Trump finally got around to mentioning John Lewis.

That’s pretty much it – he mentioned him.

It could hardly be more insultingly perfunctory. I guess he could have said “Sorry to hear about John Lewis. MAGA!” But short of that…

The ACLU explains how Trump and Customs and Border Patrol can get away with this grabbing people off the street thing – how it is actually legal. It’s an eye-opener.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects Americans from random and arbitrary stops and searches.

According to the government, however, these basic constitutional principles do not apply fully at our borders. For example, at border crossings (also called “ports of entry”), federal authorities do not need a warrant or even suspicion of wrongdoing to justify conducting what courts have called a “routine search,” such as searching luggage or a vehicle.

But here’s the kicker – the “border” is not just the border.

Even in places far removed from the border, deep into the interior of the country, immigration officials enjoy broad—though not limitless—powers. Specifically, federal regulations give U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) authority to operate within 100 miles of any U.S. “external boundary.”

Guess what. It turns out most of us live within 100 miles of any U.S. “external boundary.” I do for instance. I wouldn’t have thought so, but haha joke’s on us, our external boundary here in Seattle is not the Pacific but Puget Sound. Puget Sound! That’s walking distance from here. Down a steep hill, but still walking distance.

Check it out.

Look at that. Chicago, Milwaukee – who thinks of them as border cities? And apparently the border bulges way into California east of the Bay Area because the Bay is another “border.”

The ACLU continues:

In this 100-mile zone, Border Patrol agents have certain additional authorities. For instance, Border Patrol can operate immigration checkpoints.

Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without “reasonable suspicion” of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a “hunch”). Similarly, Border Patrol cannot search vehicles in the 100-mile zone without a warrant or “probable cause” (a reasonable belief, based on the circumstances, that an immigration violation or crime has likely occurred).

In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. No matter what CBP officers and Border Patrol agents think, our Constitution applies throughout the United States, including within this “100-mile border zone.”

The zone that most of us live in. Who knew?

Many people think that border-related policies only impact people living in border towns like El Paso or San Diego. The reality is that Border Patrol’s interior enforcement operations encroach deep into and across the United States, affecting the majority of Americans.

Roughly two-thirds of the United States’ population lives within the 100-mile zone—that is, within 100 miles of a U.S. land or coastal border. That’s about 200 million people.

Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont lie entirely or almost entirely within this area.

Nine of the ten largest U.S. metropolitan areas, as determined by the 2010 Census, also fall within this zone: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose.

This is very alarming.

The Post reports the unsurprising news that Trump’s verbal attacks on scientists are not helping the response to COVID.

This week’s remarkable character assault by some top White House advisers on Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, signified President Trump’s hostility toward medical expertise and has produced a chilling effect among the government scientists and public health professionals laboring to end the pandemic, according to administration officials and health experts.

From Trump’s point of view that means it’s working. He wants them chilled.

Though Trump does not automatically distrust the expertise of public health officials, he is averse to any information or assessment that he considers “bad news,” that compromises his economic cheerleading message or that jeopardizes his reelection, according to several administration officials and other people with knowledge of the dynamic.

A distinction without a difference. “Trump doesn’t object to the expertise when it agrees with him.” Well no kidding; that’s the problem.

In addition to Fauci, the White House has repeatedly undermined and sidelined the CDC over the last several months, which prompted four former CDC directors to pen an op-ed in The Washington Post this week that argued no president had politicized the CDC to the extent that Trump has.

We don’t want to be exterminated by a gruesome torturous disease; that’s not political, it’s just basic survival.

Two of the White House officials with the closest and longest-standing ties to Trump, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and trade adviser Peter Navarro, attacked Fauci this past week. Navarro penned an op-ed in USA Today in which he stated that Fauci was “wrong about everything,” while Scavino shared a cartoon on social media mocking Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” drowning Uncle Sam with a deluge of “extra cold” water.

… Fauci said the push to discredit him was “bizarre,” telling the Atlantic, “If you talk to reasonable people in the White House, they realize that was a major mistake on their part, because it doesn’t do anything but reflect poorly on them.”

If you can find any reasonable people in the White House.

