#‘conservatives are the ones you should be focused on they’re actually supporting this ideology!’

[luhrmannatural]

anyway! this is why which political party you vote for does matter! i know too many people on the left who straight up don’t vote because “both parties are the same” and yeah they’re both corrupt but at least one of them is not actively trying to chip away at our civil rights! anyone who isn’t voting straight blue in november block me right now for real you make me more angry than conservatives at least they fucking VOTE

[yekistraight]

Hey, could you explain what being a feminist means? I’ve heard all these terms before, and there’s this huge stigma around it. So do you think there’s a way you could clarify at least what your beliefs are, and what you believe it to be? I’m simply trying to study stuff and see what it’s become or is. Thank you.

Sorry I wrote so much i just wanted to make it comprehensive:

General definition of feminist is someone who believes in the socio-economic equality of the sexes. In the beginning this was a straightforward ideology to follow. Women needed to be equal to men. It’s only fair, there’s no reason not to be. But sharing power is not something the ruling majority particularly enjoys so there’s been some bumps in the road. Decades and decades of bumps.

The feminists of the past started this push a long time ago with one message: “we want to be taken seriously, we are humans too and we need rights that benefit us and protect us from you[men]” and they were right. Sex based crimes against women were happening at an alarming rate. So much so that it had become part of some cultures and traditions, meaning it would be defended and men would be protected while women basically died, physically and socially. Women lived in fear and helplessness, being sold a dream of subservience promoted by religion and ego in exchange for protection from men. What about the women that still, despite the odds, wanted to choose a different path? Well, they were brave enough to step out of line and others followed. They exist throughout history, inspiring other women will their bravery and confidence, proving that it was possible to have the power and authority that men had. Now imagine giving every woman that access to power? They’d have everything right? Well feminism didn’t start like that (it was racially exclusive actually) but fortunately the ideologies spread out through cities, across oceans and into continents where women wanted, no, NEEDED such power; the power to change their destinies that had been set upon them by another mere human being.

So feminism is like a sisterhood, where we’re only related by a common goal to protect each other while trying to defeat our common enemy. Here’s where the simplistic ideology begins to mutate based on strategy and cultural progression.

Feminism is a sisterhood, but not a monolith. There’s been different waves (eras) of feminism where each sisterhood used different tactics to achieve their goals for equality. Its like making a new checklist after the old one gets checked off. However there’s been one item that still needs a lot of work before ticking off and that’s dismantling gender roles. Gender roles are the root cause of every.single.thing. Toxic masculinity, performative femininity. Gender roles were created to control humans and keep them in their place. For a feminist to push her way into male dominated spaces, she must first acknowledge that gender roles have been constructed to work against her and break through it. So take note, everything is the way it is because of gender roles.

In this era, the sisterhood has been split into two major groups, two warring tribes if you will: libfems and radfems.

Liberal Feminists accept everyone. They use the tactic of assimilation, where they water down feminist ideologies to make it inclusive for everyone. They follow the lead of oppressed minorities who reclaimed slurs and instead reclaim methods tused to oppress women that past waves of feminists fought to dismantle. Remember what I said about gender roles? These women are bringing it back and think they’re reclaiming it. How do you reclaim something that hasn’t been dismantled yet?The only power they’re concerned with is the feeling of superiority that comes from thinking bowing down to the patriarchy is their idea. Their feminism tackles issues like rape, victim blaming and misogyny, things that affect them personally, while taking on the burden of other marginalised groups as their own, pushing their own goals to the backseat while feeling a self-righteous high. Basically, they’re activists who have lost the plot but would keep pushing blindly than admit it. The second group was born from libfems that wanted more than a feel good pat on the back from the patriarchy for not being too interfering.

Radical feminists are still following the original objective of their predecessors. They still have their eyes open to sex-based oppression and are aware there’s still a lot of work to be done. They don’t put the opposite sex’s needs above their own or let other group’s ideologies influence theirs and because of this, other groups as well as libfems have dubbed them as enemies to progress. Ironic isn’t it? The group that still fights for sexual equality has been silenced by none other than their own. Of course hatred for this group of feminists didn’t come out of nowhere. Radfems and their female-only values are presumed to hurt trans women, as trans women are biologically male and don’t have the same sex based experiences as biological women. Trans activists took these as transphobic fighting words and ostracised radfems, silencing them and their ideologies, claiming that everything they fought for was an attack against the trans community. Conservative americans also share some radfem values, basically the one on keeping the movement focused on female only issues, and because the right is notoriously bigoted (ironic because conservatives are the ones who uphold the gender roles feminists fight against so a conservative feminist is paradoxical) this is enough to tell people that radfems can’t be trusted. That they’re all racist, transphobic white supremacists. Because all groups that share similar ideologies are bad. The public, not wanting to be on the Unpopular Opinion side of history, shifted away and further pushed radfems into the background while libfems and their blind acceptance values were hailed as the patron saints of feminism.

So what feminism was and what it is now are vastly different. It started as a movement in different countries with different goals, then it graduated and took on more serious topics. It was like a game where every level gets tougher to prepare you for that last boss, the one who holds all the power you need to physically change your reality.

Today in the year 2021, young girls are being told that it’s feminist to enjoy selling their bodies for money. That it’s the same as working in a mine (a common comparative statement). That it’s feminist to look as womanly as the gender roles men created dictate. That it’s feminist to watch porn and be happy your romantic partner watches it to; this means you’re sexually liberated. Grown women go to Tiktok full of minors in the style of pimps to show off stacks of money they’ve made from pleasing men. They say “i did it because i wanted to and so should you”. Minors are all over twitter trying to lure men with financial dominatrix tags. They can’t wait till they become legal to start selling their nude bodies to men. They were told it would make them feel powerful. People who are skeptical are shamed into silence, because the popular crowd is always in control and no one wants to be the odd one out.

Now compare that to women who spend time researching horrifying news of sexual violence still happening today. Women still having to sell themselves to survive in 2021 is a clear indicator that we’re still not taken seriously. Sex buying, pimping and displaying women as commodities is the reason little girls are being stolen off the streets and shipped off to a disgusting dreg who think he’s owed sexual satisfaction.

Radfems want to end child sex trafficking, sex slavery, wedding night virginity checks, honour killings, femicide, sewing up little girls vaginas to avoid them exploring their sexuality before their wedding night and bring attention to way more hardcore shit being run by top dogs who are cooperating with the old powers that influence the governments.

Whose side do you think the media will be on? Whose side is worth not risking ruffling feathers?

Feminism has become many things now. You can choose the one that reminds you of the cruelty of man or the one that creates a comfortable fantasy of false empowerment while women’s violence continues. Both get stigmatised anyway.

If it wasn’t obvious already, I’m a radical feminist.

I’m an autistic radfem living in a backwards country where the lgbt community can’t thrive so there’s no pride parades, no trans movement, nothing that can be publicised anyway. I can’t create a fantasy where everything works because nothing works. Women are dying around me everyday for being female, my best friend is trapped with an abusive father who hates her for being a female firstborn (something babies get killed for), I’m not worthy of basic respect without a husband, a poor woman from a muslim state gets death threats from her fellow muslims for wearing a backless top while a rich married one gets praised and women can’t apply for anything important without a man’s permission.

Now why on earth would i want to pamper the gender that made and uphold those laws? The battle here is still greatly a battle of the sexes. Despite this stale level of progress, our movement, like many others have allies. Male allies are great, allies are great, we need them to push buttons yes but also remember they can never fully understand what we feel. All they can do is try their best to help and in return we give them acknowledgement and support; so no we’re not supposed to be misandrists or transphobes. We just hate anyone who uplifts what we and our ancestors have been fighting to destroy.

That’s all

[gunnerpalace]

Hi! Same anon as the previous one. Tbh, I agree wholeheartedly with you. Y'see I do ask rhetorically,too but i could really accept and understand how and why ppl can be oblivious to IchiRuki, and somehow felt that the 'canon' should suffice, even the most excruciating of all is the fact a number found the ending even acceptable (ships aside, too). Again, I could respect that. But it's my greatest bane when ppl ask 'why' and not be clear they are asking rhetorically because I literally will

provide you an actual answer. And I get it, it’s the reason why ppl find shipping wars toxic and silly. But then again, as human, conflicts are always part of us (partly because as social psych explains so, we are gravitated to the negative for that allows us to change and survive), and the reason why “logical fallacies” are coined in the first place. Human will always debate, and argue about something; the only thing we could change is how we approach the opposing views.

Again, I dont condone any way, shape or form of abuse and harm. In some certain extent, I could perhaps understand it’s much harder for some IH to approach the actual argument being there’s either too much noise, and trapped in their own island between sea of salt. Thus becoming too acquianted w/ few IH who shared the same thought until it became their views as the only truth (see, that’s why its important to have debates! it is what keep us grounded and fair! Just like you said)

Who am I to speak though? I never ever challenged anyone anyways. And as you said, you just have to understand things in every way you could possibly think of–endless ‘whys’. Which is where I agree in your reply the most–this silly fandom wars is just the black mirror to every truth that lies beneath human psyche–the dark and the grimy. Heck, being a psych major is like staring at dark hole–at times, good, but most just plain confusing, revolting even or just heartbreaking.

Sorry it’s been long, but for the final of this ask: let me tell how glad I was with IchiRuki fandom I found in tumblr. It was the saltiest I’ve ever been (im not generally a fandom person anyways) but it’s the himalayan salt–expensive and actually nutritive it really deepened my desire to become wiser in general. And you for your wonderful essays, critiques and whatnot. I definitively would love to talk with you more not only about IchiRuki but the wonders and nightmare that us humans! Kudos!

I have sitting in my drafts a post spelling out my thoughts on “canon” (and thus, the people who cling to it) in that as a concept it privileges:

officiality over quality when it comes to validity (thus violating Sturgeon’s law)

corporations (intellectual property rights holders) over fans, and thus capitalists over proletarians

hierarchical dominance over mutualist networking within fandom

curative fandom over transformative fandom

genre over literary content

plot over characters

events over emotions

It is notable that (1) generally degrades art as a whole, (2) generally advances the capitalist agenda, and (3–7) generally advances the dominance of men over women (as the genders tend to be instructed by society to view these as A. dichotomies rather than spectrums, and B. to ascribe gender to them and make them polarities). These form the sides of a mutually reinforcing power structure (in the typical “Iron Triangle” fashion) designed to preserve and maintain the status quo.

Who really benefits from say, the policing of what is or is not “canon” in Star Wars? Disney, first and foremost. And then whomever (almost certainly male) decides to dedicate their time to memorizing the minutiae of whatever that corporation has decided is “legitimate.”

One can imagine a universe in which fan fic is recognized by companies for what it is: free advertising. (Much like fan art already is.) Instead, it is specifically targeted by demonetization efforts in a way that fan art isn’t. Why? Because it demonstrates that corporate control and “official” sanction has no bearing on quality, and it is thus viewed as undermining the official products.

In the same way, by demonstrating that most “canonical” works are frankly shit, it undermines the investiture of fans in focusing on details that are ultimately errata (the events, the plot, the genre), which is the core function of curative fandom and the reason for its hierarchical structure. The people who “know the most” are at the top, but what they “know” is basically useless garbage. And those people so-engaged are, of course, usually male.

To “destroy” the basis of their credibility, and indeed the very purpose of their community, is naturally viewed by them as an attack.

(This is not to say that efforts to tear down internal consistency within established cultural properties are good unto themselves, or even desirable. For example, efforts to redefine properties such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Ghostbusters, for the sake of a identity-politics agenda have largely A. failed as art, B. failed as entertainment, C. failed to attract the supposedly intended audience, and D. failed to advance the agenda in question. Trying to repurpose extant media in the name of culture wars is essentially always doomed to failure unless it is done deftly and gradually.)

(At the same time, this also shows what I was talking about last time, with regard to people seeing whatever they want to see. You will see people complain that Star Trek and Doctor Who didn’t “used to be so political,” which is obviously nonsense. These shows were always political. What changed was how their politics were presented. For example, Star Trek has, since TNG, always shown a nominally socialist or outright communist future, but was beloved by plenty of conservatives because they could [somehow] ignore that aspect of it.)

Of course, almost no one is seriously suggesting that one side of the spectrums outlined above be destroyed, rather merely that a new balance be struck upon the spectrum. But, as we have seen time and again in society, any threat to the status quo, whether that be 20% of Hugo Awards going to non-white male authors or the top income tax rate in America being increased by a measly 5.3% (from 28.7% to 34%… when the all-time high was 94% and for over 50 years it was above 50%) is a threat. This is why, for example, Republicans are out there branding AOC as a “socialist” when her policies are really no different at all from a 1960 Democrat who believed in FDR’s New Deal. (Which they, of course, have also demonized as “socialism.”)

(As an aside, all this ignores the fact that most of the “literary canon” of Western civilization, or at least English literature… is Biblical or historical fan fic.)

And this is when I finally get to my point.

Those people out there who denigrate and mock shippers and shipping, the people who hurl “it reads like fan fiction” as an insult, and so on, are the people who benefit from and enjoy the extant power structure. You will see the same thing with self-identified “gamers” complaining about “fake girl gamers.” Admitting that the hobby has a lot of women in it, and a lot of “casuals,” and is indeed increasingly dominated by “non-traditional demographics” is an affront to the constructed identity of being a “gamer.” They are “losing control.” And they don’t like it.

This exact same sort of population is what the “fanbase” of Bleach has been largely reduced down to through a slow boiling off of any actual quality. Of course they’re dismissive of people who are looking for anything of substance: their identity, their “personal relationship” with the franchise, is founded on a superficial appreciation of it: things happening, flashy attacks, eye-catching character designs, fights, etc.

(What this really boils down to, at heart, is that society at large has generally told men that emotions are bad, romance and relationships of all kinds are gross, and that thinking and reflecting on things is stupid. So of course they not only don’t care about such things, but actively sneer at them as “girly” or “feminine,” which is again defined by society at large as strictly inferior. And this gender divide and misogyny is of course promulgated and reinforced by the powers that be, the capitalists, to facilitate class divisions just like say racism generally is.)

(The latest trick of these corporate overlords has been the weaponization of “woke” culture to continue to play the people off one another all the time. “If you don’t like this [poorly written, dimensionless Mary Sue] Strong Female Character, then you are a racist misogynist!” They are always only ever playing both sides for profit, not advancing an actual ideological position. It is worth noting that there was a push by IH some years ago to define IR as “anti-feminist” for critiquing Orihime for essentially the exact same reasons [admittedly, not for profit, but still as critical cover].)

