Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg says he hasn’t given up on the Trump investigation.

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, publicly discussed his office’s investigation into Donald J. Trump for the first time on Thursday, insisting that the inquiry has continued despite the recent resignations of two senior prosecutors who had been leading it.

Did they just misunderstand?

Mr. Bragg said in an interview that his office had recently questioned new witnesses about Mr. Trump and reviewed additional documents, both previously unreported steps in the inquiry.

But citing grand jury secrecy rules, Mr. Bragg declined to provide details on the new steps in the investigation, which has focused on whether Mr. Trump committed a crime in inflating the value of his hotels, golf clubs and other properties.

I wonder if it’s really focused on whether he did as opposed to whether they can prove it in court. Not the same things.

In December, Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., directed the two senior prosecutors leading the inquiry, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, to present evidence to a grand jury with the goal of seeking an indictment of Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg, two months into his tenure, halted that presentation after disagreeing with Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne on the strength of the case.

Their subsequent resignations led to public criticism of Mr. Bragg, particularly after The New York Times published a copy of Mr. Pomerantz’s resignation letter, in which he said he believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable. In the letter, Mr. Pomerantz also said that the investigation had been “suspended indefinitely.”

It’s reminiscent of the chickenshit club – what James Comey called prosecutors who were proud of never losing cases when he worked in the office of the SDNY US Attorney, because it hinted they avoided taking on cases they were likely to lose.

Adding

Lavery interview part 2 (I needed a break from transcribing).

At 35 minutes: Emma Barnett: “You have written ‘I’m quite sure that women’s rights are not, have never been, and must never be sex-based.’ [Lavery says “Yeah.”] But to those women who believe that they must have sex-based rights for a variety of reasons ranging from sport to women-only spaces for different purposes – you’ll be very familiar, our listeners will be as well – how can you say that with such surety?”

Lavery: “Well again I say it on the basis of twenty years of [? access? experts?], research, and teaching in the field, I have been doing this work for a long time.”

He’s an expert, you see. She’s not, we’re not, but he is. Credentials, my dear; you wouldn’t understand.

“The notion of sex-based rights is a very recent phenomenon,” he continues, “it hasn’t existed for more than a few years and it’s a really bad deal [or idea] for women.”

No. Rather, what’s happened in those “few years” is that men like him have tried to appropriate both womanhood and feminism, so we’ve been forced to keep pointing out that men like him are not women and do not get to take our stuff.

Lavery: “Here’s the thing, Emma, I actually had a debate with one of my GC friends -“

Barnett interjects to say GC=gender critical feminists.

” – I would say gender critical activists because I think many of them are explicitly not feminists, but I’m happy with whatever, but -“

Barnett [interrupting with some energy]: “Hang on, hang on, I’m sorry, Grace, Grace, just pause that thought – if you don’t want a world where the borders of what it is to be a woman are policed, why are you trying to police the borders of what it is to be a feminist, and what some women are meant to care about?”

Boom.

I’ll leave it there.

All the points missed at once.

What does “chronically underrepresented in sport” mean? How “represented” should they be? How does Owen Jones know?

Maybe the kind of people who are trans simply tend not to be into sport. Some people aren’t, you know.

But also, clearly being trans throws up some obstacles to being “represented” in sport. It throws up some obstacles that are not incidental and unnecessary, they’re inherent. Sport is all about bodies, and trans people mess with their bodies in ways that may make sport unpleasant or impossible or unfair to others or all three.

How does Owen Jones know that no “trans people” are pretending to be trans to get the advantage? He doesn’t, of course. He simply assumes it, which is pretty stupid for a purported journalist. I for one think Lia Thomas is pretending. I don’t know that, but I suspect it.

And finally, what is this childish “It’s who they are!” nonsense? No, actually, it isn’t who they are; the whole point is that it’s who they aren’t. That’s what “trans” means.

Ok I listened to Lavery on Woman’s Hour. I’m relieved: Emma Barnett didn’t let him get away with much. It starts at 17:25 in case you want to listen.