“It seems that some are more intent on fighting imagined enemies than the real enemy here, which is the virus,” said Thomas R. Frieden, a former CDC director and president of Resolve to Save Lives.

“The virus doesn’t read talking points,” Frieden said. “The virus doesn’t watch news shows. The virus just waits for us to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, as Texas and Florida and South Carolina and Arizona did, the virus wins. When we ignore science, the virus wins.”

And when the virus wins – this is important – lots of people die, and lots of other people survive but with life-altering damage.

Trump in recent weeks has been committing less of his time and energy to managing the pandemic, according to advisers, and has only occasionally spoken in detail about the topic in his public appearances. One of these advisers said the president is “not really working this anymore. He doesn’t want to be distracted by it. He’s not calling and asking about data. He’s not worried about cases.”

That could be good news, because it could mean he’s interfering less. But as a fact about him – it’s execrable. Don’t worry about all these people dying on your watch, dude! Go play golf!

I think that photo is from the inauguration. I watched the whole thing – first and last time I’ve ever done that. That moment in particular…well, you know.

Originally a comment by Papito on The beautiful suburbs.

What makes a suburb “successful” is a good ratio of property value to number of children. Property value is maintained by zoning. With high property value, you get rich people living there, and public schools funded by rich people’s property taxes, and a lower rate of public school attendance because rich people don’t have as many kids as poor people and so many rich people send their kids to private schools anyway.

What “abolishes” a suburb is revising the zoning to allow smaller lots, or (god forbid!) apartment buildings, increasing population density and reducing per-unit prices. Cheaper, smaller housing brings a lower ratio of property tax to children. People who are poor or who live in smaller apartments have more children per capita and rarely send them to private school. Also, though this is obviously irrelevant, there are some correlations of poverty to race. Not that making a suburb more “urban” means anything at all besides increasing population density.

The phenomenon as we see it near where I live in an American city is that the near suburbs are full of people who like to talk a lot about fair housing and fair this and that and black lives matter, but if you try to build an apartment building near them they will determine that it just wouldn’t be safe because of, you know, traffic reasons or where are we going to build a new elementary school or something. Black lives matter as long as they stay over across the interstate.

Trump did another publicly funded campaign speech in the Rose Garden yesterday. He promised to Keep America Racist.

The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to, at a much higher level, abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions. They are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations that you read about today. Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise.

Oh, gee, I wonder what he’s talking about there. Why would zoning make crime rates go up?

Joe Biden and his bosses from the radical left want to significantly multiply what they’re doing now. And what will be the end result is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.

The beautiful suburbs? The “radical left” and their stooge Biden want to destroy our great and beautiful suburbs? What suburbs? Why?

It’s called white flight. It’s real. Trump thinks we need to cling to it.

The fascist coup is getting closer, is perhaps under way.

CBP is Customs and Border Patrol – who don’t have jurisdiction over domestic protests. Do they? That’s not how any of this works is it? Deranged fascist presidents can’t just call in bombers and prison guards and heavy artillery and Border Patrol whenever they feel like staging a tantrum, can they?

Fascism. It’s here.

Jeet Heer in the Nation:

Protests have been roiling Portland for over six weeks. Even prior to these protests, Portland was a site of a long-running battle between right-wing groups like the Proud Boys and left-wing activists who are usually lumped together under the antifa label. It’s possible that the antifa connection made Portland a spot of particular interest to the Trump administration, which has used the loosely organized anti-fascist groups as a scapegoat for social upheavals in the wake of police brutality.

The deployment of unidentified federal officers is particularly dangerous in a situation like that in Portland and elsewhere in America, because it could easily lead to right-wing militias’ impersonating legal authorities and kidnapping citizens.

That would be bad. Let’s not have that.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf is currently in Portland. In a statement on Thursday, Wolf said, “The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.” Wolf warned, “This siege can end if state and local officials decide to take appropriate action instead of refusing to enforce the law.”

Wolf’s strident words echoed the law-and-order theme that has come to the fore in Trump’s reelection campaign. Trump himself sounded a racist variation on the theme in a Thursday White House virtual town hall when he decried the collapse of “law and order” in cities like New York and Chicago. Trump also claimed that Democrats were trying to destroy the suburbs. Announcing the rescinding of an Obama order against racial segregation in housing, Trump said, “The suburb destruction will end with us.”

