Some conservatives might be persuadable

Good news from Montana: the legislature was flooded with anti-trans laws, but they’ve all been defeated. They failed because a few eloquent trans advocates stood up and persuaded 29 Republicans to change course. Here’s one of the speeches, this one by Zooey Zephyr, with support by a Republican representative:

“Here I am again to rise on another bill targeting the LGBTQ+ community,” she said, exasperated. “At its very core, drag is art. It is very beautiful art. It has a deep history in this country, and it is important to my community. You know, if you are a woman in this body wearing a suit today, you are in some way challenging gender norms that existed long ago… There were three-article-of-clothing laws 50 years ago that said if you wore three articles of clothing that were indicative of the opposite gender, they could stop you, arrest you… it was those laws that led to the police raiding an LGBTQ+ bar that led to the Stonewall riots, one of the most important civil rights moments in my community’s history,” she began.

“When the sponsor closed on this bill, he said, this bill is needed… and I quote his words… ‘because transgenderism is a fetish based on crossdressing.’ And I am here to stand before the body and say that my life is not a fetish. My existence is not a fetish. I was proud within a month ago to have my son up in the gallery here. Many of you on the other side met him. When I go to walk him to school, that’s not a lascivious display. That is not a fetish. That is my family. This is what these bills are trying to come after… not obscene shows in front of children, we have the Miller test for that, we have laws for that. This is a way to target the trans community, and that is in my opinion, and in the speaker’s own words.”

Then something even more remarkable happened: A Republican, Representative Sherry Essman, rose to defend Rep. Zephyr and chastised the bill’s sponsor. “I’m speaking as a parent and a grandmother. And I’m very emotional because I know the representative in seat 20 is also a parent. No matter what you think of that, she is doing her best to raise a child. I did my best to raise my children as I saw fit, and I’m taking it for granted that my children are going to raise my grandchildren as they see fit,” she began.

“Everybody in here talks about how important parental rights are. I want to tell you, in addition to parental rights, parental responsibility is also important. And if you can’t trust a decent parent to decide where and when their kids should see what, then we have a bigger problem,” she turned to parental rights and spoke about how people who claim those rights should vote against the bill.

And then, she closed by chastising the bill’s sponsor for bringing the bill, “Trust the parents to do what’s right, and stop these crazy bills that are a waste of time. They’re a waste of energy. We should be working on property tax relief and not doing this sort of business on the floor of this house and having to even talk about this.”

There’s more at the link. I also appreciate this criticism of weak Democrats.

At a time when anti-trans bills are sailing through red-state legislatures, many are left wondering how they can be stopped. Some Democrats, like Gavin Newsom, have chosen appeasement—standing alongside anti-trans hate leaders like Charlie Kirk instead of standing up for transgender people. But Representatives Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell offer a different path. As transgender lawmakers in a Republican-dominated government, they have shown that representation, relationships, and the power of speaking truth in hostile spaces can move hearts and minds. Their success is a reminder that even in the most challenging environments, refusing to back down can make a difference.

Another chickenshit Democrat

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California who also has aspirations to the presidency, has destroyed any chance he has of achieving that higher office, by creating a podcast.

The first guest on that podcast? Charlie Kirk. The unqualified white nationalist backed by far-right millionaires.

Aww hell no. I’m never going to support a candidate who gives air to evil lunatics like that.

Even worse…what did they talk about? They found common ground in their shared hatred of transgender athletes. It’s insane. Transgender kids participating in sports is a good thing that should not be of concern, and only bigots are furious at trans boys and girls. Especially since

Newsweek also spoke to Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, a leading voice in the bid to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

Yes, that’s right. Not 5000, not 500, not even 50 – just five trans student-athletes. All of this legislation, work, lobbying and anger – is aimed at preventing a tiny handful of young people from playing school sports.

It shouldn’t matter whether there are 5 or 5 million — denying rights to any group of people is wrong. Newsom is just pandering to the perception that Americans all hate trans people.

French, the language of love

Mon coeur! I swoon. I don’t understand a word that Claude Malhuret is saying, but I am dizzy with adoration now.

His speech sounded so lovely, I had to look up a translation. It’s even better in English.

My dear colleagues,

Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is evading, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.

Washington became the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester under ketamine in charge of the purification of the public service.

