Back To December

So now it’s December, and that means the right-wing is going to go all-out with their culture war issues that sane voters won’t make their number one priority. Of course, “sane voters” is doing some heavy lifting here, given that this is the country that just gave Donald fucking Trump a second term.

Most of the time, Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love the aesthetic of it, especially when there’s snow on the ground (which, admittedly, isn’t as common as it used to be where I live). I even love Christmas music, but then again, I have never worked retail. If I did, maybe I would see Christmas music differently, because I’ve been blessed with so many memes about how “she’s defrosting” and the like.

A meme of Mariah Carey defrosting, taken from Reddit.

Now that we’re well and truly in the Christmas season as defined by retailers, the culture warriors are going to be at it again. I’m old enough to remember when Trump proclaimed people would be saying “Merry Christmas” again because of him. Yet again, this is another non-issue that the GOP has blown out of proportion.

I celebrate Christmas myself, even if it’s not really in a religious sense. That’s the same with the rest of my family. We are semi-nominal Christians, but we don’t go to church or anything like that except maybe for funerals or weddings. And I’ve never been to a wedding.

That being said, I know a good amount of people who don’t celebrate Christmas; there is a decently-sized Jewish population in suburban Boston. Yes, it’s polite to say “Happy Holidays” as a greeting in order to be inclusive, but I’ve never once met someone who’s offended when I slip up and say “Merry Christmas.” It seems everyone (at least, everyone I talk to on a regular basis) accepts that it’s just a greeting.

I’m telling you, it’s sickening that the Republican Party has been able to take power once again through emphasizing such vapid issues. I’d thought almost nobody cared about which greeting I used, but evidently so many right-wingers are even more insane than I gave them credit for. They’re really making a mockery of our country abroad, and I’m ashamed.

To me, and to many other Americans, Christmas has diminished in religious importance. Yes, a good number of people still go to church - significantly more than in Canada, Australia, or the majority of Europe. The percentage is, admittedly, lower than it used to be. But just because the religious meaning of the holiday has kind of fizzled out, that doesn’t mean it’s not still an important holiday to most of us.

Christmas in the United States is a lot like Thanksgiving in many regards. As I wrote about two weeks ago, Thanksgiving is an excuse to celebrate something. Even if it’s just the simpler pleasures in life, the fact that all of the family has survived another year in good enough health to gather together for the meal and to watch a Charlie Brown episode afterwards, it’s still significant. 

Like Thanksgiving, Christmas takes place near the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Where I live, there will only be 9 hours, 5 minutes of daylight on December 25, 2024. The further north you go, the darker that day will be.

Maybe most people have done away with pagan traditions centered around worship of the sun. Maybe an increasing number have turned away from religion in general. But I think on some level, humans want some light in the dark of winter. Perhaps, amid the decrease in sunlight, people feel they need something to celebrate, even if it’s not based on anything supernatural.

Christmas at Bondi Beach in Australia. This will never not be amusing to me. Image taken from TimeAndDate.com.

I know what my family is going to do for Christmas. We’ll get a tree like we usually do, and we’ll hang up the numerous ornaments in our collection. We’ll get up that morning and go through our stockings by the fireplace. We might not be children anymore, but that doesn’t mean the power of rituals has been fully lost on us.

 And then we’ll eat breakfast consisting of fruit salad, bagels with lox and cream cheese, and of course, that delicious cranberry apple coffee cake my mother and I bake every year. During that time, my paternal grandmother, one of the most interesting and wise people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, will no doubt have plenty to talk about. That’s what Christmas is like in my family. Even in an era of increased secularization, even when white Christmases become less and less frequent, some things never change.

Overall, I’m not sure what the overarching message of this post is. I’ll admit that I just wanted to write something for the blog after a few days’ radio silence. It’s probably nothing profound, but if it makes at least one person think, that can only be a good thing.

A Reflection on Linguistics

I have never thought of myself as a linguistics expert. In fact, I’m basically monolingual. But it’s nonetheless a fascinating topic that I think deserves a blog post today.

You see, I live in the United States, a country whose tourists are infamous for being “ugly Americans” who expect everyone to speak English to them wherever they go. Now, not every American tourist is like this, but stereotypes exist for a reason. And a reflection on this topic has led me to realize that we’re at a disadvantage relative to many other countries.

A map showing leaders of select countries according to how many languages they spoke as of late 2022, per r/MapPorn. Joe Biden (USA) was the only one to speak only English.

Most of the people I know were required to take a foreign language in high school. Many of these people, including my brother and I, selected Spanish, but it never came naturally to me. At least, not as naturally as it came to my brother. My brother, one of my best friends, did an exchange program in Spain at age 16, and later an internship in that country. I have done neither of those things.

This stands in stark contrast to Europe. On the occasions when I’ve been fortunate enough to visit European countries where English does not have official status, virtually everyone I’ve spoken to has had good enough English to where I could hold a conversation with them. Until recently, I can’t say I questioned it very much. I guess I just assumed “that’s the way it is”, without really thinking about why.

Indeed, the data bears this out. According to a 2022 survey, almost 80 percent of Americans living in the US are monolingual. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that 65% of Europeans speak multiple languages according to the same survey. The linked article, published a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, details the implications this has for both America’s economy and geopolitical status. And TLDR: It’s not good.

It wasn’t until Trump’s first term that I learned the United States doesn’t actually have an official language at the federal level. Of course, in practice, English is as good as the official language, since day-to-day life here really runs on English; indeed, more than half the states have designated it as such. That being said, the real reason Trump proposed making English the official language at the federal level was as a monument to his xenophobia, not because it would actually affect U.S. policy, let alone daily life in this country.

I could go on and on about how the United States and United Kingdom exerted efforts to promote the notion that English should be the “default” language. This has been well-documented in many academic texts and doesn’t need to be discussed any further here.

However, it’s not just Anglophone nations that have contributed to “language consolidation.” The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), uses English as its official working language.  This is despite the fact that only two of its member states, Singapore and the Philippines, have actually designated English as having official status for civilian life.

Representatives from Southeast Asian countries at their 2024 summit in Australia, taken from Kiripost. Despite (or because of?) the diversity of languages used by civilians in their countries, all of these leaders have agreed to speak English at the meeting.

Meanwhile, here’s some food for thought: There are more than seven thousand languages currently spoken by the world’s roughly 8.2 billion people. Many of these tongues, however, only have a couple thousand speakers at most, meaning that if they are not taught to younger generations, we risk losing these languages for good.

Just think about that for a moment. This post is published in English. If your primary language is English, or another widely-used language like Spanish, Mandarin, or Russian, it probably seems unthinkable (if you’ve considered it at all) that one day your language, the tongue you use for everything in your day-to-day life, could vanish. And yet, there are people, including a large percentage of the world’s indigenous population, who live with this reality every day.

Moreover, languages are not just systems of communication. Anyone who’s taken a second language in any capacity has probably figured out that every language provides a different way of seeing the world. Whenever the last speaker of a language passes away, the world loses a unique perspective. I think that’s regrettable, just like the loss of biodiversity all over the world as a result of environmental issues like deforestation and climate change.

In my mind (and again, I say this as someone who is functionally monolingual), this is an issue that deserves more attention than it’s getting. As indigenous issues have become increasingly politically salient in countries like Canada and Australia, both governments and civilians in those places have reflected on their ancestors’ role in what would become this crisis.

The Aboriginal and national flags of Australia, side by side. Image taken from the Catholic Leader website.

Canada, for instance, has their Truth and Reconciliation Commission, something I wish the United States would do. Indeed, there are many things Canada does that I wish we would. But I’m getting off track here.

The point is, if English is your first language, you should think critically about how it came to be this way. If you travel abroad, don’t be that “ugly American” who assumes that everyone around you needs to speak your language. And consider what it must be like if your own language was marginalized in favor of what others say should be the “default tongue.” 

Maybe the opportunity to gain this knowledge is the only thing I can be thankful for this year.

Platform Peril

No, not THAT kind of Platform Peril.

One of the things I’ve thought about a lot lately is just how important it is to be mindful whenever you have an audience. 

What I mean by this is the responsibility you have as someone with a platform to disseminate information responsibly. In the age of social media, the barrier to posting information that others might see as news is far lower than it used to be. You can simply go to your computer (or phone), type in a series of words on BlueSky, and congratulations - you’ve become a reporter! 

This is one of the many ways in which the Internet has fundamentally altered the way we live our lives. Among other things, it’s driven local journalism to the brink of extinction. Maybe I’ll write more about that some other time.

Of course, as a certain superhero once told us, with great power comes great responsibility. That has hardly ever been more true than it is today, in an era when we face so many overlapping crises that the U.S. government is either not solving or actively working to exacerbate. And if you don’t believe me, just take this example:

Boston Globe political cartoon from 2017.

It’s no secret that systemic racism exists in America. Even after it was no longer legal to own black people as property, we had the Jim Crow era in which there were whites-only drinking fountains, schools, etc. And I also don’t need to tell you that even after segregation no longer carried the force of law behind it, it remains effectively in place in many U.S. cities. This doesn’t even take into account the endless police brutality we see in the United States that nobody ever bothers to do anything about other than kneel in kente cloth.

All of this came to a head when Trump became President the first time. In case you’ve forgotten (which would make you the average American voter) , there was a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. After the murder of a counter-protestor, Trump went to the podium and announced that there were very bad people in that group, “but you also had people who were very fine people, on both sides.”

The uproar was immense from the same “liberal” media who seem awfully silent now. They rightly pointed out that when the President of the United States speaks, people listen. It’s no surprise that hate crimes spiked under Trump’s first term, and they are already rising again now - just look at all those racist text messages sent in the days following his 2024 victory.

But just think about the power of Trump’s platform. I might be among his detractors, but the fact remains that when the President of the United States speaks, people listen. I’m old enough to remember he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a debate, and days later the FBI unveiled a plot to kidnap and probably kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

Now, I’m going to do something surprising. I’m going to talk about irresponsible famous people who don’t live in the U.S. I know. Crazy, right?

A 2013 anti-vaccine rally in the UK, from The Independent. As an important disclaimer to remain in compliance with ethical standards: These people are incorrect, and the ideas they promote here are not only dangerously wrong, they’re just plain dangerous.

Those of my readers who are significantly older than me might remember that in 1998, a study was published in The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal in the United Kingdom, “demonstrating” a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Again, to remain in compliance with my better judgment, this link does not exist.  

The “doctor” behind it, Andrew Wakefield, was stripped of his medical license once this “study” was found to in fact be fraudulent. In a way, however, the damage was already done. Just look at who the US is going to have in charge of public health in Trump’s next administration. The harms of not vaccinating your child are very well-documented. We have seen the consequences in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, a particularly dangerous disease given that the measles virus can “reset” your immune system’s memory. But there are over eight billion people in the world, and if even a relatively small percentage are led to believe that vaccinating your child can cause them to develop autism, that’s still a lot of people.

More importantly, this doesn’t just harm public health, but also public trust in scientific institutions. As a reminder, The Lancet was previously the UK’s most trusted medical journal. It’s not just the conspiracy theorists who always shit on scientific advancements who might be swayed by such a fraudulent “study.”

Consider also the average person who doesn’t pay much attention to the scientific community, but trusts science as an institution because they have the evidence on their side. In the UK at least, this is far, far more people than those we might call anti-vaxxers. The Lancet published, and still does publish, many things that are demonstrably true. So when they publish such harmful disinformation, even if only once, this plants the seeds of doubt in some minds that maybe other scientific journals aren’t to be trusted as well. And if too many parents refuse to vaccinate their children, herd immunity will be jeopardized for the rest of us. If RFK Jr. is confirmed, we’re in deep trouble as a species.

In both of the cases I described above, the messengers probably didn’t care how much damage they would end up doing. Trump certainly doesn’t, and it speaks to the unique depravity of this country that we allowed him to return to power. 

Just because some of our “leaders” aren’t mindful of the power of their platforms, however, doesn’t absolve small creators like myself of our obligation to tell the truth. After all, the reason I write this blog is because I want to provide a news outlet for the resistance to the incoming Trump regime. I’m as careful as I can be to always get the facts right, and I only wish that more well-known people were equally mindful.

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Anti-America’s Top Ten Countdown: Week 4

It’s that time of the week again, so it’s time for Anti-America’s Top Ten Countdown! Today we’ll be going through the top ten most important stories that every progressive member of the resistance needs to know about. Without further ado, here we go!

10: GOOD RIDDANCE TO GAETZ

So Matt Gaetz had to withdraw from consideration to be Donald Trump’s Attorney General after four Republican Senators (including Senator-elect John Curtis of Utah) privately voiced their opposition to his confirmation. To me, this is a case of “good riddance.” This sex-trafficker is not going to be the Attorney General of the United States after all. However, that doesn’t mean anyone else Donald Trump picks (such as Pam Bondi, his new choice) is going to be any less dangerous. If anything, I’d argue that Bondi is more dangerous because liberals don’t despise her as much. People won’t be as motivated to resist this outwardly inoffensive lady as opposed to Matt Gaetz. But at least Gaetz won’t be coming back to Congress, and I always love to watch a conservative get humiliated. Countdown number nine!

Protest against anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Image taken from ABC News.

