Category: Notes and Comment Blog

It’s always worth being reminded of how illegitimate the whole situation is. Bush 2 lost the popular vote, Trump lost the popular vote, McConnell blocked Merrick Garland because he could and then rushed in Amy Coney Barrett because he could. A minority rules over us.

The confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett did more than install a supermajority of conservatives in the court. The locus of power on the court shifted from the more mainstream conservatism of Justice Roberts to the more ideological and rigid extremes of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

As the Texas ruling underscored, this is a court far more conservative than the nation whose constitutional meanings it is meant to protect. And it is a court that owes its composition to the triumph of anti-democratic processes, in which a majority of its members were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and/or were confirmed by a bloc of senators elected by a minority of voters.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

This one is hilarious – it’s so unabashed in its FOCUS ON ME rule for life. Hello world, unlearn everything you know to fit me into your worldview.

It’s 2021 people! You should have already been focusing all your attention on me! What’s the holdup?!

Also I love the time-sensitive aspect. What happens in 2022 I wonder? Will everything have been reversed so that we have to focus on “Them” in order to fit “Them” in our worldview all over again but opposite?

Huh. It’s not boys sexually abusing girls, it’s generic “children” doing it to generic “children” – according to the BBC.

Reports of sex abuse between children double in two years

Between children? Really?

Reports of children sexually abusing other children doubled in the two years to 2019, according to police figures obtained by BBC Panorama.

But were they reports of “children” doing this?

It’s not until paragraph 5 that we get

And overall, a big majority of cases involved boys abusing girls.

You don’t say.

Well of course they do.

Their “conceptions” of “gender” are “more nuanced” because that’s what’s available to them. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right. That question still has to be decided on the merits.

Sometimes teenagers are indeed in the vanguard in a good way: civil rights activists in the 1960s for example. Even then, though, there were plenty of teenagers on the other side, and besides that, not every vanguard is On the Right Side of History.

By “gender” Jack Turban means sex as well as gender. By “nuanced” he doesn’t mean “people can wear whatever they like” but “men are women if they say they are.” Some things shouldn’t be “nuanced” in that way. What “woman” means shouldn’t be “nuanced” in that way.

It would matter less if Jack Turban were not chief fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Elliot Kirschner on Lassen National Park, which he knows well from childhood summer vacations:

For those who have never been to Lassen, or maybe haven’t even heard of it, it is one of the true gems of the National Park system, although far less famous than its cousins like Yellowstone and Yosemite. It’s a place shaped by an active volcano, Lassen Peak, which last erupted a little over a century ago, and all the geothermal activity that goes with it. Its streams, lakes, meadows, and forests teem with wildlife and vistas both epic and intimate. As much as the sights, I remember the smells. Around the bubbling mud baths came the pungent odor of rotten eggs from the hydrogen sulphide rising from the bowels of the earth. But in the forests, the smell was sweet and full of life, a blend of the numerous species of trees. 

But not any more. Now it smells like smoke and destruction. Word is that more than half of it was eaten by the Dixie Fire.

Out West the climate crisis means increased droughts which turn even high-altitude forests into torch fuel. In other parts of the country, the effects are of course quite different. While we are praying for rain, swaths of the eastern half of the country are getting far too much of it. The scenes out of Louisiana, then up through the interior, and out to New Jersey and New York and the rest of the Northeast are heartbreaking. If only we could take some of that water out here. If only we could restore more of a sense of balance. If only we had done a better job of preparing. If only we were doing more now.

As I read the piece I can see a giant cruise ship heading out of Elliott Bay into Puget Sound and up to Alaska, burning through 80,000 thousand gallons of fuel a day. We could just skip that you know. I realize it’s a big industry that makes a lot of $$$ but cruises are not a necessity of life. We could make some effort to do something about the problem, but we’re not. I keep finding myself thinking about little energy-saving moves and then remembering those 80,000 gallons a day – for just one ship. We’re not even trying.

Bottom line? Women stink. Not just “stink”=are bad but STINK: smell of rotting fish.

The new misogyny is indistinguishable from the old misogyny.

There’s a very simple explanation.