It’s a drama for the free world, but it’s first a drama for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, that he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and threaten you to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is on a flat stomach. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down in front of Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is undoubtedly accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States capitulated to the enemy. No one has ever supported an aggressor against an ally. No one has ever trampled on the American Constitution, made so many illegal decrees, revoked the judges who could prevent it, dismissed the military staff at once, weakened all counter-powers and took control of social networks.

It is not an illiberal drift, it is a beginning of confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only a month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution.

I have confidence in the strength of American democracy and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war against a dictator, we are now fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very time that Trump passed his hand behind Macron’s back at the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against Europeans demanding the departure of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the oval office, the military service hide-and-seek gave moral and strategy lessons to the war hero Zelensky before dismissing him as a brother-in-law by ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took a step further into infamy by stopping the promised delivery of weapons. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it.

And first don’t make a mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltics, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is the return to Yalta where half of the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.

What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with the first principle of prohibiting the acquisition of territories by force.

This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressor, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to the spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.

To me Greenland, Panama and Canada, to you Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe, to him Taiwan and the China Sea.

This is called “diplomatic realism” in the evenings of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago.

So we are alone. But the speech that we cannot resist Putin is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is doing badly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has only managed to grab crumbs from a country three times less populated.

Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, and demographic collapse show that it is on the edge of the abyss. The American boost to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans come out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American release, to make it hold, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.

It will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to bypass Moscow’s accomplices even within Europe by a coalition of only voluntary countries, with of course the United Kingdom.

Secondly, require that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what the agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we would have to build the neglected European defense, for the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and sunk since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. It is to recognize that France was right for decades in pleading for strategic autonomy.

It remains to build it. It will be necessary to invest massively, strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and ammunition systems, accelerate Ukraine’s entry into the Union, which is today the first European army, rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence from French and British capacities, relaunch anti-missile and satellite shield programs.

The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And it will take much more.

Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be applied. For good.

But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of weariness and fear of war, and especially in the face of Putin’s companions, the extreme right and the extreme left.

They pleaded again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr. Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is the capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain in Putin’s boot.

The peace of the collaborators who have refused for three years any help to the Ukrainians.

Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have ended up making Americans react.

Polls are falling. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News becomes critical.

The Trumpists are no longer in majesty. They control the executive, Parliament, the Supreme Court and social networks.

But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They begin to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine is played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means of their common defense, and to make Europe the power it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of all sacrifices.

The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.

Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

Can you repeat that in Italian now? In Spanish? German? It would sound terrific in any language, except maybe Russian.

SOTU, in brief

I didn’t watch Trump’s cavalcade of lies last night, so I appreciate this compressed version that squeezes it down to a minute. Greenland, huh? No unelected bureaucrats while praising Elon Musk? Throwing out a protester while claiming to defend free speech? Woke is dead?

OK, that was bad, but possibly worse was the Democratic response in which Elissa Slotkin looked back fondly on Ronald Reagan’s presidency and was a cheerleader for American exceptionalism. Go away, Republican wanna-bes.

I thought they were free speech absolutists

I call this an attempt to crush dissent. I guess I’m going to have to protest.

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Like on Friday, when I’m protesting for science in St Paul.

Easier to predict than the weather

As part of their program to completely eliminate the federal government, the latest act of random destruction and intellectual vandalism by Musk, Trump, and Co. is the gradual cancellation of national weather forecasting centers.

As my friend
@drshepherd2013.bsky.social
says, asking why we need a National Weather Service when we have apps and the Weather Channel is like asking why we need potato farmers when we can buy fries at McDonalds.

This is going to be very unpopular here in the Midwest. The weather is the primary focus of conversations around these parts!

It might be a matter of more import in southern coastal regions, but they won’t be talking about it — they’ll be dead, or washed out, or fleeing inland.

The hateful loons are gathering in Austin this month

The eugenicists are back, and they’re having a big splendiferous conference in Austin, Texas this month. It’s called the Natalism Conference, and their theme is that women must have more babies, or we’ll go extinct. Which is not true, by the way — a population that has constant, unlimited growth is going to exceed the carrying capacity of the environment, and is going to crash hard. But OK, this is a conference about reproduction by people who don’t understand biology.

It’s a two day event, and they have 27 ‘speakers’. Actually, it’s a mob of sensationalist, narcissistic weirdos who are going to be disappointed to discover they aren’t the center of attention, and that they will be competing for the spotlight with even freakier people who will be capering and gibbering in their short slice of time on the stage. On the roster are:

Sargon of Akkad. I thought his 15 minutes were up a long time ago.

