This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

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Trigger warning: This article contains images of the KKK, Nazis, and lynchings.

If you’re not familiar with Bari Weiss’ “The Free Press” on Substack, it’s one of the top political newsletters and consistently pushes “both sides” tripe and anti-trans hate and disingenuous slop designed to either push people away from the Democratic Party or just away from voting altogether. All under the guise of “being reasonable” and “just asking questions.” It’s not pro-Republican but it sure is interesting how much it helps the right by undermining the left.

Take, for instance, this delightful little write up about the racist asshole who called a 5-yo autistic kid a racial slur and became a hero to the right.

What a load of fucking bullshit. OK, I have not read the article because it’s behind a paywall and I would burn my money in the street and piss on the ashes before I gave a single dollar to Bari fucking Weiss. But, frankly, I don’t need to read the article and neither do you. Everything you need to know about its stunning ignorance/dishonesty is right there on display.

First, it’s not “the far-right.” It’s “the right.” Matt Walsh might have been the far-right 25 years ago (he wasn’t but whatevs), but today? He’s about as mainstream as it gets. Russian asset Tim Pool and Red Scare’s Anna Khachiyan are not fringe figures on the right. They’re also quite mainstream.

Why lie about this? That’s easy: To deflect accountability away from the right and the GOP. That is, after all, the purpose of Weiss’ newsletter. If you’re not sure if that’s true, look no further than the blurb that accompanies the link: “The excesses of the woke era created a backlash so intense that the right now celebrates racism, writes River Page.”

I don’t know who River Page is. I have to imagine he1 is a clone who was only hatched last week in a lab and was raised on a diet of David Brooks columns. He could be a moron. He could just be woefully ignorant (and also a moron). Most likely, he’s a fucking liar paid by fucking liars to fucking lie.

The idea that right JUST NOW has started to celebrate racism is so breathtakingly ahistorical it’s hard to even know where to begin.

Here’s the 1988 Willie Horton ad that was so breathtakingly racist, it’s become legendary in American politics.

Was America “woke” yet in 1988? Bish, please. We were still in the throes of Reaganism and “greed is good” and the legacy press laughing at gay men dying from AIDS (yeah, that fucking happened2). We hadn’t even gotten to political correctness yet, the precursor to “woke.” And yet, the right sure did seem to love itself some racism.

But hey, I know what Mr. Page would say. This is subtle racism! (Subtle like a brink through a window) They weren’t openly celebrating it out loud! Cool story. Then let’s go back a few more years to…say…the 1970s.

This is Boston in 1975. This is in my lifetime. Racist white people were really REALLY mad that Black kids were allowed to go to school with their precious fragile white babies. And they rioted. More than once. The National Guard had to be called in.

Sure looks like the right celebrating racism, yeah?

No? That’s just angry white people lashing out? Not celebrating racism?

Cool. Then let’s go back a few more years and several hundred miles south as whites rampaged across the southern states, murdering thousands of Black people and having fun while doing it:

Phillip Dray, a historian, stated: "Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers. Men brought their wives and children to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic." ² Bray did not exaggerate. At the end of the 19th century, Henry Smith, a mentally challenged 17-year-old black male, was accused of killing a white girl. Before a cheering crowd of hundreds, Smith was made to sit on a "parade float" drawn by four white horses. The float circled numerous times before the excited crowd tortured, then burned Smith alive. ³ After the lynching the crowd celebrated and collected body parts as souvenirs.

For almost a century, racist white people on the right, one can safely assume they were not liberals, took their families to watch Black men be slowly tortured to death.

They posed and took pictures. They sold postcards:

These were people who were so delighted in their racism and violence, they needed mementos to remind them of how much FUN they had had. Did River Page not know this part of American history? Seems like a bit of an oversight.

Oh, what about when the KKK marched on Washington in 1926?

That was about 30,000 openly proud racists. Notice their faces are not concealed? They had no fear of being identified because there would be no repercussions for them. At its height in the 20s, the KKK had a membership between 3 and 8 million. In 1926, the population of the United States was just 117 million, meaning upwards of almost 7% of the entire country could have been openly celebrating its racism.

Again, we can assume no liberals were hanging with the KKK.

Do not even fucking start with the “Democrats were the party of the KKK!” thing. I will eat you alive and shit you out screaming if we have THAT conversation. It’s never a good idea to debate history with people smarter than you.

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But you know what? Let’s go North for a bit and see how they were doing in New York City.

Oh, right. 30,000 Nazis celebrated their racism at Madison Square Garden. In 1939.

Sure was an awful lot of racist white people celebrating their racism long before woke or political correctness or even the Civil Rights movement existed.

So how is it that the left always gets the blame for racist white assholes being racist white assholes? Why is it every single time a group asks for their rights, they get blamed for “the backlash” if this is how the right has always been?

Now, here’s an important part of the story: When you call the white racist assholes out for being white racist assholes, they clutch their pearls and fall to the ground crying big sobby tear of outrage. How DARE you accuse them of the thing they’re doing?! Don’t you know that will only make them angrier and more likely to do the thing they say they’re being forced to do?! This is YOUR FAULT!

