Jennifer Rubin on Giuliani’s travel plans:

Democrats should call this out for what it is: Betrayal of, and disloyalty to, the United States.

Beyond that, the House should expeditiously pass a law making it mandatory for a campaign to report all contacts with foreign officials, prohibiting solicitation of information or action from a foreign government for the purpose of influencing a campaign, and making it illegal to knowingly use material provided directly or indirectly from a foreign government in a campaign.

Should Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refuse to take up the measure, he would confirm the moral degradation of the Republican Party and the same unpatriotic attitude that prompted him to oppose a robust warning in 2016 about Russian interference in the election.

Not that he needs to do any further confirming at this point. He’s already confirmed and confirmed and confirmed.

This would be nothing less than a repudiation of democracy, a willingness to become a vassal of hostile foreign powers for the sake of winning the election. In such a circumstance, Democrats should come right out and say it: The Republicans want to get hostile powers to help them win elections because those powers figure that Republican presidents will be patsies.

I am often asked whether the Republican Party can be rehabilitated. A party is made up of individuals; in this case, a group of elected leaders who uniformly invite foreign intervention in our election should be permanently disqualified from holding office. They have violated their oaths in the most egregious manner possible and cannot be entrusted with power again. Ever.

Too bad we can’t enforce it.

The theocrats are sneaking bible study into public schools via bullshittery.

Bible classes in public school could become increasingly common across the United States if other states follow Kentucky’s lead in passing legislation that encourages high schools to teach the Bible.

The bible is a historical document and a literary work, or rather a collection of literary works, and it’s also a religious text. It could be taught in public schools under the first two categories but the third one doesn’t belong there.

Activists on the religious right, through their legislative effort Project Blitz, drafted a law that encourages Bible classes in public schools and persuaded at least 10 state legislatures to introduce versions of it this year. Georgia and Arkansas recently passed bills that are awaiting their governors’ signatures.

Among the powerful fans of these public-school Bible classes: President Trump.

“Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible,” Trump tweeted in January. “Starting to make a turn back? Great!”

Trump is illiterate, so his opinion on the subject is worthless.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonpartisan advocacy group organizing opposition to the state laws, takes a dark view of Project Blitz. The organization coordinated a statement signed by numerous religious groups that oppose Project Blitz’s efforts — including the Union for Reform Judaism, the Hindu American Foundation, Muslim Advocates, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church.

Leave religious proselytizing to the professionals.

At least one judge is fast-tracking.

Very big. Overarching q for me has been whether judges would respond to Trump’s unprecedented stonewalling tactics by speeding things up. At least one is. https://t.co/byasjDEgXD

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 9, 2019

CNN reports:

Congress and Donald Trump’s fight over his financial records is now on the fast track.

Judge Amit Mehta plans next week to weigh the major legal issues raised in President Donald Trump’s challenge of a congressional subpoena for his accounting firm’s records, according to an order issued Thursday — putting the case on an even faster track than it previously looked to be.

Congress has subpoenaed Trump and his business’ accounting records from the firm Mazars USA, and Trump’s personal legal team sued to stop the records from being turned over.

A hearing is now scheduled for May 14.

Will he have time to incite murder again before the heavy hand descends on his shoulder?

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1126464067873452032

I’m not tearing up, you’re tearing up.

Let’s find out more about these here United Constitutional Patriots.

CNN a couple of weeks ago:

They’d been keeping watch near the border for weeks, drawing little notice as they shared live videos from their desert outpost.

But after posting videos last week showing armed men wearing military fatigues detaining migrants who just crossed the border into New Mexico, a militia group known as the United Constitutional Patriots now finds itself under fire.

State authorities in New Mexico have condemned the group. The American Civil Liberties Union accuses the militia of kidnapping migrants. And now a leader of the group is facing charges of illegal weapons and ammunition possession brought by the FBI.

Hey what’s a little private army or two among friends? Especially when they’re patriots?

It’s between 12 and 20 people. Trivial, in one sense, but then again, it doesn’t take many. Timothy McVeigh got a lot done all by himself.

Videos shared on the United Constitutional Patriots New Mexico Border Ops Facebook page purport to show members of the group detaining migrants, including families with children, who have just crossed the border.

