This time we have to start with the title, whether a sub chose it or not.

Trans women are victims of misogyny, too – and all feminists must recognize this

No. There is no such “must.” Trans women are male people, and there is no “must” that commands feminists to extend their feminism to men. No. All trans activists must stop trying to bully feminist women into changing the subject to men. No.

The subtitle is also bad.

Some feminists claim misogyny targets only those who have female sex features (ovaries, vaginas and uteruses). We should be alarmed by this view.

No. We should be alarmed by the spectacle of people telling us men can be women, and the Guardian publishing them.

[S]ome feminists claim that misogyny targets only those who have female sex features ( such as ovaries, vaginas and uteruses). For these feminists – sometimes called “trans-exclusionary” feminists – trans women’s interests are none of their concern. Feminism, they say, is for people who are victims of misogyny, and anyone without female sex features cannot be a victim of misogyny.

We should be alarmed by these views. Feminism’s history displays a pattern of (mostly white, non-disabled and financially stable) women deploying claims about difference to justify ignoring the needs of women of color, disabled women and working-class women. The exclusion of trans women risks becoming the latest manifestation of this terrible pattern.

No it doesn’t. That’s a crude caricature. It’s fair to say that many feminists have focused on women like themselves and overlooked women less like themselves, and thus that feminists who had better access to the media thanks to their class and race didn’t always do a good job of remembering to use that access to include women of color, disabled women, working-class women, lesbians, immigrants, and so on. It’s not fair to say that those feminists systematically argued in favor of “ignoring the needs of women of color, disabled women and working-class women.”

It’s true that feminism now includes explicit arguments justifying claims that men are not women, but that’s radically different from mythical arguments justifying claims that working class women are not women or that women of color are not women. I don’t believe that anyone ever argued those last two items, while some insubordinate feminists do argue the first one. But what are we supposed to do? Working class women and women of color and immigrant women and lesbians are in fact women, but trans women are men who “identify as” women. There’s a great gulf between the two sets.

I do think it’s true that misogyny is part of why trans women are subject to high levels of violence (if not as high as the wilder claims suggest). I also think all this could have gone differently, but I differ from Robin Demroff in thinking that misogyny is a huge part of why it didn’t. To spell it out, I think way too many trans women are themselves intensely misogynist, and that’s why the whole “inclusion” thing hasn’t worked out.

Ray Blanchard talks to the National Review:

Kearns: What do we mean by “gender identity”?

Blanchard: What do I mean by it?

Kearns: Yes. Let’s start with that.

Blanchard: Well, back in the days when I was writing a lot on that topic, which is quite a while ago now, I tended to avoid the phrase “gender identity” because I think that it’s a trivial concept when it’s applied to normal people. I mean normal men and normal woman know what sex they are, and they respond to that automatically, like when looking for a washroom. But I think it’s only at very unusual moments that a normal man or woman has a conscious awareness of “I’m a woman” or “I’m a man,” and this is often a highly emotional situation.

Just as we don’t normally have a conscious awareness of “I’m bipedal” or “I’m a primate” or “I can read.” We take a lot of stuff for granted, and we don’t generally obsess over it. This is one of the places we part company with trans people: we don’t want to obsess over it, we want to obsess over things that are more interesting. Life is short, time is limited, we don’t want to waste huge chunks of it hanging sparkly ornaments on our Gender Identity.

So, I don’t find the concept of “gender identity” useful for normal people, and the concept of cross-gender identity is really not a normal gender identity which has found itself lodged in the wrong body. Cross-gender identity is a constant preoccupation with, and unhappiness about, the individual’s gender. So, I guess you could say I believe in cross-gender identity, but I don’t much believe in gender identity.

Does any of that sound political? No. That could be why it’s such an awkward fit as a branch of left-wing thought.

From a Fresh Air interview with the novelist Stephen McCauley:

GROSS: The first time we talked in 1996, we talked about how one of your characters – your main character – always felt like he was either too young and then he felt like he was too old. And he never felt like he was the right age. And you talked about how when you started teaching, you felt like you were too young to be an authority figure. And then at some point, you felt like you were too old in the sense that you had kind of bypassed the common reference points that you used to have with your students. Where are you now?

