Yes so this is clearly a very healthy and progressive movement for social change.

The battle continues.

In reality Cardona doesn’t meddle with curriculum decisions.

Peppered with questions Thursday about whether he supports “critical race theory,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that his department will leave curriculum decisions to state and local officials.

“It’s important that I reiterate at every opportunity I have that the federal government doesn’t get involved in curriculum,” he said during a hearing before the House education committee Thursday.

But he didn’t completely sidestep the issue of how racism should figure into classroom discussions, a question that has engulfed state legislatures and local school boards across the country over the last few months.

Credit: Fox News and Trump.

Just months ago, critical race theory was known only as a line of academic thought that argued that racism is deeply embedded in American society.

And therefore shaped many if not all institutions in American society.

The phrase was catapulted from obscurity by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who claimed that critical race theory had infiltrated the federal government and public schools. At Rufo’s urging, President Trump issued an executive order barring the concept in federal agencies. (Biden quickly rescinded it.) In the telling of critics like Rufo, critical race theory and ideas associated with it overstate the degree of racism in American society and encourage judging individuals based on their race.

As opposed to what? Our long history of not judging individuals based on their race? Come on. Ignoring it or pretending it’s long over is not reasonable or justifiable.

Rufo and others in conservative media — as well as the experience of some parents in their local schools — have helped galvanize a far-reaching backlash to a host of efforts to address racism in schools and acknowledge racism in American history. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, recently released a toolkit for parents to combat “woke schooling.”

Ok but then can we also combat comatose schooling? Can we meet in the middle somewhere?

It’s Put People Off the Vax day again.

I can’t find a link to the statement itself, including on Trump’s website, only to people citing it, so that’s irritating. Mediaite reports on it but doesn’t link to it. Maybe someone has taken it down.

Donald Trump stirred up vaccine opposition on Sunday, even linking it to his false claims about the 2020 election.

There has been significant focus on Trump supporters either being hesitant to get vaccines or outright refusing to, even though the vaccines were developed under Operation Warp Speed during his administration.

So Trump decided to amp up the distrust. Such a helpful, caring man.

Work it out for yourselves.

So the prime minister says that with the removal of Covid restrictions we will now be able to make our own “informed decisions” about what we will and will not do. Generally, we might feel it’s a sign of a good government and a good society that it allows and enables its members to make their own informed decisions about how they want to live their lives.

Generally, yes. All things being equal, yes. In normal circumstances, yes. Obviously. Of course. We can figure out for ourselves when to go out and when to stay home, what to wear and where to live, how much to sleep and what toothpaste to use. But when circumstances stop being normal, then that’s the new world we live in. You can’t always do what you want.

But it’s hard to rejoice at the removal of most Covid restrictions with the current dramatic rise in new infections. When more than 100 experts have signed an open letter in the Lancet calling the full easing of restrictions “dangerous and premature”, it can feel less like relief and freedom, and more like we’re being released into a wild unknown – and one that comes with ever-increasing ethical burdens on us as individuals.

It can probably still feel like relief and freedom if you ignore all the realities, but what it feels like and what it actually is are two different things. Humans seem to be very bad at keeping that distinction in mind – we’re always hearing people say chirpily “I feel perfectly safe!” while doing something reckless.

Sisters!

Why we can’t have nice things.

Imagine being an ICU nurse in an area of Covid deniers.

Conspiracy theories about the pandemic and lies recited on social media — or at White House news conferences — had penetrated deep into their community. When refrigerated trailers were brought in to relieve local hospitals’ overflowing morgues, people said they were stage props. Agitated and unmasked relatives stood outside the ICU insisting that their intubated relatives only had the flu. Many believed the doctors and nurses hailed elsewhere for their sacrifices were conspiring to make money by falsifying covid-19 diagnoses.

[Emily] Boucher and her colleagues were pained by those attacks — and infuriated by them. Unlike their exhaustion, that anger rarely showed on their faces, but it was often there: as they scrolled Facebook to see local ministers saying God was greater than any virus, or stood in line with unmasked grocery shoppers who joked loudly about the covid hoax.

On that December morning when she became the first person to receive the coronavirus vaccine in the 21 counties served by her hospital’s parent company, Ballad Health, Boucher breathed deeply as she described what she and her co-workers were up against. They were fighting not just for their patients’ lives, she said, but “against misinformation and reckless practices that have led to this virus getting so out of control.”

