Trump’s thug children revealed to be thugs.

Ivanka did a whispery heavily made-up little video saying she was aware that Trump had lost the election. Did she do anything about it? Of course not. Did she keep pretending to be a Government Person, and riding on the Big Plane? Of course.

Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.

“Like I said,” said Mr. Kushner, who was rarely heard from in public during his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many” presidential pardons finished as possible.

Not in preventing his criminal daddy-in-law from stealing the election. Interesting priorities. Also, what right does he have to meddle with presidential pardons?

Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons process, prompting complaints from legal experts and some of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”

Ahhhhh there speaks the tiny privileged mind of a rich twerp who will commit any crime for more money. Noticing that a coup is in progress is “whining.” He would have a point if he were saying “the team” did nothing to stop Trump, but that’s not what he’s saying at all. He’s saying he doesn’t care about Trump’s treason and he doesn’t care what anyone said about it at the time.

Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the hearing room after the video ended. “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”

Except when it’s Trump and his trumplings.

And he could be back in about 18 months.

The Daily Beast has more on the Post ructions, which is good, because I don’t much want to go digging through days of tweets.

The seemingly unending dramatics began late last week when political reporter Dave Weigel retweeted a sexist post about bisexual women. He later apologized but not before Sonmez publicly called him out along with the paper’s management, writing, “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”

Fellow Post reporter Jose A. Del Real then publicly accused Sonmez on Saturday of “repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague,” which led to several tweets worth of beefing between the pair until Del Real blocked her Sunday.

It all sounds a bit high school, but then so does a lot of Twitter.

On Tuesday, Buzbee sent out yet another company-wide memo, stating that the paper does “not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues” and promising to enforce the paper’s social media and workplace harassment policies. The memo came hours after Sonmez published a 30-tweet thread alleging editors took a years-long approach of preferential treatment for higher-profile reporters and their social media presence.

That seems kind of silly. Of course higher-profile reporters are going to get some preferential treatment – because they’re higher profile! High profile is what the bosses want, so they’re going to reward it. They shouldn’t get preferential treatment in areas where the rules are clear and apply to all, but other than that, deal. Stars get star treatment; surprise surprise.

Sonmez, meanwhile, continued to tweet, highlighting critical posts from Del Real (who had not responded to Sonmez after Saturday) as a mockery of Buzbee‘s claim to a “collegial workplace.”

Veteran Post reporter Lisa Rein then stepped in to publicly plead with Sonmez: “Please stop.”

That same afternoon, several high-profile Washington Post reporters, including Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker, tweeted about how “proud” they are to work at the newspaper.

That kumbaya moment prompted Sonmez to post a lengthy tread on Thursday noting how “the reporters who issued synchronized tweets this week downplaying the Post’s workplace issues have a few things in common.” She added that they are “All white” and “They are among the ‘stars’ who ‘get away with murder’ on social media.”

See above. Stars are stars; what do you expect?

So that went well.

Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post who in recent days has been at the center of a debate over the organization’s social media policies and the culture of the newsroom, was fired on Thursday…

In an emailed termination letter, which was viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Sonmez was told that The Post was ending her employment, effective immediately, “for misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online, and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

I added that comma after “your co-workers online” – the Oxford comma, the one the NYT style guide forbids. That comma is often needed, and that sentence is one such place. It’s three items, not two, and you need the comma to make that unambiguous. I hate style guides and I hate “rules” that ignore style and readers.

Back to the excellent gossip.

The email also said Ms. Sonmez’s “public attempts to question the motives of your co-journalists” undermined The Post’s reputation

Yes it’s not actually the best idea ever to attack people you work with on Twitter. Who knew?

“We cannot allow you to continue to work as a journalist representing The Washington Post,” the letter said.

Plus, we don’t want to.

Her name is actually Felicia. The “Bye Felicias” are going to inundate us.

In the past week, she has been at the center of a public firestorm over the newsroom’s culture.

Dave Weigel etc etc.

In the following days, Ms. Sonmez wrote a series of posts on Twitter about the newsroom culture at The Post and what she said was the uneven way its social media policy was applied to different reporters. At times she jousted with fellow journalists at The Post on Twitter.

I can see wanting to do that. Boy can I see it. But actually doing it? Well, you’d better be prepared to lose that job.

Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of The Post, subsequently wrote two memos to the newsroom asking for colleagues not to attack each other on social media.

Do it behind the scenes, peeps, not on Twitter where everybody can see you and laugh.

But Bye Felicia didn’t listen so Bye Felicia is out.

