Coping With the Brexit Blues Ten Years On

I've been blogging long enough to honor 10-year anniversaries like Brexit. What I wrote back then:

It was supposed to be a throwaway moment: it was something Prime Minister Cameron promised to do last year during the Parliamentary elections as a way to keep voters from bolting to the anti-EU, anti-immigrant UKIP (aka British Trumpshirts) during a potentially tight run. The expectations - and the polling - kept pointing to a tough but clean win to Remain with the EU, because honestly most of the elites in politics and the media believed the voters wouldn't be stupid enough to commit economic suicide.

And then they counted the votes...

The British Pound dropped to a 30-year low compared to the US dollar. In about an hour it dropped faster than a blue whale without a parachute.

To say that the global markets went into panic mode AT THAT MOMENT and remained so well into today would be an understatement.

And so here I was, sitting at home watching all of this on an Internet I swore I wasn't going to pay attention to, and this was pretty much the one thought bouncing through my head:

YOU TOSSERS! YOU HAD ONE JOB!

You Brits could have retained some stability in all three major areas of public concern: your economy, your culture, your government. All three are now burning in the dumpster fire...

Prime Minister David Cameron went in one hour from being one of the most powerful men on the planet - Prime Minister ranks somewhere below President of the United States and slightly above t.e Actor Currently Playing The Doctor - to resigning from office in utter humiliation. Few Prime Ministers fell so low so fast. The resulting battle among Conservatives for the new leadership spot will likely spill over into a broken government, forcing a new round of elections sooner than the required five-year cycle...

Ten years on, we can see it got worse than that for the Tories: a revolving door of PMs - Teresa May who resigned in disgrace, to Boris Johnson who resigned in humiliating disgrace, to Liz Truss who resigned in utter humiliating disgrace, to Rishi Sunak who oversaw the Conservatives' worst electoral defeat since the 19th Century - as none of them could figure out a smooth exit from the European Union even if they wanted to (and in Boris' case, he eagerly pushed Britain out the airlock).

Brexit as an economic fiasco for the UK is so deep a problem that the Labour Party taking over in 2024 still hasn't figured out their own solutions for it, and became one of several factors in the recent resignation of their Prime Minister Keir Starmer just yesterday.

During my write-up for that article, I didn't have much to say about Brexit's effects as most of the coverage on Starmer's imminent departure focused on other woes. However, I did refer to an article from The Atlantic, a deep dive into the aftermath of Brexit and how it's sunk the UK's economy to the level of... well, the state of Mississippi (article by Idrees Kahloon):

Who broke Britain? Someone—or something—must have. The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.

But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London...

One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one...

Some in Britain blame rotten luck—the 2008 financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic, an energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. But other countries endured these challenges too. What differentiated Britain was its self-sabotaging responses to these and other problems. Brexit is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. Bad choices, beginning just after the financial crisis, begot worse ones...

The country’s downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country’s problems get worse.

In fairness, the 2008 financial crisis hit Britain especially hard. In the 1990s, both the Tories and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Party made the same bet: Britain was to be a postindustrial, services-based economy, anchored in finance. Tax receipts from a booming London would be redistributed to lagging regions in the old industrial heartland, helping to renew them. Then came 2008, and London’s financial industry cratered.

But the government’s actions during and after the crisis compounded the damage. Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.

The promised growth did not materialize, and austerity left scars that linger still...

Conservatives, if one looks back to moments like the Great Depression, do not buy into Keynesian policies. The problem is, even when their austerity measures clearly falter they refuse to change tactics, and instead double-down on the blame-shifting.

Austerity was felt most harshly by those who were already suffering after deindustrialization. The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. This was a gambit; Cameron expected the vote to fail. He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics, who had been campaigning for withdrawal from the EU for decades. Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending...

I recommend you go and read Kahloon's article in full, because he goes into a lot more detail about the decline of industry in the more remote parts of England - everything outside of London - as well as the rise of Farage's latest political farce Reform (he abandoned UKIP when it got too overtly racist) even as much of the Brexit destruction is due to Farage's efforts.

So how does this all relate to Mississippi?

If you don't know, Mississippi is one of the poorest and most broken-down states in the Union. The roads and bridges are some of the worst in terms of safety and condition. Half the state suffers from sustained poverty for longer than 20 years. It's in the bottom five of worst states to live in.

A good example is the condition of the state's own capital Jackson, where infrastructure has broken down completely and there's no clean water (via Drew Costley and Emily Wagster Pettus with AP News, published through PBS Newshour):

But the crisis in the city of Jackson isn't over, even if its boil-water advisory was lifted on Thursday (in 2022). While the state plans to stop handing out free bottled water at sites around the city Saturday night, the city said water pressure still hasn't been fully restored, and state health officials said lead in some pipes remains so worrisome that pregnant women and young children should still use bottled water...

Other residents told The Associated Press on Friday that their water remains too discolored to count on, so now they'll have to rely on water distribution by community-run charities or buy water again themselves, adding insult to injury.

Jackson had already been under a state health department boil-water notice for a month when torrential rain fell in August, flooding the Pearl River and overwhelming the treatment system. Water pressure abruptly dropped, emptying faucets for days.

How did this happen? Residents, politicians, experts and activists say systemic racism is the root cause.

Jackson's population has declined since 1980, a decade after the city's schools began integrating. Many white families left for the suburbs, leaving less revenue to maintain the infrastructure. Middle class Black people then moved out to escape urban decay and rising crime. State and federal spending never made up the difference.

"The legacy of racial zoning, segregation, legalized redlining have ultimately led to the isolation, separation and sequestration of racial minorities into communities (with) diminished tax bases, which has had consequences for the built environment, including infrastructure," said Marccus Hendricks, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland.

Heather McTeer Toney worked to clean up discolored tap water as mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, before serving as the Environmental Protection Agency's southeast regional administrator from 2014 to 2017. Now she works on environmental justice issues nationwide for the Environmental Defense Fund. She said many majority-minority communities lack consistent access to clean water.

"Any community that is suffering from lack of infrastructure maintenance is dealing with the same problem, maybe just on a different scale," Toney said. "But across the nation, with .... poor communities that are often Black, brown, Indigenous and on the frontlines of the climate crisis, we see the same thing happening over and over again."

There have been studies over the decades highlighting how pervasive racism is when it comes to dealing with poverty, improving living standards, and community developments. I can't find it now, but one of my coworkers at the North Regional Library back in the 1990s showed me a survey where they polled white folks asking if they preferred taking a five percent pay increase if it meant blacks would get a two percent increase, or taking a two percent pay cut if it meant blacks would get a five percent pay cut... and a majority of whites went with the pay cut. I'd love to find the source for that again, because it highlights the viciousness and irrationality of racism: Under normal rules of economic theory, everyone would take the pay increase; but because of racism, whites will take the pay cut if it means blacks get it worse.

