The Liberals won, the Conservatives lost.

I don’t think there’s any question that Canadians don’t want to become our 51st state.

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:

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

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

xkcd

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?

Recall that I sneered at this new book coming out, The War on Science, edited by Lawrence Krauss. It’s a strangely focused book, given that it’s quite clear that it is the Republicans who have accelerated their attacks on education and science, yet Krauss is trying to blame any problems on DEI, the Woke, Leftists, and everyone but MAGA, Trump, RFK jr, Musk, etc. He has rounded up a real rogues gallery of awful and disreputable people to contribute articles to his patently bogus book.

Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson

The one virtue of Krauss attempting to step out of the shadows of his shame is that Rebecca Watson was roused to bring receipts and stomp this guy right down into the ground. I mean, really, if there were any justice in the world, Larry would be crumpled into a puddle, wheezing and begging for mercy through broken teeth, and would be crawling into a snake hole to bleed out and fade from public attention forevermore.

I recommend that everyone try to stay on Rebecca’s good side.

I was going to express amazement that Krauss can even find a publisher for this drivel…but it’s being published by Post Hill Press, a company that specializes in right-wing conspiracy theories. Krauss is now rubbing elbows with Tyrus and Dan Bongino and Kirk Cameron. His peers!

The federal government (innocently, I’m sure) checking on college faculty to identify which ones are Jewish.

Most professors at Barnard College received text messages on Monday notifying them that a federal agency was reviewing the college’s employment practices, according to copies of the messages reviewed by The Intercept.

The messages, sent to most Barnard professors’ personal cellphones, asked them to complete a voluntary survey about their employment.

“Please select all that apply,” said the second question in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, survey.

“The federal government reaching out to our personal cellphones to identify who is Jewish is incredibly sinister.”
The choices followed: “I am Jewish”; “I am Israeli”; “I have shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry”; “I practice Judaism”; and “Other.”

I’m “other,” so I guess I’m safe. Nothing to worry about here, folks, move along, move along…unless you’re Jewish, and then we would like to see your papers, please.

It always begins with mild impositions for your own good, doesn’t it?

I’ve been hearing this word “warfighter” a lot lately, often coming out of the mouths of macho assholes like Pete Hegseth. It implies that the role of the military is simply fighting, fighting, fighting — and I’d rather see the military as a stabilizing force, less about fighting and acting more as resilient response to threats, and also as a practical investment in a region that would be squandered if they were actually fighting.

I’m not alone in feeling as if the term misrepresents what our soldiers (what’s wrong with that fine, familiar word?) actually do.

someone binged on YouTube videos of old recruiting commercials or watched “Top Gun” too many times in a row. He (or she) birthed the term “warfighter,” which quickly took root in all the government circles and is spreading slowly into conventional media as well.

“Warfighter” is perfect. It’s dripping in red, white, and blue at a time when the military has never been more popular, or more lionized.

I hate it. “Warfighter” is the rhetorical equivalent of a “Support the troops” bumper sticker or an American flag lapel pin. It reduces the complexity and ambiguity of modern national security, dragging it back to an imagined era of good wars, bad guys, and clear-cut victory. It’s hard not to hear the phrase and picture a G.I Joe lookalike waving an American flag.

Using “warfighter” destroys our capacity for reason at a time when it’s desperately needed. With strategic flops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s clear that the U.S. needs to take another stab at the national security paradigm. We should be thinking objectively about how to stabilize the international system, promote free enterprise, and share that burden across the full range of our allies. We need a clear strategy that Americans understand, but as well as our friends and, most importantly, our actual or potential enemies.

I have a son in the army. He’s never fought in a war. What he seems to do is plant his men into a place, build up infrastructure and facilities just in case a war breaks out, and then come home, or get transferred to another place that needs maintenance or upgrading. I would never call him a “warfighter,” because being a “warfighter” means you’ve actually failed.

Can we please get rid of Hegseth?

Speaking of Hegseth:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered modifications to a room next to the Pentagon press briefing room to retrofit it with a makeup studio that can be used to prepare for television appearances, multiple sources told CBS News.

The price tag for the project was several thousand dollars, according to two of the sources, at a time when the administration is searching for cost-cutting measures.

I’m not qualified to use the term as a hard-core civilian, but my uncles who served in WWII did teach me what a “REMF” was, and I’ve also read Catch-22 a few times.

Law? We don’t need no stinkin’ law. We’re trying to banish children here. Kids are being hauled into court and told by a judge that they are trying to decide whether to kick them out of the country.

“The reason we’re here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States,” Judge Ubaid ul-Haq, presiding from a courtroom on Varick Street, told a group of about a dozen children on a recent morning on Webex.

“It’s my job to figure out if you have to leave,” ul-Haq continued. “It’s also my job to figure out if you should stay.”

The parties included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill while the judge spoke. There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.

Enough. Enough. Shut down ICE, arrest every fucking member of the Trump administration, and give them some toys to play with while a humane judge decides what to do with them. How can that judge preside over a kangaroo court to decide on the fate of children?

Do they suspect those dozen kids are members of MS-13? Do they have tattoos?