2020: On Pandemics, Genocide, and the Election

How does one even begin a blogpost during the cursed year of 2020 after a four month absence in which we are still in the midst of a pandemic and are mere days away from a presidential election wherein the incumbent has simply, genocidally given up on that pandemic? 

Do people even blog anymore? How does a person even dip the ol' toe back into it when so much has occurred between June 2020 and now?

Let me start how I've been trying to stay centered during everything:

• Reading - I've been reading about one book per week, almost entirely in the genres of science fiction, memoir, and fiction (no non-fiction or political tomes for me, right now). I log my books on Goodreads, mostly so I have a record of what I've read from year to year, and because I log a lot of notes and quotes from almost everything I read, on my e-reading device.
• Exercise - I make time every day for 40-60 minutes of exercise, usually at home (via some sort of online instruction) plus at least one walk per day. I wear a mask on my daily walks, even though it's outside and less risky, primarily because I want to be part of a culture that normalizes mask-wearing during a pandemic.
• Pop Culture - I have watched a few TV series that unexpectedly had same-sex relationships in them as major plot points, including Ratched, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Away, and I'm just going to be upfront about it, shows that include LBT women are about 200% more watchable and interesting to me than shows that only feature cishets. Sorry not sorry.
• Cooking -  The vast majority of our meals have been homemade, although from time to time we do get take-out/delivery. I have always enjoyed cooking, and I find it satisfying to know how to provide basic sustenance for myself and others. Favorites: homemade biscuits, pizza, chili, veggie/tofu stir fry, Shepard's pie.
  
• Political Engagement - A certain segment of extremely online folks think that political activism means "people dunking on people on Twitter" or whatever, but there is a lot, actually, that can be done with and targeting people not in the insular worlds of political Twitter, including contacting voters, helping people register to vote, donating to candidates, and more.

Like many, Joe Biden was not my first choice as a the Democratic nominee, but he ended up being the nominee and is now standing between us and the COVID pandemic - among other things - getting much, much worse. As such, I think every registered voter has a moral obligation to support the Biden/Harris ticket, if only as a matter of harm reduction.

In 2004, after watching in stunned depression as the hated George W. Bush won re-election, I take nothing - no poll, no prediction, no level of assume hatred - for granted in 2020. For, 16 years later, we are working against a Republican party that has only grown more brazenly empowered to cheat and win by any means possible by the vile, hypocritical Mitch McConnell who is ramming through an arch-conservative SCOTUS pick who will possibly serve on the nation's highest court for decades to come, even as he blocked President Obama's "election year" replacement pick for almost all of 2016.

But to take a step back and look more broadly, I think that the COVID pandemic, and more specifically Trump and the Republican Party's genocidal mismanagement of it, should be the defining issue of the 2020 election. 

We now know that a national mask mandate in April would have saved roughly 40% of the lives lost to COVID, but Trump and Republicans have largely ridiculed masks and treated the issue as one of "personal choice" rather than as a public health necessity for the common good. Further, Trump largely won the public "debate," such as it was, to reopen businesses before COVID in the US was anywhere near under control and the US, for many months now, has had the highest COVID death toll in the entire world.

At almost 225,000 dead as of today, we see hundreds of COVID-related deaths per day and it barely makes a ripple anymore in the news.

We, as a nation, should be mourning and grieving, and our political leaders should - at the very least - be acknowledging that.

And, while I believe probably most people in the US have become accustomed to a baseline level of cruel, sociopathic abnormality over the past four years, I don't know what to make of the reality that so many people have apparently become inured to this genocide and death toll other than, perhaps, it is overwhelming for most people to think about, some people are in idiotic denial, and/or our checks and balances in the US - both formal and informal - have profoundly failed.

No institution in the US should be treating what is happening as normal. Not newscasters, not debate moderators, not comedians, not Saturday Night Live and their both-sides fucking bullshit, not schools, not professional sports, not your workplaces and their "HOW was your weekend?" gaslighting questions, not too-cool-to-care personalities and entertained-by-it-all asshat pundits on Twitter, and certainly - certainly - not any person nominated to the US Supreme Court under the circumstances of national emergency while a presidential election is ongoing.

I don't know what to say, really. The events of the my political life as an adult, over the past 20 years, have impressed upon me that while we must not ever give up doing, saying, and fighting for what we believe is right, it's also unfair to pass the buck to the next generation by simply saying, "the young people will save us." 

Not only are there a lot of young misogynists and racists and homophobes, I'm deeply uncomfortable with, for instance, the way that so many adults are entertained by teen victims of gun violence having to regularly re-traumatize themselves on Twitter, by subjecting themselves to rightwing harassment, as part of their work of "saving the rest of us."

I've said this before, but every generation will have to fight its own battles, eventually, when we're gone. And likely, at least some of these battles will be those that have already been fought and won and lost before. Perhaps it is part of our work to leave them tools they can use, or re-purpose, for that task. But, I also refuse to cynically withdraw while I'm still here. My activism won't look like yours, and vice versa, but I think we can all find ways to contribute, and however we contribute I don't know that any of us can predict the end result(s) of our contributions.

America: The Broken, 2020 Edition

Who could have predicted, except for hundreds and thousands of commentators, many of them women and/or POC.

Here's me, writing 3 years ago, at Shakesville, for instance:

"Donald Trump is the inevitable Republican politician for a rotten-to-the-core Republican Party that has condoned the use of any means necessary to win. To enact their regressive, cruel agenda, they have enabled a man to become President who is not only temperamentally-unsuited and unqualified for the office he holds, but whose very presence there is a daily, stark reminder of their contempt for both democracy and the people of this nation.

America: we are broken."

The George B. Bush years were bad. Very bad. The Trump years are exponentially worse.

If you'd have asked me the day after the 2016 election if in a few years it would feel like we would be living through some of the worst moments of the 1930s, 40s, and 60s, but also with Twitter, Facebook, a pandemic, and a fascist president who was brought to us by the reality TV-ification of US politics, I'd say, "Yep, Sure. Sounds about right."

Every time I think we've hit rock bottom, things somehow get worse.