The racism holding down Mississippi is now the racism holding down the United Kingdom, and it was recognized even as the Brexit vote blew up everything (via Leah Donnella at NPR):

So why did the U.K. vote for something so politically and economically disruptive? Some say race has a lot to do with it — specifically, the racial tension that has resulted from the U.K.'s recently welcoming in record numbers of immigrants. In 2015, 630,000 foreign national migrants came to the U.K. from both inside and outside the EU. This year, the U.K. has ushered in an additional 333,000.

The campaign to get the U.K. to leave the EU (also known as the "Leave" campaign) was spearheaded by the right-wing, populist UK Independence Party, or UKIP. The party, led by Member in the European Parliament Nigel Farage, says that the EU "means the end of the UK as an independent, self-governing nation with its own government and its own borders."

For months, UKIP has fought for the United Kingdom's independence from the EU — some say by capitalizing on racially charged animus toward immigrants. In the Washington Post, writer Anyusha Rose points to the Leave campaign as evidence that in the U.K., "racism is no longer racism — it's legitimate opinion."

By 2019, the effects of racism in the Brexit decision were more clear (via the BBC):

Racism and race-related hate crime has increased since the 2016 Brexit referendum, with officers appointed to deal with resultant "tensions".

Three of the four Welsh police forces reported rises in the last five years, figures released to the BBC show.

Eryl Jones, from charity Show Racism the Red Card, said he believed Brexit had been a "major influence".

It comes as 24 community cohesion officers are being appointed by councils across Wales...

"Incidents of racism have gone up throughout the UK as well as in Wales since the campaign to leave the EU, " Mr Jones said.

"It's fairly obvious that Brexit has been a major influence..."

Home Office figures show hate crimes in England and Wales rising over the past five years - with a spike, it says, since 2016...

It's a simple equation: The racism spurs more poverty, and the poverty spurs more racism.

The only way the UK can break the cycle - to avoid the fate of Mississippi, which devolved into one of the poorest states as far back as the American Civil War, and which fought with gun and noose for decades to keep itself poor and racist - is to wake up to the horrors that anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence inflicts upon themselves, recognize where poverty is at its worst and spend like hell to undo the damage it leaves on families across the board, and look at rejoining their neighboring nations in an economic deal that would reinvigorate their dying industries at home.

Don't end up like Mississippi. Don't end up the trashy trailer park of nations on the European continent.

The Sins of Jim Crow Returning

So in-between the time that the Supreme Court ruled to allow more extreme gerrymandering among the Republican-controlled states - you'll notice they stopped Virginia from their own Democratic gerrymander - and my heading off to vacation in Las Vegas to see the Grand Canyon and get my left leg mangled in an e-bike accident (ow ow ow), it shouldn't be too shocking that most of the Southern (Confederate) states controlled by racist Far Right Republicans sped faster than ludicrous speed to redraw their already-skewed congressional maps to erase all Black-majority districts they could (via George Chidi at the Guardian (US)):

The reaction speed of southern states to the US supreme court’s decision last week in Louisiana v Callais has been breathtaking for voting rights activists.

One week after Callais, Louisiana’s governor has ordered the state’s ongoing congressional election to be set aside while state lawmakers redraw maps to eliminate a Democratic-majority – that is, a Black-majority – seat covering Baton Rouge.

Alabama’s Republican-majority legislature is drafting legislation in a special session that will allow it to set aside the results of a completed primary later this year if courts lift an injunction on its redistricting.

Florida was amid a special redistricting session as the ruling was handed down, passing a congressional map for 28 districts that packs Black and brown voters into four districts on the south Florida coast and Orlando, eliminating every other Democratic majority.

DeSantis and the other Republican bastards in Tallahassee as I feared did cleave the Tampa metro to turn everything in those counties into "safe" Republican districts, in spite of the huge Democratic numbers I personally know exist in that region (well okay, maybe not Pasco County...).

The corpse of the Voting Rights Act was still warm as these inheritors of John C. Calhoun and Jeff Davis celebrated their efforts to deny Black voters in their states any representation at all. It's like the conservatives who make up the modern Republican Party in the Deep South - many of whom were Democrats until the great migration to Reagan's GOP in the late 1980s - were waiting for decades to eagerly undo everything back to 1965 1855.

Donald Trump’s demand to tear up political norms has been met by Republican states eager to dust off a segregation-era playbook that maximizes the political power of white voters.

“What’s happening right now is probably the swiftest disenfranchisement of Black folks since Reconstruction, due to disenfranchisement by racist gerrymandering. And they will lie and say that it’s for political purposes,” said the Democratic state representative Justin Pearson of Tennessee, a Memphis legislator running for a congressional district blown into pieces by Republican lawmakers. “They cracked it into three. The district stretches hundreds of miles … it’s completely diluted in thirds almost to the percentage. It’s surgical, how they remove the possibility of Black participation.”

A lot of these maps will get challenged in the courts, but what success could any of them bring when the top court controlled by six Far Right Republican Justices already sided with the segregationists to bring the horrors of Jim Crow back?

Via Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

Following the Civil War and the end of slavery, the Republican Congress led an ambitious campaign of Reconstruction to integrate the formerly enslaved into political society and create pluralistic governments in the South. Hundreds of Black men (women still did not have the right to vote) were elected to offices including governor, congressman, senator and on down following the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments. But this was short-lived as white Southerners organized a campaign of violent repression and terrorism known as Redemption to seize back control, while the Supreme Court carved the original intent out of the 14th and 15th amendments and gutted civil rights laws passed by Congress.

These Redeemers imposed new laws and constitutions on the Southern states meant to ensure white rule by eliminating Black political representation and Black voting rights. This push culminated with the enactment of Jim Crow laws across the South as a response to suppress the successful fusion of Black voters with white Populists at the turn of the 20th century. What remained were authoritarian states imposing racial apartheid through legalism and violence...

The former Confederate states would not send another Black congressman to Washington for another 72 years. The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965 following the historic march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made that possible. That law banned the bread-and-butter of Jim Crow — literacy tests and other subjective discriminatory criteria for voter registration — and created legal mechanisms to challenge laws and district maps as discriminatory...

But the court’s decision in Callais threatens all of this by reversing the 1982 Voting Rights Act reauthorization by stating that challenges brought under the law’s Section 2 to district maps must prove intentional racial discrimination. The decision also requires any challenge to yield to the partisan motives of state legislators, who can now claim they are eliminating Black majority seats simply because they predominantly elect Democrats.

This is the endgame of all that conservative shifting into a Republican Party driven by Culture War racism/sexism that made certain most Blacks would shift over to the Democratic Party, giving the Far Right judges the 'excuse' of "oh, it's okay if the gerrymandering is ONLY partisan in nature," with the full understanding that racism is driving the differences between the two major national parties.

