There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.
- Andrea Gibson "Post-Election Letter to a Friend"
This week's featured post is "Yes, he does think you're stupid".
This week everybody was still talking about Jeffrey Epstein
The featured post discusses how to take advantage of the strife in MAGA World.
The Onion had two articles that lampooned what's been happening these last two weeks:
"MAGA Voter Drills Hole Into Skull To Relieve Sudden Doubts About Trump".
And "Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions".
“I’m developing new neural pathways each time I shrug off Trump’s clear violations of the Constitution and his total contempt for our system of checks and balances. You know, I have some friends who didn’t spend time rationalizing Trump’s actions, and they ended up in nursing homes.”
Meanwhile, Some Trump pronouncements are so detached from reality they seem like Onion articles even when they're legit. Like this Truth Social post:
The Washington “Whatever’s” should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.
which was quickly followed by a threat:
My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way. I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original “Washington Redskins,” and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, “Washington Commanders,” I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.
That's delusional world he lives in: Native Americans were honored by the Redskins and Indians. Those teams should change their names back out of respect.
Oh, and the Indians being "one of the six original baseball teams" is another delusion.
The concept of an “original six” does not exist in baseball, though it does in ice hockey. The Cleveland MLB team currently known as the Guardians began play in the late 1800s in a league with eight teams, before becoming one of the eight charter members of the modern American League in 1901. Like most baseball teams, the franchise has undergone numerous moves and moniker changes. Since arriving in Cleveland in 1900, the team was known as the Lakeshores (for one year), Bluebirds (in 1901), Broncos (in 1902), Naps (from 1903-1914), and Indians (from 1915-2021).
and the rescission vote
Congress passed a rescission package to take back $9 billion it had already appropriated. The bill defunds NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It also OKs foreign aid cuts Trump was already making. The bill passed with zero Democratic votes. But with only two Republican defectors in each house, it had enough support to get through.
This bill is bad on two levels: Taken as a unique event, it cuts stuff that ought to be funded. But viewed from a higher perspective, it also creates a precedent that will make the next government shutdown much harder to avoid.
Let's start with public broadcasting, which loses $1.1 billion. This is another example of congressional Republicans abusing their own voters. People like me, who live near a big blue city like Boston, will barely notice. WGBH and WBUR get a lot of contributions from their listeners as well as grants from local foundations. They'll be inconvenienced by the loss of federal money, but they'll get by. Ditto for WNYC in New York, WHYY in Philadelphia, and KQED in San Francisco.
But if you live in Trump Country -- rural Kansas, say -- you're going to see a real difference.
Public media advocates say it is these local stations, particularly the ones in rural areas like Smoky Hills PBS, that will bear the brunt of the federal funding cuts. Aside from the potential job losses, they say it would also mean less information distributed to an already-underserved population, less coverage of popular local events such as high school wrestling and less attention to day-to-day life in rural America.
Then there's foreign aid. The rescission package zeroes out USAID, which had already had its appropriation blocked by DOGE. Politico reports:
Nearly 800,000 mpox vaccine doses the U.S. government had promised to donate to African countries experiencing an outbreak of the rash-causing disease cannot be shipped because they’re expiring in less than six months, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
And The Atlantic adds:
Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.
The Economist draws the obvious conclusion: These cuts are "a gift for China as it vies with America for soft-power supremacy".
As you consider all this, remember that the Big Beautiful Bill set aside $170 billion to support Trump's mass deportation policy, including $45 billion to build concentration camps. Republicans justified their vote for the rescissions by describing the $9 billion of cuts as "a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue".
When we're saving lives or making sure kids can see Sesame Street or competing with China for influence in Africa, we have a spending problem. But there's always plenty of money for cruelty.
Now we come to the broader perspective. The appropriations being rolled back are part of the bipartisan deal that prevented a government shutdown in March. With majorities in Congress being as narrow as they've been in recent years, we have these kinds of deals every year or two.
Now, how can the Democrats ever do a deal like this again? A bipartisan spending bill typically contains some provisions that either party doesn't like; you allow spending you don't want here in order to get the spending you do want there. But now imagine that Republicans can take that deal, and then pass a rescission package to roll back every plum Democrats got in exchange for their votes. There is no deal that the minority party can make the majority uphold.
