It’s all just so bonkers.

President Donald Trump on Friday, gearing up for his first campaign rally in months in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday, threatened any protesters who show up outside or try to disrupt the event, saying “it will be a much different scene” than how they’ve been dealt with in “New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis.”

“Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!” Trump tweeted Friday morning.

It wasn’t clear exactly what Trump meant or what he could do to carry out his threat, but he has taken an increasingly hostile tone towards protesters in recent weeks, this time putting “protesters” in same category as “anarchists” “looters” and “lowlifes.”

It’s a bizarre experience, seeing a constant stream of hostility and rage toward most of the population coming from the head of state.

Tulsa itself is taking its cues from Trump.

A curfew was imposed beginning Thursday night until Saturday at 6 a.m., according to Tulsa police, citing concerns abut organized groups coming to the city. After the rally, another curfew will be in place until 6 a.m. Sunday. The rally begins at 7 p.m.

Totally normal, putting curfews in place because the president is going to be in town.

Trump, in another tweet Friday, also said he views his rally in Tulsa as the re-launch of his reelection campaign, saying, “Big crowds and lines already forming in Tulsa. My campaign hasn’t started yet. It starts on Saturday night in Oklahoma!”

The rally is expected to draw as many as 100,000 Trump supporters, some of whom had lined up outside the 19,000-seat Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa, days before the rally.

Peak contagion! Awesome!

Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt backed the rally when he met with Trump at the White House Thursday at an unrelated event focused on government assistance for small businesses. Stitt assured that the rally would be safe even as the city’s health official has called an event like the rally “a huge risk factor” for spreading the coronavirus.

One wonders what Stitt was basing his assurances on. What does he know that the city’s health official doesn’t know? Some kind of magic shield around the Trump supporters?

Trump campaign spokesperson Erin Perrine told ABC News the campaign “takes the health and safety of rally-goers seriously and is taking precautions to make the rally safe,” including checking the temperatures of attendees and providing them with face masks and hand sanitizer.

Nope. Crowding thousands of people together at a rally can’t be “made safe” by masks and hand sanitizer.

Trump announces he will unleash violence on protesters.

President of the United States, here, threatening protesters with violence.

John Cleese seeks information.

It’s like this, see – is the experience of being a woman inextricably linked to biology? Or is it just totally random and arbitrary and unpredictable?

Well honestly – what can having the biology of a woman possibly have to do with the experience of being a woman? I ask you.

After that one I watched this one, on detransitioning.

This is now available.

Oh look, more “cis white woman=bitch cunt whore,” this time from the proudly non-cis (but still white, which seems careless) Morgane Oger.

That cis white female pedestal you put yourself on is your cage.

Say what? We don’t put ourselves on it, and it’s not a pedestal.

We don’t put ourselves on it because we didn’t make ourselves either white or female, we were just born both. It’s not a pedestal because we are still objects of contempt or loathing or both.

Dear cis woman leveraging patriarchy for personal advantage, I beg you to be careful what you ask for.

Dear condescending man telling women what we are and what to say, I beg you to fuck off.

Do you see that these words come overwhelmingly from well-off white women who face few other barriers than their role in the patriarchy they uphold to not fall from their their place?

He includes a photo of Meghan Murphy to underline the point – oh yes Meghan Murphy rolling in the millions she makes from freelance writing and organizing.

He really wants everyone to agree that women are in fact not an oppressed class but a privileged dominant exploitative one…because we don’t agree that men like Oger are women just because they say they are. He thinks that white women don’t get to count as women because they are just too privilege, so they are cis women instead, which makes them oppressors. (Does Oger ever snarl like this about “cis black women”? Any bets?)

He rants about purity tests then captions a photo of Rowling with

Is that Super Rich Oppressed Writer, really dressing up transphobia as feminism?

Well, is that Super Male Oppressed Trans Laydee really dressing up misogyny as feminism? Yes, he is, and he’s an asshole.

When I read commentary like yours, I am reminded of all the times supremacist ideology like you are thoughtlessly amplifying with your words has resulted in immeasurable harm to whole communities because individuals wrap themselves around Purity and Supremacy to justify their exclusion of others on arbitrary grounds rather than on conduct or any other action.