And, if anything, the COVID pandemic should be telling everyone in the US, even the most privileged, how drastically our lives can change, pretty much overnight, and not in a good way. I think many white people mean well when they post the memes about their #whiteprivilege and how "safe" they are relative to Black people, and that is true to an extent, but white people also would do well to stop acting like they/we are entirely objective observers of history, rather than people who can also be killed, uprooted, and oppressed by the Trump regime. Especially now.

I wish I could find it now, but when I was perusing the Twitter recently, someone noted that one of the condescending errors of the post-2016-election "safety pin" thing, where white people would wear safety pins to surreptitiously signal to people of color that they/we are "allies," was the simple-minded assumption that we would be entirely untouched, ourselves, by the horrors of the Trump regime. 

I also understand that people need hope, and I refuse to give up hope. Still.

But, a lot of people seem to think that the current protests around the country mean we're on the cusp of the leftist, socialist, utopian revolution, rather than on the cusp of a violent, authoritarian dictatorship fully backed by one of our two major political parties, roughly half of US voters, about 2/3rds branches of the US government, and a federal military force commanded by the political right.

The 2016 election was, perhaps even more than 2000, the most pivotal election of most of our lifetimes, and what's done is done.

The US government has never acted with the consent of the majority of those within its borders. The majority of voters, by millions, can and did reject a man like Trump and that still, still was not enough to keep him from power. 

The protests we are seeing from city to city in response to the police killing of George Floyd are, first and foremost the result of police violence inflicted upon Black people, and more generally seem to be a release valve for the unrest that results from the reality that the United States was designed to be an unjust, oppressive state that privileges the rights, safety, and well-being of a subset of citizens, and that this fact has been self-evident to millions of oppressed people throughout the history of this nation despite mass efforts to gaslight us into thinking otherwise.

Many people now seem to be making catastrophic miscalculations about the current state of affairs, miscalculations akin to the wishful thinking that Comey or Mueller or Fauci or whoever-the-fuck-white-male-savior would somehow swoop in and save us from the madman.

Please stay safe friends and longtime readers, however you can. I know that's not super useful advice, but the only advice I can muster now is that the time for thinking about politics in soundbite is over so try not to let the memes be your guide.

Oh, and happy fuckin' pride month.

On White Daddy and Electability, Again

When you think about it, a white male Democrat hasn't won a US presidential election since Bill Clinton did in 1996, a quarter century ago.

At the same time, polling data from the past year or so consistently have white men - specifically Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders - as performing better against Trump in 2020 general election matchups than do the candidates who are women and/or people of color. Here's one sample poll from early February 2020, for instance, from Real Clear Politics:

General Election Poll vs. Trump, 2/2/20: Biden +6, Sanders +4, Warren +3, Buttigieg +1

Interestingly, the numbers for Trump tend to stay about the same no matter who he's matched up against. It's voters for the Democratic candidate who tend to peel away the further away from "cishet white man" the Democratic candidate is. Some polls, for instance, even show billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who entered the race relatively recently, doing about the same as Joe Biden.

Another data point is that historical polling data from February 2016 shows that Hillary Clinton was polling at about where Joe Biden currently is polling versus Trump. In fact - unlike Biden or any other 2020 candidate - she regularly had a double-digit advantage on Trump at around this point in the campaign. Current numbers, of course, are also before Trump and the Republicans really start going after the nominee. Although I'm sure their efforts to cause chaos and in-fighting are already well underway, we can expect such things to amp up after the Democratic National Convention when they can really solidify around different narratives and attacks on the nominee.

All of these factoids together concern me for our 2020 prospects.

Hillary Clinton bested Trump in the 2016 popular vote by literal millions of votes, of course, and Trump squeaked out an electoral college win in swing states after a, to put it mildly, clusterfucked cascade of colliding factors worked against her. The thinking this time around is that Bernie or Biden or, I guess, Bloomberg would be able to win at least some of the swing states that Clinton lost, a premise that seems to rest largely on the usually-unstated assumption that these men would win because they are white men.

Yes, I know other reasons are put forth as to why these men would win, and they usually involve some variation on the narrative that, unlike the fine specimens of politicians that these white men are, Hillary Clinton was History's Worst Candidate Ever.  As white male politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and even Martin O'Malley (yes really) looked around the post-2016-election aftermath and thought the world needed their gloat-bragging that they could have done what "the woman" didn't do, they helped write into existence the pervasive narrative that the USA was in dire need of White Daddy to come to the rescue.

Now, I don't think it's even necessarily sexist to point out that much of the electorate has bought into the sexist hype around the dire need for a white male candidate "because of everyone else's bigotry." What was largely lost in the national discourse, if one can call it that, around whether Bernie Sanders actually told Elizabeth Warren that he thought a woman couldn't win the presidency, is that a presidential contest is not like a one-on-one chess game. It's a popularity context, the results of which are an expression of millions of voters' prejudices, hopes, dreams, fears, and countless factors outside of the control of the candidates themselves.

That supposed frontrunner Joe Biden, who would perform catastrophically in a debate against Trump anyway, is treating the match-up like a boxing match and, like most 2020 candidates, has yet to acknowledge everything Clinton was up against, demonstrates primarily that he is not anywhere near equipped to face the challenges of the general election that are yet to come.

Trump is unquestionably so terrible that I think many people and institutional powers are circularly settling for mediocre candidates who don't, actually, have a great chance at beating Trump because they "reason" that "everyone else" is settling for these candidates because these are the only candidates who can win.

Or, they felt deeply threatened by Clinton's near-win in 2016 and so are implicitly or explicitly demanding consolidation around certain white male candidates. We are, I believe, still experiencing the fallout of a 2016 election cycle that was deeply misogynistic across the political spectrum and in which, in true American form, many people demanded everyone immediately stop "relitigating" (ie, processing, analyzing, writing about).

And so, here we are, with many of the same issues cropping up. That one of the major players in the 2016 Democratic Primary decided to run again while the other was largely told to go knit in the woods for the rest of her days hasn't helped the situation.

