Trump decided Lincoln would be a good look on him.

President Trump gave a two-hour interview to Fox News on Sunday night in the Lincoln Memorial. His mix of self-pity and self-congratulation was startling, especially given the backdrop, as more than 67,000 Americans have been killed by an invisible enemy that has yet to be contained and the country plunges deeper into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Yebbut look. Lincoln. Trump is another Lincoln. Right? Sure.

“They always said … nobody got treated worse than [Abraham] Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse,” said Trump, pointing toward the statue of a president who was assassinated days after winning the Civil War. “You know, I believe we’ve done more than any president in the history of our country in the first three years, three-and-a-half years. I really believe that.”

The fact that Trump really believes something is not a reason for anyone else to believe it. Rather the reverse.

Trump’s claim that no president has been treated worse than he came in response to a question from a supporter named Carolyn Perkins, a retired nurse and elementary school guidance counselor.

“The question I have is about your manner of presentation,” Perkins said. “Why do you use descriptive words that could be classified as bullying? And why do you not directly answer the questions asked by the press but instead speak of past successes and generally ramble? The U.S.A. needs you. Please let go of those behaviors that are turning people away from you. Please hold on to your wonderful attributes that make you our great leader and let go of other characteristics that do not serve you.”

If you take the bullying and boasting and rambling away what’s left? What are those wonderful attributes exactly?

“Look, I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump responded. Motioning toward the statue of the 16th president, the 45th president said: “The closest would be that gentleman right up there.”

And yet, Lincoln didn’t respond to hostility with torrents of personal abuse. It’s almost as if that’s not the only possible way to react.

Trump’s boast about “winning” came as he once again seesawed over his estimate of the number of Americans who will die from the contagion. “Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people,” he said, arguing that more than 2 million might have died if he hadn’t acted to slow the spread. “I really believe we could have saved a million-and-a-half lives.”

Second invocation of what he really believes. It’s typical of his inability to think that he thinks his really believing something would make it true.

Shaina Cruz of Cullman, Ala., a single mother, said she was already living paycheck to paycheck when she lost her job in March. “I haven’t received a stimulus payment or anything from unemployment,” she told the president. “I’m behind on every bill, about to evicted and have had to rely on donations in order to feed my children. I feel frustrated and I feel scared, not knowing where to turn or what to do. What advice do you have for me and others in my situation? Is there more help coming?”

Trump promised that help is coming. “You’re going to get another job or you’re going to get a better job. You’ll get a job where you make more money, frankly, and I think that’s going to happen,” he told Cruz.

He thinks it’s going to happen. That’s not what she asked. She asked about actual help, now. His thinking she will get a better job is not that help.

The president predicted that the economy will be “incredible” next year and start to transition back to a good place in the third quarter. “I really believe that,” he said. “I have a good feel for this stuff.”

Third “really believe.” Still doesn’t make anything happen.

The historian Eric Foner from a talk at Swarthmore in 2013:

One other point, and this I think is important to anybody here who is studying in a history class, you will have heard about this, not necessarily, but reconstruction is a prime example of what we call the politics of history. I’m not just talking about a historian is a Democrat or a Republican or something like that, I’m talking about the way historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape the politics of the present, the time that is the historian is writing in.

For many, many years, certainly into the, well past the middle of the 20th century, what we call the old or standard view of reconstruction dominated historical writing and textbooks and popular thinking. In a nutshell, in a very brief summary, that view saw reconstruction after the Civil War as the lowest point. The low point in the whole saga of American democracy. According to this point of view, which is not taught in schools anymore I don’t think, but is still widely accepted by people who were educated maybe a generation ago, President Lincoln, at the end of the Civil War, just before he was assassinated, wanted to bring the defeated South back into the Union in a lenient and quick manner.

He was assassinated, his policy was continued allegedly by his success, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was thwarted in his effort to reunite the nation by some of the villains of the piece, the radical Republicans in Congress. Either because of his hatred for the South or from another point of view, the desire to fasten the grip of Northern capitalism on the South. These radicals took over Congress, overturned Johnson’s policy, and instituted what we call radical reconstruction based on black suffrage, based on giving black men the right to vote.