Except that “exclusion” of men from the category “women” is not arbitrary grounds, any more than it’s arbitrary to exclude elephants from the category “insects” or grapes from the category “fish.” The words are human inventions but that doesn’t mean that what they name is either arbitrary or random.

I put Oger in the category “dim bulb.”

Maybe it’s all legit, I don’t know, but yes it does seem very odd for a young adult man to “adopt” a teenage boy (not that a teenage girl would look any better).

Anyway, the jokes are rolling in.

Of course Nestor is trending.

Oh what was that about Matt Gaetz’s explosion of rage at Cedric Richardson for…what was it now? Worrying about the safety of black children while not asking Matt Gaetz for approval first? Something like that? How dare Richardson assume that Matt Gaetz doesn’t have any black children? Yes that was it.

Surprise revelation!

Erm. I hate to say it, but I don’t have to, because other people did.

Gaetz was 27? When the kid was 12? And Gaetz was single? Is that usual with adoptions?

Do single men in their 20s usually adopt teenage boys in the usual, parental sense of “adopt”? Wouldn’t appearances alone suggest that might be unwise? And then there’s the whole maturity issue. Are men in their 20s usually adult enough to be parents to teenagers?

It all seems deeply weird.

H/t Chris Tygesen

One beneficial effect of the virus:

Carnival suffered losses of $4.4bn (£3.6bn) in three months, as the cruise company’s business was all but sunk by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Revenues dropped to $700m from $4.8bn for the same March-May period in 2019, as bookings dried up and the corporation’s cruise lines suspended sailings after severe outbreaks onboard its ships.

These things just do not make sense in light of the climate catastrophe.

But but but freedom, my rights, freedom to do whatever I want to wherever I want to including in a tightly enclosed space shared with hundreds of people 5 miles above the planet.

American Airlines has removed a passenger from a flight after he refused to wear a face covering in compliance with its Covid-19 safety policy.

Brandon Straka was asked to wear a face mask on Flight 1263 from New York to Dallas, Texas, on Wednesday.

When Mr Straka refused, he was asked to leave the flight, the airline said.

Mr Straka said there was no law that required him to wear a face covering on the flight.

Doesn’t matter. There’s no law that says you can’t play a trumpet on the plane either, but that doesn’t mean you can. Airlines get to make rules governing behavior on the plane and especially during the flight. This is just normal. You can’t go to a restaurant and take all your clothes off. You can’t go to a bar and throw tomatoes at everyone. You can’t go to a bookshop and sing the Marseillaise over and over. There’s an infinite number of things you can’t do in public spaces that are not against the law but are in violation of the rules that protect everyone else’s comfort, safety, ability to enjoy the public space in question, and so on.

While there is no federal law mandating masks on US flights, all major US airlines have been enforcing face covering rules for passengers and crew since mid-May.

And they get to do that. An airplane is not your living room.

Trump is livid, LIVID, about all these crazy political Supreme Court justices. How can they be so political?! It’s an outrage!

There is already a conservative (or right-wing) majority on the court. Roberts voted with the liberals on the DACA ruling, and Trump clearly thinks that’s an outrage. It’s hilarious that he complains about “politically charged decisions” though (or that Scavino translates whatever scream of rage he uttered into that phrase), given how adamantly political his choices and the confirmation process have been.

Naturally several million people have tweeted the obvious reply.

He paused for an hour to breathe and then returned to the fray.

He’s already got his conservative majority.

Is he planning to kill one of the current justices?

Trump made Juneteenth very famous.

The Times explains the car crash:

Reviewing a list of potential locations over the past few weeks, [Brad] Parscale quickly settled on Tulsa, Okla., people familiar with the planning said in interviews, mostly because it seemed easy. A deep red state President Trump carried by 36 percentage points four years ago, Oklahoma wasn’t in play for the November election. But it was the furthest along of any state in the country in terms of reopening, and it had seen fewer than 400 Covid-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

A city with a supportive Republican mayor, where the coronavirus was no longer having a deep impact on daily life, seemed like the most effortless way to pack an arena and deliver Mr. Trump the adulatory validation he craved.