20:10 Lavery: “I think what we’re really talking about is do we think the category ‘woman’ designates a class of biological being, or do we think that it’s a political category whose meaning can change over time. I think reasonable people can take different perspectives on that question, but historically speaking the people who have taken the position that it is a biologically essential category have tended to be on the side of patriarchy, and those who have claimed that it is a political category that has been deployed to oppress a class of people have been feminists. In the UK at the moment those terms are contested, the terms of the contest are a little confusing.”

That’s just nonsense. It’s not the case that “historically” feminists thought “woman” was a political category as opposed to a biological one. Of course they didn’t, because there weren’t men like Lavery running around saying they get to be women too.

At 32:12 Emma asks “Do you not understand or perhaps sympathize as to why they think of that [the strength advantage and unfairness in sport] as proof that there is such a thing as the female body?”

Lavery: “Well again I’m not for a moment contesting that there is such a thing as a female body – you know, you’re asking me if I can sympathize with a position I’ve told you I don’t agree with, so I guess my answer is yes, I can understand why people would hold the view that there was a naturally occurring organic type, after all that is what patriarchy tells us every day, and it is a very difficult view to get your head out of.”

Emma: “Are you saying that every woman who believes that is effectively having their mind warped by patriarchy?”

Lavery: “Uh I wouldn’t use that phrase, I think that it is difficult to think one’s way out of structures that one is informed of frequently.”

He starts to waffle on but Emma interrupts him: “But the irony is obviously some of those people are very much feminists and have thought [of] nothing but about patriarchy and how to think their ways out of those structures and still come to the conclusion that the male body retains an advantage over the female body.”

Score!

At around 34:25 Lavery says it’s “a profound historical novelty” for feminists to think women are “a naturally occurring type” i.e. people with female bodies. “I do not think you could find a single feminist who would take that view prior to Caitlyn Jenner appearing on the front cover of Vanity Fair.”

Classic narcissistic man setting feminist women straight on what feminism is.

The word is “suspend” not “expel” or “remove” so I assume that means it’s temporary, but anyway, there it is. Of course other flagrant rights-violators remain.

Who's this bloke on Woman's Hour talking about what a woman is?

— Helen Saxby (@helensaxby11) April 7, 2022

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on If they cannot answer a simple question.

Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves?

That’s… pretty much New Labour though.

I mean, even from people who support that shift, you get the criticism that pre-Blair Labour “was mired in an ossified form of unionism and leftism that refused to recognise that the world had fundamentally changed. A spent political force facing oblivion” to quote Rob.

And there is some merit to that.

The British economy is 80% service sector. Contrast with 1950, when it was an even split between service sector and everything else. Classical “workers rights” approaches that focus on the shop floor, need to have shop floors to be relevant enough to win elections.

So however one may feel about it, Labour hasn’t really been a worker’s party for decades, to the point where suggesting it should be is controversial within the party.

Labour’s problem is that it is a centrist, not leftist, party. Centrism is often the politics of Nimbyism. This is what it means to be economically conservative, and socially liberal – left only so far as it is not your backyard.

I’m a guy, women’s rights aren’t my backyard. Rapists getting into women’s prisons for example, isn’t going to hurt me much, if I went to prison it would be to a men’s prison and having fewer rapists around would be, if anything, to my benefit in that circumstance.

Women’s sports, are sports I don’t compete in. Any concerns around trans inclusion in women’s sports aren’t in my backyard. I don’t go to women’s toilets unless the men’s side is out of order and there’s a pre-arrangement to that effect, so, that’s not really in my backyard either.

I could very easily proclaim TWAW and the costs of saying that, would fall on someone else. I can proclaim “TERFs” deeply “privileged” because it isn’t my prison, it isn’t my sports, and it isn’t my toilet.

At the same time, I’m relatively economically comfortable with a positive bank balance. I’ve got no debt, I’ve got savings. Raising wages, putting in market protections for local businesses and building a strong social welfare system raises economic demand, which also increases production thus reducing unemployment, but at the cost of higher inflation. If I were in debt, higher inflation would mean the bank eating some of that debt, but as I have savings, that’s not personally desirable for me.

If I was British, I would be the target market for New Labour. Being economically leftwing costs me money, whereas being socially leftwing costs me nothing. Centrism has the profound benefit of not being in my backyard.