The next fiscal year starts on October 1. Expect to see some chickens come home to roost.
and Stephen Colbert
CBS announced that when Stephen Colbert's contract ends next May, that will be the end not just of Colbert's role at CBS, but of The Late Show, which David Letterman established in 1993.
"This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” read the statement. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.
No one is buying that. Yes, it's true that late-night TV in general has seen its ratings decline in recent years. But Colbert's Late Show still leads the competition by a wide margin. Some kind of reorganization might be warranted, and maybe Colbert's next contract shouldn't be as lucrative is the current one. But finances dictated the end of the show? Not believable.
Vox explains the background:
Paramount Global is currently attempting to merge with Skydance Media, and company leadership has been acting as though they are concerned that President Donald Trump might try to block the merger. Earlier this month, CBS and 60 minutes announced a $16 million settlement in its lawsuit with Trump over the editing of a segment about former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — an extraordinary concession for a media company in a case that experts agree CBS would have likely won in court.
The apparent legal settlement, in other words, was actually a bribery/extortion situation. Colbert said as much on the air:
I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It's "big fat bribe".
Two days later, Colbert was told his show was cancelled.
On Truth Social, Trump took a victory lap.
I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.
(Greg Gutfeld hosts Fox News' pathetic attempt at news-related comedy. The "moron on NBC" is Jimmy Fallon. When Trump criticized Kimmel's hosting of the 2024 Oscars on Truth Social, Kimmel famously read the tweet on-air and responded: "Isn't it past your jail time?")
Trump isn't the only one who sees this event as the first of many. Mother Jones writes:
[T]he end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide. Though his second term has already produced a string of stunning capitulations by some of the most powerful forces in the country, one could argue that Trump’s attacks had yet to take down our actual culture. I’m talking about the literal content we consume—the television, art, movies, literature, music—no matter how much Trump complained. That it remained protected and free-willed, a rare area of control for a public that otherwise feels powerless to take action. Clearly, that was magical thinking. If this can happen to Colbert and a storied franchise, this can happen to anyone.
but I want to talk about Andrea Gibson
After my wife's memorial service in January, the comment I heard most often -- practically from everybody -- was: "I never appreciated what an interesting person she was." In a self-centered way, I was gratified to hear those words, because I had designed the service to evoke precisely that response. I had recruited speakers from every corner of her life, and not even I knew what all of them would say.
But on the other hand, that comment made me sad. Because it's such a waste that even our close friends know us so poorly, and often we don't really meet someone until we gather together to mark their death.
Well, this week I experienced that sorrow from the other side: I had never heard of Andrea Gibson until she died Monday, which started her poems bouncing around social media.
Rummaging through Andrea's substack "Things That Don't Suck", I was struck by how well her "Post-Election Letter to a Friend" holds up nine months later.
I understand why so many people are sharing what they think we should be feeling right now. Though there is love at the heart of that demand, there is no such thing as a moral emotion. No one owes the world their misery. What we owe is our active participation in finding creative and compassionate paths forward. Every activist I have ever known who believed they owed the world their unhappiness has burned out. If we consciously fuel our joy, if we put our attention on the world’s beauty, we will have far more strength and stamina to show up to the world’s pain.
We need stamina. The 73 million people who voted for Trump appear to be more energized than ever. And it’s clear to me that the narrative that every Trump voter is “ignorant and hateful” is hurting our movements. 95% of our marginalized friends have at least one family member they deeply trust who voted for Trump this year. Most people, regardless of how they are voting, believe they are voting for a better world. There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.
I will try to hold that in mind as I run into Trumpists. Maybe trying to figure out what they're afraid of is a more productive path than meeting anger with anger and hate with hate.
That quote reminded of this one from the Sufi poet Hafiz.
Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men
Create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.
Trump is exactly that: a tiny god made from his followers' fear of the world that is coming to be. The pervasive cruelty of his movement is fear dressed up to deny fear: "We can't be afraid, because we have made other people fear us."
The masked ICE agent is the perfect symbol of MAGA: afraid to show his face, but trying to strike fear into others. They have the guns, the body armor, and sometimes the Marines to back them up, but no courage of their own.
And then there's this, from Gibson's poem "My Dog Knew I had Cancer Before I Did":
“lifespan” is a word I no longer use to measure length––but width. “How wide can my heart open to this life, to this world, and to everyone in it?” feels like a far more important question now than, “How long will I live?”