Vanity Fair on ructions at the Washington Post:

On Tuesday afternoon, Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey tweeted that he was “proud” to work at the paper, a place “filled with many terrific people who are smart and collegial.”

And a lot of other familiar names followed suit.

The public outpouring of Post pride—which I’m told political reporters were urging one another to take part in—followed executive editor Sally Buzbee’s memo reiterating workplace policies and promoting collegiality among staff. The memo dropped following a few days at the Post that have been, as one reporter described it, a “clusterfuck.” Dave Weigel, a national political correspondent, is, as of Monday, suspended without pay for the next month after retweeting a sexist tweet last week, which he then promptly unshared and apologized for after a colleague called him out both on the company Slack and publicly. Hours after news of Weigel’s suspension broke Monday, that colleague, political reporter Felicia Sonmez, was urging the paper to take action against a different colleague, Jose Del Real, who on Saturday took aim at Sonmez for “the cruelty you regularly unleash against colleagues.” (He made this point after commending Sonmez for “your bravery in sharing your story,” adding, “I support your fight against retribution for doing so.”)

Let’s everybody work from home forever, ok?

Ben Hunte excitedly reports:

Exclusive: Trans Journalists Pull Out of Guardian Newspaper’s Pride

Cool that it’s exclusive. Congrats, man!

Also trans journalists is a nice touch. I prefer the real ones myself.

Freelance journalists Freddy McConnell and Vic Parsons said they were declining all future work with the UK paper “until it changes its trans-hostile and exclusionary stance.”

And they won’t be missed. They’re not journalists but ideologues.

McConnell and Parsons told VICE World News they believed a recent opinion piece was “misleading and discriminatory” about cis lesbians dating trans women and said it was “the final straw” for them. Published on the 29th May in the Guardian’s sister paper the Observer and online on the Guardian’s website, the article has been widely criticised as anti-trans, with the author of the article repeatedly calling trans women “biologically male” and labelling trans campaigners working for trans equality as pushing “gender ideology”. 

In other words telling the truth. Blah blah blah; run along now.

You were asking about Sophie Grace Chappell?

But latsot didn’t “misgender” people. Emily Bridges is indeed a man. He claims to be a trans woman, but that doesn’t make him a woman, it just makes him a man who claims to be a woman or a man who claims to be a trans woman, depending on how genuine his claim is.

Chappell is a man too of course. One thing he’s famous for is saying it doesn’t matter if more women are killed because trans women are allowed to invade our spaces. The Glinner Update last September:

BBC Radio Scotland’s morning programme hosted a discussion about the Scottish government’s proposed GRA reforms and self ID legislation….One of the guests was trans-identified male, Sophie Grace Chappell, a Philosophy professor at the Open University.

Before I go on – when’s the last time you saw a grown woman dressed like that? In my case the answer would be never. Never. Grown women do not wear flouncy starched sticky-out skirts like that with white cardigans and pearls and whatever the fuck those shoes are. Nor little pink ribbon barrettes nor a coy bit of petticoat sticking out nor nail polish on stubby little nails. A grown woman would not go out in public like that, let alone a grown woman who is an academic with a job in a real university. He’s mocking us.

Ahem. Back to the update:

From the off, Chappell dismissed women’s safety concerns as ‘fearmongering’.

…

“Suppose people were saying ‘Well you know if you make it easier for gay people to be themselves in society there’s going to be a crime wave or dreadful homosexual murders are going to happen, it’s going to be awful if we do that’, I think we’d rightly dismiss that as scaremongering and we’d say ‘No it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter’. It wouldn’t matter, actually, if there was a slight spike in those statistics because this isn’t about that kind of issue.”

Cool. It wouldn’t matter if more women were murdered, as long as “Sophie Grace” (flatter himself much?) gets to wear his stupid flouncy skirt.

I’m reading a review of Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works (not a very favorable review) and am brought to a stop by a quotation from White nationalist Andrew Auernheimer at The Daily Stormer. I know nothing of Auernheimer and little of The Daily Stormer. The passage quoted is…interesting.

Don’t sit here and pretend you’re a nice traditional girl when you fight against any implementation of traditional values. Say aloud what you are, on the streets, to your families, on social media: “I’m a despicable whore.” Do it before it is too late, because I swear to whatever gods may be that when the purge comes if you have been using traditionalism as a cloak for your revolting degeneracy your name is going on a list and we will be coming to make you pay for it. You will feel the punch to your throat first, but the hours afterwards at the hands of a WHITE SHARIA gang will make that seem as just a brief and gentle touch against your skin. Your ribs will be broken. Your face will be broken. Some of you will not live to tell about it. This I promise: a much needed correction is coming for you soon, you disgusting skanks.