Melania Trump, perhaps the most private first lady in modern history, has retreated more and more from the spotlight since departing Washington last January.

…She views her husband’s continued impact on the GOP landscape as his job, not hers. “You’re not going to see her at rallies or campaign events, even if he ‘officially’ says he’s running again,” said another person aware of the disinterest Trump has shown in supporting the former President.

Lack of interest, not disinterest.

…so often was the answer “no” when Trump was asked by then-candidate Donald Trump’s staff to appear at events that eventually, “We just stopped asking altogether,” said a political operative who worked on team Trump in the early days. Notoriously weary of public scrutiny and press coverage, Trump participated in fewer than five on-camera interviews and no print media interviews when she was first lady, an unheard of scarcity.

Yes and guess why she’s wary of public scrutiny and press coverage. It’s because there’s nothing there. She’s an empty shell. It’s not because she’s glamorously “private,” it’s because she has absolutely nothing to say. Her head is empty. So is her husband’s but he fills the void with yammering. She fills it with…I have no idea what. Looking out the window maybe.

“The Trump voter puts (Melania Trump) on a pedestal. They’re awed by the way she looks or the way she basically doesn’t express ideas or opinions, which they see as stoicism and loyalty. For them, that’s enough for fealty,” the operative said.

Hahaha yes sure that’s what it is. It’s not that she’s a blank, it’s that she’s loyal and stoical. She’s trans interesting.

Alex Massie points out the familiar inconsistency:

This Scottish government has no time for those who deny the reality of climate change but it is an administration busy enthusiastically denying the reality of biological sex. We must follow the science on one matter but abandon it on the other.

I can see doing that in some contexts – there are some where science is beside the point. Moral conflicts for instance aren’t a scientific issue, although science may be able to bolster a case. But when the core issue is as brutally physical as this one, just drawing a big X through the science is stupid.

Nicola Sturgeon, of course, is “a feminist to her fingertips”, which makes one wonder why she pursues an agenda that would redefine the idea and reality of womanhood so completely the term would, in effect, lose any and all usefulness.

She does it by saying there’s no clash of rights, none at all.

Any appearance to the contrary — such as the fact the majority of women’s organisations who responded to the government’s latest consultation on its plans opposed them — must be ignored or wished away. Women’s experiences and their fears are not so very important after all.

But then that is so often the case. The wonder is not that women are sometimes exasperated but that they are not, frankly, in a state of permanent revolt. 

Oh but I am.

Talking about “people with cervixes” or “people who menstruate” — as though “woman” has now become an inflammatory term — is a means by which women are stripped of their dignity and, worse than that, denied the experience of their own bodies, their own lives. There is something ugly, even something dehumanising, about such language and yet it is ever more fashionable and ever more widespread.

Hence the state of permanent revolt.

As a matter of justice and decency, trans people must have space and opportunity to lead their lives as they see fit. Neither they nor the government, however, has the right to corrupt meaning like this. Which, again, is why this is such a revealing argument. For it is one between those who think truth must matter and words must have meaning, however inconvenient this may be, and those who think wishful thinking may replace truth and by doing so make fantasy a new kind of reality.

I do think truth matters, as it happens.

This starts out seeming to be a serious and interesting analysis of a familiar slogan:

I’m a philosopher and bioethicist. My research suggests “my body, my choice” was a crucial idea at the time of Roe to emphasize ownership over bodily and health care decisions. But I believe the debate has since moved on – reproductive justice is about more than owning your body and your choice; it is about a right to health care.

I was interested because I got into a brief wrangle on Facebook by saying I’ve always thought the slogan was stupid, because it’s not true. Choices about one’s body are not always solely personal. A couple of men replied to call me stupid with no further argument so I deleted my comment, but I remain interested in what’s wrong with the slogan. But…I hit a bump all too soon.

It makes sense that “my body, my choice” gained steam in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade – a time when reproductive rights activists were fighting for the government to stay out of abortion decisions. Roe did just that by determining that abortion is a private choice between a pregnant person and their physician.

Sigh. So much for the serious analysis, so much for the philosopher and bioethicist. If we can’t even say precisely and accurately what we’re talking about, then what is the point?