So it’s “destruction of the suburbs” to ban racial segregation in housing?

Trump hasn’t learned anything since he was sued in federal court for enforcing racial segregation in his own housing.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown has been commendably blunt in attacking Trump’s assault on protesters. On Thursday, she tweeted:

The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.

I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.

Or just plain laying the groundwork for a fascist coup.

H/t Dave Ricks

Dispatch from Yakima County:

First came the warning: A police officer in the small city of Selah told a group of young people that if they continued drawing “Black Lives Matter” chalk art on the sidewalk in front of City Hall, they would be charged with a crime.

Chalk art on a sidewalk? What “crime” will they be charged with then?

Then someone (the story doesn’t say who) sent in a pressure washer to blast it all away.

The standoff last week was just one of a growing series of conflicts between conservative leaders of Selah, a community with only a few dozen Black residents, and young people from a wide range of backgrounds who believe the city is long overdue for a conversation about race.

Everywhere in the US is long overdue for that conversation. We don’t get it and we don’t get that we don’t get it.

In Selah, city officials profess to be perplexed about the sudden activism. The city administrator, Don Wayman, said he did not see any racial issues to address, calling the Black Lives Matter movement “devoid of intellect and reason” and characterizing the activists as a “mob.”

That guy for example. He has to be tragically ignorant to think that. Most people are tragically ignorant about how all this came about.

Chalk art has long been a tableau for social activism, a form of instant commentary that takes political expression quite literally onto the streets. Cities have at times targeted it, such as in San Diego, where a man was charged with 13 counts of vandalism in 2013 for writing anti-bank messages on a public sidewalk. A jury acquitted him.

The vandalism charge might be more plausible if the damage were permanent, but chalk? Come on.

Selah’s chalk activism began with Gabriel Fabian, 20, who was not politically active until after seeing the video capturing the arrest in May that led to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Fabian, who is Latino, decided he needed to play a role in halting the oppression of Black people and that it would need to start at home.

He began drawing BLACK LIVES MATTER on the street outside his house. The city sent a crew to wash the words away; repeat repeat.

At one point, a letter from Police Chief Richard Hayes arrived addressed to Fabian’s older brother. It said the chalk drawing “is, by definition, graffiti” and could result in a citation.

Fabian’s mother, Laura Perez, said it was clear to her that the city’s crackdown had everything to do with the content of the message and the fact that it was produced outside the home of a Latino family. To her, it reinforced everything she had felt about the town since moving her family there from California eight years ago.

She had already seen her children being profiled at school. She had been surprised that the district offered little in Spanish despite the large number of Latinos who had settled in the region, originally drawn by agricultural work but now an integral part of many communities in eastern Washington. While her boys were told not to wear rosaries at school, they noticed that white students were not confronted when they wore similar items.

There were Confederate flags around, lots of them.

After the letter from the police chief, the family had a lawyer respond, objecting to the city’s handling of the art. Rob Case, Selah’s municipal attorney, responded with a more detailed warning, saying the drawings were a violation of the malicious mischief statute “that is punishable by 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine.”

For writing words in chalk on a neighborhood street.

Fabian said several white neighbors have invited him now to draw on their driveways, out of reach of the city’s pressure washers.

And its cops.

One of them, Carmen Garrison, said that after seeing what was happening out on the street, she knocked on Fabian’s door. Because of her age and concerns about the coronavirus, she said, she has not attended the demonstrations, but the artwork on her driveway was an opportunity to show her support for changes in the community that she said were overdue.

Rock on.

Here we see them in action. It’s absolutely dumbfounding.

So is all this fascist grabbing people off the streets in camo and unmarked rental vans legal? Probably not.

Legal scholars questioned whether the detentions pass constitutional muster.

“Arrests require probable cause that a federal crime had been committed, that is, specific information indicating that the person likely committed a federal offense, or a fair probability that the person committed a federal offense,” Orin Kerr, a professor at University of California, Berkeley Law School, told The Post. “If the agents are grabbing people because they may have been involved in protests, that’s not probable cause.”

