David Hogg isn’t the only Parkland survivor that Marjorie Greene harassed and abused.

Another student activist who was present that day said Greene’s behavior had been “scary” and had left her shaken. Linnea Stanton, a college student and March for Our Lives activist from Wisconsin, recalled that Greene had first confronted the students as they delivered letters to lawmakers inside a Senate office building.

“All of a sudden, this blonde woman was yelling, and someone was recording us with an iPhone,” Stanton said.

After the students started chanting to get the Capitol police to intervene, Greene left, but she waited for the group outside the building, where she continued to harass and film them once they exited, Stanton said.

Stanton said she had only learned on Wednesday that the woman who had harassed her group in 2019 was now an elected member of Congress. “It’s just kind of horrifying,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that someone who can act like that towards another human being, much less towards a teenager who survived a mass shooting, is allowed to hold power.

Horrifying is exactly what it is. This isn’t just different politics, it isn’t policy versus policy, it isn’t meritocracy or safety net, it’s unashamed cruelty and malevolence versus basic minimal giving a shit about others. It’s horrifying that that’s where we’ve arrived.

Jonathan Freedland wonders why did the 1918 Flu disappear from the collective memory so swiftly?

Look around almost any British town or village and you will see a war memorial, usually first built to honour the fallen of 1914 to 1918. But scour this country and the rest of the world, and you will struggle to find more than a couple of markers for the event that, globally and at the time of the war’s end, took many more lives. The first world war killed some 17 million people, but the “Spanish” flu that struck in 1918 infected one in three people on the planet – a total of 500 million – leaving between 50 million and 100 million dead. The number of dead was so much greater and yet, as the leading historian of that pandemic, Laura Spinney, writes, “there is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow or Washington DC” for any of them. The great writers of the age, the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, all but ignored the plague that had descended.

Think of all the war movies there are and then about the comparatively small number of flu movies. By comparatively small I mean zero.

Why is that? An explanation begins in the novelist Graham Swift’s conception of man as “the storytelling animal”. Wars offer a compelling, linear story. There are causes and consequences, battles, surrenders and treaties, all taking place in a defined space and time. Pandemics are not like that. They sprawl the entire globe. And the facts can take decades to emerge. For many years, the 1918-20 pandemic was thought to have cost 20 million lives. Only relatively recently has the truer, more deadly picture emerged.

Crucially, a pandemic lacks the essential ingredients of a story: clear heroes and villains with intent and motive. The Covid enemy is, despite our best efforts to anthropomorphise it, an invisible and faceless virus.

That’s only one kind of story though. Clear villains aren’t an essential ingredient of all stories. (There’s also the fact that bumbling or outright criminally negligent people at the top could step right up for those villain roles.) You’d think heroic nurses and doctors would make plenty of good story.

We are practised in the collective memory of war, but with pandemics we do something different. “We remember them individually, not collectively,” says Spinney. “Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.”

That’s what the precedent of 1918 suggests we’ll do this time, and yet I can’t help but hope that’s wrong. When this is over, I hope we take each other’s hands and remember this strange, dark period together – even if we spent so much of it apart, so much of it alone.

I think we’ll remember it, but whether we’ll pass the memory on or not – I have my doubts.

There’s this village in France that has a history of taking in people who are fleeing persecution or genocide.

An Austrian man who fled the Nazis with his family during the second world war has bequeathed a large part of his fortune to the French village whose residents hid them from persecution for years.

Eric Schwam, who died aged 90 on 25 December, wrote the surprise gift into his will for Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, located on a remote mountain plateau in south-east France that historically has a large Protestant community known for offering shelter to those in need.

…

Schwam and his family arrived in 1943 and were hidden in a school for the duration of the war, and remained until 1950.

They weren’t the only ones.

About 2,500 Jews were taken in and protected during the war by Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, whose residents were honoured as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre.

Over the centuries the village has taken in a wide range of people fleeing religious or political persecution, from priests driven into hiding during the French Revolution to Spanish republicans during the civil war of the 1930s, and more recently migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa.

Righteous among the nations indeed.

It’s Jewish space lasers now.

In November 2018, California was hit with the worst wildfire in the state’s history. At the time, future Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote a bizarre Facebook post that echoed QAnon conspiracy theorists and falsely claimed that the real and hidden culprit behind the disaster was a laser from space triggered by some nefarious group of people. 

A LASER from SPACE. Cue ominous theme music.

