They are proposing DEI – affirmative action – for men

Yesterday the NPR program The 1A did a 32 minute discussion on “masculinism,” a conservative movement that wants to repeal women’s right to vote and abolish other hard-won rights of women and people of color. Adherents believe the US society has become “feminized.” Hosts are Jen White and Todd Zwillich. Guests are Helen Lewis, of The Atlantic who wrote the June cover story “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” and Laura Kayfield, who wrote the book Furious Minds, the Making of the MAGA New Right. The transcript begins with a disclaimer that it is not the authoritative version, the audio is. It identifies speaker by number and, as I had seen before, isn’t accurate in identifying when there is a change in speakers. So I may not credit the right speaker or credit any speaker at all. Lewis said masculinism is different from the manosphere, viral influencers, and shock radio. It has an ideology that feminism has gone too far and that patriarchy should be rehabilitated. It advocates for traditional gender roles. A prominent advocate is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Others are leaders of highly conservative churches and of the Christian Nationalist movement. One of those is Doug Wilson, who uses highly derogatory language against women. White included a few excerpts of speakers promoting masculinism. I see that Doug Wilson mischaracterizes equality to claim it lowers standards. Influencer Charles Cornish Dale (or maybe academic Scott Yenor) claims men need to express the “wildness in their hearts” so they need to be competitive. Nick Fuentes says that women always vote Democratic, which is a vote “for the wrong person.” Sorry, Nick, votes for parties don’t follow gender lines. Kayfield said the movement is against pluralism and for hierarchy. The movement is about anger at the social transformation over the last fifty years that raised up professional women and minorities, producing a loss of status for men (a weird thought because men are still obviously on top). That leads to democracy as bad because it can’t allow men to flourish, to be fully themselves, to be fully manly. I wonder about the definitions of “flourish” and “manly.” Apparently men need to dominate those around them while democracy means there is no domination. That’s a bizarre way to look at it. A big gain by this movement is the rollback of DEI, claiming it has hurt white men because they are shut out of prestigious jobs. Jobs should go to married men who are paid well enough their wives can stay home. They are proposing DEI – affirmative action – for men. A good number of their goals are a part of Project 2025, which the nasty guy and his minions are implemented as fast as they can. Further goals are bans: for support of daycare, dating apps, no fault divorce, single parent benefits in the tax code, and more. While Congress does not have an uderrepresentation of white men, some academics, like Scott Yenor mentioned above, see that women make up the majority of students at universities, and many departments notice their faculty are, embarrassingly, all white men and they talk about diversity. That translates to white men having to compete against more people and excluded from job openings. Women in movies are portrayed differently, gay marriage is celebrated. The culture has become more liberal, more feminized. Their views are not based on real data. Another aspect is graduation rates for men have dropped and for men without a college degree their wages have stagnated. There is male loneliness, disaffection, dissatisfaction, and deterioration that allows this movement to gain a foothold. The movement appeals to men at vulnerable times in their lives, such as after divorce with a judge that favors mothers. The movement spreads through podcasts and YouTube. Doug Wilson is thoughtful about building a media empire with lots of methods of communication, including streaming, publishing, and more. He plants churches. And he’s just one of many. Kayfield wrote about movement members who have PhDs. They can have podcasts and videos on a wide range of topics while also “filling the gaps of meaning” and help young men navigate their lives. Listener David emailed said the discussion reminded him of the quote, “The loss of privilege feels like oppression.” Listener Brian, who is 25 and a gay Marine veteran, is fearful that his military colleagues are picking up on the “easily digestible and memorable slogans that further isolate them.” Kayfield discussed the target audience of the movement. Harvey Mansfield, a political theorist, talks about young men and their energy, spiritedness, and need for recognition. They need to assert themselves in the world. They are looking for guidance on how to live their lives. So they are susceptible to this message and are the target audience. While these young men are fragile there are other versions of masculinity to celebrate. We aren’t confined to this vision. They talked about Graham Platner, Maine Democratic candidate for US Senate. His primary is today and he’s likely to win. He projects another version of masculinity. He’s gruff, bearded, served in Iraq, used to be toxic, but grown past it. And a Democrat. Another example is James Talarico of Texas, also a Democrat, talking about Christianity is a completely different way. A lot of the masculinism talk is performative, it’s trolling. In person they can be pleasant and intellectual, but online they want to be someone liberals rage against. They do that because it raises their standing among their peers. Saying these things is also like a secret handshake. Saying you want to repeal women’s right to vote is a way to be accepted by the in crowd. Listener Sophia emailed that she’s disappointed that men are taking up this ideology.

Perhaps it stems from a serious lack of men being taught at early ages, healthy emotional processes, and regulation, and being taught that masculinity equals power and domination of others rather than strength, courage, leadership expressed through emotional intelligence and respect.

Listener Bruce emailed, “I don't understand why any male should think he is superior to females simply by virtue of him being male.”

Living a life void of love and compassion is not a happy life

My Sunday movie was Project Hail Mary and I went to an actual movie theater this afternoon to see it. This is a movie for the big screen. The story, adapted from the book by Andy Weir, is about Ryland Grace (which means actor Ryan Gosling is in every scene) solving a science fiction problem. A microbe is nibbling on the sun (yeah, that’s a scientific stretch, but let’s go with it) and the decreasing heat and light will cause the death of humanity in thirty years. Scientists determined a lot of nearby stars are also dimming. But one, Tau Ceti, isn’t. So the scientists of the world want to send a crew there to figure out why that star is spared. Grace is a middle school science teacher. In his past he wrote a paper proposing life could exist in other forms that don’t need water. It got a cool reception in the scientific community. But now his way of thinking might be a help, so he is forcefully recruited for the project. At Tau Ceti he wakes up from a coma on the spaceship, quite disoriented (of course) and finds the rest of the crew is dead. He doesn’t seem to know how to run the ship and I wondered why they would send a man into space without thorough training. The reason is eventually explained. He sees another ship nearby, a being from another affected star also looking for a solution. But this being appears to be made of rocks, confirming the paper other scientists rejected. That turns the story into a first contact story, then into a buddy movie as Rocky (what else are you going to name it?) helps Grace in trying to find the solution. The spaceship is, of course, named Hail Mary. IMDb tells me that gives us “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s a fun story, though one must let the problematic science slide on by. The filmscore by Daniel Pemberton (who I hadn’t heard of before) is pretty good too. So are the special effects. The film deserves its box office take (close to $328 million so far). Even seven weeks since it opened the theater was reasonably full. Before seeing the movie I saw there are related videos on YouTube. First is 19 minutes of behind the scenes, how they did the stunts and special effects. This included exploring the puppetry of Rocky, the large array of sounds used in the score, and the wire work to simulate weightlessness. It is pretty good (not great). One person wondered isn’t Ryan Gosling old enough to be Ryan Goose? Second is a 27 minute video of the science mistakes in the film. This is by Hank Green, who apparently has done a lot of these sorts of videos. He asked his subscribers for science problems that pulled them out of the movie. Green begins by saying he very much enjoyed the film. He sees it as hopeful that so many diverse people came together to solve a problem and that some people were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity. Also, if the film was extra careful to get the science exactly right it would likely be unwatchable as a story. That’s important in an Andy Weir story where science plays an integral part in the story. The thing that got most of the attention was Grace uses a centrifuge and puts two vials in adjacent spots, which could introduce a wobble into the machine. Grace, a scientist, should know to put the vials on opposite sides. Related, Grace rarely uses an isolation chamber when dealing with the microbes. That’s dangerous when he’s the only human on board and if the microbes sicken him there goes the chance to save humanity. There are scenes where Grace is weightless and others where spins up the ship to get gravity. But exactly which plane of rotation is used isn’t consistent. But Green wasn’t all that concerned about it. Green thought Weir having the bad guys, the microbes eating the sun, also serving as fuel for the spaceship was a pretty cool idea. There was one aspect of the science not being right that I caught and Green didn’t mention. That is ships in space move differently than they do on earth. In space once the rockets stop thrusting the ship doesn’t stop, it keeps going at a constant speed. And some of Grace’s maneuvering (he wasn’t trained as the pilot) didn’t move as a spaceship should. It’s a highly enjoyable film, even if the science isn’t quite right. Grace and Rocky are great buddies. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, discussed toxic masculinity. Her discussion was brought on by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signing an anti-DEI bill and claiming that white males are discriminated against. Witkowski wonders why white male politicians keep seeing white males as victims even while they say it’s weak to be a victim. But the oppression isn’t coming from DEI, but from white dudes telling other white dudes (like her son)...

they have a god-given duty to be violent and misogynistic and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t look like them. Toxic masculinity is at the helm in this country, and we’re headed straight for a tiny fishing vessel that we’re going to blow up just for fun because we think it’s cool to kill people.

