Senate Passes Bill to Protect Same-Sex and Interracial Marriage Over GOP Opposition

   

A Capitol Pride rally in Washington, D.C., on June 12, 2021. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images)

30 November 22

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The bill now goes back to the House for a final vote before it heads to Biden's desk.

Sahil Kapur / NBC News

The Senate passed landmark legislation Tuesday that would codify federal protection for marriages of same-sex and interracial couples, with Democrats securing enough votes to overcome opposition from most Republicans.

The Respect for Marriage Act was approved 61-36, with support from all Democrats and 12 GOP votes, after a filibuster was defeated and three amendments offered by Republicans who oppose the bill were rejected.

The measure now returns to the House for a final vote before it can go to President Joe Biden, who said he looks forward to enacting it.

“With today’s bipartisan Senate passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, the United States is on the brink of reaffirming a fundamental truth: love is love, and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love,” Biden said in a statement.

The Senate vote reflects the rapidly growing public support for legal same-sex marriage, which hit a new high of 71% in Gallup tracking polls in June, up from just 27% in 1996, when Gallup first began polling the issue.

"We're making a really positive difference in people's lives by creating the certainty that their ability to protect their families will be lasting," said the author of the bill, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., the first openly gay lawmaker elected to the Senate.

Baldwin revised the measure to win some Republican votes by adding language to make it clear that religious organizations wouldn’t be required to perform same-sex marriages and that the federal government wouldn’t be required to protect polygamous marriages.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said before the vote Tuesday that he was wearing the same tie he wore to the wedding of his daughter and her wife. "It's personal to me," he told reporters.

The 12 Republican proponents were an eclectic group, including retiring Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Richard Burr of North Carolina; centrist deal-makers like Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina; a leadership member in Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa; and conservative Sens. Todd Young of Indiana, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.

Lummis said backing the bill sparked blowback.

“My days since the first cloture vote on the Respect for Marriage Act as amended have involved a painful exercise in accepting admonishment and fairly brutal self-soul-searching — entirely avoidable, I might add, had I simply chosen to vote 'no,'” she said. “I, and many like me, have been vilified and despised by some who disagree with our beliefs. They do not withhold bitter invective. They use their own hateful speech to make sure that I, and others who believe as I do, that we are hated and despised by them.”

The legislation came about after the conservative Supreme Court majority overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, sparking fears that the justices may also revisit liberal court precedents that enshrine marriage rights for gay and interracial couples.

The bill would require the federal government to recognize marriages that were valid in a state when they were performed. It would also ensure full benefits for marriages "regardless of the couple’s sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin," but it would not require states to issue marriage licenses contrary to state law.

If the bill becomes law and the Supreme Court rescinds the right to same-sex marriage, Americans could go to other states and get married if it's not legal in their states.

“This will ensure that wherever you live, if you get married in a state where it’s legal, they have to recognize it wherever you are," a Democratic aide familiar with the legislation said. "And you have the same rights, benefits, responsibilities and freedoms wherever you are.”

Schumer held a lengthy procedural vote open Monday as Democrats sought to cut a deal with GOP senators who threatened to drag out the process unless they got votes on amendments. The Senate had teed up three of them: one by Mike Lee, R-Utah, at a 60-vote threshold, and two by James Lankford, R-Okla., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., both of which needed just simple majorities to pass. After they failed, the bill passed.

One Democrat, Sen. Raphael Warnock, missed the vote as he campaigns in Georgia for next week’s Senate runoff against Republican Herschel Walker.

Most Republicans opposed the legislation, although earlier procedural votes all but made it clear that the bill had enough GOP support to pass. Proponents wanted to pass the measure in the lame-duck session before Republicans take control of the House on Jan. 3.

Even in redneck country (aka Florida), some of the natives want to say "GAY."

New 'election crimes' units find nothing—because voters abusing the system was never a problem

Signs are posted in front of a polling station on Nov. 26, 2022 in Dunwoody, Georgia.

Rebekah Sager

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Monday November 28, 2022 · 9:46 AM MST

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When Republican governors, attorneys general, and legislators began cobbling together election fraud units after the 2020 presidential elections, it was apparent it would be a waste of time and money. There was scant evidence of election abuse in 2020, and to prove it, there have been practically zero cases found after the recent midterm elections. The actual fraud has been the promotion of the Big Lie, which Republicans have used to raise mountains of money from donors.

No one who is an expert in elections, or anyone who understands how low the GOP is willing to go to suppress voting, ever believed there was a real need for units dedicated to rooting out voter-related fraud—because there never was any.