Mm.

Yet according to Stanley we’re the privileged sneering cis women cruelly dominating men who call themselves women. Odd.

I wonder if the Jason Stanleys of the world ever publicly wring their hands over this kind of thing:

The Dorset teenager Gaia Pope was devastated when she learned a man she had accused of raping her had allegedly harassed and targeted many other women and girls, an inquest jury has heard.

Pope, 19, whose body was found on a clifftop in November 2017, 11 days after she went missing, had reported the rape because she wanted to protect others, jurors were told, but detectives told her there was little chance of the case succeeding and it would be traumatic to go to court, it is claimed.

A few months later, Dorset police posted on Facebook that the man had been jailed for an unrelated sexual offence.

Giving evidence at the coroner’s court in Bournemouth, Pope’s cousin Marienna Pope-Weidemann said: “Underneath the post were hundreds of reactions and comments from people in our community disclosing their own experiences of having been harassed by him, having their 12-year-old daughter contacted by him on social media and having to intervene because he wouldn’t leave them alone.”

Please, tell us more about how genocidal we are for continuing to know the difference between women and men.

In June 2016 police told Pope the man was not going to be prosecuted. They told her she had a right to appeal against the decision. “But they described what it would be like in court being cross-examined by a defence lawyer. They said: ‘We don’t think there is any chance of it being successful and it would be very traumatic.’”

Or to put it another way, rape is something men can do with impunity.

Pope-Weidemann…said Pope was particularly upset when a psychiatrist wrote she had “delusions of sexual assault”.

But men don’t get told they have delusions of being a woman.

Jason Stanley is continuing his project of explaining that women are genocidal.

Did he pause to think about the possibility that women might have good reasons to refuse to be “inclusive” of men in all circumstances? In rape shelters and toilets and feminism? No, of course he didn’t, he simply went on telling the world that women who want to be able to say no to men are intent on genocide of trans people.

What is that supposed to mean? What community? Any community? All communities? What about the community of Boko Haram for instance? That’s a community that’s very much “linked with” rape. What about fraternities? What about rapists? The community of rapists is linked with rape. What is it about the word “community” that makes it forbidden and unacceptable to link it with rape, even when it is explicitly linked with rape?

Again, what’s that supposed to mean? Some “communities” are existential threats to children. Communities that exploit child labor for instance, communities that prey on children sexually, communities that pass laws that impoverish and exploit children – I could go on.

He can’t really be as stupid as this. Yet there he is, putting the stupid out there for the world to gape at.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Underlined.

Lady Mondegreen #9

I hear this from gender identity activists, but I’ve never seen a single screenshot.

Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but to me this was one of the earlies warning signs that the trans agenda was of a very different nature from the feminist or anti-racist or LGB ones. When I started paying attention to social justice issues (with a special emphasis on feminism) in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti-Harassment Policy Wars, the women being targeted by MRAs never had any problem providing endless specific examples (in the form of direct quotes, screenshots etc.) of obvious, unambiguous cyberbullying, harassment, hatespeech, and threats. My most vivid memory from that time is watching Caroline Criado-Perez’s mentionings on Twitter fill up with the ugliest cyber-bullying I had ever seen quicker than the Twitter feed could load them. I would click “refresh”, and by the time my browser (not a particularly slow one!) was finished loading the tweets, there were already 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at a time, every day for months or even years*.

When I started hearing about the diabolical “TERFs” (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs sending rape and death threats to CCP) it was a very different story indeed. No screenshots, no direct quotes, nothing but the TRA’s own words. One of the most bizarre conversations I’ve had in my life was when a TRA PM’ed me on twitter to interrogate me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger who, by his own admission, had never said anything explicitly transphobic. Apparently it was “implied in very subtle ways” that only trans people could detect, and I was not qualified to question their judgement. It was about time I started to realize that the genocidal “TERFs” I kept hearing about included roughly half the feminists I was following, and once seen the glaring contrast between these women’s actual words and the words put into their mouth by the TRA could not be unseen. There was no going back after that.