They show people often in full military fatigues, with handguns strapped to their sides, wearing gloves and black masks. Armed men order migrants to stop, force them to sit on the ground and then apparently call Border Patrol to pick them up. At least two videos posted on the group’s Facebook page depict a man in fatigues verbally identifying himself as “Border Patrol” as he stops a group of migrants.

New Mexico’s attorney general told CNN that an armed group had detained nearly 300 people near the border.

What I’m saying – it doesn’t take many. They dress up to look official and hey presto, their victims think they’re official (and wouldn’t much want to resist heavily armed men even if they’re not official).

We need a break from the horror of watching a president of the US laughing gleefully at the recommendation to shoot immigrants at the border, so how about we reminisce about the days of Gamergate:

Most women who were working in or around the video games industry in late 2014 know exactly who Benjamin is. He was one of the more vocal figureheads of Gamergate, an online “movement” that began when an aggrieved ex-boyfriend spread malicious gossip about his game-developer ex-girlfriend. It metamorphosed into a coordinated harassment campaign against a huge number of women, under the smokescreen of anti-censorship and concern over ethics. It is now impossible not to see Gamergate as a foreshadowing of a disease that has since engulfed political and public life.

But long before Gamergate – three years before to be exact – there was Elevatorgate, which was another such foreshadowing.

What people like Benjamin want, with his disgusting speculation on whether female politicians are rape-worthy, is to bring the rank misogyny of the worst online spaces into public dialogue. It is Trumpian trolling transferred into British political life. People like Benjamin believe in a form of consequenceless free speech that dictates that if women wish to exist publicly, create things or have an opinion, they should expect all the harassment and degrading commentary and ceaseless mean-spirited scrutiny that will inevitably follow. This was the message of Gamergate, back in 2014.

And of Elevatorgate back in 2011.

For many women this abuse got bad enough to get the police involved. This largely turned out to be pointless, because the police’s advice to victims of online harassment essentially amounted to “why don’t you stay off the internet?”, as if the internet were some parallel universe that had no bearing on real life.

This kind of rhetoric is just as prevalent in the real world: on the streets outside Westminster, in politics, behind presidential pulpits, in Charlottesville. So, thanks for that, law enforcement. Perhaps it might have been an idea to hold people responsible for their targeted, sometimes violent harassment or hate speech, rather than making it the victim’s responsibility to avoid looking at it. Instead people like Benjamin, who established themselves as anti-feminist mouthpieces in 2014, have forged alliances with other alt-right agitators – including Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently announced he will be joining Benjamin on the campaign trail – and are now speaking at Brexit rallies and running as an MEP for Ukip.

…

I wonder sometimes what could have happened if people had properly listened to the women subjected to the worst of the Gamergate movement, instead of writing infuriating, prevaricating think-pieces gamely digging for legitimate grievances within the mountain of straightforward gendered harassment. Instead it took Trump’s election two years later, led by some of the exact same forces (including Steve Bannon and his coterie of alt-right Breitbart shock jocks), to prompt the tech platforms and wider society to notice that something very bad was going on and that online discourse was definitely enabling it.

If the women of the games industry had been listened to more closely in 2014, would it have taken five more years before toxic bullshitters such as Alex Jones and Yiannopoulos were banished from Twitter and Facebook? Would it have taken so long for online hate speech to become a prosecutable offence? Might white supremacy have spread so easily online, along with misogyny? Would an anti-feminist YouTuber have gained enough of a platform to be running for the European parliament?

Or if the women of the skepticism-atheism industry had been listened to more closely in 2011, would it have taken eight more years before toxic bullshitters such as Jones and Yiannopoulos were taken seriously? Probably, but they weren’t, so here we are.

There was a conversation on violence against women (“domestic abuse”) on Fresh Air yesterday. The subjects were Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises, and Suzanne Dubus, CEO of the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center. Guess what: narcissism came into it.

GROSS: I want to bring up narcissism because, Rachel, you mentioned narcissism as being one of the characteristics that a lot of abusers and murderers have. How does narcissism figure into domestic violence?

