More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The "Christians" Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue

Being gay, I have long held a low opinion of "conservative Christians" and evangelicals who have long attacked LGBT individuals through deliberate lies, efforts to dehumanize us - dehumanization was a key element of the Nazi regime that lead to the Holocaust - and depict us as threats to children. On the latter anti-LGBT slur, the reality is that the daily announcements of indictments and convictions for sexual abuse and child pornography involve not LGBT individuals but instead "Christian" pastors and youth pastors (earlier this week there were six such stories in a single day).  In short, I have long viewed these Pharisee-like "Christians" as anything but nice and decent people. Instead, their agenda is one based on lies, hatred, and division. Christian academies sprung up as a means to maintain segregation in education. It is little wonder, therefore, that these false Christians adore the Felon and even revel in the viciousness of his regime against non-whites, gays, and non-Christians.  Indeed, anyone they deem "other".  The rest of us will be watching to see whether these modern day Pharisees continue to follow the gospel of hate preached by the Felon and his morally bankrupt minions or will belatedly choose the gospel of Christ.  I for one will not be holding my breath waiting for Christ's gospel to be embraced.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at these false followers of Christ:

The National Prayer Breakfast was founded in 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower accepted an invitation to join members of Congress to break bread together. Every president since has participated, regardless of party or religious persuasion. It offers an opportunity, according to its organizers, for political leaders to gather and pray collectively for our nation “in the spirit of love and reconciliation as Jesus of Nazareth taught 2,000 years ago.”

[The Felon] Donald Trump never got that memo—or, if he did, he’s found ways to ignore it.

In a rambling, 75-minute speech at the Prayer Breakfast yesterday, we saw the quintessential [Felon] Trump. His comments were grievance-filled, narcissistic, conspiratorial, factually false, divisive, and insulting. He referred to his critics as “lunatics.” He engaged in projection, comparing them to “dictators” and “the gestapo.” He labeled Republican Representative Thomas Massie a “moron” because he won’t cast legislative votes the way Trump wants. . . . . Trump praised El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele—Bukele has referred to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator”—for his “very strong prisons.” . . . Trump emphasized that Bukele—who also spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast—is “one of my favorite people.”

The spirit of love and reconciliation that Jesus of Nazareth taught 2,000 years ago was not particularly evident in the words of the [Felon] president. Of course, it never has been. No matter. The audience of some 3,500—the great majority of whom undoubtedly claim to be followers of Jesus—responded to Trump’s remarks with a standing ovation.

It is testimony to the marketing genius of Donald Trump that he never sold himself to Christians as one of them—pious, devoted, merciful, forgiving, irenic, biblically literate, a faithful husband and father, a man of high moral standards. Instead, he sold himself as their protector. He didn’t hide his cruelty or his belief that the ends justify the means; doing so would have been impossible for him because they are central features of his personality. So he did the opposite: He presented himself to Christians as a fierce, even ruthless, warrior on their behalf. It worked. He built a huge, loyal, fanatical following.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump recounted comments made about him by Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas and a stalwart Trump ally for a decade. According to Trump, the case Jeffress made on his behalf in 2016 went like this: “He may not have ever read the Bible, but he will be a much stronger messenger for us.” It was Jeffress who said at the time, “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”

Jerry Falwell Jr., then the president of Liberty University, put it this way in a 2018 tweet: “Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys’. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!”

Tony Perkins, an ordained Southern Baptist minister and the president of the Family Research Council, a prominent evangelical activist group, admitted in 2018 that he and other evangelicals gave Trump a “mulligan” on his multiple affairs and hush-money payments to a porn star for a simple reason: Evangelicals “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”

They thrill to watch Trump savage his critics, and their devotion grows with every dehumanizing word, with every merciless act.