MCCAULEY: I’m at the I-don’t-care phase, you know, which is kind of a great phase to be in. I mean, I feel as if I actually feel – I mean, Terry, I hate to be so positive, but I feel as if I do have something to say to students. And I think in the same way that, you know, I stopped trying to be Tolstoy or Flaubert, whoever – that, as a teacher, I just feel like, OK, I have something to offer. And I’m going to offer it in a very authentic and – way that is true to me. And I don’t worry about that kind of attitude quite so much.

GROSS: So you came out in the 1970s, when you were in your late teens.

MCCAULEY: Yes.

GROSS: And there are so many issues relating to, like, sexual orientation and gender identity that have changed over the years in terms of how they’re expressed and how people identify themselves. And you’re seeing that not just as, like, a person in the world but also as a professor at a university. And having been at universities for years, you’ve seen, like, you know, generations of students come and go and define themselves in different ways.

There’s a character in your new book, who’s a college student, who goes by the name D – the letter D – and wants to be referred to as the gender-neutral they instead of he or she. That’s a relatively new phenomenon – and, you know, the idea of, like, gender-neutral names and gender-neutral identity, and I’m wondering how you’re processing that.

I think the proliferation of “likes” in that passage hints at a certain hesitancy in asking the question. They both sounded a bit walking-on-eggs in this part.

MCCAULEY: That’s a really good question. Its a really big question right now in academia, especially…

GROSS: I know.

She interjected that quickly and with emphasis. “I know.” In other words: “it’s a fucking minefield, isn’t it.”

MCCAULEY: Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, for me as a teacher, I am really happy to call my students whatever pronouns they want to be called by. I had a student recently who wanted to be called it. And I said, OK, I’ll try it, you know? And, you know, whatever makes people feel accepted and seen the way they want to be seen is fine with me.

Ok I’m gonna interrupt right there. I don’t think it should be fine with him; I don’t think it should be fine with anyone. It’s probably impossible for academics to say that now without seeming like sadistic monsters and without being immediately added to Jordan Peterson’s army, which no sane person could want. But I don’t think it’s all that fine, and I wish people had pushed back more from the beginning. Why don’t I think it’s fine? Because it’s asking too much extra attention from the teacher, for an exceptionally silly and trivial reason. That’s not what teachers are there for. Attention from the teacher should be around academic stuff, not personal feelings of being special.

And that’s another reason – the narcissism. Students shouldn’t be encouraged, much less celebrated, for maximizing their narcissism. Narcissism is bad, and everyone should hate it.

And one more reason: it’s too much load on the memory to expect teachers to remember a lot of special pronouns. Pronouns exist for convenience, and demanding other people use bespoke ones for you and you alone is making them the very opposite of convenient.

Narcissism is the bad thing about being young, probably the worst thing. It’s a mistake to valorize it.

At the same time, I find it a little bit confusing sometimes when people talk about the binary – the gender binary – because it seems to me – my experience of coming out in the ’70s was that the joy really of coming out as gay was that you didn’t have to think in terms of strict male and female roles – that you could define yourself as a man in any way you wanted to. And I never had any interests that were particularly traditional in terms of masculinity.

And when I began reading particularly feminist writers like Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, it was very liberating. It was like, well, you can define yourself as a man and still be a man but have the interests that you want in, you know, 1920’s music instead of rock ’n’ roll or whatever it happens to be. And I guess my – the students that I’m seeing now take a different approach to that where they are embracing it more as being gender-neutral. And so I’m trying to understand it more and be sympathetic to it.

That last sentence sounds as if it came out of the mouth of a hostage. It contradicts what he just said, and he was right the first time. Feminism – the best feminism – has been chipping away at the gender binary for decades, and the trans-enby-mypronouns bullshit is dragging us backward.

Catherine Bennett notes an interesting juxtaposition.

In terms of knowing the enemy, much of it, in the US, will certainly resemble the Alabama misogynists – the 25 white, male, no longer young Republicans who have just stripped half their state’s population of reproductive rights. Photographs have been generously distributed. But, as the men would probably be the first to admit, they couldn’t have ushered in a generation or more of unwanted children without assistance from at least two women combatants, Terri Collins and the state governor, Kay Ivey.

…

Signing the ban into law, Ivey celebrated “a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious & that every life is a sacred gift from God”. Give or take, as they appreciate on Alabama’s death row.