Because she was the first person in her area to get the vax, she was photographed for media stories.

Commenters speculated that the syringe might not have actually contained any vaccine. Others said she must be getting kickbacks from Pfizer. Boucher returned to her crowded ICU knowing that to some in her community, her vaccination was not a turning point and she was not a hero. She was just another part of the hoax.

She’s risking her own life and her neighbors are talking smack about her.

Jamie Swift, a registered nurse who oversees infection prevention for Johnston and Ballad’s other hospitals, recalled her realization that “people would trust Facebook more than they would trust us” — and her horror at the consequences as the winter surge began.

“You work all day, and you see people who are struggling to breathe, and you see the horrible side of what covid can do. And then you go home and you see restaurants that are packed and grocery stores where person after person is going in without a mask,” said Swift, who in December was briefly hospitalized herself with the coronavirus. “There have been times when I broke down and cried. It was just devastating, because you leave the hospital and you come out into a community that doesn’t believe that it’s real and in what it can do.”

One disbeliever went right on disbelieving even when her mother was in the ICU.

After Goff’s mother developed a high fever, she was taken by ambulance to Johnston Memorial, and a week later she was intubated. Goff was furious, claiming that doctors had not adequately informed her family about the severity of her mother’s condition. As a result, she said, she had advised her mother to refuse the proven covid-19 treatment remdesivir.

Brilliant.

She was comforted when she learned that one of her old high school friends was a nurse manager in the ICU, and thrilled when her mom recovered after several days on the ventilator. But she gives the credit to God, not to Johnston Memorial.

“It was definitely a miracle,” she said. “I had rallied the prayer warriors.” And while she no longer doubts the reality of covid-19, she said she still believes it has been exaggerated and that hospitals are falsifying cases to make money.

“It’s just like, what’s real? What’s not? Obviously the corona is real, but I don’t think the numbers that they’re reporting are actually accurate,” said Goff, a 38-year-old information systems analyst.

Nice punchline.

Is it news that Trump is a reckless imbecile? Hardly.

This week, the Guardian reported that what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents describe Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual”. Vladimir Putin, the documents say, therefore decided to assist Trump’s rise to power in 2016 as a way to weaken America. Five years on, as America digests a string of bombshell revelations about the last days of Trump’s presidency pulled from a string of new books, Russia’s judgment seems born out.

Well of course it does, but it wasn’t in doubt anyway. We’ve always known that Trump is impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced, along with greedy, cruel, stupid, lazy, corrupt, empty, and trashy.

In Landslide, Michael Wolff’s second sequel to Fire and Fury, the book that birthed the genre, Trump is shown isolated and unhinged in the White House, pushed to extremes by Rudy Giuliani before, during and after his supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol…

In Frankly, We Did Win This Election, Michael Bender reports the 2020 campaign in exhaustive detail. He also tells us Trump believed Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things”, wanted to “execute” whichever aide leaked news of his retreat to a White House bunker as anti-racism protests raged last summer, and told his top general to “just shoot” those demonstrating in Lafayette Square outside.

We need to know all this, but let’s not pretend any of it is surprising. There is no bottom to the badness of Trump.

Many Trump books report important news. Many trade in salacious gossip. But all in some way document a moment in US history that is unprecedented – and which has not ended.

Trump retains control of a party committed to advancing his lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud and to attacking the voting rights of opponents. It is therefore important, Setmayer said, for the media to continue to cover both Trump and the avalanche of books about him.

Indeed. Just don’t pretend he’s ever been any better than what he is now.

Ivermectin study withdrawn:

The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.

As in, ethical concerns over possible fakery.

[T]he drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.

…

“The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records,” Brown told the Guardian. “It’s certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren’t even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural.”

That’s quite an error.

The Elgazzar study was one of the the largest and most promising showing the drug may help Covid patients, and has often been cited by proponents of the drug as evidence of its effectiveness. This is despite a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in June finding ivermectin is “not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients”.

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that “this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there”, and it appeared to him the data was “just totally faked”. This was concerning because two meta-analyses of ivermectin for treating Covid-19 had included the Elgazzar study in the results. A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies to determine what the overall scientific literature has found about a treatment or intervention.