It’s always been the same story. White tears. White rage. White victimization. Nothing is ever their fault. Someone is always forcing them to be racist pieces of shit. No one has less agency than a white racist. If only everyone would just leave them alone, they would stop destroying everything and hating everyone. The violence and calls for genocide would stop if only things would just go back to “the way they used to be.”

Boo. Fucking. Hoo.

No one suffers like the racist white man. Jesus on his cross wouldn’t understand their pain.

To help sell this lie, we have professional fucks like The Free Press and River Page whitewashing history. The most important thing in articles like this is to absolve the right of all responsibility and recast them as innocent victims of lefty overreach and meanness.

We make them feel inferior, so they lash out. We make them scared, so they lash out. We make them angry, so they lash out. Not a drop of agency. Not a scintilla of responsibility for what they do. The Master Race is somehow the flotsam and jetsam of history while also claiming to be the prime movers of all that has come before.

Nice work if you can get it.

In reality, the point of all the victimization is to justify the hate. When you’re the victim, you get to portray your “struggles” as heroic and, as I’ve said many times before, when you’re the “hero” of the story, you can do anything. That’s the myth Hollywood has been selling us our entire lives. The ends justify the means. The hero is morally clean, no matter what immoral things he does. The right has twisted this into a clarion call to fascism and “The Free Press” is there to help.

By never EVER having to take one iota of responsibility for their actions and by always blaming the left, the right can do literally anything at all. There are no lines they cannot cross. There are no crimes they cannot commit. There no atrocities they cannot enact. It’s not their fault, you see.

They were FORCED to end democracy. The libs made them do it.
They were FORCED to embrace white nationalism. The woke mind virus made them do it.
They were FORCED to open concentration camps. The Jewish Great Replacement conspiracy made them do it.
Genocide? Man, they feel REALLY bad about it but what choice did they have?! They were FORCED to kill all those vermin and subhumans because they wouldn’t stop victimizing white people!

This crap is going to go until we, as a country, finally get tired of the bullshit and stop coddling racist white men. When we start holding them accountable for their actions, really holding them accountable, they’ll have to grow the fuck up. Then maybe, just MAYBE, they’ll act like adults instead of spoiled little brats throwing a temper tantrum every time someone tells them, “No.”

We can start by telling “The Free Press” and River Page to shut the fuck up and stop blaming the left for the racism and hate of the right. They know they’re lying and I, for one, am fucking sick of them protecting racist white assholes. Go work at the New York Fucking Times if you want to lick the boots of fascists. Stop pretending to be independent journalists, you worthless hacks.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 178 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

I had just lain down for a nap yesterday and closed my eyes and begun to drift off into sleep, when I was seized by the thought that we have no fucking idea what Donald Trump is up to, and it is very probable that neither does he. My eyes opened and I reached into my bedside drawer and pulled out my notebook and wrote down this note: “What is his strategy of pursuing so many insane and seemingly impossible goals that keep getting thwarted one after the other?”

I put the notebook aside and took my nap. When I awoke and read my note, it occurred to me that I had spent the last 100-plus days down in the weeds of Trump’s rampage through federal government departments and programs without standing back and asking that very question: what the fuck is going on? What is his plan? Does he even have a plan? Does the whole thing simply amount to a gigantic, manic tantrum brought on by his having lost the 2020 election, and the conviction of his right-wing base that over the last 50 years, they have effectively speaking been cut out of the life of this nation?

I’m writing this column as an explication of what happened yesterday before my nap because I think a lot of people have had the same questions and are struggling through the same process of having been confused by what has happened over the last hundred days. I am coming to a realization that if Trump’s dream for a second term has been a grand design, then it’s a disaster. If thinking things through isn’t his strong suit, and neither is improvisation, he’s in real trouble, because he’s got nothing left.

The numbers that I reported on Tuesday in Salon from former Common Cause counsel Fred Wertheimer – that there have 222 legal challenges to Trump’s rampage that have resulted in at least 123 rulings by judges that have stymied him with temporary restraining orders and injunctions, a few of which have gone all the way to the Supreme Court – gives you something of an inkling that things have not been going the way that Trump and his people hoped and planned. Maybe they simply hoped and had no plan and thought they could bull their way through.

There was a story today about what happened to Department of Justice lawyers in the courtroom of Judge James Boasberg, who is still trying to get to the bottom of what the Department of Homeland Security did after he ordered them to stop the flights taking alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador several weeks ago. One story said the DOJ lawyer was “rattled” when Boasberg asked him whether his client, Donald Trump, was “telling the truth” about the related case of Abrego Garcia, who was “mistakenly” deported along with the alleged gang members to the supermax prison in El Salvador. It’s never a good sign when you are an attorney representing a defendant in a federal courtroom, and the judge in the case questions the veracity of your client and the entire case you are attempting to make to the judge.

This is just one example of how things have not been going well for Donald Trump. He has been stopped or at least temporarily thwarted in his efforts to fire federal workers and shut down entire departments of the federal government. He has run into unified resistance from universities he has been trying to push around by threatening to cancel their federal funding. In the case of Trump’s bullying major law firms, after a few initial successes to get them to agree to do pro bono work for his administration, other law firms are standing firm against his threats and he is losing in a court case filed by one firm that is challenging his threats as unconstitutionally imposing on their rights to free trade and freedom of speech. Now that some law firms are starting to stand up to him, the original firms that agreed to provide millions of dollars worth of free work are explaining how hollow the agreements really are – they aren’t even written down in contract form, and in nearly all cases, the firms themselves get to decide what pro bono work they do and have the right to refuse work they don’t agree with.