Greene’s post, which hasn’t previously been reported, is just the latest example to be unearthed of her embracing conspiracy theories about tragedies during her time as a right-wing commentator. In addition to being a QAnon supporter, Greene has pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11, the Parkland and Sandy Hook school shootings, the Las Vegas shooting, and the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich, among others. 

Not to mention all the death threats aimed at Democrats.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the Republican Party have done little to stop Greene’s rising profile. During the 2020 campaign, the National Republican Congressional Committee added her to its “Young Guns” fundraising and recruitment program. In November, after Greene was elected, McCarthy defended her by falsely claiming that she’d denounced her QAnon views. And Republicans have selected Greene to be a member of the House Budget Committee and the House Committee on Education and Labor. (A spokesperson for McCarthy recently told Axios: “These comments are deeply disturbing and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them.”) One of Greene’s conspiracy theories directly targets McCarthy’s state. 

…

Rep. Greene is a proponent of the Camp Fire laser beam conspiracy theory. She wrote a November 17, 2018, Facebook post — which is no longer available online — in which she said that she was speculating “because there are too many coincidences to ignore” regarding the fire, including that then-California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) wanted to build the high-speed rail project and “oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.” She also speculated that a vice chairman at “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm” was somehow involved, and suggested the fire was caused by a beam from “space solar generators.” 

We can conclude that she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but she is violent and racist, so by god she’s welcome in the Republican Congress.

No actually let’s not spend months looking at their records.

The Pentagon has suspended the processing of a number of former President Donald Trump’s last-minute appointees to defense advisory boards as the new administration looks to weed out loyalists to the former president.

He shouldn’t have been making last-minute appointments. He should have been packing up.

The move effectively prevents a number of Trump allies, including his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy campaign manager David Bossie, from actually serving on panels tasked with providing advice to the defense secretary, at least for the time being.

Make it permanent.

The freeze announced on Wednesday pertains only to appointees who have not yet been sworn in or have [not] completed all the required paperwork, the people said. Several new board members, including Earl Matthews and Anthony Tata, were sworn in on Jan. 19 after pressure from the White House to push through as many appointees as possible before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. But others, including Lewandowski and Bossie, were still undergoing a lengthy financial disclosure and security clearance process that normally takes weeks or months, according to the people familiar.

Sworn in on January 19, one day before the criminal had to be out.

It was not immediately clear whether the Pentagon planned to take any action against those who have been onboarded, but the Biden team is looking into whether it can replace dozens of Trump’s last-minute appointments to boards and commissions across the U.S. government.

There’s a lot of muck to shovel out of there.

This is so. weird.

The gun, first of all, but by no means last. The nail polish. The wedding ring. The 45 cap. The…crotch. I didn’t notice at first but the camera is zeroed in on her crotch, and she’s all but pointing at it.

Is it just me or is that some bizarre semiotics?

The fascism (the literal kind) ratchets up by the day.

Labour issued this in 2018, but it’s grabbed people’s attention today.

What does Labour’s Statement on All Women Shortlists, women’s officers, and minimum quotes for women say?

Labour has a proud record of championing equality for women of all backgrounds, including BAME women, LGBT+ women, disabled women and working class women. The use of All Women Shortlists, women’s officers and minimum quotas for women is a key aspect of this.

The Labour Party’s All Women Shortlists are open to all women, including self-identifying trans women. Similarly, women’s officers and minimum quotas for women in the Labour Party are open to all women, including self-identifying trans women.

So actual women can lose places to men who claim to be women. If Labour decides to really be “proactive” about it their shortlists and quotas could be all men who claim to be women instead of actual women.

Also, next paragraph –

The Labour Party is committed to upholding the principle of affirmative action for women. Anyone attempting to breach Labour Party rules and subvert the intention of All Women Shortlists, women’s officers or minimum quotas for women will be dealt with via our established safeguards, selection procedures and disciplinary measures.

I don’t understand what they mean by that. Are they talking about women attempting to breach Labour Party rules and subvert the intention of All Women Shortlists, women’s officers or minimum quotas for women? Or are they talking about men doing so by pretending to be trans? The inability to know which it is just underlines how incoherent the ideology is.

Incoherent and extremely coercive; brilliant combination.

Pelosi tells the Republicans they shouldn’t be looking fixedly in the other direction when Marjorie Taylor Greene is out there threatening and gun-carrying and threatening some more.