Because black people, according to this view, are inherently incapable of intelligently exercising political rights, there followed an orgy of corruption and misgovernment in the South. Presided over by carpet baggers, that is Northerners who went down to the South to reap the spoils of office, and scalawags, who were white Southerners who cooperated with these governments.

Blacks, although it was called black reconstruction before Dubois, they really were not actors, they were more manipulated by others. They were more childlike, and these whites manipulated them in order to get into power. Eventually, groups like the Ku Klux Klan decided enough was enough and overthrew these governments and restored what was politely called home rule, or what we should really call white supremacy, in the Southern states.

What are the politics of this view? This interpretation had an amazing longevity. Historians make their living overturning what previous historians have done. That’s our job, we’re always trying to prove the guy who came before us as wrong. To remain the accepted view of a period of American history for 50 or 70 years, is unheard of. There’s no other era of American history where the same view was dominant in 1900 as in 1960, let’s say.

Impossible. This was true of reconstruction. Why? Because this view of reconstruction was congruent with the racial system of the United States in the Jim Crow era, until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Because what were the lessons of that old view? One, it was a mistake to give black men the right to vote. Reconstruction proved that black men are not capable of voting because they misused the vote. Therefore, any effort to give African Americans back their right to vote, which was taken away around 1900, would just lead to another reconstruction. The alleged horrors of reconstruction were always invoked when efforts were made to expand or restore political democracy, that is to say, in the South.

The history is not taught that way any more. Foner is one of the major figures in that change.

The headline:

Female spaces need better protection after trans woman sex assault on girl, say campaigners

The subhead:

Campaigners have called for greater protection of female-only spaces after a trans woman sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in a supermarket toilet.

How do they know the perp is a trans woman? How do they know the perp is not just a man who claims to be a trans woman so that he can use the women’s toilets for the purpose of assaulting girls? How does anybody know that? How can can anybody ever know that? Given the adamant ideology that a trans woman is anyone who claims to be a trans woman (and that said trans woman is also a woman), how can anyone ever know that?

Why is the Scotsman (ironic name) being so polite to a guy who assaulted a child in a toilet? Why is it taking his self-identification so seriously? Why is it pretending he’s a woman who sexually assaulted a child as opposed to a man claiming to be a trans woman?

Katie Dolatowski, 18, admitted sexual assault after grabbing the girl by her face and forcing her into a cubicle in Morrisons in Kirkcaldy before ordering her to remove her trousers.

A very womany thing to do.

She also told the girl, who managed to escape after punching Dolatowski in the face, that there was a man outside who would kill her mother.

See…women kind of resent being told to accept this guy as a woman even though he grabs girls by the face and pushes them into toilet stalls and tells them their mother will be killed. We think it’s adding insult to injury.

Dolatowski also tried to film a 12-year-old in the toilet of Asda Halbeath, Dunfermline, last February.

But please, continue to call Dolatowski a “trans woman.” His feelings must be respected.

Robert Reich on Trump’s kill them all plan to “re-open the economy”:

Donald Trump is getting nervous. Internal polls show him losing in November unless the economy comes roaring back.

But of course the economy isn’t going to “come roaring back” no matter what Trump does. But never mind that, he’s going to force a re-opening no matter how many people die gasping for breath.

Step 1: make it a choice between the virus and starvation.

Trump’s labor department has decided that furloughed employees “must accept” an employer’s offer to return to work and therefore forfeit unemployment benefits, regardless of Covid-19.

Trump’s ally, Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, says employees cannot refuse to return to work for fear of contracting the disease. “That’s a voluntary quit,” making someone ineligible for benefits.

Pure evil.

GOP officials in Oklahoma are even threatening to withhold the $600 a week of extra unemployment benefits Congress has provided workers, if an employer wants to hire them. Safety is irrelevant.

“If the employer will contact us … we will cut off their benefits,” says Teresa Thomas Keller of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission.

Step 2 is secrecy. Block Fauci from talking to Congress; dawdle over testing.

Step 3: sing a song of freedom.

Trump called on citizens to “LIBERATE” states like Michigan, whose Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed strict stay-at-home rules.