Paul Smith, senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, told HuffPost, “I am not aware of any significant detection of fraud on Election Day, but that’s not surprising … The whole concept of voter impersonation fraud is such a horribly exaggerated problem. It doesn’t change the outcome of the election, it’s a felony, you risk getting put in jail, and you have a high possibility of getting caught. It’s a rare phenomena.”

It was former President Donald Trump who began the whole “election fraud” shenanigans and the GOP that’s been continuing the manufactured hysteria.

Georgia, Virginia, and Florida have taken up Trump’s bogus mantle of fraud and really run with it. But so far, other than a case in Coffee County, Georgia, where there was an actual breach of voting machines at the direction of Trump, there’s been little to no evidence of fraud by voters or by the elections boards, poll workers, canvassers, or voter outreach programs designed to help people vote by absentee or early ballot. It just doesn’t exist.

In September, Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter described the Coffee County breach.

“Previously released video shows two members of SullivanStrickler, a firm hired by Donald Trump’s attorney Sidney Powell, along with the head of the county Republican Party, entering the Coffee County election office where voting machines were breached. Cathy Latham, the party official, was also one of the 16 fake electors to sign a certificate falsely claiming Trump had won the state of Georgia as part of the Jan. 6 conspiracy,” McCarter writes.

A year or so after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis created an Office of Election Crimes and Security, and just weeks prior to the midterm elections, 15 Black Florida residents were arrested for illegally voting in 2020—12 of whom were registered as Democrats.

LaVon Bracy, the director of democracy for the religious nonprofit agency Faith in Florida, which encourages civic participation, told The Washington Post at the time, “These laws were put in place to intimidate people, and that’s what’s happening … People are just wondering, is it worth it?”

HuffPost reports that in September, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares also formed an Election Integrity Unit—and this is in a state where in 2021, Republicans won in three statewide elections.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Miyares admitted there “was no widespread voter fraud in Virginia or elsewhere in the country” but formed the unit anyway.

As Smith says, despite the fact that there have been no genuine issues of voter fraud, the GOP continues to push the fake narrative and give itself an unnecessary and frightening power during elections.

“It’s a myth that’s created so they can justify making it harder for people to vote,” Smith says. 

In fact, most cases of voter fraud, as rare as they were, weren’t even from Democrats—they were from Republican voters.

Three residents at The Villages, a senior community, located just outside of Orlando, Florida—Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead, and John Rider—were each charged with casting more than one ballot in an election, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Then there was a Scottsdale, Arizona, man—registered as a Republican—who admitted he’d registered to vote under his dead mother’s name.

And last but not least, let’s not forget Mark Meadows, who was removed from voter rolls in North Carolina after it was discovered he was registered in both Virginia and North Carolina. But then it was discovered he also registered in South Carolina. I mean, who’s trying to commit voter fraud?

So which side is corrupting the vote?  The one making all the accusations, of course.

Rebelling Against Trump Is Not the Same as Rebelling Against Trumpism

  

MAGA hats. (photo: Atlantic)

28 November 22

 Even if Trump himself departs the scene, conservative demand for his approach to politics will remain.

Adam Serwer / The Atlantic

Republican elites are done with Donald Trump, and this time, they mean it.

Since the conservative “red wave” splashed on shore like gentle foam at low tide, some Republican Party bigs have begun reconsidering the GOP’s relationship with Donald Trump. Republicans took back the House with a slim margin, but Democrats kept the Senate, a dismal result given President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and the continued toll of inflation. The consensus among the right-wing intelligentsia is that they fell well short of expectations.

Fox News, typically a geyser of Trump worship, spent the aftermath of the midterms promoting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who possesses Trump’s authoritarian instincts but fewer personality defects. National Review published an editorial saying that Trump should not run for president again. Instead of sharing their skepticism of Trump anonymously with reporters, several Republican elected officials have actually gone on the record with their skepticism of the former president.

Still, we’ve seen Republicans try to distance themselves from Trump before. Early in the 2016 primary, Republican leaders and conservative-media figures were willing to acknowledge that Trump was overtly racist, but when he won the nomination, nearly all of them transformed into loyal stooges. The release of the audio of Trump confessing to “grabbing” women “by the pussy” led to disavowals, but then to disavowals of the disavowals in relatively short order. The family-separation policy, the attempt to strong-arm Ukrainian leadership into falsely implicating then-candidate Biden in a crime, the attempt to overthrow the American constitutional order by force after losing the 2020 election—there is simply no shortage of moments in which conservatives had reason to break with Trump.

And they always come crawling back. As long as Trump is seen as helping Republicans politically, he can shoot as many people on Fifth Avenue as he likes.

