazine’s Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) claims that 63.5% of UK universities “actively censor speech”.

    Launching its third annual analysis of campus censorship, Spiked said: “The fight for the freedom to criticise religion, to blaspheme, was at the very heart of the historic fight for free speech. Yet it seems some universities, terrified of offending students of faith, are turning the clock back.”

    It highlighted London South Bank University’s Code of Practice for Freedom of Speech, which warns students that one definition of an ‘unlawful meeting’ is one “at which there is a likelihood that the speaker(s) may… commit blasphemy”. In 2014 the University removed posters from their student atheist society for being “religiously offensive”. Following criticism the University removed the policy with a version that did not mention blasphemy, the document was hosted at the same address and gave no indication of when it was issued.

    That’s a little confusing – I think it means the university tweaked its code after Spiked (or others) criticized it, but without saying it had tweaked, or when it had done so. But anyway – I have to wonder why they ever had such a code in the first place. Blasphemy? A mere likelihood of blasphemy? Was “unlawful”? That’s pathetic. I suppose some religious fanatic drew up the code and no one else read it carefully.

    Warwick University’s Student Union Policy is also criticised for stating that speakers ‘must seek to avoid insulting other faiths or groups’. In 2015 the University’s student union barred Iranian-born secularist and human rights activist Maryam Namazie from speaking, claiming she was “highly inflammatory and could incite hatred” if allowed to take up secularist society invitation.

    Trump isn’t helping. People are going to be even more defensive about any and all criticism of Islamism and Islam now, thanks to him. Islam, like all religions, should and must be wide open to criticism, because it makes such large claims on people’s loyalty, and gives such flimsy reason for those claims.

    Nottingham University’s Student Union policy on “respecting religion” opposes “provocative” organisations and “certain groups with known antireligious views”.

    We’re allowed to be anti-religion. This isn’t the 14th century.

  • No checks, no balances

    Don’t worry, we have checks and balances.

    Except that we don’t.

    We have them provided various conditions apply…but otherwise, we don’t. So they’re not really checks and balances in the sense we’ve always understood, are they.

    Brian Beutler at The New Republic points out this obvious problem.

    Donald Trump’s Thursday press conference was so meandering and deranged that it brought the basic ebb and flow of all politics to a halt, as power brokers across Washington, including Republicans on Capitol Hill, stopped what they were doing to watch along in amazement.

    Amazement at what? It’s been obvious all along how mindless and malevolent he is, hasn’t it? So amazement at what? I guess the fact that no one stopped him, that he didn’t make any attempt to restrain himself, that he went on that way for so long, that it kept getting worse and worse? Something like that, I guess. I was amazed myself, despite the obviousness all along. I don’t really know why – maybe it’s just something about human psychology.

    But as surreal as the spectacle was, it wasn’t disturbing enough to shake Republicans out of their determined obliviousness to the chaos of the Trump administration. We’ve seen the pattern repeat itself so many times, it’s grown tiresome: Trump becomes unhinged; Republicans pretend they didn’t see it, or say they won’t comment on every offhanded Trump comment, or just chuckle about his “unconventional” presidency; and everyone moves on.

    Oh, no, it’s been tiresome all along – or rather, not tiresome, but disgusting.

    Their ostrich-like reflexes have been a running joke in politics for months now. But in this case, a great deal of reporting indicates Republicans awoke to the frightening implications of letting an unstable man have free reign over the government, yet remained committed to the course they’ve chosen nevertheless…

    Because he’ll do a lot of things they want done. That’s all. All we can do is try to make it so costly that they’ll draw some lines.

    [T]he unexpected, and abrupt, transition between completely divided and completely unified government has revealed a fatal weakness in our systems of political checks, which Republicans are placing under great strain.

    These systems and processes—congressional oversight, Justice Department autonomy, and legislative independence—weren’t designed to withstand a vengeful, lawless, id-driven madman taking over one party, and then the government, without popular support.

    Weren’t they? Then they should have been. It’s not as if the founding dudes were not familiar with monarchy.

