Just in time for summer

It is now legal to go topless in public in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Supreme Court issued an opinion last week that holds that women can go topfree without violating the Minnesota indecent exposure statute as long as they don’t engage in sexual conduct.

In short, the Court unanimously held that a woman who is topfree is not acting lewdly merely by appearing in public with her torso unclothed. Since the indecent exposure statute only criminalizes lewd behavior, a woman with an unclothed torso is not commiting a criminal act unless she is also engaging in sexual behavior. In other words, a woman merely going topless is neither lewd nor sexual and it’s perfectly legal.

It’s only useful about 3 months out of the year, and in those 3 months you’ve got to worry about mosquitos.

The best thing about this decision is that it removes a pretext cops used to search and arrest people.

The facts in this case are short and undisputed: On July 28, 2021, the Rochester
Police Department received a report that a woman was walking around a gas station
parking lot with her breasts exposed. An officer responded to the call and saw Plancarte
in the parking lot with her breasts exposed. The officer recognized Plancarte from two
encounters earlier that week. During those encounters, the officer saw Plancarte exposing
her underwear on one occasion, and her breasts and her underwear on another occasion.
The officer stopped Plancarte and asked her why she kept exposing herself.
Plancarte replied, “I think Catholic girls do it all the time.” Plancarte then worried about
how she would get home and stated, “I dance at the biker club. I’m a stripper.” The officer
said, “Well, you can’t strip in the middle of public.” Plancarte responded, “Yeah, but they
should account for me at the club, shouldn’t they?” The officer arrested Plancarte and later
searched her purse, where the officer found a vial containing cocaine.

Yeah, this is an anti-cop decision. I approve.

Humanity is not fading away

The world population stands at 8.2 billion, and it’s continuing to grow. It is not shrinking. We are adding 70 million people each year. Some simple facts:

During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.
Because of declining growth rates, it will now take over 200 years to double again.

Does it bother you that it’s going to take 200 years to fill up the planet with 16 billion people? The 1970s were not that overcrowded nor was it empty. I don’t think we gained that much by adding 4 billion people since then, especially since so many of the additions are being exploited and are suffering to benefit relatively rich people like me.

I wonder if some people are confused by graphs. Here’s a plot of the growth rate, not total population, and yes, the rate has gone down (which is good news), but that does not mean we’re losing population.

But this graph keeps Elon Musk awake at night, because he’s a very stupid person.

Billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News recently that falling birth rates keep him up at night. It’s a drum he’s been beating for years.

Musk is one of the world’s most visible individuals to elevate this point of view. Vice President JD Vance also talks about wanting to increase birthrates in the U.S.

I am untroubled by it. I am more concerned about whether my grandchildren have a good quality of life and opportunity to personally live and grow, and whether all the other children living in the here and now also have equal opportunities. Increasing the world’s population does not increase our happiness — we should care more about the quality of life than creating bulk quantities of consumers.

I also have to ask…why are so many of the people advocating for increased growth rates such horrible fascists? There was a meeting of these “pro-natalists” back in March, and these weren’t people who just love children and want to build hospitals and daycares and open up more educational opportunities and expand vaccination, all things I would consider virtuous evidence of a true desire to help a burgeoning population…quite the opposite. The philosophy seems to be strongly tied to Nazis.

A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.

Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.

Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.

composite image of people wearing maga caps with red stars on their mouths
‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word
Read more
The Natal conference website embeds a Musk post on X, reading: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” Musk, who reportedly has at least 13 children by four mothers, was in recent days confronted on X by musician Grimes and the rightwing influencer Ashley St Clair over his alleged neglect of the children he has fathered with them.

The conference, scheduled for 28-29 March, is being organized by Kevin Dolan, who the Guardian identified in 2021 as the person behind a Twitter account that was prominent in the far-right “DezNat” movement, and last year as the organizer of the first conference. It is the second time the conference has been held, and once again, the speakers roster runs from provocateurs who emerged from the “fascist fitness scene” to practitioners of “liberal eugenics”.

Uh, Elon…civilization will not end if we maintain a low, stable, sustainable growth rate. If you’re so concerned about too few people, open the doors of America to more immigration. More is better, right?