Hours after criminalising abortion, Ivey ruled that the life of a convicted murderer, Michael Samra, was not sufficiently precious for her to feel like saving it. He was killed by lethal injection, with witnesses to testify that this particular sacred gift from God had been returned dead, with the governor’s compliments.

By “every life” Ivey meant…um…give me a minute here…

“Drink bleach” is a version of “drop dead” or “fuck off”: it’s not a “miracle cure,” or a humdrum ordinary medical cure either. Bleach is not good to ingest. It’s toxic.

But that doesn’t stop monsters from peddling it as a miracle cure:

An American pastor from New Jersey backed by a British former clairvoyant is running a network that gives up to 50,000 Ugandans a “miracle cure” made from industrial bleach, claiming drinking the toxic fluid eradicates cancer, HIV/Aids, malaria and most other diseases.

(A former clairvoyant? He used to be able to see magical stuff that no one else can see but then lost the knack?)

The network, led by pastor Robert Baldwin and part-funded by Sam Little from Arlesey in Bedfordshire, is one of the most extensive efforts yet to distribute the “miracle cure” known as MMS, or “miracle mineral solution”. The Guardian has learned that poor Ugandans, including infants as young as 14 months old, are being given chlorine dioxide, a product that has no known health benefit and can be extremely dangerous.

Baldwin, 52, is importing bulk shipments of the components of MMS, sodium chlorite and citric acid, into Uganda from China. The two chemicals are mixed to produce chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach used in the textile industry.

Bleach can do you in if you even inhale too much of it from the air; ingesting it cannot possibly be safe. Bleach can actually dissolve cloth, so what would it do to GI tracts? Nothing good.

Baldwin, 52, is importing bulk shipments of the components of MMS, sodium chlorite and citric acid, into Uganda from China. The two chemicals are mixed to produce chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach used in the textile industry.

The American pastor has “trained” about 1,200 clerics in Uganda on administering the “miracle cure” and each in turn uses it to treat about 50 congregants, usually after Sunday service. As an inducement, Baldwin is offering smartphones to those clerics who are especially “committed” to spreading the bleach cure.

He admitted to an anti-quack activist pretending to be a journalist that he does it all covertly.

“We don’t want to draw any attention,” he said during the call, a recording of which has been heard by the Guardian. “When you draw attention to MMS you run the risk of getting in trouble with the government or drug companies. You have to do it low key. That’s why I set it up through the church.”

He added that as a further precaution he uses euphemisms on Facebook, where he raises money through online donations. “I don’t call it MMS, I call it ‘healing water’, to protect myself. They are very sophisticated. Facebook has algorithms that can recognize ‘MMS’.”

Baldwin, who trained as a student nurse and is understood to have no other medical expertise, said he chose Uganda because it was a poor country with weak regulation. Speaking from New Jersey, where he is based, he told O’Leary: “America and Europe have much stricter laws so you are not as free to treat people because it is so controlled by the FDA. That’s why I work in developing countries.”

Ah yes, we’ve been there before. That’s why the Tuskegee experiment was performed there and not at Harvard; that’s why payday loan companies and for-profit universities market to poor people not rich people; that’s why Europeans felt quite entitled to grab chunks of Africa as if they were wild berries there for the taking. “We can’t poison Americans and Europeans but we can poison Ugandans so let’s get right on that.”

Asked how babies and children were treated with MMS, he said the dose was reduced by half. “Little tiny infants can take a small amount, they will spit it out. It causes no harm – they just get diarrhea.”

Diarrhea kills. Diarrhea can kill an infant fast.

The Uganda ministry of health was alarmed to hear about the MMS trials, saying it had no information about chlorine dioxide being tested in Ugandan hospitals. Emmanuel Ainebyoona, a spokesman for the ministry, said a government investigation had been initiated.

Let’s hope so.

Where do we draw the line?

When Mary Gregory filled out the registration form to compete in a local weightlifting event, she checked the box that read “female” without hesitation.

“I mean, that’s my gender,” she said “I didn’t even think about it. That’s who I am.”

If any eyebrows were raised, Gregory didn’t notice, and on April 27, after months of training, she strode onto the platform at the Best Western hotel just east of Charlottesville and wowed the spectators and fellow powerlifters in attendance. That night she posted a picture on Instagram of herself holding a trophy, telling her 120 followers about the records she set for her age and weight class in the 100% Raw Powerlifting Federation, which organized the day’s competition.

