Trump intends to take over the elections.

Trump urged Republicans to seize control of elections and place voting under national authority Monday — one of his most explicit signals yet that he plans to interfere with the workings of democracy. 

In a radio interview on The Dan Bongino Show, Trump framed voting itself as corrupt, claimed elections were stolen from him and argued that Republicans should take over how ballots are cast and counted.

…

Trump went on to reassert his long-standing false claim that he won the 2020 election, attacking states by name.

“We have states that I won that show I didn’t win,” he said. “Now, you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out, but you know, like the 2020 election, I won that election by so much, everybody knows it.”

Trump’s comments come on the heels of an FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in Georgia last week, where federal agents executed a court-authorized search warrant and seized physical ballots, tabulator tapes, electronic images and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election. The extraordinary action has drawn sharp criticism from local officials and voting rights advocates who say the materials were secure and that the raid feeds unfounded election conspiracy theories. 

Are we going to sleepwalk into this?

In recent weeks, Trump has also suggested that the United States should not even hold the 2026 midterm elections, remarks the White House later dismissed as joking. 

Yeah. That’s a great kind of joking for a president to be doing. Truly hilarious.

Yes but let’s be clear about this.

It’s not that “the Kennedy Center is (or isn’t) closing.” It’s that Trump is closing the Kennedy Center. It’s not a thing the Kennedy Center is doing, it’s a thing that Trump is doing to the Kennedy Center, and to all of us.

It’s really important never to lose track of the direction of causality here.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on How do we know.

Sometimes I like to imagine the moral-philosophical questions surrounding transgender as a debate between Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk.

We’d ask each of them to break all the variables down into that great moral philosopher David Hume’s two columns: what “is” and what “ought”. Everything in the “is” column is a morally neutral statement of fact, or what’s close enough to fact based on the evidence. Everything in the “ought” column is a prescription for behaviour that rests on value premises and moral sentiments.

The primary difference between the gender criticals and the gender zealots is the order in which the table gets filled in. Do you start by filling in the “is” column or the “ought” column? Critical thinkers start by filling in the “is” column: first, they gather the facts. Then they feed these facts into their moral calculus to determine what should or shouldn’t be done about the matter. That’s how they fill in their “ought” column. Rational, logical, scientific. Like Mr. Spock.

If Spock flew his spaceship back in time to Earth today and decided to investigate the trans phenomenon, starting with facts, and only assembling a moral case after the facts were gathered, he’d build up an “is” column that looks something like this:

– Transwomen are biologically male.

– Decades of studies show that some heterosexual males are autogynephilic, and some of them will mentally conceptualize themselves as “women” as a result of the neurochemical rewards associated with erotic and romantic pleasure that are activated when they do so.

– Decades of studies show that some homosexual males will also conceptualize themselves as “women” as a result of a handful of complex psychological conditions related to distress surrounding their sexual and behavioural atypicality.

– It’s an undeniable fact that teenage girls virtually never mentally conceptualized themselves as “men” until very recently, coinciding with the advent of social media.

– There’s overwhelming evidence that social media is the instigating factor in girls and young women recently taking up trans identities in droves.

From there, he’d have a very easy time filling in the other column with a list of oughts, marking out the moral boundaries of transgender acceptance in secular society. Those bounds would be mostly limited to their personal social sphere. He’d no doubt be fine with cross-gender dress and presentation, and he’d be fine with people engaging in whatever personal activities they like, imagining themselves however they like within the scope of personal private lives, just like with other groups, such as religious affiliations.

But he’d find very little merit in arguments for changing the sex marker on people’s passports or allowing males with transgender identities unfettered access to women’s spaces. And he’d no doubt be appalled at the misapplication of the label “transgender” onto children — he’d rightly see that as an egregious category error — taking an adult psychological/superstitious/sexual concept and re-framing it as an innate state of being.