It is odd to see the very same evangelicals who claim the Bible is inerrant and who criticize fellow Christians about matters such as ordaining women—on the grounds that they are being unfaithful to what Paul wrote in one of his Epistles, an interpretation that many biblical scholars dispute—dismiss Jesus’s most famous sermon. For these Christians, the teachings of the son of God take a back seat to the pronouncements of the king of Mar-a-Lago.

Much of today’s evangelical world sees Trump’s viciousness not as a vice but as a virtue, so long as it is employed against those they perceive as their enemies, against those whom they resent and for whom they have a seething hatred. Unless you’ve spent time in the evangelical world, fully appreciating the level of antipathy that exists toward Democrats and progressives is difficult. The only thing that exceeds it is the loathing reserved for the Christians and conservatives who broke with Trump because their commitment to their faith, and to cherished moral truths, required them to speak out against him.

What i am describing isn’t true of all Christians, thankfully. Some have found the cumulative effect of Trump’s assault on Christian ethics too much. The Catholic Church and its American pope, Leo XIV, are speaking out prudentially but forcefully against the actions of the Trump administration. Mainline denominations, including the United Methodists, are stepping up. . . . Other pastors and theologians I respect, several of whom were formative in my journey of faith, signed a statement titled “Christ Alone: A Call to Faithful Resistance.” . . . . “In this moment we specifically call on the Church and peoples across the political spectrum to recognize the clear and present danger of rising authoritarian rule to all of us, especially the most vulnerable,” the statement says. “We commit ourselves to resisting cruel or oppressive means of control and to standing in solidarity with the oppressed, the marginalized, and the silenced.”

I don’t pretend these are easy matters for pastors to face. A minister of a conservative congregation might tell himself that the downside to speaking out against the sins of the authoritarian right, even judiciously and without partisan rancor, is too costly. They may fear that their ministry will be damaged, that offended parishioners will tune them out, and that they will gain nothing concrete.

But aren’t prophets esteemed precisely for their willingness to tell difficult truths to the people of God? For being steadfast in the face of fierce criticism; for denouncing social injustice and idolatry, including political idolatry, when it’s unfashionable to do so; for issuing warnings when others fall silent; and for calling people to repentance during times of moral blindness?

Non-maga evangelical pastors are going to face a set of difficult questions during the next three years: Under what conditions, if any, are you willing to speak out when a president and his administration repeatedly violate Christian ethics? Will you stay silent even when acts of cruelty, lawlessness, and injustice aren’t the exception but the norm? How much more indecency do you need to see before you act?

The question now comes again in our time: What does it mean for the Church to be the conscience of the state?

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

The Globalization of Anti-Trump/America Canadian Rage

The husband and I love to travel and will be renting an apartment and spending the first week of June in Paris - perhaps our favorite city - before boarding then boarding the Queen Mary 2 in Le Havre and sailing for New York City with interim stops at Cherbourg and Southampton.  We were in Europe on the eve of the 2024 U.S. elections and the overwhelming commentary we heard in countries ranging from Greece to Italy was that Europeans were dumbfounded how any Americans could support the Felon. The consensus was that America - and by extension, the world, deserved better.  Sadly, too many Americans - roughly one-third of voters - stayed home and  the Felon was reelected with less than 50% of the popular vote (it was no "landslide" as the Felon claims) and the current global nightmare was unleashed.  When we return to Europe, we do wonder how Americans will be viewed and treated given the hideousness of the Felon's regime and its effort to destroy the world order that has existed my entire lifetime.  The cheering for Team USA at the opening games showed that perhaps Americans per se are not hated, but the loud (and much deserved) booing directed at JD Vance underscored the dislike of the Felon and his regime.  While European and other world leaders tend to still tiptoe around the delusional and seemingly increasingly dementia plagued Felon, a global rage against America is building save perhaps at the Kremlin (I still view the Felon as a Russian asset) and Beijing.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon which in no way makes America stronger and could harm America economically for years to come. Here are excerpts:

The defiance against America that has consumed Canadian life for over a year now has finally spread to the rest of the West. The message of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos last month — that of a “rupture in the world order” — was not new for Canadians. Just after his election in April, Mr. Carney declared that “our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over.” At Davos, the moment caught up with him, and with Canada.