She is teaching her son “Cruelty is not strength. Empathy is not weakness.”

As any human with a heart and soul knows, living a life void of love, compassion and care for others is not a happy life. Yet the message in this country being fed to white, heterosexual, cisgender men is that the key to a good life is seizing power from wherever you can get it, especially from people who have less power than you. Fuck love and other sissy s---. Unsurprisingly, this makes these men very unhappy. And their unhappiness is blamed on immigrants and drag queens and women who wear pants and complain about being called “honey” in the workplace. And so they must oppress them. It’s literally a cycle of abuse.

I can hear a lot of men feeling “I’m not happy.” They may not know themselves well enough to recognize they aren’t happy because the manosphere doesn’t talk about happiness or feelings. Instead of trying to find things that make them happy they lash out at the things the manosphere tells them are the cause of their unhappiness. They don’t see the cause of their unhappiness is what the manosphere is telling them.

The entire Trump administration is the perfect encapsulation of this. A collection of mediocre, mostly white males engaged in a never-ending dick measuring contest. That’s literally all they know how to do.

Last Friday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos commented on the recent Callais decision by the Supreme Court that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She wrote the decision was based on a statistical error, which is an alarming thing to base such a sweeping and harmful decision on. But Justice Alito, the decision author, doesn’t care about such things as truth when destroying democracy. The statistical error was fed to Alito by the Department of Justice. What they said in their brief on the case was: “Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of white voters in two of the last five presidential elections,” as Needham phrased it. I won’t go into Needham’s details of the flaws that went into that statement. But this is an example of Alito taking anything he can get to claim that racism is totally fixed so the VRA is no longer necessary. I think Justice Roberts made that claim when they first started gutting the VRA, prompting a strong rebuke in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent. But even if the DOJ statement were true, that does not imply that black people are not an oppressed minority in Louisiana and thus don’t need protections when districts are drawn. Alas, Alito has shown us many times who he is. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital. Grossman provided links to articles that show “the judges denied facts, distorted law, and contradicted themselves” in crafting the Callais decision. I haven’t followed the links. He then wrote:

Republican partisans on the Supreme Court created a pretext to gut the Voting Rights Act so the former Confederate/Jim Crow states, and red states more broadly, could manipulate maps to lock Black Americans and other minorities out of government representation. After the decision, multiple Republican-controlled states rushed to do exactly that. Then Republican partisans on the Virginia state supreme court created a pretext to prevent Virginia Democrats from responding in kind.

Many months ago I wrote that it seemed like Alligator Alcatraz was going away. That’s the deportation detention center built in the Florida Everglades in eight days. Alas, my reading of whatever I read, was not correct. The facility is still there. Needham reports that it may really be dismantled now. After it was built there were lawsuits saying the environmental reviews were not done. The federal government sidestepped the issue saying it was a Florida facility, not one of the feds. But to make that statement stick in court the feds could not contribute to running it. Say goodbye to $600 million. Which means Florida has to pay for it with a cost of $1 million a day. And Gov. DeSantis is resenting the expense. Needham discussed what $1 million a day, well, just $1 or $2 million (a piddling amount), could do for many other programs in Florida, but DeSantis wasn’t going to direct money to such things as food banks.

DeSantis’s ongoing quest to either impress Trump, be Trump, or both has jammed him up here. His unique combination of malice and incompetence meant that the Trump administration could always fake him out, and now the state is left holding this very expensive bag.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Robert Kagan of The Atlantic. Kagan noted that previous military failures – early WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq – didn’t prevent the US from keeping its dominance.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

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.

No evidence for his claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point

My friend and debate partner wasn’t done with his debate. A week ago Saturday I wrote about an essay by Trenz Pruca about the life cycle of capitalism and that it ends oligarchy. My debate partner asked what is Pruca’s relationship to reality? On Wednesday I addressed that question by discussing Pruca’s sources. My debate partner agreed that Pruca is credible. But is he effective? What is he doing to achieve the reform he says is so urgently needed? My debate partner (yes, he’s still a friend) pulled in Daily Kos, my primary source of news, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City. What are they doing to achieve effective reform? I’m going to leave Mamdani out of the discussion. He hasn’t started his term of mayor yet and we don’t know how effective he will or won’t be. I am aware that my friend has a much stronger tie to NYC than I do so he might be right that Mamdani might be thwarted at every turn. And my friend might be surprised. Back to Kos and Pruca. Kos is a news service that supports a community and Pruca is one voice in that community. That leads to a basic question: How effective is a news service supposed to be in prompting change? Do we expect that effectiveness from the Detroit Free Press or the Sacramento Bee (just pulled that one out of thin air), or the Washington Post? Yes, some opinion sections of newspapers and online news sources, grab hold of an important idea and make a lot of noise about it, loud enough to get significant public and political attention. But their job is to report the news and to spread ideas through the readers. Daily Kos does that too. The site spreads ideas through its progressive readers, making all of us aware of the things progressives should know. Some of that is “preaching to the choir” and it is also making sure the choir knows all the songs and can accurately sing them when away from the choir loft. Another aspect is that several prominent Democrats are readers (or at least have accounts). Essays like Pruca’s might be read by lawmakers. Also Kos has an activist arm. Every day they send out an email about how the reader can do something for democracy or the progressive cause. That included donating to a cause or suggesting how a lawmaker could be contacted. I got them for a while, but decided they were just filling up my email inbox. Kos is more effective than a visitor to their website might see. Is my own blog supposed to be effective? I didn’t begin it that way. Back in 2004 I started sending blurbs of important LGBTQ news to family, starting with Massachusetts legalizing same sex marriage. In 2007 a relative suggested I switch to blogging. My focus has shifted from LGBTQ issues into the nasty things politicians are doing. Through it all my purpose has been to spread what I see as important ideas out into the world (yes, it is the world, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China are at the top of viewer countries at the moment and the US is a distant 5th). In my friend’s email he mentioned the Trust Busting that happened between 1904 and 1919. He mentioned it because I had said I didn’t know how the US got through the age of Robber Barons, a time similar to now. My friend suggested I search for Trust Busting. I did, and learned a lot about Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft applying an anti-trust law to break up big corporations. They did it by bringing cases through the court system to a Supreme Court willing to apply the law against corporations. Yeah, today we have neither a president willing to take on that fight nor a Supreme Court willing to go against their billionaire friends. In my friend’s discussion he mentioned Roosevelt’s efforts were backed by newspapers of the day. I’m sure my friend was saying see, here are newspapers being effective. But the websites I read, and I read several, said nothing about the role of newspapers. I hope I’ve shown Kos is more effective than my friend can see. As for Pruca, does he need to be the one to turn his ideas into policy or law, or is stating the ideas plainly enough for him to do, letting more appropriate people to take up the ideas? Also, I don’t know what Pruca does when he’s not writing for Kos. From his bio, which I quoted before, he does interact with government officials about government policy. Perhaps he has explained these ideas to them, about as effective as he can be. As always, dear friend, I’m open to the debate continuing. One more Trenz Pruca essay. His question is: Why are we so reluctant to tax the rich? Adam Smith, working in the 18th century, warned that insufficiently taxing the rich jeopardized democracy. But it also noted we admire those who strive with unrelenting industry, even if what they strive for is hollow. Pruca thinks in the last decade (and I think all the way back to Reagan and his tax cuts) there has been a shift from wealth affecting tax policies at the margins to a deference to wealth shaping the tax agenda. The wealth are portrayed as persecuted victims – of taxation, of regulation, of journalists, and of democracy.