9: VOICES OF VIOLENCE

So in Minneapolis, Minnesota the other day, two trans women were beaten outside of a railway station. Minnesota, of course, was the home state of Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, and Walz has designated it as a sanctuary state for the LGBTQ+ community. Remind me again why the country chose Trump and Vance over the jovial, joyous man known as Tim Walz? In any case, this shows that Trump’s rhetoric has emboldened those who traffic in hate. This is hardly news, considering all too many moments during his first term. Even so, now that Trump is actually going to be President once again, his words matter even more. I fear that hate crimes against marginalized communities are only going to increase in the coming years. Countdown number eight.

Bob Casey Jr. speaking at a Kamala Harris rally on November 4, 2024. He would be narrowly defeated at the polls the following day.

8: CASEY STRIKES OUT

The final Senate race of 2024 has been decided, ladies and gentlemen. In the midst of a recount, three-term Democratic incumbent Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania has conceded to Republican challenger David McCormick. Casey ran a pretty lazy campaign, and I’d long been a pessimist about Democrats’ Senate chances in 2024, but even I didn’t expect him to lose his seat.

 And yet, by a margin of 48.8 percent to 48.6 percent, he has indeed been defeated. This means that the Republicans will have 53 Senate seats in the coming Congress, and that Democrats will need to flip four GOP-held seats to retake the chamber in the 2026 midterms. Honestly, this is the Senate loss that angers me the most. Sherrod Brown and especially Jon Tester were always going to have very difficult races, but Casey won by 13 points in 2018! I suppose he got too complacent. Countdown number seven.

Rooster getting swabbed to test for H5N1/avian flu. Taken from the American Veterinary Medical Association.

7: ONE FLU OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

The last time a zoonotic disease emerged during a Trump presidency, it ended with more than a million Americans dead of COVID. And that was when Trump still needed to get reelected. Now, with a further emboldened Trump having nominated anti-vaxxers to key public health posts, dozens of cases of bird flu keep popping up in humans. A case was confirmed just yesterday in a US child. If Americans were able to grow numb to COVID deaths, though, they’ll grow numb to this. And I guarantee you that if this does indeed spiral into a pandemic, nothing will be done. It’s just like how we do nothing about mass shootings, only on a far greater scale. Oh yeah, and this disease has a 50 percent case-fatality rate, whereas COVID’s case-fatality rate was 2 percent at most. And look how much devastation that caused! We’re clucked. Countdown number six.

Donald Trump shaking hands with Mark Rutte. Image taken from Bloomberg.

6: THE RUTTE REACTION

Recently NATO Secretary-General and former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. I think we can all read between the lines and know that this was done for one reason, and one reason only: Rutte was begging Trump to stay in NATO. 

Well, I hate to say it, Mark, but you’re wasting your time. I voted for Kamala Harris in part because I wanted the US to keep supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. But you’re not going to convince Trump to remain a NATO ally. Just as Joe Biden is Benjamin Netanyahu’s bitch, Trump is Putin’s bitch. I wish the US would hold fast to our European allies, but he isn’t going to, and the sooner these countries realize they can’t convince Trump not to lick Putin’s boots, the better off we’ll all be as a species. Countdown number five.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at some meeting. Image taken from the Toronto Star.

5: DON’T BLAME CANADA

So Canada has decided to defy the United States with regards to the recently-issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, and a deceased Hamas leader. Meanwhile, Biden keeps supporting Netanyahu to the ends of the Earth. It’s as though Biden didn’t want to wait for Trump to take over and destroy our relationship with our closest ally; he had to do it himself.

Now, to be fair, this is mostly moot. Netanyahu isn’t stupid enough to travel to a civilized country when he knows he’s likely to be arrested on the spot if he does. In other words, Trudeau probably won’t need to act on this promise. But it’s far more than Biden was willing to commit to, so I’ll give credit where it’s due. Even after Biden’s Vice President literally lost to Donald Trump because she supports Israel, he keeps showing that he deserves the title of Genocide Joe. If Trump throws him in prison, I won’t be too sad. Countdown number four.

US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) riding the escalator. Image taken from Yahoo News.

4: THIS AIN’T NO NETHER-NETHER LAND

Tom Cotton, the biggest warhawk in a Senate full of them, isn’t too happy about the ICC’s arrest warrants against a pair of genocidal maniacs. In fact, he’s so unhappy about it that he wants to invoke the Hague Invasion Act.

Now, in case you all don’t know, The Hague is a real place. I’ve actually been there. It’s the third-largest city in a beautiful country known as the Netherlands. More importantly, the Netherlands is a NATO ally of the United States, or at least they’re supposed to be. At a time when NATO needs to be strongly behind Ukraine, Tom Cotton wants the alliance’s most powerful country to invade a fellow member. All of this for the sake of supporting Netanyahu against the warrants. 

Will this actually happen? Probably not, but you never know when you have people as insane as Tom Cotton in the Senate. Countdown number three.

Donald Trump pointing at something. Image taken from Yahoo News.

3: AMERICAN IDIOTS

Donald Trump’s Cabinet is taking shape, and it’s every bit as bizarre and horrible as many of us feared. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous people like RFK Jr. are, because you already know that. But remember Project 2025? The reason we kept saying that we could not allow Trump to be elected, but that so many people dismissed after Trump distanced himself from it?

Well, it’s happening. Trump has designated Russel Vought, one of Project 2025’s authors, to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Even if, during the campaign, Trump kept insisting he had “no idea” what Project 2025 was, he’s now filling his Cabinet with people who were behind it. I’ll borrow a line from a wise YouTuber I used to watch regularly: “Trump is a man who has no ideas, who surrounds himself with people who have bad ideas.”

But at a certain point, I have to give Trump credit. Even in the face of anti-Project 2025 attacks, even though so many people should have known just how dangerous it was, they voted for him anyway. Our education system is truly lacking, and we are a sick country. Many of us deserve what we’re about to get. Countdown number two.

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who will remain a former President. Image taken from the Boston Globe.

2: I WISH I’M GOING TO BRAZIL

I never thought I’d live to see the day when Brazil’s democratic institutions proved more durable than those in the United States, but that day has arrived when I’m all of 24 years old. A Brazilian court has indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro on charges related to trying to overturn an election loss. Now, where have we heard that one before?

Oh yeah. The guy who attempted a coup after losing an election was just elected again here. A country that had a military dictatorship in the not-too-distant past now has stronger institutions. I wish America would have taken note and realized that there’s only one way to deal with people who try to overthrow your government. Instead, we get to suffer under Trump for four more years and end the rule of law, all while Brazil and the rest of the world laugh at us. Countdown number one.

DNC JumboTron in 2024, taken from Politico.

1: THE DUMBOCRATIC PARTY

In this case, Dumbo is not a flying elephant who was the titular character of one of my favorite movies when I was a small child. Instead, it’s the prefix for one of the most incompetent political movements in the history of the world. 

These people managed to lose to Donald Trump twice. He might be a convicted felon, but apparently that doesn’t matter if the opposition runs a horrendous campaign. I don’t know how the DNC managed to screw this one up, but quite frankly, it’s unforgivable. In fact, we should probably burn the Democratic Party to the ground, because whatever rose from the ashes afterward could not possibly be more inept than the current opposition to fascism.

I’ve written about this before; it’s the feckless versus the fascists.Despite being given so many avenues to attack Donald Trump for so many different horrendous policies, they have been utterly incapable of taking advantage. Twice. In any other country, a political party with a similar record would go the way of the Whigs. But the Democratic Party has to stay, because it’s our only domestic bulwark against the world’s most dangerous organization. Arceus help us all.

Bibi’s Biden Bitch

Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, who now face arrest warrants from the ICC. Taken from France 24.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last twenty-four hours, you’ve probably heard that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, and a dead Hamas leader. This is an important first step in holding the Israeli government accountable for its crimes against humanity in the West Bank, Gaza, and now Lebanon. 

If Netanyahu travels to one of the 125 countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute of the ICC, he will be arrested. Notably, the United States is not among those countries, though that shouldn’t be surprising given that he came here in July to address Congress and was welcomed with open arms by most lawmakers.

Now, I’ve previously written about how not voting for Harris over the Gaza issue was idiotic and selfish. While I feel terrible for the people of Palestine, I continue to have no sympathy whatsoever for the Americans who were determined to defeat Biden and Harris because of their support for Israel. It’s not like Trump is any better on this issue, and he’s so much worse on everything else.

If you were to criticize the arrest warrants for any reason, you could argue that Joe Biden should have been listed as well. And I would agree. As someone who voted for him in 2020, and would have voted for him in 2024 if he’d accepted his party’s nomination, he truly is Genocide Joe. Yes, Israel had the right to defend itself after the inside job that was October 7, but they didn’t have the right to massacre more than 44,000 civilians and counting.

The choice Joe Biden faced. Taken from RootsAction on Xitter.

Now, it’s no secret by now that Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel likely cost his Vice President the election. Biden repeatedly claimed that Donald Trump was a grave danger to American democracy, and now he’s buddy-buddy with the man. But in order to prevent Trump’s return to power, he needed to appeal to the voters who were turned off by his support of this genocide. 

Again, as disgusted as I am by Biden’s support for Netanyahu, I didn’t support the Uncommitted movement. But these people held the election in their hands, and they could still vote. American voters are pretty shortsighted, and it’s not just those on the right. But back to the ICC.

After the arrest warrant was issued, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of the magical utopian land known as Canada, stated that his country would comply with international law and the arrest warrant. If Netanyahu travels to Canada, he will be arrested on the spot and sent to The Hague to be tried for war crimes. Admittedly, this is mostly moot, because I highly doubt Netanyahu is dumb enough to travel to a civilized country like Canada that supports international law. Trudeau likely won’t have to act on this promise, but it’s still far better than my home country’s response to the warrant.

Lawmakers of both parties have condemned the ICC for issuing the arrest warrant. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the most aggressive warhawk in a Senate full of warhawks, even cited the Hague Invasion Act. He threatened to attack the Netherlands, or any other country that complies with the arrest warrant. The Netherlands, one of our NATO allies in Europe! Of course, I suppose they won’t be our ally much longer once Trump takes a sledgehammer to our relationships with our soon-to-be former allies.

 Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, meanwhile, stated that if the ICC went after Israel, “we’re next”. My response to that is like that owl meme saying “O RLY?” Like, what would you expect? If you commit war crimes, the ICC will go after you. That’s how a civilized world should work.

However, I can’t absolve the Democrats of their complicity either. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who might as well switch parties at this point, signed the joint statement issued by a bipartisan group of Senators. He said that accepting the ICC’s jurisdiction over Israel was to acknowledge that they had jurisdiction over the United States. No shit! That’s the point! No country should be above the law!

Finally, let’s get to Joe Biden, also known as Genocide Joe. The man I voted for in 2020 and was prepared to vote for this year in order to stop Trump from returning to power. Even after the issue of Israel-Gaza likely cost his Vice President the election, bringing the man he claims to be so dangerous to democracy back into the Oval Office, Biden continues to be Bibi’s bitch. He refuses to condition aid to Israel even now (though, to be “fair”, his successor in two months won’t condition aid at all), and his Press Secretary, speaking for all of America, has stated that we’re working with Israel to consider sanctioning the ICC.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Taken from Reuters.

I’ll leave you with a double standard. According to official numbers, Russia has killed more than 12,000 civilians in Ukraine. Admittedly, the actual number is probably several times higher, but you could say the same about the civilian death toll in Gaza. To be clear, I do not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even if my country’s next President does. I think Putin should be locked away in The Hague, no questions asked.

But while Russia is the scum of the Earth for invading Ukraine and is rightfully condemned and sanctioned, Israel continues to get U.S. support even under Biden. I think that demonstrates that the United States doesn’t care about human rights at all. Russia is our enemy, so they must be sanctioned for committing genocide in Ukraine. Israel is our ally, so we must support them as they commit genocide in Gaza. When you hold such inconsistent positions on two conflicts, it’s no surprise that the world treats your word as though it has no meaning.

Then again, U.S. foreign policy does a 180° every four years. Maybe I’ll write about that in the future. For now, as sickening as it is that Trump will be our next President, I won’t shed a tear if Biden is locked away for his support of a genocide. He was willing to back Israel even to the point where he ensured the destruction of his own country, and that’s not what a patriot does. So I’ll say this from a leftist perspective:

This, but unironically. Taken from Amazon.com.

Relevant Song Lyrics: “World On Fire” by Daughtry

A wildfire burns at Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, Massachusetts. Courtesy of CBS Boston.

Because I’m posting this on a Thursday, it’s time for an episode of Relevant Song Lyrics. Given that it hasn’t rained here in literal weeks and wildfires are burning all over a state that isn’t supposed to get them, and given that we just elected a climate-denying President, I thought “World On Fire” by Daughtry was an appropriate choice. Lots of people don’t like Daughtry, which I don’t understand. But here we go.

Going down like a dead man walking

One step from a body in a coffin

Just one, one of the fallen

This passage perfectly reflects the state of American democracy, if you could even call it a democracy at this point. Even though we just had an election in 2024, and even though we might still have elections in 2026 and 2028, they won’t be free and fair. We’ll be a “zombie democracy” like Turkey or Hungary until our democracy is in the grave for good, just like in Russia.

Waking up to a blood moon, howling

Can't drown it out, even with the medicine

Tearing through me like a bullet of adrenaline

In my case, I’m on anti-anxiety meds, and they don’t help. Not well enough. I just want to lash out at my country for electing such a dangerous man again. Every time I wake up, I’m reminded that Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States, and I feel sick to my stomach. We knew exactly who he was, and we still gave him the popular vote. I may not have voted for him, but I’m still responsible.