“What I’m concerned about is the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, who is willing to overlook, ignore those statements,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference, days after CNN reported Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians — including Pelosi — in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress…

Greene is also facing criticism for a video of her confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to Congress went viral Wednesday. And last week, other students who survived the Parkland, Florida, school shooting and families of the victims are[sic] calling for Greene’s resignation, after comments surfaced that showed her agreeing with people who said the 2018 shooting was a “false flag” operation, remarks Pelosi called special attention to Thursday. The California Democrat also criticized Greene’s placement on the House Committee on Education and Labor.

“Assigning her to the Education Committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when she has mocked the killing of teenagers in high school at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school — what could they be thinking?” Pelosi asked Thursday. “Or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be doing? It’s absolutely appalling, and I think the focus has to be on the Republican leadership of this House of Representatives for the disregard they have for the death of those children.”

They should put her on the Sedition and Insurrection Committee. I can’t think of anywhere else she would fit.

The “Feminist” Library’s statement on “transphobia” and accountability:

… we feel it important to note that we come from different political histories as well as cultural and class backgrounds. However, while the Library has historically sought to encompass a wide variety of different perspectives, priorities, politics and stances, a by-product of this has been that we as a collective have failed to present a united and unequivocal stance on certain issues where it has been most needed. 

Like, for instance, whether feminism should stop being about women and be about men who call themselves women instead. Talk about most needed!

We understand that in an increasingly hostile conversation regarding trans inclusion from in the mainstream press and certain sects of feminism, it is important for us to reiterate that we are a trans-inclusive organisation and that we stand in solidarity with all trans people in the face of mockery, denigration, humiliation and discrimination with regards to accessing healthcare and other legal rights. We wish to reiterate as members of the collective that we believe that feminism is a political project that works in service of all of us.

Emphasis theirs.

It’s a feminist organization but somehow the really urgent issue, the one that requires bold type, is the one about men who claim to be women. That pesky of the earth earthy stuff that concerns women just doesn’t matter all that much. The bolded issue is so important that it requires redefining feminism so that it’s about all of us. Women: the sex that doesn’t get to have anything for itself.

At the Feminist Library, we believe that feminism is a political framework that we can use to end all gendered violence and transform the world for everyone.

Then why call it feminist at all? Why not call it humanist? “Gendered” violence would include male on male violence, so that’s not feminism any more, it’s everyoneism. Opposing all violence is a fine thing, but women still need specifically feminist organizations and analysis, because of that power imbalance between the two sexes.

We wholeheartedly reject any feminist framework that seeks to define womanhood solely using biological essentialism or any feminism that seeks to re-inscribe rigid ideas of sex.

A feminist collective rejects any feminist framework that is for women.

Following a long tradition of writings and activism from black feminism, trans feminists and working-class women – we believe that there is not a singular, universal origin point for all women’s oppression across the globe nor should we attempt to find one. Our time is better spent remaining attentive to the dire social, political and economic conditions we experience as women and using feminism as a tool to end these conditions.

Yes, conditions we experience as women, not as men claiming to be women. It’s just hand-waving to pretend that working class women and men who say they are women are Just Another Subset of Women.

As a collective, we want to make clear our internal commitments to tackling transphobia. They are as follows:

…

– Not to feature trans-exclusionary groups on our panels or other events at the Library, or allow them to book the Library for their own events. By “trans-exclusionary” we mean groups that promote or implicitly/explicitly support policy changes that directly restrict trans people’s access to resources, groups that do not allow trans people to access their services, groups who use “sex-based rights” as a means of querying and questioning trans people’s right to exist or to access resources.

Emphasis theirs, again. So this feminist library is barring women who want to talk about sex-based rights, while casually pretending that such women “question [anyone’s] right to exist.”

The ideology makes people stupid, but it also makes them shockingly malicious. We don’t question anyone’s right to exist. If you say you’re an emissary from planet Neptune I won’t question your right to exist but I will decline to endorse your account of yourself. The two are not the same thing.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, we are always open to comments and feedback on our efforts.

Or at least they identify as always open to comments and feedback on their efforts.

Originally a comment by KBPlayer on Round and round we go.

Nicola Sturgeon is in a lot of trouble at the moment, because of an inquiry into how the Scottish government handled the sexual assault allegations against the former First Minister, Alex Salmond, who was cleared of the charges in court. It’s a very murky story, and shows bad mismanagement on her part, or downright conspiracy (which I find very hard to believe though plenty do). The Scottish government has been obstructing this inquiry in any way they can.