Well it’s the same city. Isn’t that a fair probability?

Federal officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security have stormed Portland’s streets as part of President Trump’s promised strong response to ongoing protests. Local leaders expressed alarm at news of Pettibone’s detention and echoed calls for the feds to leave that have grown stronger since Marshals Service officers severely wounded a peaceful protester on Saturday.

On the one hand, NO MASKS plus we totally get to march into the Michigan legislature carrying assault weapons, on the other hand unarmed protesters outside a federal courthouse are probably violent anarchists and must be grabbed off the street and thrown into cells by disguised federal cops.

Jann Carson, interim executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, called the recent arrests “flat-out unconstitutional” in a statement shared with The Post.

“Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street we call it kidnapping,” Carson said. “Protesters in Portland have been shot in the head, swept away in unmarked cars, and repeatedly tear gassed by uninvited and unwelcome federal agents. We won’t rest until they are gone.”

Remember: right-wing protesters were allowed to enter the Michigan legislature, and stand in a gallery looking down on the legislators a few feet below, carrying assault rifles. Trump didn’t say boo.

After Trump sent federal officers to the city, allegedly to quell violence, tensions escalated. The feds have repeatedly deployed tear gas to scuttle protests, despite a newly passed state law that bans local police from using the chemical irritant except to quash riots. On Saturday, federal agents shot a man in the face with a less-than-lethal munition, fracturing his skull. Local officials, from the mayor to the governor, have asked the president to pull the federal officers out of the city.

This is all fine.

Well of course. Trans “woman” gets massive book deal for book about “gender.” Of course he does.

The first book by Munroe Bergdorf, a manifesto on gender by the black transgender activist and model, has been bought for a six-figure sum after a bidding war between 11 publishers.

Bergdorf’s Transitional will be published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Exploring six different facets of human experience – adolescence, sexuality, gender, relationships, identity and race – the book will draw on Bergdorf’s own experiences, including growing up in a mixed-race family, going to an all-boys school and starting her transition at the age of 24. In it, she will argue that transition is an experience every person faces in every phase in life, “and that only by recognising this can we understand times of change”.

Oh, gosh, really? I thought we were all set in stone the instant our faces popped out of Mom, never to change again. I’m shook to hear otherwise.

The book will explore the history of gender throughout the world, including Polynesian, Indian and Native American cultures that recognised more than two genders before the colonial era. “I’ve gone into the depths of where gender came from, because it hasn’t always existed in [the way] we think about gender today,” said Bergdorf. “What it’s like to be a cisgender woman today is not what it was in the middle ages, or the 1950s, or even the 1980s.”

Well thank fuck we’ve got Munroe Bergdorf to set us all straight on what it’s like to be a “cisgender” woman today, because who knows more about that than yet another man?

Bergdorf has spoken out recently about fellow Bloomsbury author JK Rowling, whose recent comments about transgender rights Bergdorf described as transphobic. She also referred the UK peer Emma Nicholson to the Parliamentary Standards Conduct Commissioner, for her posts on social media about the trans community.

In other words Bergdorf has bullied JK Rowling and Emma Nicholson; guy bullies two prominent women. Tell us something we don’t know.

On the other hand there are genuine assaults on freedom. It’s just that they don’t come from the CDC.

In the early hours of July 15, after a night spent protesting at the Multnomah County Justice Center and Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, Mark Pettibone and his friend Conner O’Shea decided to head home.

Things had been calm; the Portland cops and the feds had mostly kept a low profile.

A block west of Chapman Square, Pettibone and O’Shea bumped into a group of people who warned them that people in camouflage were driving around the area in unmarked minivans grabbing people off the street.

Uh…what? That could be anybody. That could be far-right vigilantes. That’s terrifying.

They had barely made it half a block when an unmarked minivan pulled up in front of them.

“I see guys in camo,” O’Shea said. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, ‘Oh shit. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.’”

You’ll never guess who they are.

Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.

Sound like fascism? Yes?

The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks. 

We’re allowed to protest. That’s a genuine issue of freedom. The right to protest is a real right, unlike the “right” to infect other people with deadly diseases.