Michigan has the third-highest number of Covid-19 deaths in America, although it is 10th in population. When on Thursday Whitmer extended the rules to 28 May, gun-toting protesters rushed the state house chanting: “Lock her up!”

Trump said she should “make a deal” with the gun-toting fascists.

Meanwhile, the attorney general, William Barr, has directed the justice department to take legal action against any state or local authorities imposing lockdown measures that “could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens”.

Making this about “freedom” is absurd. Freedom is meaningless for people who have no choice but to accept a job that risks their health.

Naw, the right to die for the boss is the most sacred right of all.

Step 4: give employers a “liability shield” against lawsuits by workers and customers.

No price is too high to pay for Donald Trump’s continued tyranny.

The dictator dictates:

The White House has blocked Dr Anthony Fauci from testifying to Congress, saying it would be “counterproductive” for the senior member of the White House coronavirus taskforce to talk about the government’s response to the pandemic in a House committee hearing.

“Counterproductive” to whom? What product would Fauci’s testifying be counter to? Why would it be bad for Congress to oversee the Trump administration’s incompetent response to a pandemic that has killed 70 thousand of the country’s people in a few weeks?

On Twitter on Saturday morning, Trump insisted it was safe for the Senate to return to the Capitol.

…

“Likewise the House, which should return but isn’t because of Crazy Nancy P[elosi],” Trump added. The House speaker has said members should not return next week – in response to guidance from Monahan.

Nearly 200 members of Congress are more vulnerable to serious complications from a Covid-19 infection because they are 65 and older. Pelosi herself is 80. It is unknown how many are also at-risk because of underlying conditions or who live with people who would be at greater risk if they contracted the illness.

…

McConnell, the Senate majority leader who is requiring senators, staff and US Capitol employees to return on Monday despite Monahan’s recommendations, is doing so in part because of his election-year focus on pushing conservative judicial nominees through the Republican-majority Senate.

A generation of woman-hating judges is well worth a few dead Senators, I guess…but how will McConnell make sure they’re all Democratic Senators?

Oh well if you’re going to threaten the employees ok then.

The mayor of an Oklahoma city amended an emergency declaration requiring customers to wear face masks while inside businesses after store employees were threatened with violence.

Stillwater Mayor Will Joyce announced the change Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the declaration took effect.

“In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse,” City Manager Norman McNickle said in a statement. “In addition, there has been one threat of violence using a firearm.”

So rules that protect public safety are no longer rules that protect public safety, but violations of the rights of The Sovereign Individual. The divine Ego is more important than any number of people who want to avoid getting the virus.

McNickle said that many of the people who objected to wearing the masks have “the mistaken belief the requirement is unconstitutional.” He said it’s upsetting that while people have the right to exercise their beliefs, they are also putting others at risk.

People have the right to exercise their beliefs up to a point. The “belief” that they get to refuse to wear a mask to protect others from a deadly virus is miles past that point.

“The wearing of face coverings is little inconvenience to protect both the wearer and anyone with whom they have contact,” McNickle said, condemning those who threatened violence. “It is unfortunate and distressing that those who refuse and threaten violence are so self-absorbed as to not follow what is a simple show of respect and kindness to others.

It is. It’s one of the very worst things about the rotting pumpkin in the White House, this encouraging and boosting and cheering on of hostile threatening violent selfishness as a principle of life.

The Oxford Student Union votes to ban everything.

A motion which mandates the Oxford University Student Union (SU) to condemn the use of “hateful material” in mandatory teaching was passed in Student Council this Thursday.

The motion also resolves to create a new SU Policy, entitled “Protection of Transgender, Non-binary, Disabled, Working-class, and Women* Students from Hatred in University Contexts”.

Note that transgender comes first and women come last (and have an asterisk, which oh what now).

Named the ‘Academic Hate Speech Motion’, the motion sets to establish a new policy on hate speech within the University to include ‘incitement of hatred on the grounds of gender identity, disability, and socio economic status, including to trans, non-binary, disabled, working-class, and women*’.