Arms heavy, face down on a deathbed

Blame the gods while choking on the violence

In the end, silence is deafening

I take this to mean that the Trump voters are going to blame Democrats for everything that goes wrong in the next four years. When the economy doesn’t improve (or gets worse - Harris lost despite a booming economy!), the red-hats are going to blame the politicians who claimed to resist this orange fascist as opposed to the orange fascist. If bird flu goes south and turns into another pandemic, then they’ll literally be choking.

Marjorie Taylor Greene “boldly” claims that the Democrats created Hurricane Helene and can control the weather. Image taken from Rolling Stone.

Can you hear the crowd like a thousand sirens?

In the night like thunder striking

The sickness is rising, the angels are crying

That's the sound of a world on fire

Admittedly, I don’t expect there to be very many protests this time around. Trump won the popular vote, so he can at least claim some “legitimacy” even if he shouldn’t have been allowed to run in the first place. Besides, most Democrats are too scared to protest. I know I am. In terms of “the sickness rising”, just look at HHS Secretary-designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has some serious brain worms. Whether or not you take the word “angels” literally (which I don’t, not really), it’s clear that those of us who want to do good in the world are distraught right now. And why shouldn’t we be? That’s exactly what a world on fire looks like, as Chris Daughtry reminds us.

Stressed out, head trauma, took a beating

Takes more than a pill to numb the feeling

It’s been said before, but the United States is almost surgically designed to keep you stressed out. Even though we’re supposedly the richest country in the world, our life expectancy is on the decline, That should be a national scandal, especially when one party continuously pushes policies that make it this way. It’s been said that half the country couldn’t afford a surprise $400 expense, which is pretty damning when four hundred dollars isn’t that much money in the grand scheme of things. And again, my anti-anxiety medication doesn’t do much to make me stress out less. At this point I mostly take it because I feel dizzy if I don’t.

Bang, bang, no mercy for the healing

Oh, twenty dead without a fight, without a reason

Twenty more in a cop car, bleeding

All tryna win a war without a meaning

The first two lines of this passage probably refer to the United States’ gun violence crisis. And yes, it is a crisis of our own making. There’s no mercy for those who are injured but survive mass shootings, as they often have obscene medical bills. That’s the only thing more American than mass shootings. 

The children at Sandy Hook or Robb Elementary, the concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Vegas, or the bowlers in Lewiston, Maine (a shooting that’s pretty much been memory-holed even though it’s the 10th-deadliest to date)...they weren’t fighting anyone at all. In all four of these cases, no concrete motive was determined for the massacre, not that that means anything. They’re just dead without a reason. And don’t even get me started on police brutality. In fact, this song was written in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests.

The George Floyd Protests in 2020. Thanks to the GOP, they accomplished nothing other than banning discussion of racism in schools.

So yes. The world is truly on fire, and what’s more, half the American public are arsonists. If human civilization still exists at the end of Trump’s term (and that’s a big if), and if there is to be any accountability at all for those responsible, I blame the voters just as much as the politicians. Trump would be a deranged old man whining on Truth Social if not for the tens of millions who were frothing at the mouth to put him back in the Oval Office. And they got their wish. The world is burning, and Americans lit the match. And if I believed in hell, we’d all be going there.

Enemy Of The People

MSNBC, I expected better. Image taken from the Variety Magazine’s website.

Donald Trump is wrong about many things. He’s wrong about big things, like basic science, jeopardizing the ability of the global community to deal with the climate crisis before it’s too late. Indeed, maybe it already is too late, but we’d be less fucked if we didn’t have a President dedicated to ripping up environmental protections. He’s also wrong about the little things, like whether or not there were airports in the 18th century. And yes, that really happened.

But one thing Trump is right about, even if for a different reason than us progressives might believe, is that the media is the enemy of the people.

Now, I don’t use that phrase lightly. Some of history’s most notorious dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin, used it to refer to their political rivals. So I want to be careful: I’m not calling anyone I disagree with the enemy of the people. I’m calling the legacy outlets, who were so desperate to return this traitorous, felonious scumbag to one of the highest offices in the world, the enemy.

I could write a book about the way the media has normalized Trump. They’ve sane-washed so much of what he’s said and done over the last four years, paving the way for voters to elect him once again. Most infamously, the Washington Post owned by corporate overlord Jeff Bezos blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris at Bezos’ behest. 

At the time, I didn’t think it would have much of an impact on the election results. In hindsight, maybe it did; even a “marginal” impact can mean all the difference in this deeply polarized nation. But the fact that it may have helped to elect Donald Trump is actually not even the most frightening part of this.

Look at the image that heads today’s article. Morning Joe on MSNBC, the news network of choice for the Trump administration’s detractors, has just announced that they met with Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago. The same network that avocado toast wine moms making up the #Resistance swear by has now turned its back on any efforts to hold Trump accountable. Politics is just a game to them, even though real peoples’ lives are affected by it. 

To their credit, even CNN is reporting that this meeting was driven by fear of retribution from the incoming administration. If it weren’t so frightening, I would consider this an amusing case of “be careful what you wish for.” The legacy media, and not just Fox News, clearly wanted Trump back in office because his first term was the best thing that ever happened to their ratings. Everyone needed to tune in to MSNBC et al to see what insane thing Trump had said or done that day.

This love, however, isn’t mutual; Trump is going to go after the media in his capacity as President. Legacy media probably believes they’ll be okay, and maybe they will be. But progressive independent media like David Pakman are going to be the first targets.

An actual headline of a New York Times guest essay the other day. Really. 

It’s called “anticipatory obedience”, and the headline above is a textbook example of that. Yes, it was basically guaranteed anyway that Trump’s legal cases are going to end anyway now that he’s about to be President. Yes, that means the rule of law is effectively dead in America, and nobody should ever be in prison if a convicted felon is allowed to hold the highest office in the country.

But the New York Times shouldn’t be normalizing this stuff! The fact is, at a time like this, a free press is needed more than ever before, and the New York Times was willing to capitulate so easily! Trump hasn’t even taken office yet and they’re already saying that the voters have rendered their verdict. And maybe they have, but that doesn’t make it okay. 

It’s just like with Sleepy Joe Biden. Biden spent his 2020 campaign and much of his do-nothing presidency warning us about how dangerous Donald Trump was and how he must never be allowed to return to power. Then he ran for reelection knowing he wasn’t up to campaign at his age, which paved the way for Donald Trump to be elected two weeks ago. And then, after the world’s most dangerous man gets voted in as President once again, this is what Biden does:

Biden and Trump, sitting near a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. If I told you that, I wouldn’t be stretching the truth too much.

As with the NYT calling to end the criminal cases against Trump, there’s only so much that can really be done about the situation. Harris trying to reject the results on January 6 wouldn’t do anything, and leftists aren’t going to storm the Capitol to stop Trump’s victory from being certified. But at a minimum, the legacy media and the outgoing non-authoritarian President (the last bastions of democracy in a supposedly free country) shouldn’t be normalizing this madness. It’s not normal. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

All of the above is why it’s more important than ever to support independent media. If the Democrats and the legacy media won’t hold Donald Trump accountable (and they won’t), then that’s up to us. That’s one reason why I started this blog, and one reason why I would like you to subscribe to my newsletter if you please. Thank you.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

For real, though: Turkey isn’t my favorite food by a long shot. Taken from Flickr.

Ah, yes. As of the time I’m writing this post, it is ten days until Thanksgiving. It is the most American of holidays, in which we look for any excuse to (over)eat and celebrate something we don’t fully understand. Maybe I’ll write about the holiday’s colonial history in a near-future post, but not today.

Most of the time, we have Thanksgiving with my paternal grandmother. This year both of my living grandparents (both my grandmothers) are going to join us for this time-honored tradition. Although we are not a particularly religious family, it’s still customary for us to go around in a circle and say what we’re thankful for before we dig into the meal.

I don’t know what I’m going to say this year. Yes, I’ve got a 3.65 GPA in undergrad. Yes, I have a loving family - my siblings are my best friends, after all. And I’m excited to begin graduate studies in urban planning. All of those are good things. 

And yet, it’s hard to be happy when the world seems to be collapsing all around you. A failed former President ran for the office again after endless corruption scandals, reckless endangerment of the environment, and overseeing over a million deaths in this country alone from a completely preventable pandemic.

Because he was President, he was able to appoint three Injustices to the Supreme Court. They’re on a warpath, and when they’re finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath of rights dying in daylight. His actions led directly to two genocides in Ukraine and the Middle East. And of course, let’s not forget January 6, 2021, the Beer Gut Putsch, that he was not held accountable for, and now will never be held accountable for.

And now, of course, he’s President-elect once again. America is a depraved, sick nation that never learns from its mistakes. To be clear, this was true long before November 5, but the reelection of Donald Trump was another exhibit in “Mamma Mia! Here I go again!” I’m ashamed to call myself an American, and again, that was true even before Trump won two weeks ago.

How I feel about the American flag now. Image taken from the ACLU of California.

But this crystalizes the fact that I just don’t belong here. This country’s values are not compatible with my own values. I value reason, justice, and a reckoning with our common humanity; the United States values basically the opposite. 

It doesn’t matter that I’m a white person who has never stared down the barrel of a police officer’s weapon, and will in all likelihood never need to learn how to act in such a situation. It doesn’t matter that I’m a cisgender man who will never need an abortion and won’t face genocide for my sexual orientation or gender identity. And it doesn’t matter that I’m a native-born citizen who wouldn’t be deported (though deportation from the U.S. doesn’t really sound too bad right now).  I simply can’t stand to live in a country where half the population wants a convicted felon responsible for the atrocities listed above to be their leader.

Even my home state of Massachusetts isn’t immune from this insanity. In 2020, ranked-choice voting, which would do the most to save American democracy if it were implemented nationwide (which it won’t be), was on the ballot here. It went up in flames because Republicans were able to convince enough people that ranked-choice meant less choice. You read that right. They convinced 55 percent of the voting public in one of the bluest, least insane states in the country of such an insane claim for which nothing could be so blatantly far from the truth.

Even then, I suppose I have some things to be thankful for. Unlike some people in this country, I live in a family that all voted the same way in the most recent election. Some awkward conversations might be held over the turkey, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and green beans, but the political discussion will not be among them. We will be free to air our grievances about the situation together.

But if I were in the LGBTQ+ community and had a family member who voted for Trump, I don’t know that I would be able to face them the same way again. In fact, I almost definitely wouldn’t be. And I certainly don’t blame any such person who decides to cut off contact with their Trump-supporting relative. This video sums up my feelings on the matter pretty nicely.

On Election Night, my university’s Democrats club held a watch party. Of course, I use the word “party” loosely here, because it felt more like a funeral after a while. You could say the atmosphere fell from a coconut tree - the high of “brat summer”, when it looked like Kamala Harris had all the enthusiasm in the world, was long gone. 

And yet, I believe it would have been far worse if I were alone. Almost any difficult situation is harder to deal with when you don’t have anyone else to share it with. Maybe this Thanksgiving, that is what I will appreciate most of all. As long as my family has each other, there will still be hope.

Kamala Harris supporters at her Washington, DC watch party on Election Night when things went south. Taken from ABC News.

Hell Is For Americans

Wildfire in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. This is not normal.

I don’t think I’m likely to ever forget the weather the day after the 2024 election. How could I when it was in the upper seventies? In November!

Even if much of my country doesn’t agree with me, I know that climate change is real. I know it’s caused by human activity. And I know that we have six years at best to cut all our emissions by fifty percent or face runaway climate catastrophe. The election was possibly the most important in the history of the world from that standpoint. And yet, the climate crisis was hardly ever brought up by either candidate.

Now, I’m 24 years old. I was not around for the original discovery that fossil fuel combustion was altering the world’s climate. Yes, fossil fuel companies knew since the 1950s and covered it up, and they should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Instead, they’ll be in the world’s most powerful Cabinet. But when it was first known to the general public, I’d have to imagine it was a pretty big news story! Now, crickets.

Drought conditions map of Massachusetts, taken from Telegram.com.

I live in Massachusetts, where a drought has been declared. There’s also a red flag fire warning due to the lack of rain. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and as much as I complain about the rain when we get a lot of it, we truly need rain now. And yet it isn’t supposed to rain for at least three more days. For all I know, the forecast might be wrong again, pulling the rain away like Lucy with the football. But this should not be happening!

However, Massachusetts was hardly the only part of the country to experience climate change this year. In September, Hurricane Helene devastated much of the Southeast, particularly the mountainous western part of North Carolina. Some people there still don’t have potable water almost two months later. That part of the state had once been seen as a “climate haven” that faced relatively few risks, but Hurricane Helene demonstrated that nowhere is safe from the fury of Mother Nature. 

And then there was Hurricane Milton. It was one of numerous hurricanes to hit the state of Florida in recent years, and they’re only going to become more numerous now that the climate crisis will accelerate. Quite frankly, my sympathy for Florida as a whole is limited. They keep voting for climate deniers by ever-increasing margins, even as their state is ravaged by ever-increasing climate disaster.

Hurricane Milton aftermath, taken from the Florida Times-Union.

Remember when I mentioned that it was in the upper seventies Fahrenheit the day after the election? Well, it really felt like the weather was mocking us. Or maybe, as one poster on the Massachusetts subreddit stated, hell was descending upon us. Either way, while I’m not a religious person, I firmly believe that we were being punished for electing a climate denier as President. It does not matter that Harris won Massachusetts by nearly 25 percentage points. We’re guilty by association.

