I was going to run with this but then I paused. It could be fake. I think it might be fake. It’s just that little bit too much.
It’s that very last bit that overdoes it. Asking them to limit their own concerns to one day out of three or four a week so that he can feel happy is just that little bit too much. Just that little bit too Wally Smith, if you remember him.
USAID still being wiped off the map.
The Trump administration said Sunday that it was placing all but a fraction of staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave worldwide and eliminating at least 1,600 U.S.-based jobs.
The move was the latest and one of the biggest steps yet toward what President Donald Trump and cost-cutting ally Elon Musk say is their goal of gutting the six-decade-old aid and development agency in a broader campaign to slash the size of the federal government.
The move comes after a federal judge on Friday allowed the administration to move forward with its plan to pull thousands of USAID staffers off the job in the United States and around the world. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols rejected pleas in a lawsuit from employees to keep temporarily blocking the government’s plan.
“As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally,” according to the notices sent to USAID workers that were viewed by The Associated Press.
They’re keeping on a few people to arrange the plane trips home for the others, then it’s byebye to them too.
The move escalates a monthlong push to dismantle the agency, which has included closing its headquarters in Washington and shutting down thousands of aid and development programs worldwide following a freeze on all foreign assistance. A judge later temporarily blocked the funding freeze. Trump and Musk contend that USAID’s work is wasteful and furthers a liberal agenda.
But is it really a liberal agenda to buy global good will? However pricey it is it’s nowhere near as expensive as world wars.
How lucky for Musk that he just happens to be in a position to fire federal employees at will.
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is eliminating jobs at the vehicle safety agency that oversees his Tesla Inc., regulates the autonomous vehicles he says represents its future and has launched investigations into deadly crashes involving the Texas-based company’s cars.
Deadly crashes are the price we pay for other people having dangerous cars. Aren’t we lucky?
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has cut a “modest” amount of positions at the agency, which is tasked with ensuring safety on U.S. roads, it said in a statement Saturday.
The loss of three of the seven members of the specialized unit overseeing autonomous vehicles is part of a 10% overall workforce reduction at the agency enacted by Musk’s advisory group on shrinking the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.
Almost half the people overseeing autonomous vehicles are no longer overseeing automated vehicles. Fancy that.
The Tesla CEO has accused the agency of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations into crashes and recalls of vehicles.
You are holding back PROGRESS with your pesky investigations into crashes, you filthy Marxists. Go get a job at Pizza Hut.
On Friday, Tesla recalled more than 375,000 vehicles due to a power steering issue. The safety administration said a circuit board may become overstressed, causing a loss of steering assist after a stop.
Ah, just a loss of steering, so nothing dangerous at all.
It turns out Trump doesn’t actually have the power to do what he’s doing. It looks as if nobody’s going to stop him all the same. I have to wonder why there are no enforcement mechanisms built in to all these rules and limits.
President Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government.
If Congress established the regulatory agencies as independent from direct White House control then Trump should be unable to get greater authority over them. Why are there no guardrails?
The order requires independent agencies to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review, asserts a power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects or efforts that conflict with presidential priorities, and declares that they must accept the president’s and the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law as binding.
“This is a power move over independent agencies, a structure of administration that Congress has used for various functions going back to the 1880s,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law.
It’s as if everyone has been bribed to stand back and let him do whatever he wants all the time.
The order follows Mr. Trump’s summary firings of leaders of independent agencies in defiance of statutes that bar their removal without cause before their terms are up. Collectively, the moves constitute a major front in the president’s assault on the basic shape of the American government and his effort to seize some of Congress’s constitutional power over it.
Or to put it another way, the moves constitute a coup. Not a metaphorical coup or a rhetorical coup but a real one.
Oh come ON.
How trans rights took over Scottish politics — and aren’t going away
Henceforth, no medical diagnosis would be needed and a person would be required to “live in” their acquired identity for only three months before becoming eligible for a GRC. The age at which such certificates could be gained would also be lowered to 16. In effect, a person could “self-identify” as a man or a woman as they saw fit and the system, the nuts and bolts of officialdom, would accept this as a manifestation of their true selves. The proposals would “make the lives of trans people in this country that little bit better and easier”, Sturgeon said, “and I think that is something to be proud of”.
Sturgeon’s supporters — and the former first minister herself — note that the government’s proposals were the subject of not one but two consultations over five years and claimed that the bill was “the most scrutinised” piece of legislation in the history of Holyrood. Speaking to the United Nations in 2019, Sturgeon insisted that “as an ardent, passionate feminist […] I don’t see the greater recognition of transgender rights as a threat to me as a woman or to my feminism”.