Sturgeon likes to appear as the progressive wing of the party and so adopted the transgender cause, which had cross-party support. The trans activists got posts on the National Executive Committee of the Scottish National Party. However there has been more and more disquiet about the transgender issue, and how it ties in with a new Hate Crime bill, which the Gender Critical feminists say will make it impossible to discuss women’s issues vis-a-vis transgender “rights”. There’s a clause in the bill about “stirring up hatred” – vague and stupid and could mean any discussion about eg biology could be classed as that.

So an opposing wing has grown, the most prominent voice being Joanna Cherry, who is a lesbian and a feminist and also a strong supporter on the ultra Nationalist wing whereas Sturgeon is more of a gradualist. Cherry is a contender for grabbing the leadership if Sturgeon resigns. The trans activists lost their posts on the National Executive Committee and quite a few have resigned from the party. They are accused of not being interested in Scottish independence, but of being entryists pushing the transgender issue. Those on the Cherry wing say it’s a bit rich of Sturgeon to complain of “transphobia” and not mention the kind of vile abuse chucked at her lesbian, feminist colleague. The two of them hate each other.

It’s all very complicated and murky, not to mention virulent. For an anti-SNPer like me it’s a pleasure to watch them fighting like rats in a sack, though I doubt if it will upset the majority the SNP will gain at the next election to Holyrood.

On other issues Sturgeon is great at making resounding statements which are not followed up by actual policies or budgets.

The Feminist Library, not detectably feminist at all, at least not on Twitter.

The Feminist Library @feministlibrary

Celebrating 45 years of archiving & activism. Community space & library. Trans-inclusive & welcomes visitors of all genders. We’ve moved to a new Peckham home!

Notice anything? No mention of women. No mention of women’s rights. No mention of the struggle for women’s rights. What does “feminism” mean then? Apparently it means being trans-inclusive and welcoming visitors of all genders.

To ram the point home (and I do mean ram), they make a Statement.

So there you go. Men who “identify as” women are welcome, feminist women are not. Feminism is now for men who appropriate the category “women,” while genuinely feminist women are kicked to the curb.

Installment seven billion something of the same old circular circle.

It’s actually not a clear message from Nicola at all. It’s the same old run-around.

There must be no transphobia!!!

But what are you defining as transphobia?

Trans people must have rights!!!

But nobody disagrees with that so what are you –

There must be no transphobia!!!

Yes, we have differences of opinion on gender recognition reform. We should debate them openly and respectfully. But no debate can be a cover for transphobia.

Yes but what is transphobia? Where are you drawing the border between openly debating the meaning of gender recognition and its reform, and transphobia? Please spell it out.

Trans people have as much right as any of us to be safe, secure, and valued for who they are. Transphobia is wrong and

Wait wait wait! Stop right there! You’re implying that we think trans people do not have as much right as any of us to be safe and secure! That’s an outrageous accusation. We’re not a bunch of Marjorie Taylor Greenes, we’re lefties and feminists, as you must know. We’re not advocating for anyone to be unsafe and insecure.

The issue is this “valued for who they are” bit, and you need to explain that rather than dashing on to tell us yet again that transphobiaiswrong.

It’s not actually true that there’s a core human right to be “valued for who [you, we, they] are.” There’s not even a core human right to be “valued.” That’s asking too much, which statements about human rights need to avoid, lest the whole idea become a joke.

And then there’s the “for who they are” bit, which is confused and confusing, because the whole meaning of “trans” negates the “who they are” aspect. We’re supposed to “value” trans people for who they are not, and there are situations and circumstances that can make that impossible and/or undesirable.

The unstated dogma underlying that silly formula is that we’re required to agree that trans people are, in every sense, who they say they are. The reason we can’t agree to that mandate is that sometimes it makes a difference. It makes a difference if a trans woman or girl gets an award or a scholarship or a job or an athletic prize that was meant for a woman or girl – an actual, literal, physical women or girl, as opposed to an actual literal physical man or boy who identifies as a woman or girl.

That’s it, that’s the issue. It has nothing to do with valuing or with phobia, it has everything to do with protecting the rights of women and girls.

It would be nice if women like Nicola Sturgeon and Jo Grady could take this on board.

Rinse, repeat.

Teach the future to do what it’s told.

