Except…what does it mean? Biden is our oldest president, but Reagan was second oldest — there’s something to chew on here for both conservatives and liberals.

I think we should judge candidates on their individual merits. You can be old and competent, but you can also be a youthful 70-year-old boob.

Every time they try to hide an ugly fact of history, they look worse — they’re just compounding the problem. We’re seeing this mistake in Florida and Texas and Tennessee, where Republican legislatures cobble up laws to silence teachers and prevent them from mentioning the ghastly evils that previous legislatures have executed. It’s not going to work. It just means that the next generation is going to be confronted with the fact of American slavery, for example, and the fact that America tried to hush it up in the 2020s. Tennessee has been eager to join in the shameful displays of cowardice.

Last year, Tennessee passed one of those cookie-cutter rightwing bills banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” in higher education — the very same sort of hogwash that’s currently under a court injunction in Florida. The law, SB 623 prohibited teaching a whole bunch of very bad ideas, like the concept that “One race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex” or the always fun “An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex” — so you can’t read about Ruby Bridges, you. The bill also prohibited “penalizing” students for not endorsing the concepts, because we all know how professors like to demand that students recite from the Maoist catechism.

(Do follow that link to the Ruby Bridges story. There is a woman in Florida named Emily Conklin who is going to be on the poster about the wicked perpetrators of bigotry, her picture right next to the Ku Klux Klan, the Southern Democrats of the 1960s, and Steve King of Iowa.)

You can tell these congressvermin know nothing about how education works — they’re of the God’s Not Dead school of projection, where they think their authoritarian vision of how to teach by law enforcement is the way we must work. For example, my genetics students have been given a bunch of papers on racist and sexist misconceptions in genetics that they’ll be summarizing in class this week…and I’ve explicitly told them that they can disagree with the papers without penalty. I can’t imagine standing up in a class and dictating how they must interpret the science. That’s not how any of this works, this is an exercise in learning how to think for themselves about the evidence.

Does that make me one of those red professors? There’s no way you can compel me to wear a bowtie.

The Musk rat had a very bad day yesterday.

Tesla Inc. disappointed investors with its first-quarter results, sending the electric-car maker’s shares down 9.75% on Thursday to $162.99. An experimental Starship rocket designed by SpaceX achieved liftoff in Boca Chica, Texas, only to explode about four minutes later in a fiery ball above the Gulf of Mexico. And on Twitter, as Musk promised weeks ago, many users lost their legacy blue checkmarks for choosing not to pay $8 per month for the privilege.

When it comes to the billionaire’s net worth, Tesla’s sinking share price had the most immediate consequences. His wealth dropped by $12.6 billion as a result, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his biggest decline this year. His stake in Tesla, including shares and options, makes up the biggest part of his $163.9 billion fortune, though SpaceX has become more important as its valuation soars.

The stupid blue checkmark thing is all the rage on Twitter. It’s Musk’s grand plan to make Twitter profitable by charging $8 for a little blue symbol on your account, but few people are taking him up on it, and mainly they are conservative twits begging for approval from senpai. Some famous people are refusing to pay for it, which is a bad look (what good is a status symbol if high-status people reject it?), so Musk gave Lebron James, Stephen King, and Willam Shatner the blue check for free…and then the nobodies started clamoring for a free check mark, too.

His get-rich-quick scheme of selling a pointless blue logo is flopping. Oh no, quick, his capitalist brain thinks of a way to force people to buy it…I know, it said, compel your advertisers, the only people bringing in revenue, to pay for it!

What a super-genius.

At least it’s not Parler. Parler has already closed up shop, and its former employees are scrabbling for ways to open alternatives.

“Parler management are straight up f*ggots,” Dennis Harrison, whose LinkedIn identifies him as a lead engineer at the company, wrote in a private Discord server this past Sunday. “They ruined something good.”

I’m sure Dennis will find a way to express himself elsewhere. I don’t think I’ll be interested in any company he engineers, but sure, he sounds like a genius of Musk’s calibre.

“We’re getting an entity setup so we can take donations/money whatever to help with some of the costs,” the former Parler engineer wrote on the Discord channel. “Currently about $300 a month just for the dev stuff.”

“Once we start making it public, that will go up to $500 a month, I bet,” he continued.