Also, eugenics is eugenics. Attaching the adjective “liberal” to it doesn’t make it beneficial, you’re still making value judgments on the worth of individuals. Whether you’re euthanizing them or hiding them away in institutions or giving special advantages to people who meet your subjective criteria, it’s all the same thing — it’s an attempt to short-sightedly dictate what kind of people will be allowed to thrive.

Here’s the organizer of that natalist conference.

KEVIN DOLAN: But the topic of demographic decline clearly matters to Elon Musk, JD Vance and many others in the Trump administration, which means that the great ideas developed here can get a hearing that would not have been possible last year.

HAGEN: Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter account was exposed. Among other things, he’d used it to promote the racist notion that white men are superior to other races and women. After getting doxxed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DOLAN: We’re expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time. And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies, which are found in the family. And that brings us back to where we started, with selective breeding.

What natural hierarchies? Nature is more of an anarchist collective, without a big boss deciding who benefits from selective breeding. Nature does not follow any human ideology, so it’s fallacious to try and attach one to it, or worse claim that humans should follow your biased interpretation of how it ought to work.

LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Simone Collins, in her thick-rimmed, round glasses, is one of the more visible faces of pronatalism – on purpose.
SIMONE COLLINS: My whole entire, like, Etsy getup right now, it’s intentionally cringe.
HAGEN: She’s here at Natal Con in her signature look, which she describes as techno-puritan.
COLLINS: There should obviously be more cybernetics in my outfit, but we are combining, like, chunky hipster glasses and a lot of modern equipment with a bonnet and linen clothing.

Some of the more prominent faces in this movement are Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of dorks who complain about “demographic collapse” (whatever that undefined disaster is) while saying that oh, no, they have nothing to do with those horrible people running the conferences they attend. They gave the keynote speech at the Austin natalist conference!

Image is everything to them. The Collinses are quick to verbally denounce fascists and the far right, but then you have to look at what they do: they ally themselves with people like Charles Haywood.

CHARLES HAYWOOD: And generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.

HAGEN: That’s Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con a couple years ago. This year, he’s behind the scenes as a sponsor. He made his money as a shampoo magnate. Haywood blames birth rate declines on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HAYWOOD: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever for the history of this nation.

They can tell me they’re progressive and good people when they get around to denouncing that guy and all the racist/misogynist/neo-nazi scum that form their audience.

I should also mention the incident that put them in the news a while back when Malcolm Collins slapped his son Torsten in the face.

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

Oops, the mask slipped for a moment. It’s OK, it was never a very convincing facade that they’ve put up, anyway.

Mix Harvard and the NY Times to get perfect mush

Harvard privilege + NY Times centrism gets this kind of crap published: I Teach Computer Science, and That Is All. It’s an op-ed by a clueless Harvard professor explaining that while it’s deplorable that Trump is dismantling the educational system in the US, the fault lies with those professors who bring their politics to work.

Nothing justifies the unwarranted attacks by the Trump administration on universities as a whole and on my institution in particular. I am proud of Harvard’s leadership for resisting the impossible demands made of it. I also believe these attacks are enabled by the lack of popular support for universities. We academics should look at how we contributed to this erosion of trust by allowing the blurring of the lines between scholarship and activism.

In recent years the mantra of bringing your whole self to work has replaced the old notion that you should leave it all at the door. This movement has had some positive outcomes. Ensuring everyone feels included and has access to mentors and role models can be crucial to attracting and retaining talent.

Some have taken it too far, letting the personal and political overtake the professional, which has led to pressure on businesses to take positions in matters outside their domain. Makers of business software weighed in on elections. Google employees staged a sit-in over Gaza. Right-wing activists began a boycott of Bud Light after it was featured in a transgender influencer’s promotional social media post. The result is that people who disagree with one another find it hard to work at the same company or buy the same products, increasing the problem of polarization.

Oh, yeah, the real problem here isn’t Republican politics, it’s that Google employees thought genocide was bad and Budweiser briefly featured a trans person in an ad. That’s polarizing! We can’t can’t confront and conflict with terrible ideas and actions, that’s not the university’s job. (Except…it is.)

It wouldn’t be a NY Times op-ed without a healthy dose of both-siderism.

On the extreme right, the same idea has taken hold in government, where the very notion of a nonpartisan public servant is threatened, and those deemed insufficiently loyal have been fired. Both versions, on the left and the right, are toxic.