Josh Marshall, the excellent editor of Talking Points Memo, wrote a column on April 29 with the title, “Trump’s already lost.” He explains that his assessment of Trump’s first hundred days is “more a personal interpretation, my perception of events,” and holds that things for Trump are not going to get better, and are likely to “get worse, and on some fronts they’ll get much worse.” He goes on to describe the haphazard way Elon Musk and his DOGE cowboys haven’t accomplished even a fraction of what they said they would, and then he points out how Trump’s tariff program is failing, how he’s had to scale back tariffs imposed earlier, and the spectacularly disastrous effect the tariffs are beginning to have not just on our economy, but the world’s.

This week, Marshall has begun to take a hard look at the campaign Trump launched against this country’s long history as the world’s leader in medical research. “Why does the Trump administration have it in for biomedical/ disease research?” he quite plainly asks. He concludes that it has a lot to do with Trump having a desire to “dominate and control the universities and eliminate them as what people in his world see as a seedbed for liberal ideologies.” Because so much of the federal money that goes to universities has to do with research on disease and its cures, that’s where the damage ends up being done.

But take a moment to stand back and look at that. Other than the apparent obsession to hit “the libs” where they are most vulnerable and from which they are most unable to fight back – their research laboratories and the pointy-headed nerds who occupy them – what sense does Trump’s assault on medical research and disease cures make?

Absolutely none.

The same could be said for the cuts to federal departments and programs that will end up causing the closure of dozens if not hundreds of rural hospitals and thus damage the health care of Trump’s base voters primarily in the South and in the Heartland. Why would he do that?

Well, there is the obvious answer that he doesn’t give a shit about his base and never has. But it’s not just his MAGA base that will be hurt if the cuts to medical research end up going through. There are doubtlessly Republican members of Congress and Republican appointees to jobs in the Trump administration, not to mention all the Republican office holders in states around the country, who have members of their immediate and extended families suffering from the kinds of diseases that are being studied at universities: diabetes, cancer, heart disease, even lesser chronic diseases like skin conditions and persistent bronchitis and infectious scourges such as sepsis and various auto-immune diseases such as Lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. What is going to happen when some of those Republican family members are no longer enrolled in special studies of experimental drugs and treatments associated with medical research?

Do you see how little thought has gone into so much of what Trump is attempting to do with his 143 executive orders and his appointments of obvious incompetents and loons like RFK Jr. to run departments like Health and Human Services? Washington Post columnist Dana Millbank wrote a column centered on the disastrous testimony of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins before a Senate committee on Tuesday during which he could not answer question after question put to him by senators from both parties. “Could incompetence save the Republic” Millbank’s column’s title asked.

The answer increasingly appears to be “yes.” One video clip that made the rounds this week was of Trump’s jack-of-all-trades-major-dumbo Stephen Miller addressing reporters in the White House press room. He sounded like a babbling fool, and not just in a typical Trump appointee fashion. He was worse, way worse, and everything he said reflected the fact that so little thought was given by Miller and those like him before they started doing stuff that has inevitably come back to bite them in the ass in courtrooms, like the deportations to the torture prison in El Salvador. They haven’t been forced to reverse themselves yet, but it’s coming. Their plan to use Guantanamo to hold deportees was a complete failure. NBC News reported yesterday that “A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order preventing migrants from being sent to Libya or any other third country after immigration attorneys filed an emergency motion Wednesday.” The fingerprints of Stephen Miller, drooling Eichmann of the Trump administration, are all over that one.

I can’t say that I have completely answered my own pre-nap question about why Trump is doing so much out-of-control shit in such an incredibly haphazard way. I’m beginning to think that we got fooled by the whole Project 2025 thing into thinking something like, oh-oh, this time they really have a plan. Well, to the extent that they did, their plan was half-assed, and their attempt to riff their way through court appearances and explanations – see also: bumbling VA Secretary with no clue what he’s doing or why – are backfiring spectacularly.

This is not to say that it’s time to drop our guard or sit back and relax and just watch them fuck up by the numbers. No, they need to be opposed at every turn, in the streets, on the op ed pages, in the courts, and to the extent Democrats can, as they did with the alleged VA Secretary on Tuesday, in the Congress.

But I’m beginning to agree with Josh Marshall: the fog of war is lifting, and Trump doesn’t have many victories to show on the battlefield of his first hundred days. He is announcing a tariff “deal” with Great Britain that isn’t a deal at all. He’s got one of his lackies in Switzerland readying the inevitable collapse of his tariffs on China that he will lamely try to spin as a “victory” because China “treated us very unfairly” and now they don’t. Or some horseshit to that effect. He’s not getting the Ukraine “deal” from Putin he thought he would. And a recession is tiptoeing its way on little cat feet that anyone who walks into a Walmart will be able to experience for themselves by the fall.

There is at least a chance that this will not turn out to be the summer of our discontent, but Trump’s.