If that’s true it just means she doesn’t know how to think. If men can “identify as” women and then help themselves to everything that belongs to women, that is in fact a threat to any woman “as a woman.” Men get to help themselves to everything that belongs to us. How is it not obvious that’s a threat to women as women?
“The way it was handled is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the party,” said Joanna Cherry, the former MP and long-standing critic of Sturgeon’s leadership.“There was never actually any proper vote or debate on the concept of self-ID at any SNP conference. It was tagged on to other things. There was no proper conference debate. There was no chance for anybody to go, ‘You know, I think there is a problem here’, and no matter how reasonably it was said — you were shot down.”
Isn’t it fascinating that it’s women’s rights that get brushed aside this way?
“It’s completely baffling to us that it’s become such a big issue,” said Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens. “We don’t really understand what all the fuss is about, in the sense that the Gender Recognition Act allows a trans person to change the gender marker on their birth certificate. That’s it.”
Oh come on. Nobody can be that stupid. That’s not “it” – there’s a lot more that’s “it.” Men invading women’s spaces, prizes, awards, political organizations, groups, clubs, marches, protests, campaigns, toilets, dressing rooms, jobs – all that is also “it.” Very much it. All that is it and it’s what we object to. Now do you really understand?
According to Slater: “Somehow gender and the gender recognition act has become conflated with safety for women and girls, or how the police handle prisoners — they start wrapping up all these issues together when what they’re really expressing is discrimination against trans people.”
Not “conflated with.” Understood to be a threat to. We “wrap up all these issues together” for the brutally simple reason that they are connected. (It’s hard not to scream in all italics at this much willful performative idiocy.)
Yousaf’s handling of the crisis might have been inept but it was a further demonstration of just how dangerous, and even toxic, the issue had become. “The public instinctively don’t like this, they don’t get it,” said an SNP insider who supported both Sturgeon and Yousaf. “It makes them hugely uncomfortable. It damaged Nicola and Humza.” Even many of those who backed the bill without reservation now admit it was “badly handled”. Some insist that an undue amount of attention has been devoted to an issue “that affects such a small group of people”.
The bill’s opponents consider that concern an example of the myopia that has bedevilled the process all along. In their view, women can hardly be considered a “small group of people”.
And it’s so tellingly hilariously enragingly weird that so many people think that’s exactly what women are – just some tiny boring sniveling group of eccentrics.
Crude boy asks crude question, makes crude threat.
Elon Musk said Saturday that federal employees must detail their accomplishments at work or risk losing their jobs, the latest move by the Trump administration to overhaul the government that prompted confusion among the workforce.
“Consistent with President [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk posted on X.
The email created confusion across the federal government. One senior government official said some federal employees started checking with their own legal advisers about how best to respond. One Justice Department official sent out an email asking their staff members to hold off on responding until management could provide further guidance. And one OPM employee questioned whether the agency is allowed to give work orders to employees in other agencies.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union representing thousands of federal employees, said in a statement that it would “challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees across the country.”
…
The move by Musk, whom Trump has tasked with overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency, comes after the president earlier Saturday posted on social media that he wants the Tesla CEO to “get more aggressive” with his role. Trump also has previously said he is authorizing everything Musk is doing as one of his advisers.
Yes if only Musk were more aggressive.
Maine Governor Defies Trump on Transgender Sports Ban
Last updated 21 minutes ago
Maine Governor Janet Mills has publicly opposed an executive order by President Donald Trump that aims to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. The dispute escalated after Governor Mills challenged Trump’s threat to cut federal funding to Maine, leading to a commitment to legal action. This confrontation has sparked a broader conversation on transgender rights in sports, highlighted by social media reactions from various figures, including a notable appearance of Mills at a drag show in Portland, which has stirred both support and criticism.
This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.
The summary repeats the ubiquitous lie because of course it does because the lie is ubiquitous. The issue is men in women’s sports. Women who think they are men are not an issue because of course why would they want to play in women’s sports when they think they are men? The issue is men in women’s sports, but the media uniformly lie about it, because if they said “men in women’s sports” it would be all too obvious why we oppose it.
It’s so dishonest and so manipulative and yet they all do it. And in aid of what? In aid of men systematically ruining sports for women. How very progressive.
Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”
Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “[who] protect employees’ civil rights and others [who] investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”
Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms.
