Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

A Wake-up Call for White Americans

As noted in previous post, the Felon's regime and MAGA in general are waging war against empathy as they push their ugly agenda. Unfortunately, too many Americans already lack empathy for others and look the other when others are mistreated and abused based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin.  The mindset is that so long as racist and abusive policies do not directly impact them, these people close their eyes to injustice and even violence. Indeed, those pushing ugly policies rely on this largely white segment of American society ignoring things that they would never tolerate if they themselves were the targets of cruelty and mistreatment.  As a piece at Salon sets out, this blindness to the suffering of  others is foolish because as events in Minneapolis have made clear, white skin and so-called white privilege will not protect you from the brutality and misogyny of the Felon's regime.  This is a reality long known by blacks, Hispanics and other demographics that have faced discrimination and abuse.  Here are article highlights:

None of what we have seen over the past few weeks — not the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of federal officers, the seizure of children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, the callous disregard of civil rights and liberties from an increasingly authoritarian administration — is supposed to be happening in America. But it is. 

American citizens are being arrested and brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights — recording ICE, standing nearby or simply being the “wrong” color in the wrong place. The Trump administration has labeled these Americans “domestic terrorists,” claiming they posed existential threats to heavily armed federal agents, despite clear video evidence to the contrary. Immigrants are hiding, afraid to go outside. Entire neighborhoods and communities are under siege. Even though it’s only January, at least eight people have died from their encounters with ICE.

The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Disorientation is one of the authoritarian leader’s most powerful weapons.

Hours after Pretti was killed on Jan. 24, hundreds of people protested near the site in Minneapolis where he died. There, an older white woman told a reporter that “the government is not supposed to be doing these horrible things to the American people. It is unbelievable. This is something like Nazi Germany or Russia.”

Like many other white Americans, and too many Black and brown Americans, she seemed willfully ignorant of her own country’s history, which includes genocide and land theft against First Nations; white-on-Black chattel slavery; Jim and Jane Crow; the Black Codes; the Red Scare; violent social and political repression of LGBTQ Americans; the Palmer Raids; mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, to name just a few examples.

And then there is the language. When many protesters insist that “regular people,” “good people” and “citizens” should not be treated this way, what they often mean — consciously or not — is middle- and upper-class white people like themselves.

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley recently explained why the killings of middle-class white people like Good and Pettri by ICE and Border Patrol have provoked such widespread outrage among white Americans and “even the most seasoned organizers.”

“[Good] was a white woman and a mother — two things you’re not supposed to be when armed agents of the state put you in a body bag,” Kelley wrote. . . . . White racial innocence, in its various forms, is exhausting for those of us on the other side of the color line. But after allowing myself a moment of exasperation with the woman on the television, I turned to the lessons of history.

The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement understood that images of those who were often referred to as “respectable white people” being beaten, arrested and even killed would move white moderates — and, crucially, white elites — to oppose Jim and Jane Crow apartheid.

“Their simple but straightforward calculation was that Black suffering wasn’t new,” journalist Thomas Ricks wrote in “Waging a Good War,” “but white suffering was, especially when it was inflicted by Mississippi officials on middle-class college students from the North. And so [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] decided, John Lewis wrote, to bring ‘an army of Northern college students into Mississippi….If white America would not respond to the deaths of our people, the thinking went, maybe it would react to the deaths of its own children.’”

Now, 60 years later, similar images of “respectable white people” being abused by police and other law enforcement are having a powerful impact on public opinion.

Polls released in the aftermath of Good and Pretti’s killings show that a majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s immigration policies. According to a YouGov poll, more Americans (46%) want to abolish ICE than support it (41%). A small but growing number of Republicans also want ICE abolished or reformed with far stricter oversight.

The struggle for America’s multiracial democracy needs — and has always needed — everyday white people of conscience who are prepared to make good trouble.

If I could talk to the older white woman I saw being interviewed — who appears to be what my grandmother and other elders would describe as “good white people” — I would tell her that she was in love with a country that never really existed but that she truly thought was real. Now is the time for her and others like her to broaden their lenses and accept our new reality. What is happening now to white people like her has been the norm for Black, brown and other marginalized communities throughout American history. This is the moment for us to lean into solidarity — to learn from our shared history of struggling for a better society and democracy on both sides of the color line. 

A white freedom rider — a real American hero, though he would never use that language — once told me that he decided to join the Civil Rights Movement after asking himself a basic question: What type of white person do I want to be? More importantly, what type of human being do I want to be? . . . .As Trump’s authoritarian vise continues to tighten, Americans on both sides of the color line will be forced to answer that question.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

The Felon Needs New Targets for Distraction: Bad Bunny, Iran, and Gavin Newsom?