And to get those Covid-19 numbers way up!

But to the surprise of no one except possibly Brad Parscale, it has all gone wrong.

Mr. Trump and his aides failed to grasp the significance of holding a rally on Juneteenth, a holiday celebrated annually on June 19 that honors the end of slavery in the United States. Nor did they appear to realize that Tulsa was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest outbreaks of racist violence.

Which means they didn’t bother to do any basic research, or talk to anyone outside their bubble of corrupt hacks.

Ignoring Tulsa’s troubled history, as well as the Juneteenth holiday, has put the community on edge as the rally approaches, and refocused attention on how few African-American aides work on Mr. Trump’s campaign or in the White House.

Well, that, but more basically, Trump’s total lack of interest in the “troubled history” of black people in the US, coupled with his strong and passionate interest in overt racism. One, he doesn’t give the tiniest shit about slavery and its hideous aftermath, and two, he’s an unabashed racist who spews racist shit on a regular basis.

Other than that…

So anyway they changed the date. You’d think Trump would dig in because that’s what he does, but no, see, the thing is, it wasn’t his idea in the first place so it’s cool.

For a president whose guiding political philosophy has been to double down in the face of criticism, it was seen as a stunning reversal. But Mr. Trump was amenable to changing the date, multiple officials said, in part because it did not involve caving on something he had said or a theory he had promoted, but rather involved publicly overturning a decision made by his campaign aides.

That’s very funny, in a quiet way. “Oh he was fine with it,” multiple officials said, “because it makes someone else look bad, and you know he loves that.”

CNN has some more nibbles from Bolton’s book.

Bolton writes that in December 2018, Trump offered to help Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a Justice Department investigation into a Turkish bank with ties to Erdogan that was suspected of violating US Iran sanctions. When the Turkish leader presented Trump with a memo from the law firm representing Halkbank, Trump flipped through it and then declared he believed the bank was totally innocent of violating US sanctions related to Iran.

Well thank goodness he looked into it thoroughly before committing himself.

Trump told Erdogan he would “take care of things,” and explained that the Southern District prosecutors “were not his people, but were Obama people,” and the problem would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.

Bolton notes that “this was all nonsense” because the Justice Department prosecutors were career employees who would have taken the same path with the Halkbank probe regardless of who was president.

Well Trump doesn’t understand fine distinctions of that kind. He thinks he has Absolute Power to do Absolutely Anything that pops into his head.

Before joining Trump’s White House, Bolton says he had a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who questioned Jared Kushner’s role in developing a Middle East peace plan.

Netanyahu “was dubious about assigning the task of bringing an end to the Israel-Palestinian conflict to Kushner, whose family Netanyahu had known for many years. He was enough of a politician not to oppose the idea publicly, but like much of the world, he wondered why Kushner thought he would succeed where the likes of Kissinger had failed.”

Being such a callow empty suit and having zero relevant education or expertise or experience. Maybe these guys think being rich translates to being universally skilled?

Another twerp heaves another rock:

Harry Potter fans—yes, I’m addressing roughly the entire Millennial generation—we need to have another tough conversation with ourselves: We must end our Harry Potter fantasy now.

She goes on to detail what a passionate, indeed obsessive fan she was growing up, and then gets on with the stoning.

I’m also a ciswoman, which means my feelings are not the point right now. As significant as the franchise has been for me, if I am actually going to be the ally I fancy myself to be, that means I have to consider the damage Rowling (and potentially the entire series) has done to trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people.

She’s a woman, so her feelings don’t matter right now. Won’t somebody please think of the feelings of men for once?

Being a white ciswoman gives me a voice—like a magical power, but a shitty one, because it’s a power others are denied.

Ahhhh there it is, spotted in the wild – the core Big Lie of this whole enterprise. She frames women as domineering over men, women as the people who have privilege that men lack, women who have an illegitimate hold on power, women who oppress and dominate and exploit and exclude.