“Because the Elgazzar study is so large, and so massively positive – showing a 90% reduction in mortality – it hugely skews the evidence in favour of ivermectin,” Meyerowitz-Katz said.

“If you remove this one study from the scientific literature, suddenly there are very few positive randomised control trials of ivermectin for Covid-19. Indeed, if you get rid of just this research, most meta-analyses that have found positive results would have their conclusions entirely reversed.”

Well he’s just a shill for Big Pharma, right?

The conservative Australian MP Craig Kelly, who has also promoted the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 – despite there being no evidence that it works – has been among those promoting ivermectin. Several Indian media outlets ran stories on Kelly in the past week after he asked Uttar Pradesh to loan the state’s chief minister, Adityanath, to Australia to release ivermectin. After this story was initially published, Kelly contacted the Guardian to say he disagreed with the statement that there was no evidence that hydroxychloroquine worked, and that he stood by his views.

Remember when Trump used to disagree too?

Time for another round of bleach-injection I guess.

The ABA has a Diversity and Inclusion section. There it has a Diversity Statement.

ABA exists to help member bookstores grow and succeed, and we work to do that in a way that is committed to anti white supremacy, antiracism, representation, and equity. We believe that listening to many different perspectives and empowering underrepresented voices deepens our understanding and enriches everyone’s experience. We are committed to equity, dignity, and diversity for all Peoples. 

It promises to

– Implement best practices to ensure more diverse hiring and more opportunities for promotion into senior and decision-making positions at all levels of the organization for diverse employees

– Make sure ABA policies and procedures are antiracist, create opportunities for everyone, and demonstrate support for marginalized Peoples

What are diverse employees though? What does “diverse” mean? Something to do with antiracist, but beyond that it’s left unstated.

– Work closely with ABA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council of member booksellers to be aware of concerns of a diverse group of booksellers and bookstore owners and to use the council’s insights and feedback to improve ABA’s programs and services and better serve marginalized communities

Diverse and marginalized – but which are they?

– Require representation of BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other marginalized authors and books at all ABA events (at least 40% of speakers/panelists overall)

There we go – finally we know who they are. BIPOC, queer, and disabled.

– Meet as staff throughout the year to discuss topics and educate ourselves on issues related to antiracism, antidiscrimination, microaggressions, and supporting underrepresented Peoples. 

Notice anything missing?

Women. On the whole page, there’s not one word about women.

There was a follow-up tweet from the ABA that I missed because they locked their account; it contains yet more frantic self-flagellating histrionics.

A serious, violent incident; inexcusable; terrible incident; pain we caused; apologies are not enough; harm we caused.

It’s as if they have a literal gun to their literal heads.

Meanwhile, in the Advocacy section of the ABA website, we can see:

The American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE) is the bookseller’s voice in the fight for free speech. Its mission is to promote and protect the free exchange of ideas, particularly those contained in books, by opposing restrictions on the freedom of speech; issuing statements on significant free expression controversies; participating in legal cases involving First Amendment rights; collaborating with other groups with an interest in free speech; and providing education about the importance of free expression to booksellers, other members of the book industry, politicians, the press and the public.

Except…when…they…don’t…

Some of the people Fox News is killing:

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for 95 percent of Greene County’s new cases, according to Towns. It is spreading easily because people have ditched their masks, crowded into indoor spaces, resumed travel, and resisted vaccinations. Just 40 percent of people in Greene County are fully vaccinated. In some nearby counties, less than 20 percent of people are.

Why? Partly because they’ve been told vaccinations are for Democrats – in other words it’s tribal. Their tribe is wimpy and gets the Fauci ouchy, our tribe is tough and hell no we don’t get no stinkin’ vaccination.

Almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield’s hospitals is unvaccinated, and the dozen or so exceptions are all either elderly or immunocompromised people. The vaccines are working as intended, but the number of people who have refused to get their shots is crushing morale. Vaccines were meant to be the end of the pandemic. If people don’t get them, the actual end will look more like Springfield’s present: a succession of COVID-19 waves that will break unevenly across the country until everyone has either been vaccinated or infected…

That they are in this position despite the wide availability of vaccines turns difficult days into unbearable ones. As bad as the winter surge was, Springfield’s health-care workers shared a common purpose of serving their community, Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of CoxHealth, told me. But now they’re “putting themselves in harm’s way for people who’ve chosen not to protect themselves,” he said. While there were always ways of preventing COVID-19 infections, Missourians could have almost entirely prevented this surge through vaccination—but didn’t. “My sense of hope is dwindling,” Tracy Hill, a nurse at Mercy, told me. “I’m losing a little bit of faith in mankind. But you can’t just not go to work.”