“What a day, 9 for 9!” she posted. “Masters world squat record, open world bench record, masters world dl record, and masters world total record! Still processing …”

So were the other competitors, I daresay.

But just a couple of days later Gregory was stripped of all the titles.

“She put down female. Clearly, she’s not a female,” said Paul Bossi, 100% Raw Powerlifting Federation’s president. “Not biologically anyways.

“In our rules, we go by biological,” he said. “According to the rules, she can only lift in the men’s division. … I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings but I have to follow the rules.”

He said Gregory never volunteered that she was transgender and event organizers didn’t confirm she’d competed in the wrong category until a post-match drug test was administered.

And by the way when it comes to hurt feelings…what about the feelings of the other competitors?

“We could’ve rectified a lot of this prior had we known,” Bossi said. “In a way, we felt like we were duped.”

Gregory, 44, says she never misled anyone. Two weeks later, she is still hurt and angry, as the larger sports world continues to wrestle with defining and imposing gender classifications, finding a balance for competition that’s both fair and inclusive.

Hurt and angry because prevented from cheating women out of prizes – that is one narcissistic entitled dude.

“I felt like they were invalidating my gender and my identity,” said Gregory, who began hormone replacement treatment a year ago and feels she should be allowed to compete alongside any other female.

Why does Gregor think his “gender” and his “identity” are more important than the other competitors’ interest in having a fair contest? Why does he think it’s so important that other people “validate” his gender and his identity? (The answer probably has to do with the narcissism and entitlement; see also male socialization.)

Jeffrey Toobin reminds us to be outraged:

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called President Trump’s cries of “TREASON” on Friday morning “reckless and irresponsible,” adding that it’s yet another norm the President has broken.

“And treason is a crime for which death is a potential penalty,” Toobin said on CNN’s “New Day.” “It is so reckless and irresponsible to talk that way. One of the things that this president has done has violated so many norms.”

“It’s not illegal to say what he said, but the idea of a president accusing people of any crime — remember, he accused  Michael Cohen’s in-laws of crimes. A president, who is the head of the Justice Department, the head of the FBI, accusing people of crimes, much less crimes punishable by the death penalty, is really a grotesque abuse of power,” he added. “It’s gone on for so long now, that we’re kind of, oh, well, you know, it’s just another tweet. But it is worth pausing to recognize how reckless that is.”

It is. It always is.

Wait.

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women, including trans women, and move beyond outdated, exclusionary understandings of feminism. #NoTERFsonourTurf” [4/4]

— Liberation at EdUni (@EdUniLiberation) May 7, 2019

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women and “TERFs” must be kept out. So discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women but not the women who disagree that men can be women. So discussions on women’s rights must include men who say they are women and the women who love them but not women who refuse to agree that men who don’t “identify as” men are therefore women. So ALL women but not ALL women. Mkay.

H/t Holly

https://twitter.com/aytchellesse/status/1129408007564140544

The Liverpool Echo reported a few days ago:

Two women have been charged after a woman was threatened with a hammer during a shocking road rage incident in a car park.

Footage from the incident shows two small groups coming to blows at Stonedale Retail Park in Croxteth on Wednesday night (May 8).

Initially the groups can be seen shoving and pushing each other before a woman retrieves a hammer from the boot of a car.

At one point the video shows a woman swinging the hammer towards another, younger woman, who tries to defend herself with a shoe.

A 19-year-old woman suffered head injuries, which are believed to be from a punch and was taken to hospital for assessment, say police.

A spokesperson for Merseyside Police told the ECHO: “We can confirm that two women have been arrested following an incident in Stonedale Retail Park on Wednesday night, 8 May.

“At around 7.15pm, officers were called to Stonedale Retail Park on East Lancs Road to reports of an altercation in a car park near to KFC, and threats being made by a woman in possession of a hammer.

“A third woman, aged 19, was reported as having sustained a head injury, believed to have been from a punch. She was taken to hospital for assessment.”

Carol Lea, 55,  from Bosworth Road in St Helens has been charged with possessing an offensive weapon in a public place and threatening behaviour and released on conditional bail pending further enquiries.