    If congressional Republicans were going to use their power to check Trump, the way they would a non-partisan political or national security threat, we have a pretty decent sense of what they’d do.

    In the policy realm, they might restrain his Muslim ban and deportation force designs; in the oversight realm, they would force him to sell off his assets, or at least release some of his tax returns, as well as launch a full inquiry into whether his campaign colluded with Russian intelligence to disrupt the presidential election. As a matter of basic governing competence, they would try to sideline reckless advisers like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the now-deposed Michael Flynn. Republicans probably can’t stop Trump from holding destabilizing press conferences, but they could make life uncomfortable for him and his team unless and until they started to show some semblance of control.

    Instead they choose to whine anonymously to the press.

    In other words, they’re shits. Like this shit:

    https://twitter.com/CGasparino/status/832290508823265281

    Representative Jason Chaffetz, the GOP’s chief investigator, has asked the Department of Justice to pursue criminal charges against a former Hillary Clinton aide who helped set up her private email server. The same man who continued issuing subpoenas at an impressive clip after the FBI shelved its Clinton investigation believes the appropriate number of subpoenas the scandal-plagued Trump administration should face is zero. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who called on his predecessor, Loretta Lynch, to recuse herself from the Clinton investigation for extremely flimsy reasons—is resisting demands, based on clear-letter rules, that he recuse himself from federal investigations of Trump’s aides and their potential ties to the Russian hackers who disrupted the election.

    Kakistocracy as far as the eye can see.

  • Last Night in Sweden

    You have your Last Year at Marienbad, your Last Tango in Paris or Halifax, your Last Week in Kidderminster – and your Last Night in Sweden. What happened on that Last Night? We don’t know, but we know it was bad.

    https://youtu.be/PESFM-51pOQ

    During a campaign-style rally on Saturday in Florida, Mr. Trump issued a sharp if discursive attack on refugee policies in Europe, ticking off a list of places that have been hit by terrorists.

    “You look at what’s happening,” he told his supporters. “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”

    This is how he actually said it:

    “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. [pause] Sweden! [pause] Who would believe this?”

    Or to put it another way:

    “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden.

    Sweden!

    Who would believe this, Sweden!?”

    Believe what? He didn’t say, and there was nothing he could have said.

    “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound,” Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister, wrote on Twitter.

    Mr. Trump did not state, per se, that a terrorist attack had taken place in Sweden.

    But the context of his remarks — he mentioned Sweden right after he chastised Germany, a destination for refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war and deprivation — suggested that he thought it might have.

    “Sweden,” he said. “They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe.”

    It is of course a stark staring lie to say there was no vetting. There was vetting.

    As the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet noted, Twitter users were quick to ridicule Mr. Trump’s remark, with joking references to the Swedish Chef, the “Muppets” character; Swedish meatballs; and Ikea, the furniture giant.

    Others speculated that Mr. Trump might have been influenced by a Fox News interview of Ami Horowitz, a filmmaker who asserts that migrants in Sweden have been associated with a crime wave, by the correspondent Tucker Carlson. “They often times try to cover up some of these crimes,” Mr. Horowitz said, arguing that those who try to tell the truth about the situation are shouted down as racists and xenophobes.

    So Trump managed to remember the word “Sweden” but nothing else.

  • Not the Enemy

    #NotTheEnemy

    https://twitter.com/lizzieohreally/status/832996143722164224

    https://twitter.com/ava/status/833041000595492864

  • The first thing dictators do is shut down the press

    John McCain points out that Trump’s constant spittle-flecked rages at the news media are the short road to dictatorship.

    Sen. John McCain spoke out Saturday in defense of the free press after President Trump lashed out against the news media several times over the past week, at one point declaring it “the enemy of the American People!”

    Such talk, McCain (R-Ariz.) said on NBC News in an interview set to air Sunday, was “how dictators get started.”

    “In other words, a consolidation of power,” McCain told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd from Munich. “When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press. And I’m not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I’m just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.”