But, such is life, here in the backlash.

On the Bernie front, I think hardcore Bernie supporters, many of whom operate in a rhetorical environment as though Republicans simply don't exist, are in serious denial about how he would fare against Trump/Republican attacks against him and "radical socialism." In the recent Iowa Caucus, Bernie halved his support in the state after 5+ years of campaigning for president and ended up essentially tied with the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana that no one had heard of a year ago.

My strategy for 2020 is therefore to vote for the candidate whose policies I most agree with and who I think would be most effective as president. For me, that person is Elizabeth Warren. If that person, for you, is Biden or Bernie, more power to you. But, if you're only supporting certain candidates because you think a white man is the "safer" candidate against Trump, I think that's questionable logic.

No candidate is a safe one in this age of propaganda, disinformation, and foreign collusion. Certain candidates have been granted a huge assist from the hype about white male electability, but none of that has accounted for all of the additional noise that exists in our current political landscape.

Quote of the Day: "We Knew This Already"

Even as the outcome seems a foregone conclusion and I haven't been talking about it much, I've been following the Trump impeachment proceedings.

Daliah Lithwick, at Slate, captures the zeitgeist of what it means to live in a nation with two major political parties, only one of which is remotely interested in democracy, truth, fairness, and justice, and a mainstream media ecosystem that repeatedly offers "false balance" when so many of Trump's misdeeds have been done openly, in plain sight:

"Seeking, over and over, evidence of that which has already been proved sets the bar higher than it need be. And it also blunts us to how horrifying those very first disturbing facts—from the original lies on the campaign trail to the corruption of the inauguration—really were. Or as Paul Waldman puts it, the primary mantra of the Trump Era has become 'we knew this already.' As I’ve suggested in the past, this is not about persuasion, or even about TV ratings, but about a messaging war, in which one side is overcommitted to truth-seeking while the other is overcommitted to shit-seeking.'"

The Republicans repeatedly shit-stir false allegation after false allegation, thus giving the 40% of or so of the American voting populace a pretext to continue supporting an authoritarian bigot because "Democrats are just as corrupt, if not moreso."

I think often about the vast political, opinion, and reality chasm between the population that remains committed to Trump, no matter what, and those who do not.

As we live through another Democratic Primary season, I continue to wonder if part of why those on the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum are so hard on each other is because it so often feels completely hopeless to engage those on the political right.

Adding to this tension is that the very real urgency of defeating Trump and the Republicans is coupled with the reality that legitimate divides exist among the anti-Trump crowd, divides that need to be hashed out, rather than swept under the rug in that oh-so-American-way for some people's comfort and perceived "unity."

Resolving this tension has always been one of the main tasks in our post-2016 election environment, an environment in which, instead, mainstream voices almost immediately told everyone opposed to Trump - especially the marginalized, the silenced, and the abused - to shut the fuck up, stop talking about identity politics/political correctness, and unite, and maybe just maybe some of those Trump supporters will join our side and we can win in 2020.

That narrative rested on the premise of "if they only knew Trump was bad, they wouldn't support him," which in the era of Fox News and Mitch McConnell has turned out to be faulty. We knew Trump was bad already. Everybody did. For a lot of people, that's precisely the point. And, telling the marginalized to remain silent about their pain, for the sake of perceived unity, mostly just adds cruelty on top of cruelty.

US Attacks Iran

Almost two year ago to the day, I wrote:

"If Trump remains in office for a full term, I think it is very likely that he will manufacture a war or crisis in order to bump up his approval ratings and pressure Congress to stop investigating his ties to Russia."

After having just been impeached, and with the 2020 presidential election looming, Trump appears to be doing just that with the recent US strikes that killed a top Iranian General.

Republicans in Congress will back Trump in going to war (or him just attacking states without declaring war), and he can also count on the support of many within the mainstream media to cajole the citizenry and Democrats into dropping this impeachment business and rallying behind "the President" similar to how they did with George W. Bush's immoral wars, for the sake of "patriotism," thus helping to ensure a second term in office.

On-the-cusp-of-war reminder that the people who have normalized Trump are terrible people who should be deeply ashamed and ostracized from civil society. pic.twitter.com/G9SOGzxEUu

— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) January 3, 2020

Donald Trump: Impeached

Yesterday, in a historic vote, the US House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, becoming the third president in US history to be impeached.

No one is above the law, Mr. President. #DefendOurDemocracy pic.twitter.com/59FND6JZWg

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) December 19, 2019

No Republican voted "yes" on either article of impeachment, which comes as no surprise given that the Republican Party has rotted to the core and will use any means necessary to grab and maintain political power, even if, now, that involves colluding with foreign states to win elections.

Nonetheless, despite what may happen in the Republican-controlled Senate, this impeachment will forever stain the presidency of a fundamentally bad, immoral, criminal, corrupt, reprehensible, and predatory man and this win, even if "just" symbolic, would have never been possible had Democrats not won back the House in the 2018 mid-term elections.

In addition, given the status of the Republican Party, we also have to remember that while defeating Trump, either through impeachment or the 2020 election, is vitally important for a plethora of reasons, the issues facing our nation do not begin or end with Trump.

Many factors in our media, social media, and political landscapes enabled his rise, and no matter what happens, we must continue addressing those factors.

This topic, of course, merits multiple posts if not an entire book, but these issues include (but are not limited to) realities like Fox News effectively serving as a propaganda arm for the Republican Party, the paywalls that exist for mainstream news sources but not for rightwing media sources, the mainstream media (even liberal, leftist, and progressive sites) being dominated by cishet white men (some of whom are, still, predators and abusers), the mainstream media treating Trump and politics like reality TV/entertainment for ratings and money, political commentators engaging in "both-sidesism" with respect to the two major parties, coddled and unacknowledged bigotry among the US populace, the fallout of Citizens United, the spread of propaganda on unregulated social media, voter suppression, gerrymandering, the unrepresentative electoral college, and, oh yeah, cheating in our fucking elections.