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I watched Attenborough’s latest blockbuster at the cinema last night with my family, and thought I’d collect some thoughts here. First off, it’s wonderfully put together. That’s hardly news with Attenborough. Of course, it’s beautifully shot, and captures marine animals doing things we haven’t seen them do before. Much of it is really entrancing.

It’s also quite a hard-hitting film. It focuses, laser-eyed, on the carnage industrial fishing is wreaking in the ocean. The middle section of the film, which follows the beam of a bottom trawler as it trashes – just demolishes! – everything on the seabed is genuinely traumatic to watch. There was an eerie silence in our cinema, which contained quite a few kids. Even though I knew intellectually what bottom trawling looked like, and the damage it does, I honestly don’t think I will ever forget those images. It is hard to imagine a more compelling visual demonstration of the harm we are doing to the planet.

I wouldn’t say I learned much from the film, but then I am a bit of an ocean conservation geek. I sincerely hope that as many people see the film as possible. I would love it to spark a kind of Rainbow Warrior moment, perhaps with regards to bottom trawling (scallop dredging, which the film also shows, is smaller in scale but hardly less destructive).

I was pleased to see explicit discussion of the colonial (fishing) practices that are still maiming the ocean, and impoverishing many coastal communities. There was also a genuine effort to learn from indigenous and non-Western perspectives, in addition to the usual North Atlantic voices.

My only reservations circle around the stories that the film does not tell.

First off, the film does not ‘do’ capitalism. It notes that High Seas fishing is hugely destructive, and hugely subsidised. There is a story to tell here, of the kind Guy Standing has told, about rentier capitalism, and the capture of policy-making by an unrepresentative economic elite. But the film does not really ‘do’ politics either – it fits comfortably with the narrative that environmental destruction is a problem we can ‘science the hell out of,’ rather than one that will require concerted political responses. (It would have been nice, in the closing sections where the UN’s goal of protecting 30 percent of the ocean (and land) by 2030 is discussed, to note that all of the UN’s previous biodiversity targets have been missed, and that this is one is very likely to be missed too, by quite some distance. The current conservation model is just not working).

Second, the approach to climate change is limited. In its more boosterish moments, the film is keen to highlight to contribution that rebounding ecosystems could make to drawing down carbon. This is an important message. Likewise, it notes the terrible contribution bottom trawling makes to the climate, by stirring up huge amounts of carbon currently contained on the seabed (by some reckonings, the climate impact of bottom trawling is as big as that of global aviation – another reason it should be banned).

But, given its laser-eyed focus on industrial fishing, the film rather gives the impression that if we could roll back industrial fishing, the ocean would rebound. For instance, the discussion of coral reefs suggests that, once industrial fishing is reduced, reef fish will come back and nibble away the algae that is enveloping many coral reefs. But the biggest threat to coral reefs is of course climate change, even if industrial fishing makes things (much) worse. If we do not cut our emissions radically and quickly, the vast majority of the tropical reefs will be dead, and soon. (For that matter, aside from a couple of obligatory gestures towards plastic, the film generally steered clear of discussing other forms of pollution, including nitrogen pollution). If this leaves viewers with impression that ending – or even seriously curtailing – industrial fishing would allow the ocean to recover, then that would be a misleading impression. The ocean faces many more threats, each of which needs concerted attention.

So: a wonderful film when it comes to alerting us to (some of) the problems, and (some of) the solutions, which does a terrific job of visually encapsulating (some of) the harms we are doing to the ocean’s ecosystems. But the next job is to try and conjure up a lively and contestatory politics of the ocean, which challenges business as usual and offers a sense of what other futures are open to us. As my comrades at Ocean Rebellion will be arguing at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice next month, “Another Ocean is Possible.” We need to know that, and we also need to recognise that getting there will involve not just more science, and more entrancing visuals, but more politics, more contestation, and more holding power to account.

Motherhood, it is often said, is the hardest job in the world. I’m not sure that’s true, but I do think parenting in the captivity of an unforgiving society may be one of the most impossible jobs in the world. You’ve heard the usual litany of feminist complaints about mothering in America, from our total lack of mandatory paid leave to our lack of affordable childcare to our lack of affordable housing to our lack of a national healthcare system to our lack of a universal ability to even choose or decline motherhood in the first place. It’s mothers who largely figure out how to close all of these gaps: How to drag themselves back to work while C-section incisions are still healing; how to stretch a paycheck to cover rent; how to cobble together family and neighbors, or sacrifice their own work lives and life-long financial wellbeing, for never-enough childcare.

But it’s not just these obvious things that mothers need. Mothers, perhaps more than anything else, want to keep their children safe and healthy. But in the US, health and safety have been made into individual pursuits shaped by individual circumstance: What you choose to eat, whether you choose to exercise, whether you can afford decent health insurance, whether you an afford to live in the kind of community that has clean and accessible public parks.

