Blurring the lines of acceptability, making the abhorrent palatable

One of the big discussions that are a result of the colonial era is what to do about cultural treasures taken back to the colonizing country and put in a museum there. An example of this is the Elgin Marbles, sculptures from Ancient Greece now on display at the British Museum in London. That museum has treasures from more countries than Greece. A movement has been around for a while now demanding such treasures be returned to the original culture. A lot of colonizers resist, giving reasons that are condescending. Today I went down to the Detroit Institute of Art and in addition to looking at the art I went to the Detroit Film Theater to see the documentary Dahomey. That had been a country along the southern edge of west Africa colonized by France. In the 1890s about 7,000 cultural treasures were taken from Dahomey to France, and put on display in French museums to be seen by French citizens. In 2021 President Emmanuel Macron approved the return of 26 treasures to the modern country of Benin. Many are significant works – statues of Dahomey kings, an ornate throne, and an ornamental display to guide a person’s soul to heaven. The story begins with the voice of Artifact No. 26 who speaks about being in a strange place. With the news of returning to Africa it wonders if it will still be relevant. Then we see the works being packed – and a rather cool shot when the camera is in the box as the lid is put on and fastened down. They’re loaded onto a plane, then unloaded in Benin. Only when Artifact No. 26 is removed from the box, after the sounds of unfastening and the lid lifted off, do we learn it is a statue of Benin’s King Ghezo. These treasures are put on display, Benin dignitaries come for a grand opening, and their new museum is opened to the public. Those scenes are interspersed between scenes of students at the University of Abomey-Calavi talking about what they think of all this. That was the most interesting part of the movie. Some of the points they made: Getting these 26 pieces back is great, but what about the rest of the 7,000 that were taken? Giving us only 26 is an insult and Macron did it only to say see how generous I am! I grew up on Disney, I didn’t grow up watching animated movies about King Béhazin. Why am I speaking French and not the native languages of the area? This is an important movie and important to the discussion of colonial theft. But the discussion should encompass a lot more than this. Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported that even though Matt Gaetz has been elected to another term, starting in January, he has said his resignation last week is permanent. His seat will need to be filled by someone else. The House Ethics report, supposedly damning, can remain sealed. There are several idea of what Gaetz might do next. Fox News commentator? For now he is unemployed. Singer also reported the nasty guy is getting real touchy when people point out his win was not the mandate he keeps claiming, that he actually got a tiny bit under 50% of the popular vote. His tally is just 1.6% over what Harris got. Voters in four states voted for him while voting for a Democratic senator. And his House majority is the smallest since there were 50 states. Kos of Kos wrote:

It will never make sense, but people believed Donald Trump when he lied—about Vice President Kamala Harris, about President Joe Biden, about the economy, about immigrants, about trans people, about his accomplishments. Yet, when he told the truth about what he would do if elected, people didn’t believe him. But it’s not just regular voters who are shocked, mind you. So are the high-paid lobbyists who supposedly do this for a living.

They’re stunned the Robert Kennedy Jr. got the top health job, though the nasty guy never talked about anyone else. They’re also scrambling to staff up to make sure when the nasty guy announces his tariffs the rules will be written to exempt their business. Which is a recipe for corruption. I’ve written about Sarah McBride being the first transgender person in Congress which was followed quite quickly with Speaker Mike Johnson segregating bathrooms according to “biological sex.” Morgan Stephens of Kos wrote that Natalie Johnson, former aide to Rep. Nancy Mace who proposed the bathroom rule, has a few things to say.

“‘Protecting women’ in Congress would be introducing a bill to bar Matt Gaetz, a sexual predator with an affinity for underage girls, from ever walking those halls again, rather than dropping a messaging bill that’s sole goal is getting on TV,” Johnson wrote on X on Wednesday. ... "If you think this bill is about protecting women and not simply a ploy to get on Fox News, you've been fooled," Johnson also wrote on Wednesday.

Mace is fundraising off her success, using a text about McBride, “I don’t want to see your junk in my bathroom.”

Johnson replied to the text on X, writing, “I don’t want to see your botched, cheap hooker-inspired boob job on my television. Can we introduce a bill to bar that?”

Mace posted in 262 times in 36 hours on X about McBride and bathrooms. That prompted:

“If I tweet 262 times in 36 hours about anything please come do a wellness check,” wrote Alyssa Farah Griffin, who was Trump’s White House director of strategic communications and who currently co-hosts “The View.”