It's painful that the Southern states are the ones racing to do this, because these states happen to have the largest Black populations across the whole nation. Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina all top the list, with only Maryland up north with a large enough Black population but currently not under the control of racist Republicans threatening to take away their representation (and even their right to vote, and even their citizenship). The only former Confederate state without a sizable Black population - Texas - is currently obsessed with gerrymandering to subdue the Latino vote instead (and also the large Black population in major metros like Houston).

The horrifying thing is how the Republicans in these southern states believe they can get away with gerrymandering black voters out of representation (and political power) with the belief that yes, too many WHITE voters will not turn against these redrawn maps. Even with the risks that the Republicans in these "safe" districts are vulnerable to independent or moderate voters in these regions who could vote for Democratic challengers - especially if they're mad at trump and the whole GOP for tariffs, inflation, oil wars, inflation, immigration raids tearing apart communities, and even more inflation - these wingnuts are convinced enough Whites will vote with their fears and their rage for even more racism.

It would be pretty to think that enough Whites - the ones who aren't conservative, the ones who are still Democratic voters in these redrawn districts, the ones who have a clear idea where all our economic and social ills are coming from (trump and his crooked buddies) - will prove these assholes wrong and refuse to give Republicans the false "majority" control they hope these rigged districts will bring. The Far Right knows, deep down, they really aren't the majority of this nation: otherwise, why would they gerrymander in the first place (and second, why else try to take away voting rights period)?

One of the major reasons to gerrymander is to drive down voter turnout / interest especially by the party getting drawn off the maps. It is high time for Democratic voters - and every No-Party-Affiliated voter - to rise up against these rigged districts and do everything possible to vote Republicans out. 

Fight the corrupt powers of trumpian misrule, America. 

Fight the Far Right assholes trying to take away our power to vote.

Get the goddamn vote out this midterm.

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN.

The Arc of Justice, Pretzeled by the Far Right Undoing the VRA

Goddammit. Just as I was writing a long spiel about gerrymandering, this extremist Roberts Court decides to come out with a ruling against redistricting for minority representation that basically made things worse for democracy (via Lawrence Hurley at NBC News):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday further weakened the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law aimed at protecting minority voters.

The justices, split 6-3 with the court's (note: Republican) conservatives in the majority, told states they can almost never consider race when drawing maps to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters who long faced discrimination in elections.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that while there may be extreme situations where the use of race can be justified to draw a map, no such conditions existed in the Louisiana case. As a result, the new map was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander," he added.

This ruling ignores the long, horrifying history of segregation when post-Civil War southern states slid back to control under ex-Confederate racists who rigged elections, took away voting rights for Blacks, and drew maps in such a way that pretty much guaranteed racist one-party rule well up into the Second World War. But that's the point: Alito and his fellow Far Right conservatives wanted to return to that segregationist era ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s ended their racist regimes. Labeling the Louisiana district as a "racial gerrymander" is irony of the sickest kind.

The implications could be immediate: as much as we're weeks away from midterm primaries kicking off, a number of Republican-controlled states were already in the process of last-minute gerrymandering efforts that can get a boost from this ruling to erase every Black majority district off their maps. Not only the congressional districts, but the state legislative districts are at risk of seeing every Black/Latino representative getting mapped out of office.

If there's any ray of hope, it's the one David A. Graham shared in that dummymander article I quoted in my previous blog entry:

The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

The state-level Republicans may be eager to redraw Black majority districts out of existence, but they run into the risk that those voting blocs with blend in with the surrounding districts that the conservatives made sure were racist White enough to lean conservative/Republican. A lot of those "racial gerrymandered" Black districts were intentionally over-packed with Democratic voters to where that district could be +20 Dem while the surrounding four or five districts leaned +2 or +5 GOP. Without that overpack, that +20 Blue can flow into those GOP Red districts and shift them enough to where the Republicans lose their advantages in spite of their map rigging.

This is why the Republicans are also working overtime to take away voting rights from everyone they fear/hate. Don't be surprised if there's a lot of last-minute legislation under the guise of fighting "voter fraud" to take away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Blacks, women, and college students to solidify whatever "win" the Far Right inflicted on this nation today.

Keep fighting. This was how things were in the 1960s and here we are again, but these rights are worth fighting for, there is an America still out there worth fighting for. Don't let these bastards win: Vote every fucking conservative Republican out of office while we still can.

Update: Adam Serwer at the Atlantic explains it better than I can.

As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, (segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick) had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.”

In fact, Kilpatrick’s conversion was no conversion at all. To understand it is to understand the Roberts Court’s decision today in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical.

In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people.

What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

The best way to stop racists is to stop fucking voting for them. Get every Republican out of office now.

Our Military Implosion

Update: Thank you Batocchio for providing another link at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning. As the attacks on Iran seem to be intensifying this morning (April 7th) into full-scale genocide, please everyone stay safe but please also keep standing against this stupid, globally destructive war. 

Also Update: Just posted my thoughts this morning (April 7th) about our slide into genocide. Goddamn trump and every idiot who supported him.

The damage being done to our nation's military - not by our enemies but by our own leaders - in the middle of a goddamn war is a straight-up nightmare (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic): 

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Firing the Army chaplain in particular is a hell of a move, something that's never happened before, and allegedly by someone in Hegseth who claims to be of Christian faith. A little more on that later.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

This is where firing the Army Chaplain becomes an issue, because Green - guess what - is Black. Hegseth didn't see the man's qualifications as a preacher or an officer: all he saw was a "Woke" hire and let his racist world-view push Green out the door.

Making this all worse is how Hegseth - fulfilling trump's own dark hatreds - is clearly attempting to redesign our prestigious armed forces to reflect his own recklessness, viciousness, and disdain for others.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.)

...Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

Instead of maintaining a military that spent decades developing a genuine system of merit based on qualifications and understanding of how things work, Hegseth is switching that out for a system openly based on toadying, ego-stroking, and posturing. Granted, some of that does happen in any organization, but at least the Defense Dept. tried to keep that on the down-low to avoid incompetency blowing everything up. Hegseth wants that as Standard Operating Procedure.

And while the U.S. military has a rather scary history of religious fervor among the ranks, they've tried to keep it moderated and leveled out between the various faiths (and among different Christian beliefs). Hegseth doesn't care about that: He's openly pushing the Christianist evangelical platform of Holy War in a way we've never seen from our political leadership in previous wars (not even during the GWOT versus the Taliban and Iraqi Sunnis). Today, a major scandal erupted when he staged a Good Friday prayer service... that failed to invite the Catholics - a world church currently criticizing the unjust war against Iran - to one of their major holy days (from Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost):

The Pentagon has invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel. Except it’s only for Protestants, not Catholics.

“Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel,” reads a Friday email sent by Air Force leadership, a copy of which was shared by an employee.

“I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome,” said this employee, who requested anonymity to speak about internal communications. “It’s so ridiculous.”

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed it is not hosting another, separate religious service for Catholic employees.