But mothers can’t protect their children from the air around them. They can’t entirely protect their children from water contaminated by pollutants, from grass poisoned by pesticides, from potentially toxic chemicals in so much of what we touch — including baby toys and food packaging. They can’t individual-safety their way out of collective problems

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It’s almost Mother’s Day, and this week I’m thinking about maternal worry: How we put the weight of worry on women’s shoulders, expecting mothers to optimize the well-being of their children when, really, much of what threatens children’s health and wellbeing can’t be solved by any mother, or any person, alone. If we want to keep babies and children safe, then we need societies that collectively take on this maternal worry. We need societies that decide that (credit to Mr. Baldwin) the children are always ours, and the children are all of ours — a collective responsibility.

Every mother I know worries endlessly about the safety of her children, beginning before they are even born. What’s safe to eat during pregnancy? Can I have a glass of wine? Can I go skiing? How much coffee is ok? Which prenatal vitamin is best? Is my infant getting enough to eat? Is breast best or is fed best? Is my baby breathing? How do I bathe a fragile baby-bird newborn? How do I hold a squiggly toddler in a bathtub? Is she sleeping on her back? Is he hitting his milestones? Am I spending enough time with her? Are my sockets covered? Is the yard fenced? Can he choke on that? Can I let her out of my sight on the playground for five seconds? Is this too much screen time? Is he getting enough enrichment for a developing brain? Am I being too much of a helicopter parent? Is she able to play independently? Is he securely attached? (And I won’t even get into the terror of the adolescent and teenage years).

As I sit and write this on Thursday morning Hong Kong time, the world’s five most polluted cities — cities where the air quality is at this moment so bad it’s unsafe to be outside — are Delhi, Lahore, Beijing, Kolkata, and Dhaka. These five cities are home to nearly 90 million people, and while I can’t find exact numbers on how many of those people are children, it is safe to say that at this exact moment, tens of millions of children are living in places where they cannot safely breathe the air. More affluent families can live in larger homes with sealed windows and air purifiers. But there is not a single mother in any of these cities — and in any city, town, or community around the world — who can protect her child from the air everyone breathes.

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It’s not just moms in Delhi who need to worry. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population now lives in areas where the air quality does not meet World Health Organization standards for safety — including one-third of all Americans. Women who breathe polluted air while pregnant, and the fetuses they carry, “are at increased risk of adverse health outcomes such as maternal hypertensive disorders, postpartum depression, placental abruption, low birth weight, preterm birth, infant mortality, and adverse lung and respiratory effects,” according to one recent scientific publication on the impacts of pollution on pregnancy. Babies exposed to polluted air in utero have worse lung function. They are more likely to be born underweight. They have elevated risks of autism, behavior problems, and cognitive difficulties including low IQ. Babies and children growing up breathing polluted air have permanently lower lung function, and they cannot regain it in adulthood. Our air is bad largely because of fossil fuels: The things we burn that then wind up in the air and poison billions.

There is no way to fully protect yourself or your child from air pollution. For that, we need government action. I live in a city that has pretty decent air quality in the context of a pretty polluted region, but there have been days when I’ve been out walking or hiking and I realize that my lungs and eyes physically hurt, or I see the sky turn green-gray or even orange with pollution, and I glow with rage. Some 87 million people live in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, and it is not always safe for us to breathe. This is far from unique to Hong Kong. If you live in Bakersfield, California, or south Los Angeles, or the west and south sides of Chicago, or a host of other US cities, your average day is spent breathing air that is many times more polluted than the WHO says is safe. And that is entirely because of political choices. Big corporations too, of course — but mostly politicians, who could rein in big polluters if they chose to.

Under Donald Trump, the official mantra may be “drill baby drill,” but the reality has also been “burn baby burn” — the lungs and lifespans of actual babies be damned. In the Atlantic, Zoë Schlanger writes that “So far, the EPA has announced that it will pursue a suite of rollbacks of environmental rules, among them a Joe Biden–era update to standards for particulate matter that were meant to be fully in force by 2032 and that the Biden EPA projected would, in that year alone, prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma, reaping up to $46 billion in health benefits. It also plans to reassess a rule limiting the amount of airborne mercury and arsenic that power plants can release.” The Trump administration just suspended air quality monitoring at US national parks. They are taking aim at the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Air pollution is particular pernicious because we can’t always see it, and it’s hard to quantify individual cause and effect. When your community floods because of rising sea levels or heatwave-fueled wild fires burn down your house, the effects of climate change are obvious. But if you have a heart attack at 55, how much of that do you really attribute to polluted air, versus diet, lifestyle, and genetics? If a loved one’s Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimers progresses quickly, how much of that is bad luck and how much of it is bad air? How do you know if you’re on the path to dying a few years earlier than you would have if your environment had been cleaner? If your child is born small or struggles intellectually, what was encoded in their DNA, what were your actions, and what was your environment? Air is (usually) invisible. And the relationship between our air and our individual health outcomes is nearly as hard to see.

It’s also impossible to avoid. I do a lot of things to protect my health. I exercise every day. I drink a lot of water. I eat lots of vegetables, fruits, and lean proteins, and keep sugar and processed foods to a minimum. I go to the doctor when I’m sick, I get bloodwork done, I brush my teeth, I try to get enough sleep, I have air purifiers in every room of my home.

But I can’t not breathe.