This latest break with Trump, in other words, may not be permanent. National Review was famously Never Trump in 2016, before becoming Please, Mr. Trump, may I have another after he won the primary. This latest break with Trump is not about morality or principle, but about the possibility that his influence is harming the GOP’s electoral prospects. Trump’s bigotry, his authoritarianism, even his fomenting an insurrection were not deal-breakers. But hurting Republican electoral prospects? That might be.

In some sense, that’s logical. Even in a democracy, it is foolish to expect politicians of any party or ideology to act consistently on principle rather than self-interest. If Republican perception of their self-interest leads them to abandon an unstable, corrupt, and cruel leader, well, that’s better than the alternative of not abandoning him at all.

But precisely because the rejection of Trump is a matter of political interest and not principle, it’s easy to imagine all of these Republican elites reversing themselves once again if circumstances demand, and returning to their previous role as loyal Trump sycophants, if that perception changes.

Yet even if this rejection of Trump lasts, the underlying structural factors that led to Trump’s rise, in particular the way that countermajoritarian aspects of the American system, like the Senate and Electoral College, enhance the influence of the most conservative segments of the electorate, remain intact. As long as the GOP relies on taking advantage of these elements of the system to gain and maintain power rather than winning over the majority of the electorate, it will continue to flit from one existential culture-war conflict to another, the better to convince its constituents that the apocalypse is imminent unless Republicans alone are allowed to govern.

Whoever comes after Trump will likely share his most politically dangerous ideological convictions: contempt for democracy, a belief that the rival party’s constituencies are inherently illegitimate, and a disdain for the rights of those the GOP coalition considers beneath it.

Right-wing elites concerned about Trump’s political effectiveness will not likely share the same worries about his heir. Without structural changes to that system, sustained political defeat, or shifts in the nature of the Republican coalition, Trump may go, but the conservative demand for Trumpism will remain. And as long as that is the case, the rise of another Trump by a different name is an inevitability.

G. KEILLOR: Walking a Crowded Street in Gratitude

•    
• Garrison Keillor. (photo: The Birchmere)

 

Garrison Keillor / Garrison Keillor's Website 

26 November 22

I t surprises me, a man of pen and paper, that Twitter requires regular maintenance and without the attention of veteran software engineers could easily crash leaving millions of twitterers to write notes on paper, and would they be able to write with a pen or would they need to cut words out of a book and paste them on paper to make sentences, the way kidnappers do in the movies? You’d expect the Head Twit, the world’s richest man, to be smarter than to drive his new acquisition into a bridge abutment, but who knows?

The crises of the extremely rich are entertaining to the rest of us, such as the billionaire addicted to inhaling nitrous oxide, which inspired him to think he was crystallizing. And Mr. Amazon who wants to go to the moon. And the ex-president guy who has been there for years. This gives us in the back of the bus some reassurance that vast wealth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In so many critical ways, it’s good to be normal.

I know nothing about software. I use a laptop but nine-tenths of its capability is foreign to me; I use it as an educated typewriter. I love that it makes a squiggly blue line under misspelled words, even exotic ones.

I imagined Twitter was run by robotechnicians, no need for a company cafeteria, just a lube station, but apparently not so. There are human beings there and they have feelings, which is what the rich guy is inexperienced at dealing with. He knows about circuitry but he’s bought a circus and now hundreds of acrobats have quit.

You come to appreciate humanity, living in New York as I do. I walk down upper Broadway and it’s very amiable, like the Minnesota State Fair, throngs of people, the smell of pizza and hot pretzels in the air, bursts of music in passing, a general civility, all that’s missing are the farm implements and barns of giant swine. I’m a Midwesterner, wary of strangers, but walking in New York inspires a feeling that people are good at heart. Of course we’re all Democrats in this neighborhood. That’s all we have. You couldn’t find a Republican if your life depended on it. Thank goodness, the need for one has seldom arisen.

Last week I flew to Detroit and spent a couple days in a suburban landscape of strip malls, a church next to a used-car lot next to a Walmart and hotel overlooking a cemetery, vast acreage of asphalt parking, a landscape that if I hiked a few miles along the main road, I’d feel isolated, threatened, and after dark, it’d be terrifying.

I descend into the New York subway, an institution that is often grieved over but still packed with people taking great care not to bump each other or maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds. I’d rather be on the subway than drive my car through suburbia trying to find a shopping center; I’d slow down to try to get my bearings and the car behind me would honk with real fury. I’ve never encountered fury in the subway. It’d be too scary so people avoid it.