Merseyside Police also confirmed on Twitter:

We can confirm that two women from #StHelens have been arrested following an incident in Stonedale Retail Park on East Lancs Rd on Wed night, after reports of a woman in possession of a hammer. Contact @MerPolCC, call 101 ref 19100230164 or @CrimestoppersUK on 0800 555 111 pic.twitter.com/p0eW8MKazr

— Merseyside Police (@MerseyPolice) May 10, 2019

There’s just one slight problem.

https://twitter.com/JarvisBoatOwner/status/1127919685121585153

The perp with the hammer in action:

https://twitter.com/SmithGinge/status/1126503936775450624

Oops. Wokey McWokerson made a little mistake.

https://twitter.com/MJB_SF/status/1129045483157110785

Yaaaaaaay inclusivity, no mention of women, just “uterus holding individual”! Utopia is nigh!

Oh but wait though, what’s that ugly thing in the line above? “Men”? That can’t be right. On the one hand men, on the other hand uterus holding individuals? Do these rules apply only to women?

Woking every day is not easy.

Playing the pretend-knowledge trick: I am an expert in this made-up Thing (field? discipline? ideology? campaign?) so I get to say anyone who disputes said made-up Thing has no right to do so because No Expertise.

Like trans-activist Ugla Stefanía Jónsdóttir for instance:

Experts on trans rights and people who have been working in the field for decades are being pitted against almost anyone with a negative opinion about trans people – regardless of who they are. This seems to be a trend among anti-trans campaigners; they’re given a platform despite their lack of knowledge or experience of the discussion they’re taking part in. As an example, in a controversial move, Scottish MP Joan McAlpine has just invited Canadian writer Meghan Murphy, founder of the blog Feminist Current, to speak at the Scottish Parliament about ‘how transgender ideology affects women’s rights’.

Murphy’s blog has long been known for its strong anti-trans stance and regularly publishes material that advocates against trans rights and discusses the alleged dangers of the ‘transgender lobby’. It is a go-to-site for strong anti-trans campaigners.

It would be safe to say that Murphy herself has no expertise, qualifications or experience with transgender rights.

But would it? No, it wouldn’t. Murphy has, for instance, abundant experience with the way the more belligerent trans activists work hard to silence Murphy and other feminists. And while we’re on the subject, what expertise, qualifications or experience does Ugla Stefania have with women’s rights? Other than battling them?

Her invitation to this discussion therefore seems quite out of touch, such as if a climate change denier was invited to discussion about how to stop the catastrophic damage we are doing to our planet. Or if a representative of the Flat Earth Society was invited to a discussion about an upcoming space expedition by NASA.

Oh no you don’t. There is a mountain of Actual Science dealing with climate change, and the same goes for cosmology and engineering. Transery isn’t a body of knowledge, or any kind of knowledge at all, it’s mere declaration of identity. Trans ideology insists with great ferocity that it is entirely a matter of self-identification, so it can’t possibly also be a matter of specialist knowledge. “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” – how many times have we been told that, usually with menaces? There’s  nothing to know, no expertise or qualifications or experience required. It’s all about the assertion, and the fact that it is all about the assertion is the very thing we’re attacked and shunned for questioning. So no: it’s not even slightly like climate change denial.

People who fundamentally do not believe trans people are the gender they know themselves to be, and who deliberately and repeatedly misgender and misrepresent people’s identities and personhood, can never be seen as reasonable representatives of this debate. Trans people are who they say they are, and any conversation that doesn’t acknowledge this is inherently flawed and biased.

See? She says it herself. “Trans people are who they say they are” so what expertise can there possibly be?

These groups and individuals are disguising themselves as protectors of the rights of ‘women and girls’, but it’s time we see them for what they truly are: misguided people with conservative and fundamentalist views about sex and gender. They do not want equality, but supremacy.

Interesting, that’s what anti-feminist men have been saying about feminism since before Mary Wollstonecraft learned to read.

I hadn’t heard of Miriam Toews until I read this New Yorker profile of her.