…
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
…
As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
Well that certainly puts it out there for all to see. It sounds like a dopy social media blurt, but it comes from a State Department official. Who knew that only white men are competent? That guy for one.
Other MAGA figureheads have promoted similar ideas. In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revoked “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.” Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”
Ahhhhh right, white people built this country and black people did not…except of course for all the slaves who created vast wealth for their “owners” who were thus freed up to prance around the landscape bragging about how valuable they were.
This ideology is apparent in the rote blaming of diversity by some conservatives for every catastrophic event—as they did following a midair collision over the Potomac River. Or a freighter crashing into a bridge in Baltimore. Or doors flying off Boeing planes.The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.
But no doubt a supremely competent reality-tv star.
H/t Tim Harris
Schools following Scottish Government gender guidance could be next in line for a Sandie Peggie-style legal case, John Swinney has been warned. For Women Scotland described First Minister John Swinney’s stance on single-sex spaces as “very cowardly” as the group used a Scottish Labour fringe event to call on councillors to reject national guidance.
The Scottish Labour conference rejected a motion calling for the Scottish Government to have single-sex spaces for boys and girls based on biology. It said current Scottish Government guidance “relies on the necessity of unquestioning affirmation” of transgender identity from a school pupil.
The wording is interesting because it’s so obviously nuts. How can unquestioning affirmation of anything a school pupil says be a necessity? Schools don’t exist to affirm without question what children say, they exist to teach them how to choose which things to say, and why, and how, and on what occasions, and whether or not with apologies or caution or skepticism.
Unquestioning affirmation is not necessarily a good thing. It’s dumb and destructive to teach children that it is. Schools of all institutions should be sharply aware of that fact.
Schools have rules, and they teach basics about how to treat each other, and it’s ok for that to be not up for debate, at least not when the rules are being broken. Other than that, though, questions are a core part of teaching.
Anyway gender ideology, of course, is just about the last thing anyone should accept without question.
O what a noble university is here o’erthrown.
(Also why do they put a glass of water right next to the laptop? I’d bump into it 4 seconds in.)
Part two of The Open University’s censorship and punishment of Dr Almut Gadow:
Dr Gadow had alleged that the university’s equality, diversion and inclusion (EDI) department announced plans to “incorporate its political ideologies” across the curriculum in the 2021-22 academic year. She claimed she voiced concerns that a criminal lawyer’s role “is to present facts” and that “sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies”.
The academic also argued that “no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts”. Dr Gadow said she was told that her posts on the online staff forum amounted to “serious insubordination” because she had been told it was not the place for such discussions.
Sex is a relevant fact for a whole lot of disciplines. It’s a relevant fact for daily life, too. It’s really not something we should be systematically lying about, let alone persecuting other people for not lying about.
She was informed by the university that her persistence in posting comments on issues relating to gender identity, paedophilia, and sex offending amounted to “serious bullying and harassment”.
The content of several of her posts was a breach of the university’s transgender staff policy because they may “create an environment in the forum that isn’t inclusive, trans-friendly, or respectful”, Dr Gadow was also told.
I wonder if the OU ever paused to think about an environment in the forum that isn’t women-friendly. (I don’t really – of course they didn’t. Women are the nasty dominant people who persecute memmers of the trans communinny.)
In a statement following the settlement from the Open University, Dr Gadow claimed her experience illustrated that EDI policies at universities often place undue pressure on staff and teaching.
“Much needs to be corrected in this area, where EDIdeology dictates the content of OU teaching at the expense of academic freedom. My case has highlighted the extent to which EDI-fied and ‘liberated’ curricula violate not only the university’s obligations to uphold academic freedom but the human rights of its members,” she said.
And the rights of the students to be taught truth rather than trendy drivel about magic gender.
It can be expensive to fire academics for knowing and saying that people can’t change sex.
A law lecturer who was sacked by the Open University after expressing gender-critical beliefs has been handed a payout from the institution. Dr Almut Gadow was dismissed for gross misconduct in November 2022 after she criticised changes to the curriculum based on gender identity in an online forum. She claimed the university was introducing requirements to “indoctrinate students in gender identity theory”.
The lecturer, who taught law at the university for almost a decade, claimed she had raised concerns about new teaching requirements, including making students use offenders’ preferred pronouns.
Brilliant. Requiring teachers to require students to lie about the sex of offenders – so if they’re discussing a rape case and the Offender claims to be a woman, the teacher and the students must all call him she/her. The OU might as well require teachers to tell students that money grows on trees and elephants can fly and Trump is an intelligent thoughtful compassionate fella.