Republican Administration Seeking Federal Regulation of Speech on Social Media Sites

Via Politico:

"The White House is circulating drafts of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House official and two other people familiar with the matter — a month after President Donald Trump pledged to explore 'all regulatory and legislative solutions' on the issue."
...

'If the internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system,' the White House official said."

Part of the "justification" here is that many conservatives are aggrieved that non-governmental entities don't grant them wanton freedom to spread hateful lies, violent rhetoric, and conspiracy theories.

Social media sites' banning of righwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for instance, is an oft-cited example of "bias" against "the conservative viewpoint," which is one of the biggest indictments of 21st-century conservatism in the US.

What's also neat here is that so many formal and informal checks on the Executive Branch are sort of just accepting that Trump can do whatever he wants, especially regarding "culture war issues," by merely issuing an Executive Order.

There's also this relevant tidbit:

"Trump said Monday that he wants the government to work with social media 'to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike,' and the White House has invited internet and technology companies for a discussion on violent online extremism with senior administration officials Friday."

If you actually believe the goal of such "tools" would be to prevent rightwing-inspired domestic terrorism, rather than to persecute the people Trump identifies as his political enemies, I have a large wall to sell you that will be paid for by Mexico.

ICE Conducts Largest Single-State Raid in US History

Via CBS, yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted what one US Attorney called, "the largest single state immigration enforcement operation in our nation's history." From the article:

"By targeting workplaces across six different cities in southern Mississippi, Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents, with the help of the local district attorney's office, apprehended approximately 680 undocumented immigrants.

...

Asked about what would happen to workers who have children in the U.S., Albence reiterated the administration's standard guidance that arrests in the criminal justice system lead to family separations. He said affected children would be placed with other family members and in some instances, some parents could be released with ankle bracelets."

The children of the workers were left home alone due to the raid, and reports have stated that volunteers have been donating food and shelter to the children.

What the US is doing to these families and individuals is profoundly immoral and unjust.

Whatever differences people who oppose Trump have with one another, we have to come together to stop what our government is doing in our name. We must vote Republicans out of office, not just Trump/Pence but so many more.

I feel it in my bones that as heinous as this is, worse things are to come.

It is on us to figure out additional ways, large and small, in whatever ways we can to oppose this cruelty: donating, protesting, advocating, speaking out, voting, calling/writing legislators, and more. You may feel hopeless and small and insignificant, but never discount the ripples your actions may have in the future.

A Woman Will Win, Eventually, But Will the US Let Her?

I'm currently reading Rebecca Solnit's Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) and came across a statement about the 2016 election (emphasis added):

"The other story [besides that of white working class support for Donald Trump] was about white women, who voted 43 percent for Clinton to 53 percent for Trump. We were excoriated for voting for Trump, on the grounds that all women, but only women, should be feminists. That there are a  lot of women in the United States who are not feminists does not surprise me. To be a feminist, you have to believe in your equality and rights, which can make your life unpleasant and dangerous if you live in a family, a community, a church, a state that does not agree with you about this.

... So women were hated for not having gender loyalty. But here's the fun thing about being a woman: we were also hated for having gender loyalty. Women were accused of voting with their reproductive parts of they favored the main female candidate, though most men throughout American history have favored male candidates without being accused of voting with their penises."

The highlighted statement is both profound and obvious (that is, obvious now that Solnit has articulated it). When women supported Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, women were (infamously) relentlessly mocked, harassed, and abused for supporting her - with much of the subtextual narrative being that Bernie was the better candidate with superior humanity, ethics, and policy positions compared to her, and accordingly, Hillary was only winning because she was establishment, had rigged it, and because frumpy, daft wine moms were supporting her "only" because they wanted a female president.

Newsflash: Left misogyny is real.

And then, of course, that roughly half of white women who voted voted for Trump has led to a post-2016 moral panic about white women as a class, a panic that obfuscates relevant distinctions of class, religion, sexuality, age, marital status, education level, and other aspects of one's identity including - oh, I don't know - political party that might help us more accurately describe why so many white women are conservative other than the general consensus that all white women are garbage human beings.

On Twitter in particular, it's been notable how swiftly "white feminist" has come to be used with a certain lack of precision. Or, rather, more precisely how it has come to refer to any woman who is white who expresses an opinion about something, whereas the more specific original meaning was a critique of the centering of class-privileged, cishet white women within feminism. The former is not how the term is always used, to be clear, but it's used often enough and by those with relatively large platforms such that people have largely just accepted it even though if all white women are purported practitioners of white feminism without regard to what they are espousing, then people have actually failed to describe a meaningful category of feminism that exists in reality.

Men, interestingly enough, are never called "white feminists," even if they are white men who purport to be feminists. More on that tidbit, in a moment. Cool Girls, too, seem exempt, although I suspect deep down they know that can change at any moment.

From this imprecise usage, progressive, moderate, and leftist men are taking their cues accordingly and weaponizing this new definition of "white feminism," despite the fact that it's extremely doubtful that most men using the term are aware enough of their own misogynistic thinking to be able to use it in a constructive way.

Even many moderate-to-left men are MRA-adjacent and misogynistic. So, they perpetuate slightly-modified talking points and "jokes" about "white women," "wine moms," and feminists that MRAs have been blathering about for decades, including first and foremost the pop idea that it's okay to leverage misogynistic narratives against "white women" or "rich women" or "privileged women" or "famous women" because such women are incapable of experiencing gender-based oppression since "other women have things worse."

Some people talk about how the white women who voted for Trump (or sometimes, just simply, "all white women") are "patriarchy's most eager foot soldiers," and sure that's certainly true for many. Less discussed are the progressive, moderate, liberal, and leftist women who are, as well, as they carry water for their dirtbag male peers by targeting progressive feminists who don't support a particular white male politician who shall remain nameless (just kidding, it's Bernie Sanders, but don't worry there's also the women who defend dudes like Joe Biden, Bill Maher, and Al Franken from the hysterical, vapid, no-sense-of-humor feminists) so that most feminists with even moderate followings are left fending off harassment from abusers left, right, and center for not staying in line.