Current University policy on academic free speech protects most academic speech as long as it is within the law. The motion notes that hate speech which is ableist, misogynistic, classist or transphobic is not criminalised but believes that the University should amend the relevant policy to ‘ensure that trans and non-binary people, women, and disabled people receive equivalent protection from hateful speech within University contexts as groups which are protected by the criminal law’.

What protection is that exactly? What criminal law protects groups from hateful speech?

The motion also mandates the SU to lobby for trigger warnings on readings lists and for lectures, tutorials, and examinations with content deemed prejudicial against the aforementioned groups to be non-compulsory for students. It asserts that arguments based on “free speech policy are inapplicable” when students are “required by the University to listen to the speech in question”

And who will decide which content is “prejudicial”? Why, the very same people who are coming up with these motions, of course. They know best, and nothing will be lost by forcing everyone to obey their orders.

Trump has opened up a huge jar of stupid today. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have anything important to do, because where would he find the time?

Oh yes that nice Mr Kim who murdered his brother and Otto Warmbier and who knows how many thousands of North Koreans. How lovely that he’s back and well.

He has SO much free time he can send public thanks to individual people who proclaim themselves his fans.

And that’s only a tiny sample.

It was in the daily briefing for weeks, but he never reads the daily briefing (or anything else), so oh well.

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

But the president has no attention, so his attention can’t be called to things.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

Always with the normalizing. He never reads the PDB, and I bet he never shows patience for the oral summary either.

The frequency with which the coronavirus was mentioned in the PDB has not been previously reported, and U.S. officials said it reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts or other rapidly developing security issues.

In other words the kind of thing you really would expect a president – even a mediocre one – to pay attention to.

Trump spent much of February publicly playing down the threat while his administration failed to mobilize for a major outbreak by securing supplies of protective equipment, developing an effective diagnostic test and preparing plans to quarantine large portions of the population.

Sadly, playing it down didn’t succeed in making it go away.

So I remained curious about Gazi Kodzo who wrote that pair of tweets about Anne Frank the BECKY the KAREN. I found his Twitter is suspended. His Facebook is not. He’s full of revolutionary zeal about all the beckies and karens who raised an eyebrow at his karening of Anne Frank.

Late on April 30:

For all y’all using dead African and Indigenous jews as a way to un-mayo Anne Frank! #2BFrank She is a Karen! Listen to an actual African Indigenous Jew! Our Comrade Yismael Asher Yehauda

The link is to Black Hammer:

#2BFrank Black Hammer is too busy doin the work protecting poor and working class colonized people, organizing against ongoig colonial genocide, to give two shits to rub together about one little white girl. Cry about it, that’s ur #whiteprivelege

He’s too busy to give two shits about one little white girl who died of typhus in Auschwitz, but he’s not too busy to say he’s too busy to give two shits about her. I’d have thought the first would consume a lot less of his valuable time and effort than the second.

About that “Karen” thing…

Take Anne Frank for instance:

Was Anne Frank a “Karen”?

In since-vanished but much-screenshotted (and still search-appearing) tweets, Gazi Kodzo, someone evidently of YouTube activist fame/notoriety, pointed an emoji middle finger at… Anne Frank?

As one does.

A BECKY as well as a KAREN.

To be sure, there is plenty of room to point out that we’re better at shock-horror at genocides Over There than at genocides Right Here. That probably applies to humans in general as well as USians in particular. But it’s surprisingly easy to talk about that without calling Anne Frank either a Becky or a Karen, and by the same token it’s easy to talk about it without calling anyone a Becky or a Karen.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy goes on:

Is “Karen” — or the similar “Becky” — an anti-racist protest against white ladies who call the cops at the drop of a hat? Or is it sexism posing as progressivism?

Mostly the second, in my view, especially when it’s white men doing it, as it so very often is.

It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Denzel” or “Stokely.” It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Truman” or a “Barney.” It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Juan” or a “José.” It seems to me it’s not a thing progressives do, because it looks…wrong. Bad, racist or racist-like, homophobic or homophobic-like, xenophobic or xenophobic-like. But somehow when it’s women the squick factor isn’t there. Why is that? Why does it feel ok and even progressive to use dismissive contemptuous personal names for a kind of woman you dislike when it doesn’t feel ok to do that for a kind of man you dislike?