Politico reports:

A video of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) confronting David Hogg, a gun control activist and Parkland shooting survivor, years ago surfaced online Wednesday, fueling a new wave of outrage over the Georgia Republican’s history of questioning a dark chapter in Florida that left 17 dead.

Greene, in the video, which was apparently filmed just weeks after the 2018 Parkland shooting, calls Hogg a “coward” because he walks away from her, and complains Hogg was able to meet with senators. “He had 30 appointments where he went around and got to talk to senators. I got to talk to none,” Greene said, adding “Guess what? I’m a gun owner. I’m an American citizen. And I have nothing. But this guy with his George Soros funding and his major liberal funding has got everything.”

And now she does get to talk to senators, because she is a representative, with a history of enthusiasm for talk about “executing” Democrats.

Guttenberg has been confronting the freshman lawmaker online for the past week, after social media posts surfaced from two years ago show Greene siding with conspiracy theories that the Parkland shooting was staged. He has vowed to eventually to meet Greene face-to-face so he can show her proof that his 14-year-old daughter Jaime was gunned down. The congresswoman has already become a political lightning rod for embracing the QAnon conspiracy theory and for a long string of racist comments before she was elected in a conservative district in November.

…

The unearthing of Greene’s past comments has already caused a firestorm for Republicans from Democrats and their allies. A super PAC targeting Sen. Marco Rubio — “Retire Rubio” — questioned why the senator wasn’t condemning Greene’s “harassment” of Hogg.

She’s really appalling. She should be out of there.

Because she won’t do her damn job, because she’s there to trash everything.

Back to Politico:

When asked for comment about Greene’s video, her office pointed to a statement the Georgia representative put out last week on Twitter where she called “gun-free zones” a failure and blamed the Parkland shooting on school resource officer Scot Peterson. While the shooting was going on, Peterson took cover and retreated, according to the state commission set up in the aftermath to investigate the event.

Yes, every school should have at least ten cops present at all times ready to join a shoot-out. That’s how this should work.

Jennifer Barnett tells us what it’s like to be a woman in journalism working for a terrible man, so terrible that she ended up having to quit. She says it’s a common situation and the men stay on and on, because that’s how this works.

I had the plum job. The top of the masthead of one of the most prestigious and respected publications with more than a 150-year-old history. I left because I blew the whistle on my boss for doing something unethical then abusing the staff and undermining the editorial process during which time I was assured he would be fired but instead he was promoted and after threatening me privately in his office, he marginalized me to the point of being completely invisible. In addition to being my boss at this prestigious publication, he was also the president of the principal organization in the United States for the editorial leaders of magazines and websites. Literally every editor of every publication was beholden to him.

She never names him, but she gives a lot of very specific clues, so there’s already a Mediaite piece on her piece pointing out how easy it is. I Googled “what editor had a brother running for president” (very specific clue, see) and it’s James Bennet, of the Atlantic when she worked for him and then of the New York Times editorial page – he’s the guy who decided to publish that horrendous piece by Tom Cotton, which made such a stink he had to resign, but yaboosucks now he’s at The Economist.

Not long after I quit, he also left but he went on to be next in line to run the paper of record, and I was volunteering to write the newsletter for the parent organization at my kid’s school. He’s since been fired, or rather resigned, for another major public failing but just last week I was told he’s working with the new editor in chief of the publication I left to write for them. He’s going to land on his feet. At the top.

Why does it matter? Because the same men who continually fuck up are still in charge of the media. They shape the world. If you don’t think that’s true, take a look at the coverage of Hillary Clinton during my former boss’s tenure at the paper of record leading up to the 2016 election. Despite even major public failings, they keep coming back because they work behind the scenes to protect themselves and each other to stay in power and preserve the status quo.

And it’s happening at the expense of women. Time after time.

Which means that women leave, which means that journalism and opinionating remain in the hands of men, so there’s yet more “But her emails” and “why are women so imperfect?”

There were a handful of editors, all men, who had carte blanche to walk into my boss’s office at any time, even with the most trivial of matters. But when I needed to see him for business crucial to the magazine, he’d yell at me. Loudly, and with rage. It wasn’t that I was doing anything differently than the men who wanted to see him, it’s just that he was comfortable yelling at me. I noticed he did the same thing to another woman who was on the digital side. Every time he yelled I’d shrug it off, smile feebly to anyone who was in earshot and carry on. I’d make a joke. Brush it off. It’s no big deal, I’d say, all the while working extra hard behind the scenes to adapt and find ways to get what I needed out of my boss without tripping his rage wire. I performed a tightrope walk every day to do my job and keep the respect of the staff I managed despite being publicly yelled at or shut out of meetings by our boss.