Which makes it very curious, therefore, that the most ardent IH supporters tend to be women. (Though there are more than a few men, they seem to tend to support it because it is “canon” and to attack it is to attack “canon” and thus trigger all of the above, rather than out of any real investment.) I think there are a number of reasons for this (which I have detailed before) and at any rate it is not particularly surprising; 53% of white women voted for Trump, after all.

What we are really seeing in fandom, are again the exact same dynamics that we see at larger and larger scales, for the exact same reasons. The stakes are smaller, but the perception of the power struggle is exactly the same.

Of course, the people who are involved in these things rarely think to interrogate themselves as to the true dimensions and root causes of their motivations. People rarely do that in general.

Putting all that aside, I’m glad that you have found a place you enjoy and feel comfortable, and thank you for the kind words, although I am not of the opinion that there is anything poignant about the non-fiction I write. It is, as I keep trying to emphasize, all there to be seen. One just has to open their eyes. So, it’s hard for me to accept appreciation of it.

Anyway, don’t feel shy about coming off of anon rather than continuing to send asks. We don’t really bite.

[arcticdementor]

When deciding who to vote for in November, what should we base our decision on? What considerations should we let sway us, and what considerations should we ignore? You might think the answer should have something to do with our values, beliefs, and convictions—and you’d be right. But some on the left are actually trying to make the case that voters should put all that aside. Instead, we should base critical political decisions (like who should be the President) on how likely they are to elicit violent reactions from the left.

Last Friday, Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine and Arc Digital, took issue with President Trump’s order to end diversity training based on Critical Race Theory in federal agencies. “There is plenty wrong with the ideology and practice of most forms of racial sensitivity training,” she acknowledges, but, according to Young, “recruiting Trump to fight this war is the worst possible move.” She believes that doing so risks triggering the reaction of progressive politicians and activists against President Trump’s move. The President’s opponents will “rally in defense of diversity training,” she writes, so “the anti-Trump backlash may actually strengthen such programs.”

Then, on Sunday, Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued in the Atlantic that even “law and order Republicans” should prefer a Biden victory. Like Young, Hamid’s concern was how Democrats would react. For Democrats, losing the November election will “undermine faith in democracy, resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have seen in recent months. For this reason, strictly law-and-order Republicans who have responded in dismay to scenes of rioting and looting have an interest in Biden winning.”

…

Young and Hamid have something right: at this critical moment in American history, we face a warlike foe. But we shouldn’t capitulate. We should make our decisions in accordance with our convictions and be prepared to fight back against those who’ll oppose them. We should position ourselves as wartime conservatives. After all, soldiers and nations have made the ultimate sacrifice, facing conflict and likely death to stand for truth and justice. Even if we risk mass violence, civil war, or succession by siding with the same, we’d be cowards for doing otherwise.

…

People oppose wokism because its claims are untrue and its actions unjust. Woke discourse casts people into groups ordered hierarchically by the level of oppression they’re deemed to have suffered, running roughshod over considerations of individual justice. It insists on an ideological and naive view of history, and it proceeds by trying to shame those who resist it into acceptance. In 2016, President Trump’s base rejected the Democrats because they were wandering off the woke cliff, as Clinton’s attack on “the racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic” deplorables amply demonstrated. We rejected establishment Republicans because they failed to contend with wokeness entirely, focusing instead on issues of limited government and free markets. At the same time, the left achieved dominance in all domains of cultural formation (K-12 education, universities, Hollywood, the media, etc.).

We chose president Trump because he fought back against wokeness, explicitly: bucking political correctness entirely (stating plainly, for instance, an immigration policy millions of citizens were yearning for) and refusing to bend to woke ways of manipulation. That this movement has led to “an increasingly militant cultural left” confirms the wartime conservative’s assessment of the left. Young’s tepid anti-wokism is not adequate to the threat that wokism poses. Tyranny doesn’t abate when you remove resistance to it.

So yes, the left will absolutely “rally in defense of diversity training” when confronted with President Trump’s recent order. But that’s not a reason not to endorse the executive order: it’s why we absolutely must throw our support behind it. An animal roars loudest when it’s wounded.

…

What Hamid fails to reckon with is that we voted for President Trump in 2016 precisely to teach the establishment class that their entire political culture is failing our country. The Democrats’ behavior since 2016 demonstrates that they’re failed to learn their lesson. While Hamid would abandon the lesson entirely, wartime conservatives think it should be taught again (and again, and again, and again).

Of course, we recognize the danger posed to the country by an outraged left; there’s no confusion there. But for wartime conservatives, the fear of leftist outrage is silenced by our commitment to the belief that Democrats should “process a Trump victory.” If Democrats won’t listen to what their opponents are saying in the public sphere, they should be made to hear their voice at the ballot box until they do. That’s how properly functioning democracies work.  They should be taught their lesson until they recognize that their moral vision needs amending.

…

Hamid, however, only considers that the country will be safer by appeasing the left—he fails to ask what kind of country we’d be saving by doing so. A big worry for him is that, for Democrats, a Trump re-election “would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change.” He notes that Republican politicians will be more willing to acknowledge a Biden victory than Democrats will be to acknowledge a Trump victory, an asymmetry that will be mirrored in the media. “There’s a lot of right-of-center journalists and right-of-center commentators who’ll respect a Biden victory in a way that left-of-center journalists will not respect a Trump victory,” he explained in a podcast foreshadowing his editorial. He concludes that the gap between what the country is and what it ought to be will appear greater to Democrats under a Trump presidency than it’ll appear to Republicans under a Biden presidency. This is why Democrat losers will be more despairing of democracy, and “this has implications for mass unrest and political violence across American cities.” 

…

A Biden victory, Hamid postulates, will lead to a cold civil war within the Democratic Party instead of a hot one on our streets. The ‘woke anger’ of the radical left will transfer onto Biden centrists instead of Trumpists. Hamid sees this as “a more pro-democracy outcome, for that’s not really questioning the democratic system.”

Hamid’s argument here is absurd: if Democrats lose a fair democratic election, they’ll despair of democracy. The deciding factor in the election should be whether Democratic voters are left “questioning the democratic system.” Essentially, we must vote Biden to coddle the American Democrat.

Never mind that these Democrats are falsely and unjustly claiming that democracy is now in question. (Hamid flat out denies that these facts matter: “We can debate that, but…”) What’s important to ‘guardians of democracy’ like Hamid is only that Democrats “will lose their shit and lose their minds.” That they’ll do so because “they can no longer think rationally” and will obstinately refuse to recognize the results of a fair election is, for some reason, to be ignored.

…

The radical left has outsized institutional power today. Throughout the Trump Presidency, this year especially, they’ve converted their beachheads in our major institutions into dominance of them. Liberals blame this turn of events on Trump’s provocations, but, more than anything, what it demonstrates is the wartime conservative’s view that the radical left had to be squarely confronted. And it’s appeasement-thinking like Young’s and Hamid’s that allowed the radical left to establish such strong beachheads in the first place. 

[trans-advice]

Actor Michael D. Cohen Has Something to Share: ‘I Transitioned’

Actor Michael D. Cohen in Burbank, Calif. on April 16, 2019.

“We need more sweat!”

On that command, a production assistant takes a spray bottle filled with glycerin and scurries over to actor Michael D. Cohen, making his bald head glisten as a crew stands by at a studio in Burbank, Calif. They’re filming the fifth season of Henry Danger, a farcical superhero saga that is Nickelodeon’s longest running live-action sitcom. In it, Cohen plays a character named Schwoz, a quirky genius who aids the show’s good guys much as Q aids James Bond. In this scene, as a goof, Schwoz is leading some of the show’s younger actors through an aerobic workout. Cameras roll as Cohen, clad in spandex and now suitably sweaty, breaks into action. “Your life begins where your comfort zone ends!” he barks while huffing through the routine.

It’s just a line that Cohen is delivering in his character’s silly accent. But it also expresses an idea that the actor has come to understand intimately, one he is ready to embrace again, whatever it might mean for his future. Spurred in part by the political climate — which in recent years has seen fraught public reckonings around issues related to gender — Cohen wants to publicly disclose a private fact that he has been sharing with colleagues on the set of Henry Danger: Nearly twenty years ago, he transitioned from female to male.

“I was misgendered at birth,” Cohen says. “I identify as male, and I am proud that I have had a transgender experience — a transgender journey.”

Today, there are more actors than ever who are open about having had, as Cohen puts it, a transgender journey. This is in part because there is a proliferation of shows, including Pose and Transparent, that are portraying nuanced transgender characters. But Cohen is rare in that he worked in the entertainment industry for more than two decades before he chose to make this disclosure.

In many ways, the environment is far more welcoming than it was when Cohen first transitioned, back when issues of gender identity were largely relegated to spectacles like The Jerry Springer Show. In Hollywood, figures like Laverne Cox and Asia Kate Dillon have nabbed major roles, helping to shift mindsets among producers and audiences alike. More broadly, there is unprecedented awareness about LGBTQ issues, in courts and legislatures as well as the cultural zeitgeist. Yet that visibility has also spurred backlash from conservatives who cast transgender and gender nonconforming people as a threat to societal norms.

Cohen does not use the word transgender to describe himself, but he does view himself as part of a community that typically embraces that label, and he didn’t feel he could be an outspoken advocate until he made his history known. The actor has grown restless while watching the Trump administration roll back protections for transgender people in schools and the military, as Republicans have fought bills that would protect them from discrimination in public spaces.

“This crazy backlash and oppression of rights is happening right in front of me. I can’t stay silent,” Cohen says. “The level of — let’s be polite — misunderstanding around trans issues is so profound and so destructive. When you disempower one population, you disempower everybody.”

It’s a chilly April evening in L.A., and I’m sitting with Cohen on the otherwise empty patio of a sleek restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. One of the first things you notice about him is the same thing casting directors do: he’s short, just over five feet tall. Tonight, his big eyes are framed under a flat cap and he’s sporting salt-and-pepper stubble that will be shaved before filming starts the next day. As we talk, Cohen has a tendency to fiddle with the cuff of his blue blazer. The Canadian-born actor also has a tendency to crack jokes, displaying the comedic talents that have propelled his career. When asked about how it’s been having the name Michael Cohen lately, for instance, he says that he’s had it: “I’m thinking of changing my name to Paul Manafort.”

Today, a central struggle for openly transgender actors is combatting the expectation that they should play transgender characters. If Cohen has been hemmed in, it’s only by the perception that he’s a character actor — a type of thespian he defines as “not good looking enough to sleep with a leading woman.”

He recalls watching The Carol Burnett Show as a kid in Winnipeg, marveling at the way that television can be unifying for people laughing together on a couch “regardless of whatever else is happening in that family unit.” Though Cohen always wanted to be an actor, there was a time early in his career when he focused on behind-the-scenes work and voice acting instead. “I think I loved acting so much,” he says, “that I didn’t want to do it as a woman.” Eventually, his love of acting won out. Cohen played female roles until he transitioned in 2000, a process that, in his case, involved medical treatment as well as changes in how he presented himself socially.

Some years later, Cohen left the studios of Toronto for Hollywood and started landing roles at a greater clip. In 2014, he began appearing on Henry Danger. Today, more than 750,000 kids tune in to watch the sitcom each week. According to Nickelodeon — which, along with parent company Viacom, shares wholehearted support for Cohen and “diversity in all its forms” — it’s the number one live-action kids’ show on basic cable. Adults may have seen Cohen elsewhere, on sitcoms like Powerless, in films or commercials like a Wendy’s “Biggie Bag” spot that has been airing recently.

Actor Michael D. Cohen on the set of Henry Danger in Burbank, Calif. on April 16, 2019.

Actor Michael D. Cohen on the set of Henry Danger in Burbank, Calif. on April 16, 2019.

Ryan Pfluger for TIME

Another reason Cohen wants to publicly talk about his history now is that he is preparing to put on a new production, a play about his life that has been in the making for the past fifteen years. In the one-man show that he wrote and stars in — called “4 Cubits Make a Man,” a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian specimen — he chronicles how he came to grips with his identity, as well as how he navigated family, romantic relationships and widespread ideas about what makes someone a man.

“It is not random, it is not arbitrary, it is not chosen,” he says of gender identity. “It’s like trying to negotiate with gravity.”

The play, funny enough to get the audience through the raw pain of many scenes, centers on this tension. “In my experience, I was born male. What my body said about it was irrelevant,” Cohen says. “No matter how hard I tried, it was not up for negotiation. Believe me, it would have been so convenient if I was actually a woman.”

People like him are not, as some social conservatives have suggested in fiery debates about LGBTQ rights, the product of “radical ideology” spreading around the Internet or a figment of anyone’s imagination, he says. “My chromosomes do not dictate my gender. I’m a man,” Cohen says. “It’s not that hard.”

In the play, Cohen also explains why he does not describe himself as transgender.

He understands that this word is commonly used by people who identify with a gender other than the sex they were assigned at birth. Many people “feel that does reflect their identity and they’re very comfortable with that, and that’s completely valid,” he says. But, for him, the term feels off, and he does not want to make compromises about how he describes himself at this point in his life. “I have worked so hard to get to the truth and I’ve taken on labels in the past that didn’t feel true for the sake of convenience at that moment,” he says. While the word transgender may describe his past or his transition, he says, he has always felt his “core being” was male, and so that is the language he uses.

Cohen knows that may seem complicated. But that comes with the territory. He believes that animus toward people like him — however they identify — comes in part from the fact that their existence complicates simple maxims about gender. That is part of what has made transgender people a target in political battles over issues like the sports, religious freedom and civil rights. And Cohen wants to stand with them. “These are my people. I belong to this group,” he says of Americans who have been affected by policies like the Trump Administration’s guidance on Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.

Though Nickelodeon has been supportive, Cohen knows this is a complicated time to be making this disclosure in Hollywood, too. The entertainment industry continues to grapple with what it means to be inclusive, and while LGBTQ issues are intermingling with kids’ programming more than in the past, sensitivities remain. Cohen is hopeful about the message that his continued presence on the show — which has filmed more than 100 episodes and was recently picked up for 10 more — will send to young viewers who are attuned to issues of gender identity. Yet he is also prepared for backlash from parents.