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In her book Matrescence, journalist Lucy Jones writes:

“Pregnant women, or those who want to become pregnant, must protect themselves from air pollution exposure not only for their own health but also for the health of their foetuses,” says Liqiang Zhang at Beijing Normal University, who found a link between exposure to air pollution and miscarriage. But how? By not going outside? I avoided heavily trafficked roads when I could but there was nothing, really, I could do to stop the baby being born pre-polluted. My carbon monoxide levels were read by a midwife via a pump – in case I was lying about not being a smoker, I presume – and were slightly higher than normal because I lived near a railway station. I walked to places through the local park, avoiding the locus of trains. But it stuck in the craw. I saw no sign of genuine urgency or action from governments to reduce air pollution and protect future generations at the most vulnerable period of their lives. I, though, had to avoid soft cheese and too much tea.

I think of this passage often, because it really does illustrate the screwy way we remove the burdens of worry and safety from our political leaders and society more broadly, and place them on women and particularly on mothers, expecting women to pretty radically reshape their lives to keep a fetus healthy and then a baby safe (and, it is worth noting here, criminalizing some who make decisions that prosecutors and politicians say imperil their fetuses). Many women are still told to cut out coffee, or do so out of an abundance of caution, even though the miscarriage risk from drinking as many as four cups of coffee a day seems to be lower than the miscarriage risk of high air pollution exposure. A visibly pregnant woman ordering a triple americano at Starbucks may get a few raised eyebrows, and god forbid a visibly pregnant woman sip a glass of wine in public — the shaming is real. But when was the last time you saw a Republican politician or a fossil fuel executive or a Trump voter shamed for the miscarriages and infant and child deaths their decisions are causing? (And I won’t even ask if you’ve ever seen the great fetus advocates of the “pro-life” movement try to make sure that fetuses don’t get their developing lungs polluted or their early lives lost, because we all know the answer).

It’s not just air pollution. It’s pesticides in places like public parks where children play, which were just banned in New York City a few years ago, and are still used in cities across America. It’s microplastics, the impacts of which we are just beginning to understand, but that we know are particularly harmful to fetuses and infants — exposure in utero can cause illness in adulthood. And microplastics are in everything from baby bottles (and can leach out even more from high-heat sterilization or when warm milk or formula is put into them) to baby toys to baby food containers (and grown-up food containers) to baby lotions. Parents can go to great lengths to avoid plastic exposure, and many do — but it’s nearly impossible to avoid entirely, unless you’re a homesteader who has little contact with the outside world.

You can start to see why so many health-obsessed subcultures — wellness women, crunchy-granola types, trad wives, and so on — are dominated by women, and why so many women who make up these subcultures are mothers. It can be radicalizing to be handed the responsibility of protecting a tiny being, one who did not ask to come into this world and is only here because you made it so. And it is perhaps impossible to accept that you and you alone cannot protect her from pollution in the air she breathes and the water she drinks, or toxins in the grass she touches and the toys, food, and milk she puts in her mouth. That your country won’t take basic steps to protect her — that you know many things the government told you were “safe” for children were found out to be, whoops, not — isn’t just enraging, it foments deep distrust. Who else is there but you? And, well, the internet, and what feels like a small minority of other people who are similarly concerned (this is also, I imagine, crazy-making for mothers who are concerned about, or even know about, these risks: All these hazards around and we’re just setting our kids on pesticide grass and handing them plastic toys to shove in their mouths?). In a culture as individualistic as ours and as wholly negligent when it comes to human health, it is not a long road from these concerns to the land of vaccine conspiracies and fluoride fears and RFK Jr.

These health conspiracies come in part from a very correct sense that the government really is leaving us on our own when it comes to our environment and our wellbeing. They are fueled not by stupid women, but by worried women. (And, well, a few stupid women, because women are people who like all people are sometimes stupid and sometimes believe stupid things).

I could have written a version of this newsletter about any number of environmental concerns, and chose air pollution mostly because it’s the one most impacting my own personal day-to-day right now (and plastics, my god, everything is wrapped in plastic down to apples at the grocery store and I’m moderately losing my mind over it). But it’s far from the only one.

On Mother’s Day — and every day — mothers deserve more than flowers, brunch, and praise. Mothers deserve a society that takes care of all of its members, not one that demands women protect their young and then places those young at impossible, unavoidable risk — or, I should say, risk that can only be truly avoided with government action.

Mothers have lifted cars, run into burning buildings, and literally fought polar bears to save their children. But no amount of maternal strength can pluck out invisible pollutants and toxins from the air, water, grass, food, and so much of what we touch. Do you want to honor mothers? Do you care about the lives of fetuses, infants, and children (and, uh, all of the rest of us)? Take some of the worry off of mothers’ shoulders by acting and voting as if the children were, in fact, always ours and all of ours.

xx Jill

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Prior to President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order that racially integrated the nation’s armed services, one of the major arguments for keeping the military segregated was the idea that Black soldiers should not be allowed to sleep next to or use the same bathroom facilities as white soldiers. There were other arguments as well. One was that integration would somehow damage “unit cohesion, esprit de corps, and discipline” necessary for a fighting force, and that would negatively affect the combat readiness of the military. Another was the false and racist allegation, expressed in these exact words, that “Blacks can’t fight.”

Listen to this claptrap from Trump’s January 27 executive order banning transgender people from service in our military:

“The Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion.”