It's telling, too, to watch how highly men reward women with likes, retweets, and positive reinforcement for engaging in this discourse. As a general rule, women are always rewarded for complicity under white supremacist patriarchy, a factoid that might also be relevant to the Trump-voting women.

When progressive feminists aren't being abused, they are often being ignored, which is an indignity in and of itself to not be treated like an intellectual peer of even mediocre male commentators. Quite often, they are often being gaslit, having their ideas co-opted by the mainstream without attribution, having their ideas co-opted by men who get ticker tape parades for being such good allies, being harassed/abused/doxxed/slandered/mocked, accused of hating men, and/or accused of ruining More Important Things like atheism, particular religions, socialism, capitalism, democracy, labor movements, political movements, podcasts, media companies, TV shows, men's careers, comedy, sports, workplaces, the Internet, and everything, basically.

In light of everything, it's not a wonder that women would vote for Trump. It's a wonder that there are any feminists at all.

Women are perpetually pitted against each other while it seems to me that we (the royal we, I guess) have largely given up on expecting men to be better. White men, in particular, are to be empathized with, in this political moment. A white man who is a feminist will not be called a white feminist, because hey, at least he's trying, and there's also the reality that behind the collective demand for white male himpathy is the ever-present threat: Don't ask too much of white men or else it's four more years of Trump and terror!

Ultimately, who is seen as deserving of the nation's, the media's, the political class' collective empathy is about power. And those who have power often try to narrate reality in ways that gaslight those with less relative power. "Identity politics are a distraction." "Only class matters." "Misogyny and rape culture don't exist." "Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate who didn't experience misogyny and her loss was entirely her fault, and the fact that the US has never had a female president is just a weird, flukey coincidence with no relevance to the 2016 post-mortem."

The reality back on Earth, however, is that the United States was simply not designed by its founders to account for a scenario in which a woman and/or non-white person might run against and beat a white man in a presidential (or any other) election, so when you think about it, we're largely winging this.

It's no coincidence that bigoted white Americans began escalating the collapse of American democracy after the election of the first Black president. It seems that the collective white male "Real Patriot" ego could not withstand the (to them) trauma, and neither could their wives, many of whom live in a state of hate-fear toward their husbands such that they constantly have to prove their loyalty in demeaning, self-flagellating ways ("Trump can grab my pussy! I don't mind!") while taking solace in their presumed superiority over non-white, non-Christian, non-cishet, non-conservative people.

It's a miracle the Washington Monument itself didn't explode in a fury of racist, eroticized rage. And after 8 years of President Obama, add losing to a woman? Hoo-boy. We never had a chance in 2016, did we?

I think a lot about the rage-entitlement SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh emoted during his hearings when confronted with a possible barrier, a woman - a mere woman - to the status he felt entitled to as his birthright. I'll never forget the day I watched his spittle-flecked defense of himself. Multiply that toxic attitude by millions and channel that fury into the avatar of Donald Trump, and boom, it turns out that a lot of the people who support Trump actually are racist, misogynistic, bigoted deplorables, and the sooner we collectively admit that the better.

So, unfortunately, while I believe a woman can and will eventually beat a man in a presidential election (in both the popular vote and the rigged-for-the-white-patriarchal-status-quo electoral college), I am not quite as certain that the establishment powers in this nation - the media, the Executive branch, SCOTUS, Republican-controlled Congress, and/or popular opinion - would acknowledge her win as legitimate anytime soon.

I could easily imagine a variety of scenarios that would conspire to prevent her from taking office, including faithless electors, demands for a "do-over," cheating, political assassination, and/or Trump (or any other man in office at the time) just simply refusing to concede the loss after crying that the election was "rigged" against him, and then Congress, the Courts, the media, and the public just giving a collective shrug and backing him up.

Via "she rigged it" narratives perpetuated by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 election, both of whom seemed to seethe with rage at the prospect of losing to a woman, the political left and right now have a framework for denying a woman a legitimate win, as we saw that vast percentages of the US populace and media commentators would simply adopt, or not counter, these men's narrative that the woman was both insurmountably powerful to have rigged two entire national elections and yet also so monumentally stupid as to have lost in the end.

None of this means that we give up or only vote for white men from here on out. Like I said, we're winging this, as a nation, which doesn't get mentioned near enough as it should. And, a key step here is an accurate reckoning of the predicament in which we find ourselves. We've heard a lot of about the feminist backlash we're in, but to be fair, the default state of the US since its founding has been a feminist backlash and nevertheless, we've persisted.

The Threat of Populists in 2020

Via The New York Times, in an opinion piece by Jan-Werner Muller entitled, "Populists Don't Lost Elections":

"Politicians like Mr. Erdogan are distinguished by their claim that only they truly represent the people. They suggest they can lose at the polls only when elections have been rigged by liberal elites.

....Contrary to conventional wisdom, populists are not distinctive just because they criticize elites. There’s nothing wrong with critiquing the powerful; in fact, it’s often healthy in a democracy. What is specific to populists is the claim that they are the only ones who represent those they often call 'the real people.' The implication is not only that all other contenders for power are corrupt or lack legitimacy, but also that citizens who fail to support populists do not truly belong to the people at all."

Donald Trump has been telling us since at least 2015 that he won't accept the legitimacy of an election in which he is the loser. It seems rather obvious that he would continue to erode our political system in this way by refusing to accept a loss in 2020, as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has suggested.

Many smart people seem not to be taking this threat seriously, and hold a "it can't happen here" attitude. Donald Trump's multitudes of breaches of norms and laws have become slowly normalized, just as feared. And, it seems we're stuck with this guy for life, since Republicans who actually hold power are either happy that he's implementing their preferred rightwing agenda or, the ones who are "concerned," are nonetheless paralyzed with their dicks in their hands doing nothing meaningful to resist. (Whoops, #MuellerTime didn't save us!)

Yet, the US also has a left flank, we have to remember, with a destructive authoritarian populist streak of its own. This flank is currently represented by Bernie Sanders who cannot seem to fathom running a campaign in which he is not attacking The Establishment, and whose most die-hard supporters think he will magically implement the socialist revolution as president, as though checks and balances and a Republican-controlled Senate simply do not exist.