“People don’t understand. They think this has to do with sexuality and it doesn’t. They think this has to do with pushing an agenda on kids and it doesn’t,” he says. “What it does is send a message to kids that whoever they are, however they identify, that’s celebrated and valued and okay.”

There’s something about Cohen that kids respond to, the producers of Henry Danger say. Maybe it’s his small stature. Maybe it’s his talent for physical comedy. Maybe it’s the feeling that Schwoz is a fantastical bridge between the grownup and kid worlds.

Chris Nowak, the showrunner for Henry Danger, says that colleagues respect what Cohen has told them but continue to see him as they always have: “Just a guy who’s real good at his job.” Jace Norman, a teen heartthrob who plays the show’s protagonist, Henry Hart, says in an email that the news “didn’t change anything about the high level of respect and admiration I have for the guy,” and thinks “it’s in the best interest of the entire world to have every type of person represented on TV.”

On set, Cohen’s news seems to have been processed with little hubbub. Of far more concern is the timing for delivering jokes as he flees, still in his spandex getup, from a frazzled woman who has traveled back from the future to warn everyone that humanity will be enslaved by robots. As she pursues him, Schwoz zips frantically around the show’s secret superhero lair like he’s in a Benny Hill chase scene. In between takes, he jokes that, for this particular episode, he has been drawing inspiration from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

However frivolous it is, when the episode airs, it will reflect a serious reality back to the actor: that the world sees him as he sees himself, a guy who plays another guy on TV. And he hopes that sharing the fuller picture might make the idea of disclosure less uncomfortable for others. “If I tell my truth,” Cohen says, “that gives other people permission to tell theirs too.”

Write to Katy Steinmetz at katy.steinmetz@time.com.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Over the weekend at least 31 people were killed in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. In the Texas shooting, the gunman’s attack appears to have been motivated by his white supremacist beliefs; the 21-year-old white man allegedly wrote that his attack was in response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” echoing language that President Trump has used to talk about immigrants. (So far, there’s no indication of a similar motive in the Ohio shooting.)

On Monday, Trump addressed the attacks, saying “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” But many people believe Trump helped fuel the Texas shooter, and this isn’t the first time his rhetoric has been criticized for sparking violence. Some 2020 presidential candidates, like Beto O’Rourke, squarely place the blame for what happened in El Paso at the feet of the president. At the same time, many Democrats have called for increased restrictions on gun ownership in the U.S. — an issue that seems unlikely to get passed by this Congress.

So how will what happened in El Paso affect the conversation around gun laws — and immigration — in 2020? And what does this mean for the growing problem of violent white extremism in the U.S.?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Well, we can probably expect a spike in support for stricter gun laws. Previous mass shootings, like Parkland, have certainly had that effect.

Although those spikes do tend to fade after a few weeks — probably because the shootings fade from the headlines. That said, overall support for gun regulations has increased this decade.

And we might even be starting to see the dam of gridlocked legislative action break as a result. After the Parkland shooting, for instance, Florida’s all-Republican government passed some moderate gun-control laws.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): That’s right. There is a cumulative effect even if there’s also a short-term boom-and-bust cycle after significant events. During the midterm elections, for instance, more Democrats than Republicans rated gun policy as a high-priority issue, which is a departure from the old-school conventional wisdom that guns were supposed to rally Republican voters.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): It’ll be interesting, too, to see how much of the conversation going forward is about gun control and how much is about the issue of combating white nationalist extremism and terrorism.

The two are related insofar as white nationalist attacks like the one in El Paso are committed using guns, but the El Paso attack also highlighted just how common deadly white nationalist extremist attacks are becoming and how the government seems pretty ill-equipped to respond — separate from broader conversations on stricter gun laws.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): One thing I think might happen is that even some anti-gun-control Republicans will stop describing illegal immigration from Mexico as an “invasion,” which is language the alleged shooter reportedly used to describe the motivations for his attack.

But even though some Republicans — maybe even Trump, I’m not sure — will probably dial down the white nationalist rhetoric, I think the only movement on gun control will happen on the left. Or Democrats will become even more unabashedly party of gun control.

natesilver: Do any of the Democratic candidates have really aggressive policies on guns, e.g. a proposal to ban handguns? It seems like there actually isn’t that much daylight between the various Democrats on policy solutions, so it’s mostly a matter of how much they emphasize guns versus other issues. And how much they are willing to talk about race versus other issues.

perry: Cory Booker has a proposal to require a license to own a gun that I am not sure Joe Biden would endorse (since Biden is running as the person who can appeal to more conservative voters). But generally most Democrats support: 1) expanding background checks, 2) banning assault weapons, and 3) ban high-capacity magazines.

nrakich: And these proposals are overwhelmingly popular not just with Democrats, but the public as a whole, too.

ameliatd: And also fairly effective! At least according to this round-up of experts from 2017.

nrakich: But given how far left (and into unpopular general-election territory) Democrats have gone on some other issues, like decriminalizing border crossings, I guess it’s somewhat surprising that no one has gone further left on guns? But we still have several months to go.

perry: In reaction to the shooting in El Paso, I think the Democratic candidates are going to speak more openly about racism. O’Rourke in particular is really speaking bluntly about how Trump has fomented white nationalism in a way that I expect other candidates will mirror.

sarahf: So something we’re all touching on here is that this conversation isn’t just going to be about increased calls for stricter gun laws. It’s also going to be about how the president’s rhetoric may be driving some of the violence we’re seeing, especially as it pertains to intolerance regarding immigrants in the U.S.

Is that fair?

ameliatd: I think that’s fair, Sarah. After other mass shootings, it’s been easier for the public and politicians to seize on lots of different explanations (and make lots of different arguments about how to respond) because the shooter’s motive wasn’t clear. Here, the link to white supremacy was so obvious that Trump condemned it as such, although he didn’t do it in a way that addressed his own inflammatory rhetoric. But it does mean that the conversation may end up focusing on race and Trump’s rhetoric rather than gun control.

natesilver: And you already had several of the Democratic candidates happy to call the president a racist. In fact, it’s arguably a pretty core part of the strategy for Democrats who are running on liberal identity politics, for lack of a better term, or who are saying Trump is a historic evil or anomaly who must be stopped.

nrakich: Agreed, Amelia. And I think both those issues play well for Democrats politically in places like the suburbs, where they hope to build on 2018 gains in 2020.

Although swing voters may feel that some racial-justice issues, like reparations, go too far, I still think that many can get behind condemning racist and violence-inciting rhetoric.

Even some of Trump supporters say they wish he would tweet less!

ameliatd: Not to mention, a majority of Americans already think Trump encourages white supremacists.

perry: This gets into the whole debate about how Democrats won in 2018 and how they should run in 2020. Broadly speaking, there is a bloc of Democrats who thinks 2018 was won on health care and that the party should continue to focus on populist issues and avoid talking too much talk about Trump’s comments, which they think would focus the debate on the country’s growing racial diversity and drive away some white voters. And then there is the bloc who thinks we are already in a national debate about race and identity because of Trump and there is no way to sidestep that.

Both camps have valid arguments, and there are obviously ways to both run an anti-racist and populist campaign, but I also think this incident increases the salience of racial issues.

nrakich: Right, Perry, but I think there are safer ways to run on race (e.g., condemning white supremacy) and riskier ways (e.g., calling for reparations).

Nor is decrying racist rhetoric mutually exclusive with talking about issues like health care.

Voters are smart enough to vote on multiple things at once, and since health care is a policy question and rhetoric is a question of tone, I think they’re especially non-mutually-exclusive.

natesilver: It’s not the conversation that, say, Pete Buttigieg wants to be having, though. Or Bernie Sanders. Or Elizabeth Warren.

sarahf: And why is that? Is it because it risks politicizing the topic of gun violence in the U.S. even more?

natesilver: Maybe they’re in different categories. But I think Buttigieg has had trouble relating to voters of color, for all sorts of reasons. For Warren and Sanders, they’re running on a platform of economic change — or “economic justice,” if you prefer — which of course is correlated in lots of ways with racial justice, but that’s nonetheless a real point of debate in Democratic circles, and maybe one they’d rather avoid.

sarahf: So as Amelia mentioned earlier, what sets this shooting apart from some other (although not all) mass shootings is its link to white extremist ideology. And so I wonder what impact that will have on public opinion moving forward, including how Americans think about aspects of Trump’s rhetoric.

ameliatd: It’s really hard to draw a direct line between a politician’s rhetoric and a particular act of violence. But I’m working on a story looking at the research on this topic, and pretty much all of the social scientists I’ve spoken with agree that hostile political rhetoric, particularly from someone as influential as a president, can embolden people who already had prejudiced views or were prone to violence.

perry: This is really a conversation about Trump, right?

The general public is against white supremacist language and against mass shootings. So the core question is whether Trump will stop invoking the ideas expressed by the shooter in El Paso, and whether he can reframe his rhetoric and approach to make it clear he is against increased immigration, and not Latinos and nonwhite people in the U.S.

natesilver: Yeah, it’s a conversation about Trump. I feel like people are beating around the bush too much. It’s a conversation about Trump.

sarahf: That’s fair, but it’s more than Trump, too. It’s also some of the commentary on Fox News and in right-wing conspiracy theories. Granted, Trump has had a role in bringing these ideas into the mainstream, but I’d say the problem is bigger than him, too.

perry: But we had a person kill a lot of people while invoking language that the president and his team have regularly used. I don’t think that most Americans view the country as facing an “invasion” of immigrants. Or that most Americans approve of Trump’s language. Other Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, are not talking about immigrant invasions all the time.

So my big questions are: “Will Trump stop invoking these ideas?” and “Will the Republican Party push him to stop?” I think the answer to both these questions is maybe.

Do others agree?

sarahf: I don’t know. Right now there seems to be more of a distancing from the language Trump and his team has used more than a rebuke. Trump’s acting White House chief of staff, for instance, told ABC News that he doesn’t think it’s fair to blame Trump and that the problem predates his administration.

ameliatd: Right, the answer so far seems to be that these shootings haven’t yet convinced Trump’s allies to start condemning his language.

natesilver: Not to be too both-sides-y, but let’s not forget the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting in this discussion where a gunman targeted Republican legislators. So, yes, maybe we have a rising tide of political violence overall, of which Trump’s rhetoric plays an important part, but it’s not necessarily the only cause.

perry: But if the White House is emphasizing that it’s opposed to white supremacy Trump may have to stop saying things white nationalists say.

Trump’s re-election campaign has already put out more than 2,000 Facebook ads that include the word “invasion” this year as part of his message on immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to an analysis by The New York Times. So did Saturday end that? I think the answer might be yes. I’m not sure, but that could be at least one potential shift.

natesilver: Do we really expect Trump to back down though? He seems to be convinced that this stuff is central to his re-election efforts. And he’s not the sort of guy who stops doing something just because people tell him to stop doing it.

ameliatd: I also think the fact that he’s being attacked as racist by many of the Democratic candidates could make him dig in even further.

nrakich: The White House also condemned white supremacy after Charlottesville, but of course, Trump later returned to his inflammatory rhetoric.

perry: I think this shooting is different than Charlottesville, though. Or anything else that has happened. People were literally killed by someone who invoked the same language as the president.

I don’t want to suggest something is a game-changer, but I think this is potentially an important moment. Because even if, say, Trump does not change, maybe the Republican Party shifts in some way?

nrakich: A woman died in Charlottesville, too.

I am just skeptical of any claims that “this time it’s different.”

The “invasion” language may disappear in the short term because it will be seen as too inflammatory for the next couple months. But I don’t think there will be any kind of permanent shift.

perry: That’s a reasonable position, and probably the right one.

But if Trump stops describing what’s happening at the southern border as an “invasion,” that would be significant. Words, in my view, do matter.

And that “invasion” framing is really racist.

What I’m really trying to isolate here is that a person killed people using the same words the president has used to stoke fears about immigrants in the U.S.

Does that make what happened in El Paso different than what happened in Charlottesville? “No” is probably the right answer. But I’m not sure.

nrakich: Also, this isn’t the first time during the Trump administration that a gun was used to murder multiple people as part of a hate crime — the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting targeted Jews, for example.

ameliatd: I do think the lack of condemnation from Republicans is significant. When the response is distancing, not censure, that sends a signal to Trump. But I do think you’re right, Perry, that this is an important moment for Trump and the GOP.

sarahf: The gunman also allegedly wrote that his views “predate Trump,” perhaps in anticipation of the blowback. And given that more Republicans haven’t spoken out, I’m not sure how this will change the conversation around gun violence or the fact that Trump’s rhetoric can inspire violence, other than maybe Republicans and Democrats further retreat into their partisan camps.

perry: I don’t think that Americans’ views on gun will change much, in part because most Americans, even a significant bloc of Republicans, already favor a lot of gun control measures. Americans overall are also supportive of immigration and on average are growing less prejudiced since Trump’s election (not more), so I think incidents like the El Paso shooting are likely to further those those trends — not reverse them.

And so I think we’re likely to see more polls showing that certain kinds of racial rhetoric should be out of bounds. For instance, Trump telling female congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries was very unpopular (although a majority of Republicans said that the attacks were acceptable).

natesilver: The gun control discussion is also REALLY complicated by the fact that Wyoming has as many senators as California. The Senate has big, built-in bias toward rural states, and few issues have a stronger urban-rural divide than guns do.

ameliatd: It’s at least possible that we’ll see some more movement on something like red-flag laws, though, right? These are laws that would help temporarily take guns away from people who are at a high risk of violence, and that have passed in a significant number of states since the Parkland shooting last year. And they seem to be getting some support from Republicans in Congress.

nrakich: The (Republican) governor of Ohio proposed one on Tuesday.

ameliatd: And that’s a policy that the NRA has supported in the abstract — although they’ve also worked to water them down when they’ve actually been introduced.

natesilver: There is some bipartisan support for those kinds of laws. But does it have McConnell’s support? I’d defer to Perry on all things McConnell, but it does seem as if McConnell isn’t the kind of guy who wants to give any victory to gun control advocates, even a small one.

perry: I think the gun policy debate is basically intractable for now. Republicans control the Senate, the presidency and a lot of state governments, and they are not moving on that issue — even if the public becomes even more pro-gun control.

sarahf: So if the debate on gun policy is intractable, like Perry says, where do you see the conversation on Americans’ tolerance for racist rhetoric headed?

perry: I think this racist rhetoric from Trump, Fox News and other parts of the Republican Party can change. And I think it will. Will Trump say racist things in the future? Of course. But I think the worst of it, i.e. the “invasion” rhetoric and telling members of Congress to go back to their countries, might die down.