We can’t possibly talk about abortion and reproductive rights and the politics around them if we throw a dropcloth over the fact that it’s women’s rights that are at stake. If we pretend it’s undifferentiated “people” who need these rights then we can’t talk about why they’ve been denied them for all these centuries. How a philosopher and bioethicist can think that matters less than pampering the projected wounded feelings of a few deluded women who are pretending to be men is beyond me.

And it clots up her language in the worst way.

As a private matter, the Supreme Court determined that the government cannot interfere with one’s right to an abortion prior to fetal viability.

Not “one’s right” – a woman’s right. As of course she knows, but apparently we’ve now decided that we can’t say that. If we can’t say that we can’t defend women.

The point is self-ownership is not worth much if there are no good or even available options from which to choose. This was true for the laborer in Locke’s day, and it is true for the person seeking abortion care now.

And why? Because that person is a woman, and her rights must be curtailed because she does the human-making.

Laws like mandated waiting periods for those seeking an abortion get enacted without evidence-based medical benefit… Clinic closures force those needing abortions to travel longer distances to find a provider… Accessing care in these states when it is restricted in one’s home state creates additional costs related to travel, child care and lost wages or time off work. Many abortion-seekers must also pay out of pocket for their medical care. For 40 years, the Hyde Amendment has prohibited federal spending on abortion. This impacts those insured through Medicaid…One could argue “my body, my choice” is meaningless if a person cannot enact their choice

All the marked words are replacements for woman or women or her.

This shit really needs to stop.

Hilary Mantel:

Mantel also waded into the controversy surrounding Rowling’s beliefs on transgender rights which have divided the literary world.

The Harry Potter author wrote a personal essay last year which included examples of where she believes demands by transgender activists were dangerous to women, which were described by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups as divisive and transphobic.

Later Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood and others wrote an open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” was leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.

Mantel said the online attacks on Rowling after her essay were “unjustified and shameful”.

She added: “It is barbaric that a tiny minority should take command of public discourse and terrify those who disagree with them.”

She said: “I recently found myself ‘misgendered.’ I received a university publication, with news items relating to alumni, where I was referred to as ‘they’, not ‘she.’

“My books were ‘their books.’ I wasn’t singled out – the other alumni were similarly treated.

“I thought: ‘Being a woman means a lot to me. I do not want my womanhood confiscated in print.’”

And women in general don’t want women erased in print. We’re already erased, we’re struggling to be unerased, and along comes gender ideology to erase us all over again. Sick of this shit.

To go all nostalgic for a moment…again Trump is padding the books by paying himself out of his PAC.

Tenants at Trump Tower have been floundering, which means he’s not collecting those high high rents.

But through all that — as Trump Tower has dealt with imploding tenants, political backlash and a broader, pandemic-related slump in Manhattan office leasing since last year — it has been able to count on one reliable, high-paying tenant: former president Donald Trump’s own political operation.

Starting in March, one of his committees, Make America Great Again PAC, paid $37,541.67 per month to rent office space on the 15th floor of Trump Tower — a space previously rented by his campaign — according to campaign-finance filings and a person familiar with the political action committee.

This may not be the most efficient use of donors’ money: The person familiar with Trump’s PAC said that its staffers do not regularly use the office space. Also, for several months, Trump’s PAC paid the Trump Organization $3,000 per month to rent a retail kiosk in the tower’s lobby — even though the lobby was closed.

Sly. Of course it’s not efficient, it’s not meant to be efficient. The word you need is lucrative. It’s money in Trump’s pocket. Efficiency is neither here nor there.

Trump is continuing a practice that was a hallmark of his presidency by exploiting loose regulations — and his own supporters’ trust — to convert political donations into private revenue for himself.

So surprising!

The fraudulence and hucksterism of this bit are particularly shiny.

One floor up from Marcraft, on Trump Tower’s 19th floor, are the offices of the Legacy Business School, which once boasted Kris Jenner as its chairwoman. (She reportedly resigned a few months after the school opened in 2016.) The school is expensive — its $70,000 annual tuition is $19,000 higher than Harvard University’s.

But Harvard doesn’t hold classes in Trump Tower.