“A gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”

“Absent extraordinary operational necessity, the Armed Forces shall neither allow males to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for females, nor allow females to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for males.”

They can’t even come up with new words with which to express their prejudice. Substitute “Black” or “Negro” or “African American” for “gender identity” or “gender ideology” or “male” and “female” in the above statement, and what do you get? Flat out bigotry unadorned by anything even pretending to reason, because prejudice has no rationality.

The Supreme Court yesterday ruled in an order of less than a page that the Trump administration can continue to remove transgender members of the military from their service to this country and ban the service of transgender Americans who volunteer to serve while lawsuits seeking to overturn Trump’s executive order continue to make their way through the courts. This means that in the future, even if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of service by people who are transgender, those who have been discharged would have to reapply for admission to their previous ranks and positions in the military. They would have lost the intervening time they would have served, been denied time in service leading to retirement benefits, and in cases where service members reside in military housing, they would be ordered to vacate the places where they live.

How the Supreme Court could not read the plain language of Trump’s pathetic excuse for an executive order and see the prejudice dripping from its every syllable is yet another disgrace with which this country must contend. What about patriotism? Are we to read Trump’s executive order and the Supreme Court’s upholding of it, even if it turns out to be only temporary, as denying to people who are transgender the right to be patriotic and act upon it by serving their country in uniform?

Trump’s other executive order that there are “only two genders, male and female” denies the right of Americans to live openly as who they are. The order smacks of the time of segregation, when Black people were denied the right to live full lives, including in many states, the right to marry people of a different race from their own.

They always start somewhere. Today, it is transgender Americans. And tomorrow? Are we to return to a time of Americans being compelled to live half-lives? If transgender people can be denied the right to serve openly in the military, how long until they will be denied the right to be hired for a job in civilian life because of their gender identity? Will banks be allowed to “red-line” loans to transgender people, or even deny them bank accounts and credit cards because they are transgender?

Will transgender people be denied drivers’ licenses unless they reflect the name and gender on their birth certificates? What about the right to vote? Will registering to vote be denied to people who have changed their names and the sex on their drivers’ licenses?

What Trump’s transgender executive orders do is to subtract a group of people from citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. Are we to have a future which mirrors our past, when Black people, because of the color of their skin, did not have the equal protection of our laws, including the right to vote, the right to attend schools of their choice, the right to employment, the right to eat at a restaurant or to check into a hotel or motel for the night? Will these rights be stripped from people because of their gender identity? If being transgender is effectively made to be illegal, how long before being gay or lesbian or bisexual is illegal?

It's not just patriotism that has no gender. It is citizenship. It is humanity. There isn’t liberal blood and conservative blood, or Republican blood and Democratic blood, or gay blood or trans blood and straight blood, or Black blood and white blood, or male blood and female blood. Cut us, and we all bleed red.

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These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 $25 a year while the 13k sale continues!

💩EAT SHIT, YOU REPUBLICAN SCUMBAG!💩

Once upon a time, in the distant past of 2016 and for a few years after, there was a surge of right-wing populism. Country after country swung sharply to the right and inflicted grievous wounds on itself. The UK voted for Brexit. The Philippines elected a lunatic mass killer. Austria and France almost elected Nazis. The United States elected Donald Trump.

Russia, which covertly funded much of this far-right insurgency, was having a great time. The rest of us? Not so much.

And then the crowning jewel: The United States elected Donald Trump again. This time, unleashing an open fascist attack on the rule of law in an attempt to topple the world’s oldest democracy.

You would think this would embolden far-right “populism” across the globe the way it did in 2016. Back then, fascists all around the world took Trump’s win as a cue to rise up and swing for the fences while the legacy press breathlessly reported that the tide of far-right populism seemed unstoppable.

A funny thing appears to be happening this time, though. Instead of a far-right insurgency, a strong backlash to authoritarians appears to be playing out.

In December, the right-wing president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, tried to stage an autocoup. He was tired, you see, of all these pesky laws and barriers keeping him from ruling as he saw fit. How fucking DARE the opposition party have power and, worse, USE it?! Yeol declared martial law on the flimsiest of pretenses and ordered the opposition party to be disbanded.

But the people of South Korea lost their collective shit and stormed the National Assembly (their version of Capitol Hill). The Assembly (their Congress) broke into the building, voted to lift martial law, and the military, after wavering for a bit, gave in to the rule of law.

There would be no coup. President Yeol was impeached and removed from office. Whether he ends up in jail remains to be seen, but do not be surprised. The criminal trial is currently ongoing.

Canada, on the other hand, did not have a coup. They seemed set and ready to elect a right-wing government, though. Our northern neighbor would have been run by a ass-kissing Trump toady. Wouldn’t that have been fun? No. No, it would not.

But then Trump wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how much he hated Canada. They’re gonna be the 51st state, he said. We’re going to crush them economically, he said. Something something fentanyl over the border which everyone knew was absolute bullshit.