Throughout last year, the consensus among many European policymakers in the face of Donald Trump’s bombast was to wait out the nonsense and appease when possible. Mr. Carney’s speech arrived at the exact point at which that position proved untenable: Mr. Trump’s intensifying threats to forcibly annex Greenland, not to mention his insults to NATO troops who fought and died alongside U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. “They stayed a little back, little off the front lines” is a statement that will be remembered in Europe alongside “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” as a presidential remark that embodies the American spirit of its moment. Suddenly, Mr. Trump’s mindless drive toward territorial expansion and his desire to humiliate and degrade were impossible to ignore.

For Canada, though, America’s disrespect and intimidation are now standard issue. The U.S. ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, seems to have been installed primarily as an insult engine, tasked mainly with belittling his hosts whenever and wherever possible. . . . Threatening one’s neighbors, as Canada has learned the hard way over the last year, is a hallmark of autocracy-minded leaders.

Mr. Carney’s speech went beyond diagnosis, though. It also gestured toward a way out. The U.S. president left Greenland alone in part because Denmark and its allies put more troops there. He backed off from recent tariff threats in January as the European Union debated deploying the Anti-Coercion Instrument, a tool kit of retaliatory measures also known as the “trade bazooka.” The lesson: America might be pointing a gun at you, but it can be made to behave if you point a gun back.

For a year, the institutions of Canadian life have been pivoting as fast as possible to prepare for America’s decline into authoritarianism. New trade pipelines to the Asian market are under construction. The military is reported to be modeling plans for resistance to a hypothetical American invasion involving insurgency tactics supposedly inspired by the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. One former top defense official has said that Canadians should “keep our options open” on the topic of nuclear weapons. Even Canadian-centric media content is on the rise here. (Then again, everybody is watching “Heated Rivalry,” not just Canadians.)

Other countries are moving in similar directions. Apps that help consumers boycott American products, which began to launch in Canada way back in early 2025, are surging in places like Denmark and Sweden. It’s not for nothing. With many Canadian provinces pulling American liquor from shelves, the export of U.S. spirits to Canada dropped by 85 percent in 2025 and the bourbon maker Jim Beam has temporarily halted production at one of its Kentucky distilleries. Loathing is a powerful economic and geopolitical force.

American aggression and American decline are of a piece. As Mr. Carney has announced a slew of measures aimed at boosting Canada’s electric vehicle industry, nobody has argued for a moment that American equivalents could compete. By ending E.V. tax credits, Mr. Trump may have all but ensured that the American electric vehicle will one day be a thing of the past.  . . . . If you are integrating yourself into the American sphere of influence, or whatever Mr. Trump’s national security apparatus calls it, you are integrating yourself into antiquity — or worse.

At the same time, America is becoming synonymous with dangerous randomness. The constitutional system is in collapse. The legislative branch, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, is missing in action. The Supreme Court debates the legal equivalent of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, while the legal order that has held the country together for 250 years sputters toward an ignominious end. Nobody knows what America is anymore — not Americans, not their enemies, not their friends.

Coming to terms with this reality has not been easy in Canada. American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug; it’s hard to break the habit of thinking of Americans as the good guys. For Canadians, what is unfolding in Minnesota and elsewhere is happening to our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, our kin — it is happening to people we love and understand better than anybody. But “the rupture,” as Mr. Carney calls it, is nothing more than seeing clearly. Today, it’s America that poses a threat to our freedom and democracy. Not China. Not Russia. America.

And now, the work begins. For better or for worse, what people most admire in Canada, certainly more than success, is the capacity to endure — no doubt a product of the brutality of the landscape. . . . . What liberal democracies need now, more than ever, is the sheer will to go on, without nostalgia for what once was.