It’s my job to use that “magical power” as a force for good and say what nobody wants to say. To bring to light that if Rowling had been a Hogwarts parent and heard that Lupin was a werewolf, her Karen-self likely would have demanded he be fired for putting her little Hufflepuff in danger.

There it is again – women are Karens, so now they’re the hated oppressor class and it’s not just ok but positively virtuous to do everything you can to destroy their lives.

This just in: Trump fails in his attempt to throw the children of undocumented immigrants out of the country.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration cannot carry out its plan to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known as “Dreamers,” to avoid deportation and remain in the U.S.

The decision is a big legal defeat for President Donald Trump on the issue of immigration, which has been a major focus of his domestic agenda.

That is, the issue of brown people messing up his shiny gleaming white country.

The decision authored mostly by Chief Justice John Roberts said the government failed to give an adequate justification for ending the federal program. The administration could try again to shut it down by offering a more detailed explanation for its action, but the White House might not want to end such a popular program in the heat of a presidential campaign.

Also probably wouldn’t have time.

An added wrinkle is that throwing DACA people out now would strain the medical system even more than it already is.

Brave and stunning Charlotte Clymer, who as Charles Clymer was notorious for being a domineering “I’m a good guy!” male feminist who liked to talk over women, has a piece in USA Today explaining to JK Rowling how unsafe and vulnerable trans women are…in all-too-typical oblivion of or indifference to the ways women are unsafe and vulnerable.

The rights and dignity of transgender people are constantly under attack, not only legally but physically, as we see with continuing violence against trans people, and culturally, as evidenced by the controversy J.K. Rowling stirred up last week.

You know who else is constantly under attack physically? Women. The statistics say so. Culturally we’re under attack from misogynists and pussy-grabbers and guys like Charlotte Clymer.

Her transphobic remarks attempted to deny the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus affirming trans people and peddled dangerous and hurtful myths about our community.

There is no such overwhelming consensus, and what consensus there is is all of about ten years old. We’re not talking about gravity here.

He then says it’s hard to believe Rowling knows any trans people, because HEY WE’RE IN DANGER. He gives examples.

I haven’t been to the gym since I came out. Most cisgender women would be completely fine with a trans woman using the showers after a workout, but do I want to risk ticking off some random transphobe? No. Do I want to risk having someone take photos of me without my consent? No.

See what I mean? What if some of those pesky “cisgender women” are not completely fine with having Charlotte, recently Charles, Clymer getting naked next to them? He doesn’t even pause to think about it that way – because of course he doesn’t. It’s not for him to take our needs into account, it’s for us to take his. New boss just like the old boss.

If I’m out in another city, either for business or pleasure, I watch how much I eat and drink. I don’t want to be in a position where I’ll need to use a public restroom and feel uncertain whether it’s safe.

Women who might feel unsafe when he comes in? Again, pffffff, who cares.

I have a membership to a women-only workspace. It’s quite trans-inclusive and make a point of being affirming. I’m still not going to use its shower facility. Too risky. Some random transphobe makes a fuss, and it becomes a whole thing. Not worth it.

He has a membership to a women-only workspace, which he feels perfectly happy to render not-women-only by his presence, and then he whines about a potential “transphobe” by which he means a woman who wants a women-only workspace to be actually for women, not women plus men who say they feel like women.

There is not a week that has gone by since I came out that I wasn’t street harassed in some way. It’s just something I don’t even talk about anymore. I expect it and move on with my day. Put my headphones in and walk, so I can avoid hearing it.

Again – has he ever spoken to a woman in his life? If so has he listened?

That’s enough. I’m too sick of this oblivious egotistical BUT MY NEEDS crap to read any more of it. But it’s why we won’t just roll over.

Matt Gaetz is such a worthless piece of crap.

Bolton’s book is lighting up the Twitternet.

This one got my attention:

He what?

David Choi at Business Insider:

President Donald Trump approved of a concentration camp for Uighur Muslims in China during a private meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to former national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming memoir, “In The Room Where It Happened.”