We’ve all experienced a strong centrifugal urge to find loneliness in the woods, a cabin, a beach house, a tent on an island, and I’ve been there and done that and found that silence makes me uneasy and that the presence of birds and small mammals does not constitute company. Hermitude was not appealing and in the fall I heard gunfire and imagined a headline: Writer Slain in Cabin, Sheriff Asks Public for Clues.

So now I am pleased to be in a subway car jammed with people. There’s no other city where you can see so much of America at once as here. The sheer variety is fascinating. The woman with the three small children opposite me: the sight of them speaks to my heart. The tall young woman in the black leggings whose stone-faced expression says she’s tired of people admiring her classic beauty, which, face it, is stunning, but I respect her need to be ignored, I look away, but the image of her is memorable.

New Yorkers feign indifference, but if you should fall down, people will come to your assistance. If Mr. Musk tripped on a curb, people would stop and bend over and ask, “Are you okay?” They wouldn’t say, “I closed my Twitter account you idiot and you know something? I don’t miss it!” He’s human and if he’s injured himself, we’d help him up and call 911, same as we would for you.

Far-right smears Club Q hero Fierro, but of course

I was going to quote one of the shitty things being said about Richard Fierro, who saved we-don't-know-how-many-lives, but it was certainly more than one and probably a lot more. However, the trash being said about him and the LGBTQ community doesn't belong anywhere near a caption for Richard Fierro.

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Sick fucks stalk the earth. Earlier today I saw the father of the 22-year-old Club Q murderer being interviewed, and I don’t know what the hell he was on or if that was just Wednesday, but he mumbled on about being Mormon where “We don’t do gay” (you can put that down as incorrect), so because he raised a son not to do gay he didn’t know what his kid was doing at an LGBTQ bar. Then the reporter says his son went there and murdered 5 people and injured another 18, and the relieved father goes “Whew!” Like my son mighta killed and hurt a lot of people but at least he’s not gay. Sick fuck.

Then I was visiting the website for Atrevida Beer, much in the news lately because of Richard Fierro’s heroism and TV interviews, and it’s a cool business and family if you haven’t checked—good people doing good things. With Army veteran Fierro doing about the best thing anyone can do last Saturday, risking his life to save others. So I leave that website and stumble right into a story at Vice about Mr. Fierro. More sick fucks.

The far-right … is calling Fierro a “groomer” and a “f*ggot,” while questioning his sexuality for being at the Club Q drag show. Others even questioned the veracity of his entire story, according to an investigation conducted by VICE News and researchers at Advance Democracy Inc, a nonprofit that tracks online extremism.  

They’re probably just upset that Richard Fierro managed to be a good guy without a gun. One shithead crawled out from under slug feces or something long enough to write:

“Heroes don’t take their kids to drag shows,” one of [Jack] Posobiec’s followers wrote on Telegram in response.

Others joined in: “So a married man, His Wife, Daughter and her boyfriend all go to Gay bar together? I’m gonna call bullshit on this,” a user on far-right Christian platform Gab wrote on Tuesday.

Newsflash knucklehead: Straight couples and families do go to gay bars. I bet your Christ would too. And I’m just guessing that first comment about heroes wasn’t made by someone who retired an Army Major after three tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan, only to return home with a chest full of medals to serve his community for years, not just last week. 

Sick fuck du jour Jenna Ellis said the people murdered at Club Q deserved their eternal damnation because “there is no evidence at all that they were Christians.” Neither is there evidence she is. Tucker Carlson was back at it a day after the tragedy, giving a platform to an anti-trans guest who said LGBTQ attacks will continue “until the ‘evil agenda’ of gender-affirming care is stopped.” And here’s another newsflash we knew wasn’t long in coming: QAnon nutters are running with the false flag bullshit again, saying the attack and heroic response by Mr. Fierro and others looked like a “staged event.” Alex Jones will probably steer clear of that one.

But if Jones isn’t spewing his venom (I know, insulting to snakes), there’s no shortage of it. Vice locates the source of the ugly anti-thoughts and prayers clearly where it belongs:

Figures like Posobiec, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and anti-trans troll Matt Walsh have been doubling down on attacks against the LGBTQ community for years,  increasing these attacks in regularity and toxicity in recent months, with accusations that members of the LGBTQ community are sexualizing or “grooming” children. Trans activists have warned that violent responses would be imminent, to little avail.

Fuck you and your grooming, here are your groomers. If Boebert hasn’t noticed, it’s working. I sometimes wonder if she really does notice, despite the thoughts and prayers after each slaughter, because that pea soup slogging around behind her eyes is more afraid of a Toni Morrison book or a drag show than an unregulated AR-15. Boebert: Who someone loves does not affect you, who you hate affects millions.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (CO-Groomer)

Rep. Thomas Massie (KY-Groomer)

If You Want To Die Young - Take the Red Pill

Image by Septimiu Balica from Pixabay

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If dying young appeals to you, here’s a simple bit of advice: move to a state or county controlled by Republicans.