If the wealthy are victims, then taxing them is cruelty. If they are persecuted, then oversight is tyranny. If they are heroes of capitalism, then regulation is sabotage.

No, the wealthy are not victims. They are not persecuted. They are not heroes. The middle class identifies upward, awaiting their ascent. Taxing the rich feels like taxing their aspirations. Tax law feels like an attack on “success.” The nasty guy has promoted the shift from billionaires influencing tax policy to authoring it. The government becomes a service provider for wealth, to remove “burdens.” The IRS is an inconvenience, regulators become enemies, and public spending becomes a threat. Pruca concluded:

Taxation, regulation, oversight, and enforcement have all been reframed—not as civic obligations, but as moral trespasses. And in that transformation, the democratic project itself has been bent. The task before us is not merely raising taxes on the rich—though that remains necessary. It is dismantling the cultural machinery that convinces us that the wealthy are fragile, persecuted, and unimpeachable. Smith would tell us plainly that our sympathy, however understandable, is misplaced. The wealthy do not need our protection. Democracy does.

Last week I reported that several senators released a video reminding those in the military that rejecting illegal orders is their duty. One of those senators was Mark Kelly of Arizona. On Monday this week Oliver Willis of Kos reported that the Pentagon announced it is now investigating Kelly. That may include recalling him to active duty for a court-martial. In response Kelly said he won’t be silenced by bullies. A reminder who Kelly is:

Kelly served as a captain in the Navy and flew 39 combat missions in the first Iraq War. He then went on to a distinguished career as a NASA astronaut and was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame before successfully running for Senate.

The rest of the post is a review of the case. On Tuesday Emily Singer of Kos reported that polls show the public is siding with Kelly. Yesterday Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit discussed the incident behind Kelly’s notice to the military and the recent revelation from the Washington Post. The incident was back on September 2, the first time the nasty guy used the military to strike a boat in the Caribbean. The nasty guy and his goons claimed the boat was carrying drugs to the US and the people on board were members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang of Venezuela. The nasty guy and his goons provided no evidence either of the drugs or the connection to the gang. Hartmann wrote:

If these men had truly been high–value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story.

Since that first strike there have been “more than 20 other missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.” Now to the WaPo revelation. The first missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning. Two men clung to the wreckage.

They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors. And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart.

Congress was told the second missile was to “remove a navigation hazard.” That’s an attempt to rewrite history. An order to kill wounded and unarmed survivors is defined by the Geneva Conventions as a war crime. Civilized states do not execute helpless people.

This, too, has been part of the authoritarian playbook since ancient times. Pick a foreign or criminal “other,” paint them as subhuman monsters, and then declare that the normal laws of war, morality, and basic decency no longer apply. ... The fact that the administration has produced no evidence for its claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point. When the government fabricates an omnipresent threat, it gives itself permission to kill whoever it wants.

These senators calling to disobey illegal orders makes sense. This was an illegal order. That the nasty guy called for their death also makes sense. The nasty guy (or at least his goons) know the order was illegal.

If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted. If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable. And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law. America doesn’t have many chances left to prove to the world, and to ourselves, that we still believe in the value of human life and the restraints of democratic power. This is one of them.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin called Hegseth the “Secretary of War Crimes.” Dworkin starts with an excerpt of that WaPo article, which I’ll let you read. In the comments Lady Haha posted a cartoon by Jeff Danzinger showing two generals talking:

First: OK... Here’s what the secretary wants you to do: Go through Mark Kelly’s records and find anything we can use to court-martial him. Understand? Second: Yes, General, but that sounds like an illegal order.

In the main body of the post Cliff Schechter of Blue Amp talked about the nasty guy’s theory of politics. I think Dworkin’s summary at the start of the quote is good enough, I’ll stick with that.

Trump's never been guided by ideology — only ego. His one rule's simple: flatter him, you’re in; don’t, you’re done. From Pence to Putin, it's the real theory that explains every move he's ever made.

After all that this next detail is a bit of a toss-off. Willis, working from a segment on NPR, reported that Hegseth has prepared a draft memo that would pull the Pentagon’s support form Scouting America, formerly known at the Boy Scouts. His reason is the group is “detrimental to national security.” That phrase is important because the law compels the Pentagon to support scouts unless there is a security risk. The reason behind this is that scouting has become too woke. They are now genderless (girls and gays can join) and they support diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“The organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt no longer supports the future of American boys,” Hegseth’s memo alleges. He also argues that the scouts contribute to “gender confusion” and no longer “cultivate masculine values.”

If that memo becomes policy the military would no longer provide support for the National Jamboree and US military installations would be banned from hosting scout meeting. Many bases host the scouts because that’s a place of familiarity to boys whose parents move from base to base.

Policy: drive liberals to anger, then mock them

My Sunday movie was Episode 1 of American Revolution by Ken Burns. I haven’t watched episodes 2-4 and probably won’t get to 5 and 6 unless I can find a way to stream them over the next several weeks. I’ll have to check whether PBS allows non-members to stream their shows. This episode covers 1754 to 1775. The story starts with the Seven Year War (French and Indian War) in 1754. It was actually a global war. These were George Washington’s first battles. He was part of the British military and those battles convinced him the British could be defeated. This was at a time the people still thought of themselves as British. The mainland (rather than the Caribbean) colonies were quite diverse. People came from various European countries in addition to England. There were also African slaves and indigenous people. How could such diversity be united into one country? The greater the percent of slaves in a colony, the more prosperous it was. Caribbean colonies were quite prosperous. New England colonies were not. England paid more attention to the Caribbean. Those who came to the American colonies were people who wanted their own plot of land. They did not want to work for the local aristocracy. There was a continuing demand for more land but the only available land was controlled by the natives. That meant violence. To reduce that violence Britain said no spreading beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Colonists said nope. Britain sent troops to enforce their edict. But the British government, having fought four wars (or maybe that was wars on four continents?), was deeply in debt. They decided the colonies should pay for the troops – the troops that prevented them from spreading west. Thus the Stamp Act. And that created the idea of no taxation without representation. Most of the episode is about the government in London enacting more ways to bring its colonies under control and the colonists rejecting them and becoming more united in their rejection. Then came Lexington and Concord, the first deaths, and the British retreat. Before then each colony had its own relationship with London, some rejecting the meddling and calling for defiance and others enjoying profitable relations they wanted to continue. But Lexington and Concord prompted a more unified view that the political links to England needed to be severed. I am impressed with the large range of artwork the series used to illustrate the scenes. Of course most of it I hadn’t seen before. I was amused at the painting of the young George Washington. I appreciate the show talked about the contradiction between colonists described themselves as slaves to England while having African slaves in their homes. I’ll have more to say about that when I finish the book I’m reading and about a third of the way through. When the nasty guy reclaimed the Oval Office Niece told me she wanted to get out of the country, though she doesn’t feel she is ready to support herself through such a drastic changes. Alix Breeden of Daily Kos reported:

A recent Gallup poll found that 40% of U.S. women aged 15 to 44 said that they would move to another country permanently if given the opportunity—a jump of 10% since 2014. This increase seems to be exclusive to the United States, with other countries reporting fairly consistent numbers between 20% and 30%.

The nasty guy in the Oval Office is not the only reason, though a big one. There is a general sense the US is becoming increasingly unfriendly to women, and has been since about 2016. In the last year both in Britain and Canada there has been an increase in the Americans applying for citizenship. Americans living outside considering renouncing citizenship has jumped from 30% to 49%. Reasons for the desire to leave are restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights, the cost of giving birth is going up (as health insurance is getting much more expensive), and masculinity is getting more toxic. Dan Gearino, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Kos, reported there are some things people on the left and right agree on. One is a “skepticism of entrenched power and a desire to dismantle systems that they think have ceased to serve everyday people.” And that includes increasing distrust for data centers.