I’m also not totally convinced that Trump is confident that his racial rhetoric makes great politics. So I think he might try harder to figure out how to speak and act in ways that are critical of immigration but also don’t seem targeted at people of color.

ameliatd: I agree that the conversation about Trump’s rhetoric has more staying power — both because it’s so inflammatory and racist and because it’s connected to his broader anti-immigrant posture. You can’t definitively say that Trump’s language is directly sparking violence, but I do think people intuitively understand that when a president talks this way, it brings radical, fringe-y voices into the mainstream and normalizes them. I guess I’m just not convinced he’s going to tone down his language.

nrakich: I think the answer is “at the margin”? Maybe we see a couple more minor gun laws, maybe a pause in racist rhetoric. But overall, I don’t think the big picture will change very much.

[berniesrevolution]

WARNING: LONG ARTICLE! (It’s worth it, though)

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.

By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting.

The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

Bruenig, the Post columnist, is perhaps the most prominently placed of a small but increasingly visible group of young writers unabashedly advocating for democratic socialism. In writing her attention-grabbing article, she helped elevate a discussion that has long taken place on Twitter. Of course, the relative merits of socialism—and Marxism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, you name it—have been debated in lefty journals and academic circles for a century or more. Members of this new generation, however, aren’t just talking among themselves; they’re trying to take socialism mainstream. And unlike their predecessors, they have reason to think Americans will take their ideas seriously.

They’ve got a double challenge. The first is to convince skeptical Americans that, despite what they may have learned in high school, socialism doesn’t have to mean Stalinism, and it doesn’t lead inexorably to the gulags of Soviet Russia or the starvation of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. The second may be even trickier. They must explain how their version of socialism fits, or doesn’t, into the American political system while showing how, specifically, it is distinct from traditional Democratic Party liberalism. In other words, they must not only defend socialism in the twenty-first century; they must define it.

Nathan Robinson hated Bernie Sanders before he loved him.

It was the fall of 2015. Robinson, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and, at the time, a recent law school graduate, had been steeped in socialist thought since high school, when he discovered the writings of anarchistic socialists like Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky. Socialism has always been dogged by the question of whether it’s possible to participate in electoral politics while remaining truly radical. Like many leftists, Robinson initially saw Sanders as an example of intolerable compromise.

“Based on Senator Bernie Sanders’s public statements, one of the following things must be true,” he declared on his blog in October 2015. “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it.” Sanders, he explained in a follow-up post, was “not asking for public ownership of the major sectors of the economy,” but merely calling for expanded welfare and regulations. “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”

(Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, sees socialism not as an economic platform, but as a strong commitment to certain principles.)

Those turned out to be among Robinson’s last blog posts. In January 2016, he launched Current Affairs, a deeply irreverent leftist magazine, with backing from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Despite being essentially a one-man operation, Current Affairs quickly developed a substantial following on the left thanks to Robinson’s extraordinary writing talent—especially his knack for composing viral takedowns of conservative intellectual hucksters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

By 2017, Robinson seemed to have fully shed his earlier hostility toward Sandersian socialism. Here he was, last summer, writing on the difference between leftism and liberalism: “As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: ‘We’re capitalist.’ When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: ‘No.’ Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two.”

That’s a long way from calling Sanders an ignoramus or a liar. What happened?

Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

“Those of us who consider ourselves on the more radical left were kind of disdainful of the political system,” said Robinson. “It was a real minority within Occupy saying you should even contest elections.” Sanders’s tantalizingly strong primary run—roughly equivalent to the MIT basketball team making the Final Four—made some lefties reconsider. For the first time, it seemed as though they could actually win. But winning requires engaging in politics, and politics requires some degree of pragmatism—a recognition that the achievable will always fall short of the ideal. That, in turn, requires giving up the ideological purity of the fringe.

Consider Jacobin magazine, the leading publication of the Millennial far left. It’s a magazine that wears its Marxist affections on its sleeve, with the tagline “Reason in Revolt.” Across the first seventeen issues, by my count, the word “Marx” or its derivations appeared an average of about forty times. But, since then—that is, beginning in summer 2015, when people started feeling the Bern—that’s fallen to only about twelve times on average.

Bhaskar Sunkara founded Jacobin in 2011, while an undergraduate at George Washington University—which now makes him, at age twenty-nine, something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists. The magazine doesn’t have a strict party line. In May 2015, its website ran dueling pieces on Sanders’s candidacy. One, by Ashley Smith, called Sanders’s campaign an “obstacle” to the formation of a new left. But the other, by Sunkara, argued that the left should welcome Bernie’s run, “even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.”

Since then, while Sunkara continues to distinguish in theory between Sandersism and full-blown socialism, Bernie has practically become the magazine’s mascot. A Jacobin Facebook ad, which reads, “It’s not you, it’s capitalism,” features an image of Sanders superimposed over the Jacobin logo. The winter 2016 issue featured a cartoon of Sanders on its cover, alongside Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party. And a health care–focused issue from earlier this year reads as an extended brief in favor of Medicare for All, Bernie’s single-payer plan, featuring a fawning Q&A with Sanders. The editor’s note that opens the issue begins, “When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won . . .” To cast Medicare for All—not even fully socialized medicine, since it would nationalize insurance, but not providers—in such grandiose terms is a striking shift of the socialist goalposts.

(Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, is at age twenty-nine something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists.)

“We push for social democratic reforms in the here and now,” Sunkara told me, though he insisted that his long-term vision remained as radical as ever. “There’s a need to at least dabble a little bit more with strategy and some more policy-oriented stuff, instead of just merely trying to build an opposition movement and mainly talk about theory.”

Not everyone on the left is happy about it. Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism. Taking issue with an op-ed by Sunkara in the New York Times, deBoer worried that the Jacobin editor’s “alternative” vision “does not look very different from a more humane, more nurturing liberal capitalist state.”

Nathan Robinson, who published deBoer’s piece, and is currently at work on a book about what socialism means to young people, doesn’t deny that his own thinking has become less doctrinaire. “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles,” he said. “It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”

For Robinson, the heart of socialism is not this or that policy, but rather the fundamental values that should drive our politics. During the election, Hillary Clinton bragged about having the support of “real billionaires” like Mark Cuban and Michael Bloomberg, in a shot at Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances. Obama, after he left office, was promptly seen vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island and partying with celebrities on billionaire David Geffen’s yacht. That makes someone like Robinson skeptical that the Democratic Party is actually committed to reducing inequality—which, after all, would require taking back some of the wealth of people like David Geffen.

A socialist, in other words, is hungry for a little class warfare. Sunkara, in the intro to his Sanders interview in Jacobin, wrote that while Sanders “may share some of the same policy goals as progressives like Elizabeth Warren,” the difference is his “confrontational vision of social change,” which involves calling out “the millionaires and billionaires” who are hoarding too much wealth.

Or, as Robinson put it in a Current Affairs essay (published under a pen name, a habit he has since dropped) titled “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich,”

After all, there are plenty of people on this earth who die—or who watch their loved ones die—because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets and in cars, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. All of this is beyond dispute. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s therefore deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be.

If Sanders and the prospect of political power have made some preexisting radical leftists start talking more like New Deal liberals, the even bigger effect of his prominence has been compositional: by defining socialism in an especially capacious and inviting way, he pulled in people who might otherwise still identify as liberal or progressive. “What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King Jr. stated in similar terms twenty years later, and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security,” he said in his Georgetown speech in November 2015. “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.”

This kind of talk is enough to make a certain kind of liberal’s eyes roll clean out of her head. What Democrat doesn’t believe in those things? But Sanders couldn’t have claimed this ideological real estate if his overwhelmingly Millennial supporters didn’t feel that mainstream liberals—embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment that lined up behind her—had abandoned it.

Briahna Gray, a contributing editor at Current Affairs who was recently hired as a politics editor at the Intercept, told me she probably wouldn’t have identified as a socialist in 2015. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said. Gray, a Harvard Law School–educated lawyer, has made a name for herself by embodying an intersection of identities that’s rare in media: a leftist, Sanders-supporting black woman. That has given her credibility to puncture the “Bernie bro” stereotype and take on Sanders critics who dismiss his movement as insufficiently attuned to racial or gender issues.

(Briahna Gray, an editor at the Intercept, came to socialism more recently. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said.)

“The most disappointing part of the 2016 primary was centrist candidates convincing Americans that policies that are implemented in wealthy nations all over the world, much less wealthy than ours, are completely a fantasy world,” she said. (Clinton declared during a primary debate that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass,” and later ridiculed Sanders in her campaign memoir for essentially promising Americans free ponies.) This was a recurring theme in conversations with young socialists. To their ears, the term “liberal” has come to represent an intolerably unimaginative posture toward politics: less “Yes we can” than “Not so fast.”

Still, the worldview Gray sketched out—“where socialism is used to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism”—sounded like good old Keynesian liberalism. If you’re someone who believes a word should have a fixed meaning over time, or who believes in the importance of the liberal tradition, then this approach—socialism as liberalism, just more liberal—can be deeply exasperating. Sean Wilentz, a historian and longtime friend of the Clintons, captured some of this frustration in a recent essay in the Democracy journal. “[T]here is something essentially dishonest about trying to assimilate the New Deal legacy as ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote, referring to the speech in which Sanders tied himself to Franklin Roosevelt.

There’s no denying that much of what today’s socialists are demanding fits within the liberal tradition of a Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone. Advocating something like single-payer health care, but calling yourself a socialist, can look like mere positioning. In fact, the socialist writers I spoke with didn’t really have a problem with that. “Part of it is just a rhetorical claim,” said Ryan Cooper, an opinion writer at the Week who identifies as a democratic socialist. He said that the core aspects of his political agenda are creating a “complete welfare state” and reducing inequality by democratizing ownership of capital. Why use a term as loaded as socialism to describe those ideals? “The point is to say, ‘Here’s a left,’ in a way that just could not possibly be co-opted by Andrew Cuomo types.”

Nathan Robinson echoed the sentiment. “I used to call myself ‘progressive,’ and then the term became used by everybody, and now it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “If you’re trying to say, ‘I’m further to the left than Obama and the Clintons,’ you’re stuck!” (Disclosure: I’m friendly with Cooper, who is a former Washington Monthly web editor, and Robinson.)

The divide may owe as much to differences in memory as to ideology. If you’re old enough to remember Democrats getting absolutely creamed in three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, then you’re old enough to remember them seemingly needing to pivot to the center to regain power in 1992. They didn’t compromise their core values (they would love a complete welfare state, if only it were possible), they just did what they had to do to win votes from what looked like an overwhelmingly conservative electorate. That included getting cozier with Wall Street and members of the plutocracy to ensure a stream of campaign funding that could rival the right’s.

But if the 1980s are when you were born, that’s not your experience. You remember that the Bill Clinton years were pretty good—but yielded George W. Bush. We got eight years of Obama—then Trump. If cautious, corporate-friendly liberalism gives way time after time to revanchist Republican administrations, is it really doing its job? If liberal figureheads stop even talking about a truly ambitious social safety net, how long should we keep assuming that’s what they want, deep down? Someone under thirty-five years old has no memory of a Democratic presidential nominee, let alone president, to the ideological left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, that young person is broke: a report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve recently warned that households headed by ’80s babies have 34 percent less wealth than expected based on earlier generations at that age, and are thus “at greatest risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ for wealth accumulation.”

Telling a young radical that, despite all their sharp disagreements with the liberal mainstream, they’re really a part of it, is a bit like telling a football fan that the Cleveland Browns are actually good because they won some championships in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s fair to wonder how many years a political movement can distance itself from certain principles before it runs the risk of a rival movement claiming them for its own.

(It must be said, too, that “liberal” is an unfortunate term. It belongs to that category of words—like “sanction” or“oversight”—that mean both a thing and its opposite; thus a “classical liberal” is really a free-market conservative. An acute instance of this problem is the even more awful “neoliberal,” which itself has two meanings: one is simply Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire capitalism; the other, elaborated in the pages of this magazine in the 1980s, is more akin to the “New Democrat” philosophy of Bill Clinton. But these definitions overlap, because Clinton added financial deregulation to the agenda.)

It’s a bit unfair to ask the term “liberal” to cover every political position to the left of conservative and to the right of seizing the factories. The socialist label might be annoying, but it’s useful. Of course, the policies Bernie Sanders and many of his followers are calling for fit within the American liberal tradition, if you go back far enough. But to insist that they therefore owe loyalty to liberalism itself is to get the point of political movements backward. Ask not what you can do for your ideology; ask what your ideology can do for you. If young people increasingly feel like liberalism as it exists today doesn’t represent their values, then perhaps it’s up to liberalism to win them back.

If you think the Millennial socialist movement is only about protesting Clintonism, however, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The tricky part of advancing ideas under the banner of “socialism” is threading the needle between two contradictory critiques. The first is an evergreen: that real-world socialism inevitably leads to catastrophe and dictatorship, and only someone totally ignorant of history could deny this. (A representative headline in the National Review: “Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.”) The second critique, as we’ve seen, is that self-identified socialists actually aren’t socialists. (David Brooks managed to make both these points at once in a recent column. The idea that capitalism is inherently flawed, he wrote, has “been rejected by most on the left.” Nonetheless, today’s progressive left, drunk on populism and identity politics, “seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.”)

Few people seem to be working harder to tackle that challenge than Matt Bruenig, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the People’s Policy Project, a one-man socialist think tank—and the husband and intellectual teammate of Liz Bruenig, the Washington Post columnist. I met them for lunch near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., in April. Former high school sweethearts who met on the debate team in Arlington, Texas, they’re an odd couple, by which I mean both that they are different from each other and that they are individually odd. Matt is tall and scruffy, with a paunch and a patchy beard. Liz is barely five feet tall and had her hair pulled into a tidy bun the day we met. He is hyper-analytical and obsessed with economic policy. She is a religious Catholic—her pro-life views have made her enemies on the left, whereas Matt, she joked, “loves abortion”—and more concerned with philosophical questions than policy specifics. “I make a much more romantic case for socialism than Matt does,” she said.