On the one hand, having a trans woman in an ad; on the other, boycotts, death threats, and Kid Rock shooting up beer cans with an assault rifle. Both equally evil! On one hand, Google employees peacefully protesting their employers’ policies; on the other, Israel bombing and killing civilians. We’re supposed to be confused about these two entirely equivalent actions. I have to conclude that any idiot can become a Harvard professor, and the NY Times will happily publish any waffle they shit out.

And this is how he teaches.

You might think I can avoid politics in the classroom only because I am a computer scientist. This is not the case. Faculty members who are determined enough can inject politics into any topic, and after all, computer science has brought huge and significant changes to society. The interaction of computer science and policy sometimes arises in my classes, and I make sure to present multiple perspectives. When I teach cryptography, a topic at the heart of the tension between privacy and security, I share with my students writings by former National Security Agency officials as well as “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”

In fact, I believe that the lessons students learn from computer science (and science in general) can make them better citizens. Trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.

Oh. So he’s the guy who has been teaching that imaginary pseudophilosophical claptrap about there being no such thing as truth. Now everyone can stop picking on post-modernism and go after the Harvard computer scientists instead. He teaches cryptography, a subject that he considers himself an expert in, but he can’t say anything about the dangers of crypto, because that would be political, and professors shouldn’t have political opinions.

OK, I don’t know much about crypto, but then he gives examples I’m more familiar with.

All academics are experts on narrow topics. Even when they intersect with the real world, our expertise in the facts does not give us authority over politics. Scientific research shows that vaccines work and climate change is real, but it cannot dictate whether vaccines should be mandated or fossil fuels restricted. Those are decisions for the public, with the scientific evidence being one factor. When academics claim authority over policy, the result is not an increased effect on policy but decreased trust in academia.

That is insane. College professors do not have direct power, so the idea that they “dictate” anything is nonsensical — all we can do is inform and encourage people to use their knowledge wisely. Vaccines WORK, hell yes they do, and we can confront our students with the data and evidence and experiments that show that they are effective and save citizens’ lives, and further we can show that bad policy, like that perpetrated by that grand fraud, Robert F. Kennedy jr., will not work and will kill people, so for a biology professor to sit on their hands and refrain from stating the truth is a criminal neglect of their responsibilities. Hush now with that science and facts and history — it’ll make people distrust academia, because we keep saying that your misconceptions and errors are wrong.

But that is our job.

The author, Boaz Barak, is an Israeli, and serves on Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (he seems to avoid saying where he stands on anti-Palestinian bias) so he’s a hypocrite. He’s happy to denounce all those academic activists who are eroding the public’s trust in the universities by taking a stance on the politics he disagrees with, but he himself thinks that his politics are great and good, and that no one should be offended by them.

I might disagree with his politics, but I don’t think he should be fired for holding them. I think he should be fired for being a colossal hypocritical dumbass who can’t think his way out of a soggy paper bag.

I wish I could laugh anymore

It’s from McSweeney’s. It’s a joke.

The all-gender bathrooms will be changed to “both-gender” bathrooms because, as biology tells us, there are only two genders.
(The biology department has informed us that this is not true.)
The biology department has been dissolved.

Ha ha, it’s satire that exaggerates a potential problem, therefore it’s funny. Ha ha.

Except…it includes a link to an article on the American Association of University Professors site.

Similarly, the University of North Texas administration recently censored the content of more than two hundred academic courses, including by mandating the removal of words such as race, gender, class, and equity from undergraduate and graduate course titles and descriptions.6 These actions were allegedly taken in response to state legislation banning certain diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and practices, even though the legislation specifically exempted academic course content. While university administrators and faculty members may be compelled to comply with legislation and court orders, even where these run counter to professional and constitutional principles, they remain free to register their disagreement. And under no circumstances should an institution go further than the law demands. Yet, the examples above depict an eagerness to obey on the part of administrative officers, portending a bleak future for higher education.

Wait…is this still satire? Should I keep laughing? Is the AAUP, normally a pretty damned serious site, joking?

No?

I tell you, don’t go to college in Texas. Get out of the state as quick as you can. There may be good colleges there, but the state government is certifiably insane and will be chopping the hell out of the education system there.

Republican madness reigns

Republicans in Minnesota’s 7th Congressional District have a new party chair. It’s Bret Bussman! Here’s the part of his CV that he shares with the citizens.

Terri and I live in Browerville and have since 2016. We have 3 grown sons.