Much of the discussion is about data centers, which are often large developments used to support cloud computing or artificial intelligence. But the underlying issues are broader, touching on the power of tech companies. For people who live near proposed data centers, there is an additional sense of powerlessness, which Inside Climate News has documented across the country, including the backlash to a plan for a huge data center in Bessemer, Alabama. “It’s about big tech,” Olson said. “To steal Bernie’s words, [it’s about] these big tech oligarchs that are calling all the shots at every single level of government right now.”

Gearino included poll results showing that for most things more people (and in some areas many more people) believe AI makes things worse and not better. The problem could be lessened if those wanting to build data centers talk about local benefits. The locals already hear about the high use of water and the likelihood of electrical bills going up. Companies are not working to alleviate those concerns. As for the benefits, some experts ask are there any? As part of the series on Explaining the Right Oliver Willis of Kos discusses how Republicans became shameless hypocrites. An example of them being hypocrites goes back to the 1990s when Speaker Newt Gingrich was portraying Republicans as the party of “family values” during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal while Gingrich was cheating on his wife as she fought cancer and eventually married his mistress. Of course, there are a lot of more recent examples.

For years, conservatives have made the concept of “owning the libs” central to their political ideology. The idea is to engage in behavior and use rhetoric that supposedly makes liberals angry, driving them to exhibit this anger, which conservatives then mock. Even if their behavior doesn’t provoke a tantrum, conservatives have elevated this brand of mockery above nearly everything else, including policy and ideology. This has resulted in the right, including right-wing media like Fox News, becoming fixated on “culture war” issues.

Since Gingrich was “owning the libs” his own infidelity got a pass.

This creates a permission structure on the right where Republicans are allowed to be contradictory, as long as a liberal somewhere is purportedly mad about it. But this kind of posture has a limit.

The limit is that it works great with other Republicans or MAGAs. It doesn’t work for anyone else and voters who aren’t Republicans are quite willing to throw them out of office. Emily Singer of Kos lists reasons why Democrats won the shutdown. I’ll let you read her explanations. Democrats brought health care to the forefront. Polls showed voters blamed Republicans more than Democrats. The nasty guy’s approval fell dramatically, going from -12 to -16. The shutdown gave Democrats a ton of campaign material for next year’s midterms, such as the nasty guy’s Great Gatsby party, which widely polled as inappropriate spending. On Sunday’s All Things Considered on NPR host Sacha Pfeiffer and St. Louis Public Radio reporter Hiba Ahmad discussed the tornado that hit St. Louis last May and toured some of the damage that is still quite evident six months later. Then they turned it into a discussion of the nasty guy’s desire to turn FEMA over to the states. They talked to Mayor Cara Spencer, who summarized the reason to keep FEMA national:

My argument would be that, as a nation, we would be better off, more efficient and certainly more effective if we centralize and share the resources and expertise across the nation for very unusual events, rather than saddling every single municipal government to being able to respond to what may or may not happen in the lifetime of each of those cities.

The article mentions Enright Ave of St. Louis as one that was hit hard by the tornado. There were other places hit harder, but the article doesn’t explain their location. I went looking at Enright Ave. through Google Street View and found something fascinating. Start on the avenue just east of Union Blvd. Google Maps say they rolled down the street in May 2025. The houses look to be in great shape. Then take a step east and the images are of July 2025. A lot of homes are damaged – windows gone or boarded up, walls and roofs missing and some covered in blue tarps, stacks of salvaged bricks, and piles of trash. This allows a person to compare a few houses before and after and to see the destruction on down the street. I then wondered, did the Google Street View people do this intentionally? If so, thank you. Yeah, this is the view of the street in July, six to eight weeks after the tornado. The NPR article says the street isn’t much different six months later. And that’s because the nasty guy and his desire to oppress those not in his billionaire class.

The posturing, the belittling, the proud lack of empathy

My Sunday movie was The History of Sound. I saw it in an actual movie theater and for the third time in my life I was the only person in the audience. This is the story of Lionel. He was was born about the turn of the 20th century in rural Kentucky, where he grew up. His father taught him a lot of folk songs. A music teacher recognized his talent and arranged for him to attend the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. One evening in a tavern her hears the guy at the piano singing one of the songs he learned from his father. This is David and they strike up a friendship and fall in bed together. Lionel goes back to Kentucky. Soon David sends a letter proposing the two of them hike through rural Maine stopping along the way to record the songs the locals sing. They even tote around an Edison recording machine, the one with the wax cylinders. When they get back to Boston David is called up for duty in the Great War. Lionel is spared because he wears glasses. After the war David says he is staying at the college where he teaches and suggests Lionel is such a good singer he could get a job anywhere in the world. He does, but that doesn’t satisfy. Much of the music for the film is the folk songs they record, listen to, and sing. This is a rich part of American musical history. The movie also has some background music. Paul Mescal, the actor who played Lionel looked a bit older than the college student he was playing. Josh O’Connor who played David looked older than that. We were well into the movie before I figured out David wasn’t a fellow student, but a college instructor. I also learned from IMDb that neither lead actor is American – O’Connor is English and Mescal is Irish. Strange for such an American story. I’m not sure if this is a gay love story. There is certainly gay sex, but there is hetero sex too. And Lionel isn’t sure what to make of their relationship. I very much enjoyed this movie. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Between the Lines, wrote about how conservatives talk about Charlie Kirk’s civility – and demanding liberals be civil in return – because Kirk was able to broadcast their beliefs in a “civil” manner. But those beliefs are still vile. I had written Kirk was known for inviting debate, though his “debates” were set up to show liberals in a bad light, to show Kirk winning. In another post I wrote that maybe he wasn’t so bad, that he genuinely wanted to hear another person’s opinion. Witkowski said I was right the first time.

But to claim that Kirk was some kind of paragon of free speech devoted to the free exchange of ideas is simply false. Sure, he invited debate. He was, in fact, under a tent that said "debate me” when he was killed. But he did not invite a dialog. He did not listen. Not in a meaningful way. He did not seek to understand where other people were coming from. Debate, for Kirk, was a game of one-upsmanship. He was exceptionally good at interjecting and interrupting to dominate any and all exchanges. It was, in fact, the very thing he was doing when he was killed. He was interrupting the person “debating” him to control the narrative. It was something that a lot of people liked about Kirk. He was very alpha in his approach to “debate.” It’s something that a lot of people like about Trump, too. The posturing, the belittling, the proud lack of empathy with an emphasis on cruelty. It’s a type of masculinity that is, sadly, highly valued in American culture. It’s often called “toxic” masculinity. I, personally, find it abhorrent. In a culture where toxic masculinity rules — and in this moment, it absolutely does — there’s a winner-take-all attitude toward the things we all need to participate in that whole “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” thing. Under toxic masculinity rule, there is no need to take care of the most vulnerable among us. Because they are getting exactly what they deserve. Which is nothing.

Two things can be true. Kirk said vile things. He didn’t deserve to be murdered. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos discussed Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday (so we didn’t have to watch it – and I didn’t). To sum it up: The grieving widow and the nasty guy turned Kirk’s hate from a memorial service into a campaign rally. It included a lot of whitewashing Kirk’s record and vowing vengeance on the left. AKALib of the Kos community gathered together reviews of the nasty guy’s speech at the United Nations general assembly. It was an international embarrassment, but very much true to form for this guy.

Trump’s nearly 56-minute address (it was scheduled for 15 minutes) to the United Nations General Assembly was both appalling and disgusting in how he turned it into his hate-filled campaign-like speech targeted to satisfy members of his cult.