Officers from the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Customs and Border Protection’s BORTAC, have been sent to Portland to protect federal property during the recent protests against racism and police brutality.

In unmarked vehicles???

But interviews conducted by OPB show officers are also detaining people on Portland streets who aren’t near federal property, nor is it clear that all of the people being arrested have engaged in criminal activity. Demonstrators like O’Shea and Pettibone said they think they were targeted by federal officers for simply wearing black clothing in the area of the demonstration.

…

Pettibone and O’Shea both said they couldn’t think of anything they might have done to end up targeted by law enforcement. They attend protests regularly but they said they aren’t “instigators.” They don’t spray paint buildings, shine laser pointers at officers or do anything else other than attend protests, which law enforcement have regularly deemed “unlawful assemblies.”

…

“It’s like stop and frisk meets Guantanamo Bay,” said attorney Juan Chavez, director of the civil rights project at the Oregon Justice Resource Center. 

Chavez has worked on litigation surrounding the weeks of protests and helped lead efforts to curb local police from using tear gas and munitions on protesters. He called the arrest by federal officers “terrifying.”

“You have laws regarding probable cause that can lead to arrests,” he said. “It sounds more like abduction. It sounds like they’re kidnapping people off the streets.”

Ashlee Albies, a civil rights attorney with the National Lawyers Guild, said Pettibone’s detention is an example of intimidation by federal law enforcement, and noted that people have a First Amendment right to demonstrate. She also said law enforcement officials have to follow procedures when they detain someone. 

It turns out Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf was in Portland that day.

In a letter released Thursday, Wolf said, “Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city.”

Under siege by a violent mob? For real? So the people of Portland are trapped while a violent mob surrounds the city and prevents all movement in or out? So the people of Portland will soon starve?

“A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice,” Wolf wrote, denigrating protests against racism in the United States’ criminal justice system as an angry mob. “To attack it is to attack America.”

And to protest outside it is to…?

I ask because protesting outside a building is not attacking that building.

This week, Trump has repeatedly spoken out about what he calls lawlessness in the city. He praised the role of federal law enforcement officers in Portland and alluded to increasing their presence in cities nationwide. Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan called the protesters criminals.

“I don’t want to get ahead of the president and his announcement,” Morgan said, “but the Department of Justice is going to be involved in this, DHS is going to be involved in this; and we’re really going to take a stand across the board. And we’re going to do what needs to be done to protect the men and women of this country.”

So Fox News is setting policy now.

Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office declined to offer comment on the latest events involving federal officers, but reiterated a statement from earlier in the week, saying federal officers should be restricted to guarding federal property.

“We do not need or want their help,” Wheeler said. “The best thing they can do is stay inside their building, or leave Portland altogether.”

Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkely said if Wolf is coming to inflame the situation in Portland so the President can “look tough,” the acting DHS leader should leave.

“Federal forces shot an unarmed protester in the face,” Merkely said in a tweet. “These shadowy forces have been escalating, not preventing, violence.”

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown similarly called for federal law enforcement officers to leave Portland. She added, Wolf is on a “mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes.”

“This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety,” Brown said in a statement. “The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.”

Trump lets the virus run amok while unleashing federal cops in unmarked vans to assault and kidnap random protesters.

This is literally what fascism looks like. Not an approach, not sort of kind of, but just the thing itself.

Meeting to discuss mask policy postponed because…

… because dozens of people not wearing masks filled the room.

Well at least they’re sincere.

Utah County Commissioner Tanner Ainge said Wednesday the gathering in Provo, Utah violated current health recommendations and moved to suspend the meeting until a later date. His motion to adjourn was approved with a 2-to-1 vote, with the dissent coming from a commissioner who had organized the meeting.

“This is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing,” Ainge said at the meeting. “We are supposed to be physically distancing, wearing masks.”

The audience responded with a loud chorus of boos. 

Because…why? Do they really want to make health and safety a libbrul thing and disease and peril a conservative thing?

Apparently the rationale is that it’s about who gets to make the rules aka you’re not the boss of me aka freedom freedom freedom.

Carly Lisonbee said Ainge and others wanted to “override a parent’s decision over what they think is best for their child.”