“It is not just an educational campus,” the school’s website says, making the tower one of its main selling points. “It is studying at the most powerful building in the world.”

laugh-vomit

Never mind your Harvard in those boring educational unpowerful old brick buildings in Cambridge. Yuck. For a mere 19k a year more you can study in The Most Power Full Building!! Obviously that Power rubs off on you because of your mere presence in the Building – as long as you “study” [wink wink nudge nudge] inside it. Power Full Empowermenting Powery Buildings Forevaaaaaa!!!!

The “school” is a flop though, and owes Trump a lot of back rent. So much for Power.

But Trump still has the dear reliable PAC.

At Trump Tower, the former president’s PAC appears to be a quiet tenant. Under typical office conditions, with about one worker per 175 square feet, that much space might hold 30 people. But the PAC’s latest campaign-finance filing only listed three employees at that address as of June. And even those three don’t always work there, according to the person familiar with the PAC: They work from home, or follow Trump to his clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J.

Never you mind. They have to water the plants.

Glosswitch on abortion and pregnancy and women:

Whenever I try to write about abortion, I feel one thing is holding me back: the absence of the perfect analogy. It’s similar to the way I used to think that if only I tried hard enough and spent enough time on social media, I’d conjure up The Tweet That Stops Brexit.

As always with Victoria I had to pause to savor that before I could read on.

The trouble is, pregnancy is not like anything else. If it was, the whole edifice of patriarchy wouldn’t exist. There would be no singling out and controlling of one half of the human race by the other, because we wouldn’t have something that couldn’t be replicated in any way. Attempts to make pregnancy into something else – the equivalent of paid work, or unpaid work, or blood donation, or being a violinist who can’t play due to being hooked up to another human being – never quite succeed. What you demand of someone when you insist that they continue a pregnancy against their will cannot be demanded of another person in any other context, in any other way.

Which is why it’s demanded so ferociously, which explains a lot.

The uniqueness of pregnancy, the fact that it can’t be categorised, makes people uncomfortable around it. Not just your stereotypical anti-abortion right-wingers, but pro-choice left-wingers, too. They will make the abortion debate about anything but pregnancy itself, and what it means for the status of women as a sex class in relation to men…

For several years now, it’s slightly horrified me that liberal feminists in the US have taken to dressing as handmaids in order to protest abortion restrictions, while simultaneously cheering on the rise of commercial surrogacy, ignoring the class exploitation and replication of racialised reproductive injustice, and viewing states which remove the right of surrogates who change their minds after giving birth as more, not less, progressive.

…

I don’t think it’s possible to understand why abortion is so important without understanding, equally, why pregnancy is. How can you make the case that the alternative to abortion is life-changing if you are also invested in draining it of meaning?

Just read the whole thing.

Always bring your zip ties with you.

Police arrested a 40-year-old Arizona [father] after he stormed into an elementary school principal’s office with a friend wielding plastic handcuffs, insisting the administration broke the law by asking his child and six others to wear a mask and quarantine after being in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

Ya know, even if he’d been right about the administration’s breaking the law, it’s not his job to do the arresting.

“I can tell you the end result of that incident was we did make one arrest for trespassing,” Sgt. Richard Gradillas of the Tucson, Arizona, Police Department told The Daily Beast, identifying the dad arrested as Rishi Rambaran.

So it wasn’t the administration that got arrested.

Two men accompanied Rambaran on Thursday as he ambushed Principal Diane Vargo while she sat with another educator at the Mesquite Elementary School in Tucson. One of the men, Kelly Walker, livestreamed the incident on his Instagram, explaining that Rambaran, who is also known as “Reese,” had called him and asked him to be there in case he needed backup.

The third man, who has not been identified, stood in the doorway of Vargo’s office with a fistful of “law enforcement-grade” zip ties at the ready—as the trio was prepared to make a citizen’s arrest, Walker said. (The livestream video has since been deleted.)

The school has no right to try to keep a lethal virus out of the school!

Walker owns a coffee shop that hosts luminaries like Dinesh D’Souza.