I am a 20-year Active Army retiree & a life member of the VFW and DAV.

I am a Christian and attend St. John’s Lutheran Church in Motley. Terri attends Catholic Church. Yes, Catholics & Lutherans can coexist.

I have a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Northwestern University in St. Paul and an MBA from Globe University/MN School of Business.

That’s all fine. But there’s more!

He has posted about “satanic chemtrails” in the skies above Minnesota.

He has argued that the collapse of a World Trade Center building during the 9/11 terror attacks was the result of a “controlled demolition,” and that a “cruise missile,” rather than American Airlines Flight 77, struck the Pentagon that day.

He has shared multiple videos arguing that the moon landings were faked, and that more recent footage of astronauts aboard the International Space Station was faked as well.

He has shared with followers a video entitled “5 Reasons Why I BELIEVE in the Flat Earth (And You Should Too!),” as well as numerous other videos claiming that the earth is flat.

Bussman’s Facebook posts demonstrate a longstanding interest in multiple extreme fringe theories. On May 8, 2023, he posted a video purporting to show “leaked footage of our flat earth from 1977,” showing an obviously computer-generated animation of a dim sun traversing flat icy terrain.

A year later he shared a video stating that a pilot “proved” the earth is flat because the sun and the moon were visible in the sky at the same time, a phenomenon which occurs on most days.

And on August 14, 2024, he posted the “5 Reasons Why” video about flat earth, which asks, among other things, that if the Earth is actually spinning, “why aren’t we all being flung out into space?”

Bussman has similarly posted multiple videos purporting to prove that the moon landings and other parts of the U.S. space program have been “faked.” He has shared video of an actor pretending to be film director Stanley Kubrick admitting that “he was responsible for faking the US Moon Program,” as well as a lengthy video claiming the landings were a “hoax” based on various false and spurious claims about film footage of them.

He has repeatedly suggested that a celestial structure called “the firmament” prevents space travel, which is a common trope among many flat-earthers.

Bussman’s conspiracy theorizing extends to world events like the 9/11 attacks as well. On March 22, 2024, he posted a conspiracy video and asked a skeptical follower “Have you seen the video of building 7 collapsing and the cruise missle [sic] hit the pentagon? I had a friend invomved [sic] in the clean up of the towers- no plane wreckage.” He has posted several other videos containing similar sentiments.

Some have noticed that there might be some damage to the reputation of the party in future elections.

Bussman’s elevation to a leadership position is part of a statewide pattern that alarms longtime Republican activists: The party is allowing itself to be taken over by the fringe, lowering the odds of victory in future statewide elections.

“It’s bad for Republicans who want to win,” said Michael Brodkorb, former deputy chair of the Minnesota GOP who has vehemently opposed the party’s embrace of Donald Trump and figures like him, going so far as to publicly endorse Kamala Harris last year. “This is what happens when party leadership opens the gates of the insane asylum, and people come in off the streets and the inmates run it.”

Republicans: You elected Donald Trump and every demented loon who conspired with him. Own it. The damage is done, you’re already run by the asylum inmates.

I might be slightly optimistic about possibilities in the future

That’s about as enthusiastic as I can get right now, but we do have some Democrats who actually get it. JB Pritzker is setting the tone.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) on Sunday called for mass protests against the Trump administration and blasted “do-nothing Democrats” who have failed to mount a stronger opposition to the Republicans in control of the federal government.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” Pritzker said in his keynote address at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” he continued. “They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.”

“We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box,” he added.

Oh my gosh! He’ll never get invited on CNN with that kind of rhetoric, and Watters will say snide things about him on Fox! Good. Set their hair on fire.

Also, he has a few words for his fellow Democrats.

But he also criticized some members of his own party for listening to political pundits instead of everyday Americans, saying they are “flocking to podcasts and cable news shows to admonish fellow Democrats for not caring enough about the struggles of working families.”

“Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants, instead of their own lack of guts and gumption,” Pritzker said.

Wow. The DNC is going to try to kill his chances in the next election, because they like their candidates to be gutless, hollow old farts.

JB Pritzker will be one to watch. Our governor, Tim Walz, has not let up on his criticisms of weird Republicans, and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been stirring enthusiastic crowds all around the country. Sanders is too old, I’m sorry to say — we should have elected him to the presidency 20 years ago — but I’d vote for AOC in a heartbeat. We’ve been saddled with Schumers and Pelosis for way too long.

