Ask the taxi driver what their PhD is in

This episode of Gaslit Nation is titled The Untold Inspiring History Behind Mrs. Orwell That Terrifies the Kremlin. Host and author Andrea Chalupa and artist Maya Hayuk discuss Chalupa’s new graphic novel Mrs. Orwell. Both Chalupa and Hayuk are of Ukrainian descent and children of refugees. One might think that Hayuk is the illustrator of the book, but that was Brahm Revel (I looked it up – Goodreads gives it 4.05/5). The discussion between Chlupa and Hayak is over an hour long and was posted on April 7, a few days before the election in Hungary. I worked from the transcript. They do talk about Orwell, but not much. Most of their congenial discussion is about having similar Ukrainian ancestry. Chalupa began:

I want to remind everyone that Hungary, Orban's Hungary, is the Kremlin's agent in the EU. There's been several investigations confirming that, including a recent one, showing how Orban's government was on the phone with the Kremlin, doing everything they could to weaken EU sanctions designed to try to stop Russia's genocidal invasion of Ukraine.

Good to know Orbán has been booted. Mrs. Orwell is Eileen Blair, wife of George Orwell, who wrote Animal Farm and 1984, novels that explain fascism. His real name was Eric Blair. Chalupa wrote the film Mr. Jones about the Holodomor, Stalin's Genocide famine in Ukraine (I’ve watched and recommend it). George Orwell makes an appearance in that film and Chalupa wanted Eileen Blair to do the same, but she needed her own project. And this graphic novel is it. Chalupa says of the book:

It's a tribute to this unsung heroine of literature. There would've been no George Orwell without her. She is so important to his greatest works of art. It was really a reminder to us that it takes a team, it takes community, it takes a love affair to get the truth out into the world today. We all have to find our great loves in this moment. We all have to hold on tight to the gentleness inside ourselves and others and show ourselves in grace and get through this time together and create, create, create, whatever that looks like to you.

Hayuk, speaking through grief and rage over Ukraine, said that the Iran war is great for Putin. Sanctions were lifted because the world needs his oil. The nasty guy is upset with NATO for refusing to help him in Iran – and dissolving the West is one of Putin’s goals. Yet the Ukraine war was close to collapsing the Russian economy – until the sanctions were lifted. Chalupa added that puts Ukraine as the front in the global war between democracy and fascism. And Russia is one of the nodes of the transnational crime network we’re up against. Netanyahu is another node. Netanyahu has said the Iran war will be long. The nasty guy responds with the war being good cover to drop the Russian sanctions. Hayuk wondered how a guy with 34 felonies was elected president. He wouldn’t be hired at McDonalds. Chalupa noted there are laws, which is separate from enforcing the laws. America doesn’t have the moral will to enforce its laws. At minute 36 they begin discussing Orwell. He served in the British Imperial Police in India for five years. He was one of the “boots smashing the face.” Women helped him out and shaped him, such as his Aunt Nellie, who helped him find a job at a London bookstore. It was Eileen, a springtime spirit. She gave him a happy nest from which he could create. Hayuk then talked about becoming an artist. She inherited talent from her father, though he wasn’t a professional artist. For her art isn’t a career, but a way of living, of being an activist, engaged deeply in the world. She has drawn and painted, but is also a photographer and theater scenic designer and builder. It’s gig work with a lot of administrative work. It’s a decent living. Chalupa said that researching and writing Mr. Jones she saw the same forces face us today. Back in 2015 she warned people that the nasty guy is a Russian asset. Most of her warnings were ignored. That prompted starting Gaslit Nation. Part of being defiant is building something. Chalupa and Hayuk talk about their ancestry. While in a German refugee camp at the end of WWII one of Chalupa’s ancestors got a Ukrainian language edition of Animal Farm. Chalupa now has that book. In that camp the Ukrainians organized to teach kids – whatever your profession back home you had to teach it to the kids. Even ballet. And Animal Farm was assigned reading. That prompted Chalupa to say many refugees are quite talented. Their potential needs to be developed for the sake of the world. Hayuk added that “every time you get into a taxi cab, have a conversation with what the taxi driver's PhD is in.”

Destroying democracy by saying they protect citizens

Daily Kos community member LaFeminista has a few thoughts about the promises of AI. From an article in Le Monde:

“It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.” S. Altman

Sam Altman has been the CEO of OpenAI since 2019, according to Wikipedia. LaFeminista wrote:

The amount of resources being thrown at basic AI is truly frightening, but worry not, AI will solve all the environmental damage done, it’ll solve most everything. Why stop at basic AI? Where is the gain in that mere bagatelle? The amassing of these colossal fortunes demands more, ever more. The race for Artificial Superintelligence and Artificial General Intelligence is on, the Prize for being first? Everything, it is the ultimate win. Ignore the damage! Perhaps not, methinks, but what do I know next to these titans of AI?

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about an ongoing event, a major piece happened last Tuesday and I’m glad I missed it. This major piece is the nasty guy reading from the Bible while in the Oval Office. Noting like smearing the separation of church and state.