But perhaps worse, for now, is that if he loses in the Democratic primary it will be interesting to note the linguistic turns of phrase he, his supporters, and allied media are likely to adopt to suggest that he, yet again, only lost because the primary was rigged. For instance, rather than acknowledging that individual voters chose another candidate, the narrative will be that "the Democrats" (or, likely, the "Democratic Establishment") hand-picked someone else, thus erasing the millions of people who cast votes in the election - as though "the Democrats" are a disembodied, scheming hivemind.

In November 2017, a Rasmussen Poll showed that only 54% of Democratic voters believed Hillary Clinton won the 2016 primary against Bernie Sanders fairly.

If Bernie doesn't win the nomination for 2020, expect a similar narrative to be pushed and to gain traction. This narrative will only help bolster Trump's erosion of our electoral system. After all, aren't Democrats and Republicans just as bad about rigging elections?

The White Male Establishment Will Not Save Us

The New York Times front page on March 25, 2019:

"MUELLER FINDS NO TRUMP-RUSSIA CONSPIRACY" is blasted in all-caps bold across the front page.

The New York Times front page on April 30, 2019:

A somewhat less conspicuous title, "Mueller Objected to Barr's Description of Russia Investigation's Findings."

Now, if Mueller objected to Barr's description, what might that say about how Mueller might feel about the accuracy of the paper of record, among many others, amplifying Barr's framing of his report?

Also, if a person obstructs a full investigation into whether a crime occurred - which it appears Trump did - and that investigation subsequently isn't able to establish that the crime occurred, is it actually an exoneration?

Factually, it is not. But, these are post-fact times and so many in our media are failing us. 

Also, this part of the latter NYT story made me chuckle and then cry (emphasis added):

"A central issue in the simmering dispute is how the public’s understanding of the Mueller report has been shaped since the special counsel ended his investigation and delivered his 448-page report on March 22 to the attorney general, his boss and longtime friend."

Goddess help anyone who thought a pair of Republican buddy-bros were going to pop in like Batman and Robin and save us from the misogynist white nationalist nightmare running our country. It's Mueller Time, indeed.

I like to think of this political moment we're in as America's Hindenberg era, particularly as those on the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum act completely enamored with the notion that some elderly white establishment statesmen or another is going to save us. Mueller. Biden. Bernie.

What if, instead, we are the heroes we need. What if the conditions that led to Trump are varied and multi-faceted and cannot simply be solved by replacing one old white man with another?

We should be the streets right now demanding justice, as part of a mass movement. Why are we not?

Deep Thought of the Day

I know there's a lot going on right now, but sometimes I still think about whether the last time Dottie and Kit saw each other before the @AAGPBL Hall of Fame opening was that Peaches/Belles world series game where Dottie dropped the ball.

— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) April 18, 2019

Yes, I'm ignoring a really big fucking elephant in the room that is the Mueller Report, but I don't know what else to say, really, other than that I'm sick to death of "I have to get the first, hottest take even before I read the entire report" being the norm among professional journalists. Yesterday, NPR was having reporters fumble through the report live, on-air pointing out bits and pieces they thought were maybe, perhaps, possibly important?

We don't need a fucking hot take - don't we get enough of that from Twitter? - and certainly not from public radio that is supposed to be better than the rest. We need facts and accountability. We need an honest narrative of what happened.

Talk about stuff, or whatever. Like, at what point do we just quit our jobs, buy a VW bus, and cross-country road trip it before the Oh-pocalypse?

I welcome the Oh-pocalypse. https://t.co/m0FqVA79Hp

— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) April 19, 2019

Woo. I'm delirious.

If you're Hillary Clinton right now, how are you not just drinking vodka out of the cat dish all day long?

Dispatches From the Queer Resistance #8 - A Pete Buttigieg Special

Welp, openly-gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg has officially entered the 2020 presidential race.  Over at Shakesville, I share my thoughts about that, and other stuff, for another installment of Dispatches From the Queer Resistance.

Check it out!

Quiet, Revisited

NPR ran a story last week about the song "Quiet," which women performed at the 2017 Women's March and subsequently went viral.

Two years later and I still tear up whenever I hear the song and get chills thinking about my experience at the Women's March. During that first protest, I felt hopeful for the first time since the 2016 election about our capacity to resist and endure Trump's Republican rule, after weeks of profound sadness, anger, and fear.

During these past two years of actually living through it, I've wavered now and then. We continue to live in a moment of both feminist resurgence and deep backlash, as we've done throughout our nation's history. More than ever, I believe that justice will never be a "one and done" thing, but something each generation will have to continually strive for. And, just as important, every gain must be vigilantly protected and never taken for granted.

I desperately want a progressive woman to win the presidency in the United States. I don't know if it will happen in my lifetime, particularly as so many on the left remain just as resentful of "identity politics" and threatened by women's progress as those on the right. I may not see that anytime soon, even in my lifetime, perhaps.

At the same time, we've seen a record number of women in the House of Representatives, as a result of the 2018 mid-term elections. That is no small thing.

Two years ago, I wrote that I had hoped the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum could unite in their opposition to Trump. I think that has happened in some ways, but not in others. Perhaps this is too much of a generalization but a significant division seems to rest on whether our strategy should be defeating Trump vs. whether we need to defeat Trump and also usher in the socialist revolution at the same time.

The former assumes that it will be enough of a challenge to defeat Trump. The latter assumes that 2020 will be an easy election, so we may as well make the most of it. I have grave doubts about that logic, given the existential threat Trump poses to our democracy.

Fox News essentially acts as the Trump/Republican state media channel, brainwashing millions of rightwing Americans. They are already now hate-obsessed with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and have amped up the socialist fear-mongering now that the mainstream media has anointed Bernie Sanders as the leader of the Democratic Party. I also have serious doubts as to whether the 2020 election will be free and fair. And, even if a Democrat were to win, I question whether Trump would ever concede. Remember, in 2016, he had already primed Americans for drawn-out battle, if he lost, to contest what he was calling an election "rigged" for his opponent.