I'm Unitarian, and even I know - well, I have my ex-Catholic dad as a source - that Good Friday is one of the Big Ones, especially where they perform the Stations of the Cross. Even the Pope does it (well, when he's young enough to handle carrying the heavy crucifix). To exclude the Catholics from a Good Friday service - even one meant for Protestant service - is a huge insult to that church. Considering how many Catholics are in the U.S. armed forces (roughly 1.8 million Americans in uniform or families or base employment) this could well have serious effects on morale.

And as Nichols noted earlier, Hegseth is clearly waging a war on women in the military, allowing sexism to affect the chain of command. He's risking our armed forces at the worst possible time for the dumbest (and selfish) reasons (from Edith Olmstead at the New Republic):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rampant racism and sexism extend further than we previously knew.

Hegseth has made efforts to block or delay the promotion of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process who spoke with NBC News.

“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials told NBC News...

The apparent reasons to block these promotions varied but seemed to have nothing to do with conduct—more with the identities of the officers and what they represented to Hegseth.

These are qualified officers: People who have served in the military for decades, who know how things work and how to get the best out of the personnel under their commands. Hegseth is kicking out people who know their jobs, all because Hegseth doesn't know his own job.

This ongoing war - not just the war in Iran, and South America; but the Culture War against America's move towards social justice - is going to get worse, and it's not going to end until these goddamn wingnuts from the Far Right are out of power forever. Pray for that.

One Bit of Good News (Which Highlights All The Other Bad News)

With the furor over ICE basically kidnapping a 5-year-old from the streets of Minneapolis, the courts thankfully stepped in and said "HELL NO, Send Liam And His Dad Home" (via Sofia Barnett at the Minnesota Star Tribune): 

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos returned home to Minnesota on Sunday, Feb. 1, with his father, ending a detention that carried the Columbia Heights preschooler hundreds of miles from his school and family and turned him into a national symbol of the human toll of immigration enforcement.

Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, boarded a commercial flight from San Antonio to Minneapolis after spending more than a week in federal custody at a Texas immigration detention center. They were detained Jan. 20 outside their home in Columbia Heights shortly after Liam returned from preschool, according to school officials and witnesses.

Their detention drew national attention after photos circulated of Liam being taken into custody in his driveway, wearing a blue hat with bunny ears and a Spider-Man backpack. In one photo, his face is twisted into a frown as agents lead him toward a vehicle, his small frame swallowed by a bulky flannel, his hands held together in front of him...

Liam’s release followed an emergency order from U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who directed the government to immediately free the father and son from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. The ruling capped days of mounting pressure from lawmakers, school leaders and advocates who warned the detention of the young child had crossed a line.

The good news is that Liam is home, he's in a safe place and he has a chance to recover from the trauma ICE, Stephen Miller, and trump dumped on him.

The bad news? There's still thousands of innocent children being held in cages by trump's thugs (via Holly Yan and Priscilla Alvarez at CNN):.

But the boy’s plight – and his now uncertain future – sparked renewed outrage over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown, which has also ensnared children.

Liam is now the fourth child from his school district to be taken away by ICE in just the past two weeks, Columbia Heights Public Schools said...

Liam, a student in the “PreK 4” program at Valley View Elementary, isn’t the only child from his school district who has been taken away by federal agents. Three other students have also been taken by ICE, school officials said.

Also on Tuesday, a 17-year-old Columbia Heights High School student on the way to school was taken by armed, masked agents, Columbia Heights Public Schools said.

“No parents were present,” the school district said. “The student was removed from their car and taken away.”

Last week, ICE agents entered the apartment of another 17-year-old high school student and her mother. Both were detained, the district said.

And a fourth grader was taken by ICE agents on her way to school with her mother two weeks ago. The 10-year-old is still in a Texas detention center, the school district said on Wednesday...

The current (as of December 2025) estimate on the number of children Homeland Security/ICE are detaining is around 3,800. This could be ranging from newborns to high school teens.

And we're talking CHILDREN here. Not gang-bangers. Not criminals. Children going to school, children trying to learn, trying to grow up in a nation that's supposed to be better than this.

And yet trump and Miller and Koem and nearly every Republican talking head out there are still trying to shill the Narrative that all these brown dark-skinned kids are the bad guys.

THEY'RE CHILDREN.

NONE OF THEM SHOULD BE IN CAGES, YOU MONSTERS.

Send every child back home, goddammit.

The Unqualified Are Taking Over Thanks to trump

Update: Many thanks to Steve in Manhattan for including this article to Crooks and Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please remember to order an excessive supply of Lucky Charms Marshmallows to tide you over as the trump tariffs disrupt our cereal industry, that is all...

I mentioned last article there's a ton of things to catch up on, but trump is just overwhelming me with assholery aimed at my own profession so I got to respond to this bullshit (yes I am pissed over this). 

This past weekend, trump went and fired the head Librarian of Congress - is that even something he could do? - over "complaints" that she was too woke and for the most absurd reasons (via Kara Yorio at School Library Journal):

President Donald Trump fired Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden in a terse, two-sentence email sent on Thursday night...

"This is unprecedented, and unnecessary; Dr. Hayden has served Congress and the American people with integrity and distinction,” EveryLibrary executive director John Chrastka said in a statement. “This is a purely political move. And coming as it does right after the Preliminary Injunction and TRO reopening IMLS, it is hard not to see it that way. Congress should be outraged at this overreach."

EveryLibrary has launched a petition asking the public to signal their support to stop the attacks on the Library of Congress.

Hayden was nominated to lead the Library of Congress by President Barack Obama and sworn in for a 10-year term in September 2016. She was the first woman and the first African American to serve in the position.

AP reported that Hayden had been targeted by a conservative group, American Accountability Foundation, which tweeted on Thursday: “The current #LibrarianOfCongress Carla Hayden is woke, anti-Trump, and promotes trans-ing kids. It’s time to get her OUT and hire a new guy for the job!”

Her removal is the latest for the administration that is stripping federal agencies of women, people of color, and anyone whose work is believed to be in opposition to Trump's agenda...

In a later press briefing, the White House accused Hayden of being "woke" and including "inappropriate books" in the library collection, completely ignorant of HOW the Library of Congress actually functions (via Kerry Pickett at Washington Times):

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Carla Hayden was fired as librarian of Congress because she promoted DEI and pushed “inappropriate books” for children...

“We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters at the White House. “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

And we don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well. So, she has been removed from her position, and the President is well within his rights to do that.”

Leavitt - and everybody else in that press room - doesn't understand that the Library of Congress has a mandate to include every professionally published book securing its Copyright - by that I mean books from established large and mid-sized publishers, including university presses: they do NOT take self-published books, trust me - so that Congressional staff and elected members have access to research materials (and even fictional entertainment). Hayden couldn't stop getting LGBTQ+ books if she wanted to. 