He’s not going to read it silently as a humble expression of faith, of course. That would be silly. This latest incursion into the separation of church and state comes courtesy of this grifty little America Reads the Bible production, where the world’s most ostentatiously Christian of Christian nationalist types in and out of government are reading you parts of the Bible over the course of a full week.

The other participants will be at the Museum of the Bible. And I’ll be happy to miss those too. I’m sure they will find the passages about war and ignore the ones where Jesus said love your enemy and feed the poor. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, discussed the latest book by Ibram X. Kendi. His book Stamped From the Beginning has been on my to-read shelf for at least a couple years. His bestselling book is How to Be an Antiracist, which became “a cultural touchstone” and a handbook for Americans “confronted with the depth and persistence of the nation’s history of antiblackness.” His newest book is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, discussing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and its significance in the rise of fascism. Wrote Kaplan:

Kendi defines the Great Replacement Theory as the belief that global elites are enabling people of color to displace the lives, livelihoods and electoral power of white people.

Kendi is a professor, a scholar of racism, and a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. He’s also attracted the fury of the MAGA movement, always a good recommendation. When attacked he responds as a scholar – doing research and writing a book. GRT has been around in various forms for a long time. This version...

was coined by French novelist Renaud Camus in 2010, when he became convinced that Muslim immigrants from former colonies were overtaking the white population of France and its traditions. GRT warns that Muslims and people of color, whether immigrants or citizens, are literally replacing white Christians and traditional European culture, and must be stopped.

GRT isn’t just racism. It claims that social justice movements are acts of “white genocide.” It’s a zero-sum view of the world. It declares Democracy and multiculturalism are threats to whiteness and cannot be tolerated. It should sound absurd. But it is promoted by Elon Musk, Viktor Orbán of Hungary (now out of power), far-right parties in France, and the nasty guy. GRT makes a distinction between a “good” immigrant who came in the past and a “bad” immigrant who came recently. The “good” came legally and assimilated. The “bad” came illegally and they’re destroying the nation. Black Americans, many who have been here for more generations than many white people are also declared to be “bad” based on comments by people like Thomas Jefferson who believed slaves should be freed, but could not live among white people and should be sent back to Africa. GRT and its zero-sum thinking also infects other populations. Black people believe they are being replaced by Latinos. Black Christians believe they are being replaced by Muslims. Black people may be below white, but they can be higher than black immigrants who fear being nabbed by ICE. GRT is insidious because it “causes people to consent to dictatorial states.” Some people choose the protection of privilege over democracy. That’s why authoritarians push it. They can justify destroying democratic infrastructure by saying they are protecting the citizens. GRT is a problem for black people because they’ve fought for democracy for hundreds of years. Kendi says that’s why they need to understand GRT.

There is nonetheless a hopeful cast to Kendi’s latest work, centered on his belief that “human groups are natural allies against inequities,” and that coming together is more instinctual than sowing division.

A week ago Jessica Huseman, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported that Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, also Republican candidate for governor, seized the ballots from a recent election. His reason is to do his own recount and open a criminal investigation into the election. The California Supreme Court ordered a halt to his investigation. There isn’t any more reason for this Republican to seize ballots than for any other Republican to dispute any election in a decade.

Elections in the U.S. are run locally. So is law enforcement. That overlap creates a real vulnerability. The same county responsible for storing and counting ballots is also overseen by a sheriff who can get a warrant, enter election facilities, and take materials as part of a criminal investigation. In contrast, federal authorities seeking to obtain election materials have to establish jurisdiction and work through multiple layers of oversight. A local sheriff can act much more quickly, often before state officials or courts have time to respond.

Thankfully, in California the state attorney general has some authority over local law enforcement and was able to tell Bianco to halt his investigation. This may have been before the Supreme Court could act.

Lots of things make Riverside a special case. Chiefly, Bianco’s candidacy for governor raises an obvious question of self-interest — he may be using the powers of his office to elevate a political issue that he thinks will benefit him as a candidate. He is also stepping into the administration of the same election system he wants to compete in — a personal conflict many have long complained about in relation to secretaries of state who run for office during their tenures.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing Virginia’s vote to approve gerrymandering the state to give Democrats a bigger advantage.

What Virginia Democrats did by redrawing the congressional maps was antidemocratic, and it should be illegal. But, for those who care about ensuring the future of democracy, it was the least bad option of those available. As the political scientist Seth Masket wrote last year, Democrats couldn’t force the Republican Party to “feel more reverent toward institutions and norms”; they could only “raise the costs of irreverence. In the long run, that’s the most effective tool available.”

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism, how consequential the nasty guy’s time in the Oval Office has been. The choice of “consequential” isn’t about how much the guy benefited the country, but how long his actions will endure. Edsall wrote of Kettl:

On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, noting, however, that “Trump’s consequences have been aggressive efforts to unravel the ideas of the other four presidents.”