President-elect Donald Trump is going to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords on his first day in office. With his GOP trifecta, he’s likely going to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, I’ve repeatedly called Biden feckless for how much he’s normalized Trump’s attacks on democracy. But
I think it must be said that the IRA was the most significant renewable energy investment in American history. Yes, it could have been even bigger if Manchin and Sinema hadn’t blocked key parts of it. Yes, other countries are well ahead of us in decarbonizing their societies, even those with “right-wing” governments like the Netherlands. Yet it was still a major win. And now it’s as good as gone.

Lame-duck President Sleepy Joe Biden giving a speech near Manaus, Brazil. Taken from CNN.

The image above is of the first time that a sitting American President has visited the Amazon Rainforest. It should have been a momentous occasion, since Biden’s visit was mostly about climate change and the need to preserve the rainforest as an essential carbon sink. And to some extent, it was.

However, I watched the associated video on C-Span. While Biden makes a lot of great points in his speech, it’s also one of the most depressing videos I’ve ever seen when you consider the context. Biden probably knows as well as we do that everything he announces here is going to be stripped away in two months. That’s another exhibit in how American foreign policy does a total 180° every four years and why no country will ever trust us again. Which I might write about in the future. For now, just appreciate how sad it is that Biden must spend his twilight years defending the good parts of his legacy, and just how futile his efforts will be.

Over the next four years (and well beyond that), the world is going to experience more and more climate hell. No country is safe from Mother Nature’s wrath, even countries that have done far more to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis than we have. Perhaps other countries aren’t doing enough, particularly in the light of the GOP’s brazen environmental crimes, but at least they acknowledge that the problem exists.

The Republican Party is the only mainstream political faction on Earth that denies climate change altogether, and for that I’d consider them the world’s most dangerous organization. Indeed, they are terrorists. The American people really had no right to elect these people - maybe democracy isn’t the best system after all. At least, not when the electorate is this depraved and dumb.

To be clear, the whole world will suffer for our sins. But at least the rest of the world can take “comfort” in knowing they did the best they could. And they’ll perpetually blame the United States for the rest of human history - which, admittedly, might not be that long. We gleefully voted in the world’s biggest climate menace yet again, and for that, we deserve whatever sanctions the rest of the world gives us.

When the rest of the world acted responsibly in the face of the climate crisis, we willingly exacerbated that crisis.  Every single Trump voter is guilty of ecocide, and if hell exists, there’s a special place in it for Americans. And I’ll leave you with a photo of a public service, courtesy of Just Stop Oil. It really exemplifies how I feel about my country right now.

The United States embassy in London, United Kingdom after Just Stop Oil protestors vandalized it with orange paint following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election.

Anti-America’s Top Ten Countdown: Week 3

It’s that time of the week again, so it’s time for Anti-America’s Top Ten Countdown. These are the top ten news stories that every progressive member of the resistance needs to know for the week ending November 17, 2024. At times like these, it’s very important to stay informed no matter how depressing the news is. And most of these stories are pretty depressing, but that goes with the territory right now. So here we go; countdown number ten!

Google Search trendline for “how to change my vote”, taken from the Latin Times.

10: BUYER BEWARE.

Over the last week or so, we’ve gotten many stories about how people are searching for terms like “how to change their vote” or “what are tariffs.” And I’ve got two words for these people: Fuck. Off. Seriously, you couldn’t be bothered to do even a tiny bit of research before you cast your ballot? You took the time to go to your polling place, or request a mail-in ballot, and you didn’t realize that your decision was final? 

Look, it should go without saying that elections have consequences. If they didn’t, there’d be no reason to hold them. But you need to think about what these consequences might be before you vote, not after. I always knew that the American electorate was stupid, but I guess I just didn’t know how stupid. You’ve made this mess, and now we’ll have to clean it up even in the most optimistic potential scenario. Countdown number nine.

Official US Senate portrait for Senator John Thune (R-SD) taken from his Senate website.

9: THUNE TOWN

The Senate Republican conference has selected John Thune of South Dakota to be their new Majority Leader. He defeated Rick Scott, who was seen as the more extreme option, in the leadership race. But don’t let that fool you. He may not look like Voldemort (sorry for the Harry Potter reference), but that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. In fact, I’d argue he’s more dangerous than Rick Scott would have been. 

Thune isn’t going to tank his caucus’ popularity the way Scott might. He may not be charismatic, but he doesn’t need to be in order to fill all those judicial seats and fuck this country over to an even greater extent. Already, he’s embraced the idea of recess appointments for Trump’s horrific Cabinet picks. This is especially dangerous because individual GOP Senators will not have to go on the record supporting or opposing them, insulating them from public backlash that might come from confirming people like RFK Jr. But we’ll get to that later. Countdown number eight.

An example of a racist text message sent to a black voter after the 2024 election, taken from ABC-7 News.

8: SUFFOCATE ON YOUR OWN HATE

It’s no secret that systemic racism is a stain on the U.S. nation that has never really been washed away. In many ways, we’re still suffering from the fact that we were conceived as a slave society. It’s shocking, but perhaps not surprising, that in the immediate aftermath of the election of such a horribly bigoted man, hateful people would feel emboldened to spew their vile beliefs and enforce them upon the rest of us.

Keep in mind that these bigots do all of this with the explicit support of the President-elect. It seems people have already forgotten when he stood there in the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville hate rally and said there were “very fine people on both sides.” They’ve already forgotten when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” And I’m not going to absolve the individual texters of their responsibility for this act of psychological terror. But the fact remains that when the President of the United States speaks, people listen. He’s one of the most prominent people in the world, after all, and thanks to the Supreme Court, he’s now easily the most powerful. Countdown number seven.

Bugs Bunny about to saw off Florida from the rest of the country. That’s a public service if you ask me.

7: BUGS BUNNY, YOU’RE OUR ONLY HOPE.

In the recent election, Florida gave presidential nominee Donald Trump 56 percent of the vote, and Senator Rick Scott 55.6 percent of the vote. Both men are climate-denying Republicans. This is despite the fact that Tropical Storm Sara is heading for impact in Florida right now. Hell, have these people already forgotten about Hurricane Milton? Apparently so! 

We keep hearing in the news about how Florida is becoming uninsurable due to the numerous climate change risks facing the state. And yet, they keep voting for Republicans by ever-increasing margins despite this. Florida is a dumping ground for the red-hats and anti-intellectuals of the United States, and if they want to leech off FEMA support whenever they get a hurricane, they might as well secede. But then they’ll come crying back to Uncle Sam, and I’ll have no sympathy for them. I wish Bugs Bunny were real so he could save the rest of America from the scourge that is Florida. Countdown number six.

Alex Jones yells about something. Taken from NYT.

6: KEEPING UP WITH MR. JONES

Here’s the only cheery story for this week. After liquidating all his assets to pay the grieving Sandy Hook families he defamed, Alex Jones was forced to sell his cesspit of a website known as InfoWars. It was bought by a satirical magazine you might have heard of - The Onion. Every time there’s a high-profile shooting, The Onion runs their classic headline “No Way To Prevent This, Says Only Country Where This Regularly Happens”. That’s about the only thing they post that doesn’t feel like satire.

This is the one good thing to come out of the last few weeks. Alex Jones is going to get what he deserves, which is to have his media empire destroyed and ridiculed. Reportedly they’ll make it a gun safety advocacy website, which is a far more productive use of Internet bandwidth. For the record, I’ve watched the documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones, and it just made my skin crawl. What a despicable man. Countdown number five.

Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., taken from USA Today.

5: POLIO PARTY JAMBOREE

In last week’s countdown, I wrote about RFK Jr.’s brain worms as the number five spot. Now that Trump has officially selected this anti-vaxxer as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I thought it was only fitting that he be number five again.

Excuse me, we’ll have an anti-vaccine activist in charge of public health in this country? Yes, we will. Even if he doesn’t ban all vaccines, he can still do a lot of damage to public health by promoting the notion that vaccines cause autism and whatnot. The anti-vaccine movement killed more than enough people during the COVID-19 pandemic, thank you very much. Now, with bird flu emerging as a pandemic threat, it looks like we might well have a sequel. And this time, it’ll start here. We truly live in the darkest timeline, and I hope that the protest voters who thought “both candidates are the same” go fuck themselves with cacti. Countdown number four.

Tulsi Gabbard at a Trump rally. Taken from PBS.

4: PARIAH CAREY

At a time when the United States is engaged in a proxy war with Russia that could turn into World War III any day now, at a time when we need to support Ukraine more than ever, we elected a pro-Russian President. That’s bad enough. But that President is going to appoint Tulsi Gabbard, a noted Russian asset who spreads conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine , to be Director of National Intelligence.

 Effectively, he could just name Putin in that role and be done with it. If there was any hope that our relationships with allies could be salvaged following his first term, that hope has now been dashed. The odds that any NATO country will share intelligence with us is now less than zero, and Trump voters have themselves to blame for that. If the effects of Trump’s tariffs aren’t bad enough on the economy, we’re now likely to get sanctioned just as much as Russia is. But if you didn’t vote for Harris, you have no right to complain about that! The United States is no longer a laughing stock, we are now a pariah. Countdown number three.

Matt Gaetz. Enough said. 

3: GAETZ OF HELL.

Trump has also picked Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General. Forget Matt Gaetz’s personal life for a moment, forget that the tapes suggest he’s had sex with minors. Gaetz is a Trump loyalist to the core, and he’s going to use his position to go after anyone who opposes Trump. Some people are optimistic about the 2026 elections, but I’m not. Trump will use Gaetz to go after his political opponents, and he’ll throw anyone who is an electoral threat to a Republican in prison. We’ll never have another free and fair election again, and it’s all because of November 5.

And remember, he’s also a sex offender. The release of the House Ethics Committee report to that effect is going to be blocked so that he can be confirmed. If you vote for clowns, you’re going to get a circus. Quite frankly, we’ll be lucky if a circus is all we get for the next four years and beyond. There’s a special place in hell for people who voted for Trump because it was funny, or sat out the election because “both parties are the same.” I don’t give a fuck. Countdown number two.

Image of Trump as an African-style dictator, taken from BBC News.

2: AND THE STREETS RUN RED.

It’s been reported that Trump has drafted a day-one executive order to fire any military generals he dislikes. He’ll replace them all with loyalists.Senator Tommy Tuberville (blech) blocked military promotions last year, and that wasn’t about abortion at all. He wanted to make it easier for Trump to stack the department with loyalists as part of Project 2025. This is Project 2025 right here, and that’s what a plurality voted for. So protest voters, go get that cactus. I’m waiting.

Moreover, the fact that he’ll fire all disloyal generals should make you panic. There’s nothing to stop Trump from ordering the military to fire on civilians who peacefully protest his policies. If the general says no, Trump will fire that general and replace him with someone who will. The streets will run red with the blood of Trump’s enemies, and we’ll be a war zone just like Ukraine. The only difference is that unlike Ukraine, we chose to make our country a war zone. Given that Trump won the popular vote, this is what we deserve. I’m not okay with it, but it’s what we’ll get thanks to the protest voters. Take that cactus and shove it up your ass if you didn’t vote for Harris.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office like they’re best buddies. Taken from r/Pics.

1: JOE BIDEN, LEGACY OF AN IDIOT

I voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 general election, but it’s clear now that he wasn’t up to the task that needed to be done. The image above really says it all, because Joe Biden has not stood up to the occasion. 

When Republicans across the country increasingly criminalize the LGBTQ+ community, Biden does nothing. I get that there’s only so much he could have done to stop state-level laws, but he barely said a word about them. And now that Trump is about to be President, there is nothing he can do at all. But Biden’s probably fine with that. He’s about to be 82 years old and was going to be okay regardless of the election results. The rest of us may not be.

LGBTQ+ rights are not the only issue Biden has failed us on. Remember when Biden commissioned a report about Supreme Court reform in 2021? Well, it was totally toothless. Again, just like lots of other politicians, because he isn’t directly affected by these issues, he doesn’t care. I honestly wonder what he did all day in the White House - play Scrabble with Jill? Say what you will about Trump, but when he wanted to do something highly dangerous in his first term, he exhausted every possible avenue to find a way. And now that he’ll have the courts even more in his corner, he is going to find a way far more often than not. 

I hope that cactus feels good, protest voters.

Thank you for reading. Please subscribe. This is my Jeb Bush “please clap” moment.

The Kids Aren’t Alright

Donald Trump with the Nelk Boys, indicative of his media strategy this election. Taken from the US Sun website.

If you’ve read any of my blog posts recently, you’ll know that I do not approve of Donald Trump. Indeed, that is a gross understatement. However, we have the “benefit” of knowing that in hindsight, he ran an excellent media campaign.

Lots of us made fun of Trump for going on Joe Rogan, but I recently went to the YouTube page for that interview, and it has more than fifty million views. Five. Zero. And then six more zeros. Now, I don’t have access to the analytics page for The Joe Rogan Experience, but it’s no secret that a lot of his viewers are the sort of demographic that swung hard to Republicans in the recent election. By that, I mean young white and Latino men between the ages of 18 and 29. As a 24-year-old terminally online white man who despises Trump, I have to acknowledge what he did right in this campaign.

It wasn’t just Joe Rogan. Trump went on shows like Theo Von, the Nelk Boys’ “Full Send” podcast, and more. Consider the latter case. The Nelk Boys promote right-wing political causes, yes, but they’re better known for their apolitical content. Lots of people laugh at their prank videos, including those who think politics is the sort of thing young people shouldn’t bother with.