Labour cannot campaign on economics, because to do so is to tread in the Nimby’s backyard. Pushing identity bullshit thus has to serve as a means of establishing leftwing credibility in its stead.

The current state of disorder within Labour is a natural result of centrist Nimbyism, and not everybody is a Nimby. To break out of that, requires some serious consideration of what Labour is really about – sans identity issues.

Scientists are trying to get people to wake up and smell the smoke.

I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?

On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.

But the planet is heating faster.

Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance.

Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.

You’d think that would be clear enough in light of the wildfires and heat domes and desertification and floods that are already happening, but it seems not.

It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.

The first cruise ship is due to arrive here in Seattle on April 11. They burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day.

Navarro and Scavino:

The House voted on Wednesday to hold two of Donald Trump’s top advisers – Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino – in criminal contempt of Congress for their months-long refusal to comply with subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.

The approval of the contempt resolution, by a vote of 220 to 203, sets the two Trump aides on the path toward criminal prosecution by the justice department as the panel escalates its inquiry into whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

…

The contempt citations approved by the House now head to the justice department and the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, who is required by law to weigh a prosecution and present the matter before a federal grand jury.

Should the justice department secure a conviction against the Trump aides, the consequences could mean up to a year in federal prison, $100,000 in fines, or both – though it would not force their compliance, and pursuing the misdemeanor charge could take months.

They tried to invoke “executive privilege” – you know, that thingy in the bottom drawer that makes it ok to steal an election.

At the business meeting last week where the select committee voted unanimously to recommend that the full House find Navarro and Scavino in contempt of Congress, Raskin delivered an emotional rebuke of the supposed executive privilege arguments.

“This is America, and there’s no executive privilege here for presidents, much less trained advisors, to plan coups and organize insurrections against the people’s government in the people’s constitution and then to cover up the evidence of their crimes.

“These two men,” Raskin said of Navarro and Scavino, “are in contempt of Congress and we must say, both for their brazen disregard for their duties and for our laws and our institutions.”

It all makes me rather emotional too, i.e. ragey.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Lost in the fog, with added emphasis.

… political enemies who care much less about the issue than they enjoy watching Labour fall apart.

Maybe a party whose members and leader are unable, or unwilling, to define one of the classes of people whose protected characteristics are enshrined in UK law isn’t really ready to govern. If they don’t know what a woman is, they’re not fit for office. If they know what a woman is but are afraid to say it then they are even less fit for office. Sometimes standing up and saying “no” is more important than being “kind” (or “kind of scared.”)

Many (if not most) of those asking for Labour’s definition of woman are not “political enemies” but are simply trying to wake the party up. They realize that Labour’s position is wrong and misguided but are unwilling to let it slide. The Labour Party is being held to account by those whom it seeks to represent. Is this not the very heart of democracy? Accountability and representation? If they cannot answer a simple question, if they are willing to give away rights that are not theirs to give in order to avoid pissing off a tiny, aggressive minority making unreasonable and unethical demands, how can they be trusted to govern honestly and openly? How is it that women are expected to sacrifice their own political interests in favour of men who are trying to take their places and spaces? Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves? Not bloody likely. Well, this is the same but worse, because they’re helped to screw over half the population in one go, and they’re too stupid or cowardly to acknowledge it.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand where people get the confidence to talk this kind of confused nonsense.

 Why, at this moment of both national and international crisis, has the media decided that the most important question for a party that hasn’t been in government for 12 years, is a hypothetical one about genitals?

One, they haven’t – media questions are not exclusively about genitals, or gender. Two, news flash: women’s rights still matter.

It’s not really about vaginas, it’s a quest for the “gotcha” moment, the inescapable trap of deliberately twisted logic which merits unpicking.

It’s not really about vaginas perhaps, but it is really about women. If white people were furiously agitating to be “validated” as Black I think Zoe Williams would see the problem, but when it’s men, somehow she can’t make it out through the fog.