A post by lamina566 of the Kos community talked about questions liars ask to manipulate people and derail a discussion. The author took college classes in Logic and Stoicism and recently watched a video on “The Stoic Habit.” These five questions are pulled from the video. This post includes a lot of discussion on how the questioner is trying to flip the discussion and a way to respond to the question. I’ll summarize. 1. Why are you being so sensitive? Response: I’m not sensitive, I’m observant. Does that make you uncomfortable? 2. You trust me, right? Trust is earned. If you’re asking you know you don’t have it. Response: Are you asking me to ignore my judgment? 3. Are you accusing me of something? Response: Maintain eye contact for several seconds, then “Should I be?” 4. Would I ever lie to you? That isn’t a question, it’s theater, meant to demand trust. Response: “Would I know if you did?” 5. Can’t we just move on? It’s a way to escape accountability. Response: “I’ll move on when I understand what happened.” The liar’s purpose is to exhaust you until you’re too tired to keep searching for the truth. Alex Samuels of Kos explored the idea of moving to Canada or some other country to get away from the horrors of the nasty guy, MAGA, and their destruction of democracy. Yeah, web searches for moving to Canada spiked after the 2024 election. Those searching were presumably Democrats, though there were reports of Republicans expecting to do the same if Harris had won. A new survey by the Pew Research Center suggests moving to another country might not fix what one is running from. They surveyed adults across 25 countries. In 20 of them majorities of adults say their nation’s political system needs significant change. In 7 of them about 80% of adults said the same. In all but a few countries “sizable portions of the population are pessimistic about whether reform is even possible.” Democracy forces compromise, but if the democracy isn’t functioning well, getting something accomplished can be hard. One reason why compromise may be difficult in some countries is because voting systems are winner-take-all. When I lived in Germany decades ago colleagues explained to me that so many seats are allocated directly to candidates (who are members of a party) and other seats are allocated to parties. Voters vote for both the candidate and the party. Then the party seats are allocated according to the percentages each party got in the vote. The candidate part might be winner-take-all. The party part isn’t. I will not guarantee I heard or remembered all that accurately. Samuels wrote:

While it’s tempting to blame “the other party” or fantasize about starting fresh in a new country, dissatisfaction with politics is widespread worldwide. The U.S. stands out for its particularly low trust in elected officials and extreme polarization—but the desire to escape isn’t uniquely American. Pew’s data suggests that leaving may not give you the political reprieve you’re expecting.

This post and the survey doesn’t consider whether another country’s politics is to the left or right of the US. I had reported a while back that Canada’s is far to the left of ours. And that may be enough for a refuge. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Magdi Jacobs:

Just a reminder: any & every issue that possibly divides Democrats is regularly used against us on social media by foreign, especially Russian, interference campaigns. The "source" of the issue could be organically American or not. Either way it will be amplified by bots/trolls.

In the comments are a lot of cartoons and memes about the recent big press conference in which Robert Kennedy Jr. and the nasty guy blamed Tylenol for the rise in autism. Of course, they provided no scientific evidence and the medical community says there is none. Frank Amari posted a cartoon by Dennis Goris. It shows a bullet and a Tylenol tablet. The caption says, “Only one of these this has been proven to harm children. The other will come with a warning label.” There are also many memes about the nasty guy’s speech at the UN. One meme is from Joe Walsh, who tweeted: “Every single word he says here is a lie. Every single word.” Alas, the gathered world leaders had to witness the speech. A meme posted by paulpro (author not identified) shows a young woman talking to a young man:

I see, so if I don’t have sex with you I’m a prude bitch, if I use the pill I’m a slut, if I get pregnant I’m an idiot and if I choose abortion I’m Satan. Yay.

A cartoon posted by paulpro and created by Sophie Labelle of Assigned Male shows a reporter stopping a man on the street, “Sir! In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, do you think the left is incapable of respectful debates?” The man responds with many ways in which Kirk did not engage in respectful debates. I took a look at Labelle’s Bluesky account and saw this cartoon: “The government won’t tell you that they are fascist, but they will tell you that anti-fascists are their enemies.” Another of Labelle’s cartoons talked about Horst Wessel. He was a skilled public speaker for the Nazi party and wrote the song that became the Nazi anthem. He died in 1930 during a forcible attempt to evict him for unpaid rent. And...

Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, had been looking for someone to turn into a Christian martyr for the party and drum up enrollment. He turned Wessel’s funeral into a major propaganda event full of speeches antagonizing leftists. Thinking about him today for no particular reason.

That last bit shows a sign outside the arena where Kirk’s funeral was held. In Sunday’s pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Michael Bader of Salon:

We are experiencing extreme moral injury, every single day. So what do I mean by moral injury? That can happen when a soldier is ordered to torture, abuse or kill an enemy combatant or, worse yet, to harm civilians. Or when a drone operator learns, after an attack, that his drone killed several children. Or when a nurse administers a painful treatment to a terminally ill patient, knowing it is not likely to change the patient’s ultimate fate in any way. Or when, during the COVID pandemic, medical professionals were forced to make impossible choices due to resource shortages — to decide who got ventilators, to ration out protective equipment or to work in conditions they knew were unsafe for their patients or themselves. Those situations, and others like them, are classic examples of moral injury. The individual afflicted feels guilt, shame and anger, but ultimately, and perhaps more important, feels — and is — objectively helpless to do anything about it. The nurse or the soldier in most such situations is not experiencing direct physical harm. The harm is psychic and moral, reflecting a conflict between deeply held ethical beliefs and behaviors that violate these beliefs, particularly behaviors over which one has little or no control. [...] I believe that under Donald Trump, millions upon millions of people are enduring daily moral injuries that are extremely harmful to psychological well-being.

In the comments paulpro posted a cartoon (author not identified) showing Charlie Kirk arriving at the gates of Heaven and, surprise!, he’s welcomed by a black woman. Scott Horton posted a cartoon by Matt Wuerker showing a dam on a river labeled “Journalism” showing some big cracks as the lake behind it is the dumping grounds for sludge coming from pipes labeled, “Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories, Fake News,” and more. No longer available is a tweet of two men dropping off a plastic spine at ABC, the company that let Jimmy Kimmel go.

Feeding young men a steady diet of grievance

My Sunday movie was Just Friends, a Netherlands movie released in 2018. It’s less than 90 minutes. It’s a gay love story. One of the lads in Joris. His father died ten years ago when Joris was 11. The movie opened with the family reclaiming the urn holding the father’s ashes. I pieced together that urns are held in a mausoleum for ten years and Mom didn’t want to pay the rent for another ten years. She has her own issues around being widowed so young. Joris tries to leave the urn somewhere around the house, but it is always returned to him. He wants a connection with his father, but not through the urn. Yad is the other lad. He had been a medical student in Amsterdam, but after passing out at a party he returns home to the community where he grew up. His mother is annoyed he has no occupational ambition. He gets a job as a domestic for a woman living in senior housing – who happens to be Joris’ grandmother. When the two lads meet they immediately start flirting. Did they sense the other is gay? Since both are out to their families had Grandma told her help about her son? A problem in the budding relationship is that Joris’ mom isn’t so keen on Yad being Muslim. He was born in Syria and the family moved to Netherlands as refugees, where he grew up. The story goes where expected. I may say that a lot, but it isn’t always a bad thing. I enjoyed it. Kos of Daily Kos discussed the gender gap as political chasm. He begins with stats to show the stark difference between young women voting for Harris and young men voting for the nasty guy. Then Kos included a tweet by Steve Kornacki about the results of a poll he helped conduct through NBC News Decision Desk. It asked Gen Z adults, men who voted for the nasty guy and women who voted for Harris, whether various things were important to their personal definition of success. I’m pretty sure the numbers represent the percent of respondents who said an item is important. Some of the items are similar in both groups. 21% of both men and women said having no debt was part of their personal definition of success. Making family and community proud was similar, 23% of men, 19% of women. 33% of men and 32% of women said financial independence was important. Then the items with widely differing importance. 34% of men but 6% of women said having children was important to success. 29% of men but 6% of women thought being married was important. Having money to do things you want, 28% men, 46% women. Having a fulfilling job, 30% men and 51% women. Having emotional stability, 9% men, 39% women. Kos wrote:

Both men and women highly value financial independence and a fulfilling career, but women—with higher educational attainment—are increasingly competing for and winning those opportunities. That leaves a generation of men who want families and children—while their female peers don’t—struggling to secure careers in increasingly competitive fields. Enter the manosphere and its influencers—a sprawling network of podcasts, YouTube channels, and social media accounts feeding young men a steady diet of grievance. The core message is always the same: Men are owed women—women to bear their children, keep their homes, and provide sex.