(Matt Bruenig’s one-man think tank, the People’s Policy Project, specializes in left-wing policy wonkery.)

Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle.

“We went to Twitter boot camp,” Liz said.

“Who was the drill sergeant?”

“Me.”

In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.

(Elizabeth Bruenig, a twenty-seven-year-old columnist at the Washington Post, has devoted columns to making the case for socialism.)

The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in the Post, that “it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.” Much of Matt’s work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it’s hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we’re told, “mixed economies” or “social democracies”—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems.

But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns “financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP,” compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway’s government owns around 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. “There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,” Bruenig wrote a few months later—“and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN’s 2017 World Happiness Report.”

The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt’s most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a “social wealth fund,” which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, “but one owned collectively by society as a whole.”

Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway’s, started with oil money. Under Bruenig’s idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through “taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,” or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation’s wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.

In addition to arguing for a social wealth fund, Bruenig published a long paper authored by Ryan Cooper, the writer at the Week, and Peter Gowan, a Dublin-based researcher, arguing that the best response to the problem of housing affordability would be a massive new “social housing” project, in which the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years. Unlike traditional American public housing, this would be “designed to cater to people of various income levels, rather than just serving the ‘deserving poor.’ ” Again, they point to Europe for proof of concept: in the 1960s, facing a housing crisis, Sweden built one million social-housing units over the course of a decade, increasing its housing stock by a third. In Vienna, Austria, they report, “3 in 5 residents live in housing built, owned, or managed by the municipal government.”

(Continue Reading)

[alliluyevas]

thoughts on the whole krupskaya/lenin/armand love triangle (or whatever it was) thing?

First of all “love triangle or whatever it was” is a mood,thanks for putting it that way. Secondly, I have a LOT of thoughts on this andopinions, so you really have opened up a can of worms.

A lot of historians/commentators seem to take it for grantedthat there was an extramarital affair between Lenin and Inessa, but I don’tthink there’s enough historical evidence to make that assumption. Personally, Ithink that they probably did not go as far as having a sexual relationship, butobviously we will never know entirely. That’s just based on my reading of thesituation and the people involved and the historical evidence that exists.

I think it’s pretty obvious what Inessa’s feelings were,like in one letter to Lenin she explicitly tells him that she is in love withhim and it’s hard to get more clear-cut than that. Inessa also quite stronglybelieved in “free love” and open/non-monogamous relationships as a matter ofcommunist ideology and she doesn’t seem to have had an issue with pursuing amarried man, and it does seem like she was the one pursuing him. What is up fordebate is not whether she was interested in a relationship with him, becauseshe absolutely was—but rather, to what extent he reciprocated her feelings forhim and to what extent the relationship between them actually developed.

His letters to herare much more ambiguous—he vacillates between using the formal and the intimatepronouns to address her, which in my opinion could indicate a level ofdiscomfort with the intimacy that had developed between them—that is, he mighthave been backing off because he felt like he was crossing a boundary. He alsobrings up Nadya quite frequently when writing to Inessa, and often refers toher simply as “my wife” which might be a way of stressing their maritalrelationship either to Inessa or to himself. (Most of the references to Nadyaare quite neutral, it’s usually about what she’s been doing or what they aredoing together, they’re not particularly emotionally loaded one way or theother).

There’s also a sequence of letters where she’s telling himabout her belief in non-monogamous relationships and he writes back that hethinks that’s dangerous and the most stable form of relationship is between twopeople who are married and then she blows up at him and accuses him of thinkingshe’s a slut, and he apologizes and says he didn’t mean it that way. Andhonestly to me that does not read at all to me like something a person wouldwrite to their mistress. Like I’m not discounting that people can behypocritical about sex, but seeing as he wrote that TO INESSA it just seemslike they probably never actually slept together.

Also, Lenin was in general not a very sexual person (I feeldirty writing this portion of my response aksjdfergtyhj). He was moreconservative in his attitude towards sex and relationships than most of theother Bolsheviks—not in terms of supporting gender roles, but in terms ofputting a high premium on sexual fidelity and monogamy. In some ways, I thinkhe had very typical attitudes for someone from an upper-middle-class family inthe late 19th century, actually. He also felt uncomfortable withdiscussions of sex, didn’t appreciate sexual humor, and was kind of a bitprudish about the whole thing—he thought some of the other people in themovement focused too much on sexual topics and it should be kept in thebedroom. I’m not sure whether he was repressed/self-controlled or whether hejust didn’t have a very high sex drive or (probably?) both. Also, he almostcertainly didn’t have sex with anyone before he and Nadya got married when hewas twenty-seven. Partially because he was very shy with girls and partiallybecause he was more interested in books and political activism and partiallybecause it does seem like he placed a high premium on being married first. So Ijust feel like someone who remained a virgin until their late twenties probablyisn’t the type to be having sexually passionate extramarital affairs?

However, to give credence to other arguments, he clearly didhave a very strong connection with Inessa, and was very emotionally intimatewith her. So I suppose it’s possible that if their relationship felt strongenough, and since she pursued him and was clearly expressing interest in him,that he might have had sex with her? But again, we just don’t know. Basically,the available evidence suggests that they did have a very close emotional relationship,that she was attracted to him, that he quite probably was attracted to her aswell, and that he was experiencing astrong emotional conflict regarding betraying Nadya. I would argue that it wasprobably like…emotional cheating but not sexual.

With regards to Nadya, who we haven’t discussed much thisfar, she did apparently feel threatened over his relationship with Inessa, forwhat it’s worth. So whatever went on between them, she did feel like he had violatedher trust to some degree. The whole love triangle situation, and all theletters I am referring to, are from 1911-1912, which is the period thatwhatever went on between Lenin and Inessa went on. If they did have a sexualrelationship, it was during that period. After this period, he withdrew fromInessa and seems to have put his energies towards repairing his relationshipwith Nadya. Another thing that is important to recognize is that Nadya’sthyroid issues were getting worse during this period, and she finally did endup having a partial thyroidectomy in 1913 (that is, about a year after he brokeoff whatever was going on with Inessa). Lenin was by all accounts extremelysupportive and protective of her during her health crises and was verysolicitous of her comfort and well-being. I would not be surprised if herhealth issues contributed to his sense of guilt and encouraged him to break thingsoff with Inessa.

A lot of people talking about this love triangle, especiallypeople who do assume that Inessa was his “mistress”, seem to think that he wasbored with Nadya or not in love with her, or say that she was older than Inessaand not as “exciting” or what the fuck ever and I’m really offended by that suggestion.Not to mention that it has very little basis in historical fact, because heclearly continued to care very deeply for Nadya and to see her as his lifepartner. I would say that he probably had feelings for both of them, andultimately chose Nadya, rather than that he was in love with Inessa rather thanNadya or some bullshit. Like…it is pretty clear to me that he did not choose tostay with Nadya out of duty or social convention, but out of love, even if healso loved Inessa.

Also, it doesn’t end here, because a couple years after hehad withdrawn from his relationship with Inessa the two of them sort of…extendedfriendship towards her once more and were interacting with her a lot again,only this time her relations with them seem to be inarguably completelyplatonic. And even though Nadya had initially felt betrayed, she seemed totrust her husband with Inessa later and actually felt a great degree ofaffection and respect for her and the two of them actually became close friendsas well. This indicates to me that whatever was going on between Lenin andInessa was a) over and b) that she had forgiven them for it.

With regards to my personal feelings about this, it reallymakes me mad because even though Nadya forgave him I do feel like he clearlyupset her a lot and violated her trust to some degree and *knife emoji* do notmess with my girl. On the other hand, though, I’m glad they worked it out andeveryone stayed friends. Also a lot of the discourse about this love triangleis REALLY bad and pits women against each other and I’m not here for that. Soeven though I am pro-Nadya I am not anti-Inessa by any means.

Thank you for asking me this and I hope you enjoyed mythoughts and don’t think that I am letting my bias color my reading of thesituation, because I do HOPE that he didn’t actually physically cheat on her.

[dipulb3]

Looking to 2024, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem gets caught in GOP culture war over transgender athletes

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/looking-to-2024-south-dakota-gov-kristi-noem-gets-caught-in-gop-culture-war-over-transgender-athletes/

Looking to 2024, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem gets caught in GOP culture war over transgender athletes

After saying earlier this month she was “excited” to sign a bill preventing transgender ​students from competing in ​same-gender sports, Noem effectively killed the legislation last week that had been passed by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate — citing concerns the bill as-is would invite lawsuits.

On ​Monday, however, she followed up by issuing two executive orders that implemented a ban on people assigned ​male on their ​original birth certificates from participating in women’s sports in public high schools and colleges. That predictably sparked opposition from ​trans rights advocates who say the orders are unconstitutional and discriminatory because they reference the supposed harms of the participation of “males” in women’s athletics — an echo of the transphobic claim that transgender women are not women.

But the move also prompted criticism from conservatives, who claim the executive orders are unenforceable and toothless.

Noem’s action is the latest in a growing trend among Republican-leaning states, where GOP politicians are embracing laws and executive orders to limit the participation of transgender students in school-sponsored sports. In recent weeks, Republican governors in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee have all signed similar bills into law. There are dozens of other bills proposed by Republican lawmakers in states across the country. The subject has been discussed frequently in conservative media and featured prominently at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference.

All of that suggests Republicans have found a new way to drum up support in their base by challenging the rights of a minority group. It’s the latest front in their ongoing culture war, one that puts them in the familiar position of having to choose between social conservatives and the business community. It indicates the challenge Republicans have in balancing the cultural concerns of the party’s base with assembling a winning national coalition.

It also recalls the fight in 2016 over North Carolina’s so-called bathroom law that people at a government-run facility must use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to the ​sex on their birth certificate. ​In practice, the law meant that many transgender and nonbinary people were unable to use a restroom in government buildings, and felt unsafe to do so elsewhere in public. The law was enacted by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and sparked an immediate backlash in the form of economic boycotts and saw the relocation of two major sporting events — the NBA All-Star Game and part of the NCAA basketball tournament — out of the state. McCrory lost his bid for reelection later that year.

Some social conservatives say that in rejecting the original bill, Noem bowed to pressure from the business community and the fear of lawsuits ​– a fear Noem herself cited in her statement at the time. Business groups like the Sioux Falls Greater Chamber of Commerce, for instance, were opposed to the original bill.

“The chamber’s long-term policy is to not pass laws that are discriminatory in nature that would affect our economy,” said Debra Owen, the Sioux Falls chamber’s public policy director.

And Noem herself expressed concern the bill as worded would put college programs out of compliance with collegiate athletics governing bodies. Six colleges and universities in South Dakota belong to the NCAA, the largest such governing body.

Social conservatives were not convinced.

“What we saw play out in South Dakota is the divide within the Republican party, and the divide is between the elites … and the voters,” said Terry Schilling, the executive director of the American Principles Project. “Noem ultimately capitulated to the chambers of commerce, the NCAA, and gave them what they’re wanting.”

Noem has insisted the executive orders are temporary and has called the legislature to hold a special session to draft a new bill that addresses her concerns.

“She’s still vocally supportive of the issue, and is still excited to sign a bill” achieving the same result, said Ian Fury, a spokesman for the governor​.

Bubbling up at CPAC

Noem herself appeared poised to handle the ​competing constituencies effectively.

As the breakout star at CPAC, she touted her strident resistance to mask mandates and shutdown orders in South Dakota, even as ​her state has seen one of the highest per capita death rates from Covid-19, and governors across the country did otherwise during the pandemic. Unlike many potential presidential candidates who spoke there, Noem articulated a broad definition of what the party’s principles should be.

“We must more closely articulate to the American people that we are the only ones who respect them as human beings,” Noem said. “That we are the only ones who believe the American people have God-given rights. We are not here to tell you how to live your life, how to treat you like a child or criminal because you go to church or you defend yourself.”

But ​trans rights issues were already surfacing at CPAC. One panel focused on the perceived problems of allowing transgender ​girls to compete in girls’ school athletics, and multiple speakers criticized the Equality Act, passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections against discrimination over sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

And CPAC’s headline speaker, former President Donald Trump, asserted President Joe Biden was seeking to “destroy women’s sports.”

“We must protect the integrity of women’s sports. So important. Have to,” Trump said.

Focusing on children

Republicans have raised related topics in Congress, including at the recent confirmation hearing for Dr. Rachel Levine, Biden’s nominee for assistant health secretary and the first Senate-confirmed out transgender federal official. In a line of questioning criticized as transphobic, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky ​equated life-affirming medical treatments for trans kids with “genital mutilation.”

Meanwhile, a number of social conservative groups have taken up the issue of fighting against transgender rights and are focusing on issues involving children. Among them is the Family Research Council, which has lobbied on behalf of what it calls a “biblical worldview” and in opposition to what it refers to as a “gender ideology” that promotes transgender rights.

“There are a number of manifestations of this worldview and this idea which we see as harmful, many see as harmful,” said Travis Weber, the vice president for policy and government affairs at the Family Research Council. “I think many are saying, look, this needs to be addressed in our communities, in our states.”

Weber says the FRC has identified more than 90 pieces of legislation in states across the country to limit participation of transgender women in girls’ school sports or to ban gender transition procedures for minors.

The Human Rights Campaign is also tracking bills and counts 48 anti-transgender sports bills in 26 states.

But advocates for transgender people say the actions of Republicans in state legislatures are alarming​, and risks bringing real harm to the lives of kids who are already at risk.

“As trans people, we still very much live in a world where our existence is an act of resistance and our visibility is an act of bravery,” said Carrie Davis, the chief community officer at The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth.

“In the face of such constant, vitriolic rhetoric and a record number of anti-trans bills, it is crucial to show up and show support for transgender and nonbinary youth year-round,” she added.

While it’s unclear if the South Dakota legislature would actually take another look at the legislation in a special session this year, Noem continues to insist she’d support a ban under the right conditions.

“Governor Noem has been engaged in this very fight for years,” said Fury. “But we have to pursue this fight in a smart way, with the same type of strategic approach​” used by activists who oppose abortion rights.

Schilling, however, said it’s disappointing Noem cast her lot with what he characterized as the business wing of the GOP.

“The business elites have been so entrenched in the Republican party forever,” Schilling said. “They don’t like these cultural fights.”