 It’s not much of a stretch to say that people who follow the Nelk Boys (that’s over 8 million subscribers on their main channel alone) might be swayed by what they implicitly support. Politics is not a game - real people’s lives would be affected by whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris won. Not everyone who watches the Nelk Boys will be swayed to support Trump, but some will, and in a country that’s known for having close national elections, all it takes is some.

The point is, Trump embraced alternative media to an extent the Democrats simply didn’t in the most recent election. I have to give him credit for that, as much as I hate the man’s guts. He met the voters where they were, and for all the alternative policies Harris was offering, her message didn’t reach them.

As an example of the policy implications of this: If I’d harbored any hope that America might eventually solve its gun violence crisis, it was that one day, Congress would be full of people who had to endure active shooter drills in school. Then they would be motivated to pass gun control legislation as opposed to the out-of-touch bureaucrats who comprise most of the federal government. 

The news that Trump outright won young men, according to exit polls, threw cold water on that glimmer of hope. I suppose it’s easy enough to dismiss the news of school shootings if it doesn’t happen in your community, but we’re all “someone else” to someone else. Then again, this “fear roulette” is a subject for another article.

A March For Our Lives protest against gun violence, taken from Teen Vogue.

Now I’m going to say something that might make many of my fellow terminally online netizens uncomfortable. And you should know that I’m not defending the bigotry that has very often gone hand-in-hand with religion. Indeed, I’m not religious myself, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that such organizations served a civic purpose back in the day. 

There are many unfortunate things about organized religion, but as with Donald Trump, I give credit where it’s due - they have fulfilled many peoples’ desire for community. I’m not saying that we should all get on our knees and turn to prayer. I don’t think that would solve all our problems, or even any of them. However, in some cases, I’m not convinced that what has replaced religion in this country is much better.

However, religion is far from the only civic institution that’s been on the decline in recent years. Consider that about a quarter of U.S. newspapers that existed in 2005 had shut down by 2022. Anecdotally speaking, I like to think I’m well-informed on current events, but I couldn’t tell you much about what’s happening in my own city. The decline of local news outlets has hit rural communities the hardest, and in many cases all that’s left there for the older generations to watch or listen to is talk radio and Fox News. And it’s been blamed for political polarization, too.

As for the younger generations, legacy news outlets in general have been rapidly replaced by social media. I’m the first to admit that I get most of my news from Reddit and BlueSky, and some people my age even stay informed via TikTok. But on Reddit, upvotes determine which news stories more people are going to see - the most popular news stories are not necessarily the most important from an objective standpoint. And Reddit is hardly the only social media site that quickly becomes an echo chamber. We all upvote the posts we agree with and downvote those we disagree with - that’s how it works.

A screenshot from a presentation I gave a few weeks ago about the Internet and democracy. Was a skydiving instructor getting prison time REALLY the third-most important story that day?

Again, I’m not going to sing the praises of legacy media. They’ve failed us in a big way, perhaps most notably via the Washington Post’s refusal to endorse Kamala Harris for President. They normalize Donald Trump far too much, since his first term was the best thing to happen to their ratings. Even MSNBC treats U.S. politics too much like a game show rather than something that really matters for the future of the world. And maybe it’s both, but the media has an essential role to play in any democracy.

So what’s the solution? Truthfully, I don’t know. Again, I’m not going to advocate for the revival of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, because in many ways it brought us into this mess. And yet (and I hate to borrow this saying from Donald Trump), we cannot let the cure be worse than the disease. 

Yes, societal acceptance of LGBTQ+ people has gone up as religiosity has gone down. That’s not a coincidence. But when so many young men, in a generation that is considerably less religious than those coming before it, just voted for politicians who are anti-LGBTQ+ (not to mention anti-peace, anti-renewable energy, and pro-gun), how much is that really worth? 

If you read this article and come away with one thought, let it be this: Religion and the legacy media, two civic institutions declining in influence, were and are deeply flawed. But that doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to make sure that whatever replaces them is more productive and truly contributes to the healthy, engaged society that we owe it to future generations to build.

Thank you for reading. I’d love if you subscribed to support my efforts.

The Feckless vs. The Fascists

Taken from r/Pics. This is how fascism starts.

Sometimes a picture truly is worth a thousand words. 

The photograph above depicts outgoing President Joe Biden on the right. He’s smiling that naïve old smile of his as though his predecessor and successor, Donald Trump (left) isn’t about to destroy the country and make it a living hell for even his own supporters. 

It’s often been observed that the Democrats are not willing to partake in the same tactics as Republicans in getting what they want. To some extent, I’m not saying they should. I certainly don’t think it would be wise to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2025, even if it worked out just fine for Mango Mussolini in the end. But take another look at the picture above and tell me that this is okay. Then take a look at the picture below and tell me that this is still okay.

Now, I think Trump shouldn’t have been allowed to run this year after he’d incited an insurrection. He tried to stage a coup and remain in power, and that’s totally disqualifying. But nonetheless, he was allowed to run, and he won the election. He even won the popular vote. And for the record, I believe he truly got those votes. As much as I hate the man, he did not steal this election except insofar as he shouldn’t have been allowed to be a candidate in the first place. We have to contend with the fact that half the population truly wanted him to return to power.

Given that context, I understand that there’s only so much the Democrats could do to stop Trump from taking the Oval Office again. Really, there is nothing they could do short of calling in the military to perform a coup. Biden could technically do that due to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, even if he really shouldn’t. But he shouldn’t be normalizing it, because this is not normal!

Look at the top photo again. It looks like Biden is Trump’s best buddy, like they’re reminiscing on the good old days. By “good old days”, I am of course referring to when Trump lost to Biden and incited a mob to kill a bunch of members of Congress to stop Biden from taking office. I’m referring to the times Trump threatened to prosecute Biden on trumped-up charges (no pun intended). If the shoe were on the other foot, if Trump had lost the 2024 election, I have little doubt they’d be doing another January 6, but now Biden’s playing patty-cake with this fascist.

 In hindsight, it’s clear that Biden was the wrong President at the wrong time. I voted for him in the 2020 general election, but that was mostly a vote to get Trump out rather than to get Biden in. The biggest problem is that Sleepy Joe’s an institutionalist at a time when the GOP was (and is) taking a jackhammer to this country’s institutions. Admittedly, some of our institutions remain deeply rooted in racism and should be improved, but if you think the Republican Party is going to remove this rot from our institutions, I’ve got some oceanfront property to sell you in Kansas.

Political cartoon taken from Politico. Thanks, Cocaine Mitch.

Of course, let’s not pretend that Biden’s the only Democrat who has shown his fecklessness. Take Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House. In May 2022, after it was leaked that the Supreme Court would strip women of their bodily autonomy, leading to many deaths and other horrific outcomes , the Democrats had a choice to make. They could use the trifecta they would still have for several more months to pass legislation codifying Roe v. Wade into law and keep abortion rights safe from the GOP. 

Alternatively, they could sit on their hands and do nothing. Given the subject of today’s article, I don’t think it takes a genius to realize what they did. Not only did they not codify abortion rights while they still could, but they fundraised off the overturning of Roe v. Wade!

Tens of millions of American women lose their right to bodily autonomy. Nancy Pelosi reads a poem in response. Taken from Slate.

Speaking of the Dobbs decision, it was only handed down because the Democrats did not persuade Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire prior to the 2014 midterms. She could have been replaced by a 40-year-old who would very probably still be on the Supreme Court today. Instead, Ginsburg “left the court” in 2020, and now we’re all screwed in more ways than one. And abortion rights are just the beginning. When it’s 2034 and the still-MAGA Supreme Court rules that AI-powered police drones can kill you without a warrant, you’ll know who to thank.

As bad as a 6-3 Supreme Court is, it can always get worse. Sonia Sotomayor seems determined to repeat Ginsburg’s mistake. She refused to retire under Biden even when the Democrats looked very likely to lose the presidency and Senate in 2024. If she dies under Trump and a Republican Senate, we’re going to have a 7-2 GOP majority on the Supreme Court. While Alito and Thomas are probably going to retire on day one of Trump’s second term and be replaced by 30-year-old far-right bloggers, Sotomayor did not learn her lesson. That’s Exhibit Number 547 in how the Democrats won’t play hardball. So we’ll have even more Supreme Injustice.

Biden supports abortion rights; at least, he claims to. But when push comes to shove, is he really going to fight for them? Consider his buddy Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of the magically sane land known as Canada. I have no doubt that if Canada had a right-wing Supreme Court that overturned abortion rights, Trudeau (a member of a center-left party by Canadian standards) would not take that lying down. He would not let that stand, and he’d find some way to overturn that ruling. 

Then again, as a tankie YouTuber known as Second Thought once said, Iceland’s banana production has more Wikipedia coverage than the individual members of its Supreme Court. So who knows if there’s even such a thing as a “right-wing” or “left-wing” Supreme Court up in Canada. Besides, abortion rights (and many other things we might consider basic human rights) are not up for debate anywhere else.

Remind me how Democrats lost to this guy twice? Imagine taken from the feckless Democrats on Xitter.

All of the above is to say this: I don’t subscribe to the notion that both parties are the same. That’s clearly not true, and we’re about to find out just how untrue it is. But the fecklessness of the Democratic Party, particularly when it’s against the fascism of the Republican Party, only gives more ammunition to the people who would say such things. When the only thing standing in the way of your country becoming a total fascist state is such a broken-down, dysfunctional disaster of a party, the future looks very bleak indeed.

Relevant Song Lyrics: “IDGAF” by Dua Lipa

Dua Lipa’s judging you. Taken from SoundCloud.

Today is Thursday, which means it’s time for a post about relevant song lyrics. After a brief meditation on the subject, I decided that today’s relevant song would be “IDGAF” by Dua Lipa. Because, quite frankly, I don’t give a fuck how people feel if they didn’t try to prevent the second national nightmare our country will face once more starting on January 20, 2025.

You call me, all friendly, tellin' me how much you miss me

That's funny, I guess you've heard my songs

In the most recent election, Donald Trump likely won plenty of voters who had not voted for him in either 2016 or 2020. Now that these people have realized their votes have consequences, and that politics is not a game, they’re going to come back crying to their family members who did not embrace such a horrendous individual to be the most powerful person in the world. Their family members wisely cut them off because they didn’t give a damn about LGBTQ+ rights, women who might need an abortion, or anyone else who’s not a rich, white, straight man. 

As a disclaimer, I’m lucky enough not to have any family members who voted for Trump. At least, not that I know of. All the ones I’m in regular contact with voted for Harris. This also means, of course, that I can’t speak for someone who does have Trump-voting relatives. Maybe cutting them off is more complicated than I imply here. But let’s continue.

Well, I'm too busy for your business, go find a girl who wants to listen

'Cause if you think I was born yesterday, you have got me wrong

I’m a guy, but this still applies to me. If you took the time to walk in that voting booth and fill in the oval next to “Trump and Vance”, you knew what you were doing. You don’t have the excuse of being lazy or uninformed. And I wasn’t born last night. I wasn’t even born at night, for my birth certificate says 9:01 AM. But that’s beside the point. If you want sympathy for your buyer’s remorse, then look elsewhere, because I don’t want to hear about how sorry you are. You might be sorry, but it doesn’t change the fact that your actions have doomed the country and planet.

So I cut you off, I don't need your love

'Cause I already cried enough

I've been done, I've been movin' on

Since we said goodbye

I cut you off, I don't need your love

So you can try all you want

Your time is up, I'll tell you why

Again, I say this as a cis man whose family members voted for Harris. But if I were a trans woman with family members who voted for Trump, I’d imagine that I wouldn’t put much stock in their “love.” All I would ask them to do would be a very simple non-action - don’t vote for the man who wants to put me in a labor camp. If my “loved ones” failed that very simple test of basic human decency, I would be under no illusions that they truly loved me. 

You say you're sorry, but it's too late now

So save it, get gone, shut up

'Cause if you think I care about you now

Well, boy, I don't give a fuck

It’s been reported that ever since the election, Google searches for terms like “what are tariffs” and “how do I change my vote” have skyrocketed. I’ll give a short response to that: Too late, assholes! But seriously, it’s too fucking late - just like some UK voters after the Brexit referendum, people didn’t realize what they voted for. But unlike UK voters after the Brexit referendum, we made the same mistake twice! You can’t take back your vote - sorry! Actually, I’m not sorry!

Google Trends as of a few days ago. Credit to user “itskrystlewithak” on Threads.

I remember that weekend when my best friend caught you creepin'

You blamed it all on the alcohol

So, I made my decision 'cause you made your bed, sleep in it

Play the victim and switch your position, I'm through, I'm done

While the situation described here isn’t quite synonymous with the 2024 election, in the runup to November 5 there were many “pro-Palestine leftists” who refused to vote for Harris. The leader of the Uncommitted movement said they would vote for Harris at the very last minute, but the damage had been done. A few days prior to the election, I wrote an article about how dumb this was.

I’ve said this many times: I support Palestine. I believe Benjamin Netanyahu is a genocidal maniac who should be locked up in a war crimes prison, no questions asked. But Donald Trump promised to set the pro-Palestine movement back “20 to 30 years”, and he said that when he still needed to win the election. He didn’t even try to pander to these voters, and yet they still swung violently his way. 