The West is feeling its betrayal turn into rage. The world is waking up to both its vulnerability and its value. But better late than never: We’re all Canadian now.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Murder of The Washington Post

As a news and politics junkie, I read the Washington Post for decades and recall the crucial role the newspaper played in exploding the Watergate scandal which ultimately ended in the resignation of a horrible president who thought himself above the law. Fast forward fifty plus years and when the nation is faced with another horrible president who views himself above the law and who engages in misdeeds that would have made even Nixon blush, we see the Post being destroyed by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, who is making a mockery of the paper's "Democracy dies in darkness" meme and who has seemingly sold his soul to Donald Trump, a/k/a the Felon, a would be dictator. When Bezos first swore fealty to to the Felon and gutted the paper's editorial board hundreds of thousands of subscribers, including myself, canceled their subscriptions. Now, with mass layoffs of journalists and every indication that serious journalism at the Post is dead - much like CBS News (which I no longer watch) has been destroyed by another billionaire willing to prostitute himself to the Felon - one can expect subscriptions to plummet further. What has happened to both news organizations underscores the threat that today's billionaire class, most of who have less than zero sense of noblesse oblige, pose to both democracy in America and to the wellbeing of everyday citizens.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the destruction of the Post and the growing threat posed by billionaires:

We’re witnessing a murder.  Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.

Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job.

What’s happening to the Post is a public tragedy, but for me, it is also very personal. . . . . Which is to say: The Washington Post feels like a part of my family’s DNA, imprinted on our earliest memories, memorialized among clippings of our hair and other, more traditional, recollections (first diaper blowout, first word).

As a kid growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, I can’t remember a time when the Post was not, somehow, woven through the fabric of my life. I cut out Sports-section photos of the Redskins coach Joe Gibbs and the quarterback Mark Rypien to plaster on the walls of my childhood bedroom the year my dad taught me how to watch football.

The Post was also how I fell in love with journalism. Every newspaper lover has the section they read first—Sports, Comics, Metro—and mine was Style. The section, which debuted in 1969, was like nothing that had come before it, or what has come since: a newspaper that gave its writers the time and space and freedom and voice to produce narrative long-form journalism that was must-read, holding its own against the New Journalism magazine greats of the era. And for me, it was a chance to commune with giants—to read people such as Libby Copeland, Robin Givhan, Paul Hendrickson, Sally Quinn, David Von Drehle, Gene Weingarten, Marjorie Williams—and puzzle over how they’d done it.

Then, in 2017, I arrived at the Post as a reporter to cover the Trump White House, and I stayed for eight magical years. I had planned to stay forever. So what is happening at the Post right now—what has been happening there for a while—is personal. But it is also so much larger than me or any single person.

The least cynical explanation is that Bezos simply isn’t paying attention. Maybe—like so many of us initially—he was charmed by Lewis’s British accent and studied loucheness that mask an emperor whose bespoke threads are no clothes at all. Or maybe, as many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan.

The Post journalists I know have shown a genuine willingness—even an eagerness—to evolve, a spirit of creativity and innovation at a time of transformation in the media. But its executives seem not to know where to lead it. Among the many failures here—of leadership, management, business, imagination, courage—the actual journalism stands strong.

Journalism is—has always been—a tough industry. But I watched firsthand as Bezos, Lewis, and company spoke in turgid corporate-ese (“Fix it, build it, scale it”) and failed to launch—or even attempt to launch—initiatives that might achieve their grandiose visions. They began 2025 by unveiling the “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of jumping from about 2.5 million subscribers to 200 million paying users, despite having ended the previous year hemorrhaging tens of thousands of their existing subscribers, all while blaming the journalists for the paper’s travails.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to the Post’s financial woes, or a successful business model for a local paper that is also the nation’s hometown paper. But I can tell you what will be lost if these two men—who don’t seem to understand what the Post was, what it still is, and what it could be—continue to treat it like a distressed asset or a bargaining chip with a president who, ultimately, does not respect bargaining supplicants.