Friday the Felon's corrupt DOJ released three million documents relating to the Epstein scandal some of which had allegations of sexual abuse by the Felon and some of which suddenly disappeared, seemingly once the DOJ hacks realized just how bad the accusations looked for the Felon.   The Felon has insanely claimed the released files exonerate him yet if one reads the since deleted materials that claim - like most of what comes from the Felon's lips - is clearly a lie and detached from objective reality.  He even has threatened to sue the Epstein estate - something that would open discovery and arguably force the Felon to have to be deposed. Add to this the fact that his poll numbers are plummeting, the economy is still struggling with high prices, and the ICE invasion of Minneapolis is losing its value as a distraction from the Epstein scandal.  The fact that Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick and others in the Felon's regime were also named in the documents released by DOJ has failed to take focus off the Felon.  What's a pedophile to do?  A piece at Vanity Fair muses that new targets will be needed to keep the media from fully focuses on the damning allegations now all over the Internet and ponders who/what the new distractions will be.  Here are article highlights:

Sleep with one eye open, Gavin Newsom; brace yourself for more verbal abuse, transgender athletes; and watch your back, Xi Jinping: President Donald Trump needs a new target.

This was true even before ICE and Border Patrol agents shot and killed two protesters in Minnesota in the past two weeks, violence that has provoked widespread revulsion. CNN’s most recent polling shows ICE with a net approval rating of negative 27; Axios found the steepest shift in opinion was among independents, with 67% saying they have little confidence in ICE; and more than one third of Trump’s own voters disapproved of his deportation tactics—even before the shooting of Alex Pretti. Those events came as voters soured on Trump’s economic record; the right wing is still frustrated by the Justice Department’s foot-dragging on the Epstein files; and Trump’s poll numbers have continued sinking.

Declaring a new main nemesis is how Trump tries to reset, how he attempts to change the media narrative. Previous distractions have included claiming that Barack Obama conspired to tie Trump to Russian election meddling and floating the possibility of stripping Rosie O’Donnell of her American citizenship. Enemies are Trump’s oxygen, both personally and politically.

Trump’s team ended his first year back in the White House with an aggressive flourish: snatching President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, threatening to seize Greenland, and launching a criminal investigation of Fed chairman Jerome Powell. Now the Minnesota outrages have put Trump, for once, on his heels, and badly in need of someone else to beat on.

So who’s next?

Last weekend, Trump took shots at Bad Bunny and Green Day, the musical acts performing at this year’s Super Bowl—both of whom are vocal Trump critics. But those slights are mere sugar highs for the president, and they won’t last past the end of the game.

Trump loves insulting Newsom, who is both a leading contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination and an eager troll himself. The California governor showed up at Davos last week with kneepads he said were intended for CEOs groveling to Trump. Newsom was looking to get under the president’s skin, and he succeeded . . . .

But the Trump-Newsom sparring is also a tired rerun, and could go the way “Sleepy Joe Biden” has grown equally stale. “I did a focus group with MAGA types recently,” a veteran political strategist tells me. “And even they said, ‘Give it up already—the guy isn’t president anymore.’”

Recently sworn-in New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani once seemed positioned to be the perfect foil for the president . . . But Trump tossed gushed over Mamdani during the mayor-elect’s visit to the White House in late November. “The party was gearing up to make Mamdani the Democratic poster boy,” says Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist turned Trump critic, “and then Trump has that meeting where it looks like he and Mamdani are going to get engaged.”

Trump recently did a mocking “impression” of a transgender weightlifter during a speech to House Republicans, and in an Iowa speech this week he claimed immigrants might “blow up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people.” In advance of the midterms, Trump will likely ramp up his rhetoric about Democrats “rigging” elections. He will keep playing these and other greatest hits because they continue to work with his MAGA base. . . . . “As long as he can keep reminding them that they hate the same people, they will continue to support him.”

Yet Trump’s attacks and distractions may be yielding diminishing returns beyond his base. Polling at the end of his first year back in the White House showed a strong majority of independents believing the country was worse off, with the economy driving the unhappiness. Trump’s revived threats against Iran and his continued slagging of Ilhan Omar won’t satisfy those concerns. “These recent poll numbers are rough, but I think he can get some of it back,” Steinhauser says. “The way to do that is to focus more on jobs and the economy.”

Which is why, as he searches for new sparring partners, blaming China presents an intriguing option. “A foreign enemy is always better for rallying support,” Madrid says. “And China could tie together a lot of things for Trump: They’re a military threat, they’re sending us fentanyl, they’re the cause of our economic problems!”

The president has a trip to Beijing scheduled for April. Trump could either amp up the antagonism or claim to have pulled off a brilliant America First deal—though neither approach would, or should, put the Minnesota mess behind him completely.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Saturday Male Beauty