If men don’t get what they’re owed, they blame feminism, liberalism, and “woke culture” as corrupting women away from their biological destinies. This worldview, pushed by the manosphere, tells men they’re victims. The message is the same:

True masculinity means reasserting rigid gender hierarchies—by any force necessary. It’s toxic and dangerous. These ideas don’t just encourage resentment; they legitimize violence. When men are told that society has “stolen” their futures, it doesn’t take much for frustration to turn into radicalization.

Alienated and disaffected young men are a threat to both left and right – to the right if they feel betrayed or ignored. Radicalized young men are combustible. We channel their energy constructively or we face violence. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series on Explaining the Right, he takes on why conservatives love guns so much. I think he gets quite close to the answer I’ve come up with. He of course begins by listing some of the statements over the years of conservatives declaring their love for guns, or at least their refusal to regulate guns. And that love is much more than the NRA handing out lots of money.

Conservatism embraces gun culture as an attempt to control things. Much like right-wing fear of diverse cities, conservatism asserts gun rights—despite the threat to public safety—because guns are seen as a way to control things. The right has a deep-seated issue with growing gender and racial diversity, so guns are seen as a way to keep that in check. Guns are also used by the right to reinforce a culture of faux machismo. Many on the right believe that owning and using guns is a display of strength, while they deride purported feminine weakness from groups like Moms Demand Action for opposing gun violence.

Using guns to keep things in check doesn’t say what “in check” means and why they want to control things. So to my understanding: Guns are the best way to enforce the social hierarchy. They prove the person with the gun is socially superior to the one they’re aiming at. If the target dies the death shows the shooter is superior because the shooter was able to take the life. If the gun doesn’t go off it’s usually because the target managed some act of submission, of acknowledging the superiority of the other. The nasty guy is in England to visit royalty. There was also a far right rally with a turnout that was maybe up to 150,000, way too high for comfort. NPR host Mary Louise Kelly spoke to Clive Lewis, a member of Parliament with British-Caribbean ancestry. Lewis could look down at the crowd from his window. Many held far right banners and many others were people he knew – old school chums and neighbors. He recognized these people liked what they’re hearing but aren’t yet far right. Some of that feeling of being powerless comes from many British institutions – railways, health system, water system – that have been hollowed out. The people have lost trust and feel they’re not being heard. Lewis talked about fellow MP Nigel Farange. He champions wealth, but is now moving towards a position of public-private partnerships. It is those on the right who are the first to say we hear you and will change things. Lewis said he saw American conservatives use Charlie Kirk’s assassination as an opportunity to increase political repression, to say their freedom of speech has greater weight than other’s. From what Lewis said I saw another instance of the pattern that is playing out in America. The rich cause public services to disintegrate and oppress the poor by limiting their opportunities. Then the rich are much faster at capitalizing on the angst. They blame immigrants and offer solutions that protect their own position. All of it can stir up the voters. None of it will actually make their lives better. The rich still control everything to protect their position at the top of the hierarchy. In Monday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted a pair of tweets. First Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Sen. John McCain:

I think the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country is that the left glorifies death - particularly of adversaries and the right does not. And it’s not something I think I really have fully faced until Charlie’s assassination. And it’s petrifying.

That reminds me: From the right an accusation is actually a confession. But on to a rebuttal from Sarah Longwell:

One reason you get deranged takes like this from people who used to oppose Trump, is that the mental and moral gymnastics it took to become a Trump supporter/apologist requires a simple mantra, “The Left is worse.” So you work to constantly convince yourself that’s true.

Max Burns tweeted a thread now on Threadreader:

A Gen Z colleague described the "blackpill mindset" to me in a way I'd never heard before: For younger kids today, especially men, there's a pressure to either "get rich at any cost" or "get famous at any cost." They use irony and crude memes to mask the deep anxiety they feel. What stood out to this person was the "lol nothing matters" attitude Kirk's assassin tried so hard to project in his ironic bullet inscriptions, political-but-mostly-stupid meme Halloween costumes, and the gamer culture he was steeped in. His politics almost feel secondary. We're seeing an uptick in "ironic" phrases written on bullet casings and manifestos that are peppered with Very Online references meant to be read and understood not by the media, but by these shooters' online peers. They want to be remembered as the people who "went for it." It speaks to an alienation that younger Americans (disproportionately men) try to heal not through therapy but through online game communities, Discord, and validating themselves online. Their goal isn't news coverage - it's to be cheered on their niche forums of choice.

In the comments the cartoon Twonks comments on fitness devices.

Woman: Right, I’m heading out for a walk. Couch potato man: Can you take my watch with you?

Social media algorithms lead to swallowing the red pill

The ten handbell concerts I saw over the last four days were quite wonderful. I’m pleased livestream technology exists so that I could watch them. I got to know Anne Curzan through her weekly That’s What They Say segment on Michigan Public. The series has been going on for 13 years. Through the show I’ve learned a lot about the origin of many words and phrases – this morning’s discussion was about “pet peeves.” Curzan has a PhD in linguistics and has taught at the University of Michigan for at least thirty years. Over the last year the series mentioned Curzan has a new book and I just finished reading it. The book is Say’s Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words. Yeah, the word “funner” is in the title where I would have expected “more fun.” She has a chapter on that. In each of the 33 chapters she discusses some aspect of modern American English. She delves into the rules of grammar, who said they were rules, and why the rule does, doesn’t, or never did apply. Some of the topics are making verbs from nouns, how “literally” has come to also mean “figuratively,” the difference between “less” and “fewer,” whether “data” can be treated as singular, how to use the semicolon, and when the passive voice is appropriate. In the first chapter she introduces two words: Grammando, a combination of “grammar commando” as the voice in one’s head insisting on the correct bit of grammar. And wordie, the voice that marvels at new ways of using the language, even when the example doesn’t fit in the rules. Our language is always changing. These two voices are frequently at odds in our heads and in what we say to others. Curzan’s general take on grammar battles is: Does the meaning come through? Beyond that, keep your grammando quiet. Yes, there are more formal situations where a writer (and editors) need to be more conscious of the rules. But Curzan shows, in chapter after chapter, many of the “rules” have been out of date for a long time. The most important chapter to me is the one on PC language, the attempts to use a more inclusive language. And here I’ll quote the book:

Debates about language are almost always about more than language. In this case, debates about inclusive and sensitive language are about who has the power to call linguistic shots about what language is and isn’t inclusive and sensitive. It’s fundamentally a power struggle between groups that have historically held most of the political, economic, and social power – what I’m going to call having the biggest microphone – and historically marginalized groups whose voices are becoming more and more centered in the broader public discourse. It’s not that some of the language that today is deemed offensive is newly offensive; it’s that people who have been denigrated by this language have gained more power to call the language out as offensive. They have a bigger microphone than they have had in the past.

Curzan then noted the marginalized people have to be conscious of how they speak because there could be dire consequences. A wrong word could cost a job – or a life. The socially powerful “have had to worry less about consequences – making it seem like freedom of speech is the same as freedom from consequences for getting it wrong.” I found all of this fascinating – until about three-quarters of the way through the book. Then the repetitive nature of the arguments – the explanation of what’s really going on, the check of historical sources, the appeal to a quieter grammando – got to be a bit wearying. All of it was still interesting, but I enjoyed it less. I recommend the book if you are one who cares about words. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reviewed all the ways Robert Kennedy Jr. is making the various parts of his Department of Health and Human Services have a more difficult time doing their jobs. I’ll let you read the rest and quote just the conclusion:

Fewer safety inspections, fewer guardrails on drug approvals, and conspiracy-fueled attacks on vaccines. Turns out, “Make America Healthy Again” means just the opposite.

And, I thought, “Make America Great Again” also means just the opposite. Nadra Nittle and Mariel Padilla, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, discussed how easily young male teens on social media get hooked into misogyny. The society as a whole can make these boys feel insecure. Do they measure up to the expected profile of masculinity? Will they grow up to be man enough? They have “insecurities about their physiques, jawlines and even their hair.” So the boys, who feel no one knows them well, go into social media to find out what they can do to be more masculine. They might watch a “gym-bro” video on how to start increasing muscle size They might try videos on “looksmaxxing” to enhance their appearance. From there social media algorithms take over. Rachael Fugardi is a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks extremism.

Fugardi said that algorithms force-feed sexism to young people. “So much of this misogynistic content isn’t being searched out,” she said. Research from the United Kingdom revealed that 10 percent of boys ages 11 to 14 encountered harmful content, such as misogyny and violence, within 60 seconds of going online.

The videos might start with guides to gym workouts, or a bit of comedy in ways that rack up page views, but then start slipping in the misogynistic content. Even that might start small, as in the problems of being a weak “beta male” rather than an “alpha male.” And it goes downhill from there, eventually into violence against women. Along the way they are exposed to the claim that feminism curtails men’s rights. “They have swallowed the ‘red pill’ — a manosphere metaphor for embracing a reactionary and male supremacist worldview.” Fitness influencers resonate with the boys because of “Pew Research Center’s finding that 43 percent of teenage boys feel pressure to be physically strong.” Geoff Corey, director of Advocates for Youth’s sex education project AMAZE explained:

They are looking to make friends, to look better, to win over girls or become better people. Then, they discover that it seems like the only people creating content geared towards men are people who give them an easy answer for what they want, and that easy answer somehow leads to trickery, violence, unhealthy behaviors, bottling up emotions.

The counterpart to those videos are the ones promoting “tradwives” or the traditional wife who is quite satisfied with the role of making a wonderful home for her man. The women film themselves whipping up snacks from scratch while wearing stylish outfits with expertly applied makeup.

“Male supremacy appeals to women as well. And, of course, the white supremacist project demands the participation of White women in the production of White babies,” said Pasha Dashtgard, director of research at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. The tradwife movement “is for men,” he stressed. “It’s not for women. It’s cosplaying what men think would be the ideal woman.”

Sreshta Erravelli, 17, and who finished 11th grade and thinks the manosphere is nonsense, observed:

Rather than teach that rejection is a part of life, the manosphere links rejection to weakness, causing boys to lash out when girls don’t reciprocate their feelings, she said. “You’re calling girls weird names just because she didn’t give you her number the first 20 times you asked.”

What to do about it? Jessica Berg of Rock Ridge High School in Virginia created a gender studies class that uses history to show students how patriarchy became the norm. She has plenty of recent examples. The class has also taught the young women to advocate for themselves. Dashtgard has created resources to help the public “recognize radicalization before it occurs and engage youth without condemning or humiliating them.” Fugardi wants social media companies to do more to enforce their existing rules on content moderation and demand they protect youth over prioritizing profit. AMAZE has videos that present alternatives to the manosphere. Julie Scelfo, founder of Mothers Against Media Addiction has suggestions for how parents should help their kids. View content with them. If they repeat sexist ideas, ask where they heard them and talk about the meaning of the messages. I’m glad that AMAZE is producing alternative videos. I think more liberal groups need to do the same so that social media algorithms will turn to them as well. Recently I wrote that the 988 National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline will, as of July 17, no longer provide a direct link for LGBTQ (especially the T) to get help from sensitive counselors. That help is currently supplied by the Trevor Project. I’ve since learned that since the Trevor Project is being booted out of the government system it is also losing its government funding, a good size chunk. The Trevor Project will still exist, back to privately funded, to help LGBTQ youth in crisis. Paul Berge drew a cartoon appropriate to the situation. I first saw it in Between the Lines in their previous issue. I normally like to describe cartoons, but this one I won’t because I want you to see the full impact for yourself. Trevor Project LGBTQ Crisis Hotline: 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678

One of the most brazenly made-up things from the Supreme Court

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote about a troubling Supreme Court ruling. The nasty guy had fired Cathy Harris, the head of the Merit Systems Protection board, and Gwynne Wilcox, the chair of the National Labor Relations Board. The firings troubling because both are independent agencies, intended to be insulated from the whims and vendettas of the president. They are supposed to be removed only for cause. These removals are now in court. Last week the Court used the shadow docket to rule the firings could stay in effect while litigation continues through lower courts. In the process they overturned a 90 year precedent. The shadow docket allows them to avoid explaining themselves. Franklin Roosevelt tried to remove members of the Federal Trade Commission and was blocked by the Court because the FTC is independent and the Court understood why it needed to stay independent. Why not let the board members stay on the job while litigation continues? What the Court did was reward the nasty guy to fight every battle in court.

Harris and Wilcox had argued—correctly—that if they can be removed without cause, so can Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, because that body is structured the exact same way as the NLRB and the MSPB. But the majority made an arbitrary carveout for the Fed, saying it is a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks” and therefore isn’t the same. As Mark Joseph Stern said on Bluesky, “this bespoke exception for the Fed is one of the most brazenly made-up things I've ever seen the Supreme Court do.” Yep The sole reason to protect the Fed like this is because the Supreme Court is trying to prevent Trump from further crashing the economy by destabilizing the Fed through removing Powell. No law supports this. There’s no reasoning in the opinion. But it’s stark evidence that the only thing the conservative court majority does care about is the economy. Harris’ and Wilcox’s removals mean that federal employees have no way to contest their firings and unions cannot bring any labor actions—and this troubles the majority not at all.

Back on May 7 (three weeks ago) Needham did the nasty guy another favor. He can go ahead with his plan to ban transgender people from the military while the case goes through lower courts.

By now, it’s almost routine. The administration keeps losing at the lower courts, so they rush to the friendlier confines of the Supreme Court to try to eke out a temporary win, one where Trump gets his way while litigation continues. It’s not a strategy that pans out all the time, but when it does, it’s a treat for Trump and terrible for the rest of us. And that’s precisely what happened here.

This transgender band isn’t because they are trans, it’s because, as Needham wrote, “it’s just that trans people happen to be afflicted with radical gender ideology that harms troop readiness.” No explanation provided. The Court’s action is a preliminary injunction. There are standards and criteria for when they can be used. The public can’t tell if they were because the order is less than a page. So one could assume the Supremes did not follow these standards and criteria Kos community member bilboteach posted an article about what being a member of the House is like. They wrote the post because there are too many people who think being a House member is a cushy job. They work only Monday to Thursday and get weeks at a time away from Washington. So bilboteach discussed what a representative’s schedule in the House is like, frequently 9am to 9:30pm with a quick lunch. And when they go home to their districts, the schedule can be just as grueling. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Lucy Ash of the BBC. I’ll summarize: Young (white) American men are converting to the Russian Orthodox church because it championing a form of virile, unapologetic masculinity. Down in the comments exlrrp shared a tweet from Alex C about the nasty guy.

Donald sad no one wanted to join the military under Biden while speaking to an entire graduating class aw West Point who joined under Biden.

Also shared by elxrrp is a meme about the nasty guy’s youngest son Barron, which may explain why the nasty guy is attacking Harvard so relentlessly:

Barron was rejected by Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia. These three are the most prominent universities in the country. Colleges Trump attacks are the ones that, with all of his money, said ‘no endowment will let Barron in.’

In a second roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman of The Cross Section who titled his piece, “Corruption Is Still Corruption Even If It Happens Right In the Open.”

At the heart of this failure is an expectation that no longer holds, that when a politician commits acts of corruption, they will seek to conceal their misdeeds. While it is entirely possible that Trump and his family of fraudsters have engaged in personal enrichment schemes that have been kept secret (in fact, I’d be surprised if they hadn’t), what he has done right out in public is more than enough to demand a change in how we talk about the corruption that defines this presidency. The fact that he is not hiding his corruption — indeed, he seems to revel in making it as public as possible — is still shocking to many in the news media. And they have yet to adapt.

Dworkin added:

Also assumes politicians feel shame. Trump is a broken individual who has none of that human trait.