Also, these are NOT books that circulate or even go into Interlibrary Loan: NO CHILDREN are going to get their hands on these books through LOC, let alone people from outside of Congress (there is a reading room where visitors can borrow a book if available but they can't leave it with, and threats to cutting / stealing pages prevent anybody from walking out with one). Every excuse trump and his fellow book-burners anti-woke mob are tossing out there are lies. It wasn't the taxpayers she was serving, it was Congress (and researchers able to visit in-person). If Hayden was doing anything, she was acting as Archivist for the printed works of human knowledge stretching back to the 1800s, with the Library of Congress as one of the world's largest holdings of the modern era (if not all of human history, bigger than the famed Library of Alexandria). And that is something the anti-woke mob cannot abide.

This morning, trump added onto the bullshit by appointing Todd Blanche - as white a name you can get - acting Librarian, in spite of the fact Blanche has no work history or experience as a librarian period (via Hillel Italie at AP News):

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Donald Trump during his 2024 criminal trial, has been appointed acting Librarian of Congress, the Justice Department said Monday.

Blanche replaces longtime librarian Carla Hayden, whom the White House fired last week amid criticism from some conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda. She was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama in 2015.

Blanche was named the number two Justice Department official after serving as a criminal defense attorney defending Trump against two cases brought by the Justice Department during the Biden administration. Blanche is a former federal prosecutor who was a key figure on Trump’s defense team in his New York hush money trial, which ended in a conviction on 34 felony counts.

There is NOTHING on this guy's resume that even hints he did time as a paralegal working a law library for research projects. I doubt Todd can tell you the difference between DDC, LC, and SUDOC (I've studied and worked all three, by the by).

The ONLY thing that qualifies this guy is his utter loyalty to trump, and a likely willingness to purge the entire Library of Congress - which is supposed to belong to CONGRESS - of every "woke" "DEI" "climate change" book in the collection. 

Do you understand the severity of what is about to happen if Blanche - an unqualified white boy hire - is able to weed out thousands of now-rare, hard-to-find books - some titles so old and out-of-print that even large research libraries like Harvard and Yale don't own them - all because they offend the racist/sexist/evangelical/ignorant sensibilities of the Far Right fringe? 

The book burnings of the Reich are about the most recent equivalence you can match that to. The destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria would be the closest poetic example, except that destruction honestly took centuries of fires big and small to wipe it out. Trump and Blanche and the entire MAGA fringe are capable of wiping out the Library of Congress in weeks if not days.

What the absolute hell, America. If even one rare book from 1860 gets destroyed, our nation will regret it forever.

Call your congresscritters. DEMAND they defend their own Library!

This incident, by the by, is a perfect distillation of the damage trump and his Republican cohorts are inflicting on our federal government. Purging our agencies of effective, qualified personnel, and replacing them with idiotic, toadying nobodies clinging to trump out of loyalty and self-interest. What's happening to the Library of Congress is happening to CDC, to the IRS, to Social Security Administration, to offices of Veterans Affairs, to our national parks, to even our Defense and Justice Departments. We're getting the worst government led by the worst people, and Americans are going to suffer for this for generations to come.

Update: Just finding out now trump fired the head of the Copyright Office at LOC, arguably over a published report about AI's ineffectiveness and potential to destroy copyright protections for authors, artists, and musicians. This is going to get worse.

Revision to the Update: Got pointed out on Bluesky that there's more to what trump is doing with the Library of Congress. he and his lackeys are trying to gain access to the personal data of congressmembers and their staffs, especially any legal questions/research requests that are supposed to remain confidential. Basically, trump is looking for his own kompromat on both his opponents and allies to compel them to submit to his rule.

trump Destroying Heroes

Update: Thank ye, Steve in Manhattan for adding this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! Please remember to support your public libraries as trump and his lackeys are nuking library funding outright through shutting down the IMLS agency. (posted at my writing/librarian blog) /rage

If there's any good news is that millions of us are rising up in protest, if the turnout at the Hands Off rallies are anything (of course, the mainstream media barely paid notice).

There's been a lot of bullshit happening in this second round of trumpian destruction, but this is something that drew my ire. trump continues his war on American history - and on our education and literacy - by getting his fellow racists to purge our libraries to straight-up whitewash everything (via Lolita C Baldor at AP News):

The U.S. Naval Academy has removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to review and get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, U.S officials said Tuesday.

Academy officials were told to review the library late last week, and an initial search had identified about 900 books for a closer look. They decided on nearly 400 to remove and began doing so Monday, finishing before Hegseth arrived for a visit Tuesday that had already been planned and was not connected to the library purge, officials said. A list of the books has not yet been made available.

As a librarian, this enrages me. NO LIBRARY - be it public, be it school, above all a university library - SHOULD EVER PURGE A BOOK ON POLITICAL ORDERS.

The Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, had not been included in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that banned DEI instruction, programs or curriculum in kindergarten through 12th grade schools that receive federal funding. That is because the academies are colleges.

Pentagon leaders, however, suddenly turned their attention to the Naval Academy last week when a media report noted that the school had not removed books that promoted DEI. A U.S. official said the academy was told late last week to conduct the review and removal. It isn’t clear if the order was directed by Hegseth or someone else on his staff...

Hegseth has aggressively pushed the department to erase DEI programs and online content, but the campaign has been met with questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages.

In response, the department has scrambled to restore some of those posts as their removals have come to light.

The confusion about how to interpret the DEI policy was underscored Monday as Naval Academy personnel mistakenly removed some photos of distinguished female Jewish graduates from a display case as they prepared for Hegseth’s visit. The photos were put back...

While the AP News weren't able to confirm in that story which books were getting removed, follow-up reports got out that some of the books under fire were biographies on Martin Luther King Jr, and WWII soldier - and major league baseball Hall of Famer - Jackie Robinson.

In short, Hegseth and trump and the rest of their anti-woke racists were desperate and eager to purge books on American heroes.

This is indefensible. Former congresscritter Steve Israel makes the case (via The Hill):

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I took on the issue of professional military education. It may not have garnered many headlines, but education was viewed as critical from the top echelons of the Pentagon to the remote operating bases I visited in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We sharpen our warriors’ effectiveness when we develop their skills in critical thinking, languages, cultures and history. But we are now going dangerously backwards.

The New York Times reported that the U.S. Naval Academy is identifying books in the school’s Nimitz Library that may be pulled from circulation because they relate to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion. Among the 900 potential offenders: a biography of Jackie Robinson, “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” and “Einstein on Race and Racism.”

The Chinese military is expanding. Russia is threatening Europe. But you can sleep better tonight knowing that the Navy is keeping its men and women safe from Jackie Robinson...

The irony in this move is rich. In the name of freedom, we mustn’t let our future leaders do things like, oh, read what they want to read. We must treat them like snowflakes, so brittle and sensitive that they must be protected from the offensive views of Robinson, King, Einstein and whoever else is on the blacklist of the Navy Blue and Gold.