[canadianabroadvery]

Canada's Conservatives are “completely clued out” about the unpopularity of hard-right social policies and are essentially “campaigning against themselves,” two leading political commentators argued in an online panel discussion last Monday.

Answering questions from Canada's National Observer editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood, columnists Bruce Livesey and Sandy Garossino spent an hour tackling wide-ranging questions about why today's Canadian conservative movement has moved so far to the right, its hopes for retaking power in the face of an increasingly progressive populace, and how evangelical Christians and Big Oil got a stranglehold on the right.

“The social conservative base is enormously powerful,” Livesey told Solomon Wood and the audience of 100 participants on the Zoom webinar, part of Conversations, sponsored by Canada's National Observer. “The reason (leadership rivals) Peter MacKay and Erin O'Toole have taken the positions they're doing — which are ludicrous in terms of ever trying to get elected — is because the base has this enormous social conservative element. In order to win the leadership, you've got to pander to them.”

But that's precisely what has lost them repeated elections, and will only worsen their chances over time, he said.

Livesey — an award-winning investigative journalist with experience on CBC's flagship shows The Fifth Estate and The National, Global News' 16×9, and PBS's Frontline — most recently did an analysis on the state of the Conservatives for the National Observer entitled, How Stephen Harper is destroying the Conservative party.

He said he interviewed between 25 and 30 sources for his story, and other than a couple political scientists as experts, focused almost entirely on hearing from Conservative members past and present.

“I tried to basically interview just Conservatives … people within the party, both from when they used to be called the PC (Progressive Conservative) party all the way up to the current generation,” Livesey said. “There's a lot of people who wouldn't talk to me … It was a big challenge; given that I was going to talk to them about Stephen Harper, there seemed to be a bit of a concern.”

But some did want to talk, and could be broadly lumped into two camps: the long-ousted progressive wing of the party, once nicknamed “Red Tories”; and the more recent alumni and strategists of the Harper era.

“If you talked to the sort of Red Tories — the 'liberal' wing of the party — there was no surprise there that they think the party's stuck in a ditch,” Livesey said. “The more interesting thing was finding the younger generation who were around Harper in some capacity, who are beginning to realize — having lost two back-to-back elections — that something was wrong.”

What exactly is wrong, however, he found divisive amongst loyalists. Some expressed hope to find a better leader than Andrew Scheer to save their flagging fortunes. But others, Livesey said, had started to see problems in the party's offerings to voters altogether.

“That's the contradiction the party's in at the moment,” Livesey, author of the book Thieves of Bay Street, said. “The base just thinks, 'We just need the next Stephen Harper to lead us back into power.'

“Abortion and gay marriage — those are the two issues that get social conservatives all agitated, and they want to have something done about them. Harper was brilliant at keeping that element under a lock and key. Scheer was not … nobody trusted him on those issues. The social conservative base is an enormous problem for that party.”

Whoever wins the leadership of the party, Livesey predicted, must “basically ignore what the base is” if they want to win enough seats outside Alberta, the Prairies and rural Ontario.

Hard Right

Garossino, meanwhile, agreed that infighting over who can be the most hardline on divisive issues such as LGBTQ rights and abortion is only hurting the party more with each utterance and campaign plank.

The popular longtime columnist with Canada's National Observer spent years previously as a Crown prosecutor and trial lawyer and Vancouver community advocate. She is also a keen observer of Canadian and American political trends, admitting Monday she's a big nerd for electoral data and crunching riding numbers. While she and Livesey admitted few Tories are likely paying heed to this publication, they ought to at least pay attention to the dismal electoral data.

When it comes to hard-right social issues, the numbers don't lie.

“They're actually campaigning against themselves the more they play to that,” Garossino said. “It doesn't play in any of the areas that the federal Conservatives need to take power. They have got to get into the 905 — the (Greater Toronto Area) — and they've got to get into Quebec.”

According to the most recent polls, the Conservatives are indeed trailing behind the Liberals — despite Scheer's repeated attempts to portray Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a reckless spendthrift, contemptuous of accountability and the rule of law.

A new poll released June 28 by respected pollster Léger Marketing placed Liberals at 40 per cent support, double-digits ahead of Conservatives in voter intentions compared to the Tories' 28 per cent. (The survey of 1,524 Canadians gave the NDP 17 per cent support, the Bloc Québecois seven per cent, and Greens one point behind; the online poll's margin of error could be considered equivalent to 2.5 per cent.) The results mirrored another opinion survey last week.

But yet another poll by Ekos Research found an even starker divide when it comes to gender last week, with Liberals leading among women with a staggering 24 per cent lead over the Tories, which held a slight lead over the Grits among men.

Multi-poll aggregator 338Canada, meanwhile, ran 250,000 statistical election simulations using recent polls and predicted a 189-seat Liberal seat majority if an election were held now, with the Tories trailing at 94 seats (a party needs a minimum 170 seats to win a majority government).

But both Livesey and Garossino reminded participants in the Zoom event that key to electoral victory in Canada is commanding broad support across the most vote-rich, densely populated urban centres — particularly the Greater Toronto Area suburbs, Montreal, and B.C.'s Lower Mainland. It was a lesson former Prime Minister Stephen Harper understood despite his past social-conservative, Reform Party roots.

That's something Livesey believes the Conservatives have lost sight of completely. He has little hope the once-moderate stalwarts of the party will regain control any time soon because of the need to survive the hard-right base that serves as a gauntlet for would-be leaders.

“They're not taking into consideration the electoral math that plays into this,” he explained. “The Tories' base gets them about 30 per cent of the vote, but to win a minority, you need around 35, a majority around 40.

“That means you've got to convince ... the very seat-rich urban hubs like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal … that you represent their interests. That is the programmatic problem with the party now. They have completely clued out to the fact that those voters don't want to vote for that particular platform.”

Stuck on Harper

In his June 25 analysis, Livesey argued former prime minister Stephen Harper remains the most powerful force in today's party, but may be, in fact, undermining “the very thing he created” as his successor Scheer steers the party sharply towards the far right on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights.

It's something Tory supporters should be extremely wary of, particularly as the far-right administration in the pandemic-gutted United States faces “potential devastation of unbelievable proportions because of the failure of this one man,” Garossino said. But the roots of the crisis go back decades to Reagan-era right-wing neoliberal movements, she and Livesey agreed, as billionaires and corporations were effectively handed the keys to power in the U.S.

Today, with tens of millions of unemployed losing their private health benefits, the chickens are now coming home to roost in that country.

“If you look at the trajectory, this is the sum result of a program that began in the '70s and '80s to, in effect, ensure the state did nothing for the average American citizen,” Livesey said. “(It marked) the end of the so-called welfare state — the New Deal type of government — and the capture of the state by largely the billionaire class.”

But although the Tea Party hasn't taken hold to the same extent north of the 49th parallel, similar hardline right movements have found sympathy in many parts of Canada.

Canadians, and particularly those loyal to the Conservative party, ought to worry about similar political movements here gaining any more foothold than they have. But it was actually Canada's Reagan-era Conservative leader who garnered some positive attention in Monday's online discussion.

Faced with a stark ideological choice today, Tories might look for inspiration — and success — to former PM Brian Mulroney.

“The PCs recognized they had to be a centre party to win power. The person most genius at figuring that out was Mulroney, he won two solid majorities … and destroyed the Liberals in Quebec. They had the 'big tent' approach, that social conservatives, Red Tories, environmentalists, people from all walks of life, fiscal conservatives, could all be under the same umbrella." Livesey said.

“It worked until it didn't work.”

Mulroney was also considered a leader on environmental issues, and even stalwart Conservative architect Tom Flanagan told Livesey he hoped for some critical Tory reflection on their climate change and carbon pricing policies.

“There is increasing awareness they have to be better on that front,” Livesey said, “even if it is in a very cynical way.”

But it's not just the evangelicals trying to steer the Tory ship. Another powerful force in the country has leveraged influence extremely effectively. Livesey and Garossino said other than the Tories' social conservative base, the party also has been held “hostage” by the oil industry lobby and some of Harper's former entourage, such as Jason Kenney, now Alberta premier.

Garossino has frequently commented on the state of Canada's Conservatives, most recently in her May 27 column, Stephen Harper's power dissolves, in which she argued that Harper continues to “control his chastened party” from the sidelines, but as “the right’s energy and narrative has been seized by Trumpian ideologues,” the Canadian electoral as moved on and is no longer interested.

Canada's Conservatives ought to ponder those trends carefully before selecting their next leader, Garossino said, but she's not hopeful.

“To get to be a contender nationally, you have to get past the base, which is far more conservative than the Canadian public,” she said. “They're almost fighting against themselves.”

Could the Red Tories stage a Mulroney-inspired comeback — and retake the reins from today's increasingly unpalatable oil and religious party wings? That remains to be seen.

[stopkingobama]

‘Feminist Economics’: Coming to a College Campus Near You

If you haven’t yet heard of “feminist economics,” get ready, because liberal economists, policy organizations, and activist groups are pushing the concept as the next battleground for women’s rights.

Because condemning catcalling and “toxic masculinity” in cultural terms isn’t enough, they’re now targeting government policies and institutions they contend are oppressive and discriminatory toward women.

In order to level the playing field, feminist economists are calling for a massive expansion in government benefits, from universal child care to universal health care plans that cover abortion, birth control, sterilization, fertility, and surrogacy.

What Is ‘Feminist Economics’?

In order to understand “feminist economics,” you must first understand what those on the left side of the aisle call the “economics of misogyny.”

The economics of misogyny describes “how these anti-woman beliefs are deeply ingrained in economic theory and policy in such a way that devalues women’s contributions and limits women’s capabilities and opportunities,” explained Kate Bahn in an article for the liberal Center for American Progress. “[D]espite the central role of women in the economy throughout history, our economic policy and government institutions often treat women’s diverse needs and capabilities as an afterthought to ‘real issues’ in the ‘real economy.’”

The topic was discussed at length last month at a Center for American Progress event, “The Economics of Misogyny.” Scholars and economists gathered from a handful of top colleges and universities from around the nation for panel discussions on “The Intersection of the Family and the Labor Market” and “The Economics of Bodily Autonomy.”

One of the goals behind feminist economics is to put a monetary dollar to the cost of the work women traditionally do for free, such as child, elderly, or sickness care. By ignoring the monetary value of this work, they suggest, women themselves are being undervalued and held back.

How It’s Happening and What to Do About It

Discrimination against women in the labor market has a long history, explained Nina Banks, an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. And central to it is the concept of intersectionality—the idea that categories such as race, class, immigration status, and gender are all connected. An African-American woman, for example, is more disadvantaged than a white woman.

Intersectionality explains the “grand narrative about work that is framed around the labor market experiences of white women, primarily white, married women,” she said. “It’s a white-centered bias when we look at these experiences. That’s a problem.”

Building on this idea, Michelle Holder, an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College of the City University of New York, suggested that government policies that encourage marriage should be abolished, because the black community has significantly lower marriage rates than white Americans. (According to a study on marriage patterns performed by the National Institutes of Health, black women, compared with white and Hispanic women, “marry later in life, are less likely to marry at all, and have higher rates of marital instability.”)

“Most African-American women aren’t a part of a couple, [so] I think it’s problematic to privilege couples, whether they are same-sex or different-sex couples,” Holder said. “I think we need to redefine unpaid work around these different kinds of family structures.”

Conservatives generally disagree and have long supported government policies that encourage—or “privilege”—marriage, because couples who get married prior to having children are far more likely to flourish financially.

Panelists didn’t just want to remove policies that encourage marriage, however. They also proposed subsidizing “care labor”; meaning, instead of working with your husband, wife, or the surrounding community to raise children and take care of sick or elderly family members, the state does it for you.

“Women doing unpaid care work creates particularly difficulties for women in the economy,” said Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and director of the College of Liberal Arts.

In order to address this “discrimination and occupational segregation,” Albelda proposed helping families “by providing the care work through a collectivized way that most countries do.” For example, she said:

Universal education and care, which I actually think would probably be the most important policy for all women, particularly low-income women in this country … It’s sort of a no-brainer … . If economists were really concerned about efficiency … they would be on top of this in a flash, because it is such a waste of all sorts of things. It increases our poverty rate. It reduces women’s labor force participation. It generates more inequality. Early education and care is one of the biggest engines of inequality in the United States.

Judith Warner, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, floated the idea that the hours a mother spends caring for her children or family could be factored “into someone’s Social Security payments down the line.”

“That’s a great point. It’s not just symbolic value; it’s actual production,” responded Joyce Jacobsen, an economics professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “We used to talk about strikes of household workers—that you would actually lose a huge amount of production if … people just refused to take care of their children, refused to take care of their sick parents, refused to do housework. It would be chaos. It’s not even just symbolic.

“We can come up with actual dollar amounts for the loss of productivity, and I think that’s, again, where economists can be of great help in pointing out that there are methods to do those calculations.”

‘The Economics of Bodily Autonomy’

It’s not just care work that feminist economics strives to monetize. They contend that “bodily autonomy” also plays a crucial role in women’s ability to fully engage in the economy.

“Targeted regulation for abortion providers, mandatory waiting periods, limitations on late-term abortions, all these things are happening in a much bigger group of states,” said Adriana Kugler, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. “And actually, we find, really limit labor market opportunities and economic opportunities for women.”

Until the government provides universal health care plans that cover unrestricted access to abortion, birth control, sterilization, fertility, and surrogacy, women will never truly be equal, she contends.

Conservatives—and conservative women, in particular—say the abortion industry itself undermines women’s rights.

“The abortion industry not interested in abortion clinic regulations that are crafted to protect women’s health and safety, or informed consent requirements that include scientifically accurate information about the unborn child and information about the risks and alternatives to abortion,” said Melanie Israel, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation focused on the issue of life. “And the abortion industry is certainly not interested in a health care system that empowers women to obtain a plan that both meets their needs and reflects their religious and moral values.”

Furthermore, Israel said, “Telling women that the path to success requires destroying the life inside them presents a false ‘choice.’”

The reality is, ensuring that both mom and baby are able to thrive is not an either/or endeavor. That’s why across the country, the pro-life community, and life-affirming pregnancy resource centers strive so hard to offer women services, education, supplies, counseling, and compassionate options to women experiencing a tough pregnancy.

Another area where economics plays into bodily autonomy, the panelists argued, is the national debate over transgender individuals and public restrooms.

Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, cited the so-called “bathroom bill” in North Carolina, which mandated people use bathrooms and locker rooms in schools, public universities, and other government buildings based on the gender listed on their birth certificates, as an example of a government policy regulating bodily autonomy.

These regulations, she argued, can hold women—and all people, for that matter—back.

“There was an exodus of businesses who were thinking of investing in Charlotte, and the other areas of North Carolina … so who’s hurt the most? It was actually, probably … hereosexual people. They’re the ones who would mainly have had those jobs, and they’re not having them. So I think it’s a way … we all have an incentive to have an inclusive society for everybody.”

An “inclusive society,” according to liberal groups such as the Center for American Progress, takes the form of government mandating society to use certain pronouns, teach transgender ideology to children, and open public restrooms to people based on their gender identity. But if transgender-friendly bathrooms made good economic sense, one might think there’d be no need for a law forcing businesses—public or private—to adopt these policies.

In North Carolina, however, it wasn’t just the government that got involved. Big businesses and special-interest groups stepped in, attempting to use their influence and economic power to impose their liberal values via bullying and boycotts.

Ryan T. Anderson, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and author of “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” calls this“textbook cultural cronyism” at “the expense of the common good.”

The Future of ‘Feminist Economics’

The role of “feminist economics” in our political conversation is still young. And with Democrats arguing Ivanka Trump’s paid family leave proposal doesn’t go far enough, it’s likely to continue. As the Center for American Progress put it: “Feminist economics provides a starting point to developing a broader understanding of how women’s varied lives and complex needs interact with the economy.”

At its heart is one idea: Women are better off with government as our husbands, fathers, caretakers, and moral arbiters. Anything short is discriminatory against women.

Commentary by Kelsey Harkness. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

[libertariantaoist]

Oh, it was glorious fun, yielding the kind of satisfaction that us anti-interventionists  rarely get to enjoy: not one but two prominent neoconservatives who have been  wrong about everything for the past decade – yet never held accountable  –  getting  taken down on national television. Tucker Carlson, whose show is a shining light  of reason in a fast-darkening world, has performed a public service by demolishing  both Ralph Peters and Max Boot on successive shows. But these two encounters  with evil weren’t just fun to watch, they’re also highly instructive for what  they tell us about the essential weakness of the War Party and its failing strategy  for winning over the American people.

Tucker’s  first victim was Ralph Peters, an alleged “military expert” who’s been a  fixture on Fox News since before the Iraq war, of which he was a rabid proponent.  Tucker starts out the program by noting that ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi  may have been killed in a Russian airstrike and that the talk in Washington  is now moving away from defeating ISIS and focusing on Iran as the principal  enemy. He asks why is this? Why not take a moment to celebrate the death of  Baghdadi and acknowledge that we have certain common interests with the Russians?

Peters leaps into overstatement, as is his wont: “We can’t have an alliance  with terrorists, and the Russians are terrorists. They’re not Islamists, but  they are terrorists.” He then alleges that the Russians aren’t really fighting  ISIS, but instead are bombing hospitals, children, and “our allies” (i.e. the  radical Islamist Syrian rebels trained and funded by the CIA and allied with  al-Qaeda and al-Nusra). The Russians “hate the United States,” and “we have  nothing in common with the Russians” –nothing!” The Russians, says Peters, are  paving the way for the Iranians – the real evil in the region – to “build up  an empire from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean.” Ah yes, the “Shia  crescent” which the Israelis and their amen corner in the US have been warning  against since before the Iraq war. Yet Tucker points out that over 3,000 Americans  have been killed by terrorists in the US, and “none of them are Shi’ites: all  of [these terrorists] have been Sunni extremists who are supported by the Saudis  who are supposed to be our allies.” And while we’re on the subject: “Why,” asks  Tucker, “if we’re so afraid of Iran did we kill Saddam Hussein, thereby empowering  Iran?”

“Because we were stupid,” says Peters.

Oh boy! Peters was one  of the most militant advocates of the Iraq war: we were “stupid,” I suppose,  to listen to him. Yet Tucker lets this ride momentarily, saving his big guns  for the moment when he takes out Peters completely. And Peters walks right into  it when Tucker wonders why we can’t cooperate with Russia, since both countries  are under assault from Sunni terrorists:

“PETERS: You sound like Charles Lindbergh in 1938 saying Hitler hasn’t attacked  us.

“TUCKER: I beg your pardon? You cannot compare me to somebody who makes  apologies for Hitler. And I don’t think Putin is comparable.

“PETERS: I think Putin is.

“TUCKER: I think it is a grotesque overstatement actually. I think it’s  insane.

“PETERS: Fine, you can think it’s insane all you want.”

For the neocons, it’s always 1938. The enemy is always the reincarnation of  Hitler, and anyone who questions the wisdom of war is denounced as an “appeaser”  in the fashion of Neville Chamberlain or Lindbergh. Yet no one ever examines  and challenges the assumption behind this rhetorical trope, which is that war  with the enemy of the moment – whether it be Saddam Hussein, the Iranian ayatollahs,  or Vladimir Putin – is inevitable and imminent. If Putin is Hitler, and Russia  is Nazi Germany, then we must take the analogy all the way and assume that we’ll  be at war with the Kremlin shortly.

After all, Charles Lindbergh’s opponents in the great debate of the 1940s openly  said that Hitler, who posed an existential threat to the West, had to be destroyed,  and that this goal could not be achieved short of war. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt  pretended that this wasn’t so, and pledged repeatedly that we weren’t going  to war, but secretly he manipulated events so that war was practically inevitable.  Meanwhile, the more honest elements of the War Party openly proclaimed that  we had to aid Britain and get into the war.

Is this what Peters and his gaggle of neocons are advocating – that we go to  war with nuclear-armed Russia and annihilate much of the world in a radioactive  Armageddon? It certainly seems that way. The Hitler-Lindbergh trope certainly  does more than merely imply that.

Clearly riled by the attempt to smear him, Tucker, the neocon slayer, then  moves in for the kill:

“I would hate to go back and read your columns assuring America that taking  out Saddam Hussein will make the region calmer, more peaceful, and America safer,  when in fact it has been the opposite and it has empowered Russia and Iran,  the two countries you say you fear most – let’s be totally honest, we don’t  always know the outcomes.    ”They are not entirely predictable so maybe  we should lower that a little bit rather than calling people accommodationist.”

This is what the neocons hate: reminding them of their record is like showing  a vampire a crucifix. Why should we listen to Peters, who’s been wrong about  everything for decades? Peters’ response is the typical neocon riposte to all  honest questions about their policies and record: you’re a traitor, you’re “cheering  on Vladimir Putin!” To which Tucker has the perfect America Firster answer:

“I’m cheering for America as always. Our interests ought to come first and  to the extent that making temporary alliances with other countries serves our  interests, I’m in favor of that. Making sweeping moral claims – grotesque ones  – comparing people to Hitler advances the ball not one inch and blinds us to  reality.”

Peters has no real argument, and so he resorts to the method that’s become  routine in American politics: accuse your opponent of being a foreign agent.  Tucker, says Peters, is an  “apologist” not only for Putin but also for Syrian  President Bashar al-Assad. Again, Tucker answers smears with cold logic:

“So because I’m asking rational questions about what’s best for America  I’m a friend to strongmen and dictators? That is a conversation stopper, not  a beginning of a rational conversation. My only point is when Syria was run  by Assad 10% of the population was Christian and they lived in relative peace.”

And that’s really the whole point: the War Party wants to stop the conversation.  They don’t want a debate – when, really, have we ever had a fair debate in this  country over foreign policy? They depend on fear, innuendo, and ad hominem  “arguments” to drag us into war after war – and Tucker is having none of it.

So why is any of this important? After all, it’s just a TV show, and as amusing  as it is to watch a prominent neocon get creamed, what doe it all mean in the  end? Well, it matters because Tucker didn’t start out talking sense on foreign  policy. He started out, in short, as a conventional conservative, but then something  happened. As he put it to Peters at the end of the segment:

“I want to act in America’s interest and stop making shallow, sweeping claims  about countries we don’t fully understand and hope everything will be fine in  the end. I saw that happen and it didn’t work.”

What’s true isn’t self-evident, at least to those of us who aren’t omniscient.  Many conservatives, as well as the country as a whole, learned something as  they saw the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria unfold. On the  right, many have rejected the neoconservative “idealism” that destroyed the  Middle East and unleashed ISIS. When Donald Trump stood before the South Carolina  GOP debate and told the assembled mandarins that we were lied into the Iraq  war, the chattering classes declared that he was finished – yet he won that  primary, and went on to win the nomination, precisely because Republican voters  were ready to hear that message.

Indeed, Trump’s “America First” skepticism when it comes to foreign wars made  the crucial difference in the election, as a recent study  shows: communities hard hit by our endless wars put him over the top in  the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This, and not “Russian  meddling,” handed him the White House.

Tucker Carlson’s ideological evolution limns the transformation of the American  right in the age of Trump: while Trump is not, by a long shot, a consistent  anti-interventionist, Tucker comes pretty close. He is, at least, a realist  with a pronounced antipathy for foreign adventurism, and that is a big step  forward from the neoconservative orthodoxy that has bathed much of the world  in blood.

If the demolition of Ralph Peters was the cake, then the  meltdown of neoconservative ideologue Max Boot the next evening was the  frosting, with ice cream on the side.

Perhaps the neocons, having been trounced in round one, thought Boot could  do better: they were mistaken. Tucker took him apart simply by letting him talk:  Boot didn’t answer a single question put to him, and, in the course of it all,  as Boot resorted to the typical ad hominems, Tucker made a cogent point:

“[T]o dismiss people who  disagree with you as immoral  –  which is your habit  –  isn’t a useful form of  debate, it’s a kind of moral preening, and it’s little odd coming from you,  who really has been consistently wrong in the most flagrant and flamboyant way  for over a decade. And so, you have to sort of wonder, like  –      ”BOOT: What have I been wrong about, Tucker?  What have I been wrong about?    ”CARLSON: Well, having watch you carefully  and known you for a long time, I recall vividly when you said that if we were  to topple the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, the region will be much safer  and the people who took their place would help us in the global war on terror.  Of course it didn’t happen –“

Boot starts to completely melt  down at this point, screeching “You supported the Iraq war!” To which Tucker  trenchantly replies:

“I’ve been wrong about a ton of things,  you try to learn your lesson. But when you get out there in the New  York Times and say, we really should have done more to depose Qaddafi, because  you know, Libya is going to be better when that happens. And then to hear you  say we need to knock off the Assad regime and things will be better in Syria,  he sort of wonder like, well, maybe we should choose another professions. Selling  insurance, something you’re good at. I guess that’s kind of the point. Are there  no sanctions for being as wrong as you have?”

Why oh why should we listen to Peters and Boot and their fellow neocons, who  have been – literally – dead wrong about everything: their crackbrained ideology  has led to untold thousands of deaths since September 11, 2001 alone. And for  what?

In the end, Boot falls back on the usual non-arguments: Tucker is “immoral”  because he denies that Trump is a Russian agent, and persists in asking questions  about our foreign policy of endless intervention in the Middle East. Tucker  keeps asking why Boot thinks Russia is the main threat to the United States,  and Boot finally answers: “Because they are the only country that can destroy  us with a nuclear strike.”

To a rational person, the implications of this are obvious: in that case, shouldn’t  we be trying to reach some sort of détente, or even achieve a degree of cooperation  with Moscow? Oh, but no, because you see the Russians are inherently evil, we  have “nothing” in common with them – in which case, war is inevitable.

At which point, Tucker avers: “Okay. I am beginning to think that your judgment has been  clouded by ideology, I don’t fully understand where it’s coming from but I will  let our viewers decide.”

I know where it’s coming from. Tucker’s  viewers may not know that Boot is a Russian immigrant, who – like so many of  our Russophobic warmongers – arrived on our shores with his hatred of the motherland  packed in his suitcase. There’s a whole platoon of them: Cathy Young, who recently  released her polemic  arguing for a new cold war with Russia in the pages of Reason magazine;  Atlantic writer and tweeter  of anti-Trump obscenities Julia Ioffe, whose visceral hatred for her homeland  is a veritable monomania; Gary Kasparov, the former chess champion who spends  most of his energy plotting revenge against Vladimir Putin and a Russian electorate  that has consistently rejected his hopeless presidential campaigns, and I could  go on but you get the picture.

As the new cold war envelopes the country, wrapping us in its icy embrace and  freezing all rational discussion of foreign policy, a few people stand out as  brave exceptions to the groupthinking mass of the chattering classes: among  the most visible and articulate are Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, journalist  Michael Tracey, Prof. Stephen Cohen, and of course our own Ron Paul. I tip my  hat to them, in gratitude and admiration, for they represent the one thing we  need right now: hope. The hope that this madness will pass, that we’ll beat  back this latest War Party offensive, and enjoy a return to what passes these  days for normalcy.

[anthonybialy]

Anno Donaldi

There will be a post-Trump world just in case the during part is taxing your resolve.  Imagining the calendar flipping more quickly than it can be turned helps on eternal days.  Fast-forwarding is not just to fantasize, although you should do whatever's needed to get through the day.  If they haven't run out of bourbon yet, it's likely the supply will remain constant.

At least we're already sort of there.  The president who supposedly embodied toughness has been as limp as his silhouette Twitter fans. Getting outfoxed is a nice break from being embarrassing.  Look on the bright side: an outsider president has stayed there.  An irrelevant executive can't mess with us that much.  Ineffectiveness is government at its best.  Liberals should be pleased Trump isn't changing things that much.  But they're indignant that no one's telling them how to live by law.

The shame will remain once the presidency ends.  Both those who believed Trump would install a marble clad-utopia are cloaked in humiliation just like those swearing at the children of Republicans.  It's nice that they share a common interest.  Deciding that it's a moral imperative to be as obnoxious as possible is a reflection of the subway panhandler, not the commuter just trying to hear the podcast.

There's a hangover ahead, and protesters don't even enjoy intoxication. Coming down from the frenzy won't lead to shrewdness in retrospect. Maybe we can get them to be civil.  Sure: and then get them to admit the Constitution contains nothing authorizing mandatory insurance.