I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that it’s only women he does this to and that men are welcome to bounce into his office whenever they feel like it.

One thing I observed while I worked at [The Atlantic] is that in times when we were called into question, my boss felt that we were beyond reproach — so prestigious, we were to be held to a different standard. After all, nobody did journalism better than we did.

Still, one of the contributing editors who has made a name for himself for being a Never-Trump Republican, Tweeted, (then published a lengthy defense) criticizing Hillary Clinton’s smile.

I Googled that one too: it’s David Frum.

He really did write that lengthy defense. In the Atlantic.

Seth Abramson tells us:

Well after dark on January 5, 2021—just 15 hours before an insurrection against the United States government incited by the President of the United States—Nebraska Republican Charles W. Herbster, at the time the National Chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Advisory Committee for the Trump administration, attended a private meeting of Trump family members, Trump administration officials, Trump campaign advisers, January 6 organizers, and at least one member of the United States Senate at Trump International Hotel in Washington.

Abramson says Herbster says those present were Don Junior, Eric, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, Adam Piper, executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville. Your basic nightmare evening, in short.

According to research by political strategist and regular CNN, MSNBC, The Hill, CBS, and Fox News contributor Cheri Jacobus, Txtwire CEO Daniel Beck claims he was at the January 5 meeting also, and that additional attendees at the gathering included the following three people:

Giuliani, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and the My Pillow guy. There’s a photo of some jerks in maga hats in front of the hotel.

There’s also a screenshot of Herbster’s Facebook post bragging about their plans.

“Faithful servants of freedom” – Eric and Junior Trump, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani. Right.

So were they there to plot the insurrection? I don’t know. I hope the DoJ is looking carefully.

H/t YNnB

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on But the jobs.

Things conservatives say you shouldn’t lose your job for:

1. Being in an industry that causes environmental problems

2. Being a racist, sexist, and/or insurrectionist idiot online

3. Competition from foreign imports during a Democratic administration

4. Not wanting to provide women with birth control.

Things conservatives say you can lose your job for:

1. Having any non-conservative views your employer doesn’t like

2. Trying to organize a union

3. Your employer’s desire to offshore or outsource your job

4. Bain Capital deciding to acquire and “restructure” your employer

5. Using birth control or having an abortion

6. Cheering for the wrong sports team… actually pretty much everything not included in the first list.

So what’s the thinking here, that job-existence overrules all other considerations? That if people have jobs setting fire to California forests they must continue to have those jobs because otherwise it’s ayleetizm?

Of course if The Market closes down jobs that’s a whole other story, nobody cares about those workers, but if it’s a matter of shifting to less destructive forms of energy, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUN WILD.

Remember four years ago watching that guy’s executive orders in horror?

Biden yesterday:

President Joe Biden on Tuesday ordered the Department of Justice to end its reliance on private prisons and acknowledge the central role government has played in implementing discriminatory housing policies.

In remarks before signing the orders, Biden said the U.S. government needs to change “its whole approach” on the issue of racial equity. He added that the nation is less prosperous and secure because of the scourge of systemic racism.

But it’s also less…all of those things it likes to see itself as. Decent, fair, one of the good ones. Rights-based, egalitarian, justice-seeking.

Biden directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development in a memorandum to take steps to promote equitable housing policy. The memorandum calls for HUD to examine the effects of Trump regulatory actions that may have undermined fair housing policies and laws.

Months before the November election, the Trump administration rolled back an Obama-era rule that required communities that wanted to receive HUD funding to document and report patterns of racial bias.

While Trump himself ranted about “your beautiful suburbs” and how he was going to “protect” them from…youknowwhat.

GEO Group, a private company that operates federal prisons, called the Biden order “a solution in search of a problem.”

“Given the steps the BOP had already announced, today’s Executive Order merely represents a political statement, which could carry serious negative unintended consequences, including the loss of hundreds of jobs and negative economic impact for the communities where our facilities are located, which are already struggling economically due to the COVID pandemic,” a GEO Group spokesperson said in a statement.

A spokes representing the for-profit scheme Biden is ending said words about why the for-profit scheme should not end. Duly noted.