Our warriors need body armor, not censorship. The best of them want to build their intellectual resilience. When I visited them in Iraq, Afghanistan and our military academies at home, many consistently told me that they fought better when they had time not only to drill, but to learn. To read...

It was a Marine who later explained to me why military education was so important: “If you know how to think, you realize you don’t have to kick in the door and start shooting; sometimes, you can find a safer way — for yourself...”

Instead of supporting our warriors with libraries that will give them an unvarnished telling of history, the Pentagon has decided to whitewash it. Instead of encouraging critical thinking skills, the Navy has decided to dull them...

There was nothing offensive in what Martin Luther King represents even as a man of peace who stood for civil rights. MLK may have spoke against the Vietnam War, but so did others of his era, and there is no shame in letting our military schools offer his biographies to highlight the man's overall commitment to justice.

There was nothing offensive in what Jackie Robinson represents even as a veteran of the Second World War - one of the few "good" or Just Wars humanity's ever known - who faced court martial during his service over refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus, and who broke the racial barriers in professional baseball to make it truly America's Game.

But these men - and many other men and women who impacted our nation's history over the centuries - offend trump and Hegseth and others among trump's ranks of hate-driven lackeys all because the likes of King and Robinson were heroes who dared to confront and bring an end to the institutionalized racism that scarred the United States since our nation's birth... and clearly still scars us to this day.

MLK offends the likes of trump because Reverend King dared to win the Nobel Peace Prize fighting for our nation's soul, sacrificing his own life in the pursuit of equality, justice, and economic fairness not just for Blacks but for the poor.

Jackie Robinson offends the likes of trump because Robinson suffered years of public attacks by haters while proving racists wrong that Black players were just as good as Whites, helping his Brooklyn Dodgers make playoffs and even a World Series championship. Jackie entered the hallowed Hall of Fame - notorious as one of the hardest sports halls to join - and his jersey number retired by all the major league teams in honor of what he endured.

King and Robinson and dozens if not hundreds of other American heroes - those who are Black, or Latino, or Natives, or Asians, or Women - offend trump and his ilk because King and Robinson and those hundreds of Blacks and Latinos and Natives and Asians and Women all defy the white supremacist myth that only White Men are capable and worthy of respect (that even the most mediocre White Man is superior to all others).

Rather than step away from an easily disprovable lie - that Whites can be mediocre and ought to live with the reality that We Are All Human capable of both greatness and failures - trump and the patriarchal racists would rather whitewash - literally - every fact and human face from our history books, from any form of information and knowledge that can inspire our generation and those who follow us.

trump will erase the fact we have heroes who aren't him - that there are heroes with different faces and different skins and different genders than him - just to make himself a false god.

Damn him.

Do not purge our heroes from the shelves, America.

Do not let these tiny, broken, hollow men erase everything good about our nation.

Erasing America

Update: Thanks to Steve In Manhattan over at Crooks & Liars for including this blog in Mike's Round Up! Please take a look around, and I am getting close to my 2,500th post so keep an eye out for anything special I'll do for that moment (haven't figured it out yet).

Ta-Nehisi Coates warned us, years ago:

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is a shameful yet common view among racists that Blacks are "unqualified," a long-standing myth since the (first) Civil War that Blacks can't be literate, intelligent, or successful. Frederick Douglass spent his adult life as abolitionist defending his eloquence, writing skills, and self-learning. It's a myth that defined the segregationist Jim Crow era that prevented Blacks from achieving better employment, and reaching higher ranks in the military until the Second World War; when the more vicious racism of the Nazis compelled America to look for our better angels.

Even after all of the efforts of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s - after all the attempts to equalize educational and employment opportunities - that racist world-view is what got trump his electoral chances to enter the White House and impose his fearmongering and rage onto the nation's already broken psyche.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch... that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

As Coates noted, trump entered the White House as the least-qualified person ever - since arguably Andrew Johnson, who at least had political skill to win elections in his career - only because he exulted his whiteness. trump was a disaster as a businessman, filing more bankruptcies than people have had hot dinners, and yet marketed himself as a deal-making "genius" all to get people to buy his next scam. 

If a black man had even filed once for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, he'd never get another loan to start a new business ever again. But trump did repeatedly, even after banks realized he was a money pit from which they'll never get their interest back. 

If a black man got exposed as a sex offender, his political career would end in a heartbeat. trump exposed himself repeatedly, was even found liable for sexual assault that the judge equated to rape, and most of the media and national leadership ignored it all while enough Americans voted for the monster to gain - and regain - the presidency.

All of the warning signs were there that trump is a monster, and yet his whiteness became the very thing that lifted him into power. And now, he's using that power to drag the rest of us backwards into our racist past to rebuild an America that was never all that great. As Adam Serwer noted this weekend at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration...”

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else...

It should be noted that Marxism - and Communism, and even Socialism, all equated to Liberalism by the Far Right - is the go-to dismissal of civil rights, painting the Civil Rights movement as a Soviet plot to undermine American greatness (it was also accusations by the South African Apartheid system to suppress Blacks in their country). The Far Right didn't want to accept those equality gains of the 1960s, and they are desperate to undo everything LBJ, hell everything Truman and FDR and even Teddy Roosevelt ever did to advance the rights of all of us.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly...

Serwer seems to think that these acts of erasure by trump and his wingnut allies will only go as far as resetting our nation back to the segregated days of Jim Crow. But I see something more ominous, tied into the efforts by trump and his cohorts to undo birthright citizenship. They may be currently aiming at the children and families of Latino immigrants, but going after those rights opens the door to allowing whoever is in power - and right now it's that racist bastard trump - to expand denying citizenship to so many others.

I wrote about this before, when wingnut punditry and politicians were talking about undoing the 14th Amendment years ago:

What could happen then in a world where Citizenship is not an automatic given based on birth but instead vulnerable to the whims and interests of whichever political party is in charge of Congress, the White House, and the Courts?  Nowadays the Republicans can call you "Un-American" and that would be just another insult.  If the 14th Amendment were gone... A Republican With Authority can call you "Un-American" and mean it... which would also mean no rights under the law, no protection from immediate arrest, no Habeus, no home, no life...  This is the true danger of what the Republicans are proposing to do by getting rid of the 14th Amendment.  They claim it'll be to get rid of unwanted illegals... but also consider that the Republicans have no love of Muslims right now, and not much love for Blacks, and very little love for Liberals... and so on, and more, and also...  Repeal the 14th Amendment and NO ONE would be safe from the charge of being "Un-American."

We're looking at a reality where trump - backed by a cowardly Republican-controlled Congress that won't stop him and a supine Supreme Court that's already enabled trump's criminality - can erase the rights of any group he despises, which is a lot of us who aren't rich, white, and male.