Gender zealots, on the other hand, lead with their feelings, like Captain Kirk. They start by filling in the “ought” column. The first order of business upon hearing the word “trans” is to establish one’s value premises and moral sentiments. Am I a good liberal? Do I care about “LGBTQ”? Isn’t it virtuous to support smashing barriers around “gender”? Don’t I just hate those horrible Klingons homophobes who were so cruel to gays and lesbians? Then, after their moral framework has been laid out, they start to fill in the “is” column: they go out and gather facts, unwittingly letting their biases influence where they’re getting their data from.

– They suddenly find themselves eagerly swallowing postmodernist gobbledygook in order to justify their biased desire to conclude that transwomen are not, in fact, biologically male.

– They willfully accept absurd claims that “autogynephilia is a myth” desipite the comical abundance of evidence that cross-sex erotic roleplay is a massive kink for some men.

– They block out their own memories of their own childhoods, where “trans kids” clearly didn’t exist, and none of their classmates and neighbours killed themselves because they couldn’t get sex changes before they were old enough to get a driver’s licence.

On and on. From there, once they’ve got both the “is” and “ought” columns filled in, they see the whole picture quite differently. That’s why they’re so utterly blind to the scandalous goings-on. They think they’ve got the complete picture already. But because they started assembling the picture with their biases, the rest of it ended up terribly biased as a result, and there’s no room left in either column for dissenting views.

Captain Kirk was a passionate man, who led with his emotions, and he saved many people — and aliens! — with his daringness and bravery. But he was also flawed: good liberal that he was, devoted to the Space UN Federation’s progressive, pluralist, diplomatic, largely pacifist, science-embracing objectives, his passions also gave him a prejudice: a hatred for homophobes and by extension transphobes Klingons that lasted for several years, from 2285 to 2293 (or, from Star Trek III to Star Trek VI, if you must). Ultimately, it was combination of persuasion from Spock and personal experience that helped him see past his biases around this touchiest of subjects, those blasted transphobes Klingons.

Hopefully, with a combination of persuasion from us gender-criticals plus personal experience as a result of the mounting chaos the gender mess has created, the otherwise well-intentioned gender zealots will eventually come to the light of reason. It took Kirk eight Space Years to reconcile with the Klingons. How much longer until the gender zealots come around?

Oof. Watch this.

He’s so different it’s startling. Not better, of course, but very different. Fast, sharp, New Yawk energy type different. He doesn’t come across as stupid. Evil, yes, but stupid, no.

So anyway. This business of grabbing the Kennedy Center only to shut it down.

What about that, eh? What next? Is he going to grab the Metropolitan Museum of Art so that he can shut it down? The Art Institute of Chicago? The National Gallery of Art right there in DC?

It was revolting and vomit-inducing enough when he slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, but now that he’s admitted (aka bragged) that he did it in order to demolish it, we have to wonder how many items of this kind will be turned to rubble over the next three years.

Litigators also wonder.

Sounds like a fun evening.

In a frenetic presidency that has been marked by jarring contrasts, he added another Saturday night: suiting up in black-tie regalia and telling jokes about invading Greenland and bombing Iran even as demonstrators assembled across the nation to rebuke his aggressive roundups of noncitizens in Minneapolis.

In one sense, Trump’s appearance put him inside one of official Washington’s longtime traditions: the annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an exclusive organization of CEOs, politicians, and other Washington luminaries. But it was done in characteristic Trumpian fashion, at once unapologetic and awkward, with barbs aimed at political adversaries, grievances over perceived slights and punch lines that at times fell flat before a bipartisan audience.

Ah yes, unapologetic and awkward, more commonly known as vulgar and rude. In characteristic Trumpian fashion=trashy and stupid.

Spending his Saturday evening, as he himself put it in his remarks, in a room that included “people I hate” was an unlikely but somehow fitting end to a week in which he continued to test the limits of his power but also found time for distractions.

They aren’t distractions though, not to him. His war on everything and everyone with the slightest trace of basic decency is his favorite thing.

It was the first time Trump addressed the Alfalfa Club, speaking before a room whose membership includes such foes as JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (whose bank he is suing), David Rubenstein (whom he fired as head of the Kennedy Center), and Jerome H. Powell (the outgoing Fed chairman whose role he is investigating).

Some jokes landed with a thud, and the room fell silent repeatedly.