In a private meeting during the 2019 G-20 meeting in Japan, Trump and Xi were only accompanied by their interpreters, according to Bolton’s book, parts of which were published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Xi “explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang,” Bolton claimed, based on the interpreter’s account. The interpreter reportedly added that “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Of course he did. He likes to single out Muslims for persecution and insult and banishment himself, and he likes to cozy up to people who like to do things like that. He would have loved Hitler, and I say that in all seriousness. An empty head and a complete lack of moral compass is all it takes to love Hitler.

The Chinese Communist Party has long been criticized for its construction of large concentration camps in Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims are believed to be detained under the guise of a counter-terrorism campaign. Inside the roughly 465 camps in Xinjiang and surrounding region, roughly 2-3 million Uighur Muslims are under surveillance and are subject to mandatory “reeducation” training. Some survivors have reported being beaten, subjected to medical experiments, and even being forced to watch gang rapes.

Exactly the right thing to do though.

Josh Dawsey at the Post has been reading Bolton’s book.

He tried the same move on China as he tried on Ukraine.

During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi complained to Trump about China critics in the United States. But Bolton writes in a book scheduled to be released next week that “Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats.

“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes. “He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”…

The episode described by Bolton in his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” bears striking similarities to the actions that resulted in Trump’s impeachment after he sought to pressure the Ukrainian president to help dig up dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden in exchange for military assistance.

So we can assume he’s done it to everyone, because he’s far too stupid to figure out that different heads of state have different interests, and just assumes they will all do what he asks if he bullies or pleads hard enough.

The request for electoral assistance from Xi is just one of many instances described by Bolton in which Trump seeks favors or approval from authoritarian leaders. Many of those same leaders were also happy to take advantage of the U.S. president and attempt to manipulate him, Bolton writes, often through simplistic appeals to his various obsessions.

Yeah no shit. It’s not as if he doesn’t advertise how stupid he is.

Bolton recounts numerous private conversations Trump had with other leaders that revealed the limits of his knowledge. He recalls Trump asking Kelly if the nation of Finland is part of Russia. In a meeting with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018, a British official referred to the UK as a “nuclear power,” and Trump interjects: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” Bolton adds that he could tell the question about Britain, which has long maintained a nuclear arsenal, “was not intended as a joke.”

If only that were surprising. It’s not surprising in the least. He’s made it entirely clear that he knows nothing. This is a man who insists on referring to one of his [shudder] predecessors as “Honest Abe.”

Daniel Dale had some time so he made a list (non-exhaustive) of Trump’s lies about Obama.

Trump has long been fixated on his predecessor. Since May 1, as his presidential campaign against former Vice President Joe Biden has heated up, Trump has made at least 12 separate false claims about Obama and his record in office.

Trump added a new one Tuesday in a speech about police reform, declaring that Obama and Biden “never even tried” to fix problems in policing. That’s not even close to true.

It’s true of Trump. It’s not true of Obama.

Trump touted his own efforts to address policing problems, then said, “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period. The reason they didn’t try is because they had no idea how to do it.”

Who has fewer ideas of any kind: Obama, or Trump? Who thinks less? Who knows less? Who reads less? Who talks to experts and critics and a wide range of people less?

Obama’s Department of Justice initiated “pattern-or-practice” investigations into troubled police departments and secured court-enforceable consent decrees or other agreements in which cities including Baltimore, Cleveland, Portland and Miami formally agreed to make changes.

Ok but besides that.

In 2014, after the unrest that followed the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama launched the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which in 2015 put forward dozens of recommendations for improvement. The administration provided grants to some departments that were implementing the recommendations.

Ok but…oh never mind.

Trump claimed: “I did Criminal Justice Reform, something Obama & Biden didn’t even try to do – & couldn’t do even if they did try.”

Facts First: The Obama administration did try to get a criminal justice reform bill passed; a bipartisan bill failed in the Senate during the 2016 presidential election, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided not to bring it up for a vote.

Ok but that’s Obama’s fault!

Trump said Obama did nothing about HIV/AIDS; in fact his administration spent billions on it.

That’s three; there are nine more.