In one episode of the original Cosmos series (there is a point to all this, I promise), Carl Sagan talked about how there were at one time people speculating that the surface of Venus was a swamp and maybe even inhabited by dinosaurs. When you looked at Venus through the best telescopes available at the time, it appeared to be completely featureless, so apparently the thinking went something like:

I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it covered in clouds! What are clouds made of? Water! Ok, so there must a lot of water on Venus. Well, if there’s a lot of water on Venus, it’s probably a swamp. And if it’s a swamp there’s A and if there’s A, there is B […], and if there is Z, why not dinosaurs?

I think the way TRAs get from “this feminist said xyz” to “phobias”, “hate”, “denying our right to exist”, ” violence”, “murder”, “genocide” etc. is very similar to the way those people got from “I can’t see a thing” to “Dinosaurs”. As I keep saying it’s never about what the alleged “TERF” actually said. It’s only ever about what the thing she said supposedly implies as seen through the distorting lens of a million unstated premises and only at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations (involving word-magic, mindreading etc.). Yet when people like Jones report on the latest internet showtrial against feminist thoughtcriminals, they invariably skip right past the million unstated premises and impossibly sloppy inferences and go straight to the “supposedly implies” part as if it had already been established more firmly the the laws of thermodynamics, such that the only question left to consider is how severe the punishment needs to be. As Not Bruce keeps pointing out, if they had any real examples of feminists spouting “hate”, denying trans people’s “rights” (including the “right to exist”), advocating “violence” and even “genocide”, etc. they would use it for everything it was worth. The reason they keep focusing on – never mind “first world problems”, or even “luxury problems”, these are “Utopia” problems! – like the technically accurate use of pronouns (!) or a popular author of young adult literature writing one of the least hateful things I have ever read*, is because that’s all they have. That’s the nothing that their dinosaurs ultimately boils down to.

* All that effort just to make the point that sexism was a non-issue…

** Certainly orders of magnitude less hateful than anything I have ever read by a TRA.

Oh lord I’d forgotten Jason Stanley was this guy. I can’t keep track of them – the Daily Nous guy and Stanley and the guy in Vancouver and that other guy and the other one. But Jason Stanley is the hell yes I’m self-important guy.

He says, typing the most embarrassing tweet in human history.

The Times on those two men missing, probably murdered, in the Amazon:

The Javari Valley in the Amazon rainforest is one of the most isolated places on the planet. It is a densely forested Indigenous reserve the size of Maine where there are virtually no roads, trips can take a week by boat and at least 19 Indigenous groups are believed to still live without outside contact.

The reserve is also plagued by illegal fishing, hunting and mining, a problem exacerbated by government budget cuts under President Jair Bolsonaro. Now local Indigenous people have started formally patrolling the forest and rivers themselves, and the men who exploit the land for a living have responded with increasingly dire threats.

Dom Phillips, a British journalist who has lived in Brazil for fifteen years, went to the Javari Valley to interview the Indigenous patrols, along with Bruno Araújo Pereira, an expert on Indigenous groups who was helping the patrols. Last Saturday they encountered a boat with some illegal fishermen, who made a point of showing their guns. They left for home on Sunday and haven’t been seen since.

Over the past three days, various search crews, from Indigenous groups to the Brazilian Navy, have scoured the area; Brazilian politicians and celebrities have called for more action to find the men; and their disappearance has led the morning newspapers and nightly news across the country.

…

Mr. Phillips, who also wrote regularly for The New York Times in 2017, has dedicated much of his career to documenting the struggle between the people who want to protect the Amazon and those who want to exploit it. Mr. Pereira has spent years defending Indigenous groups under the resulting threat. Now fears are growing that their latest journey deep into the rainforest could end up as one of the grimmest illustrations of that conflict.

Meanwhile much of the left is too busy being Allies to men who say they are women to pay any attention to pesky Indigenous groups in the Amazon. (On the version of this article I’m reading the text is interrupted by a giant gaudy blue- and pink-striped banner ad from the ACLU shouting STOP ANTI TRANS BILLS.)

Also the lannnguage is merrrging.

Yes and we also use the same word for “wine” and “afternoon” and “stick” and “jump.” It’s uncanny what a lot of words we share. IT MUST MEAN WE ARE NAZIS.

One might think Jason Stanley would be able to tell the difference between lefty feminist women and hate groups/enemies of democracy, but he isn’t. New sexist pig just like the old sexist pig.

One, Putin probably also thinks dogs are not cats. Two, the feminist women you’re smearing aren’t “anti-trans”: we’re against the empty, brain-dead ideology that says men are women if they say they are and women must agree no matter what, and be punished and ostracized if we refuse.