    He’s not not trying to be a dictator. I think he’d be delighted to be a dictator if he could manage it. I don’t know that that’s what he’s trying to do though. In all fairness I think he’s too stupid to think about it that clearly.

  • Nothing to see here

    Donnie wasn’t happy about the latest cover of TIME.

    by artist Tim O'Brien. (courtesy of TIME 2017)

  • The Donald’s prayer

    Wut.

    https://twitter.com/Patriot_Drew/status/833091742568157184

  • Lugenpresse

    Little Hitler is ranting about the media at his Nazi rally. I heard him squawk “But despite all their lies” before I turned the sound off. He’s a fascist piece of crap and he’s going to keep on with this shit until he gets it, or drops dead trying.

    In his speech, Mr Trump said he wanted to speak to Americans “without the filter of fake news”.

    Describing the media as “dishonest”, he repeated his assertion that some outlets “don’t want to report the truth” and were making up their stories about him.

    “We will continue to expose them,” he said, pledging to “win, win, win”.

    In his speech, the president also:

    • Repeated his campaign pledge to keep America “safe” and said the country would “have strong borders again”
    • Said Americans would have “a great healthcare plan” and Obama reforms would be repealed
    • Stressed that the White House was running “so smoothly”, dismissing claims that his administration was in disarray

    It is unusual for a sitting president to hold a rally in the style of those held during election campaigns.

    Yes, it’s unusual for a sitting president to carry on like a fucking Nazi.

    Throughout the week, Mr Trump launched attacks on the media while indicating his excitement at facing crowds in Florida again.

    On Thursday, he held a 76-minute press conference where he told reporters their level of dishonesty was out of control, citing coverage of his campaign’s alleged contacts with Moscow.

    Because he’s a Nazi.

  • Nobody is hungry for the shit sandwich

    So Trump’s insatiable need for total, uncritical admiration, or worship, is messing up that “fine-tuned machine” in a very tangible sense: it’s making it impossible for them to fill their thousands of vacancies.

    During President Trump’s transition to power, his team reached out to Elliott Abrams for help building a new administration. Mr. Abrams, a seasoned Republican foreign policy official, sent lists of possible candidates for national security jobs.

    One by one, the answer from the Trump team came back no. The reason was consistent: This one had said disparaging things about Mr. Trump during the campaign; that one had signed a letter opposing him. Finally, the White House asked Mr. Abrams himself to meet with the president about becoming deputy secretary of state, only to have the same thing happen — vetoed because of past criticism.

    That’s a massive obstacle. There aren’t many intelligent people who uncritically worship Donald Trump. They’re narrowing their hiring pool down to a vanishing point. And there are a lot of vacancies still.

    In some cases, the Trump administration is even going in reverse. A senior political appointee at the housing department, who had already started the job, was fired this past week and marched out of the building when someone discovered his previous statements critical of Mr. Trump. The State Department laid off six top career officials in recent days, apparently out of questions about their loyalty to Mr. Trump.

    “Many tough things were said about him and by him” before last year’s election, Mr. Abrams, who served as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state and George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, said in an interview. “I would have hoped he would have turned toward just hiring the most effective people to help him govern rather than looking back to what we said in that race.”

    But that’s not the kind of human he is…which is another reason intelligent people won’t want to work for him…so the hiring pool shrinks again.

    The ill will between Mr. Trump and much of the Republican establishment works both ways. Many Republicans who might have agreed to work for the president have been turned off by what they consider his sometimes erratic behavior and the competing power centers inside his White House. After firing his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump found that his initial choice for a replacement, Robert S. Harward, a retired vice admiral, would not take the job without assurances that the president was ultimately unwilling to make.

    Harward said it was a shit sandwich.

    Contributing to the discomfort among potential officials was Mr. Trump’s rambling, disjointed news conference on Thursday, which several Republicans said made them worry about what life in the White House or agencies would be like.

    Right? Can you imagine wanting to work in his administration? Even if you agreed with him politically? Nobody wants to work for a giant furious baby.