Labour’s position has not changed since 2019 – it supports both the reform of the GRA and single-sex spaces. This is the next battleground for gender-critical feminists, who would like to see the party drop its support for reform, on the basis that any such move allows for more trans people – generally cast by some as predatory men – to access single sex spaces. When faced with the question of what defines a man or a woman, Labour is not only being implicitly asked to row back on its own policy, but also to backtrack on current legislation which says that trans men are men and trans women are women, regardless of whether they have undergone medical treatments.

Legislation could “say” that airplanes are oak trees, but that wouldn’t make it true. Trans women are men who want to “live as” women; they’re not literally women.

As things stand now, the government has blocked reforms to the GRA and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has provided guidelines extending the circumstances under which trans people can be excluded from single-sex spaces.

But the issue isn’t about “trans people” being excluded from single-sex spaces, it’s about men being excluded from [some] women’s spaces. That’s not a quibble, it’s essential. The men aren’t being excluded because they’re trans, they’re being excluded because they’re men. Williams frames it as cruel irrational exclusion of trans people, and that’s dishonest.

“Legitimate justifications” now include female-only fitness classes and the toilets of places of worship where it may offend people, on religious grounds, to have inclusive spaces.

There it is again. No, not “inclusive spaces”; toilets where men can intrude on women.

I can’t even wrap my head around the person who doesn’t want anybody trans in their aerobics class…

Again – it’s not the “trans” bit, it’s the male bit.

Labour needs to take a stand based on principles of equality with which they are familiar. They could also maybe learn from their history of being wedged – on Brexit, and long before that, on nuclear disarmament – by political enemies who care much less about the issue than they enjoy watching Labour fall apart.

What principles of equality? What does trans dogma have to do with equality?

When the left is mired up to its nostrils in fantasies sometimes even Boris Johnson gets it right.

Boris Johnson has said he does not “think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events”, amid the fallout from his decision not to ban conversion practices for people questioning their gender.

Well, as we have seen, that all depends on what you’re calling “conversion.” I don’t consider it “conversion” to tell a man he’s not a woman.

Johnson also said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which were “dedicated to women”.

Imagine that. Just imagine thinking a woman in prison shouldn’t have to share a cell with a rapist.

He also insisted it was right to exclude people who were questioning their gender from a long-promised ban on so-called conversion “therapy”.

Or, to translate, he also insisted it was right to encourage people who were questioning their gender to think carefully and talk to a therapist before making irreversible changes to their bodies.

It doesn’t sound so malevolent put that way, does it. Why not talk to a therapist first? Why not think seriously about the possibility of regret down the road?

Johnson said: “I suppose I’d just make a few points: I don’t think that it’s reasonable for kids to be deemed so-called Gillick competent to take decisions about their gender or irreversible treatments that they may have. I think there should be parental involvement at the very least. That’s the first thing.

“Second thing, I don’t think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events. And maybe that’s a controversial thing, but it just seems to me to be sensible.”

The prime minister added: “We will have a ban on gay conversion therapy, which to me is utterly abhorrent. But there are complexities and sensitivities when you move from the area of sexuality to the question of gender. There, I’m afraid, there are things that I think still need to be worked out.”

In other words gender and sexuality are not the same thing, so it’s not just self-evident that they should be bundled together.

It’s bizarre to see BJ talking more sense than the other team, but there it is.

More on Fawcett. Check out their staff – most of them were hired in the last six months. It doesn’t say how long the CEO has been there, but other than the CEO the staffer who has been there the longest (hired in 2016) is…

…a man.

ANDREW BAZELEY, POLICY, INSIGHT & PUBLIC AFFAIRS MANAGER

Andrew joined Fawcett in 2016. He works across the breadth of issues Fawcett campaigns on, developing research proposals, formulating policy based on that evidence, and advocating for change in a lead role within our public affairs team. He has led on work including our Local Government Commission, in the development of our Equal Pay Bill, and on our Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood. Before joining Fawcett he worked for three years in Parliament, including as a policy advisor on work and pensions issues, and for four years in local government including a year spent managing a ‘big data’ team. Andrew holds a Masters in Public Policy from Birkbeck College, where he is also studying for a Law degree in his spare time, which there isn’t much of as he’s also a new dad.

I guess he’s there to make sure Fawcett “balances” women’s rights with those of the people who matter.