Toews, who is fifty-four, is one of the best-known and best-loved Canadian writers of her generation. She grew up in Steinbach, a town founded by Mennonites in the province of Manitoba, for which the colony in Bolivia was named. (“Toews,” which rhymes with “saves,” is as recognizably Mennonite as “Cohen” is Jewish.) Her fiction has often dealt with the religious hypocrisy and patriarchal dominion that she feels to be part of her heritage, and with a painful emotional legacy, harder to name but as present as a watermark. Her father and her sister both died too young, and she sees a certain Mennonite tendency toward sorrow and earthly guilt as bearing some responsibility for their deaths.

Her father and sister both committed suicide, we find out later.

One segment of my family tree is Mennonite, which I find deeply weird. My maternal grandfather moved from farm to town (in Iowa) and he must have left the Mennonite part decisively behind, because I don’t remember even hearing the word in childhood. Not so with Toews.

Over a lunch of butter-chicken rotis, the conversation turned to Toews’s novels. An Elvira-like figure appears in just about all of them, pragmatic, comical, full of good sense, though some of these incarnations are more fictional than others.

Elvira is her mother.

“I have no secrets left, and that’s O.K.,” Elvira said. “I stand behind Miriam one hundred per cent. She has a mind I don’t have, and I know that. And with what they call your coming-out story—”

“Coming-of-age story,” Toews said. “ ‘A Complicated Kindness.’ ”

The novel, published in 2004, is narrated by sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel, who has begun to rebel against the repressive religious culture of her small Mennonite town. It won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and became a best-seller, the kind of book that gets assigned in school and included on lists of novels that “make you proud to be a Canadian,” and it turned Toews, a niche, indie sort of Canadian writer, into a famous one. It is a master class in schputting; not even Menno Simons, for whom the faith is named, gets away with his dignity intact, and many Mennonites took offense.

Do I want to read a novel narrated by a teenage girl who has begun to rebel against the repressive religious culture of her small Mennonite town? Oh hell yes.

Of course there was angry reaction.

“It was Marj who also really helped me a lot, who told me, ‘Listen, people are going to come after you, people will be angry,’ ” Toews said. “She told me to say this thing I’ve said for so long, and so often, which is that it’s not a critique of the Mennonite faith or of Mennonite people but of fundamentalism, of that culture of control. I wish that people who felt that they were being personally attacked could step back and say, ‘Maybe she is really talking about the hypocrisy of the intolerance, the oppressiveness, particularly for girls and women, the emphasis on shame and guilt and punishment.’ ” Her voice was catching. “We all have a right to fight in life.”

This happens with all religions. They all treat women as dangerous rebellious contaminants, and they all control and punish them harshly. We all have a right to resist.

It is not lost on Toews that her separatist ancestors’ fates have depended on those who wield worldly power, or that their pacifism has often been contingent on the conquest of other peoples. The founders of Steinbach came from Russia in the eighteen-seventies, at the invitation of the newly formed Canadian government, which offered them land that had been wrested from people of the First Nations. The newcomers belonged to a particularly punitive sect of Mennonites. Harmonizing while singing hymns was considered sinful, and so was dancing. Trains might encourage contact with the outside world, so Steinbach had no station. Someone who was thought to have done or said something unacceptable could be shunned by the church, and cast out of the community.

By the time Toews was born, in 1964, shunning was no longer official practice, but the atmosphere remained oppressive, nosy, censorious. “It’s a town that exists in the world based on the idea of it not existing in the world,” Nomi Nickel says.

Rather like spending your whole life committing suicide.

Biden is so full of shit.

“History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration,” Biden told an Iowa ballroom-full of supporters last week. “This is not the Republican Party,” he continued, noting his longstanding ties to “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

If this is not the Republican Party, why is it occupying all those Republican seats and passing all those Republican votes and protecting Donald Trump no matter what he does? If it’s not the Republican Party why don’t they all quit, or vote with the Democrats to hobble and then impeach Trump?

Indeed, as The New York Times has reported, “in the Obama White House, he was known as the ‘McConnell whisperer’ for his skills in striking agreements with the often recalcitrant Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.”

And how well that worked! Don’t take my word for it: Ask Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland. Behold how many Republicans voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act once it was bringing affordable health care to tens of millions of their compatriots. And note the swarms of Republicans who opposed the Trump tax cut for directing a trillion or so dollars to the already super-rich.

For real.

Biden should not be running at all. It’s sheer entitlement and it needs to die.

The barmaid hits a nerve.