With citizenship gone, the minority groups across America - Blacks, Latinos, Asians, even women (the GOP will try to carve out exemptions for White women who register Republican, no doubt), and even the handicapped (trump has a serious hate-on for them) - will lose their right to vote which Republicans hope would ensure their control of government forever, will lose their rights to own property, will lose any possibility of getting good jobs at good wages because companies will ignore or abuse them, will lose any chance at higher education (and see their basic education weakened to the point of uselessness), will lose any standing before the courts where in theory (alas, not in practice) we're supposed to be equal before the law, which was the major horror of the Dred Scott decision, when Taney proclaimed Blacks - even freedmen - had no rights. That was why the birthright citizenship clause was formed in the first place. 

It won't matter how qualified a Black or Latino or Asian person will be with their education, their experience, their genuine skills. It won't matter how qualified a woman will be with her education, her experience, her genuine skills. It won't matter how qualified a military veteran or handicapped person will be for those jobs or educational opportunities offered through the civil service. They will all lose their standing compared to White men who have not enough education, not enough experience, not even the skills for the jobs and opportunities that are out there. All because trump and his ilk are convinced "unqualified" minorities are taking all the good jobs away from "deserving" White men who aren't competent or deserving at all.

In this version of trumpian dystopia Black- Latino- Asian- and Native Americans, the poor and starving, the women and families fighting to feed and care for their own, will have no recourse but to submit to every demand and folly the powers that be - the patriarchy of mediocre white guys - can squeeze them and get away with it. All because mediocre White guys can't abide sharing anything with others they can't perceive as being human. They will all be erased - from the history books, from our archives, from our rollcall of legends and heroes - to allow these mediocrities the delusion that they alone are superior over everyone, even fellow Whites who won't play to those fantasies.

It's been noted before: White Privilege White Grievance is a hell of a drug.

And our nation is truly going to suffer for this. Any and all competency and expertise we tend to see in our civil service - our communities even at the municipal and county levels, where the lack of federal aid and quality of service will be felt most - will disappear in a wave of cronyism and hackery that would make the Spoils system of the 19th Century seem quaint.

All because trump and his racist allies cannot see the beauty and strength of a diverse and unified community that America could be.

That long arc bending our history towards justice is no longer tied up in a pretzel. It is now a solid u-turn back to the dark ages of ignorance, racism, and fear. The next thing we'll see is the campaign of violence and terror that defined the horrors of the Jim Crow years, and arguably a nation caught up in a tyranny of martial law under the worst White man to ever sit in the Oval Office.

Gods help us.

Where the Rich and the Racist Disagree

Update: Many thanks and Happy New Year to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for adding this article to Mike's Blog Round-Up! Stay safe everyone, and meet me in Gainesville FL this February 1st for the Sunshine State Book Festival. ;-)

As part of the ongoing American meltdown this winter, we're witnessing a very public and very nasty spat between donald trump's MAGA voting base and trump's billionaire buddies. There's a quick refresher at NPR's All Things Considered with Stephen Fowler commenting:

So for people who are not terminally online, here's a quick recap. Trump made a number of smaller staffing announcements for his second term earlier this week. One of them is a high-profile tech entrepreneur named Sriram Krishnan, who's worked at Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Far-right activists started trashing the pick on the social media site X, pointing out that Krishnan was born in India, that he previously made comments advocating for more green cards, and devolving into a lot of racist and anti-immigrant attacks on foreign workers that come to the U.S. on these H-1B visas...

the debate over H-1Bs and legal immigration and what Trump might do about them is not something new. In his first term, Trump said that certain visa programs were being abused to bring in foreign workers to replace American workers. He suspended the H-1B program during the pandemic for the same reason, but this time around, things could be different. People in the tech industry, with the Musk-Ramaswamy viewpoint that the U.S. needs more of these top workers no matter where they're from to keep an edge in fields like AI - they're more in Trump's ear and his good graces this time around.

There's also interest in reforming the visa process not just for these tech workers - from lawmakers across the aisle who say it's an overly complex system chock full of carveouts that benefit certain industries and, like Trump has said, are being abused. But there's also a lot of conservatives, especially among the base of the GOP, that shape primary elections, who believe Trump's hard-line immigration stances means reform should primarily come in a reduction of immigrants...

Fowler mentioned the "devolving into a lot of racist and anti-immigrant attacks" but didn't discuss it in detail, considering how that racism is foundational to the Far Right anger towards even legal migrants (like we saw during the elections with the spiteful attacks towards Haitian migrants in Springfield). Steve Benen over at Maddow's Blog (MSNBC) digs a little deeper:

It was against this backdrop that the president-elect announced early last week that venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan — a proponent of green cards for skilled workers — would work in Trump’s incoming administration, serving in a top artificial intelligence policy post. The news was not well received on the Far Right.

A highly controversial MAGA activist named Laura Loomer — who spent at least part of the year as a member of Trump’s inner circle — condemned the decision to hire Krishnan, pointing to his support for the H-1B program, which provides temporary worker visas for high-skilled tech workers. An ugly back-and-forth, which some have labeled the “MAGA civil war,” erupted soon after.

On one side of the divide are prominent far-right voices such as Loomer and Steve Bannon, who have spent the last week clashing with figures such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They all remain Trump allies, of course, but they’ve also targeted each other in caustic and personal ways, culminating in the world’s wealthiest individual publishing a tweet in which he urged many of the president-elect’s supporters, “Take a big step back and f--- yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Subtle, it was not.

We are witnessing the divide between the massive and anger-driven Far Right voting base that has been stirred up by fearmongering and racism to hate ALL immigrants (unless they're from Norway) and the upper elite billionaires of the Far Right who have fed all that fearmongering and racism to their masses while profiting - and hoping to profit even more - from that very immigration system that brings them cheap - and indentured - labor. From Janice Gassam Asare at Forbes (paywalled):

The support of H-1B visas by billionaires like Musk, Ramaswamy and others should come as no surprise. On the surface, these work visas seem like a win-win, allowing highly skilled workers in specialized fields to contribute to the U.S. labor force while being granted the ability to stay in the country. What isn’t talked about enough is the exploitation that these workers often experience. The Economic Policy Institute reported that a majority of H-1B workers are paid below median wages. Not only is paying employees lower wages advantageous for employers, but workers on H-1B visas may be less likely to report workplace harm and mistreatment due to fears of how the loss of an H-1B job could drastically impact their life. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities that because of what’s at stake, many H-1B workers are more compliant and less rebellious than American employees, which would naturally make them a more enticing hire. 