At first glance, the images below appear to be political maps. And in the most real sense of the word they are: the county-by-county differences shown by the map from Jeremy Ney’s brilliant American Inequality and the state-by-state screen shot from the CDC’s NCHS below it.

Both reflect, in large part, decades of regional policy differences.

Long-lived parts of America have generally embraced progressive policies dating back to FDR’s New Deal; the early-death parts of our country most often reflect conservative opposition to everything from the working-class wealth that unionization and higher minimum wages bring, to the availability of healthcare through Medicaid expansion.

Source: American Inequality by Jeremy Ney

2019 Life Expectancy by State — Source: National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control

To zoom out ever farther, since many conservative policies affect the entire country, consider what happened to the health of our nation in the 1980s with the Reagan Revolution. It’s particularly visible when you compare the outcomes of our healthcare system with other developed countries.

Our World In Data lays it out starkly, as you will see below. Prior to the neoliberal Reagan Revolution — following a bill Nixon signed in 1973 that opened the door for for-profit HMOs — most hospitals and health insurance companies were non-profits. The non-profit Blue Cross/Blue Shield controlled much, perhaps most, of the US health insurance market until that era.

Reagan also, in 1983, ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to essentially stop enforcing anti-trust laws dating back to the 1891 Sherman Act, resulting in the “Mergers & Acquisitions Mania” that characterized the 1980s and inspired the “greed is good” movie Wall Street starring Michael Douglas.

Health insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical manufacturers all morphed from regional and competitive organizations into giant, monopolistic predators.

Their profits exploded and our lifespans collapsed. Every year now, they spread hundreds of millions of dollars around Washington DC and state capitols to prevent regulation and maintain the status quo.

We are, quite literally, the only country in the world with a corrupt Supreme Court that has legalized this kind of a vicious attack on its citizens by a bought-off political party and their morbidly rich donors.

The Republicans on the Supreme Court call it “free speech” but every other nation in the world knows it’s simply naked, criminal, political bribery.

Source: Our World in Data

As you can see above, the average American spends more than twice as much on healthcare every year as do the citizens of any other developed country in the world. And, as the Reagan Revolution really bit hard in the 1980s and 1990s, our average lifespans collapsed while corporate healthcare profits exploded.

And it’s not just death by lack of healthcare that skews these statistics: if you’re concerned about being murdered, it’s also a good idea to avoid states run by conservatives.  As the centrist Third Way think tank noted last month:

• “In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.

• “8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”

It’s true of Red cities as well. Again, from Third Way:

“For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat [sic] mayor, despite their comparable populations.

“In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.”

And don’t even think about having sex in Red states: they generally lead America in sexually transmitted diseases, presumably because most have outlawed teaching sex education in their public schools.

The five states with the highest rates of Chlamydia infections are Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and New Mexico. The highest rates of Gonorrhea are in Mississippi, Alaska, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana.

Speaking of schools, the states with the lowest educational attainment in the nation are entirely Red states. Ranked from terrible to absolutely worst, they are: Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, Alabama, Nevada, Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia.

As giddy as Republicans are about “owning the libs,” the citizens they govern pay a tragic price for the sport. They are literally dying as conservative politicians revel in their ability to cut taxes for the rich and suppress wages and healthcare for everybody else.

Republicans are about to take over the House of Representatives and begin their “investigations” into, well, anything that will distract from these terrible statistics. In the meantime, Americans, particularly those in Red states and counties, will continue to die at rates considered obscene by the standards of every other developed nation in the world.

Our next chance to put America back on track will be in two years, and we damn well better get ready.

The US Right Is Stoking Anti-LGBT Hate. This Shooting Was No Surprise

  Hundreds of people attended a candlelight vigil at Temple Beit Torah in Colorado Springs for those who were affected by the shooting at Club Q and the Interfaith Transgender Day of Remembrance. (photo: Shanna Lewis/KRCC News)

 

22 November 22

What happened in Colorado Springs this weekend was part of a trend of escalating violence targeting gay spaces

Moira Donegan / Guardian UK

As far as mass shootings, go, it was over quickly. Just before midnight on Saturday, a man carrying multiple magazines of ammunition entered the Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, spraying gunfire. As bullets flew, two patrons at the club subdued the attacker by grabbing a gun from him, and hitting him with it. They held him down until police arrived. The first 911 call was made at 11.56pm; the killer was taken into custody at 12.02am. But in those six minutes, five people were killed, including Daniel Aston and Derrick Rump, two men who were tending bar, and Kerry Loving, a partygoer. Eighteen were wounded. As the clock struck midnight, it became a holiday for the bar’s community: Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors trans people killed in hate attacks, was observed on Sunday.