“So many people in the room I hate. Most of you I like,” he said, according to an attendee. “Who in the hell thought this was going to happen?”

Huh. Gee, with wit and eloquence like that it’s hard to figure out why the room kept falling silent.

Oh gawd.

The writing. It gets worse every day.

“many Highly Respected Experts”

Just go back to kindergarten. Go. They will give you milk and cookies.

A question asked in a gender critical Facebook group:

How do we know we are on the right side?

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve become extreme and captured…Are we on the right side? How do we know?

I think about that often. I’m sure all gender-skeptical types do.

One of the first things I think when I ask myself that question is the fact that I couldn’t believe in it if I tried. Even if I decided kindness or compassion or basic decency required me to, I couldn’t. The best I could do is fake it. Am I wrong not to fake it? Am I on the wrong side because I can’t fake it?

There are at least two parts to the belief problem – at least two things to believe or not. The first is whether or not men can be women (and vice versa but the men one is the one that raises all the power issues), and the second is if they can, what are we required to do?

I can imagine believing that men can (sort of kind of, in some sense, etc) be women, but I stumble at trying to believe that therefore it’s perfectly fair for men to take everything away from women. I couldn’t do it, not without becoming a completely different person, one I have no interest in being and no interest in interacting with.

It’s a bit of a brick wall.

Also: right side of which?
There are at least two aspects of the ideology that require taking a side.
One is whether or not men can be women and vice versa. A factual question.
The other is what do you do if you decide that men can indeed be women. A “now what?” question.
Even if I could bring myself to agree that men can be women, or at least that men can genuinely think they are women, I would still have to think about what to do about men who claim to be women.
Even if I could manage to believe that men can be women or deeply convinced they are women, I would still think they have no right to take what belongs to women.

Miller says the quiet part out loud.

I haven’t so far found any more details on this but I expect they will be forthcoming. Meanwhile: siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

It’s International Women’s Day; you have to include some men.

Why though?

RFK Jr. is now a wellness guru for Republicans

Why? Why him? Why not someone with actual medical training who is nevertheless a “wellness” crank? That would at least improve your odds. Bad Kennedy is just so random.

The GOP’s embrace of nutrition and wellness stands in sharp contrast to its position less than 15 years ago, when Republicans sharply criticized then-first lady Michelle Obama’s push for healthier meals and more exercise as nanny state nonsense.

That’s a sharp contrast all right. White man crank attacking vaccination versus Black woman pushing for healthy food and exercise.

Oh gawd they’re talking about “Islamophobia” again.

For the billionth time: Islam is a religion, and we are allowed to dispute religions. Theocracy is bad, and making one particular religion immune from dissent is a bad form of theocracy.

Islam treats women like shit, and we do get to say that.

A proposed new definition of Islamophobia is being considered by the Government, with the intention of helping combat hostility and discrimination to Muslims.

However, representatives of Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs have written to Steve Reed, the Communities Secretary, urging him not to place one group above others.

They have also warned that the proposed definition was so vague that it could have a “chilling” effect on matters of public debate such as criticism of halal slaughter, gender segregation or face coverings.

That’s putting it very politely, not to say terrifiedly. Let’s talk about “criticism of” treating women as dangerous filthy whores who are always one glance away from letting men fuck them on the street.

Maureen Dowd reviews that Melanie movie:

Some theaters showing “Melania” were so empty that wags suggested that undocumented immigrants should hide out there. Reviews are brutal: The Independent said the first lady came across as “a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda.” The Guardian dismissed the movie as “gilded trash,” and Variety asked, “Why would Amazon spend $75 million on a movie this boring?” (I think we all know the answer to that.)

Can you say “baksheesh”?

We knew everything we needed to know about her in the wake of Jan. 6. In the memoir of Stephanie Grisham, Melania’s former aide and confidante, Grisham told a chilling story about the chilly first lady. When the rioters broke through the barricades outside the Capitol, Grisham sent Melania a text: “Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness and violence?” Melania texted back simply “No.” She was busy getting ready for a photo shoot of a rug she had chosen for the White House.

Eyes on the prize, people.