“I think you’re forgetting we live in America,” Lisonbee said, according to the Herald. “And we the people decide. You work for we the people, not the other way around.”

So murderers get to “decide” that they can murder at will? Arsonists get to “decide” they can set people’s houses on fire at 3 a.m.? (There was once an arsonist who did exactly that roaming north Seattle when I lived in north Seattle. It was a nervous time until he was caught. A bunch of people died when he did it to a nursing home.) Men get to “decide” they can rape women?

It doesn’t work like that. Along with the infrastructure and the regular food and water and Netflix there are some rules. You can’t have the first without the second.

You think one pandemic is bad…

I first worried about the possibility of a double pandemic in March. Four months ago, it felt needlessly alarmist to fret about two rare events happening simultaneously. But since then, federal fecklessness and rushed reopenings have wasted the benefits of months of social distancing. About 60,000 new cases of COVID-19 are being confirmed every day, and death rates are rising. My worry from March feels less far-fetched. If America could underperform so badly against one rapidly spreading virus, how would it fare against two?

COVID-19 has made clear what happens when even powerful, wealthy countries are inadequately prepared for rare but ruinous events. Months into the pandemic, international alliances are strained, resources are diminished, and experts are demoralized. The longer this fiasco drags on, the more vulnerable America becomes to further disasters: inbound hurricanes, wildfires, and many other viruses that lie in wait.

Also major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Having failed to lead the best-prepared nation in the world against one pandemic, Donald Trump has made it more vulnerable to another. He has, for example, frayed international bonds further by trying to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization. Whether he has the legal authority to do so is still unclear, but even if the threat is empty, “some of the effects will be immediate,” says Loyce Pace, the president of the Global Health Council. U.S. officials and experts will start disengaging from international institutions, and that might encourage other nations to follow suit.

This won’t just harm the WHO at the time when it is most needed, but will also further diminish America’s already damaged international standing. A country that has badly mishandled its own outbreak, that has bought up the world’s stock of important drugs, and that has petulantly withdrawn from global alliances is less likely to receive warnings or support if a new crisis emerges.

And then it gets worse. Ed Yong spells it all out.

Bully complains of bullying.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle has stepped down from the Labour frontbench, saying he had been the victim of a “torrent of online hate” because of a “campaign by the rightwing media”.

…

Russell-Moyle did not specify the details of the abuse he had suffered. His resignation came weeks after he apologised to the author JK Rowling for accusing her of “using her own sexual assault as justification for discriminating” against trans people.

And of course by “discriminating against trans people” he means saying such shocking things as:

I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Let’s look again at what he said about Rowling:

Rather than attacking the update or even the two main laws, the Gender Recognition Act 2005 and the Equality Act 2010, these conservative forces attacked nebulous concepts which you couldn’t argue with. They raised women and children’s safety in ways that seemed innocuous at first but were ultimately manipulated to cast trans people as predators. These issues on their own are important and worthy of discussion, but here they were being used cynically to undermine the rights of others.

We saw the spectacle of a social conservative shouting “penis” over and over again at trans women during a TV debate, as if this was enough to win the argument. Recently, of course, we saw people like JK Rowling using her own sexual assault as justification for discriminating against a group of people who were not responsible for it. Trans people are no more likely to be rapists; in fact, they are more likely to be victims of sexual assault themselves. That’s why, despite JK Rowling’s hate towards them, hundreds of trans people wrote to complain to The Sun when it trivialised her domestic abuse on a recent front page.

Not a nice man.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on He says please read it all.

Les sigh. This is just a little of what goes through my head when I see this sort of thread/post/article/etc.

Trans women are women.

Trans men are men.

Non binary people are non binary.

For some, these terms are porous and they live between them.

Gender is not absolute.

What are women? What are men? Are you using the same senses of these words as the people you’re responding to? As law does? As science does? As literature does? As the totality of our species history does? If yes, can you show that? If not, how do you justify that, and what are the potential consequences that need to be navigated?

What does it mean to be non-binary? Does it entail that everyone who is not non-binary is binary? Is that not a binary? If non-binary means neither A nor B, what are the potential Cs? What distinguishes A from B, A from C, and B from C?