Tucker Carlson, take a bow. Lauren Boebert, step up.

The grueling slog is harder now because it feels so needless, and because many patients don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late.

…

Missouri Governor Mike Parson never issued a statewide mask mandate, and the state’s biggest cities—Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, and Columbia—ended their local orders in May, after the CDC said that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks indoors. In June, Parson signed a law that limits local governments’ ability to enact public-health restrictions. And even before the pandemic, Missouri ranked 41st out of all the states in terms of public-health funding. “We started in a hole and we’re trying to catch up,” Towns, the director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, told me.

Well, that’s unfortunate, but at least Trump and Tucker Carlson have had a lot of fun.

Now it’s the Vagina Museum doing it. Yes really – the Vagina Museum.

But women talking about things that concern women (and women only) don’t need to be “more inclusive.” It is just women who menstruate – men don’t menstruate.

But menstruation is “gender-specific” – or rather sex-specific. Women menstruate, men do not, the end.

No. No no no no no, and stop this self-hating women-hating women-disappearing bullshit.

But it’s not true that “anyone can menstruate” – only female people can menstruate. Girls and women can menstruate, boys and men can’t.

The replies seem to be all hostile. Good.

One of the comments allowed to remain on the American Booksellers Association’s Facebook post yesterday captures the eccentric nature of the ideology:

The book is a ploy for people to see gender dysphoria as a trend rather than a legitimate feeling. It’s ideology is one where being transgender is a “fad”. Someone’s gender identity is not a debate. It’s not something to question or say isn’t true based or crap science or psychology. The simple answer to the author’s “mysterious” question as to why gender dysphoria is more widely acknowledged is because society is finally opening up to discuss and talk about it. Not because it didn’t ever exist before. Society has purposefully been heteronormative and forced people with gender dysphoria to remain silent and stuck. This isn’t new. Gender dysphoria has existed as long as humans have. As have transgender individuals. And what they decide to do with their bodies is their choice.

First claim: gender dysphoria is a legitimate feeling.

Sure it is. There must be lots of kinds of dysphoria and they’re all legitimate feelings, because what would an illegitimate feeling be? You feel what you feel. But that doesn’t mean what you feel reflects a truth about the world, or that what you feel imposes some kind of obligation on everyone else.

Second claim: the book’s ideology is one where being transgender is a “fad”.

Yes, and? Of course it’s a fad. Its faddishness is reflected in the comment itself. It’s reflected in the melodramatic language of the ABA’s apology. It’s reflected in the numbers. It could be a harmless fad, or a benign fad, or a wonderful fad that will reverse climate change – but it’s clearly a fad.

Third claim: Someone’s gender identity is not a debate.

That’s the core mistake. Yes it is. If someone’s [___] identity contradicts external reality and has an impact on other people then yes it is [up for] debate. Absolutist libertarianism about something called gender identity is not reasonable except for the single occupants of desert islands.

Third claim restated: It’s not something to question or say isn’t true based o[n] crap science or psychology.

Yes it is. It’s something to question based on a number of things, including our own perceptions. We’re not required to perceive other people as the sex they aren’t simply because they order us to. We’re not required to and besides that we can’t – we can’t override our perceptions that way.

That’s the core issue, that third claim – that people’s internal fantasies about themselves are a mandate for the rest of the world. The wack nature of that claim is why the whole movement is so absurd and bonkers and hyperbolic and melodramatic. We can’t do that, we can’t believe personal claims that deny reality, and a pseudo-political movement that tries to force us to is doomed to drill its way into the center of the earth and expire.

It’s a fierce competition for who can shout the loudest.

The American Booksellers Association is facing withering criticism from booksellers after walking back its promotion of an anti-trans title to member bookstores. Among the promotional items included in the ABA July “white box” mailing sent to 750 bookstores, the organization included a copy of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, as well as a sell sheet.