A lot of this danger seemed more obvious in 2017, as Trump opponents united in staunch opposition to him. Despite whatever internal conflicts we may have had with one another, I think many people were alarmed by the norms he had already violated. What changed? Have Americans become inured and numb to his transgressions? Does the US not look like what they think an authoritarian regime stereotypically looks like? Do people think it hasn't been as bad as they thought it would be? Have people given up on a female president out of fear, and are investing hope in a white male savior? Do they truly think the Democrats are worse, or just simply weak?

I don't know. I remain fearful, angry, hopeful, and inspired.


Related:
Friday Feeling: Political Music

The Third Reich, Trump, and The Gravedigger of American Democracy

From the October 25, 2018 New York Review of Books, Christopher Downing compares and contrasts the Trump Administration to the Third Reich:

"If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the 'steal'' of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

One can predict that henceforth no significant judicial appointments will be made when the presidency and the Senate are not controlled by the same party. McConnell and our dysfunctional and disrespected Congress have now ensured an increasingly dysfunctional and disrespected judiciary, and the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is in peril."

So much of the harm Trump has caused, especially on the US Supreme Court, was enabled by Mitch McConnell.

During the tail-end of 2018, I read William L. Shirer's multi-volume The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and what I'll add to Downing's observations is that a lot of really bad men in Hitler's administration have received props for "resistance" when they basically stood around with their dicks in their hands taking no action with meaningful consequences in the real world while millions of people were slaughtered.

The media narratives today, as they have been for our nation's entire history, continue to be shaped by shitty men. Today's incarnations are those who are Very Impressed by men like Mitt Romney who "resist" Trump in the most tepid ways imaginable given their power and status while the ordinary people who put way more on the line resisting are largely ignored or ridiculed as pussy-hat wine moms.

My other observation, also noted by Downing, is that Hitler had no single opposition leader who the country could rally around as an alternative. Conservatives were happy to rally behind him because their interests aligned with his enough, and when he went too far they couldn't, or chose not to, stop him. The center-to-left side of the political spectrum remained fragmented, with Communists continuing to act like moderates, rather than Nazis, were the real enemy and true barrier to progress. Far be it from me to suggest we coronate an opposition leader to Trump in 2020, but approximately 53 people running in the Democratic presidential primary doesn't seem like a great idea either.

My final observation at the moment is that Shirer talked a lot about the narrative that so many ordinary Germans tolerated, even welcomed, the Nazis because they were humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. That struck me as sort of like the mythical narrative that ordinary Americans voted for Trump because they are economically anxious. Maybe a lot of ordinary Germans, like Americans, were simply bad, immoral people.


Related: 
America: The Broken

This Is Fine

Greg Miller at The Washington Post reports:

"President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

...

The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.

As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference."

Somewhere in a parallel universe President Hillary Clinton is running the United States of America while not being a Russian asset.

On the Hashtag Resistance

From time to time, I think about the folks who deride, sneer at, and otherwise denigrate what they refer to as the hashtag resistance.

This happens on Twitter a lot. As folks across the political spectrum engage in this ridicule, a common bond is often, although not always, that its purveyors are straight white cisgender men.

With the Trump Administration disproportionately targeting those who are women, people of color, LGBTQ, disabled, immigrants, and/or poor, this ridicule is no coincidence, but part of a backlash to social justice activism and, especially, feminism. For one, many men, whether they will admit it or not, and regardless of political party, are likely following Trump's lead in the way that those on the center-to-left side of the political spectrum so often internalize Republican attacks and cruelty.

Is there a person who is on the left side of the political spectrum who would ever admit or acknowledge that they've been affected or swayed by Republican attacks and talking points?  Probably not, and yet.

Remember that rash of post-2016 election articles telling us to give up on identity politics since that's what led to Trump?

Let's also look at the way the right obsessively attacks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Many center-to-left folks love her, but over the years, we're going to see that change. Now, a change in popularity is bound to happen to any politician, but with a woman of color in the US, it's always going to be complicated and tainted by misogyny and racism. Rightwingers know this, and know that they can taint liberal-left politicians by simply putting attacks "out there" and letting them seep into the minds of receptive liberal-left audiences.

Also, millions of kids are growing up in conservative homes only learning the Fox News perspective that she is terrible. These kids will grow up to be voters one day, with some of them leaving behind their conservative roots and yet, how many of them will have echoes of the constant attacks against Ocasio-Cortez ringing through their heads?  There's just something about her, they'll say, they just can't fully trust or like.

We'll see.

And two, regarding the hashtag resistance, it's not straight white cisgender men who are leading it.  It's women, primarily. And, an eternal political question in the USA seems to be whether, if men are not at the center of a political movement, does it exist as all a serious phenomenon?

The men who are part of the hashtag resistance, meaning that they understand the reality that Democrats and Republicans have significant differences and they are not at all "the same," are also ridiculed, probably in no small part for their association with something associated with pink pussy hats and wine moms.

Consider a piece in bro-rag Vice, in which its author actually spent time curating "The Worst Anti-Trump #Resistance Pop Culture of 2018." His examples are things like Jim Carrey's art and JK Rowling's Twitter presence and oh who gives a fuck, why is this even a battle someone would want to fight right now? The big kicker, though, is his intro, in which he snarks:

"Donald Trump is a demonstrably corrupt and narcissistic con man. Two years into his presidency, this is not a novel thing to say. Actually, you would think that pointing out his loutish personal behaviour, destructive policies, or chaotic governing technique as if it were a new observation would be regarded with the same sort of derision reserved for people who still say Nickelback sucks. Yes, and your point is."

Yes yes. It's so interesting that many people - many women, including that crone Hillary Clinton - were warning about Trump more than two years ago and while so many media men stood around with their dicks in their hands, literally in some cases, they have now come to understand the danger and also, by the way, they don't think it's, like, even very interesting to point out anymore.In fact, it's so uninteresting to say nowadays, that anyone pointing it out ought to be mocked.

This sentiment has to be something pretty close to peak privilege these days.