I’d rather have an “emotional” woman at the nuclear button

My Sunday movie was Claydream, a documentary about Will Vinton who built a video studio based on claymation, the stop-motion technique using clay scenes and figures. He didn’t invent claymation, but certainly raised the level of quality of the art. If you’re a few decades old you probably remember the singing and dancing California Raisins of the 1990s. That was Vinton’s creation. Vinton attended the University of Berkeley in the 1960s, which contributed to his unconventional view of the world. He and a partner created the film Closed Mondays about a man who visits a museum while it is closed and all kinds of strange things happen. That won an Oscar for a short subject in 1974. After that he got four more nominations. He created feature films, one of them The Adventures of Mark Twain. It took three years to make and was released in 1985. Alas, it had at least PG-13 content (I don’t know if this rating was used then) yet was marketed to kids. It didn’t do well. I found it online and may watch it soon. For a while his studio was quite prosperous. But it didn’t last. He was a great creative guy, but not a good CEO. He went to the wrong people to be investors. A lot of what he did was replaced with computer animation. And he didn’t own the California Raisin characters (the California Raisin Board did), so didn’t earn anything off the merchandising of what his team created. One of his last gigs was to help market M&Ms. He was the one who came up with the idea that each color of M&M should have its own personality, such as the green one wearing high-heeled shoes. I enjoyed the movie and was fascinated by some of the characters he brought to life. Natalie Kon-yu, Michael Burke, and Tom Clark of Victoria University with Emily Booth of the University of Technology Sydney, all in Australia, wrote an editorial that appeared in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. Alas, the article is behind a paywall. They didn’t explain why Australians were writing about American politics. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost to the nasty guy in part because people said a woman is too emotional to be allowed near the nuclear button. Have you seen the guy who is near that button? The authors say that everything about the MAGA movement is steeped in emotion. The nasty guy bases is actions on his latest grievances (an emotion). The attack against Iran was title Epic Fury (and emotion). MAGA men are all about how their manhood has been slighted (and emotion) or who they are jealous of (an emotion). The nasty guy and many of his top officials yell at their staffs when displeased (an emotional response). His campaign was based on retribution (an emotion). I’d rather have an “emotional” woman in charge than these people. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that yesterday Virginian voters narrowly passed a constitutional amendment to temporarily suspend what the citizens redistricting commission did and allow Democrats in the General Assembly substitute a map that would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in their delegation to the US House. This would replace a 6-5 map and give Democrats a national 10-9 advantage in the redistricting battle the nasty guy started with Texas. I found a map of the new districts put out by The Cook Political Report. It accomplishes its goal in the usual way gerrymandering is done – several new districts take a chunk of the huge Democratic population in the DC suburbs, then snake out into Republican territory. The AP article concludes:

A Tazewell County judge ruled that the redistricting push was illegal for several reasons. Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. said lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session. He ruled that their initial vote failed to occur before the public began casting ballots in last year’s general election and thus didn’t count toward the two-step process. And he ruled that the state failed to publish the amendment three months before that election, as required by law. If the state Supreme Court agrees with the lower court, the referendum results could be rendered moot.

Florida has yet to try redistricting and some of the Republican legislators see the likely blue wave and think the effort will leave too many districts with margins too small. Some of the other Republican redistricting attempts are still in court. Beyond Florida states are too far into the primary process and the election cycle to attempt a change. On Sunday – before Virginia’s vote – Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed why Virginia should approve their referendum.

Put simply, Virginia will go from having a very fair map to a very biased one. So how is that good for democracy? Because Republicans have rigged maps across the country for decades, skewing the House’s overall partisan makeup, and Virginia’s proposed map would be merely a minor corrective. In general, congressional delegations tend to be biased in Republicans’ favor. Among states with at least five House seats, there are five where Republicans regularly receive less than 50% of the statewide vote but hold a majority of that state’s House delegation: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There is not one state where the same is true for Democrats.

And this mid-decade redistricting skews states even more.

The big difference is that only one party—the Democratic Party—is pushing to eliminate partisan gerrymandering altogether.

So far they haven’t been successful. And some of their attempts have been blocked by Democrats. A voice I heard today while driving suggests that this redistricting battle will show Republicans the battle cannot be won and they approve a deal. I won’t hold my breath. Mangan included a 2025 poll by YouGov (about the time this redistricting arms race began) that shows 69% of US adult citizens say gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9% say it should be legal. Even among Republican citizens 57% say it should be illegal and only 14% say it should be legal. In today's pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a quote of an article on NPR that was posted late last week:

The more seats you try to flip with redistricting, the harder it is to win approval from the court and the public — and the harder it is for your party to hold the seats it has. In Virginia, some Democrats wanted to settle for a new map that could pick up three House seats. But Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, wanted to go for four seats. It could take the state’s U.S. House delegation from a near-even six Democrats and five Republicans to possibly 10-1 for Democrats.

Acyn, senior digital editor of Meidas Touch tweeted a clip of a speech by Pete Buttigieg talking to fellow Democrats. Alas, I don’t think he’s running for anything.

And my word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That’s not what we’re here to do. We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say, “Here you go, I give you the world as it looked in 2023.” That’s not going to work. It’s not what we need. So much has changed, and the truth is they are destroying things right and left. They’re destroying a lot of good, important things. They’re destroying some useless things too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.