Billionaires like Musk need to rile up the voting base to keep them compliant and voting Republican - so that the Republicans can then gift those billionaires massive tax cuts and easy access to the federal pork barrel - but they need the current immigration system to hire thousands of workers who can't fight for better wages or defend themselves in a legal system skewed against them. This is a dynamic vulnerable to rebellion by the MAGA base when they realize their racism has limits. Back to Asare:

Ramaswamy and Musk’s posts on X have sparked a bitter debate among Trump’s supporters. Some Trump supporters have resorted to spewing racist and xenophobic rhetoric online based on fears of a “browning” America and anxieties about being replaced. Instead of uniting across party lines over class struggles and society’s collective disdain for rising inflation, racism has reigned supreme. At the end of the day, capitalism trumps nativism and regardless of one’s party affiliation, the almighty dollar rules. Many of Trump’s supporters may feel hoodwinked; voting for him because of his immigration promises, only to learn that Trump and his billionaire allies are more focused on how foreign workers make American businesses more profitable...

At the moment, this schism is mostly relegated to the social media arena where the MAGA haters are expressing their fury towards their GOP masters. There is no sign that this will translate into the Far Right voters from abandoning the Republicans altogether (after all, where can they go?), or any political factions in Congress turning against trump and Musk to make them suffer for their pro H-1B stances. 

But this all highlights one real fact: The voter anger that supported trump this 2024 wasn't really about inflation, or economic anxiety. It was about hating others who weren't privileged, who weren't viewed as American, who weren't "born here" and "needed to go back where you came from."

It was always the racism. It was always that fear - unjustified, uncontrollable - of the dread Others - even among the non-White communities - that the Far Right demonized for political gain.

That racism won't quiet down any time soon. In the coming year, we are going to see our fellow (White) Americans at their worst, on a scale we haven't seen since the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s.

Gods help us all, as that rage will consume more innocent lives and destroy more communities than the Far Right believes will happen.

Stay safe this 2025.

What the trump Hate Rally Means

In the final push towards Election Day, trump announced in early October a major rally in Madison Square Garden this Sunday with all the big name celebrities he could find - along with a number of Far Right media rage artists - to make his "big pitch" to the American People.

A lot of observers immediately compared it to the infamous American (Nazi) Bund rally of 1939, as trump's open love of Hitler and open desire to impose his brand of fascism on the nation made such comparisons unavoidable.

Well, this Sunday trump held his rally.

This is how bad it was. (via Marina Dunbar at the Guardian (US)):

Outrage is continuing to mount following the racist anti-Puerto Rican remarks at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York as Democrats, celebrities and even some Republicans condemned the incident.

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe came under fire for comments made about Latinos and Puerto Rico at the Sunday rally.

“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, among other controversial remarks.

In the hours following, Democrats and Hispanic groups on both sides of the political aisle have condemned the comments as “offensive” and “derogatory”.

trump never did work with dog whistles. he always went straight for the bullhorn to express his rage and fear towards Latinos (and Blacks, and Asians, and women, and Jews, and every other demographic that he couldn't comprehend or respect). And at that rally, he let the haters and fearmongers like Hinchcliffe go straight for the bullhorns to announce as loud as possible how vicious they are.

That quote Dunbar referenced wasn't even the worst of it. David A. Graham at the Atlantic documented more Far Right atrocity:

We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who was the evening’s first speaker.

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,” he joked. “Just like they did to our country...”

Hinchcliffe defamed and derided every Latino in the United States, not just the migrants crossing the borders to find work and homes for their families, but also every Latino whose lineage in this country stretch back centuries: As far back as the Mexican Tejanos who sided with Sam Houston to form a Texan Republic in the 1830s, and with all the Californian and Southwest Latinos who came with the territory grabs after the Mexican-American War in the 1840s.

Hinchcliffe - and by extension trump and every Republican who worked that rally - basically insulted Puerto Ricans - who are by birth American citizens and every bit the equals of these Republican haters - for no other reason than that they are Spanish-speaking Hispanic residents of the United States.

None of this was a joke. It was intentional. All of trump's rally was a festival of racist drivel (as Graham notes):

Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”)...

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks...

This is how far fear and racism have driven the modern Republican Party. And this is what trump thinks is a winning message for his campaign, even as the expected outrage and blowback are dominating this last week of the election.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.).

“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This—all of this—is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness.

Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland...

Reports on social media are rife with planned pro-Harris rallies in major Puerto Rican communities in places like Allentown, Pennsylvania, a battleground state that can easily side to Harris if enough angry Puerto Ricans show up at the ballots. I can tell you Florida holds one of the largest stateside population of Puerto Ricans, and I know them to be insanely patriotic as well as culturally attuned to their own community (and the ones I knew were mostly Republican, one was even deeply MAGA. I wonder how they're feeling about their idol trump now).

The residents in Puerto Rico are ironically enough American citizens, but because of the territorial status they can't vote in federal elections. They must be fuming at their inability to punch back at trump and the Republicans for this travesty. (If the Democrats win Congress this 2024, they need to address this injustice by granting Puerto Rico statehood at the earliest.) One can hope that the 5.6 million who DO live in the states and who CAN vote will avenge their loved ones back home.

This does beg a question: Why? Why at this late stage when trump and the GOP need to scrounge for every undecided voter still out there, when they need to appeal to a more broad - and less racist - demographic of Americans, why did trump and company go Full Racist on the national stage?

Part of it is because trump genuinely believes this is a winning message. he ran on an openly racist campaign against Mexicans, Chinese, and Middle Easterners the second he came down that escalator in June 2015, and he thinks it helped him "win" a broken Electoral College that 2016... even as he ignores how he lost the popular vote that year, and that the same campaigning failed him in 2020. 

The other major reason is desperation. The early voting numbers, while not officially counted, are arguably trending towards Harris and the Democratic Party by landslide numbers. The way the turnout is going, it's looking like Harris can easily win enough battleground states to where trump's cries of "stolen votes" or act of sabotage won't work.

So he's doing what he did in the lead-up to the January 6th Insurrection: Rile up his faithful and violent MAGA base with derogatory race-baiting. Make the racists who are already believing the worst about Mexicans and Haitians and now Puerto Ricans into fearing them even more, driving that fear into hate and making that hate fuel acts of violence.

I said this earlier:

The observation gained by trump's constant calls for his followers to "show up, be wild" is that he wants confrontation between the Far Right and the rest of the nation. He wants more Charlottesvilles, trump wants more moments where his extremists have free reign to attack the Left-leaning counter-protests, and induce terror in average Americans so that they dare not question him or his grabs for power and money. trump believes he can profit from the chaos spurred by street fights sparked by the Nazis and extremists that back him, and that when the blood starts flowing the rest of White America - who are not as to-the-bone racist as he is, but still driven by certain prejudices - will panic and side with him and the Republicans in the coming battle...

If trump doesn't win at the ballot box this November 5th, and if trump can't win in the courtrooms following the election with his false claims of "stolen votes," trump will go to Phase Three: street war and chaos. If he cannot rule he will do everything to ruin.

We cannot let trump win either way. Stop him at the ballots, and stop his followers from whatever acts of violence they hope to inflict on the rest of America.

Get out the vote, people. Make it a Blue Wave, to wash away every trace of trump's rage and fear.