Yale philosophy bro Jason Stanley tweeted a faux-naïve question about why it’s always women who dispute claims about trans women, and never men. I’m giving the gist because he’s now deleted it (and of course insulted the feminist women who replied) and I don’t have a screenshot handy.

The question was so faux-naïve (he must know perfectly well why), and the deletion so quick, that it seems highly likely he did it on purpose – a tiny little one act drama in which Yale stud asks thoughtful question, transphobic witches respond with their phobic witchery, and he deletes the innocent tweet with regret about all the witchy phobicry. Misogynist prick. I daren’t say that on Twitter but I can say it here.

He compares feminist women to Hindutva and white supremacists. Misogynist prick.

Oookaaaaay…

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) said this week that he opposes gun control in response to mass shootings because the country did not ban airplanes after they were used in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The country didn’t ban them but it sure as hell did put a lot of new restrictions and checks in place, which, funnily enough, is what gun control means. It means control, not elimination.

Also: guns have one purpose, which is to shove metal slugs into living flesh at high speed. That’s not the purpose of commercial airplanes. The purpose of commercial airplanes is to move people and goods around. The people who flew them into buildings were not using them for their designed purpose. The people who use AR-15s to shoot a lot of people in a short time are using them for their designed purpose.

I hope that clarifies.

Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater at the Times a couple of weeks ago:

Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.

Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged.

Because he was dragging his feet on the whole steal the election thing.

It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.

His narcissistic rage at being unable to steal the election in broad daylight.

Mr. Pence resisted weeks of pressure from Mr. Trump and some of his allies to use his ceremonial role in overseeing Congress’s certification of the electoral votes on Jan. 6 to block or delay Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Despite being told by Mr. Pence and his advisers that they did not believe that the vice president had that power, Mr. Trump continued to apply pressure, privately and publicly, through that morning.

As any mob boss would.

Mr. Trump denounced Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with the effort during his rally at the Ellipse just before the Electoral College certification began in the Capitol.

“We want to be so respectful of everybody,” Mr. Trump said in a slashing speech in which he attacked various people and institutions for not cooperating with his desires. “And we are going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country. Because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.”

Which of course was why he wouldn’t do it. Trump too was sworn to uphold the Constitution, and never had the slightest intention of doing so at the expense of his own wants.

Mr. Trump made his displeasure with Mr. Pence clear not just to his aides but to the public when he tweeted, at 2:24 p.m., as the rioters were swarming the building, that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Narcissism is in the driver’s seat in too many vehicles.

What’s wrong with this headline? (Aside from the fact that it’s too long for a headline.)

‘I’d be BANNED from swimming if I had as much testosterone as Emily Bridges’: Olympian Sharron Davies slams trans cyclist as ‘NOT female’

It’s not a slam. It’s just a simple, humble, obvious fact. Men are not women. Women are not men. Adults are not children, children are not adults. Stones are not flowers. Squirrels are not hammers.

Anyway. The Mail goes on:

Between 1975 and 1985, Davies missed out on a string of medals while competing against East German drug cheats. She now believes there are parallels between the state-sponsored doping campaigns of the Cold War and transgender athletes taking hormone-suppression medication in a quest to win medals in women’s categories. 

Again: that’s not a belief, it’s a fact. Here’s one very big clue: women lose in both cases. Some women take testosterone: the other women lose. Some men compete against women: women lose. It’s never men who lose in these manipulations, it’s always women.

Owen Jones gets a little ahead of himself.

It’s not a fact that X people will read this and not care about that. You can’t call a prediction a fact. You especially can’t call a prediction a fact when it’s as tendentious as OJ’s. He doesn’t know what gender critical people will or won’t read, and he doesn’t know how we will or won’t react to what we read. In short it’s a really stupid argument to claim that This Evil is underlined by my prediction that X people will do Y and react Zly. You can’t underline current evils with your claims about what will happen tomorrow.

Bros before hos, I guess.

Of course I don’t. Nobody does. That’s not “courage,” it’s triumphant cheating. It’s a man cheating women, and courage is not the quality it requires. Narcissism and entitlement, yes, courage, no. Utter contempt for women, yes, courage, no.

David Bradford is the fitness editor for Cycling Weekly. Men helping other men cheat women in sports: what a picture.

Updating: Forgot his follow-up.

What has the reaction been? Anger at his flattery of Bridges’s “courage,” of course, from women pointing out that Bridges’s “courage” is actually his effrontery in cheating women in their own sport. He simply brushes that off as if it means absolutely nothing, and admires the cheater’s “courage” even more.

It’s astonishing.