More than one of my friends is dying right now. I don't think I can do anything to lengthen their lives, but maybe I can still widen them a little.
and you also might be interested in ...
Trump seems to have an uncanny knack for finding the wrong side of every issue.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro used to be president, and was sometimes described as Brazil's Trump. He had a similar disdain for democracy, and when Brazilians voted him out in 2022 (just as Americans voted Trump out in 2020), his supporters stormed the seat of government, much as Trump supporters did on January 6.
Unlike the US, Brazil is holding Bolsonaro to account. He is currently on trial for his role in the coup attempt.
Recently, Trump has been trying to interfere with that trial. He threatened Brazil with 50% tariffs if they didn't end Bolsonaro's trial. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio withdrew US visas from judges in Bolsonaro's trial.
Writing on X, Rubio said he had ordered visa revocations for the judge leading the investigation into Bolsonaro, Alexandre de Moraes, as well as “his allies on the court” and their family members.
So that's where we are: We're trying to interfere in the legal processes of the second-biggest democracy in the Western hemisphere, to the point of threatening sanctions against the family members of judges.
ProPublica analyzed hospital-discharge data from Texas.
After Texas made performing abortions a felony in August 2022, ProPublica found, the number of blood transfusions during emergency room visits for first-trimester miscarriage shot up by 54%. The number of emergency room visits for early miscarriage also rose, by 25%, compared with the three years before the COVID-19 pandemic — a sign that women who didn’t receive D&Cs initially may be returning to hospitals in worse condition, more than a dozen experts told ProPublica.
The problem: A dilation and curettage procedure (D&C) is the safest way to clear the uterus of a woman who has had an early miscarriage. But a miscarriage followed by a D&C looks a lot like an abortion, and doctors don't want to be exposed to prosecution under the new law.
The data mirrors a sharp rise in cases of sepsis — a life-threatening reaction to infection — ProPublica previously identified during second-trimester miscarriage in Texas.
Blood loss is expected during early miscarriage, which usually ends without complication. Some cases, however, can turn deadly very quickly. [Dr. Elliott] Main [a hemorrhage expert and former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative] said ProPublica’s analysis suggested to him that “physicians are sitting on nonviable pregnancies longer and longer before they’re doing a D&C — until patients are really bleeding.”
ProPublica also examined RFK Jr.'s latest avenue to attack vaccines. Back in the 1980s, Congress established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It's a no-fault insurance program that covers the rare injuries caused by vaccines, and it's funded by a 75-cent tax on each disease a shot is supposed to protect against. It compensates victims quickly without going through the ordinary system of lawsuits, and it shields vaccine manufacturers from more costly awards in court.
Kennedy is overhauling the system, and may do so in ways that break it. For example, if he adds autism to the list of automatically covered injuries, the trust fund that pays compensation will quickly go bankrupt. Kennedy keeps saying that vaccines cause autism, despite the fact that this theory has been studied exhaustively and has been refuted every time.
If the fund goes bankrupt and cases go back to the regular tort system, vaccine manufacturers may simply pull out of the US market. That was the problem the VICP was designed to solve.
Democrats have indeed moved a bit to the left on economic issues in recent years. But they’re hardly extremists. They’re basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party. Republicans, however, are extremists. The whole party has raced to the right into what amounts to full-on fascism.
If that last statement has you reaching for the smelling salts, ask yourself, what more evidence do you need? Do we have to wait until a Republican administration creates a masked secret police force that snatches people off the streets and starts building concentration camps? Wait, that has already happened.
and let's close with a moment of schadenfreude
It's hard to explain what's so satisfying about this incident: The CEO and HR manager of the software company Astronomer were cuddling at a Coldplay concert in Boston's Gillette Stadium when the kiss-cam put them on the big screen. They didn't notice immediately, but when they did, the HR manager covered her face with her hands and the married-to-somebody-else CEO tried to sink into the ground. As so often happens, the cover-up is worse than the crime: Their horrified reaction to being caught together made the video go viral. Anybody who wasn't supposed to see it has certainly seen it by now.
Reportedly, Astronomer had a policy against employees dating, which the HR manager should have been familiar with. The CEO has subsequently resigned.
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