Razib Khan. Yeah, sorry, he’s got legit academic credentials, but he uses them to push race science.

Scott Yenor. If your mission is to get women to have more babies, why invite this guy who wants to deny education and voting rights to women…oh, wait, that tracks.

Robin Hanson. America’s Creepiest Economist.

Geoffrey Miller. Evolutionary Psychologist who loves the idea of selecting babies for their IQ.

Malcolm and Simone Collins. Silicon Valley neofascists.

Most of the people on the schedule are total unknowns to me, but I think it’s safe to assume that they’re all right-wing assholes. The Guardian has a more thorough breakdown, and it looks like my assumption is valid.

I must admit I’d like to see this guy perform. He adds a certain luster to the lineup.

Sadly, “babygravy9” is not his real name. He has been outed, and his actual legal name is Charles Cornish-Dale.

Cornish-Dale is a figurehead of the rightwing bodybuilding scene, and has been a keen promoter of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. He had nevertheless lived with his mother in sleepy south Dorset during the entirety of his career as a rightwing influencer, according to Hope Not Hate.

Guy, you’ve got to get out of your mother’s basement if you hope to repopulate the world!

The Democrats are dead, we need a new party

I get email from the Democratic party:

PZ,

In just a few weeks, Elon Musk has shown that he is the worst president America’s ever seen.

We have one message for Trump and Musk: We’re coming.

This is a new Democratic Party, and we’re taking the gloves off. We cannot and will not stand for their extreme, harmful agenda and efforts to drag our country back centuries.

We’re in this fight until the very end, but it’s going to take Democrats from every corner of the nation stepping up and joining this movement to defeat Trump and his MAGA cronies.

Then it asks me for money.

I hate it.

They’re going to be running forever on the “TRUMP BAD” idea, aren’t they? Not one specific, positive idea was anywhere in that message. Come on, come right out and tell me you’re going to rescue social security by raising the cap, you’re going to finally get around to a federal law allowing abortion, you’re going to build programs to help immigrants integrate, you’re going to give trans people respect and dignity, you’re going to fully fund the NIH and NSF, you’re going to stand up to Putin and give aid to Ukraine, you’re going to give everyone Medicaid…I can think of so many things I want the American government to do, and the Democrats are afraid to push them. It’s convenient for them to have an undeniably horrible boogeyman in office so they can run against him, get elected, and not have to do anything.

Then I read this list of things a centrist group within the Democratic party calling itself “The Third Way” is proposing. This is coming from a bunch of Clintonesque, Blairite neoliberal stooges who fear socialism — wanna-be Republicans. (This comes from Politico, a conservative rag that is not at all friendly to progressive values, and even they are sneering at this list.)

  • The party should “embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery”;
  • Democrats should “ban far-left candidate questionnaires and refuse to participate in forums that create ideological purity tests” and “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate”;
  • They should “push back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging” ;
  • Candidates should “get out of elite circles and into real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches)”; and
  • The party needs to “own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities and commit to improving local government.”

We’re gonna lose again and again and again, aren’t we?

Treat your allies like crap, this is what you get

Do these things have oars?

A Norwegian fuel company is refusing to fuel US Navy vessels. I can’t blame them.

A petrol giant in Norway has announced a ban on fuel sales to all US forces following Donald Trump’s treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, it has been reported.

Norwegian firm Haltbakk Bunkers announced it will stop providing fuel to all American forces in Norway as it declared “No fuel to Americans!”. The firm posted on social media to declare its support for Zelensky as it dealt a hammer blow to US President Trump following the heated spat televised from the Oval Office.

It said: “We have today been witnesses to the biggest s***how ever presented “live on tv” by the current American president and his vice president. Huge credit to the president of Ukraine restraining himself and for keeping calm even though USA put on a backstabbing tv show. It made us sick. Short and sweet. As a result, we have decided to immediate STOP as fuel provider to American forces in Norway and their ships calling Norwegian ports.

“No Fuel to Americans! We encourage all Norwegians and Europeans to follow our example. SLAVA UKRAINA”

They also refuse to fuel Russian ships.

This is how Donald Trump weakens the US military, by poisoning our alliances.