Pathetic. The Fawcett Society responds to EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers:

The recently published EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers confirms our understanding of the current law. Providers of single-sex services can restrict or modify access for trans people when doing so is necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and when the action taken is proportionate in balancing impacts on different groups of women.

But (yet again) the issue isn’t “trans people,” it’s men who claim to be trans women.

But much more to the point – “balancing impacts on different groups of women” shouldn’t have anything to do with impacts on men, including men who claim to be trans women. The set “groups of women” doesn’t include men.

Fawcett supports this position and believe there are occasions where services, in particular those for trauma survivors, should be able to make this decision. We welcome the guide for providing that clarity.

Gee, how nice of it. In some circumstances, especially in the wake of brutal violence, services get to exclude men, but mostly, they don’t.

However, we have some concerns with the guidance. We believe some of the examples that are given to wider service providers as they consider their approaches to the inclusion of trans people are confusing and lack detail. In some cases, we believe the examples used suggest a threshold for the exclusion of trans people that is too low. We are worried that this will have a disproportionate impact on trans people. 

There it is again, that shockingly dishonest obfuscation – all the more dishonest coming from an organization that used to be feminist. They’re not talking about “trans people,” they’re talking about trans women, i.e. men. Isn’t it interesting that this obfuscation is so pervasive. Isn’t it interesting how it betrays the fact that these groups and institutions know they’re stabbing women in the back and are trying to hide both the stabbing and their awareness of the stabbing.

Fundamentally, everyone deserves access to high-quality services and to be treated with fairness, dignity and respect.

No shit, but it doesn’t follow that women don’t deserve access to high-quality services for women. Men can be treated with fairness, dignity and respect without being allowed to invade services for women.

Whilst this is a complex discussion and balancing the rights of different groups of women is challenging, acceptance and support should always be the starting point.  

But men aren’t a “different group of women”; men are men. We don’t have to “balance” our rights with men’s rights. We’re not the dominant group in this particular pairing.

And another thing.

Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.

Bollocks. Forcing women to gestate and push out babies they don’t want is extreme torture. It’s beside the point that the bill also punishes doctors, because the whole concept of forced pregnancy is punitive.

Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.

Dead wrong. Forcing women to bear children is slavery – literal slavery. It’s hard labor, it’s not paid, it’s against their will, it’s unwanted, it’s coercive, it’s painful – it’s slavery. Olsen doesn’t care because it will never happen to him.

The war on women continues to rage.

Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.

And this doesn’t make forced pregnancy the law in Oklahoma, it also catches Texas women in its trap.

More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas outlawed abortion after six weeks gestation in September 2021.

One way or another they will force women to stay pregnant when they don’t want to.

Before former president Donald Trump took office, federal courts routinely blocked abortion bans. However, Trump was able to confirm three conservative justices, which tipped the balance of the supreme court to the right.

Donald Trump who brags of grabbing women by the pussy, Donald Trump who bragged of never doing anything with his children when they were babies and laughed at the idea of walking them in the park, Donald Trump who has been accused of sexual assault by more than one woman, Donald Trump who leers at his own daughter and brags of how “hot” she is, Donald Trump who tells us which women are too ugly for him to molest, Donald Trump who is apparently never photographed with a grandchild in his arms or on his lap (have you ever seen such a photo?), Donald Trump who insults and ridicules women every chance he gets – he has succeeded in forcing thousands of women to stay pregnant or spend a lot of money and time getting an abortion. No skin off his ass is it.

“These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms,” said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, a related reproductive rights advocacy group.

“These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access.”

Women, god damn it. It’s women who are forced to stay pregnant, women whose lives are ruined. If it were “people” this wouldn’t be happening.

Trump has been trying to tell historians what to say about him.

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”

Point missed. He was “not so great.” He hired the not so great people. He was the record-breakingly bad president.

I am the editor of a scholarly history of Trump’s term in the White House, the third book in a series about the most recent presidents. A few days after The New York Times reported on the project, Trump’s then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me—something that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had done. For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time—more than any other ex-president that we know of—trying to influence the narratives being written about him. My co-authors and I weren’t the only people he reached out to. According to Axios, Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency.