Imagine thinking that, let alone putting it in writing, when Donald Trump's approval rating currently hovers around 42%, meaning literal millions of people actually do think he's doing an okay job and don't yet see or care that he's a con man. Contrary to this writer's dopey assertion, we don't actually have collective agreement in our nation, at all, about Donald Trump.

Trump fans approve of his cruelty. The indulge it, celebrate it, and engage in it themselves and, worse, they weaponize it via their votes and continued support of this man who is actively hostile toward marginalized people.

My point?

This Vice piece is part of a toxic online ecosystem that privileges the viral, marketable "hot take" over the accurate, but no longer new, statement of fact..

The center-to-left Cool Guy on the Internet mockers of the hashtag resistance never seem to care about what a gift their smackdowns of a woman-led movement are to the millions of rabid, bigoted Trump fans that exist in the US. They don't have to, because so much of politics is an abstraction to them, an ironic joke to make, or a quippy, one-liner re-tweet that he desperately hopes will help him build his Twitter brand.

Entertaining is the point, rather than informing.

Which, coincidentally, is also how the normalization of Trump has functioned.

TFW You Realize Trump Wants Bernie To Lead the Dems

Even though self-avowed socialists and lefitsts make important distinctions between themselves and, gasp!, liberals, you can count on conservatives not to.

In response to what it deems the "comeback of socialism," the White House Council on Economic Advisers has published a report warning of the dire harm that results when nations try to implement socialism (PDF).

Some of it is silly, and some of it is not (but that would be a much longer post to parse out).

What I primarily want to observe is the following.

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump promoted the narrative that Hillary Clinton rigged the election against both himself and Bernie Sanders, the man many credit for socialism's current popularity.

What a great evening we had. So interesting that Sanders beat Crooked Hillary. The dysfunctional system is totally rigged against him!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2016

Bernie himself, and his campaign leadership, had problems conceding that he lost fair and square to Clinton. Partly as a result of this lingering belief that Bernie was "robbed" of a win, Bernie (and many people's support of him) never really went away the way it's demanded that certain other, ahem, election losers go away forever. In fact, Bernie is largely treated as a 2016 winner, for purportedly pushing the Democrats leftward.

It is true that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, some high-profile Democratic politicians have publicly expressed more left-wing positions, such as supporting Medicare For All. Moving left is not necessarily a bad thing, but some of it seems to have been done in a reflexive, follow-the-white-man way in which a lot of people are taking cues from either Trump or Bernie. The mainstream media, too, has dutifully conceded that Bernie is the leader of the left and that everyone he hasn't properly anointed as a true leftist is therefore a "centrist" or "moderate."

Aside from the particularities of broad socialist policies (For instance, what happens to reproductive and trans healthcare rights when Republicans control the government that controls "healthcare for all"? And when the fuck are we going to talk about childcare?), I think many of the what I call "online socialists" simply have no clue how socialism, and particularly rightwing caricatures of it, plays in much of rural white America. I grew up in rural America in the 1980s, in a town that was about 99% working-class white people.

The teachers at my public schools told us horror stories about what happened to people in communist regimes. "Communist" was used often as a synonym for fascist, liberal, n-word, and/or Democrat. Yet, many of the men were in labor unions. And, the women had low-paying service sector jobs where unionization either couldn't happen or unions in the area didn't give a shit about them. Yeah, there was potential for .... political education, I guess. But I remember zero socialists (or Democrats or Republicans) going there and trying to organize or educate (or learn from) people.

The truth is, in the US, a lot of white guys across the political spectrum seem to fetishize violent political revolution. I don't mean that in a "both side-ism" way.  I think it's far, far more prominent and worse on the right in the US, mostly because the US has been rigged for the racist, anti-woman far right since its founding. Indeed, even as they adopt hammer/sickle avatars and so forth, the Internet left-wing "revolutionaries" seem not to realize that an actual violent leftwing revolution would probably be squelched in the United States very, very quickly, as both the military and police force are more conservative than the general population.

My larger point today is that if the "online left," and even academia to an extent, spent a tenth of the time doing real-world outreach and education to the ordinary people(tm) they think are latent socialists as they did "dunking on libs," "ironically" being misogynistic rape culture racists, and having esoteric circle-the-wagons intra-left debates, I wouldn't feel so hopeless at the moment. (Because, unfortunately, toxic cishet white men often hog the best gigs, the leadership positions, and the large platforms via which they spew their versions of "socialism").

All that said, I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong for Democrats to move leftward. But that the debates we're about to see regarding socialism are going to be very, very stupid in the age of Twitter and Fox News, so Bernie and the Democrats who have kowtowed to him better have a fucking plan if they're leading this shitshow.

Trans People Exist, Elections Matter, and Identity Politics Are Here To Stay

I have a new piece up at Shakesville today about the Trump Administration's ongoing attack on transgender and non-binary people.

Here's a snippet:

"Republicans know they can get away with attacking trans people partly because they know that many people on the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum, particularly cishet white men, will give them sufficient cover.

Remember the spate of articles right after the 2016 election, those high-and-mighty 'I told you so' taunts of marginalized people: You people had this coming for obsessing about identity politics!

I think about Mark Lilla's version of this genre often. His piece was called, 'The End of Identity Liberalism.'  Wishful thinking, there? It was also published at The New York Times. For sufficient balance to all those 'trans people are people' pieces, I suppose."

This national conversation must center the voices and perspectives of trans and non-binary individuals, and definitely not the voices of those whose prism for "identity politics" is that it's all a game.

Read the whole thing.

Gilead of Republicans Stand By Their Man, Kavanaugh

I wrote about yesterday's Kavanaugh hearing over at Shakesville:

Notice how so much of his testimony was him recounting his top-dog academic, cultural, and legal experiences, as though we all take it as a given that a man of such stature couldn't possibly have done wrong and thus might experience consequences for shitty, frat-bro behavior. Notice how he blubbered about his sports buds, and his female mentees, and the Anonymous Woman Friend who purportedly texted him that he was "a good man," as though any of it rendered an attempted rape of a woman factually impossible.

Read the whole thing!