Melania is where she wants to be, in the bosom of a corrupt family that is prostituting the People’s House. Following up her shady ventures into NFTs and a meme coin, the first lady got a windfall from Jeff Bezos, who certainly wanted to curry favor with her husband. Bezos’ Amazon MGM studio made her movie, providing a whopping $40 million for the film and another $35 million for marketing. The Wall Street Journal reported that Melania’s cut of the $40 million was at least $28 million.

She can buy a lot of Barbie shoes with that kind of cash.

This is particularly gross given that Amazon is engaged in mass layoffs and Bezos seems intent on starving his Washington Post of money and talent. The split screen of Bezos and his spendthrift wife, Lauren Sánchez, frolicking everywhere — including Paris fashion week — while the tech mogul defiles the crown jewel nurtured by Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham, is sickening.

What does the Washington Post matter compared to Melania’s shoes?

Well, they’re still doing it.

The local police chief, in Saint Peter, zoomed up to intervene and prevent her arrest.

The National Review tells us:

The first gender “detransitioner” medical-malpractice case to go to trial resulted in a $2 million dollar verdict against the medical professionals who approved a double mastectomy for the plaintiff, Fox Varian, in 2019 when she was only 16.

…

Fox Varian, now 22 and no longer identifying as transgender, was awarded $2 million in damages, with $1.6 million for past and future pain and suffering, and another $400,000 for future medical expenses.

The jury found that in many respects the surgeon and psychologist had skipped important steps when evaluating whether she should go forward with the surgery and had not adequately communicated with each other. These missteps were a “departure from the standard of care,” they decided.

This is one reason the normalization of all this gender-adjusting nonsense is so destructive. Saying no becomes more and more difficult because jeeeez mommmmm all the other kids are doing it. The fact that it’s a desperate measure at best disappears over the horizon.

This verdict is an important development in the great cause of protecting gender-confused minors from being subjected to irreversible procedures from which they can never be made whole. Why? Trial lawyers! I know this community well. Hell, I was one! Most are liberal politically, but if they smell money in the water, they will sue the “gender-affirming” care industry into the ground just as they do other business sectors with deep pockets.

There you go – the one thing that can out-compete the jeeeez mommmm factor: money.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

On the one hand, great news. On the other hand, the word “women” doesn’t appear even once.

Rape Crisis Scotland chief executive steps down after 24 years 

Rape Crisis Scotland chief executive Sandy Brindley is stepping down after 24 years at the organisation.

Sandy has been part of the Rape Crisis movement for more than three decades, starting as a volunteer support worker in Glasgow in 1994 before leaving to set up Rape Crisis Scotland in 2002.

Under Sandy’s leadership, and through her passionate advocacy, Rape Crisis Scotland has become a national voice for and with survivors of rape and sexual violence.

She has worked tirelessly to raise awareness, challenge public attitudes around rape and sexual violence, and ensure that the needs and concerns of survivors are respected and represented when laws and policies change. 

Yeah, she has worked tirelessly to challenge public attitudes like the one that says women should have access to rape crisis services for women only. She has worked tirelessly to be inclooosive of men in Rape Crisis Scotland whether women like it or not.

Chair of Rape Crisis Scotland’s board Lindsey Millen said: “Sandy has been with Rape Crisis Scotland since the organisation’s inception, and she has been supporting survivors of rape and sexual violence for more than 30 years.

“Sandy’s unwavering commitment to improving support and justice services for survivors has always been at the very heart of her work.”

Unless they insist on women-only services.

Sandy said: “The Rape Crisis movement in Scotland is full of wonderful, dedicated and passionate staff and volunteers – it has been such a privilege to work alongside them to stand with survivors, and to transform how Scotland responds to sexual violence.

Oh you’ve transformed it all right – but not in a good way.

Melania movie not wowing the critics.