Some of the dumbest people alive, proving that it’s not just Trump’s cultists who live in an alternate reality. If they regret their votes, I won’t shed a tear for them. Taken from ABC7 Bay Area.

If you were angry about Gaza, you should have voted for Harris. But all too many of you didn’t, so instead Gaza will be turned into beachfront property or glass. And if you respond by saying that Gaza was glass anyway and it made no difference who would become President, then you clearly didn’t care about trans rights (which so many of you claim to care about). If you believe, as I do, that genocide is bad, then you should’ve voted for one genocide rather than the two genocides we’re about to have, one foreign and one domestic. This is to say nothing of the genocide in Ukraine, but that’s a topic for another post.

I see you tryna get to me

I see you beggin' on your knees

Boy, I don't give a fuck

So stop tryna get to me

Get up off your knees, 'cause

Boy, I don't give a fuck

I don’t care how hard you beg to be forgiven. Unless you vote for Democrats in 2026 and 2028, I won’t forgive you. Honestly, it might already be too late for this country. It’s certainly too late for the world, because electing Trump doomed the whole world, not just Gaza. This generation is just too dumb to live sometimes.

Voting is irreversible. You can’t take it back. And now the people who refused to vote for Harris, voted third-party, or especially voted for Trump are going to reap what they sow. We’re all going to suffer for it, but if this suffering is what it takes for these people to realize their mistakes, then so be it.

My Dark Side

Cover for The Young Elites by Marie Lu, a book series that felt relevant when I wrote this post. 

There’s a young adult fantasy trilogy called The Young Elites written by Marie Lu. I read them in my mid-teens, though for the record, I prefer young adult novels even in my mid-twenties. Without spoiling anything, the main character, Adelina Amouteru, aligns with passion, and it gets her in a lot of trouble. She’s the sort of protagonist whom it’s often hard to love. 

While I sat at a table in a computer lab yesterday evening, wondering what I was going to write about for today’s post, those books occurred to me again. In some ways, I am like a male version of Adelina Amouteru. And I’m going to explain.

In a previous blog post (the one dated November 4, 2024), I wrote about how being autistic makes me weird and wonderful, like Bennie And The Jets. For the record, I still believe that sometimes. I want to believe that without people like me, the world would not have as much passion, and that people like me help solve problems. Is it a superpower?

Well, not exactly. Today I’m going to talk about the darker side of that passion and why it matters.

One way in which the passion manifests is shame. As I talked about just yesterday, I feel deeply ashamed to be American and am compelled to constantly state it. Perhaps that is a result of my OCD, very often a comorbidity with autism. I care what other people think, sometimes far too much, and it’s led to some situations that I don’t feel like talking about publicly. Sometimes, to quote Alice Merton…

Lyrics for a karaoke music video of “Lash Out” by Alice Merton

Yes, that line is rather tongue-in-cheek, but I have to drive the point across somehow. More to the point, I also have incredibly thin skin. I can’t handle being teased for having an orange buffoon as President not once but twice. I just can’t deal with the fact that more than half the country wanted Trump again, and I counted down ten reasons why this was a bad idea here.

Passion also extends to the damage Donald Trump is going to do to everything I care about. Consider the topic of reproductive rights. If Trump is able to pass a national abortion ban, I fear for any woman of child-bearing age in this country, particularly women who have reason to believe their pregnancies are more likely to be difficult. My heart breaks for my younger sister, all of her friends, and all the female friends I have both in real life and online. These should be the best years of their lives. They should be excited about maybe starting a family, not worried about how dangerous it might be to become pregnant.

Consider also the issue of gun violence, which is so often sanitized in this hellish nation. Maybe the passion drives me to worry more than I should, as getting shot is statistically relatively unlikely (even if it’s a lot more likely than it should be). But whenever I hear a loud noise - a car backfiring, a hammer, even the furnace going off - I instinctively flinch at the sound, wondering for a split second if I am about to die. I weep even harder for the students of America who must get on that big yellow school bus every morning not knowing if they’re going to come home on that same bus. Again, the chances of it happening to you or your child are objectively low, but in the words of one survivor of September’s Apalachee High School shooting…

A gun control advocate holds a sign saying “Our schools shouldn’t be cemeteries.” Taken from The Economist.

Finally, let’s take the issue of climate change. This issue deserved a lot more attention in the 2024 campaign, considering that it poses an existential threat to all life on this planet. And yet, my country elected Donald Trump, and now the fight against climate change is over. Don’t take it from me; take it from Bernie Sanders - he literally said exactly that when trying to convince pro-Palestinian voters to back Kamala Harris in last week’s election. As we now know, that plea fell on deaf ears.

And I feel responsible for all of this, as a citizen of the only country holding the world back from solving this crisis. It doesn’t matter that I personally voted for Harris - I feel as though I should pay somehow. It literally makes me feel sick to my stomach whenever I think about what the world thinks of us. And by extension, what they think of me. Humanity has failed to save the Earth, and we only have American voters to blame.

How Greta Thunberg probably feels about American voters right now. 

So what does all this have to do with my autism? Well, the common thread with all these societal problems is that I have no control over them. Or rather, I’ve already done everything that’s within my legal ability to solve these problems - it’s just that 50.3% of the American electorate (according to currently counted ballots) unleashed this hell on both the United States and, in the case of the climate crisis, the rest of the world. One of the things about being autistic, at least for many people, is the hyperfixation - it just so happens that one of my hyperfixations is politics. And it’s a very depressing time indeed to follow politics if you’re a progressive in the United States.

Adelina Amouteru aligned with passion. She aligned with it so much that it led her to some very dark places. After a particularly impulsive yet consequential act, to paraphrase the ending of the second book, she waited and waited for the wave of satisfaction to hit her. But it didn’t come. And that’s exactly how I feel right now. 

The worst thing about being passionate is when there’s no practical application for said passion. It doesn’t matter how fervently I support a woman’s right to choose, the ability to be safe in public, or a habitable planet for future generations. Thanks to the decisions of just over half my countrymen, we will not get those things. We will never get those things, and I feel as though that passion of mine will go to waste. 

And there’s nothing worse than wasting the one thing you’re good at.

Surviving Shame

Disclaimer: This post will discuss my mental health challenges, so reader discretion is advised.

I don’t know why I feel ashamed all of a sudden. Actually, I do know why - it’s because of that orange dipshit who just won the presidential election last week. Some would say that I’m not my country, that it’s not my fault he’s in charge. After all, I voted for Kamala Harris in large part because I didn’t want Trump to be President again and make a mockery of this country. Based on that, why should I feel any shame at all to be American?

Part of it is because I’m terminally online. The other day I was on the Pics subreddit, and a picture of the Royal Flying Doctor service in Australia (which I have shared below) was posted and labeled as “universal health care, costing the patient nothing no matter who they are.” Which it is, of course - just about every country other than America has universal health care. You could say that about a lot of other things too. We are the only country without many good things, and conversely, the only country with many bad things. But again, I didn’t choose to be born here, so why do I feel like it’s a moral failing of myself to live in the United States?

Universal health care in the Australian Outback, courtesy of the country’s Royal Flying Doctor Service. Taken from r/Pics.

Possibly it’s because I have OCD. And by “OCD”, I don’t mean “I’m so OCD because I need to have everything neat and tidy”. I mean more like, “I wash my hands so often that they often bleed during the colder months”. It’s not as bad as it was some years ago; my knuckles are not nearly as dry and cracked. However, it’s entirely possible that whenever Trump says or does something insane, it’s a compulsion that forces me to yell about how much I hate my country. It’s the reason why next time I go to Europe, I might take a Canadian flag pin with me and put it on my bag so people know I don’t approve. I know that realistically, most people in Italy aren’t going to judge me for my nationality unless I tell them I voted for Trump (which I won’t, because I didn’t), but I can’t cope with being a laughingstock. I just can’t.

Recently I was on a Discord server and had a discussion about how I couldn’t get over what other people thought of me. Somebody asked me if I was on the autism spectrum, and I said yes, because I am. In many ways it means I’m weird and wonderful, but sometimes the weird part wins out. It certainly has lately, and it probably will a lot over the next four years. Maybe that’s another part of the reason I give so much thought to what others think of me for something I didn’t choose. I voted against Trump - that’s the most potent legal form of protest I could have used. But he’s still going to represent us abroad for the next four years, and we’ll be even more of a laughing stock than we were previously. Even in my personal life, whenever someone is laughing around me, I often feel like they’re laughing at me, even if they really aren’t. 

Trump asks about injecting bleach during a COVID-19 press conference on April 23, 2020.

It’s not just the fact that things are worse here than they should be, though. It’s that voters, by and large, appear to be okay with it. Consider that Donald Trump openly bragged about killing Roe v. Wade, multiple times in fact, and still won the presidency last week. This occurred even in the face of his opponent making abortion rights the center of her campaign. Even after Amber Nicole Thurman’s story was publicized, voters just didn’t care.  This stands in stark contrast to the Republic of Ireland, where just one death due to lack of abortion access was seen as too many, and they immediately legalized it. And don’t even get me started on our gun laws.

Another example: As stated above, the United States doesn’t have universal health care, and even many Democratic lawmakers don’t support it. Consider that Justin Trudeau, the current Prime Minister of Canada, is considered left of center by Canadian standards. Imagine if he proposed moving to an American-style health care system. Just imagine. You probably can’t, because that would never happen.

Redditors from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, or any other civilized country you can think of will proudly tell you that even the conservatives in their country vocally support universal health care, and that any politician proposing to get rid of it would immediately be shooed out of office. That’s probably true. It’s not just that we get screwed over so much, but that we as a country mind it so little. In Canada, no party that campaigned on rolling back LGBTQ+ rights would ever be elected. Compare that to our culture war bullshit that elected Trump once again. And this time, he won the popular vote, so the Electoral College can’t be used as an excuse.

So when the world laughs at you for your country being a laughing stock, what do you do? How do you go on living when you’re the butt of so many jokes? How do you not feel as though everyone hates and mocks you?

One thing’s for sure: Don’t be like this guy.

The answer is that, at least in the case of the latter question, you don’t. You just have to keep living - you’re not going to sink through the floor and disappear like anyone who’s just been in a very embarrassing situation wants to. But at the same time, actively working to make things better isn’t going to solve my shame either. Like I said at the top, I feel responsible for whatever does or doesn’t happen now even though I voted for Harris. The fact remains that I will still have to pay taxes to the Trump administration, and I don’t trust him one bit to spend my tax dollars with any decency whatsoever.

Maybe one morning, four years, two months, and eight days from now, I will wake up and Trump will no longer be President. We’ll still be a laughing stock, of course, because in any civilized nation Trump would be lucky to get 5 percent of the vote, if he were allowed to run at all after attempting a violent coup. It’s a testament to our unique collective depravity that he got over 50. But for now, I am a dissident. I will embrace the label of dissident, because it shows that I do not approve of the administration. Even if the Trump administration starts supporting Russia instead of Ukraine, even if they “drill baby drill” in the face of every other country fully embracing renewable energy, even if they hunt down and lock up every last LGBTQ+ person in the country, I will go to the gas chamber knowing I tried to resist.

 If anyone from Canada still hates me for being American, that’s on them.

Lessons From My Grandfather

Say what you will about The Simpsons, but this image felt very appropriate.

As with many other major historical events, I still remember where I was that day. 

One dreary afternoon in February 2023, I received the call from my mother, and she seemed to think the matter was urgent. She told me that her father, my grandfather, had passed away. And I’ll admit that on some level, I was relieved, because he wasn’t suffering anymore. Given that he was 97 years old when he died, and had suffered from dementia for several years prior, I felt as though I had already lost him three years before I actually did. Of course, it’s achingly sad when anyone dies, even if you’ve seen it coming from a mile away. Nobody lives forever, after all - more on that later.

My grandfather was an exceptional man. Most people say such things about their deceased relatives, but in this case I truly feel that way. He was born into a Jewish family that felt reluctant to express that culture; anti-Semitism was rampant at the time, even if it didn’t carry the force of law like it did in Europe. However, he is the reason I consider myself Jew-ish, even if I’ve never fully practiced the faith. Maybe it comes from going to many of my friends’ bar and bat mitzvahs when I was younger. 

He was also incredibly active in his community. Again, that might sound like a cliché statement, but it’s true. He and his wife, my grandmother, helped found a Unitarian Universalist congregation in their hometown, and he was an active member for the last nearly thirty years of his life. He was also fascinated by aviation, having acquired a private pilot’s license in adulthood. When he and my grandmother moved into a retirement home, he continued playing table tennis into his early nineties. And for the record, he was pretty good at it, even against someone as agile as my brother! 

A flaming chalice, a symbol of Unitarian Universalism.

My grandfather’s memorial service was held that May at the UU congregation that he’d helped establish. It was a somewhat gray spring day, and my siblings and I dressed up for the occasion. When my uncle gave a speech about what his father had meant to him, I was struck by a pair of quotes he highlighted, lines my grandfather had so often used in life.

Give a damn: If you’re going to try something, give it your best effort. Don’t half-ass a task under any circumstances; show your friends, family, and loved ones that you care about what you’re doing. During my time writing fanfiction, I would have done well to take pride in my craft as opposed to how many readers I was getting from various countries. 

Just because something is good doesn’t mean more is better: This can mean a number of different things. You might tell this to someone who’s tempted to have an extra slice of cake at a birthday party, or who wants to overindulge in alcohol before they have to drive home from a restaurant. However, the way I see it, you should savor what you have, whether it means the time you have on this planet or any material possession. Although my grandfather lived a relatively long life, 97 years, he never took a single day for granted.