The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, including the financial sum awarded to Dr Gadow. It amounts to an about-turn for the university, which previously told The Telegraph it would “vigorously defend” itself before a judge.
The institution also accused the academic of making “spurious allegations” about the circumstances surrounding her dismissal and said it looked forward to presenting its own version of events at an employment tribunal.
Well it totally did look forward but it turned out it was getting its hair done that day so it had to settle.
In a statement, Dr Gadow accused the university of agreeing “to pay me an undisclosable amount of money to avoid a public airing of the facts”.
“After long claiming it could not wait for the truth to come out in court, that it would fight this case ‘vigorously’ and ‘robustly’ all the way, the OU [Open University] – while making no admission as to liability – has resolved the matter by way of payment of an undisclosable sum of money.”
Can we all guess why? I think we can.
Shouldn’t that be “inseminated thing”?
DemocratIC Governor. “Democrat” is a noun, not an adjective. The adjective is “democratic.”
But anyway – the determination to erase women continues. Men can’t be inseminated, so there’s no point in changing “pregnant woman” to “inseminated person.” If women who claim to be men are offended by “pregnant woman” that’s just too bad.
President Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.
…
The chairman is the most senior officer in the United States and by law the principal military adviser to the president. He does not direct military forces and is not in the chain of command. Normally, the chairman serves a four-year term; the position, like that of FBI director, is meant to bridge across administrations rather than change with each incoming president—specifically so that the chairman (again, like the head of the FBI) does not become a partisan political appointment.
Obviously, Trump has no use for such conventions, and believes that every senior official in the United States should be a personal appointee of the president—so long as that president is him.
…
Trump loathed Brown’s predecessor, General Mark Milley, and has floated the idea that Milley should be executed for actions he took at Chairman. (This idea came to him shortly after the publication of this magazine’s profile of Milley, by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, which detailed how Milley protected the Constitution from Trump.)
Trump and Hegseth have announced their intentions to fire several other senior officers—and perhaps even most ominously, including the head lawyers of each of the services. Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI, the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government. None of this has anything to do with effectiveness, or “lethality,” or promoting “warfighters,” or any other buzzwords. It is praetorianism, plain and simple.
Terrifying enough yet?
CNN reports the latest insanity:
In an unprecedented purge of the military’s senior leadership Friday night, President Donald Trump fired the top US general just moments before his defense secretary fired the chief of the US Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force.
Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine – an extraordinary move since Caine is retired, according to an Air Force official, and is not a four-star general.
Trump called Brown a “fine gentleman” and an “outstanding leader,” while hinting at the firings to come. “Finally, I have also directed Secretary [of Defense Pete] Hegseth to solicit nominations for five additional high level positions, which will be announced soon,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Minutes later, Hegseth released a statement announcing he’d fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy.
The removal of the second Black man to serve as America’s most senior general and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff appears to send a strong signal from an administration that has outlawed diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and wider government.
Hegseth called Franchetti a “DEI hire” in his 2024 book, in which he wrote: “If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — hooray.”
Hegseth on Friday also said that Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force, had been fired, and that he was “requesting nominations” for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force, indicating they will be replaced.
Systematically firing a woman and a Black man for being a woman and Black respectively.
This is hell, nor are we out of it.
My American friends are asking me about President Trumps’s observation that the British ‘like him’.
I regret this is quite unfounded.
The explanation for this canard is that Trump is pronoid.
Pronoid is the opposite of paranoid. A paranoid person thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody is out to get them. A pronoid person is someone who thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody likes them.
The fact is that the British loathe Donald Trump
This is because he is the polar opposite of a ‘ Gentleman ‘, who has qualities the British admire. A fine example is Gareth Southgate.
To the British, a ‘ Gentleman ‘ is a man who is modest, well-mannered, self deprecating, quietly intelligent, considerate of other people’s feelings, and well-informed.
He is not vulgar, inflated, vain, boastful, noisily ignorant, sleazy and common as muck.
I hope this clears up any confusion.
[Photo not included.]
Unite Scotland turns out to be not all that unitey.
I’m especially impressed by that breezy “Unite believes that the strengthening and protection of the rights of trans people does not mean the rights of others will be diminished or affected.” Well that’s nice, but they offer no explanation of how that claim can possibly be true. How can it be true that “rights” such as the “right” for men who say they are trans to have everything that belongs to women and go everywhere that women go will not diminish or affect the rights of women? It can’t; the claim is absurd. Just making boastful assertions is not enough; you have to explain how your claim can be true.