Watergate started as a local story. Marty Weil—who is now in his 61st year at the Post—was subbing as a night editor on the Metro desk when he heard five words crackle across the police scanner: “Doors open at the Watergate.” Al Lewis, the dayside police-beat reporter, wrote the first story that appeared on the June 18, 1972, front page—“5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here.”  . . . . An arresting officer allowed him to glimpse the address book of one of the Watergate burglars, containing a scribbled entry, “H Hunt. WH,” and a number that went straight to the White House.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported for duty that Sunday, and they soon took over. The story went national, toppling a presidency and inspiring generations of journalists. But it was also quintessential Post reporting—relentlessly and fearlessly pursuing the truth and holding power to account in a collaborative effort across the newsroom.

Watergate was hardly the last time that the paper turned coverage of local events into national news. The Post also reported on the September 11 attacks, which killed 125 people at the Pentagon and all 64 people aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, which left 32 professors and students dead and dozens more injured; and the January 6 riot at the Capitol and its aftermath. This past year, the Post, with expert reporters at nearly every major federal agency, delivered unsurpassed accounts of the DOGE-ing of the federal government. . . . Whatever bar you set for success—exposing corruption, changing lives, moving readers to tears and to action, bringing joy and understanding to the community it serves, winning prizes—the Post has always cleared it.

Today’s layoffs provide a whiff of the latest alleged strategy: an almost-exclusive focus on politics and national-security coverage, though even that explanation defies credulity, as the growing list of those laid off includes some of the nation’s finest political and international reporters and editors. . . . To the extent that a plan exists, it seems to be to transform the Post into a facsimile of Politico.

But general-interest publications can be profitable. The New York Times has shown there is money to be made by diversifying, expanding, experimenting, offering something for everyone. (News! Audio! Games! Cooking! Video! Long-form!) The publication you’re reading now is profitable, and has nearly 1.5 million subscribers. Other specialty publications, such as Axios and Punchbowl News, have succeeded by tripling down on the needs and interests of their core audience. The Post, instead, is abandoning its current audience in search of one that may not exist.

What Bezos, Lewis, and their jargon-loving underlings also fail to understand is that the paper’s coverage of Washington will be neither as vivid nor as authoritative without the contributions of journalists in bureaus around the world. Those correspondents risk their life to help readers understand how, say, the United States deposing a leader in Venezuela may have consequences for citizens living in Ohio. Coverage of the White House and Congress is enhanced by a well-sourced Metro team and gimlet-eyed narrators in Style.

Nearly all media outlets are struggling to reinvent themselves. But the Post should have been better equipped than most to meet the moment. It has a great reputation, great talent, and great positioning to cover local stories for a large and highly educated audience willing to pay for news, and to serve a broader national audience eager for deep political and accountability reporting.

During President Trump’s first term, the then–executive editor, Marty Baron, green-lighted a graphic-nonfiction version of the Mueller Report and later turned it into a book. And when Congress declined to create a September 11–style commission to investigate the January 6 attacks, the Post decided that it would do what Congress would not: Without subpoena power, more than 100 journalists from across the newsroom produced a 38,000-word investigative series, “The Attack,” offering the definitive story of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. (It was part of the package that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.)

The Post was a place where everyone could be, and was, part of the same shared mission; we wore Democracy Dies in Darkness hoodies to work, blue-and-white WP beanies in the winter. . . . Although many talented and hardworking people have left the paper in recent years, many talented and hardworking people have chosen to remain, and others have joined. The Post is still one of the best places to do important work. Journalists there turned down lucrative buyouts or other compelling offers to stay and fight for a place they love because they believe in the paper and the mission. . . . But each departure—whether by choice or buyout or, now, deliberate gutting—represents not just an individual loss but the erasure of years of institutional memory.

[A]s I watch the deliberate dismantling of the paper of the Graham family, of Woodward and Bernstein, of Marty Baron, of so many of my best friends, my grief is still visceral, my anger still raw.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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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

 

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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.

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