Speaking of get-rich-quick schemes on social media, here’s another: Align Us, an app that lets users rate businesses on a conservative to progressive scale, so you can boycott them. I’m not at all interested — I know that all businesses are pro-business, so what more information do I need? — and I also don’t believe in the companies claim of neutrality.

In the wake of “Go Woke, Go Broke”, consumers are feeling highly motivated that they can make a difference in society simply by where they spend (or don’t spend) their hard-earned money. They want to know that when they support a business, that business isn’t going to spend it with organizations or give money as political donations to an agenda that goes against their values.

The site has a number of advertisers — they all seem to be niche conservative weirdos, like Mammoth Nation (totally a grift) and Law Enforcement Today. It’s also badly coded, frequently popping up an alert to tell you it’s struggling, along with quotes from people like Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell, and then not being able to find any business near you and instead handing you a link to a random review of a company in Chicago. Did you know that Frito-Lay Inc. is liberal? Put those corn chips back on the shelf.

I’m learning that “Go Woke, Go Broke” is not a thing. It is obvious that putting right-wing ideologues in charge of anything, whether it’s the Supreme Court of a website, leads to catastrophic failure.

Hank Munzer is one of those far-right nuts, a braggart and bully, and one of those people who was in Washington DC on January 6th, and who is proud of it, despite being arrested and facing a prison sentence. He’s also unfortunate because one of his fellow residents of Dillon, Montana has written an essay about how screwed up small-town conservatives have become, and uses Munzer as a specific, named example. That’s a brave act — I guarantee you that this essay is a hot topic at the Dillon cafe and in telephone gossip. I know, because his description of his county sounds a lot like mine.

A generation ago, one national politician described our state as “hyper rural.” You know the feeling? My county, larger than Connecticut, boasts about 9,000 residents and few traffic lights. Most Americans can’t imagine or understand or appreciate such a mode of life. Many pass through but few would choose to stay. In pockets like mine, it’s an unimaginable distance to D.C. or New York—other countries.

Stevens County, Minnesota is a bit smaller geographically, and we have 10,000 residents (optimistically), and two, count’em, two traffic lights. Similarly, both Morris and Dillon were named after late 19th century railroad executives. But we also have a university in town. I guess that makes us immensely more cosmopolitan than Beaverhead County, Montana, but we’re still in the same ballpark of rural, conservative counties, and the descriptions sound familiar.

Hank Munzer’s building also has analogs here.

The paint job on Hank’s business building proves his lie as it is far more than an eyesore; as a calculated act of visual violence, it repels many of us and, according to one local realtor, dissuades occasional prospects who considered moving here. One friend told me she no longer drives on this main street; another said she chants “a–hole, a–hole, a–hole” every time she rides by. The city council does nothing because of Fred’s ostensible First Amendment protections.

My stomach used to cramp as I passed but in more recent seasons, I’ve grown numb, pretending to ignore this bizarre paint job. Most townspeople do their best to ignore it. I’ve never seen a building, graffitied or otherwise, like this one anywhere.

The essayist needs to get out more. I’ve seen similar in lots of places. Here in Morris, there’s a house on 7th Avenue with huge crudely painted signs saying “ALL LIVES MATTER,” with a thin blue line police flag and various other unsightly splatters on it — coincidentally, I also mutter “a–hole, a–hole, a–hole” when I drive by. In Glenwood, several miles away, there was a construction detour that forced us to swing through a residential zone with a house covered with gigantic Trump posters and signs — it was a major eyesore that had me saying even ruder things every time we had to drive by it.

I wish I could say it’s just one fringe lunatic in a small town in Montana, but they’re everywhere. And they’ve become bold and outspoken and swagger when they trumpet their idiotic conspiracy theories, and pretend they’re not on a downward spiral.

In his spot-on analysis of my state, “Fifty-Six Counties,” novelist Russell Rowland defines a fierce love of “the land or their families or their country” characteristic, I believe, of rural Americans: “They love until it makes them blind, until they feel the need to barricade themselves against anything that threatens that love.”

That circling-the-wagons mentality against ostensible outside threats, a species or xenophobia and denial, results in destructive conduct: “So we drink. We kill ourselves. We throw our sinking self-image out onto those around us, sometimes in violent, ugly ways, and we decide that our problems are everyone else’s fault, and that if they would go away, or act more like we do, or learn to think more like we think, then we would feel better.”