(Oh, hey, Buttigeg works for me, too.)

Pritzker said more that I like:

Science is being murdered in the USA, and we know who is doing it

You should know that the National Institutes of Health was the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world. It was huge. It wasn’t just a gigantic research complex located in Bethesda, it administered the funding for most of the biological research in the country.

The NIH is headquartered on this sprawling 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s home to the largest clinical research hospital in the world, and 27 research institutes and centers.

The “leaked” budget draft includes a plan to consolidate those 27 institutes and centers into eight and eliminate four, including the Institutes on Nursing Research and Minority Health.
…
But Collins says the bulk of that budget, more than 80%, goes to researchers off campus.

Dr. Francis Collins: Most of that goes out to the universities and institutes all over the country. They’re the ones that do the work, but they get the funds from NIH by writing very compelling grant applications that go through the most rigorous peer review system in the world.

Some of those researchers’ work lines America’s medicine cabinets, such as statins, antidepressants, and new forms of insulin.

A Journal of the American Medical Association study found that between 2010 and 2019, 99% of FDA-approved drugs had ties to research funded by the NIH.

Dr. Francis Collins: Every dollar that NIH gave out in 2024 to a grant is estimated to have returned $2.46 just in a year. That’s a pretty darn good return on investment.

I was careful to use the past tense up there, because right now it’s being rapidly dismembered, dismantled, and disemboweled, in a savage act of intentional vandalism. This is like Egypt blowing up the pyramids, or Italy bulldozing the Vatican, or France deciding the Louvre would be a great storage facility for outflow from a sewage treatment plant. If America were to be remembered by history for one great accomplishment, it would be the scientific productivity established here, and an institution modeled by other countries around the world. And it’s being willfully destroyed by a gang of incompetent know-nothings.

NIH insider: I’ve never seen the morale of an institution or any place change so abruptly to where we feel fear.

It began, he says, in February, when more than a thousand probationary employees were placed on leave.

Sharyn Alfonsi: When that happened, that first hit, what was the reaction, like immediately and in the office the next Monday?

NIH insider: Tears. Everybody trying to assess damage, who’s been fired, who hasn’t been fired, what do we do? And then an immediate sort of assessment– in the clinical center: “Okay, can we still take care of patients and our research participants? Is it still safe?”

Sharyn Alfonsi: No one thought before they fired the people that dealt with the patients that maybe they shouldn’t be fired?

NIH insider: This didn’t come from within NIH, it came from outside, they don’t know what these people do.

As DOGE dismantled parts of the agency, employees told us work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.

Imagine the burning of the library of Alexandria — we will look back on this moment as something entirely equivalent. This is not something you can rebuild in a few years with a supportive congress and a bunch of money. Those people are leaving. They’re emigrating or looking for career alternatives. They’re knee-capping universities.

NIH insider: This doesn’t feel like a strategic plan to reorganize and make the NIH better and more efficient. It feels like a wrecking ball.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Typically, when a company has layoffs they talk about restructuring. There’ll be a new structure and this is how it’s gonna work. Is there a structure in place right now for the NIH?

NIH insider: Not that anybody’s shared. We have no idea. You know making the organization better, everybody is for that . There is no question. But again– this is not more efficient. It is infinitely less efficient right now because you can’t get anything done.

The confusion in Bethesda has also paralyzed many of the 2,500 universities and institutes that rely on the NIH to help fund their research.

So far, nearly 800 grants have been terminated- some on HIV and AIDS, trans health and COVID-19 after researchers were told their work was no longer an agency priority.

And last week, the NIH signaled that more cuts could be coming. It announced that any university with a DEI program or that boycotts an Israeli company might not be awarded new NIH grants for medical research and that existing grants could be terminated.

It’s catastrophic. And what’s amazing is that we can pin it directly on one man, Donald Trump, who has put vandals and morons in charge of what should be America’s pride. In particular, he’s put Rat FucKer jr in charge of HHS, which oversees the NIH. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and what he thinks he knows is all wrong.

If you need a little humor (I don’t, I think it’s time to seriously charge forward and battle these assholes) to stomach the bad news, here’s John Oliver. The best bit in this segment where RatFucker jr just confidently and stupidly makes up figures, claiming, for instance, that 50% of the people in China are diabetic. Nothing the RatFucker says can be trusted — he’s a liar, a con man, and a snake oil salesman.