They don’t bother with thinking or explaining or giving reasons, these goons, they just make Grand Statements consisting entirely of threadbare assertions we’ve all heard a billion times. They might as well stand around ringing a cowbell all day.
Julia Carrie Wong chats with “scholar” Sophie Lewis about those evil women who dare to call themselves feminists even though they don’t think men are women.
…just three weeks into Trump’s second term, the man responsible for stripping women in the US of the right to an abortion was declared a “feminist kween”, “feminist hero” and “feminist icon” by several prominent feminist writers in the UK.
The occasion for these declarations was Trump’s all-out assault on trans rights. Since taking office, the president has used executive orders to attempt to restrict the ability of trans Americans to travel, work, receive medical care, serve in the military, attend school and participate in women’s sports.
Are trans Americans foreigners who claim to be American but aren’t?
What this dishonest “journalist” is talking about of course is not letting people do all these things with fake identities and/or with the aid of cross-sex hormones. Newsflash: nobody gets to travel or work or serve in the military with fake ID. The whole point of ID is to make sure you are who you say you are.
How did we get here? How have we arrived at a place where self-identified feminists ally themselves with a man who has so extravagantly dedicated his personal and political lives to the humiliation, domination and degradation of women and girls?
I brought this question to Sophie Lewis, whose new book, Enemy Feminisms, out this week in the US, seeks to understand how and why some forms of feminism have diverged so fundamentally from others as to become, well, enemies.
Ya it’s a good question – how did you fuckers get your “feminism” so twisted that you celebrate men in skirts who take everything that belongs to women, while you demonize women who object? Please do tell us all about the thought process.
“It is difficult – I would say impossible – to say that [Terfism] is not feminism, that the philosophical and movement roots of their whole deal is not feminism,” Lewis said. “That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there were always other feminists fighting them tooth and nail.
“It hurts and confuses us to imagine that there are anti-liberatory feminisms, but I think when we do allow that and we do conceptually break that possibility open, that’s when it becomes possible to stake out our ground as an anti-colonial, proletarian, trans feminism,” she continued.
She continued, implying that feminists who think feminism is for women are also colonialists and anti-worker.
In Enemy Feminisms, Lewis also takes on the anti-pornography turn that some radical feminists took in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of the Islamophobic femonationalist (“death by drone bomb is better (and more feminist) for women than life is under sharia law”)
So genuine feminism is Islamophilic? How does that work exactly? Islam does not repeat does not return the love.
Lewis is not the first to connect Terfism to the rising power of the global far right. The philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler has warned for years of the growing movement against “gender” – and the damage that feminist transphobia does to the coalition building needed to combat fascism. “Continuing the ‘anti-gender ideology’ discourse places contemporary ‘radical feminists’ in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,” they wrote in the 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender.
Butler wrote it therefore it’s obviously true, yeah? No.
Butler wrote a lot of things
Steve Bannon has been accused of making a “Nazi” salute while giving a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday.
The incident occurred soon after Elon Musk, another top ally of Donald Trump, was accused of giving a Nazi salute on stage during an event celebrating the president’s January inauguration.
There’s a clip, and I gotta say, it’s a pretty feeble “Nazi salute” if it is one at all. It’s not as energized as Musk’s was – it’s more like a wave than a Nazi salute. But I’m not going to quibble. It’s not as if either of these guys is a staunch opponent of Nazi-style messages.
H/t NightCrow
Time for some Steve Bannon news.
He’s not a fan of the unelected overlord from South Africa.
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former White House chief strategist, has renewed his feud with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a top Trump adviser, calling him a “parasitic illegal immigrant” in an interview published online on Tuesday.
Mr. Bannon made the comments in an interview with UnHerd, a British news site, that took place last week.
“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions,” Mr. Bannon told the interviewer.
Of course Trump too wants to play-act as god etc etc.
Despite his dramatic and fractious departure from the White House in 2017, Mr. Bannon became close with Mr. Trump again in the final year of Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Bannon is still a close ally and, more significantly, a popular figure within the Trump movement: His show, War Room, is watched closely by a number of Trump allies, as well as the president himself.
Musk and Bannon are like the two hit men in Fargo. Musk is the babbling jittery hyper guy played by Steve Buscemi, and Bannon is the huge sullen silent Swedish guy who axes him.
By all means follow the plot, guys.