There’s a grim routine, these days, to the mass shootings in America. Some elements remain constant from shooting to shooting. Usually, the gunman is a young white man, and usually, he has a history of violence against women. There will have been mental health episodes, or previous run-ins with police. But none of this history will have stopped him from getting a gun. American mass shooters tend to use automatic or semi-automatic long guns, the kind that aren’t available to civilians in other countries. Almost always, they purchased them legally.

In the aftermath, the public makes a grim calculus. How many dead? How many wounded? The initial numbers that trickle out through the media tend to tick upward in the following hours and days, as more of the injured arrive in local hospitals and some of the wounded pass away. Americans compare the latest massacre to the others, rationalizing to keep the panic and despair at bay. “That one wasn’t so bad,” we tell ourselves. “Only three were killed.” This has become the price of being in public in America, a psychic tax that we all pay when we leave the house: that the next time, when the next gunman opens fire in a school, or a church, or a grocery store, that one of the anonymous numbers printed in the newspaper will be someone we love.

In the hours after a gunman stormed into Club Q, a morbid kind of box checking began. Yes, it was a young white man who committed the rampage – this time a 22-year-old. Yes, the shooter had a history of violence against women: the attacker was arrested last year after an hours-long standoff with police after making a bomb threat against his mother. He was charged with multiple felonies, but, yes, he still had access to guns. Yes, the killer used an AR-style long gun to murder his victims. And yes, the killer appears to have rightwing ties: he’s the grandson of a far-right California state assemblyman who supported the January 6 insurrection. On Monday, the shooter was charged with five counts of murder and several hate crimes.

There’s a morbid randomness to American gun violence – that fatal combination of scarce mental health treatment and superabundant firearms that makes America, and only America, a place where mass public massacres are common even when the nation is ostensibly at peace. But if the Colorado attack was enabled by America’s pervasive gun violence problem, it seems to have been prompted by the tenor of rightwing media, both broadcast and online, which over the past years has turned a virulent, conspiratorial and obsessively hateful eye towards the LGBT community.

In the coming days, the massacre at Club Q will be cast as an isolated tragedy, and those who point out the right’s complicity in the violence will be accused, with predictable cynicism, of politicizing the tragedy. But what happened in Colorado Springs this past weekend was the foreseeable continuation of a trend of escalating violence targeting gay spaces, and drag shows in particular.

Egged on by conservative politicians, like Lauren Boebert, social media figures, like Libs of TikTok, and traditional media scions, like Tucker Carlson, conservatives have spent the past months consuming the lie that gay and trans people are “groomers” – that is, perverts and pedophiles who want to molest children, or sterilize them, or confuse them into leading different, wrong and lesser lives. In the face of this supposed harm to the innocent, any vengeance can be justified.

The lie that gay people are “grooming” children has provided cover for violent and bigoted displays at LGBT community spaces across the country. Over the past year, drag performances and other LGBT events have been targeted with protests and violent threats in California, Idaho, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Indiana, Oregon, North Carolina and New York. Violent rightwing militia groups, like the Proud Boys and a group calling itself Patriot Front – who wear masks, because they are ashamed to show their faces – have appeared at these events, menacing gay people with threats. Just last month, in Eugene, Oregon, violence erupted outside a drag show when rightwing goons appeared and began throwing rocks and smoke bombs. At that hate rally, as at others, the anti-gay protesters carried semi-automatic rifles. It was only a matter of time before they started using them.

Like most bigots, homophobes know little about the groups they target, and their hatred doesn’t hew to logic. But when pressed, they will say that gay and trans people lack the virtues that they associate with traditional masculinity – virtues like honesty and integrity; courage, discipline and willingness to protect the innocent. But it was patrons, several of them gay themselves, who subdued the attacker at Club Q. According to the New York Times, a drag queen at the club helped by stomping on the man with her high heels

Meanwhile, in Uvalde, police officers armed to the teeth – the paragons of hegemonic masculinity that the right is always insisting we worship – stood by, cowardly and immobile, while a gunman slaughtered little children. If the right sees “manliness” as a virtue, a willingness to risk yourself to help the vulnerable, then you’d think it would be clear to them who the real “men” were.

ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: Ivanka is sad her friends don't like her anymore just because her dad tried to end America

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Say what you want about Ivanka Trump, but she knows when to bail on a loser. Her father, who would lose his head and his one-man stainless steel Arby’s slop trough if they weren’t both attached to his body, is running for president again because Russia’s about to turn into a giant Spirit Halloween store and Vlad needs a sincere, loyal friend with unfettered access to top secret nuclear documents.

But Ivanka is not along for the ride this time. She and the high-born toothpaste stain she married have decided to rest on their $2 billion laurels and chill for the time being in South Florida. But that doesn’t mean Ivanka wasn’t the absolute worst victim of Trump’s backyard cockfight of a presidency, according to her.

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post—which has seen the writing on the wall and belatedly acknowledged it’s all in crayon—has now turned heel on Trump, and it has the inside scoop on Ivanka’s break with MAGA. (Yes, I could link to Murdoch’s paper. I could also personally mail you all anthrax. I prefer to do neither.)

A source told The Post on Thursday that moving forward, she just wants a “normal life” for her family with husband and fellow Trump administration adviser Jared Kushner.

“Ivanka hated all the criticism and the threats, and was unhappy about how a lot of their friends turned their back on them,” the source said of her time in the political spotlight during Trump’s presidency.

Oh, my God, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, not counting that time Martin Shkreli went to prison. Ivanka has lost her high-society friends just because she worked for and unconditionally supported a guy who forcibly separated babies from their mothers, tried to turn our country into a police state, and convinced millions of vulnerable Americans to eschew basic, lifesaving public health measures, leading to thousands of tragic, unnecessary, completely preventable deaths? I feel so bad for her! And now this same guy wants to go back to the job he showed exactly zero interest in doing? How mortifying. 

The Post’s source also noted that Ivanka and Jared didn’t gain any friends while working for her dad and she now “wants as normal a life as she can arrange for her and her family … she’s unhappy about becoming a political target.” 

Must be nice to work a few years in a job with no defined responsibilities, watch your husband collect $2 billion for his troubles, and then retreat to Florida for a more or less permanent vacation. Because that’s all “normal.” Meanwhile, the rest of us are forced to root like concussed truffle hogs through endless heaps of smoldering rubble for vanishingly rare shreds of “normal.” But, hey, as long as Ivanka is having fun.

Sadly, this is the most likely reason Ivanka decided to snub her father during his recent big announcement that he really liked having legal immunity and an attorney general who acted more like a mafia consigliere than a public servant, so he’s going to torture us all for another couple of years at least. It’s not that he’s a horrifying ogre; it’s that his horrifying, ogre-like behavior makes her trips to the Hamptons marginally less enjoyable.

After all, being asked to appear with the guy who literally tried to end America kind of sucks when you’re trying super hard not to be a pariah, so you get mealy statements like this:

“I love my father very much. This time around, I am choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family.

“While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena. I am grateful to have had the honor of serving the American people and will always be proud of many of our administration’s accomplishments.”

Yeah, they accomplished a lot of things—$2 billion worth, to be precise. And they served two American people with unmatched devotion. The other 330 million of us are still waiting our turn, but I’m sure they’ll get around to us just as soon as Vanky finds the perfect settee for her foyer.

The Donald and the Ivankster in happier times.

Trump's Terrifically Stupid Return to Twitter

 

  Donald Trump. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

 

21 November 22

Two wealthy and self-involved men are seeking the attention they crave.

Quinta Jurecic / The Atlantic

Like the monster miraculously resuscitated to terrorize the heroes in a horror-movie sequel, Donald Trump is back.

No, I’m not talking about his November 15 announcement of his third campaign for president of the United States. Instead I have in mind something far more important: Twitter.

On the evening of November 17, Elon Musk—the richest man in the world and Twitter’s new owner—posted a poll asking users of the site whether he should “Reinstate former President Trump,” who was banned from the platform after his instigation of the insurrection on January 6. Musk’s followers voted in favor, though there’s no guarantee that the poll wasn’t manipulated by the same bots that Musk has spent the past several months railing against. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, and Trump’s account was magicked back into existence.

This entire incident is terrifically stupid. The story revolves around the whims of two wealthy and self-involved men who enjoy nothing more than public attention. It is an enormous waste of everyone’s time, and I resent having to think about it.

During Trump’s 22-month “permanent suspension” from Twitter, the account was obscured from anyone who tried to look for it: Typing @realDonaldTrump into Twitter produced a blank gray screen that simply announced, “Account suspended.” Now, however, Trump’s old tweets are back, preserved like the citizens of Pompeii frozen amid the ashes of Mount Vesuvius. His most recent tweet dates to January 8, 2021, the day he was banned: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” If you want a reminder of what led Twitter to block him from its platform due to “the risk of further incitement of violence,” you can scroll through the former president’s other tweets from the day of the insurrection. (But not his tweets egging on the Capitol rioters’ rage against Vice President Mike Pence or calling the insurrectionists “great patriots”—he deleted those posts before the account’s deactivation.)