SNYDER: Narcissism is one of the key components of an abuser. You know, we have, I think, a vision of what an abuser is. Right? Even in – even when you see media reports of domestic violence, the pictures of – that most often accompany those media reports are really dark. You know, even, like, the coloration – they’re, like, gloomy, dark, dangerous; they’re portentous. And people don’t recognize themselves in those pictures because, of course, they have a much larger context of just a single moment.

And so abusers, in fact, are not people with anger problems, generally speaking. They are about power and control over one person or the people in their family. So they tend to be very – they’re often very gregarious. Only about a quarter of the abusers fit that stereotypical definition of someone who is, you know, generally angry. And so the narcissism plays out in the idea that they are owed something – in the idea that they are entitled to their authority, that their partners have to be subservient to them. There’s very often traditional gender dynamics in abusive relationships.

It’s the same thing, really – entitlement and “traditional gender dynamics” that cash out as “I, the man, get whatever I want.” That crap brings narcissism with it.

GROSS: I guess the narcissism probably figures into the coercive control part of the relationship? The wife and the children – these are people who the man can control or thinks he can control, tries to control. He can’t control the world around him, but he can control them. And it seems like that would be – that that would fit a narcissistic personality who wants the world to just revolve around him.

DUBUS: In our works with survivors, we also notice that abusers typically really do feel like their home is their castle and that everything must be adjusted and retrofitted and – to his whim, to his mood, to his needs. And there is, you know, quick and rapid punishment when it’s not. And to me, that is narcissism, when the world revolves around you and everybody better get into their constellation and do what they need to do to support, to prop up, to make him feel better – whatever it is he needs that day.

SNYDER: Yeah. It’s very black-and-white thinking. Right? Like, it’s my way, and this is it.

Very black-and-white and very very very selfish. This idea that you are the sun and everyone else is a mere planet – it’s poison.

I don’t consider Julie Burchill the best of the Julies, but she says good things at (sorry) Spiked:

Paradoxically, redrawing the boundaries of what is ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate’ in order not to make anyone feel ‘excluded’ actually has the counter-productive effect of literally excluding many groups from both social media and public platforms: ex-Muslims espousing atheism, women querying the rights of the transgendered to play them at sport, and lesbians not attracted to a penis even if it has a frock over it. A whole page of last week’s Sunday Times was entirely composed of items reflecting what I call the Perils Of Inclusivity: ‘Tax expert fired for saying trans women aren’t women’ – ‘Gallery covers up art after complaints by Muslim viewers’ – ‘Anonymous journal lets academics publish and not be damned’. All in aid of preventing hurty feelz!

And now sexual perverts (among whom, on occasion, I happily count myself) are the latest group to demand ‘inclusion’. Please! When I was young, we thought nothing more desirable than being An Outsider – why are the young of today so obsessed with getting a tick on the register, rather than playing hooky? There is a happy place between believing that no one should be excluded on the basis of race, sex or social class, and believing that official validation of every life choice any person freely makes are the same. Someone who likes dressing up in a gimp mask is not Rosa Parks, and I find the increasing lack of ability to differentiate between the two in some quarters highly risible at best and downright insulting at worst.

Too right about the official validation bit. The plaintive cries of “I am valid!” are indeed both hilarious and insulting. What are you, a bus pass? Why do you need “validation” from the world in the first place?

The latest snowflake flutter is ‘Don’t kink-shame me!’. At a Vancouver university last year, a man insisting he was an ‘adult baby’ pestered a university nurse to change his dirty nappy and perved over his repulsed female classmates. A whistle-blowing workplace-safety director was sacked for standing up for the women. In Wolverhampton a few months back, a tattooist calling himself ‘Dr Evil’ was charged with grievous bodily harm after slicing ears and nipples from paying customers. He was reported as having support from ‘the body-modification community’ who set up a petition in his favour.

Say…what? Why were we not told? Does ‘the body-modification community’ get together to validate each other’s plans to body-modify other people?

Consults Google.

It’s true.

A body modification artist known as Dr Evil has been jailed for carrying out ear and nipple removals and splitting a customer’s tongue.

Brendan McCarthy carried out consensual procedures without using anaesthetic.

…

Judge Amjad Nawaz said the body-modification industry was unregulated and McCarthy was only registered as a tattooist and cosmetic piercer.

He said McCarthy “had no qualifications to carry out surgical procedures or to deal with any adverse consequences which could have arisen”.