What does it mean for a term to be porous? If non-binary’s complement is binary, what would it mean to “live between” the dichotomy?

Are the proposed senses of these terms indisputable? On what grounds? Does that sort of justification apply to other terminology? How do we know when a term isn’t indisputable?

Most people’s gender “matches” with the one conferred on them by biology and society.

What does it mean for a gender to match? How do you know that this is true of most people? What does biology confer, gender-wise? What does society confer, gender-wise?

To the cis women who feel betrayed by the Guardian’s coverage of trans issues: I’m genuinely saddened to have lost you as everyone working here wants to fight misogyny, sexism and patriarchal power/bullshit.

How does misogyny relate to gender? To sex? Does this understanding of misogyny result in things previously considered misogynist no longer being considered so? What of the reverse?

How does sexism relate to gender? To sex? Does this understanding of sexism result in things previously considered sexist no longer being considered so? What of the reverse?

How does patriarchy relate to gender? To sex? Does this understanding of patriarchy result in things previously considered patriarchal no longer being considered so? What of the reverse?

Do transwomen have concerns not shared by “cis” women? Do “cis” women have concerns not shared by transwomen? If the answer to either question is no, what does this entail with respect to biology? If, instead, the answer is yes to either, what are those concerns? Do transwomen have the right to speak about those concerns that are peculiar to them? Do “cis” women have the right to speak about those concerns that are peculiar to them? Does any of the aforementioned vocabulary make discussing those concerns difficult or unclear?

Men threaten women in so many ways. Trans women (often non-white trans women) experience the blunt, murderous end of that threat all too often.

What does “all too often” mean? Why is the frequency with which “cis” women experience violence from men not mentioned? Is the omission to suggest that “cis” women suffer violence from men at an acceptable rate?

Does any of the aforementioned vocabulary make the source of violence and the nature of its threat unclear? If transmen are men, then do transmen threaten women? How do non-binary people fit into this analysis?

Again, these women need compassion.

What do you mean by compassion? Is compassion an experience of empathy? A display of sympathy? Does it entail a particular sort of social or legal practice?

There needs to be debate on how to ensure safety and agency of all women; of methods and timings of transitioning, which will vary for each person. But any debate needs to come from a place of compassion where the fact of trans women’s existence and womanhood is honoured.

What do you mean by honored? Do honoring and compassion have any entailments about what sort of positions are permissible in the debate you desire? Do they preclude certain conclusions about transition timing?

What do you mean by the fact of transwomen’s existence? Does it mean that a person labeled as trans exists? Does it mean that a person labeled as trans is all the things that the label denotes? Does this reasoning apply elsewhere? Is it possible for a label to denote logically impossible things? Is it possible for a label to denote empirically impossible things? How do we determine which labels those are? Is it possible for a label to be wrongly applied? How do we know when that happens? When a label is wrongly applied to something, does that thing exist?

I signed the letter in the wake of Suzanne Moore’s column because I thought she mis-characterised the fight for trans rights as denying women’s rights.

In your terms, to what class of people is Moore referring when she says “women’s rights”? Is Moore using the same sense of women as you? If not, how can you restate her position or argument in your terms? How can you restate your argument in her terms? Are these restatements equivalent in meaning?

This debate should continue until everyone feels safe.

Is feeling safe the most appropriate goal? Why a feeling of safety over the fact of safety? Would feeling safe make us safe?

Is a universal feeling of safety is attainable? If it is, how? If it isn’t, what level of feeling safe is acceptable?

People often approach it in bad faith. … Talk to trans people and understand the reality of their identities; their difficulties and joys.

What does it mean to understand the reality of their identities? Does this mean “understand that their identities are real”? Is this any different from accepting what they say to be true? Is it possible to approach the discussion in good faith and yet disagree on whether a transperson’s claim are true? If not, in what sense is there a discussion or debate? Is your belief potentially falsifiable or defeasible? What sort of argument, evidence, or experience would be sufficient to reduce your confidence in your belief?

I don’t have all the answers but I want to ask the right questions, to help equality and understanding, and for everyone to be empowered.

If you do not have all the answers, does that mean that some of the answers you do not know might be incompatible with a belief you currently hold? Would such an answer mean that the question isn’t right?