Next month, Walker, who compared Thursday’s elementary school dust-up to Rosa Parks’ struggle for equal rights, will be welcoming Matthew Lohmeier, a disgraced Space Force lieutenant colonel who was relieved of his post in May over a self-published book warning of an impending “white genocide,” as well as a “neo-Marxist agenda” within the military “designed to patiently and methodically overthrow the US government and replace it with a communist dictatorship.”

But don’t you see? It’s all joined up! Masks – grumpy checkers at the supermarket – Denny’s closing early – people earning FIFTEEN DOLLARS an hour – masks – Joan Crawford – masks –

Walker also claims to believe that the U.S. is “on a sure and certain path to democide,” as he wrote in late August, comparing government mask mandates and vaccine guidance to the “Holocaust in Germany, the Warsaw Ghetto genocide, the murder of millions of Russians and Chinese under Communist regimes, the Killing Fields of Cambodia.”

Anti-government sentiment aside, Walker asked for—and received—a PPP loan in May 2020 for nearly $13,000. It was fully forgiven by the Small Business Administration, according to ProPublica’s PPP tracker.

Yes but people make FIFTEEN DOLLARS AN HOUR working at McDonalds! It’s sheer Nazism and democide.

Oh god maybe we haven’t sufficiently taken into account the role of sheer stupidity.

Pink News headline:

Trans adults twice as likely to die as cis adults, eye-opening study finds

Very eye-opening.

The author of this howler is the reliable Vic Parsons.

Trans adults are twice as likely to die as cis adults, according to an analysis of almost 50 years of medical records from an Amsterdam gender clinic.

The headline you could “meh” because headlines are notoriously prone to error (and are usually composed by an editor), but now we’re in the subhead and still saying it. And all the way into the article…

Trans women had particularly high risks of death, and are nearly three times more likely to die than cis women and twice as likely as cis men, with the most common causes including HIV-related illnesses, heart disease, lung cancer and suicide.

Trans men had similar mortality rates to cis men, but were twice as likely to die as cis women, especially from non-natural causes like suicide.

Still he doesn’t spot it.

Thick as a brick.

It will be all over Twitter before the paint has dried.

A win for safeguarding:

A whistleblower who claims she was “vilified” by an NHS gender identity clinic after raising concerns about the safety of children undergoing treatment has been awarded £20,000 in damages.

Sonia Appleby, 62, a social worker and psychotherapist, was “seen as hostile” and subjected to “quasi-disciplinary” proceedings after raising issues with managers at the Tavistock and Portman Trust, a tribunal ruled.

Appleby, who started working at the trust in 2004 and is the safeguarding lead for children, was awarded damages for “significant” injury to her feelings in a judgment handed down by a central London employment tribunal on Friday.

A few more cracks in the edifice.

Appleby had raised concerns about what the Gender Identity Development Service was doing to children.

Run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the service — the only one of its kind in England — has been at the centre of controversy over its treatment of young people, including the provision of drugs known as puberty blockers to children as young as 10.

In December, the High Court ruled that children under 16 considering gender reassignment were unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to use of the drugs, and said court authorisation should be sought for the treatment.

The ruling is being challenged by the Tavistock, and at an appeal hearing in July, the trust said the drugs gave children distressed by their birth sex time to consider “options”.

Yes but the “time to consider” comes at a high price. It’s now more widely understood that it’s not a simple pause: the drugs cause irreversible effects…or more bluntly, damage. Maybe for some people it’s worth it, but it’s not something to do lightly.

Referrals to GIDS have risen sharply in recent years, from 1,408 in 2016-17 to 2,728 in 2019-20, the tribunal heard, leading to individual caseloads rising and putting “considerable pressure” on staff.

Also hinting that maybe just maybe there is some social influencing going on.

Last night, Appleby said taking the NHS trust to an employment tribunal was an “overwhelming decision”.

“I am naturally extremely pleased about the outcome and want to thank my legal team and all those who supported me during the tribunal process,” she said.

Good.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on False marketing.

It’s fair enough to say that a single incident (or a small number of incidents) doesn’t change one’s overall view of what the optimal policy should be to a given issue. We don’t accept the anti-vaxxer argument that a single death from a vaccine means that vaccines are dangerous and should not be approved or mandated. We don’t think that men should be banned from leaving their homes at night, even if it might prevent some violent crimes. The “if it saves ONE life (or avoids ONE assault, etc.) then it’s worth it” argument doesn’t hold water.