…

An online petition which attracted 13,000 signatures was set up to support the “knowledgeable, skilful and hygienic” body-piercer, who was refused permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The BBC quotes one guy who says if he’d known the whole thing wasn’t legal he wouldn’t have had his ear sliced off, because he certainly wasn’t that desperate to have it done.

Back to Burchill:

I’m a broad-minded broad, so I’m not offended by these people – but I do despise them for being so wimpy that they need their kink validated by straight society. When did perverts start being ashamed to be perverts and need to be a community? ‘Community’ used to be such a jolly word, redolent of cheery singing or a nice place to land on the Monopoly board. Now it just means a bunch of whiners whining about stuff.

So I would say this to the youth of today: grab your outsider status and wear it with pride. Don’t demand that society alters to accommodate you, because that’s the way of the wimp. And try to remember that narcissism is not rebellion next time you call yourself ‘genderqueer’ on the occasion of your heterosexual marriage, Miley Cyrus, when so many genuinely queer people are still being murdered for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality all across the world. Don’t wear a crown that’s been paid for with the blood of others.

There should be a line of T shirts with “narcissism is not rebellion” on them in big scarlet letters.

A Twitter thread with much wisdom.

The mad thing is, every feeling or lived experience in "gender dysphoria" can far more readily be explained by the clinical characteristics & traits of many other psych conditions. It's forbidden to speak of this. Through our dysregulated emotions & incessant rumination, >>>

— Hacsi Horvath (@dontkillfrogs) May 4, 2019

There’s a thread reader but I’m just going to knit it all together for ease of reading, because I think it’s that useful.

The mad thing is, every feeling or lived experience in “gender dysphoria” can far more readily be explained by the clinical characteristics & traits of many other psych conditions. It’s forbidden to speak of this.

Through our dysregulated emotions & incessant rumination, we become susceptible to the full range of GD/GID symptoms, which we’re told are unique & special. It’s not unique at all. It’s garden variety identity disturbance & diffusion. The only thing somewhat different is the emphasis on wanting to be the opposite sex. This is a combo of cognitive bias and gaslighting by the trans industry.

Men & women develop GD/GID for completely different reasons, and while many are uncomfortable with their bodies, sex roles etc. they can usually manage all right & even work through their discomfort. It’s not a crisis of “identity” for them, there isn’t a relentless unstoppable drive to “transition.” Until: They learn about transgenderism, see a film, read a magazine article, etc. Suddenly there begins the whole pathological process of rumination, disavowal, idealization and “splitting.” This almost always happens during a time of high stress. It becomes a crisis.

The experience has very close parallels with the emergence of borderline personality disorder, with the difference being that the trans industry harnesses the energy of your disturbed identity to sell us a costume and tell us we’re a real girl/boy now. That’s the gaslighting. Had we seen a film, read a book, however we learned about it, without the accompanying lie that our secret wish will now come true, we would not have taken the bait.

Young or old, if we bite the hook, the clinical progression is similar. It’s just our minds under pressure, and when an impossibility is presented as an option, the tension becomes extreme. It’s iatrogenic (caused by medical industry) & also mediagenic. Meanwhile, all the same processes have been studied intensely for decades, with explicit exception of GD/GID.

Further reading in the final tweet:

…have been studied intensely for decades, with explicit exception of GD/GID.

If anyone is unsure what I'm going on about, consider reading this thread:https://t.co/vzVh64yT31

…and looking at some of the titles, here:https://t.co/mhAHgPV3lS
(feel free to download, too)

— Hacsi Horvath (@dontkillfrogs) May 4, 2019

In short, what we have here is a manufactured “condition” or “identity” or whatever you want to call it. Being trans isn’t a thing, it’s an idea, a thought process, a fantasy, a contagion, a product of incessant rumination. It’s an invention, and not one of the better ones. It’s an idée fixe, and those are usually considered more a hindrance than a help.

It’s not that I think fantasy is always a bad thing. I think it can be quite helpful, as long as it continues to be recognized as fantasy. But not all fantasies are helpful, and the one about being the opposite sex has jumped the tracks into a nightmare. Combine personality disorder with rumination with narcissism with the internet, and what would you expect to come up with?

Via Hell No, We Won’t Go 2: