Remigration - the one word to rule them all

[This should have gone out a few days ago, but production was slowed by events of the past week involving a fainting spell, a trip to the ER where it was discovered that I had a heart rate repeatedly dropping to like 22 with a BP of something like 85/13, a heartbeat ever more irregular than it already was, and oh by the way I have COVID. 

I left with a pacemaker and (due to wrestling with that damn hospital bed while wearing a heart monitor) a pinched nerve with the result that I can only work for about 10 minutes before my shoulder hurts so much I can't concentrate and have to take a break. Hope it was worth the wait....]

They said it. Not by second-hand reference, not by implication or suggestion or as a passing reference buried in a longer list, but right out. And not for the first time. But this time in shouting all caps.

Just before midnight on Thanksgiving, our rapidly-decomposing Orange Overlord turned to his sickenly-misnamed “Truth” Social for a deranged screed labeling immigration as the root of all our evils¹ - one punctuated with “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can finally cure this situation.”

And there it is. Maybe this time we will finally notice.

“Reverse migration,” you see, is a longer version of “remigration,” once a neutral, descriptive term with no overlying meaning. It meant simply homecoming, of a return to a place you previously lived. It was used, for example, following the end of World War II to refer to Jews who had fled Nazi Germany or Nazi-controlled territory in Europe who were returning to where they had lived before.

However over past couple of decades, particularly over the last 10-15 years and particularly in Europe, the right wing has taken hold of it and as often happens when the right wing grabs onto something, it has been twisted into a vile encapsulation of their inhumanities and unreasoning hatreds.

Put perhaps over simply but still accurately, the right wing saw an opportunity to spread their bigoted, racist xenophobia by amplifying the increasing resentment about both immigrants from Africa and refugees, particularly from Ukraine. “Remigration” was twisted from a straightforward reference to relocating to a previous home into a rallying cry first for kicking out any refugees and then to kicking out all foreigners, whether they had legal status or not.

The concept expanded, as such fanaticism invariably does, in this case to pushing for the “forced return” - the active expulsion - of all non-white immigrants and their children, regardless of their birthplace or citizenship; indeed, it meant forcing them back to their “ancestral home,” their home of racial ancestry, no matter how long their family had lived in Europe.

In other words, “remigration” is a wink-and-a-nod substitute for ethnic cleansing and racial-cultural lily white hegemony.

The driving philosophical idea - although I feel dirty using a fine phrase for such a low concept - the driving idea has been a rebirth in Europe of the idea of “Völkisch” (“people”), an ethno-nationalist movement from the late 1800s which under the Nazis became a policy in law of having to be, it was said, German (mostly, non-Jewish) “enough” to be a citizen.

After the defeat of the Nazis, those laws were scrapped - but like the man said, “Fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.”² “Völkisch” was rebranded as “Völkisch nationalism,” basically the same racist ideas with a little bit of dressing up - replacing references to “race” with “culture,” for example - without being explicitly antisemitic.

For example, in France, the Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”) emerged during the late 1960s to argue that different ethnicities require their own segregated living spaces, creating a need for remigration of people with “foreign roots.” The ND, as it’s called, gained some importance in the 1980s amid right-wing cries of “La France aux Français” (“France for the French”).

In Germany, the slogan is “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus” (“Germany for Germans, foreigners out”) - bringing us to elections in Germany this past February in which the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) - the AfD³, you remember, the party that Elon Musk and J.D. Vance wanted Germans to support - got 20.8% of the vote, making it the largest opposition party in the Bundestag and the second largest overall.

That degraded duo of Musk and Vance serves to bring it home to the US version.

On October 27, 2024, at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Stephen “Voldemort” Miller, the driving force for this in the campaign (and now in the White House) declared in a deliberate echo of the extremist cries in Europe, “America Is For Americans And Americans Only.”⁴

As I wrote at the time,

I’m surprised that more people have not emphasized the fact that the references have moved from bizarrely false claims about “illegal” immigrants to being about immigrants, period, claims given an exclamation point by Steven Miller’s goose-stepping.

No more the fig leaf of “if only they’d do it legally, there would be no problem.” No more the differentiation of the “bad hombres” from the “good hombres.” Just naked hatred for and irrational fear of any and all among “the other.”

This is fascism fulfilled, paranoia as policy, systematized xenophobia.

It was explicit, it was overt; the extremism, the meaning, was there for all to see - and most of the media to ignore.

And while this was perhaps until that time the most emphatic revelation of their intentions, it was definitely not the first. Mother Jones, for one, flagged it two months earlier, quoting a post from the Orange Soon-to-be-Overlord referring to “return[ing] Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration)” and Voldemort reposting it with “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

It was out there - but even then, even after Miller’s invocation of the overtly racist slogans of the furthest of Europe’s far right, still too much of the media (and, bluntly, too many of the rest of us) essentially sleep-walked our way through the declarations, preferring to see it all as a re-run of the old “illegal immigrants invading our country/stealing our jobs/blah-blah-blah” rabble-rousing bullshit.

But it wasn’t. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was the smokescreen. Because it isn’t about undocumented immigrants and for people like Miller it never was. For them, it’s always been about immigrants, period - or, again more accurately, non-white immigrants.

As soon as they got into office, they went to work. The Spray Tan Who Would Be King suspended the nation’s 40-year-old refugee resettlement program on his first day in office.

A few - emphasize few - highlights from the rest of the year:

In April, the White House cabal filed a brief in federal court claiming they can deport someone for their “beliefs, statements or associations.” This came the same day that ICE shared (and then deleted) a social media post saying that it is responsible for keeping illegal “ideas” from entering the US.

In May, the White House announced that an agency called the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, historically involved in supporting refugee programs, would be restructured to “reflect core administration priorities,” including an Office of Remigration to “revers[e] the flow of migrants” and focus on “Western values.”

In June despite the suspension of refugee resettlement, a group of about 50 white South Africans entered as “refugees” fleeing a non-existent “white genocide,” not only going to the front of the line for vetting, but skipping over it entirely.

In July, AttGen Pam Bondage⁵ directed that federal application forms and processes must only be in English, a step to implement the executive order declaring English the official language of the US.

That same month, “border czar” Tom Homan⁶ said ICE and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to detain and question someone; their “physical appearance” (read: skin color) is enough, a notion to which the Scurrilous SCOTUS Six later gave their blessing.

In September, the Orange Overlord declared that no more than 7500 refugees would be admitted in 2026, just 6% of the number in Biden’s last year. Most of those slots will go to white South African farmer “refugees” like the group that arrived in June.

Over the course of the year they have attacked the idea of DACA and have seized people under its protection.

They have striven to strip protection from temporary protective status (TPS) recipients, more than 1.2 million people who fled wars, oppression, natural disasters, poverty, and more and who have permission to live and work in the US.

They have made a practice of rejecting the concept of due process, dismissing it in theory and denying it in practice.

They’ve openly talked about denaturalization, stripping people of their citizenship, even aggressively pursuing cases.

They’ve even attacked the notion of birthright citizenship, including pressing the Supreme Court for support.

Which brings us to November and Thanksgiving and the deranged post I mentioned at the top, the core of which multi-screen screed can be found in just three statements, which in a way can sum up the entire argument. In order of appearance, they are:

One: The “foreign population stands at 53 million people, most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”

The population figure is from the Census Bureau and it is a count of all “foreign-born” residents of the US, no matter their status - which means it includes not only the long-demonized “illegals” but any who are here legally, including those covered by DACA or TPS, who have asylum claims pending, who have green cards, and who are naturalized citizens, all thrown into one, we might call it, basket of deplorables to be condemned and reviled for the ethnic crime of being foreign-born.

Two: This supposed “refugee burden” is “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II.”

The other side of the always-evil present in these xenophobic dreamscapes is the always-glorious, wonderful, mythologized past, one in which, we are here told, there was no crime, no shortage of health care or housing, no urban decay, and no student failed or was failed, at least not enough to care about. It depends on both ignorance of the present and amnesia about the past. That is why history is their enemy and why they’re looking to, for one example, scrub LGBTQ+, particularly trans, history: not just to sanitize US history, but to fantasize, to infantilize, it, the better to turn the past into a weapon of control.

Three: He wants to “deport any foreign national who is ... non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Which, we can safely assume, would exclude anyone non-Christians - especially Muslims, indeed I expect it was said with them in mind. (I suppose Jews would be okay. For now.) But questions of “non-compatibility” are not limited to religion but can include cultural. Remember the French New Right and the argument that different ethnicities require segregated living spaces.

Which brings up another, related, and final point. Although I’ve been addressing immigration mostly, don’t think for a moment that this is unrelated to, in fact do know it is wholly intertwined with, their attacks on DEI. Because diversity is exactly what repels them, inclusion is exactly what they can’t abide, and equity is exactly what denies their racial supremacy.

It’s all part of the same overriding racist, xenophobic, white supremicist, Christian nationalist worldview, an openly and consciously fascist ideology, rooted in visions of racial and ethnic purity that sees non-white people as undeserving of citizenship or even basic human rights.

It is a worldview, an ideology, the Orange Overlord and his minions, most particularly Steven Voldemort Miller, have firmly embraced and are pushing for, trying to wrench our society into their personal warped, evil dreamscape of a white ethno-state untouched by the contamination of lesser beings.

That’s what they’re after, those are the stakes. And as their speech becomes more openly exclusionary, more eliminationist, it’s ever more important that we never forget and we never let them pretend otherwise.

1 And here you thought it was the love of what he most passionately desires: money. (1 Timothy 6:10, Luke 12:15, Matthew 6:24)
2 Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (July 13, 1925). (Yes, the movie used an actual trial quote.)
3 In May, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor” that “threatens democracy.” The classification was suspended a week later, awaiting a final court decision.
4 If you want to see the video, it’s here.
5 Because she keeps getting tied up in legal knots trying to make sense of the regime’s legal arguments.
6 Good last name for him because, y’know, it’s almost human.

So I said - something about AI in healthcare

Another in an occasional series of trying to provide some more content here by posting worthwhile comments I’ve posted elsewhere.

In this case, I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices.

-

November 26, 2025

What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed.

During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

  

What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?

Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data.

But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities.

Which, by the way, makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.

Liars figuring

I am sick to flaming death of our senile buffoon president claiming that in the wake of COVID we had “the highest inflation in the history of our country” and nobody ever, ever, calling out that transparent lie. I know it's a lie because remember, I saw, higher inflation than during Biden’s term.

Start with the fact that the peak year-over-year (YOY) inflation rate during Biden’s term was 9.1% in June 2021.*

In 1974, YOY inflation was 12.3%.

In 1978, it was 9.0%.
In 1979, it was 13.3%.
In 1980, it was 12.5%.

The highest in any year since 1929 was 18.1% in 1946.

Okay, next: For the year 2022 as a whole, (based on December end of year figures, the standard method) YOY inflation was 6.5%.

In the period 1941-2024, there have been 12 years with YOY inflation rates above 6.5%.**

Third: Over the course of his presidency, average YOY inflation under Biden was 4.95% - lower than under Nixon (6.10%), Ford (8.11%), or Carter (9.85%) and just a bit higher than Bush the elder (4.8I).

Has inflation been a struggle recently? Is it still a struggle, especially with slow growth and stalled real income growth? Absolutely freaking yes.

But “the highest in the history of our country?” Not even close. And dammit, some one of the White House reporters should have the guts to say it out loud to his face.

I may be considered old, but I damn well can remember 1974. And so can the Orange Overlord - unless his dementia has erased that part of his memory. Either that or he’s just a damned liar.

Actually, I suspect it’s both.

*All data via Investopedia.com.

**The years were 1941, 1942, 1946, 1947, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 2021.

So I said - somethng about elections

As it has developed, I’ve written very little here of late, partly because for whatever reason I’ve found it difficult to compose a piece of any significant depth or length - I guess you could call it some sub-variation of writer’s block - and because as I noted recently, I don’t feel that I’m adding anything of sufficient value around here to justify having a readership. The two are likely connected in some way, but that’s rather more self-analytical that I care to be right now.

Anyway, the point of this is that I thought I’d try to from time to time post some substantive comments I’ve made on others’ posts, not single line or toss-off reactions, but something that makes some kind of point. I’ll date each one and include a heading sufficient, I hope, to provide enough context for the comment to make sense. All such posts will be headlined "So I said."

This may not produce a lot of content and no guaranteed regularity because it depends on how wordy I’ve been elsewhere, but maybe enough to make it worth checking here from time to time. I’ll start with this one and thanks more than I can say for bothering to read.

-
November 10, 2025
[SCOTUS will review the question of counting mail-in ballots received after election day]

This is inane. Elections are supposed to be directed and controlled by the individual states, not the federal government - including accepting mail-in ballots postmarked on or before but received after election day.

The only - the only - argument I’ve heard to the contrary is the real reach that the Constitution sets election day, so you can’t count votes cast after it.

But to do that, they have to be arguing that a vote is “cast” when it is counted, not when it’s actually cast. Which runs into two major problems. First, if they want to be consistent, that “one set election day” argument would not only require banning early voting entirely (which, admittedly, is also part of the right-wing agenda), it ignores the fact by previous decisions the votes in question were cast when that envelope was put in the mail. Cast before, not after, not even on, election day.

“Oh yes, but they were still counted after,” they say? Okay, so suppose you vote in person on election day but because of turnout, vote counting isn’t completed by midnight. Must the counting stop and remaining votes be discarded? They would, after all, by the logic of the argument be "counted after election day" and therefore cast too late, so making the very argument self-defeating.

The issue at hand is not when votes are counted but when they are cast. The power of the states to count mail-in ballots postmarked by but received after election day is not in rational question, the arguments to the contrary are flat-out voter suppression, and it's a disgrace - a revealing one, but a disgrace nonetheless - for SCOTUS to even have taken this up.

Two new rules!

One of my more popular offerings is my "Rules for Right-wingers," a compilation of tricks, deceptions, evasions, and misdirections right-wingers use to avoid honest debates, answering questions, responsibility, and truth.

 

It made its first appearance in June 2009 with 13 rules, since expanded several times with additional rules, reaching a total of 22 rules in February 2024.

 

Well, guess what. It's time for two more.

 

Rule #23: Screw the forest, look at the trees!
Drown the argument in details to distract from the overall point. Gaza again is an example, where disputes were created and questions were raised over just how many Palestinians were starving or had been killed to avoid accepting the fact that Palestinians were starving and had been killed.

Rule #24: Use passive voice as a weapon.
To illustrate, look once more at Gaza. The October 7 attack must always be called “a terrorist attack by the terrorist organization Hamas.” When forced to admit to the destruction in Gaza, refer to it only in terms of “the humanitarian situation” as if it was the result of a hurricane or tidal wave with no human agency involved. The words “Israel,” “Netanyahu,” and “IDF” must never be employed in this context.

Okay, I need help

Or maybe advice is a better word.

Y’see, up until relatively recently I kept up a reasonably steady output of political commentary both through a website (okay, a blog, as old-fashioned as that sounds now) and a web channel which also served as a local-access cable TV show in about five states.

I was never a big dog; my audience was in the hundreds, but dammit I felt useful because I knew that audience consisted mostly of people whose news sources were largely limited to things like the nightly TV news - so I knew that I was giving them information and a perspective they might not see anywhere else.

But here nowadays I feel like I’m surrounded by posters who are heavily into news and politics and related commentary. I’m neither a known quantity nor one with any special expertise or background on any particular topic, with the result that I feel I have nothing to contribute here, nothing that is not being said equally well if not better by louder voices (i.e., bigger audience), nothing that adds to the conversation other than the occasional comment. Put simply, I feel useless.

So I guess I’m asking if anyone has any guidance.

If you want to see what I do/did, you can check out my stuff here or at my Substack (whoviating.substack.com). I haven’t been able to do the videos for the last two years, but the ones before then can be found at YouTube; just search on “whoviating.”

Let me be clear: I am not asking you to subscribe. This is not a pitch. You can subscribe if you want, of course, but the idea here is that if you’re moved to consider offering any ideas/suggestions/hope, you might want a sense of where I have been up to this point.

Thanks for reading.

The next level

The fascists and the self-interested camp followers are working up to their campaign to "destroy the left" and its "terrorism networks" and we accept the threat is real because we seem to have finally embraced Maya Angelou's famous quote, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." As I remarked a little while back, "It is possible to overstate their power; it is not possible to overestimate their intentions."

But I also have a next-level concern, beyond the coming attempts at repression, that I wanted to raise, one to be filed under "be ready for the fallout from unintended consequences, even if they’re not your own."

It's what happens when the MAGA Masters can't make good on their promises to "destroy" the left? Because they won't. They can't. Oh, there may be, probably will be, some show trials or at minimum multiple prosecutions; there will be a lot of "investigations" and a surfeit of accusations; there will be repression of speech and assembly; there will be a lot of pain for those directly and the much greater number indirectly impacted - but no, while the left may even be significantly injured it will not be "destroyed." We survived the Palmer Raids, we survived McCarthyism, we survived the conspiracy trials of the 60s, we will survive this. Maybe scarred and limping, but alive and continuing and re-building. And truth be told, every time we have gone through one of these cycles, at the end of it the country is a little better than it was before. The moral arc of the universe and all that, I suppose.

So anyway, getting back to the point, what happens when after the MAGA Masters have gotten their rabid followers all pumped up, they can't produce the ultimate victory they promised? How far will they go, how desperate will they be, to keep that loyalty, to hold that blind commitment?

And will those followers try to make that victory come true on their own? It wouldn't be the first time that leaders of a movement lost control of their creation. We've already seen it here on a small scale in the refusal of some of the MAGA crowd to accede to the attempts of the Orange Overlord and company to drop the whole Epstein file business. So yeah, that could happen.

If it does and the MAGA Masters start to lose control, lose their grip on the formerly obedient, will those Masters turn on their own followers? Again, it has happened before.

And don't anyone tell me "that'd be good" because now we're talking about literal blood in the streets and guerrilla warfare and if you think that wouldn't affect you, wouldn't come to your door (it's often been said, with cause, that civil wars are the worst), you're an idiot.

This doesn't mean, of course, that other than the moves at repression this will happen. Of course and yes it's a string of "what ifs." I only raise it as a scenario for which we should be prepared - because even if you think it unlikely, you, I think, have to agree it's plausible.

And I raise it for another reason: to remind ourselves that, in another old but true phrase, the best defense is a good offense. The more strongly we today, now, don't just defend our rights but press our commitments to justice, the more strongly we don't merely say "no" to what shouldn't be done but also say "yes" to what should, the more prepared we are to sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future, the sooner and more clearly we can show "destroy the left" to be the pipe dream it ultimately is, the less pain there will be in the end to us and, more importantly, everyone else.

So carry it on. Except more.

Speaking of Kirk

What follows is rather meandering and I probably should go to bed and do it tomorrow, but I'm worried I would cool off to much by then. So with that warning and the understanding that I may feel compelled to edit this later to straighten out spaghetti syntax, I'll proceed.

When anybody among the wingnuts of the right says anything about "free speech," you can be pretty damn sure that they mean free speech for them but not for anyone else.

If it wasn't already obvious, the wave of firings, suspensions, and other penalties we've seen imposed on workers for failing to react in a MAGA-approved manner to the killing of the sexist, racist, xenophobic, trans-hater that was Charlie Kirk drove home the point.

Well, here's another example: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is urging people to respond to Kirk's killing by reporting to the State Department people "who glorify violence and hatred" so officials can "undertake appropriate action." What constitutes such “action” is left unsaid along with how far it can and will extend.

Why is that concerning? For one, the meaning of "people" is curiously limited to "immigrants and foreign visitors." That could be taken as an admission they can't touch US citizens, except that stripping citizens of their passports is already under discussion, the DOJ is "is aggressively prioritizing efforts" to denaturalize citizens, and there is the on-going effort to repeal birthright citizenship - so that admission-that's-not-an-admission is at best cold comfort and the phrase "can't touch US citizens" must be modified with "yet."

For another, while the meaning of "people" is curiously limited, the meaning of "glorify" is curiously broad, embracing "praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event," none of which need describe anything approaching "glorify." "I'm glad he's dead" isn't "glorifying" the murder, "he made his name spewing hatred so we can't be surprised if he generated a hateful response" certainly doesn't, and "I guess if he'd used a hammer instead of a rifle it would've been okay," while crude, likewise doesn't make the cut.

The real point, however, is that none of that matters even if any of it actually did "glorify" the murder because all of it fits quite comfortably under the banner of the "FREE SPEECH!" the reactionaries will screech at the least challenge to their vile and often enough violent rhetoric. Because that human right does not rise or fall depending on citizenship or even legality of residency. It is a right, not a privilege to be dispensed to a favored few.

But not as far as the right wing is concerned, oh no. Note that Landau's whole premise by definition excludes anyone who has used Kirk's death to issue calls, no matter how violent, for "war" against those in any way on the left, regardless of their status as "immigrant or foreign visitor" or citizen. As long as it is said in praise of Kirk, it's fine.

Well, sauce for the goose and all that and if anyone objects to you having excoriated Charlie Kirk in death for the execrable person he was in life they should just be told "It's free speech. Do you believe in it or don't you?"

Trans killers? Or killers of trans rights?

So it's being reported that senior officials at the DOJ are talking about a possible federal ban on transgender folks owning guns.

This is building on the right-wing meme machine's notion that trans folks commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings and the ban would be justified on the grounds that people with gender dysphoria are mentally ill and unstable.

If this were a rational world, it would be enough to simply dismiss this as the twisted fantasies of trans-hating bigots politicizing a tragedy to advance their paranoid fears and political ambitions - but unhappily, it is not.

So let's go through it. Note at the top that I’m not going to bother with any arguments about “but the Second Amendment,” questions that seem to be the focus of too many words on this because, y'know, guns and freedom and all that. Not only because I’d be happy to see that widely misused and historically misinterpreted provision dumped from the Constitution, but because it’s actually irrelevant. Instead, a few facts.

1. Gender dysphoria is the stress that arises when there is a conflict between someone's sex, based on their primary and secondary sex characteristics, and their gender, that is, their sense of self. It is not a mental illness. In fact, therapists will often prefer the term “gender incongruence” specifically to affirm that the issue is one of dealing with stress, not in any way one of sanity.

2. Not only are trans folks not over-represented among mass shooters, they are if anything underrepresented.

Snopes and Media Bias/Fact Check both looked at the question of a supposed overabundance of trans mass shooters and the conclusion was the same both times. Snopes called it "False" and Media Bias/Fact Check bluntly called it a "Blatant lie."

The primary sources for each were the Gun Violence Archive and the Violence Prevention Project, which use somewhat different measures for inclusion. The Gun Violence Archive records mass shootings, meaning a shooting in which at least four victims are shot, not including the shooter. The Violence Prevention Project tracks mass killings, one in which at least four people are killed, again not counting the shooter. Despite that difference in focus, their answers to the overall question were the same.

The Violence Prevention Project recorded 195 mass shootings committed by 200 people between 1966 and 2024. Of those 200 shooters, only one was listed as transgender. That's 0.50% of the shooters.

The Gun Violence Archive reports that from January 1, 2013 to August 29, 2025, there were 5,729 mass shootings - involving just five confirmed transgender shooters. If you include a few cases in which the gender identity of the shooter was unconfirmed, there may have been eight. That's between 0.09% and 0.14% of all mass shooters in the GVA database.

So transgender folks, who by varying estimates make up about 1% of US adults, make up something between 0.1% and 0.5% of mass shooters.

Which means that to what should be no one’s surprise, the Department of Injustice is either lying or so wrapped up in their paranoid hatred that they can’t even count.

Meanwhile, cis men, who make up about 47% of the US population, commit about 96% of all mass shootings. What were you saying about over-representation?

We need to talk about the "Unitary Executive"

A couple of seemingly disparate points that will come together in an unholy embrace:

First, there have long been philosophical debates among Constitutional scholars about the role and nature of the office of the presidency, which are not as defined as those for Congress.

The debate has revolved around two lines in Article II: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President” (Section 1) and the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Section 3).

The latter provision, it has been argued, means that the role of the president is to carry out, to execute, the will of Congress as expressed in the laws. Through the veto power, the president has a say in what the laws are, but once a law is passed, that say is limited to what Congress allows - somewhat like a CEO subject to oversight by a board of directors. In its extreme versions, the president is reduced to little more than a functionary of Congress.

The former, on the other hand, claims that “as night follows day,” in the words of one advocate, giving the president “the executive power” means giving them direct and personal control over all matters that could be considered executive functions, including those related to staffing and the heads of agencies, distribution of funds, establishment and administration of regulations, and more. In addition, any federal-level board or agency carrying out any executive function such as regulatory oversight or enforcement is likewise under the president’s control, as are, therefore, their staffs.

That theory of the presidency is known as the “Unitary Executive”* and perhaps because of the enormous amount of power this would concentrate in one person’s hands, it was long considered a fringe theory, only to emerge from the shadows in recent decades, particularly since about 2010.

Okay, point two is that the Supreme Court has something called the “emergency docket,” where it takes up “emergency” appeals of lower court rulings, usually injunctions of some sort, in cases where the issue is at least supposedly of such immediate and pressing importance that it can’t wait to go through the normal appears process. The rulings are made without a full briefing, without oral argument, and, it appears, often with the justices discussing them at all. It seems to often be just “Here’s the appeal, how do you vote?”

The decision is issued often without any legal reasoning and frequently with no record of who voted which way. Because of the opaque nature of the whole business, this “emergency docket” is often called the “shadow docket.”

Point three is a Supreme Court decision called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The case dates from 1935 and in it, the Court unanimously held that Congress has the authority to create independent agencies, not under the direct management of the president, and to insulate their members from presidential removal unless a good cause for the firing existed.

Okay, how do these points come together?

Over recent months, various federal courts, at both district and appellate levels, have blocked the Orange Overlord and his minions from carrying out mass firings and mass deportations, kicking trans folks out of the military, cancelling various grants, moving to dismantle the Education Dept., undermining birthright citizenship, trying to take over various agencies by firing their boards or administrators, giving DOGE’s (pronounced “dodgy”) band of grizzled veterans of high school access to our personal data - and more. And SCOTUS has repeatedly used the shadow docket to get rid of many of those injunctions, letting King Spray Tan continue his rampage. (It should be noted - while unnecessary to say - that almost all of these were by votes of 6-3, so “who voted which way” isn’t exactly a Final Jeopardy!-level challenge.)

Most recently, on September 8, they declared both that a)Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, can be, sure, why the heck not, fired and b)that those roving bands of masked government thugs can continue to strut around LA assuming anyone non-white who happened to be near, for example, a car wash is a potential “worst of the worst” “illegal alien” to be assaulted, cuffed, and hauled off - y’know, just in case.Um, but hold on a sec there. By any rational standard, in at least a great portion of those cases there is no “emergency.” There is no irreparable harm to either the Big Brother-wannabe in the White House or his coterie of clowns if courts freeze things in place during appeals - which is the idea behind an injunction. Indeed there is no harm to them at all, except to their egos and dreams of unrestrained power. So why were these on the shadow docket at all?

Perhaps even more to the point, a good number of these rulings are in stark contradiction to the Humphrey’s Executor case, the one which found that Congress could put precisely the sort of limits on Executive action that the Scurrilous Six (AKA the SS) are allowing.

“Piffle,” the SS reply. “We’re not deciding these cases. These are not final decisions.” Oh, yeah, that’s right. They are just “while appeals continue.” No harm, no foul.

Except, of course, to the irreparable harm that is done to those who, to name a few, will be kicked out of their jobs or their careers or the country, the irreparable harm done to scientific research, to health care, to the environment, the irreparable harm to the aspirations for justice among those, like trans folks**, who are stripped of anywhere to seek it if “the Messiah of America” (as wild-eyed Xian fundamentalist Shane Vaughn calls him) is given continued free rein. Or reign.

Which is the real point. In a technical, legal sense, it’s true, these actions are not final. But in a practical sense, for those people and agencies impacted they are.

And it’s more than that, which is the ultimate point I wanted to make, what brings this all together. Because it won’t be the end. By consciously choosing to allow the slaughter of reason, of ethics, of functioning government agencies built up over decades to continue, by empowering the mass firings, the mass deportations, the stripping of rights, the destruction of independent agencies, and doing it all in direct defiance of 90 years of Supreme Court precedent, these reactionaries in robes, the Scurrilous Six, have de facto embraced an extreme version of the Unitary Executive, one in which, as a mirrored version of the alternative that could make the presidency just a functionary of the Congress, could and if they have their way would make Congress little more than a piggy back for an Executive Branch controlling all the levers of power in the federal government.

So don’t be fooled for a minute, a second, by the “while appeals continue” blather. I see no reason to think that if and when an appropriately useful case gets to them, they will not contrive some reason, some justification, for kicking Humphrey’s Executor to the curb in favor of centralized power, even if that power is not in the hands of our present pretender to a nonexistent throne.

This does not mean give up, it does mean stop going to the federal courts, if only because SCOTUS can’t take up every case, with some wins at the district and circuit levels having gone unappealed for just that reason.*** And it definitely does not mean not hitting the streets or ignoring state-level pressure and organizing.

It does, however, mean that this is the reality of the legal universe in which we are operating and we have to be prepared to fight on that basis.

I gave a much-shortened version of this to a group of folks with who I join in a weekly rally and was chided by one afterwards for not including something hopeful. I’m afraid on this matter I don’t see a lot of cause for hope at least in the short make that middle run - but I will say it makes whatever we actions we do take even more vital.

*Curiously, the term originally arose in the discussion at the Constitutional convention over if the presidency should be held by one person or a council.

**If you’re one of those “LGB without the T” folks, do you really think that if the fascist reactionaries who dream of, to quote George Will, “back to 1900" do succeed in driving trans folks out of society, do you really think you won’t be next? Really? At a time when right-wing voices are starting to openly talk about overturning Obergefell and two members of SCOTUS say it should be “re-visited,” do you really think that? Really??

***To the contrary, it suggests filing more suits, as many as can be justified and maybe some that can’t, flooding the system with more cases and findings than SCOTUS would have the room on its docket to overturn even if the SS wanted to.

Another lie on an old topic

So the US is claiming that accusations of genocide in Gaza are just Hamas propaganda.

Really?

I spent about 10 minutes doing web searches around variations of "Israel genocide Gaza" and came up with the following list, which I'm sure isn't complete.

Human Rights Organizations
Amnesty International
B'Tselem
al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights
Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights
Center for Constitutional Rights
Human Rights Watch
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel

Universities/Academics (in a joint statement)
Center for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
International Human Rights Clinic, Boston University School of Law
International Human Rights Clinic, Cornell Law School
Lowenstein Human Rights Project, Yale Law School
University Network for Human Rights

Individuals
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Bernie Sanders
Elana Sztokman - American-born writer living in Israel for the past 30 years
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, Emir of Qatar
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the situation in Palestine
Itamar Schwartz, Israeli combat soldier who served in Gaza
Josep Borrell, former EU president, former EU foreign policy chief
Yair Golan, former deputy chief of staff of the IDF

14 Nations (in the genocide case against Israel at the World Court)
Belgium
Bolivia
Chile
Colombia
Cuba
Egypt
Ireland
Spain
Libya
Maldives
Mexico
Nicaragua
Türkiye
South Africa

Genocide Researchers
Dirk Moses, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research
Melanie O'Brien, president, International Association of Genocide Scholars
Omer Bartov, Brown University
Raz Segal, Stockton University, New Jersey
Rutger Bregman, historian
Shmuel Lederman, Open University of Israel
Uğur Ümit Üngör, University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies

Bartov said that there has been a consensus among genocide researchers since the second half of 2024 that this is genocide.

Geez, that Hamas propaganda is damn effective, ain’t it?

Surrounded by reptiles - and I don't mean the alligators

Snickering over it being an “Alligator Alcatraz,” Florida AttGen James Uthmeier announced plans for a "one stop shop" at a decrepit airfield in the Everglades with the goal of confining 1,000 kidnapped immigrants. 

Environmentalists were of course and quite properly outraged by the plan and the damage it will do to the environmentally-prized and -sensitive region while other folks decried the inhumanity involved - as if either mattered to the conglomeration of ass-kissers, boot-lickers, grifters, and self-dealers who make up the royal court of The Spray Tan Who Would Be King.

The site would be one of several in the state to hold imprison up to 5,000 people to be removed from our insufficiently white population as part of the state's contribution toward enacting the xenophobic rantings of their liege.

But I have to admit what stood out to me was how these deportation dungeons would be paid for. Reports the Post:

"The state can be reimbursed for the estimated $450 million cost of the detention centers by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to DHS."

According to Department for the Protection of the Fatherland secretary and cosplay addict Kristi Noem, the money would come from FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which was created by Congress to provide grants to groups and state/local governments who provide services to immigrants awaiting legal proceedings. That is, it was created at least with the idea of helping immigrants who are going through the legal system - aka "doing it the right way." Instead, it will now be used for what bluntly amount to prisons intended to cage people until they can be kicked out.

So FEMA will pay for them. FEMA, the agency that is supposed to, designed to, created to, assist local communities in recovering from natural disasters, the agency that is perpetually short of money to cover costs related to our climate-change-driven storms, floods, and fires, the agency whose bosses confirmed just a few days earlier that there would not be any aid to the state of Washington for recovery from a bomb cyclone that hit in November, that FEMA is going to pay to for this latest paean to perversity.

On the other hand, I guess we shouldn't be the least surprised since King Donald the I (that's a pronoun, not a Roman numeral) intends to "wind down" FEMA "after hurricane season" - doesn't want to risk impacting Florida - and assume personal control over who gets help and how much which I'm sure will be distributed on exactly the sort of impartial, non-partisan standard for which he is so famous.

As a footnote to all this, we have GOT to talk about "remigration."

Does Sarah McBride speak for the trans community? "Moderates" sure hope so.

Updated I suppose this could be considered a type of full disclosure: This was was prompted by Erin Reed’s piece on Rep. Sara McBride’s “New York Times” interview with Ezra Klein.

I admit to a good deal of sympathy for Sarah McBride in that when she first entered Congress, she indicated she wanted to be seen as "the Gentlelady from Delaware," not "the transgender member of the House." That, of course, while understandable was nonetheless impossible and the first thing she encountered as soon as she passed through the door was the bathroom business, followed by daily humiliations like repeated references to "Mr. McBride." So yes, it's a tough path she's negotiating. Credit her with trying to do it with grace.

The problem here is that with her interview with Ezra Klein she now has allowed herself to be presented as some sort of voice of the community, the "most politically powerful transgender official in the country" (says Faux News), someone who is not merely expressing some personal opinions about tactics (some of which she clearly has not thought through) but communicating Significant Views worthy of Serious Consideration by the Serious People. The choruses of "But Sarah McBride said" and "As Sarah McBride said" are already emerging.

If she now wants to be seen as a community leader, she damn well should have pushed harder on behalf of, as she herself put it (referring to Delaware), the people she represents. If she doesn't, if her goal is just to be "the Gentlelady from Delaware," perhaps in hope of quietly normalizing her presence and that of those who may follow, then she should have refused the interview.

Not only because McBride shows serious signs of already falling into old-style Washington insider ways (such as referring to advocates by the dismissive epithet "the groups"), but because she betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamics of social change. Specifically, she says fighting across a broad front "regardless of whether the public is ready ... misunderstands the role that social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion."

That is utter nonsense. Being where the public is not, being where the public is not immediately ready to go, is exactly the role of social movements. It is their whole purpose.

Indeed, in writing this I recalled writing some years ago that in an odd sort of way, the goal of any movement for social justice is to lose because you should always be somewhat unpopular, somewhat beyond where the public is prepared at that moment to go - and if you do succeed in moving them to where you are, such that they are raising their own voices and you are no longer speaking to them or to power on their behalf, it's time either to shift to a different issue or to a sharper position on the same one. Because there is always more to do.*

The point here is that no movement for justice ever gained broader acceptance by the self-defeating strategy of "follow[ing] the polls." That is a road not to progress but to irrelevance and at best stasis. And whatever it's uses in military campaigns, "strategic retreat" in a political movement is simply giving up ground and at best losing more slowly.

The history of gaining rights is one of leading, not following; is one of struggle, not of settling; is one where compromises follow campaigns, they do not precede them - and, importantly, where such compromises are found only in gains, not losses.

I could go on about this for some time - I certainly have in the past - but to save myself some typing and repetition, I'm going to refer you to my piece called "Newsom and Moulton: A Tale of Two Trimmers" (I'm sure you can guess the topic) which contains some discussion related to "compromise" actually meaning slow-motion surrender.

Instead, I'll repeat something I've said so many times that I should have it tattooed on my forehead to save time:

The movement for peace and social justice in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth without giving a flying damn if anyone was "offended" or not. We didn't build a movement against the Indochina War or for civil rights, women's equality, or a cleaner environment by worrying about how we'd be received by the bigots, sexists, or greedy corporate bosses - or how we'd "look" or who we'd "turn off" if we labeled the discriminators and despoilers for what they were.

And while that referred to movements of the dreaded '60s, it has remained true through all the movements since it was first written about 35 years ago. And, I suspect, will continue to be so.

Which Sara McBride does not understand. Know this clearly: I do not fault her for this. As I said above, she may well see her role is to do her job as a congresswoman and to fit in such that being transgender is no longer remarkable. If so, I wish her the best but I am also old enough to remember the Mattachine Society, which adopted a very similar "we're just like you" strategy only to have to wait for decades until such as Stonewall and Act Up! actually get the needle moving.

No matter; Sarah McBride has to decide how she personally will deal with her own situation. But she is not cut out to be - and may well not want to be - a community voice or leader. And she should not be made into one.

Updated to make note of the fact that this post has been viewed over 8000 times, which makes it one of my most popular posts ever. I'm small-time, always have been, always will be, so this is kind of a big deal for me and in the hope they'll see it, I waned to express gratitude to whoever and however it came to so many people's attention. (I just wish a few of those folks had left a comment. Oh, well.)

*I used to enjoy telling people my political philosophy was that of a “socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclectic-iconoclast.” Part of the point was the “iconoclast” - because I’d say that there ever was a society designed along the lines I imagine, the first thing I’d do is to examine it for its shortcomings that needed to be addressed. The I Jing says “the only thing that doesn’t change is that everything else changes.” My version is “the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer.” There’s always more to do.

Trans folks get Screw-mettied

A few observations on US v. Skrmetti, the case over Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, drawn from the reporting from, among others sources, Chris Geidner (Law Dork) and Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning)

For those terminally uninformed, the state of Tennessee had passed a law barring medical gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 18. On June 18, in a 6-3 split along the usual lines, SCOTUS upheld the law. 

Okay, one thought is that unlike Geidner, who called the "logic" of primary author John Roberts "circular," I'd liken it more to a spiral, spinning further and further out beyond the bounds of reasoned thought in pursuit of a predetermined conclusion. And that was mild compared to Mark Joseph Stern writing at Slate, who called Roberts' ruling "an incoherent mess of contradiction and casuistry," a "travesty," and "a series of half-arguments and specious assumptions stitched together into one analytic trainwreck."

Another thought is that in saying the law is not discriminatory based on sex because it denies treatment to both trans boys and trans girls, the ruling clearly echoes (for not the only time) the bigoted (and rejected) defense to bans on same-sex marriage which claimed those laws did not discriminate on the basis of sex because gays and lesbians could still get married, provided it was to each other.

A third arises from Roberts saying the law "does not restrict the administration of puberty blockers or hormones to individuals 18 and over." That is, you can get puberty blockers, but only after puberty is or is essentially complete. Kind of like saying you can vote in an election provided you do it after the votes have been counted.

Fourth, the decision spouts some blather about evolving standards and there are still, y’know, “questions” and some “controversial” stuff, argued in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus on the basics: Puberty blockers and HRT work, can be used safely, gender-affirming care leads to improved lives for the vast, vast majority of people affected, and regret rates are, compared to other medical and surgical interventions, remarkably low. But there are still bozos and bigots spinning tales, so there is, yeah, “controversy” and lack of absolutely perfect knowledge so we must give full weight to “both sides” and approve bans where they exist. And I look forward to a SCOTUS suit of someone arguing a school can’t teach students that the Earth is a globe because of the “controversy” about if it is flat or not.

Finally, there is this horrifying statement from the head of the Sleazy Six: "SB1 does not exclude any individual from medical treatments on the basis of transgender status. Rather, it removes one set of diagnoses from the range of treatable conditions.”

If the first sentence there has any coherent meaning at all - which is quite an assumption - it's that banning trans-related health care is not discriminatory because a trans person can't be denied treatment for, say, diabetes on the grounds of being trans. And, it would follow, it's not discriminatory to deny a diabetic treatment because they can still be treated for cancer.

But the second sentence is the really horrifying one. Its actual argument is that any category of person can be banned from needed treatment by "remov[ing] one set of diagnoses" - the very ones that define the condition for which treatment is sought - "from the range of treatable conditions,” even as it effectively acknowledges these are valid medical diagnoses. "You've been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes? Sorry not sorry, we've decided that diagnosis cannot be treated."

The sheer inhumane depravity, the cold-blooded indifference to the welfare or even, given the suicide statistics, the survival of trans people revealed by that passage is difficult to grasp.

Oh, and as a footnote: Any time a right-wingers comes at you defending a law or policy with any form of “all it does is,” as the Scurrilous Six do here, you can be damn sure it does a hell of a lot more.

Burning down the future

The Spray Tan Who Would Be King has declared open war on the future.

Not his future, what does he care, he will not live to see the effects of his self-glorifying ineptitude.

And not the future of his apostles and Wormtongue-whisperers, whose gaze does not extend beyond the limits of their personal greeds, hatreds, and schemes, who see the "king" as a means to their warped ends.

Nor that of the bootlickers, acolytes, and court jesters, all of who have long since abandoned any shred of independent thought or self-respect.

No, I mean The Future.

On June 11, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was changing its name to the Environmental Destruction Agency with the announcement that the agency

is proposing to repeal all “greenhouse gas” emissions standards for the power sector under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and to repeal amendments to the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that directly result in coal-fired power plants having to shut down.

That is, it proposes to allow power plants to emit as much climate-destroying greenhouse gases as they feel like, with the argument being (if you can believe it but I bet you can, considering) that because it can't be said with assurance of just how significant an impact on global climate change is driven by US-based fossil-fuel power plants, those emissions can't be regulated at all.¹

 To show the science-based, non-political nature of the change, the announcement quotes EDA Administrator Lee Zeldin as saying the "Biden-era regulations have imposed massive costs" on the poor, beleaguered, barely-getting-by fossil fuel industry and their "primary purpose" was "to destroy industries that didn't align with their narrow-minded climate change zealotry" and to "regulate coal, oil and gas out of existence.”

The reactions from actual environmentalists were not kind.

- The plan is a "reckless betrayal," "ugly and unpatriotic," "cynical," and "dangerous." - Moms Clean Air Force director Dominique Browning

- It's "destructive," "reckless," and "fan[s] the flames of extreme heat and wildfires." - Center for Biological Diversity environmental health attorney Ryan Maher
- It's "completely reprehensible," "trad[es] American lives for campaign dollars," and is "an assault on our health and future." - Sierra Club climate policy director Patrick Drupp
- It's "astoundingly shameful," "galling," "sacrifices the public good," and would leave "no meaningful path to meet global climate goals." - Julie McNamara of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program

This announcement came on the same day that The Guardian reported that climate.gov, the highly-respected source of information and education about climate change run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been effectively shut down.

Every member of the content production staff was fired as of May 31, meaning that other than (maybe) some already-prepared material to go up later this month, there will be no new content, no new reports on studies, no new refutations of denialist bullshit.

Worse, two web developers were kept on, raising the specter that the site may be maintained, but turned into an outlet for fossil-fuel industry propaganda and conspiracist trash.

Oh, and speaking of NOAA, on June 5 the agency and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (at UCal, San Diego) stated, as reported by CommonDreams.org,

the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked above 430 parts per million in 2025 - the highest it has been in millions of years.

In fact, in more than 30 million years, according to Ralph Keeling, director the Scripps CO2 Program, who responded to the study's findings with a typical scientist's understatement: “Another year, another record. It’s sad.”

Sad indeed, but it's more, though. A new study, published June 2 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment says that coastal communities in North Carolina are already experiencing a frequency of high-tide flooding "an order of magnitude greater" than the official numbers. Although the immediate cause was shortcomings in measuring rainfall runoff and the effects of local drainage infrastructure, still, as the Washington Post noted in its coverage, the study

offers insights into a reality that a growing number of coastal communities will face, or already are facing: that infrastructure built for another time and another climate is not equipped to handle the higher tides and persistent flooding fueled by rising seas.

Part of the issue with rising sea levels, of course, is that warming climate yields warming water yields expanding water yields sea level rise. Another and potentially much larger issue is melting ice caps, particularly in Greenland and Antarctica. And according to work also published in Communications Earth & Environment, this one on May 20, the current Paris Climate Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels is too damn high and

even current climate forcing (+1.2°C), if sustained, is likely to generate several meters of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures

trying to deal with the result of melting of ice sheets. The study concluded that the "safe limit" of warming for ice sheets is not 1.5°C or even 1.2°C but more like 1°C "and maybe a little less," the "safe limit" being defined by study co-author Jonathan Bamber as "one which allows some level of adaptation, rather than catastrophic inland migration and forced migration." Exceed that limit and

it becomes extremely challenging for any kind of adaptation, and you're going to see massive land migration on scales that we've never witnessed in modern civilization,

he said.

And don't just think of the migration. Think of the hunger it will cause. Think of the pain, the suffering, the starvation, it will cause. Think of the wars it will cause from conflicts over land, over water, over resources, over territory, the ethnic wars over "foreign invaders."

That is the world that King Donald in his lust for vengeance and power, that corporate CEOs in their "warmed and well-lighted offices"² with their lust for more! more! more!, that the sniveling party sycophants who would rather see the world burn than have to find a different job, that the worshipful buffoons who think that wearing a red cap is a solution to their shrinking futures, that is the world they would leave to the generations to come, that is the world that we, we, that we will leave to our children, our grandchildren if we are not willing to face what is before us.

Lead author on this study Chris Stokes noted that "we only have to go back to the early 1990s to find a time when the ice sheets looked far healthier" and global warming was within that safe limit.

So let me ask you this: Think of (or do some looking into) the 1990s, the level of conveniences you had than, the standard of living, the available technology. Then ask yourself this: Was that way of life so terrible that you would sacrifice a world to avoid living that way again?

If your answer is yes, then you are a waste of air and I don't think I believe you. If your answer is no, then know that precisely because of the technological advances of those past 35 years we can leave a livable world behind us if - but only if - we are prepared to pay the price (and I mean invest the money, the tax money, because the corporations sure as hell aren't going to do it willingly) and probably do without some tech-y but unnecessary geegaws.

The choice is stark, but there is a clear right one and no it does not involve "starving in the dark" but it will likely involve some sacrifice. I can only hope we're up to it.

 

¹According to the EPA (to the extent it can still be trusted to not downplay the issue, 24% of US greenhouse gas emissions are from electricity production, of which 60% is from burning fossil fuels. That means that 15% of all US greenhouse gas emissions arise from fossil-fuel burning electric power plants. Not what I'd call "not significant."

²"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Silent encroachment

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, June 1778

 

Here is something on-going which has gotten not near enough attention even as people are kinda sorta aware of it in particular circumstances.

 

We are facing a new wave of bills and lawsuits designed to limit and repress First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly.

 

People are aware, I expect, of moves to restrict (properly read as drive out of existence) campus protest against the genocide in Gaza and/or support of Palestinian rights. But that is not the intended end. Just like sports and bathroom bans are not the actual goal of the transphobes and transmisiacs but are just the "foot on the door," the "camel's nose," to much more far-reaching ends, so are these laws and regulations.

 

The Guardian offered a brief rundown a few weeks ago, declaring

[a]nti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests ... have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year ... according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines.

 For example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would make it a federal felony punishable by 20 years in prison to “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – without defining what constitutes "disruption," meaning it even could be applied to a lawsuit challenging a pipeline's permit. Similar bills based on model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) already have been enacted in 22 states.

 

Social movements, the Guardian notes, usually generate attempts at repression. Repressive anti-protest laws proliferated in the wake of the 2016 Standing Rock protests. Protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulted in 52 such laws being introduced across 35 states. One federal bill then was the Unmasking Antifa Act, potentially criminalizing wearing a mask during a protest. This March, the virtually-identical Unmasking Hamas Act would make wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way punishable by 15 years in prison - while not defining either “oppressive” or “disguise.”

 

So understand: Protests about Gaza are not the cause; they are just the latest excuse. In the words of AJenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU,

“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.” 

And there is Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, who said

“Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”

That is the goal.

 

And not just the legislatures and the executive, the courts get used as well. The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties and expanding causes for individual action - a means of allowing repressive suits to be filed by individuals rather than government agencies. Such suits, which can tie up activists in expensive and bankrupting litigation for years, often take the form of a SLAPP* (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), used by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals, and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements. For example,

[i]n Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.`

Three other states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois – are considering new or harsher civil penalties for protesters.

The good news here is that most of these bills fail to pass or never make it out of committee in the first place. The bad news is that any of them at all pass, especially when any one of them applied with hostile intent - which is the point of them - can do significant damage to our right to protest.

On Monday[, April 7,] in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.

Years in prison and a bankrupting fine for "conspiracy" and "damage" that wasn't even to the statue and could be cleared up with a wet cloth. Intimidation into utter silence. That what all this is about.

And don't you ever forget it.

 

*From April 5, 2013: A SLAPP is a lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their opposition. That is, the suers don't really expect to win the suit. What they want to do is to drain their opponents either financially, emotionally, or better yet both, so the opponents are exhausted and just give up.

They were popular among corporations from the 70s to the 90s, particularly when they were leveled against individuals or "kitchen table" groups that were using regulatory proceedings and hearings to oppose some plan of some corporation. The price for dropping such suits - which were patently frivolous, as they often claimed that by criticizing the company's proposal you were by definition "defaming it" and "causing it to suffer financial loss" - the price for dropping the suits was usually dropping out of the regulatory process and letting the company's proposal proceed unopposed. These suits lost a lot of their luster when their targets who were in a position to fight them began to file what became known as SLAPP-backs, where the roles were switched and the corporation went from plaintiff to defendant.

 

For more on SLAPP-backs, go here.