Of course he did. He’s a narcissist, and he’s clueless. Put the two together and you get this absurdity.

But if anything, our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweets—because the former are more elegant and lengthier—he sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.

He’s both evil and stupid. There’s nothing covert about it.

He seemed to measure American politicians primarily by how they treated him. Even many of those elected officials who criticized him in public sang a different tune, he insisted, when the television cameras were off. Trump vented about governors who continually expressed during private meetings how impressed they were with his COVID policies (“I hope you can get the tapes,” Trump said) yet proceeded to “knock the hell out of me” in public: “So unfair.”

It occurs to me to wonder how this plays out in real life. I’ve known some vain self-centered people, as we all have, but I can’t say I’ve ever experienced anyone who carried on as grotesquely as Trump does as a matter of course. It’s just so odd. It’s as if he has the tiniest amount of awareness of other minds of anyone in human history – just no idea that everybody doesn’t love him the way he loves himself. Person woman man camera tv.

The current issue of Free Inquiry arrived yesterday. One of the esteemed editors found the perfect illustration for a column I wrote.

But “conversion therapy” is the wrong label. Why does the BBC keep using it?

More than 100 organisations have pulled out of the UK’s first ever global LGBT+ conference over the government’s stance on conversion therapy.

The UK government had promised to ban conversion therapy but last week decided to exclude conversion therapy for transgender people in the ban.

Probably because it’s not conversion therapy. Sexual orientation is not the same as “gender identity.” The two are different. The most noticeable and consequential difference is that sexual orientation entails no surgical or pharmaceutical interventions at all. This discrepancy is why medical professionals need to be very cautious about agreeing with the self-diagnoses of adolescents who say they are trans: agreeing could be the first step to drugs or surgery or both that will cause irreversible changes to the teenage bodies that get them. Being lesbian or gay? Not so much. Literally speaking, not at all. No drugs, no surgery, no nothing, just live your life.

This is why the BBC really needs to report on the subject truthfully.

But who are the reporters on this story? Josh Parry, LGBT producer, and Lauren Moss, LGBT correspondent. Is it the LG part or the T part? Here again, the two need to be uncoupled. T isn’t the same as LG, and it isn’t much like it, either.

According to NHS England, conversion therapy tries to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Then NHS England is wrong, because that’s apples and oranges.

But the LGBT+ Consortium, an umbrella body for LGBT+ community organisations, has issued a statement branding the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy “abhorrent”.

Eighty-two member organisations of the consortium have signed an open letter, which is written by LGBT+ charity and campaign group Stonewall, pulling out of the conference.

Stonewall is not the solution here, Stonewall is the problem. Mashing the T together with the LG is a mistake.

A Terrence Higgins Trust spokesperson said: “Trans rights are human rights – progress without or at the expense of trans people is not progress. We stand together and will not be divided.”

But it’s not at the expense of. Not rushing to provide surgeries or puberty blockers is not an injury to trans people and people who think they’re trans but change their minds. It’s first do no harm.

Boris Johnson has previously called the practice of conversion therapy “repulsive and abhorrent” and had promised plans to outlaw it on a number of separate occasions. However the plans to do so have since changed; meaning the legislation will mean conversion therapy to attempt to change people’s sexuality will be outlawed, but those practices carried out to try to change people’s gender identity will not.

But what if there’s no such thing as “people’s gender identity”? What if there’s just a spectrum of feelings about one’s sex or gender or both? What if some or most or even all such feelings are highly malleable and temporary? What if they’re social and cultural rather than physical? What if they’re not actually a good reason to make drastic irreversible changes to one’s body? What if it really is better to be slow and cautious rather than speedy and reckless?

Responding to the legislation on Friday, Nikki da Costa, a former director of legislative affairs at No 10, said elements of the law would have had “profound consequences for children struggling with gender dysphoria”.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Doctors, therapists and parents would be deterred from exploring with a child any feelings of what else may be going on for fear of being told they’re trying to change a child’s identity”, adding that it was “deeply concerning”.

And she’s not wrong. Even if she’s one of Boris Johnson’s very best friends, she’s not wrong.