In such soil grows the Hankss of rural communities. After all, “they” are out to get us, right? And rural problems come from elsewhere, according to this self-delusion.

This toxic combination of ignorance, victimhood, naiveté, and auto-hypnosis, now commonplace, would remain minuscule but for alt-right media platforms.

That’s the thing: they’ve found self-reinforcing online communities where every stupid thing they say and believe gets echoed and praised by other people who also believe the same stupid thing, and they lose all sense of perspective and swell up with righteousness and think petty obsessions make them great and meaningful. So here’s where Hank Munzer stands now.

He was arrested about a week after the Capital riot and charged with one felony count and four misdemeanors, two of those disorderly or disruptive conduct. Among other things he was accused of recording videos inside the Capitol. Six days later he posted those on Facebook. That fact alone evidences his online dependency. Did he know or care about legality? He thinks he did nothing wrong and only exercised free speech.

He was arraigned then released on bail—he grins in his orange prison suit—and then he got to work on his business’ building in Dillon.

Hank was supposed to go to trial in August 2022 but now there’s been another half-year postponement. He’s wanted a change of venue but will be tried in Washington D.C. He prefers to represent himself rather than use a lawyer. That fact suggests the level of his self-righteous zealotry or his narcissistic personality disorder. Or both.

Meanwhile, he enjoys local notoreity. He even ran for city council and garnered dozens of votes. Whose sick joke is that? Exactly whom in rural America is he speaking for? One flavor of rural America consists of a range of deep resentments; above all, resentment of the federal government. Nothing new here, given the long history of agricultural subsidies and dependencies.

Same here, except that I’d add that many of those resentments are fostered by the corporate farms that have eaten up the small landowners. It’s just good policy to give the peons a far-away enemy to hate, lest they notice that greed is destroying their local community.

I agree, though, that small town problems have been getting enflamed by the pernicious poison of talk radio, Fox “News,” and Facebook.

It’s all just hanging out there, exposed, flapping rudely in the wind, and we’re supposed to pretend that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t selling out the country. The story is simple and transparent.

Thomas’s mother lived on some property owned by Thomas. Harlan Crow paid Thomas $133,363 for that property, and then allowed his mother to continue to live there rent-free afterwards, and in fact renovated the house, put on a new roof, a nice fence, etc.

Crow was the best landlord of all time!

Of course, what it all was was a pretext to put a whole lot of money in a judge’s pocket and curry favor with him. Thomas knew this; he rather obviously avoided reporting the whole money shuffle to the government, and tried to hide the source of this sudden largesse.

“He needed to report his interest in the sale,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.”

Oh, really? You think? I’m not wondering at all. Hint to ethics lawyers everywhere: the time for understatement is over. This is time to suspend him from the bench while impeachment proceedings are begun. I’d go so far as to suggest it’s time for handcuffs, except we all know that white collar crime by high-ranking federal officials is going to be treated with kid gloves, instead.

See also Robert Reich’s take on this situation.

Seriously, you had to know it wasn’t going to stop with banning drag shows.

Let’s close the libraries in Missouri. They’re just full of seditious blasphemy.

Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives have voted to defund their state’s libraries after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the state for banning numerous LGBTQ+ books as “explicit sexual” materials.

The April 4 vote removed $4.5 million of state budget funding for libraries as well as “costs for diversity initiatives, childcare, and pre-kindergarten programs,” WCPT 820 Radio reported. The removal now requires an additional state house vote and state senate approval before heading to the governor’s desk to become law.

In Texas, they’re starting small. Give ’em time.

A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children’s books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.

The Llano County commissioners have scheduled for Thursday a special meeting in which the first item on the agenda is whether to “continue or cease operations” at the library.

You might wonder what horrible books they tried to ban.

The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel “Spinning” by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.

Last year, an assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired after he read “I Need a New Butt!” to a second-grade class. The reason? Because the book used words like “butt” and “fart” and included cartoon images of a child’s butt.

Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”; Robie H. Harris’ “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health”; and four other children’s picture books with “silly themes and rhymes,” like “Larry the Farting Leprechaun,” “Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose”; “Freddie the Farting Snowman” and “Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts,” according to the complaint.

I guess we’ve moved beyond hiding the books that talk about sex and race to silencing anything that mentions farts. Don’t straight white people do that, too?