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quotes a few things worth mentioning. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that for most people what the nasty guy does is still an abstraction.

It’s very different in the transgender community. There, leaders like Sanchez are having gut-wrenching conversations with people wondering if they need to accelerate major life moves, like gender-affirming surgery or a legal name change, before an openly hostile government arrives on Jan. 20. Indeed, fears of what life might be like under Trump 47 for at least 1 million transgender Americans already began to hit home this week when the community’s one bright star on Election Day — a victory for the first-ever transgender member of Congress, Delaware’s Rep.-elect Sarah McBride — quickly became a symbol of the GOP’s determination to turn ugly campaign rhetoric into harsh governing reality.

Michael Li tweeted on Bluesky that we don’t have to look to Europe for examples of authoritarianism.

A lot of people think of the Jim Crow South as a non-democracy for Black people & a democracy for white people. But the reality is that it wasn’t especially a democracy for white people either. Many scholars, in fact, refer to the Jim Crow South as a series of authoritarian enclaves.

I’m pretty sure a referenced this article yesterday though Dworkin chose to quote a different part than Chitown Kev had. The article is by Sam Wolfson for The Guardian discussing the Manosphere or the Rogansphere, named for Joe Rogan and his popular podcast. This is Fox News for young people.

Steve Bannon always said the doctrine behind Breitbart was that “politics is downstream of culture” and that to change politics one must first change culture. It’s a doctrine that guided Trump to victory during his first campaign, mostly with older white voters, but has been taken to a new apex by these podcasters. They blend liberal and conservative culture, blurring the lines of acceptability and making figures like Trump more palatable to those who might have previously abhorred him. ... These podcasters are nothing like the extremist far-right white nationalist and men’s rights influencers, such as Andrew Tate and Gavin McInnes, who are explicit in their hate speech. Instead, they feature left-leaning and comic guests alongside hard-R Republican ones and then include extreme voices, normalising them by association (McInnes appeared on Rogan and Andrew Tate has appeared on Carlson; Rogan says Tate “says very wise things” among “ridiculous s---”). Kill Tony has an incredibly diverse mix of regular comedians, including a huge number of comics with disabilities. It also has lots of white comics who say the N-word. It’s not simple.

Natalie Jackson tweeted:

I wrote about the things I think are missing from the Democrats discourse: 1) scope of the losses (you'd think this was 1984) 2) how media struggles to explain a second Trump win; easier to yell at Dems 3) there might not be a grand theory. it might be uninformed voters' vibes. We're still doing it. We're still obsessing over what Dems did wrong instead of sitting with the uncomfortable reasons voters went with Trump. Some of them - including how voters made decisions - are pretty uncomfortable to consider. Trump ran an objectively terrible campaign. Making this about campaign decisions is missing the point.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme. I don’t know who is speaking – the woman is shown, but I don’t recognize her. She said:

I have shared the same bathroom with Sarah McBride on several occasions, and she never once made me feel uncomfortable. She did however help me fix my makeup. That Congresswoman knows how to blend her foundation, which is more than I can say about Donald Trump.

In another pundit roundup Dworkin quoted a tweet by Steven Dennis:

Not sure people realize just how close Democrats were to taking control of the House of Representatives. ~10K votes or so = the difference between Mike Johnson controlling the House agenda and Hakeem Jeffries. Trillions in taxes and spending changes likely hinged on those 10,000...

Heather Cox Richardson of Letters from an American noted that Pete Hegseth, nominated to run the Department of Defense, has no relevant experience.

According to Heath Druzin of the Idaho Capital Sun, Hegseth has close ties to an Idaho Christian nationalist church that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”

I read that and wonder about Hegseth’s definition of “America.” I’m sure it is centered around America being a white ethnostate, which it never was, though there has always been a strong belief in white supremacy. He isn’t talking about the wonderfully diverse and culturally rich place modern America is. In a tweet Mark Joseph Stern quoted Jacob Rubashkin:

When RFK was running for president he said he would stop research on drug development and infectious diseases for eight years.

Stern added:

Just a massive "f--- you" to the millions of families relying on advancements in treatment for loved ones with ALS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, and so much more. Confirming this lunatic would amount to killing people.

The New Yorker tweeted a cartoon by Robert Leighton from 2016. A woman opens the door to her cartoonist husband’s studio and says, “Stop — that Trump cartoon you came up with this morning just happened.”