Updating to add another example, this time from Pharyngula:

The Idaho playground rebellion was grotesque, and the different rules for white people are grotesque, but it’s entirely possible to say that without saying “a flock of Karens” just as it’s possible to say that without saying “a bunch of cunts.”

H/t latsot

Uh oh, it turns out that lockdown presents problems for trans people. Why did no one think of this?? Why did no one put a stop to the whole thing?! All these selfish privileged exclusionaryist people for whom lockdown is such a massive party, what were we thinking?

International transgender rights groups are warning [that] global coronavirus lockdown restrictions have led to trans people being denied healthcare. Many have had surgeries delayed, and some are struggling to access hormone therapy and counselling services.

But is that healthcare? Are the surgeries in question health-preserving? Is hormone “therapy” meant to make men resemble women and women resemble men really therapy?

And, even if you think they are, are they urgent? Are they more urgent than the non-emergency surgeries and therapies that many people are having to wait for? If so, how? Why?

We’re not told. We’re given the usual stories, of children who don’t like the clothes considered mandatory for their sex, one in Kenya to make doubt even more reprehensible, but we’re not given real explanations.

It’s a long thread so I’ll just quote the rest.

It was reported and got me a 12-hour ban from Twitter. I was forced to delete the tweet. Thing is, the people who espouse trans-activist rhetoric are, mostly, people interested in global betterment and social justice. They’re good people, aren’t they? I started thinking. Why do good people believe bad ideas? And from that base, why do ALL people believe bad ideas. And then, why do good people ENFORCE bad ideas? The answer, I think, is that they are not given any choice. There is no discourse, there is only what is permissible and what is not.

There is some choice here though. There is more than there was a few years ago. One isn’t quite so far out on a fragile limb when questioning the bad ideas now.

I am a critical theorist with two master’s degrees and a PhD. I have taught cultural studies at university level. Ironically, my specialism is post-structuralism and postmodern theory – from which much of the trans-gender studies orthodoxy of 2008 onwards emerged.

And that, folks, is literally how old this ideology is. Ten years, give or take. It had earlier antecedents but the slogans and argot with which we are now familiar – the language that is now protected. Ten years old.

How has it taken root so quickly and absolutely? One explanation is that its tenets are *memetic*. Memes, in Dawkins original sense, are transmittable units of culture. Idea-bites – rather than nuanced arguments. Ideology reduced down to slogans.

You see this in much recent ideological communication over social media. Unlike other discourse, memetic slogans are immutable. They are nuggets of dogma that are easy to transmit, replicate rapidly and are difficult to remove once embedded.

The speed of replication is as important as multiplication and simplicity. They spread fast and wide and are difficult to challenge once they become the foundations of discourse.

Does this sound like anything? They are viruses.

This mechanism has firmly entrenched the tenets of trans-activism into the permitted discourse of some institutions so effectively that any attempt to interrogate or examine them at all is now considered hate speech. They have quickly become “protected”.

A curious side-effect of this is that you cannot even ask why. You cannot interrogate the mechanism of transmission, you cannot examine evidence or nuance or meaning.

Indeed you cannot. I tried that back on Freethought Blogs and was told very explicitly that you cannot. You cannot even try to figure out exactly what the claims are, you can only repeat the correct words in the correct order.

And the final irony. Twitter is partially responsible for this cultural shift. Alongside other platforms, it has increased the reach of all ideas and reduced their complexity to a finite number of characters.

The world becomes a place where dogmatic idea-bites stand in for discourse and, once entrenched, become protected. They are protected not by law, but by cancelling, banning and blocking. By amassing a following and ending conversation.

This is not confined to trans-activism. Every extreme benefits from this. Any ideology that is absolute and inflexible. Anything that can be reduced to an idea-bite. “Build the wall”. “Brexit is Brexit”. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the disease”.

Make America Great Again. But her emails. Dirty cops. LIBERATE MICHIGAN!

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

A Twitter troll is the PR honcho for the Trump DHHS.

The top spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly directed crude and sexist comments toward women in now-deleted tweets, a CNN KFile review finds.