So Publishers Weekly poisons the well in the first sentence (and the title) by calling the book “anti-trans.” What does “anti-trans” mean? It implies, and I think is generally taken to mean, hostile to trans people, but usually the subject is the truth claims about what “trans” means and how anyone knows any of them are true. It’s not necessarily hostility to trans people (to people who consider themselves trans) to question the truth claims about what “trans” means.

Meanwhile, the ABA issued a groveling apology, as we know, accusing itself of “violence.”

But booksellers said the statement fell short, calling out the organization’s use of the passive voice in the opening sentence. They also demanded greater transparency about how the decision to include the book was initially made, and called for demonstrable steps to restore trust with trans book workers and authors. Some called on the ABA to offer promotions for trans authors’ books at no cost.

Why stop there? Why not send trans authors on a luxury multi-week tour of Europe at no cost?

ABA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee member Luis Correa, who works as a bookseller at Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., was first made aware of the issue when fellow booksellers emailed him Morrissey’s tweet. Correa identifies as a queer, Latino, and fat-bodied person, and said he thought the apology was flawed.

Of course it’s flawed, it didn’t address the queer Latino fat-bodied community. Where’s that free trip to Europe?! (Also what happened to Latinx? Uh oh, better cancel Correa; no free trip to Europe for him.)

Regnery, the publisher of Irreversible Damage, sent the copies to booksellers to promote the book’s forthcoming paperback release. First published in hardcover in 2020, the critical reception to the book varied widely and the book has become the subject of fierce debate. Psychology Today criticized the author’s reliance on a controversial gender dysphoria theory and her rejection of basic science.

What rejection of basic science is that, exactly? What does the trans ideology have to do with any kind of science, basic or advanced?

The publisher defended the book, but Publishers Weekly knows better.

Among booksellers, however, there was little disagreement about the content of the book. “As longtime @ABAbook members with beloved staff across the gender spectrum, we’re extremely disappointed and angered to see the ABA promoting dangerous, widely discredited anti-trans propaganda, and we’re calling for accountability,” the Harvard Book Store wrote on Twitter.

But what does “anti-trans” mean?

DEI committee member Correa said he is cautiously optimistic that the ABA will take steps that demonstrate a commitment to doing right by booksellers, and believes that the decision to take the coming weeks to outline steps was more prudent than rushing. In the past, he said ABA has been responsive on issues that are important to trans booksellers, including adding functionality to the Indie Commerce websites that many member bookstores use so that they can remove anti-trans titles from the ordering database. Still, he is wary.

“We’re dealing with a historically white, cis organization in a white supremacist society. So there are going to be a lot of missteps,” he told PW.

Is it historically male at all? Or is that something that just doesn’t matter these days.

David Aaronovitch reviews Helen Joyce’s Trans:

I didn’t look too closely when in 2015 a Conservative administration proposed changing the law on gender recognition. A few trans people want more easily to get official confirmation for the new gender they have become? Well, I thought, that’s probably OK. No skin off any part of me.

Then the issue appeared to morph into a different kind of conflict. It had clearly somewhere along the line become impermissible for those who thought that there was something ineluctable about biological sex to say so. It wasn’t whether they were correct or mistaken on the subject that was in question, but their right even to express their view.

That had definitely happened by 2015 – that’s when I was explicitly and furiously told that I had zero right to express such a view, by people who 5 minutes earlier had been friends.

Here I drew the line. I saw people I knew being bullied and harassed for having an opinion on biological sex (actually the majority opinion on biological sex), and even if I didn’t know whether I agreed with them, I knew that was wrong. And wrote so, inevitably drawing the accusation from Britain’s most-followed far leftist, Owen Jones, that I was an “apologist for transphobia”, a sentiment published to his one million followers on Twitter.

As to the subject of the dispute itself, I was still deliberately agnostic. But two things were beginning to worry me. The first was the absurdity of what was happening to the language. For health publications to eschew using the word “women” in relation to the need for cervical smears, substituting the phrase “people with cervixes” seemed not just awkward but damaging. Some women, for example, might not even know they had cervixes. Why would a transwoman feel her existence was denied by health authorities recognising that people with cervixes were, to a statistical vanishing point, women?

It’s much more than that though – much more. We need the word “woman” for more than just medical tests. If we can’t have the word “woman” we can’t have feminism. We have to have feminism.