For now, they must lose their freaking minds as melodramatically and publicly as possible. There's an emergency occurring, namely something not going how they wanted.  The siren wails for as long as anyone else thinks differently.  Dissent is a special occurrence which to liberals justifies enjoying fun moments like an ideological foe's death or thinking someone who votes differently deserved bullets.  Join them so they respect you.

It's uncanny how special circumstances force them to unabashedly despise those who voted differently every time there's a Republican in office.  If it's tiresome watching them throw a tantrum because someone might reverse one of their dreadful initiatives, imagine what it's like to be them.  Absence of agony offers semi-relief.  Their utterly pleasant collective demeanor hasn't improved since Nixon, although it as gotten far worse.

Constant hate isn't a virtue.  Shake it up a bit.  If there's ever a normal Republican with manners and a semi-conservative voting record, the figurative executive will still be Adolf Rumsfeld.  Liberal replies are going to remain just as charmingly hateful, not to mention that they'll simultaneously continue their habit of declaring they tolerate everything that agrees with them.  There are no learned lessons, which is why they believe what they do in the first place.

At least the unpleasantness is bipartisan.  This is the era for changing the locks.  Those who commandeered the party are steering now, which means they're responsible for the direction.  Granted wishes are curses, they noted as the bumper dangled from the guardrail.

Republicans proving their revulsion for government by nominating the most distasteful option possible.  But Democrats should be the ones learning, as they cope with a braggart claiming he can change everything by fiat.  It's not fun when the other side tries, is it?

All this arguing obscures common goals, like deciding everyone else is a subhuman toxic sewer monster.  The principled ideology of hating everyone who's deemed to not meet their standards is how the modern liberal flaunts tolerance.  They're so pure that they won't even respect someone who helps them.

I've lost count of how often Trump makes up a policy to expand power like their precious previous leader.  But he doesn't even have to commit the mortal sin of thinking everyone paying the same tax rate would be both fair and an enticement for advancement for them to treat him like a gun-owning coal miner.

While arguing over personality has been as much of a blast as expected, conservatives must remain focused on ideas.  The cult of personality just doesn't seem constitutional. Prepare now to get back to actually having ideas deeper than noting one clod's unchallenged awesomeness.  Of course, this doesn't mean the other ostensible side deserves support. You don't have to patronize Arby's because Subway is on the other side of the street and the walk signal's broken.  Maybe make a sandwich at home instead of dining with the tasteless.

Get hated by newspapers and celebrities for the proper reasons.  Dismay is normal for those who want to limit government despite getting blamed for the actions of a president out to expand it.  Seek a nominee who ticks off liberals for more than his churlish demeanor.

Contemporary melancholy should be used as motivation, not an excuse to wallow. Prepare for them to despise us like Nazis who don't care about gas mileage.  Irrational contempt based in thinking nobody can question daft progressive goals is normal.  So, we may as well make them hate us for legitimate reasons.  It'll make their nastiness justified in its repulsive way.  Liberals are confused enough, so we may as well give them a hand.  And they think they're the humane ones.

[krestmarketinggroup-blog]

How Content Can Succeed By Making Enemies - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by  randfish   Getting readers on board with your ideas isn’t the only way to achieve content success. Sometimes, stirring up a little controversy and earning a few rivals can work incredibly well — but there’s certainly a right and a wrong way to do it. Rand details how to use the power of making enemies work to your advantage in today’s Whiteboard Friday.  

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  Video Transcription  Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re going to chat about something a little interesting — how content can succeed by making enemies. I know you’re thinking to yourself, “Wait a minute, I thought my job was to make friends with my content.” Yes, and one of the best ways to make close friends is to make enemies too.

     So, in my opinion, I think that companies and businesses, programs, organizations of all kinds, efforts of all kinds tend to do really well when they get people on their side. So if I’m trying to create a movement or I’m trying to get people to believe in what I’m doing, I need to have positions, data, stories, and content that can bring people to my site. One of the best ways to do that is actually to think about it in opposition to something else, basically try and figure out how you can earn some enemies.

  A few examples of content that makes enemies & allies  I’ll give you a few examples, because I think that will help add some context here. I did a little bit of research. My share data is from BuzzSumo, and my link data here is from Ahrefs. But for example, this piece called “There Are Now Twice as Many Solar Jobs as Coal Jobs in the US,” this is essentially just data-driven content, but it clearly makes friends and enemies. It makes enemies with sort of this classic, old-school Americana belief set around how important coal jobs are, and it creates, through the enemy that it builds around that, simply by sharing data, it also creates allies, people who are on the side of this story, who want to share it and amplify it and have it reach its potential and reach more people.

  Same is true here. So this is a story called “Yoga Is a Good Alternative to Physical Therapy.” Clearly, it did extremely well, tens of thousands of shares and thousands of links, lots of ranking keywords for it. But it creates some enemies. Physical therapists are not going to be thrilled that this is the case. Despite the research behind it, this is frustrating for many of those folks. So you’ve created friends, allies, people who are yoga practitioners and yoga instructors. You’ve also created enemies, potentially those folks who don’t believe that this might be the case despite what the research might show.

  Third one, “The 50 Most Powerful Public Relations Firms in America,” I think this was actually from The Observer. So they’re writing in the UK, but they managed to rank for lots and lots of keywords around “best PR firms” and all those sorts of things. They have thousands of shares, thousands of links. I mean 11,000 links, that’s darn impressive for a story of this nature. And they’ve created enemies. They’ve created enemies of all the people who are not in the 50 most powerful, who feel that they should be, and they’ve created allies of the people who are in there. They’ve also created some allies and enemies deeper inside the story, which you can check out.

  “Replace Your Lawn with These Superior Alternatives,” well, guess what? You have now created some enemies in the lawn care world and in the lawn supply world and in the passionate communities, very passionate communities, especially here in the United States, around people who sort of believe that homes should have lawns and nothing else, grass lawns in this case. This piece didn’t do that well in terms of shares, but did phenomenally well in terms of links. This was on Lifehacker, and it ranks for all sorts of things, 11,000+ links.

  Before you create, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this, and why?  So you can see that these might not be things that you naturally think of as earning enemies. But when you’re creating content, if you can go through this exercise, I have this rule, that I’ve talked about many times over the years, for content success, especially content amplification success. That is before you ever create something, before you brainstorm the idea, come up with the title, come up with the content, before you do that, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this and why? Why will they help?

     One of the great things about framing things in terms of who are my allies, the people on my side, and who are the enemies I’m going to create is that the “who” becomes much more clear. The people who support your ideas, your ethics, or your position, your logic, your data and want to help amplify that, those are people who are potential amplifiers. The people, the detractors, the enemies that you’re going to build help you often to identify that group.

  The “why” becomes much more clear too. The existence of that common enemy, the chance to show that you have support and beliefs in people, that’s a powerful catalyst for that amplification, for the behavior you’re attempting to drive in your community and your content consumers. I’ve found that thinking about it this way often gets content creators and SEOs in the right frame of mind to build stuff that can do really well.

  Some dos and don’ts  Do... backup content with data  A few dos and don’ts if you’re pursuing this path of content generation and ideation. Do back up as much as you can with facts and data, not just opinion. That should be relatively obvious, but it can be dangerous in this kind of world, as you go down this path, to not do that.

  Do... convey a world view  I do suggest that you try and convey a world view, not necessarily if you’re thinking on the political spectrum of like from all the way left to all the way right or those kinds of things. I think it’s okay to convey a world view around it, but I would urge you to provide multiple angles of appeal.

  So if you’re saying, “Hey, you should replace your lawn with these superior alternatives,” don’t make it purely that it’s about conservation and ecological health. You can also make it about financial responsibility. You can also make it about the ease with which you can care for these lawns versus other ones. So now it becomes something that appeals across a broader range of the spectrum.

  Same thing with something like solar jobs versus coal jobs. If you can get it to be economically focused and you can give it a capitalist bent, you can potentially appeal to multiple ends of the ideological spectrum with that world view.

  Do... collect input from notable parties  Third, I would urge you to get inputs from notable folks before you create and publish this content, especially if the issue that you’re talking about is going to be culturally or socially or politically charged. Some of these fit into that. Yoga probably not so much, but potentially the solar jobs/coal jobs one, that might be something to run the actual content that you’ve created by some folks who are in the energy space so that they can help you along those lines, potentially the energy and the political space if you can.

  Don’t... be provocative just to be provocative  Some don’ts. I do not urge you and I’m not suggesting that you should create provocative content purely to be provocative. Instead, I’m urging you to think about the content that you create and how you angle it using this framing of mind rather than saying, “Okay, what could we say that would really piss people off?” That’s not what I’m urging you to do. I’m urging you to say, “How can we take things that we already have, beliefs and positions, data, stories, whatever content and how do we angle them in such a way that we think about who are the enemies, who are the allies, how do we get that buy-in, how do we get that amplification?”

  Don’t... choose indefensible positions  Second, I would not choose enemies or positions that you can’t defend against. So, for example, if you were considering a path that you think might get you into a world of litigious danger, you should probably stay away from that. Likewise, if your positions are relatively indefensible and you’ve talked to some folks in the field and done the dues and they’re like, “I don’t know about that,” you might not want to pursue it.

  Don’t... give up on the first try  Third, do not give up if your first attempts in this sort of framing don’t work. You should expect that you will have to, just like any other form of content, practice, iterate, and do this multiple times before you have success.

  Don’t... be unprofessional  Don’t be unprofessional when you do this type of content. It can be a little bit tempting when you’re framing things in terms of, “How do I make enemies out of this?” to get on the attack. That is not necessary. I think that actually content that builds enemies does so even better when it does it from a non-attack vector mode.

  Don’t... sweat the Haterade  Don’t forget that if you’re getting some Haterade for the content you create, a lot of people when they start drinking the Haterade online, they run. They think, “Okay, we’ve done something wrong.” That’s actually not the case. In my experience, that means you’re doing something right. You’re building something special. People don’t tend to fight against and argue against ideas and people and organizations for no reason. They do so because they’re a threat.

  If you’ve created a threat to your enemies, you have also generally created something special for your allies and the people on your side. That means you’re doing something right. In Moz’s early days, I can tell you, back when we were called SEOmoz, for years and years and years we got all sorts of hate, and it was actually a pretty good sign that we were doing something right, that we were building something special.

  So I look forward to your comments. I’d love to see any examples of stuff that you have as well, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

   Video transcription  by  Speechpad.com 

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[fapangel]

Special Elections, What happened?

What happened is quite clear-cut: five very safe Republican House districts (which went for Trump by 20~ points in the election) continue to be safe Republican House districts. There’s been some hurfablurf silver-lining rationalizing by Democrats that the special elections being “closer” than the general elections means Trump’s support is gonna crash and burn “any day now;” which completely ignores that people were showing up to the polls anyway to vote for a President; midterm elections always get significantly less turnout, and a special election, wherein there’s not even significant local/municipal stuff on the ballot, gets even less. And that’s entirely aside from the astonishing sums of money Democrats pissed away on these races - the Georgia one alone, I’ve seen estimates ranging from $30 million to $50 million (probably depending who you count as a PAC or not,) most of it flowing in from California. 

And of course their campaigns were fucking trousers-on-face retarded - just look at this dumpster fire of an ad featuring Mr. Young Hipster Who Doesn’t Even Live In The God-Damned District showing off how trendy he is by tweeting about D-D-RUMPF IS SHIT. Who the hell expected this to play south of the Mason-Dixon? 

This all is obvious. The real question is why they mismanaged things so well - Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida put his finger right on it in this excellent article titled “Democrats must stop clinging to ideology if they want to win elections again.” It does a fantastic job of illustrating how the Georgia special election in particular highlights just how dogmatic, rigid and uncompromising the left wing ideological cult has become - to the point where they’re getting beat by a party that counts among its constituents actual compound-dwelling religious cults:

“Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 when their views were out of step with all of New England and most of the Midwest. In that election, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., then the leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was canny enough to put aside ideology and recruit pro-gun, antiabortion candidates to pick off conservative seats that would have otherwise been out of reach. Today, the situation is reversed, with many Democratic leaders and activists more focused on ideological purity than on regaining political power.”

That link (to the Chicago Tribune) and the original posting in the Washington Post should clue you in (if his own words don’t) that Mr. Scarborough’s no Trump fan. He’s talking pure political tactics, and in so doing, he illustrates why the American “big tent” concept of party politics exists at all: 

“Roosevelt’s melange of Northern progressives and Southern conservatives passed Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Civil Rights Act. It dominated Congress for most of the 20th century. Tearing down that big tent in favor of a more ideologically homogenized movement would be a recipe for political disaster.

Instead, to win nationally, Democrats must start thinking locally. Tip O'Neill famously said that all politics are local, and the liberal Boston speaker of the House practiced what he preached. Because of it, O'Neill’s party dominated national politics for decades by recruiting conservatives in the South, moderates in the Midwest and liberals in large industrial states. That embrace of ideological diversity kept Republicans in the political wilderness for 40 years, and I saw the strategy’s impact firsthand during my time in Congress, even during a period when Republicans were in control of the House.”

The rigidity and fervor of the leftists ideological cultism has reached a fever pitch as of late - perhaps because they control so many of the engines of culture; the media, Hollywood, the schools and college campuses, and even the Internet - both in the userbase (youth) and the forum itself (Silicon valley corporations.) In a way they might be victims of their own success; so strongly have they reinforced rigid adherence to their ideology that they can no longer tolerate candidates that deviate enough from it to win local races where the culture’s not already under their sway… or perhaps they’ve simply lost the ability to conceptualize a culture that doesn’t mimic theirs closely, due to their echo chamber. 

This isn’t just an ideological problem, but a geographical one - populations have been moving into ideologically-aligned areas over the last few decades, and the ideological divides between the populations of midwest/western “red states” and the coastal “blue states” has been steepening, so that the geographic boundaries define ever-more intense ideological boundaries as well. Coastal California is simply a different world at this point; a place where there’s boundless opportunity, more than enough work and money flowing out of everyone’s ears. Compare to the rust belt, where the youth must scratch and struggle to get minimum-wage gas station jobs and despair permeates the air over decaying cities that once played host to thriving populations that were engines of culture themselves - such as The Motor City and “Motown.” Now that belongs to Hollywood. As that piss-poor ad shows, they really, truly struggle to comprehend just how different things are outside of their urban enclaves. 

This is a worrying trend and has serious implications for the nation… but that’s worth a separate post itself.