  • One criterion

    Life in the Trump administration – if they find out you wrote something critical of Trump in the past, they physically remove you from the premises.

    A top aide to President Trump’s housing secretary nominee, Ben Carson, was fired and led out of the department’s headquarters by security on Wednesday after writings critical of Mr. Trump surfaced in his vetting, according to two people briefed on the matter.

    Shermichael Singleton, who was one of the few black conservatives in the Trump administration, had been working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development since Jan. 23 as a senior adviser. He was preparing a cross-country tour for Mr. Carson, who is expected to be confirmed by the Senate this month.

    But they hadn’t quite finished his background check yet. Oh no, oh no, what’s that – a deviation in thought.

    Mr. Trump’s advisers turned up public writings by Mr. Singleton that appeared during the later stages of the campaign in which he was deeply critical of the candidate.

    “My party in particular has allowed itself to be taken over by someone who claims to be a Republican but doesn’t represent any of our values, principles or traditions,” he wrote in The Hill in October 2016.

    Call Security!!

    The firing was reminiscent of the decision by the White House to block a senior Republican foreign policy adviser, Elliott Abrams, from becoming deputy secretary of state. The move came after Mr. Abrams’s anti-Trump writings came to the president’s attention. Mr. Abrams had been the choice of Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.

    This administration has one core belief: that Donnie Trump is the best human who has ever lived.

  • A chummy affair

    I do wish journalists would learn to stop portraying Milo Yiannopoulos as some sort of legit commentator or thinker or even forsooth fellow journalist. He’s a Twitter troll. That’s it. That’s all he is, that’s his only claim to fame, and it’s not something anyone should be taking seriously.

    Despite a brief flare-up of controversy that preceded it, a conversation between Milo Yiannopoulos, the incendiary right-wing author and lecturer, and Bill Maher, the comedian and host of HBO’s “Real Time,” on that program Friday night was a largely docile, chummy affair. There was little conflict or cross-examination, as both men chided the political left for avoiding or drowning out Mr. Yiannopoulos’s views rather than engaging with them.

    He’s not an author and lecturer. He’s a troll. He’s a verbal sadist who makes a career of bullying women. He is not any kind of substantive thinker. He doesn’t have “views”; he has a taste for bullying.

    Introducing Mr. Yiannopoulos, 32, an openly gay editor at Breitbart News, Mr. Maher said: “I think you’re colossally wrong on a number of things. But if I banned everyone from my show who I thought was colossally wrong, I would be talking to myself.”

    Blah blah blah they laughed when Beethoven sat down to play. Yes it would be foolish for Bill Maher to decide to talk only to people he thinks are right about everything, no it does not follow that he should talk to people whose only claim to fame is bullying women off the internet. That’s another thing I wish people would stop being so dense about. It’s generally good to interact with a wide range of ideas and people; that does not mean it’s generally good to seek out the worst, meanest, shallowest bullies on Twitter and interact with them.

    Mr. Yiannopoulos began the interview by cracking jokes about gay people (whom he said he did not hire because they did not show up to work on time) and women, and telling Mr. Maher’s audience that they were “very easily triggered.”

    “All I care about is free speech and free expression,” Mr. Yiannopoulos explained. “I want people to be able to be, do and say anything. These days, you’re right, that’s a conservative issue.”

    Bullshit. Milo Yiannopoulos is not another Voltaire or Tom Paine or John Stuart Mill. Milo Yiannopoulos is another random shithead who gets his jollies from bullying women in public.

    Describing himself as “a virtuous troll,” Mr. Yiannopolous said, “I hurt people for a reason.”

    He said people “want to police humor” because “they can’t control it.”

    “Because the one thing that authoritarians hate is the sound of laughter,” Mr. Yiannopolous said.

    Milo Yiannopoulos is not Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Milo Yiannopoulos is a court jester for authoritarians.

  • From the Space Needle

    The sunset this afternoon:

    Image may contain: ocean, sky, cloud, twilight, outdoor, water and nature

    Image may contain: ocean, sky, cloud, twilight, outdoor, water and nature