And we KNEW it was bullshit when Kevin Hassett, a little turd from the White house, vomited this out:

After Hassett raised concerns about fentanyl reaching American soil through the northern border, [ABC’s Jonathan] Karl reminded his guest, “I don’t think that’s happening. I mean, 1% of fentanyl is being smuggled across the border, 1%. I mean, Canada is not a major source at all of fentanyl in the United States, are they?” Hassett replied:

“Well, yes they are a major source. And I can tell you that in the Situation Room, I’ve seen photographs of fentanyl labs in Canada that the law enforcement folks were leaving alone. Canada’s got a big drug problem.”

As always, whenever someone from the Trump regime is speaking, assume they are lying. I believe the amount of Fentanyl seized at the northern border last year was twenty-something pounds? Truly, a tsunami of drugs flows from the Great White North.

Trump’s tariffs were the final straw. Canada’s Conservative Party went from a VERY comfortable 27-point lead in December, much to the delight of the far-right:

…to getting stomped into the ground so badly, the leader of the party lost his seat:

Womp-womp.

Every political observer understands very clearly that Canadians were furious at Trump and took it out on anyone who seemed aligned with him. That meant the right-wing Poilievre and his Conservative Party, who ran a populist campaign complaining of Canada’s lost glory days and immigration and blablabla “We want to be just like MAGA.”

If Trump has kept his fucking mouth shut, he would have had a bootlicking worm to feed his ego and boost his credibility. But he couldn’t do that because he’s Trump. So now he has a hostile nation on his border who will wage economic war if Trump continues to fuck with them. Lovely. Just what we needed.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre likes Canada, eh?

Then there’s Australia. Trump didn’t go out of his way to attack Australia but the results were the same. The country took a sharp and unexpected swing to the left.

Now, the right-wing party in Australia, curiously called the Liberal Party, was not expected to win the election. But they WERE expected to pick up a lot of seats and significantly increase their power in the government. The left-wing party, the Labor Party, had been struggling in the polls but was still ahead, if not by a lot.

Instead of picking up seats, though, the Liberal Party (remember, right wing) was crushed and, just like in the UK, the party leader, Peter Dutton, lost his seat.

Dutton also ran a nasty Trumpian campaign filled with racism and “populism,” and he paid the price for it.

The UK didn’t follow this trend as the “populist” Reform Party had a great election night last week. But the UK is a slow-motion car crash after Brexit, with its economy shriveling like a slug in a tub of salt. It’s so bad that the center-left party, Labour, has tacked to the right, attacking immigrants and cutting public spending in an attempt to woo back voters.

It didn’t work. Perhaps that should be a lesson to certain Democrats who have recently taken to kicking the trans community in a bid to appeal to voters? Adopting fascist framing on social issues will not win you votes.

With no actual left to vote for as their economy continues its decade-long implosion, the people of the UK went with the loudest, angriest voice. There’s a reason fascists love economic downturns. It’s why the Trump regime is engineering one as we speak. Desperate people listen to loud, angry voices.

But aside from the UK, the trend is unmistakable. Complacent people across the globe saw the United States put a literal fascist in power. They’re watching the most powerful country in the world, once the gold standard of democracy and freedom try very VERY hard to remodel itself into an authoritarian Nazi shithole complete with concentration camps and a gestapo.

A lot of this shock has to do with the fact that foreign media are reporting on what’s happening here accurately. They’re not whitewashing it and downplaying the ongoing coup the way the legacy press is. The horror of watching America fight against encroaching fascism scared enough people to ask the question: “If it can happen there, it can happen here, too, right?” And they are acting accordingly.

Likewise, our own elections have veered sharply to the left, not that you would know it from the dearth of coverage by the legacy press. Sure, they made a big deal out of that one election in Wisconsin but they just kind of gloss over all the OTHER elections where the electorate has shifted sharply to the left.

Did you know the GOP had a very bad night in Texas on Saturday? Probably not. The legacy press hasn’t bothered to talk about it. But the Lone Star Left newsletter did:

Last night, voters across Texas sent a message loud enough to rattle the far-right out of their echo chambers: we’re done with your culture wars, your book bans, and your crusade against public schools. Voters chose community over chaos, educators over agitators, and progress over extremism.

The local elections weren’t just a series of wins but a sweep. MAGA-backed candidates got absolutely trounced across the state. This was the result of deep organizing, years of work by local Democrats, and voters who are fed up with the far-right hijacking of school boards and city councils to push their agenda.

Texas isn’t turning blue overnight, but make no mistake: the MAGA movement had a very bad night, and the momentum is shifting.

Thank god for independent journalism. Otherwise, I would have never known about this and neither would you.

But this has been the case all over the country. Special elections have been disastrous for Republicans. Even when they win, their margin of victory is far smaller than it was just six months ago and we haven’t even gotten to the REAL effects of Trump’s recession. And wait until the regime ramps up with its terrorism tactics against dissent. That’s REALLY going to max out their popularity! For sure!

So, yeah, Trumpism is killing right-wing populism. Nothing sours the public on fascism like seeing it in practice, and after years of populists across the globe patterning themselves after Trump and his brand of racism and misogyny and hate? It’s going to be really hard to distance themselves and convince people they won’t be anything like the man they’ve based their entire political identity on.

Everything Donald Trump touches dies. Let’s hope that holds true for the movement he inspired.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 $25 a year while the awesome 13k sale is happening! Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 181 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.