But Penny really should be re-evaluating her position here, because this isn’t just a matter of cost-benefit analysis, or a “bad apple” or two. There seems to be a fundamental contradiction between Penny’s original position (it’s perfectly fine for a male-bodied person to strut around a women’s changeroom naked as long as they say they’re a woman, and the only blame should attach to the person, adult or child, who fails to avert her eyes from the penis) and her apparent concession now that this individual was a “predator” who is a “disgrace” and committed a “crime.”

After all, what, in Penny’s eyes, did this predator do at WiSpa that was wrong? There’s no indication that the actual conduct at WiSpa is different from what was previously alleged/reported. Only the known details of the perpetrator’s background have changed. How did he go from “poor innocent person being discriminated against despicably simply for being naked in a place where she had every right to be” to “predator who committed a crime,” when the actual conduct has not apparently changed? How did the complainants at WiSpa go from “evil fucking TERFs who should stop looking at other people’s genitals and oppressing minorities” to “victims of a crime”?

It’s not a coherent position to say “it’s ok to strut around a women’s changeroom displaying your penis, provided that you don’t have a history of convictions for sexual offenses.” The impact on the other patrons is the same regardless of the penis-waver’s personal history or subjective belief, neither of which they can really ascertain. And of course, savvy sexual offenders can now confine their exhibitionism to these situations, in which case the Laurie Pennys of the world will insist that they aren’t sexual offenders at all.

What does Penny advise a woman to do in the future if she’s confronted with a situation like this? Or the staff at a spa? Check the penis-haver’s identification and run a criminal background check to determine whether it’s ok to be upset, or to take any action? Not only is that impractical, but I suspect that Penny would insist it’s a vile discriminatory practice to insist on background checks for penis-havers in the women’s changeroom — indeed, the second quoted tweet says as much.

Democracy Now is all the way on board with erasing women.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn to a major setback for reproductive rights. As of midnight last night, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to go into effect that bans abortion after six weeks. No other six-week ban has ever gone into effect in the United States. At six weeks, many people don’t even know they’re pregnant.

If it were “people” the law wouldn’t exist. It’s not “people” who are controlled and bullied and sadistically punished in this way, it’s a specific subset of “people” who are. Amy Goodman is one herself so you’d think she’d get it.

The law is seen as a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that enshrined the right of women to choose to have an abortion, by striking down Texas laws that criminalized the procedure.

The new Texas law is unique. It empowers private citizens — not government officials — to file a civil lawsuit against patients, medical workers, or even a patient’s family or friends who, quote, “aid and abet” an abortion — or a taxi driver who drives a woman to a clinic…

There you go! You can do it. But do it passim, instead of forcing us to be grateful that you do it some of the time. Don’t erase us at all.

Anyway it doesn’t last long. She talks to Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, asking her if this is the most extreme law so far.

NANCY NORTHUP: Well, it’s the most extreme that’s ever gone into effect. And as you pointed out, this morning, unfortunately, in Texas, the clinics can’t be open to provide abortions any later than six weeks. And 85% of people seeking abortions in Texas do so after six weeks, since many people don’t even know they’re pregnant yet at six weeks.

…

You know, our client, Whole Woman’s Health, was open until 11:59 p.m. last night seeing patients, because people wanted to get in and exercise their right and make the decisions for their life, health and future, right up to the midnight hour.

How embarrassing that it’s called Whole Woman’s Health, when it’s people who wanted to get in.

This is a great time to shoot ourselves in the foot by obscuring the fact that attacks on abortion are attacks on women.

Heather Cox Richardson on Texas and the Supreme Court and civil rights:

The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right.

Since World War II, the Supreme Court has defended civil rights from state laws that threaten them. During the Great Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to use the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net—this is when we got Social Security—and promote infrastructure. But racist Democrats from the South balked at racial equality under this new government.

After World War II, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Republican appointed by Richard Nixon, the Supreme Court set out to make all Americans equal before the law. They tried to end segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools. They protected the right of married couples to use contraception in 1965. They legalized interracial marriage in 1967. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, they tried to give women control over their own reproduction by legalizing abortion.