Michael Caputo, who just started at the department in April, called several women on Twitter “dogface” and made crude insinuations and sexist comments aimed at former FBI attorney Lisa Page prior to joining HHS.

He deleted them but the archive has them.

Caputo called Page a “jezebel,” and a “notorious homewrecker.” He tweeted a picture of Page writing, “sedition is nearly as fun as someone else’s husband.” Caputo said he believed “woke women of the #Resistance” supported Page “until it’s time to introduce her to their husbands.”

…

In December 2019, Caputo directly responded to a tweet from Page with a crude reference to oral sex, writing, “what’s that on your chin.”

In other tweets from 2020, Caputo repeatedly referred to different women as “dogface,” telling them “look at this dogface,” “you have a dogface,” and “I would never sleep with you, dog-face.” In another tweet Caputo told a woman to “go f**k yourself,” saying she was “ugly,” and calling her “honey.”

He called Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic consultant, a crone and a “nutty hag.”

And that’s not even all he called her.

The Guardian Live reports:

The executive director of the World Health Organization reiterated that the group believes coronavirus came about naturally, despite Trump’s dubious claims that he has seen evidence it was created in a Chinese government lab.

“Dubious claims” is too polite. “Stupid reckless lies” is closer, but doesn’t capture all that’s wrong with his habit of making shit up and throwing it at people who irritate him.

Just yesterday, Trump claimed he had seen evidence that coronavirus was made in a lab in China’s Wuhan region, which saw the first outbreak of the virus. Asked what evidence he had seen, Trump said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

More lies.

The president’s comments came hours after the office of the director of national intelligence said in a statement that intelligence officials “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified”.

Naturally. He thinks he has every right to lie to us, and we have zero right to object or contradict.

That “patriot” riot in Lansing yesterday…

Originally a comment by Papito on Men with rifles yelling at us.

You have be pretty far down the rabbit hole to understand how these militia creeps think they’re being patriotic. The fact you don’t is a good sign. The fact I do reflects poorly on my relatives.

They’re patriotic to an imaginary country. That country doesn’t exist, has never existed, but they’ve been convinced it really does, or did, somehow.

The real country around them – full of people who are not white, and sometimes governed by people who are not male – is somehow preventing their imaginary country from coming fully into being. The laws of this real, imposter country, insofar as they infringe on these mens’ feelings and desires, prove how evil the imposter country is, and how urgently it must be opposed. This thinking is fundamentally religious in nature; they are motivated in similar ways to the Islamic extremists who want to establish a new Caliphate.

These y’all quaeda yokels don’t see the coronavirus lockdown a discrete response to a single problem; their complaint is not about a single policy mistake. They see it as part of a conspiracy to deprive them of the ability to establish their imaginary country. Hence the guns: they will need lots of guns to establish their imaginary country. They are explicitly fomenting a second civil war, or second revolution, after which they will be able to establish their imaginary country.

In this foolishness they are supported by numerous American politicians, such as Trump and Rep. Steve King. Abroad, they are supported by Russia, because Putin both loves to screw America up and loves right-wing extremism. Numerous Faux News talking heads also fortify their rhetoric.

In distinction to the kind of racist policing exemplified by the murder of Tamir Rice, these people pose an actual threat to America and its citizens. Also in distinction to movements like Black Lives Matter, the militia freaks have not just sympathizers but members in law enforcement, and are duly emboldened.

Stonewall UK has a disappoint.

Have the courts missed a vital opportunity to send a positive message that recognises all parents for who they are? (There’s also the separate question that asks whether it’s the job of courts to send a positive message or not.) Would it “send a positive message” to let a mother legally call herself a father and thus make her child the first in human history to be gestated and birthed by its father? Would it really send a positive message to tell a child it never had a mother?

Even if you think the answer is yes, what about the next part? What about the recognising people for who they are bit? Surely the demand here is for recognising people for who they are not. Literally speaking Freddy McConnell is a woman. Physically Freddy McConnell is a woman. That’s who Freddy McConnell is. What Stonewall is really talking about is endorsing people’s fantasies about themselves, which is radically different from recognising who they are.