Me in my outfit for the memorial service. 

As one of his surviving relatives, I was honored to deliver a two-minute eulogy for my grandfather. I’ll leave you with this anecdote, which I mentioned during the eulogy.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember visiting my grandfather in his bedroom. We talked for a while about what we wanted, and my aging grandfather said he wanted to live forever. Even at that young age, I knew that immortality was a myth; at least, to the extent that it exists on Earth. I thought my grandfather was either completely joking or expressing his eccentricity, and neither would have been out of place for him. 

 As I noted in the eulogy, that clearly didn’t happen in the literal sense. He is no longer with us. However, as I was writing the speech I’d eventually give, it occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t talking about immortality in the literal sense. Maybe instead he meant that he wanted to live forever in the memories of the people who cared about him. Again, perhaps that’s an obvious point to make, but sometimes it’s only when the loss of a loved one stares you in the face that you realize how true it is. 

As long as people keep talking about you, you’ll never truly die. Isn’t that the only sort of afterlife you’d want?

If you spend a lot of time on Reddit like I do, you might have seen a number of people saying something like that. Of course, the Internet is not real life; I’d hazard a guess that Redditors are less religious than the population at large, and not just those frequenting r/atheism. However, there are legitimate questions about whether living forever would really be worth it. At the same time, I don’t want death to truly be the end of our experience. Maybe I’m just not mature enough to acknowledge the truth, or maybe there is in fact something to the human desire to believe in something supernatural. Maybe the evidence suggesting that prehistoric humans believed in something akin to religion isn’t actually a coincidence. I just don’t know. 

While I don’t know much, I do know one thing. I am determined to live my life to the fullest, making every day count just like my grandfather did. I want people to remember me. Maybe this blog will be an essential part of the historical record a hundred years from now when scholars look back on the 2024 election and its consequences. Maybe it can provide some solace knowing that I’m contributing to the historical record of the next four years with sage articles like this one. Who knows? Either way, I have my grandfather to thank for this. 

I miss you, G-Pa.

Anti-America’s Top Ten Countdown: Week 2

Today might be Sunday, but it certainly isn’t a fun day. It’s that time of the week again, which means it’s time for Anti-America’s Top Ten Countdown. For today’s blog post, I’ll go through the top ten most important news stories of the week for the resistance to know about. Given the unfortunate election results from Tuesday, this week it’ll be the top ten reasons we shouldn’t have elected Donald Trump. The top ten reasons us Harris voters can say “I told you so.” I would tell you to enjoy, but this isn’t the sort of thing that’s fun unless you’re a far-right nutcase. Which, apparently, is more than half the voting public.

YouTube thumbnail for “Getting Away With Murder” by Papa Roach.

10. GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!

Donald Trump faced four criminal trials after leaving office in 2021, and he was even convicted in one of them despite his Supreme Court’s best efforts. However, now that he is about to be President, the Justice Department has agreed to wind down these cases. Essentially, this means Trump will get away with it. He is a convicted felon, but that doesn’t matter when you’re President of the United States. Trump is quite literally above the law. In many states (which should really be all states, though put that aside for now), you can’t buy a gun if you’re convicted of a felony. If there’s even the slightest possibility you might be problematic, you won’t be allowed to work at any job involving children. And yet, this convicted felon is about to be the most powerful person in the world. Even if he leaves office in four years and doesn’t become a full-on dictator, the rule of law is forever dead in this country. Nobody should be in prison if the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military is a felon. Countdown number nine.

Elon Musk doing the X jump on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania.

9. THIS COUNTRY’S GOING DOWN THE XITTER.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. He used this wealth to buy Twitter, then the world’s most popular social media platform, and alter the algorithm to constantly promote heinous propaganda, all for the sake of getting Donald Trump elected President again. If you still use Xitter (pronounced “shitter”), you are supporting this man’s efforts to take over the world. Literally. Now that Trump is going to be President again, he’s promised Elon a position in his Cabinet, and for all the promises he hasn’t kept and still won’t keep, I truly believe he intends to fulfill this one. In hindsight, the acquisition was part of a highly effective strategy to brainwash young people into voting Republican, and it worked. If the Democrats are to combat this in the future, they will need to contend with this right-wing media ecosystem and how much damage it has done to this country. Countdown number eight.

Unfortunately, not enough people truly believe this.

8. TRANS RIGHTS? NO MORE.

This isn’t a surprise to everyone, but in states like Texas and Florida that have worked to make the lives of trans people hell on Earth, Project 2025 was already in effect. Even if Kamala Harris had won Tuesday’s election, it would still be in effect. But that’s not to say things won’t get far worse under Trump. He pledged to end “this transgender madness” on day one. Who knows how far he’ll go, but at a minimum, I expect hate crimes against trans people (and cis people whom the right perceives as seeming trans) to skyrocket. After all, when the President speaks, people listen. What’s most disturbing to me is that some of the people on BlueSky with “trans rights are human rights” in their bio were vocally anti-Harris. I’m all for trans rights, but if you truly believe they’re important, I fail to understand how you can justify not voting for the one candidate who could have beaten Trump. Make it make sense! Countdown number seven.

Map of the Israel-Hamas War, taken from Wikipedia. This war, which has spilled over into Iran and Lebanon, is about to escalate even further.

7. THE MIDDLE EAST WILL GO SOUTH.

Some of the people I mentioned above cited Gaza as a reason not to vote for Harris. In my mind, it would be a reason to vote for Harris, because Trump’s decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal led directly to the Netanyahu inside job that was October 7, which gave Israel an excuse to escalate their genocide against the people of Gaza. Now Iran has joined on behalf of Palestine, and Israel has invaded Lebanon. The Middle East has long been a tinderbox, but at times of heightened tension like this, it would be nice if the world’s most powerful man was a functioning adult. Oh wait - he won’t be! Trump has promised to give Netanyahu even more of what he wants, and Gaza will be turned to glass. As bad as things are there now, they’re going to get even worse under Trump, and yet all too many people thought it was worth electing him just to virtue-signal about how awful Harris’ views on the genocide were. Make it make sense! Countdown number six.

Progressive activists protest GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Image taken from the Denver Post.

6. WEALTH CARE. 

I’m not going to defend the U.S.’ atrocious health care system. I’m the first one to say that Medicare For All would be nice. But the Affordable Care Act was better than what we had before it, which was basically no protection at all for anyone. Now that the law sometimes referred to as Obamacare is likely about to be repealed, we’ve seen lots of people say that they want the Affordable Care Act to remain even though they hate Obamacare. They’re the same thing, you dumbasses! A lot of these voters will get buyer’s remorse now, but too late - be careful what you vote for, because you just might get it! That’s not to minimize the very real harm that will be done to people who didn’t want Trump to win, but a sizable number of people voted for him even in the face of his promises to strip these protections from people. And I won’t shed a tear for the latter group. Countdown number five!

Political cartoon from the Daily Freeman about the man who’s about to be in charge of public health in the US. 

5. AMERICA HAS SOME SERIOUS BRAIN WORMS. 

Donald Trump has promised to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health in this country. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaxxer who believes vaccines cause autism. Now, I’d rather be autistic than dead of an easily preventable disease; in fact, I’m already one of those things. More to the point, RFK Jr. is probably going to ban all vaccines from being administered in the United States. We’ll be the pariahs of the world just like we were during COVID. And by the way, remember COVID? Over a million Americans died due to the GOP’s genocidal negligence, and we not only collectively forgot about it, but we rewarded the architect of this genocide by making him President once again. Furthermore, in the face of an impending bird flu pandemic with a case-fatality rate of 50% (by comparison, COVID’s was 2-3% at most, and look how catastrophic that was), we’re going to have this man be our health czar. May Arceus have mercy on our souls. Countdown number four.

Donnie and his buddy Vlad meeting in Helsinki, Finland back in 2018. 

4. WORLD WAR III IMMINENT.

Donald Trump has promised to abandon Ukraine. He literally said that the war would end in 24 hours if he were President again. Technically, he isn’t lying about that - he just wasn’t telling people how he’d end it. Trump might not pull the US out of NATO, but he can still withhold aid to Ukraine even if he doesn’t take that more drastic step. It’s at least conceivable that Europe might increase aid to compensate, but I won’t hold my breath. It’s more likely that Ukraine will be overrun by Russia, and then they’ll come back for the Baltic states and Poland. The blood of every last Ukrainian who dies from here on out is on Trump’s hands, and by extension the hands of all Americans who voted for him. If we don’t stop Russia now, we’ll have to stop them later, and that’ll mean World War III. And when it happens, when all of Europe is a warzone and nukes start flying, we will only have ourselves to blame. Countdown number three.

2024 United States Supreme Court “group photo”, taken from ABC News.

3. SUPREME INJUSTICE.

If there’s one lesson that should be learned from Trump’s first term, it’s that the Supreme Court matters. We already have two Injustices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are flat-out fascist insurrections and openly flout ethics rules - not that there really are ethics rules, of course. Donald Trump has already appointed Gorey Gorsuch, Gang Bang Brett, and the Contagious ACB to the Supreme Court, and they were three of the Injustices who not only stripped women of their bodily autonomy, but also said he can do whatever he wants as President. Because he is now once again President, I expect at least Alito to retire, and Trump will replace him with some 30-year-old far-right blogger who said all Democrats should be hunted down in the streets. Thomas will probably also retire, and then we’ll have five of the nine Supreme Court Injustices appointed by Donald Trump. Say goodbye to any progressive priority until at least mid-century. Now, it’s also true that in any other country, most people can’t name a single member of their Supreme Court. That’s a problem in and of itself, though also a topic for another day. Countdown number two.

Wildfire in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY the other day. Image taken from AMNewYork.

2. WE HAVE FAILED TO SAVE THE EARTH.

Climate change was hardly talked about in this campaign, but this election was incredibly important for anyone who wanted the planet to remain remotely habitable in the future. The GOP is the only mainstream political party in any country that denies climate change. While every other country embraces the renewable technology of the future, we’re the only country that keeps going further back and committing to fossil fuels. We’re already paying the price for that. The day after the election, it was in the upper 70s Fahrenheit (mid-20s Celsius) in Massachusetts, and it felt like the weather was mocking us for electing a climate denier. It hasn’t rained for weeks here, and Brooklyn is quite literally on fire! At a time when responsible climate leadership is more important than ever, the United States is the reason the world will lose the fight against climate change. People wanted to spend a little less on groceries, so they voted to let the world burn instead. The United States is no longer a global laughingstock; we are a global pariah. The whole world hates us, we’re going to hell, and we have to live with it. Game over.

If there’s one silver lining of the next four years, it’s that we’ll get plenty of sequels to this meme. 

1. PROTEST VOTERS: I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY!

All of the above happened because of the protest voters who tried to act so superior by not voting for Kamala Harris. Honestly, when Trump enacts these horrendous policies (and more), I hope you don’t show up to the protests against them. You aren’t welcome there if I have anything to say about it. The day to save the Earth, the day to stop Project 2025, the day to save trans people, etc., was November 5, 2024. You didn’t show up when we needed you, and for that I want to say: Shame on you. You don’t deserve my sympathy, or anyone else’s. The leopards are going to eat your face, and you just have to deal with it. I’m going to curse all of you with my last breath as I choke on wildfire smoke, or die from bird flu. Assuming there is another election, all of you have to realize that you fucked up big-time, and maybe if you don’t want things to get even worse, you should get off the couch and vote for Democrats. Until then, fuck off.

We sure have, Happy Mask Salesman. We sure have. And we brought it upon ourselves. Taken from r/Zelda.

Democrats Need To Run On Fear

NBC exit polls from a society in steep decline. Trump won despite these numbers.

https://www.the-mane-course.com/journal/the-leopards-are-hungry-and-they-will-eat-well

One of the many things the 2024 election has taught me is the importance of anger in this country’s politics. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ran an overwhelmingly positive campaign, with “We’re not going back” as their slogan. At the time, I thought it might work, that providing a contrast with the grievance politics of Donald Trump and JD Vance was a good strategy. Given the results of this election, that strategy clearly failed the Democrats. And the leopards will have a feast.

Consider that exit polling suggests Trump won voters who believed democracy was at risk. That’s insane, and it really makes me feel like there’s no hope for this country. Even if Trump doesn’t actually become a dictator and suspend elections, I don’t understand how we come back from this. You can out-organize voter suppression all day long, but you can’t out-organize the fact that half the country really wants to live in a dictatorship run by people who hate the same people they hate. But for the sake of the people who will be harmed most by the incoming administration, we have to try. 

All of this leads me to my thesis: Democrats need to run on fear. Unlike the Republican Party, who come up with insane stories about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating peoples’ pets, or transgender women having an unfair advantage in womens’ sports, the Democrats don’t need to lie in order to make voters fear the consequences of Republican rule. They shouldn’t have needed to in this year’s election, but they went for positivity instead, and look where it got them. I don’t like the thought of politics being exclusively about negative campaigning, but it’s clear that’s where we are at now, and it’s best to accept things as they are rather than as we might like them to be.

The deceased victims of the Robb Elementary massacre in 2022. Image taken from Good Morning America. The GOP (and their allies, the NRA) have their blood on their hands.