I had lunch today with my friend and debate partner and his term for the bill with those Medicaid cuts is The Deficit Expansion Bill (sorry, friend, if my quote is not accurate, though it is close). I think my favorite name is still The Big Brutal Bill. Way down in the comments, below the cartoons commenter The Geogre discussed the likely cuts in Medicaid. He quoted Paige Skinner of Huffpost reporting Mike Johnson said they would not “cut Medicaid for the deserving people.” Geogre said “So nice of him to JUDGE THE VALUE OF AMERICAN LIVES.” I look at Johnson’s statement and wonder who got to define the word “deserving?” Looks like it came from Prophet Mike’s definition, taken directly from the Prosperity Gospel, or maybe it was Calvinism. The idea is that God rewards the good and punishes the evil and does it in this life. If one is poor it is because one is sinful (better check on the definition of that word too) and anyone helping the poor is acting against the Will of God. Wrote Geogre, “It’s a way of thinking that even the Puritans found pernicious.” Yeah, it’s a pretty slick way of a rich person justifying why the policies he’s shepherding through Congress are designed to boost the rich by taking money from the poor.

He’s still trying to prove his manliness to himself

I was a barely grown lad when Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre occurred on October 20, 1973. Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was investigating the Watergate scandal. President Nixon ordered him fired. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (Cox’s boss) refused and resigned. Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork carried out the firing and intended to resign, but Richardson and Ruckelshaus persuaded him to stay. That started the impeachment process against Nixon. Lisa Needdham of Daily Kos reports in comparison to what happened over the last few days in the DoJ that night in 1973 looks like “a quaint tea party.” I’ll summarize. Deputy AG Emil Bove ordered the criminal charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams be dropped. The reason wasn’t the usual prosecutorial misconduct or insufficient evidence. Rather pending charges meant Adams couldn’t devote enough time to fighting illegal immigration. This would be an illegal quid pro quo arrangement. Yeah, this echoes the nasty guy’s own presidential immunity. Also strange, the charges were to be dismissed without prejudice – they could be refiled at any time, such as when Adams is declared to be insufficiently vicious to immigrants. Bove demanded a federal prosecutor sign the order. Seven refused and resigned. These were not Biden holdovers but included a Federalist Society member and former clerks for Justices Scalia and Kavanaugh. They all recognized when something was downright illegal and they had limits. Since Bove could have signed the order himself he was using it as a loyalty test and to see how far he could push them into acting unethically and illegally.

All of these acts are part and parcel of Trump consolidating power within the executive branch. Demanding federal employees engage in illegal or unethical acts is designed to weed out those who won’t go along with his plans. It’s terrifying that it took such a short time for those demands to be so over-the-top that even people otherwise ideologically aligned with Trump had to tap out. It’s equally terrifying that he’s seeking complete control over agencies that were previously independent. He’s warping the whole executive branch to be nothing but a place where amoral loyalists do his bidding. Now, unvarnished, unrestrained authoritarianism feels right around the corner.

Kai Ryssdal, host of the NPR show Marketplace, talked to Sarah Binder, professor of politics at George Washington University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The topic was the new executive order from the nasty guy saying he is taking over several agencies that Congress designated as independent from the president, even though the prez. nominates the head and the board. The order includes: the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission (TV and radio), the Securities and Exchange Commission (stock markets), the Federal Trade Commission, and more. This does not (yet) include the Federal Reserve’s ability to set interest rates, though the Reserve does a great deal more to stabilize the economy and those are affected. Yes, this is illegal. But who in Congress will stop him? It will end up before the courts. Will he abide by their decision? These agencies were set up as independent to they would be insulated from politics and the whims of the president. Having them under the control of the nasty guy affects the ability to control inflation, regulate banks to keep them healthy, keep companies that sell stock honest, decide who does or doesn’t get a radio or TV license, and whether candidates for office play by the rules. What these executive orders are doing is allowing the nasty guy to usurp Congress’ ability to designate how money is spent. And Congress isn’t standing up for itself. Steve Inskeep of NPR took up the same topic, discussing it with Jane Manners, a legal historian at Temple University Beasley School of Law. The discussion was prompted by Russell Vought, author of parts of Project 2025 and now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, has declared the nasty guy administration is rejecting the notion of an independent agency within the Executive Branch. Everything under the nasty guy is under his power. Inskeep and Manners have four key points. First, independent agencies go back to 1887 with the regulation of railroads, which were becoming quite critical to commerce. Because of the importance Congress wanted the agency to be insulated from politics. Second, independent agencies need to be accountable to someone. If not the president, who? But they can’t function properly under presidential pressure. Third, the current system says an agency is responsible to its appointed board. They can be removed only for neglect of duty and malfeasance. That accountability seems ambiguous. Fourth, the Department of Justice is headed by one person, not a board. It’s independence is (again) to shield it from politics. Scott Detrow of NPR started a segment with:

New York Times opinion writer M Gessen lived through much of Russia's slide into autocracy and wrote a book about it. They argue that one of the ways that Vladimir Putin consolidated power was by making a series of arguments that seemed outrageous at the time, like the idea that the LGBT population was a threat to Russian sovereignty.

That book is The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen didn’t take that argument seriously, though a couple years later had to flee the country. In the same way the nasty guy has put out a “barrage of unthinkable ideas.” They don’t seem connected, but Gessen says they are. People who are the targets of an autocrat see it as terrifying. But for most people living under autocracy is just dumb. The US buying Greenland? Clearing Gaza? Dumb ideas. But they undermine the idea that people have obligations to one another and that there is a law-based world order. Gessen said:

I think that Americans voted for Donald Trump because there are some really major problems with the system of government as it's constituted. And I think that, basically, the Democratic Party, for at least three election cycles, has now insisted that things are fine just the way they are, that we just have to live in some sort of imaginary normal, really refusing to hear that the normal - whatever that is - isn't working for a lot of people, that they are anxious and miserable. And they would rather throw a grenade at the way things are in the form of Donald Trump than continue living the way they've been living. And the reason it's important to think about that now is that it's still the same sort of dynamic where Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the world as we've known it, and the Democrats are saying, well, you can't do that. That's not how the rules are written. Americans have said that the way that the rules are written and the way that the system functions doesn't work for them. So there has to be a bigger idea. The rules were written for a reason. They were there to perform certain functions. They were there to make sure that our obligations to one another are, in fact, fulfilled, and they haven't been.

I read that and think of the biggest issue Democrats didn’t touch – inequality and curbing the power of the extremely wealthy. Yeah, there have been voices – Sens. Warren and Sanders – but no action by a party supposedly for the worker yet paid off by those wealthy people. People were expecting the nasty guy’s second term to be similar to his first. And it isn’t. Now people may act to give the authoritarian more power over them.

I think that, rationally, people are settling in for the long haul and making decisions about their organizations that will benefit them or at least keep them safer in the short term. And that's really the problem with this kind of abeyance is that it is reasonable, it is well thought through and it is sometimes even values based. People are thinking, I'm protecting my employees. I'm protecting my organization. The problem is that when everyone does that, that is exactly how autocracy is built. It cannot be built without people's cooperation.

As part of a series Explaining the Right on Kos Oliver Willis titled his article, “Why conservatives are obsessed with phony masculinity.” As in at least one other article in the series the question isn’t answered, though several examples of phony masculinity are described. One is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the NATO summit. His performance was seen to be quite an embarrassment. There is the nasty guy who posted his criminal mug shot outside the Oval Office. Bush II in his flight suit declaring “Mission Accomplished” when it wasn’t. Then the discussion turned to research that show diversity really does lead to a better armed forces.

But figures like Hegseth and Trump are locked into the worldview that only people who look like them are legitimate, and everyone else must fall to the wayside. That has historically been the path that leads to unwinnable quagmires, claiming the lives of millions of innocent people. History tells us that this time won’t be any different.

I did find an answer to the posed question in the comments. Mystic Michael wrote:

I’m not going to accept any lectures from the likes of Pete Hegseth — and certainly not from the likes of Donald Trump — about what it means to be a man. A real man doesn’t abuse women — as Hegseth does. A real man doesn’t pick on the weak, the underprivileged, the marginalized — as Trump does. A real man doesn’t feel the need to prove his manliness...because it’s obvious. Any man who’s obsessed with demonstrating his masculinity only succeeds in showing how insecure he really is...because he’s still trying to prove it to himself. Not exactly the most manly quality in the world. Spare me from these macho creeps. No wonder so many women are so on guard against their type. They give men a bad name.