“The golden age of America begins right now!” Trump bleats in his inaugural address, while Melania sits behind him, her face twitching unnervingly between pout and smile. Woven through the documentary’s depiction of the events in the run-up to the Trumps’ return to the White House are signs of the film’s strange genesis. Melania’s chief of staff denies a request from Matt Belloni, the entertainment journalist, to hear more about her mysterious Amazon deal. At the banquet dinner on inauguration eve (where guests are served a gold egg and caviar, because, as a sycophantic designer tells the first lady, “white and gold is you!”) viewers will repeatedly spy Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos alongside other oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. For the rights to tell this “story”, Amazon paid around $40m, including $28m directly to Mrs Trump. An expensive seat at an expensive table.

…

To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring staring up at his looted Monet.

Maybe we should all be replaced by pods. It would certainly be simpler.

This guy saw the Melania movie and he tells us about it. He’s not a fan.

Piglet pointed out in comments this excruciating exercise in Not Saying the W Word, and it’s so excruciating I have to point out every excrutiation.

Fear of ICE is keeping pregnant immigrants in Minnesota from critical care

All euphemisms for woman/women bolded from here on.

Health care providers said pregnant patients are having more complications linked to stress. But fear of immigration agents is keeping them from prenatal care.

Pregnant patients increasingly aren’t showing up for prenatal visits. Those who are are asking if they can have fewer. 

…

Across the country, health care providers have said that people are increasingly skipping prenatal visits, citing concerns about raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

…

Some patients, afraid of encountering law enforcement officials, are changing their delivery plans to opt for home births — sometimes without communicating it to providers. 

“We are seeing significant no-show rates for prenatal care visits in our clinics,” said Dr. Chelsea Thibodeau, a Minneapolis-based family physician who provides prenatal care and delivers babies at one of the hospitals. “We’ve certainly heard from patients in my clinic where they don’t feel safe coming in.” 

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that pregnant patients get regular prenatal care…

“Many, many conditions in pregnancy — whether it is anemia or high blood pressure or gestational diabetes or a growth restrictions — identifying those early and addressing them early, that can make a profound difference in fetal development and in the health of both a pregnant person and the fetus,” Thibodeau said. 

Another obstetrics provider, who asked that her name be withheld because she worries her clinic will become a target of immigration raids, said that since the start of the federal campaign, patients have been less likely to show up for visits, or to answer their phones. Those who do come in for care have expressed nervousness about coming back, or want to reduce their number of visits. 

Many, she said, are running out of food, which is particularly concerning in pregnancy, when doctors recommend patients consume an extra 300 calories per day. And when patients do come in, she said, she is seeing many at higher risk of gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, conditions that are most effectively treated when caught early in a pregnancy. 

One nurse-midwife, who works in the Twin CIties and predominantly treats Latinx patients, has seen three cases of preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) — a rare complication in which someone’s water breaks early — since the start of the federal blitz, with two of those three resulting in miscarriage…

…

Her patients are also consistently registering symptoms of depression, she said, a concern echoed by other providers across the area. Depression during or after pregnancy not only threatens the health of a pregnant person, but can harm a newborn, making it more difficult to breastfeed and undercutting the bonding between parent and infant.

Some obstetrics and gynecology providers are pivoting to in-home visits and mailing medications. But that isn’t possible to provide on scale, said Dr. Erin Stevens, an OB-GYN in Minnesota. Patients are increasingly requesting home births, including those with high-risk pregnancies that may require complex interventions.

Some patients are requesting doctors’ notes stating they are pregnant, said Dr. Kendra Harris, an OB-GYN in St. Paul whose no-show rate has also increased. The idea, she said, is that a physician’s endorsement might encourage ICE agents to treat them more gently. 

…

…

And with patients less likely to attend key visits, physicians said they worry they are missing chances to intervene. 

“That’s the reason we see people for prenatal care is to make sure things are healthy and well to make sure we can catch complications,” Stevens said. “We’re going to have a lot of people showing up when it’s time to have their baby with complications we don’t know about.”

Thibodeau recalled one recent patient with a history of previable delivery, putting her at higher risk of losing her pregnancy.

That’s a LOT of anxious erasure of women. To be fair, saying patient/patients some of the time would not necessarily be bullshit, but in a context in which the word women is banned entirely then yes, “patients” is just more of the same bullshit.

Shut up and move over, bitches.