The conclusion is also good.

Secretary Kennedy is a danger to the public’s health and should resign or be fired.
…
RFK needs to go and by impeachment if necessary.
…
This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t know who he’s fired, he doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research all while bringing in a basement quack.

Yeah. But by impeachment? Congress approved RFK jr’s appointment, despite knowing everything that Oliver pointed out, so who believes we can trust them to act responsibly now?

The fascists are already here, and they’re in control

Mona Eltahawy has witnessed the dictatorship in Egypt, so she has some expertise in diagnosing what’s happening in the US. She says that the US has become a fascist state. She’s right.

I moved to the United States from Egypt in 2000 and I have spent the past 25 years watching the US turn into Egypt – from encroaching state power to the increasingly unchecked role of religion in politics.

After each travesty – the lies used to invade Iraq, the zealotry that destroyed abortion rights, the arming and financing of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – I thought: “Any minute now, there’ll be a revolution, they’ll burn things down.”

And here is Trump, finessing that state power into a regime that, as with the regime in Egypt, is targeting culture, education, media, judges, students and any group or entity that poses a threat or even the potential of dissent to the regime. And I’m still waiting for the revolution.

Me, too. I was deluded, as were so many of my peers, into thinking it couldn’t get this bad, that the rule of law and our revered state institutions would put the brakes on the excesses of a tyrant. Boy, was I wrong. The Republicans undermined the judiciary, wrapped themselves in flags and waved a Bible, and took over congress. They just needed a president who would ride that power straight into hell, and they got one. Aided by the quislings who thought students shouldn’t allowed to protest and that DEI was a conspiracy to take away their privilege, academia and the education system as a whole are being trashed by a president who loves the uneducated and believes in a mythical genetic superiority of the white race.

The DEI-hatred was the hint to what this whole fascist movement was rooted in — it’s racism. It’s an inescapable observation. The Republicans have come to power by harnessing the resentment of millions of bigots, and they’re having a grand time using that power to do great harm to everyone who isn’t a white man. That’s all it is. That’s the key to understanding what they are doing. They’ve got God’s permission to oppress everyone who doesn’t look like them, think like them.

Mona Eltahawy sees it clearly.

White Americans are the largest voting bloc and the group most responsible for bringing Trump to power both times – and they are the least enraged. The privilege of whiteness means that for many in the US, the loss of rights only happens to people who aren’t white, far away somewhere, in places such as Egypt. Only Black and brown people in faraway countries end up with an authoritarian ruler. But, if anything, where the Trump regime is taking the US is infinitely worse than what is happening in Egypt, because Egypt’s footprint on the world is not nearly as damaging as that of the US. This is why I’m enraged at the lack of rage.

White people in the US have a delusional amount of confidence in their government and institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them from autocratic power. That stubborn belief in their exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought when he was first elected and that he is now cementing. Black and Indigenous people and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions. To people like me and others who have lived in and survived autocracies, white state power and its institutions have always functioned like a regime – so we are well versed in scepticism of anything that politicians say.

No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries, who know to be suspicious of state power, and those of us who have fought fascism – whether implemented through military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists – warned and warned, white people in the US arrogantly shook their heads and said it couldn’t happen here. Because the US is like a teenager who is stubbornly determined in their own self-destruction.

As a white American man, I have finally moved into a state of rage. It took me a while, I tried to be complacent, and dream that this too shall pass, that we’d wake up and restore normality in the next election…always we’ll get it right next time.

I no longer believe there will be a next election. There will be martial law, and a state of emergency, and the appointment of MAGA party masters to guarantee total control of the state. Before that, there will be rising protests at the incompetence of the MAGA government, but those will just be used as the pretext for cracking down on the citizenry.

WAKE UP.

Police state confronts students at UCLA

The most discouraging xkcd ever yet

I had to change the title because there is no reason to think we’ve reached the bottom yet.

Commencement is coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ve been encouraging all these students to go into science careers, and now I feel like I’ve been throwing them into a shark tank.

Rise up, America. I’ve been to Bucharest, and strolled through the Palace of Parliament — there are ways for a country to rid itself of a tyrant like Nicolae Ceaușescu. Donald Trump and his sycophants next?