Musk, though, is clearly unconcerned about the risk of future violence. His decision, the childishness of its implementation aside, isn’t particularly surprising. In May, while Musk was still locked in a legal battle over his attempt to back out of purchasing Twitter, he called the site’s decision to ban Trump “foolish in the extreme” and suggested that he would reinstate the former president.

When Musk announced his decision, some Twitter users, predictably, freaked out. A number of people announced that they would be leaving the platform. Doom and gloom proliferated. Representative Liz Cheney of the January 6 committee posted a tweet of her own suggesting that Twitter users might be interested in watching the committee’s hearing documenting how Trump’s tweets contributed to the violence of the insurrection.

One person, though, has been notably quiet: Trump himself. He has not yet tweeted—and his contractual obligations to Truth Social, the platform created to act as Trump’s alternative online home during his Twitter ban, may actually limit what he can post to his newly revived account. In public remarks after Musk issued his poll, Trump said he didn’t “see any reason” to return to Twitter: “Truth Social has taken the place for a lot of people, and I don’t see them going back onto Twitter.”

That said, Truth Social is a far smaller platform than Twitter: Trump’s following there (4.6 million) is dwarfed by his following on Twitter (88 million). And Trump is not known for honoring his word. His return wouldn’t be surprising. A world with Trump back on Twitter, once more campaigning for office and newly able to broadcast his hatreds and destabilizing whims, is likely riskier than a world with Trump banned from Twitter. In a time of rising political violence, handing a megaphone back to this man is a dangerous thing.

But as David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic when Musk first took over Twitter, there is no guarantee that the former president will be able to recapture the magic. The political situation has shifted. Most saliently, Trump is, well, no longer president. The unique power of his tweets always lay in the fact that he could reorient the direction of the U.S. government with his words alone. That power is no longer his—which is exactly the truth he attempted to undo when he sicced rioters on Congress on January 6.

There are a million lenses through which to understand Trump’s potential return to Twitter. Consider the ramifications for social-media platforms alone. What will happen to Trump’s suspended Facebook account? What might Trump’s sojourn at Truth Social show researchers about the impact of “deplatforming”—the banishing of toxic users from a social-media website? Truth Social runs on Mastodon, the decentralized social-media network that many Twitter users are now treating as a life raft. If Trump stays on Truth Social, and onetime Twitter aficionados flee to Mastodon, what could that signal about the growth of smaller, less-centralized networks as a possible future for social media?

Ultimately, though, I find something absurd and even insulting about having to consider these questions at all. You are reading this, and I am writing it, because a very rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him posted an easily rigged poll on the website he’d just bought for $44 billion. The answers to many of the questions I have just posed will depend on the fancies of another rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him. There’s an indignity to having one’s attention jerked around this way.

Demanding that people simply ignore these bumbling titans is too simplistic: Their flailing has a tendency to wreck the world that the rest of us live in. But we can at least be more discerning in what kind of attention we pay them, and why. Throughout the Trump administration, journalists struggled to provide the public with crucial information without simply amplifying Trump’s absurdities or giving him the attention he so craved. The press was not entirely successful, but recent news coverage of Trump’s 2024 run suggests that journalists have learned some lessons. In their stories on Trump’s presidential announcement, for example, The Washington Post and NPR chose not to focus on his latest provocations, instead highlighting Trump’s role in the insurrection and the threat he poses to democracy.

If Trump rejoins Twitter, the press must hold on to this approach rather than reverting to the breathless, substance-free coverage that often took hold during Trump’s time in office. And because journalists learned the hard way how—and how not—to cover Trump, they should apply some of those lessons to the public discussion about Musk as well. He cannot, unfortunately, be tuned out entirely. (I can attest to this: I muted Musk on Twitter in a fit of pique more than a year ago, but it turns out that all this does nowadays is make it extremely difficult to follow what’s happening on the platform.) But we can refuse to allow him to entirely reshape the scope of our attention.

For journalists, that means thinking more critically about how to cover Musk, perhaps widening the aperture to consider not just the man himself but the larger forces that made his Twitter takeover possible, and the effects of his actions on the broader world. 

For the average Twitter user, that might simply mean not panicking too much about Musk’s decision to reinstate Trump just yet. There will be plenty of time to do that if, and when, Twitter’s most notorious poster reopens the bird app. And if it does come to that, you can always find me on Mastodon.

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