Let’s look at gun violence as an example. The weapons crisis in this country is already through the roof, and it’s likely to get worse now that an NRA shill is going to be President once more. One of the things I’ve noticed when reading about these shootings is that the consequences are so often sanitized for the general public. For instance, I get ads from Sandy Hook Promise on YouTube literally all the time, and the cute 6-year-old kids are invariably shown smiling as though they just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. They never show what a victim of an AR-15 or AK-47 actually looks like once they’ve been torn apart by the bullets. 

For those who say this would be disrespectful to the victims and their families, I will fully acknowledge that I can’t speak for all of these people, or even any of them (because I’ve thus far been fortunate enough not to be directly affected by gun violence). However, if my loved one died that way, I would want the graphic photos of their corpse to be publicized. When it comes to gun violence, if a solution is even possible at this point, it’s only going to happen if the general public sees exactly what these weapons can do. The New York Times, for all their faults, published such a report last year called “Terror On Repeat”, but you have to actively look for it. Imagine if the images were plastered all over the evening news, which is sure to get a boost in ratings from the insanity that’s about to occur with Trump in power once more. If people couldn’t avoid seeing these images, maybe they’d be determined never to give the NRA’s enablers power again.

Gravestone of Amber Nicole Thurman, who died in Georgia as a result of the state’s abortion ban. Trump made that possible.

Now let’s talk about abortion. In 2022, the first regularly-scheduled election after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, NBC’s exit polls state that Democrats won voters who believed abortion should be legal in “most cases” by a 22-point margin. This past Tuesday, such voters tied. You read that right; moderately pro-choice voters split their votes evenly between a woman who emphasized abortion rights in her campaign and a convicted felon who bragged openly about having overturned them. If you were going to write that into a dystopian novel, or a screenplay, it would get rejected because your agent would never believe that voters could be that stupid. And yet, it’s real life. 

During the 49 years when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, Republicans ran vicious ads showing images of aborted fetuses, all for the sake of energizing their voters to elect them and eventually overturn abortion rights. And it worked! Of course, once Trump passes a national abortion ban (which he will, given that he has control over both chambers of Congress), maybe these “pro-choice” voters mentioned above will see the light. But I wouldn’t count on it. It’s going to take a lot of soul-searching to understand why so many pro-choice voters chose Donald Trump. I knew the Democrats were a broken-down, dysfunctional disaster of a party even before the recent election, but even I could not have imagined this level of incompetence.

The January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol. Trump is going to pardon every last one of these people.

Finally, let’s look at what David Pakman described as the number one most humiliating moment of Trump’s first presidency. I am talking about the mob he incited to storm the Capitol to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election results. Even after that, about two-thirds of the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives voted to overturn the election and make Trump a dictator. And well, now I guess they got their wish. Not only is Trump himself never going to be held accountable for attempting a coup, but he’s almost certainly going to pardon all his foot soldiers from that day’s Beer Gut Putsch. Today is 1932, indeed.

The Democrats should have run ads about this. They should have included testimony from Democratic lawmakers and Capitol Police who feared for their lives that day. But what would have been even more powerful in my mind is reminding people that if Trump returned to power, there would be nothing stopping him from becoming a dictator. As with my suggested messaging about gun violence and abortion rights, they wouldn’t even have to lie. Dying in a mass shooting, facing dire health consequences because you can’t access reproductive health care, or ending up in a concentration camp because Trump’s a dictator…these are legitimate things to be afraid of in present-day America. The Democrats were unable to take advantage of such easy attacks.

Many people on Reddit are saying that Trump can just cancel the 2026 and 2028 elections. Given that most of the swing states still have Democratic Secretaries of State, given the decentralization of the US’ electoral system, I’m not sure I buy that. However, they certainly won’t be totally fair given voter suppression efforts. But if Democrats are ever to retake power, they would do well to remember that Trump did not steal the 2024 election. Even if he shouldn’t have been allowed to run, he was, and he won the popular vote because people voted for him, and people voted for him because they didn’t realize what the consequences would be. Democrats need to make these consequences feel real to the average voter, and the next few years may give them plenty of help. 

As always, if you have anything to say about what I have said here, feel free to comment.

The Leopards Are Hungry, And They Will Eat Well

A badge for the “Leopards Face-Eating Party”, which so many people thought would never eat THEIR faces.

For those of you who don’t know, the saying “leopards ate my face” comes from a 2015 post on the platform formerly known as Twitter (I call it Xitter, pronounced “shitter”). What it basically means is that people voted for a cruel political party because they wanted to impose its policies on other people, but these people will face the consequences of these policies themselves. In the past it’s been applied to people who voted for Brexit in the UK in 2016 when a British citizen resents having to go through passport control when returning from an EU country, or people in the US after voting for Trump that same year. With the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024, we are about to have a sequel to this movie. And the sequel is usually worse.

One of the reasons Trump won so decisively is because he was able to make some immense gains with the Latino vote. According to current exit polling data from Edison Research, 54% of Latino men voted for him, compared to 36% in 2020. Following his victory, Trump promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on day one. Now, only United States citizens can vote in the country’s elections, but it won’t be easy for this orange fascist to tell who’s undocumented and who isn’t. It’s entirely possible that Latino U.S. citizens will be caught in the crossfire, and some of these people will be deported even if they have every legal right to be here. To be honest, if I were them, I wouldn’t mind being deported from Trumpistan, but that’s just me.

Pro-Palestine protestors objecting to the DNC, taken from the Associated Press. Some of these people are idiots, and we’re all going to suffer for their stupidity.

Then we have the pro-Palestine protestors. Now, I am no fan of the Israeli government. In fact, I think Benjamin Netanyahu is a genocidal maniac who should be in a war crimes prison, and it’s a disgrace that the Biden administration has kept sending him weapons even in the face of this genocide. But I’ve been saying for a long time that these people cannot be reasoned with, and that shows it isn’t only Trump’s cultists who live in an alternate reality. If anything I find the anti-Harris leftists more frustrating than the Trump cultists, because in the latter case, you at least know that you don’t have to convince them. If only Trump’s most diehard supporters had voted for him, he would not have been able to win Tuesday’s election. But instead, it seems many young people who claimed to support Palestine did not vote, and I’m about to demonstrate how stupid and short-sighted that was.

First of all, there’s literally a place in Israel called Trump Heights. My dad’s been there on business. That says it all. But if you’re still not convinced, Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, which Netanyahu really wanted him to do. That led indirectly to October 7, in which one of Iran’s proxies massacred Israeli civilians and gave the government casus belli to go after the civilians in Gaza. It’s believed by many that Bibi knew the attack was going to happen and did nothing to prevent it for that reason. Additionally, in the last few months he has escalated the genocide in Gaza, which has now spilled over into Lebanon, and all of that was in service of getting Trump elected. And it worked.

Over the last few months, I’ve seen a lot of people on the social platform BlueSky say that they wouldn’t vote for Harris because she supports genocide. Now, I don’t know what Harris would do about the Israel-Gaza conflict. Would she keep giving Netanyahu free reign, or would she try to check the Israeli Prime Minister’s worst impulses? I don’t know, and we’ll never know, because she isn’t going to be President. But Trump has openly said he wants to make Gaza beachfront property. He’s said he wants to deport pro-Palestine protestors and set the movement back “25 or 30 years”, per Vox. Given the aforementioned promise of mass deportations starting day one, I truly believe that for all the promises he hasn’t fulfilled, this is one he intends to keep. In other words, he’s repeatedly said he’ll give Netanyahu carte blanche to do whatever he wants, and the pro-Palestine people who sat out this election, voted third-party, or in some cases even voted for Trump just didn’t realize that. Or maybe they didn’t care, and they were just virtue-signaling to begin with. One of the two.

I could name many more examples. Lots of people who voted for Trump rely on the Affordable Care Act to survive. I’m not going to defend the ACA - ideally, it would have gone much further and given us truly universal health care. But things could also be much worse. We might have a government dedicated to repealing it…oh wait. Additionally, there’s this pastor I look up to (even if I’m not a religious man myself). His name is John Pavlovitz, and I’ll provide you all with this sage quote from him, which I think truly says it all:

A very wise and sobering quote about the state of our politics.

I’ve talked about all the things Trump has said during this campaign. He said all these things knowing that he needed to win the election, and that if he didn’t, he was likely to go to prison. And now he won’t go to prison, because he will be President of the United States instead. Keep in mind that once he’s President, he will never have to run another campaign again. I believe he will be truly unleashed in his second term to do whatever the hell he wants. And that’s a terrifying thought, to be sure, but if you voted for him, my sympathy for you is limited. The rest of us will be paying the price for potentially decades to come. But in the meantime, the leopards are going to feast like it’s Thanksgiving. And speaking of Thanksgiving, I feel very fortunate that nobody in my family voted for Trump; otherwise, it would be incredibly awkward at best. I’ll leave you with this meme shared by a user called “scottie1966” on Threads:

Thank you for reading. 

Relevant Song Lyrics: “Mamma Mia” by ABBA

Ah, yes. ABBA. That Swedish band who sang with such angelic voices, even when their lyrics were secretly quite depressing. I never thought I’d be thinking about this song so soon after my country fucked up the most important election of my lifetime, but perhaps it is fitting. Maybe I’ll do this every Thursday from here on out, finding a song that fits well with a news story of the week. And it’s going to be a busy four years of news stories, that’s for sure.

This morning, it occurred to me that ABBA’s 1975 hit “Mamma Mia” is incredibly relevant to the present. The song is about a woman who keeps returning to a relationship with an unfaithful, abusive partner. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last two days, you’ll probably know exactly why I relate to this song right now. It does not matter that I voted for Harris and volunteered several times to get out the vote in battleground states. The United States is just addicted to Donald Trump.

So let’s get into the lyrics, shall we?

I've been cheated by you since I don't know when

So I made up my mind, it must come to an end

Ever since Trump first came down that golden escalator in 2015, we’ve been constantly glued to him. Even his detractors, a group I count myself among, couldn’t keep our eyes off that man. In many ways, he is a creation of the 24-hour news cycle in which Americans demand stimulation at all times in the news they consume. Trump’s first presidency was also the best thing that ever happened to the ratings of legacy media outlets, because those who disliked him constantly had to check CNN or MSNBC to see what crazy thing he’d said or done that day. 

Come 2020, however, Trump had worn out his welcome. By the time that year’s general election rolled around, the COVID-19 pandemic had claimed a quarter of a million lives in this country alone, and he’d clearly given up even pretending to do something about the virus. The American people decided that Trump’s presidency needed to end, so they voted him out of office, even if by a far closer margin than they should have. I maintain that Trump should have lost like Herbert Hoover, because his disregard for the crises the country faced was on par with Hoover if not even worse.

I don't know how, but I suddenly lose control

There's a fire within my soul

(One more look) and I can hear a bell ring

(One more look) and I forget everything, whoa

This describes the last four years to a T. At least, the latter two lines do. Trump might have remained in the headlines, but he was only in the background. It seems all too many Americans, even those who’d been highly motivated to get Trump out of office the first time, could not remember the urgency of keeping him out of office for good. It seems that many people still had a “fire within their soul” for Donald Trump. As soon as he started his populist campaign in late 2022, all too many people were entranced by him, and they remembered why they voted for him in the first place. Even those who would regret it later and not vote for him in 2020 gave up their newfound conviction that he must not be allowed to take power again, and they supported him in Tuesday’s election.

Yes, I've been brokenhearted

Blue since the day we parted

Why, why did I ever let you go?

Mamma mia, now I really know

My, my, I could never let you go

Okay, I’m obviously not speaking for all Americans here, but I was not brokenhearted when Biden was declared the winner in 2020. It seems like many people were, however. They came up with songs to cope with what they claimed to believe was a stolen election, such as “Trump Won (And You Know It)” by Natasha Owens. That song is not nearly as funny anymore, at least not to me. However, it is not just the “red hat cultists” whom this line refers to. Those voters who switched back to Trump this time are currently wondering why they ever flipped away from him in 2020, and the optimistic side of me believes that if 2026 is a blue wave, it will be because these people get buyer’s remorse big-time. They will remember why they voted Trump out in 2020, and they will come to terms with why they voted for him this time. Now, my sympathy for them will be very limited, though that’s another rant entirely.

I've been angry and sad about things that you do

I can't count all the times that I've told you we're through

And when you go, when you slam the door

I think you know that you won't be away too long

You know that I'm not that strong

I don’t think this stanza needs much explanation. We kept thinking Trump was done. Even after losing an election, even after two impeachments, even after four indictments and thirty-four felony convictions, he won’t be away too long. The American public was not strong enough to reject him this time, and we’re going to pay the price for it. If it were only Trump’s voters who would be harmed by his decisions, I might not care quite as much, but those who voted for Harris are going to suffer disproportionately from his actions, particularly the LGBTQ+ community. It was no secret to anyone that LGBTQ+ people voting for Trump would be, to borrow a phrase from a cartoonish conservative commentator, “chickens voting for KFC”. That’s why I don’t think many of them voted for Trump, and that’s why I think our 47th President is going to be incredibly vindictive against them in his second term. My heart breaks for that community, because, by and large, they knew what a catastrophe his reelection would be, and they were unable to prevent it.

Hopefully 2026 is a blue tsunami, but I have my doubts. Even if the midterm election is anything remotely resembling free and fair, the fact remains that the Democratic Party lost to a convicted felon who literally tried to overthrow the government. They are a broken-down, dysfunctional disaster of a party, and yet they’re our only hope. I hate to be an alarmist, but the future looks pretty bleak from this vantage point.