The point Joyce is establishing is that you cannot simply become a woman or a man by saying so. But that in recent times a fashion, an industry, has developed based around the idea that you can. Not long ago, Joyce writes, “the idea of a non-hormone, non-op transwoman — someone who retains a physiologically normal male body but understands themselves to be a woman because that is their ‘gender identity’ and expects everyone else to agree — would have seemed nonsensical to almost everybody”. And now in many places it’s the law.

Joyce places the origin of this development — which, as she establishes, has (unlike debates over gay equality or reproductive rights) somehow sneaked onto the statute books of several countries — in a new ideology about gender. This holds that biological sex is as much a “social construct” as the idea of gender is.

One benefit of Joyce’s book is its intellectual clarity and its refusal to compromise. So she takes apart this ideology of gender with a cold rigour. What, after all, is the woman or man you want to become, if there’s no such thing as a woman or man? The thing that is yearned for will often be precisely the fashionable and frankly prejudiced notion of what a person who was born a woman or man would ideally be like. So you ditch biological reality for a set of shifting aspirations and call it progress?

Correct. Women don’t get to call themselves women, and everyone is required to call men women on demand.

Something odd has happened and is happening. Younger people in particular are, out of good-natured tolerance, accepting an ideology that is so empty that its proponents hugely prefer assertion and “cancellation” to argument. But in seeking to cancel JK Rowling, trans activists met their Joe McCarthy accuses the US army moment — the point at which they tried to take down a loved and respected institution and came unstuck.

I’m off the fence. I will call people by the name and pronouns they tell me they want to be called by. I am prepared to defend their right not to be discriminated against at work and in shops, to defend them against bullying and harassment. But as Joyce says so passionately, that doesn’t change reality. A penis is a male sex organ, men don’t have babies. Women exist.

And without women, no humans exist.

Trump and “like a dog” – Philip Rucker in the Post in 2018:

In President Trump’s singular lexicon, there is no more vicious put-down than likening an adversary to a dog.

“Choked like a dog.”

“Fired like a dog.”

“Sweat like a dog.”

Then there is what Trump said Tuesday of Omarosa Manigault Newman, his former reality television protege and White House staffer who is now scorned and telling all in her new book, “Unhinged,” and accompanying media tour.

“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” Trump tweeted. “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

Animalistic slurs come easily to Trump, who over the past few years has likened a long list of perceived enemies to dogs — including former FBI director James B. Comey, former acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates, former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), journalist David Gregory and conservative commentator Erick Erickson.

Calling a woman a dog is just old-style frat house sexism, where it meant “not sexually attractive to frat boys.” Calling anyone and everyone you don’t like a dog is weird.

The Wall Street Journal:

The American Booksellers Association apologized Wednesday for a “terrible” and “serious, violent incident.” What dastardly offense did it commit? The profound trauma occurred this month when the trade group dedicated to selling books sent out a paperback copy of a book some of its members don’t like.

So its members have all liked every single book the ABA has ever sent out? This shocking violence of sending one that some didn’t like is a brand new event in the world?

No, it’s not that, it’s that Abigail Shrier’s book is different. It’s violent enough to say that some girls who say they are trans are just caught up in a fad.

Ms. Shrier’s book nonetheless offends the sensibilities of the woke left, which has tried to censor research into rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the regret felt by some who have undergone gender transitions. Twitter mobs are now leading a campaign to ensure that the public can’t buy or read Ms. Shrier’s book.

The American Booksellers Association did not respond to a request for comment, but its groveling statement makes clear it caved to the censors. The group apologized for mailing the “anti-trans” book to its members, calling it an “inexcusable” act that went against “everything we believe and support.” It also promised to take “concrete steps to address the harm we caused,” since “apologies are not enough.”

Then they flagellated themselves with knotted cords until the blood ran.

The trade group isn’t alone. On Thursday afternoon Ms. Shrier’s book no longer appeared to be available on the website of Target, the giant retailer. (Target didn’t respond to a request for comment.) This week NBC News reported that two Amazon employees resigned after the company continued to offer Ms. Shrier’s book. Hundreds more have called in a petition for the book’s removal from the online marketplace.

Oh well. Climate changes has passed the tipping point so none of this will matter for much longer.

And they’ve also deleted dissenting comments from the Facebook post, and blocked some people from commenting – like me, for instance.

What a shower of class traitors and scabs and informers. What a complete shit-show.

Pathetic and shameful.