They based their decisions on the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. Congress developed this amendment after legislatures in former Confederate states passed “Black Codes” that severely limited the rights and protections for formerly enslaved people. Congress intended for the powers in the Fourteenth to enable the federal government to guarantee that African Americans had the same rights as white Americans, even in states whose legislatures intended to keep them in a form of quasi-slavery.

Justices in the Warren and Burger courts argued that the Fourteenth Amendment required that the Bill of Rights apply to state governments as well as to the federal government. This is known as the “incorporation doctrine,” but the name matters less than the concept: states cannot abridge an individual’s rights, any more than the federal government can. This doctrine dramatically expanded civil rights.

Those who don’t like this expansion call it “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench.”

This is the foundation for today’s “originalists” on the court. They are trying to erase the era of legislation and legal decisions that constructed our modern nation.

An obstacle to that project is decades of Supreme Court precedent. The Texas law gets around that by making private citizens the enforcers rather than the state.

A state has undermined the power of the federal government to protect civil rights. It has given individuals who disagree with one particular right the power to take it away from their neighbors. But make no mistake: there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much of the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II years.

On September 4, 1957, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a crowd of angry white people barred nine Black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The white protesters chanted: “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”

In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower used the federal government to protect the constitutional rights of the Little Rock Nine from the white vigilantes who wanted to keep them second-class citizens. In 2021, the Supreme Court has handed power back to the vigilantes.

It’s a nightmare.

The Times talks to Graham Linehan:

Over the past four years he has lost almost everything, campaigning obsessively, not against trans rights, he insists — “I know more trans people than the people who call me transphobic” — but for women’s rights.

Of course he insists, because it’s true. The defense of women’s rights is framed as an attack on trans rights via the expedient of never bothering to explain what “trans rights” are and who says so and why we have to defend them at the expense of women’s rights. There is no “right” to force the world to pretend to believe your fantasy about yourself.

With his wife he was part of the writing team behind the 2016 pilot episode of Motherland but Linehan left midway through the creation of the first series, broadcast the following year. By then he was becoming embroiled in sexual politics and he links his rising interest in the trans rights debate to his work during the campaign in Ireland to decriminalise abortion.

He and Helen took part in a short film made by Amnesty International, which focused on their own tragic case. After an 11-week pregnancy, Helen was advised by doctors in London to terminate the pregnancy because her foetus had been found to have a condition known as acrania, and there was no chance that the baby would survive longer than an hour after birth. In Dublin Helen would have been forced to carry the pregnancy or face a 14-year prison sentence for procuring an illegal abortion. The film about their experience, says Linehan, “helped to moved the needle in many ways”.

See also: Texas.

Then something took him by surprise. “It was such an odd thing but I was in Dublin at a protest. Someone was going, ‘Women’s right to abortion!’ And we went, ‘Yeah!’ Then they said, ‘And trans people need to have their operations paid for by the state!’ And we went, ‘What?’

So they went “Terf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“I did what everyone does: you’re very polite, calling for debate. You say things that you cannot imagine anyone would disagree with, like ‘a lesbian does not have a penis’. And yet the pushback was so ferocious.”

…

He emphasises repeatedly that he has trans friends and says many agree with his views. He distinguishes them from the activists, who he reckons take their cue from Donald Trump, to achieve their ends at any costs.

Part of the bully class, he explains.

He cites two of the best known trans women sports competitors. “Laurel Hubbard is Trump; Rachel McKinnon, the cyclist, is Trump,” he says. “Anyone who can get on a bike, or beat women easily and take the money, and take the crown, that’s a narcissist, that’s a narcissistic psychopath. These are the people who are being emboldened by activists who think they’re helping transsexuals”.

Ok but why can’t he just go back to comedy? Huh? Huh?

“And do what? Dance round the maypole? I’m not in the mood. I’m happy to put on the hat with the bells on it but only when the house isn’t on fire, but the house is on fire. The. House. Is. On. Fire.”

Women’s rights are on fire, and the right to tell the obvious truth is on fire.